The Seamstress and the Wind

4

IT’S INCREDIBLE, THE speed a chain of events can take, starting with one that could be called immobile. It’s a kind of vertigo; straightaway events do not occur: they become simultaneous. It’s the ideal resource for getting rid of memory, for making an anachronism of any recollection. Starting from that slip of mine, everything began to happen at once. Especially for Delia Siffoni, Omar’s mother. Her son’s disappearance affected her deeply, it affected her mind, which must have surprised me since she wasn’t the emotional type; she was one of those women, so abundant then in Pringles, on the poor outskirts where we lived, who — before ceasing to bear children forever — had a single child, a boy, and raised him with a certain severe coolness. Each of my friends was an only child, each more or less the same age, each with that kind of mother. They were maniacal about cleanliness, they did not allow dogs, they acted like widows. And always:

a single male child. I don’t know how, later on, there came to be women in Argentina.

Delia Siffoni and my mother had been friends when they were children. Then she’d left town, and when she came back, married and with a six- or seven-year-old boy, she ended up renting, completely by chance, the house next to ours. The two friends were reacquainted. And the two of us, Omar and I, became inseparable, all day together in the street. Our mothers, on the other hand, maintained that distance tinged with malevolence typical of the local women. Mamá found many defects in Delia, but that was practically a hobby for her. In the first place, she thought Delia was crazy, unbalanced: they all were, when you started thinking about it. Then the mania for cleaning; you have to recognize that Delia was exemplary. She kept her little parlor hermetically sealed, and no one ever entered it under any pretext. The single bedroom was resplendent, and so was the kitchen. Those three rooms were the whole house, and their house was an exact copy of ours. Several times a day she swept both patios, the front and the back, including the chicken coop; and the sidewalk, which was dirt, was always sprayed down. She devoted herself to that. We’d nicknamed her “the pigeon,” because of her nose and eyes; my mother was an expert at finding animal resemblances. The way Delia talked also contributed to this: her voice was whispery and abrupt, as were her manners and movements when she was on the sidewalk (she was always outside: another defect): she would move away from her interlocutor with light little steps and then come back again, a thousand times, she’d go, she’d come back, she’d remember something else she had to say. .

Delia had a profession, a trade, which made her an exception among the women of the neighborhood, who were only housewives and mothers, like mine. She was a seamstress (a seamstress, exactly, now I see the coincidence); she could even have made a living with her work, and in fact she did, because her husband had I don’t know what vague shipping job and you couldn’t really say that he worked in the broadest terms. She had a good reputation as a seamstress, trustworthy and very neat, although she had terrible taste. She did everything perfectly, but you had to give her very precise instructions and keep an eye on her up to the very last minute or she would ruin it by following some nefarious inspiration. But fast, she was extremely fast. When the customers came for a fitting. . There were four fittings, that was canonic in Pringlense couture. With Delia, the four fittings were muddled together in an instant, and anyway the garment was already finished. With her there was no time to change your mind, or anything else. She had lost a lot of her clientele because of it. She was always losing customers; it was a miracle she had any left. New ones were always appearing, that was the thing. Her supernatural velocity attracted them, like moths to a candle.