Varamo (4 page)

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.
Th
e 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.
Th
e
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.
Th
e 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
en 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:
Th
e
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.
Th
at 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
e 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.

Although Varamo wasn’t particularly curious about the
content of the letter, he picked it up and tried to read it, to humor his
mother. It was difficult because of the weak light (night was falling), but what
he could make out was enough to confirm that it was indeed a poison-pen letter.
It was made up of snippets of information, half digested and thrown together, as
such letters typically are; in fact, the style was a little
too
typical, as if the author had simply wanted
to conform to the rules of the genre without having anything definite to say and
had filled the letter with classic phrases, which seemed to have been strung
together at random, with the sole aim of producing the “poison-pen effect.”
Th
e light was almost gone, and the
handwriting was atrocious, in spite of which, extrapolating from what he had
picked up so far, Varamo recognized such classic warnings as “Your husband is
cheating on you,” “We’re going to blow you up,” “You won’t get away with it,”
etc. It could have been addressed to anyone, or to everyone and no one: it was
bound to hit on somebody’s guilty secret. But why should it matter to Varamo and
his mother, when all they had was one another, and they were entirely absorbed
by the game of survival entailed by the fact that she was a mother and he was a
son? If he had married . . . He turned the paper over: it was the receipt for
the mattress. Typical: they had turned the house upside down in their search,
and now it appeared in this sinister form. But that could be an explanation,
because the name Varamo and the address must have been on the receipt. He tried
to verify this, holding the paper up to his eyes, but he couldn’t see a thing.
He put the letter down on his thigh, gripped his mother by the arms and shifted
her, then turned back to the poison-pen receipt . . . It was an explanation,
yes, but how could he get her to understand? He put the paper down and shifted
her back to her original position, barely aware that his mother had been talking
as he performed these maneuvers.
Th
ere she was
beside him, within arm’s reach, his mother, but also what she represented: the
historical possibility of another life he might have led; every man’s impossible
dream.
Th
ere, within arm’s reach, in the
collusive darkness . . . And yet they were cut off from one another.

She was speaking, trying to justify herself, replying to
accusations that no one had actually made. Which meant that in her senile
confusion she had to go way back, to a story that was half a century old, older
than the world they knew, almost older than Panama itself. In the depths of that
prehistory, she discovered the emblematic couple of
Th
e Mother and
Th
e Son, which, for
her, was fundamental; wherever she found herself in space and time, it
recentered the constellation of themes. In her agitation, she had slipped into
Chinese (Cantonese, to be precise), a language that Varamo didn’t understand. He
could have said, “Don’t talk to me in Chinese,” but that would have been as
futile as saying, “Don’t talk to me in the dark.” He shifted his mother again,
by feel, like a child positioning his teddy bear on the pillows in his bed,
never satisfied with the object’s illusory expressiveness. And yet he also
belonged to the nucleus of that mobile Nova journeying through the ethereal
spaces. He was
Th
e Son, and the themes
rearranged themselves because of him as well. Of all the themes that his mother
might have chosen to counter the poison-pen letter, she had settled precisely on
Th
e Mother and
Th
e Son.
Th
at was the story, the
only story in the end, because all the insinuations that could emanate from a
poison-pen letter (adultery or blackmail, vengeance or vice), eventually led
back to the ubiquitous theme of filiation.

While denouncing her envious, gossiping neighbors,
Varamo’s mother was also covertly affirming a truth: as a young woman, living on
the isthmus all alone and fending for herself, she had been overwhelmed by a
terrible yearning for a child. She would smile at all the children she saw (it
was the only time she smiled), and make a fuss and caress them, and even pick
them up for a moment; and the parents let her do it, perhaps because she looked
so exotic and colorful, perhaps because they thought she was a good fairy who
had chosen to confer talent or good luck upon their child. She wouldn’t have
been able to disillusion them for lack of a common language.
Th
en one day, a couple took off and left her
holding the baby.
Th
ey disappeared, she didn’t
know how; she was distracted and when she looked up again they were gone. She
didn’t even know if it had been deliberate or not. Her dearest wish, her only
wish in fact, had been granted. From that point on, to all intents and purposes,
the baby was her son. But the smile on her face gave way to terror.
Th
e change was almost instantaneous, and it was
definitive.
Th
e baby was a boy between nine
months and a year old, cute and healthy, alert and happy . . . But all his
attributes, all the toy’s little pieces, the dimples, the tears, were tokens of
a metamorphosis.
Th
at delicious animated doll
would have to become a human being, and she would have to bear the full cost of
the transformation. It was as if the world had become a mountain that she had to
climb. How could she do it? She didn’t even know where to start.
Th
e thought of leaving him on a doorstep crossed
her mind a thousand times, but horror had stripped her of the decisiveness
required to carry out such a plan.
Th
e task she
had taken on was impossible because her initial depression turned out to be
lasting. And now the scandalmongers, the writers of that letter, were attacking
her, saying that he wasn’t her son, accusing her of stealing him from human
parents!

For Varamo this story was a sort of metaphor or fable. It
condensed the many trials his mother had faced as a poor, ignorant, fatalistic,
unassimilated immigrant. But via the long detour of interpretation, the fable
returned, along with the characters, and the reason they returned was precisely
to tell one another the fable, and so it began all over again. Its fictional
nature was diluted by this circulation. Had she tried to use arguments based on
reason, as interpretations are, the fable would have reconstructed itself
immediately, in the same terms. If motherhood worked in his mother like a
constant beginning, widowhood worked like an ending that was, in turn, a
premise: she was a widow, true, but she had been married once. Varamo’s father
had been a prosperous storekeeper and a devoted father, who had kept his wife
safe and happy. And by some miracle his son had landed a ministerial job.
Sitting in the rustling darkness of the garden as night came on, the notion of a
miracle suggested a fable that was analogous and equivalent to the one in which
his mother was immersed: in the whole of Panama, only one man had obtained a
government job, and that man was Varamo.
Th
e
others could only dream about it. But this wasn’t a fable; it had really
happened. It could well have provoked envy among the neighbors — he knew what
they were like, because he was their neighbor too — and it was easy enough to
imagine how staggered they or anyone might be by the idea that somebody could
have a salary for life, a kind of perpetual fellowship. To calm his mother down
he told her that soon, any moment now, a neighbor would come and apologize for
the evil deed, with the ridiculous excuse that the anonymous letter was a
forgery, written by somebody else.
Th
e stars
were not yet shining, but tears were shining already on his mother’s cheeks and
in the universe.