A History of Money: A Novel

by Alan Pauls

  Ten days later, he has the money again—in cash. He doesn’t get it back at once, all together, as he had expected, but rather bit by bit, in four installments, first two small ones, wrapped in newspaper, and then two larger ones in brown paper bags, some of it in heaps of Argentine money, some of it in dollars, the smallest and most wrinkled notes mixed with larger, newer ones, among them some so new and so crisp that he wonders whether he’s being given freshly counterfeited money. They’re rapid transactions, with no preamble nor any particular show of emotion, which his father carries out as if he doesn’t want to leave any trace of them, briskly and in all the normal settings: the office; a bar full of cooking smells and staff with dandruff gesticulating in their shirtsleeves; even the street door to his building, where his father briefly stops the taxi he’s passing in, hands him the final packet of cash through the window, without getting out, and goes on his way, giving him no time to react, not even to say thank you. Broken up like this, the handover leaves a vaguely disappointing taste in his mouth. Which isn’t so bad, after all that’s happened. As is often the case with trivial but unexpected feelings, which can eclipse much stronger but more predictable ones simply because they come as a surprise, the disappointment dulls and dispels his anxiety, which is what he should reasonably have felt when his father originally told him that the return of his money would be staggered. But the urgent, scatterbrained, sloppy nature of the collection also blunts his relief at having recovered the money and, more importantly, the happiness he should feel at the miracle of its multiplication. He has almost three times what he started with, much more than anyone else could or does make by putting the same initial amount in a bank at the same time, while he gets his fingers dirty counting his small fortune. It’s a pity that the miracle withers a little when he spreads the cash out on the table and contemplates an assortment of piles, sizes, colors, currencies, and textures that don’t go together and will never—and this is what makes him saddest—have the unity, the wholeness of the original bundle of dollars, scrawny as it was.

  He’d like to thank him, at least. He seeks him out in the next few days, asks him to lunch, to see a film, to meet him for a drink. He could swear that his father is avoiding him. The few times he does see him, always at the office, the only place he can be sure of ambushing him, and always hurriedly, because every single time, his father has to get to a meeting or has people waiting for him, he takes advantage of the few minutes he has and talks. At the mere mention of the money, his father busies himself with something else—a phone ringing in a nearby office; the mess of bar napkins covered in scrawling, coffee receipts with notes on the back, and phone numbers written on bits of ripped newspaper that he calls my diary—or frowns and even seems to get annoyed, like those very modest or very vain people who love recognition when it takes them by surprise, but who get prickly about praise for talents they already know they have.

  He’ll have to wait years to find out the truth behind his father’s behavior: until his father is in the last stage of life—last in the strictest sense, meaning the stage of hospitalization, because as soon as he’s admitted to the hospital and he sees the retinue of doctors and nurses crowding around him—him, the man who’s set foot in a medical practice only twice in seventy-two years, and both times for the most extraneous reasons, to collect payment for some tickets to Cancún the first time and a poker debt the second—he knows there’s no going back, that he’ll only be exiting this stage feetfirst. Though it’s true that the explanation comes from his father, out of his mouth, one night when it’s his turn to sit beside the bed, it’s not exactly his father who confesses. It’s not the same man who comes to the hospital of his own accord a week earlier, in any case. That man is very tired and bathed in sweat. His thighs are cramping up with a pain like nothing he’s ever felt before, and his blood pressure’s through the roof, but he’s also sufficiently with it to stop the taxi without interrupting the sermon on soccer and politics with which he’s been persecuting the driver, a combination he excels in and to which his blood pressure is particularly sensitive. His reaction to the dizziness that overcomes him in the street—the latest in a series of episodes he’s been keeping secret—proves that he’s still in his right mind: he goes straight to the hospital—an absolutely astonishing decision for him, given the disdain he’s always so famously professed for the medical world, and the equally famous good health, or pride, that has enabled him to manage without his son—and after arriving and being confined to a wheelchair that he initially rejects but is soon thrilled by, like a bad-tempered child who’s figured out how to turn some stupid adult treasure against its owners, he objects to every method by which the doctors propose to stabilize him, treating them as though they’re completely useless, fleeing them in his chair, and launching himself at full speed down the ramps in the emergency room. Between the wild, irascible man who checks in to that citadel of medicine of his own will and drives its residents crazy, and the glassy-eyed ghost who suddenly starts remembering everything aloud in the intensive care unit where he spends almost two weeks (how he was never sure whether he’d be able to get the money back; how many times during those ten days he nearly called him to confess that he had lost it all; how many he felt he couldn’t face it and considered disappearing off the face of the earth), there come an angioplasty to which he submits with contagious and belligerent good cheer, the disastrous coronary symptoms that flare up as a result of the angioplasty, and almost five hours of open-heart surgery, five hours of brutal butchery from which it’s not clear to anybody how he will recover, if he’s lucky enough to, and from which he does ultimately recover a minimal kind of life, stuffed full of tubes and with his chest slit from throat to diaphragm and wrapped in a corset made of bandages that are soon soaked with blood.

