Georgia, Chapter II — Cranes, Capital, and the Small Problem of Calling Anything with a Penthouse Progress
The future still had laundry hanging out to dry.
I saw it the next morning.
Underwear.
T-shirts.
Socks.
Sheets.
Towels moving in the wind among battered façades, exposed pipes, air conditioners hanging from walls, and balconies transformed over the years through an urban-planning technique found throughout the world:
doing whatever the fuck you feel like.
The day before, Batumi had shown me its towers.
Its statues.
The waterfront.
The Ferris wheel.
The mechanical love of Ali and Nino.
Its national identity wrapped around 427 feet of steel.
It had auditioned for the future with the confidence of a woman arriving at a date in a dress that rendered irrelevant any opinion you might have about her personality.
Then I walked behind the set.
There was the underwear.
Thank God.
Nothing restores balance to a discussion of modernity like a pair of underwear fluttering above a street.
You can build the tallest tower in the Caucasus.
You can call a neighborhood *New Boulevard*.
You can commission renderings in which genetically improbable young people drink champagne on immaculate terraces while the sun sets according to precise instructions from the marketing department.
Sooner or later, someone has to wash his pants.
And hang them somewhere.
Life has this vulgar ability to ruin architecture with its needs.
Buildings would prefer to be photographed empty.
People insist on living in them.
I walked into a narrow street.
Laundry crossed the space from one side to the other.
The façades were different.
One blue.
One gray.
One covered in materials that had probably gone out of production before I learned to tie my shoes.
New buildings appeared behind them.
Tall.
Glossy.
Clean.
The future rose above a city that calmly continued drying its laundry beneath its ass.
That was the second Batumi.
Not the postcard city.
The city from behind.
Every place has a front and a back.
The front is what has been prepared for guests.
The back contains the bucket, electrical wires, slippers, brooms, the full ashtray, and that chair no one dares throw away because “it might still come in handy.”
People work the same way.
We have an emotional living room and a storage closet.
In the living room, we arrange the books we want people to see, the opinions we know how to defend, and a few travel experiences capable of making us look curious rather than merely incapable of sitting still.
In the closet, we keep everything else.
The fears without a good explanation.
The calls never made.
The failures that have not yet found a metaphor elegant enough.
The city, however, could not close the door.
Its storage closet was twelve stories tall.
I photographed it.
An old apartment block filled the frame.
Repeating windows.
Balconies.
Air conditioners.
Pipes.
Stains.
Repairs.
Every apartment had altered a small part of the structure.
One balcony had been enclosed.
Another covered.
Another turned into a sunroom.
One had curtains.
One plants.
One a satellite dish.
One held enough objects to suggest its owner was either preparing to flee or had never managed to finish a move begun in 1997.
The building had been born uniform.
Life had disobeyed it.
That is one of the most beautiful things about planned architecture.
The human being arrives and immediately ruins the design.
You give him a geometric façade.
He installs an air conditioner.
Paints a railing green.
Encloses a balcony with windows different from all the others.
Hangs a flowered blanket.
Sets out a plastic chair.
Grows something in a container that once held paint.
Within a few years, ideology has to surrender to a drying rack.
Grand political systems imagine abstract citizens.
Order.
Modules.
Functions.
People distributed through rational spaces.
Then the citizen buys a satellite dish, owns three more pairs of shoes than anticipated, and decides the kitchen needs an unauthorized extension.
The problem with every utopia is always the tenant.
He wants to live.
Not collaborate with the purity of the design.
The apartment blocks retained a certain Soviet severity.
Repeating lines.
Heavy volumes.
A color range spanning administrative gray, mandatory-meeting beige, and that particular shade of blue that seems to have been invented for hospitals where no one brings good news.
They were not beautiful.
At least not in the simple way a newly renovated building can be beautiful, with matching windows and no visible trace of the fact that human beings have lived through divorces, fevers, birthdays, burnt meals, and mortally long Sunday afternoons inside it.
They were alive.
Which is not the same thing.
We constantly confuse beauty with life.
A new house is beautiful because it bears no marks.
Clean walls.
Untouched floors.
Bathrooms where no one has yet cried while sitting on the closed toilet lid.
A lived-in home fills up.
Gets scratched.
Absorbs smells.
Keeps objects.
Begins to resemble the people it contains.
It does not improve photographically.
It becomes real.
But “real” is a dangerous word too.
