A History of Money: A Novel

by Alan Pauls

  It’s like a fever. Every week the front pages of the papers announce a new record. Four million for the general manager of the iron-and-steel company, a case the dead man knows well, partly because it concerns the corporation he works for, but more because, as he himself says, it hits very close to home, and proves what the discovery of his body at the bottom of the San Antonio River spells out in black and white: how close he is to being next. But there’s also the twenty million that the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias demand for Roggio in Córdoba, the five million for the metalworker Barella, the two million three hundred that the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo gets out of Lockwood, the million for John Thompson from Firestone, the twelve million Esso pays for Victor Samuelson after five months in captivity. And so on, up to the zenith, the blow to end all blows, the ne plus ultra of the flesh–money tariff system, which manages to contain a whole cycle of inflation within itself: the five million that the Montoneros demand when they kidnap the Born brothers in September 1975, and the forty or sixty million—reports vary—that the grain processor Bunge y Born ends up paying out in April 1976, when the executives are finally freed. He follows the dramatic twists in these operations delightedly, as enthusiastically as many of his friends—generally the ones who make fun of him or walk out on him whenever he suggests going to the Communist cinema to see an Eastern European film cycle—follow the local soccer tournament, and is never more jubilant than when the captives regain their freedom and appear, exhausted but happy, on the front pages and in TV news bulletins, surrounded by a cordon of police and cameras. It’s not their liberation that moves him, exactly. Neither is it the fact, repeated right and left in the bourgeois press, that with their freedom the prisoners regain the most vital element of life and therefore life itself, which during their captivity in those so-called people’s prisons had been reduced to sleeping, pissing, shitting, chewing on some repulsive gruel, walking in circles around tiny rooms, half-hearing their neighbors’ radios, and being interrogated. He’s not interested in the humiliating miseries of their survival. After all, don’t the companies of which these captives are the brains, the figureheads, the proud spokesmen condemn their thousands upon thousands of workers to live precisely the same life, a life that’s almost sub-life, that all but falls below the minimum threshold of life? And not for the two weeks or three months that they themselves are forced to live it, but for years, whole decades, a whole lifetime, so that for them it’s not some perverse substitute for life but life itself, the only one they have, and so the one that, pitiful and foul and inescapable as it may be, demands to be celebrated. No, what delights him, splashed as flagrantly on the newspapers’ front pages as the layers of makeup on actors’ faces in photos stuck to theater doors, is the transformation that has taken place in the captives. There they are, driving around in the latest cars, flashing tailor-made suits and Italian shoes and signing checks with gold fountain pens, when a perfectly timed commando operation uproots them from their lavish lifestyle. Days, weeks, months later, when they’re released and brought before those dazzling flashes, they’ve turned gray, their scalps have been eaten away by lice, they haven’t shaved for weeks, their skin is chafed. They’re dirty, they’ve grown thin, you can see the bones in their faces. They look as defeated as condemned men, and have the glassy-eyed, evasive air of alcoholics, the heavily medicated, victims of abuse. They wear poor-quality sports clothes, outfits improvised from the garments given to them by their captors, all of them mismatched—the shirt untucked, shoes with no laces, nicotine stains on their fingers (those that smoked before being kidnapped carry on puffing like chimneys, and those that didn’t adopt the habit with a deadly thirst); their fingernails are broken and dirty, the fingernails of people who’ve spent every day digging in the vain search for an escape. They’re disoriented, they have trouble remembering, they stammer. They look like wild animals or the mentally retarded.

  But to him—whose closest encounter with the department of kidnapping and extortion and everything that moves in its orbit (executives at monster corporations, commando units, rifles, people’s prisons, hoods, ransoms, fake military uniforms) is the figure four million, as yelled by the dead crostini lover in the grip of a wave of terror, and of course the dead crostini lover himself, whom he sees for the last time one summer lunchtime in Mar del Plata, ranting and raving about the garish orange they’ve painted the chairs at the beach club while filling his mouth with crostini, and then, from one minute to the next, in a dark suit and makeup, squeezed by the narrow walls of a coffin—to him the physical and mental deterioration, the loss of energy, and the premature ageing that abductees undergo while they’re being held, and which the newspapers feature ecstatically on their front pages, seems to have less to do with the conditions of their captivity, no matter how harsh they are, than with the monetary demand that’s imposed on them. The difference between a showy executive soon after his abduction, while he’s still in full possession of his faculties, and the same executive when he’s released days, weeks, or months later, is monetary. It’s the money he’s missing, that’s been stolen from him; it’s the cash flow—because these armed organizations are in his father’s camp: they only believe in cash—that’s been drained, taking with it all his proteins, nutrients, plasma, red blood cells: all of the basic elements whose evident depletion the police doctors note with alarm when they examine the abductees immediately after their release. He even pictures the whole process in a kind of neat mental cartoon, drawn in that already slightly outdated style—king-size Havana cigars lit with hundred-dollar bills, bulging bellies filled with glassfuls of shrimp cocktail, wristwatches shining like gold ingots—that the radical press often uses to satirize capitalists and their lackeys: the abductee, with his Montecristo still between his fingers, growing thin and fading away in a rickety old bed while a tube that’s full to bursting extracts money and blood at once from the same vein.

