Varamo (9 page)

It was a very small space, but even so Varamo had to wait
for his pupils to dilate before he could take stock of its contents, because it
was lit only by some luminous buttons and dials made of red glass. “
Th
e broadcasting booth,” he had heard the Góngoras
say. And indeed, half the space was occupied by what seemed to be a telegraph
console, with loudspeakers, cables everywhere, revolving cylinders, baffles and
manometers . . . What made the strongest impression on him, in that
semi-darkness, was the movement.
Th
ere must have
been clockwork mechanisms, with springs, continuing to function in the absence
of an operator.
Th
e Treasurer was stretched out
on a mattress on the floor, wearing large earphones made of leather and metal
which were connected to the console by a cable. Varamo stood still for a few
minutes considering this strange installation. In the silence, beneath the sound
of his own breathing, he began to hear a murmur that struck him as familiar,
although its volume barely exceeded the threshold of perception. He tried to
determine its source and realized that it was coming from the Treasurer’s
earphones. Varamo knelt beside him, loosened one of the earphones and raised it
to his own ear . . .
Th
e sound of his Voices
made him freeze in terror. His head began to spin. He sat on the floor,
stupefied. Gradually, as he emerged from his bafflement, he began to piece
together an explanation.
Th
e Góngoras used this
equipment to communicate with the ships that brought in the smuggled goods (the
golf clubs). And it wasn’t, as Varamo had initially assumed, a telegraph
machine, but a more recent invention which transmitted speech, like a telephone.
Th
e sisters must have hooked it up to a
cylinder phonograph in order to keep transmitting twenty-four hours a day. And
some kind of electrical leak, which wouldn’t have been at all surprising, given
the precarious condition of the grid in Colón, had allowed the transmission to
escape or to be echoed in the atmosphere surrounding the house.
Th
at was where they came from, the Voices that he
had been hearing for years on his nightly walk to the café. It wasn’t surprising
that they pronounced apparently meaningless sentences; they must have been
speaking in code. It was as simple as that. And the doctor had exploited the
device to keep the Minister alive, using an automatic system to perfect the
well-known technique of talking to a comatose patient in order to provoke a
response from the dormant consciousness. But had he really perfected the
technique? Perhaps he had done just the opposite, because the treatment only
worked when the voice was familiar, when it conveyed affection and recognition,
calling on the patient’s personal memories, emotions and reasons to live.

Just then Caricias rushed into the room; she bumped into
Varamo (there was very little space) and stifled a cry. Luckily she didn’t
panic. “I came in to change the cylinders,” she explained. He in turn stammered
out an explanation of his presence there, admitting that curiosity had got the
better of him.
Th
e girl was friendly; sometimes
a crisis can break down the barriers of shyness or mistrust. After replacing the
cylinders in the machine, she smiled at him charmingly in the half-light, which
gave Varamo the courage to tell her that, for a long time, he had been hearing
fragments of those transmissions, and they had always seemed mysterious to him.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “If you don’t know the code they must sound like
absolute nonsense.” She took a notebook from a shelf and flicked through it
quickly; in the semidarkness, all he could see was that the pages were covered
with large, clumsy handwriting in block letters. “Here are the keys.”
Th
en, to Varamo’s great surprise, she told him
that he was the trigger for the nocturnal transmissions. Caricias and the ladies
of the house were usually very busy with their guests, and the transmissions had
to begin at the same time every night, so they had decided to use him as the
“ignition,” since they had noticed how punctual he was on his walk to the café.
As the mass of his body entered a magnetic field located in the street, it set
off the automatic mechanism. “
Th
at explains a
lot . . . ,” said Varamo; then, after a pause, he added, “A lot of things that
would have remained inexplicable if I hadn’t come here tonight, by chance.” “I
don’t think it’s a question of chance, Mr Varamo.” “What do you mean?” “
Th
at two-timer might have planned it all.” “I
thought he was your fiancé.” “I’m starting to suspect that Cigarro never really
loved me. He was just using me to get access to this communications system, and
now he’s intending to use it to achieve his goals.” “And what goals are they?”
“I’m not really sure, but I’m afraid he might be planning to lead a black
uprising and overthrow the government.” Because there was so little space, they
were standing very close together, almost touching, and this was so pleasant for
Varamo that what he was hearing didn’t seem particularly implausible.
Th
ere was a demographic undercurrent to everything
that was happening, and whatever “the last woman” said in that connection
automatically became significant, absorbed the significance of the context, like
a vacuum cleaner, and emitted it along with the message. In any case, one thing
was certain: he had no idea what to say.
Th
e
same old problem: he didn’t know how to talk to women. But she solved it for
him: “We have to stop Cigarro. What we can do is change the keys, so that he
can’t communicate with the ships that are coming from Haiti to invade us. Take
this,” she said, handing Varamo the notebook, “and start making changes. We can
finish it together later on. I have lots of ideas. I have to go now, or they’ll
notice I’m gone. Come back later, through the back patio.”
Th
ey opened the door and left the room together;
Varamo put the notebook in his pocket. Before going off to the dining room,
Caricias pointed to the front door, through which he passed without a sound.

