The Seamstress and the Wind E-Book

César Aira

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 154

Beschreibung

In a small town in Argentina, a seamstress is sewing a wedding dress. All of a sudden she fears that her son has been kidnapped and driven off to Patagonia. She gives chase in a taxi. Her husband finds out and takes off after her – to the end of the world, to the place where monsters are born, and to where the southern wind falls hopelessly in love.

Leseprobe

First published in the UK by And Other Stories High Wycombe, Englandwww.andotherstories.org

First published in English translation in the US by New Directions Books

Originally published by Beatriz Viterbo Editoria, Rosario, Argentina, as Lacosturera y el viento in 1994.

Copyright © 1994 by César Aira. Published in conjunction with the Michael Gaeb Literary Agency, Berlin

English-language translation copyright © 2011 Rosalie Knecht

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

ISBN 978-1-908276-84-1 eBook ISBN 978-1-908276-85-8

Proofreader: Laura Willett; typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; cover design: Edward Bettison

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book also was supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

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These last weeks, since before coming to Paris, I’ve been looking for a plot for the novel I want to write: a novel of successive adventures, full of anomalies and inventions. Until now nothing occurred to me, except the title, which I’ve had for years and which I cling to with blank obstinacy: The Seamstress and the Wind. The heroine has to be a seamstress, at a time when there were seamstresses… and the wind her antagonist, she sedentary, he a traveller, or the other way around: the art a traveller, the turbulence fixed. She the adventure, he the thread of the adventures… It could be anything, and in fact it must be anything, any whim, or all of them, if they begin transforming into one another… For once I want to allow myself every liberty, even the most improbable… Although the most improbable, I should admit, is that this plan will work. The gusts of the imagination do not carry one away except when one has not asked for it, or better: when one has asked for the opposite. And then there is the question of finding a good plot.

Anyway, last night, this morning, at dawn, still half asleep, or more asleep than I thought I was, a subject occurred to me — rich, complex, unexpected. Not all of it, just the beginning, but that was just what I needed, what I had been waiting for. The character was a man, which wasn’t a problem because I could make him the seamstress’s husband… However, when I woke up I had forgotten it. I only remembered that I had had it, and it was good, and now I didn’t have it. In those cases it’s not worth the trouble to wrack your brain, I know from experience, because nothing comes back, maybe because there is nothing, there never was anything, except the perfectly gratuitous sensation that there had been something… Still, the sensation is not complete; a vague little trace remains, in which I hope there is a loose end that I could pull and pull… although then, to go on with the metaphor, pulling on that strand would erase the embroidered figure and I would be left with a meaningless white thread between my fingers. It’s about… let me see if I can put it in a few sentences: A man has a very precise and detailed premonition of three or four events that will happen in the immediate future all linked together. Not events which will happen to him, but to three or four neighbours, out in the country. He enters a state of accelerated movement to make use of his information: speed is necessary because the efficacy of the trick is in arriving on time, at the point at which the events coincide… He runs from one house to another like a billiard ball bouncing on the pampas… I get this far. I see nothing more. Actually, the thing I see least is the novelistic merit of this subject. I’m sure in the dream all that senseless agitation came wrapped in a precise and admirable mechanism, but now I don’t know what that was. The key to the code has been erased. Or is that what I should provide myself, with my deliberate work? If so, the dream doesn’t have the least use, and it leaves me as unequipped as before, or more so. But I resist giving it up, and in that resistance it occurs to me that there’s something else I could rescue from the ruins of forgetting, and that is forgetting itself. Taking control of forgetting is little more than a gesture, but it would be a gesture consistent with my theory of literature, at least with my disdain for memory as a writer’s instrument. Forgetting is richer, freer, more powerful… and at the root of the dream idea there must have been something of that, because those serial prophecies, so suspicious, lacking in content as they are, all seem to come to an end at a vertex of dissolution, of forgetting, of pure reality. A multiple, impersonal forgetting. I should note, in parentheses, that the kind of forgetting that erases dreams is very special, and very fitting for my purposes, because it’s based on doubt as to whether the thing we should be remembering actually exists; I suppose that in the majority of cases, if not in all of them, we only believe we’ve forgotten things when actually they had never happened. We haven’t forgotten anything. Forgetting is simply a sensation.

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Forgetting becomes simply a sensation. It drops the object, as in a disappearance. It’s our whole life, that object of the past, that falls into the antigravity updraughts of adventure.

