A brief story about tiles - by Teresa Saavedra
"What sweetens the blackness of this thick, coarse stonework are the fragile, shiny squares the size of an open hand, covering all fronts top to bottom with their fresh vegetable rigour. Flowers and foliage of ingenuous design, repeated in luminous and geometric exhaustion in an infinity of drawings, created by ignored artists, workers of factories sprouting around this city that has gradually accustomed to cover its houses with expensive tiles as they can endure the moods of the weather. (...)
White and blue cover the oldest houses, showing signs of ageing, splashed here, broken there, sometimes harder to replace half a dozen tiles than to paint an entire wall. The artists are gone the craft ceased to exist. The only solution is to replace them with others, even if different, drawing in the old frontages revealing bizarre and multicoloured sets of tiles in capricious mating."
Saavedra, Teresa, Memória das Doze Casas (Memory of the Twelve Houses), editora Civilização, 1995, pp. 64-65.
