City

by Alessandro Baricco

“Are you the clock man?” says Bird.

  “Yes.”

  “May I?”

  “If you like.”

  Bird comes in. Drawings everywhere.

  “Sit down,” says Phil Wittacher.

  “I have only one thing to say to you and I can say it standing up.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I piss blood, pain keeps me from sleeping, even whores find me disgusting, and I can’t see worth a damn. Hurry up and fix that clock. I need to die.”

  Phil Wittacher raises his eyes to heaven.

  “Don’t tell me you believe that story . . .”

  “There’s not much else to believe in, around here.”

  “Then take the first stage, get out when you come to where there’s no more wind, and wait: if you really believe it, a short wait should be enough, and you’ll find someone to kill you.”

  How is it that Bird is now pointing two guns at him? Only a second ago they were in their holsters.

  “Pay attention, kid. At this distance I don’t need eyes.”

  Phil Wittacher puts his arms up.

  How is it that those two guns are again in the holster? A moment ago they were pointed at him.

  “Lower your arms, you idiot. I can’t kill you if I want to die.”

  Phil Wittacher lets himself fall on a chair. Bird takes a wad of dollars out of a pocket.

  “This is all the money I have. I was saving it for a mariachi player, but I’ve been waiting for years and one hasn’t arrived yet. There’s no more poetry in this world. Fix the clock and it’s yours.”

  Bird puts the money back in his pocket.

  Phil Wittacher shakes his head.

  “I don’t want money, money is no use to me, I’ve made the mistake of taking this job and all right, I’ll finish it, but leave me alone, all I want is to get away from this town of crazies as fast as possible, in fact, you know, I’ll tell you something. I wonder why I haven’t left already, that’s the truth, do you happen to have any idea why on earth I’m still here?”

  “Simple: you can’t leave in the middle of a gunfight.”

  “It’s not a gunfight.”

  “Of course it is.”

  Says Bird. Then he touches two fingers to the brim of his hat, turns, and heads for the door. Before opening it, he pauses. He turns towards Phil Wittacher again.

  “Kid, you know where a gunfighter looks, during a gunfight?”

  “I’m not a gunfighter.”

  “I am. He looks in the eyes of his adversary. His eyes, kid.”

  Bird nods his head at the drawings that crowd the table and the room.

  “Staring at the guns is useless. By the time you see something, it’s already too late.”

  Phil Wittacher looks at his drawings. The last words he hears from Bird are:

  “Look him in the eye if you want to win, kid.”

  Shatzy said that the next day Phil Wittacher had them take down all the boards that had been nailed over the Old Man’s face. The hands were stuck on 12 and 37. The Dolphin sisters were right: it was like a blind eye that never stopped staring at you. The Old Man and its thirteen diamonds. From his room Wittacher studied it for hours. He had moved the table in front of the window: he would work on his drawings, then lift his head and gaze at the Old Man. Every so often he went down to the street, crossed it, and went up into the heart of the clock. He checked, he measured. When he got back to his room, he sat down at the table and began to study again. Through the wind, he stared at the Old Man’s blind eye. On the morning of the fourth day he woke at dawn. He opened his eyes and said to himself:

  “What an idiot.”

  He dressed, went downstairs, and asked Carver who was the oldest person in Closingtown. Carver pointed out a half-breed Indian who was sitting on the ground, sleeping, with a half-empty whiskey bottle in one hand.

  “Isn’t there someone who isn’t drunk out of his mind?”

  “The Dolphin sisters.”

  “No, not them.”

  “Then the judge.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “In his bed. The house beyond Patterson’s store.”

  “Why in bed?”

  “He says that the world makes him sick.”

  “So?”

  “He said it ten years ago. Since then, he only gets out of bed to pee and to shit. He says it’s not worth the trouble.”

  “Thanks.”

  Phil Wittacher leaves the saloon, arrives at the judge’s house, knocks on the door, opens it, goes into the semi-darkness, sees a big bed, and on it, half dressed, an enormous man.

