The Loom Does Not Care Who Owns It

There was a man called Xosé who worked in a textile factory outside A Corunha for thirty-one years. He started at seventeen, sweeping floors, and by the time the factory closed he was operating a loom that could produce in one hour what his grandmother would have taken a week to weave by hand. He was not bitter about the loom. This is important to understand. He was not one of those men who shook his fist at machines. The loom was a good machine. It did its work honestly. What Xosé was bitter about—and he would tell you this over umha cunca , slowly, the way you explain something to a child who is clever but hasn't yet been hurt—was that when the factory closed, nobody seemed to have a plan for what thirty-one years of floor-sweeping and loom-operating were supposed to become. The machines got better. Then they got cheaper. Then they moved to a place where the people who operated them cost less than Xosé. And Xosé, who had paid his taxes and raised three children and never missed a day