The Seamstress and the Wind (10 page)

22

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, “
Th
ey 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
e first was the remains of a black Chrysler, smashed up and lying there. He stopped and looked it over for a while.
Th
ere 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.
Th
e 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.

Th
e 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
is, 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.
Th
e 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.

He’d been working for hours, and was covered in sweat. He crawled in again and stretched out on the membrane, as if on a prehistoric white rug, to rest and think. An idea occurred to him; it seemed crazy, but maybe it wasn’t. If he took this fossil as a chassis . . . and put the Chrysler engine in it, and attached the wheels . . . He was drowsy with mechanical dreams. But how would he get the engine and the other parts he needed here? He wouldn’t have to bring them, he could take the shell to where they were . . . He got out to try. Indeed, he could move it, but very slowly, with much difficulty, and it would take days to make the one or two miles that separated him from the car. It was a little like gambling: sometimes you have everything you need for a winning hand, but not all together . . . Another idea occurred to him (which isn’t so impressive: in general when an idea occurs to a person, another one occurs to him afterwards, so much so that I’ve come to wonder sometimes if ideas don’t come to me only to provoke the occurrence of other ideas). He walked off in the direction of the Chrysler. He would have to find it again, of course, but he was confident that he could, and he did. What he’d thought of was to take the rims off the wheels, get the axles out, and make a kind of wheelbarrow to carry the engine to the shell. But it turned out that it wasn’t so easy.
Th
e lack of tools didn’t help, although he found a providential screwdriver in the taxi’s crushed glove compartment. In the end he got the four wheels off (the circle had not been deformed on any of the four); to make the kind of wheelbarrow he’d thought of was crazy. It would be more practical to work backwards. He made four trips to the excavation site, carrying one wheel each time, another trip to bring the axles, and with the help of the obliging screwdriver he managed to attach them, precariously, to the underside of the armadillo. He pushed it, and it moved forward with perfect ease. He put the tail inside, in case it might be useful; he thought he might have to put it back in its place to act as a rudder, its natural function.

It didn’t take long to pull it off. First he took the whole wreck apart, screw by screw. He jury-rigged it brilliantly; he put the engine in front, held it in with clamps, and put in the gas tank, the radiator, et cetera.
Th
e pulleys, the axles, the wheels in the four openings for the legs . . . all set. It’s easier to explain it than to do it, but in his case it was very easy nonetheless.
Th
e next step was to turn it on and try it out, which he did.
Th
e machine moved, slowly at first, and then faster.

23

NIGHT FELL AND
he drove on and on, with the horn in front . . . because he’d put the armadillo’s tail-cone on as the nose of his vehicle, that is to say he’d screwed it to the opening in front. It looked good, he thought; he’d done it only for aesthetics, not aerodynamics. What he liked most was that it entirely changed the appearance of the remains: with the horn in front it didn’t look like an armadillo anymore. It made him think how easy it was to change the appearance of a thing, what seemed most inherent to its being, most eternal . . . it was completely transformed by a measure as simple as changing the placement of the tail. How many things that seem different from each other, he thought, might actually be the same, with some little detail turned around!

What was impressive was the noise it made.
Th
e hoarseness of the engine resounded in the great hollow oval like thunder.

He hadn’t slept the night before, and he was nodding off. So he parked (it made no difference where) and lay down on the membrane, behind the seat. He had more than enough room. He fell asleep immediately. Close to dawn, an abrupt shaking woke him.
Th
e circle of the setting moon had come to rest just inside the tail opening, which was the only entrance or exit from the vehicle. He barely managed to wonder if he’d been dreaming before a second shake, this one more prolonged, rocked him again. It kept going while he got to his feet, stiff and still half asleep.
Th
e shell was rocking back and forth so much that Ramón fell three times before he could get hold of the back of the seat. Once he was sitting down, he looked out through the half-moon he’d left open in the upper part of the hole in front, over the steering wheel, which made a windshield without glass.
Th
e plateau was dim and tranquil, and the grass wasn’t moving.
Th
e vehicle kept vibrating, a little less now, and as soon as he could orient his attention he realized that the blows and scrapes were coming from above, from the cupola of the marvelous mother-of-pearl shell. Evidently some animal had climbed onto it; it wouldn’t have to be very big to shake the structure like that, being so light, but it might be dangerous anyway. He decided to check with the Chrysler’s rearview mirror, which he’d taken the precaution of bringing along. He grabbed it and stuck his hand out through the half-moon, pointing it backwards. What he saw froze his blood with fear.

It was the Monster. Ramón had never seen anything so ugly, but then, nobody else had ever seen anything so ugly either. It was a child monster. Perched on the roof . . . the way Omar always perched on Chiquito’s truck . . . children liked to do that.

Th
e chilling thing was the Monster’s shape . . . More than a shape it was an accumulation of shapes, fluid and fixed at once, fluid in space and fixed in time, and vice versa . . .
Th
ere was no explanation for it.
Th
e monster had seen (because it had eyes, or one eye, or it was an eye) the mirror coming out of the slot, shining in the light of the moon, and he stretched toward it . . .

Ramón pulled his hand, which had begun to tremble, back inside, put in the clutch, stepped on the accelerator . . .
Th
e vehicle surged forward, with the monster tumbling around on top.

Omar . . . the game . . . the monster child . . . the lost child . . . It all tumbled in his mind, like the creature on the roof of the Paleomobile . . . He saw Omar duplicated in his inseparable friend César Aira . . . He trusted that the Airas had taken Omar in and fed him that night and the night before; in the end, it didn’t matter . . . But how paradoxical, in the middle of all this, for the lost child to be at home, and the parents circling and circling in the desert hundreds of miles away . . .
Th
at didn’t make him any less a “lost child,” as in the story about the bears: he entered an empty house, he wondered who lived there, with a feeling of imminence . . . at any moment the owners might interrupt him . . . It didn’t matter that it was his house, that he’d lived there all his life; this was a detail that had no decisive weight to the overall meaning of the story . . .

