The Seamstress and the Wind

10

PATAGONIA. . the end of the world. . yes, agreed; but the end of the world is still the world. The whole pink sky, like the petal of a colossal flower, the blue earth, an immobile disk with no other end but the horizon. . That was the world, then. That was the whole world, that place where Delia had been taken by accident, by the mad force of events, and from which it seemed entirely unthinkable that she would ever escape. At first she felt like a child on a carousel, riding on the back of a beetle made of black glass. She even thought she heard music; and she did, actually, but it was the whistling of the wind.

Then, all at once, the horrible circumstances of which she was victim and protagonist became clear to her. She let out a scream and waved her arms in terror, at which Zaralegui’s corpse abandoned her lap and flew out of the car. A pothole must have helped: she wasn’t that strong.

And in addition to the potholes, in all certainty, the maelstrom of wind — at full speed the truck displaced a mass of air the volume and weight of a mountain. The mountains missing from that infinite plateau were created by the air. But there was also wind, and more than a little: Patagonia is the land of wind. In fact there were various winds, which competed for the dust raised by the truck and fought fiercely with the vehicle’s own wind, packed and wrapped by speed. They unwrapped this package a thousand times a second with a sound like paper in the air, they untied the ribbons of gravity, they tore up in their hurry, like children driven by the sight of toys, both its rigid and fluid folds.

Zaralegui gave two half-somersaults twelve feet in the air; no acrobat in the world could have imitated his pirouettes with the broken spine that he had. Then he went flying off to one side. Since his arms were moving, agitated by the same force that carried him, he seemed alive. What a spectacle! But the conjunction of the pothole and the whirlwind must have made a catapult, because Zaralegui wasn’t the only one who flew: he was followed by the dress, Delia, and the car, in that order. When the dress opened the enormous white wings of its train and rose, at a supersonic velocity, up and away, Delia felt dispossessed. It was her work that was going, and she was left out, useless. She thought she’d never get it back. And then when Delia herself took flight, all her feelings contracted into terror. It was the first time she flew.

The earth dropped away, the truck too — (the last she saw of it was the back wall of the trailer, from which the black cocoon that had been the Chrysler was coming loose, to take its turn at flying) — the sky approached vertiginously. She closed her eyes and after an instant opened them again.

The sun, which had already set on the surface, appeared again at the end of the world; it was the first time she’d seen the sun after it had set. It was as red as a red rubber ball slick with luminous oil. And it was in a strange place: although visible, it stayed below the line of the horizon, in a niche. It was the nighttime sun, which no one had ever seen.

And it’s not as if Delia lingered in contemplation of the sun. It couldn’t even be said that she looked at it. She wasn’t even thinking, and thinking always comes before looking. Flying was an absorbing activity for her — so much so, and so absorbing of life, that she was absolutely convinced she would not survive. And how could she? The contradictory currents of the wind had carried her, in two or three somersaults, to a height of more than a hundred yards. The circle of the horizon changed position as if the compass had fallen into the hands of a lunatic. The winds seemed to be shouting berserkly: “You take her!. . Give her here!” — amid uncanny bursts of laughter. Delia was thrown back and forth, vibrating, vibrating, like a heart in the heights and depths of love, or in space.

“These are my last moments,” she screamed to herself without moving her lips. The last seconds of her life, and afterward there would be only the black night of death. . Her anguish was unspeakable. Talking in terms of seconds was rhetoric, but it was also a great truth. The mad winds seemed bold enough to turn the seconds into minutes, and even hours, and if they felt like it, it would not be out of place to say days. But even so they would be seconds, because anguish compresses time, whatever interval of time, to the painful dimensions of seconds.

I should at least take advantage of this experience, she managed to say to herself, since there won’t be another one to follow it.

But that was, from any point of view, impossible. Enjoyment is impossible when everything is impossible; what’s more, there was no point of view; the show she was putting on didn’t have a point of view, since there was no one to see it. There in the limpid heights of twilight, she spun around so many times at a speed greater than sound, that she no longer had relative positions. She was a collage, a figure cut out and moved by a capricious artist, filmed in fast-forward against the pinkest and smoothest backdrop in the world (or in the sky) and illuminated by a red spotlight. No one enjoys the experience immediately before death, ever. Although, of course, with death, the quintessentially unexpected, no experience can be called the last. There’s always the possibility that it’s the next-to-last. This was an error on Delia’s part (her last moments!), the first of a strange series that would carry her very far.

Some things seem eternal, and still they pass anyway. Death itself does that. Delia had lost sight of the earth a little while before, and she no longer knew if she was moving forward or backward, falling or rising, following the vertical or the horizontal. . What did it matter, at that point? There was always a new wind to take hold of her and play yo-yo with her. Where did they come from, those winds? The torrent seemed to come from a hole in the sky — the hole was invisible.

But, as I say, suddenly it was over. Delia found herself on the earth again, and walking. She really didn’t know how it happened. But, there she was walking on her two legs, on the flat, clean-swept earth. She didn’t see a tree, a hill, anything. She forgot immediately the danger of death she had just faced.

Delia loved to play the committed fatalist, the lady of death — every afternoon she felt prepared to spend the night at a wake; her conversations were full of cancer, blindness, paralysis, comas, heart attacks, widows, orphans. She had embodied this character with so much enthusiasm that it was now her theme, her position. It was an inclination she had chosen, because the safe and protected life she’d led, the cocoon of the small town middle class, placed her on the margin of any serious test in which her survival could be at stake. Her desire to live was exempt from any corroboration. And this also formed a part of her definitive being. While she flew, with no time to think or react (which are the same thing), she had clung to her old philosophy. Yet now that she was walking, safe and sound, time was opening up beneath her feet; her legs were the scissors that cut the translucent stalk of time and continuously opened and unfolded it. And because of this she saw before her the urgent necessity to give way to certain ideas about reality and to renounce momentarily that “what does it matter, I’m dead already anyway” that constituted her elegance.

She didn’t know where she was or where she was headed — or even what time it was. To start with, how was it possible that it was daytime? It was night, she felt that in her body and her mind. And yet, it was day. What insane zone had she fallen into?

Then this is Patagonia? she said to herself, perplexed. And if this is Patagonia, then what am I?