Read Online The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira - Free Book Online
Authors: César Aira
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before and what comes after, the motives and the consequences, are not. To tell the truth I can’t figure out how it is that people can make the decision to travel. Maybe it would be helpful to study the work of those Japanese poets who trekked from landscape to landscape finding subjects for their somewhat incoherent compositions. Maybe the explanation lies there. “ Th e next morning the sky was very clear, and just when the sun shone brightest, we rowed out into the bay.” (Bashō)
Th e skies of Patagonia are always clean. Th e winds meet there for a great carnival of invisible transformations. It’s as if to say that everything happens there, and the rest of the world dissolves in the distance, useless — China, Poland, Egypt . . . Paris, the luminous miniature. Everything. All that remains is that radiant space, Argentina, beautiful as paradise.
How to travel? How to live in another place? Wouldn’t it be lunacy, self-annihilation? To not be Argentinian is to drop into nothingness, and no one likes that.
And in full transparency . . . I want to make note of an idea, although it has nothing to do with all this, before I forget: might it be that the Chinese ideograms were originally conceived to be written on glass, so they could be read from the other side? Maybe that’s the source of the whole misunderstanding.
And in full transparency, I was saying . . . a wedding dress. A cloud? No. A white dress, without the form of a dress, of course, or rather: without the form of a human, which it takes when placed on its owner or a mannequin, but instead its authentic form, the pure form of a dress, which no one ever has occasion to see, because it’s not simply a question of seeing it as a mountain of fabric thrown over a table or chair. Th at is formlessness. Th e form of a dress is a continuous transformation, limitless.
And it was the most beautiful and complicated wedding dress ever made, an unfolding of all the white folds, a soft model of a universe of whites. Flying at thirty thousand feet with what appeared to be majestic slowness, even though it must have been going very fast (there was no point of reference in the blue abyss of daylight), and changing shape ceaselessly, endlessly, giant swan, forever opening new wings, its tail forty-two feet long, hyperfoam, exquisite corpse, flag of my country.
18
SO MANY YEARS have passed that by now it must be Tuesday!
. . . . .
I’d left Delia wandering in the desolate twilight. After several hours of uncertain walking, she began to wonder where she would spend the night. She felt lost, suspended in an inhuman fatigue. A little more, very little, and she would be walking like an automaton, a lunatic. And now it didn’t really matter which way she went; if there was any apparition, anywhere, she’d go toward it. What alarmed her was the feeling that she was at the extreme end of caring: when she came out on the other side she would not change direction again. Th e night could, at a whim, become the kind of uniform desert that would invade her soul, and that possibility filled her with terror. A house, a roof, a cave, a cabin! An abandoned ranch, a shack, a shed! She knew that even from the depths of fatigue she could find the will to make any room habitable for a night, even the most deplorable . . . She saw herself sweeping it, putting it in order, making the bed, washing the curtains . . . Th ey were absurd fantasies, but they consoled her a little even as her sense of abandonment grew, the plateau stretching out more and more and the horizon unfolding a new fringe of white, and another — did it make any sense to keep going?
It was practically nighttime. Th e only thing left was for darkness to fall. Each moment seemed like the last chance to glimpse a sign of salvation. And in one moment, finally, she saw something: two long, low parallelograms resting far in the distance, like two hyphens. She went toward them on winged feet, feeling all the pain of fatigue
Th e skies of Patagonia are always clean. Th e winds meet there for a great carnival of invisible transformations. It’s as if to say that everything happens there, and the rest of the world dissolves in the distance, useless — China, Poland, Egypt . . . Paris, the luminous miniature. Everything. All that remains is that radiant space, Argentina, beautiful as paradise.
How to travel? How to live in another place? Wouldn’t it be lunacy, self-annihilation? To not be Argentinian is to drop into nothingness, and no one likes that.
And in full transparency . . . I want to make note of an idea, although it has nothing to do with all this, before I forget: might it be that the Chinese ideograms were originally conceived to be written on glass, so they could be read from the other side? Maybe that’s the source of the whole misunderstanding.
And in full transparency, I was saying . . . a wedding dress. A cloud? No. A white dress, without the form of a dress, of course, or rather: without the form of a human, which it takes when placed on its owner or a mannequin, but instead its authentic form, the pure form of a dress, which no one ever has occasion to see, because it’s not simply a question of seeing it as a mountain of fabric thrown over a table or chair. Th at is formlessness. Th e form of a dress is a continuous transformation, limitless.
And it was the most beautiful and complicated wedding dress ever made, an unfolding of all the white folds, a soft model of a universe of whites. Flying at thirty thousand feet with what appeared to be majestic slowness, even though it must have been going very fast (there was no point of reference in the blue abyss of daylight), and changing shape ceaselessly, endlessly, giant swan, forever opening new wings, its tail forty-two feet long, hyperfoam, exquisite corpse, flag of my country.
18
SO MANY YEARS have passed that by now it must be Tuesday!
. . . . .
I’d left Delia wandering in the desolate twilight. After several hours of uncertain walking, she began to wonder where she would spend the night. She felt lost, suspended in an inhuman fatigue. A little more, very little, and she would be walking like an automaton, a lunatic. And now it didn’t really matter which way she went; if there was any apparition, anywhere, she’d go toward it. What alarmed her was the feeling that she was at the extreme end of caring: when she came out on the other side she would not change direction again. Th e night could, at a whim, become the kind of uniform desert that would invade her soul, and that possibility filled her with terror. A house, a roof, a cave, a cabin! An abandoned ranch, a shack, a shed! She knew that even from the depths of fatigue she could find the will to make any room habitable for a night, even the most deplorable . . . She saw herself sweeping it, putting it in order, making the bed, washing the curtains . . . Th ey were absurd fantasies, but they consoled her a little even as her sense of abandonment grew, the plateau stretching out more and more and the horizon unfolding a new fringe of white, and another — did it make any sense to keep going?
It was practically nighttime. Th e only thing left was for darkness to fall. Each moment seemed like the last chance to glimpse a sign of salvation. And in one moment, finally, she saw something: two long, low parallelograms resting far in the distance, like two hyphens. She went toward them on winged feet, feeling all the pain of fatigue
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