Getting the Massage in Willemstad Shop

A bull in a china shop could not have stunned me more than seeing a neck-and-shoulder massage being given amid Villeroy and Boch porcelain at a Spritzer & Fuhrmann store in Willemstad on the island of Curacao.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” crooned the contented customer as she sat with bowed head near the door.

I was signing charge slips at the cashier’s cage when I heard the woman say to no one in particular--and yet to all:

“What every store needs is someone to give a shoulder massage so that shoppers would have the strength to carry on.”

“You are right,” said a clerk in a gentle voice. “I will rub your shoulders. We must take time to help each other.”

Student of Yoga

The clerk, who turned out to be a student of yoga, calmly stretched and rubbed and soothed the kinks from the traveler’s aching neck. She used a lime-green liquid called Alcolado Glacial, a product made by Curacao Laboratories Ltd., which has a penguin on the bottle but lists no ingredients. It claims to be “refreshing, invigorating and wholesome,” and has the light, brisk smell of after-shave.

The customer thanked the clerk, then asked directions to a drugstore where she bought Alcolado Glacial in case she met another stranger with time on her hands.

Time does not seem to count for much on the island of Curacao, except for the noon to 2 p.m. slot when businesses close for lunch and the narrow streets of Willemstad are packed with bikes and taxis.

Even that traditional siesta has been broken by the popular New Amsterdam stores, which stay open to sell duty-free linens and Dutch dolls and sportswear, including a fine selection of guayabera shirts, those pocketed, jacket-like cottons that are a staple of warm-weather men’s wear from the Philippines to Mexico to the Caribbean.

But back to time. On Gomez Plein, the main square of Willemstad, is the home store of Spritzer & Fuhrmann, a jewelry plant that was founded in the 1920s by two Austrian watchmakers.

Above its entrance is a landmark carillon clock with seven tiers of bronze bells and a procession of native figurines that revolve on the quarter hour. I had been told, as we sailed into port, that the bells were not working.

“How long have they been broken?” I asked a young clerk as I studied the face of a Jaeger-Le-Coultre classic.

“For some time,” she responded. “They say a man will come from Switzerland to fix them.”

Sensing a fact in my path, I pushed on. “And when will that be?”

“Some time,” she said slowly.

As I walked outside, where the sun danced on gabled roofs of 17th- and 18th-Century Dutch buildings, a ripple of chimes began shimmering through the air, as if trade winds had lifted the lid from a music box.

Waterfront Beauty

Maybe the bells work, but not the clock, I mused. Maybe the procession of figures had slowed. Maybe I would learn more about it later.

Maybe.

I had promised to meet a friend before noon at the perfume counter of Penha, a yellow waterfront beauty near the Queen Emma pontoon bridge. My watch said 11:15, and that seemed wrong. I paused by a taxi whose driver was shining the hood.

“Pardon me,” I said, “but do you have the time?”

“I have Nov. 26,” he said, squinting at a calendar watch. “But I believe it to be December.”

Timeless, the Caribbean.