by AIRA, CESAR
What happened was that, many hours down the road, an enormous truck suddenly hurled itself into them, into Zaralegui at the wheel, in front. Except that the truck was smashed not in front, but behind. Or rather they were the ones who hurled themselves into the truck, and at full speed, at the multiplied speed that only occurs when two vehicles collide head-on. Who knows how it could have happened, since they were both going in the same direction. Maybe the truck had reduced its speed a little, a very little, and this was equivalent to a fantastic acceleration on the part of the car coming up from behind. (To explain this episode to myself, as with so many others, I am assuming, not very realistically, enormous speeds.) What’s certain is that the Chrysler was smashed against the back of the tractor trailer in the most savage manner — was destroyed, reduced to a shell of crushed tin. And not only that: it stuck there, like a meteorite that had collided with a planet, and it continued its travels, suspended. The truck driver, ninety feet ahead, didn’t even notice. Those trucks really were like planets. Anyone driving one would never know what was happening at its unreachable extremities — especially pulling a trailer, like another planet rolling along behind.
Zaralegui died instantly; he had no time to think anything. Delia, who was riding in the back, busy attaching a bodice with her miniscule stitches, was unscathed. But the crash, the jolt, the adhesion to the planet, and Zaralegui’s backwards leap, which brought him to rest in her arms like a baby, already dead, in a rosebud of tulle, produced a considerable shock. She lost consciousness and continued the journey asleep, without seeing the landscape. It was more of an hysterical coma than sleep, and she emerged from it a different woman, gone crazy for the third time. She never knew it, but the truck driver had parked on the side of the road and slept all night in his bunk bed, the little compartment those trucks have behind the cab, and then resumed the trip at dawn and didn’t stop the whole next day.
When Delia awoke, the sun was setting over the province of Santa Cruz.
10
PATAGONIA . . . the end of the world . . . yes, agreed; but the end of the world is still the world. The whole pink sky, like the petal of a colossal flower, the blue earth, an immobile disk with no other end but the horizon . . . That was the world, then. That was the whole world, that place where Delia had been taken by accident, by the mad force of events, and from which it seemed entirely unthinkable that she would ever escape. At first she felt like a child on a carousel, riding on the back of a beetle made of black glass. She even thought she heard music; and she did, actually, but it was the whistling of the wind.
Then, all at once, the horrible circumstances of which she was victim and protagonist became clear to her. She let out a scream and waved her arms in terror, at which Zaralegui’s corpse abandoned her lap and flew out of the car. A pothole must have helped: she wasn’t that strong.
And in addition to the potholes, in all certainty, the maelstrom of wind — at full speed the truck displaced a mass of air the volume and weight of a mountain. The mountains missing from that infinite plateau were created by the air. But there was also wind, and more than a little: Patagonia is the land of wind. In fact there were various winds, which competed for the dust raised by the truck and fought fiercely with the vehicle’s own wind, packed and wrapped by speed. They unwrapped this package a thousand times a second with a sound like paper in the air, they untied the ribbons of gravity, they tore up in their hurry, like children driven by the sight of toys, both its rigid and fluid folds.
Zaralegui gave two half-somersaults twelve feet in the air; no acrobat in the world could have imitated his pirouettes with the broken spine that he had. Then he went flying off to one side. Since his arms were moving, agitated by the same force that carried him, he seemed alive. What a spectacle! But the conjunction of the pothole and the whirlwind must have made a catapult, because Zaralegui wasn’t the only one who flew: he was followed by the dress, Delia, and the car, in that order. When the dress opened the enormous white wings of its train and rose, at a supersonic velocity, up and away, Delia felt dispossessed. It was her work that was going, and she was left out, useless. She thought she’d never get it back. And then when Delia herself took flight, all her feelings contracted into terror. It was the first time she flew.
The earth dropped away, the truck too — (the last she saw of it was the back wall of the trailer, from which the black cocoon that had been the Chrysler was coming loose, to take its turn at flying) — the sky approached vertiginously. She closed her eyes and after an instant opened them again.
