A History of Money: A Novel

by Alan Pauls

  Day is beginning to break. He can tell not because of the light, which is still too weak, and which melts as soon as it hits the hospital’s tinted windows, but by the buzz coming from the intensive care unit’s command center, which is increasing, getting more lively and more intense: the sound of a machine warming up. It’s very early in the morning, and everything blends into his father’s soft voice as he lies amid his monitors, which blink impassively while in the room next door a woman with almost no hair clutches her pillow, in the throes of death, and in the one opposite a young athlete lies snoring, the covers cast aside, his heart broken to pieces. So he has to whip up the money—a delinquent use of the phrase he’s always liked. He has to whip it up in record time, and with the utmost discretion, without him, his son, ever suspecting what’s going on. In his father’s confused delirium, the figure ranges between ten, three hundred and fifty, and fifty thousand dollars, the variations almost as capricious and extravagant as the origins his father claims for it in the course of his explanation (a very well-paid job he never had, the sale of a car he never owned, the redundancy payment he still dreams about, and, hidden among these fakes, the real one, the living inheritance given to his son by his mother’s husband); however much it is, though, his father claws it back, a little here, a little there, diverting funds from their intended destinations, helping himself to sums that don’t belong to him, delaying urgent payments. For ten days he floats between scandal and crime with his head underwater, holding his breath. If just one of his maneuvers comes to light, everything will fall apart. After a couple of days of this, there’s nothing, or almost nothing, to distinguish him from the lowlife who conned him. He’s lied, he’s promised things he won’t deliver, he’s got his hands on other people’s money. He still sleeps in his own bed, still bathes and changes his clothes, still walks the streets undisguised and sends his clients to Rio, New York, and Rome. But these privileges won’t last long. One night he inexplicably puts off going home. He sees himself on the CCTV monitor in the window of an electrical appliance store and doesn’t recognize what he sees. He lingers in a bar, and then another, and then another still, and as the hours go by the basements grow more sordid, the air fouler, and the drinks lower-grade (though it’s still always neat whiskey: anything else isn’t alcohol, it’s a bad joke), and the only thing he can feel is nausea. Shame: a kind of cold, black lava, which someone has spilled inside him and which is filling him from head to toe and rapidly turning to stone. And all this, says his father, fixing him with wide-open, shining eyes that can’t even see him any longer, all this for three hundred and fifty dollars? For a return ticket to Rio?

  He’s moved by his father’s shame, much more than by the juggling act he discovers he performed in order to return the money he’d entrusted to him, trebled in that stunningly short period. His shame, more than the ordeal of emergencies, danger, and last-gasp efforts he had to go through. He’s moved by the fact that once he’d got the money back, he kept the lengths he had to go to in order to recover it secret. But what moves him most—now that his father has closed his eyes and is once more abandoning himself to sleep, exhausted by the effort of remembering, which is as titanic an undertaking as the epic tale he lived through during those ten desperate days—is seeing him getting muddled and losing his way among numbers, precisely where he’s always been a beacon. He doesn’t know what day it is; he’s incapable of figuring out how much time separates two events; years and dates become particles blending together blindly in chaos. Temperatures, quantities, prices: anything that can be measured or counted, which has always been his element, is now a swamp in which he trips and falls and makes a fool of himself—a fool: the nightmare he has spent his whole life avoiding at any cost. Over the next few days, he often complains of having his temperature or blood samples taken five, six times a day, which happens nowhere but in his imagination, or indignantly protests that he’s only had one meal and one visitor in forty-eight hours, when the supply of food is in fact perfectly regular and his visitors so numerous that the head nurse has to step in and limit them. When he’s transferred to a normal room, having for a moment convinced everyone that this long hospital stay will soon be nothing but a bad memory, he’s amazed countless times to see actresses he had thought dead alive and kicking on the TV (an element that’s almost as innate to him as numbers), and surprised countless more times when he asks after people long buried, TV presenters or reporters whose deaths he was among the first to tell everyone about, having always been quick with breaking showbiz news. And how many times must the famous German-speaking nurse—the only one in the whole hospital, according to his father; in fact one of four or five who regularly patrol the floor, as he verifies for himself one day when he’s a little weary of the exalted picture his father ceaselessly paints of her; in any case the only one to whom his father, naturally overlooking the fact that he has delegated the task to others, contrives time and again to give money, slipping it into the pocket of her uniform when she leans over him (in his version to sing “Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf!” to him; in hers to give him a pill or change his dressing)—how many times must she beckon to him discreetly from the door to the room, so that his father won’t notice, and, seeming touched but uncomfortable, as though she’s just endured the lascivious advances of an elementary school student, return to him the few measly coins or the exorbitant sum his father has slipped her as a tip without her noticing.

