Read time: 6 minutes
The watch was made in Paris in spirit if not in factory, and Paris is where I started — a quiet Tuesday morning, the kind where the city is still waking up and the croissants haven’t quite made it out of the ovens yet. I had the Santos on, the small square Galbée with the silver guilloché dial. I’d packed three watches and ended up wearing only this one. Travel does that. You pack for the person you imagine being, and then the days narrow you down to who you actually are.
There’s a particular pleasure in wearing a watch in the city it came from. The Santos was born in 1904, when a Brazilian aviator told Cartier he was tired of fumbling for a pocket watch while flying — and the screws on the bezel are said to nod at the iron architecture of that Paris, the same era that built the Eiffel Tower and decided rivets could be beautiful if you let them show. The Galbée is the later evolution, the case curved instead of flat — galbée meaning shapely, sculpted, in French — softer on the wrist, a small concession to the body without losing the geometry. Mid-90s into the early 2000s. Discontinued now, which is when watches start getting interesting.
Paris
I had coffee at a café on rue Saint-Antoine, the kind of place where they bring you a small glass of water with the espresso and don’t comment when you sit there for an hour. An older man across from me kept glancing down. Eventually he leaned forward — not to interrupt, just to meet my eye — and said, “Ah, le Santos.” That was it. A small smile, a nod, and he went back to his newspaper.
It’s a strange thing, to be acknowledged by a stranger through a watch. We didn’t exchange names. He didn’t ask the reference. He recognized the silhouette across the table and nodded the way you might nod at someone wearing the colours of a team you also support. Then we both went back to our mornings. I think about that a lot. The watch wasn’t a status object in that moment; it was a flag in a small private country.
Has that ever happened to you? A stranger noticing, no words, just a nod?
Later I drifted into Galeries Lafayette without intending to buy anything, which is the way most people drift into Galeries Lafayette. The dome was doing what the dome does. I ended up in the fragrance hall at the Bulgari counter, where they were sampling the Le Gemme line. There’s a particular discipline to those fragrances — each one named after a gemstone, dense and oriental, the kind of perfume that doesn’t apologise for itself. I left wearing one I hadn’t planned on, and walked out with the watch on my wrist and a scent I didn’t pick, somehow more myself than when I came in.
That night: a small bistro near Place des Vosges. Steak tartare hand-cut at the table, an unfussy carafe of red, oysters before. The wrist resting on marble. Light catching the guilloché — those concentric circles radiating from the centre of the dial, almost like a sound wave, almost like the ripple of a stone dropped in water. The Santos in Paris feels at ease the way a person feels at ease in their own kitchen. Nothing to prove.
Barcelona
Then the flight south, and a city that has nothing to do with rivets and right angles.
Barcelona is curved. It slouches. It eats late and starts the day at a pace that would embarrass a Parisian. I had vermut at noon at a tiled bar where the bartender poured from a height for no other reason than he could, and I sat with pa amb tomàquet — bread rubbed with garlic, ripe tomato, olive oil, salt — which is the kind of dish that reminds you most great food is just three good ingredients and the confidence to leave them alone.
The Santos looked different in Catalan light. Sharper. The square case stood out against all those curves — the melted Gaudí façades, the wrought-iron balconies that look like something a wave left behind. In Paris the watch had blended in. In Barcelona it asserted itself. Interesting, because the watch hadn’t changed at all. Only the room had.
Dinner was in El Born — jamón ibérico that dissolved before you could chew it, gambas still tasting of the morning’s sea, a fideuà that arrived in the pan it was cooked in. I noticed the bracelet — those exposed screws on each link mirroring the bezel — caught the warm light of the restaurant differently than they had in the Marais. Steel can be cold or warm depending on what’s around it. I’d never thought about that before.
One afternoon I walked from the Gothic Quarter up toward the Eixample with no particular destination, and the watch became a kind of metronome. Glance, walk, glance. I wasn’t checking the time so much as checking in. At some point I realised the silver guilloché dial — that texture of countless precise lines turned on a rose engine, a technique older than the watch itself — was almost the same colour as the stone of the buildings around me. The city had absorbed it.
Late one afternoon I walked down to Barceloneta. The Mediterranean was doing what the Mediterranean does in March — pulling the day toward sunset slowly, taking its time. I took my shoes off and sat on the sand for a while, watching the light change against the watch as much as the horizon. Brushed steel does something specific in that hour: it warms, it softens, it takes on the colour of the day around it. The screws on the bezel caught the last gold of the sun like small punctuation marks. The Santos was made for a man who flew, and yet it sits just as easily by the sea. The watch doesn’t care what kind of distance you’re crossing. It only marks that you are.
What’s a city that absorbed one of yours?
Coming home
There’s a thing that happens when you travel with a single watch. It stops being an object you put on and becomes something more like a witness. It was there for the espresso in Paris. It was there for the vermut. It saw the stranger nod, smelled the Bulgari, watched the train cut through the south of France, sat on the white tablecloth in El Born while the gambas arrived. By the time I unpacked it back home, the Santos felt different — not changed, exactly, but informed. It had been somewhere with me.
This is what I think watches do at their best. They aren’t really about telling time. Time is everywhere — on phones, on screens, in the sky if you know how to read it. A watch is about marking time. Cinching a moment to the wrist so it doesn’t drift away.
I’ll wear other watches. But this one came home with stories the others didn’t.
