His hobby was embalming small animals. The spirit in which he had taken it up was not, however, entirely disinterested; his aim had been to garner funds to supplement his meager salary. And now that his salary had been paid in counterfeit bills that would land him in prison as soon as he tried to put them into circulation, he’d have to depend on what, if anything, he could earn as an embalmer. Embalming isn’t easy, especially not for someone who has no practical experience in the field and doesn’t know any practitioners. There were no books on the subject, of if there were, they hadn’t reached Panama. So Varamo had been obliged to make it up all on his own, using the primitive method of trial and error. The most daunting aspect of the trials was their enormous scope, covering everything from life to death and a fair bit more on either side. To make things worse, it was the sort of work that was only worth doing if it was done well, because it wasn’t necessary: the finished products, especially if he was hoping to sell them, had to display certain obvious qualities, transcending the process of their production. The animals had to “turn out” well — whole, shiny, natural, strikingly posed — in other words, they had to turn out to be just as they’d been at the start, before the process began. And even disregarding movement, life simply had too many qualities, not to mention the impossibility of knowing for certain what they were.
His aim had been to produce a fish playing the piano. He had the fish in a washbowl, to keep it alive until the last minute, because he knew how quickly organic matter begins to rot in a climate like Colón’s, once the sustaining breath of life is gone. He had begun by tackling the scaled-down piano, with a conspicuous lack of success so far. The scene, he thought, would be amusing, and was bound to appeal to customers. Ideally it would have included a music box of some kind, but that was far beyond his technical skills. After a last despondent glance at the model, he put it aside. He might as well start with the fish; since he was working with definitive eternities, it didn’t matter what he did first and what he left till later. Embalming the fish was the hard part, in principle, but constructing the piano had seemed easy and turned out to be hard, so the opposite outcome was possible too. He leaned over the water. The little fish was swimming around and around in circles. Varamo was overwhelmed by discouragement. There was so much to do. The animal had to die and then wake to a second life: that would take centuries, surely, but it had to be done in a matter of minutes, by correctly executing a series of predetermined steps, all in the correct order (and he didn’t even know what the steps were). The most awful failure, so awful it was almost supernatural, would be to reach the end of the process and find that the creature was still alive. Not lifelike, but actually living. Unbelievable as it seemed, that was what was happening to him.
Precisely because there were so many steps, which had to be taken in a specific order, and because the substances to be used (mainly acids) had to be measured exactly, he had decided to keep a log, so that he could repeat the experiment, in the event that it turned out to be a success. He hadn’t done this in the past because no one interfered with his things (a rare privilege among home experimenters and backyard inventors); he always found them undisturbed, even if he had been called away in the middle of a transfusion. That room was his secret labyrinth, and the rest of the house as well, and since he was broadening his view, he could have said that all of Colón, indeed the whole of Panama, was his secret laboratory. He could work in peace for as long as he liked. Although, of course, he would gladly have given up that work, or any other hobby that his privileged circumstances gave him the leisure to pursue, in return for a wife and family. And however convenient it was to be able to take up where he had left off, no matter how often he was interrupted, the advantage didn’t apply to things that were transient by nature and slipped away into the past. So he took a blank sheet of paper, smoothed it out on the table, and placed a pencil on it. And in his neat, professional, sloping hand, he proceeded to note every little thing he did to the fish, leaving spaces between the notes, and numbering them to dispel any doubts about the order. Inevitably, as he worked, his hands got wet and his fingers were smeared with the sticky oils that oozed out of the little creature when it was squeezed, so the paper lost its whiteness and crispness, and the lines of his writing, except for the first, veered erratically up or down to avoid the spots.
He proceeded in what he felt was the most reasonable way. The first cuts he made in the fish were as wobbly as the lines of his handwriting, because it was slippery and he couldn’t get a firm grip. He had been intending to remove everything he found inside it but couldn’t, simply because the inside of the fish turned out to be empty. He peeled a stick of sulfur and placed it against the spine. He painted the inside surfaces with a little brush dipped in tartaric acid, then applied a coat of carpenter’s glue and closed up the body again. He held the fish up by the tail and blew on it to open the gills, into which he poured a solution of vitriol and brilliantine, trusting that this would suffice to keep the scales looking fresh. Then he moved on to the head. He would have liked to give the fish an expression of some sort: the look of a musician concentrating on a difficult score, for example, but he didn’t have much to work with. The eyes, which he touched with the tips of his fingers, were very soft. He removed them with a little spoon, and it was a disaster: his fingers were already very greasy and kept slipping. He ended up with holes that were too big for the polyhedral pieces of colored glass that he had been planning to use. The solution was to insert more than one piece into each hole; he had to put half a dozen in before they would sit tight. Then he tried to twist the mouth into a kind of smile and succeeded, more or less, by inserting a piece of wire. He forced himself to pause after every step and note down what he had done, and although this interrupted the flow of his inspiration, it did at least ensure that the procedure could be repeated. But was it really possible to record everything he did? Thousands of things were left out: gesture, position, degree of manual force, the exact quantity of acid, the line of every cut and fold in the constantly changing organic matter, even the light and his state of mind, his haste or enthusiasm. The record was very crude, very schematic; there was no way of knowing what might be important.
After having impregnated the fish with the contents of all his flasks, using every hole he could find and several others that he made specially (since the success of the operation depended on an effect, it seemed a pity not to try all the possible causes), and having twisted its body into an S-like shape, which was meant to represent the posture of a pianist seated at his instrument, some association of ideas prompted him to notice a detail that rather seriously undermined his project: fish don’t have arms, so they don’t have hands or fingers and can’t possibly play the piano, even as a joke. He was baffled and stunned. He couldn’t believe that he had neglected something so fundamental; he tried to reconstruct the scene that he had imagined at the start, and all he could see was a vague, indefinite picture, which under careful scrutiny revealed an essential disjunction between fish and piano, definitively isolated from each other. Grafting on a pair of little arms, the arms of a frog for example, would be horribly complicated. Just as well the piano hadn’t worked out. He would have to improvise a solution, and the need to find one urgently was unbearable. He had an idea: he could swap the piano for a wind instrument. . That was more appropriate for a fish. . There was just one problem: he’d given it an idiotic smile with that piece of subcutaneous wire. . But maybe it wasn’t too late. . He began to massage the face, his fingers trembling with irritation; and his exasperation and haste helped him to shape it into an inverted cone, like a crazy bugle. As he took his hand away, the result struck him momentarily as a telling emblem, and he even imagined a high note sounding forth, the call to action. But rather than springing into action, he was about to lapse into torpor; by this stage he was exhausted. He remembered the bugle that he had heard earlier, in the square. It must have been working on his unconscious all that time: it was the day’s autobiographical imperative.