Arturo Perez Reverte
GREAT ARTICLE by Arturo Perez Reverte.
It rains at times, and Madrid's cold and dreary. Umbrellas pass across the window of the library of my friend Antonio Mendez, the bookseller of the Calle Mayor . We are there to chat, smoking a cigarette, surrounded by books as Alberto, the thin, tall and quiet employee, has not read a novel of mine in his life and thinks "no need to do," orders the latest news. Then a young man with a backpack comes , and is a little aside, the timid air, waiting for Antonio and I to make a pause in our conversation. Finally, in a low voice, he asks Antonio if he can leave a resume. Sure, replied the bookseller. Leave it. And then the boy got bundle of pages out of the bag, each with his passport photo stapled, and gives one. Thank you very much, he mutters, just as shy as before. If you ever work for me, begins to say. Then shut up. Smile a little, puts everything back into the bag and goes out in the rain. Antonio looks at me, serious. They come in dozens, he says. Boys and girls. Each with their resume. And you can not imagine what level. Graduates of this and that, courses in foreign languages. And look. You have to be fucked up.
I catch the folio of the hand. John Doe, born in 1976. BA in History courses, this and that in Paris and Italy. Three languages. Places, companies, dates. I count to seven jobs away from those three or six months and then to the street. I look at the passport photograph, a sketch of a smile, look confident, perhaps hope. Then I look across the window, but the young man has disappeared from the umbrella in the rain. He will, I suppose, go into other stores, bookstores or wherever, pulling his moving resume of the backpack. I return the paper to Antonio, who shrugs helplessly, and stores it in a drawer. He himself had to fire an employee recently, unable to pay two salaries as is the courtyard. Before you close the drawer, I can see more photos of card stapled to pages: boys and girls with the same look and smile.
Spain is going well and all that, I think. Hooker Spain. Suddenly the sadness I slip inside and cold drops, and the day becomes more bleak and gray. What are we doing with them, damn it? With these guys. Antonio looks at me and lights another cigarette. I know you think so. What are we making all these youth backpack, behind the illusion of some studies and a career, after the dreams and efforts, they are walking the streets handing out resume that leave the last remnants of hope or Graduates in History as it is, eight years GBS, five vocational training courses, personal and family sacrifices to learn languages in schools that fail and leave you lying after paying tuition. Helplessness, traps, mousetraps end, unscrupulous businessmen who will return you to squeeze before the street, politicians who look the other way or decorating nice, unions with more shame on demagoguery and lounging. Office Space, unemployment garbage, trash resumes.
And when the miracle occurs, it is with requirement that you are willing to everything: the mouth shut until you are fired, and if you have a nice ass, if possible, let the boss sobe it. Still, kid, kid, you have to give thanks for arbitrary shift changes, worked weekends, six hundred hours of overtime each year of which only eighty listed as such on payroll. And if you intend to support a family above and pay a flat date with a song in the teeth not sodomize you free. Flexibility, call it. And thanks to the damn flexibility zillions thousand more jobs have been generated, said government spokesman, and are light and fan in Europe. Wow. Thanks to that, too, a guy in his early twenties can enjoy the thrill of knowing chichinabo eight jobs in three or four years, and after being on the street with a backpack, eking out life in the rain. Starting over and over again from scratch. Labor flexibility. Damn. Euphemism and how much shit. See what happens when, from time to flex, break the shed and everything goes to hell, and instead of what the boy resumes his backpack to be Molotov cocktails.