Varamo (5 page)

Th
ere was, in fact, an
argument at his disposal, which touched on a very concrete issue, and therefore
could have cut through the levels of fiction and “free indirect style” that
separated him from his mother. But he wouldn’t have known how to bring it up, or
how to set it out, in spite of its simplicity. It was one of those arguments
that only works if it occurs spontaneously to the other person. His mother was
Chinese; he was Chinese; therefore he had to be her son; there could be no doubt
about it.
Th
e conclusion was irresistible in
Panama, for overwhelming demographic reasons. It was obvious at a glance, and
might almost have been the reason for their move to a remote corner of the
world. For a European, for a Panamanian, or an American in general, “All Chinese
look the same,” but that’s because they’re Chinese, not because they’re the
same. In China, the fact that a Chinese mother had a Chinese son would have been
utterly unremarkable, so the door would have been open to doubts about
filiation, except that over there they could see the differences and
similarities. Given the length of the journey and the fifty years that had
passed, it was only courteous to consider the question of identity to be
settled. It wasn’t the sort of matter a mother could discuss with her son.
Heaving an exaggerated sigh, he said it was time to start getting dinner and
stood up. He went to the kitchen and switched on the light. He looked back
across the patio. Gradually, taking tiny, reluctant steps, his mother appeared,
with her red trousers and gold vest, in the rectangle of pale light projected
through the open door.

While he played domino solitaire at the kitchen table, his
mother prepared the meal. She cooked the fish, which was strangely colored and
tasted suspicious. It was one of those potentially fatal meals, and only luck
prevented them from falling ill; but it must have affected them somehow, because
Varamo had hallucinations and a fever. He raised the financial issue timidly
over dinner. He said that because of a budget adjustment the Ministry would be
paying the salaries late, so they would have to use their savings to make ends
meet.

In that peculiar state of mind, as he clacked the dominoes
down on the table (mechanically recording the progress of each game according to
a system of his own invention — he was sure that one day he would “win,” and if
he didn’t note down the moves, he wouldn’t be able to reproduce them), he
entertained a series of thoughts which, given their crucial importance, merit a
detailed and exhaustive reconstruction.
Th
e
thread is sinuous and long, the concepts slippery, the meanings elusive, but the
reconstruction is not, in fact, all that difficult, if it is carried out step by
step: one only has to follow the order of the thoughts, and there’s no way to go
wrong, because each thought emerges from its predecessor, as in a numerical
sequence.
Th
e point of departure was a problem
that had, of course, been worrying him ever since it was raised by the payment
of his salary: the pair of counterfeit notes.
Th
e fact that the situation was, as far as he knew, unprecedented (and,
like any citizen, he felt that he was fully informed on the issue) made it all
the more disturbing.
Th
ere were no prior cases
of counterfeiting in Panama; public opinion had not been alerted because there
had been no reason to do so, which meant that there was no relevant
jurisprudence, and certainly no legislation. After all, Panama was a young
nation, and situations of this kind require a minimum of history. It was
complicated enough to establish the laws that govern the legal printing of
money, an operation which, in its early stages, is bound to resemble
counterfeiting. So if he were caught trying to use fake money — as he was sure
he would be — the case would set a precedent; the sentence and the legal concept
would have to be invented, made up from scratch, given a comprehensible form and
surrounded with discourse to make them plausible. All of which would involve
intellectual and imaginative work, but that didn’t make the prospect any
brighter for him, as the object of the work; quite the contrary, because the
authorities would have to invent a punishment, to extract it from their
imaginations, that is, from an infinite combinatory system of possibilities. And
who could tell what they would come up with? Especially since, in a first case
like this, they’d feel obliged to devise something original enough to capture
the imagination of the public and serve as an example.
Th
e combination of novelty and exemplarity could produce literally
anything, as in the wildest sadistic fantasies: they could happen on his most
secret fear, or create it. Everything was possible, as in a world about to take
shape.

Faced with such a prospect, the first strategy that
occurred to him was to feign innocence, or ignorance, to act as if he hadn’t
noticed anything strange about the bills, to change them as he would have done
if they had been genuine, as he did every month, and if they did catch him, or
trace the money back to him, to stick to his story and persist in the role of
the naïve victim. It was the most obvious solution, what he would have done
instinctively, following his first impulse. But a few minutes’ thought would
have sufficed to reveal its flaws (and hours had already gone by).
Th
e first and most decisive flaw was that it
didn’t matter what he decided to do or not to do, which course of action he
adopted, how well or badly he carried it out, because for a judge, the only
thing that mattered were the facts, not the intentions.
Th
e mental trajectory that preceded the facts was not taken into
account, for the simple reason that it was always subject to doubt and therefore
belonged to a fictional realm, beyond the remit of the justice system.
Intentions were the stuff of fables.
Th
e only
reality was made of facts — the rosy, nacreous globe of what happened: not only
was it distinct from fiction, no fiction ever came anywhere near it. So any
trouble he might take to clothe his intentions in innocence was a waste of time,
because at the crucial moment all intentions would be ruled out of court, and if
for some reason an intention had to be presumed, it was far more logical to
presume a bad one than a good one.

