The Seamstress and the Wind

3

IT’S NOT RANDOM, I said. I have a biographical motive to back up this reasoning. My first experience, the first of those events that leave a mark, was a disappearance. I would have been eight or nine. I was playing in the street with my friend Omar, and it occurred to us to climb into the empty trailer of a truck parked in front of our houses (we were neighbors). The trailer was an enormous rectangle, the size of a room, that had three high wooden walls without a fourth, which was the back. It was perfectly empty and clean. We began to play at scaring each other, which is strange because it was in the middle of the day, we had no masks or disguises or anything else, and that space, of all those we could have picked, was the most geometric and visible. It was a purely psychological game of fantasy. I don’t know how such subtlety could have occurred to us, a couple of semi-savage children, but kids are like that. And the fear turned out to be more effective than we expected. On the first try, it was already excessive. Omar began. I sat on the floor, close to the back edge, and he went and stood by the front wall. He said “Now” and started walking toward me with heavy, slow steps, without making faces or gestures (it wasn’t necessary). . I felt such terror that I must have closed my eyes. . When I opened them, Omar wasn’t there. I was paralyzed, strangled, as in a nightmare; I wanted to move but couldn’t. It was as if a wind were pressing in on me from all sides at once. I felt deformed, twisted, both ears on the same side of my head, both eyes on the other, an arm coming out of my navel, the other from my back, the left foot coming out of the right thigh. . Squatting, like an octidimensional toad. . I had the impression, which I knew so well, of running desperately to escape a danger, a horror. . to escape the crouching monster that I now was. All I could do was stay in the safest place.

All at once, I don’t know how, I found myself in the kitchen of my house, behind the table. My mother was standing at the counter with her back to me, looking out the window. She was not working, not making food or tidying things, which was very strange for a classic housewife who was always doing something; but her immobility was full of impatience. I knew because I had a telepathic connection with her. And she with me: she must have felt my presence, because she turned abruptly and saw me. She let out a yell like I’ve never heard from her and brought both hands to her head with a moan of anguish, almost a sob, something she’d never done before but which I knew was within her expressive capabilities. It was as if something impossible had happened, something unimaginable. By the shouting she subjected me to when she was able to articulate again I found out that Omar had come, at noon, to say I’d hidden and wouldn’t reappear despite his calling me and his declarations that he wasn’t playing anymore, that he had to go. Such obstinacy was typical of me, but as the hours passed they started to get alarmed, mamá joined the search, and in the end papá intervened (this was the highest degree of alarm) and was still looking for me, with the help of Omar’s father and I don’t know which other neighbors, in a by-the-book search party through the immediate area, and she hadn’t been able to do anything, she hadn’t started making dinner, she hadn’t even had the heart to turn on the lights. . I saw that, in fact, it was already very dark out — it was almost night. But I had been there the whole time! I didn’t say this to her because I was too emotional to speak. It wasn’t me, they were wrong. . it was Omar who’d disappeared! It was his mother who had to be told, a search for him that had to be undertaken. And now, I thought in a spasm of desperation, it would be much more difficult because night was falling. I felt responsible for the lost time, whose irretrievable quality I understood for the first time.