Cesar Aira - Varamo

Varamo thought it highly suspicious that Cigarro happened to have secret documents concerning the rally in his pocket. He had also recognized the handwriting from the betting slips he passed on to his mother. What this probably meant was that Cigarro had made copies in secret, to sell to the competitors. That would fit in with his various sidelines. Which is partly why Varamo hadn’t wanted to play along with him. The explanation of the regularity rallies had struck him as vaguely familiar. The Voices operated in the same way, except that for them, he was both the route and the cars. There might have been some connection, in which case the overall result of the rally might reveal the Voices’ secret. He knew that counterfeiting was one of the anarchists’ favorite strategies. There is often a causal link between apparently unrelated events, but we are deceived by simultaneity, which suggests a mere coincidence. Fake money and real money are simultaneous; both flow through the capillaries of society at the same time, more or less at the same rate, and they are not independent of each other. If there was any truth to the economic axiom that “bad money drives out good,” there was a curious parallel with those defeatists in the regularity rallies who came up beside the good competitors and accelerated just to provoke them. So Varamo got up from the table and left the dining room, saying he was going to check on the patient. He needed a distraction, because there is a limit to the number of worries a mind can accommodate. And, as far as distractions were concerned, he was spoiled for choice, because he was in a house that he had never visited before, where everything was new and unfamiliar to him.

He was in a house. But whose? He should have known whose house it was because he passed it on his daily walk, and he had always taken the same route because he had never lived anywhere else. Houses look different from the outside and the inside, but he’d entered this one in such a rush that he hadn’t registered the transition; his consciousness had failed to take it in. He had to reconstruct the events: the accident, the corner. . Then he realized that he was in the house that belonged to the Góngora sisters. Any doubts he might have had were dispelled when one of them rushed past in front of him wearing a bathrobe, on her way to the kitchen, and assuming that he had come to ask for coffee, told him that they were making some and would bring it in. When he was alone again, he looked around, with renewed interest. “The Góngoras’ house” was a rather mysterious place, at least for him. Since childhood he had heard people in the neighborhood refer to the building and its inhabitants in a knowing, insinuating way, which he had come to think was, fundamentally, the product of more or less willful ignorance rather than of any factual knowledge. The Góngoras were rarely seen in public, and were not on familiar terms with anyone in the neighborhood. Apparently, they were satisfied with their own company and happy to stay home, or very busy with their housework. Women who live on their own always provoke gossip, especially when they keep to themselves and no one knows where their money comes from. And it’s worse if there is no income, or no plausible theory about its source, because an almost supernatural element creeps in. “They live on air.” Seen from the street, the house was an obscure edifice in the middle of a jungle-like profusion of palms and overgrown shrubs. Although the façade was partly obscured by vegetation, the doors and windows seemed to be permanently closed. What could be seen of the house gave an impression of decadence and neglect. How long had the Góngoras been living there? Forty, fifty years? A hundred? They had already been there when Varamo was a boy. There must have been successive generations of them, because there were always young Góngoras. If there were men, the sisters kept them well hidden or received their visits very discreetly. Although Varamo passed the house every night on his way to the café, he never paid attention to it, perhaps because his perceptions were dulled by habit, or because, at that point on the walk, the Voices were at their most intense and he was too preoccupied to be looking at houses.

