Authors: César Aira
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.”
Th
e
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.
Th
e 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 . . . “
Th
at 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.
Th
e
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.
“
Th
at doesn’t matter!”
Th
e 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.
Th
ey 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?”
Th
e publishers gaped in amazement.
Th
ey 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 . . .
Th
at 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.”
Th
is
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.
Th
ey 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.
Th
inking 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 . . .”
Th
e publishers cut him off abruptly: “What?
What are you talking about?”
Th
ey 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.
Th
at’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. “
Th
en 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. “
Th
at 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
ere 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
e 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).
He left the café with the firm intention of beginning to
write immediately, without giving it any more thought (it was as if he had
already done all the necessary thinking), and he couldn’t wait to go home, sit
down at his desk and get to work. With a delicious sense of anticipation, he
savored the half-lie he had told the publishers: none of his notes had been made
with a view to any kind of publication, but he had so many that the writing
seemed a pure formality; he need only copy them out, string them together
somehow, and allow them to form a book.
Th
e time
had come to reap the benefits of his inveterate, impractical habit of holding on
to every piece of paper that came into his possession. And if he needed anything
more, as he supposed he would, for example an overall tone to unify this
disparate material, a rhythmic pulse to make it all cohere in a single volume,
he didn’t have far to look, because he’d decided, right from the start, to
imitate the delivery and syntax of the Voices, which, now that Caricias had
explained away their terrifying power, were reduced to the roles of bodiless
muses and nocturnal signaling.
Th
inking of the
girl, Varamo remembered that he had arranged to meet her at dawn. He had just
enough time to write his book before then, and to spend it writing was an ideal
solution, because if he went to sleep he was bound to wake up at midday and miss
his date.
Th
e excitement of writing had
dispelled his sleepiness. He’d be there on time and surprise her by having mixed
up all the keys more thoroughly than she could have imagined. One stone could
always kill two birds. Or three, because he felt that he had finally succeeded,
by serendipity, in exchanging the two hundred bad pesos for two hundred good
ones.
But when Varamo looked at his watch he saw that it wasn’t
even midnight yet and became worried that he might have too much time. He could
go for a walk instead of heading straight home, as he had initially intended to
do.
Th
at would be a good way to clear his mind
and gather his thoughts, or rather to scatter them productively. In any case, he
had to make a detour, so as not to go past the Góngoras’ place and risk bumping
into someone he didn’t want to see. So at the first intersection he turned
toward the city center, and let his steps lead the way, while his mind drifted
off into a pleasant reverie.
Th
at very night
(though it seemed like years ago already) there had been talk of the
possibility, or the threat, that Colón would cease to be Colón, that the city
would leave the city, and he had feared that he would be abandoned, cut off from
the world in which he had always lived. Now, seeing the nocturnal cityscape
opening all around him like an abstract model in black and gray, his fears
vanished into the far reaches of the sky, forever. As long as he stayed, the
city would too. No one could take it away from him. When he began to write, in a
few minutes’ time, every sentence would be a spell to ensure the eternity of
Colón. His perfect solitude was interrupted by the appearance of a slow-moving
car at a distant intersection, traveling as steadily as a star tracing its arc,
or the hands of a watch.
Th
e rally drivers were
still setting off, it seemed. A little further on Varamo saw a second car, on a
different street, heading in the opposite direction.
Th
e cars, with their constant velocity and crisscrossing paths, were
also contributing to the city’s permanence. How could politics compete with
those geometries? Suddenly, in the midst of his sublime distraction, he came to
the main square with its esplanades: before him lay a deserted panorama, with
the moon up above, the palm trees standing still, the dark ministries, and a
lone car creeping along like a windup toy. Varamo couldn’t believe that sleep
had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer’s
privileges, he thought, already nostalgic for the present.