Cesar Aira - Varamo

Which meant that it might be time for something new, they said. Perhaps Darío’s “gentle air, with turns and pauses” was already old-fashioned. In fact, the publishers admitted that over the last few years they had simply been turning out the same kind of product; they needed to provide a new generation of readers with something really new to read. Perhaps, said one, “the time has come for realism.” The other two disagreed vehemently: the time for realism would never come. To which the reply, and here they were all in agreement again, was that it depended on how realism was defined. The time for realism in that sense (to be defined) was always now. Varamo asked if they published only translations. “Not at all. We’ve drawn heavily on the catalogs of Spanish and Latin American publishers.” He had asked the question simply to participate in the conversation, but they assumed that he had an agenda: “Do you write?” Varamo smiled and said no, amused by the thought. It had never occurred to him. “But we’re open to local writing, especially if it’s the work of intelligent and cultured people like yourself. You wouldn’t like to try?” Varamo replied that it was tempting. But he had no experience, he didn’t even know the basics of the writer’s craft. . “That doesn’t matter at all,” the publishers exclaimed. On the contrary: in barbaric lands like the Americas, writers produced their best work before learning the craft, and nine times out of ten, their first book was the strongest, as well as being, in general, the only one they wrote. Since Varamo had no counterarguments left, he improvised an obliging fantasy: “For a while I’ve been wanting to write a book, to record what I’ve learned from my experiences as an amateur embalmer. I’ve even come up with a title: How to Embalm Small Animals .” Had he known what a keen interest his declaration would provoke, he would have kept his mouth shut. The three publishers expressed their desire to publish the book straight away. “When can you deliver the manuscript?” “Does it have illustrations?” “I have enough paper ready for a good print run.” “I’d do it in hardcover.” Although the project was a castle in the air, Varamo felt he should rein it in somehow: he said that he still hadn’t achieved satisfactory results with his embalming. “That doesn’t matter!” The thing was to make it look like real work; in the current phase of capitalism, work was coming to resemble play, and losing its necessity; that was why instructions were the way of the future, a poetry of instructions freed from the tyranny of results. They continued in the same vein for a while, but Varamo wasn’t listening, and eventually he interrupted them. “I have an idea: what about How to Embalm Small Mutant Animals , wouldn’t that be a more attractive title?” The publishers gaped in amazement. They were thinking: He’s one of us. In their minds the book was already written and published. Varamo himself, swept up by the enthusiasm he had sparked, had begun to think that the task might be feasible, and it struck him suddenly as an unexpected solution to his financial problems.

But this last thought reminded him of the publishers’ distinctive trait. As tactfully as he could, he raised the subject of remuneration: he understood that they didn’t pay royalties. . That was true, they never did, but in a case like this, they would pay a lump sum, on delivery of the material. It was the same for the translators, except that their payment was strictly proportional to the number of pages (or words, actually), while, in Varamo’s case, they could offer a fixed amount irrespective of length, provided it was more than the sixty-four pages they needed to “give it a spine.” This munificence was due to the fact that the publishers were paying for the “title” — in other words, the idea. From the way they explained this, Varamo guessed that, no matter what he said, they would use the title, and from that moment on he felt obliged to write the book. He asked them what the lump sum would be. After an exchange of glances, one of the publishers spoke up: “We could pay you, let’s say. . two hundred pesos, sharing the cost equally, and we’d publish three simultaneous editions, to be distributed in different parts of the continent.” Two hundred pesos! It was Varamo’s turn to gape in amazement. When he recovered the use of his voice, he spluttered: “I never imagined it was such big business. I thought books were sold for ten cents. .” Accustomed to the opposite reaction, the publishers were pleased, and proceeded to explain the marvelous mathematical secrets of the book trade, its surprising paradoxes and fluid transformations of small into large quantities. They added that they were offering him a special deal, to foster a new vocation, as it were, in the hope that it would be the beginning of fruitful partnership. Although Varamo accepted their sleight-of-hand accountancy as gospel truth, the proposal brought him down to earth rather than going to his head; because although two hundred pesos was a princely sum (as he was only too well aware), and the exact sum he needed, as it happened, it too had to be broken down and related to other figures, the first of which was the number of days or months it would take him to write the book. He hadn’t been lying when he had said that he knew nothing of the writer’s craft. Thinking about it now in practical terms, it seemed to him that writing a book would surely require years of work. Feeling very discouraged, he said: “I’m afraid it will take me a long time, since I’ll only be able to write for a little while in the evenings, when I get back from the Ministry. .” The publishers cut him off abruptly: “What? What are you talking about?” They explained that writing was very easy and could be done very quickly. “Do you have anything to do tonight? No? It shouldn’t take you more than three or four minutes to fill up a page, if you concentrate. That’s twenty pages an hour. In four or five hours you could finish off a decent little book. Tomorrow’s a public holiday, so you’ll be able to sleep in. And you’ll have two hundred pesos in your pocket!” Varamo’s discouragement dissolved as quickly as it had formed. Was it that easy? “I’ve made some notes,” he said. “Then you’ve already done half the work; more than half, actually. Write out the notes one after another, with some commentary in between. Try not to tidy them up too much; immediacy is the key to a good style.” Varamo shifted uneasily on his seat, and they sensed his impatience to begin. “Off you go. We’ll meet back here at midday tomorrow. Don’t worry about the spelling, the typesetters will take care of that.”

