2nd day

People don’t know that houses have a memory, like a superior human brain or a computer disc.
I discovered mine when the last tile was adjusted over my roof. At the beginning it was like waking up and suddenly having conscience of my existence beyond the rough materials of my body.
I started by assimilating the beauty of silence, the birds songs and then I found the talkative humans and their noisy devices that at some time completely annul the rest of the environment. Brick layers, carpenters, electricians, the foreman, the cement helpers and so many other men led my acquaintance to the humans. Step by step they achieved to give me the shape initially shown on a piece of paper that defined my contours, my colours, my iron intestines and my fragile skin.
Most part of those men were immigrants either from Brasil or Eastern countries. Apart from the Portuguese foreman and the two fat Russians that were driven home everyday, the rest of the crew remained on the site. In summer covered with mosquitoes in winter covered with wet rags.
For what I understood later, the ones camping on the building site had left the families on their home countries and they would go and visit the local prostitutes on Saturday. The most ardent had to go twice a week.
Their food was mostly grilled chicken, tinned fish, rice and loads of beer or cheap wine as the frugal salaries posted home every month meant a better life for their families. Some of them had «pão com chouriço» bread with sausage.
I heard all kinds of small and big talk, understood all languages but without feeling really, as if the universality of my inexistent ears had made me another kind of a god spectator.
This was probably designated by the other wholly mighty so that my emotions would not excrete any liquids over the weak web of my walls.
- Enough cement, enough. Five millimetre iron, forget the project. Those guys have to move quicker; have to sell this wreck before winter.
Well, can’t name it all. In the evenings, after the lights would go off I could sometimes hear small António sobbed in tears as his arms were aching due to the amount of cement buckets he was forced to serve the others, or Mikail, a young g.p. in Kiev who missed his job and his young family.
Leonid had a local girl friend and would fall asleep with a UE passport in one eye and his Ukrainian bride in the other.
Ricardo would sleep right away and wake up in the middle of the dark. With my silent inexistent eyes I could see him stealing from the others, eating their food, packing their best Tshirts in his bag but the day I saw him stealing from his employer a complete box full of taps and tools, I suppose I had the first glimpse of what humans may call feelings. Disliked the attitude and later I saw I was right as little António was sent away and called «ladrão *».
Before that, he was beaten by the two fat Russians as if the act of beating was duet. And he left.
Ricardo stayed with his posture of good boy, singing all day those tender Brazilian ballads and serving with bonhomie his holiness the foreman.