He left the café with the firm intention of beginning to write immediately, without giving it any more thought (it was as if he had already done all the necessary thinking), and he couldn’t wait to go home, sit down at his desk and get to work. With a delicious sense of anticipation, he savored the half-lie he had told the publishers: none of his notes had been made with a view to any kind of publication, but he had so many that the writing seemed a pure formality; he need only copy them out, string them together somehow, and allow them to form a book. The time had come to reap the benefits of his inveterate, impractical habit of holding on to every piece of paper that came into his possession. And if he needed anything more, as he supposed he would, for example an overall tone to unify this disparate material, a rhythmic pulse to make it all cohere in a single volume, he didn’t have far to look, because he’d decided, right from the start, to imitate the delivery and syntax of the Voices, which, now that Caricias had explained away their terrifying power, were reduced to the roles of bodiless muses and nocturnal signaling. Thinking of the girl, Varamo remembered that he had arranged to meet her at dawn. He had just enough time to write his book before then, and to spend it writing was an ideal solution, because if he went to sleep he was bound to wake up at midday and miss his date. The excitement of writing had dispelled his sleepiness. He’d be there on time and surprise her by having mixed up all the keys more thoroughly than she could have imagined. One stone could always kill two birds. Or three, because he felt that he had finally succeeded, by serendipity, in exchanging the two hundred bad pesos for two hundred good ones.
But when Varamo looked at his watch he saw that it wasn’t even midnight yet and became worried that he might have too much time. He could go for a walk instead of heading straight home, as he had initially intended to do. That would be a good way to clear his mind and gather his thoughts, or rather to scatter them productively. In any case, he had to make a detour, so as not to go past the Góngoras’ place and risk bumping into someone he didn’t want to see. So at the first intersection he turned toward the city center, and let his steps lead the way, while his mind drifted off into a pleasant reverie. That very night (though it seemed like years ago already) there had been talk of the possibility, or the threat, that Colón would cease to be Colón, that the city would leave the city, and he had feared that he would be abandoned, cut off from the world in which he had always lived. Now, seeing the nocturnal cityscape opening all around him like an abstract model in black and gray, his fears vanished into the far reaches of the sky, forever. As long as he stayed, the city would too. No one could take it away from him. When he began to write, in a few minutes’ time, every sentence would be a spell to ensure the eternity of Colón. His perfect solitude was interrupted by the appearance of a slow-moving car at a distant intersection, traveling as steadily as a star tracing its arc, or the hands of a watch. The rally drivers were still setting off, it seemed. A little further on Varamo saw a second car, on a different street, heading in the opposite direction. The cars, with their constant velocity and crisscrossing paths, were also contributing to the city’s permanence. How could politics compete with those geometries? Suddenly, in the midst of his sublime distraction, he came to the main square with its esplanades: before him lay a deserted panorama, with the moon up above, the palm trees standing still, the dark ministries, and a lone car creeping along like a windup toy. Varamo couldn’t believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer’s privileges, he thought, already nostalgic for the present.
Speaking of writing, it was time he got to work. After this, he would go straight home. But since he had come to the square, he went for a walk around it. Emptied of people, it was unrecognizable. The still moonshadows made it more jungle-like and wild. Varamo walked along the paths, thinking about the magic of inspiration. He wasn’t the only visitor, although he was the only human, the only one walking on the ground. A flock of black birds with white heads was circling at medium altitude, avoiding the trunks of the palm trees. They weren’t making the slightest sound, which gave the mysterious impression that their flight was a purely visual phenomenon, unless, perhaps, the dull humming of the cars as they crossed the city was drowning out the whispering of their wings; but that seemed unlikely, since the constant, faint noise of the motors had been absorbed by the silence. Sometimes the birds flew over Varamo, and he stopped and tilted his head back to look at them. They were flying all together, but not in a tight formation, and after a while he noticed that some were breaking away in twos and threes, and executing crazy figure eights and zigzags, very low or very high, above the treetops. And then Varamo noticed something else. Although at first those aerial paths had seemed like aimless scribbling, without center or periphery or form, he began to realize that there was a point at which they all converged, and at that point there was a brief halt, a sudden dip, after which the birds flew on, more quickly than before. He walked toward the point to find out what it was. Halfway there he saw that the center of attraction was a bush beside a path. He reached it just as another group of birds was approaching, and his presence must have frightened them, because after a moment of fluttering they flew straight on. There was nothing special about the bush; he couldn’t understand why they were drawn to it. He walked over to the other side of the path, sat on a bench and kept as still as he could. The strategy worked; the next time around the birds flew at the bush, and Varamo was able to figure out what they were doing. Without perching, suspended in midair like hummingbirds (though physically they were more like small grouse), they bobbed their white heads and pecked, quickly, one peck each, at a big red spot stuck on a branch. It was the piece of candy he had left there that afternoon. He was amazed by the delicacy with which the birds were treating the morsel. One peck would have been enough to dislodge it from the branch. But they were pecking daintily, out of consideration for one another or so it seemed; very odd behavior, because it could only be explained by a species-wide instinct, and the endless chains of instinct could not have been produced by a fortuitous discovery like that of the sweet. It was the particular, flowering in the universal (the gelatinous marshmallow, now riddled with holes, did in fact resemble a flower, and its carmine was glowing in the dark). This struck Varamo as interesting and poetic: a “writerly” experience. For him, everything was “writerly” now. Poison or elixir, narcotic or aphrodisiac, whatever it was, this flower, relic of a day in the life of an accidental writer, an inadvertent counterfeiter leaving his traces in code, the birds were coming to try it, performing a dance for no one and flying up toward the moon. The cathedral clock struck midnight. Varamo headed for home.