Before getting up, as if to relieve an excess of pressure, Varamo said he wasn’t sure that he could start working that night, because he wasn’t feeling too well; maybe it would be better to sleep and start the following day, when he’d be alert and fresh. “Excuses, excuses. Beware of procrastination; it’s the bane of literature. You have to strike while the iron’s hot.” “It’s just that my dinner didn’t agree with me.” “Really? What did you eat? It wasn’t that ready-cooked trash, was it?” “No, it was fish; my mother cooked it.” He didn’t tell them that it was one of those “small animals” that he had been trying to embalm. “That can’t have done you any harm! Fish is healthy!” In spite of having urged him to lose no time, the publishers started telling him a story that had circulated many years before about widespread food poisoning: one of the powers that was coveting the canal, before it was completed, came up with the sinister scheme of poisoning the country’s entire population, or the urban population at least, with the aim of using the subsequent chaos as a pretext for imposing a protectorate. The plan failed because an unknown investor bought all the boxes of packaged food that were to be used for the poisoning and held on to them. Before the publishers had finished telling the story, even in this summary form, they were already pointing out that it was really a myth, even though half the country was still convinced of its truth. And while they were at it, they improvised a preliminary lesson to prepare Varamo for his writing career, describing the elements that made up this myth, and, by extension, myths in general. There could be no more useful knowledge for someone who really wanted to write. In the first place, thematic plausibility: it was true that the world powers had their eyes on Panama, and that supplying food to the many single men who had come to work on the canal was problematic; it was also the case that the production of ready-cooked meals had begun around that time, and that speculators had been buying up large quantities of non-perishable goods. In other words, the fantasy’s raw material was the truth. As for the narrative content of the myth, its effectiveness lay in the way it targeted real fears and bridged the yawning gap between the public and the private. The myth’s success consisted in connecting an international political conspiracy with something as domestic as food. And for the myth to survive beyond the phase of its initial propagation, it had to explain the origin of something that was still current. The mere failure of a food-packaging company would not have been enough, nor the way women had appeared unexpectedly in the country and started cooking with fresh produce. But there was a phenomenon that called for a mythical explanation: the female population had evolved to form an inverted pyramid, confounding all demographic calculations. . from this point on the lesson was harder to follow, mainly because the three publishers got carried away and started talking all at once, drawing diagrams on the table with their fingers to show that at the vertex, that is, in the present, there was just one woman left, and, along with her, a single man, but because the man was the “unknown investor,” and because the words “invest” and “invert” differed by a single letter (the myth being a linguistic construction), the pyramid inverted itself. . Varamo, who was utterly lost by this stage, kept nodding and smiling idiotically. Meanwhile he was thinking that everything they had told him was based on the presupposition that he was young, but he wasn’t: he was the same age as they were, although he looked much younger, perhaps because of his healthy lifestyle or not having children or his race or maybe his humility (which wasn’t so much a virtue as the natural result of his ignorance).