11 November 2014
Lalo was pretty certain that his crew of twenty-three men would
be able to finish colando las zapatas
before dark even if they didn’t begin the process until nearly 4:00. That would
give us two whole hours before the sun set, and we could count on another
fifteen minutes of twilight before it got pitch dark. The sky was clear, but the
half moon wouldn’t rise over the mountain until midnight, so it would not help
at all.
Zapatas are the
footings of the load-bearing walls of the Casa. Colar —literally to glue— actually means to pour cement on them.
Th
ree weeks ago, right after the Casa’s outline had been successfully chalked
out, a backhoe came in and dug trenches for the footings down to the
appropriate depth, which seems to be about a meter and a half, or about 60
inches.
Then the crew laid a thin layer of cement over the floor of the
trenches. From the large load of 3/8” rebar that lay in a pile over against our
fence, the half-dozen crew members who have a special aptitude for bending
iron, shaped the rebar into a grid, wired the pieces securely together, and
laid the grid over the thin cement floor in the trenches.
At the corners and the mid points of what will eventually be
walls, they wired vertical castillos into
the grid. Despite the name, these are not castles but rebar columns. For the
last two weeks,
six crewmembers have been cutting rebar into 18” lengths and
bending each length into a 4” x 5” rectangle. Curiously, in this culture long
bits are measured in meters and short bits are measured randomly in centimeters
or inches. The crew made
many hundreds of these rectangles and stacked them
along side the work shed. Next they took about thirty rectangles, and threaded
through them four strands of rebar, each perhaps 6 meters long. Then they wired
the long strands to the rectangles, one in each corner, spacing the rectangles
about 10” apart. The result is a long, rigid column that when cemented into
place will be the main vertical support of the corners of the house, the
corners of the rooms, and the midpoints of the walls. When they finished wiring
all the rebar columns to the metal grids on the footings, the house site looked
like a forest of skinny trees all of whose leaves have fallen off.
The last of these preliminary steps is to pour cement over
the zapatas and the bases of the
rebar -- once it has all been dusted carefully so that the cement will adhere --
columns to a height of ..... well, really to a depth of. Those blue
filaments stretched all over the site mark the level of the floors of the Casa.
The cement had to be poured to a height that was exactly 39” below the blue
filaments.
The small, pot-bellied cement mixer, starts like a lawn
mower. At 3:45, one of the 23 crew members winds a cord around the mixer’s fly
wheel and yanks it, turning over the crank shaft of the mixer’s motor. Nothing
happens. He rewinds and yanks it again. Nothing happens again. He rewinds it a
third time and gives it a mighty tug.
Cough cough, screech grind, cough cough, chukata chukata
chukata.
Now everything happens at once. Two men with large flat-bladed
shovels and trowels stuck into their belts climb down in the trenches and stand
ready. Six men shovel material into buckets, heave the buckets onto their
shoulders, and in a continuous line feed the cement mixer. A bag of cement, a
bucket of gravel, a bucket of sand, a bucket of water, a bag of cement, a
bucket of gravel . . . In the mixer the gravel clunks, the sand hisses, the water
sloshes, and the cement flares out a billowing white cloud as the bag is shaken
into the mixer’s maw. The pace is frenetic. Lalo, in addition to being crew
boss and choreographer and alchemist of cement, is the waterman who dips
buckets from the black plastic Rotoplast tank and decides when it is time to
pour the mixed concrete out onto the ground.

The potbelly rotates, the concrete pours, and four men with
shovels load it into large plastic buckets. As each bucket is filled, a porter
hefts it onto his shoulder and trots to the site, picking his way across the
trenches on narrow plank bridges until he gets to the place where one of the
men with the shovels is working. The shovelman points, the bucketman pours,
turns around, and trots with the empty bucket back to where the sprawling mound
of wet concrete is being shoveled into more buckets. About a dozen men—the
apprentices, not the masters—form this bucket brigade. They make a continuous
chain: loaded buckets trotted in, poured into the trench, empty buckets trotted
out, refilled by the cement mixer, and again. And again. The feed-the-mixer
line and the haul-the-concrete line interweave but never seem to slow each
other down.

