The Heart of Gold

That pendulum clock on the wall of my cell—do you see it?—that is my heart. My son’s is another one: a pocket watch on a chain, which my husband bought in a pawnshop. I know nothing about its previous owners. It is solid gold, of an exquisite design. It has a crystal in front, to see the dial, and another, smaller one at the back, which shows the inner mechanism.

It was the agitated oscillation of this machine that caught my attention. It seemed to me like the throbbing of a frightened little animal, with its viscera exposed on a dissecting table. Its springs and gears moved like a vital organ. “It looks like it’s beating,” I remarked to my husband, “like a baby’s heart.” No sooner had I uttered this phrase than I regretted my words. I looked toward the empty crib that, covered in stripes of light and shadow, rested in a corner, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

My baby had died a year before. “Crib death,” they told me. He had stopped breathing, for no reason. “But why?” I asked. Nothing happens without a cause. I remember that on that day he had the hiccups and I put a little wet cloth on his forehead; minutes later he was dead. (I read not long ago that, when a baby a few months old feels moisture on its face, its brain tells it that it is still immersed in the liquid environment of the womb and its breathing stops.) Since then I spend the afternoons in the rocking chair, contemplating the photos of my departed baby. I moved nothing in the room: the empty crib stayed in the same corner.

I have felt a bad omen on special dates, ever since I was a girl. “What if something happens?” I ask myself every time a birthday or anniversary draws near. “What if a tragedy occurs on this date?” That is why, as the anniversary of my baby’s death approached, my husband decided to head off a relapse of my depression. He went to a pawnshop and bought me a pair of gold earrings. While he was there, he fell in love with the pocket watch I have described and acquired it without asking the reason for its rock-bottom price. I have a feeling that the watch was cursed: it had surely conjured up misfortunes for its former owners, and that is why they got rid of it.

The days went by and my husband seemed happy with his new watch. He never carried it with him, but kept it in a little ebony box, since its value, even just as metal, was considerable. Every morning, before leaving, he wound the device and left it in the little box.

After a few weeks I learned that I was pregnant. I had prayed to God for a new baby since the day I buried the first. “The Lord has finally heard me,” I told myself. But after brief moments of bliss, I was assailed by the memory of the ill-omened phrase that had escaped my lips that day. I could not get it out of my head.

At last I gave birth to my second baby. It was a little boy, beautiful as an angel painted by Raphael, the living portrait of his departed brother. He grew up healthy, as the other one had. I felt guilty for the death of the first baby, and so I strictly followed all the recommendations for avoiding crib death. The new little one slept on his back, on a firm mattress with no objects that might hinder his breathing. Although there was no sign of illness in his body that warranted any worry at all, at two months a terrible fear invaded me, for the second anniversary of my first son’s death was approaching. The unease was twofold, for that day would also mark one year since I had uttered that cursed phrase. I know that many people do not count the days so meticulously, because they pay no attention to the signs of time. But I am always alert, so as to anticipate misfortune.

You may wonder about the nature of my foreboding. I feared that my words might come back to torment me. So every day, when I was left alone, I took the watch out of the little wooden box, and contemplated it in silence. “With this same faint and rhythmic beat, our son’s heart throbs,” I told myself.

There are many similarities between the heart and a watch: both are astonishing little machines, which work without ceasing even when we are not watching them, feeling them, thinking about them. Look at a watch at night and look at it again in the morning: you will see that it ran without rest all night and still shows the correct time. In the same way your heart runs all through the night, without your noticing. Although you do not think about it while you sleep, your heart beats to keep you alive.

One night, in the small hours, I woke up with a start. Obsessed with an idea, I could not get back to sleep. I took the watch and went to the crib. With my ear on the chest of the sleeping baby, and my eyes fixed on the watch, I compared the heartbeats with the movement of the second hand. I verified their synchrony. For fifteen minutes I listened to the thump-tack of the little heart and checked it against the tick-tick of the watch: not a single beat, not a single jump of the second hand was out of rhythm with the heartbeat.

Doing research in the library, I came to understand this synchrony better. If you will allow me to explain it, you will see that—contrary to what my husband led you to believe—I am not crazy. The heart of a two-month-old baby beats one hundred and twenty times a minute, two beats every second. On the other hand, in the mechanism of a watch like that one there is a wheel, controlled by a pin, that jumps two teeth every second. You see the connection, don’t you? That is one hundred and twenty jumps of the wheel each minute, the same number as the beats of a baby’s heart.

The similarity does not end there: the second hand does not jump from one second to the next in a single movement of the hand, but in four shorter movements, each of a quarter of a second. The same goes for the baby’s heart: each beat has two sounds, thump-tack, which come from the closing of the different valves. Is the parallel not obvious? Each second, there are four small jumps of the hand, just as a baby’s heart gives out four sounds.