A minute later he was walking down the usual street, as on
any other night. He was leaving the Voices behind. He smiled to think that he
had, in his pocket, the Rosetta stone with which to decipher them. And he smiled
again when he remembered the mission entrusted to him by his new friend: to mix
up the keys, to scramble the codes, to render them indecipherable. But that task
could wait. Ahead of him, at the end of the street, the café shone like a
carbuncle. As he approached the door, everyone else seemed to be coming out, and
some of them greeted him. Because of the accident, he was later than usual. From
a few stray words, he gathered that the theme of the evening’s conversation had
been the regularity rally, and it seemed that the true enthusiasts were going
back to the starting point to see the last cars setting off.
Th
e conversation must have been lively that
evening, with the rally and the political rumors. Varamo thought he might have
arrived too late, just as the café was closing, but he glanced in through the
windows and saw that there were still customers at some of the tables. Since his
acquaintances were leaving, he decided to sit down on his own and examine the
keys. But he wasn’t able to carry out this plan, because as soon as he walked
in, a thickset figure rushed at him yelling, “Pay me back the money I lent you!
Don’t pretend you can’t hear me!” It was the usual madman, the one who had
accosted him in the square that afternoon. He was extremely worked up. He
gestured vaguely at the tables. “
Th
e bill has to
be paid.” At this pronouncement the customers, who were all watching to see what
would happen, burst into unanimous laughter.
Th
e
combination of the madman’s untimely demand and Varamo’s confusion must have
made for a farcical scene. Someone said: “Two hundred pesos? C’mon, we didn’t
drink that much. Ten would cover it.”
Th
en more
laughter, which distracted the madman, and Varamo tried to slip away, but the
owner stepped in and shoved the lunatic out the door. “
Th
at’s enough trouble from you!” Varamo looked for a place to sit.
He was standing beside a table occupied by three regulars, who were looking at
him and smiling. One of them said: “He must have thought you looked rich; he
didn’t try to get as much from us.” One of the others corrected him: “No. It’s
because he charges interest. He was bothering this gentleman today in the
square. I saw him.”
Th
e things people notice,
thought Varamo. But they were friendly. Before he could think of a polite reply,
the one who had spoken first invited him to take a seat. “You work in the
Ministry, don’t you? What are people saying there about what’s happening?”
Varamo sat down, but there wasn’t a lot he could tell them, except that the
all-powerful Minister of the Interior had resigned, and they knew that
already.

