I worked for three years on the lower tip of the island: first bringing land to where there was no land, and then building the two tallest skyscrapers in the world. And both of those jobs made me feel closer to God. I know that he’s inside us and that the ultimate meaning of life is to give existence the proper form; a blue-eyed German cardinal told me so. He must have read my heart, because he said it with the implacable severity of good people.
I also know that life is a hard battle, indeed a via crucis, but when I was a working man, I seemed to see God in everything: In my fellow workers’ eyes, filled with enthusiasm and hope. In our callused hands, which defied first the sea and then the sky. In the sweat of an entire city, which never slept, just like me. And in the moments of sudden silence a little before dawn, when I got the urge to sing and give thanks. And to pray, which is after all the same thing.
And I felt him close to me when I shared my pastrami sandwich with workers from every part of the world. And up there, on the 104th floor, in the skeleton of a skyscraper with neither walls nor windows, I could see the whole city, the Statue of Liberty, and then the ocean. We would have fun identifying the sounds, which came to us all together: the firemen’s sirens as they tried to navigate their fire engines through tangles of downtown traffic, the ice-cream truck that played the same music-box jingle over and over without interruption, the helicopter that took off from the 34th-floor rooftop to fly some millionaire to his country estate.
I’d become good friends with Luis, a proud-eyed Spaniard who said that from up there, on the clearest days, he could even manage to see Europe. He wasn’t joking at all, and we others would play along, staring at the horizon and arguing about whether the land we sighted was Ireland or Portugal. Luis was taller than me, and he had in his eyes the sorrow of one who has lost his happiness, but his stories were beautiful too. Once he told me that he’d worked in the movies and that there was no more delightful illusion. He’d known Rita Moreno and Marlon Brando, and he could imitate their gestures and their way of walking. He’d give you the impression that he wanted to brag about knowing them, to recall them with fascination and reverence, but then he’d conclude, “They’re just a couple of stars, that’s all.”
On the day of his inauguration, Mayor Beame declared that at least fifty thousand people would work in those two skyscrapers, and that within a few years the buildings would be welcoming two hundred thousand visitors every day. A monument to the future, he said, a monument that nothing and no one could scratch, and which would bear witness forever to the power of the city whose mayor he had the honor to be. He thanked us all, Mayor Beame did, speaking in the same vibrant tones that he would employ before too long when begging President Ford to help the invincible city avoid bankruptcy.