Free Varamo by César Aira Page B

with powdered faces,
brushed hair, and wearing jewelry. “Well, it looks like we have a little
get-together on our hands,” they remarked, then added, with the smiling poise of
true sophisticates, “Unplanned parties are always the most fun.” For them, to
spend the night entertaining was the most natural thing in the world. Th eir only complaint was that they had been caught
with “everything in a mess.” Varamo reassured them politely, but a second look
around revealed that the place really was a shambles. He couldn’t quite put his
finger on what was giving him that impression of chaos . . . But then, all of a
sudden, he realized: it was the golf clubs all around the room, in expensive
leather bags that were propped against the walls and the furniture, or just
lying around. In fact, there was one under the table, and Varamo picked it up
out of idle curiosity (he had never handled a golf club before). Th e sisters sighed: “When Carmencita comes back,
we’ll get her to tidy up a bit.” Showing them the club, Varamo said: “Do you . .
. play?” No, they had never played and had no intention of doing so. Th ey didn’t even know the rules of the game,
although the terminology had rubbed off on them over years of dealing with golf
enthusiasts. Th ey sold the clubs. Apparently
they had decided to confide in him; they told him the whole story, but perhaps
they would have told anyone who happened to visit them. Or maybe they wanted to
show that the malicious rumors were unfounded: they were business women, who
earned their living respectably (although they did admit, in an aside, that the
name of one kind of club — putter , which
sounded unfortunately like whore in Spanish —
might have accounted for some of the slurs).
    Many years before, the engineers and other foreigners
working on the canal, from France, England and the United States — three nations
crazy about golf — had introduced the game, creating a demand for clubs, which
grew as the local public servants, anxious to be fashionable, began to play as
well. Th e clubs, of course, were not made in
Panama, so they had to be imported. Any one of the city’s shipping firms would
have taken care of that, if the government, in the grip of one of its regular
financial crises, hadn’t imposed an exorbitant import duty, which made smuggling
almost mandatory. And that was where the Góngoras came in, seizing the
opportunity, occupying the little economic niche that society provides for each
of its members, though few realize it and reap the rewards. Th e sisters found their opening by a curious
fluke: someone realized that the safest way to smuggle the clubs in was to board
a ship docked in Colón and disembark again soon afterward, walking with the aid
of a “stick,” which was, in fact, a golf club. Since the customs agents and port
inspectors had no notion of the game and had never seen the clubs, they assumed
that they were a strange kind of walking stick, and gave the matter no more
thought. Th e sister with the prosthetic leg
perfected the plausibility of the trick; she ended up making it her specialty
and monopolizing the sector. All this was explained while she was away getting
herself ready, and the other Miss Góngora added that there had been positive
side effects: since the clubs had to be smuggled singly, her sister had been up
and down hundreds and thousands of gangways over the years. As well as giving
her something to do and helping her to regain her self-esteem after the
accident, it had made her exercise intensively and kept her healthy, active and
youthful. Th ey couldn’t complain about the other
side of the business, either: dealing with the buyers. It had obliged them to
keep open house for foreign gentlemen and local personalities, and that had put
them in touch with the city’s elite. Another reason, Varamo supposed, for the
Góngoras’ anxiety about the potential transfer of the ministries.
    No, no, they couldn’t believe that