Cesar Aira - Varamo

While he played domino solitaire at the kitchen table, his mother prepared the meal. She cooked the fish, which was strangely colored and tasted suspicious. It was one of those potentially fatal meals, and only luck prevented them from falling ill; but it must have affected them somehow, because Varamo had hallucinations and a fever. He raised the financial issue timidly over dinner. He said that because of a budget adjustment the Ministry would be paying the salaries late, so they would have to use their savings to make ends meet.

In that peculiar state of mind, as he clacked the dominoes down on the table (mechanically recording the progress of each game according to a system of his own invention — he was sure that one day he would “win,” and if he didn’t note down the moves, he wouldn’t be able to reproduce them), he entertained a series of thoughts which, given their crucial importance, merit a detailed and exhaustive reconstruction. The thread is sinuous and long, the concepts slippery, the meanings elusive, but the reconstruction is not, in fact, all that difficult, if it is carried out step by step: one only has to follow the order of the thoughts, and there’s no way to go wrong, because each thought emerges from its predecessor, as in a numerical sequence. The point of departure was a problem that had, of course, been worrying him ever since it was raised by the payment of his salary: the pair of counterfeit notes. The fact that the situation was, as far as he knew, unprecedented (and, like any citizen, he felt that he was fully informed on the issue) made it all the more disturbing. There were no prior cases of counterfeiting in Panama; public opinion had not been alerted because there had been no reason to do so, which meant that there was no relevant jurisprudence, and certainly no legislation. After all, Panama was a young nation, and situations of this kind require a minimum of history. It was complicated enough to establish the laws that govern the legal printing of money, an operation which, in its early stages, is bound to resemble counterfeiting. So if he were caught trying to use fake money — as he was sure he would be — the case would set a precedent; the sentence and the legal concept would have to be invented, made up from scratch, given a comprehensible form and surrounded with discourse to make them plausible. All of which would involve intellectual and imaginative work, but that didn’t make the prospect any brighter for him, as the object of the work; quite the contrary, because the authorities would have to invent a punishment, to extract it from their imaginations, that is, from an infinite combinatory system of possibilities. And who could tell what they would come up with? Especially since, in a first case like this, they’d feel obliged to devise something original enough to capture the imagination of the public and serve as an example. The combination of novelty and exemplarity could produce literally anything, as in the wildest sadistic fantasies: they could happen on his most secret fear, or create it. Everything was possible, as in a world about to take shape.

Faced with such a prospect, the first strategy that occurred to him was to feign innocence, or ignorance, to act as if he hadn’t noticed anything strange about the bills, to change them as he would have done if they had been genuine, as he did every month, and if they did catch him, or trace the money back to him, to stick to his story and persist in the role of the naïve victim. It was the most obvious solution, what he would have done instinctively, following his first impulse. But a few minutes’ thought would have sufficed to reveal its flaws (and hours had already gone by). The first and most decisive flaw was that it didn’t matter what he decided to do or not to do, which course of action he adopted, how well or badly he carried it out, because for a judge, the only thing that mattered were the facts, not the intentions. The mental trajectory that preceded the facts was not taken into account, for the simple reason that it was always subject to doubt and therefore belonged to a fictional realm, beyond the remit of the justice system. Intentions were the stuff of fables. The only reality was made of facts — the rosy, nacreous globe of what happened: not only was it distinct from fiction, no fiction ever came anywhere near it. So any trouble he might take to clothe his intentions in innocence was a waste of time, because at the crucial moment all intentions would be ruled out of court, and if for some reason an intention had to be presumed, it was far more logical to presume a bad one than a good one.

And even leaving all that aside, there was another, more fundamental problem: how to feign innocence. As well as being insurmountable, this difficulty was unfathomable. The idea was to simulate naturalness, in other words, to make it up as he went along. That might have seemed the easiest thing in the world, the paragon of easiness, but in fact there was nothing more difficult; intending to be natural was, in itself, contradictory and self-defeating. In his case, it was condemned to failure from the outset, because if he intended to improvise his course of action, he would have to act as if he were really improvising, and at the same time he would, also, really be improvising, which was no more feasible than moving in two opposite directions at the same time. Irrespective of intentions, each act (or gesture or attempt or instant) had to be followed by another, by any one of all the others. The improviser had to make a superhuman choice among all the possibilities, which, by definition, were so numerous that a lifetime would not suffice to count them or even to contemplate their range. And improvising meant, by definition again, that he didn’t have a lifetime at his disposal, or even a fragment of a life, but only an atom, a vanishing of time. Decisions, that is choices and intentions, were nourished by time, but the premises of improvisation swallowed up all the available time, before the improvising could even begin. And appearances were against him, because whatever account he gave of his day, that story would presuppose time, and no one would believe that time had been annulled.

His predicament was peculiar, and especially uncomfortable. Like any other improviser, he could do anything, anything at all, but unlike any other, he had a point of departure, in the form of a secret intention: to exchange those bad bills for good ones. His intention was not to improvise: on the contrary, improvising was what he had to do in order to fulfill his intention. Nevertheless, he had to have the intention to improvise as well, because everything we do, even incidentally, is done with an intention. But the secrecy of his prior intention necessarily contaminated this secondary one, so he had to hide his improvising, which, given the lack of time, meant improvising his hiding. What a headache! As if just improvising wasn’t already hard enough! Pulling something out of nothing, straight after having pulled something different from the same teeming, variegated nothing. . And so on, different every time, to keep it moving forward. Could there really be enough different things in the universe to fill up a lapse of time that was infinitely divisible? Some things could be repeated, of course, but always against a ground of difference. He had to create a series. The natural numbers provided an obvious model, but he couldn’t really use them because a natural series of that kind is governed by reason, not improvisation. No one could claim to be “improvising” when counting from one to ten, or reciting the prime numbers. In improvisation one has to keep jumping from reason to unreason, creating the unexpected, and satisfying expectations with what would be expected to confound them. Who could embark on a task like that with any hope of success? Certainly not Varamo. Him least of all. As a public servant, he shrank in horror from hard work, and for him it was second nature to take the easy way out, by delegating where possible. He wondered if, in a case like this, with a biographical series, there might not be some procedure, an automatic mechanism that would generate the circumstances, and spare him the effort of searching for them.