The Seamstress and the Wind

15

WHAT DELIA DIDN’T know, in that endless twilight, was that there was a night in this story of hers. She was unaware of it because she’d spent it in a coma inside the remains of the Chrysler smashed against the truck-planet.

Ramón Siffoni, her husband, had driven all night in his little red truck without giving himself a minute’s rest. He didn’t even think of stopping to sleep for a while, not at all. He saw the moon rise before him, an orange disk gushing light, and he felt like the master of the hours and the nights, of all of them without exceptions or interruptions, in a perfect continuum. His concentration at the wheel was perfect too. The night had arrived in the midst of this concentration, while the truck passed like a toy through the sleeping towns. Suddenly it was the desert, and suddenly it was night. The towns became jumbled arrangements of stones, the kind that radiated darkness. The cities rose out of the earth. They were not cities: no one lived in them. But they resembled cities as one drop of water resembles another. The fact that there was no one in them only meant that no one had to orient themselves on their rough escarpments. Their streets ran according to a general abstract orientation, like the map of the moon. It was when he was crossing the Río Colorado that the moon came out, over the bridge, and Ramón was mesmerized, his eyes like two stars. A great unknown plateau had placed itself between him and the horizon, taking the place of his concentration. There was nothing there.

A phenomenon had taken place without him knowing it, a phenomenon that was unrecorded but very common in Patagonia: the atmospheric tides. The full moon, exercising the entire attractive force of its mass over the landscape, draws the sleeping atoms out of the earth and makes them undulate in the air. Not just atoms, which wouldn’t count for much, but their particles too, among them those of light and the extremely intricate ones of order.

Maybe the tide that night had some effect on Siffoni’s brain, maybe not, we’ll never know. For the truck, it had the curious consequence of depriving it of its color, the red it had had when it left the factory forty years ago and which was now half-faded, though it still shone so brightly at daybreak in the summer, when the birds were singing. And also the color under the paint. It turned transparent, although there was nobody to see it.

When, hours later, Ramón looked in the rearview mirror, he saw a little blue car following along a half-mile behind him. The dust had turned transparent too. The presence there of the tiny vehicle filled him with uneasiness. The uneasiness made him feel pursued. A short while later, they were still separated by the same distance. It didn’t seem difficult to lose the car; he had never seen a car as tiny as that one before, and he doubted it had much of an engine. He accelerated. He would have thought it impossible, because he had the accelerator pressed to the floor already, but nonetheless the truck sped up, by a lot. It shot forward, the little glass truck, like an arrow shot from a bow.

Here I digress. Because, thinking it over, the moon did have an effect on Ramón. It was that he saw himself as a husband. He was a husband like so many, regularly good, and normal, more or less. But what he now saw was that this comfortable role in which he found himself rested entirely on one supposition, which was “I could be worse.” Indeed, there are husbands who beat their wives, or debase them in this or that way and humiliate them, or play all kinds of dirty tricks on them, in general very visibly (nothing is more visible for those contemplating a marriage), all of which culminates in abandonment: there are husbands who leave, who vanish like smoke, lots of them. So even if the husband stays, and persists in his infamies, even so, he “could be worse.” He could leave. But women are not so foolish as to go along with this scenario; it’s evidently “better to be alone than in bad company,” since there are life-threatening situations in which getting rid of a monstrous husband is better than keeping him. Actually the “could be worse” premise is very flexible, and even very demanding; the least flaw could discredit a husband in the eyes of his wife. “He could be worse. .” only if he is already almost perfect, if his faults are venial, of the humorous type (for example if he doesn’t pull his pants up a half an inch every time he sits down, so that after a while the fabric stretches at the knees). Very well, in this way a hierarchy is established: there are men who are monsters and make life hell for their wives, like drunks, for example; and there are others who don’t, and if a husband is in the latter category he can allow himself the luxury of looking back over his small (and large) defects, sitting in his easy chair in the living room and reading the paper while his wife makes dinner, and feel very sure of himself. So sure of himself that pretty soon he sees opening in front of him, like a marvelous flower, the world of vices that he could, that he can, practice with impunity thanks to his position as a good husband, a good family man. Life allows him this, it’s for him and only him. Wouldn’t it be a shame, a crime, to waste an opportunity like that? The specter of dirty tricks is his Jacob’s ladder: each step will have its subtle dialectic of “I could be worse,” and a lifetime won’t be long enough for him to reach the top, the monster.

