A History of Money

by Alan Pauls

  No, he won’t be getting rich from his mother’s accidental death, or her husband’s. Not in that ignoble way—which much later, when he remembers those two months in 1975 and relives the excitement that flooded him every time the phone rang and he discovered that his mother and her husband were setting out on another flight, or getting back into the Giulia to go from one little town on the Côte d’Azur to the next, fills him with incomparable shame—nor any other, since he will always be useless not so much at earning money—because he will earn it, and sometimes in considerable sums, although always completely hopelessly, only realizing how considerable they are once he’s made them vanish, disappear into thin air, squandered them, not a fucking cent in the coffers, zero—as multiplying it or just keeping it as it is, intact, safe from any eventuality, beyond history, like an egg in a gene bank, a trophy in a club’s display cabinet, or a work of art in a museum. He would give everything he doesn’t and won’t ever have to know how to make money. Literally make it, produce it, like employees of the mint, or former employees who—later or even while still working there—become counterfeiters; or make it appear, like his father does, in fact, two Fridays of every month for years, between eleven at night and seven thirty the next morning, when he has a table booked—the turn of phrase he himself uses for his poker nights once they’ve been made common knowledge within the family—and also on his visits to the casino in Mar del Plata, lightning-fast excursions that also always begin on a Friday (one of the two left after those when he has a table booked), real raids of frenzied, compulsive gambling that start when he sets out, always in a taxi, on the 404 kilometers from the office at Maipú and Córdoba, right in the center of Buenos Aires, to 2100 Boulevard Marítimo Patricio Peralta Ramos, where he spends on average seven hours gambling ceaselessly—never playing roulette, which is for amateurs; it’s always baccarat or blackjack, sometimes baccarat and blackjack at the same time; seven hours without eating or sleeping and sometimes without even standing up to stretch his legs, fueled by whiskey and cigarettes, while the taxi driver—the same boy from Tucumán his ex-father-in-law hired to follow him, who lent him the six hundred pesos that helped him turn around that famous bad table—waits for him a few blocks away with the radio on, head nodding sleepily in a car parked by the square.

  As for him, if there’s one thing he knows how to do with money, it’s pay. That’s the only thing he can boast about, pathetic as it is. He accepts this as the role assigned to him in an arbitrary but indisputable allocation. His lot is not to make money, like his father does, or to inherit it, like his mother. Of all the possible missions, his is to settle the books, be the one who clears accounts. Some people feed the hungry, others cure the sick. His way of healing wounds—a passion that’s not always very well understood—is paying. He assumes the role with the same resigned conviction with which he states his star sign—the one that gets by far the worst press in the whole zodiac—whenever he’s asked (generally by women, women he doesn’t want and who want him more than any he might ever want); but even so he performs it with an inexplicable satisfaction, in a state of euphoria, feeling like he does when, after exhausting his oxygen reserves with a lengthy exploration of the tiled bottom of a swimming pool, he pushes his head out of the water and uses the last of his energy to open his mouth wide and fill himself with lungfuls of air. There’s always a strange urgency in paying, no matter whether he’s on time or not: a suspense that seems to contradict the rather submissive nature of the act. While his friends steal money from the coats their parents leave hanging on the rack or siphon it from their monthly allowance to buy records, beer, clothes, cigarettes, and maybe a few hour-long sessions at seedy hotels, he, when he gets his first bit of money, the money he earns from his first job—which is to translate an article on the epicurean eccentricities of an English playwright who twenty years later, after he’s been ravaged by stomach cancer, wins the Nobel Prize—uses it in part, but as a matter of priority, to pay a months-old debt to a classmate, a rich, forgetful young satrap who once got him out of one of his not-infrequent tight spots—his mother having yet again secretly taken the money he had put aside for the next day’s food after finding herself short of cash in the small hours of the night—by paying for his lunch; a classmate who is of course most surprised when he tries to return the money, the loan and also the lunch having disappeared from his memory without trace. He hesitates. In two seconds, everything he could do with the money if he didn’t return it passes before his eyes, all the things it singles out and burnishes with its light and renders possible and that now suddenly start trying to tempt him, like dazzling sirens, at the door of the terrible steakhouse where he’s trying to return the money that was lent to him, the same place where months earlier he invested it in a withered salad and a rump steak that he left half eaten. But he’s so close to paying, so close to closing something that’s been open for such a long time … How could he fail to follow through when he’s this close, when he’s come this far? That would be squandering par excellence, one luxury he can’t allow himself. Of course, what kind of repayment is it when even his creditor can’t remember the debt he swears he’s incurred? He doesn’t remember the episode, or how much he lent him, none of it. Not the rump steak, or the salad, or the clothes he assures him he was wearing that day—gym pants with knees made stiff by generation upon generation of mending, a white piqué T-shirt, the regulation blazer with the sleeves tied around his neck, like a parody of a scarf. It’s useless: there’s no way to make him remember. And then, partly so that he can feel that he’s doing everything in his power, like Kafka’s man before the law, and partly dragged along by the insistence of his own memory, he lets himself get carried away by the details of that lunchtime of whose occurrence even he is not now entirely sure, perhaps it’s just a pretext created by his desire to satiate himself by paying. Spring: the windows at half-mast, the smell of carne asada in the air, the television tuned in to a gossip show, the blades of the ceiling fans turning endlessly. In walks the girl from the third year who all the boys in the fifth are in love with—the boss-eyed one who’s killed beside the train tracks three weeks after the coup d’état—displacing a cloud of air that hits him in the face like a slap, and asks for a tortilla de papas to take away (she’s as prickly as a beggar and always eats her lunch alone underneath the staircase at school); then she turns back to face the dining room and, resting her elbows on the counter like a girl from a Western looking for trouble, looks them both in the eyes, both of them at once. The other guy thinks for a few seconds and shakes his head, but he takes the money all the same. They go into the steakhouse, which is still deserted, and sit down. “Get what you like,” he says. “It’s on me.”

