Only then did the massive automobile stop heaving forward and backward and allow him to proceed in a straight line to the sidewalk. And only when he got there did he look at what he was nervously gripping in his hand and see that it was a faded one-peso note, so old and worn that it was beyond creasing, enfolded in a sheet of paper, a page from a notebook. On this sheet the driver had written the winning numbers, followed by the unsuccessful combinations, and the balance of losses and gains. Varamo was accustomed to serving as a go-between for his gambling mother, so he barely bothered to glance at the writing before putting the paper into his pocket and forgetting all about it. But it was a curious document, and would have left the uninitiated observer in a state of perplexity. For a start, there wasn’t a single number, although it was all about sums of money. As a precautionary measure, the drivers used a code, in which each number was represented by a word. The sheet of paper had the innocent look of an incoherent letter, written in clumsy upper case. Tables of examples had been copied out for the barely literate drivers, but they reproduced the words from memory, with every imaginable kind of error. If Varamo had been betting (as he sometimes did), he would have ignored this balance sheet and trusted to the driver’s honesty, but he knew that his mother spent a lot of time deciphering that gobbledygook and would not be satisfied until she had confirmed that every bet tallied with her original intentions and with the dictates of chance.
With his hand still in his pocket he looked up, and the light washed over him, like a holy bath. Light was what made the world work; the world was Colón; Colón was the square. Light dissolved the worries created by its dark twin, thought. Why think? Why build a prison of problems when the solution was as simple as opening one’s eyes? On the one hand light dissolved, and on the other it condensed: its action had produced those colored statues known as plants, people, animals, clouds and the earth. It was the time when everyone went out, when everyone came downtown to meet, and all eyes opened, those of the living and those of the dead. Every leaf on every tree corresponded to a human footprint, and the evening’s transparent labyrinths led to happiness. But Varamo had those two damn bills in his pocket, like two bat’s wings fanning a velvety darkness; they weighed him down like thoughts that he still had to think. Out there, all around him, was life, but he couldn’t live it! Changing two bills should have been the easiest thing in the world, but he couldn’t even start to plan a course of action. He was drowning in a glass of water, terrified of slipping toward the dark pulsation of ideas, as if it meant that he would lose the visible and the real forever. He took his hand out of his pocket and with a futile gesture tried to grasp the floating cell of light. He took a step and thought: Why did this have to happen to me? Why me? There were hundreds of men, women and children milling around on the square and in the head of every one, an iridescent brain seemed to be flashing out the mocking refrain, “Not me,” “Not me.”
He felt a little dizzy, a little out of sorts, which wasn’t surprising given the circumstances. He stopped and looked ahead with eyes half closed. In front of him, almost as far as he could see, stretching away on both sides of the central avenue and right around the square in fact, was an unbroken row of indigenous women sitting on the ground with their merchandise laid out on rugs. They sold everything, from fried food to golden earrings. Predictably, his blood pressure had fallen, and he needed a snack to give himself a boost. He went up to one of the women, greeted her, stood there for a moment examining her wares, and finally pointed to a piece of red candy in the shape of a die. She wrapped it in a square of paper, and he leaned forward to take it. He unwrapped it straight away, put the paper in his pocket so as not to litter the sidewalk, and held the little red cube between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. He was so distracted that it took him a moment to remember that he had to pay; then, twisting awkwardly, he began to rummage in his pockets with his left hand. But how could he pay? He had no coins. . Then he remembered the one-peso bill that the driver had given him. He held it out to the woman. She refused it with a look of horror on her face. A peso was too much! She had no change. Didn’t he have anything smaller? He shook his head, despondently. For a moment he was tempted to show her one of the hundred-peso bills, but then he felt that it would be unwise, not to mention the difficulty of finding them with the wrong hand and extracting them from his pocket. In the end she snatched the peso, having decided to activate a system for obtaining change to which the necessities of trade had accustomed the street vendors. The instrument of this operation, a crippled man, was already approaching, as if alerted by a special instinct. Although his limited mobility would have seemed to render him unfit for such a task, he actually earned his living in this way, which goes to show that, in society, even the smallest necessity can provide a means of support for someone. Holding the bill in his hand, he walked away along the row of Indian women, tottering on his debilitated legs, lurching about and swinging his arms wildly to recover his precarious balance. As he addressed them, the women complained and kicked up a fuss, but roughly one in five helped him out as best she could, and so the peso was gradually divided into smaller and smaller sums. He had to go almost all the way to the corner, and while the candy vendor was waiting, just to pass the time, she remarked on how much work it was for all of them, providing change: a Sisyphean task, because whatever they did, at the close of trading, it came to nothing, and they had to start all over again the next day.
When the cripple returned with the change, Varamo apologized, thanked them profusely, and had no choice but to stay and listen to the man, who was covered in sweat and so exhausted by the effort that his speech was almost incomprehensible. What he was trying to say, in response to Varamo’s apologies, was that it wasn’t the client’s fault. It was the fault of the monetary authorities, who wouldn’t issue sufficient quantities of bills and coins, and had allowed an absurd situation to develop, in which people valued the units of currency in inverse proportion to the size of the denomination. It made no sense, however you looked at it. It wasn’t as if the mint was working to capacity, and even if it had been, they could have put in a few extra hours to satisfy the community’s increasingly vocal demands. The problem was, they were too busy printing thousand-peso notes for their own salaries to bother with the smaller denominations that you need to turn the big ones into real working currency. It was truly unbelievable that the government couldn’t be bothered to do such a little thing, which would have made it so popular with its constituents. But they just didn’t care; they’d lost touch with the real life of ordinary people. That was the only explanation, because it would have been simple for them to order the minting of enough small change to meet the needs of a generation or two, and make life a bit easier for the citizens of Panama. Wasn’t that what they were paid to do? Public servants were supposed to serve the public. And if they were going to argue that it was more expensive to mint coins than to print bills, what was to stop them printing bills? Where was it written that the low denominations had to be represented by costly coins and not by cheap paper bills? Couldn’t it be the other way around? Wouldn’t it be more logical?