The Bells of the Afternoon

Doña Candelaria's residence in the El Prado neighborhood of Barranquilla smelled of orange blossoms and ocean brine. It stood as a republican mansion framed by white plaster Doric colonnades and broad garden terraces planted with royal palms imported from Cuba in the nineteen-forties. A gray-haired niece answered the door, regarding me with astonishment as she noticed my fingers stained with nitric acid and jewelers' rouge. In the rear bedchamber, framed by tall windows welcoming the cool breeze of the Caribbean Sea, rested an elderly woman whose serene face and dark eyes still retained the penetrating brilliance of river youth. Upon seeing me stand in the doorway with the purple cloth in my hands, she asked neither my name nor my origin: her lips formed the name of Aureliano with the instinctive grace of a river finding its bed.

The bedchamber breathed a timeless stillness. Upon a mahogany chiffonier rested sepia portraits of river steam packets, antique postcards of Hamburg and Paris, and a small daguerreotype of my grandfather at age twenty, clad in white drill linen and holding a drawplate between his artisan palms. Doña Candelaria gestured with her right hand, inviting me toward her bolster. Her skin was so paper-thin and translucent that blue veins could be traced pulsing like threads of silver beneath her temples.

I placed the filigree sphere upon the mahogany nightstand beside her bed. I inserted the silver key, turned the winding arbor three full rotations, and tripped the escapement. In the silence of the chamber the secret melody began to unfold: the deep, resonant cadences of the Magdalena flowed with crystalline clarity, followed by the subtle chime of gold hammers striking miniature tuned bells. When the sphere finished its rotation, the hemispheric lid sprang open, and the ruby ring sparkled in the honeyed amber glow of the Caribbean sunset. Doña Candelaria reached out her slender, age-trembling fingers and touched the red stone with boundless reverence.

"He always swore the metal would say what his throat could not," she whispered in a gentle voice that seemed to arrive from afar, like the distant surf echoing inside a conch shell. "Tell your father and all of Mompox that they no longer need to arrest the clocks at four. Tell them the steamer reached its landing, and that no one was left waiting alone upon the shore." She handed me a wax-sealed envelope addressed to the parish priest of Santa Bárbara, bequeathing the funds required to restore the cracked bronze carillon of the municipal clocktower. I remained by her bedside until the velvet shades of night enveloped the courtyard gardens. She wept softly, without theatrics or lamentation, with that austere dignity shared by women who learned patience beside great alluvial waters.

I returned to Mompox three days later, as the bells of San Agustín rang out noon beneath an incandescent sun. I stepped into my quiet workshop, where gold filings drifted like stardust through beams of light slanting across the wooden shutters. I gazed at the twelve wall clocks hanging throughout the receiving room. For the first time in half a century I did not walk the corridors at three fifty-five to arrest the pendulums. I sat down at my workbench with tweezers in hand and waited in stillness. And when the great German floor clock struck four solemn, resonant chimes, its bronze echoed through the ceiling rafters not as a harbinger of drowned ghosts, but as a benediction setting the memory of our home free at last.

Before I left the high-ceilinged house in Barranquilla, Doña Candelaria asked me to bend down and blessed my forehead with fingers that smelled of cologne and camphor. She placed the filigree box in my hands, without the card now, and closed my fingers over it the way one closes a reliquary. "Go back to your river, child," she whispered. "And the next time four o'clock strikes, don't run to stop it."

I crossed back on the Bodega ferry with the filigree box in my lap. In the square of Santa Bárbara the children were spinning wooden tops under the almond trees and the women were hanging sheets in the afternoon sun. I went into the workshop, picked up the bronze tweezers and went on with a pair of basket earrings for a village bride. At five to four I did not get up. The twelve pendulums in the waiting room reached four together and struck the first chime, the second, the third. I counted the fourth with the tweezers in the air. I heard no sunken steamboats, no voices from the nineteenth century. I heard the lizard knocker, and the bride asking from the doorway whether the earrings would be ready by Saturday.