The sun, which had already set on the surface, appeared again at the end of the world; it was the first time she’d seen the sun after it had set. It was as red as a red rubber ball slick with luminous oil. And it was in a strange place: although visible, it stayed below the line of the horizon, in a niche. It was the nighttime sun, which no one had ever seen.
And it’s not as if Delia lingered in contemplation of the sun. It couldn’t even be said that she looked at it. She wasn’t even thinking, and thinking always comes before looking. Flying was an absorbing activity for her — so much so, and so absorbing of life, that she was absolutely convinced she would not survive. And how could she? The contradictory currents of the wind had carried her, in two or three somersaults, to a height of more than a hundred yards. The circle of the horizon changed position as if the compass had fallen into the hands of a lunatic. The winds seemed to be shouting berserkly: “You take her! . . . Give her here!” — amid uncanny bursts of laughter. Delia was thrown back and forth, vibrating, vibrating, like a heart in the heights and depths of love, or in space.
“These are my last moments,” she screamed to herself without moving her lips. The last seconds of her life, and afterward there would be only the black night of death . . . Her anguish was unspeakable. Talking in terms of seconds was rhetoric, but it was also a great truth. The mad winds seemed bold enough to turn the seconds into minutes, and even hours, and if they felt like it, it would not be out of place to say days. But even so they would be seconds, because anguish compresses time, whatever interval of time, to the painful dimensions of seconds.
I should at least take advantage of this experience, she managed to say to herself, since there won’t be another one to follow it.
But that was, from any point of view, impossible. Enjoyment is impossible when everything is impossible; what’s more, there was no point of view; the show she was putting on didn’t have a point of view, since there was no one to see it. There in the limpid heights of twilight, she spun around so many times at a speed greater than sound, that she no longer had relative positions. She was a collage, a figure cut out and moved by a capricious artist, filmed in fast-forward against the pinkest and smoothest backdrop in the world (or in the sky) and illuminated by a red spotlight. No one enjoys the experience immediately before death, ever. Although, of course, with death, the quintessentially unexpected, no experience can be called the last. There’s always the possibility that it’s the next-to-last. This was an error on Delia’s part (her last moments!), the first of a strange series that would carry her very far.
Some things seem eternal, and still they pass anyway. Death itself does that. Delia had lost sight of the earth a little while before, and she no longer knew if she was moving forward or backward, falling or rising, following the vertical or the horizontal . . . What did it matter, at that point? There was always a new wind to take hold of her and play yo-yo with her. Where did they come from, those winds? The torrent seemed to come from a hole in the sky — the hole was invisible.
But, as I say, suddenly it was over. Delia found herself on the earth again, and walking. She really didn’t know how it happened. But, there she was walking on her two legs, on the flat, clean-swept earth. She didn’t see a tree, a hill, anything. She forgot immediately the danger of death she had just faced.
Delia loved to play the committed fatalist, the lady of death — every afternoon she felt prepared to spend the night at a wake; h
er conversations were full of cancer, blindness, paralysis, comas, heart attacks, widows, orphans. She had embodied this character with so much enthusiasm that it was now her theme, her position. It was an inclination she had chosen, because the safe and protected life she’d led, the cocoon of the small town middle class, placed her on the margin of any serious test in which her survival could be at stake. Her desire to live was exempt from any corroboration. And this also formed a part of her definitive being. While she flew, with no time to think or react (which are the same thing), she had clung to her old philosophy. Yet now that she was walking, safe and sound, time was opening up beneath her feet; her legs were the scissors that cut the translucent stalk of time and continuously opened and unfolded it. And because of this she saw before her the urgent necessity to give way to certain ideas about reality and to renounce momentarily that “what does it matter, I’m dead already anyway” that constituted her elegance.
