It turns you into a loner, that’s the problem with this job. Compared to how he was when he started, he could even be called a hermit. Yes, that’s probably what he is now.
To think that he comes from a huge family with seven siblings, not counting all the cousins, and all the friends to boot. In his house, there was always a lot of noise, people talking, music. His father loved music, especially classical. Schubert, Wagner, he doesn’t really remember what others.
To tell the truth, he never really took to it. He never really understood how the simple fact of listening to music could transform a person in that way. But there are so many things about other people we don’t understand, especially about our parents. How often he thought about it, about his father, while he was wandering around out there in the fields, on so many nights. Everything he never understood and, at the same time, that never occurred to him to ask.
That’s the thing about this job, Federico says, doubling back: you’ve got to spend eight, even ten hours straight going from one oil well to another, alone.
There are times when everything is going perfectly, you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, checking to make sure that everything is in order, that there are no spills, that the bolts are all tightened. But there are other times when your mind wanders, it refuses to see that a bolt is a bolt and instead starts to ask these kinds of questions. Why was it that his father could only achieve that kind of serenity with music and why was it that he was an alcoholic?
To put it simply, he tells me, there are days when the questions enter his head and since there’s nobody to answer them out there, he ends up answering them himself, or something like that. That’s what he meant about becoming a loner.
At first, when he started doing this, they usually went out into the fields in a group. And he even enjoyed that. He’d just left home, and he was used to doing everything in a pack. To think, it was his first job ever, and now to think that he’s been at it for around ten years. Sometimes, when he remembers how it happened that he came there, he wonders if it’s not some kind of revenge against his family that makes him keep doing it; other times he honestly thinks that there’s no job that could possibly make him happier.
Become a free member to read this article.