Old is not automatically authentic.
Mold possesses no moral superiority.
A broken window is not a poetic form of resistance to capitalism.
It lets in cold and water.
A deteriorating building is no more human than a new one.
It is simply a building in need of maintenance, probably housing people tired of hearing some foreign photographer explain how fascinating the texture of their hardship is.
Nostalgia is mold with a good press office.
It romanticizes everything we are no longer forced to endure.
I photographed the walls.
The worn color.
The mismatched windows.
A broken pane.
Moss growing along the edge.
They were powerful images.
I knew it.
But I did not want to commit the usual bullshit.
Old equals real.
New equals fake.
Poverty equals soul.
Wealth equals emptiness.
They are very convenient formulas.
They allow you to judge an entire city without the inconvenience of understanding it.
Reality is more irritating.
A new home can improve a life.
A working elevator can mean freedom to an elderly person.
Modern wiring reduces the chance of being roasted alive while using the washing machine and hair dryer at the same time.
A window that closes properly does not destroy spirituality.
It keeps out drafts.
Modernity has concrete advantages.
That is why it has been so successful.
If it consisted only of glass, loneliness, and takeout coffee, humanity might have ignored it.
The problem was not that Batumi was building.
The problem was understanding for whom.
And above all, who could continue to remain while it built.
I looked up.
A tower rose behind an old building.
Then another.
Then a crane.
The contrast was almost too perfect.
It looked staged by a photographer with no sense of proportion whatsoever.
Foreground: worn façade.
Middle ground: cars.
Background: real estate future.
Title:
*Transition.*
Or:
*Who the Fuck Approved All This?*
The new building had orderly balconies.
Glass.
Clean lines.
Vertical promises.
The old one displayed pipes, curtains, satellite dishes, and enough air conditioners to alter the regional climate.
They were not two separate eras.
They were close.
Sometimes attached.
Modernity had not replaced the past.
It had parked in front of it.
Batumi grew by collision.
Every new tower seemed to arrive without asking the rest of the city’s permission, plant itself there, and wait for the landscape to find a way to justify it.
Some worked.
Others possessed the elegance of a drunk man walking into a church during a wedding and assuming the guests were there to applaud him.
But they all communicated the same thing.
Taller.
Bigger.
Newer.
More expensive.
We have a childish relationship with size.
Men develop it very early.
They compare height.
Speed.
Engine displacement.
Bank balances.
The length of things upon which, out of respect for human dignity and zoning regulations, we need not dwell.
Cities are governed by the same men.
It was inevitable that sooner or later they would begin comparing skyscrapers.
Real estate capitalism has the psychology of a locker room.
“How tall is your tower?”
“How many stories?”
“Sea view?”
“Rooftop pool?”
“Panoramic restaurant?”
“Underground parking?”
No one asks whether the neighborhood has enough space, services, schools, sewers, trees, or sidewalks where two people can pass without having to negotiate the right to survive.
Those are details.
They do not fit well in renderings.
Real estate renderings are architectural pornography.
Impossible bodies.
Perfect lighting.
Smooth surfaces.
No stains.
No noise.
No overdue condo fees.
They always show a young couple.
Beautiful.
Internationally thin.
Neutral clothes.
Glasses of wine.
Almost never a child vomiting on the couch, a neighbor dragging furniture at seven in the morning, or a man in his underwear arguing on the phone with the electric company.
Pornography sells sex by removing the consequences.
A rendering sells living by removing life.
Batumi seemed to have stepped directly out of one of those programs.
New buildings appeared around every corner.
Some finished.
Others open.
Concrete skeletons.
Repeating floors.
Rebar.
Netting.
Cranes.
The city’s belly was open.
And the real estate agent kept pointing out the sea view.
It was not merely my impression.
In 2018, sixty-five building permits were issued in Batumi for roughly 648,000 square meters.
In the first quarter of the following year, projects under development included more than 1.25 million square meters of residential space.
Numbers large enough to cease meaning anything.
The human mind cannot imagine a million square meters.
It can imagine a room.
A bed.
A window.
A table.
The exact spot on the floor where the sun arrives at four in the afternoon.
The market, on the other hand, does not need to imagine a home.
It only has to multiply.
Square meters.
Price.
Yield.
Occupancy.
Resale.
A city observed by capital has no rooms.
It has units.
It is a fundamental linguistic transformation.
A home contains a life.
