Varamo (6 page)

As a landmark of Latin American avant-garde writing
in the first decades of the twentieth century,
Th
e Song of the Virgin Child
belongs to the category of “experimental
literature.”
Th
e poem’s capacity to integrate
all the circumstantial details associated with its genesis is a feature that
situates it historically. It doesn’t possess that capacity by virtue of being an
avant-garde work; in fact, it’s the other way around: it’s avant-garde because
it makes the deductions possible. It can be said that any art is avant-garde if
it permits the reconstruction of the real-life circumstances from which it
emerged. While the conventional work of art thematizes cause and effect and
thereby gives the hallucinatory impression of sealing itself off, the
avant-garde work remains open to the conditions of its existence. And the more
accomplished it is, the more confident the critic can be in restoring the
antecedent events and thoughts. In the case of a masterwork like Varamo’s poem,
that confidence is absolute, and all the critic has to do is translate each
verse, each word, backwards, into the particle of reality from which it sprang.
Th
ose “particles of reality” are what the
critics call “circumstantial details,” and when appropriately combined, they
constitute a discourse that could be mistaken for that of a novel. Two
qualifications need to be made here: the first is that the size of the elements
used for the reconstruction is not fixed: they can be words or lines, but also
syllables or stresses, or one particular sense of a word, or something as large
as a stanza, a section, or even the poem as a whole; the same goes for the
reconstructed fragments of reality, and there is no one-to-one correspondence
between those fragments and the elements of the text.
Th
e second qualification is that the particles of reality
reconstructed by interpreting the poem, although complete and sharply defined
like miniature universes, appear as discrete units with nothing to indicate
their order of occurrence, so that the critic who is picking them out is free to
arrange them according to personal taste, and the result can have a rather
surrealist air (as I’m afraid has been the case in the story of Varamo’s day so
far, and the same will be true, no doubt, of what remains to be told after this
explanation).
Th
is is what happens when the
circumstantial details are treated as givens. On one hand, there is no need to
bother inventing them, a rather silly or childish task, or at any rate
impossible to justify; on the other hand, the reality effect is lost, as it
always is when an automatic mechanism intervenes.

One more observation, to conclude: it has been said,
though I’m not sure how true it is, that the ultimate achievement in literature
is to make the content resonate somehow in the form. I think it would be hard to
find convincing examples, and much harder still to arrive at any kind of
objective certainty. But in this case it is heartening (though perhaps
spuriously so) for the critic to note that the subject of Varamo’s anxiety in
the hours leading up to the writing of the poem was money, and that the method
adopted here to communicate his state of mind is free indirect style . . . since
there is a fundamental congruity, which no one can deny, between that style and
money. Just as free indirect style is the reason behind (and the explanation
for) every discursive move in this text, so money is what ultimately moves the
world, in the depths of the psyche as well as on the surface. Free indirect
style and money, are, in their respective domains, causes that operate at a
level apart, above or below the other causes. A feature of free indirect style
that limits its effectiveness, although writers do not always take this into
account, is that it leads to abstraction. As for money, one need not be a
philosopher to see that what it does to society is to infect it with
abstraction, which is hardly surprising, because money
is
abstraction, and that is precisely why it is useful. In fact, if
this were a novel, its principal shortcoming would be the cold intellectual
abstraction pervading its pages, which is produced by the use of free indirect
style to create a point of view at once internal and external to the
protagonist, who as a result becomes a discursive entity, drained of life.
Th
e only possible, though very tenuous,
justification lies in the fact that the counterfeit bills, precisely because
they are counterfeit, bring an element of irreducible materiality to a space of
abstractions and equivalences. On the other hand, it would be quite reasonable
to criticize the hypothetical novel for resorting to the device of forgery,
which has been overused in contemporary narrative, and, as a metaphor, is now
rather obvious.

Circumstantial details are a matter of occupying time,
while free indirect style is a matter for the occupying subject. Without the
details, there is no time; without the style, time remains empty.
Th
e details are the object of invention; the
style, that of improvisation. Varamo had sensed the essential impossibility of
improvising a crime; he was facing the classic, thorny problem of the alibi. “I
wasn’t there; I was somewhere else.” Everything in his world of circumstantial
details and free indirect style had to lead toward the point where he would be
able to speak those words. And in that requirement there was already a hint of
the poem’s culminating scene: midnight in Bethlehem, the Child and the Mother
making History (neither could say, “I wasn’t there”) and thus setting the
coordinates for every potential alibi.

Once the game was over and the washing up was done (the
dominoes and the dishes were similar in a way), it was time to go to the café,
that masculine, Arabic institution, so characteristic of Central America. Varamo
never missed an evening. He was a different man when he went to the café:
nonchalant, sociable, more Western, more normal, not so neurotic. It was an
illusion, but that didn’t matter, because it was still a subjective reality. He
put on his hat. He raised a finger to his chin in a gesture of intense
concentration.
Th
ere was something he had to do
before going out, but he couldn’t remember what. A discreet little cough
reminded him. He had to put his mother to bed. It wasn’t difficult; by that hour
of the evening she was asleep on her feet. Another effect of poor assimilation:
not having learnt the language or adapted to the climate and the hours people
kept.

“Prease . . . prease . . . ,” she said, and her dry
little voice sounded like the cry of a bird lost in the mountains.

“Mother, your glasses . . .”

Silence.
Th
e quiet rooms
were inviting him to resume his experiments, but habit prevailed. He put on his
hat, went around checking the doors and the windows one last time, and stepped
out into the starry night.

