The Seamstress and the Wind

11

MEANWHILE, WHEN NIGHT had almost fallen, Ramón Siffoni returned to the neighborhood in his little red truck and found a committee of anguish waiting for him.

“Omar wasn’t lost!” he began, but he stopped there, because he sensed that no one was listening. He was a nervous and bad-tempered man, impatient, demanding and dissatisfied. “ Where’s my wife?” he asked.

This was what the neighbors were waiting for.

“She took a taxi to Patagonia.”

If they’d bored a hole in the back of his neck with a drill they couldn’t have shaken him more badly.

They explained it to him, but who knows if anything got through his crust of rage. But something must have gotten through, because he got back into his red wreck of a truck and took off with a noise like rattling tin cans — also headed south, where everyone seemed to be going that day.

What he didn’t see was parked on the corner — a little sky-blue one-seater car, the kind that had to be dismantled from the top for the driver to get in: it began to follow him. Such a maneuver was highly unusual, perhaps the first, and the last time, such a thing happened in Pringles.

And even so, it went unnoticed. The neighbor women were dazzled by the abrupt gesture, romantic in its way, of the angry husband. And Ramón Siffoni. . what could he notice, in his state? He ran, he launched himself off, to keep his wife from committing the greatest mistake of her life. And if his old red truck was not as fast as it needed to be, it didn’t matter, because what he wanted at that moment was an interplanetary rocket ship.

He was going, as anyone with a map can verify, southeast. Which is to say, in the two directions that lengthen the day in the Argentine summer. And as he was beside himself, he was the southeast. That worked. The day began to lengthen like a snake, and the red truck, which in the immensities it now slid across was becoming truly small, was the blazing hungry head of the snake, with its tongue sticking out: the tongue was the crank with its two right angles which in his haste Ramón had forgotten to take off.