The Seamstress and the Wind

21

I’M SITTING IN a café on the Place de Clichy. . At this point I remain here against my will. I should have left a while ago, I have a commitment. . But I can’t call the waiter, I simply can’t do it, it’s stronger than I am, and the minutes are passing. . I’ve reviewed the bill and my pocket several times, I’ve counted the coins from back to front and front to back and I come up short by a hair, I have six francs and ninety centimes and the coffee costs seven, it’s as if it were done on purpose. . That’s why I need the waiter to come, he’s going to have to give me change for fifty francs, I don’t have anything smaller. . If I had enough coins I would leave them on the table, free as a bird I would leave these little metal eggs and fly away. My impatience is so great that if I had a ten franc note I would leave it. . But I don’t. I’m reduced to waiting for him to look at me so I can make some gesture, wave him over. . it’s the same here as everywhere in the world: waiters never look your way. My eyes are fixed on him, every turn he makes I try out my gesture. . By now all the customers must have noticed, and the other waiters, of course, all except him. Let’s see. . He’s coming this way. . no, again I failed, I must have the air of a supplicant, I’m stuck to my chair. . I move it, I scrape the legs against the floor, to make him look at me. . I know going after him would be useless as well as grotesque, he’d slip away. . Then, I would become the invisible man, yes, the ghost of the Place de Clichy. There’s nothing to do but wait for the next opportunity, hope that he turns this way, that he clears the table next to mine and sees me. . And I want to go, I have to go, that’s the worst. . I’ve been here for two hours writing at this table (he must think that if I stayed two hours, I could just as well stay three, or five, or until they close), and in the enthusiasm of inspiration, which I’m cursing now, I went on and on until I’d finished the previous chapter. . and when I looked at the clock I wanted to die. . I should already be at that dinner, they’ll be waiting for me — for me, stuck here. . I have twenty minutes on the Métro at least, and the minutes pass and I keep searching for the waiter’s gaze. . I don’t know how I can be writing this, if I’m not taking my eyes off his head. .. Every time I put in an ellipse I make holes in the notebook. This is beginning to look definitive: he’s never going to look at me, ever. Have I been trying for ten minutes? Fifteen? I don’t want to look at the clock any more. I stare at him like a maniac. . The law of probabilities should be in my favor, at some point he should look at me, since he can’t help looking at something. . And to think it would have been so easy to make him come over as soon as I saw the time: calling him would have been enough. So many people do it. . But I can’t. Never in my life have I called a waiter except by mute craft (and I have written all my novels in cafés), I’ve never done it, I will never do it. . never. . And then an ardent recrimination of my Creator rises in me — mute of course, internal, though I pronounce and hear it with the greatest clarity:

“Lord, what did You give me a voice for if it’s no use to me? Along with my voice, shouldn’t You have given me the capacity to use it? How hard would that have been? Don’t You think it’s sarcastic, almost sadistic, to make me the owner of this marvelous instrument that passes from the immobile body through the air like a messenger and which is the body in another form, the body in flight. . and wrap that voice up in me, under a spell of interiority? It’s as if I’m carrying a corpse inside, or at least an invalid, or a guest who won’t leave. . I suppose as a newborn I could scream to call my mother like anybody else. . but then what? My voice has atrophied in my throat, and when I speak — and I only speak when spoken to, like a ghost — what comes out is an adenoidal and affected stammer barely adequate for carrying my ignorance and doubts across very short distances. If You’d at least made me mute, I’d be calmer! Then I could yell, and I’d yell all the time, the sky would be full of my dumb howling! You’ll say I’ve abused my reading of Leibniz, Lord, but don’t You think, given the circumstances, You should move the waiter’s head in such a way that he might see me?”

Delia, my reality. . Talking to you now, in my silence, does your story not resemble mine? It’s the same, it matches in each iridescent turn. . What in me is a miniscule incident, in you becomes destiny, adventure. . And yet the two things are not dissimilar; rather, one is a rearrangement of the other. It’s not the volume of the voice that matters, but its placement in the story where it’s spoken; a story has corners and folds, proximities and distances. . A word in time can do everything. . And more than anything else (but it’s all the same) what matters is what’s said, the meaning; in the arrangement of the story there is a silver bridge, a continuum, from voice to meaning, from the body to the soul, and the story advances by that continuum, by that bridge. .

I left off just at the release of the voice. . The wind left with the words of love riding on his back, and crossed vast distances in all directions. To throw them off he shook, he twisted, but he managed only to turn the words around, point them elsewhere, drive them into the interstices of Patagonia. The wind too had a lot to learn. In his life there was only one restriction on total freedom: the Coriolis effect, the force of gravity applied to his mass — which is just what keeps all winds stuck to the planet. The voice, for its part, has the peculiarity that when released it carries the weight of the body from which it has come; since that weight is erotic reality, lovers believe they can embrace words of love, they believe they can make them into a continuum of love that will last forever.

The continuum, by another name: the confession. If I wrote confessional literature, I would dedicate myself to seeking out the unspoken. But I don’t know if I would find it; I don’t know if the unspoken exists within my life. The unspoken, like love, is a thing that occupies a place in a story. Leaving aside the distances involved, it’s like God. God can be placed in two different locations within a discourse: at the end, as Leibniz does when he says “and it is this that we call God” — which is to say, when one arrives at Him after the deduction of the world; or at the beginning: “God created. .” They are not different theologies, they are the same, only exposed from the other side. The kind of discourse that places God at the beginning is the model and mother of what we call “fiction.” I must not forget that before my trip I proposed to write a novel. “The wind said. .” is not so absurd; it’s only a method, like any other. It’s a beginning. But it’s always a beginning, at every moment, from the first to the last.

Words of love. . Traveling words, words that alight and stay forever balanced on the scales within the heart of a man. In Ramón and Delia’s past there was a small, secret puzzle (but life is full of puzzles that are never solved). They had consummated their marriage some time after the wedding, apparently due to Ramón’s desire or lack of it, although he never explained himself. What I mean to say is, there was a blank spot between the wedding and the consummation. Even if anyone besides the two of them had known about this blank spot, it would have been pointless to ask Delia about it, just as it was pointless for Delia to ask herself, because she wouldn’t have known how to answer. And, that was what I was referring to, in large part, when I talked about forgetting, and memory, et cetera: there are things that seem like secrets someone is keeping, but aren’t being kept by anyone.

The backbiting of neighbors, that passionate hobby at which Delia was an expert, was a similar thing. If I entered Delia’s consciousness the way an omniscient narrator could, I would discover with surprise and perhaps a certain disillusionment that backbiting does not exist in her intimate heart. But it was Delia herself who was surprised! And she discovered her surprise as her own omniscient narrator. .