Free The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira Page A

random, crossed a room full of junk she didn’t look at and went through another door, into a small room with leather armchairs. She stopped there, looking at them in disbelief. Th ere was no light here except what came through an open door, through which she could hear noises. Th e room had four doors, one on each side. Th ey were all open. She glanced into the darkest one, which led to a hallway, and then the next: an office, with a great roll-top desk, where the disorder and filth of the bedroom were repeated. She crossed the room and went out through the door on the other side, where she found herself in a vestibule with chairs. And three doors. She went through the first on the left: an unoccupied bedroom, with the bed made. Actually it seemed less like a bed than a kind of low, elastic table . . . Th ere, also, was another door. She noticed, in retrospect, that it was the same in all the rooms, as if someone had been preoccupied with achieving maximum circulation. Th e result was that she was lost. She went on, and came somehow to the kitchen, which was the source of the light that spread throughout the whole labyrinth.
    Here she thought the moment of truth had come, but there was nobody there. Th e burner was lit however, and two frying eggs crackled in the pan. Th e cook must have gone out for a moment, maybe in search of her, if he’d heard her. A large Petromax lantern cast a blinding light through the bastion of containers and foodstuffs. Th e pile of dirty dishes was incredible, and there were scraps thrown everywhere, even stuck to the walls and ceiling. A summary glance at the pan indicated that the eggs were almost perfect. On the counter, half a bottle of red wine and a glass. She lost her nerve and hurried out: she burst into the room she’d been in before, which seemed different to her now, as a new odor redoubled her trembling. Following a spiral of smoke with her eyes, she saw that in the ashtray on the end table was a recently lit Brasil cigarette. But there was still no one there . . . How strange.
    Delia’s aversion to tobacco smoke was extreme and fairly inexplicable. She couldn’t conceive of smoking inside a house. She had managed to get her husband to give up the habit when they married, a minor but nonetheless remarkable miracle. To a certain extent, she’d forgotten about it. She stood watching with incredulous horror as the smoke rose in the supernatural stillness of the room.
    Chiquito came in through the door from the hallway and leaned down to pick up the cigarette. He was in boxer shorts and an undershirt, hairy, unkempt, and with the face of a man who had few friends. He went into the kitchen.
    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