  It all disappears so quickly, anyway, swallowed by the hunger of the present moment. One year later there’s nothing, not a penny left of that money, the modest capital his father saves from depreciation—recklessly or not, it doesn’t matter anymore—by entering it into the Russian roulette of financial speculation, and which he himself immediately changes into dollars, on his father’s advice. It’s devoured by the construction work, inflation, the fees charged by the architect—who slams the door on his way out the day he gets his last payment, disappointed that he hasn’t received the compensation he’d expected, and shatters the stained-glass window by the front door, his proudest addition to the house. Still, he has a house, a splendid house, his first. And when he’s struck by nostalgia and he misses having cash, misses banknotes and their comforting readiness to serve, he often consoles himself by telling himself that no, he hasn’t lost it, the money just looks different now, and it can be changed back to its previous form whenever he wants.

  Two months after they move in, when he’s been terrified by the amount of water that accumulates in the roof’s covered gutters after forty-eight hours of torrential rain, eventually soaking through the ceiling and falling into the bedroom in a cascade, directly onto the lamb’s wool slippers he puts on every morning of the year, summer and winter alike, he follows in the architect’s footsteps and disappears. He leaves the apartment and never comes back. For a while his ex-wife vegetates in her nightdress in the still uninhabited living room, in shock. Later, thinking less of the house than his toiletry bag, his clothes, his books, his music, and the piles and piles of videotapes he’s left in the top room, which he never comes back to fetch, she quickly finds a buyer, sells the house off cheaply, and gives him his half. Minus costs and extras, it’s roughly the same amount in dollars that his mother’s husband gave him a year and a half earlier. The famous wad of a hundred hundred-dollar bills. It’s magic: eighteen months obliterated at a stroke, as if nothing had ever happened. He looks at these crisp, new, identical notes, and can’t believe it; he asks himself if they’re the same ones. There’s no doubt about it: money doesn’t change. This is one of its secret, miraculous laws. Everything else does, though. Him, for a start: he’s older, more abject, more cowardly. And just like every other time he decides to be single again—returning to the damp but always welcoming darkness that he knows so well, which though it soon becomes suffocating he comes back to at intervals, hopelessly and as hungrily as an addict or an orphan—he realizes that if there’s one person he can depend on, it’s his father. And so he goes to the trav
el agency, puts the wad of dollars on his desk, and asks him to put together a tailor-made trip to Europe. And with that, the money vanishes, is translated once more: countries, cathedrals, crappy hotels, a coat for the rain. He comes back sick and fatter, with a cracked molar (a rogue falafel full of unidentified hard bits), tendonitis in his right ankle (from weeks of walking on the edge of his foot to keep the holey sole of his shoe off the rainy European sidewalks), and no clothes (his suitcase having been stranded in baggage purgatory).

  He’s pitiful. If he even had as much financial sense as a clochard. He spends a good part of his stay in Paris watching them, at first tenderly and then consumed by uncontrollable envy. His favorites: the one who installs himself with his bottle of wine and his newspapers in one of the glazed public phone booths that nobody uses anymore and whose doors it’s almost impossible to open without dislocating a shoulder; the one who patrols the block barefoot in the middle of winter, periodically giving out an alarmed or threatening shout that nobody understands; the one who sleeps on a stairway landing at the metro station, protected by her retinue of dogs. He never gives them money. It’s not that he doesn’t have any—although it’s the end of his trip and he’s treasuring his last handful of traveler’s checks as devotedly as if they were undiscovered works of art. He doesn’t know how to approach them, what to say to them, how to behave as he drops a coin in their hat or dented aluminum bowl. He doesn’t want to insult them. He watches them counting their donations and is moved to tears by the rapt care with which they examine and classify the coins, putting some in a pocket and keeping others—the ones they’ll have to use soon—in the palm of a blackened hand. And when he gets back, he’s as dirty as they are, and just as asocial and indifferent, only what in them is distance and dandyism is, in him, pure desperation.

  How could he knock on his mother’s door in this state? And what would he wear? The ridiculous tattered sheepskin coat he hasn’t taken off since he got off the plane, even though it hasn’t been in style for more than ten years and it’s the middle of summer in Buenos Aires? And besides, he wouldn’t find her even if he did go to her place. She’s on the Uruguayan coast, half on vacation, half busy with the Beast, which already has two floors (not one, as stated in the plans), four bedrooms (not two), two small sea-facing terraces (not one), and a kidney-shaped swimming pool that takes up nearly all the space originally set aside for a garden complete with a little gazebo and flower beds, a tribute to the mansion in Mar del Plata that his mother’s husband has to scale down to two or three consolatory vases full of hydrangeas and relocate to one of the numerous halls that have recently sprouted from the project. Listening to her describe its growth over the phone, he can’t tell whether his mother is talking about a house or a living organism that’s obedient only to its own rules. It’s all excitement and alarm, and the call constantly threatens to cut out. Expenses, cash, bills, and more bills: a bottomless pit, which, incidentally, he knows about all too well—but the house is splendid, a strange green cube that imposes a certain rigor on a landscape colonized by chalet kitsch. No, he tells her: he won’t go see her right now—however much he’d like to catch the architect red-handed, expose him once and for all; he’s always suspected the worst of him, and particularly since discovering that he makes his living as a professional rugby coach and only dusts off his degree certificate when his mother and her husband, who meet him at a party, confess to him that they’ve finally decided to do something with the four hillside plots they own. He would go, but he’s only just got back to Buenos Aires and he has to sort everything out, find a job of some kind. Europe’s expensive, he doesn’t have much money left—and then he’s interrupted by a volley of maternal laughter. “What’s the problem?” she says: “Give it to your father, he’ll put it to work for you!”

