A History of Money

by Alan Pauls

  No, it’s not ambition; it’s an absolute lack of hope, a sudden, frozen emptiness that opens in her chest when it becomes clear that she doesn’t have a peso left. This is what condemns his mother to wait for the demented miracle of money raining down from the sky. Less out of conviction than because they’re within her grasp and as fresh as ulcers, she starts with reasonable miracles, clinging desperately to the idea that sooner or later the Beast will be sold, no matter what state it’s in, no matter what time and the winters and the humidity and weeds and gangs of squatters with backpacks have done to it, and that she’ll recover at least some of what she lost. She hasn’t been back for a long time; she hasn’t witnessed half the metamorphoses it’s gone through; she can’t even picture it any longer. Every image she has of it is out of date. She remembers it only in dreams, on the rare occasions that she manages to sleep uninterruptedly, and the payback for those interludes stolen from insomnia—a miracle that’s almost more unheard-of than money raining down: she has her own table set aside in the hotel bar, and the night guard knows to switch on a light and serve her some tea or a glass of cognac when she comes downstairs with eyes like saucers at three or four in the morning—is a vision played at high speed of a type of creeping citadel growing constantly and in every direction, including down into the earth, following a system of interlocking cubes through which all manner of frightened little creatures pass in and out: moles, armadillos, guinea pigs from some useless experiment, which a psychotic stylist has decided to dress up in tiny rugby shirts. “It must be worth something,” she thinks. And if there’s no value in the house, in the grounds, the cement, the floor tiles, the window frames, the flagstones, or the mosaic tiling, then there must at least be some—just like in tales of adventure in which, for all his charisma and virtue, the hero always owes much of his appeal to his nemesis’s monstrosity—in the tragic role the Beast has played in her life; in the way in which the house lays waste to everything in the space of ten years.

  Sitting in the hotel’s picture window in her nightgown, with her beautiful Italian raincoat hanging from her shoulders, getting a little tipsy from the cognac fumes, she daydreams about someone who hunts for grisly scenes in real estate, one of the vultures that patrol the stars’ neighborhoods in Hollywood with checkbook and pen at the ready, searching for ruined or abandoned mansions with blood spattered on the marble in the bathroom, the gold ceilings embroidered with bullet holes, poolhouses decorated with brain matter. Why not. Why shouldn’t she be blessed by one of these evaluators of misfortune. It must be worth something. But if anyone were to ask her what “something” means, how she measures “something,” she wouldn’t know what to say. Nobody would know what to say—just as committees of experts brought together to value the masterworks of idiotic artists, or idiotic works by masterful artists, don’t know what to say and can never reach an agreement. When she comes back down to earth and reassesses, and decides that only modesty will save her, she imagines small amounts, just a bonus, the difference that would understatedly but decisively remove her from this nightmare from which she can’t seem to wake up. But she waits, and she waits, and that modest little amount that would make her happy never comes, and once again the Beast becomes everything to her, responsible for taking everything she had and capable of giving it all back, and at those moments she opens her hotel room’s window in the middle of the night, in her nightgown, with her Italian raincoat falling off her shoulders and onto the floor, still completely unwrinkled, no creases at all except the ones the designers intended to be there, and she yells at the world, at the sleeping world of Calle Uriburu, the astronomical figure for which she’s prepared to talk—only to talk, she won’t guarantee anything beyond that—about selling the house. It’s clear, in any case, that the one possibility his mother never considers, neither in her moments of modesty, when she just wants to forget, nor when she’s overcome by the desire for revenge and she screams for the whole world to be signed over to her, is the ridiculous, paltry, disproportionately sad figure they end up getting from a Uruguayan construction firm, the last on a long list of buyers—and the only one that agrees to actually see the house—who disappear one after another when they see the photos: ten thousand dollars, to be halved with her ex-husband.

  She’s almost in tears when she shows him her five thousand—a stack of fifty-dollar bills in a dirty, bulging envelope with a lottery ticket stuck to it like a stowaway, peeping out surreptitiously until she hides it in irritable embarrassment by shoving it to the bottom of her purse—under the fluorescent lights of the bar she arranges to meet him in after collecting it, a strange place—all tinted windows, with waitresses serving in their underwear and all wearing the same dark wig, like replicas of an original from Le Crazy Horse—two blocks from the basement office of the construction firm’s Buenos Aires sister company, or maybe it’s just the den of its team of accountants and lawyers. She raises the hand holding the envelope to call the nearest stripper—yes, it’s a dive, but the cheesecake is unbeatable—and he catches a neighboring regular following the gesture with a look of murderous longing. “Let them rob me,” she says disingenuously, and then, still crying, she blithely waves the bills in the air in a bid to divert the stripper’s attention away from a client who’s asking for clarification about the menu while staring at her chest. “What’s five thousand dollars compared with everything I’ve lost?”

