Cesar Aira: The Seamstress and the Wind

The stakes are always raised. The moon was rising. . But it was not rising, just as the sun does not rise; the ascent is an illusion created by the turning of the earth. . At the zenith of the betting, Ramón Siffoni, the moon-man, who by the mere gravitation of his mass made the tides of money rise, would lay on the table, or had already laid on the table, the supreme bet: his marriage.

When he looked in the mirror again, the little blue car was still following him, pegged at a distance of one half mile. Ramón gave more credence now to his suspicion that they were following him. What to do? Accelerating more was useless, and could be counterproductive. He took his foot off the gas pedal and let his speed fall by itself; he always did that, it was an automatic thing. From a hundred it dropped to ninety, eighty, seventy. . sixty. . fifty, forty, thirty. . My God! It was worse than just slamming on the brakes. The lunar landscape of the plateau had been fleeing past him, and now it fled forward, the transparent dust he was raising over the dirt road surrounded him like quicksilver. . It was almost like advancing and retreating in the dimensions, not on the plateau. But when he glanced in the mirror again, there was the half mile, the sky-blue mouse. .

He accelerated again, like a lunatic: thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy. . eighty. . ninety, a hundred, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty. . the transparency had trouble keeping up with him, the moon leapt. . The truck was crossing its own wake of dust, its own trajectory. .

When he looked in the mirror again. . he couldn’t believe it. But he had to surrender to the evidence. The little car was there, always at the same distance, the same half mile, which was, what’s more, the exact same half mile, not another, equivalent one. He resolved to slow down again, but this time so abruptly that his pursuer would have no choice but to overtake him. That’s what he did: a hundred, ninety, eighty, seventy, sixty, fifty, forty. . thirty. . twenty, ten, zero, minus ten, minus twenty, minus thirty. . — he had never done that before. The whirlwinds of the moon enveloped him.

And still, when he looked in the rearview mirror, to his immense surprise, there was the blue car, and the half mile that separated them. He accelerated. He decelerated. Etc. If he hadn’t believed it at first, now at the end of a couple of hours of racing, he was even less able to believe it. What most intrigued him, in his periodic inspections of the rearview mirror (which was external, the kind that sticks out on a metal arm from the side of the cab) was that the small blue car shone so brightly, and that it maintained its position as if suspended above the road, as if floating over the potholes while he bounced up and down, and on top of everything that the distance remained identical. . too identical. . Without reducing or increasing his speed (by this point having tried so many alternations, he no longer knew which side of excess he was on) he cranked down the window with his left hand. When it was open, with his eyes half-closed against the wind, he put his hand out and brought the tip of his forefinger and thumb, as delicately as the lurching of the truck would allow, to the oval surface of the mirror, and pulled off — pulled off the little sky-blue car! As if it were a little decal stuck there. . He brought it up to his eyes, tilting his head a little to see it by the light of the moon: a butterfly wing, metallic cobalt, the moon brought out that shine that had made it so visible. . He marveled at having fallen prey to such a baroque illusion, it could only happen to him. . Because what was more, a butterfly wing can get stuck on one part or another of a vehicle in motion, in fact it happens all the time on a road trip, but butterflies smash against the parts of a vehicle that break the air, like the windshield or the radiator! And the mirror faced backward! The only explanation was that in one of the recent decelerations the butterfly had gotten trapped in the change of relative velocities and smashed into it from behind. He opened his fingers, let the wind take the centimeter of sky-blue wing, rolled up the window and did not look in the mirror again.

If he had, he would have been surprised to see that the car was still there, just where its silhouette had been traced by a butterfly wing. Inside the car was Silvia Balero, the drawing teacher, mad with anguish and half asleep. She followed Siffoni’s red truck because it was the last thread connecting her to her wedding dress, the seamstress, and she had just seen it disappear before her eyes. The moment when the atmospheric tide made the truck invisible found her in bad shape. Like all candidates for spinsterhood, she was very dependent on her biorhythms, and after midnight she was always, always asleep. Never in her life had she gotten past that hour. Night was an unknown quantity for her; she was a diurnal, impressionistic being. So at midnight, which by a strange coincidence was the moment when the moon acted on the truck, she went on automatic pilot, like a sleepwalker. As if in a nightmare she felt despair as her prey vanished before her eyes. In her state, this disappearing act was the trick that hid all of reality from her.

“I’m hungry,” thought Ramón Siffoni, who hadn’t had dinner. Up ahead, he saw a kind of little mountain under the moon, and on its peak a hotel. In spite of the hour lights could be seen in the windows on the ground floor, and he thought it was not unlikely that there was a dining room. The supposition became much more plausible when he saw, as he came up to it, several trucks parked in front of the hotel. Any traveler in Argentina knows that where truck drivers stop, one eats well; therefore, one stops.

As soon as he stepped on the ground, a woman came walking toward him, although at the same time she appeared to flee from him. He wasn’t sure, because what captured his attention was the little blue car she’d alighted from.

Silvia Balero noticed that he didn’t recognize her, even though he opened the door for her on her daily visits to the seamstress. All women must have looked the same to him. He was that kind of man.

“I’m sorry to bother you, heaven knows what you’ll think of me, but may I ask you a favor?”

Siffoni looked at her with an expression that seemed impolite but was actually intrigue, because she looked familiar and he didn’t know from where.

“Could you walk me in? I mean, as if we were colleagues, traveling salesmen. Since you’re going to stay here. . I’m nervous about going in alone.”

Finally he reacted and took off toward the door.

“No. I’m just going to have dinner.”

“Me too! Then I’m getting back on the road!”

She wondered: Where could he have left the truck? It looked like he’d climbed out of empty air.

But the door was locked; through the curtains the lobby could be seen, dark and deserted. Ramón took a few steps in front of the building, with the woman following behind. The windows of a room that might have been the dining room also showed a black space on the other side, but from somewhere a few rays of smoky light reached him. Ramón Siffoni retreated a few feet. From the road he’d seen lights on, but now he didn’t know from where. He tried to make sense of the structure of the building. He couldn’t concentrate because of the perplexity his company was causing him; by the light of the moon, the woman did not look very lucid. Might she be drunk, or crazy? That kind of man is always thinking the worst of women, precisely because they all look the same to him.

The difficulties he encountered were due to the fact that the hotel’s floor plan was really unintelligible. It was a hot springs establishment whose ground floor had been adapted to the stone wellsprings in the earth; which, being bedrock, could not be removed.