Heure espagnole

L’Heure espagnole: synopsis

L’Heure espagnole - which, unlike most Spanish hours, lasts no more than fifty minutes - is set in Torquemada’s clock shop in 18th-century Toledo. Ramiro, the mule driver, comes in to have his watch repaired. He has to wait, however, since this is Thursday and time for Torquemada to set off on his weekly mission to regulate the municipal clocks. The clock maker’s wife Concepcion is impatient for Torquemada to go, since this is the one hour in the week she has to entertain her lovers. But now the mule driver has got in the way. She solves the problem with the bright idea of asking Ramiro to carry a grandfather clock up to her bedroom – to which, as a man more used to carrying heavy loads than to making polite conversation, he readily agrees. As he goes out with the clock on his shoulder Gonzalve comes in with a song on his lips.

Gonzalve, a student who fancies himself as a poet, proves to be more interested in making bad verse than in making love to Concepcion. He is still rhapsodising when Ramiro returns. The emergency inspires Concepcion to ask the mule driver to go and bring the clock down again so that she can replace it with a better one. As soon as Ramiro has gone Concepcion talks Gonzalve into hiding in the other grandfather clock. Charmed by the poetic situation, Gonzalve is happy to stay where he is while a new Thursday visitor, the fat old banker Don Inigo Gomez, tries his clumsy seduction techniques on Concepcion. But Ramiro comes back to take the second clock upstairs (with Gonzalve inside it) and she follows. Left alone, rather than admit defeat Inigo squeezes himself into the first clock to try his luck later.

Looking after the shop in Concepcion’s absence, Ramiro reflects on the subtle mechanism of clocks and women. But now Concepcion wants the defective second clock    brought back down again (with the defective Gonzalve inside it) to make way for the first clock. Inigo reveals his hiding place to Concepcion who, on Ramiro’s return with the second clock, has no option but to allow him to take the first clock upstairs again (this time with Inigo inside it). Concepcion tells Gonzalve to go but he prefers to stay in his clock composing his “Impressions of the Hamadryad.” She goes upstairs but is soon back again with another errand for the ever-willing Ramiro. As he goes back to get the first clock she gives vent to her frustration with Gonzalve and her contempt for Inigo and his inability to extricate himself from his clock. When Ramiro returns with Inigo’s clock and asks her which of the two she wants in her bedroom now, she invites him to go up “without a clock.”

Thinking himself alone in the shop, Gonzalve is just leaving his clock when Torquemada comes back. He scrambles to take refuge in another one and finds that it is already occupied by Inigo. Delighted to find two customers taking such a close interest in his stock, Torquemada sells a clock to each of them. Inigo is still stuck, however, and it takes the indefatigable Ramiro to lift him out of his predicament. The moral, they tell us, is that “every mule driver has his day.”