A History of Money

by Alan Pauls

  Always the wad of notes. No matter where he is, whether on the street or playing tennis, on a layover in Dakar airport or getting up from his TV chair—his true place in the world, in his final years—to fetch his perennial divorcé’s dinner of roast chicken and potatoes, which he orders from the deli on the corner, he always seems to have his money within arm’s reach. All of his money, which of course includes the pounds, Swiss francs, dollars, and lire with which he usually impresses the delivery boy, holding the wad right under his nose to select the notes he’ll use to pay him. The question is how to tell, in light of this law of cash, the single, ironclad axiom that rules his economy from beginning to end, whether his father is rich or poor. It’s a question that will never cease to confuse him. The size of the wad, its arrogant bulge, the variety of denominations and colors it comprises, even its organizing principle: all of this seems to be a sign of wealth, of the wealthiest of wealths, direct, immediate wealth, which doesn’t need to be translated or converted or passed through an intermediary before it can be put to use. But whenever he catches his father taking the wad from a pocket to pay for something, anything, two cinema tickets, a pair of sneakers, a small tub of ice cream, twenty-eight nights at the Croatian hotel in Villa Gesell, which nevertheless are so sublime that to him they’re priceless, and allows himself to marvel at the idea that this bundle of notes, which his father handles as masterfully as a cardsharp, as though he’d been born with it in his hand, is in fact all his money, there comes a moment when the spell stands still, as though lashed with a malevolent whip, and what appears after it’s dispersed is its flip side of doubt and suspicion: the terror—arising precisely from the evidence that what he sees there is it, that there’s nothing more—that it might run out, run out completely, with no chance of being replaced, once and for all.

  But if he had any idea about anything, he’d understand that the amount doesn’t matter. The fact that his father always has all his money to hand doesn’t make him rich or poor. It makes him ready. It’s simple: his father is prepared. He can do what he likes whenever he likes, buy what he likes, go where he likes. Rich or poor, he’s free. The idea is too abstract—reckless, even—for a boy of six, which might explain its fate in his imagination: it spends years hibernating in a dark, remote limbo, along with other ideas that brush by him sometimes but never really reach him, as though they never quite believe him worthy of themselves, and so keep their distance, tempting him and contemplating him but remaining as far from his reach as any other wonder of the adult world, like shaving, for example, or knowing all the streets in a city. Until the day he finds out that Sartre—who’s described as the ugliest philosopher in the world, according to the person who entrusts this fact to him—boasts that he carries everything he needs in order to survive in his coat pockets—money, obviously, but also tobacco; a notebook and something to write with; a penknife; a small, difficult book; and a spare pair of glasses—and the idea is reawakened and fills his head with a blinding clarity.

  Free, yes, but free to do what? Probably to vanish into thin air from one day to the next, without giving any warning or leaving any clues, just as his mother—hoping to open his eyes once and for all, she says—tells him his father’s father did: a true founder of the school of family escapology who, incapable even of coming up with a remotely original excuse, announces in his shirtsleeves one day that he’s going to the corner to buy cigarettes and never comes back, only sending a sign of life two years later, from the hotel he’s lording it over with a Spanish woman in a new, still unfinished resort on the Costa del Sol, one of those paradises for enterprising tourists where the sky, judging by the photo on the postcard that arrives at the house with no envelope, with the postmark stamped directly on the fugitive’s handwriting and the unbearable indignity of its revelations on show, is a fluorescent cyan, and an army of palm trees guards the sunbathers while they lie on the sand.

  He never gets to see this postcard, which like so many things is mislaid and then lost, or perhaps destroyed by his grandmother in a fit of spite, or maybe she takes it out of circulation and keeps it locked in some secret place so that, when everyone is asleep and the neighborhood is as calm as it was the day her husband left her, she can worship it in silence, with the tortured loyalty of a victim opening a secret altar to worship the tragedy that still sets her hopeless life alight. He never sees it, but he knows it perfectly from descriptions; not so much those he gets from his mother, who returns to the subject frequently, as if the famous postcard had cast the mold for all the later disasters, starting with her own divorce, but rather from his father, who’s the first to mention it to him, and in the bitterest terms, and who thirty years later can evoke in lush detail the perfect beach day that shines on one side of the card, and remember precisely how many palm trees there are in each row, and how many sunbathers, and what colors their bathing suits are, how many floors have already been built in the apartment block growing across the promenade, how many clouds you can see, and how much the postmark says it cost to send this card from Torremolinos to Buenos Aires in 1956.

