A History of Money: A Novel

by Alan Pauls

  They won’t be the ones to tell, if they even know the answer. There’s nothing to make them. The only person who could do that is the dead man, who might have found out before everybody else, when he goes up to the roof of the iron-and-steel company’s Buenos Aires headquarters, boards the helicopter sitting there with its blades spinning, sits down, and signals to his assistant to give him the attaché case containing the money, only to discover that the assistant is empty-handed and now closing the helicopter door with a slam and telling the pilot to take off. They were relying on him. He’s remained loyal to the company’s interests for how many years? Twenty? How many times has he saved them from using forceful measures? How many union leaders has he shut up? He’s the ideal man for this undertaking, the only one capable of understanding its exceptional nature, a nature that calls for emergency operating procedures justified by an equally exceptional situation that’s raging out of control. Nobody ever imagined that he would oppose out of principle, or that he even had his own principles independent of the company’s. But when the time comes, he objects to all of it: the means, the end, the very idea. His loyalty remains intact, but there are certain lines he is not willing to cross. It comes as a surprise. The real problem, which there’s no fixing, is that it also comes too late. It becomes clear not only that he won’t do it, but also that he knows too much. If it comes down to a loyal soldier with moral sensitivities and a perfect plan that will pacify the whole region and that comes with the government’s blessing, which are they likely to choose?

  The money must be there. Not twelve hours after the family announces that the helicopter hasn’t arrived at its destination, a procession of vehicles a kilometer and a half long brings local police, federal agents sent from the capital, and a squad of select union thugs, in total some four thousand men in 105 vehicles (including private cars with no license plates, patrol cars, and assault cars), armed with long guns and kitted out with the accessories of intimidation that will inspire frenzy throughout the country for the next eight years—fake Ray-Bans, hoods, peaked caps, green or navy-blue berets—to Villa Constitución, the city once named the capital of the red belt of the Paraná River, to do away with a troublesome trade union group and uproot a subversive plot against the nation’s heavy industry—a task that from that moment on they’ll pursue almost unchecked, paid alternately by the chief of staff and the head of labor relations at the iron-and-steel company to the tune of a hundred and sometimes a hundred and fifty dollars each a day, and enjoying the use of the plant’s helipad for the police helicopters, the parking lots for their cars, the plant’s dining rooms for affordable lunches and dinners, the comfortable houses, originally meant for executives, for sleeping, watching television, and playing cards, and the workers’ lodgings for interrogations and torture and stockpiling the loot from their daily raids.

  The money is there, but it can’t be seen, and he soon realizes that this is almost always the case. Maybe disappearing isn’t an unpleasant accident, one of many eventualities eagerly awaiting money, but actually its very logic, a fatal tendency it has. Maybe, he thinks, that’s the main similarity between money and life—more so even than the reproductive impulse, which they also share. It’s there, but it’s always embodied in or translated into something else: clothes, magazines, food, buildings, machines, school supplies, records, cinema tickets, thugs in dark glasses who stick their forearms out the window while they cock their Czechoslovakian guns. This is why he’s glad that his father prefers not to pretend and always walks around with his pockets full of banknotes: because he likes the anachronistic challenge this represents. He trusts only what he sees, and what he sees, what circumstances dictate that his father sees—just as others before him saw grains of salt, seashells, feathers, or gold—is printed paper.

  One day not long after the afternoon when he sees his first dead person—a day on which his mother, with a certain gravity in her voice, arranges a formal meeting with him, saying she wants to “talk to him about something,” even though they live in the same house—he starts to wonder whether the compensation the crostini lover’s widow received from the iron-and-steel company—as exceptional and possibly as ample a consignment as that which should have been on board the helicopter and which in a way condemned the dead man to death, since it’s used to pay for the troops who are meanwhile turning mattresses over, stealing wedding rings, and ripping off testicles in Villa Constitución—is paid in cash. He’s wondering this at the exact moment his mother appears in the living room, freshly showered, with her head wrapped in one of the towel turbans that suit her so well, and hands him an envelope containing two typed pages, which she asks him to read and sign at the bottom.

