He was surrounded by the watchful shapes of dark houses, closed doors and corners. The most natural reaction to a supernatural experience in circumstances such as these would have been a panic attack, and he did begin to have one, but it was just a beginning, because the café wasn’t far away, and at the rate he was going, almost breaking into a run, he would soon be there. As he drew near, he was seized by a more definite dread: perhaps the Voices were informing others, the police for example, of what was in his pocket. Ever since he had first heard the Voices, he had harbored the fear that they would reveal his secrets to others who, unlike him, would be able to understand. Luckily, he’d never had to worry about the practical consequences of such a revelation, given his blameless conduct and the upright life he led. Now, however, the forgery, although it was none of his doing, was growing in the night and taking on threatening forms, as unrecognizable things always do. He had inadvertently crossed the line between the private and the public. A crime transformed the most private and retiring citizen into a public figure. And from that point on, anything concealment could, in turn, become a criminal act, in an endless proliferation.
The night, however, had something else in store. Not the police, but a motor car. From the end of the street came one of the large official vehicles, traveling at a moderate speed, and when it reached the corner right in front of Varamo, it collided with another car coming along the cross street. Odd. They must have been the only two cars on the road in the whole city, or in the neighborhood anyway, and they had to go and crash into each other. “You never know what’s going to happen.” The accident, it seemed, was a truly universal concept. The second car, which had been the active instrument of the collision, was much smaller than the first and flimsier (it looked like a homemade model, put together by a handyman). In spite of which, perhaps because of the relative velocities, or positions, the big car turned over and came to rest upside down, while the little one continued on its way down the street with just a few damaged panels, whose rattling was soon drowned out by the noise of the accelerating motor. And then it was gone. The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds, and Varamo didn’t have time to react. In any case, all he had to do was keep on walking (he hadn’t stopped) to reach the overturned car in the middle of the intersection. As he approached, he saw a man crawl out through the driver’s window, get to his feet, feel his arms and legs to make sure that he hadn’t been injured and look up. The man recognized him, and his greeting was almost cheerful. Varamo, whose reactions were slower, took a moment to recognize the man: it was the driver from the Ministry who had given him the peso for his mother earlier. He was black, and his teeth were shining in the dark, a sign that he was smiling. Typically irresponsible, thought Varamo. But not altogether. Because, just as the driver was about to open his mouth, he remembered something; a worried look came over his face, and he turned back to the car from which he had emerged. The wheels were still spinning in the air. He leaned down to look through the side windows, which were level with the ground, and what he saw jolted him into action. He tried the rear door, which opened with magical ease, backwards. He started crawling in, but first he turned to Varamo, who had reached the car by then, and asked for his help. Inside the car was a fat man in a black suit who was unconscious. He was in a curious position, resting on his shoulders and his upper back, as if he had frozen in the middle of a somersault. The driver crawled in, righted him by pushing and shoving, then, with Varamo’s help, pulled him out onto the pavement by the legs. It was the Treasurer.
It hadn’t been an accident but an attempt on the Treasurer’s life. Although unconscious, he established a temporary office in the house on the corner, whose occupants had been woken by his driver. They put him on a sofa and sent for a doctor and the Treasurer’s secretary. The presence of the latter was superfluous, because the black man, Cigarro (as well as being a driver and a betting agent, he was also a purveyor of smuggled tobacco; hence the nickname), took control of the situation. Before Dídimo, the secretary, arrived, he explained his suspicions to Varamo: the attack had been perpetrated by anarchists, pretending to participate in a regularity rally that was under way, an event of national significance. Since Varamo wasn’t familiar with rallies of this kind, Cigarro explained.
In so-called “regularity rallies,” the aim is to maintain a predetermined speed, and the winner is not the first to arrive, but whoever deviates the least from that speed between the start and the finish. But how could they tell who was sticking to the speed and who wasn’t? Well, said Cigarro, it was pretty complicated but perfectly feasible, although it did require meticulous planning and many calculations. If the total length of the course was two hundred miles, and the set speed was fifty miles an hour, and a car left at exactly five o’clock (the competitors didn’t start all at once, but one every fifteen minutes), it would pass the midpoint (the hundred-mile point) at exactly seven; a timekeeper stationed there, with a list and a watch, would record its passing. At many other points along the route there were other timekeepers noting down the times at which each car went by in exactly the same way. When the rally was over, all the lists were gathered up, there was a general reckoning, the average punctuality of each competitor was calculated in minutes and seconds, and the winner was whoever turned out to have been the most punctual. But wasn’t that too simple? wondered Varamo. If the driver had a list of the checkpoints and the times, couldn’t he just pass each point at the time he was supposed to, without worrying at all about traveling at a constant speed? For example, after passing one point he could drive at top speed till he was near the next one, then stop and wait until it was time to go past. Cigarro laughed, pleased to be asked this question, and proceeded to enlighten Varamo: apart from two or three indicative checkpoints, whose locations were indulgently revealed to the public, all the rest were kept secret. Only the organizing committee knew where they were. Varamo nodded. But it seemed like a very boring event, a test of patience and nerves, without any kind of emotion. Cigarro, Dídimo and the doctor, who had arrived in the meantime and joined the conversation, agreed, although the doctor added a qualification: one kind of emotion was replaced by another, and the competitive spirit lived on. He concluded, philosophically, that “it took all sorts.”
At this point, Cigarro, who was well informed, had something to contribute. But first he inquired about his boss’s condition. “Uncertain,” pronounced the doctor succinctly, and they resumed their conversation. The rallies, said Cigarro, were fundamentally technical competitions, an opportunity for the fledgling automobile industry to test its innovations, and they appealed mainly to car fanatics rather than to the general public, which made them somewhat esoteric. The rally under way was a special case, because it had been promoted by the Central Administration as part of the festivities for the inauguration of the linked highways running right across the isthmus, connecting the cities of Colón and Panama. In fact (and here he lowered his voice, as if revealing a state secret) the rally had been planned, mainly, as a trap for anarchists. To them, a regularity rally was a provocation; its strict regulation of time and space was bound to prove repugnant to the libertarian spirit. The way things were going, with conspiracies about to erupt across the country, the event would act as an irresistible lure. In fact, competing in a regularity rally was so nerve-wracking that it could turn a normal and previously law-abiding citizen into an anarchist. There had been a number of such cases. If a competitor suspected (sometimes with good reason, but almost always jumping to conclusions) that he no longer had a chance (having passed too many hidden checkpoints too early or too late), he would quite often give up trying to maintain the pace, and instead of simply going home, would tear away at full speed, come up beside another car in the competition, and challenge the driver by revving loudly, honking and making obscene gestures, trying to make him chuck in the rules by appealing to his machismo and the primal urge to get ahead and leave all the others coughing dust. If this operation failed, all the rogue driver had to do was race ahead a bit (and how he relished the freedom to do that, while the others were still slaves to the speedometer) and try it on the following car, or rather the car ahead. If regularity rallies were a kind of education that built the driver’s character, these brutish outbursts were the midterm exams.