  In fact, he comes across it thirty years later in a secondhand bookshop in the center of the city. He’s been there for a while, getting his fingers mucky on the dusty spines of the books—perhaps the only objects capable of collecting more dirt than money. He’s not looking for anything in particular, and this lack of purpose aggravates his disappointment in all these little books of poems, scrawny vanity publications, and colossal, idiotic novels with garish covers that nobody will ever buy, not him nor anybody else. Not holding out much hope, simply to entertain himself a little, he moves to the table opposite, which holds a series of large cardboard boxes containing a jumble of period newspapers, old magazines in plastic sheaths, film stills, sheets of stamps, and postcards. And while he looks at his blackened fingertips, which the layers of dust seem to have hardened, the bookseller, a burly asthmatic in ancient suspenders who’s been walking around the shop putting more stock on the tables, stops beside him for a moment and drops a transparent envelope full of old postcards into the box his hands are sunk in. On top of the pile, balancing on one corner and staring straight at him, is the postcard of the beach in Torremolinos. He takes the envelope out of the box and shows it to the bookseller. He wants to buy it. The lot’s being sold whole, or not at all. He asks how much and listens incredulously: it costs a hundred and twenty times what his fugitive grandfather paid to send the original postcard. He’s willing to buy it even so, but when he puts his hand in his pocket, he realizes that he’s not carrying that much money on him. He passes the envelope containing the postcards to the bookseller and asks him to put it aside, so that nobody can come along while he’s gone and take a liking to it, and goes in search of an ATM. The closest one is out of service; there’s a line at the second one; the third has run out of money. He wanders around for another fifteen minutes before coming up with the cash. By the time he gets back, the bookstore has closed. He rests his forehead on the glass, makes a visor with his hands, and spots the envelope on top of the cardboard box, lying with an air of disdainful superiority on an old copy of a political weekly—from back when the early years of the seventies were flying, or rather shooting, by—on whose cover a ’73-model yacht designed by the Martinoli shipyard is being blown to pieces by twenty kilos of trotyl, while a police chief suspected of torturing political prisoners waits on board, ready to set off on his weekly outing to Tigre. The cyan blue of the Torremolinos sky dazzles even through the triple filter of the transparent envelope, the dirty glass of the shop’s door, and the iron shutter-curtain. But the farther he gets from the bookstore, the hazier the details of the photo become. The half moon of the beach trembles and evaporates like a landscape seen in passing from a distance, and the colors of the bathing suits start to fade. How can he be sure that it was the one, that it was the postcard? His grandfather and his father, the only people who could confirm it, are dead. He never goes back to that bookshop.

  No bank
account; checks are unthinkable; pension, taxes—his father isn’t made for all that. He has married and divorced, had cars and apartments, renewed his ID card, signed rental contracts, worked for companies, and signed business letters on letterhead. But he keeps his money in rolled-up socks and only applies for his tax ID number when he’s over seventy-five years old, and even then reluctantly, after doing everything in his power to avoid it, before finally being convinced by a neighbor who lives two floors above him and offers to help him with the paperwork. He’s a classic misfit, the type his father would blindly follow anywhere: he has only a few teeth left, calls himself a public accountant, and wanders around the block in old sweatpants, dragging along a pair of plastic sandals. He’s a fanatical supporter of San Lorenzo, like his father, and an expert in numbers by vocation too, but he’s also sufficiently artful with shady numbers to understand a basic principle that his father will never understand: that nobody can dedicate themselves to such numbers and give nothing to the law in exchange, and that the tax ID number is the most innocuous nothing that can be given. But when the accountant tells his father that the number has finally arrived, he doesn’t go outside, bathe, or answer the phone for three days; he lies sprawled on his TV chair with his back turned to the machine, so depressed by the magnitude of his own lack of principle that he doesn’t even have the energy to press the ON button on the remote. And nevertheless, when they find the lover of crostini dead at the bottom of the river, horribly swollen by the more than three days he’s spent in the water, and without the attaché case that reportedly contains the bundle of dollars everyone wants to know about, the only person to bring up the subject of the money and, after performing some mental magic, estimate how much has been lost or stolen—whether from the bottom of the river when the helicopter is found or earlier, sometime between takeoff and the crash, nobody knows—is his father, his crackpot father, who never saw the dead man in person. As far as he knows, nobody in his stepfamily mentions it, though they’re so closely linked to the dead man by friendship, by business, and by class interests that it’s difficult to imagine them not knowing what role he played in the powder keg in Villa Constitución, what mission he was on when he boarded the helicopter that morning, and also, of course, how much money he had been given to achieve it.

