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The Watchmaker


The Watchmaker.
About thirty years ago, as a student of anthropology, I visited Italy for the first time. We were a team of eight, headed by a senior student, Jack Devon. Fifteen days they gave us for touring seven cities. It was not a pleasure trip however; we were to bring back enough data to form a full project on a city of our choice and submit it to the college to show that we were worth getting a scholarship. To make a fair decision, we drew chits to select a city and I drew Venice.
Venice was on the travel schedule as the last city. By this time, everyone was completely exhausted from all the running around, travelling, walking, asking, photographing, writing and committing to memory. We headed to Mestre, the port city connecting to Venice and put up in a hotel there. According to Jack’s plan, all our major luggage would be kept in Mestre, while we would carry just the bare minimum up to Venice. We took a bus in the afternoon over the two and a half mile long causeway that connected Venice to the Italian mainland, the Freedom Bridge. The railroad adjacent to the causeway provided a strange sight- the trains leading into Venice appeared to be moving straight into the sea, travelling on water. The blue waters of the Adriatic provided unparalleled serenity to our minds and seemed to tell a hundred mysterious stories, such as we had never before heard.
Once in Venice, we got to see a strange sight. We had expected taxis and buses but got a series of gondolas instead, all black with steel bench work and steep sterns, where a gondolier had to stand to see his way around the narrow canals. We hopped into one that delivered us to the doorstep of our hotel; very near to the bridge they call the Bridge of Sighs. Evening had set in and as it was winter, there was a mist over the waters of the Grand Canal and we could see people hurrying home. In an hour or so, the people disappeared, leaving the city as cold and cheerless as a grave, yet impressing a new visitor by its silence, only occasionally broken by the sound of salt tides washing up the sides of its buildings.
That night, over plates of fettuccini, bruschetta and pizza, I told my friends that I wanted to do some sightseeing in Venice myself. Jack was extremely displeased with the idea of letting me move around the city alone. The Esposito twins, offered to help me by setting up a travel schedule around Venice so I could gather as much as possible within the limited time. The following morning, as we checked out of the hotel to hit the streets of Venice, Jack told me, “Fiona, we are taking a train back to Mestre. Be at the railway station well on time- the last railway train for the day leaves at half past seven in the evening. Don’t miss the train, or we will have to move without you.”
I roamed around Venice the whole day, the sun shining on the waters of the canal made it glitter like a stream of diamonds and the streets seemed to be paved with molten gold. I had lunch at the Rialto Bridge and sauntered around St. Marks Square, noting down everything worthwhile. The church of Santa Maria Della Salude was the last building I entered. The paintings of Tintoretto and Titian held me in awe for a long time and I completely lost track of time. It was about quarter to seven when I glanced at my watch and made a dash for the station. The golden city had now changed its colour and mood with the change in the time of the day. It now seemed to be a city in mourning, with dark canals, gray buildings and palaces and a stark absence of people. I went to the steps of the Grand Canal to wait for a gondola to take me to the station. The waters of the canal that looked ornate like a thousand sparkling diamonds strewn over the landscape, now looked black and sinister- like the blood of the devil himself, an acid river that could burn a thousand souls in hell. By now, mist had fallen heavily over the water and the colossal watch tower behind me was about to strike seven. To add to my woes, the sky aimed sharp drops of rain at me, forcing me to put my camera and watch in my bag. At length, the mist that had metamorphosed into a thick fog put an abrupt end to my visibility of the canal.
Time was racing by and it was extremely important that I reach the station on time- I wished to show jack that I did not need a babysitter; reaching on time would be like a slap on his over bossy face. “Fair haired lady,” a voice called, “For whom do you wait?” I turned back to see a priest, sitting on the steps of the church. “I am waiting for a gondola to take me to the railway station,” I answered him. The place where the priest sat was in the darkness and I could not see his face well. “But there aren’t going to be anymore tonight,” he replied. I was worried by the answer. I asked him why. “For the sea is gets wilder. Look up at the clock tower. It is time.”