  “My name is Phil Wittacher,” he says.

  “Fuck off.”

  “I’m the one who’s fixing the Old Man.”

  “Good luck.”

  He takes a chair, pulls it up to the bed, sits down.

  “What was the man who built it like?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to look him in the eye.”

  31

  The first few times Shatzy came, she stayed for a while, then left. Whole days could pass and we wouldn’t see her. During that time I was in the hospital. It was one of those times. So days could pass and I wouldn’t see her. Then, I don’t know how it happened, but she began to stay longer, and then she told me that they had given her a job there. I don’t know. I don’t think she had a job. She needed one. She wasn’t exactly a nurse, she wasn’t trained, but she did something like that. She stayed with the sick people. Not that she liked them all, no, there were some she didn’t like in the least. I remember that once they found her in a corner crying, and she didn’t want to say why. Crazy people can be very nasty, now and then. We can be very nasty.

  Stink of shit and cigars, blinds half lowered over the windows, the whole room overflowing with newspapers, old newspapers, clippings from newspapers—right in the middle is the big iron bed, and lying on it is the judge, who is enormous: his pants unbuttoned, strange-looking shoes on his feet, greasy hair combed carefully back, yellowish beard. Every so often he leans over to grab a basin that’s resting on the floor, spits some brown catarrh into it, and puts it down again. Otherwise he talks. Phil Wittacher listens.

  “Arne Dolphin. Say what you like, but he was a man who knew how to talk. If you gave him a little time he could convince you that you were a horse. You laughed, but meanwhile the first chance you had you took a look at yourself in the mirror: like that, just to make sure. I imagine, there, in the city, he bugged everyone with all his nonsense about the West. He had maps, and on the maps there was a valley, beyond the Sohones Mountains: a paradise, he said. He convinced sixteen families. Seventeen, including his: two sisters and a brother, Mathias. Even the newspapers mentioned it: Arne Dolphin’s expedition. They traveled for six months, going farther than anyone had gone before. They had been lost for weeks when they arrived in this territory. There was nothing. Only Indians, in the surrounding canyons, hidden in their invisible villages. Arne Dolphin stopped his wagon train for the night. I don’t know where he was thinking of going, the next day. Anyway, he didn’t go. In the morning someone came back from the river and said that the water was shining down there. Gold. They had been looking for woods, fertile land, meadows. They found gold. Arne Dolphin decided that it should remain a secret. He proposed a pact to the heads of the sixteen other families. For five years they would work in isolation from the world, then each would be able to go his own way, with his gold. They accepted. Closingtown was born: the city that was on no map in the world.

  “They worked hard. Arne Dolphin even managed to get the Indians involved. I don’t know how he did it, but little by little he persuaded them to work for him. He was fascinated by them. He had learned their language, he studied their mysteries. It became his passion. He spent hours questioning them, listening to their stories, learning their ceremonies. The Indians respected him, they even gave him a name, he had become their brother.
Indians, poker and clocks: these were the three things he was passionate about. To listen to him, in fact, they were a single thing, three faces of a single thing. Who knows what he meant. Indians, poker and clocks. Women he hardly looked at, liquor he didn’t drink, and as for money he seemed not to care about it, relatively speaking. He felt that he was the father, the inventor of all that was happening: this was enough. It must have been rather like feeling you were a god. Not bad as an emotion.

  “Every so often, out of the desert, some desperadoes arrived, or a wagonful of lost settlers. Arne Dolphin welcomed them, told them about the gold, explained the rules, and if they failed to obey he murdered them. There was not even a mention of a trial. Arne Dolphin didn’t administer justice: he was justice. Every so often some of the new arrivals did make an attempt to get away, to bring the news to the world: he and his brother Mathias went off in pursuit. They would return a few days later with the heads of those poor wretches tied to their saddles. They burned the eyes, so that the message was clearer. He was a man who was gentle, lively and fierce.

