Cesar Aira: Varamo

Once that moment had passed, a more objective gaze revealed that the sticky object in his hand was formless and repulsive. He was through for the day. He tossed the fish into the washbowl full of water, and, for want of a rag, dried his hands on the sheet of notepaper, which he then folded and put in his pocket, thinking it might come in useful. He had a superstitious respect for any kind of paper. When his eyes returned to the washbowl, he saw that the twisted, bloated, monstrous fish was swimming, on its side, up and down, vertically, like a sea horse, visibly alive. That was the finishing touch. They always went on living, no matter what he did to them. Actually, this was the first time it had happened, but once was as good as “always.”

Even if he’d wanted to go on working he wouldn’t have been able to, because just at that moment his concentration was broken by the sound of a slamming door. It was as if he had woken up. As if, suddenly, he were no longer alone in his secret laboratory, although it was still secret. In other words, it was as if he had woken from one dream into another. At once frenzied and indecisive, he shook his legs, and the movement spread right through his spindly body, making his head wobble painfully. He lost his balance, staggered, and bumped into the wall. He used the rebound to propel himself through the door, and crossed the living room breathing heavily. There was no one there nor in the little vestibule. He went back to the bedroom, then into the kitchen. . No one, unless the intruder was hiding behind a piece of furniture or a curtain. But there wouldn’t have been time to find a hiding place, and anyway, if that had been the intruder’s intention, he wouldn’t have slammed the door like that, so loudly that the bang was still echoing. The house was small and there was only so much it could hold in the way of secrets. It was too dark to see, so all Varamo could do was bounce off the walls, using the bumps to punctuate the melody of his jagged breathing. There were two ways a door could be slammed; the intruder could end up on either side. The secret might be shut out. And, in fact, the noises he could hear were not coming from inside the house.

He went to the front door. As soon as he opened it, he was deafened by shouting. He winced, half closing his eyes. It was hard to believe that a creature as tiny and as ancient as his mother could make such a racket, but there was no one else in sight. She was yelling in the middle of the street. The afternoon light had taken on its last and definitive shade, and the solitary, multicolored figure of his mother was sunken in that dusky gold. Her shouting was completely incomprehensible, of course, and yet it was perfectly clear. The different forms that madness and senility can take all have a common effect, which is to bring intentions to the surface, and it is with intentions that understanding begins and ends. The old lady’s furious ranting at the closed doors and windows of the neighborhood was due in part to her volatile temper, and in part to the fact that all she had to go on were the intentions of others, which she presumed to be malevolent and inscrutable to all but a single, hidden consciousness. The content of the ranting was, in a way, a coded message. It was humiliating for Varamo to have a paranoid mother, but he knew it was something that could happen to others, since it was within the range of human possibilities. So he accepted it philosophically. He walked out to the middle of the street, bent over (her head was level with his waist — she’d almost become a dwarf), took her arm and led her to the open door, meeting with little resistance.

Although his mother let herself be taken into the house, her agitation didn’t subside; on the contrary, it intensified and became more focused, now that she had an interlocutor. Before crossing the threshold, she turned back to the street and screamed a last threat, brandishing a clenched fist the size of a hazelnut. Varamo guided her toward an armchair, turned her around and made her sit, then sat beside her and took both her hands as a way to start calming her down. But as he took her left hand, he noticed that she was gripping a piece of paper and guessed that it was the cause of her outburst. All things considered, it was better to have something concrete to talk about, so he got straight to the point and asked her what it was, touching the paper with the tip of his finger. But she was suddenly distracted; she lifted her chin and sniffed. Varamo couldn’t help noticing an unpleasant odor that made the air almost unbreathable. He started explaining that he had been doing an experiment; it was the smell of the chemicals he’d used. But he found it hard to talk: the stench made his throat seize up and his eyes burn; tears began to stream down his face. And what he was saying or trying to say was drowned out by the splashing of the fish in the washbowl. Under those conditions, it was impossible to have a rational conversation, let alone calm a hysteric. With gestures that indicated, “I’ll be right back,” he ran to open the windows. Then he returned to the armchair, picked up his mother, carried her briskly through the kitchen (while she fanned herself with the piece of paper), and went out onto the patio. On the far side, among the plants, was a long iron bench, on which they sat down.

When, a few moments later, he was breathing normally, and the sound of the fish in the depths of the house could barely be heard over the whispering leaves and chirping birds, Varamo leaned forward, staring at the tips of his black shoes, sighed and gathered his strength to face the evidence that was about to be presented. But how could he have a civilized conversation with that barbarous, instinctive, inhuman being: The Mother? How had other men managed in the past? A mother was a creature made up of superimposed layers of life: before and after giving birth, but also the befores and afters of all the other life-changing events, still present within her. Anything he said would have to be multiplied by all those layers of existential representation, and he could never be sure of pitching the argument at the depth required to produce an effect. Meanwhile his mother had taken the initiative and was already talking, hurriedly, incomprehensibly, but with the confidence that came from knowing that her son had a single layer of reception, the layer everyone could see: that of a thin man in a black suit and hat, cut from the shadows of the universe and pasted onto the luxuriant, crepuscular landscape of Panama. Cohabitation was full of traps for a single man.

What was the problem? She had received a poison-pen letter. That was the piece of paper she was holding in her hand: it had been slipped under the door — just the sort of evil, underhanded stratagem you might expect from people who would persecute a poor widow: cowards and racists, envious schemers, virtual murderers. Varamo narrowed his eyes until they were two slits with nothing behind them. His bowler hat was giving off sinister gleams in the half-light. If he had been a bottle of mineral water, and she had been holding a glass instead of a piece of crumpled paper, she would have drained him in two insatiable gulps. The look of the paper had reminded Varamo of a recent event: a banal occurrence, but it had left its mark. Some weeks earlier, his mother had gone to buy him a mattress and declined to pay the extra fee for home delivery; she had said she would come to fetch it later. When Varamo got back from the Ministry he had no choice but to accompany her, although he was tired, and on the way he complained about her “false economy.” She assured him that the mattress was light, and that between the two of them they could carry it without difficulty, which was true, although it was also true that she had gone and chosen a store on the other side of Colón. When they arrived, the salesman asked her for the receipt, and she gave him the piece of paper she had brought. The man examined it on both sides and abruptly handed it back: it wasn’t the receipt. And when Varamo looked for himself, he saw that it was just a scrap of paper covered with scribbles. To his infinite mortification, his mother insisted that it was the receipt — they hadn’t given her anything else — and there ensued a long dispute, during which the salesman showed them the receipt book, with printed headings, and made it clear that he wouldn’t hand over the goods until they presented the genuine document, to which he would then apply the “Delivered” stamp. But, tired of arguing, he yielded in the end, and they carried the mattress as best they could, with frequent stops because, on top of everything else, it had begun to rain. When they got home, they looked all over for the damn receipt, but couldn’t find it anywhere.