The wise hands of the carpenter, by Olga Merino

I go out early to buy apples, effervescent aspirin and EL PERIÓDICO on paper. You should be right back in the ‘batcave’, but I keep walking instinctively beyond the usual streets of the neighborhood in the cold and bright morning. Walk to run I enter an unknown bar. I ask for a coffee at the bar and after a while someone from the past comes in, someone who shouldn’t be there not here nor now, my old carpenter, the one who made me with his hands the most beautiful table in the universe, wide and strong as an imperial bed. The table where I live.

woodworm

Joan, that’s the name of the carpenter, is already retired and lives in a small town in Bages. He used to put a pencil stub over his ear. He wrung secrets from the wood. He caressed her. She knew many things about the trade, a legacy that is only treasured by dint of years and shavings. she said that the best time to cut the trees It is a new moon with a waning quarter, since the sap is then concentrated in the roots and frees the trunk of moisture. The planks come out more uniform, more resistant, less prone to bugs to woodworm and termites.

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Joan’s hands are as big as shovels. There are no more hands like that. tanned hands of a miller, a matrix maker, a welder, a turner. My hands, my capital. The hands of the workers who built the 20th century and from whom the 21st century has gotten rid of. Now the automatic, volatile, metaversic, ‘low cost’. The working class no longer has workers, and a strange force pulls the middle classes down towards muddy bottoms. The other day a taxi driver wisely explained it to me with simple words: «Before we could save a little, to buy you the car or whatever; now, the accounts no longer come out ». It seems that the social elevator is over. In any case, the forklift from the warehouse to the basement survives. And a dull discomfort. A rattling noise.

INFLATION

I return home through the streets of the middle class of a lifetime, at the time of retirement and the old ladies who do the shopping from stall to stall, from store to store like erratic bees seeking the pollen of the price. Living, filling the fridge, is a robbery. As Manuel Alcántara, poet and columnist of the greats, said, “when inflation shoots up, the same ones are always badly injured ». According to the OECD, people who earn between 9,000 and 24,000 euros net per year are considered middle class. The numbers stun and confuse. I only know that every time he enters more into the conversations what it costs to make ends meet. Where you come from? Apples I bring. very expensive

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