  But someone, one of them, must know something. Know, even though they won’t tell—because, as he hears said more than once in the mansion in Mar del Plata, only those who don’t have money talk about it: those who had it once and lost it, and those who made it through unpleasant means, which is to say those who made it at all, rather than inheriting it. Maybe the widow doesn’t have much to say; she might have been kept in the dark by the logic of secrecy and the parallel worlds surrounding militant leaders’ immediate families and the intimate circles of prominent businessmen at the time, ordinary people, wives, husbands, children, siblings, who find out who they’ve been sharing their homes with, their beds, their plans, their vacations, only when someone calls them and asks them to come to the morgue and identify the bodies. And meanwhile this same logic is beginning to rule everything, the specific and the general, the life of companies like the one that employed the dead man for so long and life throughout the whole country, with its Martinoli yachts flying through the air, its industrial belts in flames, and its cross-eyed economy, which has forked into one laughable official dimension, with an anemic, purportedly ruling currency, and another, the so-called black one, where the virus of the dollar releases its toxic fumes.

  Yes, everything tends to the shady, the double, and what happens on one side of the mirror isn’t necessarily known on the other, even when the repercussions might be felt there, might make an impact or even pose a danger. One winter’s night at the Hotel Gloria, his father, taking more trouble than he has in the four preceding days of their vacation in Rio de Janeiro, hurries him into the shower, has his dinner brought up to the room, puts him to bed and tucks him in, and, after turning out every light but the one on the nightstand, tells him that tonight, also for the first time in four days, he’s going out on his own, without him, and that it’s very possible he’ll be back late. When he gets back, he wants to find him asleep. And then, raising his voice a little, exaggerating the note of admonition until he’s almost singing, he delivers a string of assorted warnings and pieces of advice, at times so varied—don’t raid the minibar; don’t use the bed as a trampoline; be careful of the flock of toucans that might suddenly invade the room, thirsty for revenge for the fake toucan food they gave them that afternoon at the jardim botanico, really a few crumbs of old nougat that he accidentally smuggled from Buenos Aires in the pocket of his pants—that he, covered up to his chin and still terrified by the prospect of staying behind on his own, can’t help laughing. But why can’t he go with him? Why can’t they go out together, just like last night when they went to the juice bar on the beira-mar, the seafront, or the night before that, when they went to the cinema to see O dolar furado—he repeated the title loudly on the way out—the Portuguese-dubbed version of Un dólar marcado, the western starring Giulianno Gemma they’ve already seen together half a dozen times in Buenos Aires? “It’s grown-up time,” his father says, putting a hand just liberated in protest back under the sheet. “I have to see a friend.” “Now? At night?” he asks. Though he could swear that he’s only asking for information, a routine explanation, a faint but uncontrollable trembling in his lower lip tells him that the matter is more serious than that, that he might be about to cry. “It’s a friend who owes me money,” says his father. And he leans toward him, kisses his still-damp hair, and heads for the door, putting on his blue blazer as he walks. He sees him pause in the hallway by the door, where he takes one last look at himself in the mirror and, with two sharp tugs, rescues his shirt’s white cuffs, which had gotten caught under the sleeves of his jacket. Then he opens a dresser drawer, takes out a dark package, studies it for a few seconds with his head bowed, puts it in a pocket, and leaves.

