Miguel de Cervantes — Chapter 1: A clockwork mechanism ticking backwards in the archive — Novella Movement 2

In a corner of the archive whose name I have no desire to remember, nor shall the reader compel me to it, there was discovered, in a year not worth the fixing, a mechanism of brass and jointed wire that ticked, as all the witnesses of that house will attest upon their oaths, not forward into the future as is the custom of honest clocks, but backward into what had already been spent and buried. Whether this be true I leave to graver pens than mine, for I have it only at second hand from a certain Morisco translator who swore he had it from a manuscript in Arabic characters, and such authorities, as is well known, are worth exactly as much credit as the reader is disposed to lend them, and not a maravedí more.

The finder of this curiosity was one Don Anselmo de la Fuente, a gentleman of scant rents and vast reading, whom the neighbourhood called the Flâneur for his habit of walking the cloisters of the ducal library with his hands clasped behind him as though he were escorting his own thoughts to some solemn audience; a man learned in genealogies no one asked after, in the customs of chivalry no one practised, in the laws of courtly love no one any longer obeyed, and in nothing whatsoever that concerned the management of his estate, which last omission had reduced him, before he was forty, to lodging above a saddler's shop and taking his dinners upon credit. It was he who, rummaging among ducal papers condemned to dust, laid hold of the ticking mechanism, and turned it in the light, and pried open its case, and found within a scroll of paper wound upon a spindle, inscribed with names and qualities and small emblematic marks after the fashion, though he could not have known it, of what our own age calls an algorithmic dating profile — a table of suitors ranked and sorted by some vanished clerk's private arithmetic, the virtues of each catalogued against the virtues required, the whole apparatus turning backward, unspooling matches already made and unmaking them, as though Fortune herself had been persuaded to take back her wagers.

Don Anselmo did not for one instant entertain the vulgar supposition that this was merely some German engineer's toy of accountancy, made to spare a merchant the trouble of his own judgment in the choosing of a wife; for such things, said he, gravely and without the least mockery in his voice, are beneath the dignity of an instrument that dares to reverse the very current of time, since no mortal artificer, however cunning with his files and his tempered springs, has yet been granted power over that which Heaven alone unwinds and winds; and therefore this must be the work of some enchanter friendly to true lovers, who, seeing how the false arithmetic of the world had parted hearts that ought never to have been sundered, had set his wheels turning contrary to nature so that what was lost might, click by patient click, be given back.

PART 1 (unchanged):
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His companion in this discovery, a certain Ginesillo, sharp of eye and sharper of finger, who had attached himself to Don Anselmo's fortunes in the hope of dining at their expense, examined the same scroll and found upon it nothing more than a list of names, sums, and small crude portraits, and said, without ceremony, that a fool and his supper are soon parted, and that if the gentleman wished to eat that week he had better sell the brass for what the brass would fetch and leave the enchanters to their own business. Don Anselmo did not answer him; he only wound the mechanism the tighter, and listened to it counting backward toward some hour he could not name, and resolved that he would follow that hour to its source, come dust, come debt, come whatever ridicule the age might heap upon a man who believed that what had been unmade might, by patience and by faith, be remade after all. Whether such faith deserves our laughter or our reverence, I confess I have not yet decided, and beg the reader's pardon for leaving the question, like the mechanism itself, ticking.
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PART 2 (smoothed):
"""
And ticking it led him, for Don Anselmo followed that sound as a hound follows a scent grown faint with rain, through three streets and a plaza and the low door of a widow's house where, said the scroll, in letters gone the colour of rust, there dwelt one Doña Casilda de Robles, ranked first of all the names, first in virtue, first in dowry, first in whatever mysterious calculus the vanished clerk had set turning against her; and it seemed to him a thing beyond doubting that here, at the very spring-head of the mechanism's backward count, he should find restored to him — though he had never possessed it — some love the false arithmetic of the age had broken before ever it was made whole. He knocked; the door was opened; and there stood before him not the lady of the emblematic portrait, dark-browed and slender as the scroll had painted her, but a woman of some sixty years, broad in the beam as a galleon and twice as slow to come about, who looked upon the gentleman and his brass mechanism with the settled contempt that women of business reserve for men of leisure, and asked him, without preamble, whether he had come to buy eggs, for she sold nothing else, and had sold nothing else these twenty years, her husband the notary having died and left her that trade and no other.
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Don Anselmo, nothing daunted, for daunting was not among the humours Heaven had allotted him, unrolled the scroll and showed her her own name, her own small crude portrait, the very sums and qualities set down against her as though she were a horse at a fair; and he began to explain to her, gravely and at considerable length, the doctrine of the reversed hours, and how the mechanism, ticking backward through what had already been spent, might yet unmake the false match that parted her from whatever destiny had first intended, and give back what the arithmetic of clerks and dowries had stolen; to which she answered, setting down her basket of eggs upon the step between them, that she did not know what destiny he spoke of, unless it were the destiny of a man too proud to work and too poor to eat, and that eggs, unlike enchantments, were sold for coin and not for speeches, and that he had best be about his business before she called the watch, for she had buried one fool already and had no leisure to bury another.

Here Ginesillo, who had followed at a prudent distance the better to see how the adventure ended, and who saw now that it had ended as he had foretold, remarked, not without a certain rustic satisfaction, that a bird in the hand had ever been worth two enchanters in the archive, and that his master had walked half the town to be told the price of eggs; whereat Don Anselmo, colouring, replied that the fault lay not in the mechanism nor in the doctrine but in some malign influence — some enchanter hostile to true lovers, jealous perhaps of the very fidelity the device had been built to restore — who had, by his arts, disguised the lady's true countenance and true fortune beneath the borrowed shape of an egg-wife, the better to mock a gentleman's faith; for it was not to be believed, said he, that Heaven's contrivance could err, only that the malice of enchanters could counterfeit the appearance of its working.

No longer would he seek the second name upon the scroll, nor the third, nor trouble the ducal library for further papers, nor wind the brass wheels before witnesses who took his faith for madness; the mechanism itself, that same night, ceased its ticking altogether, whether from want of winding or from some more occult exhaustion I do not pretend to determine, and sat silent upon his table as any other broken thing sits silent, its scroll unspooled to its final inch, its names all spent. Was it Heaven's judgment upon a foolish faith, or the last kindness of an enchanter tired of his own jest? I confess the question outruns my authority, and I leave it, like the mechanism, stopped; and if the reader finds this digression longer than the matter deserved, I can only answer, in Ginesillo's rustic coin, that he who examines a gift horse too closely will find, in the end, only its teeth.