The father of my father's name was André and is on the right, which seems to tilt his head slightly to browse the work of his partner.
late nineteenth century had no machines Sanders and as you can guess, the only technique known artisanal to sand the floor and not leave the ground waved past was to go by hand parallel to the direction of the grain at an appropriate speed and uniform. The floor is sanded three times in succession with three types of sandpaper: coarse, medium and fine for edging the nooks and corners.
A very tiring and painful, according to André told him my father some evenings when he came home exhausted after kneeling eleven hours a day for a wage floor polishing ridiculous.
Once he had told a colleague that nicknamed him "Tortue (Tortuga ), because with only 32 years he was already fully folded poor because of an acute torsion of the trunk caused by many hours and many years working hunched over the floor. An early degeneration of the discs between the vertebrae, had sentenced the doctor.
On Sundays, the only day that Andre was free the whole week, my father told that his father got the whole family-his wife and three children-in an old tram that ran through Saint Paul, The Rue de Rivoli and the Barrio de Chatelet and left in a park on the outskirts, where they spent the day under the sun, eating the grass, perched on small white pedal boats from the pier, playing the ball ... André then buy their kids every Sunday (a great effort with their meager wages), a chocolate waffles with ice cream and cinnamon ... My father said he had never retested as tasty as those in his life, under the spring sunshine in the countryside of Paris.
Also, once a month, with what little they managed to save his job as Slasher parquet, André took his wife to the theater, and that was the only night in which he holster his only suit of clothing, beige, and she'd be his only decent dress, a muslin " color pink maiden pink " tone of fashion in time.
My father said that his parents the night of the month other people seemed very different. André passed by someone wealthy who can hire people to you will sand the floor and his wife at his side, looked like a very pink angel fallen from a crack in the sky.
But one afternoon killed an archduke, France went to war and my father's father, although no longer a youngster and had a wife and three children, was sent to the trenches near Verdun, along with their two grown sons.
When the war ended, the parquet slashed back from Verdun on one leg and two children less, who had perished in one of the bloodiest battles just across the river Marne.
Andre sent him to administrative duties in a bank, with rights acquired as a veteran and savior of the country it was. Now bend it represented a colossal effort. They put a chestnut prosthesis in place that had been the leg and that it was only air. The father of my father became moody and began drinking. Not bought back his now only son chocolate wafers and cinnamon ice cream on Sundays and returned to take his wife to the theater.
My father told me that most of the nights André was the only thing was to sit quietly in front of the window, looking lost and, with very fine sandpaper, very carefully, be reviewing the veins and faults of his new leg by a strange brown and incessant strumming dry and dull, as trying to modulate a mantra that protects you against the darkness that was accumulating out there.
André died of cirrhosis of the liver seven years after returning from the front.
This story of my father's father's story in case anyone ever has the curiosity to ask what was slashed young hardwood that seems to tilt your face to look partner's work, which appears in the famous painting by Gustave Caillebotte.
Greetings to Jim and printing.
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