Varamo by César Aira Read Free Book Online

the wildest sadistic fantasies: they could happen on his most
secret fear, or create it. Everything was possible, as in a world about to take
shape.
    Faced with such a prospect, the first strategy that
occurred to him was to feign innocence, or ignorance, to act as if he hadn’t
noticed anything strange about the bills, to change them as he would have done
if they had been genuine, as he did every month, and if they did catch him, or
trace the money back to him, to stick to his story and persist in the role of
the naïve victim. It was the most obvious solution, what he would have done
instinctively, following his first impulse. But a few minutes’ thought would
have sufficed to reveal its flaws (and hours had already gone by). Th e first and most decisive flaw was that it
didn’t matter what he decided to do or not to do, which course of action he
adopted, how well or badly he carried it out, because for a judge, the only
thing that mattered were the facts, not the intentions. Th e mental trajectory that preceded the facts was not taken into
account, for the simple reason that it was always subject to doubt and therefore
belonged to a fictional realm, beyond the remit of the justice system.
Intentions were the stuff of fables. Th e only
reality was made of facts — the rosy, nacreous globe of what happened: not only
was it distinct from fiction, no fiction ever came anywhere near it. So any
trouble he might take to clothe his intentions in innocence was a waste of time,
because at the crucial moment all intentions would be ruled out of court, and if
for some reason an intention had to be presumed, it was far more logical to
presume a bad one than a good one.
    And even leaving all that aside, there was another, more
fundamental problem: how to feign innocence. As
well as being insurmountable, this difficulty was unfathomable. Th e idea was to simulate naturalness, in other
words, to make it up as he went along. Th at
might have seemed the easiest thing in the world, the paragon of easiness, but
in fact there was nothing more difficult; intending to be natural was, in
itself, contradictory and self-defeating. In his case, it was condemned to
failure from the outset, because if he intended to improvise his course of
action, he would have to act as if he were
really improvising, and at the same time he would, also, really be improvising,
which was no more feasible than moving in two opposite directions at the same
time. Irrespective of intentions, each act (or gesture or attempt or instant)
had to be followed by another, by any one of all the others. Th e improviser had to make a superhuman choice
among all the possibilities, which, by definition, were so numerous that a
lifetime would not suffice to count them or even to contemplate their range. And
improvising meant, by definition again, that he didn’t have a lifetime at his
disposal, or even a fragment of a life, but only an atom, a vanishing of time.
Decisions, that is choices and intentions, were nourished by time, but the
premises of improvisation swallowed up all the available time, before the
improvising could even begin. And appearances were against him, because whatever
account he gave of his day, that story would presuppose time, and no one would
believe that time had been annulled.
    His predicament was peculiar, and especially
uncomfortable. Like any other improviser, he could do anything, anything at all,
but unlike any other, he had a point of departure, in the form of a secret
intention: to exchange those bad bills for good ones. His intention was not to
improvise: on the contrary, improvising was what he had to do in order to
fulfill his intention. Nevertheless, he had to have the intention to improvise
as well, because everything we do, even incidentally, is done with an intention.
But the secrecy of his prior intention necessarily contaminated this secondary
one, so he had to hide his improvising, which, given the lack of time, meant
improvising his