  He’s the one keeping his father company on the night three or four days after the operation when a nurse announces with a smile that stretches from ear to ear that they’ve taken the ventilator away to see if he can manage on his own. He came to the hospital just to come, because there’s nothing else he can do, not because he thought it would be useful. He’s only allowed in the room intermittently, for half an hour out of every two. He spends the rest of the time in the waiting area, dozing and reading in its bad light, and is flooded with surprise and envy when he sees the camping kit—thermos, blankets, a little plastic cooler, board games, a nightstand—his neighbors unpack for their vigil, proving themselves to be either less shortsighted or more experienced than him in the matter of hospitalization. All he wants is to be in the room. As soon as a nurse reminds him of visiting hours and he leaves it for the dull light of the waiting area, he begins to yearn for the starry, throbbing darkness in which his father lies sleeping, as though it were some strange kind of paradise, a chilly, modern kingdom full of mechanical emotion and electronic diversions. Then an hour and a half later, when they let him in again, he feels nothing but desolation: sadness; helplessness; an awful, bloodsucking boredom. There’s nothing he can do. He’d like to touch his father, but he doesn’t know where; it’s impossible to reach his body through all the tubes, catheters, and wires. And he might not touch him even if he did know. He’s terrified that any gesture, let alone a loving one, could irreversibly alter the extremely delicate equilibrium that’s keeping him alive. There aren’t even any chairs in intensive care—they’ve thought of everything that might keep visitors away—so he dozes standing up, clutching the book he won’t read because there isn’t enough light.

  At one point he thinks he hears a noise coming from his father, the tail end of a human phrase, and opens his eyes. Just as it occurs to him that he might have heard it in his sleep, coming from one of the spruce, smiling gravediggers he’s been talking to lately in his dreams, he sees his father half open his mouth and move his head on the pillow; it’s a slow movement, the sort you’d expect from a body that has forgotten its own existence, but perceptible nonetheless. He draws near and leans toward him. Bad breath, drugs, sweat
, disinfectant: it’s an effort to withstand the smell emanating from his body. He sees him struggle to swallow and soaks a patch of gauze in the glass of water next to the bed, then wets his lips. His father takes a deep breath that seems almost like a show of irritation and then sinks back into blackness. He has never seen him so pale. The skin on his face looks so thin you could tear it with a fingernail. A bruise has stained one side of his neck purple like a secret kiss. He moves a little farther away, just far enough to see his whole face, and when he’s regained his focus he jumps another two steps backward, stunned. His father has opened his eyes and is looking at him. For a moment he doesn’t know what to think. Has he come to? Is he dying? Then he seems to take up that lost sentence again, and the dark, moldy tongue he spoke it in; he lets out a long, dragging sound, a sort of voiced sigh that weaves through the air and then abruptly turns into a word halfway through, as though impelled by some sudden necessity, which then becomes two clear words that come together, and he speaks.

