Varamo

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ONE DAY IN 1923, in the city of Colón (Panama), a third-class clerk, having finished work, and, since it was payday, passed by the cashier’s desk to collect his monthly salary, left the Ministry in which he was employed. In the interval between that moment and the dawn of the following day, ten or twelve hours later, he completed the composition of a long poem, from the initial decision to write it up to the final period, after which there were no further additions or corrections. The self-contained nature of the interval emerges more clearly still if we take into account the fact that never, in all his fifty years, had he written or felt any inclination to write a single line of poetry, and nor would he ever again. It was a bubble in time, in his biography, an exception without precedent or sequel. The action contained the inspiration, and vice versa, each nourishing and consuming the other, so that nothing was left over. Even so, this episode would have remained private and secret had its protagonist not been Varamo, had it not produced that celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Child.

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