One more observation, to conclude: it has been said, though I’m not sure how true it is, that the ultimate achievement in literature is to make the content resonate somehow in the form. I think it would be hard to find convincing examples, and much harder still to arrive at any kind of objective certainty. But in this case it is heartening (though perhaps spuriously so) for the critic to note that the subject of Varamo’s anxiety in the hours leading up to the writing of the poem was money, and that the method adopted here to communicate his state of mind is free indirect style. . since there is a fundamental congruity, which no one can deny, between that style and money. Just as free indirect style is the reason behind (and the explanation for) every discursive move in this text, so money is what ultimately moves the world, in the depths of the psyche as well as on the surface. Free indirect style and money, are, in their respective domains, causes that operate at a level apart, above or below the other causes. A feature of free indirect style that limits its effectiveness, although writers do not always take this into account, is that it leads to abstraction. As for money, one need not be a philosopher to see that what it does to society is to infect it with abstraction, which is hardly surprising, because money is abstraction, and that is precisely why it is useful. In fact, if this were a novel, its principal shortcoming would be the cold intellectual abstraction pervading its pages, which is produced by the use of free indirect style to create a point of view at once internal and external to the protagonist, who as a result becomes a discursive entity, drained of life. The only possible, though very tenuous, justification lies in the fact that the counterfeit bills, precisely because they are counterfeit, bring an element of irreducible materiality to a space of abstractions and equivalences. On the other hand, it would be quite reasonable to criticize the hypothetical novel for resorting to the device of forgery, which has been overused in contemporary narrative, and, as a metaphor, is now rather obvious.
Circumstantial details are a matter of occupying time, while free indirect style is a matter for the occupying subject. Without the details, there is no time; without the style, time remains empty. The details are the object of invention; the style, that of improvisation. Varamo had sensed the essential impossibility of improvising a crime; he was facing the classic, thorny problem of the alibi. “I wasn’t there; I was somewhere else.” Everything in his world of circumstantial details and free indirect style had to lead toward the point where he would be able to speak those words. And in that requirement there was already a hint of the poem’s culminating scene: midnight in Bethlehem, the Child and the Mother making History (neither could say, “I wasn’t there”) and thus setting the coordinates for every potential alibi.
Once the game was over and the washing up was done (the dominoes and the dishes were similar in a way), it was time to go to the café, that masculine, Arabic institution, so characteristic of Central America. Varamo never missed an evening. He was a different man when he went to the café: nonchalant, sociable, more Western, more normal, not so neurotic. It was an illusion, but that didn’t matter, because it was still a subjective reality. He put on his hat. He raised a finger to his chin in a gesture of intense concentration. There was something he had to do before going out, but he couldn’t remember what. A discreet little cough reminded him. He had to put his mother to bed. It wasn’t difficult; by that hour of the evening she was asleep on her feet. Another effect of poor assimilation: not having learnt the language or adapted to the climate and the hours people kept.
“Prease. . prease. .,” she said, and her dry little voice sounded like the cry of a bird lost in the mountains.
“Mother, your glasses. .”
Silence. The quiet rooms were inviting him to resume his experiments, but habit prevailed. He put on his hat, went around checking the doors and the windows one last time, and stepped out into the starry night.
Since he knew his habitual route by heart, he could look up at the sky, though he did remind himself briefly of the caution required when crossing the street, now that motor cars had begun to proliferate. Like all adults, he was afraid of accidents. What dismayed him most about them was the temporal contrast between the instant, or fraction of an instant, in which an accident could occur, and the long months or years required to repair its effects, if indeed they were reparable and didn’t last a lifetime. He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass. In the dark empty streets of Colón, of course, this wariness seemed excessive. And the black sky crossed by streams of phosphorescent mercury was a vision worth the risk. The stars were an overwhelming surprise. But since each scene was linked to the one that had gone before, he continued to see the dominoes and dishes, twinkling among the constellations.
He began to hear the Voices, as he always did at that time on his way to the café. It was a daily fit of madness: disturbing, distressing, almost unbearable, except that it was brief. Just as they had come, the Voices went. They sounded inside his head, so there was no point covering his ears or running, and yet he hurried on, grimacing, and soon, magically, he left them behind. He had grown used to them, but, like any inexplicable phenomenon, they retained a certain latent menace. Concise sentences, definitions, formulae, but none of it seemed to make any sense. When he thought about it, before or afterward, he was cross with himself for being so distracted: a sentence, half a sentence or a word always made some kind of sense. The whole set of sentences might have been senseless, but if he took the time to search for the key. . Not when it was actually happening, of course — it was too sudden and frightening — but perhaps if he could memorize the sentences, or note them down afterward and make lists. . Why had he never done something like that, in all those years of being ambushed by the Voices, instead of passively tuning in?
Sometimes he suspected that he was not the only receiver of that nocturnal dictation. The others might have been keeping it secret, like him. It’s natural enough to say, “Why me of all people? Why me?” but everyone else could be saying the same. The worrying thing was not being able to understand. He had remarked that the most awkward aspect of individuality was being left out of the shared understandings that create social bonds. This happened in everyday life, with his colleagues at the office or his friends at the café, not just with the Voices, but that supernatural phenomenon may well have been a model for the way it worked in general. If it really was an auditory hallucination, as he had occasionally suspected, perhaps it was his mind’s way of providing remedial practice, but if so he kept squandering that opportunity.