by AIRA, CESAR
The castaway marched toward the front of the truck, and on coming to the cabin she went carefully around, walking on tiptoe to see inside. The windshield, the size of a movie screen, covered the upper half of the truck’s flat front end. The constellations were reflected in the glass, and there was also a collection of butterflies smashed across it that the driver had not taken the trouble to clean off. The little pieces of wing, pale blue, orange, yellow, all with a metallic brilliance that intensified the light from the sky — were stuck there by their phosphorescent gel, tracing out capricious shapes in which Delia, even in her distraction, recognized lambs, tiny cars, trees, profiles, even butterflies.
Inside she saw no one, but that didn’t surprise her. She knew that truck drivers, when they parked for the night to sleep, went to bed in a little compartment behind the cabin, sometimes with room for two people or more. People said they were pretty comfortably arranged. She’d never seen one, but she’d heard about them. Omar, her son, had told her about the personal comforts Chiquito had in his truck, which we were always climbing on when we played. Even after making the appropriate deprecations for fantasy and the relative dimensions of a child, she’d believed him, because others had confirmed it and it was reasonable anyway. She was sure this nocturnal truck, so large and modern, would be no smaller than the one in her neighborhood (she didn’t know it was the same one).
She went to the driver’s side door and knocked. She waited a moment, and as there was no response, she knocked again. She waited. Nothing. She knocked again. Toc toc. No one answered. The truck driver did not awake. But . . . what a smell of fried eggs! Delia had not had a bite to eat in an enormous number of hours, so that more than surprising her, she was beside herself with indignation that that incongruous smell taunted her so impishly, and it roused her to knock on the door again. “I’m going in,” she said to herself, as the silence persisted. Even so, she waited a little, and knocked again. It was useless. She knocked once more, now without much hope, and stood there for another moment, intent and expectant. She caught the smell again. It seemed obvious that it was coming from inside the truck; the truck driver must have been making dinner. And with her outside, dead from hunger and exhaustion, hundreds of miles from home! “I’m going in there, I don’t care,” she thought, but a remaining scrap of courtesy made her knock again, three times with her knuckles on the solid metal of the door, which felt like iron. She waited to see if he happened to hear her this time, but he didn’t.
Getting in, once the decision was made, was not so easy. Those trucks seemed to be made for giants. The door was extremely high. But it had a kind of foothold and from there she managed to reach the handle. It wasn’t locked, but activating the hydraulic door handle demanded almost superhuman strength. In the end she managed it by hanging from it with all her weight. The door of a truck, like any vehicle, inverse to that of a house, opens out. And this one opened all the way, welcoming her, but also carrying her along on its arc . . . The foothold disappeared from beneath her feet and she was left swinging there, hanging from the handle, six feet off the ground. She couldn’t believe she was pirouetting like this, like a naughty child. “And now what do I do?” she wondered with alarm. There did not appear to be a solution. She could let herself fall, trusting that she wouldn’t break a leg, and then climb up again by the foothold, in which case she didn’t see how she would be able to shut the door again, although that was the least of her problems. In any case, she did it the hard way: she stretched out a leg and pushed off hard from the wall of the cab, so the door began to swing shut; and then before it could make contact, at just the right moment, she let go of the handle and grabbed the side mirror. Hanging there she managed to get her body far enough into the opening to place a foot inside, and with a second act of risky acrobatics she let go of the door handle for good and got hold of the steering wheel. This was not as firm as her previous supports; it turned, and Delia, surprised, was suddenly horizontal, and in the rush of falling she opened both hands and brought them to her face. Luckily she fell inside, on the floor of the cab, but with her head hanging out, and the door, on its last swing, was coming toward her . . . It would have neatly decapitated her if an unknown force hadn’t stopped it a millimeter from her neck. The sharp metal edge retreated softly and Delia, without waiting for it to come back, pulled her head out of the way. She moved around, extremely uncomfortable, trying to get onto the seat. The space was so large, or she was so small, that she was able to stand up, with her back to the windshield.
