Varamo Read online

  Varamo

  César Aira

  Translated by Chris Andrews

  A New Directions Paperbook Original

  ONE DAY IN 1923, in the city of Colón (Panama), a third-class clerk, having finished work, and, since it was payday, passed by the cashier’s desk to collect his monthly salary, left the Ministry in which he was employed. In the interval between that moment and the dawn of the following day, ten or twelve hours later, he completed the composition of a long poem, from the initial decision to write it up to the final period, after which there were no further additions or corrections. The self-contained nature of the interval emerges more clearly still if we take into account the fact that never, in all his fifty years, had he written or felt any inclination to write a single line of poetry, and nor would he ever again. It was a bubble in time, in his biography, an exception without precedent or sequel. The action contained the inspiration, and vice versa, each nourishing and consuming the other, so that nothing was left over. Even so, this episode would have remained private and secret had its protagonist not been Varamo, had it not produced that celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Child.

  This enigmatic poem (published in book form just a few days later, thus consolidating its status as a legendary bolt from the blue), origin and apogee of the most daring and experimental avant-garde movement in the language, has been repeatedly described as an inexplicable miracle because of the insurmountable contextual problems it poses for critics and literary historians.

  But there is an explanation for everything in the world. To find the explanation in this case, we must remember that just as the episode had an end (the poem itself), so it had a beginning, and the two points correspond symmetrically, as an effect corresponds to its cause, or vice versa. The cause, as suggested already, intervened when Varamo, having finished his day’s work, went to the cashier’s desk to collect his salary. And what made this a beginning, the beginning of something that had, as yet, no form or name, was that on this occasion he was paid with counterfeit money. (The sum of two hundred pesos was given to him in two one-hundred peso bills.)

  The aim of this narrative is to lay out the events as they unfolded, one after another, in a causal sequence, from the moment at which he picked up the bills to the completion of the poem. Both extremities of the sequence were equally foreign to the usual run of his thoughts. He had never handled, or seen, a counterfeit bill. He was quite capable of imagining the forgery of money, but nothing in his personal experience or that of his associates had ever led him to consider it as a real possibility. Similarly, he had never written, or read, or given any thought to poetry, or any other literary genre, for that matter. But one thing happened and it led on to the other; and the two were linked by a perfectly reasonable chain of causes and effects. There was, however, no reason for the beginning, or the end: their radical arbitrariness sealed off the sequence of events and set it apart, reinforcing its internal causal links with a cast-iron logic. Furthermore, the disparate nature of the two extremities (what relation could there be between a pair of counterfeit bills and a literary masterpiece?) led to an uncontrollable proliferation of intermediate steps. So the sequence was dense with meaning, but threatened from within by the infinite.

  Varamo left the Ministry consumed by anxiety. He had realized that the bills were counterfeits even as the teller was handing them over with mechanical movements that he had repeated thousands of times. But he hadn’t known how to react and was still in the grip of that quandary. What should he do with this money, which represented the sum total of his purchasing power for the duration of a month? His bureaucratic mentality had prevented him from responding promptly, before he touched the bills, and now that he had put them in his pocket it was too late. He had felt that their illegal status called implicitly for silence and discretion. Like nearly all public servants, he didn’t do anything special to earn his salary, so he thought of it as a kind of gift, and all his instincts had told him to take the money, to keep his head down and his mouth shut. In any case it was a miserable amount, a mere pittance doled out by the state to those privileged, middle-class citizens who were incapable of productive work. But now, of course, he could end up under a different rubric of the national budget: if he were caught using counterfeit money, he’d be thrown into prison. He had literally no idea what to do, and he could barely walk; the few hundred yards to his house seemed like a journey all the way around the world. What could he do? What could he do? He couldn’t even imagine possibilities. The situation was too unfamiliar. Up until then counterfeit bills had been unheard-of in Panama. And new bills were released very gradually into the country’s slow-moving economy. But if this predicament really was entirely new, how could he have grasped it immediately, with all its ramifications? There was only one explanation: this was the reactivation of an archetypal situation, deeply imprinted in the brain, even the brain of a man as inexperienced as this pen pusher. Which also explained why it was so overwhelming, because it gave him cause to wonder: Of all the people in the world, why me?

