The Seamstress and the Wind

9

DURING THE TAXI ride Delia didn’t sew a stitch or open her mouth. She rode along stiffly in the back seat with her gaze fixed on the road, hoping against hope that she would see the truck. Zaralegui didn’t say anything either, but his silence had a different density, because it was the last afternoon of his life. He could have said his last words, but he kept them to himself. He concentrated on driving; though the traffic on the road didn’t demand much attention (there was none), the potholes did. He was a good professional. He must have been intrigued, or at least confused, by what was happening. No one had ever taken him on such an inexplicable trajectory before, and he must have been wondering how far, how long. .. He wouldn’t wonder much longer, poor man, because very soon he was going to die.

What happened was that, many hours down the road, an enormous truck suddenly hurled itself into them, into Zaralegui at the wheel, in front. Except that the truck was smashed not in front, but behind. Or rather they were the ones who hurled themselves into the truck, and at full speed, at the multiplied speed that only occurs when two vehicles collide head-on. Who knows how it could have happened, since they were both going in the same direction. Maybe the truck had reduced its speed a little, a very little, and this was equivalent to a fantastic acceleration on the part of the car coming up from behind. (To explain this episode to myself, as with so many others, I am assuming, not very realistically, enormous speeds.) What’s certain is that the Chrysler was smashed against the back of the tractor trailer in the most savage manner — was destroyed, reduced to a shell of crushed tin. And not only that: it stuck there, like a meteorite that had collided with a planet, and it continued its travels, suspended. The truck driver, ninety feet ahead, didn’t even notice. Those trucks really were like planets. Anyone driving one would never know what was happening at its unreachable extremities — especially pulling a trailer, like another planet rolling along behind.

Zaralegui died instantly; he had no time to think anything. Delia, who was riding in the back, busy attaching a bodice with her miniscule stitches, was unscathed. But the crash, the jolt, the adhesion to the planet, and Zaralegui’s backwards leap, which brought him to rest in her arms like a baby, already dead, in a rosebud of tulle, produced a considerable shock. She lost consciousness and continued the journey asleep, without seeing the landscape. It was more of an hysterical coma than sleep, and she emerged from it a different woman, gone crazy for the third time. She never knew it, but the truck driver had parked on the side of the road and slept all night in his bunk bed, the little compartment those trucks have behind the cab, and then resumed the trip at dawn and didn’t stop the whole next day.

When Delia awoke, the sun was setting over the province of Santa Cruz.