The Seamstress and the Wind

by AIRA, CESAR

  It was within this strange logic that Delia Siffoni walked through Patagonia that calamitous afternoon. But she didn’t walk with the obliviousness of the madman. The poor woman had fallen into the trap of a melodrama where she was just another character, and barely that — Delia Siffoni, the woman who was always talking about disasters. Her fatalist palinodes wouldn’t have helped her now, because fate did not depend on her. She was in an ensemble, but she was all alone. There was no third person. There was no story.

  How could this happen to me? she said to herself. How could I have come to land, without realizing it, in this stony, godforsaken desert? She meant: to me, why did it have to happen to me and not to someone else? She belonged to a common type: without ever really thinking it over in detail, she had considered herself a woman like the rest, with no reason for anything to happen to her that didn’t also happen to all other women. It was as if this sort of thing happened to someone else, to an absolute someone else, which is to say, as if it didn’t happen to anyone. And yet . . . Her brain, somewhat feverish at that moment, was unexpectedly reviewing all kinds of exceptions. She knew so many women who were victims of lamentable fates, some of them almost unbelievable in their bitterness. So many women who could have asked themselves “Why me?” . . . and the question was left unanswered . . . So many, that suddenly it seemed as if it were all of them. In that sense then, she, to whom nothing ever happened, was part of a small minority of typical women, so small she was almost alone in it. Inconceivable women who were free to narrate it all, to fill themselves with all destinies. And if she was the exception, the only one, if the world was turned around in that sense, then it was logical that the exceptional and unique would happen to her. Just to her. Maybe it seemed like there were so many victims because she had always devoted herself to their disasters, to juicy remarks, one after another, squeezing the last drops out of them. She was grandly unoccupied, she was the gossip woman. For example, something was coming back to her, who knows why, with almost excessive microscopic clarity — the case of a young woman who in the recent past had been one of her favorite topics until it was displaced by the electrifying Balero affair: the girl was named Cati Prieto, she had been married for a couple of years and was the mother of a baby; the husband, with the excuse (justified or not, that was unknown) of a job in Suárez, had literally abandoned her; he came Sunday mornings, he left at night, he didn’t even stay to sleep. He had another woman in Suárez, that was obvious. And when he presented himself, the bastard, hardly noticing the presence of his son, she spent the hours pointing out the child’s progress to him, the smile, the little hand, the gurgling; look, did you see, did you hear . . . and him smoking through it all, behind his mask of ice, his indifference. And she would insist, the poor unhappy girl . . . papá, pa . . . pá . . . For the commentators on the case, like Delia, it was relatively simple, because in the end it all came down to an unknown quantity, like when people say, “Every family is a world,” and no one can pretend to know an entire world. But maybe . . . this occurred to Delia now, with the crystalline clarity of her vision . . . maybe the pathetic young girl didn’t know either. She didn’t know either, to start with, if her husband had abandoned her or not, if she was stupid, if she was hanging on to her hopes, if he did or did not have another woman in Suárez, et cetera. Maybe she didn’t know anything, and maybe she had no way of knowing it; she was the one who knew the least, like when they say, “She’s always the last to know,” and that’s where the gossips made their mistake: believing that the sea of ignorance they operated over was a mirage, until their wings were broken and they found themselves thrashing in waters that were real and turbulent and salty. Cursed water, that does not satisfy thirst.

  Cursed Patagonia, beautiful and diabolical. Her anguish and perplexity grew with every passing minute. Like all housewives, of each and every epoch, Delia was very stuck on schedules, a slave to them even when she thought she was their master. And here it seemed as if schedules did not exist, directly. The day went on. It actually scared her a little. Strange atmospheric phenomena seemed to be occurring: a curtain of clouds had risen from the horizon, and in the heights of the sky there were disordered movements . . . While on the surface reigned an astonishing calm. That by itself was strange, threatening, and together with the persistence of the light, the calm was beginning to give the

  castaway chills. She couldn’t believe this was happening to her. She couldn’t, and now she hardly tried; but still she felt that it had happened, or was happening, enough to make her believe it, and leave behind her smooth and flat reality, her life of schedules.