  Once again—as with the life insurance policy his mother makes him sign a week before she sets off for a month and a half in Europe with her second husband—the question is why four million and not two, seven, or a hundred and twenty-five thousand? Once they’ve seized their target, to use the military jargon that’s all the rage at the time, how do the highest-ranking guerrillas work out how much to demand? What criteria do they use, what estimates are they guided by, how do they rationalize this accounting anomaly? If all of these men are rich, why do they ask for seven hundred thousand for some of them and two and a half million for others? Do they ask for the amount they think the enemy can pay, or the amount they need in order to resupply themselves with weapons, communications equipment, vehicles, and hiding places, or to distribute food and clothing in slums and rural wastelands, or to plan future actions? The only thing that’s more difficult to price than a human life is art. Whenever he stumbles across one of these exorbitant figures while reading the newspaper, his first feeling is a rush of joy, a euphoric frenzy. When he thinks about poverty, and the misery that has no name, and the terrible hardships that the abductees and the companies they represent force, directly and indirectly, on ever-greater swathes of society, any sum seems too small, any amount ridiculous. There isn’t enough money in the world to repay all that! His second impulse is a little different: a slight hesitation, tinged with a certain discomfort. He reads the figure again and thinks: if at least there were some logic to it. If at least it followed the example of Godard-of-no-man’s-land, as he christens him on the afternoon he spends buried in a creaky seat at the film archive, stretching his neck as far as he can in an attempt to see over the afros of the couple in front of him; the afternoon he sees the executions in the indoor swimming pool in Alphaville for the first time, with the unhappy victims falling into the water in their suits and ties and the party of pinups in bikinis plunging in after them to drag them to the side of the pool; the afternoon he decides, with the solitary solemnity typical of decisions made at fifteen years old, that he will no longer tell the lie everyone tell
s, calling him the French Godard, the Swiss Godard, even the Swiss-French Godard, because to his mind the border between France and Switzerland is the origin of all that he admires in him, which is to say everything, from his bottle-cap glasses to the cuffs of the narrow-legged pants that are too short for him, not forgetting his women, especially his women, and the bursts of music that erupt like downpours of rain, split the imagery of his films down the middle, and then fall silent again. Godard-of-no-man’s-land, who finishes shooting Tout va bien, the anticapitalist tract he makes with Jean-Pierre Gorin, and sits down to think, as he does at the end of every film, though now more than ever—precisely because what he’s shooting now aren’t films but rather anticapitalist tracts, and who the hell is going to pay to get into a cinema to watch one of those, what possible audience could there be for this masterpiece of Kino-Pravda slapstick in which Jane Fonda and Yves Montand play hostages caught in the crossfire of a union dispute—and sets the ceiling at a hundred thousand viewers, the same hundred thousand, he thinks, who go to Père Lachaise for the burial of the militant Maoist Pierre Overney, who was killed at the gates of the Renault factory in Billancourt by the security guard Jean-Antoine Tramoni, without any Lumière brothers present to record the episode. A funeral procession seven kilometers long, a hundred thousand mourners (among them the ugliest philosopher in the world, the one who swears, though he’s lying, that he carries everything he needs in his jacket pockets), a hundred thousand cinema seats occupied in Paris.

  That’s it, that’s all he’s asking for in the moments when this vertigo strikes him: a system of economy. It doesn’t matter what it is. Something that gives some answer to the question of why four million and not two, twenty, or five hundred thousand. It’s different with bank robberies, or attacks on police stations or military bases or arms factories. But any ransom request must be based on something. Coca-Cola bottles, cars, meter lengths of steel, stocks and shares, undeclared property, offshore bank accounts, livestock, hectares of land … Something! If not, he thinks, if there’s no model, no principle of value by which to measure the ransom—no matter how demented it is—there’s no solution but to measure it in the worst thing of all: in human life. And if that’s the case, how can anyone tell whether the amount requested is a lot or very little?

