City

by Alessandro Baricco

  “My sister means to say that it would be reassuring for us to see your, how to put it, the tools of your trade. Just out of curiosity, of course; you know, we, too, are, in a way, connoisseurs, if we may be allowed such a presumption.”

  The stranger smiles.

  He places the case on a chair and opens it.

  Sparkling metal, oiled and smooth. Mother of pearl inlay.

  The two sisters lean over to look.

  “Good heavens.”

  “Real jewels, if I may say so.”

  “Are they wound?”

  The stranger nods.

  “Naturally.”

  Melissa Dolphin looks at the stranger.

  “Then why are they stopped?”

  Phil Wittacher arches his eyebrows slightly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My sister wonders why these splendid clocks of yours are stopped, since you assure us that you have wound them.”

  The stranger approaches the case, leans over to look. He observes the three dials carefully, one by one. Then he straightens up again.

  “They’ve stopped,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Miss Dolphin, I assure you that it is impossible.”

  “Not here, in this town,” says Julie Dolphin. She closes the case and hands it to the stranger.

  “As I was saying, it would be extremely useful if you would have the kindness to listen to what we have to tell you.”

  Phil Wittacher takes the case, puts on his duster, recovers his hat, and heads for the door. Before he opens it he turns, takes out his pocket watch, glances at it, puts it back in its place, and looks up at the Dolphin sisters, his face slightly pale.

  “Excuse me, can you tell me what time it is?”

  His tone is that of a man who has been shipwrecked and asks how much drinking water is left.

  “Can you tell me what time it is?”

  Julie Dolphin smiles.

  “Naturally no. It’s been thirty-four years, two months, and eleven days since anyone in Closingtown has known what time it is, Mister Wittacher.”

  At that point she burst out laughing. Shatzy. She started laughing. You could see that she really liked this story, she enjoyed telling it, she could have gone on doing it for a lifetime. It made her happy, that was it.

  “Until tomorrow, Mister Wittacher.”

  29

  No gun—over his heart, in the pocket, business cards that say

  Wittacher & Son.

  Construction and repair of clocks and watches.

  Medal of the Senate, Chicago Universal Exposition.

  Suitcase in hand, he walks in the wind to the very edge of town, a red house, the Dolphins’ house—three steps, the door, Julie Dolphin, the living room, odor of wood and vegetables, two guns hanging over the stove, Melissa Dolphin, dust that creaks under your shoes, everywhere, a strange town, dust everywhere, no rain, a strange town, good evening, Mister Wittacher.

  Good evening.

  For five days—every day at sunset—Phil Wittacher went to the Dolphin sisters’, to listen. They told him the story of Pat Cobhan, who killed himself in a gunfight, at Stonewall, for love of a whore, and the story of Sheriff Wister, who left Closingtown innocent and returned to Closingtown guilty. They asked if he had met an old man, half blind, the two guns in his gunbelt polished to a shine. No. You will meet him. His name is Bird. This is his story. And they told him about old Wallace, and his wealth. They told him about the Christiansons, a love story, from beginning to end. On the fifth day they told him again about Bill and Mary. Then they said

  “Maybe that’s enough.”

  Phil Wittacher puts out his cigar in a blue glass dish.

  “Good stories,” he says.

  “It depends,” says Melissa Dolphin.

  “We are rather inclined to consider them horrendous stories,” says Julie Dolphin.

  Phil Wittacher gets up, goes to the window, looks out into the darkness. He says

  “All right, what’s the problem?”

  “It’s not so easy to explain. But if there’s anyone who can understand it’s you.”

  They ask if he has noticed that all the stories have one thing in common.

  Wittacher thinks.

  Death, he says.

  Something else, they say.

  Wittacher thinks.

  The wind, he says.

  Exactly.

  The wind.

  Wittacher is silent.

  Again he sees Pat Cobhan, after days of travel, get off his horse, pick up a handful of dust, let it slide slowly through his fingers, and think: no wind, here. And at last is allowed to die.

  There was no wind where Sheriff Wister surrendered to Bear. Desert, sun. No wind.

  Wittacher thinks.

  He’s been in this town for six days, and the wind hasn’t stopped blowing for an instant, in a frenzy. Dust everywhere.

  “Why?” asks Phil Wittacher.

  “The wind is the curse,” says Melissa Dolphin.

  “The wind is a wound of time,” says Julie Dolphin. “That’s what the Indians think, did you know that? They say that when the wind rises it means that the great mantle of time has been torn. Then all men lose their way, and as long as the wind blows they will never find it. They are left without destiny, lost in a tempest of dust. The Indians say that only a few men know the art of tearing time. They fear such men, and call them ‘assassins of time.’ One of them tore the time in Closingtown: it happened thirty-four years, two months, and sixteen days ago. On that day, Mister Wittacher, each of us lost our destiny in a wind that rose suddenly in the sky over town, and hasn’t ceased.”