Well then, Ramón Siffoni had a vice. He was a gambler. Marriage had made him a gambler, but the game had made him a married man as well. He’d gambled long before he got married, since his early youth, but in the case of gambling, like all vices, it wasn’t so much a matter of starting as of continuing. He was incorrigible. With him it was definitive. It was the mark of his life, the stigma. He gambled everything, the money he earned and what his wife earned too, in the form of undeferrable debts: the furniture, the house (luckily they rented), and the truck. He was always broke, strapped, and he sank from there to vertiginous depths. He always lost, like all true gamblers. It was a miracle that they survived, that they fed and dressed themselves and paid their bills and raised their son. The secret must have been that at times, by chance, he won, and with the marvelous imprudence of gamblers, who never think about tomorrow, he would spend all the winnings, down to the last cent, on catching up and getting on with things: so that the same gesture of short-sightedness that at night acted against the family, acted in its favor in the daytime. More miraculous, much more, was that it wasn’t known in the neighborhood, in the town (all of Pringles was one neighborhood, and information circulated as fast as a body in free fall). Of course activities of that kind are carried on with a certain discretion; but even so, it’s inconceivable that it wasn’t found out, that my mother, an intimate of Delia’s, didn’t know. Because, although discreet and nocturnal, it was a pastime obviously subject to indiscretions. And it had been going on for years, and it would continue for decades, before and after (before and after what?). And above all, it would have taken very little, any fact, the tiniest filament of information, to draw conclusions, for the whole thing to be explained. . And even so, it was only found out many years later (clearly it was found out, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this), I was no longer living in Pringles, one day, I’m not sure when, on one of my visits, Mamá knew it, she knew it very well, she was tired of knowing it, how else would the vicissitudes, the status quo of the Siffoni family be explained, without that piece of information? How would it have been explained from the beginning, from our prehistory in the neighborhood? That’s what I wonder: How? If no one knew!

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.

But finally, coming around a sharp corner, he found himself before a lit window, and could see inside. His surprise was superlative (but his surprise was enormous every time he looked at anything that night). He stood before a scene he knew all too well: the poker table. Now, in a flash, he remembered having heard talk of this hotel, a requisite stop for all gamblers headed south, smugglers, truckers, aviators. . An old hot springs hotel, its clientele extinct, a legendary den. He’d never thought that one day — one night — he’d see it for himself.

Before this spectacle he forgot everything, even the woman who stood on tiptoe behind him to see. The men, the cards, the chips, the glasses of whiskey. . But he didn’t forget absolutely everything: there was one thing he noticed. One of the gamblers was from Pringles, and he knew him very well, not only because they were neighbors. He was the one everyone called Chiquito, the truck driver. It meant everything to see him, and understand that the trip had not been in vain, or at least that he hadn’t gone the wrong way. If he got what he wanted from him, he wouldn’t have to keep going.

He knew perfectly well how to get to a gambling table, even if all the doors were closed. His movements became confident, and Silvia Balero noticed. She followed him. Ramón knocked a few times on the window, and then on the closest door. Before anyone came to open it, he searched in his shirt pocket and pulled out a black mask. He’d had it there for some time, and he hadn’t expected to use it so soon. He put it on (it had an elastic band that tightened around the back of the neck). In those days it was common, as it is now, for gamblers in poker dens to hide their identities with masks, so the hotel porter who came to open the door only had to look at him to know what he wanted. They entered. Silvia Balero tugged on his sleeve.

“What do you want?” he snapped. He couldn’t believe how inconvenient it was to have a strange woman begging for his attention when he was about to make the bet of his life.

She wanted a place to sleep. She was already half asleep in fact, somnambulant.

Without answering her, Ramón signaled to the porter to guide them, but the man told them they had to speak to the owner of the hotel, who happened to be seated at the card table. So they did. Those present threw an appreciative look at the young teacher, and the porter took her to a room not far from where they were and came back. The new arrival was already in place, they had recited the rules for him, and he was requesting chips on credit. Counting the owner, there were five of them. The porter watched. Two were truck drivers, Chiquito and another suspicious-looking man; the remaining two were local ranchers, cattle men, very solvent. Chiquito had won a lot. At that hour they were already playing for thousands of sheep, and entire mountains.

Why linger over a description of a game, the same as any other? Queen, king, two, etc. Ramón lost, successively, his truck, the little blue car, and Silvia Balero. The only thing left was to pay for the two whiskeys he’d drunk. He dropped the cards on the table with his eyes half-closed behind his mask and said:

“Where’s the bathroom?”

They pointed it out. He went, and escaped through the window. He ran toward the place where he’d left the truck, pulling the keys out of his pocket. . But when he came to his spot among the other trucks in the lot, all of them big and modern (and Chiquito’s, which he knew well, with a strange black machine stuck to the back wall of the trailer; he didn’t stop to see what it was) there, on the flat ground, he didn’t find his truck. He thought he was dreaming. The moon had disappeared as well, and all that was left was an uncertain brilliance between the earth and the sky. His truck was not there. When he’d bet it, the second trucker, who was the one who’d won, went out to see it, and on returning had accepted the bet against ten thousand sheep, which had surprised Siffoni a little. Could he have moved it then? Impossible without the keys, which had never left his pocket. At any rate he couldn’t look for it for very long, because discovery of his escape was imminent. . He tried to get into the little blue car, but he didn’t fit; he was a corpulent man. He heard a door slam, or thought he did. . Panic disconcerted him for a moment, and then he was running across the open ground, in every direction, coming down the mountain to the plain, while dawn was breaking, at an impossibly early hour.