Cesar Aira: The Seamstress and the Wind

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.

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 still 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!