I remember your fascination with the mix of linseed oil and wax we burnt to get that black patina, as it came out of the can, and how you watched that thick, viscous body slowly being brushed onto hot torched metal as though it were the first time: blue to black, then reddish ginger, then fully black. Do you see how it melts, how lazy and warm it is? That’s how the world moves at the core, you said once. That capacity to supersede harshness and exhaustion through wonder is something I could never forget. Still, we were tired, on the brink of collapse. We didn’t want to work anymore, and that’s what brought us closer. We wanted to pause, flee. We tried to hold stillness long enough. We couldn’t.

It’s too bad we only came here because of the project. I mean, we did turn it into a home, but what else did we have? We had our hidden places, sure, our discrete architecture. That lookout on the slope behind the pavilions where we used to spend hours smoking and drinking, for instance. That slope was whimsical. We’d stay there for hours, gazing at that endless, placid lake without horizon, sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes grey, in absolute silence. I once asked you how long you could look at the sea for. I guess you didn’t like it. Waves have been breaking in the same melody for millions of years, you said. Do you think it is impossible to stop because the vision is endless?, I once asked. You just kept looking out the bay. You had that funny way of speaking as though you were heralding something eternal.

Everything is still here; it’s just different. I think work has that weird ambiguity of being both a catalyst and a sweeper. Workers will work anywhere they’re needed, mostly because of somebody else’s accord. Then they’ll work, change, transform. Big cities will be drafted and built through repetition—and it will all hold until what was there before is replaced by something else (the workers, too). That is just how it all comes about, I guess. Labour edifies the will of those who decree its execution. It’s an old history, a stubborn endeavour. And yet we build our hidden cities, our secret shelters, we seize the harshness of our routines (as workers do). That’s what I learnt from the way you talked about the wax: no task can overcome a gesture.

You truly believed that grids and fences could be seized, didn’t you? That walls could become invisible. In a way, I guess you were right. xxxxxxxx holds the debris of that tenderness: cast aluminium, Baltic Green granite, linen, sewing pins, steel, PVC, aluminium welding wire, pulleys, steel rope, fixtures. The shore has changed. I didn’t find much walking around. I guess some people left and returned several times, but ultimately everyone abandoned it because there was not much to do. Not much has been left behind, either—a few tables and chairs, some vessels, some frozen flowers, a pair of boots. Your old granite table was still there, too. I found many more walking around. Funnily enough, a table seems to be the first thing people bring into a new house and the last one to be taken.

I wonder what could have been if we had met under different circumstances. Do you remember the beehives in Agamemnon’s tomb I told you about? I recalled that now as I hear the bees buzzing from inside the walls. It really took me back to Mycenae. There was a smooth, echoing, incessant noise coming closer. That buzz is unforgettable—a warm, fresh echo, an iridescent shade. Marble is hard to break through, I guess. Surely Mycenaeans knew something about permanence. They certainly knew about bronze masks and adornments, how to make the thinnest foil out of a hard material. In the end, what is the difference between a slope and a house? Once the purpose is gone, it’s all matter. Only craft gives it a shape. I can see that now in the way the wind shivers on the shacks’ antennas, dancing in a chain of steel, coated in metal. It’s all melting.

xxxxx,

xxxxxxxx

— Guilherme Vilhena Martins