  Yes, paying, and all of its attendant sibylline delights: turning around and walking away from the cashier’s window with his heart still in his mouth, as though he’s just received a pardon, and putting the precious stamped receipt safely in his pocket with an excitement he’s barely able to conceal, and later on stapling it—that adorable crunch!—to the bill, crossing it off his list of debts, and, finally, filing it away in the clear plastic file where, one by one, his receipts from accounts paid all end up, each one a trophy of a vice that he never dares to share with anybody. This all strikes him as so contemptible and miserly that he’d find it very difficult to confess; it’s like the pleasure a bank teller takes in tracing and savoring the dirty scent of money on his fingertips, or a night guard in spotting couples on the garage’s security cameras. And afterward, once the receipt’s been filed away, comes the feeling that he can start again from zero: he’s young again, virginal, free to look for the next payment on the list … Though it’s hard to believe, this bureaucrat’s pleasure is the thing that excites him most about living on his own for the first time—much more than the possibility of organizing his time and space as he wishes, without having to answer to anybody, or the freedom to invite over whomever he wants, whenever he wants, for whatever reason he wants. Just that:
paying his bills, much more than all the things that are normally understood by sovereignty, at a time—he’s just turned twenty-one—when after four crushing years of terror, the experience of sovereignty survives only in the private realms of life, in homes, bedrooms, basements, rooms as far as possible from the street and public life. For him, gaining his freedom, a phrase that’s been emptied of all meaning apart from the individual departure from the nest, primarily means discovering an unexpected form of alchemy that makes a typical adolescent nightmare pleasurable, even glorious: Will I have enough money to pay the bills every month? Paying, paying: the principal enjoyment of the adult life he’s trying on for the first time. What a joy to arrive at the beginning of the month and have to pay.