  It’s strange. His love life falls apart in the space of a few months, and he doesn’t shed a single tear. Until the day he goes to the bank to close the safe deposit box he used to share with his ex-wife (box two, unit three), which in fact he still shares, as demonstrated by the two matching keys he gives back and her signature below his on the record card like a miniature electrocardiogram. They go in, through two sliding, prisonlike grille doors, and when the woman who works for the bank asks him to open the metal box to confirm that it’s empty, a necessary stage in the process of giving it up, his knees suddenly go weak, and he only avoids falling over by putting a hand on the woman’s delicate shoulder while she looks at him in consternation. Sitting on the edge of the seat that’s hurriedly brought to him—one of the high, uncomfortable stools he sometimes used to sit on while depositing or withdrawing something from the box, whenever he found himself suddenly drawn to the two tiny, red, padded chests that appeared at the bottom, and opened them and sat for a while contemplating the modest, slightly childlike beauty of the two pieces of jewelry his ex-wife loved like nothing else in the world—sitting there on the stool, he starts crying openly and at length, and noisily, howling like a beaten animal, and his tears fall and hit the bottom of the empty box and shatter into a thousand microscopic shards, a thousand watery diamonds that belong to him, that in fact are him, but which will stay there forever, locked away in that little flattened coffin.

  Closing the account is even more agonizing, and he has to come back several times. There’s a missing signature, he forgets his ID, he’s just been sent some money that hasn’t been credited to the account yet. Every time he pushes the glass door open and walks into the bank, he feels his chest contract in a spasm of pain. It doesn’t surprise him the first time, when he sits opposite the account manager he’s been seeing forever and tells her that he’s decided to close the account, and after listening to the full repertoire of possible alternatives with which she tries to change his mind—all of them written in angry red in her client-retention manual, and all formulated with equally suspicious clarity and benevolence—he hears his voice faltering and finds himself confessing the only thing he promised himself he wouldn’t admit even under torture: that they’ve split up, that it doesn’t make sense to have a shared account any longer. The next visits are more difficult. And yet the bank isn’t the first crime scene he’s returned to. He’s drunk in the bars he used to meet his ex-wife in and smoked in the cold in the forbidding square where he grabbed her and kissed her against a tree, inexcusably grazing her elbows on the bark. He’s already been caught alone and with his guard down by songs they used to listen to together, friends used to seeing them together, smells or urges that only make sense, that he’d only smell or pursue if he were with her. He’s not indifferent to any of these blows, but their effect never amounts to more than an agreeable sense of déjà vu, like something you’d experience in a museum of romance; they’re more like souvenirs or a form of preservation than stones sent from the beyond to chip the glass cube in which he’s trying to catch his breath. The impersonal atmosphere of the bank, on the other hand, the fluorescent strip lighting, the dirty upholstery on the seats, and the employees’ uniforms, which always fit badly and are covered in stray threads, not to mention the condescension they’ve always treated him with (given how insignificant a client he is), the lines he’s forced to stand in, the number of times he’s called without anybody answering, and the silent, daily swindle they subject him to: all of the most insipid and abhorrent elements of this place they seldom visited together (“Everybody should go to a bank at least once in their life. To rob it,” she liked to quote, blowing the smoke from an invisible 1873 Colt Peacemaker), and which he’s come back to now to take his leave, come together and suddenly form a world, a kind of unique, poisonous, palpable atmosphere, and mere contact with it is enough to expose him, the imperturbable man, to the elements, leaving him so defenseless that the faintest evocation of his former life could kill him.

  He’s waiting in line one afternoon, probably for the last time, holding the handful of signed, sealed documents that will set him free—at least from this bank, or from this branch, or from this love that
he so underestimated. He’s brought something to read. He likes the shield of arrogant indifference a book erects between him and the world, especially when he senses a queue agitator nearby, the type of person that sighs, raises their weary eyes to the ceiling, complains, seeks complicity, wishes the most hellish punishments on the bank and its employees, and when it’s their turn stands in front of the window and slides their check or their bill forward as politely as a geisha. He’s reading, or rather indolently skating over, a page with the right corner folded down—a sign that this isn’t the first time he’s paused on it in passing—on which a young disciple whose abilities have abandoned him announces his own radical powerlessness and surrenders before his master, thanking him for everything he’s done for him, everything he’s given to him, and the truths he’s enabled him to understand, but asking him to forget him forever, when the line advances two spaces and the back of a gleaming head of straight, jet-black hair—which from his position three people back he assumes is a wig—appears in front of the window, and the employee serving it checks something on a card and then raises her eyes toward it and forms the fateful phrase he never imagined he’d hear, the only one he should have expected to hear: “Box two, unit three.” His box, with his emptiness and his tears trapped inside.