An Intimate and Local Fact

a September post with no paywall

“How people tell time is an intimate and local fact about them.”

Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours

Many years ago, when I was a cocktail waitress in a tequila bar in Midtown Manhattan, a traveler from Uruguay asked me out on a date. I preferred not to date customers, but I found him sexy, even though he was wearing a backpack stuffed to the seams. It was my first time meeting someone from Uruguay, so maybe that was why.

The next evening, I arrived at the bar we’d agreed on at the time we’d agreed on, settled onto a stool, and ordered a vodka soda. I doubt anyone has ever enjoyed bubbly, watery vodka, but because I’d internalized the message that clear liquor would make me thin, whereas my heart’s true desire, beer, would make me fat, throughout my 20s I dutifully ordered vodka soda after vodka soda.

I waited, glancing periodically at the door. The man from Uruguay and I hadn’t exchanged phone numbers. Back then, it wasn’t necessary. We all had flip phones and we weren’t Velcroed to them. We could still agree to meet somewhere at 8:00 and then just…meet there at 8:00.

8:00 became 8:10 became 8:20 and I got the sinking feeling that I was being stood up. I was young enough to perceive a man’s bad behavior as an indictment of my worth. I felt the rejection in my gut, but kept a game face for the bartender, hoping she’d think I’d meant all along to drink Smirnoff by myself.

And then my date ambled in.

“What the hell?” I said.

“What?”

“You’re 40 minutes late.”

He did not apologize or offer the easiest of New York City excuses—that the trains were messed up. He simply plopped down beside me, wriggling free of his hulking backpack, his expression conveying that women the world over were over-reactors and men were fated to endure their hysteria. We had a couple of drinks, but the damage was done. I thought he was the rudest person alive.

I forgot about the Uruguayan until a decade later when I was living in Mexico. In Mexico, if a party is called for noon, one need not arrive before 3:00. In Mexico, manaña means tomorrow, but also means at some nebulous future point or never. In Mexico, it clicked for me that I’d misinterpreted the Uruguayan’s lateness. He came from a part of the world where time is not an authoritarian regime, but a floaty, ephemeral substance like the fluff blown from a dandelion.

Did my revelation make me wish I’d given him a chance? Well, no. For one thing, he told me with conviction that New Yorkers were always tired because shadowy forces were poisoning us via airplane condensation trails. For another thing, he took a sip of wine without swallowing and then tried to kiss me and transfer the wine to my mouth. And for a third thing, he not only returned uninvited to my place of work the next evening, but took to lurking around my subway stop.

Relatedly/unrelatedly, I love this novel.

When I lived in San Miguel de Allende, a city with a sizable American population, a local I knew who worked as a massage therapist told me that his Mexican clients always asked for the lightest possible pressure and his American clients wanted him to hurt them. He was amused by the expression no pain, no gain. He said he heard it a lot from the Americans.

I didn’t say so, but I agreed with my compatriots that a meek little massage was a waste of an hour. I thought about that, and about other Capitalism-infused expressions woven into America’s fabric: No pain, no gain. Time is money. Work hard, play hard.

San Miguel de Allende by streetlight

Perhaps we can trace our on-the-dot ethos to the ancient Egyptians and their sundials, but early civilizations kept time for spiritual and survival reasons—tracking, for instance, when to pray for rain. Really, we’ve been pathologically punctual for a couple hundred years. In his book The Silent Language, anthropologist Edward T. Hall coined the terms monochronic time, a view of time as a linear entity divided into precise segments; and polychronic time, an understanding of time as fluid. During the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. became a monochronic culture, meaning we conceptualize time as a commodity. Polychronic cultures, in which the clock does not reign supreme, are comparatively laid-back.

Living in polychronic Latin America taught me something I’d long known intellectually, though not viscerally—that the way I see things is not the way everyone sees things; that behavior I find rude is, beyond my country’s borders, not necessarily rude.

In certain contexts in Mexico, it’s ill-mannered to speak directly, but I’m monochronic to the core: I see indirectness as the ultimate time-waster. I once asked my friend Kristina, who has lived half her life in the States, half in Mexico; is the child of one Mexican parent, one American parent; and has equal fluency in English and Spanish, if saying “no” directly is rude or polite.

She sort of combusted: “It’s rude and polite! It’s rude and polite!”

With magical, beautiful Kristina, who reads this newsletter. (Love you!)

I spend a lot of time imagining the inner lives of strangers: What sold the Uruguayan traveler on the chem trails conspiracy theory? That guy who’s yelling at the cashier about tomatoes—what is it that’s made him feel powerless? That driver at the stop light who’s singing her guts out—what is that concert giving her that she’s not getting elsewhere? There are so many ways to think, so many ways to move through life. I relish that. Or as my therapist would say, a “part” of me relishes that, because even after living for years in three different regions of Mexico, after spending time in Guatemala and Argentina; in Cuba, Costa Rica, and Peru; after falling in love with the Spanish language and Latin culture and a couple of Mexican men, I never came around to indirectness or lateness and I wished everyone would cut the shit. Just say what you mean! Just show up at eight! Just perceive the world through my body, not yours. Just exist as a manifestation of my preferences! It’s impatience borne of monochronism—I don’t have time to figure you out. Is anything sadder than that?

Buenos Aires in the rain

The shaman in the first Mexican town I lived in on Lake Chapala died last year. He was my friend. His name was Katuza. Lately, he’s been on my mind, in part because another friend from that circle was moved this week into Hospice. Using stones and clay, Katuza built temazcales—sweat lodges—with his bare hands, and I’ve been remembering how we would spend Sundays at his place, sweating inside that dark little dome. I’ve been thinking about how time moves differently in nature, how when you’re hiking in the mountains, or swimming in the ocean, or lying in the grass after a temazcal, looking at the sky, you’re not thinking about deadlines. You’re not thinking about the clock. You’re not saying, would you look at the time, or how is it September already? You’re not worrying that the day will “get away” from you. Or that life will.

Katuza used to tell me that we’d known each other for 2,000 years. I have no reason to doubt him.

Katuza on Lake Chapala, baptizing his hairless puppy Don Pablito

Love,

Diana

P.S. A prompt: Write about discovering that your reality was subjective.

P.P.S. What is your relationship to time? Let me know in the comments.