  His paralysis notwithstanding he had kept moving and was now in the street. The Palace of the Ministries, from which he had emerged, faced onto the city’s central square. The last rays of sun lit up the plumes of the palm trees, in whose mercifully cool shade a busy crowd was milling. Waves of office workers were leaving the government buildings around the square and crossing it in all directions; there were couples meeting, noisy schoolboys and girls hanging around, old people taking the air, children hurrying to finish their games before they had to go home. He too had to cross the square, but first he had to cross the street, which he did with care: it was the moment when the drivers of the senior public servants started up their cars and engaged in all kinds of maneuvers to secure the most convenient positions for their bosses. The din they made was deafening, but there was also the multitudinous buzz of hundreds of voices and cries, and the chorus of the birds in the trees making their usual evening racket. Suddenly, a high, sustained note was added to all that noise; Varamo scarcely needed to register the sound to know what it was. It made him look up and across the square to the long central avenue, where he could see that that ceremony of lowering the flag had indeed begun. Opposite the Palace of the Ministries, on the other side of the square, was the Ministry of the Interior, and every afternoon at exactly five o’clock a squad of cadets issued from its gates and proceeded to lower the flag that they had hoisted at the break of day, in an identical but inverted ceremony. The slow ascent or descent was accompanied by the sustained bugle note that was now setting the tone for the general cacophony. That high-pitched single note felt very intimate and close, detached from the soldiers who, seen from a distance, looked like miniatures because of their garishly colored uniforms, the inhuman, metallic rigidity of their postures as they stood at attention, and the impeccable formality of their grooming — not a hair out of place — in striking contrast to the tropical exuberance of everything around them.

  As Varamo crossed the street, carefully watching the cars, which were moving very slowly but in all directions, one of them reversed, then lurched forward and even seemed to move sideways around him, almost as if it were trying to block his way. It was one of the Hispano-Suizas imported many years be
fore by the French, a vast black machine, eight yards long, sputtering and honking and apparently out to get him. Because of the nervous strain he was under he started in fright, as if a strange mechanical monster had chosen him for its prey. But as he was making up his mind to go around it and do whatever was necessary to reach the safety of the sidewalk (he was about to break into a run), he noticed that the driver, whose window he was facing, was calling out. He froze. The driver was addressing him, and must have been trying to approach him before; that was why the car had been making those strange movements, which Varamo had rendered even more bizarre by attempting to continue on his way. He greeted the man with a nervous smile, and as soon as he recognized him was assailed by a range of new fears. The drivers who worked for the Ministries formed a sort of brotherhood: they took bets on the last two or three numbers of the lottery, and offered credit to office workers like him. When it came to his gambling debts Varamo suffered from serious amnesia, so there was always a chance that he would be reminded of one at the most unexpected moment. It was a likely enough scenario, because the drivers would have known that it was payday and that he was bound to have cash in his pocket. Except that the cash . . . But no: when he finally understood what the driver was saying, he realized that it was the other way around. The fellow had winnings to deliver, not Varamo’s, but his mother’s. She was an inveterate gambler and when she came downtown, as she did every day, to shop or chat with her friends, she never missed an opportunity to “play” the numbers that she had dreamed up or worked out. This time she had won something, and the driver wanted to entrust the prize to her son. It was somewhat irregular to use an intermediary, but the irregularity of the whole operation meant that every so often it was suddenly imperative to pay all the debts and recoup all the loans, to wipe the slate clean and start over. Too relieved to protest, Varamo stretched out his hand and took what the entrepreneurial driver was offering him.

