Varamo (3 page)

Th
e Great Wall of History
reflected every little eccentricity in the life of an individual.
Th
e 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.
Th
e 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.

His hobby was embalming small animals.
Th
e spirit in which he had taken it up was not,
however, entirely disinterested; his aim had been to garner funds to supplement
his meager salary. And now that his salary had been paid in counterfeit bills
that would land him in prison as soon as he tried to put them into circulation,
he’d have to depend on what, if anything, he could earn as an embalmer.
Embalming isn’t easy, especially not for someone who has no practical experience
in the field and doesn’t know any practitioners.
Th
ere were no books on the subject, of if there were, they hadn’t
reached Panama. So Varamo had been obliged to make it up all on his own, using
the primitive method of trial and error.
Th
e
most daunting aspect of the trials was their enormous scope, covering everything
from life to death and a fair bit more on either side. To make things worse, it
was the sort of work that was only worth doing if it was done well, because it
wasn’t necessary: the finished products, especially if he was hoping to sell
them, had to display certain obvious qualities, transcending the process of
their production.
Th
e animals had to “turn out”
well — whole, shiny, natural, strikingly posed — in other words, they had to
turn out to be just as they’d been at the start, before the process began. And
even disregarding movement, life simply had too many qualities, not to mention
the impossibility of knowing for certain what they were.

His aim had been to produce a fish playing the piano. He
had the fish in a washbowl, to keep it alive until the last minute, because he
knew how quickly organic matter begins to rot in a climate like Colón’s, once
the sustaining breath of life is gone. He had begun by tackling the scaled-down
piano, with a conspicuous lack of success so far.
Th
e scene, he thought, would be amusing, and was bound to appeal to
customers. Ideally it would have included a music box of some kind, but that was
far beyond his technical skills. After a last despondent glance at the model, he
put it aside. He might as well start with the fish; since he was working with
definitive eternities, it didn’t matter what he did first and what he left till
later. Embalming the fish was the hard part, in principle, but constructing the
piano had seemed easy and turned out to be hard, so the opposite outcome was
possible too. He leaned over the water.
Th
e
little fish was swimming around and around in circles. Varamo was overwhelmed by
discouragement.
Th
ere was so much to do.
Th
e animal had to die and then wake to a second
life: that would take centuries, surely, but it had to be done in a matter of
minutes, by correctly executing a series of predetermined steps, all in the
correct order (and he didn’t even know what the steps were).
Th
e most awful failure, so awful it was almost
supernatural, would be to reach the end of the process and find that the
creature was still alive. Not lifelike, but actually living. Unbelievable as it
seemed, that was what was happening to him.

Precisely because there were so many steps, which had to
be taken in a specific order, and because the substances to be used (mainly
acids) had to be measured exactly, he had decided to keep a log, so that he
could repeat the experiment, in the event that it turned out to be a success. He
hadn’t done this in the past because no one interfered with his things (a rare
privilege among home experimenters and backyard inventors); he always found them
undisturbed, even if he had been called away in the middle of a transfusion.
Th
at room was his secret labyrinth, and the
rest of the house as well, and since he was broadening his view, he could have
said that all of Colón, indeed the whole of Panama, was his secret laboratory.
He could work in peace for as long as he liked. Although, of course, he would
gladly have given up that work, or any other hobby that his privileged
circumstances gave him the leisure to pursue, in return for a wife and family.
And however convenient it was to be able to take up where he had left off, no
matter how often he was interrupted, the advantage didn’t apply to things that
were transient by nature and slipped away into the past. So he took a blank
sheet of paper, smoothed it out on the table, and placed a pencil on it. And in
his neat, professional, sloping hand, he proceeded to note every little thing he
did to the fish, leaving spaces between the notes, and numbering them to dispel
any doubts about the order. Inevitably, as he worked, his hands got wet and his
fingers were smeared with the sticky oils that oozed out of the little creature
when it was squeezed, so the paper lost its whiteness and crispness, and the
lines of his writing, except for the first, veered erratically up or down to
avoid the spots.

He proceeded in what he felt was the most reasonable
way.
Th
e first cuts he made in the fish were as
wobbly as the lines of his handwriting, because it was slippery and he couldn’t
get a firm grip. He had been intending to remove everything he found inside it
but couldn’t, simply because the inside of the fish turned out to be empty. He
peeled a stick of sulfur and placed it against the spine. He painted the inside
surfaces with a little brush dipped in tartaric acid, then applied a coat of
carpenter’s glue and closed up the body again. He held the fish up by the tail
and blew on it to open the gills, into which he poured a solution of vitriol and
brilliantine, trusting that this would suffice to keep the scales looking fresh.
Th
en he moved on to the head. He would have
liked to give the fish an expression of some sort: the look of a musician
concentrating on a difficult score, for example, but he didn’t have much to work
with.
Th
e eyes, which he touched with the tips
of his fingers, were very soft. He removed them with a little spoon, and it was
a disaster: his fingers were already very greasy and kept slipping. He ended up
with holes that were too big for the polyhedral pieces of colored glass that he
had been planning to use.
Th
e solution was to
insert more than one piece into each hole; he had to put half a dozen in before
they would sit tight.
Th
en he tried to twist the
mouth into a kind of smile and succeeded, more or less, by inserting a piece of
wire. He forced himself to pause after every step and note down what he had
done, and although this interrupted the flow of his inspiration, it did at least
ensure that the procedure could be repeated. But was it really possible to
record everything he did?
Th
ousands of things
were left out: gesture, position, degree of manual force, the exact quantity of
acid, the line of every cut and fold in the constantly changing organic matter,
even the light and his state of mind, his haste or enthusiasm.
Th
e record was very crude, very schematic; there
was no way of knowing what might be important.

After having impregnated the fish with the contents
of all his flasks, using every hole he could find and several others that he
made specially (since the success of the operation depended on an effect, it
seemed a pity not to try all the possible causes), and having twisted its body
into an S-like shape, which was meant to represent the posture of a pianist
seated at his instrument, some association of ideas prompted him to notice a
detail that rather seriously undermined his project: fish don’t have arms, so
they don’t have hands or fingers and can’t possibly play the piano, even as a
joke. He was baffled and stunned. He couldn’t believe that he had neglected
something so fundamental; he tried to reconstruct the scene that he had imagined
at the start, and all he could see was a vague, indefinite picture, which under
careful scrutiny revealed an essential disjunction between fish and piano,
definitively isolated from each other. Grafting on a pair of little arms, the
arms of a frog for example, would be horribly complicated. Just as well the
piano hadn’t worked out. He would have to improvise a solution, and the need to
find one urgently was unbearable. He had an idea: he could swap the piano for a
wind instrument . . .
Th
at was more appropriate
for a fish . . .
Th
ere was just one problem:
he’d given it an idiotic smile with that piece of subcutaneous wire . . . But
maybe it wasn’t too late . . . He began to massage the face, his fingers
trembling with irritation; and his exasperation and haste helped him to shape it
into an inverted cone, like a crazy bugle. As he took his hand away, the result
struck him momentarily as a telling emblem, and he even imagined a high note
sounding forth, the call to action. But rather than springing into action, he
was about to lapse into torpor; by this stage he was exhausted. He remembered
the bugle that he had heard earlier, in the square. It must have been working on
his unconscious all that time: it was the day’s autobiographical imperative.

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.
Th
at was the finishing touch.
Th
ey 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.
Th
ere 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
ere were two
ways a door could be slammed; the intruder could end up on either side.
Th
e secret might be shut out. And, in fact, the
noises he could hear were not coming from inside the house.