His predicament was peculiar, and especially uncomfortable. Like any other improviser, he could do anything, anything at all, but unlike any other, he had a point of departure, in the form of a secret intention: to exchange those bad bills for good ones. His intention was not to improvise: on the contrary, improvising was what he had to do in order to fulfill his intention. Nevertheless, he had to have the intention to improvise as well, because everything we do, even incidentally, is done with an intention. But the secrecy of his prior intention necessarily contaminated this secondary one, so he had to hide his improvising, which, given the lack of time, meant improvising his hiding. What a headache! As if just improvising wasn’t already hard enough! Pulling something out of nothing, straight after having pulled something different from the same teeming, variegated nothing. . And so on, different every time, to keep it moving forward. Could there really be enough different things in the universe to fill up a lapse of time that was infinitely divisible? Some things could be repeated, of course, but always against a ground of difference. He had to create a series. The natural numbers provided an obvious model, but he couldn’t really use them because a natural series of that kind is governed by reason, not improvisation. No one could claim to be “improvising” when counting from one to ten, or reciting the prime numbers. In improvisation one has to keep jumping from reason to unreason, creating the unexpected, and satisfying expectations with what would be expected to confound them. Who could embark on a task like that with any hope of success? Certainly not Varamo. Him least of all. As a public servant, he shrank in horror from hard work, and for him it was second nature to take the easy way out, by delegating where possible. He wondered if, in a case like this, with a biographical series, there might not be some procedure, an automatic mechanism that would generate the circumstances, and spare him the effort of searching for them.
In any case (and perhaps this would invalidate all the efforts he might eventually decide to make), everything he chose to do, every moment of action, however singular, would share an unvarying characteristic with all the other moments: it would come after the one before, and before the one after. This succession was the only thing that a situation experienced in the present had in common with the same situation seen retrospectively, in the past. The only thing, because the other common element, subjectivity, underwent a complete mutation: in the present it was one’s own; in the past, that of another. The judge, if the case ever came to court, would make the leap from the other to the self. And thus the fearsome figure of the judge assumed a form that seemed, but only seemed, to be less threatening: that of the narrator.
Which brings us to the reason for the importance of this moment in the train of thoughts that occupied Varamo’s mind as he sat at the table playing dominoes. It is so important that, in a sense, it explains everything. Although this book takes the form of a novel, it is a work of literary history, not a fiction, because the protagonist existed, and he was the author of a famous poem that is studied to this day as a watershed in the development of the Spanish American avant-garde movements. That being the case, the reader may well have wondered why, so far, the protagonist’s thoughts have been presented in “free indirect style,” as it is called, a standard method in fiction and in the fictionalization of historical facts (which has no place here). There is an explanation for this choice, which in no way contradicts the present volume’s status as a strictly historical document. Any invention there might have been is involuntary and incidental; and a check of what has been written up to this point, carried out precisely now (taking advantage of the temporal margin left by Varamo’s meditation, proceeding, as it is, in real time), confirms that, in fact, there has been none. Invention can assume the form of a documentary record of reality, and vice versa, because both have essentially the same appearance. Free indirect style, which is the view from inside a character expressed in the third person, creates an impression of naturalness, and allows us to forget that we are reading fiction and that, in the real world, we never know what other people are thinking, or why they do what they do. Naturalness, in general, is the confusion of the first and third persons. So, far from being just another literary technique, free indirect style is the key mechanism of trans-subjectivity, without which we would have no understanding of social interactions.
But our invasion of Varamo’s consciousness is not magical or even imaginative or hypothetical. It is a historical reconstruction. The difference is that we have presented it backwards, starting with the final results of our research. All the circumstantial details with which we have been coloring the story of the character’s day and making it credible have been deduced (in the most rigorous sense of that word) from the poem that he finally wrote, which is the only document that has survived. Partly because it is all we have, and partly because of its inherent characteristics, that document is absolute, and worthy of unqualified trust. The course of events that preceded the composition of the poem can be deduced from the text, in ever greater detail, as one reads it over and again. Perceptual data is recovered in this way, but also psychological binding elements, including memories, daydreams, oversights, uncertainties and even subliminal brain flashes. The treatment of the external conditions should be similarly inclusive: the succession can be progressively enriched with particles of reality, down to the subatomic level and beyond. Consequently, no invention has been required to recount the process of inspiration as a straightforward narrative, not unlike a novel. It has, however, been necessary to make a rigorous selection, since the poem provides us with everything, and could have given rise to a tome the size of a telephone book. Restraint had to be exercised because the objective was to write a slim volume, since this is an experiment (an experiment in literary criticism), and to be convincing, experiments must be brief; once the initial hypothesis has been demonstrated, there’s no point going on. Not to mention the risk of boring the reader.
As a landmark of Latin American avant-garde writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, The Song of the Virgin Child belongs to the category of “experimental literature.” The poem’s capacity to integrate all the circumstantial details associated with its genesis is a feature that situates it historically. It doesn’t possess that capacity by virtue of being an avant-garde work; in fact, it’s the other way around: it’s avant-garde because it makes the deductions possible. It can be said that any art is avant-garde if it permits the reconstruction of the real-life circumstances from which it emerged. While the conventional work of art thematizes cause and effect and thereby gives the hallucinatory impression of sealing itself off, the avant-garde work remains open to the conditions of its existence. And the more accomplished it is, the more confident the critic can be in restoring the antecedent events and thoughts. In the case of a masterwork like Varamo’s poem, that confidence is absolute, and all the critic has to do is translate each verse, each word, backwards, into the particle of reality from which it sprang. Those “particles of reality” are what the critics call “circumstantial details,” and when appropriately combined, they constitute a discourse that could be mistaken for that of a novel. Two qualifications need to be made here: the first is that the size of the elements used for the reconstruction is not fixed: they can be words or lines, but also syllables or stresses, or one particular sense of a word, or something as large as a stanza, a section, or even the poem as a whole; the same goes for the reconstructed fragments of reality, and there is no one-to-one correspondence between those fragments and the elements of the text. The second qualification is that the particles of reality reconstructed by interpreting the poem, although complete and sharply defined like miniature universes, appear as discrete units with nothing to indicate their order of occurrence, so that the critic who is picking them out is free to arrange them according to personal taste, and the result can have a rather surrealist air (as I’m afraid has been the case in the story of Varamo’s day so far, and the same will be true, no doubt, of what remains to be told after this explanation). This is what happens when the circumstantial details are treated as givens. On one hand, there is no need to bother inventing them, a rather silly or childish task, or at any rate impossible to justify; on the other hand, the reality effect is lost, as it always is when an automatic mechanism intervenes.