I did not understand at all. I was not interested in asking him either. It was more important to reach the station . Nevertheless, I looked up at the clock tower. It was seven in the evening. I turned back to the priest who was by now strangely nervous. He kept wiping the sweat off his forehead, which was quite unlikely, as it was winter. He was constantly counting the beads in his rosary. He reminded me of those priests in the horror movies, who are attacked by invincible spirits. However, I was glad to have him there, for it made me feel accompanied. The silence around was slowly getting to me. I resumed my waiting. Just then, a gondola moved into view and a young man alighted. But before the gondolier could be paid, he looked at me with big scared eyes, uttered a cry of fear and rowed away as fast as he could, chanting the name of the Lord a thousand times. Both of us were perplexed at the reaction and trying to make out what just happened, when the same happened with the priest too. He screamed and held up the cross and started sprinkling holy water all around him and slowly backed into the church , pushing shut the heavy doors of the gothic ancient structure, as fast as his frail frame could permit him.
I was shocked. It suddenly seemed that the whole of Venice was going mad. So I turned my thoughts towards getting to the train on time. “Excuse me,” I asked the stranger, “Can you tell me how I can reach the station on time? I have to be there by half past seven.” The stranger flashed me an amicable smile and answered in an accent so funny, that his English sounded like something hammered out of Italian, “I am going there too. We run!” He didn’t even find it necessary to take my permission and grabbing hold of my hand as if he never intended to let go, started running through the streets of venice, with me tailing close behind him. I was having a hard time keeping up and he never even stopped for breath. He took me through narrow streets flanked by high buildings on both sides, sometimes past dead ends with blackened walls and barred windows. It was strange how he could find his way out through this confusing city, but I wasn’t actually thinking about that – my mind kept turning to abductors, secret covens and clinical psychopaths and many a times I wondered if I was being tagged along by one, into his lair where he could murder me or may be eat me alive and preserve my skin. Yet this man was my only hope for there was no saying how many others I would meet if I didn’t get to the station on time, so I readily tagged along, through the bewildering maze of venetian lanes.
Soon enough we were at the station. Now I willingly tailed along, pleased that I wasn’t running with a serial killer. However, the bright smile on his face disappeared when he returned from the enquiry. “We missed it,” he said, “now we have to go by bus.” By this time I had given in to fate and did not wince or protest when he grabbed my hand again and we ran to the bus stop. But fate wasn’t going to treat me well this time either. We had missed the last bus too. I was despondent about my ever reaching the mainland on time. The big clock at the bus stop showed it was well beyond eight. My train to Rome was at three in the morning. I just had to get back to my hotel in the mainland on time. Sitting on the pavement with my face hid in my hands, I wept and regretted not listening to Jack. If I missed the train to Rome, I would never be able to take the flight back to my country which was exactly at eight in the morning the following day. I noticed that my friend was sitting next to me, feeling my pain. “Don’t cry. We can always walk.” These words just exasperated me. “Walk? For two and a half miles , you expect me to walk with you? I don’t even know your name! Stop joking and making fun of my problems!” My words alarmed him. In a serious tone, he replied, “You never asked me my name. Yet you already ran 2 kilometers with me.” I don’t know what happened but I burst out laughing when I heard these words. On his advice, I made a phone call from a public phone at Piazzale Roma to my hotel in Mestre and left a message for Jack at the reception, giving him details of my return. We started to walk. Alonso kept on talking about everything in Italy- the people, politics, the art and architecture; all this he spoke incessantly and what pleased me the most- with rhetoric speechmaking. I enjoyed the way we palavered to cover the length of the bridge that lay before us and we seemed to get along well.
The rain was beating on our faces and the wind seemed to whip up the cold, making the weather uncomfortably horrible. The street lights had started flickering. It may be my imagination, but I thought that the lights seemed to flicker in order, flickering towards the direction of the mainland and back, just like the neon lights which lit up the entrances of the huge casinos in Vegas. Not a single soul was in view and the way the light started playing with us on the bridge lent a strange effect to the road ahead. The situation was aggravated with the onset of lightning; the shape of each bolt was like claws of the demon. Sometimes I felt like there was someone following the two of us and I kept turning back every now and then, only to find that it was the cold air that brushed against my back. Soon enough, the wind turned into a light storm and the sea waves rose to considerable heights making me worried about being washed out to sea. My friend, Alonso, was strangely quiet and we concentrated our focus on the skinny bridge in front of us and trying not to think that the Adriatic sea was all around . I was soaking wet- my partner in misery was drenched and shivering too, his face as white as a sheet, with a ghostly gleam in his eyes, the charming , tanned Hispanic appearance and lovely smile now completely changed into a straight , expressionless face . Soon the atmosphere around became so phantasmal, that I avoided looking at my companion and tried to urge my tired legs to walk. I preferred not to think about the happenings back at the canal, specially the actions of the priest, who kept raising the cross and sprinkling us with holy water. Strange thoughts came to my mind and I kept thinking to myself, what the reason for this eldritch look on his face could be.