  It takes him a little while to understand what it is he’s reading. “In the event of an accident …” “compensation …” “as a result of which …” “through the stipulated premium.” It’s the archaic, severe, alien-sounding music of technical jargon. He recognizes the characters in this drama—beneficiary, policyholder, insurer—but it’s not so easy to identify the relationships the text establishes between them, or, more importantly, its directionality, who gives what to whom, who pays and who charges, what has to happen for so-and-so to do such a thing and such-and-such another. He gets lost in the middle of sentences. Every time he stumbles over an “aforementioned” or a “the same,” he has to go back and look for the previous use, but the path is tortuous and he gets lost. The only thing he recognizes is his own name typed in capitals, alone and faltering like an explorer lost in the woods. When he’s finished scanning the text, he looks up and meets his mother’s eyes, which are wearing an expression of weary impatience. How long has she been looking at him like that, with her turban coming undone on her head at a geologically slow pace, as if it were alive? She wanted his signature, that was all. She didn’t think he would read it. But she thought wrong, or she was thinking of someone else. He reads everything. Something need only come to him in writing for his interest to be awoken, no matter whether it’s dosage guidelines for medication, a flyer given to him on the street, a furious promise of sodomy scrawled on a bathroom wall, or the series of ominous auspices—fortune and prosperity for those who pass them on; ruin, pain, and failure for those who do not—that begin to appear on notes for five thousand pesos ley, the currency of the day. Why those and not the others is a question he often asks himself. Why not the red ten thousand bill, for example, or the hundred thousand one, with its exotic sheen, on which, though all the notes in the series use the same portrait of General José de San Martín—in three-quarter left-side profile, hair and mustache completely gray and a cravat around his neck: the Liberator in his European exile, confined to a rented room in Boulogne-sur-Mer—he looks slightly older and more bitter than on the fifty-thousand-peso bill and slightly less so than on the two-hundred-thousand-peso one, as if as the denominations rose they accompanied the hero on his journey toward death. Maybe, he thinks, it’s because these are the bills in mass circulation, the ones that are used in the commonest transactions; they’re the ones that pass through the most hands, and superstitious chains need this kind of fluid circulation in order to spread.

  How old must he be the first time he gets one of those marked notes—seven or eight? He’s on his way back from a newsstand, where he’s just bought himself a little blue block of bitter Suchard chocolate, his favorite candy, and while he’s organizing his change he suddenly comes across one of the prophecies written in extravagant biblical syntax that will worry him from that moment on, whether they’re frightening or benevolent. When this note passes into your possession, your luck will change, create seven in its likeness, Judas Thaddaeus … How strange it is to read money. And how frightening that your destiny might leap out of it, just as it leaps out of your coffee grounds or the lines on the palms of your hands. He stops next to the stand, slowing the passage of new customers, and while the first piece of chocolate melts in his mouth, he reads the supplication in a very low voice, absorbing, by mere co
ntact with the note, a religious capital that he has never had nor will ever have. Asunción F., from the Los Roques archipelago, Venezuela, broke this chain and was fired from her job and two months later became sick and lost a leg and died. The fortunate lives, the stories of salvation—María Y. wrote this message on seven notes and went to Miami and today she has a house and three beautiful children, one a postmaster and one an engineer—never have any effect on him. He doesn’t even believe them. The tragic ones, on the other hand, have an intolerable realism that makes the whole device plausible. Those notes make such a marked impression on him that on the afternoon eight years later when, partly so as not to upset his mother and her husband, who are devastated by the episode, and partly to check whether what everyone says is true and death is the only thing that can soften the most passionate aversions, he leaves his school uniform on and goes to the dead crostini lover’s wake, he can’t help asking himself whether that might have been this man’s fatal mistake, a man of whom it’s not at all clear, today—and the question of what’s meant by today can be added to all the other unknowns—whether he was a hero or a traitor, fallen in the line of duty or a victim, a soldier or a double agent, a crook out for blood or a family man determined to avoid spilling any: Could it have been breaking a prayer chain that came to him on a lucky note, perhaps not so different from the one that fell into his own hands after he bought his little blue block of Suchard, that caused him to plummet to the bottom of the San Antonio River?

