Varamo Read online

  Just at that moment he was wrenched from his daydreaming by a shrill voice calling his name and embellishing it with all manner of obscene insults. It was a madman, a well-known local character. Colorful, but bothersome, because his madness took the form of buttonholing passersby and demanding the repayment of imaginary debts, which were real to his deluded mind, to judge by the sincerity of his shouting. He wanted his money back, a large or small sum, the money he had loaned to X or Y or Z, who refused to repay him, with an outrageous, evil stubbornness, which filled him with a vehement righteous indignation, renewed a thousand times a day, whenever he came across someone he knew. He lived in his own reality. It was futile to argue. Some people hit him, others took it as a joke. The only way to get rid of him was to give him a coin and say, “I’ll pay the rest later.” This worked but was counterproductive in the long run because it confirmed his delusions, so that the next time he would fall upon a victim who had weakened, insisting that now it was time to pay in full. Many, however, did weaken just to get away, and so did Varamo on this occasion. He started feeling for some change, which was hard to do with his left hand; he had to twist his whole body to reach into the pockets on the other side, where, being right-handed, he unthinkingly put everything. Finally he managed to get hold of a coin with the tips of his fingers and handed it over, thinking: Here I am, searching for love, and what do I find? An obnoxious madman. The madman went off mumbling incoherent complaints: “He gave it to me with his left hand, the son of a bitch . . .” In Colón, a deeply Catholic city, certain liturgical proprieties still carried weight. But couldn’t he see I had no choice? thought Varamo.

  When he was alone again, continuing on his way, he wondered why he couldn’t use his right hand, and in fact the whole upper right-hand side of his body. He tried to concentrate or to break out of his concentration . . . And that was when he realized how distracted he really was. The reason he couldn’t use his right hand was that he was still holding the little cube of red candy between his thumb and index finger. He was holding it up at head-level with his elbow bent. The heat had melted a fair amount of the cube; it had lost its sharp edges, and the sugary juice had run all over his hand and under the sleeves of his shirt and jacket, flowing down his forearm in sticky rills. He looked around anxiously for somewhere to dispose of it, but as he’d observed on many previous occasions, there were no trash baskets in the square; another administrative oversight, which obliged him to fill his pockets with useless papers. But his pockets were out of the question in this case, unless he wanted to make an irreparable mess. So he approached one of the hedged lawns, intending to throw the candy on the grass, where no one would step on it. But a better solution presented itself in the form of a tall bush: he stuck the sweet onto the end of one of its branches. And there it remained like a kind of amorphous, fleshy flower, not so alien, after all, to the capricious forms that nature can take in the tropics. His arm had gone stiff from the unconscious tension. He shook it, hoping to get the blood flowing again. He spread his fingers as widely as he could to stop them sticking together and looked at his hand: it was glazed red and shiny, as if he had slipped it into a glass glove. He set off resolutely homeward, in a bad mood, though he didn’t really know why. He was halfway down the diagonal avenue that led away from one of the corners of the square when there was a sudden change in the air (or was it in his head?). Before he knew why, he knew that he had been relieved of a crushing weight, a weight of time. What had happened? Everything had changed without anything changing. He turned his gaze inward, searching deeper and deeper . . . He went over the events of the previous minutes, his memories and sensations; it was vertiginous, but luckily it was over in an instant, because he realized what it was straight away: the bugle note that accompanied the lowering of the flag had stopped. He turned to look back and, sure enough, the bugler was taking the instrument from his lips, while two other soldiers were holding the flag by its corners, like a sheet, and walking toward one another, folding it in half, then in four, then in eight, then in sixteen . . . All that time the shrill note had been boring through his head (it can’t have been good for anyone’s health), and he wondered if it had really lasted as long as it seemed. It made him think of those magical lapses or bubbles in time: to the person inside it seems as if a whole life has gone by, while for everyone else it has been just a moment, barely the time it takes for an apple to fall from its branch to the ground. But perhaps it was always like that. We usually associate the law of gravity with speed, forgetting that it can also govern movements of prodigious slowness when it chooses. Suddenly the air seemed empty, and Varamo began to move through it more quickly. Freed of the bugle note, his mind performed an odd short circuit, deciding not to think any more.

  So what was the problem? There was no problem. Those stupid counterfeit bills. Their value was precisely nothing, and maybe they would come to nothing in the end. Long long ago, in the continuum of the world’s reality, two random objects were set apart by a radical heterogeneity. A difference so irreducible no concept could embrace both things. No term except Being. That was how Being came into being, and from then on thought and philosophy existed too, at least until that afternoon in Panama. The counterfeit bills had also come to introduce a heterogeneity. Perhaps the end of thought was at hand. But if people didn’t think, how would they occupy their time?