  Where could I be? she wondered.

  The belief had a name: Patagonia.

  The circumstances made Delia practical. Goodbye to her funereal philosophies, her fantasies of a housewife in black! Suddenly there were more urgent matters to resolve. The simple fact of being alive and not dead had unexpected consequences. How simple the causes are, how complicated the effects!

  She had to find shelter. A place to spend the night. Because the night, which had not yet come, would waste no time arriving, and then she would really be in trouble. Much more than she imagined, even though it would be precisely what she was imagining: a night without a moon, without light, everything transformed into horrors . . . That was what was beyond her imagination: the nature of the transformations. Because she saw nothing around her that could be susceptible to turning into something else, not a tree, not a rock . . . The clouds? She couldn’t conceive of being afraid of a cloud. And as for the air, it wasn’t susceptible to taking shapes.

  But still, there were things there. She wasn’t in the ether. The faltering afterglow at the end of the long twilight was there, showing her millions of objects: grasses, thistles, pebbles, clods of earth, anthills, bones, shells of armadillos, dead birds, stray feathers, ants, beetles . . .

  And the great gray plateau.

  15

  WHAT DELIA DIDN’T know, in that endless twilight, was that there was a night in this story of hers. She was unaware of it because she’d spent it in a coma inside the remains of the Chrysler smashed against the truck-planet.

  Ramón Siffoni, her husband, had driven all night in his little red truck without giving himself a minute’s rest. He didn’t even think of stopping to sleep for a while, not at all. He saw the moon rise before him, an orange disk gushing light, and he felt like the master of the hours and the nights, of all of them without exceptions or interruptions, in a perfect continuum. His concentration at the wheel was perfect too. The night had arrived in the midst of this concentration, while the truck passed like a toy through the sleeping towns. Suddenly it was the desert, and suddenly it was night. The towns became jumbled arrangements of stones, the kind that radiated darkness. The cities rose out of the earth. They were not cities: no one lived in them. But they resembled cities as one drop of water resembles another. The fact that there was no one in them only meant that no one had to orient themselves on their rough escarpments. Their streets ran according to a general abstract orientation, like the map of the moon. It was when he was crossing the Río Colorado that the moon came out, over the bridge, and Ramón was mesmerized, his eyes like two stars. A great unknown plateau had placed itself between him and the horizon, taking the place of his concentration. There was nothing there.

  A phenomenon had taken place without him knowing it, a phenomenon that was unrecorded but very common in Patagonia: the atmospheric tides. The full moon, exercising the entire attractive force of its mass over the landscape, draws the sleeping atoms out of the earth and makes them undulate in the air. Not just atoms, which wouldn’t count for much, but their particles too, among them those of light and the extremely intricate ones of order.

  Maybe the tide that night had some effect on Siffoni’s brain, maybe not, we’ll never know. For the truck, it had the curious consequence of depriving it of its color, the red it had had when it left the factory forty years ago and which was now half-faded, though it sti
ll shone so brightly at daybreak in the summer, when the birds were singing. And also the color under the paint. It turned transparent, although there was nobody to see it.

  When, hours later, Ramón looked in the rearview mirror, he saw a little blue car following along a half-mile behind him. The dust had turned transparent too. The presence there of the tiny vehicle filled him with uneasiness. The uneasiness made him feel pursued. A short while later, they were still separated by the same distance. It didn’t seem difficult to lose the car; he had never seen a car as tiny as that one before, and he doubted it had much of an engine. He accelerated. He would have thought it impossible, because he had the accelerator pressed to the floor already, but nonetheless the truck sped up, by a lot. It shot forward, the little glass truck, like an arrow shot from a bow.

