Cesar Aira - Varamo

Circumstantial details are a matter of occupying time, while free indirect style is a matter for the occupying subject. Without the details, there is no time; without the style, time remains empty. The details are the object of invention; the style, that of improvisation. Varamo had sensed the essential impossibility of improvising a crime; he was facing the classic, thorny problem of the alibi. “I wasn’t there; I was somewhere else.” Everything in his world of circumstantial details and free indirect style had to lead toward the point where he would be able to speak those words. And in that requirement there was already a hint of the poem’s culminating scene: midnight in Bethlehem, the Child and the Mother making History (neither could say, “I wasn’t there”) and thus setting the coordinates for every potential alibi.

Once the game was over and the washing up was done (the dominoes and the dishes were similar in a way), it was time to go to the café, that masculine, Arabic institution, so characteristic of Central America. Varamo never missed an evening. He was a different man when he went to the café: nonchalant, sociable, more Western, more normal, not so neurotic. It was an illusion, but that didn’t matter, because it was still a subjective reality. He put on his hat. He raised a finger to his chin in a gesture of intense concentration. There was something he had to do before going out, but he couldn’t remember what. A discreet little cough reminded him. He had to put his mother to bed. It wasn’t difficult; by that hour of the evening she was asleep on her feet. Another effect of poor assimilation: not having learnt the language or adapted to the climate and the hours people kept.

“Prease. . prease. .,” she said, and her dry little voice sounded like the cry of a bird lost in the mountains.

“Mother, your glasses. .”

Silence. The quiet rooms were inviting him to resume his experiments, but habit prevailed. He put on his hat, went around checking the doors and the windows one last time, and stepped out into the starry night.

Since he knew his habitual route by heart, he could look up at the sky, though he did remind himself briefly of the caution required when crossing the street, now that motor cars had begun to proliferate. Like all adults, he was afraid of accidents. What dismayed him most about them was the temporal contrast between the instant, or fraction of an instant, in which an accident could occur, and the long months or years required to repair its effects, if indeed they were reparable and didn’t last a lifetime. He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass. In the dark empty streets of Colón, of course, this wariness seemed excessive. And the black sky crossed by streams of phosphorescent mercury was a vision worth the risk. The stars were an overwhelming surprise. But since each scene was linked to the one that had gone before, he continued to see the dominoes and dishes, twinkling among the constellations.

He began to hear the Voices, as he always did at that time on his way to the café. It was a daily fit of madness: disturbing, distressing, almost unbearable, except that it was brief. Just as they had come, the Voices went. They sounded inside his head, so there was no point covering his ears or running, and yet he hurried on, grimacing, and soon, magically, he left them behind. He had grown used to them, but, like any inexplicable phenomenon, they retained a certain latent menace. Concise sentences, definitions, formulae, but none of it seemed to make any sense. When he thought about it, before or afterward, he was cross with himself for being so distracted: a sentence, half a sentence or a word always made some kind of sense. The whole set of sentences might have been senseless, but if he took the time to search for the key. . Not when it was actually happening, of course — it was too sudden and frightening — but perhaps if he could memorize the sentences, or note them down afterward and make lists. . Why had he never done something like that, in all those years of being ambushed by the Voices, instead of passively tuning in?

Sometimes he suspected that he was not the only receiver of that nocturnal dictation. The others might have been keeping it secret, like him. It’s natural enough to say, “Why me of all people? Why me?” but everyone else could be saying the same. The worrying thing was not being able to understand. He had remarked that the most awkward aspect of individuality was being left out of the shared understandings that create social bonds. This happened in everyday life, with his colleagues at the office or his friends at the café, not just with the Voices, but that supernatural phenomenon may well have been a model for the way it worked in general. If it really was an auditory hallucination, as he had occasionally suspected, perhaps it was his mind’s way of providing remedial practice, but if so he kept squandering that opportunity.

He was surrounded by the watchful shapes of dark houses, closed doors and corners. The most natural reaction to a supernatural experience in circumstances such as these would have been a panic attack, and he did begin to have one, but it was just a beginning, because the café wasn’t far away, and at the rate he was going, almost breaking into a run, he would soon be there. As he drew near, he was seized by a more definite dread: perhaps the Voices were informing others, the police for example, of what was in his pocket. Ever since he had first heard the Voices, he had harbored the fear that they would reveal his secrets to others who, unlike him, would be able to understand. Luckily, he’d never had to worry about the practical consequences of such a revelation, given his blameless conduct and the upright life he led. Now, however, the forgery, although it was none of his doing, was growing in the night and taking on threatening forms, as unrecognizable things always do. He had inadvertently crossed the line between the private and the public. A crime transformed the most private and retiring citizen into a public figure. And from that point on, anything concealment could, in turn, become a criminal act, in an endless proliferation.

The night, however, had something else in store. Not the police, but a motor car. From the end of the street came one of the large official vehicles, traveling at a moderate speed, and when it reached the corner right in front of Varamo, it collided with another car coming along the cross street. Odd. They must have been the only two cars on the road in the whole city, or in the neighborhood anyway, and they had to go and crash into each other. “You never know what’s going to happen.” The accident, it seemed, was a truly universal concept. The second car, which had been the active instrument of the collision, was much smaller than the first and flimsier (it looked like a homemade model, put together by a handyman). In spite of which, perhaps because of the relative velocities, or positions, the big car turned over and came to rest upside down, while the little one continued on its way down the street with just a few damaged panels, whose rattling was soon drowned out by the noise of the accelerating motor. And then it was gone. The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds, and Varamo didn’t have time to react. In any case, all he had to do was keep on walking (he hadn’t stopped) to reach the overturned car in the middle of the intersection. As he approached, he saw a man crawl out through the driver’s window, get to his feet, feel his arms and legs to make sure that he hadn’t been injured and look up. The man recognized him, and his greeting was almost cheerful. Varamo, whose reactions were slower, took a moment to recognize the man: it was the driver from the Ministry who had given him the peso for his mother earlier. He was black, and his teeth were shining in the dark, a sign that he was smiling. Typically irresponsible, thought Varamo. But not altogether. Because, just as the driver was about to open his mouth, he remembered something; a worried look came over his face, and he turned back to the car from which he had emerged. The wheels were still spinning in the air. He leaned down to look through the side windows, which were level with the ground, and what he saw jolted him into action. He tried the rear door, which opened with magical ease, backwards. He started crawling in, but first he turned to Varamo, who had reached the car by then, and asked for his help. Inside the car was a fat man in a black suit who was unconscious. He was in a curious position, resting on his shoulders and his upper back, as if he had frozen in the middle of a somersault. The driver crawled in, righted him by pushing and shoving, then, with Varamo’s help, pulled him out onto the pavement by the legs. It was the Treasurer.