Varamo Read Free

was for all of them, providing change: a
Sisyphean task, because whatever they did, at the close of trading, it came to
nothing, and they had to start all over again the next day.
    When the cripple returned with the change, Varamo
apologized, thanked them profusely, and had no choice but to stay and listen to
the man, who was covered in sweat and so exhausted by the effort that his speech
was almost incomprehensible. What he was trying to say, in response to Varamo’s
apologies, was that it wasn’t the client’s fault. It was the fault of the
monetary authorities, who wouldn’t issue sufficient quantities of bills and
coins, and had allowed an absurd situation to develop, in which people valued
the units of currency in inverse proportion to the size of the denomination. It
made no sense, however you looked at it. It wasn’t as if the mint was working to
capacity, and even if it had been, they could have put in a few extra hours to
satisfy the community’s increasingly vocal demands. Th e problem was, they were too busy printing thousand-peso notes for
their own salaries to bother with the smaller denominations that you need to
turn the big ones into real working currency. It was truly unbelievable that the
government couldn’t be bothered to do such a little thing, which would have made
it so popular with its constituents. But they just didn’t care; they’d lost
touch with the real life of ordinary people. Th at was the only explanation, because it would have been simple for
them to order the minting of enough small change to meet the needs of a
generation or two, and make life a bit easier for the citizens of Panama. Wasn’t
that what they were paid to do? Public servants were supposed to serve the
public. And if they were going to argue that it was more expensive to mint coins
than to print bills, what was to stop them printing bills? Where was it written
that the low denominations had to be represented by costly coins and not by
cheap paper bills? Couldn’t it be the other way around? Wouldn’t it be more
logical?
    Varamo walked away toward the center of the square,
overwhelmed by anxiety, and the people slid by like fugitive impressions. Th is may have damaged his reputation, since there
must have been acquaintances among those people, and if he had neglected to
greet one of the ladies who, many years earlier, might have become his fiancée,
she would think not only that he was rude and a failure, but also that he had
sunk to the lowest point of his life. Varamo was one of those men who was apt to
serve as an example. A man of his age (the classic age for taking stock) will
often say: “When I was young, I had a lot of problems; if I hadn’t solved them
or been lucky, I’d be dead today or a beggar or locked up in an asylum . . . or,
worse still, I’d be scraping by in some job I’d been given as a favor, still
living with my mother, still single, no family of my own . . .” Th at was Varamo: a living cliché, a textbook case.
He looked up. He couldn’t help noticing the sailors who came to the square at
that hour of the day and the prostitutes waiting for them. Th ey too were searching for love, in their way.
But they were searching in the present moment, not looking to destiny. He was
already in the center of the square, on the site of the monument that hadn’t
been built, and to his left he could see the cathedral with its doors open; his
line of sight went straight down the aisle to the altar. In the dark inner
depths he glimpsed the Virgin, swathed in the reddish light of the votive
candles burning at her feet, and behind her, like a sinister bird in the
shadows, Christ, the God born from her body, quasi per
tubum , without affecting her. Everyone went to the Virgin looking for
consolation or encouragement or inspiration or whatever because life was
impossible without the help of some supernatural being. But such beings did not
exist beyond the world of images and fantasy and superstition. Varamo