  He seems to be worrying about something imminent, a danger so close and apparently so serious that it’s managed to do what drugs and visitors couldn’t: repatriate him after a ninety-six-hour coma, a limbo that he later—sometime during the brief interval in which his father seems to convince everybody, including the doctors, that he’ll pull through—remembers with great joy, the same way many of his father’s Jewish clients remember the stay at the Király thermal baths that he inserts into their itineraries without telling them, like a secret courtesy. He’s very agitated. He lifts a hand and points to one side with his index finger, signaling a vague area between the terry-cloth slippers he still refuses to use and a three-legged IV stand. He asks, demands to be given his pants. He demands just like that, in general, not aiming the request at him, his son, who never has been nor ever will be as thankful for anything as for the gift of hearing his voice again after the four days he’s been in a coma; it’s not aimed at him, though he’s fixed his gaze on him and is now separated from him by less than twenty centimeters, but at nobody, or maybe at the same unknown, hazy interlocutor he was speaking to a few minutes earlier, while he was asleep. He needs his pants, the money in the pocket of his pants, right now. He has to tip the morning nurse before she leaves. Because if he waits, who knows what the others will do with the cash? It’s no use telling him that it’s two in the morning, that the morning nurse won’t be there for five hours, that there’s no rush. He isn’t listening. He tilts his head very slightly to one side with a cheerful distrust, like a dog whose master is attempting to speak its language, but nothing he hears seems to penetrate the stupor that’s shielding him. Now, he wants his pants now, before the shift ends and the nurse leaves. The only nurse who speaks German. There, in the pocket. He’s asking him this one favor: to get the cash from his pants pocket. His son changes tack. Maybe playing along will work better than contradicting him. How much does he want to give her? His father hesitates. He frowns, as though calculating, and while they waver, his eyes recover a little glimmer of humanity. Twenty thousand pesos? When he hears this, he laughs. The eight days his father has spent in the hospital probably cost the same amount. Twenty thousand? he repeats, you think so? His father looks at him again. I don’t know, he says, thirty thousand? The nurse speaks perfect German. She’s pretty, too, and she wears real shoes, not those flat pieces of junk nurses usually drag around. And she knows all the songs by heart: “Hans hat Hosen an,” “Laterne, Laterne,” “O Tannenbaum,” “Der Kuckuck und der Esel.” There, in my pants, he says, and points blindly again, and then he suddenly sticks an elbow into the bed and sits halfway up, sweeping the edges of the room with a keen, suspicious look. He leaps toward him to stop him, and while he’s there he pushes the button hanging from the bed. He’s so weak that his catheter and the wires connecting him to the heart monitor are enough to restrain him. He looks at himself for the first time, at his arms, and then his chest, and then he starts to follow the course of the tube emerging from his wrist but gives up after a few seconds, exhausted. All the evidence is there; none of it is powerful enough to prevail and break through to his consciousness. He sweeps the room again, looking confused. He can’t see his pants. He’s asking where his pants are. Blue corduroy; thick, blue corduroy. They were there, on the chair, before dinner arrived. Someone must have stolen them. He strokes his father’s face, smooths the wild clumps of hair that spring up when he lifts his head from the pillow. They must have taken them away to clean them, he tells him, and offers to leave the money for the nurse himself. His father looks at him in surprise, as though he’s not convinced but doesn’t think the idea is so absurd as to be ruled out immediately. He takes some cash out of his pocket and shows it to his father. Tell me how much and I’ll give it to her, he says. His father points to a few notes with his chin. Which, he asks him. The blue ones, says his father. How many, he says. Two, says his father: two blues. And then he seems to have second thoughts, and says, is that too much? His son smiles again.

