Cesar Aira: Varamo

So what was the problem? There was no problem. Those stupid counterfeit bills. Their value was precisely nothing, and maybe they would come to nothing in the end. Long long ago, in the continuum of the world’s reality, two random objects were set apart by a radical heterogeneity. A difference so irreducible no concept could embrace both things. No term except Being. That was how Being came into being, and from then on thought and philosophy existed too, at least until that afternoon in Panama. The counterfeit bills had also come to introduce a heterogeneity. Perhaps the end of thought was at hand. But if people didn’t think, how would they occupy their time?

When Varamo got home, he flopped onto his bed without undressing. It was the time of day when he usually took a nap, to rest and recover his appetite before dinner, but on this occasion lying down was not a choice: he was in such a state of distress and nervous exhaustion that he simply couldn’t go on standing up. He dropped like a stone, unable even to take off his dark suit, his shoes or his hat. He began to writhe immediately in a kind of waking nightmare, bathed in sweat, with his eyes open (if he closed them he felt nauseated). There was something very hard pressing into his side, near his hip, when he turned. He tried to locate it with his hand, which was opening and closing in involuntary spasms, rummaging through the damp lumps of his clothing and the sheets, until he felt a warm, very smooth object, which eluded his grasp. Finally, pushing and pulling blindly with his whole hand — he had lost control of his fingers — like a one-armed man laid out in soft puff pastry boxing with an oyster, he managed to dislodge the object from the bed. It was a double-sided silver pocket watch. It shot out and went rolling across the floor with a dull rumbling noise for quite a while before coming up against an obstacle: the foot of a wardrobe. The impact made the doors, which didn’t shut properly, swing open. The full-length mirror on the inside of one of them revolved through 180 degrees, taking in the whole room, and came to rest reflecting Varamo’s bed and his gaze. He didn’t recognize that kicking, groaning, horizontal figure as himself.

Although the house was quiet, sounds of all sorts could be heard from his room, all of them unrecognizable. Some must have been coming from very far away, others were psychic projections of sounds that he had registered at other times, in other places. Strange creaking noises leading up to thuds so familiar they bypassed his consciousness, and far beneath them all, the whisper of his own breathing. Something loose, rattling in its tin case. At that hour of the day, the light indoors consumed itself. That made a noise as well. The silence created little “befores” and “afters” in the sequences of light. Noise itself made a noise of its own: subtle, doubled over. It is possible to have a nightmare without actually having a nightmare, as Varamo had discovered that afternoon, thanks to the counterfeit bills. You only need to find yourself in a certain situation.

When the impact of the watch made the doors swing open, stacks of boxes that had been pressing against them, crammed into the top shelves of the wardrobe, began to fall out onto the floor. The brightly painted boxes traced garish arcs in the air, punctuated by the dull thumps they made as they hit the floor one after another, the stacks above tottering more precariously with every successive collapse. The boxes contained instant food: mashed potato flakes, dried shark fins, blocks of powdered meat, vegetables, dried pasta, even fruit-juice pills. The contents were indicated by crude caricatures on the cardboard packets, which flashed past in a rapid cascade, like a flip book, before the astonished eyes of the reclining man reflected in the background. He had bought the boxes a while back, as an investment. It had seemed the safest placement for his savings. Panama was one of the first countries to manufacture and package ready-cooked food because of the large numbers of single men who had come to work on the canal. Although the products were of excellent quality, the companies that made them went bankrupt overnight because they launched their new lines too late: they had to wait until the requisite technology had matured, and by that time, one way and another, women had arrived, and the workers had wives to cook fresh food for them. In the subsequent liquidation, Varamo bought up as much as he could and stored it. Luckily, the use-by dates printed on the boxes were a long way off.

The Great Wall of History reflected every little eccentricity in the life of an individual. The point of reflection was always the same; it constituted the personality or the destiny of the subject in question, and since the point was single and unique, despite the wealth of intersecting and superimposed perspectives, life itself, in the end, was strictly one-dimensional. So it was in Varamo’s case. Why had he never married? If the question was asked the other way round, it answered itself: Why was he a bachelor? Because he hadn’t married. For this too there was a historical explanation: the proportion of virgins in Panama had fallen abruptly with the influx of men, and by the time the virgins reappeared, they were already married with children. Demographic imbalances, whether caused by immigration, as in this case, or by other factors, always end up affecting private life. Not just because of sheer numbers, but also because of the social tone they set, which lingers on even after the numbers have reached a new balance. All through Varamo’s life this process had been under way, and he had not known any other situation. He couldn’t even imagine a different set of conditions, as one cannot imagine living in a world whose space-time manifold comprises an extra dimension. And yet it’s not so difficult. Bachelors contaminate the world, creating a perspective of their own, and their particular solutions generate other realities, which may last only a day, but leave their traces all the same.

Our hero had a hobby. It was his means of escape from what was, on the whole, a melancholic and unsatisfying existence. So when he finally decided that there was no point trying to take a siesta, he got up and went to his work table in the corner to see if he could find some distraction. He had nothing to do, after all. The sudden appearance of the counterfeit bills had at least stopped him worrying about how to spend his time. But time was reasserting itself. On his table there was a basin, and in the basin was a fish about six inches long, one of those yellowish so-called mutant fishes from the canal, although the mutation, if that’s what it was, hadn’t affected the appearance of the fish, only the speed at which they swam. Varamo had a large box divided into various compartments, which contained flasks of acid, tubes, catheters, and instruments for cutting and piercing. He cast a proprietorial eye over these treasures, then turned his attention to a half-completed cardboard model sitting on the table. Scissors, thread, glue and a mess of cardboard pieces testified to a long series of trials in search of the form; and to judge from the state of the model, the form was still a long way off. His intention had been to represent a piano. But what was a piano like? Needless to say, he didn’t have one handy, and his visual memory was poor. He suspected that, like most man-made objects, it was basically made up of cubes embedded in one another. But that didn’t help him much because the problem was how to embed them. Before beginning, he had thought he knew exactly what a piano was like. Who doesn’t? Since the piano didn’t have to be perfect in all its details, as long as it was identifiable, and even a schematic model will usually serve that purpose, he had thought it would be an easy task. Which is why he was perplexed when the object that he produced, after a series of repeated and painstaking attempts, didn’t look like a piano at all, even to him.