The first part of the rally, and by no means the easiest, was a complicated circuit through the streets of Colón, before setting off on the journey. Some were expected to drop out even at this stage. Before settling down to a long, sleepless night of attending to telegraphic reports from the main checkpoints, the Treasurer had wanted to go out and see some of the competitors who had already set off, while they were still in the city. This too, Cigarro added incidentally, was something of a provocation, especially if his route crossed that of the rally at certain intersections, or all of them, given that the drivers couldn’t slow down. But since the Minister had a comprehensive schedule, he wasn’t really running a risk, accustomed as he was to performing the most complex mental calculations. .
At this point, Doctor Garruto asked why the Treasurer was taking an interest in this rally. It didn’t seem to be directly related to his portfolio, although everything came under the umbrella of the national economy in one way or another. Cigarro glanced at Dídimo, the secretary, who after heaving a melancholy sigh explained that the Treasurer was also acting, that night, as Minister of the Interior; he had assumed this additional responsibility and been sworn in a few hours earlier, just minutes after the previous Minister’s sudden resignation.
Garruto and Varamo raised their eyebrows in surprise. The Minister of the Interior had been a dominant figure and exercised a veritable hegemony over the nation’s political life. His resignation, which had not been publicly announced, came as a shock. Cigarro, speaking like someone who knows a great deal more than he is prepared to say, remarked that the worsening of the situation had left no alternative, then took up the tale where he had left off: the Treasurer, sitting in the back seat, had told him which streets to take, where to stop, when to go on, and in this way they had been able to watch a large number of competitors driving past in front of them at a pleasantly constant pace. He hadn’t made any mistakes along the way, or at this corner, Cigarro could swear, so the collision had been deliberate, and premeditated, to judge from the way the culprit had fled. But it would be easy to catch him. Well, perhaps not easy. It was a matter of doing the sums; given the premises on which the rally was run, they could use the relevant information (as he said this he took the lists and maps from his pocket and spread them out) to calculate where the fugitive would be at any particular moment. No crime writer had ever invented a surer, more geometrical method of identifying and apprehending a criminal. All it required was a little mental effort. He invited them to move to the dining table, where they would be able to work more comfortably. Once they were there, he started handing out the papers; but Varamo excused himself, saying that he hadn’t brought his reading glasses (a lie, since his eyesight was fine). Cigarro muttered a remark about some people’s lack of patriotism, while the other two concentrated obediently on the task.
Varamo thought it highly suspicious that Cigarro happened to have secret documents concerning the rally in his pocket. He had also recognized the handwriting from the betting slips he passed on to his mother. What this probably meant was that Cigarro had made copies in secret, to sell to the competitors. That would fit in with his various sidelines. Which is partly why Varamo hadn’t wanted to play along with him. The explanation of the regularity rallies had struck him as vaguely familiar. The Voices operated in the same way, except that for them, he was both the route and the cars. There might have been some connection, in which case the overall result of the rally might reveal the Voices’ secret. He knew that counterfeiting was one of the anarchists’ favorite strategies. There is often a causal link between apparently unrelated events, but we are deceived by simultaneity, which suggests a mere coincidence. Fake money and real money are simultaneous; both flow through the capillaries of society at the same time, more or less at the same rate, and they are not independent of each other. If there was any truth to the economic axiom that “bad money drives out good,” there was a curious parallel with those defeatists in the regularity rallies who came up beside the good competitors and accelerated just to provoke them. So Varamo got up from the table and left the dining room, saying he was going to check on the patient. He needed a distraction, because there is a limit to the number of worries a mind can accommodate. And, as far as distractions were concerned, he was spoiled for choice, because he was in a house that he had never visited before, where everything was new and unfamiliar to him.
He was in a house. But whose? He should have known whose house it was because he passed it on his daily walk, and he had always taken the same route because he had never lived anywhere else. Houses look different from the outside and the inside, but he’d entered this one in such a rush that he hadn’t registered the transition; his consciousness had failed to take it in. He had to reconstruct the events: the accident, the corner. . Then he realized that he was in the house that belonged to the Góngora sisters. Any doubts he might have had were dispelled when one of them rushed past in front of him wearing a bathrobe, on her way to the kitchen, and assuming that he had come to ask for coffee, told him that they were making some and would bring it in. When he was alone again, he looked around, with renewed interest. “The Góngoras’ house” was a rather mysterious place, at least for him. Since childhood he had heard people in the neighborhood refer to the building and its inhabitants in a knowing, insinuating way, which he had come to think was, fundamentally, the product of more or less willful ignorance rather than of any factual knowledge. The Góngoras were rarely seen in public, and were not on familiar terms with anyone in the neighborhood. Apparently, they were satisfied with their own company and happy to stay home, or very busy with their housework. Women who live on their own always provoke gossip, especially when they keep to themselves and no one knows where their money comes from. And it’s worse if there is no income, or no plausible theory about its source, because an almost supernatural element creeps in. “They live on air.” Seen from the street, the house was an obscure edifice in the middle of a jungle-like profusion of palms and overgrown shrubs. Although the façade was partly obscured by vegetation, the doors and windows seemed to be permanently closed. What could be seen of the house gave an impression of decadence and neglect. How long had the Góngoras been living there? Forty, fifty years? A hundred? They had already been there when Varamo was a boy. There must have been successive generations of them, because there were always young Góngoras. If there were men, the sisters kept them well hidden or received their visits very discreetly. Although Varamo passed the house every night on his way to the café, he never paid attention to it, perhaps because his perceptions were dulled by habit, or because, at that point on the walk, the Voices were at their most intense and he was too preoccupied to be looking at houses.