Artisans: A wandering thread by Maureen Murphy
There is a little coffee shop under a covered roof on a narrow street in Aleppo. A single bomb could leave it rubble at any time, but for the moment, the stream of coffee carefully poured out into small cups joins others, poured out over a thousand years.
“Things here are unchanged,” remarks the patron at the next table. “Things are just as they always have been.”
In Madrid, the Plaza Mayor is surrounded by streets of small shops. One shop serves snails in clay bowls, another bocadillos, another piles of crisp-fried seafood. At night, locals weave in and out on an endless tapas parade, eating, drinking, moving on. At one of the smallest, a stone hobbit-hole of a place, a middle-aged man wields his cast iron pans, turning out endless golden discs of egg and potato tortilla. As he breaks egg, after egg, after egg, his pattern is as smooth and perfect as the coffee man in Damascus.
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A tourist couple walks by as the line to the cashier winds through the shop. Simultaneously asking permission and snapping, the woman catches him mid-egg-crack. He looks up, ever so slightly, then looks down again, all before the yolk has finished landing in his bowl. The next second, he is back to cracking.
In Venice, behind the glossy shops selling masks mass-produced in Pakistan or Vietnam, sits an alleyway full of gondolas slightly past their prime. There is a strong smell of varnish in the air. A young bearded man with the aquiline nose of a medieval monk ever so slowly slices at the edges of a piece of wood. It is the forcola or oarlock, always built from a single piece of walnut. A lengthy line of brother forculas fills the room. The only movement besides his slow carving is the ginger cat scratching in the corner. Every so often, waves lap from the lagoon.
One more artisan works in a neighborhood just north of downtown Tokyo. It is Yanaka, a backwater somehow spared from the firebombs of World War II. At a small shop, the owner sits on a raised platform adding sums. Another worker in wood, he rescues bamboo from demolished houses, turned brown and black by decades of wood smoke. A faded autographed picture of Prince Charles hangs on the wall.
With careful attention and total focus, the owner helps today’s visitor pick out something to fit her limited budget. It is a small piece of smoked bamboo filled with even smaller slivers of bamboo toothpick. Joining the coffee maker, the cook, and the woodcarver, the bamboo merchant rings his customer up, gives a small, polite nod and consigns her to the endless human stream outside his shop.
And gets back to work.
