The Seamstress and the Wind Read Online Free PDF

immediately before death, ever. Although, of course, with death, the quintessentially unexpected, no experience can be called the last. Th ere’s always the possibility that it’s the next-to-last. Th is was an error on Delia’s part (her last moments!), the first of a strange series that would carry her very far.
    Some things seem eternal, and still they pass anyway. Death itself does that. Delia had lost sight of the earth a little while before, and she no longer knew if she was moving forward or backward, falling or rising, following the vertical or the horizontal . . . What did it matter, at that point? Th ere was always a new wind to take hold of her and play yo-yo with her. Where did they come from, those winds? Th e torrent seemed to come from a hole in the sky — the hole was invisible.
    But, as I say, suddenly it was over. Delia found herself on the earth again, and walking. She really didn’t know how it happened. But, there she was walking on her two legs, on the flat, clean-swept earth. She didn’t see a tree, a hill, anything. She forgot immediately the danger of death she had just faced.
    Delia loved to play the committed fatalist, the lady of death — every afternoon she felt prepared to spend the night at a wake; her conversations were full of cancer, blindness, paralysis, comas, heart attacks, widows, orphans. She had embodied this character with so much enthusiasm that it was now her theme, her position. It was an inclination she had chosen, because the safe and protected life she’d led, the cocoon of the small town middle class, placed her on the margin of any serious test in which her survival could be at stake. Her desire to live was exempt from any corroboration. And this also formed a part of her definitive being. While she flew, with no time to think or react (which are the same thing), she had clung to her old philosophy. Yet now that she was walking, safe and sound, time was opening up beneath her feet; her legs were the scissors that cut the translucent stalk of time and continuously opened and unfolded it. And because of this she saw before her the urgent necessity to give way to certain ideas about reality and to renounce momentarily that “what does it matter, I’m dead already anyway” that constituted her elegance.
    She didn’t know where she was or where she was headed — or even what time it was. To start with, how was it possible that it was daytime? It was night, she felt that in her body and her mind. And yet, it was day. What insane zone had she fallen into?
    Th en this is Patagonia? she said to herself, perplexed. And if this is Patagonia, then what am I?

11
    MEANWHILE, WHEN NIGHT had almost fallen, Ramón Siffoni returned to the neighborhood in his little red truck and found a committee of anguish waiting for him.
    “Omar wasn’t lost!” he began, but he stopped there, because he sensed that no one was listening. He was a nervous and bad-tempered man, impatient, demanding and dissatisfied. “ Where’s my wife?” he asked.
    Th is was what the neighbors were waiting for.
    “She took a taxi to Patagonia.”
    If they’d bored a hole in the back of his neck with a drill they couldn’t have shaken him more badly.
    Th ey explained it to him, but who knows if anything got through his crust of rage. But something must have gotten through, because he got back into his red wreck of a truck and took off with a noise like rattling tin cans — also headed south, where everyone seemed to be going that day.
    What he didn’t see was parked on the corner — a little sky-blue one-seater car, the kind that had to be dismantled from the top for the driver to get in: it began to follow him. Such a maneuver was highly unusual, perhaps the first, and the last time, such a thing happened in Pringles.
    And even so, it went unnoticed. Th e neighbor women were dazzled by the abrupt gesture, romantic in its way, of the angry husband. And Ramón Siffoni . . . what could he notice, in his