And even leaving all that aside, there was another, more
fundamental problem:
how
to feign innocence. As
well as being insurmountable, this difficulty was unfathomable.
Th
e idea was to simulate naturalness, in other
words, to make it up as he went along.
Th
at
might have seemed the easiest thing in the world, the paragon of easiness, but
in fact there was nothing more difficult; intending to be natural was, in
itself, contradictory and self-defeating. In his case, it was condemned to
failure from the outset, because if he intended to improvise his course of
action, he would have to act
as if
he were
really improvising, and at the same time he would, also, really be improvising,
which was no more feasible than moving in two opposite directions at the same
time. Irrespective of intentions, each act (or gesture or attempt or instant)
had to be followed by another, by any one of all the others.
Th
e improviser had to make a superhuman choice
among all the possibilities, which, by definition, were so numerous that a
lifetime would not suffice to count them or even to contemplate their range. And
improvising meant, by definition again, that he didn’t have a lifetime at his
disposal, or even a fragment of a life, but only an atom, a vanishing of time.
Decisions, that is choices and intentions, were nourished by time, but the
premises of improvisation swallowed up all the available time, before the
improvising could even begin. And appearances were against him, because whatever
account he gave of his day, that story would presuppose time, and no one would
believe that time had been annulled.

His predicament was peculiar, and especially
uncomfortable. Like any other improviser, he could do anything, anything at all,
but unlike any other, he had a point of departure, in the form of a secret
intention: to exchange those bad bills for good ones. His intention was not to
improvise: on the contrary, improvising was what he had to do in order to
fulfill his intention. Nevertheless, he had to have the intention to improvise
as well, because everything we do, even incidentally, is done with an intention.
But the secrecy of his prior intention necessarily contaminated this secondary
one, so he had to hide his improvising, which, given the lack of time, meant
improvising his hiding. What a headache! As if just improvising wasn’t already
hard enough! Pulling something out of nothing, straight after having pulled
something different from the same teeming, variegated nothing . . . And so on,
different every time, to keep it moving forward. Could there really be enough
different things in the universe to fill up a lapse of time that was infinitely
divisible? Some things could be repeated, of course, but always against a ground
of difference. He had to create a series.
Th
e
natural numbers provided an obvious model, but he couldn’t really use them
because a natural series of that kind is governed by reason, not improvisation.
No one could claim to be “improvising” when counting from one to ten, or
reciting the prime numbers. In improvisation one has to keep jumping from reason
to unreason, creating the unexpected, and satisfying expectations with what
would be expected to confound them. Who could embark on a task like that with
any hope of success? Certainly not Varamo. Him least of all. As a public
servant, he shrank in horror from hard work, and for him it was second nature to
take the easy way out, by delegating where possible. He wondered if, in a case
like this, with a biographical series, there might not be some procedure, an
automatic mechanism that would generate the circumstances, and spare him the
effort of searching for them.

In any case (and perhaps this would invalidate all
the efforts he might eventually decide to make), everything he chose to do,
every moment of action, however singular, would share an unvarying
characteristic with all the other moments: it would come after the one before,
and before the one after.
Th
is succession was
the only thing that a situation experienced in the present had in common with
the same situation seen retrospectively, in the past.
Th
e only thing, because the other common element, subjectivity,
underwent a complete mutation: in the present it was one’s own; in the past,
that of another.
Th
e judge, if the case ever
came to court, would make the leap from the other to the self. And thus the
fearsome figure of the judge assumed a form that seemed, but only seemed, to be
less threatening: that of the narrator.

Which brings us to the reason for the importance of this
moment in the train of thoughts that occupied Varamo’s mind as he sat at the
table playing dominoes. It is so important that, in a sense, it explains
everything. Although this book takes the form of a novel, it is a work of
literary history, not a fiction, because the protagonist existed, and he was the
author of a famous poem that is studied to this day as a watershed in the
development of the Spanish American avant-garde movements.
Th
at being the case, the reader may well have
wondered why, so far, the protagonist’s thoughts have been presented in “free
indirect style,” as it is called, a standard method in fiction and in the
fictionalization of historical facts (which has no place here).
Th
ere is an explanation for this choice, which in
no way contradicts the present volume’s status as a strictly historical
document. Any invention there might have been is involuntary and incidental; and
a check of what has been written up to this point, carried out precisely now
(taking advantage of the temporal margin left by Varamo’s meditation,
proceeding, as it is, in real time), confirms that, in fact, there has been
none. Invention can assume the form of a documentary record of reality, and vice
versa, because both have essentially the same appearance. Free indirect style,
which is the view from inside a character expressed in the third person, creates
an impression of naturalness, and allows us to forget that we are reading
fiction and that, in the real world, we never know what other people are
thinking, or why they do what they do. Naturalness, in general, is the confusion
of the first and third persons. So, far from being just another literary
technique, free indirect style is the key mechanism of trans-subjectivity,
without which we would have no understanding of social interactions.

But our invasion of Varamo’s consciousness is not magical
or even imaginative or hypothetical. It is a historical reconstruction.
Th
e difference is that we have presented it
backwards, starting with the final results of our research. All the
circumstantial details with which we have been coloring the story of the
character’s day and making it credible have been deduced (in the most rigorous
sense of that word) from the poem that he finally wrote, which is the only
document that has survived. Partly because it is all we have, and partly because
of its inherent characteristics, that document is absolute, and worthy of
unqualified trust.
Th
e course of events that
preceded the composition of the poem can be deduced from the text, in ever
greater detail, as one reads it over and again. Perceptual data is recovered in
this way, but also psychological binding elements, including memories,
daydreams, oversights, uncertainties and even subliminal brain flashes.
Th
e treatment of the external conditions should be
similarly inclusive: the succession can be progressively enriched with particles
of reality, down to the subatomic level and beyond. Consequently, no invention
has been required to recount the process of inspiration as a straightforward
narrative, not unlike a novel. It has, however, been necessary to make a
rigorous selection, since the poem provides us with everything, and could have
given rise to a tome the size of a telephone book. Restraint had to be exercised
because the objective was to write a slim volume, since this is an experiment
(an experiment in literary criticism), and to be convincing, experiments must be
brief; once the initial hypothesis has been demonstrated, there’s no point going
on. Not to mention the risk of boring the reader.