Cesar Aira - The Seamstress and the Wind

I left off just at the release of the voice. . The wind left with the words of love riding on his back, and crossed vast distances in all directions. To throw them off he shook, he twisted, but he managed only to turn the words around, point them elsewhere, drive them into the interstices of Patagonia. The wind too had a lot to learn. In his life there was only one restriction on total freedom: the Coriolis effect, the force of gravity applied to his mass — which is just what keeps all winds stuck to the planet. The voice, for its part, has the peculiarity that when released it carries the weight of the body from which it has come; since that weight is erotic reality, lovers believe they can embrace words of love, they believe they can make them into a continuum of love that will last forever.

The continuum, by another name: the confession. If I wrote confessional literature, I would dedicate myself to seeking out the unspoken. But I don’t know if I would find it; I don’t know if the unspoken exists within my life. The unspoken, like love, is a thing that occupies a place in a story. Leaving aside the distances involved, it’s like God. God can be placed in two different locations within a discourse: at the end, as Leibniz does when he says “and it is this that we call God” — which is to say, when one arrives at Him after the deduction of the world; or at the beginning: “God created. .” They are not different theologies, they are the same, only exposed from the other side. The kind of discourse that places God at the beginning is the model and mother of what we call “fiction.” I must not forget that before my trip I proposed to write a novel. “The wind said. .” is not so absurd; it’s only a method, like any other. It’s a beginning. But it’s always a beginning, at every moment, from the first to the last.

Words of love. . Traveling words, words that alight and stay forever balanced on the scales within the heart of a man. In Ramón and Delia’s past there was a small, secret puzzle (but life is full of puzzles that are never solved). They had consummated their marriage some time after the wedding, apparently due to Ramón’s desire or lack of it, although he never explained himself. What I mean to say is, there was a blank spot between the wedding and the consummation. Even if anyone besides the two of them had known about this blank spot, it would have been pointless to ask Delia about it, just as it was pointless for Delia to ask herself, because she wouldn’t have known how to answer. And, that was what I was referring to, in large part, when I talked about forgetting, and memory, et cetera: there are things that seem like secrets someone is keeping, but aren’t being kept by anyone.

The backbiting of neighbors, that passionate hobby at which Delia was an expert, was a similar thing. If I entered Delia’s consciousness the way an omniscient narrator could, I would discover with surprise and perhaps a certain disillusionment that backbiting does not exist in her intimate heart. But it was Delia herself who was surprised! And she discovered her surprise as her own omniscient narrator. .

RAMÓN, MEANWHILE. . that is to say, the day before: let’s not forget that Delia had lost a day. . was walking, lost, on the hyperflat plateau, disoriented and in a bad mood. And with good reason. He was on foot, in an endless desert. . For a Pringlense at that time, being on foot was serious: the town was the size of a handkerchief, but for some reason, maybe precisely because it was so small, getting around on foot was no good. Everyone was motorized, the poor in ancient vehicles — the kind that ran on miracles, but were fixed up to come and go all the time, though if they didn’t go, they didn’t come. My grandmother used to say, “They even drive to the latrine.” It was those trips which agreeably annoyed mechanics who thought they could conquer time and space. Ramón, being a gambler, went further than the others in this subjective system. In his case it was more important, more exciting: each change of place had its own importance. He wasn’t the only one to dabble in these illusions, of course: he wasn’t the only compulsive gambler in Pringles, not by a long shot; there was a whole constellation of them, a hierarchy of equals. As a popular joke had it, they were the ones who kept playing even when they left the green table at dawn; the sun rose so they could keep playing without knowing it; the truth was, they carried their addiction everywhere they went, in their cars or their vans, even out of town, into the surrounding country. The games were constellations, a conjunction of values telling their secrets to each other at a distance, each addictive game at its point in the black sky of the gambler’s night; so they couldn’t help but carry their addictions with them everywhere. It was a way of life with them: circulating at full speed, in an almost exultant simultaneity of numbers and figures.

Ramón Siffoni’s quarrel with Chiquito had grown over time, as quarrels do in small towns. It had begun at some moment or other, and almost immediately had encompassed the whole of one of those private universes. . Ramón believed, not without naïveté, that it would be possible to keep the quarrel in a stable state until he decided. . what? Impossible to say. Until he decided to look his delusion in the face; a delusion is, by definition, that which always turns its back.

And now, vehicle-less, walking in a place with no roads and no way to find them, he discovered that the moment had arrived. All moments arrive, and this one too. Chiquito had taken control of everything. . of what? Of his wife? He would never have gambled Delia away at cards, he wasn’t a monster, and he had other things to wager first, many other things, almost an infinite number of things. . But there was a moment, that moment, when it arrived. . in which Ramón realized the bet might have been placed anyway, without him knowing it; that had happened to him before. He’d predicted this would happen. . but now he didn’t know if it had happened or not.

He walked all morning, at random, trying to keep in a straight line so he could cover more terrain, and above all so he wouldn’t end up back at the hotel he’d fled. And although there’s nothing in the desert, he found some surprising things. The first was the remains of a black Chrysler, smashed up and lying there. He stopped and looked it over for a while. There were no bodies inside, and it didn’t look like anyone had died in the accident; he saw no blood, at least, and the whole front seat had stayed more or less intact, basketed. It was a taxi: it had a meter. . And the license plate was from Pringles. In fact, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the car that belonged to his friend Zaralegui, the taxi driver. Ramón understood a fair amount about mechanics, it was one of the many skills a life of idleness had taught him; but getting this wreck running again was out of the question, its body had been twisted so badly there was no longer any front or back. He calculated that the crash had happened at a formidable speed, there was no other way to explain how smashed up it was. The fact that such an old car had reached such a speed was a credit to the engine, an old one so perfect and solid that it had been left mostly intact; if anyone had been interested, it would have been the only recoverable thing in the wreck.

He mentally took its coordinates; he didn’t know why (he couldn’t even take shelter there if it rained, since the roof was now below the blown-out tires). But at least it was a thing, a discovery, something he could return to. He went on.

The second find was half-buried. It looked like a round-topped wardrobe, but on closer examination he saw that it was the magnificent shell of a gigantic Paleozoic armadillo. What stuck out was barely a fraction of it, but he discovered that the earth trapping it was fragile, crystallized, and would shatter and disperse at a breath. He dug with a loose rib, out of pure curiosity, until the whole shell lay exposed; it was twenty-four feet long, fifteen wide, and nine high at the middle. In life this had been an armadillo the size, more or less, of a baby whale. The shell was perfect, unbroken, a color you might call brown mother-of-pearl, worked over to the last quarter-inch with knots, borders, Islamic flourishes. . When it was struck it made a dry little noise, like wood. It wasn’t just the upper convex part that was intact, but the lower part too, which was a thick, flat, white membrane. He moved the enormous structure to one side of the excavation and was surprised at how light it was. He crawled inside. This, yes, could serve as shelter; and it was spacious and bare. He could stand up inside it, and walk. . with some armchairs and a coffee table it would be a cozy little room. He cleaned it, tossed out what was left of the bones through the openings (there were six: one in front and one behind, for the head and tail, and four below, for the legs) and sat inside admiring the ancient marvel. The mother-of-pearl shell was not entirely opaque; it let in a very warm, very golden light. He remembered that the tails of that type of animal were also armored, and was surprised that there was nothing hanging from the back opening. Maybe it had fallen off. . He got out and looked around. He had to dig a little more, but he found it: a kind of horn of the same material, an elongated cone some eighteen or twenty feet in length, curving to a very sharp point. It was empty too, and light enough so he could stand it up, with the point on top, and shake the dirt and pebbles out.