  He listens to his steps, which are muffled by the carpet, growing more distant and then suddenly quickening into the cocky little trot he always breaks into at the top of a flight of stairs, and he closes his eyes in resignation. It takes him a long time to get to sleep. He lies still in the bed, just as his father left him, ignoring the temptations stalking the room’s darkness, the TV, his comic books, the garoto chocolates in the minibar, and his collection of Brazilian cruzeiros, which he’s been accumulating since the beginning of the trip from change they’ve been given, and which are due their first audit. He’s scared that if he moves, something in his father’s life—in the mysterious, dangerous life he’s decided to lead without him, away from him—might change, or be endangered. This is the way he’s lying, as rigid as a dead man, as the dead man who can still make his head ring with the crostini-crackling that tormented him for whole summers when he’s laid out in his coffin eight years later, when sleep creeps up on him in the hotel’s dense silence, after it’s begun to grow light outside and the old, tattered exhausts of the first buses full of workers have started roaring two floors below. His father wakes him up, as usual, by ruffling his hair, hair that the pillow has straightened at will, according to the vagaries of sleep, and that’s now electrified, shooting locks charged with static in every direction. “Up, sleepyhead, or we’ll miss breakfast,” he says, standing up and turning his back to him, and then emptying his pants’ pockets onto the nightstand. He covers his eyes so that the light that bursts into the room doesn’t blind him. Then, very carefully, he opens his fingers just a tiny bit and watches him as though spying through the cracks of a blind: except for the blazer, which is hanging on the back of a chair, he’s wearing the same clothes he had on when he went out last night.

  This scene is replayed three times, identically, over the course of the trip, but the cloud of mysteries it brings with it pursues him for years. He can never understand how his father can call someone who owes him money a “friend.” It’s not the notion of debtors t
hat he finds problematic; in fact, that’s not new to him. How many times has he heard his father shout that people owe him money? Everyone owes him money, all the time. It’s as though the world were split in two: his father, alone, and the huge wave of debtors that persecutes him. What he can’t understand is why he declares it the way he does. There’s an element of complaint in it (as though the money he’s owed is a curse that can only be cast by yelling), but also a certain disconcerting pride that transforms the status of creditor into a privilege, a miraculous gift of the type that fate bestows on the heroes of apocalyptic films, like being fertile in a world sterilized by nuclear radiation, or the ability to speak or think on a planet populated by beasts. It’s really the money itself that he finds disturbing. He can never imagine friendship and money coexisting without feeling scandalized. It’s as though, by dint of some extraordinary cosmic misalignment, two radically foreign kingdoms have come together in an unknown territory, and it’s anybody’s guess what sort of unwonted plants and creatures will result. And since it’s impossible for him to grasp, he naturally starts to jump to conclusions.

  His father said “a friend” to ease his mind, to alleviate the worrying effect of “owes me money,” the only charged and therefore true part of the sentence. But how can “a friend” share any reasonable sequence of events with the dark package that his father takes out of the drawer and puts in his pocket each of the three nights he goes out alone, leaving him in the eye of a storm of omens from which only sleep can free him? If “a friend” can’t share a phrase with “owes money,” what kind of phrase would it take to unabashedly unite “a friend” and “a revolver”? Because that’s what his father takes with him every time he goes to see the friend who owes him money, a revolver, an 1873 Colt Peacemaker six-shooter with a walnut handle, just like the one Montgomery Wood, the hero of O dolar furado, uses when he tries to avenge his brother’s murder. Which means his father is in danger. How did he not think of it earlier? That’s obviously why he goes out alone. He leaves the Hotel Gloria, travels the length of the city in a taxi—one of the demented race cars that serve as taxis in Rio de Janeiro—and, with his Colt 1873 at the ready, tiptoes into a gloomy, unfamiliar apartment where everything from the arrangement of the furniture to the location of every last light switch and bell, everything that could either serve his purpose or hinder it, is obedient to someone else’s will: that of the friend who owes him money. Which is to say his worst enemy, who won’t only not return his money but will make the most of his local advantage, will surprise him, split his head open with the sharp edge of a rock or a trophy, and leave him sprawled on the floor, drowning in his own blood. Sometimes, years later—long after the enigma has been solved, when there’s no longer anything to fear—he replays the scene to himself, more out of the peculiar inertia of internal fictions than anything else, and he’s flooded with a very potent retrospective terror that can change the past instantaneously, at the lightest of brushes, and he lies awake for hours, his eyes wide open, until, when he’s as exhausted as he was at eleven years old, he hears the frenzied cawing of the birds breaking the morning silence.