In the summer I woke up very early, with the birds, because the dawn was very early then, much earlier than now. Time didn’t change according to the seasons then, and Pringles was very far south, where the days were longer. At four, I think, the chorus of birds would begin. But there was one, one bird, the one that woke me up on those summer mornings, a bird with the strangest and most beautiful song you could imagine. I never heard anything like it afterwards. His twittering was atonal, insanely modern, a melody of random notes, sharp, clean, crystalline. It was special because it was so unexpected, as if a scale existed and the bird chose four or five notes from it in an order that systematically sidestepped any expectations. But the order could not always be unexpected, there is no method like that: by pure chance it would have to meet some expectation, the law of probabilities demands it. And yet, it did not.
In fact, it was not a bird. It was Mr. Siffoni’s truck, when he turned the crank. In those days you had to turn a crank on the front of a car to make the engine turn over. This was a really old vehicle, a little square truck, a red tin can, and it wasn’t clear how it kept running. After the marvelous trill came the pathetic coughing of the engine. I wonder if that wasn’t what woke me up, and that I imagined the previous. I often have, even today, these waking dreams. That one gave them the model.
The little red truck stood out against the clean and beautiful colors of the Pringlense dawn, the perfect blue sky, the green trees, the golden dirt of our street. The summer was the only season when Ramón Siffoni worked as a trucker. He relaxed the rest of the year. Not even in season did he work much, according to my parents, who criticized him for it. He didn’t even get up early, they said (but I knew the truth).
Next to our house on the other side lived a professional trucker, a real one. He had a very modern truck, enormous, with a trailer (the very same one in which Omar and I had played on that ill-fated day), and he made long trips to the most distant reaches of Argentina. Not just in summer, like Siffoni making casual fair-weather hauls in his toy truck, but serious trips. His name was Chiquito, he was half-related to us, and sometimes when I left for school in the dead of winter, when the sky was still dark, I would find that he’d left me a snowman on the doorstep, a sign that he’d gone off on a long trip.
The snowman. . the lovely postcard of the little red truck in the pale blue and green dawn. . the senses celebrating. And all of that was suddenly shaken by the disappearance.
6
MY PARENTS WERE realistic people, enemies of fantasy. They judged everything by work, their universal standard for measuring their fellow man. Everything else hung on that criterion, which I inherited wholly and without question; I have always venerated work above all else; work is my god and my universal judge, but I never worked, because I never needed to, and my passion exempted me from working because of a bad conscience or a fear of what others might say.
In family conversations in my house it was our habit to review the merits of neighbors and acquaintances. Ramón Siffoni was one of those who came out of this scrutiny in bad standing. His wife didn’t escape condemnation either, because my parents, realists that they were, never made wives out to be victims of their slothful husbands. That she also worked, a very strange thing in our milieu, didn’t exempt her, but rather made her all the more suspect. The thin seamstress, so small, so bird-like, neurotic to the highest degree, whose business hours were impossible to determine because she was always gossiping in the doorway — what did she really do? It was a mystery. The mystery was part of the judgment, because my parents, being realists, were aware of the fact that the recompense of work was fickle and too often undeserved. The enigmatic divinity of work was made flesh, in a negative suspension of judgment, in Delia Siffoni. My mother could spot the clothes she made on any woman in town (she certainly knew them all) — they were perfect, insanely neat, above all on Saturday nights when they made their usual rounds and afterward she would mention them to Delia; it seemed a little hypocritical to me, but I didn’t really understand her machinations very well. Epiphanies and hypocrisy, after all, are part of the divine plan.
At that precise moment in her professional life, and in her life generally, Delia had fallen into a trap of her own design. Silvia Balero, the drawing teacher, sworn innocent and candidate for spinsterhood, was getting married in a hurry. For appearances’ sake she would do it in the church, in white. And the order for the wedding dress was given to Delia. As she was an artist, Balero made the pattern herself — daring, unheard of — and came back from Bahía Blanca, where she often went in her little car, with a ton of tulle and voile, all nylon, which was the latest thing. She even brought the thread to sew it with, also synthetic, with trim in pearl-strewn banlon. Her drawings accounted for the smallest details, and on top of that she made it her business to be present for the cutting and preliminary basting: everybody knew the seamstress had to be watched closely. Now then, Delia was especially prudish, more than most. She was almost malevolent in that sense; for years she had been alert to every moral irregularity in town. And when her acquaintances, the ones she talked to all day, began to ask her questions (because the Balero case was discussed with intense pleasure) she became annoyed and started to make threats — for example, that she would not sew that dress, the gown of white hypocritical infamy. . But of course she would! An order like that came once a year, or less. And with the useless husband that she had — according to the neighborhood consensus, she was not in a position to moralize. The situation was tailored for her, because one velocity was superimposed on another. I already said that when she put her hands to a job the fittings overlapped with the final stitch. . A pregnancy had a fixed term and speed, which is to say, a certain slowness; but this was not a matter of a baby’s layette; in Silvia Balero’s case it was an anachronism of timing, which attracted a lot of attention in town. The ceremony, the white dress, the husband. . It all had to be carried out quickly, in an instant, in the blink of an eye, that was the only way it would work. And it didn’t really work, because anyone who might claim an opinion that would matter to Silvia was already on notice. It’s something to think about, why she went to so much trouble. Probably because she was obligated to do it.