The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira Page B

Th e wine had made her very sleepy. Th e white knit sheets invited her to sleep. She looked around. It was a little incongruent, this bed in the middle of the plain. And her dress was impossibly greasy. She hesitated a moment, and then said to herself, lying to herself with the truth: “No one can see me.” She stripped, and as she slid under the sheets her body shone in the moonlight. Th e night sighed.

20
    WHEN SHE WOKE the next morning she thought she was at home, as often happens to travelers . . . Except for her it was not a brief, fleeting state, a short lapse of incomprehension . . . instead, the strangeness of it settled in her mind like a world, and stayed there. Under normal circumstances, she was in her bed, her bed was in her bedroom, her bedroom was in her house, and her house was in Pringles. Today, however, it looked like that whole chain of familiarity had been broken. Th e sky was very blue, and the sun was a white dot set in the most distant part of it. She turned to her right, and there was no Ramón beside her, and beyond that no child’s bed, no sleeping Omar. To her left there was no dresser with its mirror on top . . . and, therefore, no reflection of the window over Omar’s bed . . . In a word, she was not at home. She was not anywhere. An immense space surrounded her on all sides. Th e only thing that seemed to be in its place was the time, although not even the late dawn in that place had a particular time: one could call it a lapse in eternity. It didn’t feel like time to get up . . . She stretched.
    Days of idleness in Patagonia . . .
    When she put on her dress she could see now, in the light, what a greasy disaster it was. Her shoes were impossibly covered with dust, she could have written on them with her finger. Th e wind, so helpful for other things, had not taken care of her clothes, probably because she hadn’t asked him to. It occurred to her that he must be like those maids who are very hardworking and efficient, but lack initiative, and have to be told to do everything.
    “Good morning, Delia.”
    “Ah, um . . . Good morning.”
    “Did you sleep well?”
    “Perfectly. I wanted . . .”
    “One moment. I have to take this.”
    Th e bed and everything on it flew away at full speed and was lost beyond the horizon. “Such a hurry,” Delia thought. In an instant the wind was back.
    “Delia, I have to tell you something I would have preferred to keep to myself, but it’s better for you to know, just in case.”
    “About what? Don’t scare me . . .” Delia was already thinking of catastrophes, as was her custom.
    “Last night,” began Ventarrón, “I went out for a stroll, after you fell asleep, and over there I saw a light, and got closer to look. Th ere’s a hotel there, on top of a little mountain, and at first I thought it was on fire, it glowed so brightly. But there was no fire. I went down and looked in the windows. It wasn’t a party either. It was a radioactive kind of light, pulsing, pulsing so much it shook the whole hotel . . . A red, horrible light, and the temperature had risen to several thousand degrees . . . As I had no intention of becoming an atomic wind, I moved back, and stayed there watching. It went from bad to worse. Even I started to become frightened, though there’s no one better at getting away than me. But I know there are distant terrors from which escape is useless. And then, all at once, the whole hotel fell in, melted like a snowflake in the sun . . . And there it was — free, burning and horrible — the Monster . . . the child who should never have been born . . .”
    His voice, already naturally low, had taken on a from-beyond-the-grave resonance, very pessimistic. His last words gave Delia goose bumps along her spine.
    “What child . . .? What monster . . .?”
    “ Th ere is a legend that says that one day, in a hot springs hotel in this area, a child will be born who is gifted with all the power of transformation, a being that will