In between poured buckets of concrete, the shovelmen smooth
the concrete with the back of the shovel, pack it into the corners and edges
tight against the wooden forms that hold the concrete in, and measure after
every couple of pours to make sure that the concrete covers to the appropriate
depth below the blue filaments.
Cynthia scurries from point to point, checking to make
certain the rebar columns cement truly vertical, and precisely in the center of
each zapata grid, and that the level
of concrete is precisely 39” below the guiding filament. Hermilo does the same,
and between them they cover the entire site. Lalo, his trousers doused with
water, his shirt and hair caked with cement dust, f
eeds the potbellied mixer.
Young men haul bag after bag of powdered cement from the storage shed to the
mixer. Mica stands as still as a statue on a mound of dirt, and wide wide-open
eyes gazes at the churning human machine.
It may look like Rube Goldberg, but it functions like a Ford
assembly line.
Until we run out of gravel. Two-thirds of the zapatas have been colado, but we still have a third to go. Lalo turns off the cement
mixer. The bucket brigade stops. The shovel men climb out of the trenches.
Everyone clusters in the shade in front of the storage shed. Linda and I keep
lubricate the resting machine with two-liter bottles of cold Coke and Mirinda,
and fuel it with bowls of potato chips, popcorn, and fried pork rinds. Mica
doesn’t budge. Lalo gets on the phone. I ask Cynthia whether this is it for
tonight, and whether we are going to have to finish colando tomorrow. Before she can answer, Lalo comes over.
“More gravel is coming. We can start again as soon as it
gets here.”
It is 5:50, and the sun has just touched the rim of
mountains on the west side of the Etla Valley.
I go back to the house for another tub of popcorn, and when
I come back out I see a gravel truck backing up the access road. The driver
throws a lever, the back tilts, the gravel pours, the potbelly starts to
rotate, the shovelmen return to the trenches, Mica yawns but does not move, the
bucket men start their parade, and Cynthia and Hermilo go back to checking
angles and heights and lines.
But now it is getting dark fast. These are the tropics, and
twilight lasts about as long as it takes a hungry kid to eat a chocolate bar.
The streetlights come on, but they’re a distance from the site, and what they
mostly throw are deceptive shadows. The bucket line keeps up its rhythm without
missing a beat.
Now it is pitch black. Cynthia maneuvers her car around and
turns on the headlights. Some light, more shadows. Someone runs home for an
electric lantern (the workmen are almost all Santa Cruz Etla residents, so home
isn’t far away). Linda brings out our two wimpy flashlights. Someone unfastens
the light socket from the storage shed, drags over the long extension cord that
usually runs the power saw, and hot wires the light socket into the cord. One
of the shovelmen lashes it to one of the castillos.
Linda and Cynthia use the flashlight apps on their smart phones to beam
light down into the trenches. And the beat goes on.
None of the heavily laden porters slips or falls from the
plank bridges that span the trenches. No one electrocutes themselves. No one
trips on a wire or a castillo or a
blue filament or Mica. The Coke bottles and tubs of chips and popcorn slowly
empty as the trenches slowly fill with concrete.
It is near 8:00 when we finish. The potbelly shuts down.
With the remaining water the men wash their arms and faces. They don’t bother
trying to clean their clothes; their pants are caked with enough concrete that
they will stand by themselves when they take them off, and their shoes will be hard
as brass.
Linda gives the men a round of applause, and they chatter
together for a few moments before heading off into the night, reluctant for
this extraordinary evening to end. At last they trickle away, each one leaving
with a “See you in the morning.” Hermilo and the two shovelmen remain, checking
the heights and alignments, tamping down the hardening concrete to make sure
that no air pockets remain to weaken the walls of our Casa.
On each of the Linda’s and my five pilgrimages to
Compostela, there has been one extraordinary day that turns into an adventure.
Getting lost in the fog high above Ronesvalles. The double march from Cebreiro
through Compludo all the way to Ponferrada. Wandering for hours in the Montes
de Oca. Nearly losing a pilgrim as we forded the Río Porma. Each time we
struggled, we hurt, we did more than we thought we could or that was possible,
and each time the group of pilgrims emerged with a self confidence and a group
solidarity that in many ways has lasted over all these decades.
I think we will find that colando las zapatas was ours.