Varamo (7 page)

It hadn’t been an accident but an attempt on the
Treasurer’s life. Although unconscious, he established a temporary office in the
house on the corner, whose occupants had been woken by his driver.
Th
ey put him on a sofa and sent for a doctor and
the Treasurer’s secretary.
Th
e presence of the
latter was superfluous, because the black man, Cigarro (as well as being a
driver and a betting agent, he was also a purveyor of smuggled tobacco; hence
the nickname), took control of the situation. Before Dídimo, the secretary,
arrived, he explained his suspicions to Varamo: the attack had been perpetrated
by anarchists, pretending to participate in a regularity rally that was under
way, an event of national significance. Since Varamo wasn’t familiar with
rallies of this kind, Cigarro explained.

In so-called “regularity rallies,” the aim is to maintain
a predetermined speed, and the winner is not the first to arrive, but whoever
deviates the least from that speed between the start and the finish. But how
could they tell who was sticking to the speed and who wasn’t? Well, said
Cigarro, it was pretty complicated but perfectly feasible, although it did
require meticulous planning and many calculations. If the total length of the
course was two hundred miles, and the set speed was fifty miles an hour, and a
car left at exactly five o’clock (the competitors didn’t start all at once, but
one every fifteen minutes), it would pass the midpoint (the hundred-mile point)
at exactly seven; a timekeeper stationed there, with a list and a watch, would
record its passing. At many other points along the route there were other
timekeepers noting down the times at which each car went by in exactly the same
way. When the rally was over, all the lists were gathered up, there was a
general reckoning, the average punctuality of each competitor was calculated in
minutes and seconds, and the winner was whoever turned out to have been the most
punctual. But wasn’t that too simple? wondered Varamo. If the driver had a list
of the checkpoints and the times, couldn’t he just pass each point at the time
he was supposed to, without worrying at all about traveling at a constant speed?
For example, after passing one point he could drive at top speed till he was
near the next one, then stop and wait until it was time to go past. Cigarro
laughed, pleased to be asked this question, and proceeded to enlighten Varamo:
apart from two or three indicative checkpoints, whose locations were indulgently
revealed to the public, all the rest were kept secret. Only the organizing
committee knew where they were. Varamo nodded. But it seemed like a very boring
event, a test of patience and nerves, without any kind of emotion. Cigarro,
Dídimo and the doctor, who had arrived in the meantime and joined the
conversation, agreed, although the doctor added a qualification: one kind of
emotion was replaced by another, and the competitive spirit lived on. He
concluded, philosophically, that “it took all sorts.”

At this point, Cigarro, who was well informed, had
something to contribute. But first he inquired about his boss’s condition.
“Uncertain,” pronounced the doctor succinctly, and they resumed their
conversation.
Th
e rallies, said Cigarro, were
fundamentally technical competitions, an opportunity for the fledgling
automobile industry to test its innovations, and they appealed mainly to car
fanatics rather than to the general public, which made them somewhat esoteric.
Th
e rally under way was a special case,
because it had been promoted by the Central Administration as part of the
festivities for the inauguration of the linked highways running right across the
isthmus, connecting the cities of Colón and Panama. In fact (and here he lowered
his voice, as if revealing a state secret) the rally had been planned, mainly,
as a trap for anarchists. To them, a regularity rally was a provocation; its
strict regulation of time and space was bound to prove repugnant to the
libertarian spirit.
Th
e way things were going,
with conspiracies about to erupt across the country, the event would act as an
irresistible lure. In fact, competing in a regularity rally was so
nerve-wracking that it could turn a normal and previously law-abiding citizen
into an anarchist.
Th
ere had been a number of
such cases. If a competitor suspected (sometimes with good reason, but almost
always jumping to conclusions) that he no longer had a chance (having passed too
many hidden checkpoints too early or too late), he would quite often give up
trying to maintain the pace, and instead of simply going home, would tear away
at full speed, come up beside another car in the competition, and challenge the
driver by revving loudly, honking and making obscene gestures, trying to make
him chuck in the rules by appealing to his machismo and the primal urge to get
ahead and leave all the others coughing dust. If this operation failed, all the
rogue driver had to do was race ahead a bit (and how he relished the freedom to
do that, while the others were still slaves to the speedometer) and try it on
the following car, or rather the car ahead. If regularity rallies were a kind of
education that built the driver’s character, these brutish outbursts were the
midterm exams.

