The Stonemason’s Hands

Many years ago we thought a diagnostic of the house stones would be wise. Did that crack in the façade presage a catastrophe? Or normal settling after a few centuries? Acknowledging that reading stones was like reading runes – interpreter required – we looked up the most reputable stonemason in our region.

I was expecting an iron booted, massive sumo type covered in rock dust, but it was a smallish fellow in canvas sneakers, hopping out of a truck nimble as a goat who extended his hand.  His eyes burned a bleached out blue against the worker’s tan, framed by deep white smile fissures.  The sneakers and smile lines distracted me as we said bonjour and he very politely crushed my fragile finger bones in his massive hands.

First piece of business, the stones.  In short order he put our concerns to rest;  the  walls, some of them 400 years old, were in fine condition.  On the other hand he clucked with worry when he saw the occasional slap dash repair (circa 1950) made with that “modern improved material,” cement.  Stones need to breathe and cement is their death knell; it asphyxiates them. He gestured to the façade – how lucky it has been preserved by chaux, a lime mortar made of sand, pebbles, hemp, clay…  the old fashioned stuff used for thousands of years.  Many people today like the fashion of “exposed stone,” but what is exposed is not necessarily sightly, and there is always the risk that exposure itself brings.   Les anciens had no need to show off their stones, preferring to protect them under this natural sealant.

To liberate an interior wall suffering from asphyxiation, he removed all the cement and replaced it with a golden colored chaux. Now the wall breathes.  As a bonus, he donned his moon man outfit and sandblasted the soot covered 400 year old stone chimney.

Over the years he has made his mark on our dwellings.  For the renovation of an annex we asked for light, and lo he pierced.  Where there was darkness there is now there a circle framed in fossil studded stones.  When a stairway needed repair he carefully saved another old fossil printed stone, the favorite of all the children, stepped upon for ages.

Each time he came by, I smiled at his litheness and flinched as we shook hands, watched in awe as this slight being lugged stones twice his weight.  But always, I couldn’t help noticing his hands, completely out of proportion to the rest.  He started working at the age of 14, quit school in order to help support his family.  When he caught me staring at his hands he stated evenly that stone work uses people up, and gravity and weight drag them down.  Most of the older workers around us were bent and stooped – decades of wheelbarrows laden with rocks and heavy clay from digging trenches for foundations.

Just before his workers were to dig up a patch of garden, he asked if he could uproot a few of the wild salad plants that had spread from the vegetable patch all through the grass of the lawn.  He would keep them in his greenhouse and make winter salads, full of minerals and nutrients. Thus I discovered that this wielder of massive stone was also a health conscious Mediterranean eater, shunning traditional worker’s fare of beef and pork for soup and vegetables and goat cheese.

On another day as we planned the blasting of walls to create doors, he offered  advice based on principles of feng shui or the earth’s magnetic field. That’s when I learned he and his wife spend their vacations in an artists’ colony each year.  She is a painter.  He is a sculptor.

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Our stone mason continues to be a big actor in our life as we renovate yet another old building. We pierce openings for light while I silently imagine the children and their friends filling up the space someday.

But I don’t speak about young people right now.  In this long strange winter of rain and mud, I met him twice when the smile lines went flat and he brushed away tears in order to speak.  His extended family has lost two young women in two months.  We don’t speak of the timelessness of stone, or sculpting memorials for the young, while the stooped and aged continue pushing their wheelbarrows.  When we do exchange words, we speak of creating spaces that are in proper alignment with earth and sky.

He sees me looking at his hands.  They are grotesque in a way.  Deformed, outsized.  I have to help him turn the pages of the architect’s drawings, his fingers are so stiff and large he can’t manage the delicate.  And then I see them as gorgeous.  Strong with the force of stone, aligned with the earth, creating frames for light to enter dark places.

When he arrives these days, he laughs as I stuff my hands in my pockets.  It’s a sign for him to extend his wrist for me to shake, as a farmer or garage mechanic will do.  Politeness be damned, he has no sense of his own strength.