  It’s less than the price of one of the two packets of cigarettes his father has smoked every day since he was thirteen years old, and twice what the nurse who responds to the bell pays for the packet of peppermint gum she buys every time she works overnight in intensive care, a well-chewed stick of which is now releasing its last languid reserves of flavor into her mouth. No, it’s not dementia, it’s disorientation, says the nurse, and, charged with this unexpected technical nuance, the word feels new and gleams as though he were hearing it for the first time. It’s common in surgical patients who spend a long time isolated in intensive care, without the vital contact with the world—day, night, other people, the TV news—that makes it through, albeit in regulated form, to normal hospital rooms. And it’s while he’s in this trance, a sort of benign, candid dizziness that makes him seem like a drunk child, which can devastate and bring tears of laughter at the same time and last for hours unbroken by anyone or anything, dragging its shipwrecked subject to extremes of delirium—it’s while he’s in this state that his father is suddenly swept along by the topic of conversation (money: the four, five, twenty, or thirty thousand pesos he must give to the morning nurse, the only one in this pseudo-German hospital with whom he can sing German children’s songs, which besides the language rotting inside him because he never speaks it to anyone any longer is the only treasure he has left of the Germany he left behind sixty-eight years earlier) and sets about digging up those ten hellish days.

  It’s hard to follow him. He grasps the basics: that the casualness, almost indifference with which his father told him that the money would be returned to him in stages was nothing but a bluff, a cover sustained only by an enormous effort in order to buy himself time to search for and, if he was lucky, find the pair of lowlifes in charge of the “financial operation” in which the money had supposedly ended up, twin brothers who don’t answer the phone for days, or go to the extravagant offices they only use for occasional cups of coffee, checking the mail, and admiring the calves of the numerous secretaries who’ll soon end up on the street. The matter gets more complicated with every day, every hour, every minute that passes, because that’s how things are in the demented economy of the day: forever dividing, getting smaller and smaller until the whole weight of events is concentrated on a single point—the present—which might not withstand the pressure. He hears rumors that the twins are in Uruguay, maybe in prison, or buying land, or competing together for all they’re worth in an offshore regatta; in any case very far, geographically but moreover morally, from assuming any responsibility to the investors and savers they’ve left behind in Buenos Aires, who spring up like fungus and can be found uselessly standing guard, squeezing homemade receipts signed by some flunky in their fists, in the bars near the office, the parking lot where the twins have left their latest-model cars, and the country houses (also twin) where they live—or used to live before the embezzlement—with their blond wives, who are tan even in the middle of winter from sun reflected on snow. It’s difficult to figu
re out the order of events from his father’s account—if account is the right word for the coils of memory he twines and untwines in the darkness of the intensive care unit, his eyes like saucers, like the eyes of someone who’s sleepwalking or has been possessed or hypnotized; the dry, glassy eyes associated with psychotropic drugs, which always seem to be lit up from the inside—but after a while it seems that actually only one of the pair, the real brains behind the scam, has been seen in Montevideo. The other one—who’s apparently as much a victim as the victims themselves, if not more so, because to the financial blow he suffers must be added the emotional damage that can be caused only by the betrayal of one’s own flesh and blood—stayed in Buenos Aires, in hiding, hoping to buy himself some time and breathe a little, but ultimately intending to show his face and deal with his contractual obligations. His father exhausts his means. He leaves no contact untried, knocks on every door, spends hours by the phone. In his father’s version, the characters get confused; names, nicknames, and jobs are switched and rarely return to their original positions: suddenly the fugitive twin weathering the storm in his cousin’s garage has the features, bushy mustache, and vices of a former work contact of his father’s, a man who gets arrested for having a secret phone line; and the methods his father uses to gather the money he owes sound too much like his schemes for doing the only thing he’s trained to do, clear up the mess, a prime example being the case of the pharmaceutical company that hires him to arrange an end-of-year trip as a reward for its staff and then, pleading financial difficulties, pays him six months late for the almost ninety airfares for which his father had to pay the airline strictly on time. What’s clear, in any case, is that his father rolls up his sleeves, uses some contacts he isn’t proud to have, gives up certain rights in exchange for information, and finally finds the twin; and once he gets to the damp, poorly lit garage where he’s set up a sort of parody of an office using a table and some plastic garden chairs and an old Bakelite phone, he hears the twin himself, in a tank top and with several days’ worth of stubble, red eyelids, and the brutishness that comes from being locked away—looking just like the hostages of those armed organizations who regained their freedom fifteen years earlier—tell him the very thing he’s feared since the beginning: that he doesn’t have the money, that he doesn’t know when he will have it, that he can’t even promise he’ll ever have it.