Cesar Aira - Varamo

A minute later he was walking down the usual street, as on any other night. He was leaving the Voices behind. He smiled to think that he had, in his pocket, the Rosetta stone with which to decipher them. And he smiled again when he remembered the mission entrusted to him by his new friend: to mix up the keys, to scramble the codes, to render them indecipherable. But that task could wait. Ahead of him, at the end of the street, the café shone like a carbuncle. As he approached the door, everyone else seemed to be coming out, and some of them greeted him. Because of the accident, he was later than usual. From a few stray words, he gathered that the theme of the evening’s conversation had been the regularity rally, and it seemed that the true enthusiasts were going back to the starting point to see the last cars setting off. The conversation must have been lively that evening, with the rally and the political rumors. Varamo thought he might have arrived too late, just as the café was closing, but he glanced in through the windows and saw that there were still customers at some of the tables. Since his acquaintances were leaving, he decided to sit down on his own and examine the keys. But he wasn’t able to carry out this plan, because as soon as he walked in, a thickset figure rushed at him yelling, “Pay me back the money I lent you! Don’t pretend you can’t hear me!” It was the usual madman, the one who had accosted him in the square that afternoon. He was extremely worked up. He gestured vaguely at the tables. “The bill has to be paid.” At this pronouncement the customers, who were all watching to see what would happen, burst into unanimous laughter. The combination of the madman’s untimely demand and Varamo’s confusion must have made for a farcical scene. Someone said: “Two hundred pesos? C’mon, we didn’t drink that much. Ten would cover it.” Then more laughter, which distracted the madman, and Varamo tried to slip away, but the owner stepped in and shoved the lunatic out the door. “That’s enough trouble from you!” Varamo looked for a place to sit. He was standing beside a table occupied by three regulars, who were looking at him and smiling. One of them said: “He must have thought you looked rich; he didn’t try to get as much from us.” One of the others corrected him: “No. It’s because he charges interest. He was bothering this gentleman today in the square. I saw him.” The things people notice, thought Varamo. But they were friendly. Before he could think of a polite reply, the one who had spoken first invited him to take a seat. “You work in the Ministry, don’t you? What are people saying there about what’s happening?” Varamo sat down, but there wasn’t a lot he could tell them, except that the all-powerful Minister of the Interior had resigned, and they knew that already.

The three gentlemen were very well informed; they were colleagues, occasional business partners and old friends. Whenever Varamo went to the café, they were there, and he had sometimes exchanged a few words with them, but this was the first time he had sat at their table. He hadn’t approached them on earlier occasions because he had assumed that they would be discussing their common profession — book publishing — about which he knew nothing. But it seemed they had taken an interest in him. They were eminent representatives of a trade that dated back to the birth of the nation and had grown to become its principal source of foreign currency: the publication of pirate editions. Although illegal, the activity was tolerated; it had become legendary, and Colón was its historical center. As a result, Panamanian books had found their way to every corner of the continent. It’s true that what they published was commercial fiction, easy reading, designed to satisfy the most basic demand for escapist entertainment, but it still had a certain dignity, because these were books, after all. Modest books, admittedly, paperback editions with garish, vulgar cover illustrations, printed on the cheapest paper and flimsily made in general. The profits depended on flouting the intellectual property laws, which had little force anywhere, and less still internationally, because legislation had failed to keep pace with the worldwide rise in literacy and the changes in the book market, which had been growing at different rates around the Spanish-speaking world, according to the social conditions in the different countries. Because of its geographical location, Panama was the ideal distribution hub, with the advantage of access to both oceans. The laxity of the industrial legislation was a factor too: the country was still in its infancy, still in the process of sorting out its overlapping, uncoordinated jurisdictions. And then there was Panama’s cosmopolitan character, resulting from its ethnic mix and its constant communication with the centers of European and North American culture. The completion of the canal had left a sizeable unemployed labor force: speakers of English and French who had adapted to the climate and were reluctant to leave. Faced with the alternative between becoming translators or alcoholic bums, some at least favored the first option. Over time, natural selection had winnowed this wild population of translators down to an efficient guild of professionals. They were very poorly paid (translation was the only thing these publishers were prepared to pay for, along with paper, and only because there was no other way to keep the wheels turning), and if in general their translations lacked elegance and style, they managed to make them intelligible, and that was enough. Varamo’s chance companions were three of Panama’s most active and prosperous pirate publishers. Not magnates, the industry wasn’t that lucrative, but men of considerable means; each owned a printing press, as did all their colleagues. Although they were competitors, they had remained friends, no doubt because they were operating in such a large field that there was no need to fight over any particular sector. All the literature of the world was at their disposal, and they could choose freely from that inexhaustible treasure trove.

Varamo discreetly raised the subject of the ministries and their rumored transfer to the capital, Panama City: would it affect them? He was also curious to know if there were any real grounds for the Góngoras’ fears. The publishers were characteristically open-minded: a relocation would affect them to some extent, because they printed official stationery; and of course it would mean that they no longer had easy access to the offices of Foreign Trade, with which they had to negotiate; but, really, bribes and commissions could just as well be paid at a distance. All three, in any case, dismissed the question airily: it was the least of their problems. Panama was just a point, an almost abstract point at the center of a vast circle encompassing the demand for their goods, which stretched away in all directions. The problem for them was to perceive the concrete from the vantage point of the abstract. And the concrete in this case turned out to be something as unstable as taste or fantasy or a collective whim. This had forced them to become perpetual explorers of novelty and change. They themselves were constantly changing, to the point where they lost sight of the patterns of change and ended up getting lost themselves. What they could see right then, that night, was that all the transformations of the market over the previous twenty years had taken place within the framework established by modernismo , which had been the big, original breakthrough. The work and the personality of Rubén Darío had served as a myth of origin and created a market, and his countless imitators, perfectly in tune with the reading public (that is, with themselves), had kept the presses running ever since. But that paradigm was worn out. . everything wore out, inevitably. Every book contained the seed of another; every direction taken by the collective will carried within it beginnings of a different and deviant direction. Paradoxical as it seemed, there were avant-garde movements and experiments even in lightweight, throwaway literature, and the public’s attention reacted to them, as the butterfly reacts to the air through which it flutters.