  When Varamo got home, he flopped onto his bed without undressing. It was the time of day when he usually took a nap, to rest and recover his appetite before dinner, but on this occasion lying down was not a choice: he was in such a state of distress and nervous exhaustion that he simply couldn’t go on standing up. He dropped like a stone, unable even to take off his dark suit, his shoes or his hat. He began to writhe immediately in a kind of waking nightmare, bathed in sweat, with his eyes open (if he closed them he felt nauseated). There was something very hard pressing into his side, near his hip, when he turned. He tried to locate it with his hand, which was opening and closing in involuntary spasms, rummaging through the damp lumps of his clothing and the sheets, until he felt a warm, very smooth object, which eluded his grasp. Finally, pushing and pulling blindly with his whole hand — he had lost control of his fingers — like a one-armed man laid out in soft puff pastry boxing with an oyster, he managed to dislodge the object from the bed. It was a double-sided silver pocket watch. It shot out and went rolling across the floor with a dull rumbling noise for quite a while before coming up against an obstacle: the foot of a wardrobe. The impact made the doors, which didn’t shut properly, swing open. The full-length mirror on the inside of one of them revolved through 180 degrees, taking in the whole room, and came to rest reflecting Varamo’s bed and his gaze. He didn’t recognize that kicking, groaning, horizontal figure as himself.

  Although the house was quiet, sounds of all sorts could be heard from his room, all of them unrecognizable. Some must have been coming from very far away, others were psychic projections of sounds that he had registered at other times, in other places. Strange creaking noises leading up to thuds so familiar they bypassed his consciousness, and far beneath them all, the whisper of his own breathing. Something loose, rattling in its tin case. At that hour of the day, the light indoors consumed itself. That made a noise as well. The silence created little “befores” and “afters” in the sequences of light. Noise itself made a noise of its own: subtle, doubled over. It is possible to have a nightmare without actually having a nightmare, as Varamo had discovered that afternoon, thanks to the
counterfeit bills. You only need to find yourself in a certain situation.

  When the impact of the watch made the doors swing open, stacks of boxes that had been pressing against them, crammed into the top shelves of the wardrobe, began to fall out onto the floor. The brightly painted boxes traced garish arcs in the air, punctuated by the dull thumps they made as they hit the floor one after another, the stacks above tottering more precariously with every successive collapse. The boxes contained instant food: mashed potato flakes, dried shark fins, blocks of powdered meat, vegetables, dried pasta, even fruit-juice pills. The contents were indicated by crude caricatures on the cardboard packets, which flashed past in a rapid cascade, like a flip book, before the astonished eyes of the reclining man reflected in the background. He had bought the boxes a while back, as an investment. It had seemed the safest placement for his savings. Panama was one of the first countries to manufacture and package ready-cooked food because of the large numbers of single men who had come to work on the canal. Although the products were of excellent quality, the companies that made them went bankrupt overnight because they launched their new lines too late: they had to wait until the requisite technology had matured, and by that time, one way and another, women had arrived, and the workers had wives to cook fresh food for them. In the subsequent liquidation, Varamo bought up as much as he could and stored it. Luckily, the use-by dates printed on the boxes were a long way off.

  The Great Wall of History reflected every little eccentricity in the life of an individual. The point of reflection was always the same; it constituted the personality or the destiny of the subject in question, and since the point was single and unique, despite the wealth of intersecting and superimposed perspectives, life itself, in the end, was strictly one-dimensional. So it was in Varamo’s case. Why had he never married? If the question was asked the other way round, it answered itself: Why was he a bachelor? Because he hadn’t married. For this too there was a historical explanation: the proportion of virgins in Panama had fallen abruptly with the influx of men, and by the time the virgins reappeared, they were already married with children. Demographic imbalances, whether caused by immigration, as in this case, or by other factors, always end up affecting private life. Not just because of sheer numbers, but also because of the social tone they set, which lingers on even after the numbers have reached a new balance. All through Varamo’s life this process had been under way, and he had not known any other situation. He couldn’t even imagine a different set of conditions, as one cannot imagine living in a world whose space-time manifold comprises an extra dimension. And yet it’s not so difficult. Bachelors contaminate the world, creating a perspective of their own, and their particular solutions generate other realities, which may last only a day, but leave their traces all the same.

