The Seamstress and the Wind Read Online Free PDF Page A

competed for the dust raised by the truck and fought fiercely with the vehicle’s own wind, packed and wrapped by speed. Th ey unwrapped this package a thousand times a second with a sound like paper in the air, they untied the ribbons of gravity, they tore up in their hurry, like children driven by the sight of toys, both its rigid and fluid folds.
    Zaralegui gave two half-somersaults twelve feet in the air; no acrobat in the world could have imitated his pirouettes with the broken spine that he had. Th en he went flying off to one side. Since his arms were moving, agitated by the same force that carried him, he seemed alive. What a spectacle! But the conjunction of the pothole and the whirlwind must have made a catapult, because Zaralegui wasn’t the only one who flew: he was followed by the dress, Delia, and the car, in that order. When the dress opened the enormous white wings of its train and rose, at a supersonic velocity, up and away, Delia felt dispossessed. It was her work that was going, and she was left out, useless. She thought she’d never get it back. And then when Delia herself took flight, all her feelings contracted into terror. It was the first time she flew.
    Th e earth dropped away, the truck too — (the last she saw of it was the back wall of the trailer, from which the black cocoon that had been the Chrysler was coming loose, to take its turn at flying) — the sky approached vertiginously. She closed her eyes and after an instant opened them again.
    Th e sun, which had already set on the surface, appeared again at the end of the world; it was the first time she’d seen the sun after it had set. It was as red as a red rubber ball slick with luminous oil. And it was in a strange place: although visible, it stayed below the line of the horizon, in a niche. It was the nighttime sun, which no one had ever seen.
    And it’s not as if Delia lingered in contemplation of the sun. It couldn’t even be said that she looked at it. She wasn’t even thinking, and thinking always comes before looking. Flying was an absorbing activity for her — so much so, and so absorbing of life, that she was absolutely convinced she would not survive. And how could she? Th e contradictory currents of the wind had carried her, in two or three somersaults, to a height of more than a hundred yards. Th e circle of the horizon changed position as if the compass had fallen into the hands of a lunatic. Th e winds seemed to be shouting berserkly: “You take her! . . . Give her here!” — amid uncanny bursts of laughter. Delia was thrown back and forth, vibrating, vibrating, like a heart in the heights and depths of love, or in space.
    “ Th ese are my last moments,” she screamed to herself without moving her lips. Th e last seconds of her life, and afterward there would be only the black night of death . . . Her anguish was unspeakable. Talking in terms of seconds was rhetoric, but it was also a great truth. Th e mad winds seemed bold enough to turn the seconds into minutes, and even hours, and if they felt like it, it would not be out of place to say days. But even so they would be seconds, because anguish compresses time, whatever interval of time, to the painful dimensions of seconds.
    I should at least take advantage of this experience, she managed to say to herself, since there won’t be another one to follow it.
    But that was, from any point of view, impossible. Enjoyment is impossible when everything is impossible; what’s more, there was no point of view; the show she was putting on didn’t have a point of view, since there was no one to see it. Th ere in the limpid heights of twilight, she spun around so many times at a speed greater than sound, that she no longer had relative positions. She was a collage, a figure cut out and moved by a capricious artist, filmed in fast-forward against the pinkest and smoothest backdrop in the world (or in the sky) and illuminated by a red spotlight. No one enjoys the experience