  There’s nobody else in the world who can keep time’s accounts like his father does. His father, who will die without a penny, broke, as they say, leaving half a dry lemon and a withered lettuce in the fridge and a collection of dusty jazz records on two shelves held up by bricks, and taking his mental calculator to the grave with him, having never, even for a second, stopped shuffling quantities with it, or adding and multiplying years and money; calculating ages, the duration of marriages, flight times, and time differences between countries; converting dollars to pesos, pesos to dollars, official dollars to black-market dollars; figuring out the attendance at protests, soccer matches, film screenings; predicting the commercial success of new theatrical undertakings; or prorating ticket-office takings according to numbers of cinema screens. He, of course, is always quick to lose count, but what he does know is that years later—at least ten or fifteen—it’s not just on the first of each month that he gets to enjoy the pleasure of paying, but rather, to his delight, every Friday of every week, four times a month—“like clockwork,” per his father’s description of the regularity with which he does three things in life: shit, fuck, and play poker—for the eleven never-ending months it ends up taking to refurbish the apartment he buys fifty-fifty with his wife—two and a half times longer than the time frame the architect quoted without hesitation at the beginning of the project. Every Friday at half past six or seven in the evening, he runs up those three long flights of stairs with his pockets bursting with cash. The contractors are in the apartment’s living room, smoking while they wait for him surrounded by wooden beams and piles of bricks. He comes in, greets them with a monosyllable and a nod of the head—the same currency they use to communicate with him for the duration of the job, whether they like him or not—and sits down in the kitchen, or rather the dilapidated hovel where according to the architect’s drawings there will someday be something resembling a kitchen, and with a wad of notes in his hand, he shouts, “First one’s up!” Thus begins the weekly round of payments. And so it is, every Friday.

  Anyone else in his position would have exploded already. Not just because of the way the completion date keeps being pushed back, which is annoying and even slightly insulting in light of the smile and the slaps on the back the architect tries to placate him with every time he asks for explanations, distracting him by pointing out sheets of colored mosaic tiling, the antique floor tiles he found at the salvage yard, and the period toilets waiting their turn in a corner, three apparently more than sufficient justifications for him to accept the delays, even to enthusiastically approve them, as the price he must pay for the inspiration and good taste of a sublime architect. In fact, the truly hellish thing is the inflationary disaster in which the country is burning up day by day, which surges a fortnight after work begins, accompanies the refurbishment from beginning to end, sending the agreed budgets into orbit and making a mockery of every estimate, and will outlive the project by a year and a half, an insane period during which it devours everything that gets in its way, not only his money, his time, his nerves, and his already fragile relationship with the architect, but also his love. Love: the only reason he put all his money—the only money he has or will ever have, aside from that which literally comes out of the past, like a ghost, raining down on him on the very same afternoon that he has to cremate his father—into the purchase of an apartment that is what’s known as an opportunity: underpriced, immediate sale, almost abusive terms of payment, which the seller accepts without saying a word. But these benefits are no compensation for the problems he and his wife discover later, when, exhausted by eleven nightmarish months of construction, they move in and experience for themselves the fierce hostility of the neighbors (all more than seventy-five years old, all deaf), the vibration of the machinery in the textile business next door against the apartment’s south wall from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, the neighborhood’s unreliable drains, the criminals-in-training who meet on the corner, the piles of broken glass from car windows gleaming by the side of the curb, the always-out-of-date goods at the local stores, the smell of rotting in the produce stores and insecticide in the bars, the sparse bookshops, the outdated film screenings, the faded posters in the video shop, and above all the unbearable, almost radioactive heat that melts the treeless roads and beats down all summer long on the building’s leaky roof terrace—which is to say, on the roof of the brand-new home that they don’t even manage to share for two months.

  Prices change overnight, from hour to hour, sometimes two or three times in the same hour. Sometimes he comes back from the building supply store empty-handed, having been unable to buy anything. “We don’t have any prices,” they tell him. Other times—and this happens very often—he counts out the cash he owes while he’s lining up in front of the register, but when he gets to the window he has to calculate it all again. The price has gone up 10, 15, sometimes 20 percent in the tiny interval—no more than ten, fifteen minutes—between the last markup and his turn to pay. The same thing happens every Friday afternoon, ten, sometimes five minutes before the financial institutions close, when he turns up with his weekly installment of dollars in the usual filthy den in the business district, the lair of a money changer his father trusts, an affable man who’s suffocating under his own weight, and who takes advantage of each of his visits to draw him away from the line and, lowering his voice to the confidential tone people usually use to reveal the secret of the country’s economic future, bombard him with stories of his father’s other life, his real, completely fantastical life, which when he relays them to him just as he heard them, his father is evidently a little disconcerted to hear, neither accepting nor denying anything but, finally, smiling and saying he doesn’t remember anything about it. And just like that, in the few minutes it takes this legendary father to clean out a sheik in Monaco, or break the bank in Baden-Baden, or get locked up for claiming responsibility for the urine with which a tourist in his charge decides to leave his mark on the ruins of Pompeii, the peso has depreciated so vertiginously that the pockets of the jacket he wore especially for the occasion, which were tried and tested in the same basement the previous Friday, in front of the same redheaded cashier who counts money with one hand while peeling the other’s cuticles with his teeth, can’t accommodate the heap of australs he receives in exchange for his dollars.

