Varamo Read Free Page A

had always
wondered how people managed to go on living. Now he thought he knew the answer:
they could do it because they didn’t have to wonder how they would change their
counterfeit bills.
    Just at that moment he was wrenched from his daydreaming
by a shrill voice calling his name and embellishing it with all manner of
obscene insults. It was a madman, a well-known local character. Colorful, but
bothersome, because his madness took the form of buttonholing passersby and
demanding the repayment of imaginary debts, which were real to his deluded mind,
to judge by the sincerity of his shouting. He wanted his money back, a large or
small sum, the money he had loaned to X or Y or Z, who refused to repay him,
with an outrageous, evil stubbornness, which filled him with a vehement
righteous indignation, renewed a thousand times a day, whenever he came across
someone he knew. He lived in his own reality. It was futile to argue. Some
people hit him, others took it as a joke. Th e
only way to get rid of him was to give him a coin and say, “I’ll pay the rest
later.” Th is worked but was counterproductive in
the long run because it confirmed his delusions, so that the next time he would
fall upon a victim who had weakened, insisting that now it was time to pay in
full. Many, however, did weaken just to get away, and so did Varamo on this
occasion. He started feeling for some change, which was hard to do with his left
hand; he had to twist his whole body to reach into the pockets on the other
side, where, being right-handed, he unthinkingly put everything. Finally he
managed to get hold of a coin with the tips of his fingers and handed it over,
thinking: Here I am, searching for love, and what do I find? An obnoxious
madman. Th e madman went off mumbling incoherent
complaints: “He gave it to me with his left hand, the son of a bitch . . .” In
Colón, a deeply Catholic city, certain liturgical proprieties still carried
weight. But couldn’t he see I had no choice? thought Varamo.
    When he was alone again, continuing on his way, he
wondered why he couldn’t use his right hand, and in fact the whole upper
right-hand side of his body. He tried to concentrate or to break out of his
concentration . . . And that was when he realized how distracted he really was. Th e reason he couldn’t use his right hand
was that he was still holding the little cube of red candy between his thumb and
index finger. He was holding it up at head-level with his elbow bent. Th e heat had melted a fair amount of the cube; it
had lost its sharp edges, and the sugary juice had run all over his hand and
under the sleeves of his shirt and jacket, flowing down his forearm in sticky
rills. He looked around anxiously for somewhere to dispose of it, but as he’d
observed on many previous occasions, there were no trash baskets in the square;
another administrative oversight, which obliged him to fill his pockets with
useless papers. But his pockets were out of the question in this case, unless he
wanted to make an irreparable mess. So he approached one of the hedged lawns,
intending to throw the candy on the grass, where no one would step on it. But a
better solution presented itself in the form of a tall bush: he stuck the sweet
onto the end of one of its branches. And there it remained like a kind of
amorphous, fleshy flower, not so alien, after all, to the capricious forms that
nature can take in the tropics. His arm had gone stiff from the unconscious
tension. He shook it, hoping to get the blood flowing again. He spread his
fingers as widely as he could to stop them sticking together and looked at his
hand: it was glazed red and shiny, as if he had slipped it into a glass glove.
He set off resolutely homeward, in a bad mood, though he didn’t really know why.
He was halfway down the diagonal avenue that led away from one of the corners of
the square when there was a sudden change in the air (or was it in his head?).
Before he knew why, he knew that he