collidor, an orange-picker — you hardly need a university degree to learn how to handle the shears or how to carry the crates around like a mule, worrying about whether it’s going to rain, because if it rains, you don’t get paid, and you have to put food on the table every day, oh yes, and as if that wasn’t a miserable enough life, then you go and get a slipped disc and have to walk around all bent. And what became of your pension, huh? You get the bare minimum. Or even less. Nothing. We go at each other then, me and my Dad, as he counters with: Yes, but at least shears are a man’s tool and you work with other men (that was then, I said to myself, now it’s all Romanians picking the oranges, more women than men, women pick more quickly and carry more crates, and if you don’t watch out, the foreman, who tends to be a forewoman now, will shout at you and humiliate you; I’ve seen it happen), and picking oranges and pruning and burning dead leaves and scrub and carrying crates and putting them on a truck are jobs men have always done, but trailing around with a broom and leaning on street corners, that hardly seems like a job for a man, I mean the only people I’ve ever seen sweeping the street are old women sweeping the sidewalk outside their house, but I know you’ve always preferred that to carrying wooden beams, climbing up scaffolding, hefting bags of cement, or even driving a truck, you soon got tired of all that; your mother and I gave you a good strong body, and you could have earned as much as you liked these past few years, when there was bags of money to be made in the construction business, like you did when you drove the truck, but, no, you never wanted that, you may have a strong body, but you lack oomph. I told him to go to hell. Are you calling me a fairy? And you, you call yourself a man? You never even made it to the end of the month on what you earned and then you’d spend all day whining on about how your back ached from all that bending and lifting and carrying, despite mother’s hot salt baths, and rubbing your back with herbs and oils, calling the doctor every five minutes because you’d got a sore throat (it’s because they’re exposed to the damp air in the orchards all day, it’s because there was such a heavy frost this morning, it’s because: yes, every day she had an “it’s because your poor father”), or taking you to the clinic because you’d pulled a muscle, and you didn’t even have the balls to go to the doctor’s on your own, the sight of the hospital corridor and the stretchers was enough to make you practically shit yourself; if I am a coward, then I’ve inherited that cowardice from you. You’re not a man. You’ve been a slacker all your life, and you’ve been treated like a slacker and paid what a slacker should be paid. It’s not even really a job, picking oranges, you’ve never really been able to say: I have a job. You had a job the day they took you on and lost it the day they didn’t take you on — you’re just a tame dog, trailing after the first person to offer you a few euros, wagging your tail, and it was pour us another brandy, another glass of wine, and if no one offered you work, then you’d be in a foul mood, grumbling on about how you hadn’t been picked for any of the teams because it was raining or because the bastard on duty (they were all bastards according to you) had chosen someone cheaper and — of course — nowhere near as good as you, or because there were no more oranges left to pick, and then you’d take it out on her, raise your voice and your hand to her, but not to those bastards who had failed to choose you. You’ve been jobless all your fucking life, a permanent job-seeker: every night you’d go to the bar, every day to the main square on the look-out for work, showing yourself off the way whores do, smiling at the man doing the choosing, trying to get into conversation, to see if some jerk would notice you or like you better than someone else and take you on. Clowning around so that they’d pick you rather than another man. Desperately telling jokes. Saying you’d buy the guy a drink or give him a cigarette, when he had enough money to buy a million drinks and a million cigarettes. So they’re all men, are they, that bunch of losers you get together with in the bar, all of them with a chip on their shoulder, their pensions too small to get them through to the end of the month, but criticizing anyone who attempts to improve his lot? Haggling with the waiter, noticing who pays for a round and who doesn’t, and whether they drank a one-euro glass of wine or a brandy that cost one twenty-five. Are they men, those wretches who spend all day watching what others do with their lives, as if, by talking about other people’s lives, they could forget what they’ve done or failed to do with their own? Because you didn’t exactly equip me with the right weapons for this war. Not me or my sister. You were far more interested in your game of cards, in having a late breakfast with your friends on Saturday mornings and a brandy every evening after work, than in what I had or hadn’t done. So don’t you fucking lecture me. I feed my kids and I take them to school and I’ll pay for their studies for as long as I can. You had me working as soon as I was old enough, it didn’t matter what kind of work. You just wanted the money earned by your fourteen-year-old son. You shameless… My mother hurled herself at me, covered my mouth with her hands to stop me talking. I pushed her away: you keep out of it, it’s none of your business. She started crying. Her solution to everything. But all I wanted was to be able to earn a little more so that I could live the way I had up until then. And that was when I got lucky and started working at the carpentry workshop. Or, rather, I thought I’d got lucky — that I had, at last, found a nice, quiet, stable job.