The Seamstress and the Wind (2 page)

4

IT’S INCREDIBLE, THE
speed a chain of events can take, starting with one that could be called immobile. It’s a kind of vertigo; straightaway events do not occur: they become simultaneous. It’s the ideal resource for getting rid of memory, for making an anachronism of any recollection. Starting from that slip of mine, everything began to happen at once. Especially for Delia Siffoni, Omar’s mother. Her son’s disappearance affected her deeply, it affected her mind, which must have surprised me since she wasn’t the emotional type; she was one of those women, so abundant then in Pringles, on the poor outskirts where we lived, who — before ceasing to bear children forever — had a single child, a boy, and raised him with a certain severe coolness. Each of my friends was an only child, each more or less the same age, each with that kind of mother.
Th
ey were maniacal about cleanliness, they did not allow dogs, they acted like widows. And always:
a single male child. I don’t know how, later on, there came to be women in Argentina.

Delia Siffoni and my mother had been friends when they were children.
Th
en she’d left town, and when she came back, married and with a six- or seven-year-old boy, she ended up renting, completely by chance, the house next to ours.
Th
e two friends were reacquainted. And the two of us, Omar and I, became inseparable, all day together in the street. Our mothers, on the other hand, maintained that distance tinged with malevolence typical of the local women. Mamá found many defects in Delia, but that was practically a hobby for her. In the first place, she thought Delia was crazy, unbalanced: they all were, when you started thinking about it.
Th
en the mania for cleaning; you have to recognize that Delia was exemplary. She kept her little parlor hermetically sealed, and no one ever entered it under any pretext.
Th
e single bedroom was resplendent, and so was the kitchen.
Th
ose three rooms were the whole house, and their house was an exact copy of ours. Several times a day she swept both patios, the front and the back, including the chicken coop; and the sidewalk, which was dirt, was always sprayed down. She devoted herself to that. We’d nicknamed her “the pigeon,” because of her nose and eyes; my mother was an expert at finding animal resemblances.
Th
e way Delia talked also contributed to this: her voice was whispery and abrupt, as were her manners and movements when she was on the sidewalk (she was always outside: another defect): she would move away from her interlocutor with light little steps and then come back again, a thousand times, she’d go, she’d come back, she’d remember something else she had to say . . .

Delia had a profession, a trade, which made her an exception among the women of the neighborhood, who were only housewives and mothers, like mine. She was a seamstress (a seamstress, exactly, now I see the coincidence); she could even have made a living with her work, and in fact she did, because her husband had I don’t know what vague shipping job and you couldn’t really say that he worked in the broadest terms. She had a good reputation as a seamstress, trustworthy and very neat, although she had terrible taste. She did everything perfectly, but you had to give her very precise instructions and keep an eye on her up to the very last minute or she would ruin it by following some nefarious inspiration. But fast, she was extremely fast. When the customers came for a fitting . . .
Th
ere were four fittings, that was canonic in Pringlense couture. With Delia, the four fittings were muddled together in an instant, and anyway the garment was already finished. With her there was no time to change your mind, or anything else. She had lost a lot of her clientele because of it. She was always losing customers; it was a miracle she had any left. New ones were always appearing, that was the thing. Her supernatural velocity attracted them, like moths to a candle.

