"Time and Space" (Spanish)

"El tiempo y el espacio," La rana viajera
by Camba, Julio (1884-1962)

I have something urgent to air out with my friend. But he’s been resisting to talk with me about it forever.

— What do you say we see each other tomorrow?

—Alright. What time?

—Whenever. After lunch, for instance...

I let my friend know that this doesn’t constitute a precise time. After lunch is something all too vague, too elastic.

—When do you eat?—I ask him.

—When do I eat lunch? Well, when everyone else in the world eats; at lunch time…

—Yeah, but when is lunchtime exactly? Noon? 1:00 in the afternoon? 2:00…

—Yeah, around then...—my friend says— I eat between one and two. Sometimes I pull up to the table around three, though... At any rate, I’m always free at four.

—Perfect. Let’s write in 4:00, then.

My friend agrees.

—Of course, if I’m a few minutes behind—he adds— you’ll wait for me. When one says four, one means four fifteen or four thirty... Ultimately, I’ll definitely be in the café between four and five. What do you say?

I try to get more specific:

—Let’s go for 5:00.

—Alright. Five…or between five and five thirty… I’m no train, you know. Damn! What if I break a leg or something…

—Ok, let’s go for 5:30—I propose.

At which point, my friend comes up with a brilliant idea.

—Why don’t we shoot for cocktail hour?—he suggests.

A new conversation defining the exact time of that hour ensues. Finally, we plan on meeting between 7:00 and 8:00.

The next day, 8 rolls around, and as expected, my friend doesn’t show. He comes in puffing at 8:30 and the waiter tells him I’ve already left.

—You have no right—he shouts days after running into me on the street—. You make me settle on a time, you make me run, and then you don’t even wait around 10 minutes for me. I was in the café at exactly 8:30.

The strangest thing about all this was that my friend’s fit was sincere. That two men who agree to meet at 8:00 actually meet at eight seems to him a complete absurdity.

It’s logical, for him, that they meet up a half hour, forty-five minutes, or an hour afterward.

—Alright, but just think about this—I tell him—. An appointment is something that is as limited by time as it is by space. What would you say to me if after agreeing to meet up in the Puerta del Sol, you later find out that I went to see you in the Cuatro Caminos? That’s how I see it when I say eight, and you show up at 8:30. By rejecting time, you reject space. So, if you respect space, why not pay a little attention to time?

—Yeah, but with that kind of precision, with that kind of exactitude, life would be impossible—my friend exclaims.

How to explain to him that this exactitude and precision on the contrary serve to simplify life? How to convince him that arriving on time actually saves time to devote to whatever else you want?

Impossible. Spaniards are never on time for appointments, not because they perceive time as being precious, but, just the opposite, because time means nothing to anyone in Spain. We are not time’s superiors, but its inferiors. We are not above, but below punctuality.

The Heart of Hell (Spanish)

El Corazon del Tartaro
de Rosa Montero (2001)
Espasa Calpe


The worst is that misfortunes do not announce their arrival. There are never any dogs howling with the rising sun pointing out the date of our imminent death, and no one ever knows, if, when the day begins, routine or catasphrophe is lurking in the wings. Misfortune is a fourth dimension that sticks to our lives like shadows; almost all of us cling to life forgetting that we are fragile and mortal, but there are some individuals who have no idea how to shield themselves from the terrors of the abyss. Zara belonged to this later group of folks. She always knew that disaster was approaching with muffled and insidious cloth-bound feet.

That day, Zarza woke up before the alarm rang and announced that she felt awful. It was a discomfort that she knew well, that she often suffered, especially come morning time, in that state of awakening sleep, just rising from the limbo of dreams. A certain level of confidence in the world in and in oneself is necessary to suppose that reaility moves on, on the other side of pressed eyelids. One waits patiently to be awoken. That day, Zaraza was in no mood to trust existence, and she lay there waiting with her eyes shut, afraid to look and to see. She lay flat on her back in bed, still in a daze, not yet finished assembling her daily personality, and the world semed to rock around her, gelatinous and instable. She was a cast away tossed onto a raft in a sea teeming with sharks. She made the rash decision to not open her eyes unitl reality regained its solidity. Sometimes, returing to life was a difficult voyage.

From the shadows came a long groan and Zarza squeezed her eyelids a little tighter. Yes, in fact, it was an animal-like moan, a hoarse lament. She could still hear it. An anxious murmor, a teary soliliquy. And then, a shower of sighs. Suddenly, the rapid creaking of wood, like a sail being thrown in the wind. Mens' voices. Shouting. The echo of strikes poundingg on flesh, and more rythmic crashing. A few meters from Zarza's closed eyes, from her body, from her bedroom, there was a couple making love. It was possible that they'd just finished making a baby. At these times, she thought only with cruelty and displeasure. On the other side of her wall, there life was exploding, while Zarza emerged heavily from her sea of Jello. The noise of clashing bodies continued, all that exaggeration, all that mushy racket. Reduced to neighborly din , broken down into rubbing and shaking, sex was ridiculous and absurd. A kind of muscular spasm, a necessary exercise. The shreak of her alarm blended with the pair's final screams. Annoyed, Zarza opened up one eye, and then the other.

(p.11-12)

At 8:14, Zarza got in the shower. There was something in the repetition of small quotidian minutia that consoled her. Sometimes she entertained herself by imaging how many times in her life she would turn on the hot water faucet in the same exact way, how many times she would remove her watch and then put it back on. How many times she would squeeze the tube of toothpaste over her toothbrush. How many times she would coat her armpits with deodarnt or warm milk for her coffee. All these trifles, lined up one after the other, resulted in the construction of something like a life. They were the exoskeleton of existence, routines to forge ahead, to drag on, to breathe and not thinkg. The days would slide forward like this softly on the flanks of time, happily bereft of meaning. For Zarza the fact that the rest of her life might reduce down to a fistful of automatisms didn't disturb her. For all she cared, her biography could read like a dusty tome of routine gestures annotated by some annoying beauracrate for all she cared: "Upon her death, Sofia Zarzamala brushed her teeth 41, 217 times, fastened her bra on 14, 239 occasions, clipped her toenailes 2, 053 times..." But at 8:15 that day, just as she started to soap up, something unexpected occured that rattled the inertia of things: the phone rang. The phone rarely rang at Zarza's place, and never that early. She shut the water off and leapt out of the shower, grabbing a towel on the fly, leaving a hurried trial of water on the floor all the way to her nightstand.

(p.15)