by AIRA, CESAR
We were a pair of healthy, normal children, nice enough to look at, good students . . . We adored our mothers and venerated our fathers, and feared them a little as well; they were so strict, such perfectionists . . . I believe we were the quintessence of petit bourgeois normalcy. And even so, though we didn’t realize it, it all rested on fear, the way the rock floats on the crest of the lava at the end of Journey to the Center of the Earth; fear — it might be said, the lava — was the biology, the plasma. To simplify by putting things in successive order, first came the fear the pregnant women felt (that is, it was beginning before we began ourselves), fear of giving birth to a monster. Reality, aristocratic and indifferent, followed its course. Then the fear was transformed . . . It’s all a question of the transformation of fears: this makes society volatile, changeable, worlds change, the distinct successive worlds that, added together, are life. One of the avatars of fear is: that the child is lost, that he disappears . . . Sometimes the fear is transferred from the mother to the father; sometimes it is not; the child registers these oscillations and is transformed in turn. That it might be the parents who disappear, that the wind might fall in love with the mother, that a monster might pursue them, that a truck driver might never lose his way because he carried his house with him like Raymond Roussel, etc. etc. etc., all that, and much more still to be seen, is part of literature.
Now I remember a type of candy that the children of Pringles adored in those days, a kind of ancestor of what afterwards became gum. It was very local, I don’t know who invented it nor when it disappeared, I only know that today it does not exist. It was a little ball wrapped in parchment paper, accompanied by a little loose stick, all very homemade. One had to chew it until it got spongy and grew enormously in volume; we knew it was ready when it no longer fit in our mouths. We’d take it out, and it would have transformed into an extremely light mass that had the property of changing shape when blown by the wind, to which we exposed it by putting it on the end of the little stick. That must be why it was only a local candy: the winds of Pringles are like knives. It was like having a portable cloud, and seeing it change and suggest all kinds of things . . . It was healthy and entertaining . . . The wind, which left us as we were (it limited itself to mussing our hair) ceaselessly transfigured the mass . . . and there was no point falling in love with a particular shape because it would already be another, then another . . . until suddenly it would solidify, or crystallize, into any one of the shapes that had been delighting us for so many minutes, and then we would eat it like a lollipop.
I said before, I think, that when it snowed at night Chiquito would come by at dawn and leave me, as a present for when I left for school, a snowman in the doorway of my house. For me, as for Omar, both of us ignorant of his secret life, Chiquito was a hero, with his truck as big as a mountain and his journeys across all of marvelous Argentina . . . The neighbors praised his heart, his slightly childish gesture — which did more justice to his name than to his herculean physique — for building a snowman at those impossible hours when he always set out, just to give me a fleeting surprise, a little pleasure. Sometimes, when I went out on those occasions, the wind had already started to blow, and my snowman received me with eight arms, or a humpback, or more often with a Picassoesque twist, the nose at the nape of the neck, the navel on the back, both shoulders on the same side . . . On my return at noon nothing would be left: it always melted.
But there was one snowman, (two or three winters before the summer in which the action of this novel takes place) that didn’t melt. When I came outside I was taken aback. No one had told me it had snowed. It was still dark, but I could see well enough; in front of me there was a snowman, three and a half feet high, that originally, when Chiquito stopped by to make it before he left, would have been one of those friendly squat dwarfs that snowmen always are. But in the meantime the snow had stopped falling, the wind had begun to blow, and the snowman had been modified on all four sides. This didn’t frighten me; on the contrary, I was so delighted I burst out laughing . . . The fact that the snowman would melt within a few hours didn’t worry me either . . . but it did worry him.
“When the sun comes out,” he said, “and it won’t be long, I will turn to water and the earth will swallow me.”
“When someone puts their foot in it they often say ‘May the earth swallow me up,’” I said. Even as a boy I was very pedantic and a know-it-all.
“But I’m not saying that! I don’t want to die.”
I said nothing. I couldn’t help him, but then to my surprise the wind spoke:
“That can be arranged.”
The Snowman: “How?”