  It’s impossible to keep up. Nobody is fast enough. When construction work begins, the largest banknote in circulation is a thousand pesos, and to try to get change from one is a true odyssey. By the time it’s finished eleven months later, there are already five- and ten-thousand-peso bills going around, reigning like monarchs, young, distant, and untouchable, and then four weeks later, when they’re as common as the commoners over which they once reigned, they disappear without fanfare in the purchase of a few basic items. You can’t even name amounts without getting something wrong. There’s palo, meaning a million, which he hears for the first time more than ten years earlier in one of the surreptitious conversations at the crostini lover’s wake aimed at figuring out how much the dead man was carrying in the famous attaché case—a palo of dollars, at least, is the precise phrase that reaches him through the jangling of spoons against coffee cups; and now there’s a new one: luca, meaning a tho
usand pesos, coined partly as an abbreviation, and probably partly in the hope that the shift from the domain of numbers to that of words will calm the expanding chaos that is the universe of money, will somehow confine and control it, at least inasmuch as everyday language can ever control what is mute, has nothing to say, and can only grow up and down at the same time, like Alice when she falls down the hole. But how soon luca loses its original luster and begins to sound cheap. How quickly it’s replaced, not by other notes, but by other names, cheap, spontaneous inventions that are always slightly childish and immediate, like a red, a green, a blue, names inspired by the colors of the notes, which taxi drivers, salesmen, and cashiers begin to use routinely alongside old and disappearing denominations, as in, that’s two lucas, a red, and two blues, for example, or gimme a luca and I’ll give you three greens—shows of primitive pedagogy that do nothing but confuse everybody.

  It’s crazy. Some days he has to go to five separate building supply stores—each a long way from the last and usually in remote parts of the city, so that he wastes hours traveling between them—before ending up not at the best one, nor at the one that’s been recommended to him, nor even at the cheapest one, but simply at one that can give him a price—a price that he is able to pay, which, by this stage, with the cost of living rising by 150 percent every month, means a price that’s unacceptable within reason—and where they haven’t followed the example of most building supply stores and decided to hoard all their goods and wait for prices to go up again: bricks, sand, cement, whatever the mobs of project managers, architects, and construction workers who knew about the place before him haven’t already taken. He finds the place, goes in, and finally gives his order, flooded with happiness but also trembling, so acute is his awareness that the immediate future of the work depends on the response he gets from the foreman, which will be one of three things: yes, they have everything he needs, and the price doesn’t irredeemably compromise his already decimated quote, and everyone’s happy; or yes, they have everything, et cetera, but when it’s time to pay they don’t ask for pesos—which is what he carries on him, out of prudence more than practicality, since, sign of the times, the mere suspicion that someone is carrying a handful of foreign notes is enough to make them a target—but dollars, dollar bills, the currency in which 80 percent of store owners have by this point taken refuge, and in which they’ll remain entrenched even when there’s no longer any reason to be, a bit like the televisions that show up in bars along with the first World Cup games and end up becoming part of the furniture. If they require dollars, cash verde, and he doesn’t want to lose his order and put a stop to the construction work, he’ll have to find them before the store closes, which means by six o’clock at the latest, and given that banks and currency exchanges have been closed for half an hour already, this means he’ll have to track them down in sordid local malls, back rooms of sham travel agencies, bar restrooms, parking lot stairways, all the secret dens where the arbolitos, or little trees, as they call themselves, to match the dollar’s vegetal green—members of an underclass who come out only after the banks and currency exchanges have pulled down their shutters, looking to earn their living by buying and selling when there’s no rate of any type to be had, either the official one or the accepted black-market one; when there’s a totally free market on the dollar—have been blooming for months, stationed behind columns to smoke, or walking in circles, seeming idle at first glance but in fact with all of their senses alert, prickling for the arrival of desperate people like him. In time he learns to recognize them straight away, too, even right there at the building supply store, where they’ve infiltrated the line and the notes they plan to sell at astronomic prices are growing warm in their pockets.