by AIRA, CESAR
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. This 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. That one gave them the model.
The 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. The 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.
The 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. They 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. That she also worked, a very strange thing in our milieu, didn’t exempt her, but rather made her all the more suspect. The 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. The 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. The 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. The 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. The 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.
The 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. They 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. This 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.
7
DELIA SIFFONI WAS already crazy, and the disappearance of her only son drove her crazy again. She went into a frenzy. Prodigious spectacle, perennial postcar
d, transcendental cinema, scene of scenes: to see a madwoman go mad. It’s like seeing God. The history of the last decades has made this occasion stranger and stranger. Although I was a witness, I would not dare attempt a description. I defer to the judgment of the neighborhood, where the members of the same sex as the defendant always got the last word. The men were in charge of the men, the women of the women. My mother was an enthusiastic supporter of desperation when it came to children. According to her, there was nothing to do but howl, lose your head, make scenes. Luckily she never had to: she had German blood, she was discreet and reserved in the extreme, and I don’t know how she would have managed it. Anything less was equivalent to being “calm,” which in her allusive but very precise language meant not loving your offspring. Beyond desperation she saw nothing. Later she did see, she saw too much, when our happiness fell apart, but at that time she was very strict: the scene, the curtain of screaming — and beyond it nothing. The fact was, neither she nor any woman she knew had ever had to go mad with anguish; life was not very novelistic then . . . The madness of a mother could only be unleashed, hypothetically, by some horrendous accident to her children. And everything happened to us — we were free, savage children — but not the definitively horrendous. We didn’t get lost, we didn’t disappear . . . How could we get lost in a town where everyone knew each other, and almost everyone was more or less related? A child could only be lost in labyrinths and they didn’t exist among us. Even so, it did exist if only as a fear, the accident existed: an invisible force dragged the accident toward reality, and kept dragging at it even there, giving it the most capricious forms, reordering over and over its details and circumstances, creating it, annihilating it, with all the unmatched power of fiction. There lay the happiness of Pringles, and there it must still lie.
It can’t seem strange, then, that in the midst of that ordeal Delia saw herself before the abyss, before the magnetic field of the abyss, and she rushed forward. What else could she do?
8
THE ABYSS THAT opened before Delia Siffoni had (and still has) a name: Patagonia. When I tell the French I come from there (barely lying) they open their mouths with admiration, almost with incredulity. There are a lot of people all over the world who dream of traveling some day to Patagonia, that extreme end of the planet, a beautiful and inexpressible desert, where any adventure might happen. They’re all more or less resigned to never getting that far, and I have to admit they’re right. What would they go there to do? And how would they get there, anyway? All the seas and cities are in the way, all the time, all the adventures. It’s true that tour companies simplify trips quite a bit these days, but for some reason I keep thinking that going to Patagonia is not so easy. I see it as something quite different from any other trip. My life was carried to Patagonia on a gust of wind, in a moment, that day in my childhood, and it stayed there. I don’t think traveling is worth the trouble if you don’t bring your life along with you. It’s something I’m confirming at my own expense during these melancholy days in Paris. It’s paradoxical, but a journey is bearable only if it’s insignificant, if it doesn’t count, if it doesn’t leave a mark. A person travels, goes to the other side of the world, but leaves his life packed away at home, ready to be recovered on his return. But when he’s far away he wonders if perhaps he might have brought his life with him by accident, and left nothing at home. The doubt is enough to create an atrocious fear, unbearable above all because it is a baseless fear, a melancholy.
There’s always a reason given for rushing into things. That’s what reasons are for. The one Delia used was not only correct in itself but also appropriate for what had happened, along general lines, leaving some details aside. That day at noon, just when we were playing in the street, Chiquito had set out in his truck for Comodoro Rivadavia, carrying I don’t know what, probably wool. My Aunt Alicia, who rented him a room in her house, had seen him leave, after an early lunch she’d prepared for him. He’d filled the tank in the morning to prepare for the crossing and then climbed into the truck after lunch, started the engine and left in a hurry. What could be more natural than that a boy playing in the empty box might be imprisoned by the movement, fail to make himself heard, and be carried by accident to who-knew-where — a perfectly involuntary kidnapping? It was unlikely the truck driver would stop before nightfall, and by then he would already be past the Río Negro, well into Patagonia. Chiquito’s endurance was formidable, he was a bull, and in this case he’d even made some comment (and if he hadn’t made it, Alicia could well have invented it) about how urgently they were waiting for that shipment and how convenient it was to leave after a good lunch and make a long haul all at once, etc.
Several hours had already passed, and the whole neighborhood was on tenterhooks over the case of the lost boy. Mr. Siffoni had taken the matter in hand, although it might have been only to diminish his wife’s hysteria. As soon as the boy went missing a crisis was set off by the supposition of a forced departure in the truck’s cab or trailer, which was not entirely unreasonable. It was almost too obvious. The neighbor women were a little guilty of presenting it that way to Delia. Next they did something absolutely unheard-of: they called a taxi, so as not to lose another minute going after the truck. In Pringles there were two taxis, and they were only used for going to the Roca train station. One of them, Zaralegui’s, had to be called by phone. He must not really have understood the matter at hand, or he wouldn’t have undertaken the trip. It was absurd, since his 1930s Chrysler could never reach the cruising speed of a truck a quarter of a century more modern. But they didn’t think it was strange for the pursuer to be slower than the pursued. On the contrary, it seemed that by the logic of the long term it would have to catch up — what else could happen?
In the rush of departure, Delia, who was acting like a lunatic, snatched up her sewing kit and the wedding dress she was working on, thinking she could keep working during the journey, because the job was so urgent. Now, if that was the case, if the work was urgent, the neighbors might wonder, why didn’t she work, instead of spending the day keeping up with everything in the street? She was out of her mind at that critical moment: an enormous wedding dress with a vaporous white train and a volume exceeding her own (which was pretty meager) was the most awkward thing she could have chosen to bring. (I want to make a note here of an idea that may be useful later on: the only appropriate mannequin I can think of for a wedding dress is a snowman.) Besides, sewing a wedding dress in the back of a taxi, bouncing along those dirt roads that go south . . . Where would her famous meticulousness end?
And she left, like a crazy woman . . . The neighbors saw her go and stayed where they were, commenting and awaiting her return: The situation was so irrational they really thought she would be back at any minute. She hadn’t even locked up the house, she hadn’t even let her husband know . . . That was enough to justify the neighbor women staying there on the sidewalk in a circle, gossiping and waiting for Ramon Siffoni so they could tell him his wife had left, desperate, crazy (like a good mother), and still wasn’t back . . .
All this may seem very surreal, but that’s not my fault. I realize it seems like an accumulation of absurd elements, in keeping with the surrealist method, a way of attaining a scene of pure invention without the work of inventing it. Breton and his friends brought elements together from anywhere, from the most distant places; in fact they preferred them as far flung as possible, so that the surprise would be greater, the effect more effective. It’s interesting to observe that in their search for the distant they went — for example, in the “exquisite corpses” — only to what was closest at hand: the colleague, the friend, the wife. For my part, I don’t go near or far, because I’m not looking for anything. It’s as if everything had already happened. And, in fact, it did all happen; but at the same time it’s as if it hadn’t happened, as if it were happening now. Which is to say, as if nothing had happened.
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.