Varamo by César Aira

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