5

IN THE SUMMER,
birds woke me. We had only one bedroom for the whole family, in the front of the house, facing the street. My bed was under the window. My parents, country people, were in the habit of sleeping with the window closed; but I had read in the
Billiken
children’s magazine that it was much healthier to have it open, so when everyone was asleep I would stand on my bed and open it, barely a centimeter, without making the tiniest noise.
Th
e uproar of the little birds in the trees out front reached me before anyone else. I was the first one awake, startled by that burst of sharp sounds, just as I had been the last to fall asleep, at the end of an interminable session of mental horrors. And yet it always turned out that my mother had fallen asleep after me, and woken up before. I would find out indirectly, by some remark, and later I knew she stayed up past midnight knitting, sewing, listening to the radio, playing the piano — that last one was a curious pastime, but she had once been the town pianist, she had neither time nor desire to practice in the daytime, and it never woke me up. When the birds did wake me in the morning she had already been bustling around for some time. I don’t know how that could have been, because without denying one reality, I went on believing the other: that I lay awake while she slept, that I even saw her sleeping (I believe I see her still), sleeping profoundly, abandoned to sleep, which made her more beautiful. Her wakefulness was misfiled in sleep. Might she have been a sleepwalker? Her curious habit of playing the piano (Clementi, Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, and a transcription of
Lucia di Lammermoor
) in the depths of the night suggested it. I never heard it, she must have made sure I was sound asleep, but to this day I can evoke that supernaturally sedative nocturnal music, each note untying every knot in my life.
Th
at must be where my tortured passion for music started, music I don’t understand, the strangest, most absurd, most avant-garde — to me none of it seems advanced or incomprehensible enough. As an adult, I discovered that my mother slept deeply, she was privileged, a Queen of Sleep, one of those people who could sleep forever, all their lives, if they set themselves to it. But back then she had the coquetry of insomnia, and when by chance she referred to the night it was to say “ I didn’t sleep a wink.” Like all children, I must have believed her word for word. I am also a King of Sleep; I sleep like a log.

In the summer I woke up very early, with the birds, because the dawn was very early then, much earlier than now. Time didn’t change according to the seasons then, and Pringles was very far south, where the days were longer. At four, I think, the chorus of birds would begin. But there was one, one bird, the one that woke me up on those summer mornings, a bird with the strangest and most beautiful song you could imagine. I never heard anything like it afterwards. His twittering was atonal, insanely modern, a melody of random notes, sharp, clean, crystalline. It was special because it was so unexpected, as if a scale existed and the bird chose four or five notes from it in an order that systematically sidestepped any expectations. But the order could not
always
be unexpected, there is no method like that: by pure chance it would have to meet some expectation, the law of probabilities demands it. And yet, it did not.

In fact, it was not a bird. It was Mr. Siffoni’s truck, when he turned the crank. In those days you had to turn a crank on the front of a car to make the engine turn over.
Th
is was a really old vehicle, a little square truck, a red tin can, and it wasn’t clear how it kept running. After the marvelous trill came the pathetic coughing of the engine. I wonder if that wasn’t what woke me up, and that I imagined the previous. I often have, even today, these waking dreams.
Th
at one gave them the model.

Th
e little red truck stood out against the clean and beautiful colors of the Pringlense dawn, the perfect blue sky, the green trees, the golden dirt of our street.
Th
e summer was the only season when Ramón Siffoni worked as a trucker. He relaxed the rest of the year. Not even in season did he work much, according to my parents, who criticized him for it. He didn’t even get up early, they said (but I knew the truth).

Next to our house on the other side lived a professional trucker, a real one. He had a very modern truck, enormous, with a trailer (the very same one in which Omar and I had played on that ill-fated day), and he made long trips to the most distant reaches of Argentina. Not just in summer, like Siffoni making casual fair-weather hauls in his toy truck, but serious trips. His name was Chiquito, he was half-related to us, and sometimes when I left for school in the dead of winter, when the sky was still dark, I would find that he’d left me a snowman on the doorstep, a sign that he’d gone off on a long trip.

Th
e snowman . . . the lovely postcard of the little red truck in the pale blue and green dawn . . . the senses celebrating. And all of that was suddenly shaken by the disappearance.

6

MY PARENTS WERE
realistic people, enemies of fantasy.
Th
ey judged everything by work, their universal standard for measuring their fellow man. Everything else hung on that criterion, which I inherited wholly and without question; I have always venerated work above all else; work is my god and my universal judge, but I never worked, because I never needed to, and my passion exempted me from working because of a bad conscience or a fear of what others might say.

