| Tale of a tile man
Pain and satisfaction, art and precision. A young man finds he and
his father have more in common than they knew.
by
Sabatino Mangini ’01
 hen I was a child, I never understood
why my father worked as a tileman. Dad was a specimen of physical
strength but he always seemed to be in pain. Even when relaxed,
his wrists and forearms bulged and pulsed with the pinch of carpal
tunnel syndrome. His shoulders seemed swollen from tendons stretched
from dislocations on demolition jobs. His back was broad and strong
but harbored an inoperable slipped disk. His knees and ankles throbbed
with arthritis.
My father’s pain prevented him from doing normal father-son
activities like playing outside with me. I’d ask him why he
continued to cripple his body, and he’d reply, “It’s
a part of me. I make art with tile.”
To me, setting tile wasn’t an art. To me, his art wasn’t
worth so much suffering. To me, Dad wasn’t a Picasso or a Hemingway;
he was a tough guy who made people’s bathroom walls leak-proof.
As I grew, my love for the art of writing took hold and it seemed
as if my father and I had less and less in common. When I turned
20—and after another debate about the painfully high price
Dad was willing to pay for his art— he convinced me to watch
him tile a 340-square-foot kitchen floor.
At the job-site, Dad covered the old linoleum floor with prefabricated
cement, using a utility knife to shape the boards to fit the kitchen’s
obstacles and outer edges. Next, he sat cross-legged for the ensuing
hammer-and-nail session: outlined by the droplets of sweat dripping
from his entire body, he plunged nails every six inches across all
340 square feet.
Then he mixed 100 pounds of cement—all by hand, all by himself.
When the gray powder struck the bucket, a mushroom cloud of smoke
blasted upward into the air. Measuring by eye, he slowly added water
and began mixing with a trowel.
Standing now, Dad extended his legs into a sort of a half-split and
bending over at the waist, he scooped gobs of cement with the trowel
and spread them over the prefabricated surface. With a flick of his
wrist and a steady drag of his trowel, he formed dunes of cement
grooves that would clutch the underside of the toothpaste-white tile,
locking them into place.
When a tile had to be cut, Dad used a wet-saw, a water-filled flat
tray that held a menacing circular saw. Once he plugged the aqueous
monster into an outlet, it gave a birth-scream of power to warn that
it was alive. With the saw biting close to my father’s hands,
he’d feed the tile into the mouth of the demon. The piercing
screeches of fragmenting ceramic rang through our ears. Amid the
fury of spraying water and flying tile debris, Dad would lift a perfectly
carved tile out of the chaos. His skill and precision did befit an
artist.
The next day as I watched Dad with each mixing and application of
the grout, each wringing of the sponge, each finishing touch on yesterday’s
tile setting, I noticed my own arms start to tremble. I thought of
how my arm and back pain following a long writing session paled in
comparison to my father’s perpetual ache. I also began to appreciate
the similarities between our two forms of expression: the tedious
dedication, the long hours spent alone, the balance between logic
and creativity, the need for skill and precision and the understanding
of how form follows function.
At job’s end, the floor perfectly complimented the white and
light gray tones of the kitchen. Dad surveyed his work with satisfaction:
He was lost in his art, free from his labors. Now each time I finish
writing, starting from scratch to create a work that is all my own,
I recall that image of my father and I feel as if I can finally understand
him. Art dwells within each of us: My father makes art with tile;
I make art with words.
______________________________
Sabatino Mangini’s article, Digital
Dynamos, also
appears in this issue. He is pursuing an M.A. in writing at Rowan.
His non-fiction book, Top Italian-American Athletic Achievers,
will be published in September (Sports Publishing, LLC).
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