  “I don’t know if the others were afraid of him. But they had no need to be. He was the man who had invented the world they lived in. Rather than fearing him, they loved him. They owed everything to him, and he very much resembled what each of them would have dreamed of being. No, they had only blind faith in him, absolute faith, if you like. For example: all the gold they found they gave to him. I’m serious. And he hid it in a safe place. A place that only he and his brother knew. It was a good system for preventing anyone from feeling a desire to leave before the proper time and cheating all the others. It was a good system for not being robbed by the first bandits who happened by. Arne Dolphin caused the gold to literally disappear: there was more in Closingtown than in all the banks of Boston, but if you arrived in the town, and didn’t know it, you wouldn’t find an ounce, a nugget, nothing. They had agreed that they would divide it among themselves at the end of five years. No one wanted to know where it was before then. Arne Dolphin and his brother Mathias knew. That was sufficient. Closingtown wasn’t a city: it was a safe.

  “After three years, three and a half years, the river stopped bringing gold. They waited, but nothing happened. So Arne Dolphin sent his brother with some Indians to follow the course of the river upstream. They thought that in the mountains they might find a seam or something like that. They returned a month later. They had found nothing. That night, at the Dolphins’ house, came the disaster. A discussion between the two brothers, perhaps more. The next morning Arne had disappeared. Mathias went to where they kept the gold, and found the storehouse empty. No one wanted to believe it. Mathias took five men and without saying a word set off at a gallop towards the desert. A few days later their horses returned, walking. Tied to the saddles were their heads, with the eyes burned. The last horse was that of Mathias. The last head was his. End of the story, kid. If you ask around you’ll hear different versions, everyone has his own theory on how Arne Dolphin managed to carry off all that gold. But the truth is that no one knows. The man was a genius, in his way. No one has seen him since. And nothing has happened, from the day he left. This is a ghost town. It died that day. Amen.”

  Phil Wittacher lets a few moments pass.

  Silence.

  “When was this?” he asks.

  “Thirty-four years, two months, and twenty days ago.”

  Phil Wittacher is silent. He’s thinking.

  “Why didn’t they go and look for him?”

  “They did. They paid the best bounty hunter they could find, and sent him after him.”

  “And the result?”

  “I followed him for twenty years, I was on his track a thousand times, and I never managed to look him in the face.”

  “You?”

  “Me.”

  “But you’re a judge.”

  “Judges are tired policemen.”

  “You’ll never catch him lying here.”

  “Wrong, kid. If you lose a horse you can do two things: run after him or stay where the water is and wait till he’s thirsty. At my age a man runs badly but he waits beautifully.”

  “Wait here? Why on earth should he come back?”

  “Thirst, kid.”

  “Thirst?”

  “I know that man better than my own cock. He’ll be back.”

  “Maybe he’s dead, maybe he’s been in the ground for years.”

  The judge shakes his head and smiles. He nods his head in the direction of the newspapers, tons of paper, saturating the room with words.

  “Indians, poker and clocks. He changes his name, changes his town, changes his face, but it’s not hard to recognize him. Even his style is always the same. A megalomaniac. Gentle, lively and fierce. He’s not a man who likes to hide. To flee, yes, of that he is a master, but as for hiding . . . it wouldn’t be like him. If you know how to read the newspapers properly, it’s like being stuck to his horse’s balls.”

  Phil Wittacher looks at the judge. His hands are bursting with fat, the nails long and dirty. Fingers black with ink. He has lovely eyes, of a boyish blue. They wander aimlessly, gazing at spirits dancing in the air. Phil Wittacher gazes at them until they notice, turn, and stare at him, waiting. Then he says

  “Thank you.”