  This wasn’t exactly what she had in mind when she imagined money raining down. As a result, she doesn’t use it to alleviate or anticipate necessities, but rather as a sort of restorative compensation, damages for the misunderstanding of which she’s once again been the victim. She packs her little suitcase, settles her bill at the hotel, and waits until nighttime to say goodbye to the guard. And then she moves and spends all of it, down to the last fifty-dollar bill, at a slightly better hotel (three and a half stars, although the half star on the neon sign doesn’t always light up) on Calle Juncal, two blocks from the last one, with an elevator, cable TV, and a basket of umbrellas in the lobby for rainy days. She had envisaged something more unexpected and drastic, the type of downpour that’s unleashed without warning and changes everything, for good or ill, like a doctor holding an X-ray to the light, clearing his throat, and pointing at a laughable little white cloud growing hesitantly in the middle of the pancreas. She was thinking of a true event, the type that always intrudes in such an untimely fashion in old romance novels, with a visit—announced by a bell that shreds the tranquility of a home that’s had little to do with the outside world—or a letter in a tattered, worn-out envelope, its address so poorly written that it’s been lost and sent back and forth several times before arriving at its destination, and even run the risk of not arriving at all.

  For example: Ángela. At the age of twelve, she befriends a sullen, skinny girl with very bony knees who spends recess clinging to the railings in the yard, trying to hide the monstrous platform shoe that completes her right leg. She frequently lends her her protractor and ruler, shares her lunches with her, lets her copy her tests. One day while either winning or losing at hopscotch or elastics (it’s just as boring either way), she abandons the game and makes her way to the railings at the other end of the yard with her head held low, and then, somewhat warily, enters her ostracized orbit. She stays there with her for the rest of recess, leaning on the railings and gossiping rapidly about each and every one of the classmates she likes or pretends to like during the day, like a spy hurrying to transmit the information she’s harvested, until after a brief spell of surprise and shyness Ángela joins in and starts doling out her own lashes in a delayed frenzy: the stitching coming undone on Berio’s shoes, Melnik’s bad breath, Venanzi’s zits, Serrano’s fake tits. They spend months this way. On the last day of school, while they’re leaving class in a flock, as they always do, Ángela takes advantage of the general confusion to put a piece of folded paper in her hand and asks her not to read it until after she’s left, and then, as they reach the door and her
driver gets out of the car and starts to head toward her, kisses her very quickly, grazing the corner of her mouth with her lips. She never sees her again. Her family moves and she changes schools, or maybe they move overseas. But fifty years later, when she’s more of a millionaire, more crippled, and more lonely than ever, who else would Ángela write to again but her, his mother, asking to meet up; who else would she tell that she’s sick and putting her affairs in order, and that after considering and rejecting a relatively scant list of obvious candidates, she has decided to leave her entire fortune to her.

  That’s the kind of rain she’s hoping for. But will it ever come, if she hopes for it so desperately? Will it ever come, if it’s less rain than late payments, the type of delayed satisfaction that no creditor ever truly forgets, even if only because they’ve made a note of it somewhere in their little book of debtors? Conquering her reserve about telling people of her change of lifestyle, she circulates the address and telephone number of the hotel she’s living in. Among the calls she receives, which she gaily filters through the hotel’s reception, there’s only one she doesn’t recognize. She repeats the name aloud and searches for it fruitlessly in her address book. She asks a couple of the old friends who over time have become emergency memory sources. Nobody remembers it. It’s unknown, faceless, untraceable, and impossible to pin down. “This is it,” she thinks. This is the secret: that there are no clouds or thunderclaps; that the rain truly comes from the beyond. She gathers her courage (a siesta, a shower, two glasses of cognac, three lines of written prompts on how to sound surprised, what tone of voice she should use, and how thankful she should be) and makes the call. It’s answered by a nasal voice that thins every now and then into a dramatic and artificial-sounding falsetto. He blurts out her married name—the excitement of getting a callback, no doubt—and then tries to cover the slip by coughing until he realizes that he doesn’t know her maiden name. He’s a former stockbroker. He used to manage—quite solvently—some shares his mother bought on her ex-husband’s advice (and then sold at a loss between the Ecolodge Period and Time-share Mark II, in order to replace all the flooring in the Beast). He’s set up on his own now, still in finance. He’s offering some very advantageous opportunities, and going through his portfolio of good former clients … Might they meet up for a coffee? He got her new number from her ex-husband. Incidentally: What’s all this about living in a hotel?

  Though she dreams of a downpour of money, he’s the one who ends up getting wet. His father dies. One night he waits for the nurses to make their last rounds, unplugs his tubes and wires (the morbid pleasure of the tape crackling as it comes away), and crosses over to the room opposite in his bare feet and orange robe, where a former Boca Juniors midfielder hooked up to a dialysis machine is waiting to play poker with him. The night nurse—the tall, severe one who doesn’t accept tips—finds him in a chair next to the midfielder’s bed, very rigid, with three sevens in one hand, his head leaning slightly to the left in an attitude of elegant mistrust, and the other hand resting on the edge of a table on wheels that’s serving as a makeshift baize, where the deck (with the seven of clubs on top) and a plastic cup containing two fingers of whiskey sit waiting for him.

