Varamo Read Free Page B

had been relieved of a crushing weight, a
weight of time. What had happened? Everything had changed without anything
changing. He turned his gaze inward, searching deeper and deeper . . . He went
over the events of the previous minutes, his memories and sensations; it was
vertiginous, but luckily it was over in an instant, because he realized what it
was straight away: the bugle note that accompanied the lowering of the flag had
stopped. He turned to look back and, sure enough, the bugler was taking the
instrument from his lips, while two other soldiers were holding the flag by its
corners, like a sheet, and walking toward one another, folding it in half, then
in four, then in eight, then in sixteen . . . All that time the shrill note had
been boring through his head (it can’t have been good for anyone’s health), and
he wondered if it had really lasted as long as it seemed. It made him think of
those magical lapses or bubbles in time: to the person inside it seems as if a
whole life has gone by, while for everyone else it has been just a moment,
barely the time it takes for an apple to fall from its branch to the ground. But
perhaps it was always like that. We usually associate the law of gravity with
speed, forgetting that it can also govern movements of prodigious slowness when
it chooses. Suddenly the air seemed empty, and Varamo began to move through it
more quickly. Freed of the bugle note, his mind performed an odd short circuit,
deciding not to think any more.
    So what was the problem? Th ere was no problem. Th ose stupid
counterfeit bills. Th eir value was precisely
nothing, and maybe they would come to nothing in the end. Long long ago, in the
continuum of the world’s reality, two random objects were set apart by a radical
heterogeneity. A difference so irreducible no concept could embrace both things.
No term except Being. Th at was how Being came
into being, and from then on thought and philosophy existed too, at least until
that afternoon in Panama. Th e counterfeit bills
had also come to introduce a heterogeneity. Perhaps the end of thought was at
hand. But if people didn’t think, how would they occupy their time?
    When Varamo got home, he flopped onto his bed without
undressing. It was the time of day when he usually took a nap, to rest and
recover his appetite before dinner, but on this occasion lying down was not a
choice: he was in such a state of distress and nervous exhaustion that he simply
couldn’t go on standing up. He dropped like a stone, unable even to take off his
dark suit, his shoes or his hat. He began to writhe immediately in a kind of
waking nightmare, bathed in sweat, with his eyes open (if he closed them he felt
nauseated). Th ere was something very hard
pressing into his side, near his hip, when he turned. He tried to locate it with
his hand, which was opening and closing in involuntary spasms, rummaging through
the damp lumps of his clothing and the sheets, until he felt a warm, very smooth
object, which eluded his grasp. Finally, pushing and pulling blindly with his
whole hand — he had lost control of his fingers — like a one-armed man laid out
in soft puff pastry boxing with an oyster, he managed to dislodge the object
from the bed. It was a double-sided silver pocket watch. It shot out and went
rolling across the floor with a dull rumbling noise for quite a while before
coming up against an obstacle: the foot of a wardrobe. Th e impact made the doors, which didn’t shut properly, swing open. Th e full-length mirror on the inside of one
of them revolved through 180 degrees, taking in the whole room, and came to rest
reflecting Varamo’s bed and his gaze. He didn’t recognize that kicking,
groaning, horizontal figure as himself.
    Although the house was quiet, sounds of all sorts could be
heard from his room, all of them unrecognizable. Some must have been coming from
very far away, others were psychic projections of sounds that he had registered
at other times, in other