The Seamstress and the Wind Read Online Free PDF Page B

state? He ran, he launched himself off, to keep his wife from committing the greatest mistake of her life. And if his old red truck was not as fast as it needed to be, it didn’t matter, because what he wanted at that moment was an interplanetary rocket ship.
    He was going, as anyone with a map can verify, southeast. Which is to say, in the two directions that lengthen the day in the Argentine summer. And as he was beside himself, he was the southeast. Th at worked. Th e day began to lengthen like a snake, and the red truck, which in the immensities it now slid across was becoming truly small, was the blazing hungry head of the snake, with its tongue sticking out: the tongue was the crank with its two right angles which in his haste Ramón had forgotten to take off.

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    BUT HE WAS not alone. A half mile or so behind, the gaze of a lady at the wheel was fixed on his trail of dust, driving a little sky-blue car, one of the smallest and lightest ever constructed. Th e fact that it was as light as a yawn mattered less (or didn’t matter at all) in view of the important mystery the little car held. Th at was everything. Th at little car was the mystery, and it was more than that: it was mystery in motion. Th ose vehicles, made for mobility in cities, for short distances, were an eccentricity of the fifties and sixties, and forgotten afterwards. We called them “mice.” Only one not very fat person fit, and only if they were tightly folded-up. No one ever thought of traveling in one of those cars. And yet this one, a pale blue example of the tiniest model, threw itself into the longest and most dangerous chase, almost like a miniature replica of something else — a toy intruding into the adult world. Surrounding it, Patagonia, gigantic and deserted, was beginning to open its vast mouth. But the car was not afraid. It pressed on, at full speed, almost as if it knew where it was going, or as if it were going somewhere. Or as if it were not going anywhere. It was the magnet-car, the soda bubble in the wind, the blue point of the sky, mystery in all its dimensions. Th e proverb says mystery does not occupy space. All right, fine; but it crosses it.

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    VERY WELL. NOW all the protagonists in the adventure are on stage. Let me see if I can make an orderly list:
    1) Th e huge tractor trailer, Chiquito’s double planet, leading the way.
    2) Th e shell of Zaralegui’s Chrysler, at this point looking more than anything like a black lacquered Chinese bathtub.
    3) Zaralegui’s corpse.
    4) Delia Siffoni, lost and wandering around.
    5) Silvia Balero’s wedding dress, carried by the wind.
    6) Ramón Siffoni in his red truck (a day behind).
    7) And closing the retinue, the mysterious little blue car.
    Of course, it’s not that simple. Th ere are other characters, who are now going to appear . . . Or better yet, no. It’s not that there are other characters (these are all of them) but revelations will transform these characters into others, making room for encounters that Delia Siffoni never would have expected, neither she nor any of the other Delia Siffonis in the world, with all of them beginning, there in Patagonia, a dance of transformations.
    Th ere are drunks who, starting at a certain point in the evening, sample all kinds of mixes: they drink anything, a glass of any alcohol at hand, at random. We know how imprudent this policy is, but they laugh and keep going; you have to recognize their astonishing physical vigor, their superhuman stamina, which they might have been born with but which they’ve certainly developed further with this habit — the paradox of self-destruction, which conversely never quite arrives. Th ey mix everything, and they don’t worry . . . it all contributes to the same effect, which is inebriation, their personal inebriation, which is singular, unique. And if he also is singular, the drinker says to himself, what does it matter how many elements there are to take him to that sublime level of unity . .