center's collapse
by Douglas Messerli
César Aira Varamo, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama) 2002 /
New York: New Directions, 2012)
If he attempts to cash the money he is certain that he will be arrested
for counterfeiting and, since Panama has had very few cases of such a crime,
will be made an example of, the authorities creating new methods of punishment
as an example to the populace. Yet how can he survive without money for another
month? Although he lives modestly as a bachelor, he cares for a slightly mad
mother, and has his own expenses. Moreover, just having the money on his being
might endanger him. Were he to give it away, he is certain that he will be
tracked down. Perhaps the counterfeit money itself is a kind test. In short,
Varamo is put into a kind moral and even metaphysical predicament which
requires all of his abilities to resolve.
Aira takes us through this first day and night of this man's horrifying
situation, wherein he is threatened by forces larger than him, and which all
seem to implicate him in some grand plot of which he has no knowledge. On his
way home from the Ministry, he is accosted by a local madman who insists Varamo
owes him money and is approached by a shady underground figure, Cigarro, to
award him the small winnings of his mother's gambling bet.
At home, even his personal objects, his selves of food, his bed, his
mirror seem to accost him. His Chinese mother arrives in a state of near
hysteria, having received, so she claims, a blackmail letter. Work on his hobby
of embalming goes no better, and before he can stop her his mother has cooked
up the fish he painted with chemicals, feeding it up for dinner.
In a near fever of dread, Varamo attempts to walk, as he does daily, to
the local bar, only to be confronted what he describes as "the
voices" speaking meaningless sentences to him as they daily do, words that
he cannot put together to create significance.
Just as he is about to step into the street, he witnesses a car hit
another automobile containing the country's Treasurer who, in his new, just
announced role as Minister of the Interior, is determined to observe the
country's "regularity rallies," "races" through the roads
and highways where the goal is to keep to a slow, regularly-timed pace. The
Treasurer/Minister is unconscious, and Varamo is forced by his driver (Cigarro
in another role) to take him to a local house owned by two spinster sisters.
There, in the "lion's den," he discovers the sisters know
perfectly well who he is, that they have been working with the underground to
sell golf-clubs, carrying them as canes, one-by-one from local ships with whom
they communicate in code through messages bounced off of the regular passer-by
Varamo, which explains the mysterious voices he encounters night after night.
After another entanglement with Cigarro's girlfriend, the sisters' maid,
Varamo is entrusted with the code book, charged with scrambling up the codes
before it falls into Cigarro's or other's hands.
When the dizzyingly confused Varamo finally escapes the sisters' house,
he finds publishers at the bar, men who abuse Panama's lack of participation in
the International Copyright Agreements, who are interested in having him write
a book about his embalming experiences, promising him an advance precisely of
the amount of his counterfeited salary. Having never written a word before in
his life, Varamo is skeptical, obviously, about such an undertaking, but has little
choice: it is a perfect solution to his dilemma.
So, after a mind-releasing walk through the late-night Colón, does
Varamo return home to write:
“He sat down, and wrote the poem. It
is true that the verb "to write" covers a wide range of practices. In
this case the author simply copied out all the papers he had put in his pocket
since leaving the Ministry that afternoon. He did this in a cumulative fashion,
without punctuation or divisions, without rearrangement, in lines of irregular length
(the idea of prose, a late refinement in old civilizations, was utterly foreign
to him). The order was determined by chance. The code book provided a basic
structure, and he alternated the keys with literal transcriptions of the other
notes. He had the advantage of having received contradictory instructions,
which he followed with
providential diligence of a
beginner: Caricias had told him to change the keys to make them unrecognizable,
and the publishers had advised him to leave the raw materials as they were.”
The final work, The Song of the
Virgin Child, Aira tells us at the beginning of the book, became the
"celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry," a work
"drilled into the minds
of schoolchildren or regularly
chosen for recitation in poetry competitions."
On top of Aira's hilarious
spoof of how great experimental work is created, the author also plays with
notions of genre, arguing that his own narrative, since it is "true,"
is not a fiction but a use of the
third person to tell the "truth," as a journalist might. It is after
all, he insists, a story well known and evident in the structure of Varamo's
work itself, like all highly modernist experiments, is a work that reveals its
own reality.
Of course, Aira's work is not at all truthful, but an absurd series of
"postmodern" lies pretending to represent reality. And the joy of Varamo lies in the fact that as the
fictional poet's world collapses about him, forcing him to build up a new
conception his world, the reader gets to tag along, to play with the character
and author in the creation of a new universe made up of the accidental and
coincidental elements of an imagined life. And isn't that what the creative act
is really all about?
Los Angeles, Easter Day, 2012
Reprinted from Rain
Taxi
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