Varamo by César Aira Page 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