Gilgamesh - Singing is good for the Soul

Singing is good for the Soul

. I was at the bank this morning, standing at the queue waiting to be served. I had a tune in my head, it usually happens without rhyme nor reason, it was the Bangles Eternal Flame. So I started singing it under my breath, and then slightly louder. It's interesting how people start making a bit more room for you when you either start talking to yourself or doing things unexpected.
Anyway it's a bank, I'm a customer, I can sing if I want to. So even though I realised that I was making people uncomfortable I kept at it as I was slightly bored, they could have piped Muzak in and that would have kept me quiet. At work I'll sing all the time, but with the radio to provide backing music, they don't like it either but hey it's a free country.
So I started thinking about my less than social behaviour and remembered someone else that used to sing and talk while walking. And this brought me to a whole train of thought about a set of people that have a similar thread and deal with the same situation differently. I still kept singing while I was formulating this, multi tasking I call it, I was authoring a new work while gives a few people the creeps. Gilgamesh says and continues with the meat in the sandwich.
The first person I ever saw working with wood was my father, not his chosen profession. His real profession was initially as a sales rep, he also did mechanics and was a volunteer fireman. Anyway his dealing in carpentry was more out of need than want. He built our house in Chile, with the help of a master builder and my brothers. The Master builder, interesting how a tradesman will achieve a tittle of master amongst his peers, he would arrive in the morning tell my father what to do and then come back in the afternoon to check up on the results.
My father and the master builder were good friends, so a lot of money was saved in material and labour costs. The problem was my father's inability to deal with wood. He could get it in the right place at get it to hold, as a matter of fact the house he built still stands today. It was the effort required to get the thing happening, there was always a lot of muttering and swearing. He treated the wood with insults and forced it into position, the nails bent when trying to go into the wood and he would just hit it harder and harder until the nail would penetrate the wood, you could gauge how much trouble each piece was by the number of bent nails on the floor.
It wasn't until I was in Australia that I had to deal with another carpenter. Don Tito, was what I used to call him, Tito in Spanish is an abbreviation for an assortment of names, Francisco, Roberto and a few others all get shortened to Tito. He wasn't so much a carpenter more of a cabinet maker. He liked to talk to people while he worked, we spent a lot of time together as he stayed at our house for a year. His marriage had broken up and he was a good friend with my father.
Don Tito did a lot of work at our place, his way of repaying the stay. My mother's kitchen and a few cupboards are still there to show his trade. He worked with power tools and compressed wood. He would take the pieces and turn them so he could gauge the work, it was all done effortlessly, without fuss or worry. All while he worked he talked, he went on about the weather, politics and life in general. He would talk to the work itself sometimes, but not often. He didn't use nails in his work, just glues and staples that would hold everything together, nails split the work and created hassle he would tell me. Though he didn't use solid wood, he used it in a manner that it would last and still be as good.
Don Tito found himself a Spanish woman, we called her Gallega, she was from La Coruna in western Spain. She was a lovely woman, whose real name was Olga, she was a hairdresser by trade and tried to make my hair do things that it didn't want to, she is the only one that had any success with it. She used to call me chavalito, which is Spanish for kid, I didn't like it much but for her I allowed it. They fell in love and went back to Spain after a while.
Antonio was the third one and he impressed me the most, but I will leave him for last, my prerogative as the author. I will tell you about my brother instead. When I was 24 I bought my first house, it was a little dream. A dilapidated 2 bedroom, fibro cottage. The owner had died in it a year before and the relatives decided to sell rather than fix. It was a steal at the price, and it had the distinction of being across from my parents house.
The house, although small, was legally on 2 blocks of land. For a little while there Humberto Manzo, my father's name also, could get mail addressed to 61 Woodville Rd, 62 Woodville Rd and 63 Woodville Rd, the postman hated us, the banks couldn't keep up either as they always got the accounts mixed up.