She tried to turn halfway around to sit and wait for her heart to calm down, but she couldn’t. With terror she felt a steely pressure that circled her waist and kept her from moving. If she had fainted — and it wouldn’t have taken much more of that paralyzing fear to make her do it — she would have stayed on her feet, held up by the pitiless ring. And it wasn’t an illusion, or a cramp; she put both hands on her waist and felt a kind of rigid snake, hard and smooth to the touch, circling her like an impious belt. She tried to scream, but no sound came from her open mouth. She could turn right and left, but always in the same spot — the thing didn’t give even an inch, although curiously it allowed itself to make a quarter-turn with her every time she tried it. It took her several agonizing seconds to understand that when she’d gotten to her feet she’d put her body through the steering wheel, which now had her by the waist.
She clambered up out of it and let herself fall on the seat, which smelled like leather and grease, and curled up panting, wondering for the thousandth time why such disagreeable things had to happen to her. She was so worn out she might have fallen asleep if it hadn’t been for the frying smell, which was, she noticed only now, even more intense inside the truck.
It took her a moment to calm down and reconsider her situation. She’d landed facing the windshield, and what she saw through it made her raise her head. Before her lay marvelous nighttime Patagonia, whole and limitless. It was a plateau as white as the moon, under a black sky filled with stars. Too big, too beautiful, to be taken in with a single gaze; and yet it must be, because no one has two gazes. The panorama appeared to repose against the pure black of the night, and at the same time it was pure light. It was scored with little black marks, like holes in space, that traced out sharp, capricious shapes, in which chance seemed to have been the determining factor in representing all of the things a fluctuating consciousness might want to recognize, but without recognizing them completely, as if the plethora of figures exceeded the existence of objects. Those marks were the reverse side of the pieces of butterfly wing stuck to the glass of the windshield.
When Delia could finally take her eyes off this splendid spectacle, she admired the instruments that adorned the dashboard. There were hundreds of gauges, little clocks, needles, switches, dials, buttons . . . Would a person need all that to drive a truck? There wasn’t one gear shift: there were three, and ten more bristled from the crossbar of the steering wheel. The wheel itself was so enormous it didn’t seem strange that she’d gotten stuck in it by accident; it would have been strange if she’d missed it. Underneath, in the shadows, she could make out a jumble of pedals. She felt very small, very diminished; she remembered to take her feet off the seat.
But then she had to put them on it again, and even worse, stand on it, to reach the trucker’s compartments. She knew from Omar’s descriptions that the entrance was above the headrest, and she leaned in to look. A double horizontal partition, which cut twice across a golden light. She thought of calling out, but some faint noises and the muffled echo of a voice made her suddenly afraid. The truth was she didn’t know what she had gotten herself into, what lion’s den. But it was no longer a question of retreat. With the ever-flawed logic of polite intruders, she preferred not to call out but to enter on tiptoe instead, to temper the surprise a bit; she didn’t want to give the unprepared trucker a heart attack, or fail to give him time to put on his pants.
She climbed in, legs first. When she let go she fell further tha
n expected. She slid down one of the screens, which was on an incline, being attached by hinges to the back wall of the cab. In this highway bedroom she could now see what she had heard so much about. There were two beds very close together, both unmade. The disorder and filth were indescribable: comic books, clothes, dissected birds, knives, shoes . . . A lit candle on the bureau illuminated the little room. For a lost woman, alone, like Delia was, such an atmosphere could have presaged anything. Part of her consciousness knew that, and another part was occupied with trying to see what would happen next, and that part took the initiative: she went through one of the two doors at random, crossed a room full of junk she didn’t look at and went through another door, into a small room with leather armchairs. She stopped there, looking at them in disbelief. There was no light here except what came through an open door, through which she could hear noises. The room had four doors, one on each side. They were all open. She glanced into the darkest one, which led to a hallway, and then the next: an office, with a great roll-top desk, where the disorder and filth of the bedroom were repeated. She crossed the room and went out through the door on the other side, where she found herself in a vestibule with chairs. And three doors. She went through the first on the left: an unoccupied bedroom, with the bed made. Actually it seemed less like a bed than a kind of low, elastic table . . . There, also, was another door. She noticed, in retrospect, that it was the same in all the rooms, as if someone had been preoccupied with achieving maximum circulation. The result was that she was lost. She went on, and came somehow to the kitchen, which was the source of the light that spread throughout the whole labyrinth.
