Cesar Aira - The Seamstress and the Wind

But finally, coming around a sharp corner, he found himself before a lit window, and could see inside. His surprise was superlative (but his surprise was enormous every time he looked at anything that night). He stood before a scene he knew all too well: the poker table. Now, in a flash, he remembered having heard talk of this hotel, a requisite stop for all gamblers headed south, smugglers, truckers, aviators. . An old hot springs hotel, its clientele extinct, a legendary den. He’d never thought that one day — one night — he’d see it for himself.

Before this spectacle he forgot everything, even the woman who stood on tiptoe behind him to see. The men, the cards, the chips, the glasses of whiskey. . But he didn’t forget absolutely everything: there was one thing he noticed. One of the gamblers was from Pringles, and he knew him very well, not only because they were neighbors. He was the one everyone called Chiquito, the truck driver. It meant everything to see him, and understand that the trip had not been in vain, or at least that he hadn’t gone the wrong way. If he got what he wanted from him, he wouldn’t have to keep going.

He knew perfectly well how to get to a gambling table, even if all the doors were closed. His movements became confident, and Silvia Balero noticed. She followed him. Ramón knocked a few times on the window, and then on the closest door. Before anyone came to open it, he searched in his shirt pocket and pulled out a black mask. He’d had it there for some time, and he hadn’t expected to use it so soon. He put it on (it had an elastic band that tightened around the back of the neck). In those days it was common, as it is now, for gamblers in poker dens to hide their identities with masks, so the hotel porter who came to open the door only had to look at him to know what he wanted. They entered. Silvia Balero tugged on his sleeve.

“What do you want?” he snapped. He couldn’t believe how inconvenient it was to have a strange woman begging for his attention when he was about to make the bet of his life.

She wanted a place to sleep. She was already half asleep in fact, somnambulant.

Without answering her, Ramón signaled to the porter to guide them, but the man told them they had to speak to the owner of the hotel, who happened to be seated at the card table. So they did. Those present threw an appreciative look at the young teacher, and the porter took her to a room not far from where they were and came back. The new arrival was already in place, they had recited the rules for him, and he was requesting chips on credit. Counting the owner, there were five of them. The porter watched. Two were truck drivers, Chiquito and another suspicious-looking man; the remaining two were local ranchers, cattle men, very solvent. Chiquito had won a lot. At that hour they were already playing for thousands of sheep, and entire mountains.

Why linger over a description of a game, the same as any other? Queen, king, two, etc. Ramón lost, successively, his truck, the little blue car, and Silvia Balero. The only thing left was to pay for the two whiskeys he’d drunk. He dropped the cards on the table with his eyes half-closed behind his mask and said:

“Where’s the bathroom?”

They pointed it out. He went, and escaped through the window. He ran toward the place where he’d left the truck, pulling the keys out of his pocket. . But when he came to his spot among the other trucks in the lot, all of them big and modern (and Chiquito’s, which he knew well, with a strange black machine stuck to the back wall of the trailer; he didn’t stop to see what it was) there, on the flat ground, he didn’t find his truck. He thought he was dreaming. The moon had disappeared as well, and all that was left was an uncertain brilliance between the earth and the sky. His truck was not there. When he’d bet it, the second trucker, who was the one who’d won, went out to see it, and on returning had accepted the bet against ten thousand sheep, which had surprised Siffoni a little. Could he have moved it then? Impossible without the keys, which had never left his pocket. At any rate he couldn’t look for it for very long, because discovery of his escape was imminent. . He tried to get into the little blue car, but he didn’t fit; he was a corpulent man. He heard a door slam, or thought he did. . Panic disconcerted him for a moment, and then he was running across the open ground, in every direction, coming down the mountain to the plain, while dawn was breaking, at an impossibly early hour.

SILVIA BALERO, WHO unbeknownst to the gamblers carried a child in her belly (if they’d known, they would have bet him too), was left in the legal possession of Chiquito, although unaware of it herself, being profoundly asleep. At some point in the night the faucets in the bathroom of her hotel room opened automatically, and the tub began to fill with boiling red water, which spun and eddied and gave off steam that was also red, boiling, and sulphurous.

When Chiquito rose from the gambling table, at which he had been the only winner, and made a tour of the hotel (which had also become his property) with lurching steps — not because of the drinking, which never affected him, or the many hours of immobility, which his profession had already accustomed him to, but purely for the pleasure of lurching, for the brutish coquetry of it. It was all his; and to this he was also accustomed, because he always won. He was the luckiest gambler in the universe, and a legend had been woven around him, a legend and a great enigma — what did he keep working for? For years the gamblers of Pringles had had their sights fixed on him, each of them proposing, on his own, to beat him at a game of cards; they knew that only one would manage it, only once, and that event, if it came, would be a great triumph over luck. He didn’t know this, and it wouldn’t have worried him in the least if he had. On the contrary, he would have laughed his head off.

He crossed the dark lobby, looking around with cloudy eyes. It was all his, as it had been so many times, as always. And there was nothing that wasn’t his, because there were no travelers checked in. . Wait a minute: yes, there was someone, a beautiful stranger. . who was also his, because he’d won her from the masked man. He set off looking for her, without stumbling. He opened the doors of all the rooms, all of them empty, until finally he came upon Silvia Balero’s. She was deeply asleep in the midst of a reddish fog. He stood looking at her for a moment. . Then he went to the bathroom, and stood looking at the red water boiling in the tub. Finally he stripped and submerged himself. No one could have withstood that temperature, but it did nothing to him. His heart nearly stopped beating, his eyes closed halfway, and his mouth opened in a stupid grimace.

The next step was to violate the sleeping woman. He didn’t notice she was pregnant; he thought she was only big-bellied, like so many women in the south of Argentina. Consequently, inside, a few pale blue little fingers grasped his member like a handle, and when he withdrew, puzzled, he dragged out a hairy phosphorescent fetus, ugly and deformed like a demon, who woke Silvia Balero with its shrieking and obliged them both to flee, leaving it master of the scene.

That was how the Monster came into the world.

IDLE DAYS IN Patagonia. .

Tourist days in Paris. .

Life carries people to all kinds of distant places, and generally takes them to the most far flung, to the extremes, since there’s no reason to slow its momentum before it’s done. Further, always further. . until there is no further anymore, and men rebound, and lie exposed to a climate, to a light. . A memory is a luminous miniature, like the hologram of the princess, in that movie, that the faithful robot carried in his circuits from galaxy to galaxy. The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting. All movement, the great horizon, the journey, is a spasm of forgetting, which bends in the bubble of memory. Memory is always portable, it is always in the hands of a wandering automaton.