Varamo by César Aira Read Free Book Online Page A

hiding. What a headache! As if just improvising wasn’t already
hard enough! Pulling something out of nothing, straight after having pulled
something different from the same teeming, variegated nothing . . . And so on,
different every time, to keep it moving forward. Could there really be enough
different things in the universe to fill up a lapse of time that was infinitely
divisible? Some things could be repeated, of course, but always against a ground
of difference. He had to create a series. Th e
natural numbers provided an obvious model, but he couldn’t really use them
because a natural series of that kind is governed by reason, not improvisation.
No one could claim to be “improvising” when counting from one to ten, or
reciting the prime numbers. In improvisation one has to keep jumping from reason
to unreason, creating the unexpected, and satisfying expectations with what
would be expected to confound them. Who could embark on a task like that with
any hope of success? Certainly not Varamo. Him least of all. As a public
servant, he shrank in horror from hard work, and for him it was second nature to
take the easy way out, by delegating where possible. He wondered if, in a case
like this, with a biographical series, there might not be some procedure, an
automatic mechanism that would generate the circumstances, and spare him the
effort of searching for them.
    In any case (and perhaps this would invalidate all
the efforts he might eventually decide to make), everything he chose to do,
every moment of action, however singular, would share an unvarying
characteristic with all the other moments: it would come after the one before,
and before the one after. Th is succession was
the only thing that a situation experienced in the present had in common with
the same situation seen retrospectively, in the past. Th e only thing, because the other common element, subjectivity,
underwent a complete mutation: in the present it was one’s own; in the past,
that of another. Th e judge, if the case ever
came to court, would make the leap from the other to the self. And thus the
fearsome figure of the judge assumed a form that seemed, but only seemed, to be
less threatening: that of the narrator.
    Which brings us to the reason for the importance of this
moment in the train of thoughts that occupied Varamo’s mind as he sat at the
table playing dominoes. It is so important that, in a sense, it explains
everything. Although this book takes the form of a novel, it is a work of
literary history, not a fiction, because the protagonist existed, and he was the
author of a famous poem that is studied to this day as a watershed in the
development of the Spanish American avant-garde movements. Th at being the case, the reader may well have
wondered why, so far, the protagonist’s thoughts have been presented in “free
indirect style,” as it is called, a standard method in fiction and in the
fictionalization of historical facts (which has no place here). Th ere is an explanation for this choice, which in
no way contradicts the present volume’s status as a strictly historical
document. Any invention there might have been is involuntary and incidental; and
a check of what has been written up to this point, carried out precisely now
(taking advantage of the temporal margin left by Varamo’s meditation,
proceeding, as it is, in real time), confirms that, in fact, there has been
none. Invention can assume the form of a documentary record of reality, and vice
versa, because both have essentially the same appearance. Free indirect style,
which is the view from inside a character expressed in the third person, creates
an impression of naturalness, and allows us to forget that we are reading
fiction and that, in the real world, we never know what other people are
thinking, or why they do what they do. Naturalness, in general, is the confusion
of the first and third persons. So, far from being just another literary
technique, free indirect