A unit contains a return.
A home can be too small, noisy, bright, hot, cold, far from work, or close to the person you love.
A unit is a number in a spreadsheet.
It does not complain.
Does not grow.
Does not get divorced.
Does not age.
Does not need schools.
It can remain empty and continue to constitute an investment.
Human beings are far less efficient.
They demand water.
Transportation.
Space.
Memory.
Sometimes even the outrageous right to continue living in the neighborhood after it becomes interesting.
As I walked, I kept seeing that overlap.
An old red façade.
Black laundry hanging from the windows.
Balconies enclosed with different materials.
Immediately behind it, a wall of glass.
A skyscraper rising so close it looked ready to ask the lower building to move because it was ruining the buyers’ view.
The towers promised the sea.
The old buildings risked receiving only shadow.
The future has this bad habit.
It arrives declaring that it brings light and begins by blocking the sun from those who lived there first.
I photographed a colorful apartment building.
Red.
Green.
Blue.
The balconies told different lives.
Curtains.
Clothes.
Objects.
One room looked orderly.
The one beside it was fighting a losing war against accumulation.
Below were stores.
Signs.
People.
Between one window and the next, there was no urban strategy.
There were families.
Each had taken the rectangle it was given and tried to turn it into something habitable.
A balcony is not merely there to increase the apartment’s market value by a few percent.
It is there for smoking.
Drying clothes.
Growing basil.
Watching the people arguing below.
Making a call without the children overhearing.
Keeping things you no longer want inside the house but are not yet ready to remove from your existence.
It is there to lean out when an ambulance arrives.
To check the weather.
To see whether the person you were expecting is really coming or has once again fed you some bullshit.
A balcony is the diplomatic border between private life and the rest of the world.
In renderings, it is empty.
In reality, it contains a broken bicycle, two faded chairs, and proof that someone stayed long enough to accumulate useless things.
Batumi sold apartments to international buyers.
It was no longer merely a city to live in.
It had become a city to buy.
The distinction is enormous.
You can love a place without owning a single inch of it.
You can own an apartment without knowing the name of the street where you invested.
Money travels better than people.
It does not get homesick.
It does not have to learn the language.
It does not wonder where to buy bread.
It arrives by wire transfer, acquires a sea view, and waits.
People, on the other hand, have to live inside the consequences.
There was nothing necessarily wrong with foreign buyers.
They were not a gang of criminals arriving with briefcases, fake mustaches, and a secret plan to fill Batumi with studio apartments.
An investment can finance construction.
Construction can create jobs.
New buildings can improve an area.
Money is not evil.
It is indifferent.
Which sometimes produces very similar results, but with better accounting.
Money enters wherever it glimpses growth.
It does not ask whether the place is ready.
It does not ask what it will lose.
It does not ask who was already there.
It does what it was designed to do.
Seeks more money.
Expecting sensitivity from capital is like scolding a shark for failing to appreciate the sunset.
You can do it.
The shark will keep eating.
The job of politics and urban planning should be to establish where it is allowed to swim.
Batumi, however, seemed to have opened the pool.
The sea was near.
The mountains behind it.
Tourism was growing.
Casinos attracted visitors.
Taxes and procedures made the market attractive.
The cranes found an ideal habitat.
They began to reproduce.
Yellow.
Long.
Slender.
The metal erections of real estate capitalism.
They rose above the rooftops and rotated slowly, carrying concrete from one place to another with the satisfied air of someone convinced that size settles every argument.
I photographed one up close.
The suspended cab.
The structure.
The counterweights.
Other buildings behind it.
For a few seconds, I thought about the man who might be up there.
From that distance, I could not see him.
Capital has a remarkable ability to render people invisible even when it lifts them above an entire city.
We see the crane.
Not the operator.
We see the building.
Not the person who tied the rebar, poured the concrete, installed the windows, or breathed dust for months so someone else could receive the keys to an investment with a sea view.
But I did not want to repeat another elegy about hidden labor.
Batumi was showing me a different problem.
Not only who builds.
Who imagines.
Who decides.
Who establishes the shape of the future before the future has had a chance to voice an opinion.
The buyer sees a floor plan.
The resident sees a portion of sky disappear.
The designer sees volumes.
The child sees that the ground where he played is now surrounded by a fence.
The city government sees investment.
The woman on the fourth floor sees that, beginning at three in the afternoon, her kitchen no longer receives sunlight.
