The Seamstress and the Wind

7

DELIA SIFFONI WAS already crazy, and the disappearance of her only son drove her crazy again. She went into a frenzy. Prodigious spectacle, perennial postcard, transcendental cinema, scene of scenes: to see a madwoman go mad. It’s like seeing God. The history of the last decades has made this occasion stranger and stranger. Although I was a witness, I would not dare attempt a description. I defer to the judgment of the neighborhood, where the members of the same sex as the defendant always got the last word. The men were in charge of the men, the women of the women. My mother was an enthusiastic supporter of desperation when it came to children. According to her, there was nothing to do but howl, lose your head, make scenes. Luckily she never had to: she had German blood, she was discreet and reserved in the extreme, and I don’t know how she would have managed it. Anything less was equivalent to being “calm,” which in her allusive but very precise language meant not loving your offspring. Beyond desperation she saw nothing. Later she did see, she saw too much, when our happiness fell apart, but at that time she was very strict: the scene, the curtain of screaming — and beyond it nothing. The fact was, neither she nor any woman she knew had ever had to go mad with anguish; life was not very novelistic then. . The madness of a mother could only be unleashed, hypothetically, by some horrendous accident to her children. And everything happened to us — we were free, savage children — but not the definitively horrendous. We didn’t get lost, we didn’t disappear. . How could we get lost in a town where everyone knew each other, and almost everyone was more or less related? A child could only be lost in labyrinths and they didn’t exist among us. Even so, it did exist if only as a fear, the accident existed: an invisible force dragged the accident toward reality, and kept dragging at it even there, giving it the most capricious forms, reordering over and over its details and circumstances, creating it, annihilating it, with all the unmatched power of fiction. There lay the happiness of Pringles, and there it must still lie.

It can’t seem strange, then, that in the midst of that ordeal Delia saw herself before the abyss, before the magnetic field of the abyss, and she rushed forward. What else could she do?