The Seamstress and the Wind

5

IN THE SUMMER, birds woke me. We had only one bedroom for the whole family, in the front of the house, facing the street. My bed was under the window. My parents, country people, were in the habit of sleeping with the window closed; but I had read in the Billiken children’s magazine that it was much healthier to have it open, so when everyone was asleep I would stand on my bed and open it, barely a centimeter, without making the tiniest noise. The uproar of the little birds in the trees out front reached me before anyone else. I was the first one awake, startled by that burst of sharp sounds, just as I had been the last to fall asleep, at the end of an interminable session of mental horrors. And yet it always turned out that my mother had fallen asleep after me, and woken up before. I would find out indirectly, by some remark, and later I knew she stayed up past midnight knitting, sewing, listening to the radio, playing the piano — that last one was a curious pastime, but she had once been the town pianist, she had neither time nor desire to practice in the daytime, and it never woke me up. When the birds did wake me in the morning she had already been bustling around for some time. I don’t know how that could have been, because without denying one reality, I went on believing the other: that I lay awake while she slept, that I even saw her sleeping (I believe I see her still), sleeping profoundly, abandoned to sleep, which made her more beautiful. Her wakefulness was misfiled in sleep. Might she have been a sleepwalker? Her curious habit of playing the piano (Clementi, Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, and a transcription of Lucia di Lammermoor) in the depths of the night suggested it. I never heard it, she must have made sure I was sound asleep, but to this day I can evoke that supernaturally sedative nocturnal music, each note untying every knot in my life. That must be where my tortured passion for music started, music I don’t understand, the strangest, most absurd, most avant-garde — to me none of it seems advanced or incomprehensible enough. As an adult, I discovered that my mother slept deeply, she was privileged, a Queen of Sleep, one of those people who could sleep forever, all their lives, if they set themselves to it. But back then she had the coquetry of insomnia, and when by chance she referred to the night it was to say “ I didn’t sleep a wink.” Like all children, I must have believed her word for word. I am also a King of Sleep; I sleep like a log.

In the summer I woke up very early, with the birds, because the dawn was very early then, much earlier than now. Time didn’t change according to the seasons then, and Pringles was very far south, where the days were longer. At four, I think, the chorus of birds would begin. But there was one, one bird, the one that woke me up on those summer mornings, a bird with the strangest and most beautiful song you could imagine. I never heard anything like it afterwards. His twittering was atonal, insanely modern, a melody of random notes, sharp, clean, crystalline. It was special because it was so unexpected, as if a scale existed and the bird chose four or five notes from it in an order that systematically sidestepped any expectations. But the order could not always be unexpected, there is no method like that: by pure chance it would have to meet some expectation, the law of probabilities demands it. And yet, it did not.

In fact, it was not a bird. It was Mr. Siffoni’s truck, when he turned the crank. In those days you had to turn a crank on the front of a car to make the engine turn over. This was a really old vehicle, a little square truck, a red tin can, and it wasn’t clear how it kept running. After the marvelous trill came the pathetic coughing of the engine. I wonder if that wasn’t what woke me up, and that I imagined the previous. I often have, even today, these waking dreams. That one gave them the model.

The little red truck stood out against the clean and beautiful colors of the Pringlense dawn, the perfect blue sky, the green trees, the golden dirt of our street. The summer was the only season when Ramón Siffoni worked as a trucker. He relaxed the rest of the year. Not even in season did he work much, according to my parents, who criticized him for it. He didn’t even get up early, they said (but I knew the truth).

Next to our house on the other side lived a professional trucker, a real one. He had a very modern truck, enormous, with a trailer (the very same one in which Omar and I had played on that ill-fated day), and he made long trips to the most distant reaches of Argentina. Not just in summer, like Siffoni making casual fair-weather hauls in his toy truck, but serious trips. His name was Chiquito, he was half-related to us, and sometimes when I left for school in the dead of winter, when the sky was still dark, I would find that he’d left me a snowman on the doorstep, a sign that he’d gone off on a long trip.

The snowman. . the lovely postcard of the little red truck in the pale blue and green dawn. . the senses celebrating. And all of that was suddenly shaken by the disappearance.