No one is necessarily lying.
They are looking at different objects in the same place.
That is the difficulty with cities.
Every decision produces a different photograph depending on the window from which you view it.
I crossed an intersection.
A sign marked the pedestrian crossing.
Behind it were cars, construction sites, towers, and still more buildings in preparation.
It seemed the city had planned a safe route across the road, but no equally clear way through its own development.
Cranes appeared everywhere.
Buildings occupied the horizon.
The mountain remained in the background, looking ever more like a decorative element inserted to raise apartment prices.
“Sea view.”
“Mountain view.”
“City view.”
A view became a commodity the moment we understood we could sell it without owning it.
No one builds the sea.
No one produces a mountain.
But place a window in front of one and nature suddenly enters the price list.
It is brilliant.
Humanity spent millennia trying to dominate the environment.
Then it discovered it was far more profitable to photograph it from a balcony and add twenty percent to the price.
I passed a lot covered in stones, earth, and construction debris.
The skyline rose behind it.
It was one of the most honest images.
The future does not arrive clean.
It produces rubble.
Digs.
Demolishes.
Moves things.
Leaves rebar, dust, panels, holes, and materials that disappear from brochures with a single click.
Every new building generates an amount of disorder proportional to the perfection it promises.
It is like falling in love.
At first, you see the imagined result.
Two people in tune.
Travel.
Sundays.
Regular sex.
Someone who finally understands your particular way of being an asshole.
Then construction begins.
Walls get broken.
Pipes no one knew existed emerge.
The wiring is not up to code.
The budget doubles.
Someone sleeps on the couch.
The difference is that relationships do not have a sign outside reading:
“Delivery expected in the second quarter.”
Even when they do, they are usually lying.
The towers beyond the rubble kept rising.
I did not feel only mistrust.
I was impressed.
That has to be admitted.
Building is exciting.
Something that did not exist takes shape.
Foundations become floors.
Floors become façades.
The façade begins to reflect the sky.
Ambition has a concrete allure.
You can touch it.
You can count its levels.
You can watch it advance week by week.
It is much more photogenic than maintenance.
No one inaugurates a repaired pipe with champagne and music.
No mayor cuts a ribbon to celebrate an elevator that simply keeps working.
Politics loves what it can display.
Care, on the other hand, is repetitive.
It has no renderings.
It requires doing things every day that no one notices until you stop.
It is true of cities.
It is true of homes.
It is true of human beings.
Building something new produces excitement.
Taking care of what already exists requires character.
Batumi was excited.
It had bought the dress.
Ordered a drink.
Met someone.
Started three projects at once.
It would think about maintenance the next day.
Perhaps.
On one street, I came upon a white car parked in front of an old building.
The door was open.
The windows in the façade looked dark.
Worn stone.
Plaster.
Marks.
I did not know who had gotten out of the car.
It did not matter.
The image brought two speeds together.
The vehicle ready to leave again.
The building forced to remain.
Cities transform through this difference.
Money can leave.
People often cannot.
An investor sells.
A company changes the project.
An administration reaches the end of its term.
An architect adds the work to a portfolio and accepts a commission elsewhere.
The city remains with what they built.
It is the patient who outlives the surgeon and continues to carry his signature on the body.
Some scars become part of the face.
Others require embarrassing explanations on every new date.
Batumi had quite a few.
A large mural covered one wall.
A face.
Hands.
Colors.
The painting turned an ordinary building into something that forced you to stop.
Behind it and around it, towers kept appearing.
The difference struck me.
The mural added meaning to an existing surface.
The skyscraper added value to the land.
Both changed the city.
But they spoke different languages.
One said:
“Look at this wall.”
The other:
“Imagine the return this could generate.”
There was no need to choose which was nobler.
Urban art can become marketing too.
A mural can also raise property values, attract visitors, and prepare a neighborhood for the arrival of people enthusiastic enough to pay twice as much for craft beer inside a former repair shop.
Capitalism does not always fight creativity.
It often invites creativity to dinner, buys it drinks, and uses it to increase the area’s value.
It is a very experienced seducer.
It makes you feel rebellious while calculating the return.
I kept walking.
Old buildings.
New towers.
Balconies.
Cranes.
Satellite dishes.
Glass.
Rust.
Colors.
Concrete.
At every corner, Batumi refused to choose an era.
That was what made it so photographically powerful.