Th
e three gentlemen were
very well informed; they were colleagues, occasional business partners and old
friends. Whenever Varamo went to the café, they were there, and he had sometimes
exchanged a few words with them, but this was the first time he had sat at their
table. He hadn’t approached them on earlier occasions because he had assumed
that they would be discussing their common profession — book publishing — about
which he knew nothing. But it seemed they had taken an interest in him.
Th
ey were eminent representatives of a trade that
dated back to the birth of the nation and had grown to become its principal
source of foreign currency: the publication of pirate editions. Although
illegal, the activity was tolerated; it had become legendary, and Colón was its
historical center. As a result, Panamanian books had found their way to every
corner of the continent. It’s true that what they published was commercial
fiction, easy reading, designed to satisfy the most basic demand for escapist
entertainment, but it still had a certain dignity, because these were books,
after all. Modest books, admittedly, paperback editions with garish, vulgar
cover illustrations, printed on the cheapest paper and flimsily made in general.
Th
e profits depended on flouting the
intellectual property laws, which had little force anywhere, and less still
internationally, because legislation had failed to keep pace with the worldwide
rise in literacy and the changes in the book market, which had been growing at
different rates around the Spanish-speaking world, according to the social
conditions in the different countries. Because of its geographical location,
Panama was the ideal distribution hub, with the advantage of access to both
oceans.
Th
e laxity of the industrial legislation
was a factor too: the country was still in its infancy, still in the process of
sorting out its overlapping, uncoordinated jurisdictions. And then there was
Panama’s cosmopolitan character, resulting from its ethnic mix and its constant
communication with the centers of European and North American culture.
Th
e completion of the canal had left a sizeable
unemployed labor force: speakers of English and French who had adapted to the
climate and were reluctant to leave. Faced with the alternative between becoming
translators or alcoholic bums, some at least favored the first option. Over
time, natural selection had winnowed this wild population of translators down to
an efficient guild of professionals.
Th
ey were
very poorly paid (translation was the only thing these publishers were prepared
to pay for, along with paper, and only because there was no other way to keep
the wheels turning), and if in general their translations lacked elegance and
style, they managed to make them intelligible, and that was enough. Varamo’s
chance companions were three of Panama’s most active and prosperous pirate
publishers. Not magnates, the industry wasn’t that lucrative, but men of
considerable means; each owned a printing press, as did all their colleagues.
Although they were competitors, they had remained friends, no doubt because they
were operating in such a large field that there was no need to fight over any
particular sector. All the literature of the world was at their disposal, and
they could choose freely from that inexhaustible treasure trove.

Varamo discreetly raised the subject of the ministries and
their rumored transfer to the capital, Panama City: would it affect them? He was
also curious to know if there were any real grounds for the Góngoras’ fears.
Th
e publishers were characteristically
open-minded: a relocation would affect them to some extent, because they printed
official stationery; and of course it would mean that they no longer had easy
access to the offices of Foreign Trade, with which they had to negotiate; but,
really, bribes and commissions could just as well be paid at a distance. All
three, in any case, dismissed the question airily: it was the least of their
problems. Panama was just a point, an almost abstract point at the center of a
vast circle encompassing the demand for their goods, which stretched away in all
directions.
Th
e problem for them was to perceive
the concrete from the vantage point of the abstract. And the concrete in this
case turned out to be something as unstable as taste or fantasy or a collective
whim.
Th
is had forced them to become perpetual
explorers of novelty and change.
Th
ey themselves
were constantly changing, to the point where they lost sight of the patterns of
change and ended up getting lost themselves. What they could see right then,
that night, was that all the transformations of the market over the previous
twenty years had taken place within the framework established by
modernismo
, which had been the big, original
breakthrough.
Th
e work and the personality of
Rubén Darío had served as a myth of origin and created a market, and his
countless imitators, perfectly in tune with the reading public (that is, with
themselves), had kept the presses running ever since. But that paradigm was worn
out . . . everything wore out, inevitably. Every book contained the seed of
another; every direction taken by the collective will carried within it
beginnings of a different and deviant direction. Paradoxical as it seemed, there
were avant-garde movements and experiments even in lightweight, throwaway
literature, and the public’s attention reacted to them, as the butterfly reacts
to the air through which it flutters.