  Our hero had a hobby. It was his means of escape from what was, on the whole, a melancholic and unsatisfying existence. So when he finally decided that there was no point trying to take a siesta, he got up and went to his work table in the corner to see if he could find some distraction. He had nothing to do, after all. The sudden appearance of the counterfeit bills had at least stopped him worrying about how to spend his time. But time was reasserting itself. On his table there was a basin, and in the basin was a fish about six inches long, one of those yellowish so-called mutant fishes from the canal, although the mutation, if that’s what it was, hadn’t affected the appearance of the fish, only the speed at which they swam. Varamo had a large box divided into various compartments, which contained flasks of acid, tubes, catheters, and instruments for cutting and piercing. He cast a proprietorial eye over these treasures, then turned his attention to a half-completed cardboard model sitting on the table. Scissors, thread, glue and a mess of cardboard pieces testified to a long series of trials in search of the form; and to judge from the state of the model, the form was still a long way off. His intention had been to represent a piano. But what was a piano like? Needless to say, he didn’t have one handy, and his visual memory was poor. He suspected that, like most man-made objects, it was basically made up of cubes embedded in one another. But that didn’t help him much because the problem was how to embed them. Before beginning, he had thought he knew exactly what a piano was like. Who doesn’t? Since the piano didn’t have to be perfect in all its details, as long as it was identifiable, and even a schematic model will usually serve that purpose, he had thought it would be an easy task. Which is why he was perplexed when the object that he produced, after a series of repeated and painstaking attempts, didn’t look like a piano at all, even to him.

  His hobby was embalming small animals. The spirit in which he had taken it up was not, however, entirely disinterested; his aim had been to garner funds to supplement his meager salary. And now that his salary had been paid in counterfeit bills that would land him in prison as soon as he tried to put them into circulation, he’d have to depend on what, if anything, he could earn as an embalmer. Embalming isn’t easy, especially not for someone who has no practical experience in the field and doesn’t know any practitioners. There were no books on the subject, of if there were, they hadn’t reached Panama. So Varamo had been obliged to make it up all on his own, using the primitive method of trial and error. The most daunting aspect of the trials was their enormous scope, covering everything from life to death and a fair bit more on either side. To make things worse, it was the sort of work that was only worth doing if it was done well, because it wasn’t necessary: the finished products, especially if he was hoping to sell them, had to display certain obvious qualities, transcending the process of their production. The animals had to “turn out” well — whole, shiny, natural, strikingly posed — in other words, they had to turn out to be just as they’d been at the start, before the process began. And even disregarding movement, life simply had too many qualities, not to mention the impossibility of knowing for certain what they were.

  His aim had been to produce a fish playing the piano. He had the fish in a washbowl, to keep it alive until the last minute, because he knew how quickly organic matter begins to rot in a climate like Colón’s, once the sustaining breath of life is gone. He had begun by tackling the scaled-down piano, with a conspicuous lack of success so far. The scene, he thought, would be amusing, and was bound to appeal to customers. Ideally it would have included a music box of some kind, but that was far beyond his technical skills. After a last despondent glance at the model, he put it aside. He might as well start with the fish; since he was working with definitive eternities, it didn’t matter what he did first and what he left till later. Embalming the fish was the hard part, in principle, but constructing the piano had seemed easy and turned out to be hard, so the opposite outcome was possible too. He leaned over the water. The little fish was swimming around and around in circles. Varamo was overwhelmed by discouragement. There was so much to do. The animal had to die and then wake to a second life: that would take centuries, surely, but it had to be done in a matter of minutes, by correctly executing a series of predetermined steps, all in the correct order (and he didn’t even know what the steps were). The most awful failure, so awful it was almost supernatural, would be to reach the end of the process and find that the creature was still alive. Not lifelike, but actually living. Unbelievable as it seemed, that was what was happening to him.

  Precisely because there were so many steps, which had to be taken in a specific order, and because the substances to be used (mainly acids) had to be measured exactly, he had decided to keep a log, so t
hat he could repeat the experiment, in the event that it turned out to be a success. He hadn’t done this in the past because no one interfered with his things (a rare privilege among home experimenters and backyard inventors); he always found them undisturbed, even if he had been called away in the middle of a transfusion. That room was his secret labyrinth, and the rest of the house as well, and since he was broadening his view, he could have said that all of Colón, indeed the whole of Panama, was his secret laboratory. He could work in peace for as long as he liked. Although, of course, he would gladly have given up that work, or any other hobby that his privileged circumstances gave him the leisure to pursue, in return for a wife and family. And however convenient it was to be able to take up where he had left off, no matter how often he was interrupted, the advantage didn’t apply to things that were transient by nature and slipped away into the past. So he took a blank sheet of paper, smoothed it out on the table, and placed a pencil on it. And in his neat, professional, sloping hand, he proceeded to note every little thing he did to the fish, leaving spaces between the notes, and numbering them to dispel any doubts about the order. Inevitably, as he worked, his hands got wet and his fingers were smeared with the sticky oils that oozed out of the little creature when it was squeezed, so the paper lost its whiteness and crispness, and the lines of his writing, except for the first, veered erratically up or down to avoid the spots.