The Measure of Time

By Jesús María Zarco

The shop occupied minimal space. Truly minimal. Barely a room at all. I always preferred entering through the entrance facing San Antón street, reserving the Rey street door for customers. These are habits transmitted from parent to child without conscious explanation or deliberate teaching. The scent of American cigarettes that Antonio chain-smoked pervaded the space, creating such a familiar atmosphere that prolonged absence from it felt somehow incomplete. Visiting Antonio had evolved into a cherished routine, especially since this gentle man possessed the gift of making visitors feel entirely at ease in his company. What drew me to seek his presence? Perhaps the answer lay in my enduring affection for my father's old friends, in whose eyes I imagined seeing reflected the warmth of those who had shared youth and purpose with him.

Most times Antonio received my visits with an expression that could be interpreted as blending joy with melancholy, stemming from what I attributed to an ambivalent internal tension he barely managed to conceal, silently lamenting how I reminded him of his lost friend while remaining completely convinced he was honoring the obligations inherent in true friendship. When I stopped by, I would watch him work in silence, standing upright, back against the wall, beside the door, eagerly anticipating the moment when he would begin relating one of those learned histories I so enjoyed and which he nonetheless dispensed sparingly, like the one that occurred in the twelfth century at a Cistercian monastery, where the primitive mechanism germinated, one that tolled the canonical hours, lacked a face, and divided the bell into seven strikes: lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline.

Seeking precious silence there proved entirely futile, scarce as silence is unfortunately, since it was sometimes broken by Antonio's narratives and constantly by the monotonous sound of sensitive machineries. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Upon the walls hung large ones, small ones, aged ones, new ones, traditional ones, modern ones, singular contraptions that each in their own rhythm and in chaotic disorder, strove with unequal fortune to pay homage to Chronos' relentless trajectory. Like everything else in the shop, the display case was also tiny, at one end of which, pushed against the wall, the operating theater where daily miracles occurred remained within reach of incredulous gazes. Washers, belts, gears, toothed wheels, snail wheels with chains, reduction wheels, concatenated wheels, crowns, magnifying lenses, and springs scattered across the worktable like a colony of ants at the mouth of their hill.

With enviable skill and infinite patience, with steady hands and subtle delicacy, Antonio disassembled contraptions searching for the delayed minute, the lost second, the perfect machine, and the pure mechanism. Sooner rather than later his hands, skillful, wise, precise, would succeed in healing the ailments of his singular patients, demonstrating that the system of time and its measurement, which since antiquity had been a source of obsession for mankind, as if measuring it might allow them to achieve mastery over it, held no secrets for one who knew how to restore order to whatever caused the ingenious device to fail.

This morning I passed by the shop again, and driven by curiosity I decided to step inside for a moment. To take a look around. The space it occupies remains tiny, minimal, and although it has ceased being one of those sanctuaries where Chronos' slaves make pilgrimage, the little shop does maintain its charm. A young artist, with a certain bohemian air, devotes herself to selling all manner of objects made with her own hands. Fans, oil paintings, watercolors, ceramics, bracelets, rings, pendants, scarves, and all sorts of objects and trinkets remain on display for sale. What I haven't dared to verify is whether in the small lavatory, either hanging on the wall or atop the cistern, there now sits a roll of toilet paper or whether there still remains a dog-eared copy of the Official State Gazette.