The Góngoras started chatting to him. Everything entered Varamo’s consciousness with a liquid fluency: some pieces of information were absorbed in a linear and orderly fashion, while others were twisted, folded, knobbled, but they all slipped in with the same baroque lubrication, which made him suspect that they would slip out just as easily. There were only two Góngoras, it turned out, two sisters in their sixties: solidly built, well-preserved, dark-skinned Creole ladies. They laughed in response to his discreet inquiry: No, their mothers or grandmothers had never lived there, just them. And they didn’t have daughters either. “We didn’t get married because we were quite happy together, just the two of us,” said one. The other nodded, and the one who had spoken glanced at her, then said to Varamo: “My sister lost a leg in an accident,” which might have been another reason why they hadn’t married; and perhaps it explained their reclusive life, and all the ambiguous rumors about them. “It’s not that we never see anyone else,” pointed out the one-legged sister. And together they praised the fidelity of numerous old friends who continued to visit them: “Why, just last night we had a little gathering; we were chatting and listening to music till dawn.” And sure enough, there were many signs of a lengthy party: ashtrays overflowing with butts, dirty glasses, and the remains of sandwiches on plates. “Do you do all the housework on your own?” asked Varamo. They had a maid, they said, but she was more like a member of the family, a daughter: Carmen Luna. “But you’d know her by her nickname: Caricias.” No, the name meant nothing to Varamo. They were surprised but said he’d recognize her when she came back. “We got her out of bed, poor thing,” one of the sisters added, tilting her head in the direction of the dining room, “to go and bring in all those people.” The other one insisted, looking intently at Varamo: “You used to play with her when you were children.” “I don’t remember. Are you sure you’re not getting me mixed up with someone else?” “No! Truly!” they exclaimed in unison. “You’re the son of that nice Chinese lady.” “We knew your father, Tuñon de Varamo, and your aunt Ilolay.” To complete these revelations, they added: “We thought you’d have kept up with Carmen’s news, because she’s engaged to your friend Cigarro.” At this point Varamo did remember something, though probably not what the Góngoras had in mind. Although Cigarro wasn’t really his friend, they used to exchange a few words outside the Ministry, and on a number of occasions the driver had referred to a woman who was, so he said, “the last woman,” and he had mentioned the name Caricias. Varamo had never given any serious thought to what he might have meant. The expression seemed rather derogatory (if it meant the last one he’d picked up), but perhaps it could also mean “the last real woman”; and in a way her nickname, Caricias, Caresses, supported that interpretation.

The interest the sisters were taking in him, and the conversation as a whole, began to make sense in the light of his supposed friendship with the driver. After expressing their concern for the future well-being of their maid and adopted daughter, they got to the point. Cigarro’s job, was it secure? Wouldn’t it be affected by the current political unrest? Varamo said that he wasn’t aware of any unrest, but whatever happened, he didn’t think that the fiancé’s position would be affected by changes of that kind. “When there’s a revolution, it’s the senior public servants who are replaced, not the drivers.” That’s what the Góngoras had thought as well, but they were worried for another reason, which they proceeded to explain, choosing their words with care. What they couldn’t understand was how there could be ministries in the city of Colón, although it wasn’t the national capital. Maybe they were provincial or municipal or regional ministries? “No, they’re national,” said Varamo without hesitation. They nodded. That was what they had always thought, what they had always assumed: the ministries were the ministries of Panama. But who had ever heard of an executive government with its ministries based outside the national capital? They weren’t talking about a satellite city that was bound to be swallowed up by urban sprawl eventually and become part of the same agglomeration. No, Colón was on the opposite coast, separated from the capital by the full width of the isthmus. They were speaking with an effusive fervor; they had clearly pondered this question at length. Varamo was at a loss for words; it had never occurred to him that there was anything odd about the situation. But he saw what they meant. Once again he was struck by how the inexplicable can lie hidden within what we have always taken for granted. Noting his ignorance and his interest, the two ladies set out the hypothesis that they had developed in the course of their cogitations: Colón must have been a capital of sorts twenty years earlier, before independence, or even before the establishment of the Colombian Republic. In any case, it must have possessed a ministerial system that would have been onerous and inconvenient to transfer to the new capital; but, of course, having the ministries so far away was even more inconvenient, so there must be a plan afoot to move them to their natural place. It was hardly surprising that nothing had been done to implement the plan in two long decades, given the country’s general inefficiency. But sooner or later it would happen; in fact, these long-delayed initiatives provided an easy way for politicians to boost their popularity and appear to be dynamic men of action. The opening of the linked highways from one coast to the other, which was to be celebrated in the coming days, could be a logical first step. They looked at him again, expectantly. He didn’t know what to say: the problem seemed both very far away and very near. Far away like all those things we have never really stopped to think about; near like the very same things as soon as we begin to consider them and realize how they affect us. If there was a relocation, he might be obliged to choose between moving and resigning. He had never left Colón, the city of his birth, and moving away was out of the question, for his mother if not for him. But he couldn’t survive for long without a job. In any case, faced with the sisters, he could only confess his ignorance and promise to look into it. They nodded and said they would stay in touch: “After all, we’re neighbors.” Their interest in the matter was purely altruistic or maternal: they wanted to make sure that their ward’s future husband had a good, steady income. They didn’t mind that he was black. And they couldn’t have been aware (oddly, for ladies who seemed so worldly-wise) that he had a number of lucrative sidelines.