What It Is
The quarry that closes off the back of João Romão's plot, beyond the grassy lot: a rock of granite from which he takes stone, from which the shop's customers come and where Jerônimo is hired. In the book The Slum it is the source of material, labor and risk: in it Romão grows, Jerônimo establishes himself and the Machona's son dies.
Where It Appears
In chapter I Bertoleza cooks for the quarry workers, Romão and she steal stone from there for the first little houses and he buys part of the rock. The tenement fills with people who work there.
pedra, que o velhaco, fora de horas, junto com a amiga, furtavam à pedreira do fundo, da mesma forma que subtraiam o material das casas em obra que havia por ali perto, stone, which the rogue, out of hours, together with his companion, stole from the quarry at the back, in the same way they took the material from the houses under construction nearby
Os empregados da pedreira preferiam todos morar lá, porque ficavam a dois passos da obrigação, The quarry workers all preferred to live there, because they were two steps from their duty
In chapter IV Romão takes the quarryman to see the quarry, and the man, who is Jerônimo, points out the wrong attack on the rock, the wasted chips and the slackness of the workers. Romão gives in to the wage of seventy milreis because he calculates that the money will come back to him.
pareciam um punhado de demônios revoltados na sua impotência contra o impassível gigante que os contemplava com desprezo, they looked like a handful of demons in revolt, in their impotence, against the impassive giant who regarded them with contempt
Os meus setenta mil-réis voltar-me-ão à gaveta. Tudo me fica em casa, My seventy milreis will come back to my drawer. Everything stays with me at home
In chapter V Jerônimo takes over the direction of the work, reforms the staff, and in two months the owner is already counting the profit.
No fim de dois meses já o vendeiro esfregava as mãos de contente e via, radiante, quanto lucrara com a aquisição de Jerônimo, At the end of two months the shopkeeper was already rubbing his hands with delight and saw, beaming, how much he had gained from acquiring Jerônimo
In chapter VIII, on the morning after the pagode, Jerônimo leaves work at lunchtime and lies down: the body interrupts the quarry's day. In chapter XIX, after leaving the tenement, he takes a job again at a quarry, the São Diogo one, where he had worked before.
In chapter XXI Agostinho, the Machona's son, falls from the quarry where the tenement's boys play.
Agostinho havia ido, segundo o costume, brincar à pedreira com outros dois rapazitos da estalagem; tinham, cabritando pelas arestas do precipício, subido a uma altura superior a duzentos metros do chão e, de repente, faltara-lhe o equilíbrio e o infeliz rolou de lá abaixo, Agostinho had gone, as usual, to play at the quarry with two other little boys from the tenement; skipping like goats along the edges of the precipice, they had climbed to a height of more than two hundred meters above the ground and, suddenly, he lost his balance and the poor boy tumbled down from there
What It Means
The quarry is the other face of Romão's money. At the beginning the stone comes free, at the moment of the theft (chapter I); then the wage returns to the drawer through the shop and the rent (chapter IV); and the profit from Jerônimo is counted in two months (chapter V). The narrator makes the rock a giant against which men rebel to no effect, and Jerônimo sees it as badly directed work: two measures of the same labor, one epic and one of the workshop. The quarry also exacts a price, and chapter XXI gives the case without comment. Those who profit from it and those who pay are not the same people, and the text leaves the reader to connect them, if the reader wishes.
Relationships
- Work: The Slum, by Aluísio Azevedo.
- Standard themes: Work and Vocation, Ambition, Nature and Civilization.
- Characters: João Romão, Jerônimo, Bertoleza.
- Neighboring symbols: the São Romão tenement, which lives by sheltering those who work at the quarry, and the fado and the chorado, the music Jerônimo brings at the end of the day of stone.