But that is not all. The watch was acquired on the same day that, according to my calculations, the baby was conceived. This might seem irrelevant to you, but it is not. Could it not be that, by a whim of fate, the watch was signaling the arrival of the new son? If so, could it not also foretell his disappearance? I do not expect anyone to believe me, for at first I too resisted the idea. Allow me to finish my story, and you will understand that it was true. I only implore you not to assume that I have lost my mind.

I have read a great deal about the human heart, and I know well that its beating is not uniform. This does not mean that I am lying. The explanation is different: the running of the second hand was not uniform either. Heart and watch ran together, exact in their temporal relation. I confirmed this by repeating the experiment many times. On lonely afternoons, when I sang sweet nonsense to the child, the second hand ran faster to keep pace with his happy little heart. Likewise, when the little one slept, the watch slowed its pace, in synchrony with his resting heart.

At first I believed that the watch ran as a slave to the little creature’s heart. But then I was assailed by the doubt that the dependence might run in the opposite direction. The difference is not trivial, for what would happen if the watch stopped? Would my son’s heart not stop too?

This fear turned into a permanent anxiety and led me to be very watchful (but not obsessed, as my husband said) that the watch should always be running. Knowing it was in the padded interior of the little wooden box, safe from any knock, calmed me. All that was needed, then, was to keep it wound to guarantee perpetual motion.

The following is evidence of my sound judgment: a full winding of the watch lasted two whole days, and yet not a single day went by without my setting myself the task of winding it all the way. Does this precaution not confirm my lucidity? Every day I also set the watch to the correct time, because the variability imposed on it by the baby’s changing heartbeat made it lose or gain up to two hours a day. That the watch lost time cannot be explained by a mechanical fault, as is shown by the fact that on some occasions it ran slow and on others it ran fast.

A month went by in this routine. On the eve of the anniversary, however, something changed: my poor baby, my soul, my treasure… (excuse me for a second!) My son woke up with a bit of a fever and difficulty breathing. At the hospital they told us it was an upper respiratory tract infection. According to what I had read, this is linked to cases of crib death. I spent the night at the hospital with the child, and I asked my husband—making it look like something casual—to wind the watch when he got back home. Will God ever be able to forgive me for having left this delicate task in the care of his mediocre mind, of his coarse hands? That is why I no longer need him: the wretch was a brute.

The following afternoon my husband came back to the hospital. I asked him whether he had wound the watch. Oh, infinite pain!

“I sold that shit at a pawnshop,” he answered me. “It never kept the right time. Besides, we’re poor and we can’t afford the luxury of a gold watch. The money will help us pay the baby’s hospital bill.”

How my heart sank in my chest! Without saying a word, I ran out toward the pawnshop. But I found it padlocked, the lights off.

I have told you that this pendulum clock is my heart. Obviously it is not my physical heart, but it keeps with it the same parasitic relation of synchrony that the gold watch kept with my son’s little heart. Its golden pendulum, swinging back and forth every two seconds, is my only company. In the long hours before dawn, when the other inmates have at last fallen silent after the brawls of the day, its tock-tock echoes off the walls of my cell, exactly once every second, coinciding with the beats of my heart. Tock to the left, tock to the right: sixty beats a minute, a healthy value for an adult at rest. Its swaying keeps me alive. It is my life. God! I wish so much that it would stop…

Whoever has not had their heart bound to the beat of a watch, with time as their enemy, does not know what I felt that afternoon. Knowing that my son’s life was in danger, I got the owner’s address from the pawnshop’s neighbors. But when I confronted him at his house, he refused to hand over the watch unless I paid him a new price that he had set after reassessing its value in gold. Of course, I did not have a cent on me. What kind of person could ask me for something like that knowing that we are poor?

I decided to confess to him the secret reason for my urgency: I was not interested in the watch, but in saving the life of my child. The bastard laughed in my face, called me crazy and shut the door. Pounding on the window, I begged him at least to go and wind the watch, because I feared it would soon run down, but he ignored me completely.

My baby was… How can I put it? He was my soul. If I could have sacrificed my body then, given him the beats of my own heart to save his, I would have done it at once. I went to the pawnshop, and broke in to get the watch back. The owner, who had followed me, tried to stop me. I killed him with a dagger that hung on the wall. They tell me I stabbed him so many times that it was impossible to count them. I do not remember it, but it could be true. I only know that the watch’s spring, almost run down, was wound back to the full by my trembling hand.

I do not know what my son looks like today, after so many years. My husband does not allow me to see him. On nights of longing I dream of him sturdy and brave. I keep the gold watch, which I wind every morning. Contemplating its second hand, I sense when my son is happy or sad, when he is exercising or resting. His heart rate, replicated in the little machine, keeps me informed.

The other clock, the one on the wall, was a sarcastic gift from my husband to rub my loneliness in my face. Sometimes my gaze gets lost in the golden disk of its pendulum, a golden bob that comes and goes, like an angel dancing as it hangs over an abyss. Only after several years in this prison did I understand that this clock reflected in its beat the beats of my own heart.