Cesar Aira - The Seamstress and the Wind

Inside she saw no one, but that didn’t surprise her. She knew that truck drivers, when they parked for the night to sleep, went to bed in a little compartment behind the cabin, sometimes with room for two people or more. People said they were pretty comfortably arranged. She’d never seen one, but she’d heard about them. Omar, her son, had told her about the personal comforts Chiquito had in his truck, which we were always climbing on when we played. Even after making the appropriate deprecations for fantasy and the relative dimensions of a child, she’d believed him, because others had confirmed it and it was reasonable anyway. She was sure this nocturnal truck, so large and modern, would be no smaller than the one in her neighborhood (she didn’t know it was the same one).

She went to the driver’s side door and knocked. She waited a moment, and as there was no response, she knocked again. She waited. Nothing. She knocked again. Toc toc. No one answered. The truck driver did not awake. But. . what a smell of fried eggs! Delia had not had a bite to eat in an enormous number of hours, so that more than surprising her, she was beside herself with indignation that that incongruous smell taunted her so impishly, and it roused her to knock on the door again. “I’m going in,” she said to herself, as the silence persisted. Even so, she waited a little, and knocked again. It was useless. She knocked once more, now without much hope, and stood there for another moment, intent and expectant. She caught the smell again. It seemed obvious that it was coming from inside the truck; the truck driver must have been making dinner. And with her outside, dead from hunger and exhaustion, hundreds of miles from home! “I’m going in there, I don’t care,” she thought, but a remaining scrap of courtesy made her knock again, three times with her knuckles on the solid metal of the door, which felt like iron. She waited to see if he happened to hear her this time, but he didn’t.

Getting in, once the decision was made, was not so easy. Those trucks seemed to be made for giants. The door was extremely high. But it had a kind of foothold and from there she managed to reach the handle. It wasn’t locked, but activating the hydraulic door handle demanded almost superhuman strength. In the end she managed it by hanging from it with all her weight. The door of a truck, like any vehicle, inverse to that of a house, opens out. And this one opened all the way, welcoming her, but also carrying her along on its arc. . The foothold disappeared from beneath her feet and she was left swinging there, hanging from the handle, six feet off the ground. She couldn’t believe she was pirouetting like this, like a naughty child. “And now what do I do?” she wondered with alarm. There did not appear to be a solution. She could let herself fall, trusting that she wouldn’t break a leg, and then climb up again by the foothold, in which case she didn’t see how she would be able to shut the door again, although that was the least of her problems. In any case, she did it the hard way: she stretched out a leg and pushed off hard from the wall of the cab, so the door began to swing shut; and then before it could make contact, at just the right moment, she let go of the handle and grabbed the side mirror. Hanging there she managed to get her body far enough into the opening to place a foot inside, and with a second act of risky acrobatics she let go of the door handle for good and got hold of the steering wheel. This was not as firm as her previous supports; it turned, and Delia, surprised, was suddenly horizontal, and in the rush of falling she opened both hands and brought them to her face. Luckily she fell inside, on the floor of the cab, but with her head hanging out, and the door, on its last swing, was coming toward her. . It would have neatly decapitated her if an unknown force hadn’t stopped it a millimeter from her neck. The sharp metal edge retreated softly and Delia, without waiting for it to come back, pulled her head out of the way. She moved around, extremely uncomfortable, trying to get onto the seat. The space was so large, or she was so small, that she was able to stand up, with her back to the windshield.

She tried to turn halfway around to sit and wait for her heart to calm down, but she couldn’t. With terror she felt a steely pressure that circled her waist and kept her from moving. If she had fainted — and it wouldn’t have taken much more of that paralyzing fear to make her do it — she would have stayed on her feet, held up by the pitiless ring. And it wasn’t an illusion, or a cramp; she put both hands on her waist and felt a kind of rigid snake, hard and smooth to the touch, circling her like an impious belt. She tried to scream, but no sound came from her open mouth. She could turn right and left, but always in the same spot — the thing didn’t give even an inch, although curiously it allowed itself to make a quarter-turn with her every time she tried it. It took her several agonizing seconds to understand that when she’d gotten to her feet she’d put her body through the steering wheel, which now had her by the waist.

She clambered up out of it and let herself fall on the seat, which smelled like leather and grease, and curled up panting, wondering for the thousandth time why such disagreeable things had to happen to her. She was so worn out she might have fallen asleep if it hadn’t been for the frying smell, which was, she noticed only now, even more intense inside the truck.

It took her a moment to calm down and reconsider her situation. She’d landed facing the windshield, and what she saw through it made her raise her head. Before her lay marvelous nighttime Patagonia, whole and limitless. It was a plateau as white as the moon, under a black sky filled with stars. Too big, too beautiful, to be taken in with a single gaze; and yet it must be, because no one has two gazes. The panorama appeared to repose against the pure black of the night, and at the same time it was pure light. It was scored with little black marks, like holes in space, that traced out sharp, capricious shapes, in which chance seemed to have been the determining factor in representing all of the things a fluctuating consciousness might want to recognize, but without recognizing them completely, as if the plethora of figures exceeded the existence of objects. Those marks were the reverse side of the pieces of butterfly wing stuck to the glass of the windshield.

When Delia could finally take her eyes off this splendid spectacle, she admired the instruments that adorned the dashboard. There were hundreds of gauges, little clocks, needles, switches, dials, buttons. . Would a person need all that to drive a truck? There wasn’t one gear shift: there were three, and ten more bristled from the crossbar of the steering wheel. The wheel itself was so enormous it didn’t seem strange that she’d gotten stuck in it by accident; it would have been strange if she’d missed it. Underneath, in the shadows, she could make out a jumble of pedals. She felt very small, very diminished; she remembered to take her feet off the seat.

But then she had to put them on it again, and even worse, stand on it, to reach the trucker’s compartments. She knew from Omar’s descriptions that the entrance was above the headrest, and she leaned in to look. A double horizontal partition, which cut twice across a golden light. She thought of calling out, but some faint noises and the muffled echo of a voice made her suddenly afraid. The truth was she didn’t know what she had gotten herself into, what lion’s den. But it was no longer a question of retreat. With the ever-flawed logic of polite intruders, she preferred not to call out but to enter on tiptoe instead, to temper the surprise a bit; she didn’t want to give the unprepared trucker a heart attack, or fail to give him time to put on his pants.