keep your heart open.

Giorgio Vasari, 1511-1574

Allegory of Patience, 1552, oil on canvas, 197.8x108.8 cm

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

this is torquemada. no, not the inquisition guy. this torquemada is a little tenor bean who runs a clock shop in the beautiful city of toledo, spain, and has also gotten a gig going around the city every thursday afternoon to check all the municipal clocks. he is in this opera for like five minutes.

this is torquemada’s wife concepción, who is our actual main character and for lack of better terminology is an absolute girlboss who stays winning. thursday afternoons (when her husband is out doing municipal clock things), she engages in her favorite hobby: juggling multiple lovers.

meet said lovers: gonsalve, a tenor more interested in aesthetics and poetry than actually getting down to brass tacks and banging concepción—much to her despair—and don íñigo, a wealthy old banker who got torquemada that cushy little municipal job to get more hangout time with concepción and is mostly just here to be old and ridiculous.

but on this particular thursday afternoon, there is a bit of a wrench in her plans! meet ramiro, a muleteer who has stopped by because a family heirloom watch has broken. he insists on staying at the shop even when torquemada leaves for his rounds. concepción cannot get a read on him at first—what if he spoils her fun?

but eventually, she has an idea for a Plan to still have her fun. and it turns out that ramiro, who (bless his heart) has a heart of gold, muscles to rival a god, and absolutely zero brain cells (especially when it comes to women), is amenable to said plan. there are multiple large clocks involved. it is an absolute farce. the ending suggests that torquemada may already know and be okay with the fact that concepción is doing her own thing.

and that’s how they keep time in spain (a common poetic translation of the title)!