The Weight of Clocks

The man who repairs watches in the Galería Comercial has not sold a single timepiece since March. He told me this without complaint, the way you announce weather. His name is Ernesto Palomino and his fingers are the most precise things I have ever watched move.

I found him because I was killing an afternoon between two meetings, that particular urban drift that Medellín allows if you stop looking at your phone long enough. The gallery — calling it that is generous, it is a corridor of small commerce wedged between a money transfer office and a place that sells only buttons — smells of machine oil and a sweetness I could not name until I realized it was the wood of very old clock cases, breathing.

Ernesto's table holds perhaps forty watches in various states of openness. Some are face-up, some gutted, their movements exposed like the insides of something living. He works with a loupe fixed in his right eye socket, giving him the look of a man who has grown a monocle as a natural adaptation. He does not look up when I enter. He is listening to a movement, he explains later, the way a doctor listens to a chest.

The watch in his hands is a 1960s Colombian railroad piece, issued by the Ferrocarriles Nacionales before the whole system collapsed into political argument and bad concrete. The company does not exist. The railroad barely exists. The watch runs perfectly, Ernesto says, once he cleans forty years of lint from under the rotor. It keeps better time than the phones we carry.

I ask him who brings watches to repair these days. He puts down his tools.

Mostly, he says, it is people who inherit things. A grandfather dies, there is a watch on his wrist, and the family cannot throw it away but cannot wear a stopped thing either. So they come to him. He fixes it. Sometimes the family sells it immediately after, now that it has value again. Sometimes they wear it. Once, a woman from Itagüí brought her father's Omega in a plastic bread bag, the crystal cracked, the crown missing, and she cried the entire time Ernesto estimated the cost. Not because of the money. Because hearing the ticking again was hearing something she thought was finished.

He says this flatly. He is not a sentimental man, or rather he has metabolized sentiment into craft.

The afternoon light comes through the corridor at an angle that only happens in Medellín, that valley-filtered gold that makes even fluorescent tubes look like they are trying. It catches the open movements on his table and for a moment all those tiny gears are burning.

I ask about the railroad watch specifically. He picks it up. The man who brought it in is a retired engineer who rode those trains as a boy, Boyacá to Bogotá, seventeen hours through páramo fog. The engineer is eighty-one. He found the watch in a cigar box in his closet and could not remember how long it had been there. Not the watch's fault, Ernesto says. Watches do not lose time. We lose watches.

This sounds like something that should be embroidered on a pillow and I almost dismiss it, but then I think about the specific weight of that cigar box, the specific texture of finding a thing you forgot you owned, and I understand he is not philosophizing. He is describing a mechanical fact about time and human carelessness and how those two things are not the same problem.

Before I leave, I show him the watch on my own wrist, a cheap automatic I bought in a hurry at a pharmacy in Bogotá three years ago. He glances at it. He says nothing for a moment.

It is ten minutes fast, he finally says.

I know, I tell him. I have always meant to fix it.

He nods, the way craftsmen nod when they have heard every version of that sentence and have chosen mercy over judgment. He gives me his card. The card says ERNESTO PALOMINO – RELOJERÍA and has a phone number and nothing else. No slogan. No website. No hours of operation.

I walk back out into the corridor and then into the street, into the city's particular early-evening noise, and I am ten minutes ahead of everything around me, or ten minutes behind, and I cannot decide which version is the more honest one to live with.

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