Varamo Read Online Free Page A

sudden appearance
of the counterfeit bills had at least stopped him worrying about how to spend
his time. But time was reasserting itself. On his table there was a basin, and
in the basin was a fish about six inches long, one of those yellowish so-called
mutant fishes from the canal, although the mutation, if that’s what it was,
hadn’t affected the appearance of the fish, only the speed at which they swam.
Varamo had a large box divided into various compartments, which contained flasks
of acid, tubes, catheters, and instruments for cutting and piercing. He cast a
proprietorial eye over these treasures, then turned his attention to a
half-completed cardboard model sitting on the table. Scissors, thread, glue and
a mess of cardboard pieces testified to a long series of trials in search of the
form; and to judge from the state of the model, the form was still a long way
off. His intention had been to represent a piano. But what was a piano like?
Needless to say, he didn’t have one handy, and his visual memory was poor. He
suspected that, like most man-made objects, it was basically made up of cubes
embedded in one another. But that didn’t help him much because the problem was
how to embed them. Before beginning, he had thought he knew exactly what a piano
was like. Who doesn’t? Since the piano didn’t have to be perfect in all its
details, as long as it was identifiable, and even a schematic model will usually
serve that purpose, he had thought it would be an easy task. Which is why he was
perplexed when the object that he produced, after a series of repeated and
painstaking attempts, didn’t look like a piano at all, even to him.
    His hobby was embalming small animals. Th e 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. Th ere 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. Th e
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. Th e 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. Th e 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