Th
e first part of the
rally, and by no means the easiest, was a complicated circuit through the
streets of Colón, before setting off on the journey. Some were expected to drop
out even at this stage. Before settling down to a long, sleepless night of
attending to telegraphic reports from the main checkpoints, the Treasurer had
wanted to go out and see some of the competitors who had already set off, while
they were still in the city.
Th
is too, Cigarro
added incidentally, was something of a provocation, especially if his route
crossed that of the rally at certain intersections, or all of them, given that
the drivers couldn’t slow down. But since the Minister had a comprehensive
schedule, he wasn’t really running a risk, accustomed as he was to performing
the most complex mental calculations . . .

At this point, Doctor Garruto asked why the Treasurer was
taking an interest in this rally. It didn’t seem to be directly related to his
portfolio, although everything came under the umbrella of the national economy
in one way or another. Cigarro glanced at Dídimo, the secretary, who after
heaving a melancholy sigh explained that the Treasurer was also acting, that
night, as Minister of the Interior; he had assumed this additional
responsibility and been sworn in a few hours earlier, just minutes after the
previous Minister’s sudden resignation.

Garruto and Varamo raised their eyebrows in surprise.
Th
e Minister of the Interior had been a
dominant figure and exercised a veritable hegemony over the nation’s political
life. His resignation, which had not been publicly announced, came as a shock.
Cigarro, speaking like someone who knows a great deal more than he is prepared
to say, remarked that the worsening of the situation had left no alternative,
then took up the tale where he had left off: the Treasurer, sitting in the back
seat, had told him which streets to take, where to stop, when to go on, and in
this way they had been able to watch a large number of competitors driving past
in front of them at a pleasantly constant pace. He hadn’t made any mistakes
along the way, or at this corner, Cigarro could swear, so the collision had been
deliberate, and premeditated, to judge from the way the culprit had fled. But it
would be easy to catch him. Well, perhaps not easy. It was a matter of doing the
sums; given the premises on which the rally was run, they could use the relevant
information (as he said this he took the lists and maps from his pocket and
spread them out) to calculate where the fugitive would be at any particular
moment. No crime writer had ever invented a surer, more geometrical method of
identifying and apprehending a criminal. All it required was a little mental
effort. He invited them to move to the dining table, where they would be able to
work more comfortably. Once they were there, he started handing out the papers;
but Varamo excused himself, saying that he hadn’t brought his reading glasses (a
lie, since his eyesight was fine). Cigarro muttered a remark about some people’s
lack of patriotism, while the other two concentrated obediently on the task.

Varamo thought it highly suspicious that Cigarro happened
to have secret documents concerning the rally in his pocket. He had also
recognized the handwriting from the betting slips he passed on to his mother.
What this probably meant was that Cigarro had made copies in secret, to sell to
the competitors.
Th
at would fit in with his
various sidelines. Which is partly why Varamo hadn’t wanted to play along with
him.
Th
e explanation of the regularity rallies
had struck him as vaguely familiar.
Th
e Voices
operated in the same way, except that for them, he was both the route and the
cars.
Th
ere might have been some connection, in
which case the overall result of the rally might reveal the Voices’ secret. He
knew that counterfeiting was one of the anarchists’ favorite strategies.
Th
ere is often a causal link between apparently
unrelated events, but we are deceived by simultaneity, which suggests a mere
coincidence. Fake money and real money are simultaneous; both flow through the
capillaries of society at the same time, more or less at the same rate, and they
are not independent of each other. If there was any truth to the economic axiom
that “bad money drives out good,” there was a curious parallel with those
defeatists in the regularity rallies who came up beside the good competitors and
accelerated just to provoke them. So Varamo got up from the table and left the
dining room, saying he was going to check on the patient. He needed a
distraction, because there is a limit to the number of worries a mind can
accommodate. And, as far as distractions were concerned, he was spoiled for
choice, because he was in a house that he had never visited before, where
everything was new and unfamiliar to him.