  The coffin shrinks him and makes him look ugly. A very long white hair comes out of his mustache, does a double somersault, and embeds itself in the side of his upper lip, very close to the corner of his mouth. Has his beard been trimmed? He argues with someone who works at the funeral parlor about the shroud they’ve put on him, which is made of white linen and very similar to the one they used at the hospital because they didn’t have anything else, only more sheer, almost transparent, a ridiculous, feminine little piece of baby’s clothing that looks as though it belongs on an angel. “Why don’t you give him a harp, too?” he says, and leaves, slamming the door behind him. At one point, when he’s left alone with the body, he leans over his face, takes another close look at the wrinkles on his forehead that he knows so well, and kisses him. The temperature of the body makes him recoil. It’s a cavernous cold, like marble, dense and abysmal; a cold that will never change, that will stay this way forever. His mother, who to his surprise is the first to arrive and the only guest who takes the starting time to heart, stands up throughout the whole service, keeping her vigil with her umbrella and purse in hand. Out of loyalty to the old law of punctuality and stoicism as means of sharing in others’ pain, she refuses a seat and rejects water, coffee, and the repulsive mints that a gaunt raven in a suit brings around every now and then on a plate, with his other arm folded gently against his back like a waiter at a pretentious restaurant.

  There aren’t many people at the wake; most of their faces are hazy, and though they signal to him determinedly from someplace in the past, he doesn’t recognize them. Acquaintances. His father spent his life surrounded by transitory, furtive people, whose ties to him were always circumstantial or contingent. He tries to remember who they remind him of while he accepts their hugs, pats on the back, and distressed or encouraging words. He recognizes a couple of employees from the agency; the now decidedly obese money changer who used to change his dollars while the house was being renovated; the doorman from a building in Belgrano where he’d get trapped in the elevator on two out of every three visits; the blond, slightly wall-eyed woman from Air France or Alitalia, who would always point at him when he accompanied his father on his payment rounds as a boy and ask if he could make one like that for her. When the time comes, though, it’s not these guests but rather five doleful strangers—one of whom has a deep tan and tries to stifle an attack of allergies by pressing a handkerchief to his nose—who help him to carry the coffin, while the undertakers’ cars double park and everyone disperses into clusters of dark sadness, some following the procession to the cemetery, others leaving. His mother leaves. She gives him one last hug, jabbing him slightly between the shoulder blades with the handle of her umbrella, and he suddenly breaks down in tears like a little boy; he breaks just like a little boy when he cries. In the arms of that shrunken body, which he would never have believed could contain him, he’s struck for the first time by the certainty that he is the only tie there ever was between his mother and his father. She dries the tears from his face with a finger, tells him that the cremation would be too much for her, and asks him for twenty pesos for a taxi.

  Doors slam shut, engines start up, a gear stick groans, there’s a monosyllabic froth of goodbyes. Normality—a red light, a cleaning-supply store open for business, a woman sweeping her balcony with a shawl on her head—pierces him like a scandal. Someone removes the white letters spelling out his father’s name on a sign made of black cloth and replaces them with different ones. G-R-O-L-M-A-N, they say. He could swear it should be a double n. Mr.? Mrs.? He’ll have to come back at three, when the Grolman service starts, to check. He looks for something or someone to tell him what to do, what to say, where to go: a sign, an instruction manual, one of those promotions girls in tight skirts and too much makeup who can show you how to get a loan or configure the latest phones in the space of two minutes. How can “how to behave at your parents’ funerals” possibly not be a compulsory class at school? An open door appears in front of him, and without thinking about it he ducks into a car that smells of leather, leather so fragrant it seems fake. They wait for a few minutes. There’s a trio of ravens deliberating next to the car in front, the one carrying the coffin. The driver of his car has protruding ears, very short hair, and a string of tiny warts across the back of his neck. He distracts himself by looking at the tinted city, now as dull and dark and muffled as on a cloudy winter’s evening. His eyelids are heavy and his body feels numb, like it’s been padded with layers of damp wool. He’s suddenly grazed by a very old memory of his father: he’s fallen asleep watching TV with his mouth wide open and is snoring at a cartoonishly high volume, as though there’s some kind of broken machine stuffed up his nose. He’d so like to fall asleep. In fact, he is beginning to sleep, to dream—a point-of-view shot of h
is hand grabbing a handle, a door leading to a garden carpeted with water, the cawing of a sort of paper toucan that flaps its wings as it passes—when the door opens and into the seat beside him, as delicately as if he were invisible or a part of his dream, slips the stranger who sneezed while carrying the coffin.