“You will have to accept my terms.”
“And I’m not going to die?”
“Never.”
“Then I accept, whatever it is!”
There I intervened, unable to stay at the fringes of any conversation:
“Be careful, this looks like one of those soul-selling deals the devil does, for example in . . .” I started telling them, with a wealth of detail, the plot of The Man Who Sold His Shadow, which I’d already read (as an eight-year-old! How insufferable I must have been!). But the snowman interrupted me:
“And if I don’t have a soul, snotface?” And to the wind: “What are the conditions?”
“Only one: that you let me carry you to Patagonia, where the sun does not melt the snow, and you let yourself be molded forever, every instant, by the winds. You will live forever, but you will never have the same shape twice.”
“What a deal! Since you’ve already changed my shape anyway . . .”
“But listen, there we blow a thousand times harder than here.”
“Don’t exaggerate. What do I care, anyway? It’s a deal, let’s go.”
I had nothing to say (and they wouldn’t have paid me any attention anyway) since the whole business seemed pretty reasonable to me . . . But didn’t it always seem reasonable in these cases? Wasn’t that the devil’s best trick? Except in this case, since it was a snowman, it really did seem reasonable, no hidden trap. And yet . . .
I watched as the wind lifted the snowman with a whirling “Ups-a-daisy!” and carried him away through the gray light of dawn.
24
I NEVER KNEW what I did that lost afternoon . . .
In loss everything comes together. Loss is all-devouring. A person can lose an umbrella, a piece of paper, a diamond, a bit of lint . . . It’s all metabolized. To lose is to forget things in cafés. Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything into the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past. I seek it, to oblivion, in the insanity of art. I pursue forgetting as well-earned pay for my fatigue and my memories . . . What good is working? I’d rather be finished already. One more effort . . . I would like all the scattered elements of the fable to come together at the end in one supreme moment. Except maybe I don’t have to work to pull it off, in which case my efforts would be unnecessary. Or at least . . . I should have thought it through better . . . Instead of sitting down to write . . . about the seamstress and the wind . . . with that idea of adventure, of successiveness . . . I’m not saying, Renounce the successiveness that makes the adventure . . . but rather to imagine beforehand all the successive events, until I had the whole novel in my head, and only then . . . or not even then . . . The whole project like a single point, the Aleph, the monad totally unfolded but as a point, an instant . . . My life set in the present with everything that has happened in it, which isn’t much, which is hardly anything. Wasting time in cafés. I never found out what I did that lost afternoon . . .
En fin. Now that I’m here, let’s finish.
I’d left Delia in the twilight, lost and waiting. The wind came back with a small, perfectly gray thing.
“I didn’t find the dress or the sewing kit. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you wanted them for anyway.”
&n
bsp; “And this?”
“It’s the only thing I found. Is it yours?”
“Yes . . . It was mine . . .”
It was her silver thimble, a precious souvenir, in whose little hollow Delia thought her whole life might fit, her whole life since she was born. And now that it looked like her life was coming to an end, or that it was slipping into an unintelligible abyss, she saw it had been worth the trouble to live it, there in Pringles.
“It’s not just a common thimble,” said the wind. “I’ve transmuted it into a Patagonian Thimble. You’ll be able to pull anything you want out of it, whatever your desire tells you, whatever size it might be. All you’ll have to do is rub it until it shines every time you ask for something, and I’ll take care of that, I’m very good at rubbing.”
Delia was about to answer him, because she’d finally found a good response, when she heard a distant sound and looked up.
There were people coming, from all four sides. Miniatures. Distant things have been made small. The function of truly large places, and Patagonia is the largest of them all, is to allow things to become truly small. They were toys. Four of them, and they came from the four cardinal directions, in a perfect cross whose center was Delia. Chiquito’s truck, the Paleomobile, the Monster, and the Snowman arm in arm with the empty Wedding Dress. These last two came with little measured steps, like a bride and groom bound for the altar. But the speed of all four was the same, and it was obvious that in the end there would be a collision on the spot where Delia stood. She tried taking a step to the side, and the four right angles moved with her. The encounter would be simultaneous. (I could never have thought of such an appropriate image of the instant as catastrophe.) There was nothing to do. She closed her eyes.
