The crowd, like a hoard of locusts that devours everything and plants nothing, eventually departed. But the silence they left behind was not the silence of old – that velvet that used to comfort the soul. It was now the silence of an empty house, plunged into mourning for a joy that had been murdered. The workshop, once a womb of creation, now seemed a desert of sorrow.
Elias, with trembling fingers, dared to peer into the girl's world. He read, with the eyes of one watching his own funeral, what they said of him in those digital squares. They called him an 'exotic curiosity', a 'bastion of the past', a 'talking museum piece'. Everything about him was criticised, from his beard to his leather apron, as if he were a waxwork figure placed there for the amusement of screen-bound tourists. Elias felt the blood rise to his face from the shame that he had now become. He had ceased to be an invisible and forgotten little thing in some city ground floor and had been transformed into a commodity of laughter.
Outside, in the city of cold lights, the noose tightened around Iris. Her friends, with painted nails and hollow spirits, asked her through gritted teeth:
– So… is this 'vintage' phase not over yet?
– Enough with the sawdust, don't you think?
Her family, with the weight of economics textbooks under their arms, spoke of 'real careers', of internships in glass offices, and of her 'wasting her time'. That magical summer, to the world, was nothing more than the whim of a rich girl playing at ancient crafts.
In a corner of the workshop, Elias looked at himself in the mirror. The mirror was pitted by a time that never lies, and in it, he saw neither a master nor a hero. He saw only a tired man, a labourer of yesterday who did not even know how to speak the language of today.
– You are an obsolete part, Elias – he whispered to his own image. – You do not fit in her frame. She is of crystal and light; you are of iron and rust.
When Iris knocked at the door, with red eyes and forgiveness on the tip of her tongue, she did not find the man who smiled at her with his eyes, but rather a wall of ice. Elias opened the door only as much as was necessary, making his rigid body and his voice, devoid of any music, known.
– Good morning, young lady. If you have come for the part, it is not yet ready. Technical work requires rigour, nothing more.
He treated her like a stranger, a passing customer. Each word was a nail in the coffin of the intimacy they had built amidst sawdust and secrets.
The city had begun to change colour. The sky, once a deep-sea blue, became grey, heavy as lead. The October wind began to sweep around corners, carrying away the dry leaves and the warmth that, for a few brief weeks, had united two impossible worlds.
Elias, in the gesture of one clearing the altar after mass, began to tidy up. He put away the chair where she used to sit, hid the mug from which she had drunk her coffee, and stowed in a dark drawer the notes she had left scattered about. He wanted to erase the trail of that passage, as if he could deceive his own heart.
At the end of the day, Elias sat before Iris's grandmother's camera and noticed it was almost ready, with the mechanism now beating with the precision of a Swiss watch. But, looking at that object, Elias felt a tightening in his throat. He knew, with the wisdom of old mariners, that on the day he declared the restoration finished, the last thread binding him to the girl would snap forever. The end of the restoration was, after all, the beginning of his final solitude.