I took Robert's suggestion and went out to Mas Maury, a salvage yard in Pescadoires, to have a hunk of iron at 1,20 meters cut for the lintel of the bathroom window. It was raining. It almost always rains when I go to this place. You cross a very long, very narrow one way bridge. You have to watch your driving and you can't go too slowly because there is inevitably somebody waiting for you to get past. But your eyes are bugging out when you look down at the wild, chaotic poverty of the gens de voyage, the Roms who live under the bridge in dilapidated caravans and mobile homes. There's trash all over the place and a doubtful fire smoking away in the rain.
You wind through ancient Pescadoires to scene of equally impressive commercial incoherence. The yard is all men. They don't employ even the token woman and, as for the customers, neither the foreigners nor the French bring along their women, though Mrs Snoutsworthy likes the place and often goes along. Today the customers were all hardcore artisans, most in blue coveralls, all over the age of 50. The place is getting neater and neater. Back where they keep steel of all profiles--I-beam, angles, rounds, squares, all shelved, like with like, it used to be a welter of crappy wood moldings, toppled piles of ceramic tiles, odd crud. They've even gotten a new saw, water-cooled bandsaw with automatic feed to replace the deafening old chopsaw.
There were two parties in front of me, but it was for me that the old guy who runs the place took off his glove for a handshake, a favor for a regular customer. We've talked seriously in the past about our two countries, about what matters and what doesn't. He came to retrieve Francis' gate a year or two back and patiently pulled off all the snails stuck to it. He called them "inoffensive."
From the office as I waited to pay up, the big picture windows look out on the motley scene of inanimate worthless stuff--a couple of huge metal lions next to a pile of 40 x 40 exterior tiles, everything agglomerated together in one insensate mass, waiting for somebody to come along and see each one as separate and adorable. Willing to breath value into them like a modest version of some creation myth.
