CII. El Techo de Vidrio

The Glass Roof

That's Franciso, all 6'3" and 210 lbs of him, laying the first pieces of vitral--
stained glass. He did an outstanding job from cutting precisely to finishing
completely and carefully.

June 28. Rainy all day here in Ajijic. Got back home from Guadalajara just after noon. Tons of traffic on the city streets, the industrial zone, bumps, holes in the asphalt, trucks stuck in traffic. Chose the stained glass—vitral—out of a limited selection, but good colors. Just outside the city, I check our load. "El vitral es un poco roto—broken.” We pull over to the side of the pereferico just before the airport. Now twice as many pieces of glass as before. F offers to make good on the loss, but I figure out a new design where he won't need to go back to the big city, one that also takes into account both the fragility of the vitral and the sizes of the remaining pieces by using it mostly to fill smaller rectangles of the framework.

The plans I drew up from which work followed.
Areas that are not colored were filled with a
lightly tinted glass.

Early July. For the past week I've been waking up every couple of nights at 3 AM imagining scapel-sharp shards of glass falling to embed in the unsuspecting skulls of household guests--I guess members of the immediate family are exempt in my bloody fantasies. No matter what the odds are against it happening at any particular moment, sometime in the next quarter century or so it’s bound to occur, no? After much tossing, turning, and getting up to roam the darkened premises, I’m finally able to picture a solution: two layers of thicker glass sandwiching the fragile vitral. Sharing this idea with Juan, I am relieved that he seems to agree.

Julio 12. Two weeks to the day after the Saga of the Broken Glass, I've received assurances anew about both the security of the redesign and that the work may actually have an end date soon. This morning Francisco called to say he was ready to come over with his crew. I'll be out of the house then, I told him, but back by mid-afternoon. We settled on a las tres--three o'clock. We'll see how that goes. Over the past two weeks I've been told two or three different times that someone will come by our casa to work right now—ahorito. The visits seldom came to pass at the appointed hora or even día. 

July 13. Whoa! All of a sudden, in a matter of hours, the work is complete. Juan, Francisco and a helper have carefully laid a protective overlay of three 80-pound pieces of 6mm clear glass on a layer of the 2mm stained, or lightly tinted, glass all sealed and cushioned by silicone. They did a fine job. And the bonus is that they're also neighbors; I'll see them several times a week, at least, probably for the rest of my life, sharing the memory of this creation into which we all put our best effort.

Looking through the completed techo de vidrio. The protective overlay layer  is over twice as thick as the colored layer, and very heavy--more than 200 lbs. Fortunately it's in three pieces, but even so, watching the trio of workers lay it was a little nerve-wracking.