She didn’t know where she was or where she was headed — or even what time it was. To start with, how was it possible that it was daytime? It was night, she felt that in her body and her mind. And yet, it was day. What insane zone had she fallen into?
Then this is Patagonia? she said to herself, perplexed. And if this is Patagonia, then what am I?
11
MEANWHILE, WHEN NIGHT had almost fallen, Ramón Siffoni returned to the neighborhood in his little red truck and found a committee of anguish waiting for him.
“Omar wasn’t lost!” he began, but he stopped there, because he sensed that no one was listening. He was a nervous and bad-tempered man, impatient, demanding and dissatisfied. “ Where’s my wife?” he asked.
This was what the neighbors were waiting for.
“She took a taxi to Patagonia.”
If they’d bored a hole in the back of his neck with a drill they couldn’t have shaken him more badly.
They explained it to him, but who knows if anything got through his crust of rage. But something must have gotten through, because he got back into his red wreck of a truck and took off with a noise like rattling tin cans — also headed south, where everyone seemed to be going that day.
What he didn’t see was parked on the corner — a little sky-blue one-seater car, the kind that had to be dismantled from the top for the driver to get in: it began to follow him. Such a maneuver was highly unusual, perhaps the first, and the last time, such a thing happened in Pringles.
And even so, it went unnoticed. The neighbor women were dazzled by the abrupt gesture, romantic in its way, of the angry husband. And Ramón Siffoni . . . what could he notice, in his state? He ran, he launched himself off, to keep his wife from committing the greatest mistake of her life. And if his old red truck was not as fast as it needed to be, it didn’t matter, because what he wanted at that moment was an interplanetary rocket ship.
He was going, as anyone with a map can verify, southeast. Which is to say, in the two directions that lengthen the day in the Argentine summer. And as he was beside himself, he was the southeast. That worked. The day began to lengthen like a snake, and the red truck, which in the immensities it now slid across was becoming truly small, was the blazing hungry head of the snake, with its tongue sticking out: the tongue was the crank with its two right angles which in his haste Ramón had forgotten to take off.
12
BUT HE WAS not alone. A half mile or so behind, the gaze of a lady at the wheel was fixed on his trail of dust, driving a little sky-blue car, one of the smallest and lightest ever constructed. The fact that it was as light as a yawn mattered less (or didn’t matter at all) in view of the important mystery the little car held. That was everything. That little car was the mystery, and it was more than that: it was mystery in motion. Those vehicles, made for mobility in cities, for short distances, were an eccentricity of the fifties and sixties, and forgotten afterwards. We called them “mice.” Only one not very fat person fit, and only if they were tightly folded-up. No one ever thought of traveling in one of those cars. And yet this one, a pale blue example of the tiniest model, threw itself into the longest and most dangerous chase, almost like a miniature replica of something else — a toy intruding into the adult world. Surrounding it, Patagonia, gigantic and deserted, was beginning to open its vast mouth. But the car was not afraid. It pressed on, at full speed, almost as if it knew where it was going, or as if it were going somewhere. Or as if it were not going anywhere. It was the magnet-car, the soda bubble in the wind, the blue point of the sky, mystery in all its dimensions. The proverb says mystery does not occupy space. All right, fine; but it crosses it.
13
VERY WELL. NOW all the protagonists in the adventure are on stage. Let me see if I can make an orderly list:
1) The huge tractor trailer, Chiquito’s double planet, leading the way.
2) The shell of Zaralegui’s Chrysler, at this point looking more than anything like a black lacquered Chinese bathtub.
3) Zaralegui’s corpse.
4) Delia Siffoni, lost and wandering around.
5) Silvia Balero’s wedding dress, carried by the wind.
6) Ramón Siffoni in his red truck (a day behind).
7) And closing the retinue, the mysterious little blue car.
Of course, it’s not that simple. There are other characters, who are now going to appear . . . Or better yet, no. It’s not that there are other characters (these are all of them) but revelations will transform these characters into others, making room for encounters that Delia Siffoni never would have expected, neither she nor any of the other Delia Siffonis in the world, with all of them beginning, there in Patagonia, a dance of transformations.
