EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALFebruary 19, 1999
Calle Conde de Barajas, Seville
The Ledge
The lock is broken. The key is stuck and won’t go all the way. We
are standing in front of our door, wiggling the key.
Our front door is easily seen from the patio below. Domingo, the
concierge, sees us and the wiggling and ascends the marble staircase. He tries the key and
plies the lock with spray lubricant. Black grease pours from the lock.
Domingo opens one of the large, patterned glass windows in the hallway
and shuffles along the ledge towards the window to my studio. The ledge is a long way up
from the marble below. The ledge is slanted. Domingo shuffles along the ledge, hanging
onto the seams of the old window pattern.
The studio window is locked, and Domingo taps on a seam to remove some
putty from the edge of the glass. The old, brittle glass breaks and falls, crashing on the
floor below. Now the beautiful antique window is broken and the concierge is flirting with
death at the edge of my studio. He is tapping away at the broken glass, standing on the
ledge with his back to the large, open patio. He reaches through the hole in the glass,
cutting himself, and unlocks the window and pulls it open towards him. Then he climbs into
the studio and unlocks our front door.
The lock seems to be working now. As for the broken antique window
section, we must trace the design and make a template for new glass. This is difficult.
Domingo steps onto the ledge again. He is scraping the old putty from the seam. His whole
body swings and jerks with the putty scraping. I’m watching his shoes on the slanted
ledge. All the while people come to the iron gate downstairs and look up at him, do their
business, have their questions answered and go away. Domingo is performing his downstairs
door duties from the ledge. Our neighbours take this opportunity to look into our
apartment and into the studio and marvel at the broken window. The girl next door is an
art student. Domingo tells her I am a painter. She wants to come over some time.
I make three attempts to trace the design. It’s complicated. The
window is very old and uneven. The design is a section of overlapping, different-sized
circles. The circles are not perfect. The seams are not exact, and the old putty takes an
hour to remove. Finally, between the three of us—Rich with one leg on the ledge and
one leg in the studio, Domingo wielding the Leatherman and scoring the design from the
inside, and I holding Band-Aids—we manage to make a somewhat accurate template.
Tomorrow we will find the glasscutter and a place to buy putty.