About two hours later, we had left most of the bridge behind and the mainland was in view. The rain continued to hit us like cold pebbles, though the storm had reduced to a breeze by now. Alonso had not exchanged a word yet. But suddenly, as if something inside had turned on a switch, his face brightened a little and he started yapping again. I was not able to understand this sudden change in him. However, I tried to appear unruffled by his dynamic demeanour. He proceeded to tell me the classic Italian story of Bertolo, in which Bertolo the court jester, managed to enrage his king and received a death penalty. However, his last wish was to choose the perfect tree on which to hang and he travelled far and wide in search of the tree at the king’s expense and of course, never found it. The way Alonso narrated this story was a full dress performance, blasted with fiery words and heartfelt facial expressions, which endeared me to him. Thereafter, I started referring to him as Bertolo and he never seemed to mind it.
I soon spotted the end of the bridge and Alonso exclaimed, “Ah! There is the mainland!” his words seemed to disguise a feeling of sadness on the thought that he would never see me again and the same feelings poked me somewhere inside my heart, so I took out a card with my name and address on it, from my bag and handed it to him. “I will stay in touch,” he promised. I saw Jack standing with an umbrella over his head and I felt and inexpressible joy on seeing him. I wanted him to meet Alonso and I ran to him immediately. The pained expression on his face slowly calmed and he returned my embrace while I kept apologizing for my defiance. Poor fellow had been standing there for a long time, waiting for me to return. I took him by his hand, in the same way that Alonso had dragged me to the station, to introduce him to Alonso, but he was nowhere to be seen. It was strange and unaccountable for him to have vanished into thin air like that, because the entrance to the bridge was almost empty and we would have seen him going. At a distance, all the lights on the bridge seemed to flicker again, the same way as it had done while we were approaching the mainland, but this time I noticed, that the order in which the lights were flickering was the opposite. A chill ran down my already cold spine.
By the time I returned to the hotel, my friends had already resumed packing our luggage and decided not to sleep, for it was already twelve and we would have to leave for the train station at one. We sat in the hall room of the hotel, surrounding an old waiter, who was always at our beck and call. We called him grandpa and he loved us too. Jack forced him to tell us of popular legends that people believed to this day. He looked up at the calendar and then at the rainy weather outside. The storm had commenced again and it provided a perfect eerie atmosphere to the room. “About two hundred years ago,” he began, “a watchmaker fell I love with a very beautiful girl, daughter of a very rich Venetian magnate. The two were terribly afraid that they would be separated if the father found out. So they eloped one night. Now this watchmaker had a Gondolier friend who used to row people across the Adriatic. He had promised to deliver them to the mainland. But in greed of some money, he turned over his friend to the girl’s father and they hammered an iron rod into his legs and hung him upside down in the watch tower by the hour hand, so that the whole clock had become red with his blood and it had stopped ticking. It was seven in the evening when that happened. All this happened in front of his beloved, and so she became unhinged and remained indoors all the time. Every year on that day, she kept returning to the canal, waiting for her lover, but he never came and so one day, after many years, she slit her throat at the canal and all the canal was drenched with her blood.” The story was interesting, or atleast the way he narrated it , made it sound good. “What happened to the gondolier?”I asked with growing interest. “Ah, the watchmaker took his soul with him one day. Every year, from then on, he would take a Gondolier’s soul along with him. Today is that day.”
There was a strange silence in the room after that. A sudden bolt of lightning made us look at the clock. All of us, secretly heaved a sigh of relief to see it was ticking and fine. No wonder the priest had told me that no gondolas were coming. ‘It is time’ finally made sense to me. The old waiter soon left us and while we decided to pick up our bags and head towards the station, one of the Esposito twins remarked, “Old thief! He copied parts from ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter’, a Tennyson poem.” We broke out into laughter. I needed to wear my watch and so I asked a friend Sarah, to take my watch out of my bag and hand it to me. As she was doing this, a look of horror passed her face. She handed the watch to me and I looked at it. As soon as I did so, my head started reeling and all the walls seemed to close in. My eyes dimmed and I started to feel faint, for the dial of my watch, which was originally white, now had a hint of red and there were drops of blood on the watch. The watch was stuck at seven. I do not remember what happened after that.