In family conversations in my house it was our habit to review the merits of neighbors and acquaintances. Ramón Siffoni was one of those who came out of this scrutiny in bad standing. His wife didn’t escape condemnation either, because my parents, realists that they were, never made wives out to be victims of their slothful husbands.
Th
at she also worked, a very strange thing in our milieu, didn’t exempt her, but rather made her all the more suspect.
Th
e thin seamstress, so small, so bird-like, neurotic to the highest degree, whose business hours were impossible to determine because she was always gossiping in the doorway — what did she really do? It was a mystery.
Th
e mystery was part of the judgment, because my parents, being realists, were aware of the fact that the recompense of work was fickle and too often undeserved.
Th
e enigmatic divinity of work was made flesh, in a negative suspension of judgment, in Delia Siffoni. My mother could spot the clothes she made on any woman in town (she certainly knew them all) — they were perfect, insanely neat, above all on Saturday nights when they made their usual rounds and afterward she would mention them to Delia; it seemed a little hypocritical to me, but I didn’t really understand her machinations very well. Epiphanies and hypocrisy, after all, are part of the divine plan.

At that precise moment in her professional life, and in her life generally, Delia had fallen into a trap of her own design. Silvia Balero, the drawing teacher, sworn innocent and candidate for spinsterhood, was getting married in a hurry. For appearances’ sake she would do it in the church, in white. And the order for the wedding dress was given to Delia. As she was an artist, Balero made the pattern herself — daring, unheard of — and came back from Bahía Blanca, where she often went in her little car, with a ton of tulle and voile, all nylon, which was the latest thing. She even brought the thread to sew it with, also synthetic, with trim in pearl-strewn banlon. Her drawings accounted for the smallest details, and on top of that she made it her business to be present for the cutting and preliminary basting: everybody knew the seamstress had to be watched closely. Now then, Delia was especially prudish, more than most. She was almost malevolent in that sense; for years she had been alert to every moral irregularity in town. And when her acquaintances, the ones she talked to all day, began to ask her questions (because the Balero case was discussed with intense pleasure) she became annoyed and started to make threats — for example, that she would not sew that dress, the gown of white hypocritical infamy . . . But of course she would! An order like that came once a year, or less. And with the useless husband that she had — according to the neighborhood consensus, she was not in a position to moralize.
Th
e situation was tailored for her, because one velocity was superimposed on another. I already said that when she put her hands to a job the fittings overlapped with the final stitch . . . A pregnancy had a fixed term and speed, which is to say, a certain slowness; but this was not a matter of a baby’s layette; in Silvia Balero’s case it was an anachronism of timing, which attracted a lot of attention in town.
Th
e ceremony, the white dress, the husband . . . It all had to be carried out quickly, in an instant, in the blink of an eye, that was the only way it would work. And it didn’t really work, because anyone who might claim an opinion that would matter to Silvia was already on notice. It’s something to think about, why she went to so much trouble. Probably because she was obligated to do it.

She was a girl whose twentieth year had passed without a fiancé, without marriage. She was a professional, in her way. She had studied drawing, or something like that, in an academy in Bahía Blanca; she taught classes at the nun’s school (her job was in jeopardy), at the National College, and to private students; she organized exhibitions, and that kind of thing. She was not only a licensed drawing teacher but a friend of the arts, she was almost avant-garde. It was true she’d gotten only as far as the Impressionists, but there’s no need to be too harsh on that point. For Pringlenses at that time you had to explain Impressionism, and start history all over again, with courage. She did not lack courage, even if perhaps it was only her foolish thoughtlessness. And she was pretty, very pretty even, a tall blonde with marvelous green eyes, but that is what always happens to spinsters: being pretty to no effect. To have been pretty in vain.

Th
e real problem was not her, but the husband. Who could it be? It was a mystery. It takes two to get married. She was getting married, for love, as they said (or they made her say in the stories: everything was very indirect), and not out of necessity . . . very well, it was a lie but very well. Except, to whom? Because the subject, the responsible party, was married, and had three daughters. Hysterics of the type who took their nuptial fantasies for reality were abundant among the spinsters of Pringles.
Th
ey represented an almost magical power. And from Balero one might well expect something like that, even if no one had expected it of her before.
Th
is was all supposition, commentary, gossip, but it was advisable to pay attention to it because as a general rule that was as right as the truth.