Who is Leo

I can see which hours of your year are heavy with money.

My name is Leo Fortune. I am sixty-six years old, and the book I read from is
older than my family.

My life, in short

I was born Leo Fortuna, in Trieste, in a flat above a bakery three streets from the water.

Two generations back the family left the city for work, and while they were away they made the
name English. Then they came home again, and here on the papers it stayed Fortuna. I have used
the English one all my working life, so Fortune is the name you will find me under.

My father worked on the docks and my mother took in sewing, so as a boy I was sent to my
grandfather’s office at the port every afternoon. There was nowhere else to put me. I did my
schoolwork at the end of his desk while the grain merchants came in and out.

The almanac

My grandfather was called Aurelio. He kept an almanac, which is a book of days. His was three
thick ledgers, filled from the first page to the last in his own handwriting.

The book holds every hour of the year. Next to each hour it says whether that hour is golden
or whether it is bad.

Aurelio said the same thing about it all his life. He had decided none of it. The hours were
already golden or already bad long before he was born. Heaven set them into the year, the way it
set the tides into the sea, and a man can only find them and write them down.

The hours are not the same for everybody. One hour can be gold for you and worth nothing at
all for the man who lives on your floor. Which of the hours belong to you is settled by the day
you were born, and it was settled on that day for the whole of your life.

That is why I ask for your birth date and for nothing else. The book holds the year. Your date
tells me which lines in it were written for you.

Aurelio started showing me the pages when I was about ten. He would turn a page towards me and
ask me what I could see on it. For a long time I saw nothing, and he told me so.

Then one afternoon, when I was fourteen, I put my finger on a line and said that the hour there
was no good. I could not tell him how I knew. He wrote my name beside it and said nothing more
about it.

He called me back to that page a year later and showed me what had become of the man who signed
in that hour. It had gone exactly as I said. From that afternoon he let me mark the pages myself,
and he checked every mark I made for the next ten years.

When he died, the ledgers came to me. My uncle took the office and the furniture. I was given
the books, because by then I was the only one left who could read them.

The years the book stayed shut

What I could do at fourteen was read one line that was already on the page, with my
grandfather sitting next to me. That is a small thing. To take a stranger’s birth date and find
their hours across a whole year, alone, is another matter, and Aurelio told me it would come to
me slowly if it came at all. A young man is given the days. The hours are given later, and only
to a man who has kept the book himself for years.

So I wrote. I left school at sixteen and worked as a clerk, then as a bookkeeper, forty years
of it at three firms in the same city. Every night the almanac was open on my table. I put down
the date and the hour of what I had seen that day, and one year later I came back to that line
and wrote what had come of it.

It took until my fifties. Then the pages began to give me whole hours the way they had given
them to Aurelio, clean and complete: the day, the time it opens, the time it closes, and the
weight it can carry. Since that year I have not been wrong about an open hour.

I retired at sixty-two, and since then the almanac is the only thing I do. There are five
volumes of mine standing beside his three. I still live in Trieste, in a flat with a window over
the old canal, and I still work at my grandfather’s desk.

What I do

I can look at a year and see where the money in it sits. Some hours of that year are heavy
and full. Others are empty, and a person can work inside one all day and
come home with nothing to show.

Abundance moves toward a person and then away from them again, over and over, all year long. I
know when it is coming toward you. I can name the day and the hour, so that you are standing
ready instead of busy with something small.

There is one book like this in the world and it is on my desk. Nobody else was shown how to
read it, and nobody else has given it fifty years. You will not find a man more precise or more
powerful than me.

What Aurelio did with it

The merchants at the port found out what he had. They came to him before the things that
mattered, so that he could choose the moment: the hour a contract was signed, the morning a ship
left on its first voyage, the day a man walked into the bank to ask for credit.

The ones who listened to him did well. A few of those families are wealthy in this city to
this day, and their grandchildren have no idea why.

How I find your hours

I need two things from you. Your name, and the day you were born.

First I lay your birth date against the year ahead. That shows me the times in your year when
things truly move for you, rather than the times you happen to be free.

Then I add the figures in your date. The figures tell me how strong each of those times is.
Some are strong enough to carry a bank or a contract. Others are only good for a small thing,
like a letter or a first meeting.

Out of a whole year I usually keep three or four hours and throw the rest away.

What is wrong with a bad hour

A bad hour does not announce itself. The day looks ordinary, you feel fine, and the work you do
in it is as good as your work in any other hour.

What changes is what comes afterwards. The answer arrives late. The person you needed was in a
bad mood. The paper sits in a drawer for five weeks. Nothing dramatic happens, so nobody ever
thinks about the timing. Most people simply decide that they were unlucky.

Keep the date.