by Alan Pauls
How does he not break down? Most nights, he can’t sleep, and in the still half-light of dawn he feels the day nibbling at him before it’s even begun. He foresees everything that might go wrong, the things he’ll fail to get, the opportunities that will pass him by unnoticed or that he’ll be unable to take. He can see it all so clearly and in so much detail that ten minutes later his head starts to fizz. He’s sitting up in bed, rigid and covered in sweat, his mouth dry, already wondering not how he’ll get back to sleep, but how he’ll manage to poke a toe out of the sheets and put it on the ground and begin, get going. If only he were bulletproof, like his father. If only he had his agility, his flexibility, the mixture of indifference and sangfroid with which he makes his way through this minefield. If it weren’t for his father, in fact, there would be no apartment, no renovation, no architect, no gang of taciturn construction workers to summon every Friday to the forbidding pit that someday, if the architect is to be believed, will be a kitchen, where he performs the ritual of paying, the only thing he knows how to do, and the only thing that saves him from going crazy over the course of those eleven hellish months.
Because it’s to his father that he decides to entrust his money, without giving it a second thought—his father, who, to judge by the familiarity with which he moves through this world, sees little difference between the maneuvers used in financial speculation and those he’s learned from years of casino visits. Though in fact it’s not exactly his money—since he doesn’t have a single peso that’s truly his own—but a gift he receives out of the blue one day from his mother’s husband, who apparently attaches little importance to it, seeming to have no other motive than the idea of a “living inheritance” following the sale—or cashing out, in the translation his father gives on receiving the parcel of money, literally a parcel, since what he gets is the wad of notes exactly as the currency exchange office gave it to his mother’s husband and his mother’s husband to him: wrapped in brown paper, tied around its length and breadth with the same plastic string bakeries use to tie up packets of pastries—of the collection of things, fields, livestock, and farming machinery he gets after his mother’s death.
Ten thousand dollars. It’s the first cash he’s had in his life—real, noteworthy cash; cash and not wages, remuneration, or payment for services rendered—and it doesn’t come from the people from whom natural order or the law might dictate that he’d receive it—his father, his mother—but rather from someone who has no legal obligation to him, who would have been entirely within his rights to spend the whole fortune on himself—blow it, in his father’s words—and not invite him to the party. Although he does blow it nonetheless, with the unwavering help of his wife and number-one business partner, his mother—who in turn contributes her share of the proceeds from the sale of the steel factory her father leaves behind when he dies—over the course of the following ten or fifteen years: trips, bad investments, bold but ill-conceived business ventures, hesitations the country does not forgive, and, above all, the lengthy construction of the Beast (as it comes to be known less than three months after work begins, with a clairvoyance that probably merited more attention), their house-building project on the Uruguayan coast, a true coup de foudre that keeps them locked in blind, unconditional complicity, like the bond between two souls planning and executing a long-cherished crime, and which then grows out of all proportion, and out of their grasp, and finally turns against them, bleeds them dry, and destroys them.
Though it’s hard to believe, ten thousand dollars go to him. That translates to a hundred and forty thousand pesos in January, when his mother’s husband gives them to him, and nineteen million five hundred thousand in December, when the apartment in which he’ll sleep for less than two months has sucked all but the last centavo out of him. He never really recovers from the shock. The line about the living inheritance doesn’t convince him. He thinks there must be something else. If it’s some bizarre code of ethics on being a stepfather, he’d like to know about it, and maybe what its principles are. He’s wary. What if the money is just the visible part of a plan he knows nothing about, and by accepting it he’s committing to a life he doesn’t want? But his mother’s husband doesn’t give any explanations—he’s not a big talker—and, despite his worst fears, he’s more respectful of him and takes more of an interest in his affairs than ever after giving him the money. Meanwhile, his mother, whether out of objection, or jealousy, or because her husband’s decision surprised her as much as it did him, takes every opportunity to let him know that she was responsible—not directly, because they never spoke about it, but by a sort of osmosis, using her private, everyday influence, which then explains a multitude of otherwise inexplicable things—for making sure that that pile of cash, as she calls it—and from the way the phrase twists her mouth it’s obvious that this is the first time she’s used it—went to him and not a fixed-term dollar account, another property in Uruguay, a brand-new Japanese car, or the most expensive tournament pass to the tennis club in Forest Hills, including a five-star hotel and first-class flights. She tells him this when he first receives the money, naturally, but she also carries on telling him after that, eternally, so that he can never forget: when he uses it to renovate the apartment he plans to share with his wife, and later on, after the separation, when he and his ex-wife sell the newly renovated apartment and he brokenheartedly spends all the money, blows it—him, too!—on a trip to Europe that couldn’t be more depressing, and even much much later, when the little matter of the living inheritance has been totally forgotten, is off the agenda, and his mother and her husband separate after thirty-five years of marriage in the midst of calamitous financial and emotional bankruptcy, made mortal enemies by, among many other things, the way in which the construction of the Beast has eaten away at them over the almost fifteen years they’ve spent dealing with it. But he knows it’s not true. He knows that there’s only one person who’s responsible for this decision, extravagant as it is, and it’s his mother’s husband; that it’s to him and his secret reason for making this decision, be it love, generosity, an attempt at bribery, or idiocy, pure and simple, that he is and always will be indebted.
