It didn’t take long to pull it off. First he took the whole wreck apart, screw by screw. He jury-rigged it brilliantly; he put the engine in front, held it in with clamps, and put in the gas tank, the radiator, et cetera. The pulleys, the axles, the wheels in the four openings for the legs. . all set. It’s easier to explain it than to do it, but in his case it was very easy nonetheless. The next step was to turn it on and try it out, which he did. The machine moved, slowly at first, and then faster.
23
NIGHT FELL AND he drove on and on, with the horn in front. . because he’d put the armadillo’s tail-cone on as the nose of his vehicle, that is to say he’d screwed it to the opening in front. It looked good, he thought; he’d done it only for aesthetics, not aerodynamics. What he liked most was that it entirely changed the appearance of the remains: with the horn in front it didn’t look like an armadillo anymore. It made him think how easy it was to change the appearance of a thing, what seemed most inherent to its being, most eternal. . it was completely transformed by a measure as simple as changing the placement of the tail. How many things that seem different from each other, he thought, might actually be the same, with some little detail turned around!
What was impressive was the noise it made. The hoarseness of the engine resounded in the great hollow oval like thunder.
He hadn’t slept the night before, and he was nodding off. So he parked (it made no difference where) and lay down on the membrane, behind the seat. He had more than enough room. He fell asleep immediately. Close to dawn, an abrupt shaking woke him. The circle of the setting moon had come to rest just inside the tail opening, which was the only entrance or exit from the vehicle. He barely managed to wonder if he’d been dreaming before a second shake, this one more prolonged, rocked him again. It kept going while he got to his feet, stiff and still half asleep. The shell was rocking back and forth so much that Ramón fell three times before he could get hold of the back of the seat. Once he was sitting down, he looked out through the half-moon he’d left open in the upper part of the hole in front, over the steering wheel, which made a windshield without glass. The plateau was dim and tranquil, and the grass wasn’t moving. The vehicle kept vibrating, a little less now, and as soon as he could orient his attention he realized that the blows and scrapes were coming from above, from the cupola of the marvelous mother-of-pearl shell. Evidently some animal had climbed onto it; it wouldn’t have to be very big to shake the structure like that, being so light, but it might be dangerous anyway. He decided to check with the Chrysler’s rearview mirror, which he’d taken the precaution of bringing along. He grabbed it and stuck his hand out through the half-moon, pointing it backwards. What he saw froze his blood with fear.
It was the Monster. Ramón had never seen anything so ugly, but then, nobody else had ever seen anything so ugly either. It was a child monster. Perched on the roof. . the way Omar always perched on Chiquito’s truck. . children liked to do that.
The chilling thing was the Monster’s shape. . More than a shape it was an accumulation of shapes, fluid and fixed at once, fluid in space and fixed in time, and vice versa. . There was no explanation for it. The monster had seen (because it had eyes, or one eye, or it was an eye) the mirror coming out of the slot, shining in the light of the moon, and he stretched toward it. .
Ramón pulled his hand, which had begun to tremble, back inside, put in the clutch, stepped on the accelerator. . The vehicle surged forward, with the monster tumbling around on top.
Omar. . the game. . the monster child. . the lost child. . It all tumbled in his mind, like the creature on the roof of the Paleomobile. . He saw Omar duplicated in his inseparable friend César Aira. . He trusted that the Airas had taken Omar in and fed him that night and the night before; in the end, it didn’t matter. . But how paradoxical, in the middle of all this, for the lost child to be at home, and the parents circling and circling in the desert hundreds of miles away. . That didn’t make him any less a “lost child,” as in the story about the bears: he entered an empty house, he wondered who lived there, with a feeling of imminence. . at any moment the owners might interrupt him. . It didn’t matter that it was his house, that he’d lived there all his life; this was a detail that had no decisive weight to the overall meaning of the story. .
We were a pair of healthy, normal children, nice enough to look at, good students. . We adored our mothers and venerated our fathers, and feared them a little as well; they were so strict, such perfectionists. . I believe we were the quintessence of petit bourgeois normalcy. And even so, though we didn’t realize it, it all rested on fear, the way the rock floats on the crest of the lava at the end of Journey to the Center of the Earth; fear — it might be said, the lava — was the biology, the plasma. To simplify by putting things in successive order, first came the fear the pregnant women felt (that is, it was beginning before we began ourselves), fear of giving birth to a monster. Reality, aristocratic and indifferent, followed its course. Then the fear was transformed. . It’s all a question of the transformation of fears: this makes society volatile, changeable, worlds change, the distinct successive worlds that, added together, are life. One of the avatars of fear is: that the child is lost, that he disappears. . Sometimes the fear is transferred from the mother to the father; sometimes it is not; the child registers these oscillations and is transformed in turn. That it might be the parents who disappear, that the wind might fall in love with the mother, that a monster might pursue them, that a truck driver might never lose his way because he carried his house with him like Raymond Roussel, etc. etc. etc., all that, and much more still to be seen, is part of literature.
Now I remember a type of candy that the children of Pringles adored in those days, a kind of ancestor of what afterwards became gum. It was very local, I don’t know who invented it nor when it disappeared, I only know that today it does not exist. It was a little ball wrapped in parchment paper, accompanied by a little loose stick, all very homemade. One had to chew it until it got spongy and grew enormously in volume; we knew it was ready when it no longer fit in our mouths. We’d take it out, and it would have transformed into an extremely light mass that had the property of changing shape when blown by the wind, to which we exposed it by putting it on the end of the little stick. That must be why it was only a local candy: the winds of Pringles are like knives. It was like having a portable cloud, and seeing it change and suggest all kinds of things. . It was healthy and entertaining. . The wind, which left us as we were (it limited itself to mussing our hair) ceaselessly transfigured the mass. . and there was no point falling in love with a particular shape because it would already be another, then another. . until suddenly it would solidify, or crystallize, into any one of the shapes that had been delighting us for so many minutes, and then we would eat it like a lollipop.
I said before, I think, that when it snowed at night Chiquito would come by at dawn and leave me, as a present for when I left for school, a snowman in the doorway of my house. For me, as for Omar, both of us ignorant of his secret life, Chiquito was a hero, with his truck as big as a mountain and his journeys across all of marvelous Argentina. . The neighbors praised his heart, his slightly childish gesture — which did more justice to his name than to his herculean physique — for building a snowman at those impossible hours when he always set out, just to give me a fleeting surprise, a little pleasure. Sometimes, when I went out on those occasions, the wind had already started to blow, and my snowman received me with eight arms, or a humpback, or more often with a Picassoesque twist, the nose at the nape of the neck, the navel on the back, both shoulders on the same side. . On my return at noon nothing would be left: it always melted.