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I'm sitting in Eric's basement right now. Joey is snoring on the left side of me, and Eric had been quietly sleeping for more than an hour. This house creeks all the time. Ever since I have been sleeping since 4th grade. This house always creeks
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Don Felix was there. He was just getting in or just leaving, you could never tell which.
Neither could you tell his age. While we were putting away a bottle of red wine, he confessed he was ninety. Gustavo said he'd subtracted a year or two, but Felix Payrallo Carbajal had no birth certificate. "I never had any ID so I couldn't lose it," he told me while he lit another cigarette and blew a few smoke rings.
With no papers and no clothes beyond what he wore, he walked from country to country, from town to town, the length of the century and the breadth of the world.
Don Felix left sundials in his wake. Unlike most Uruguayans, who can't wait to retire, he still made his living that way. He built gnomons, clocks without mechanisms, and sold them in town squares. Not to tell time, a custom he considered discourteous, but for the simple pleasure of keeping the sun company on its earthly travels.
When we met in the city of Rivera, Don Felix was just starting to feel at home. That had him worried. The temptation to stay was an order to leave. "New, new, new!" he shrieked, banging the table with his childlike hands.
There, as everywhere else, he was just passing through. He came in order to leave. He arrived from a hundred countries and two hundred sundials, and he departed whenever he fell in love, fleeing the danger of setting down roots in any bed or abode.
For leaving, he preferred dawn. When the sun rose, he'd be on his way. As soon as the doors opened at the train or bus station, Don Felix would put the few bills he'd managed to save on the counter and say: "As far as this will take me."
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