Since he knew his habitual route by heart, he could look
up at the sky, though he did remind himself briefly of the caution required when
crossing the street, now that motor cars had begun to proliferate. Like all
adults, he was afraid of accidents. What dismayed him most about them was the
temporal contrast between the instant, or fraction of an instant, in which an
accident could occur, and the long months or years required to repair its
effects, if indeed they were reparable and didn’t last a lifetime. He had
developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all
the time available to human beings must pass. In the dark empty streets of
Colón, of course, this wariness seemed excessive. And the black sky crossed by
streams of phosphorescent mercury was a vision worth the risk.
Th
e stars were an overwhelming surprise. But since
each scene was linked to the one that had gone before, he continued to see the
dominoes and dishes, twinkling among the constellations.

He began to hear the Voices, as he always did at
that time on his way to the café. It was a daily fit of madness: disturbing,
distressing, almost unbearable, except that it was brief. Just as they had come,
the Voices went.
Th
ey sounded inside his head,
so there was no point covering his ears or running, and yet he hurried on,
grimacing, and soon, magically, he left them behind. He had grown used to them,
but, like any inexplicable phenomenon, they retained a certain latent menace.
Concise sentences, definitions, formulae, but none of it seemed to make any
sense. When he thought about it, before or afterward, he was cross with himself
for being so distracted: a sentence, half a sentence or a word always made some
kind of sense.
Th
e whole set of sentences might
have been senseless, but if he took the time to search for the key. . .
Not when it was actually happening, of course — it was too sudden and
frightening — but perhaps if he could memorize the sentences, or note them down
afterward and make lists. . . Why had he never done something like that,
in all those years of being ambushed by the Voices, instead of passively tuning
in?

Sometimes he suspected that he was not the only
receiver of that nocturnal dictation.
Th
e others
might have been keeping it secret, like him. It’s natural enough to say, “Why me
of all people? Why me?” but everyone else could be saying the same.
Th
e worrying thing was not being able to
understand. He had remarked that the most awkward aspect of individuality was
being left out of the shared understandings that create social bonds.
Th
is happened in everyday life, with his
colleagues at the office or his friends at the café, not just with the Voices,
but that supernatural phenomenon may well have been a model for the way it
worked in general. If it really was an auditory hallucination, as he had
occasionally suspected, perhaps it was his mind’s way of providing remedial
practice, but if so he kept squandering that opportunity.

He was surrounded by the watchful shapes of dark houses,
closed doors and corners.
Th
e most natural
reaction to a supernatural experience in circumstances such as these would have
been a panic attack, and he did begin to have one, but it was just a beginning,
because the café wasn’t far away, and at the rate he was going, almost breaking
into a run, he would soon be there. As he drew near, he was seized by a more
definite dread: perhaps the Voices were informing others, the police for
example, of what was in his pocket. Ever since he had first heard the Voices, he
had harbored the fear that they would reveal his secrets to others who, unlike
him, would be able to understand. Luckily, he’d never had to worry about the
practical consequences of such a revelation, given his blameless conduct and the
upright life he led. Now, however, the forgery, although it was none of his
doing, was growing in the night and taking on threatening forms, as
unrecognizable things always do. He had inadvertently crossed the line between
the private and the public. A crime transformed the most private and retiring
citizen into a public figure. And from that point on, anything concealment
could, in turn, become a criminal act, in an endless proliferation.

Th
e night, however,
had something else in store. Not the police, but a motor car. From the end of
the street came one of the large official vehicles, traveling at a moderate
speed, and when it reached the corner right in front of Varamo, it collided with
another car coming along the cross street. Odd.
Th
ey must have been the only two cars on the road in the whole city,
or in the neighborhood anyway, and they had to go and crash into each other.
“You never know what’s going to happen.”
Th
e
accident, it seemed, was a truly universal concept.
Th
e second car, which had been the active instrument of the
collision, was much smaller than the first and flimsier (it looked like a
homemade model, put together by a handyman). In spite of which, perhaps because
of the relative velocities, or positions, the big car turned over and came to
rest upside down, while the little one continued on its way down the street with
just a few damaged panels, whose rattling was soon drowned out by the noise of
the accelerating motor. And then it was gone.
Th
e whole thing was over in a matter of seconds, and Varamo didn’t have
time to react. In any case, all he had to do was keep on walking (he hadn’t
stopped) to reach the overturned car in the middle of the intersection. As he
approached, he saw a man crawl out through the driver’s window, get to his feet,
feel his arms and legs to make sure that he hadn’t been injured and look up.
Th
e man recognized him, and his greeting was
almost cheerful. Varamo, whose reactions were slower, took a moment to recognize
the man: it was the driver from the Ministry who had given him the peso for his
mother earlier. He was black, and his teeth were shining in the dark, a sign
that he was smiling. Typically irresponsible, thought Varamo. But not
altogether. Because, just as the driver was about to open his mouth, he
remembered something; a worried look came over his face, and he turned back to
the car from which he had emerged.
Th
e wheels
were still spinning in the air. He leaned down to look through the side windows,
which were level with the ground, and what he saw jolted him into action. He
tried the rear door, which opened with magical ease, backwards. He started
crawling in, but first he turned to Varamo, who had reached the car by then, and
asked for his help. Inside the car was a fat man in a black suit who was
unconscious. He was in a curious position, resting on his shoulders and his
upper back, as if he had frozen in the middle of a somersault.
Th
e driver crawled in, righted him by pushing and
shoving, then, with Varamo’s help, pulled him out onto the pavement by the legs.
It was the Treasurer.