  Here I digress. Because, thinking it over, the moon did have an effect on Ramón. It was that he saw himself as a husband. He was a husband like so many, regularly good, and normal, more or less. But what he now saw was that this comfortable role in which he found himself rested entirely on one supposition, which was “I could be worse.” Indeed, there are husbands who beat their wives, or debase them in this or that way and humiliate them, or play all kinds of dirty tricks on them, in general very visibly (nothing is more visible for those contemplating a marriage), all of which culminates in abandonment: there are husbands who leave, who vanish like smoke, lots of them. So even if the husband stays, and persists in his infamies, even so, he “could be worse.” He could leave. But women are not so foolish as to go along with this scenario; it’s evidently “better to be alone than in bad company,” since there are life-threatening situations in which getting rid of a monstrous husband is better than keeping him. Actually the “could be worse” premise is very flexible, and even very demanding; the least flaw could discredit a husband in the eyes of his wife. “He could be worse . . .” only if he is already almost perfect, if his faults are venial, of the humorous type (for example if he doesn’t pull his pants up a half an inch every time he sits down, so that after a while the fabric stretches at the knees). Very well, in this way a hierarchy is established: there are men who are monsters and make life hell for their wives, like drunks, for example; and there are others who don’t, and if a husband is in the latter category he can allow himself the luxury of looking back over his small (and large) defects, sitting in his easy chair in the living room and reading the paper while his wife makes dinner, and feel very sure of himself. So sure of himself that pretty soon he sees opening in front of him, like a marvelous flower, the world of vices that he could, that he can, practice with impunity thanks to his position as a good husband, a good family man. Life allows him this, it’s for him and only him. Wouldn’t it be a shame, a crime, to waste an opportunity like that? The specter of dirty tricks is his Jacob’s ladder: each step will have its subtle dialectic of “I could be worse,” and a lifetime won’t be long enough for him to reach the top, the monster.

  Well then, Ramón Siffoni had a vice. He was a gambler. Marriage had made him a gambler, but the game had made him a married man as well. He’d gambled long before he got married, since his early youth, but in the case of gambling, like all vices, it wasn’t so much a matter of starting as of continuing. He was incorrigible. With him it was definitive. It was the mark of his life, the stigma. He gambled everything, the money he earned and what his wife earned too, in the form of undeferrable debts: the furniture, the house (luckily they rented), and the truck. He was always broke, strapped, and he sank from there to vertiginous depths. He always lost, like all true gamblers. It was a miracle that they survived, that they fed and dressed themselves and paid their bills and raised their son. The secret must have been that at times, by chance, he won, and with the marvelous imprudence of gamblers, who never think about tomorrow, he would spend all the winnings, down to the last cent, on catching up and getting on with things: so that the same gesture of short-sightedness that at night acted against the family, acted in its favor in the daytime. More miraculous, much more, was that it wasn’t known in the neighborhood, in the town (all of Pringles was one neighborhood, and information circulated as fast as a body in free fall). Of course activities of that kind are carried on with a certain discretion; but even so, it’s inconceivable that it wasn’t found out, that my mother, an intimate of Delia’s, didn’t know. Because, although discreet and nocturnal, it was a pastime obviously subject to indiscretions. And it had been going on for years, and it would continue for decades, before and after (before and after what?). And above all, it would have taken very little, any fact, the tiniest filament of information, to draw conclusions, for the whole thing to be explained . . . And even so, it was only found out many years later (clearly it was found out, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this), I was no longer living in Pringles, one day, I’m not sure when, on one of my visits, Mamá knew it, she knew it very well, she was tired of knowing it, how else would the vicissitudes, the status quo of the Siffoni family be explained, without that piece of information? How would it have been explained from the beginning, from our prehistory in the neighborhood? That’s what I wonder: How? If no one knew!

  The stakes are always raised. The moon was rising . . . But it was not rising, just as the sun does not rise; the ascent is an illusion created by the turning of the earth . . . At the zenith of the betting, Ramón Siffoni, the moon-man, who by the mere gravitation of his mass made the tides of money rise, would lay on the table, or had already laid on the table, the supreme bet: his marriage.