  You had to listen to Shatzy when she explained all this. She said that you had to imagine Closingtown as a man hanging out the window of a stagecoach with the wind in his face. The stagecoach was the World, which was making its nice journey through Time: it went along, grinding out days and miles, and if you stayed inside, sheltered, you didn’t feel the air or the speed. But if for some reason you leaned out the window, zac, you ended up in another Time, and then the dust and the wind could make you lose your mind. She really did say “lose your mind”: and around here that’s not just an expression. She said that Closingtown was a place that was leaning out the window of the World, with Time blowing in its face, blowing dust right in its eyes and confusing everything within. The image wasn’t all that easy to understand, but everyone liked it a lot, it had gotten around the hospital, and I think that in some way everyone found in it a story he vaguely recognized, or something like that. Prof. Parmentier himself, once, told me that, if it was helpful, I could think of what was happening in my head as something not very different from Closingtown. Something tears Time, he said to me, and you are no longer punctual about anything. You are always a little bit somewhere else. A little before or a little after. You have a lot of appointments, with emotions, or with things, and you are always chasing them or stupidly arriving ahead of time. He said that that was my illness, if you like. Julie Dolphin called it: losing your own destiny. But that was the West: certain things could still be said. She said them.

  “Thirty-four years, two months, and sixteen days ago, Mister Wittacher, each of us lost our destiny in a wind that rose suddenly in the sky over Closingtown, and hasn’t ceased. Pat Cobhan was young and the young can’t live without destiny. He got on his horse and rode until he reached the land where his was waiting for him. Bear was an Indian: he knew. He led Sheriff Wister far away, to the edge of the wind, and there delivered him to the destiny he deserved. Bird is an old man who doesn’t want to die. He curses but he is crouching in this wind where his destiny as a gunfighter will never find him. This is a town from which someone has stolen time, and destiny. You wanted an explanation: is that sufficient?”

  Phil Wittacher thinks.

  It’s completely mad, he says.

  Less than you think.

  They’re legends, he says.

  Don’t talk nonsense, boy.

&
nbsp; It’s only wind, he says.

  You think so?

  Shatzy said that then they made him open his suitcase. Inside were all his tools and his three clocks, perfect and beautiful: inexorably stopped.

  “And how do you explain this, Mister Wittacher?”

  “Perhaps it’s the humidity.”

  “Humidity?”

  “I mean, it’s very dry here, in this town, it’s terribly dry, I suppose it’s the wind or . . .”

  “The wind?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “It’s only wind, Mister Wittacher, since when does the wind stop a clock?”

  Phil Wittacher smiles.

  “Don’t corner me: it’s one thing to stop a clock, another to stop time.”

  Julie Dolphin rises—without hesitation rises—and goes over to the stranger, goes very close, and looks him in the eye, straight in the eye.

  “I beg you to believe me: here in Closingtown, they are the same thing.”

  “In what sense, Ma’am?”

  In what sense, Shatzy? we asked her. Every so often there were five or six of us listening to her stories. She was actually telling them to me, but I didn’t mind if the others listened, too. They came to my room, we filled it up, someone would bring cookies. And we listened.

  In what sense, Shatzy?

  Tomorrow, she said. Tomorrow.

  Why?

  She said tomorrow, she means tomorrow.

  Tomorrow?

  Tomorrow.

  The first time I saw Shatzy I was downstairs, in the reading room. She came and sat down near me and said

  “Everything all right?”

  I don’t know why, but I mistook her for Jessica, one of those college girls who would come here as interns. I remembered that she had a problem with a grandmother, something like a sick grandmother. So I asked her about her grandmother. She answered and we went on talking. Only after a while, when I looked at her closely, did it occur to me that she wasn’t Jessica. Not at all.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Shatzy. Shatzy Shell.”

  “Have we ever seen each other before?”

  “No.”

  “Well, hello, my name is Ruth.”

  “Hello.”

  “Are you an intern here?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a nurse?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you do in life?”

  She stopped to think for a while. Then she said

  “Westerns.”

  “Westerns?”

  I wasn’t sure I remembered what they were.

  “Yes, Westerns.”

  They must be something that had to do with guns.

  “And how many have you made?”

  “One.”

  “Is it good?”

  “I like it.”

  “Can I see it?”

  That’s exactly how the stories began. By chance.

  Phil Wittacher smiles.

  “Don’t corner me: it’s one thing to stop a clock, another to stop time.”

  Julie Dolphin rises—without hesitation rises—and goes over to the stranger, goes very close, and looks him in the eye, straight in the eye.

  “I beg you to believe me: here in Closingtown, they are the same thing.”

  “In what sense, Ma’am?”

  Then Julie Dolphin told him.