  Only then did the massive automobile stop heaving forward and backward and allow him to proceed in a straight line to the sidewalk. And only when he got there did he look at what he was nervously gripping in his hand and see that it was a faded one-peso note, so old and worn that it was beyond creasing, enfolded in a sheet of paper, a page from a notebook. On this sheet the driver had written the winning numbers, followed by the unsuccessful combinations, and the balance of losses and gains. Varamo was accustomed to serving as a go-between for his gambling mother, so he barely bothered to glance at the writing before putting the paper into his pocket and forgetting all about it. But it was a curious document, and would have left the uninitiated observer in a state of perplexity. For a start, there wasn’t a single number, although it was all about sums of money. As a precautionary measure, the drivers used a code, in which each number was represented by a word. The sheet of paper had the innocent look of an incoherent letter, written in clumsy upper case. Tables of examples had been copied out for the barely literate drivers, but they reproduced the words from memory, with every imaginable kind of error. If Varamo had been betting (as he sometimes did), he would have ignored this balance sheet and trusted to the driver’s honesty, but he knew that his mother spent a lot of time deciphering that gobbledygook and would not be satisfied until she had confirmed that every bet tallied with her original intentions and with the dictates of chance.

  With his hand still in his pocket he looked up, and the light washed over him, like a holy bath. Light was what made the world work; the world was Colón; Colón was the square. Light dissolved the worries created by its dark twin, thought. Why think? Why build a prison of problems when the solution was as simple as opening one’s eyes? On the one hand light dissolved, and on the other it condensed: its action had produced those colored statues known as plants, people, animals, clouds and the earth. It was the time when everyone went out, when everyone came downtown to meet, and all eyes opened, those of the living and those of the dead. Every leaf on every tree corresponded to a human footprint, and the evening’s transparent labyrinths led to happiness. But Varamo had those two damn bills in his pocket, like two bat’s wings fanning a velvety darkness; they weighed him down like thoughts that he still had to think. Out there, all around him, was life, but he couldn’t live it! Changing two bills should have been the easiest thing in the world, but he couldn’t even start to plan a course of action. He was drowning in a glass of water, terrified of slipping toward the dark pulsation of ideas, as if it meant that he would lose the visible and the real forever. He took his hand out of his pocket and with a futile gesture tried to grasp the floating cell of light. He took a step and thought: Why did this have to happen to me? Why me? There were hundreds of men, women and children milling around on the square and in the head of every one, an iridescent brain seemed to be flashing out the mocking refrain, “Not me,” “Not me.”

  He felt a little dizzy, a little out of sorts, which wasn’t surprising given the circumstances. He stopped and looked ahead with eyes half closed. In front of him, almost as far as he could see, stretching away on both sides of the central avenue and right around the square in fact, was an unbroken row of indigenous women sitting on the ground with their merchandise laid out on rugs. They sold everything, from fried food to golden earrings. Predictably, his blood pressure had fallen, and he needed a snack to give himself a boost. He went up to one of the women, greeted her, stood there for a moment examining her wares, and finally pointed to a piece of red candy in the shape of a die. She wrapped it in a square of paper, and he leaned forward to take it. He unwrapped it straight away, put the paper in his pocket so as not to litter the sidewalk, and held the little red cube between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. He was so distracted that it took him a moment to remember that he had to pay; then, twisting awkwardly, he began to rummage in his pockets with his left hand. But how could he pay? He had no coins . . . Then he remembered the one-peso bill that the driver had given him. He held it out to the woman. She refused it with a look of horror on her face. A peso was too much! She had no change. Didn’t he have anything smaller? He shook his head, despondently. For a moment he was tempted to show her one of the hundred-peso bills, but then he felt that it would be unwise, not to mention the difficulty of finding them with the wrong hand and extracting them from his pocket. In the end she snatched the peso, having decided to activate a system for obtaining change to which the necessities of trade had accustomed the street vendors. The instrument of this operation, a crippled man, was already approaching, as if alerted by a special instinct. Although his limited mobility would have seemed to render him unfit for such a task, he actually earned his living in this way, which goes to show that, in society, even the smallest necessity can provide a means of support for someone. Holding the bill in his hand, he walked away along the row of Indian women, tottering on his debilitated legs, lurching about and swinging his arms wildly to recover his precarious balance. As he addressed them, the women complained and kicked up a fuss, but roughly one in five helped him out as best she could, and so the peso was gradually divided into smaller and smaller sums. He had to go almost all the way to the corner, and while the candy vendor was waiting, just to pass the time, she remarked on how much work it was for all of them, providing change: a Sisyphean task, because whatever they did, at the close of trading, it came to nothing, and they had to start all over again the next day.

