The Seamstress and the Wind

13

VERY WELL. NOW all the protagonists in the adventure are on stage. Let me see if I can make an orderly list:

1) The huge tractor trailer, Chiquito’s double planet, leading the way.

2) The shell of Zaralegui’s Chrysler, at this point looking more than anything like a black lacquered Chinese bathtub.

3) Zaralegui’s corpse.

4) Delia Siffoni, lost and wandering around.

5) Silvia Balero’s wedding dress, carried by the wind.

6) Ramón Siffoni in his red truck (a day behind).

7) And closing the retinue, the mysterious little blue car.

Of course, it’s not that simple. There are other characters, who are now going to appear. . Or better yet, no. It’s not that there are other characters (these are all of them) but revelations will transform these characters into others, making room for encounters that Delia Siffoni never would have expected, neither she nor any of the other Delia Siffonis in the world, with all of them beginning, there in Patagonia, a dance of transformations.

There are drunks who, starting at a certain point in the evening, sample all kinds of mixes: they drink anything, a glass of any alcohol at hand, at random. We know how imprudent this policy is, but they laugh and keep going; you have to recognize their astonishing physical vigor, their superhuman stamina, which they might have been born with but which they’ve certainly developed further with this habit — the paradox of self-destruction, which conversely never quite arrives. They mix everything, and they don’t worry. . it all contributes to the same effect, which is inebriation, their personal inebriation, which is singular, unique. And if he also is singular, the drinker says to himself, what does it matter how many elements there are to take him to that sublime level of unity. .

Happy drunk! If he’s gotten that far, he’s gotten to everything, he has no reason to worry anymore, because the idea on which he bases all his reasoning is correct, and there’s nothing else to say (even though it’s bad for your health). It’s true that he is singular, and it’s true that this is a process of simplification: everything goes toward a kind of happy nothing, and nothing is lost on the way.

“Simplify, child, simplify.” For some reason, I can’t do it. I want to, but I can’t. It’s stronger than I am. It’s as if I were abstemious. Here in Paris I drink more than I should.

As I am not much of a drinker, the effect is immediate, and exaggerated. It’s the effect and nothing but. The effect is to walk drunkenly, smiling stupidly past all those prestigious places, accumulating experiences, memories, for a time when I have nothing else to lean on. It’s a commonplace to say that a great city offers a continuous succession of different impressions, all in a magma of variable intensity. But shouldn’t it also be true for other people, not just for oneself? I see people pass, from café terraces where I write, and all without exception look compact, closed in on themselves, making it very clear that the city has had no effect on them.

But what am I after? I don’t know. People disarmed by their own visions, like Picasso’s women, medusa-like and limping, thousand-armed goddesses, hollow people, fluid people?

Maybe what I hope to see, at the end of a line of self-sustaining reasoning, is people who, like myself, have no life. In that, I am condemned to failure. It’s curious, but everyone has life, even the tourists, who by my reasoning shouldn’t. No one leaves life anywhere, all lives seem to be portable. They are naturally so. To be practical about it and drop the metaphysics, having a life is equivalent to having business, affairs, interests. And how can anyone strip himself of all that? Very well. But then how did I do it?

I don’t know.

I’ve stood on the threshold of all the beauties, all the dangers. And the sums did not add up. The remainders did not remain, the multiplications were not multiplied, the divisions were not divided.