5 Vile & Ignoble Tales

A Mere Clock

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In the mid-nineties of the nineteenth century, wristwatches were already feverish. At first, attention was not directed to the watch, but always to the time. "What's the time?" asked a gentleman on the pavement, "eleven hours and twenty minutes" answered the beautiful lady looking at her wrist; and from there a romance would emerge. It was no longer a matter of looking for the watch at the bottom of the left pocket inside the jacket — much simpler: wrist ahead, eye on the wrist. With the arrival of this invention, poor people, when walking in the street, stopped staring at the great clocks in the great towers of the great cities, and stopped asking sirs the time, since that class always had a golden and valuable pocket-watch. Enough of that! The price was more accessible because the models available were of cheap materials; certainly, everyone admired with notoriety the skill of that tiny device that already fulfilled its purpose before gaining handles, but it was not received with such an expression due to the lack of practice with which people previously used it.

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Joaquim was a watchmaker in the city, and his business, which opened at eight in the morning and closed at three in the afternoon, was doing well because he was the only wristwatch repairer in the city and had started at the beginning of the fashion in the country. He worked five days a week, month after month, and the years passed while the business grew. By the way, it is worth noting here, you never saw a watchmaker who did not wear a watch, whether it was a wall clock, pocket watch or wristwatch, did you? In the same way, Joaquim wore a wristwatch. He had everything to show off, to make straps from the best of leathers, to use the best small parts and gears to build the clock's mechanics, and he also had everything to bathe the case of the accessory in gold or silver, since he kept a fortune from Portuguese heritage. However, he settled for the mere watch with dark leather straps and made of aluminium. It was light and practical, besides the fact that it did not miss the time, nor did it stop counting it. It was always ticking, here and there, and made such a vapid noise that you could only hear the hand movement when the whole city block was silent. Well, one way or another, it was certainly a clock. Ugly. It turned out that Joaquim married a beautiful countrywoman, closed his little shop, moved to his wife's town and even bought land and built a farm with his fortune. He lived solemnly. He never boasted, never humiliated anyone, never acted with arrogance; he treated his neighbours very well and was known to be a quite honest man. So God blessed him very much and his farm was also doing well — as was his old watchmaking business. He had many children, but one, in particular, had in his old age. He didn't spend much time with the boy because the old watchmaker died of tuberculosis just before he was sixty.

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Now, forget the view of the growing metropolis and the big cities, and let's go to a quieter and slower environment; more natural: the rural one of the fields and the green land full of crops and little animals in the vast enclosure. Now, there was a little man who looked after everything in sight. He was a boy with blond hair, white skin, honey-coloured eyes, a flat nose and big ears. His name was Pedro, he was seventeen years old and lived peacefully with his mother, now retired from farming. Pedro was brave and feared few things, among them snakes, which once bit him in the rib when he was a child. But he was not used to being afraid of animals. This was already a more vivid region, and a small village was not far away. So the forests were already more open, and beasts like jaguars could no longer be found there by any means. So I say, confirming even more, that it was a quiet life. However, Pedro lived during the height of the Second World War. They drafted him. His mother, consoled by two other loving sons, gave the younger one his father's old watch; he did not wait any longer and went where he had to go, flew to Italy and fought bravely in the war, protecting all his comrades with the watch on his wrist. It reminded him of his father since it was as ugly as him. It made him know many things, among them the hour, the minute, the second, and many others. Pedro and his companions emerged victoriously; they all returned safe and sound to their homeland! Ah, never was such a celebration seen in that interior when the boy returned. All the neighbouring townsfolk — all known to the family — met outside the barn and drank and ate to their hearts' content. Pedro, who was as modest as his father, refused and renounced the whole feast, but in the end, he had to give thanks for having arrived back home. He ended up celebrating. As time went by, Pedro became more and more urbanized. When still young, he visited the big city and fell in love with the social lifestyle. He lived there for a few years, but he returned to his dear ones: mother and brothers; only that he took a young woman with him! He asked permission to marry Raimunda. His mother allowed it. There was another party in the region, and the little couple went, after the processions were over, to live closer to the big city. They had four children. They were happy and had no difficulties — Pedro was a worker in a car factory and ended up, after years, becoming the manager of the establishment.