The contrast did not have to be constructed.
It was already there.
A tired façade in front of a newly completed building.
A broken window with a skyscraper reflected in the glass that remained.
A crane above a roof where someone had laid out clothes to dry.
Past and future shared the frame without having agreed on the terms.
We call that period “transition.”
It is a polite word.
It suggests progressive movement.
Orderly.
From one point to another.
Like changing trains.
In reality, a transition looks more like a poorly organized move.
You do not know where the silverware ended up.
You still have the keys to the old house.
The new one has no curtains.
Someone wrote “fragile” on a box full of books and “books” on a box containing every photograph from your childhood.
For weeks, you live surrounded by objects without a place.
Batumi was moving house inside itself.
Some rooms were already modern.
Others still held Soviet furniture.
In the kitchen were international plans.
On the balcony, sheets were still drying.
The city was growing.
But growth and progress are not synonyms.
Something can grow larger without growing better.
A tumor, for example.
A debt.
The ego of a man who has just been promoted.
The number of apps required to perform tasks that once required only a phone call.
Growth is quantitative.
You can measure it.
Floors.
Square meters.
Transactions.
Prices.
Arrivals.
Investment.
Progress is more of a bastard.
It requires questions.
Who is better off?
Who can afford to stay?
Who receives services?
Who loses space?
What is built?
What is destroyed?
How much future is sold, and how much present life is treated as an obstacle?
A skyscraper answers the question “how much?” very well.
It is less prepared for “why?”
By 2025, Batumi’s residential market would reach 17,478 transactions with a total value of roughly $1.3 billion.
One billion three hundred million dollars.
The city had become a successful product.
The numbers say so.
And the numbers are right.
That is the most irritating thing about numbers.
They can be right and explain absolutely nothing.
Seventeen thousand four hundred seventy-eight apartments changing hands.
But how many were homes?
How many investments?
How many would remain empty through the winter?
How many would hold a family?
How many would become short-term rentals?
How many people would look at the sea through the window, and how many would merely watch the yield chart from another country?
I did not know.
The number measured the market.
Not the city.
It is a distinction we constantly forget.
GDP measures the economy.
Not peace of mind.
Price measures what someone is willing to pay.
Not what something is worth to the person who would lose it.
The number of floors measures height.
Not the quality of life at street level.
Capital loves what it can count.
People live mostly inside what escapes calculation.
Habit.
Memory.
The neighbor who has a spare key.
The shopkeeper who gives you credit.
The route taken every morning.
The tree beneath which you waited for someone.
The window from which your mother called you.
These are economically awkward elements.
They produce no yield.
But remove them and a neighborhood ceases to be home.
It becomes a location.
Batumi risked becoming a highly desirable location.
Sea.
Mountains.
Casinos.
Connections.
Competitive prices.
An attractive environment for investors.
A convincing line in someone’s portfolio.
The problem was not attracting money.
Cities need money.
You cannot pay for concrete with authenticity.
Hospitals do not accept sunsets.
Roads are not paved with poetry, however serious an organizational failing of the universe this may remain.
The problem begins when money stops being a tool and becomes the only resident whose opinion is requested.
A city should not be forced to choose between decay and selling itself completely.
Between broken windows and towers for investors.
Between remaining motionless and becoming unrecognizable.
That is not a choice.
It is blackmail with a glossy brochure.
I saw another large apartment block.
Blue balconies.
Pale façade.
Marks of time.
It was not elegant.
It did not try to be.
It had the shape of a building designed to hold many people, not to persuade one rich person to feel special.
Behind it, the new city rose again.
Seen this way, the difference looked almost moral.
It was not.
The old blocks had represented a future too.
They too had once been new.
They promised homes, services, order, a different society.
Every era believes its architecture has finally solved the human being.
Then the human being moves in.
Moves a wall.
Breaks a window.
Has one more child than expected.
Gets divorced.
Ages.
Installs an antenna.
Hangs out the underwear.
Time turns every future into an old building.
The glossy towers would grow dull.
The pools would need repairs.
The elevators would begin stopping between floors during the exact week the building manager could not be reached.
The façades would lose panels.
The exclusive apartments would develop mold in the corners.
Someone would enclose a balcony with a mismatched window.
The future would become life.
It was its only hope.
I looked at Batumi from above.
Towers occupied the horizon.
Cranes crossed the sky.
The old blocks looked low.