The house was not only small, but in a huge state of disrepair, plus it had an outhouse and no inhouse. An outhouse is a great Australian tradition, the toilet is outside in a little partition of its own, great in cold nights. So there was a lot of work to do and not much money to do it with. My brother who had arrived from Chile a couple of years back helped me with the renovations. We knocked down a couple of walls, put up a couple of new ones and then built a new bathroom in the house this time. The whole thing took us a month and a bit and cost us very little.
Eugenio likes to talk as he does things also, but he likes to talk about the actions rather than the weather. He would take a piece of wood and look it over before using it, as if gauging its strength and durability. He would tell me which pieces were going to go where and why, as if he was teaching me rather than doing most of the work. He never swore at the wood, and never bent a nail. His tools were a hammer and a candle.
Eugenio would run the nail over the candle and then use it. No matter what type of wood the nail would glide into the wood without effort. I tried it myself but could not duplicate the action. I had to hit the nail straight on five or six times before it was fully in, while Eugenio only ever hit them twice, it was as if the wood parted for him. Eugenio is shorter than I am by a couple of inches and there is no real strength difference, but he understood something about the wood that I have never.
The third carpenter was Antonio, he was a Spaniard, a cogno. That is what he liked to be called, cogno, it translates to bloke or guy. He was an inventor of sorts and had a hand for the wood. My father met him at a club and found that he lived closed to us, so he offered him the use of his garage for his toying. Antonio was a short man, even by my standards, five foot nothing and slightly round, he had a bald pate like that of a Franciscan monk.
There was as shuffle to his walk, we went out often to buy things or just on walks. I walk fast and hurried, even with my longer stride he kept up and managed to lead the walk without ever breaking into a jog. His motions were different but they wasted no energy, it was as if he had adapted rather than naturally come by them. His eyes where moist at all times, which gave them an eternal glint when he faced the light. He talked about things that made little sense unless you already understood some of the basics behind the concepts.
As to the wood, there was something between him and the things he made. I saw him create a few pieces in the time I knew him. He made a complete four poster bed, not a piece of iron in it. He didn't like to hold things with nail or screws, he told me the iron would rust way before the wood would rot. He used wooden dowels and glue, but they held with strength I had not seen before. He didn't draw plans, he worked in his head, whenever he needed to find out a measurement he stared at a wall as if there was some internal blueprint that would light up before him.
Antonio talked while he worked, and he sung as well, though he didn't talk to anyone but the work itself. He would pick up a piece of wood and tell it where it was going to go, what it was going to be. You're going to be the leg, you and three others will hold up the whole bed, I noticed you have a knot further down, there must have been a small branch here, I will sand you and then put some dowels to hold up the runners. Antonio would say in a low voice as he held up the piece of wood.
He didn't use power tools, his drill was an old fashioned kind that you wind with one hand while you hold it with the other, still he was faster than I with a black and decker. He would sing as he was clamping the pieces of wood together, it was a weird little tune that made no sense, it was in Spanish and yet it was not as I couldn't understand a word of it. Yet the wood seemed to understand and it did as asked. The pieces came together and stayed together, there was never any fixing up, the first time was the only time.
Solid pieces of thick wood would bend for him, he had this contraption that he'd made out of wood himself, he would place the solid beams of wood and over a few days give them shape, sometimes he would use an clothes iron with the steam setting on. I have seen circles made from wood, but it is achieved by cutting bits out of it with powertools and routers. Antonio could do the same in a couple of days without cutting the wood at all, he just placed it where he wanted it and caressed it, talked to it, gave it purpose. When he finished a piece he would carve his signature into it, not letters just a sigil of sorts.
Antonio left one day for his native land and left a whole lot of things behind, I still have his tool box and some of his carving tools and memories. Nothing else I've heard from him for the last 17 years, yet the man had something about him that makes me think about him now and then. And then I sing a little tune heard from the radio, I never asked him what his song was, it was his song after all.
Oh well, the radio is on and Faith no More is playing, I better change it to something gentler. I'll see if I can find a song by the Bangles or maybe even Neil Diamond. Gilgamesh says and gets up to do some channel surfing on the FM band.

front page