Cesar Aira - Varamo

Varamo didn’t have much time to consider this issue because he heard voices approaching. He listened carefully: the Góngoras and the Police Chief were coming down the passage. “It was the doctor who connected him, so that he wouldn’t lose touch with the world!” one of the ladies explained emphatically, while the Police Chief muttered pessimistic objections: “That’s the surest way to lose touch.” They were talking about the Treasurer. “No one’s irreplaceable.” Gleeful, conspiratorial laughter. “This is the lion’s den,” thought Varamo, panicking. Luckily the voices continued on their way, toward the dining room, where they met with a chorus of greetings and laughter. It was his chance to make himself scarce, and without a second thought he headed for the front door, trying not to trip over the golf clubs. But as he crossed the sitting room he glanced around, looking for Caricias. Just as he was about to reach the door, he hesitated. Although he wasn’t sure why, he wanted to speak to the girl again and was saddened by the thought of missing a chance to do so. Opportunities don’t always present themselves. In fact, they never present themselves as such; it isn’t in their nature. That was something he knew well. Opportunities only exist in retrospect, when it’s already too late. And he was sure that he would regret having missed the opportunity to speak with “the last woman.” It didn’t matter that the sobriquet had been bestowed on her as a joke by her boyfriend Cigarro. Once pronounced, it acquired an enormous conceptual weight, the full force of which was bearing down on Varamo. Glancing around, he noticed the little door through which the visitors had passed a few minutes earlier. He was curious to see how the Treasurer had been accommodated, and there was a chance to kill two birds with one stone: it was unlikely that anyone else would go in there for a while, so it would be a safe place to wait until Caricias came back into range. In he went, without any further deliberation.

It was a very small space, but even so Varamo had to wait for his pupils to dilate before he could take stock of its contents, because it was lit only by some luminous buttons and dials made of red glass. “The broadcasting booth,” he had heard the Góngoras say. And indeed, half the space was occupied by what seemed to be a telegraph console, with loudspeakers, cables everywhere, revolving cylinders, baffles and manometers. . What made the strongest impression on him, in that semi-darkness, was the movement. There must have been clockwork mechanisms, with springs, continuing to function in the absence of an operator. The Treasurer was stretched out on a mattress on the floor, wearing large earphones made of leather and metal which were connected to the console by a cable. Varamo stood still for a few minutes considering this strange installation. In the silence, beneath the sound of his own breathing, he began to hear a murmur that struck him as familiar, although its volume barely exceeded the threshold of perception. He tried to determine its source and realized that it was coming from the Treasurer’s earphones. Varamo knelt beside him, loosened one of the earphones and raised it to his own ear. . The sound of his Voices made him freeze in terror. His head began to spin. He sat on the floor, stupefied. Gradually, as he emerged from his bafflement, he began to piece together an explanation. The Góngoras used this equipment to communicate with the ships that brought in the smuggled goods (the golf clubs). And it wasn’t, as Varamo had initially assumed, a telegraph machine, but a more recent invention which transmitted speech, like a telephone. The sisters must have hooked it up to a cylinder phonograph in order to keep transmitting twenty-four hours a day. And some kind of electrical leak, which wouldn’t have been at all surprising, given the precarious condition of the grid in Colón, had allowed the transmission to escape or to be echoed in the atmosphere surrounding the house. That was where they came from, the Voices that he had been hearing for years on his nightly walk to the café. It wasn’t surprising that they pronounced apparently meaningless sentences; they must have been speaking in code. It was as simple as that. And the doctor had exploited the device to keep the Minister alive, using an automatic system to perfect the well-known technique of talking to a comatose patient in order to provoke a response from the dormant consciousness. But had he really perfected the technique? Perhaps he had done just the opposite, because the treatment only worked when the voice was familiar, when it conveyed affection and recognition, calling on the patient’s personal memories, emotions and reasons to live.

Just then Caricias rushed into the room; she bumped into Varamo (there was very little space) and stifled a cry. Luckily she didn’t panic. “I came in to change the cylinders,” she explained. He in turn stammered out an explanation of his presence there, admitting that curiosity had got the better of him. The girl was friendly; sometimes a crisis can break down the barriers of shyness or mistrust. After replacing the cylinders in the machine, she smiled at him charmingly in the half-light, which gave Varamo the courage to tell her that, for a long time, he had been hearing fragments of those transmissions, and they had always seemed mysterious to him. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “If you don’t know the code they must sound like absolute nonsense.” She took a notebook from a shelf and flicked through it quickly; in the semidarkness, all he could see was that the pages were covered with large, clumsy handwriting in block letters. “Here are the keys.” Then, to Varamo’s great surprise, she told him that he was the trigger for the nocturnal transmissions. Caricias and the ladies of the house were usually very busy with their guests, and the transmissions had to begin at the same time every night, so they had decided to use him as the “ignition,” since they had noticed how punctual he was on his walk to the café. As the mass of his body entered a magnetic field located in the street, it set off the automatic mechanism. “That explains a lot. .,” said Varamo; then, after a pause, he added, “A lot of things that would have remained inexplicable if I hadn’t come here tonight, by chance.” “I don’t think it’s a question of chance, Mr Varamo.” “What do you mean?” “That two-timer might have planned it all.” “I thought he was your fiancé.” “I’m starting to suspect that Cigarro never really loved me. He was just using me to get access to this communications system, and now he’s intending to use it to achieve his goals.” “And what goals are they?” “I’m not really sure, but I’m afraid he might be planning to lead a black uprising and overthrow the government.” Because there was so little space, they were standing very close together, almost touching, and this was so pleasant for Varamo that what he was hearing didn’t seem particularly implausible. There was a demographic undercurrent to everything that was happening, and whatever “the last woman” said in that connection automatically became significant, absorbed the significance of the context, like a vacuum cleaner, and emitted it along with the message. In any case, one thing was certain: he had no idea what to say. The same old problem: he didn’t know how to talk to women. But she solved it for him: “We have to stop Cigarro. What we can do is change the keys, so that he can’t communicate with the ships that are coming from Haiti to invade us. Take this,” she said, handing Varamo the notebook, “and start making changes. We can finish it together later on. I have lots of ideas. I have to go now, or they’ll notice I’m gone. Come back later, through the back patio.” They opened the door and left the room together; Varamo put the notebook in his pocket. Before going off to the dining room, Caricias pointed to the front door, through which he passed without a sound.