He came back almost immediately with the fried eggs in the pan. He crossed the room and exited through the same door he’d come from before. . At the end of the hall there was a dining room. Delia, peering out from behind the chair where she’d hidden, saw him sit down at the table, empty the frying pan over the plate and settle down to eat. She recognized him, and the surprise paralyzed her. In an instant, and without being any kind of intellectual, she was suddenly inspired to summarize the situation in an epigrammatic inversion of what she’d been saying up until now: in fact it was she, Delia herself, without meaning to, who had played a dirty trick on her own destiny.
Suddenly Chiquito let out a yelp. He’d put a whole egg in his mouth without remembering to take the cigarette out from between his lips, and the ember had burned his tongue. He spat out a jet of viscous yellow and white stuff, splattering a woman seated across from him. It was Silvia Balero, who had undergone a pronounced transformation since her last fitting with the seamstress: she was black. Down her black face, chest and arms ran the egg slobber, but she didn’t move a muscle. She looked like an ebony statue. Chiquito ran out groaning into the hallway and came back with a band-aid on his tongue. He drank several glasses of wine in a row. Miss Balero remained immobile, unblinking, and completely covered in that bruised black color. The truck driver finished his dinner, peeled an orange and threw the skin carelessly on the floor, and finally lit another cigarette. Through all of this he’d been talking to his guest, but with guttural, incomprehensible words. The black woman shook herself at intervals and let out some senseless phrases. It was incredible that a natural blonde with such a white complexion had taken on that dark veneer overnight. Chiquito, his accident already forgotten, was roaring with laughter; he seemed happy, not a care in the world. .
Until he lit his third or fourth after-dinner Brasil cigarette and Delia, behind the armchair, couldn’t help a sigh or little cough of irritation (the air was becoming unbreathable): Chiquito heard her and turned his formidable bulk in a violent twist that made his chair creak as the legs scraped together. How strange that someone so solid had gotten that diminutive nickname: Chiquito. Surely they’d given it to him as a child, and it had stuck. To think of antiphrasis or irony would have been out of place given his background.
Delia crawled backwards to the closest door, and as soon as she thought she was out of sight she ran. Luckily there were exits everywhere. . But that very extravagance only contributed to her running around in circles within the labyrinth, and increased the risk of running straight into the hands of her pursuer. Delia had abandoned any idea of asking for refuge or help in getting home. Not from him, at least. She hadn’t had time to think, with all the surprises and fear, but it didn’t matter. She was discovering that one could also think outside of time.
Chiquito was bearing down on her, shouting:
“Who’s there, who’s there. .”
“At least he didn’t recognize me,” Delia said to herself, hoping even in her desperation to preserve their coexistence within the neighborhood. . if she ever got back there.
She was looking for the bedroom she’d first come in through, to get out by way of the hanging screens. . but she came out somewhere completely different, in a dark and intricate jumble of metal. She was helplessly caught in its twists and turns. As if the inertia weren’t enough, she insisted on continuing forward, sticking a leg in, and then another, an arm, her head. . It was the truck’s engine, asleep for the moment. . But what if it turned on? Those iron pieces, in motion, would grind her up in a second. . She felt something sticky on her hands: it was filthy black grease that covered her from head to toe. It was the finishing touch. She could hardly move, neither backward nor forward, caught in the machinery from all sides. . And Chiquito’s shouts and footsteps were getting closer, they boomed in the mastodonic pistons. . she was lost!
At that moment a great jolt shook everything. For a moment Delia feared the most horrible thing had happened: the engine was starting. But it was not that. The agitation multiplied, and the whole truck danced clumsily on its thirty wheels. A deafening whistle enveloped it and passed through the metal walls. All the smells came back to her, and then vanished. A current of cold air touched her.
“The wind has picked up,” she automatically thought. And what a wind!
Chiquito’s reaction was surprising. He started to scream like a lunatic. It was as if his worst enemy had appeared at the very worst moment.
“You again, damn you! You damned wind! Son of a thousand whores! This time you won’t get away! I’m going to kill youuuuu!”
The wind’s response was to increase its force a thousand times. The truck shuddered, its metal walls rattled, the whole inside crashed together. . and, most importantly, it seemed to expand with the air forced in under pressure — into the engine parts too. . Delia felt herself get free, and immediately a current of air snatched her up and carried her away, bouncing and sliding in the grease, toward a vortex in the radiator, in the grille where the whistles refracted like ten symphonic orchestras in a gigantic concert. . The chrome grille flew off, and Delia jumped after it, and now she was outside, running like a gazelle.
19
SHE WAS SURPRISED how fast she was going, like an arrow. She often boasted, and rightly so, of her agility and energy; but that was inside the house, sweeping, washing, cooking and so on, hurrying through the neighborhood with short little steps when she went out to do her shopping, never running. Now she was running without any effort, and she was eating up the distance. The air whistled in her ears. “What speed!” she said to herself, “This is what fear can do!”
When she stopped, the whistling dropped to a whisper, but it persisted. The wind still wrapped itself around her.
“Delia. . Delia. .” a voice called, from very close by.
“Huh? Who. .? What. .? Who’s calling me?” asked Delia, but she corrected her somewhat peremptory tone for fear of offending; she felt so alone, and her name sounded so exquisitely sweet. “Yes? It’s me, I’m Delia. Who’s calling me?” She said it almost smiling, with an expression of intrigue and interest, if a little fearful as well, because it seemed like magic. There was no one nearby, or far away either, and the truck was no longer in sight.
“It’s me, Delia.”
“No, I’m Delia.”
“I mean: Delia, oh Delia, it’s me who speaks to you.”
“Who is me? Pardon me, sir, but I don’t see anyone.”
It was a man’s voice: low, refined, modulated with a superior calm.
“Me: the wind.”
“Ah. A voice carried by the wind? But where is the man?”
“There is no man. I am the wind.”
“The wind talks?”
“You’re hearing me.”
“Yes, yes, I hear you. But I don’t understand. . I didn’t know the wind could talk.”
“I can.”
“What wind are you?”
“My name is Ventarrón.”
The name sounded familiar.
“That sounds familiar. . Have we met before?”
“Many times. Let’s see if you remember.”
“Do you remember?”
“Of course.”
She tried to think.
“It wasn’t that time. .?”
“Yes, yes.”
“And that other time, when. .?”
“Yes! What a good physiognomist you are.”
He wasn’t joking. It must have been a figure of speech.
“So many times. .! Now I remember others, but it would take me hours to mention them all.”
“I would listen to you without ever feeling bored. It would be like music for me.”
“Millions of times.”