  He gets up. He puts the chair back where he found it. He goes to the door. On the wall he sees a framed photograph of a girl pretending to read a book. Her hair is gathered at the nape, and she has a slender, shapely neck. There is something written on it, by hand, blue ink. He tries to read it, but it’s in a language he doesn’t know. He thinks of Bird, and the story of how he spent years memorizing the French dictionary, from A to Z. Not stupid, he thinks, looking at that slender and shapely neck. His hand is on the doorknob when he stops, and turns to the judge.

  “And the clock?”

  “What clock?”

  “The Old Man.”

  The judge shrugs his shoulders.

  “Typical of Arne Dolphin. He wanted to build the biggest clock in the West. And he did. He put the Indians to work, and he did it.”

  The judge leans over to spit. Then he lies back again. “If you want to know the truth, I’ve never seen it working.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you know what’s broken inside?”

  “It’s not broken. It’s stopped.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  Phil Wittacher turns the doorknob, hears the click of the lock.

  “Yes,” he says.

  He opens the door and goes out into the light that, clinging to the dust, whips the festive midday air, leading thoughts to fly about over the earth burned by the merciless sun, like trapeze artists in love, said Shatzy, rather, she almost sang, as if it were a ballad—smiling, I remember this very well—she smiled. Even when I began going home a couple of days a week, I’d still see her, and listen to her, when she felt like telling a story. She always had a tape recorder, so that when she thought of something she could say it to the tape recorder, and not lose it. I thought that might be a good idea. That it might be a good way of putting order into one’s things. For a time I wanted to have a tape recorder, too, like that. That way, if by chance I should see everything clearly, everything that had happened and everything that had not happened, I would be able to say it into the tape recorder. And I would have explained to myself how things were. Strange ideas come into your mind, from time to time.

  Once Shatzy told me she had known my child.

  There were a lot of rumors about her, at the hospital. They said that she went with the doctors. That she went to bed with them. I don’t know. There wouldn’t have been any harm in it. Some were married but some were not, and then, in the end, what does it mean? My husband, Halley, said she was a good girl. I don’t know if he was faithful to me when I wasn’t all there, when I barely recognized him. It would be nice if he had been. It would be something for us to laugh about over the years.

  “Not to hurry you, Mister Wittacher, but do you
think you’re on the right track to understanding what’s not working in the Old Man?” says Julie Dolphin.

  “Everything works.”

  “Are you making fun of us?”

  “It’s not broken. It’s stopped.”

  “Is there any difference?”

  Phil Wittacher takes his hat in his hand.

  “Yes,” he says to himself.

  The name of my child was Gould.

  32

  All that hot and windy day Phil Wittacher is shut up inside the Old Man. A hydraulic clock, he says to himself as he opens the conduits of the cistern and lets the water flow, following every twist and turn down through the rewinding mechanism. He repeats the operation dozens of times. He can’t figure it out. He sits down. Weary. He thinks. He gets up. He follows a stream that he alone knows and that takes him around inside the Old Man from one gear to the next, up to the painted clockface, with its thirteen beautiful playing cards, diamonds. He looks at them. For a long time.

  Hours.

  Then he understands.

  At last he understands.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  He says.

  “Ingenious son of a bitch.”

  He climbs down from the Old Man with his head emptied out by fatigue. In the void a buzz of questions. They all begin with: Why?

  He doesn’t go back to his room, he goes straight to the house of the Dolphin sisters. Odor of wood and vegetables. Two guns hanging over the stove.

  “What happened that night between Arne and Mathias?”

  The sisters sit in silence.

  “I asked what happened.”

  Julie Dolphin looks at her hands, resting in her lap.

  “They had a discussion.”

  “What sort of discussion?”

  “You repair clocks, there are some things there’s no point in your knowing.”

  “That is a peculiar clock.”

  Julie Dolphin again looks at her hands, resting in her lap.

  “What sort of discussion?” asks Phil Wittacher.

  Melissa Dolphin raises her head.

  “The river no longer yielded gold. In the mountains they had found nothing. Mathias had an idea. He made an agreement with the heads of five other families. The idea was to take all the gold and leave, at night.”