La Paz Time

For the easygoing citizens of La Paz (pop. 350,000), time has never been of the essence. Like Latinos everywhere, they are determinedly late for dinners and parties, but they also have their own private jibe at punctuality: in all of thin-aired La Paz there is no dependable timepiece. The city (almost due south of Bar Harbor, Me.) has only two public clocks: one, on the Banco Mercantil, seldom runs; the other, on the Congress Building, keeps time erratically because it has been shot up so often in Bolivia's revolutions. Radio programs often begin & end according to the announcer's wristwatch.

Some years ago, according to La Razon's sardonic columnist, "Buenavista," a boy and girl had a 7 p.m. date. Because they followed the time of different broadcasting stations, they failed to meet. When the girl failed to show up, the boy went home, at 7:40 (his time) blew out his brains. Brokenhearted because her lover had not appeared, the girl went to her own home, took poison, died at 7:45 (her time). Both actually died at the same moment, and just as the Congress clock was chiming 6.

For the precise and punctual members of La Paz's British colony, this state of affairs has been hard to bear. Last week the Britons were busy doing something about it. To mark the city's 400th anniversary next month, they had hit upon a handsome gift: a clock, not nearly so big as Big Ben, but big enough to bang out the hours in deep and dependable tones. Topping a 33-ft. granite tower, the $10,000 clock will stand smack in the middle of 2-mi.-high La Paz.* Cracked Buenavista: "What is the use of having a British clock if the man who sets it is a Bolivian? Let us by all means have a Britisher, or at any rate someone not a Bolivian."

*British-Bolivian relations have not always struck so resonant a note. In the 1860s, the Bolivian dictator Mariano Melgarejo tied the British minister on to a burro, face tailward, rode him three times around La Paz's principal plaza because he had slighted the dictator's mistress. Queen Victoria, on being told that British naval guns could never reach landlocked Bolivia, seized a pen, crossed the country off the map, saying: "Bolivia no longer exists."

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