In a “house of guests” at another place, where not another stranger had stopped for perhaps three months, I was one freezing night availing myself of the meager kitchen fire while two old women and a younger one busied themselves with the supper dishes and pestled in a stone mortar the variety of seeds to be used in the morrow’s mole—a dish, as Mexican newspapers say of a boxing match, “truly emotional.” Presently another ancient figure wrapped in black rebozo came in.
“What hour is it?” she asked.
“The hours are eight,” answered one of the dames, peering at a loud-ticking American-made alarm clock on a shelf.
“Is this tiempo de Calles?”—the daylight-saving time decreed by President Calles—asked the stranger.
“No, it is tiempo Porfiriano”—time as it was under Porfirio Diaz—responded with some asperity the old woman who stood as guardian to time. “We do not use tiempo oficial. Leave that to the ‘coyotes’ and ‘hawks’ of the government.”
“Ours is tiempo astronómico,” elucidated the younger woman.
“It is el tiempo de Dios—the time of God,” spoke with finality the ancient crone who had first consulted the battered clock.
“So, so,” I translated freely, “and an hour ago it was seven o’clock and when another hour has passed it will be nine o’clock. Then in the morning all the men will lie in bed until ‘the cloak of the poor’ drops down from the sky to warm them.”
“Yes, yes,” they all agreed.
“Only,” the most ancient of them moralized, “who has promised any of us tomorrow?”
And el tiempo de Dios ticked on.
— J. Frank Dobie