There are drunks who, starting at a certain point in the evening, sample all kinds of mixes: they drink anything, a glass of any alcohol at hand, at random. We know how imprudent this policy is, but they laugh and keep going; you have to recognize their astonishing physical vigor, their superhuman stamina, which they might have been born with but which they’ve certainly developed further with this habit — the paradox of self-destruction, which conversely never quite arrives. They mix everything, and they don’t worry . . . it all contributes to the same effect, which is inebriation, their personal inebriation, which is singular, unique. And if he also is singular, the drinker says to himself, what does it matter how many elements there are to take him to that sublime level of unity . . .
Happy drunk! If he’s gotten that far, he’s gotten to everything, he has no reason to worry anymore, because the idea on which he bases all his reasoning is correct, and there’s nothing else to say (even though it’s bad for your health). It’s true that he is singular, and it’s true that this is a process of simplification: everything goes toward a kind of happy nothing, and nothing is lost on the way.
“Simplify, child, simplify.” For some reason, I can’t do it. I want to, but I can’t. It’s stronger than I am. It’s as if I were abstemious. Here in Paris I drink more than I should.
As I am not much of a drinker, the effect is immediate, and exaggerated. It’s the effect and nothing but. The effect is to walk drunkenly, smiling stupidly past all those prestigious places, accumulating experiences, memories, for a time when I have nothing else to lean on. It’s a commonplace to say that a great city offers a continuous succession of different impressions, all in a magma of variable intensity. But shouldn’t it also be true for other people, not just for oneself? I see people pass, from café terraces where I write, and all without exception look compact, closed in on themselves, making it very clear that the city has had no effect on them.
But what am I after? I don’t know. People disarmed by their own visions, like Picasso’s women, medusa-like and limping, thousand-armed goddesses, hollow people, fluid people?
Maybe what I hope to see, at the end of a line of self-sustaining reasoning, is people who, like myself, have no life. In that, I am condemned to failure. It’s curious, but everyone has life, even the tourists, who by my reasoning shouldn’t. No one leaves life an
ywhere, all lives seem to be portable. They are naturally so. To be practical about it and drop the metaphysics, having a life is equivalent to having business, affairs, interests. And how can anyone strip himself of all that? Very well. But then how did I do it?
I don’t know.
I’ve stood on the threshold of all the beauties, all the dangers. And the sums did not add up. The remainders did not remain, the multiplications were not multiplied, the divisions were not divided.
14
LET’S SUPPOSE A man who, as a result of a mental disturbance (I can imagine this because yesterday I saw it), cannot walk, advance, or move at all, without the accompaniment or propulsion of very sonorous music, which he is obliged to provide for himself at the top of his lungs. Uncomfortable for other people, evidently; but maybe not as much as you’d think, at least for those who see him only briefly and think, quite reasonably, that the poor unhappy man isn’t doing it because he likes to. It’s curious, because I’d bet that anyone who has to put up with him every day would certainly have the right to think he does do it because he likes it, and surely they do think that. Because he could always choose immobility and keep quiet.
He moves not in silence, but in song. It’s almost like opera: the song becomes gesture, and fate, and plot (incoherent, insane), and the people who surround him also become destiny and fate. He advances loaded down with signifiers, dragging the cart of his rhythm, which only he perceives. He opens a pathway by opening his life with the demented clumsiness of an angry man tearing the gift wrap off a present. But he doesn’t find a gift, and keeps on opening forever, singing forever. The perpetual melodrama. There it is, what his accusers may wonder: Why does he insist? Actually, they wonder what comes first: movement or song? Does he sing to walk, or walk to sing? All right, there is no answer, as there is none for the puzzle of the opera. Because there is no anterior or posterior, there is no succession, only a kind of successive simultaneity.
