Celeste Goes Dancing and Other Stories (1989)

Norman Thomas di Giovanni's Argentine anthology, subtitled An Argentine Collection, was published by Constable in Great Britain in 1989 in translations by di Giovanni and Susan Ashe. It collects fourteen writers, most translated into English for the first time, with stories written or published in the 1980s. In Isidoro Blaisten's "Lotz Makes No Reply", the railway man Pecheny wakes before dawn in tears, sure that something is happening very close by. (Open Library)

Watches

Longines (unidentified model): In "Lotz Makes No Reply", Pecheny gropes in his bedside drawer for tobacco and finds his Longines pocket watch. In the kitchen he leaves it open on the oilcloth and follows the second hand (p. 38). He and his neighbour Lotz were made special inspectors together in 1924, when Mr Donovan handed each of them a Longines (p. 41); every morning they set them and call to each other over the garden fence. At daylight Pecheny puts it away and hears Teresita Lotz cry out (p. 43). The watch is a pocket watch; no model is named.

Source text: He stuffed everything into his pockets, and at the back of the drawer his fingers touched his Longines pocket watch. (Norman Thomas di Giovanni, ed., Celeste Goes Dancing and Other Stories, scan cataloged as Constable, 1989, p. 37, in "Lotz Makes No Reply" by Isidoro Blaisten, which begins on p. 35; Internet Archive scan OCR)