Cesar Aira: Varamo

When the cripple returned with the change, Varamo apologized, thanked them profusely, and had no choice but to stay and listen to the man, who was covered in sweat and so exhausted by the effort that his speech was almost incomprehensible. What he was trying to say, in response to Varamo’s apologies, was that it wasn’t the client’s fault. It was the fault of the monetary authorities, who wouldn’t issue sufficient quantities of bills and coins, and had allowed an absurd situation to develop, in which people valued the units of currency in inverse proportion to the size of the denomination. It made no sense, however you looked at it. It wasn’t as if the mint was working to capacity, and even if it had been, they could have put in a few extra hours to satisfy the community’s increasingly vocal demands. The problem was, they were too busy printing thousand-peso notes for their own salaries to bother with the smaller denominations that you need to turn the big ones into real working currency. It was truly unbelievable that the government couldn’t be bothered to do such a little thing, which would have made it so popular with its constituents. But they just didn’t care; they’d lost touch with the real life of ordinary people. That was the only explanation, because it would have been simple for them to order the minting of enough small change to meet the needs of a generation or two, and make life a bit easier for the citizens of Panama. Wasn’t that what they were paid to do? Public servants were supposed to serve the public. And if they were going to argue that it was more expensive to mint coins than to print bills, what was to stop them printing bills? Where was it written that the low denominations had to be represented by costly coins and not by cheap paper bills? Couldn’t it be the other way around? Wouldn’t it be more logical?

Varamo walked away toward the center of the square, overwhelmed by anxiety, and the people slid by like fugitive impressions. This may have damaged his reputation, since there must have been acquaintances among those people, and if he had neglected to greet one of the ladies who, many years earlier, might have become his fiancée, she would think not only that he was rude and a failure, but also that he had sunk to the lowest point of his life. Varamo was one of those men who was apt to serve as an example. A man of his age (the classic age for taking stock) will often say: “When I was young, I had a lot of problems; if I hadn’t solved them or been lucky, I’d be dead today or a beggar or locked up in an asylum. . or, worse still, I’d be scraping by in some job I’d been given as a favor, still living with my mother, still single, no family of my own. .” That was Varamo: a living cliché, a textbook case. He looked up. He couldn’t help noticing the sailors who came to the square at that hour of the day and the prostitutes waiting for them. They too were searching for love, in their way. But they were searching in the present moment, not looking to destiny. He was already in the center of the square, on the site of the monument that hadn’t been built, and to his left he could see the cathedral with its doors open; his line of sight went straight down the aisle to the altar. In the dark inner depths he glimpsed the Virgin, swathed in the reddish light of the votive candles burning at her feet, and behind her, like a sinister bird in the shadows, Christ, the God born from her body, quasi per tubum , without affecting her. Everyone went to the Virgin looking for consolation or encouragement or inspiration or whatever because life was impossible without the help of some supernatural being. But such beings did not exist beyond the world of images and fantasy and superstition. Varamo had always wondered how people managed to go on living. Now he thought he knew the answer: they could do it because they didn’t have to wonder how they would change their counterfeit bills.

Just at that moment he was wrenched from his daydreaming by a shrill voice calling his name and embellishing it with all manner of obscene insults. It was a madman, a well-known local character. Colorful, but bothersome, because his madness took the form of buttonholing passersby and demanding the repayment of imaginary debts, which were real to his deluded mind, to judge by the sincerity of his shouting. He wanted his money back, a large or small sum, the money he had loaned to X or Y or Z, who refused to repay him, with an outrageous, evil stubbornness, which filled him with a vehement righteous indignation, renewed a thousand times a day, whenever he came across someone he knew. He lived in his own reality. It was futile to argue. Some people hit him, others took it as a joke. The only way to get rid of him was to give him a coin and say, “I’ll pay the rest later.” This worked but was counterproductive in the long run because it confirmed his delusions, so that the next time he would fall upon a victim who had weakened, insisting that now it was time to pay in full. Many, however, did weaken just to get away, and so did Varamo on this occasion. He started feeling for some change, which was hard to do with his left hand; he had to twist his whole body to reach into the pockets on the other side, where, being right-handed, he unthinkingly put everything. Finally he managed to get hold of a coin with the tips of his fingers and handed it over, thinking: Here I am, searching for love, and what do I find? An obnoxious madman. The madman went off mumbling incoherent complaints: “He gave it to me with his left hand, the son of a bitch. .” In Colón, a deeply Catholic city, certain liturgical proprieties still carried weight. But couldn’t he see I had no choice? thought Varamo.

When he was alone again, continuing on his way, he wondered why he couldn’t use his right hand, and in fact the whole upper right-hand side of his body. He tried to concentrate or to break out of his concentration. . And that was when he realized how distracted he really was. The reason he couldn’t use his right hand was that he was still holding the little cube of red candy between his thumb and index finger. He was holding it up at head-level with his elbow bent. The heat had melted a fair amount of the cube; it had lost its sharp edges, and the sugary juice had run all over his hand and under the sleeves of his shirt and jacket, flowing down his forearm in sticky rills. He looked around anxiously for somewhere to dispose of it, but as he’d observed on many previous occasions, there were no trash baskets in the square; another administrative oversight, which obliged him to fill his pockets with useless papers. But his pockets were out of the question in this case, unless he wanted to make an irreparable mess. So he approached one of the hedged lawns, intending to throw the candy on the grass, where no one would step on it. But a better solution presented itself in the form of a tall bush: he stuck the sweet onto the end of one of its branches. And there it remained like a kind of amorphous, fleshy flower, not so alien, after all, to the capricious forms that nature can take in the tropics. His arm had gone stiff from the unconscious tension. He shook it, hoping to get the blood flowing again. He spread his fingers as widely as he could to stop them sticking together and looked at his hand: it was glazed red and shiny, as if he had slipped it into a glass glove. He set off resolutely homeward, in a bad mood, though he didn’t really know why. He was halfway down the diagonal avenue that led away from one of the corners of the square when there was a sudden change in the air (or was it in his head?). Before he knew why, he knew that he had been relieved of a crushing weight, a weight of time. What had happened? Everything had changed without anything changing. He turned his gaze inward, searching deeper and deeper. . He went over the events of the previous minutes, his memories and sensations; it was vertiginous, but luckily it was over in an instant, because he realized what it was straight away: the bugle note that accompanied the lowering of the flag had stopped. He turned to look back and, sure enough, the bugler was taking the instrument from his lips, while two other soldiers were holding the flag by its corners, like a sheet, and walking toward one another, folding it in half, then in four, then in eight, then in sixteen. . All that time the shrill note had been boring through his head (it can’t have been good for anyone’s health), and he wondered if it had really lasted as long as it seemed. It made him think of those magical lapses or bubbles in time: to the person inside it seems as if a whole life has gone by, while for everyone else it has been just a moment, barely the time it takes for an apple to fall from its branch to the ground. But perhaps it was always like that. We usually associate the law of gravity with speed, forgetting that it can also govern movements of prodigious slowness when it chooses. Suddenly the air seemed empty, and Varamo began to move through it more quickly. Freed of the bugle note, his mind performed an odd short circuit, deciding not to think any more.