memory, on the other hand, his look was laden with everything that happened subsequently. By virtue of remembering, everything took place at the same time, even though the temporal sequence had been maintained.
I proceeded to explain: the protagonist, at the very moment when he finds one of his goats dead, and bends down to pick it up, precisely at that moment, as he places his hands under the animal’s dead body, the sleeve of his coarse, rawhide jacket gets pushed up, exposing his wrist, part of his forearm, and a large gold Rolex watch — clearly recognizable as such with its design and the company’s logo: the little crown.
My friend shook himself out of his stupor and asked me: What goat? What dead goat? He had seen no dead goat.
While remembering this, I knew that shortly thereafter we would realize that he had missed that scene. During the conversation itself, that possibility still had not occurred to me, so I tried to help him remember: it was the goat he finds dead when he descends from the mountaintop in the evening, and he carries it to his cabin . . . It was impossible that my friend hadn’t noticed this episode, because it was important to the storyline, for that night, as he was getting ready to roast the goat for dinner —
That’s when he interrupted me: Yes, he’d seen the scene in which he guts the goat, but not the one before that, when he finds it. At that moment, he’d probably gone to the kitchen to get himself something to drink and had missed it. With movies they show on cable channels without commercial interruptions, such gaps were the lesser of two evils and quite common. I surely had similar ones. Everyone does when they watch movies on television. Then the missing scenes return like ghosts: one has to supply them in the imagination in order to complete the story, and then reconstruction and reality — whatever minimal reality those scenes have — get all mixed up.
Once this point had been cleared up, my friend still did not understand what I meant by my observation. What was so weird about the movie’s protagonist wearing that watch or any other watch? Don’t we ourselves wear watches? he asked, pointing with his chin at the ones we, he and I, had on our left wrists. And we don’t wear them for decoration, he added with that smile of his I know so well. We need them so we could meet at the café on time, don’t we? Th is was a self-referentially ironic allusion to his inveterate habit of always arriving late for our dates. I never reproached him. I was so used to it that when we planned to meet I simply added fifteen or twenty minutes to the appointed time; so, one could say that he is very punctual, in a certain sense.
I was obliged to tell him that I was not talking about the watch itself but rather the fact that it was such an elegant one and in possession of an illiterate goatherd, isolated in the mountains. I was also, though, talking about the watch itself. The fact that he had a wristwatch at all was anomalous. That community of goatherds lived in a subsistence economy, completely removed from consumer society. Even assuming that the goatherd would go down to a nearby town for a fair or a market and want to buy himself some object, he would not have chosen a watch, which would have been utterly useless to him. In the ancestral traditions of herdsmen, the only watch that mattered was the Sun. In their world, there were no dates to meet in cafés, no television sets, no trains or airplanes to catch, only the passing of the days and the nights and the seasons. And even in the case that a clever merchant had managed to squeeze a few coins out of this ignorant and innocent mountain dweller, it would have been in exchange for a cheap one, not a Rolex — not even a fake!
The subject had almost run out of steam, as far as I could tell at that moment, and my mind was already groping in other directions, toward the more habitual and usual subjects we discuss, reflections, which
I proceeded to explain: the protagonist, at the very moment when he finds one of his goats dead, and bends down to pick it up, precisely at that moment, as he places his hands under the animal’s dead body, the sleeve of his coarse, rawhide jacket gets pushed up, exposing his wrist, part of his forearm, and a large gold Rolex watch — clearly recognizable as such with its design and the company’s logo: the little crown.
My friend shook himself out of his stupor and asked me: What goat? What dead goat? He had seen no dead goat.
While remembering this, I knew that shortly thereafter we would realize that he had missed that scene. During the conversation itself, that possibility still had not occurred to me, so I tried to help him remember: it was the goat he finds dead when he descends from the mountaintop in the evening, and he carries it to his cabin . . . It was impossible that my friend hadn’t noticed this episode, because it was important to the storyline, for that night, as he was getting ready to roast the goat for dinner —
That’s when he interrupted me: Yes, he’d seen the scene in which he guts the goat, but not the one before that, when he finds it. At that moment, he’d probably gone to the kitchen to get himself something to drink and had missed it. With movies they show on cable channels without commercial interruptions, such gaps were the lesser of two evils and quite common. I surely had similar ones. Everyone does when they watch movies on television. Then the missing scenes return like ghosts: one has to supply them in the imagination in order to complete the story, and then reconstruction and reality — whatever minimal reality those scenes have — get all mixed up.
Once this point had been cleared up, my friend still did not understand what I meant by my observation. What was so weird about the movie’s protagonist wearing that watch or any other watch? Don’t we ourselves wear watches? he asked, pointing with his chin at the ones we, he and I, had on our left wrists. And we don’t wear them for decoration, he added with that smile of his I know so well. We need them so we could meet at the café on time, don’t we? Th is was a self-referentially ironic allusion to his inveterate habit of always arriving late for our dates. I never reproached him. I was so used to it that when we planned to meet I simply added fifteen or twenty minutes to the appointed time; so, one could say that he is very punctual, in a certain sense.
I was obliged to tell him that I was not talking about the watch itself but rather the fact that it was such an elegant one and in possession of an illiterate goatherd, isolated in the mountains. I was also, though, talking about the watch itself. The fact that he had a wristwatch at all was anomalous. That community of goatherds lived in a subsistence economy, completely removed from consumer society. Even assuming that the goatherd would go down to a nearby town for a fair or a market and want to buy himself some object, he would not have chosen a watch, which would have been utterly useless to him. In the ancestral traditions of herdsmen, the only watch that mattered was the Sun. In their world, there were no dates to meet in cafés, no television sets, no trains or airplanes to catch, only the passing of the days and the nights and the seasons. And even in the case that a clever merchant had managed to squeeze a few coins out of this ignorant and innocent mountain dweller, it would have been in exchange for a cheap one, not a Rolex — not even a fake!
The subject had almost run out of steam, as far as I could tell at that moment, and my mind was already groping in other directions, toward the more habitual and usual subjects we discuss, reflections, which
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