Cesar Aira - The Seamstress and the Wind

“Thank you very much.”

He stayed off at a certain distance, whistling, until she finished. Then he pulled out the chair, Delia stood up, and he carried it all away.

“Who knows who he snatched it from,” the seamstress thought. “To think I had to eat what a thieving wind brought me!”

“Now you’ll want to sleep.”

Just then a bed, a mattress, sheets, a fur blanket, and a pillow came flying in from the horizon. The bed was made up before her eyes in an instant, without a single wrinkle.

“Sweet dreams.”

“Thank you. .”

His voice had become caressing, as had he. He wrapped himself around her, ruffling her hair and her dress, circling her legs with velvet breaths. .

“Until tomorrow, Delia.”

“Until tomorrow, Ventarrón.”

There was a kind of whirlwind of absence, and the wind climbed into the starry sky. Delia stood for a moment, unsure, beside the bed. The wine had made her very sleepy. The white knit sheets invited her to sleep. She looked around. It was a little incongruent, this bed in the middle of the plain. And her dress was impossibly greasy. She hesitated a moment, and then said to herself, lying to herself with the truth: “No one can see me.” She stripped, and as she slid under the sheets her body shone in the moonlight. The night sighed.

WHEN SHE WOKE the next morning she thought she was at home, as often happens to travelers. . Except for her it was not a brief, fleeting state, a short lapse of incomprehension. . instead, the strangeness of it settled in her mind like a world, and stayed there. Under normal circumstances, she was in her bed, her bed was in her bedroom, her bedroom was in her house, and her house was in Pringles. Today, however, it looked like that whole chain of familiarity had been broken. The sky was very blue, and the sun was a white dot set in the most distant part of it. She turned to her right, and there was no Ramón beside her, and beyond that no child’s bed, no sleeping Omar. To her left there was no dresser with its mirror on top. . and, therefore, no reflection of the window over Omar’s bed. . In a word, she was not at home. She was not anywhere. An immense space surrounded her on all sides. The only thing that seemed to be in its place was the time, although not even the late dawn in that place had a particular time: one could call it a lapse in eternity. It didn’t feel like time to get up. . She stretched.

Days of idleness in Patagonia. .

When she put on her dress she could see now, in the light, what a greasy disaster it was. Her shoes were impossibly covered with dust, she could have written on them with her finger. The wind, so helpful for other things, had not taken care of her clothes, probably because she hadn’t asked him to. It occurred to her that he must be like those maids who are very hardworking and efficient, but lack initiative, and have to be told to do everything.

“Good morning, Delia.”

“Ah, um. . Good morning.”

“Did you sleep well?”

“Perfectly. I wanted. .”

“One moment. I have to take this.”

The bed and everything on it flew away at full speed and was lost beyond the horizon. “Such a hurry,” Delia thought. In an instant the wind was back.

“Delia, I have to tell you something I would have preferred to keep to myself, but it’s better for you to know, just in case.”

“About what? Don’t scare me. .” Delia was already thinking of catastrophes, as was her custom.

“Last night,” began Ventarrón, “I went out for a stroll, after you fell asleep, and over there I saw a light, and got closer to look. There’s a hotel there, on top of a little mountain, and at first I thought it was on fire, it glowed so brightly. But there was no fire. I went down and looked in the windows. It wasn’t a party either. It was a radioactive kind of light, pulsing, pulsing so much it shook the whole hotel. . A red, horrible light, and the temperature had risen to several thousand degrees. . As I had no intention of becoming an atomic wind, I moved back, and stayed there watching. It went from bad to worse. Even I started to become frightened, though there’s no one better at getting away than me. But I know there are distant terrors from which escape is useless. And then, all at once, the whole hotel fell in, melted like a snowflake in the sun. . And there it was — free, burning and horrible — the Monster. . the child who should never have been born. .”

His voice, already naturally low, had taken on a from-beyond-the-grave resonance, very pessimistic. His last words gave Delia goose bumps along her spine.

“What child. .? What monster. .?”

“There is a legend that says that one day, in a hot springs hotel in this area, a child will be born who is gifted with all the power of transformation, a being that will encapsulate all of the winds in the world, an über-wind, and therefore terrifyingly ugly. . At least for me, and for you, because what in me is exterior, in him is interior, fostering all kinds of deformations. . Now you see why it impressed me so.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing. I ran away, and here I am. The problem is that the Monster is loose, and he’s looking for you.”

“For me?! Why me?”

“Because that’s what the legend says,” answered the wind, cryptically. “And it’s obvious that the legend has come true.”

“But where could this Monster have come from?”

“Evolution follows no path.”

“And the truck driver is looking for me too, no?”

“I’ll take care of the truck driver, he’s not a problem.”

“And the Monster?”

Silence.

“That’s something else,” said Ventarrón.

Delia lowered her head, overwhelmed.

“Changing the subject,” said the wind. “Last night I saw another thing which enchanted me: a great wedding dress, folding and unfolding at thirty thousand feet up, sailing south. .”

“A wedding dress? With nylon voile cuffs, satin. .?”

“Yes! But what do I know about fabrics! Why do you ask?”

“Because it’s mine. I lost it yesterday, or the day before

yesterday. .”

“Yours how? Aren’t you married? Didn’t you tell me you had a son?”

“No. I mean I was sewing it, for a girl who just. .”

“Don’t tell me you’re a seamstress?!”

“Yes.”

The wind almost fell over. He took a while to recover.

“You’re the seamstress then? Ramón Siffoni’s wife?”

“Yes. I thought you knew that.”

“Now I’m starting to understand. It’s all beginning to line up. The seamstress. . and the wind.”

“The two of us.”

“The two of us. .”

The wind was in love. He’d been in love for all eternity, or at least for all of his wind-eternity. And now that the story was starting to unfold before him, he found it suddenly too real, shrill, paradoxically unpredictable. .

“Sir. .” Delia interrupted his meditation.

“Yes?”

“You told me you could bring me what I asked you for?”

“. .”

“Would you bring me the dress?”

“What do you want it for?”

Yes, well put, what for? It didn’t look like Miss Balero, who was now black and in the power of that savage truck driver, was going to need it. But one never knew; in any case, she could charge for the labor and turn it over to Miss Balero’s mother; it was already practically done. Besides, it was reasonable to ask for it, since it was her work.

“The customer provided the fabric,” she said, “and she’s going to want it back.”

“All right, but give me time. Who knows where it might be by now.”

“One more little thing, if it’s not too much trouble. I brought a sewing kit, and I lost it, surely the things are spread all over. . Could you gather them up and bring me the box?”