  When he looked in the mirror again, the little blue car was still following him, pegged at a distance of one half mile. Ramón gave more credence now to his suspicion that they were following him. What to do? Accelerating more was useless, and could be counterproductive. He took his foot off the gas pedal and let his speed fall by itself; he always did that, it was an automatic thing. From a hundred it dropped to ninety, eighty, seventy . . . sixty . . . fifty, forty, thirty . . . My God! It was worse than just slamming on the brakes. The lunar landscape of the plateau had been fleeing past him, and now it fled forward, the transparent dust he was raising over the dirt road surrounded him like quicksilver . . . It was almost like advancing and retreating in the dimensions, not on the plateau. But when he glanced in the mirror again, there was the half mile, the sky-blue mouse . . .

  He accelerated again, like a lunatic: thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy . . . eighty . . . ninety, a hundred, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty . . . the transparency had trouble keeping up with him, the moon leapt . . . The truck was crossing its own wake of dust, its own trajectory . . .

  When he looked in the mirror again . . . he couldn’t believe it. But he had to surrender to the evidence. The little car was there, always at the same distance, the same half mile, which was, what’s more, the exact same half mile, not another, equivalent one. He resolved to slow down again, but this time so abruptly that his pursuer would have no choice but to overtake him. That’s what he did: a hundred, ninety, eighty, seventy, sixty, fifty, forty . . . thirty . . . twenty, ten, zero, minus ten, minus twenty, minus thirty . . . — he had never done that before. The whirlwinds of the moon enveloped him.

  And still, when he looked in the rearview mirror, to his immense surprise, there was the blue car, and the half mile that separated them. He accelerated. He decelerated. Etc. If he hadn’t believed it at first, now at the end of a couple of hours of racing, he was even less able to believe it. What most intrigued him, in his periodic inspections of the rearview mirror (which was external, the kind that sticks out on a metal arm from the side of the cab) was that the small blue car shone so brightly, and that it maintained its position as if suspended above the road, as if floating over the potholes while he bounced up and down, and on top of everything that the distance remained identical . . . too identical . . . Without reducing or increasing his speed (by this point having tried so many alternations, he no longer knew which side of excess he was on) he cranked down the window with
his left hand. When it was open, with his eyes half-closed against the wind, he put his hand out and brought the tip of his forefinger and thumb, as delicately as the lurching of the truck would allow, to the oval surface of the mirror, and pulled off — pulled off the little sky-blue car! As if it were a little decal stuck there . . . He brought it up to his eyes, tilting his head a little to see it by the light of the moon: a butterfly wing, metallic cobalt, the moon brought out that shine that had made it so visible . . . He marveled at having fallen prey to such a baroque illusion, it could only happen to him . . . Because what was more, a butterfly wing can get stuck on one part or another of a vehicle in motion, in fact it happens all the time on a road trip, but butterflies smash against the parts of a vehicle that break the air, like the windshield or the radiator! And the mirror faced backward! The only explanation was that in one of the recent decelerations the butterfly had gotten trapped in the change of relative velocities and smashed into it from behind. He opened his fingers, let the wind take the centimeter of sky-blue wing, rolled up the window and did not look in the mirror again.

  If he had, he would have been surprised to see that the car was still there, just where its silhouette had been traced by a butterfly wing. Inside the car was Silvia Balero, the drawing teacher, mad with anguish and half asleep. She followed Siffoni’s red truck because it was the last thread connecting her to her wedding dress, the seamstress, and she had just seen it disappear before her eyes. The moment when the atmospheric tide made the truck invisible found her in bad shape. Like all candidates for spinsterhood, she was very dependent on her biorhythms, and after midnight she was always, always asleep. Never in her life had she gotten past that hour. Night was an unknown quantity for her; she was a diurnal, impressionistic being. So at midnight, which by a strange coincidence was the moment when the moon acted on the truck, she went on automatic pilot, like a sleepwalker. As if in a nightmare she felt despair as her prey vanished before her eyes. In her state, this disappearing act was the trick that hid all of reality from her.