The Embalmer of Small Things
'Varamo,' a Novel by Cesar Aira
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: March 16, 2012
Illustration by Marie Assénat
VARAMO
By César Aira. Translated by Chris Andrews.
Since 1975 he has published more than 80 of them in Spanish, according to his publisher. "Varamo" is the seventh to be translated into English, and the sixth since 2006 by New Directions. It concerns an afternoon and evening in the life of a middle-aged civil-service flunky by that name. The setting is Colón, the Panamanian city by the Caribbean mouth of the canal; it's 1923, nine years after the canal's completion.
Here's the plot, which is both all-important and beside the point. One day, before going home to the house he shares with his Chinese-born mother, Varamo is paid his monthly salary in counterfeit money. Instantly recognizing the problem, he is paralyzed with the fear that he will be turned in for possessing illegal tender. Facing a month of starvation, he takes comfort in his hobby: embalming. His current project is a fish playing the piano. His mother cooks the fish for their dinner, even though he has applied to it tartaric acid, carpenter's glue, brilliantine and vitriol.
After dinner Varamo makes his habitual short walk to the local cafe, and as usual he hears voices uttering unintelligible codes and formulas. On the way, he witnesses a car crash involving the nation's treasurer. During a tense interlude at the home of the driver's girlfriend, where a doctor works to revive the treasurer, he takes part in conversations about conspiracies and black-market golf clubs. He is given a written copy of the strange codes and formulas that his voices have been reciting: it takes too long to explain here, but the codes have to do with the golf clubs, and he's been hearing them thanks to a wax-cylinder phonograph near an open window.
Finally arriving at his destination — "ahead of him, at the end of the street, the cafe shone like a carbuncle" — Varamo meets three book publishers. (It seems Colón has become a hub of international black-market fiction.) The pirate editors, eager to expand their catalogs with all kinds of ephemera, persuade Varamo to write a book about embalming, and offer him as an advance the exact sum of his monthly salary. He goes home and more or less invents a new style of literature, transcribing the codes, as well as everything else we've seen him put in his pocket since the end of his workday, in random order and in lines of irregular length. The manuscript is published and becomes the "celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry," ridiculously called "The Song of the Virgin Child."
The book you are reading, as you come to learn during a stretch in the middle when the academic-sounding narrator inserts himself, is not "The Song of the Virgin Child" — that would be too easy for Aira — but a literary history, a reconstruction of Varamo's day based on information teased out of the poem. "Although this book takes the form of a novel, it is a work of literary history, not a fiction," says the narrator, who further explains why the perfectly novelistic "free indirect style" used therein is a valid nonfiction form, given the circumstances.
One quickly learns, in reading about Aira, that he does not revise. In interviews he talks about "fuga hacia adelante" — the "flight forward." And so his books are often like elaborate bedtime or campfire stories in which the narrator works through the progressive decisions of ordinary characters but stretches the reader's trust all the time. (He rationalizes backward: he'll conjure a treasurer in Colón, then make his characters speculate idly about why there are government ministries in a noncapital city.)
"Varamo," like all the Aira books in translation, is charming and infuriating, built of plain prose that blooms without warning into carbuncular visions; they're filled with invented games, preposterous theories delivered in reasonable tones, portentous subplots that later appear to have no importance and metafictional shifts only partly rewarding the attention they demand. Relationships are wooden and dialogue is farcical.
But there is something modestly cool going on underneath here, something to do with content following form. Aira seems fascinated by the idea of storytelling as invention, invention as improvisation and improvisation as transgression, as getting away with something — as anyone might be who essentially writes stories in real time.
Thoughts about improvisation, as fancy and as dread, pervade the book. In a creative moment at home, Varamo considers grafting frogs' arms onto his embalmed fish; in a panicky moment a few pages later, he worries about how to properly feign innocence while holding counterfeit bills; and of course the entire novel is itself an improvisation, though the harrumphing narrator proclaims (in the smugly reassuring tone of the animal-safety messages that appear after some movies) that "no invention has been required to recount the process of inspiration as a straightforward narrative."
And what about those counterfeit bills and those pirated books? They're symbols of the same preoccupation with the improvised versus the certified. In the end, "Varamo," like its main character, writes its own ticket.
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