  When the cripple returned with the change, Varamo apologized, thanked them profusely, and had no choice but to stay and listen to the man, who was covered in sweat
and so exhausted by the effort that his speech was almost incomprehensible. What he was trying to say, in response to Varamo’s apologies, was that it wasn’t the client’s fault. It was the fault of the monetary authorities, who wouldn’t issue sufficient quantities of bills and coins, and had allowed an absurd situation to develop, in which people valued the units of currency in inverse proportion to the size of the denomination. It made no sense, however you looked at it. It wasn’t as if the mint was working to capacity, and even if it had been, they could have put in a few extra hours to satisfy the community’s increasingly vocal demands. The problem was, they were too busy printing thousand-peso notes for their own salaries to bother with the smaller denominations that you need to turn the big ones into real working currency. It was truly unbelievable that the government couldn’t be bothered to do such a little thing, which would have made it so popular with its constituents. But they just didn’t care; they’d lost touch with the real life of ordinary people. That was the only explanation, because it would have been simple for them to order the minting of enough small change to meet the needs of a generation or two, and make life a bit easier for the citizens of Panama. Wasn’t that what they were paid to do? Public servants were supposed to serve the public. And if they were going to argue that it was more expensive to mint coins than to print bills, what was to stop them printing bills? Where was it written that the low denominations had to be represented by costly coins and not by cheap paper bills? Couldn’t it be the other way around? Wouldn’t it be more logical?

  Varamo walked away toward the center of the square, overwhelmed by anxiety, and the people slid by like fugitive impressions. This may have damaged his reputation, since there must have been acquaintances among those people, and if he had neglected to greet one of the ladies who, many years earlier, might have become his fiancée, she would think not only that he was rude and a failure, but also that he had sunk to the lowest point of his life. Varamo was one of those men who was apt to serve as an example. A man of his age (the classic age for taking stock) will often say: “When I was young, I had a lot of problems; if I hadn’t solved them or been lucky, I’d be dead today or a beggar or locked up in an asylum . . . or, worse still, I’d be scraping by in some job I’d been given as a favor, still living with my mother, still single, no family of my own . . .” That was Varamo: a living cliché, a textbook case. He looked up. He couldn’t help noticing the sailors who came to the square at that hour of the day and the prostitutes waiting for them. They too were searching for love, in their way. But they were searching in the present moment, not looking to destiny. He was already in the center of the square, on the site of the monument that hadn’t been built, and to his left he could see the cathedral with its doors open; his line of sight went straight down the aisle to the altar. In the dark inner depths he glimpsed the Virgin, swathed in the reddish light of the votive candles burning at her feet, and behind her, like a sinister bird in the shadows, Christ, the God born from her body, quasi per tubum, without affecting her. Everyone went to the Virgin looking for consolation or encouragement or inspiration or whatever because life was impossible without the help of some supernatural being. But such beings did not exist beyond the world of images and fantasy and superstition. Varamo had always wondered how people managed to go on living. Now he thought he knew the answer: they could do it because they didn’t have to wonder how they would change their counterfeit bills.