Roads became lines.
Cars became dots.
Construction sites became great patches of earth.
From that distance, everything looked inevitable.
The city was growing.
The end.
The aerial view possesses a dangerous authority.
It makes you believe you understand because you can see the whole.
But the whole is merely the portion of reality from which the faces have disappeared.
Capital loves aerial photographs.
From above, you cannot see the laundry.
You cannot make out the broken windows.
You cannot hear the noise.
You cannot recognize the store about to close.
You do not know who lives where.
You see surfaces.
Volumes.
Density.
Potential.
The city becomes clean the moment people are small enough.
I had a drone.
I participated in the problem with excellent image quality.
I sent it up.
Took photographs.
The coast.
The roads.
The towers.
The construction sites.
The entire city compressed inside an orderly rectangle.
It was beautiful.
Naturally.
Beauty is a very willing collaborator of power.
It makes desirable what, viewed from the ground, might raise questions.
But the aerial photograph did not lie.
Batumi truly was impressive.
Truly alive.
Truly growing.
Truly full of energy, contradictions, and possibility.
I did not have to pretend the transformation was only destruction.
That would have been another form of dishonesty.
The city was not a passive victim of the future.
It desired it.
Many people probably desired it.
New opportunities.
New homes.
Work.
Tourists.
Money.
Connections.
The possibility of no longer being regarded as the periphery and beginning to choose the center of their own map.
There is nothing noble about remaining poor to preserve a beautiful atmosphere in foreigners’ photographs.
No people should have to live inside a museum so we can visit and pronounce the word “authentic” with satisfaction.
Batumi had the right to grow.
The question was different.
Could it grow without expelling itself from its own image?
Could it build towers without regarding everything beneath them as a mistake to correct?
Could it attract capital without granting it the exclusive right to define the future?
Could it become international without turning into a generically luxurious city, identical to every other seaside destination that has replaced character with a perfumed lobby and an apartment catalog?
I had no answers.
I had photographs.
It is a recurring problem.
Photographs formulate questions with a precision words often take pages to reach.
An old façade.
A tower behind it.
Laundry hanging out.
A crane.
That was enough.
Everything else was my attempt not to look intellectually unemployed.
I looked again at the opening image.
The narrow street.
The laundry.
The new buildings in the background.
At first, I had thought future and past were in conflict.
Now I was no longer sure.
Perhaps the conflict was between two ways of looking at the same city.
On one side, Batumi as a place to transform.
On the other, Batumi as a place already inhabited.
The first sees possibility.
The second, bonds.
The first asks how much space can be built.
The second already knows what occupies that space.
Both may be right.
That is why urban transformations become so fierce.
They do not pit good against evil.
They pit a promise against a memory.
And a promise is always more photogenic.
It has no wrinkles.
It has nothing to prove.
It can promise you a pool, sea view, return, and an elegant life in which you will no longer need to hang underwear above a street.
Memory, on the other hand, arrives with exposed pipes, mismatched windows, and a broken chair on the balcony.
It has no marketing department.
It can only say:
I was here.
That is not always enough.
But it should count for something.
That evening, the wind kept moving the clothes.
The towers remained still.
The cranes had stopped working.
For a few hours, the city did not grow.
It lived.
The windows lit up.
Someone prepared food.
Someone came home.
Someone closed a curtain.
Someone took in a shirt that was finally dry.
The future had not defeated the past.
It had rented an apartment in the same neighborhood.
The two watched each other from their windows.
One had panoramic glass.
The other knew where the pipes ran.
I did not know who would have the last word.
But I had understood one thing.
A city does not progress when it grows taller.
It progresses when the future it builds still has room for the people who will have to live in it.
The rest is growth.
It can be spectacular.
It can produce magnificent photographs, billions of dollars, and terraces from which the sea seems to belong to you.
But if seeing the future requires you to climb so high that you can no longer make out the people, perhaps you are not looking ahead.
You are merely looking down.
Batumi kept building.
The cranes would begin moving again the following morning.
More floors.
More square meters.
More windows sold before they had ever reflected a face.
Meanwhile, in the old building, someone left a row of clothes outside.
They were not beautiful.
They did not match.
They did not constitute an investment.
They said only that, behind that façade, the city had not yet become a project.
Someone lived there.
The future had washed its shirt.
The past had lent it the balcony.
The wind, as always, did all the work without asking for a percentage.