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And this my hand, against my self uprear.         — William Shakespeare I took the crooked, arcade-overshadowed road off the main square built by de Chirico and chanced upon a watch repairer's shop which might have been painted by Bhupen Khakhar for whose summer show the London weeklies have just prepared such a frosty welcome. Wait. Is this ekphrastic or oneiric? The site Bologna or Bombay? Are the hanging watches, so sure of their gender, Bulgari or Janata? Too early to tell. But there he sat at his workbench working at what looked like tiny jeweled bits of time laid out under his eye loupe in magnolia light. These fragments he seemed to be reassembling into a perfect circle, or a sphere seen from above — it was like a miracle obligingly performed in slow motion, or the flight of an arrow broken down into ever smaller fractions of advancement. He took his time, and my time, to acknowledge me — clearly he didn't crave an audience, as though the slow work that so ravished him required if not secrecy at least discretion. Could he mend, I wondered, the cracked glass on my watch before I had to leave tomorrow? His black eyes rested on the old Omega as though bemused such a watch should belong to someone so importunate, then he cleared the air with a lenient, experienced smile. Certo. But it will have a different bombatura not quite as fine as this one was. Though the word was unfamiliar, it conjured up at once light skating the rim of a sheer bevel. Va bene. So long, I thought, as I can tell the time, and don't have to squint through cracks as I had since fending off a drunken punch which I'd provoked myself enough to throw. I would have paid extra to watch him clean the face with the wad of turquoise putty he had to hand, paid double to have Devanagari numerals replace the Roman, but he wanted me out. A domani allora. Then as I left he said it needed una revisione completa before it got too late. A watch like this deserves — he changed the tense — deserved a lot more care.