  But of course, isn’t he himself the perfect counterexample? How many superstitious notes have fallen into his hands since then? Fifty? A hundred? He lets them all pass him by, and he’s still healthy, sane, and completely untouched by the massive, grisly tragedies they predict. It’s not that he’s never considered joining in. He’s even got to the point of sitting at the table with a note smoothed out in front of him and a pen in his hand, thinking about how to word his supplication. His own prayer. But he never does it. At the crucial, decisive moment, the idea of entering into such hazardous circulation frightens him more than the consequences of breaking the chain. Still, the idea lingers. He knows he’ll never do it, but even so, not a day goes by that he doesn’t pay for something and get his change back in small notes—the ones that creep closer to certain extinction with every day, every hour, every second, like endangered species—and start to search them, almost in spite of himself, for some of the illiterate cursive that still manages to be menacing though it’s worn by handling; not a day goes by that he doesn’t tell himself that someday he’ll make up his mind and take the plunge, someday he’ll write his prayer and send the note bearing his mark out into circulation, he’ll throw it into the anonymous sea of money where it’ll shine, unique; and someday, too, no doubt when he least expects it, years, maybe decades later, if the country ever emerges from the black hole that’s sucking it in and condemning its cash to periodic deaths, someone will pay him or will give him some change in notes and it’ll be like finding a long-lost twin, he’ll immediately recognize his own writing, the prayer written on that note by his own hand.

  “Don’t worry. I don’t understand a word of it either,” his mother tells him, handing him a pen. “You have to sign down there, above where it says ‘Beneficiary.’ ” He hesitates for a second. He hates his signature. He’s hated it ever since the day he first realized he needed one and ended up choosing it hurriedly and without thinking, rushed by the police officer drumming his ink-stained fingers while waiting for him to sign the form to get his ID card. He has always hated it. And while he perfects it—between the first piece of crappy zoo art he decides to put his name on and his membership card for the Communist cinema—his dissatisfaction grows staggeringly complex and refined. Like an artist who invests his talent only in his worst flaws, he’s unbelievably faithful to this squiggle that he’s so ashamed of, which singles him out wherever he goes: twin lightning bolts, pointing to the right in perfect synchrony, like a pair of ice skaters caught in the middle of a routine. That’s him—but he recognizes himself in it even less than in the photos people take of him, which always seem determined, in such a childishly spiteful way, to give him some other idiot’s sickly sweet, evasive face.

