Saramago and the Clocks
Most of you have probably heard of José Saramago, the famous writer and Nobel Prize winner in literature. Below we reproduce an excerpt from an interview published in El Mundo, whose full text can be found at the link we leave below the text.
There's a romantic detail in Saramago's life that you will surely find sublime if you are sensitive, and we find it so curious that we've decided to dedicate a little space to it in this section. The writer is telling the interviewer how he met his current wife and how that affected the clocks in his house:
Q.-Remind me how you met her, the exact moment of the love cataclysm. A.-It happened in June 1986. I was in my house in Lisbon and received a call from her, which was not the call of a journalist but of a reader. She introduced herself saying she wanted to travel to Lisbon and wished to steal a quarter of an hour from me. I agreed, but without setting a date. The fact is that 48 hours later, she was already in Lisbon. I remember we met at four in the afternoon... Haven't you noticed that in this house the clocks are stopped at four in the afternoon? You are the first person I tell this to. I stopped them at four because it was the time I met her.
Q.-It's a very beautiful confidence. A.-All the clocks show that time, all except the one you have in front of you, which is a Chinese clock from the times of the cultural revolution. It was my idea to stop them. At that moment, my life changed.
Source: http://www.elmundo.es/magazine/m70/textos/saramago1.html