One thing that’s for certain is that as soon as he has the money in his power, he rejects outright the investment options his mother’s husband insists on offering him—livestock, premium semen pills, plots of fertile land outside the city: the very burdens he’s just happily rid himself of in favor of cold, hard cash and the freedom, in his own words, to dispose of it whenever he likes—and gives it to his father to take care of. He trusts his father. He even trusts him in the face of the scandalized skepticism he meets from his mother, who when she finds out gives her most sarcastic laugh and tells him very well, wonderful, but it would have been safer to put it on the horses at the Palermo tracks or invest it in stamps or subway tokens, and then informs him that if some disaster should occur—at which point a lush catalog of catastrophes seems to pass before his shining eyes—he won’t get any more from them.
What his father does with the money is a mystery. He doesn’t tell him, and he prefers not to ask, convinced that if he finds out, his life will be made impossible by worrying about its fate. He also develops a superstition: he thinks that if he ignores the game his money’s participating in, he can neutralize the irrational nature of that game, or magically tip it in his favor. The only thing he knows, because it’s the first thing his father tells him, is that for the five months his money’s put to work—during which time, he says, his capital will achieve the highest return the black market can offer—there will be no receipts or documentation, nothing official, signed, sealed, or dated; none of the stuff that would come with a fixed-term deposit at a bank or other financial institution to prove that the money exists and is earning dividends somewhere and belongs to him. He also knows that, strictly speaking, the fact that he gives his father a wad of a hundred new hundred-dollar bills doesn’t mean anything at all, and neither is there any meaning in the fact
that his father puts it in his inside jacket pocket just as it is, without unwrapping it or counting it, as though he had been expecting it for years. It’s not his father’s hands that he’s placing the money in, a truth his father confirms before his very eyes some twenty minutes later in a European airline’s office, when he approaches the employee at the register, a young woman in a flight attendant’s uniform with the remains of old eyeliner on her eyelids, and after the obligatory swaggering, double entendres, and jokes that make her blush—the flirting routine that he’s been watching in action since he was a child accompanying his father on his work errands in the business district every Friday, and which he now sees as his father’s second language, a basic but crucial tongue without which none of his necessary daily transactions would turn out as happily as they seem to—his father plucks the ten thousand dollars he’s just given him from his inside jacket pocket and settles an account.
Trusting him means trusting that he knows whom to trust. His father is a link in a chain, a recruiter of cash. Without him, that money—though it’s only a modest sum—would never enter the game. But the chain is long and winding, and he doesn’t know the other links, and they probably don’t and won’t ever know one another, not because it’s safer that way or out of a desire to preserve hierarchies—these being the most common explanations for the obsession with compartmentalization that underlies the logic of many secret organizations, among them the armed organization that is said to have crashed the helicopter carrying the dead crostini lover, along with the attaché case full of money and the pilot—but because they’re linked by nothing more than a number, a purely nominal entity, in this case ten thousand dollars, or to put it another way, one more among the millions of anonymous figures that set the game in motion and keep it going. This is all he needs to know about the logic of finance, a magma that will always fascinate and elude him. No, there’s no such thing as “his” money; “his mother’s husband’s money” doesn’t exist, nor “his father’s.” Money isn’t personal, it isn’t property, it doesn’t belong to anybody. Money is what’s always there before money. It’s a boundless ocean, nothing but horizon, into which millions of wads just like his flow every second, from every direction, losing their identities the moment they plunge in and surviving for months in a state of total formlessness and amnesia, every trace of their origin and even any quantity distinctions having been wiped out; in the best-case scenarios they return to being what they once were when a shore appears out of nowhere and, from it, someone remembers them and recognizes them and returns them to everyday circulation, enriched by the scars left by danger and adventure.