  “You can believe it or not, but thirty-four years, two months, and sixteen days ago someone tore the time in Closingtown. A great wind arose and suddenly all the clocks stopped. There was no way to get them started again. Our brother had mounted an enormous clock on a wooden tower, right in the middle of Main Street, under the water cistern. He was very proud of it, and he went to wind it, personally, every day. There was no other clock so big, in all the West. It was called the Old Man, because it moved slowly and looked wise. It stopped that day, and never started again. Its hands were stuck on the 12 and the 37, and, in that condition, it was like a blind eye that never stopped staring at you. Finally they decided to board it up. At least then it stopped spying on everyone. Now it looks like a smaller water tank, under the big one. But inside it’s still there. Stopped. If you think that these are merely legends, listen to this. Eleven years ago people from the railroad come to town. They say that they want to route the tracks through here, to link the Southern line with the great plains. They bought land and drove in stakes. Then they notice something odd: their watches have stopped. They ask around and someone tells them the whole story. So they have an expert come from the capital. A little man who was always in black, and never spoke. He stayed here for nine days. He had some strange tools, he never stopped taking clocks apart and putting them back together. And he measured everything, the light, the humidity, he even studied the sky, at night. And naturally the wind. In the end he said: ‘The clocks do what they can: the fact is that there is no longer Time here.’ The little man had almost got it right. He understood something. In reality, time has never stopped existing here. But the truth is that it’s not the same time as in the rest of the world. Here it runs a little ahead or a little behind, who can say. What is certain is that it runs in a place where the clocks can’t see it. The people from the railroad thought about this for a while. They said it was not ideal to route a railroad through a land where time no longer existed. Probably they imagined trains disappearing into a void and getting lost forever. No one made a big deal of it. People who are used to living without destiny can live perfectly well without a railroad. Nothing has happened since then. In the sense that the wind hasn’t stopped blowing for an instant, and no clock has been seen that wasn’t stopped. We could go on this way forever, whatever forever means in a place where time has been torn. But it’s hard. One can live without clocks: it’s more complicated to do without destiny, to live a life that has no appointments. We are a city of exiles, of people absent from themselves. It seems that only two possibilities remain to us: to somehow sew up the tear in time, or to go away. We two would like to die here, on a day with no wind: that’s why we’ve called on you.”

  Phil Wittacher is silent.

  “Let us die at the right time, without dust in our eyes, boy.”

  Phil Wittacher smiles.

  The world, he thinks, is full of lunatics.

  He thinks of the little man in black and can’t imagine him anything but drunk, leaning against the bar in the saloon, bewildered by nonsense.

  He thinks of the Old Man, and wonders if it really is the biggest clock in the West.

  He thinks of his three splendid clocks, with the time in London, San Francisco and Boston. Stopped.

  He looks at the two old women, their house in perfect order, certain that they are adrift in a time that is not theirs.

  Then he clears his throat.

  “All right.”

  He says

  “What do I do?”

  Julie Dolphin smiles.

  “Make the clock go again.”

  “What clock?”

  “The Old Man.”

  “Why that one?”

  “If it goes, the others will follow.”

  “It’s only a clock. It won’t restore anything to you.”

  “You see about making it go. Then what must happen will happen.”

  Phil Wittacher thinks.

  Phil Wittacher shakes his head.

  “It’s crazy.”

  “What’s the matter, boy, you shitting in your pants?”

  “My sister wonders if you do not by chance nourish an exaggerated distrust in the possibilities of your . . .”

  “I’m not shitting in my pants. I’m only saying that it’s crazy.”

  “Did you really think that for all that money you’d find yourself doing a reasonable job?”

  “My sister says that we’re not paying you to tell us what’s crazy and what isn’t. Make the clock go, that’s all you have to do.”

  Phil Wittacher gets up.

  “I imagine it’s absolutely idiotic, but
I’ll do it.”

  He says.

  Julie Dolphin smiles.

  “I’m sure of it, Mister Wittacher. And I am truly grateful to you.”

  Melissa Dolphin smiles.

  “Whip his ass, that bastard. No pity.”

  Phil Wittacher looks at her.

  “It’s not a gunfight.”

  “Of course it is.”

  Music.

  30

  The Old Man was so big that when you went inside it was like going into a house. You opened a door, climbed some steps and ended up in the clock case. It was as if you were a flea entering a pocket watch. Phil Wittacher was dazed with wonder. The works were all of wood, rope and wax. The winder mechanism was water-operated, using the cistern above the clock. Only the hands were of iron. The numbers, on a white-lacquered wooden face, were painted in different colors, but they were not normal numbers. They were playing cards. All diamonds. From the ace to the queen, who was in the place of the 12. The king was in the middle of the face, where the signature of the clockmaker would ordinarily go.

  Town full of crazies, thinks Phil Wittacher.

  He climbs up and then descends into that incomprehensible network of toothed wheels, tracks, hooks, ropes, weights, balances.

  Everything is stopped.

  If only you couldn’t hear the wind whistling between the boards, thinks Phil Wittacher.

  He spends three days in there, hanging lamps everywhere and making a thousand drawings. Then he shuts himself in his room to study them. One evening he goes out to the Dolphin sisters’.

  “What did your brother do?” he asks.

  “You’re not being paid to ask questions, boy,” says Melissa Dolphin.

  “You mean before coming to the West?” asks Julie Dolphin.

  “Before building the Old Man.”

  “He cheated thieves,” says Melissa Dolphin.

  “He invented safes,” says Julie Dolphin.

  “Oh, that’s it,” says Phil Wittacher.

  Then he returns to his room over the saloon. And studies the drawings some more.

  One night there’s a knock on the door. He opens it and sees an old man dressed like a gunfighter. Including the guns. Two, in their holsters, backwards, with the handles jutting forward.