The Seamstress and the Wind

6

MY PARENTS WERE realistic people, enemies of fantasy. They judged everything by work, their universal standard for measuring their fellow man. Everything else hung on that criterion, which I inherited wholly and without question; I have always venerated work above all else; work is my god and my universal judge, but I never worked, because I never needed to, and my passion exempted me from working because of a bad conscience or a fear of what others might say.

In family conversations in my house it was our habit to review the merits of neighbors and acquaintances. Ramón Siffoni was one of those who came out of this scrutiny in bad standing. His wife didn’t escape condemnation either, because my parents, realists that they were, never made wives out to be victims of their slothful husbands. That she also worked, a very strange thing in our milieu, didn’t exempt her, but rather made her all the more suspect. The thin seamstress, so small, so bird-like, neurotic to the highest degree, whose business hours were impossible to determine because she was always gossiping in the doorway — what did she really do? It was a mystery. The mystery was part of the judgment, because my parents, being realists, were aware of the fact that the recompense of work was fickle and too often undeserved. The enigmatic divinity of work was made flesh, in a negative suspension of judgment, in Delia Siffoni. My mother could spot the clothes she made on any woman in town (she certainly knew them all) — they were perfect, insanely neat, above all on Saturday nights when they made their usual rounds and afterward she would mention them to Delia; it seemed a little hypocritical to me, but I didn’t really understand her machinations very well. Epiphanies and hypocrisy, after all, are part of the divine plan.

At that precise moment in her professional life, and in her life generally, Delia had fallen into a trap of her own design. Silvia Balero, the drawing teacher, sworn innocent and candidate for spinsterhood, was getting married in a hurry. For appearances’ sake she would do it in the church, in white. And the order for the wedding dress was given to Delia. As she was an artist, Balero made the pattern herself — daring, unheard of — and came back from Bahía Blanca, where she often went in her little car, with a ton of tulle and voile, all nylon, which was the latest thing. She even brought the thread to sew it with, also synthetic, with trim in pearl-strewn banlon. Her drawings accounted for the smallest details, and on top of that she made it her business to be present for the cutting and preliminary basting: everybody knew the seamstress had to be watched closely. Now then, Delia was especially prudish, more than most. She was almost malevolent in that sense; for years she had been alert to every moral irregularity in town. And when her acquaintances, the ones she talked to all day, began to ask her questions (because the Balero case was discussed with intense pleasure) she became annoyed and started to make threats — for example, that she would not sew that dress, the gown of white hypocritical infamy. . But of course she would! An order like that came once a year, or less. And with the useless husband that she had — according to the neighborhood consensus, she was not in a position to moralize. The situation was tailored for her, because one velocity was superimposed on another. I already said that when she put her hands to a job the fittings overlapped with the final stitch. . A pregnancy had a fixed term and speed, which is to say, a certain slowness; but this was not a matter of a baby’s layette; in Silvia Balero’s case it was an anachronism of timing, which attracted a lot of attention in town. The ceremony, the white dress, the husband. . It all had to be carried out quickly, in an instant, in the blink of an eye, that was the only way it would work. And it didn’t really work, because anyone who might claim an opinion that would matter to Silvia was already on notice. It’s something to think about, why she went to so much trouble. Probably because she was obligated to do it.

She was a girl whose twentieth year had passed without a fiancé, without marriage. She was a professional, in her way. She had studied drawing, or something like that, in an academy in Bahía Blanca; she taught classes at the nun’s school (her job was in jeopardy), at the National College, and to private students; she organized exhibitions, and that kind of thing. She was not only a licensed drawing teacher but a friend of the arts, she was almost avant-garde. It was true she’d gotten only as far as the Impressionists, but there’s no need to be too harsh on that point. For Pringlenses at that time you had to explain Impressionism, and start history all over again, with courage. She did not lack courage, even if perhaps it was only her foolish thoughtlessness. And she was pretty, very pretty even, a tall blonde with marvelous green eyes, but that is what always happens to spinsters: being pretty to no effect. To have been pretty in vain.

The real problem was not her, but the husband. Who could it be? It was a mystery. It takes two to get married. She was getting married, for love, as they said (or they made her say in the stories: everything was very indirect), and not out of necessity. . very well, it was a lie but very well. Except, to whom? Because the subject, the responsible party, was married, and had three daughters. Hysterics of the type who took their nuptial fantasies for reality were abundant among the spinsters of Pringles. They represented an almost magical power. And from Balero one might well expect something like that, even if no one had expected it of her before. This was all supposition, commentary, gossip, but it was advisable to pay attention to it because as a general rule that was as right as the truth.