Varamo (11 page)

Speaking of writing, it was time he got to work. After
this, he would go straight home. But since he had come to the square, he went
for a walk around it. Emptied of people, it was unrecognizable.
Th
e still moonshadows made it more jungle-like and
wild. Varamo walked along the paths, thinking about the magic of inspiration. He
wasn’t the only visitor, although he was the only human, the only one walking on
the ground. A flock of black birds with white heads was circling at medium
altitude, avoiding the trunks of the palm trees.
Th
ey weren’t making the slightest sound, which gave the mysterious
impression that their flight was a purely visual phenomenon, unless, perhaps,
the dull humming of the cars as they crossed the city was drowning out the
whispering of their wings; but that seemed unlikely, since the constant, faint
noise of the motors had been absorbed by the silence. Sometimes the birds flew
over Varamo, and he stopped and tilted his head back to look at them.
Th
ey were flying all together, but not in a tight
formation, and after a while he noticed that some were breaking away in twos and
threes, and executing crazy figure eights and zigzags, very low or very high,
above the treetops. And then Varamo noticed something else. Although at first
those aerial paths had seemed like aimless scribbling, without center or
periphery or form, he began to realize that there was a point at which they all
converged, and at that point there was a brief halt, a sudden dip, after which
the birds flew on, more quickly than before. He walked toward the point to find
out what it was. Halfway there he saw that the center of attraction was a bush
beside a path. He reached it just as another group of birds was approaching, and
his presence must have frightened them, because after a moment of fluttering
they flew straight on.
Th
ere was nothing special
about the bush; he couldn’t understand why they were drawn to it. He walked over
to the other side of the path, sat on a bench and kept as still as he could.
Th
e strategy worked; the next time around
the birds flew at the bush, and Varamo was able to figure out what they were
doing. Without perching, suspended in midair like hummingbirds (though
physically they were more like small grouse), they bobbed their white heads and
pecked, quickly, one peck each, at a big red spot stuck on a branch. It was the
piece of candy he had left there that afternoon. He was amazed by the delicacy
with which the birds were treating the morsel. One peck would have been enough
to dislodge it from the branch. But they were pecking daintily, out of
consideration for one another or so it seemed; very odd behavior, because it
could only be explained by a species-wide instinct, and the endless chains of
instinct could not have been produced by a fortuitous discovery like that of the
sweet. It was the particular, flowering in the universal (the gelatinous
marshmallow, now riddled with holes, did in fact resemble a flower, and its
carmine was glowing in the dark).
Th
is struck
Varamo as interesting and poetic: a “writerly” experience. For him, everything
was “writerly” now. Poison or elixir, narcotic or aphrodisiac, whatever it was,
this flower, relic of a day in the life of an accidental writer, an inadvertent
counterfeiter leaving his traces in code, the birds were coming to try it,
performing a dance for no one and flying up toward the moon.
Th
e cathedral clock struck midnight. Varamo headed
for home.

Th
e rest is history,
common knowledge, at least for those who know the poem, which isn’t drilled into
the minds of schoolchildren or regularly chosen for recitation in poetry
competitions; but anyone who wants to read it will be able to find one of the
many editions.
Th
is is where Varamo’s adventure
comes to an end. He sat down, and he 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 purely 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).
Th
e order was determined by chance.
Th
e 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
the 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.

Th
e result was Varamo’s
famous poem, except that it was less a result in itself than a way of
transforming what had preceded it into a result. It produced a kind of
automatism or mutual fatality, by which cause and effect changed places and
became the same story. Far from diminishing the poem’s initial vigor, this
circle intensifies it. Which is, in fact, what always happens. If a work is
dazzlingly innovative and opens up unexplored paths, the merit is not to be
found in the work itself, but in its transformative effect on the historical
moment that engendered it. Novelty makes its causes new, giving birth to them
retrospectively. If historical time makes us live in the new, a story that
attempts to account for the origin of a work of art, that is, a work of
innovation, ceases to be a story: it’s a new reality, and yet a part of reality
as it has always been for everyone.
Th
ose who
don’t believe me can go and see for themselves.

December 15, 1999

Also by César Aira from New
Directions

An Episode in the Life of
a Landscape Painter

Ghosts

How I Became a Nun

Th
e Literary Conference

Th
e Seamstress and the Wind

Copyright © 2002 by César Aira

Translation copyright © 2012 by Chris Andrews

Originally published by Editorial Anagrama, S. A., 2002;
published in conjunction with the literary Agency Michael Gaeb/Berlin

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a
newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (
nd
p1219
) in 2012

Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada
Limited

Design by Erik Rieselbach

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aira, César, 1949–

[Varamo. English]

Varamo / César Aira ; translated from the Spanish by Chris
Andrews. — 1st American
paperback ed.

p. cm.

“A New Directions Paperbook Original.”

ISBN 978-0-8112-1741-5 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

1. Poetry—Authorship—Fiction. 2. Poets—Fiction. I. Andrews,
Chris. II. Title.

PQ7798.1.I7V3713 2012

863'.64—dc23

2011039758

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011