Varamo Read Online Free Page B

to be hard, so the opposite outcome was
possible too. He leaned over the water. Th e
little fish was swimming around and around in circles. Varamo was overwhelmed by
discouragement. Th ere was so much to do. Th e 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). Th e 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. Th at 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. Th e 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. Th en 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. Th e 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. Th e solution was to
insert more than one piece into each hole; he had to put half a dozen in before
they would sit tight. Th en he tried to twist the
mouth into a kind of smile and succeeded, more or less, by inserting a piece of
wire. He forced