Jacques

Jacques is an experienced demolition worker who informally directs Hacine Bouali at a job dismantling neglected workers’ housing in the valley. Though he is neither the boss nor paid much more than his coworkers, he understands the work’s unending rhythm and helps Hacine replace frantic effort with a way to last.

Role on the Demolition Crew

The crew’s work is to tear apart residential buildings left to decay after the old steel mills shut down. Armed with buckets, sledgehammers, and crowbars, the workers smash walls and plumbing, then haul the rubble away. Jacques occupies an informal position of authority: he gives the orders even though he is not the supervisor, and his modest pay difference underscores that his influence comes from experience rather than rank.

At first, Hacine attacks the job as if speed and aggression could bring it to an end. He races up stairways, hurrying through the demolition until he is sore and spent. Jacques takes him aside and explains that every finished bucket will be followed by another, every completed apartment by another, and every demolished wall by more work. The job has no near finish for Hacine to reach by exhausting himself.

Teaching Hacine to Pace Himself

Jacques’s counsel is practical rather than grand: Hacine’s alarm will ring at six the next morning, so there is no point in destroying himself before then. Hacine is initially angry enough to consider punching Jacques, but he is already hurting, and Jacques weighs about 220 pounds. On the ride home, watching the gray landscape pass, Hacine recognizes that Jacques is right: hurrying cannot alter the work’s duration.

The following Monday, Hacine struggles to get up and arrives late. When the others tease him, Jacques tells them to leave him alone and takes Hacine aside once more. His assurance that there is a proper time for things reinforces the earlier lesson: the point is not to prove commitment by pushing the body past its limits.

Hacine gradually learns by observing Jacques’s routines. Jacques pauses for cigarettes at eight and ten, has coffee with the later break, and turns up the radio at eleven for a favorite program. He puts more effort into the morning than the afternoon and works hardest early in the week. These small acts divide a seemingly endless stretch of labor into manageable intervals. Jacques does not make the work disappear; he demonstrates how a worker can make time more bearable.

Character and Significance

The account presents Jacques through the details of both his appearance and his conduct. Hacine notices his Rica Lewis jeans, old-fashioned work boots, rough hands, and the flannel belt around his lower back; Jacques does not talk much. His authority is similarly unshowy. Rather than punish Hacine for being late or join in the workers’ mockery, he protects him and passes on knowledge acquired through repetition.

For Hacine, Jacques’s example reframes endurance. Work remains something imposed on the body by other people’s rules, and Hacine feels that his time does not belong to him. Yet Jacques shows that routine can be manipulated at the margins: breaks, radio, and the distribution of effort provide ways to measure a day that otherwise seems to extend without limit. His lesson is neither that the work is fulfilling nor that it will end soon, but that survival within it requires learning its pace.