Authors: César Aira
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.
Th
e 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.
Th
at 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.
Th
is 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 . . .”
Th
at 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.
Th
ey 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.
Th
e
only way to get rid of him was to give him a coin and say, “I’ll pay the rest
later.”
Th
is 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
e 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.
So what was the problem?
Th
ere was no problem.
Th
ose stupid
counterfeit bills.
Th
eir 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.
Th
at was how Being came
into being, and from then on thought and philosophy existed too, at least until
that afternoon in Panama.
Th
e 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).
Th
ere 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.
Th
e impact made the doors, which didn’t shut properly, swing open.
Th
e 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.
Th
at
made a noise as well.
Th
e 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
e boxes contained instant food:
mashed potato flakes, dried shark fins, blocks of powdered meat, vegetables,
dried pasta, even fruit-juice pills.
Th
e
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.