There was, in fact, an argument at his disposal, which touched on a very concrete issue, and therefore could have cut through the levels of fiction and “free indirect style” that separated him from his mother. But he wouldn’t have known how to bring it up, or how to set it out, in spite of its simplicity. It was one of those arguments that only works if it occurs spontaneously to the other person. His mother was Chinese; he was Chinese; therefore he had to be her son; there could be no doubt about it. The conclusion was irresistible in Panama, for overwhelming demographic reasons. It was obvious at a glance, and might almost have been the reason for their move to a remote corner of the world. For a European, for a Panamanian, or an American in general, “All Chinese look the same,” but that’s because they’re Chinese, not because they’re the same. In China, the fact that a Chinese mother had a Chinese son would have been utterly unremarkable, so the door would have been open to doubts about filiation, except that over there they could see the differences and similarities. Given the length of the journey and the fifty years that had passed, it was only courteous to consider the question of identity to be settled. It wasn’t the sort of matter a mother could discuss with her son. Heaving an exaggerated sigh, he said it was time to start getting dinner and stood up. He went to the kitchen and switched on the light. He looked back across the patio. Gradually, taking tiny, reluctant steps, his mother appeared, with her red trousers and gold vest, in the rectangle of pale light projected through the open door.
While he played domino solitaire at the kitchen table, his mother prepared the meal. She cooked the fish, which was strangely colored and tasted suspicious. It was one of those potentially fatal meals, and only luck prevented them from falling ill; but it must have affected them somehow, because Varamo had hallucinations and a fever. He raised the financial issue timidly over dinner. He said that because of a budget adjustment the Ministry would be paying the salaries late, so they would have to use their savings to make ends meet.
In that peculiar state of mind, as he clacked the dominoes down on the table (mechanically recording the progress of each game according to a system of his own invention — he was sure that one day he would “win,” and if he didn’t note down the moves, he wouldn’t be able to reproduce them), he entertained a series of thoughts which, given their crucial importance, merit a detailed and exhaustive reconstruction. The thread is sinuous and long, the concepts slippery, the meanings elusive, but the reconstruction is not, in fact, all that difficult, if it is carried out step by step: one only has to follow the order of the thoughts, and there’s no way to go wrong, because each thought emerges from its predecessor, as in a numerical sequence. The point of departure was a problem that had, of course, been worrying him ever since it was raised by the payment of his salary: the pair of counterfeit notes. The fact that the situation was, as far as he knew, unprecedented (and, like any citizen, he felt that he was fully informed on the issue) made it all the more disturbing. There were no prior cases of counterfeiting in Panama; public opinion had not been alerted because there had been no reason to do so, which meant that there was no relevant jurisprudence, and certainly no legislation. After all, Panama was a young nation, and situations of this kind require a minimum of history. It was complicated enough to establish the laws that govern the legal printing of money, an operation which, in its early stages, is bound to resemble counterfeiting. So if he were caught trying to use fake money — as he was sure he would be — the case would set a precedent; the sentence and the legal concept would have to be invented, made up from scratch, given a comprehensible form and surrounded with discourse to make them plausible. All of which would involve intellectual and imaginative work, but that didn’t make the prospect any brighter for him, as the object of the work; quite the contrary, because the authorities would have to invent a punishment, to extract it from their imaginations, that is, from an infinite combinatory system of possibilities. And who could tell what they would come up with? Especially since, in a first case like this, they’d feel obliged to devise something original enough to capture the imagination of the public and serve as an example. The combination of novelty and exemplarity could produce literally anything, as in the wildest sadistic fantasies: they could happen on his most secret fear, or create it. Everything was possible, as in a world about to take shape.
Faced with such a prospect, the first strategy that occurred to him was to feign innocence, or ignorance, to act as if he hadn’t noticed anything strange about the bills, to change them as he would have done if they had been genuine, as he did every month, and if they did catch him, or trace the money back to him, to stick to his story and persist in the role of the naïve victim. It was the most obvious solution, what he would have done instinctively, following his first impulse. But a few minutes’ thought would have sufficed to reveal its flaws (and hours had already gone by). The first and most decisive flaw was that it didn’t matter what he decided to do or not to do, which course of action he adopted, how well or badly he carried it out, because for a judge, the only thing that mattered were the facts, not the intentions. The mental trajectory that preceded the facts was not taken into account, for the simple reason that it was always subject to doubt and therefore belonged to a fictional realm, beyond the remit of the justice system. Intentions were the stuff of fables. The only reality was made of facts — the rosy, nacreous globe of what happened: not only was it distinct from fiction, no fiction ever came anywhere near it. So any trouble he might take to clothe his intentions in innocence was a waste of time, because at the crucial moment all intentions would be ruled out of court, and if for some reason an intention had to be presumed, it was far more logical to presume a bad one than a good one.
And even leaving all that aside, there was another, more fundamental problem: how to feign innocence. As well as being insurmountable, this difficulty was unfathomable. The idea was to simulate naturalness, in other words, to make it up as he went along. That might have seemed the easiest thing in the world, the paragon of easiness, but in fact there was nothing more difficult; intending to be natural was, in itself, contradictory and self-defeating. In his case, it was condemned to failure from the outset, because if he intended to improvise his course of action, he would have to act as if he were really improvising, and at the same time he would, also, really be improvising, which was no more feasible than moving in two opposite directions at the same time. Irrespective of intentions, each act (or gesture or attempt or instant) had to be followed by another, by any one of all the others. The improviser had to make a superhuman choice among all the possibilities, which, by definition, were so numerous that a lifetime would not suffice to count them or even to contemplate their range. And improvising meant, by definition again, that he didn’t have a lifetime at his disposal, or even a fragment of a life, but only an atom, a vanishing of time. Decisions, that is choices and intentions, were nourished by time, but the premises of improvisation swallowed up all the available time, before the improvising could even begin. And appearances were against him, because whatever account he gave of his day, that story would presuppose time, and no one would believe that time had been annulled.