It happens in the beautiful start of the second chapter of the third season of The Bear. Eddie Vedder is playing and for two minutes you contemplate, without dialogue, the beauty of Chicago’s blue hours. No one is wearing a suit or heels or hair gel and the sun doesn’t rise behind one of those glass attics from which you can see the malleable and tiny people. On your screen appear the faces and hands of those who make it possible for everything to start and continue every morning, for the city to exist. Bakers kneading loaves, workers with the newspapers from the printing press, florists preparing bouquets, cleaners in line. Tortillas on the fire ready to be served. For 140 seconds you get close to the reality of those bodies hidden the rest of the time, those who cross the city in underground train cars, work in the back room and come out to get some air in closed alleys. There they are, in your living room, the masters of routine. Their shoulders carry the confidence in the possibility of a tomorrow. Theirs is the liturgy of the day to day.
I’ve been thinking about how well that beautiful tribute dialogues with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech at the recent Democratic convention. “Six years ago I was serving tortillas as a waitress in New York. I didn’t have health insurance. My family was fighting eviction, dealing with bills after my father unexpectedly passed away from cancer,” Ocasio said in a speech in which she dignified those without names or surnames in the captions of the mainstream press. “To love this country is to fight for its people, the everyday Americans, like waiters and factory workers and fast-food cashiers, on their feet all day in some of the hardest jobs there are,” she added. The congresswoman added that, because she was a waitress, Republicans ignore her: “They say I should be one again. I would gladly do it any day of the week, because there is nothing wrong with working for a living.”
How cruel this concept of “making a living” is, and how little it is questioned, I thought. Those words came back to me as I continued to watch. The Bear And I finally discovered the past of Tina’s character —the great Liza Colón-Zayas—. There we find out how she became a chef in that restaurant years before, when the owner caught her crying while she was eating a sandwich as a customer. It was, in Tina’s words, the worst day of her life: “They raised our rent. My husband has been waiting for a promotion for years and it may never come. I’ve been fired. I’ve applied for all the jobs in the city and nothing. I’m 46 years old. I can’t remember the last time I slept.” In that conversation about the perverse influence of work in the construction of identity, the future cook clarifies that she never had a dream job. “I’m overwhelmed by paying the rent and groceries. I would clean the floor, I would sell anything to work. I have to survive. I don’t want to save the world. I just want to feed my son. Give me a routine,” she says, claiming her dignity, and Michael, the owner, offers her a job. Something that will sustain her day to day life.
I saw that and I went back to when my father was fired from the iron factory, where he worked the night shift for 23 years until he was given early retirement when the plant closed. I was afraid that, like Tina, he would become depressed and cry. But then I remembered that, unlike her, he never missed those sleepless nights because he started his own vegetable garden and found a new routine, carefree thanks to the fantastic pension that his company committee fought for. That is the dignity that the person who makes your iron, the person who serves you the tortilla, deserves.