Here she thought the moment of truth had come, but there was nobody there. The burner was lit however, and two frying eggs crackled in the pan. The cook must have gone out for a moment, maybe in search of her, if he’d heard her. A large Petromax lantern cast a blinding light through the bastion of containers and foodstuffs. The pile of dirty dishes was incredible, and there were scraps thrown everywhere, even stuck to the walls and ceiling. A summary glance at the pan indicated that the eggs were almost perfect. On the counter, half a bottle of red wine and a glass. She lost her nerve and hurried out: she burst into the room she’d been in before, which seemed different to her now, as a new odor redoubled her trembling. Following a spiral of smoke with her eyes, she saw that in the ashtray on the end table was a recently lit Brasil cigarette. But there was still no one there . . . How strange.
Delia’s aversion to tobacco smoke was extreme and fairly inexplicable. She couldn’t conceive of smoking inside a house. She had managed to get her husband to give up the habit when they married, a minor but nonetheless remarkable miracle. To a certain extent, she’d forgotten about it. She stood watching with incredulous horror as the smoke rose in the supernatural stillness of the room.
Chiquito came in through the door from the hallway and leaned down to pick up the cigarette. He was in boxer shorts and an undershirt, hairy, unkempt, and with the face of a man who had few friends. He went into the kitchen.
He came back almost immediately with the fried eggs in the pan. He crossed the room and exited through the same door he’d come from before . . . At the end of the hall there was a dining room. Delia, peering out from behind the chair where she’d hidden, saw him sit down at the table, empty the frying pan over the plate and settle down to eat. She recognized him, and the surprise paralyzed her. In an instant, and without being any kind of intellectual, she was suddenly inspired to summarize the situation in an epigrammatic inversion of what she’d been saying up until now: in fact it was she, Delia herself, without meaning to, who had played a dirty trick on her own destiny.
Suddenly Chiquito let out a yelp. He’d put a whole egg in his mouth without remembering to take the cigarette out from between his lips, and the ember had burned his tongue. He spat out a jet of viscous yellow and white stuff, splattering a woman seated across from him. It was Silvia Balero, who had undergone a pronounced transformation since her last fitting with the seamstress: she was black. Down her black face, chest and arms ran the egg slobber, but she didn’t move a muscle. She looked like an ebony statue. Chiquito ran out groaning into the hallway and came back with a band-aid on his tongue. He drank several glasses of wine in a row. Miss Balero remained immobile, unblinking, and completely covered in that bruised black color. The truck driver finished his dinner, peeled an orange and threw the skin carelessly on the floor, and finally lit another cigarette. Through all of this he’d been talking to his guest, but with guttural, incomprehensible words. The black woman shook herself at intervals and let out some senseless phrases. It was incredible that a natural blonde with such a white complexion had taken on that dark veneer overnight. Chiquito, his accident already forgotten, was roaring with laughter; he seemed happy, not a care in the world . . .
Until he lit his third or fourth after-dinner Brasil cigarette and Delia, behind the armchair, couldn’t help a sigh or little cough of irritation (the air was becoming unbreathable): Chiquito heard her and turned his formidable bulk in a violent twist that made his chair creak as the legs scraped together. How strange that someone so solid had gotten that diminutive nickname: Chiquito. Surely they’d given it to him as a child, and it had stuck. To think of antiphrasis or irony would have been out of place given his background.
