Although Varamo wasn’t particularly curious about the content of the letter, he picked it up and tried to read it, to humor his mother. It was difficult because of the weak light (night was falling), but what he could make out was enough to confirm that it was indeed a poison-pen letter. It was made up of snippets of information, half digested and thrown together, as such letters typically are; in fact, the style was a little too typical, as if the author had simply wanted to conform to the rules of the genre without having anything definite to say and had filled the letter with classic phrases, which seemed to have been strung together at random, with the sole aim of producing the “poison-pen effect.” The light was almost gone, and the handwriting was atrocious, in spite of which, extrapolating from what he had picked up so far, Varamo recognized such classic warnings as “Your husband is cheating on you,” “We’re going to blow you up,” “You won’t get away with it,” etc. It could have been addressed to anyone, or to everyone and no one: it was bound to hit on somebody’s guilty secret. But why should it matter to Varamo and his mother, when all they had was one another, and they were entirely absorbed by the game of survival entailed by the fact that she was a mother and he was a son? If he had married. . He turned the paper over: it was the receipt for the mattress. Typicaclass="underline" they had turned the house upside down in their search, and now it appeared in this sinister form. But that could be an explanation, because the name Varamo and the address must have been on the receipt. He tried to verify this, holding the paper up to his eyes, but he couldn’t see a thing. He put the letter down on his thigh, gripped his mother by the arms and shifted her, then turned back to the poison-pen receipt. . It was an explanation, yes, but how could he get her to understand? He put the paper down and shifted her back to her original position, barely aware that his mother had been talking as he performed these maneuvers. There she was beside him, within arm’s reach, his mother, but also what she represented: the historical possibility of another life he might have led; every man’s impossible dream. There, within arm’s reach, in the collusive darkness. . And yet they were cut off from one another.
She was speaking, trying to justify herself, replying to accusations that no one had actually made. Which meant that in her senile confusion she had to go way back, to a story that was half a century old, older than the world they knew, almost older than Panama itself. In the depths of that prehistory, she discovered the emblematic couple of The Mother and The Son, which, for her, was fundamental; wherever she found herself in space and time, it recentered the constellation of themes. In her agitation, she had slipped into Chinese (Cantonese, to be precise), a language that Varamo didn’t understand. He could have said, “Don’t talk to me in Chinese,” but that would have been as futile as saying, “Don’t talk to me in the dark.” He shifted his mother again, by feel, like a child positioning his teddy bear on the pillows in his bed, never satisfied with the object’s illusory expressiveness. And yet he also belonged to the nucleus of that mobile Nova journeying through the ethereal spaces. He was The Son, and the themes rearranged themselves because of him as well. Of all the themes that his mother might have chosen to counter the poison-pen letter, she had settled precisely on The Mother and The Son. That was the story, the only story in the end, because all the insinuations that could emanate from a poison-pen letter (adultery or blackmail, vengeance or vice), eventually led back to the ubiquitous theme of filiation.
While denouncing her envious, gossiping neighbors, Varamo’s mother was also covertly affirming a truth: as a young woman, living on the isthmus all alone and fending for herself, she had been overwhelmed by a terrible yearning for a child. She would smile at all the children she saw (it was the only time she smiled), and make a fuss and caress them, and even pick them up for a moment; and the parents let her do it, perhaps because she looked so exotic and colorful, perhaps because they thought she was a good fairy who had chosen to confer talent or good luck upon their child. She wouldn’t have been able to disillusion them for lack of a common language. Then one day, a couple took off and left her holding the baby. They disappeared, she didn’t know how; she was distracted and when she looked up again they were gone. She didn’t even know if it had been deliberate or not. Her dearest wish, her only wish in fact, had been granted. From that point on, to all intents and purposes, the baby was her son. But the smile on her face gave way to terror. The change was almost instantaneous, and it was definitive. The baby was a boy between nine months and a year old, cute and healthy, alert and happy. . But all his attributes, all the toy’s little pieces, the dimples, the tears, were tokens of a metamorphosis. That delicious animated doll would have to become a human being, and she would have to bear the full cost of the transformation. It was as if the world had become a mountain that she had to climb. How could she do it? She didn’t even know where to start. The thought of leaving him on a doorstep crossed her mind a thousand times, but horror had stripped her of the decisiveness required to carry out such a plan. The task she had taken on was impossible because her initial depression turned out to be lasting. And now the scandalmongers, the writers of that letter, were attacking her, saying that he wasn’t her son, accusing her of stealing him from human parents!
For Varamo this story was a sort of metaphor or fable. It condensed the many trials his mother had faced as a poor, ignorant, fatalistic, unassimilated immigrant. But via the long detour of interpretation, the fable returned, along with the characters, and the reason they returned was precisely to tell one another the fable, and so it began all over again. Its fictional nature was diluted by this circulation. Had she tried to use arguments based on reason, as interpretations are, the fable would have reconstructed itself immediately, in the same terms. If motherhood worked in his mother like a constant beginning, widowhood worked like an ending that was, in turn, a premise: she was a widow, true, but she had been married once. Varamo’s father had been a prosperous storekeeper and a devoted father, who had kept his wife safe and happy. And by some miracle his son had landed a ministerial job. Sitting in the rustling darkness of the garden as night came on, the notion of a miracle suggested a fable that was analogous and equivalent to the one in which his mother was immersed: in the whole of Panama, only one man had obtained a government job, and that man was Varamo. The others could only dream about it. But this wasn’t a fable; it had really happened. It could well have provoked envy among the neighbors — he knew what they were like, because he was their neighbor too — and it was easy enough to imagine how staggered they or anyone might be by the idea that somebody could have a salary for life, a kind of perpetual fellowship. To calm his mother down he told her that soon, any moment now, a neighbor would come and apologize for the evil deed, with the ridiculous excuse that the anonymous letter was a forgery, written by somebody else. The stars were not yet shining, but tears were shining already on his mother’s cheeks and in the universe.