When my eyes opened, I was at the Rome airport, with a bunch of medics hovering around me. I announced I would not need their help, though I was not really fine. I was running a high fever and was in shock. Eight hours later, I reached home to a very worried mother, for Jack had been wise enough to inform her I was not well but he had taken care not to inform her why. When I felt better, she sat down by my bed and I narrated to her my experience with the ghost. As I said it, I broke out into a cold sweat and started to shiver. Mother, however, reacted rather differently. She actually broke out into laughter. “Well,” she said, “I have heard of haunting and ghosts who can kill, but I have never heard of a ghost who holds a Ph.D. in Aeronautics!” I was shocked. Her laughter suddenly sounded sinister; in her eyes was a look so unearthly, that I shrank back to the headboard of my bed, pulling the quilt tight around myself. She must have taken notice of the sudden change in my behavior and stopped laughing. Heading close to me she caressed my forehead. “ Fi , my darling, u need not be scared of anything.” Then looking at the watch, she answered, “Dear, I have to head to an important meeting, I have no time to explain, but if you read this letter, it will do you some good.” She kissed my forehead and went out, closing the door behind her. I took the letter in my hands and started shaking vigorously, for the letter was from the ghost himself, from Alonso. My fingers were white and I broke out into a cold sweat. Yet I seemed to be unable to stop myself from tearing open the letter and when I did, it read something like this -:
“Cara Fiona,
You see, it was rude of me to leave you without a good bye, but I had some important business to attend to. I just had to make up for it and since there was no correspondence address in Mestre, I was compelled to write to your home. I also placed a phone call to your kind mother before I wrote this. Well, we could have shared so much, if I wasn’t so afraid. You see, Venetians have an old legend which says that a wandering spirit of a woman waits for her lover by the steps of the canal to head to the mainland. Those that have seen her and been afraid have been faced with bad luck. But those who have helped her get to the mainland, despite the bad weather which generally accompanies her arrival, are faced with luck, love and money. So now you know why I helped you across! Let me confess, that I was a trifle scared when the weather worsened halfway on the bridge and I didn’t want to even look at you! However, my doubts subsided when you gave me your name and address.
Now for the real purpose of this letter. Luck has already confronted me, for I now will be holding a job in one of the most prestigious colleges of the world as a junior lecturer of aeronautical sciences; money of course comes gratis. And love? I do not know but it may come along. Well, just if you would like to know, I am going to work in your college. I have left my correspondence address with your lovely mother, do write to me if you wish to.
Love,
Bertolo”
It was funny how he had remembered to sign his name exactly the way I had liked it. And it was funny the way I picked up a pen and wrote back. Letters moved back and forth and when Bert took up a job in the university, the letters changed to lengthy walks in the park and occasional luncheons in each other’s homes. About two years later, Bert and I were happily married.
It was when I was expecting our first son, that we moved into a bigger home right next door to his parents’ home in my country. While he was busy sorting out things to be moved into the attic, his eyes seemed to catch hold of something rare and interesting, but he gave me one of his ‘trying to appear calm’ looks and went about his work. I decided not to question him anyway.
A week later, on our wedding anniversary morning, he handed me a white box with ribbons on it. I was ecstatic, wondering what the gift could be. All it had was an old purse that I had discarded years ago, however, I remembered that I had it with me during my trip to Italy. “Look what is inside it Cara!” and I opened it to receive the shock of my life. It was the same Rolex that was stuck at seven, stained with blood, that I had in my bag when I was crossing over to Mestre from Venice. However, it seemed to be working well. The dial was still red, but I remembered that the purse that I had put it in had a cheap red suede lining inside and the rain must have caused the color to run, for my backpack was soaking wet when I got to Mestre. “You took this to the watchmaker to get it repaired?” I asked.
He smiled a strange smile. His eyes developed the same ghostly gleam as I had beheld on the freedom bridge years ago. Fear crept into my veins. “Cara ,” he said in a strange husky voice, “I was a watchmaker back in Venice.”

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 05.11.2011

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