We were a pair of healthy, normal children, nice enough to look at, good students . . . We adored our mothers and venerated our fathers, and feared them a little as well; they were so strict, such perfectionists . . . I believe we were the quintessence of petit bourgeois normalcy. And even so, though we didn’t realize it, it all rested on fear, the way the rock floats on the crest of the lava at the end of
Journey to the Center of the Earth
; fear — it might be said, the lava — was the biology, the plasma. To simplify by putting things in successive order, first came the fear the pregnant women felt (that is, it was beginning before we began ourselves), fear of giving birth to a monster. Reality, aristocratic and indifferent, followed its course.
Th
en the fear was transformed . . . It’s all a question of the transformation of fears: this makes society volatile, changeable, worlds change, the distinct successive worlds that, added together, are life. One of the avatars of fear is: that the child is lost, that he disappears . . . Sometimes the fear is transferred from the mother to the father; sometimes it is not; the child registers these oscillations and is transformed in turn.
Th
at it might be the parents who disappear, that the wind might fall in love with the mother, that a monster might pursue them, that a truck driver might never lose his way because he carried his house with him like Raymond Roussel, etc. etc. etc., all that, and much more still to be seen, is part of literature.

Now I remember a type of candy that the children of Pringles adored in those days, a kind of ancestor of what afterwards became gum. It was very local, I don’t know who invented it nor when it disappeared, I only know that today it does not exist. It was a little ball wrapped in parchment paper, accompanied by a little loose stick, all very homemade. One had to chew it until it got spongy and grew enormously in volume; we knew it was ready when it no longer fit in our mouths. We’d take it out, and it would have transformed into an extremely light mass that had the property of changing shape when blown by the wind, to which we exposed it by putting it on the end of the little stick.
Th
at must be why it was only a local candy: the winds of Pringles are like knives. It was like having a portable cloud, and seeing it change and suggest all kinds of things . . . It was healthy and entertaining . . .
Th
e wind, which left us as we were (it limited itself to mussing our hair) ceaselessly transfigured the mass . . . and there was no point falling in love with a particular shape because it would already be another, then another . . . until suddenly it would solidify, or crystallize, into any one of the shapes that had been delighting us for so many minutes, and then we would eat it like a lollipop.

I said before, I think, that when it snowed at night Chiquito would come by at dawn and leave me, as a present for when I left for school, a snowman in the doorway of my house. For me, as for Omar, both of us ignorant of his secret life, Chiquito was a hero, with his truck as big as a mountain and his journeys across all of marvelous Argentina . . .
Th
e neighbors praised his heart, his slightly childish gesture — which did more justice to his name than to his herculean physique — for building a snowman at those impossible hours when he always set out, just to give me a fleeting surprise, a little pleasure. Sometimes, when I went out on those occasions, the wind had already started to blow, and my snowman received me with eight arms, or a humpback, or more often with a Picassoesque twist, the nose at the nape of the neck, the navel on the back, both shoulders on the same side . . . On my return at noon nothing would be left: it always melted.

But there was one snowman, (two or three winters before the summer in which the action of this novel takes place) that didn’t melt. When I came outside I was taken aback. No one had told me it had snowed. It was still dark, but I could see well enough; in front of me there was a snowman, three and a half feet high, that originally, when Chiquito stopped by to make it before he left, would have been one of those friendly squat dwarfs that snowmen always are. But in the meantime the snow had stopped falling, the wind had begun to blow, and the snowman had been modified on all four sides.
Th
is didn’t frighten me; on the contrary, I was so delighted I burst out laughing . . .
Th
e fact that the snowman would melt within a few hours didn’t worry me either . . . but it did worry him.

“When the sun comes out,” he said, “and it won’t be long, I will turn to water and the earth will swallow me.”

“When someone puts their foot in it they often say ‘May the earth swallow me up,’” I said. Even as a boy I was very pedantic and a know-it-all.

“But I’m not saying that! I don’t want to die.”

I said nothing. I couldn’t help him, but then to my surprise the wind spoke:

“
Th
at can be arranged.”

Th
e Snowman: “How?”

“You will have to accept my terms.”

“And I’m not going to die?”

“Never.”

“
Th
en I accept, whatever it is!”

Th
ere I intervened, unable to stay at the fringes of any conversation:

“Be careful, this looks like one of those soul-selling deals the devil does, for example in . . .” I started telling them, with a wealth of detail, the plot of
The Man Who Sold His Shadow
, which I’d already read (as an eight-year-old! How insufferable I must have been!). But the snowman interrupted me:

“And if I don’t have a soul, snotface?” And to the wind: “What are the conditions?”

“Only one: that you let me carry you to Patagonia, where the sun does not melt the snow, and you let yourself be molded forever, every instant, by the winds. You will live forever, but you will never have the same shape twice.”

“What a deal! Since you’ve already changed my shape anyway . . .”

“But listen, there we blow a thousand times harder than here.”

“Don’t exaggerate. What do I care, anyway? It’s a deal, let’s go.”

I had nothing to say (and they wouldn’t have paid me any attention anyway) since the whole business seemed pretty reasonable to me . . . But didn’t it always seem reasonable in these cases? Wasn’t that the devil’s best trick? Except in this case, since it was a snowman, it really did seem reasonable, no hidden trap. And yet . . .

I watched as the wind lifted the snowman with a whirling “Ups-a-daisy!” and carried him away through the gray light of dawn.