There’s been little adventure. None, in fact. I don’t remember any. And I don’t think it’s by chance, like when you stop to think and realise that in the whole past year you haven’t seen a single dwarf. My life must be shaped around that lack of adventure, which is lamentable because it would have been a good source of inspiration. But I’ve sought out that lack of adventure myself, and in the future I will do it on purpose. A few days ago, before I left, reflecting, I came to the conclusion that I will never travel again. I won’t go out looking for adventure. To tell the truth, I’ve never travelled. This trip, the same as the previous one (when I wrote El Llanto), can only come to nothing, a spiral of the imagination. If I now write, in the cafés of Paris, The Seamstress and the Wind, as I have proposed, it’s only to accelerate the process. What process? A process with no name, or form, or content. Or results. If it helps me survive, it’s only the way some little riddle would have. I think that for a process to be sustained over time there must always be the intrigue of a point out of place. But nothing will be discovered in the end, or at the beginning either, because the decision has already been made: I will never travel again. Suddenly, I’m in a café in Paris, writing, giving expression to anachronistic decisions made in the very heart of the fear of adventure (in a café in my neighbourhood, Flores). A person can come to believe he has another life, in addition to his own, and logically he believes that he has it somewhere else, waiting for him. But you only have to test this theory once to see it doesn’t hold. One trip is enough (I made two). There’s only one life, and it is in its place. But still, something must have happened. If I’ve written, it’s been so I might interpolate forgetfulness between my life and myself. I was successful there. When a memory appears, it brings nothing with it, only a combination of itself and its negative after-effects. And the whirlwind. And me. In some ways the Seamstress and the Wind have to do with (and are the most appropriate to, and even, I would almost say, the only fitting things for) a strange quotation. I would prefer them to be the pure invention of my soul, now that my soul has been extracted from me. But they still aren’t, after all, nor could they be, because reality, or the past, contaminates them. I raise barriers, hoping they’re formidable, to impede the invasion, though I know the battle is already lost. I didn’t have an adventurous life because I didn’t want to weigh myself down with memories… ‘Perhaps it is an exclusively personal point of view, but I experience an irrepressible distrust when I hear it said that the imagination will take care of everything.

‘The imagination, this marvellous faculty, does nothing, if left uncontrolled, but lean on memory.

‘Memory makes things felt, heard and seen rise into the light, a bit the way a bolus of grass rises again in a ruminant. It may be chewed, but it is neither digested nor transformed.’ (Boulez)

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It’s not random, I said. I have a biographical motive to back up this reasoning. My first experience, the first of those events that leave a mark, was a disappearance. I would have been eight or nine. I was playing in the street with my friend Omar, and it occurred to us to climb into the empty trailer of a truck parked in front of our houses (we were neighbours). The trailer was an enormous rectangle, the size of a room, that had three high wooden walls without a fourth, which was the back. It was perfectly empty and clean. We began to play at scaring each other, which is strange because it was in the middle of the day, we had no masks or disguises or anything else, and that space, of all those we could have picked, was the most geometric and visible. It was a purely psychological game of fantasy. I don’t know how such subtlety could have occurred to us, a couple of semi-savage children, but kids are like that. And the fear turned out to be more effective than we expected. On the first try, it was already excessive. Omar began. I sat on the floor, close to the back edge, and he went and stood by the front wall. He said ‘Now’ and started walking towards me with heavy, slow steps, without making faces or gestures (it wasn’t necessary)… I felt such terror that I must have closed my eyes… When I opened them, Omar wasn’t there. I was paralysed, strangled, as in a nightmare; I wanted to move but couldn’t. It was as if a wind were pressing in on me from all sides at once. I felt deformed, twisted, both ears on the same side of my head, both eyes on the other, an arm coming out of my navel, the other from my back, the left foot coming out of the right thigh… Squatting, like an octodimensional toad… I had the impression, which I knew so well, of running desperately to escape a danger, a horror… to escape the crouching monster that I now was. All I could do was stay in the safest place.

All at once, I don’t know how, I found myself in the kitchen of my house, behind the table. My mother was standing at the counter with her back to me, looking out the window. She was not working, not making food or tidying things, which was very strange for a classic housewife who was always doing something; but her immobility was full of impatience. I knew because I had a telepathic connection with her. And she with me: she must have felt my presence, because she turned abruptly and saw me. She let out a yell like I’ve never heard from her and brought both hands to her head with a moan of anguish, almost a sob, something she’d never done before but which I knew was within her expressive capabilities. It was as if something impossible had happened, something unimaginable. By the shouting she subjected me to when she was able to articulate again I found out that Omar had come, at noon, to say I’d hidden and wouldn’t reappear despite his calling me and his declarations that he wasn’t playing anymore, that he had to go. Such obstinacy was typical of me, but as the hours passed they started to get alarmed, mamá joined the search, and in the end papá intervened (this was the highest degree of alarm) and was still looking for me, with the help of Omar’s father and I don’t know which other neighbours, in a by-the-book search party through the immediate area, and she hadn’t been able to do anything, she hadn’t started making dinner, she hadn’t even had the heart to turn on the lights… I saw that, in fact, it was already very dark out — it was almost night. But I had been there the whole time! I didn’t say this to her because I was too emotional to speak. It wasn’t me, they were wrong… it was Omar who’d disappeared! It was his mother who had to be told, a search for him that had to be undertaken. And now, I thought in a spasm of desperation, it would be much more difficult because night was falling. I felt responsible for the lost time, whose irretrievable quality I understood for the first time.

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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. They 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. Then 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. The 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. Then the mania for cleaning; you have to recognise that Delia was exemplary. She kept her little parlour hermetically sealed, and no one ever entered it under any pretext. The single bedroom was resplendent, and so was the kitchen. Those 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 pavement, 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. The way Delia talked also contributed to this: her voice was whispery and abrupt, as were her manners and movements when she was on the pavement (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 neighbourhood, 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… There 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.

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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