After ending this ritual, of the lamp making, we were entering the Nepomuc Gallery. The entering was made according to our gradations and age. First was the horizon master. I was the last. The spotlights that the lamp was giving chase at the darkness figures of the gallery walls. In the boots settle while walking you could not hear a lot. Who had something to say had to holler to be heard. Even walking, the head posture while walking was agonizing. The head cover with the helmet had to be “recessed” between the shoulders. The back had to be “brought down” so it won’t catch the subsidence from the top, the reinforcement, the cables or anything else it was in there. A hit in the head if it wasn’t “pulled out”, could have broken your neck. If you regarded this, at how fast you were walking, a hit on the head could have out you down but could not break your neck.
Feeling my way through the gallery behind the shift from it I felt alone in an atmosphere with a taste and smell of decayed carrots. The moonshine figures caught to the faded light of the carbide lamp as the faded chromatic of the walls disillusioned a young man that loves blazing colors, clear colors. We might have walked for about hundred meters and my mind “getting away” outside not only for the sun I left behind but most of all for the disappointment that I was able to accept “the entrance in the mine”, which I feel as a big punch. I resign to it, a shift will pass, then I would go with other teams with less entrances in the mine, if it’s possible none.
These were my thoughts at the first entrance in the mine. Now after so many years, what then seemed a mission (moving up the discussions to my own person) was a typical “teacher’s” from the underground protection. The fact that I was not “taken in the middle”, and for lots of days I was receiving immediately the answers at my questions (and no glimpse of blame) a tacit sense in their world started to create, in the world of the mine diggers. Maybe, even if I haven’t expressed myself by no means in front of them, they accepted me knowing how hard it is for a man to accept to work “under ground” and maybe they saw something in me that I didn’t know yet. Their way of being friendly, with no words, helping you “through hand grabbing” and not by advising, and that atmosphere in which you could feel protected by seeing and feeling anything different but feeling their attachment all the time, vanished the work’s tidiness and of the place where I had to work and I started to feel that actually life is beautiful.