  Who’s to say in the case of his mother, for the potential loss of whose life the insurance company offers a hundred thousand dollars—a hundred thousand greens, as they’ve already come to be known on the streets, ushering in the financial environmentalism that will pervade public and private conversation over the course of the next two decades—“payable,” as he manages to read in the policy before signing it, “on presentation of the corresponding death certificate”? And also, payable how? In their equivalent in pesos? In dollars? And if in dollars, at what exchange rate? The official one, which in April 1975 is set to fifteen pesos and five centavos for every dollar? Or the parallel one, which is more than double that, thirty-six pesos and forty-five centavos? And if it’s the parallel rate, from when? From July ’75, when in the so-called caves, the offices and agencies where the secret life of money is decided, they’re paying sixty-six pesos and five centavos for every dollar? From September, by which time they’re paying a hundred and ten? And if it’s in pesos, which pesos? The ones from before June 1975, or the ones from afterward, when a bus ticket has gone up by 150 percent and a liter of gas 175? Like everyone else, he finds it difficult to understand the way in which these figures suddenly skyrocket, and in which in produce stores around the city the zeros on the slightly concave violet cartons where the owners chalk up their prices start multiplying dementedly, as though describing some cosmic magnitude—light-years, for example, or expanses of geological time—and not the price of a lettuce, until from one day to the next a law stops them dead and cuts them back down to the ground, and what had cost ten thousand pesos now costs one. But it’s even more difficult for him to grasp that the multiplication of those zeros in the price put on the lives of his mother and her husband—when they’re on vacation, no less, and at their most relaxed, in the Giulia convertible they hired in Portofino—doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re worth more, that they’re more expensive, that more money will have to be paid out for them if an accident finishes them off.

  His mother. At what point does her defiant beauty start to shrivel up? With the devaluation of June ’75? Or the even more unexpected one in the middle of July, a coup de grace that wipes out the few survivors left after June? He couldn’t say, if he even ever knew. He does remember that on their return from that famous trip to Europe in high season on which—far from being killed by a plane crash, a lapse of concentration, or an attack by one of the many armed organizations ravaging the continent (particularly Italy, where they spend twelve unforgettable sunny days, and Germany, which they’re careful to avoid, although less for fear of the Baader-Meinhof group than out of a visceral rejection of all things German, starting with its obscene white-skinned sausages), these apparently being the three main accidents insurance companies take into consideration when drawing up life insurance policies—on their return from that trip on which they spent a good deal of the money that would have come to him if they hadn’t been so fortunate, he spots some strange purple parentheses near her temples and under her eyes, as though some tiny arteries had burst beneath her skin and spilled some reddish-black threads. Seeing her, he imagines a crash, a car’s brakes being slammed on as if it’s collided with something, and the frame of her glasses imprinting itself in her skin. He refrains from asking about them, partly because he hasn’t yet recovered from the shock of seeing them both alive again, and on the promised date, after spending hours imagining them suffering all manner of fatal disasters, and partly because he knows full well that if there’s one thing his mother cannot tolerate, it’s questions or comments about her physical appearance that she herself has not explicitly posed or invited. He’s known this for a long time, since the afternoon on the beach in Mar del Plata—with her lying on her side, greasy from the tanning oil with which she seems to be lacquered from head to toe, her head resting on one outstretched arm and the strap of her bathing suit halfway down the other, and him fidgeting, desperate to find some moderately comfortable position in which to while away the siesta, a terrible prison sentence under which he’s banned from swimming in the sea and indeed any physical activity—when he discovers the shiny, silvery end of a scar poking out diagonally from her bikini bottoms, and asks her about it, and his mother, without saying a word, turns onto her stomach and twists her head in the other direction, like someone in a deep sleep negotiating the waking world’s feeble attempts at sabotage and continuing coolly as they were. That’s how it happens: he becomes aware of his mother’s beauty at the very moment that he perceives a danger to it, just as we become aware of a day’s perfection only when a blackish cloud, dragging itself toward the sun with reptilian slowness, tinges the electric-blue sky with fear. And it’s not only these purple bunches crowding around her eyes. Something in her face—probably related to those marks but vaguer and harder to define—seems to have expelled his mother from the full, sovereign, arrogant world that her beauty had permitted her to inhabit: a type of icy fear, much more icy than her beauty, which has lodged in her and is making her quake.

  In fact, this is also the first time he ever sees her shaking. She’s looking for her keys in her purse, and the moment she finds them she drops them and then stands motionless for a fraction of a second, bewildered, with the guilty hand frozen and shaking very slightly in midair, as though electrified by a cluster of simultaneous shocks. Every journey toward a glass of wine becomes unsteady and precipitous; writing a check ceases to be the child’s play it once was. She can no longer answer the phone without making the receiver dance in its cradle, so she begins to turn around and hide her shaking hand behind her own body, as though protecting it from mocking eyes. One afternoon, under pressure from the super, who’s been there for hours fixing the living roo
m blinds and is now hanging about by the door, pretending to examine a loose lock in order to give her time to find a tip, she comes to him to ask for the usual quota of small change, and when she takes it—three small notes, folded in two, with a little stack of coins on top—the trembling cup her hands have formed gives a little, as though it might cave in from the weight.