  He signs nevertheless, and the moment he does so he realizes something extraordinary: he’s rich. It’s true that he realizes it in a slightly abstract way, exactly like the way we understand, with total ease and, moreover, no sense of desperation, that we belong to such an inauspicious category as, for example, that of being mortal. He’s rich means that he will get two hundred thousand dollars—a hundred thousand for her, another for him, even though he’s only his stepfather—if the jumbo jet that takes them to Europe in a week decides to plummet into the middle of the Atlantic, or if a guardrail on the road between Barcelona and Cadaqués permanently interrupts the progress of the 1975 Giulia Sprint that his mother’s husband plans to hire to explore the Mediterranean coast. The mere idea of such a catastrophe is appalling, and in the fraction of a second that he spends thinking about it, allowing it to shake him, he sweats five times more than he does while running the fifteen laps of the gym the PE teacher sentences him to for forgetting his sports kit. But death is such a general hypothesis that it grows weak and fades, and moreover is eclipsed by the hypothesis of instantaneous wealth, which is so unexpected and now so near. True: something terrible would have to happen for it to come about. But at the same time, aren’t an aerial catastrophe or a lapse of concentration on a mountain road simpler and more accessible routes to wealth, at least for him, who hasn’t yet turned fifteen, than a whole lifetime of work, a redemptive business deal, a string of lucky nights at a casino, or a stroke of genius like the one the seven golden men have in the film that teaches him everything he knows and will ever know about bank robbery? Besides, it’s precisely the boundless brutality of the idea that stops him from picturing it, from unfurling a macabre post-collision tableau full of noise, flames, twisted metal, and severed bodies. (And even so, even though the tableau is truly unimaginable, some of its ferocity manages to seep through the cracks between the fingers he’s clamped together over his eyes to avoid seeing it, as he often does at the cinema during the first shots of surgery or of syringes full of heroin piercing addicts’ veins, and the glimpses of the disaster that seep through to him always feature his mother in the middle of the accident, still pinned to her seat by her safety belt, either dying or simply spaced out from the sleeping tablet she took on takeoff so she could sleep uninterruptedly during the flight—his mother, who blinks in annoyance, as though wondering who would be so rude as to disturb her sleep like this, looks around, notices the devastation all around her, and realizes that she’s going to die, and after straightening her hair a little thinks of him, and hopes with all her heart that he will make good use of the insurance money.) And so he invests all of the imagination he withholds from the mysterious conflagration the policy describes as an accident—the only technical term he remembers, which is just as ancient as the others but also imbued with a semantic indecision of the type that could survive any age with its power to disturb intact—in the idea of being rich—rich, rich, rolling in money!—and in figuring out insurance companies’ modus operandi when they put prices on the lives of the people they insure. If he thinks about it (and he does, the moment he stamps his monstrous signature on the bottom of the policy, while his mother, abruptly coming back to life, lets the towel around her head unravel like a snake and starts to dry her hair with it), why a hundred thousand dollars and not fifty, three hundred, a million? And why the same amount for his mother, who never wakes up before eleven and stays in bed with slices of fresh cucumber on her eyes and her face smothered in creams until well past noon, as for her husband, who gets up at dawn and spends his life twisting and turning down muddy country roads surrounded by sick cows, manure, and the smell of disinfectant?

  It’s as though he’s suddenly discovered a new meaning of the phrase cost of living. Where else has he seen the species priced
in this way? Maybe in films … slaves in films about Rome, who are bought and sold in town squares for a handful of crude, poorly made coins, or for a few little gilded discs masquerading as coins, which a greedy hand shakes in a bag to make their obscenity ring out like a tambourine. And prostitutes, of course, who are at once so archaic and so auratic, although with them it’s never clear whether the price is for the prostitute herself or the package of services she offers. But that’s cinema, and he knows all too well how distrustful he must be of anything that impresses him. And besides, with both cases—the slaves under the whip, the women offering their flesh on the street—there’s always the same pathos and emotional agitation, a truly cancerous form of extortion that makes it virtually impossible to understand anything. The policy is ruthless in that regard. It doesn’t soften emotion, it destroys it. One life equals a hundred thousand dollars. Period. Where else has he seen the orders of the flesh and of money converge like this, with such impassive matter-of-factness? Suddenly, the dead man’s voice comes back to him from some distant Sunday lunch, speaking with a terrified tremor. He doesn’t see him straight away, something that happens to him often with certain memories: they come back to him lacking a component, such as images, or sounds, or smells, or any of the resonance of the experience, as though someone’s intercepted them on their way from the archive to him. But against this momentarily black canvas, he hears his voice repeating a number over and over again in a falsetto, four million, the amount that the armed organization that has kidnapped the iron-and-steel company’s general manager is demanding by way of ransom, until the picture grows clearer and the dead man appears, utterly beside himself, his whole face bloodshot, gesticulating in his shirtsleeves at a table spread with food that’s growing cold, and then taking advantage of the general stupor into which the guests have fallen to stretch out a hand and snatch a crostini. Yes, these numbers tell him something. Much more, in any case, than the phrase cost of living in its most common sense, the one everyone uses it in because the price of every single thing and good and service changes from one day to the next, though the crucial question is never answered: why the phrase applies to fluctuations in the price of milk or clothing and not in the price of a captain of the refrigeration industry or an executive at a multinational company.