Delia crawled backwards to the closest door, and as soon as she thought she was out of sight she ran. Luckily there were exits everywhere . . . But that very extravagance only contributed to her running around in circles within the labyrinth, and increased the risk of running straight into the hands of her pursuer. Delia had abandoned any idea of asking for refuge or help in getting home. Not from him, at least. She hadn’t had time to think, with all the surprises and fear, but it didn’t matter. She was discovering that one could also think outside of time.
Chiquito was bearing down on her, shouting:
“Who’s there, who’s there . . .”
“At least he didn’t recognize me,” Delia said to herself, hoping even in her desperation to preserve their coexistence within the neighborhood . . . if she ever got back there.
She was looking for the bedroom she’d first come in through, to get out by way of the hanging screens . . . but she came out somewhere completely different, in a dark and intricate jumble of metal. She was helplessly caught in its twists and turns. As if the inertia weren’t enough, she insisted on continuing forward, sticking a leg in, and then another, an arm, her head . . . It was the truck’s engine, asleep for the moment . . . But what if it turned on? Those iron pieces, in motion, would grind her up in a second . . . She felt something sticky on her hands: it was filthy black grease that covered her from head to toe. It was the finishing touch. She could hardly move, neither backward nor forward, caught in the machinery from all sides . . . And Chiquito’s shouts and footsteps were getting closer, they boomed in the mastodonic pistons . . . she was lost!
At that moment a great jolt shook everything. For a moment Delia feared the most horrible thing had happened: the engine was starting. But it was not that. The agitation multiplied, and the whole truck danced clumsily on its thirty wheels. A deafening whistle enveloped it and passed through the metal walls. All the smells came back to her, and then vanished. A current of cold air touched her.
“The wind has picked up,” she automatically thought. And what a wind!
Chiquito’s reaction was surprising. He started to scream like a lunatic. It was as if his worst enemy had appeared at the very worst moment.
“You again, damn you! You damned wind! Son of a thousand whores! This time you won’t get away! I’m going to kill youuuuu!”
The wind’s response was to increase its force a thousand times. The truck shuddered, its metal walls rattled, the whole inside crashed together . . . and, most importantly, it seemed to expand with the air forced in under pressure — into the engine parts too . . . Delia felt herself get free, and immediately a current of air snatched her up and carried her away,
bouncing and sliding in the grease, toward a vortex in the radiator, in the grille where the whistles refracted like ten symphonic orchestras in a gigantic concert . . . The chrome grille flew off, and Delia jumped after it, and now she was outside, running like a gazelle.
19
SHE WAS SURPRISED how fast she was going, like an arrow. She often boasted, and rightly so, of her agility and energy; but that was inside the house, sweeping, washing, cooking and so on, hurrying through the neighborhood with short little steps when she went out to do her shopping, never running. Now she was running without any effort, and she was eating up the distance. The air whistled in her ears. “What speed!” she said to herself, “This is what fear can do!”
When she stopped, the whistling dropped to a whisper, but it persisted. The wind still wrapped itself around her.
“Delia . . . Delia . . .” a voice called, from very close by.
“Huh? Who . . .? What . . .? Who’s calling me?” asked Delia, but she corrected her somewhat peremptory tone for fear of offending; she felt so alone, and her name sounded so exquisitely sweet. “Yes? It’s me, I’m Delia. Who’s calling me?” She said it almost smiling, with an expression of intrigue and interest, if a little fearful as well, because it seemed like magic. There was no one nearby, or far away either, and the truck was no longer in sight.
“It’s me, Delia.”
“No, I’m Delia.”
“I mean: Delia, oh Delia, it’s me who speaks to you.”
“Who is me? Pardon me, sir, but I don’t see anyone.”
It was a man’s voice: low, refined, modulated with a superior calm.
“Me: the wind.”
“Ah. A voice carried by the wind? But where is the man?”
“There is no man. I am the wind.”
“The wind talks?”
“You’re hearing me.”