The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira Read Free Book Online Page B

believe it. But he had to surrender to the evidence. Th e little car was there, always at the same distance, the same half mile, which was, what’s more, the exact same half mile, not another, equivalent one. He resolved to slow down again, but this time so abruptly that his pursuer would have no choice but to overtake him. Th at’s what he did: a hundred, ninety, eighty, seventy, sixty, fifty, forty . . . thirty . . . twenty, ten, zero, minus ten, minus twenty, minus thirty . . . — he had never done that before. Th e whirlwinds of the moon enveloped him.
    And still, when he looked in the rearview mirror, to his immense surprise, there was the blue car, and the half mile that separated them. He accelerated. He decelerated. Etc. If he hadn’t believed it at first, now at the end of a couple of hours of racing, he was even less able to believe it. What most intrigued him, in his periodic inspections of the rearview mirror (which was external, the kind that sticks out on a metal arm from the side of the cab) was that the small blue car shone so brightly, and that it maintained its position as if suspended above the road, as if floating over the potholes while he bounced up and down, and on top of everything that the distance remained identical . . . too identical . . . Without reducing or increasing his speed (by this point having tried so many alternations, he no longer knew which side of excess he was on) he cranked down the window with his left hand. When it was open, with his eyes half-closed against the wind, he put his hand out and brought the tip of his forefinger and thumb, as delicately as the lurching of the truck would allow, to the oval surface of the mirror, and pulled off — pulled off the little sky-blue car! As if it were a little decal stuck there . . . He brought it up to his eyes, tilting his head a little to see it by the light of the moon: a butterfly wing, metallic cobalt, the moon brought out that shine that had made it so visible . . . He marveled at having fallen prey to such a baroque illusion, it could only happen to him . . . Because what was more, a butterfly wing can get stuck on one part or another of a vehicle in motion, in fact it happens all the time on a road trip, but butterflies smash against the parts of a vehicle that break the air, like the windshield or the radiator! And the mirror faced backward! Th e only explanation was that in one of the recent decelerations the butterfly had gotten trapped in the change of relative velocities and smashed into it from behind. He opened his fingers, let the wind take the centimeter of sky-blue wing, rolled up the window and did not look in the mirror again.
    If he had, he would have been surprised to see that the car was still there, just where its silhouette had been traced by a butterfly wing. Inside the car was Silvia Balero, the drawing teacher, mad with anguish and half asleep. She followed Siffoni’s red truck because it was the last thread connecting her to her wedding dress, the seamstress, and she had just seen it disappear before her eyes. Th e moment when the atmospheric tide made the truck invisible found her in bad shape. Like all candidates for spinsterhood, she was very dependent on her biorhythms, and after midnight she was always, always asleep. Never in her life had she gotten past that hour. Night was an unknown quantity for her; she was a diurnal, impressionistic being. So at midnight, which by a strange coincidence was the moment when the moon acted on the truck, she went on automatic pilot, like a sleepwalker. As if in a nightmare she felt despair as her prey vanished before her eyes. In her state, this disappearing act was the trick that hid all of reality from her.
    “I’m hungry,” thought Ramón Siffoni, who hadn’t had dinner. Up ahead, he saw a kind of little mountain under the moon, and on its peak a hotel. In spite of the hour lights could be seen in the windows on the ground floor, and he thought it was not