The three gentlemen were very well informed; they were colleagues, occasional business partners and old friends. Whenever Varamo went to the café, they were there, and he had sometimes exchanged a few words with them, but this was the first time he had sat at their table. He hadn’t approached them on earlier occasions because he had assumed that they would be discussing their common profession — book publishing — about which he knew nothing. But it seemed they had taken an interest in him. They were eminent representatives of a trade that dated back to the birth of the nation and had grown to become its principal source of foreign currency: the publication of pirate editions. Although illegal, the activity was tolerated; it had become legendary, and Colón was its historical center. As a result, Panamanian books had found their way to every corner of the continent. It’s true that what they published was commercial fiction, easy reading, designed to satisfy the most basic demand for escapist entertainment, but it still had a certain dignity, because these were books, after all. Modest books, admittedly, paperback editions with garish, vulgar cover illustrations, printed on the cheapest paper and flimsily made in general. The profits depended on flouting the intellectual property laws, which had little force anywhere, and less still internationally, because legislation had failed to keep pace with the worldwide rise in literacy and the changes in the book market, which had been growing at different rates around the Spanish-speaking world, according to the social conditions in the different countries. Because of its geographical location, Panama was the ideal distribution hub, with the advantage of access to both oceans. The laxity of the industrial legislation was a factor too: the country was still in its infancy, still in the process of sorting out its overlapping, uncoordinated jurisdictions. And then there was Panama’s cosmopolitan character, resulting from its ethnic mix and its constant communication with the centers of European and North American culture. The completion of the canal had left a sizeable unemployed labor force: speakers of English and French who had adapted to the climate and were reluctant to leave. Faced with the alternative between becoming translators or alcoholic bums, some at least favored the first option. Over time, natural selection had winnowed this wild population of translators down to an efficient guild of professionals. They were very poorly paid (translation was the only thing these publishers were prepared to pay for, along with paper, and only because there was no other way to keep the wheels turning), and if in general their translations lacked elegance and style, they managed to make them intelligible, and that was enough. Varamo’s chance companions were three of Panama’s most active and prosperous pirate publishers. Not magnates, the industry wasn’t that lucrative, but men of considerable means; each owned a printing press, as did all their colleagues. Although they were competitors, they had remained friends, no doubt because they were operating in such a large field that there was no need to fight over any particular sector. All the literature of the world was at their disposal, and they could choose freely from that inexhaustible treasure trove.
Varamo discreetly raised the subject of the ministries and their rumored transfer to the capital, Panama City: would it affect them? He was also curious to know if there were any real grounds for the Góngoras’ fears. The publishers were characteristically open-minded: a relocation would affect them to some extent, because they printed official stationery; and of course it would mean that they no longer had easy access to the offices of Foreign Trade, with which they had to negotiate; but, really, bribes and commissions could just as well be paid at a distance. All three, in any case, dismissed the question airily: it was the least of their problems. Panama was just a point, an almost abstract point at the center of a vast circle encompassing the demand for their goods, which stretched away in all directions. The problem for them was to perceive the concrete from the vantage point of the abstract. And the concrete in this case turned out to be something as unstable as taste or fantasy or a collective whim. This had forced them to become perpetual explorers of novelty and change. They themselves were constantly changing, to the point where they lost sight of the patterns of change and ended up getting lost themselves. What they could see right then, that night, was that all the transformations of the market over the previous twenty years had taken place within the framework established by modernismo, which had been the big, original breakthrough. The work and the personality of Rubén Darío had served as a myth of origin and created a market, and his countless imitators, perfectly in tune with the reading public (that is, with themselves), had kept the presses running ever since. But that paradigm was worn out. . everything wore out, inevitably. Every book contained the seed of another; every direction taken by the collective will carried within it beginnings of a different and deviant direction. Paradoxical as it seemed, there were avant-garde movements and experiments even in lightweight, throwaway literature, and the public’s attention reacted to them, as the butterfly reacts to the air through which it flutters.
Which meant that it might be time for something new, they said. Perhaps Darío’s “gentle air, with turns and pauses” was already old-fashioned. In fact, the publishers admitted that over the last few years they had simply been turning out the same kind of product; they needed to provide a new generation of readers with something really new to read. Perhaps, said one, “the time has come for realism.” The other two disagreed vehemently: the time for realism would never come. To which the reply, and here they were all in agreement again, was that it depended on how realism was defined. The time for realism in that sense (to be defined) was always now. Varamo asked if they published only translations. “Not at all. We’ve drawn heavily on the catalogs of Spanish and Latin American publishers.” He had asked the question simply to participate in the conversation, but they assumed that he had an agenda: “Do you write?” Varamo smiled and said no, amused by the thought. It had never occurred to him. “But we’re open to local writing, especially if it’s the work of intelligent and cultured people like yourself. You wouldn’t like to try?” Varamo replied that it was tempting. But he had no experience, he didn’t even know the basics of the writer’s craft. . “That doesn’t matter at all,” the publishers exclaimed. On the contrary: in barbaric lands like the Americas, writers produced their best work before learning the craft, and nine times out of ten, their first book was the strongest, as well as being, in general, the only one they wrote. Since Varamo had no counterarguments left, he improvised an obliging fantasy: “For a while I’ve been wanting to write a book, to record what I’ve learned from my experiences as an amateur embalmer. I’ve even come up with a title: How to Embalm Small Animals.” Had he known what a keen interest his declaration would provoke, he would have kept his mouth shut. The three publishers expressed their desire to publish the book straight away. “When can you deliver the manuscript?” “Does it have illustrations?” “I have enough paper ready for a good print run.” “I’d do it in hardcover.” Although the project was a castle in the air, Varamo felt he should rein it in somehow: he said that he still hadn’t achieved satisfactory results with his embalming. “That doesn’t matter!” The thing was to make it look like real work; in the current phase of capitalism, work was coming to resemble play, and losing its necessity; that was why instructions were the way of the future, a poetry of instructions freed from the tyranny of results. They continued in the same vein for a while, but Varamo wasn’t listening, and eventually he interrupted them. “I have an idea: what about How to Embalm Small Mutant Animals, wouldn’t that be a more attractive title?” The publishers gaped in amazement. They were thinking: He’s one of us. In their minds the book was already written and published. Varamo himself, swept up by the enthusiasm he had sparked, had begun to think that the task might be feasible, and it struck him suddenly as an unexpected solution to his financial problems.