He was in a house. But whose? He should have known
whose house it was because he passed it on his daily walk, and he had always
taken the same route because he had never lived anywhere else. Houses look
different from the outside and the inside, but he’d entered this one in such a
rush that he hadn’t registered the transition; his consciousness had failed to
take it in. He had to reconstruct the events: the accident, the corner . . .
Th
en he realized that he was in the house
that belonged to the Góngora sisters. Any doubts he might have had were
dispelled when one of them rushed past in front of him wearing a bathrobe, on
her way to the kitchen, and assuming that he had come to ask for coffee, told
him that they were making some and would bring it in. When he was alone again,
he looked around, with renewed interest. “
Th
e
Góngoras’ house” was a rather mysterious place, at least for him. Since
childhood he had heard people in the neighborhood refer to the building and its
inhabitants in a knowing, insinuating way, which he had come to think was,
fundamentally, the product of more or less willful ignorance rather than of any
factual knowledge.
Th
e Góngoras were rarely seen
in public, and were not on familiar terms with anyone in the neighborhood.
Apparently, they were satisfied with their own company and happy to stay home,
or very busy with their housework. Women who live on their own always provoke
gossip, especially when they keep to themselves and no one knows where their
money comes from. And it’s worse if there is no income, or no plausible theory
about its source, because an almost supernatural element creeps in. “
Th
ey live on air.” Seen from the street, the house
was an obscure edifice in the middle of a jungle-like profusion of palms and
overgrown shrubs. Although the façade was partly obscured by vegetation, the
doors and windows seemed to be permanently closed. What could be seen of the
house gave an impression of decadence and neglect. How long had the Góngoras
been living there? Forty, fifty years? A hundred?
Th
ey had already been there when Varamo was a boy.
Th
ere must have been successive generations of
them, because there were always young Góngoras. If there were men, the sisters
kept them well hidden or received their visits very discreetly. Although Varamo
passed the house every night on his way to the café, he never paid attention to
it, perhaps because his perceptions were dulled by habit, or because, at that
point on the walk, the Voices were at their most intense and he was too
preoccupied to be looking at houses.

Th
e Góngoras started
chatting to him. Everything entered Varamo’s consciousness with a liquid
fluency: some pieces of information were absorbed in a linear and orderly
fashion, while others were twisted, folded, knobbled, but they all slipped in
with the same baroque lubrication, which made him suspect that they would slip
out just as easily.
Th
ere were only two
Góngoras, it turned out, two sisters in their sixties: solidly built,
well-preserved, dark-skinned Creole ladies.
Th
ey
laughed in response to his discreet inquiry: No, their mothers or grandmothers
had never lived there, just them. And they didn’t have daughters either. “We
didn’t get married because we were quite happy together, just the two of us,”
said one.
Th
e other nodded, and the one who had
spoken glanced at her, then said to Varamo: “My sister lost a leg in an
accident,” which might have been another reason why they hadn’t married; and
perhaps it explained their reclusive life, and all the ambiguous rumors about
them. “It’s not that we never see anyone else,” pointed out the one-legged
sister. And together they praised the fidelity of numerous old friends who
continued to visit them: “Why, just last night we had a little gathering; we
were chatting and listening to music till dawn.” And sure enough, there were
many signs of a lengthy party: ashtrays overflowing with butts, dirty glasses,
and the remains of sandwiches on plates. “Do you do all the housework on your
own?” asked Varamo.
Th
ey had a maid, they said,
but she was more like a member of the family, a daughter: Carmen Luna. “But
you’d know her by her nickname: Caricias.” No, the name meant nothing to Varamo.
Th
ey were surprised but said he’d recognize
her when she came back. “We got her out of bed, poor thing,” one of the sisters
added, tilting her head in the direction of the dining room, “to go and bring in
all those people.”
Th
e other one insisted,
looking intently at Varamo: “You used to play with her when you were children.”
“I don’t remember. Are you sure you’re not getting me mixed up with someone
else?” “No! Truly!” they exclaimed in unison. “You’re the son of that nice
Chinese lady.” “We knew your father, Tuñon de Varamo, and your aunt Ilolay.” To
complete these revelations, they added: “We thought you’d have kept up with
Carmen’s news, because she’s engaged to your friend Cigarro.” At this point
Varamo did remember something, though probably not what the Góngoras had in
mind. Although Cigarro wasn’t really his friend, they used to exchange a few
words outside the Ministry, and on a number of occasions the driver had referred
to a woman who was, so he said, “the last woman,” and he had mentioned the name
Caricias. Varamo had never given any serious thought to what he might have
meant.
Th
e expression seemed rather derogatory
(if it meant the last one he’d picked up), but perhaps it could also mean “the
last real woman”; and in a way her nickname, Caricias, Caresses, supported that
interpretation.