That’s the best-case scenario. In the worst, which is also the most frequent when the country is caught in the centrifugal force of a so-called inflationary spiral, the money is lost and disappears forever, is swallowed by the common ocean and only reminds the world of its existence when its owner—who awaits it anxiously for the agreed period and then, once that’s over, carries on waiting in vain for weeks or months more, knocking on doors that never open, dialing disconnected phone numbers, hunting down employees who are stunned by this madman they’ve never seen before—realizes that he’s lost it all, leaves his jacket folded neatly on a bench at the station, and hurls himself onto the subway tracks. More than once during those five months, after being startled by the parade of bloodbaths he reads about in the newspapers—bankruptcies, banks folding, fugitive directors of finance companies, small investors who’ve been conned rioting until the police come and disperse them—he begins to feel a little like that furious man holding his hand to his forehead like a visor and desperately searching the open sea for some trace of his money. If he isn’t that man, if he just feels like him, that’s only because his father knows how to calm him down. His father brings the subject up before he does, as a topic of conversation rather than a source of terror, talking about the cash with a mixture of nostalgia and admiration, as though remembering a much-loved and very sensible relative who at a certain age decided on a change of life and is now the center of all manner of thrilling intrigues in far-off countries, which will change them forever but from which they’ll return safe and sound and even improved, stronger, capable now of facing the monsters they once fled. And having brought it up unbidden, he abandons it again just as easily, filing it away and returning to the routine they’ve shared for twenty years: a while at the office, then lunch at the fake Italian restaurant at Esmerelda and Córdoba, coffee in a bar at Florida and Paraguay, his rounds of airlines, agencies, and currency exchanges, a visit to the bookshop in the basement of the Jardín mall, goodbyes in Plaza San Martín.
Seeing him going about his business so naturally, his fears dissolve. He figures none of this could be happening if his money were in danger. At least one habit would have to change. His father wouldn’t eat as quickly as he always does, pitting himself against an invisible opponent. He wouldn’t clean his plate with little pieces of bread and then throw them in his mouth. He wouldn’t joke about soccer with the maître d’. He wouldn’t leave his customary exorbitant tips. He wouldn’t stop to look at shoes in a shop window. He wouldn’t discuss the Finance Ministry’s announcements in the distant, sarcastic tone of someone who knows they don’t apply to him, as though he came from a foreign country. Somehow this energetic, slightly restless normality soothes him. No matter what happens, things always find a way to run their own course. And so he ends up forgetting about the money, and when he’s reminded of it by something he wants or suddenly realizes he needs, something that costs more than he carries in his pocket or keeps in the old shoebox in his wardrobe, the blow has a visible effect on him, and he feels a stab of frustration, but his discomfort eases as soon as he sees this missing money for what it is: a homeland he’s had to leave for reasons of force majeure, though he remains committed to it and it awaits him with open arms, more opulent than ever.
This lasts for five months. Until one day while getting out of a taxi his mother realizes that, as usual, she doesn’t have any small change—a phrase she uses only when she’s the one who doesn’t have it—and asks him to pay, and then has a sudden moment of illumination right there on the sidewalk and asks him if he shouldn’t be getting his money back right around now. At the time, he lets himself be drawn in by the mockery poisoning his mother’s tone, and then ignores it in order to take his mind off his fear, just like he does every time something shocks him. But later, when they’ve said their goodbyes and his mother turns and begins to walk away slowly, with her already slightly tired gait, her arms hanging almost still by her sides, and her head held low, as soon as he’s safely out of her sight, the first thing he does is open his diary and flick as fast as his anxious fingers will go through days already lived, bills paid, and bar napkins full of to-do lists that he emptily promises himself he’ll transfer to the diary, until finally he’s looking at the page for that day and at the crucial hour ringed with a fluorescent circle and surrounded by large exclamation marks, like an inspired chess combination—and he discovers that his mother is right. Today’s the day. How, why she’s so mindful of the date he’s supposed to get his money back, even though he thought he’d taken great care to keep this information from her, having foreseen the toxic use she could make of it, he doesn’t know. His mother always seems to be bragging that she knows everything about his father and him, the double act that comes together as rapidly as the marriage breaks down (which is to say very rapidly), and in particular that she knows all about the things they hide from her, that she knows about them before they’ve even happened, and though she often gets it wrong and ends up putting two and two together and getting five, and taking as given things that exist only in her own imagination, he’s not insensible to the conviction with which she lets him know that she knows; it always makes him founder and doubt himself, makes him double- and triple-check things he was sure of, things he’d confirmed seconds before meeting her. This is probably the only thing she has left of the unfortunate, fleeting kin
gdom the three of them once shared, and she carries it everywhere with her: a certain bent for suspicion; the desire to know what the enemy is plotting.