But even simultaneity has an internal hierarchy: it’s a law of thought. In this case, the principal thing, the irremediable problem, was that the Monster had found her. In the face of this circumstance it was pointless to close her eyes, so she looked at it.
It really was horrible. Like an abstract painting, a Kandinsky. And it was shrieking:
“I’m going to kill you! Carrion! Wretch!”
“No! No!”
“Yes! I’m going to kill you!”
“Aaaah!”
“Aaaaaaah!”
Delia fell to her knees. From that position she raised her eyes for the second time. The Monster was coming toward her. If motives for fear have already been given in the course of this adventure, this one trumped and transcended them all. She would have run away . . . but there was nowhere to go. She was in Patagonia, limitless Patagonia, and she had nowhere to go — not the smallest of the paradoxes of the moment.
“Don’t kill me!” she cried.
“Shut up, you whore!”
“I’m not that! That thing you said! I’m a seamstress!”
“Shut up! Don’t make me laugh! Grrragh!”
It had grown a lot. Only a few feet separated them . . . And then the wind came between them, as a last defense. He blew furiously, but the Monster only laughed harder. How little the wind could do against a transformation! The wind is wind, and nothing more. How could it have fallen in love with Delia? How could she have believed it? No one could be so innocent. The gentleman Sir Ventarrón, the wandering knight. He madly tried to slow the monster down, but he was nothing but air . . .
An instant, too, has its eternity. We’ll leave Delia in that eternity while I look after the other guests.
Chiquito and Ramón stopped their vehicles at a certain distance and studied each other for a moment. The former had Silvia Balero at his side, unhinged and dazed as a zombie. Only Ramón’s eyes were visible through the narrow half-moon over the horn at the front of the rolling armadillo. At last the truck driver opened his door and stuck out a leg . . . Ramón’s eyes disappeared from the slot, and a moment later he was getting out through the back of his vehicle. They approached without taking their eyes off each other.
“Good afternoon,” said Chiquito. “I have to ask you a favor, if you’re going to Pringles; take this young lady with you. She had an accident , and it’s hard to find transportation from here.”
“And you?”
“I’m going to keep going south. I’m going to pick up a shipment, they’ve been waiting for me since this afternoon in Esquel. I’m already late.”
“But then you’re coming back, and surely you’ll have room for her.”
“The thing is, the lady urgently needs to be in Pringles. Tomorrow at ten she gets married.”
“Married?”
“That’s what she told me. You can imagine her state. She’s hysterical. I can’t stand her anymore.”
“We’ve all got problems.”
“True. Me too.”
“But taking on other people’s problems . . .”
“Listen, Siffoni, I found her there, all I did was open the door for her, I couldn’t leave her in the middle of nowhere like that.”
“Don’t lie!” roared Ramón, and he pulled the mask out of his shirt pocket for the other to see. “You won her playing poker. You won her from me.”
Chiquito sighed. He’d actually been aware of this, but he’d given it a shot anyway. They were silent for a moment. Ramón, calmer, suggested:
“You can just leave her on the side of the road. Someone will come by.”
“Yes, I can. But she could make a lot of trouble for me. There’s the matter of her wedding. Couldn’t you do me a favor?”
“You know me, Larralde. I don’t do favors for anybody.”
This phrase was a password; it meant they had reached an agreement, without any need to go into details. The cards would decide. Not the matter of Silvia Balero, either; that was just an excuse. It was the other matter.
The wind, impartial, brought everything they needed from beyond the horizon: a table, two chairs, a green tablecloth, fifty-two cards and a hundred red mother-of-pearl chips. They sat down. The table was too big and they looked tiny across it, their eyes half-closed, like two Chinese. The wind shuffled and dealt.
Paris, July 5, 1991
Also by César Aira from New Directions
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
Ghosts
How I Became a Nun
The Literary Conference
Varamo