A History of Money: A Novel

by Alan Pauls

  When they’re on the brink of going bust (if only they had a company that could go bust, or anything more tangible than the chaos of blind transactions, financial juggling acts, hopeless business prospects, and ever-more-meager accounts that now constitutes their respective inheritances) and sick of their money disappearing into the Beast, which swallows it as regularly as Sonia receives her remittances from the beyond, they decide that it’s time for the house to give some money back. They don’t have any grand ambitions. They’re not hoping to get rich. They just want it to pay for itself. Someone—probably a prompt hired by the former rugby coach—suggests that they convert it into a time-share complex. When they call him to discuss, the former rugby coach turned architect and now apparently mind reader, since he seems to have known all about it before he’s even picked up the phone, unfolds the plans (which he mysteriously has with him) and, in a tone of boundless enthusiasm, details a plan for remodeling. That’s what he says: remodeling. He’s planned for every eventuality; the most important thing to him is to put their minds at rest from the start. Since it’s so spacious and generously proportioned—it’s almost as though he foresaw this the first time he drew it!—nothing needs to be added to the house, not a single brick—except, of course, what’s required by the current regulations on time-share apartments: communal spaces; three, or maybe two, yes, just two more tiny little bathrooms; the extra sixteen square meters they’ll need to add to the pool; and parking spaces—crucial: who would stay all the way up there without a car?—for half a dozen vehicles. They’ll work with what they have. Divide up what’s already there. They could get half a dozen apartments out of it, and the seventh, a duplex, the best and most expensive apartment in the development, would be theirs for three weeks of the year, whichever they liked, and they wouldn’t have to pay a penny. Construction can start today, now, yesterday even, if necessary. The ex-rugby guy happens to have some people in the area ready to work—a Filipino-style bungalow complex that had to be abandoned because of a little financing hiccup. It’d be as simple as sending them to the Beast instead. When could they get the advance together so work can start?

  The project is a failure. They plan to open in December, in time for high season, with a view to quickly earning back the cost of the work. But a nasty winter, legal setbacks that are slow to work themselves out (rugby guy’s contact at town hall having been arrested for the little matter of corrupting minors), and rugby guy’s disappearance for a month and a half—which he says he spends in a foul-smelling hospital in Maldonado being treated for a string of lung collapses, but which according to the house sitters, who bump into him twice at the currency exchange in town, he spends holed up in the casino, wearing flip-flops, tinted glasses, and a floral shirt bearing the bungalow complex’s logo; wherever he is, it’s a long way from the construction work, which grinds to a halt, inspiring a furious union protest, complete with two days of peaceful occupation of the Beast and the smell of chorizo sausages in the complex’s future lobby—all combine to delay the cutting of the ribbon until the chilly month of May, when only an outlaw on the run would rejoice at the prospect of a stay in a time-share on the Uruguayan coast, and thus begins the saddest case of lost profits in the history of summer architecture.

  This phase lasts ten years—more or less the same amount of time it takes Sonia to go from adoration to weariness, until one day she turns him out onto the street with a cardboard box full of clothes (minus the items she’s bought him during their time together, all of which are in exquisite good taste, particularly that tweed jacket, and which now fit the delinquent like a glove) as well as a plastic bag containing his dream diary, his little medal, his envelope full of baby pictures, his die, and his tin frog, which is still leaping around in thin air, like a badly castrated cat investing the remaining drops of its instinct in copulating with stuffed toys like an absentminded robot; and a piece of paper torn untidily from the phone pad that lists the days and times of his visits with the delinquent, who for good or ill has ended up growing fond of him. In ten years, the Beast passes through more than one change of identity; every time, the house sitters act as figureheads (the only demand his mother and her husband successfully uphold throughout the whole process), and every time, it’s all in vain. There’s a first attempt at time-sharing, which starts off well (with 80 percent occupation) but soon dies out, having been eclipsed by the mania for all-inclusive resorts and their exclusive hedonism. After that come three years as an eco lodge; years of ugly forest-green paint and solar panels that can never make up their minds to work. Then another bid at time-sharing, a concept that’s won back some followers during an interim of economic crisis, recession, and unemployment. From then on, it’s free fall. It becomes the headquarters of a burgeoning local property development firm that goes under the same year it moves into the Beast, whose owners, a pair of incestuous cousins, have to be forcibly evicted by the police, leaving behind them a year’s unpaid rent, utilities, and local taxes. It’s the part-time headquarters (for long weekends only, since they’re perfect for marathon sessions of psychodrama, sensory perception, transcendental meditation, and yoga) of a fraudulent “holistic health clinic” that contacts them via the rugby guy, who has recently been named consul or military attaché or first secretary of the Argentine embassy to South Africa, where his old friends on the All Blacks await him eagerly. It becomes a production house and, later, a film studio, first for ad spots (the pool in that soda ad, the spiral staircase where the husband gives his wife two tickets to Punta Cana, the big living room with the chimney and the built-in bookshelves where those twin brothers wage their chocolate-cookie war), then for two or three experimental films that are never screened, in which the production house’s director ends up investing (and losing) the little money he’s earned, and which, according to the few surviving members of the cast who are prepared to talk about it, turn into huge, pointless orgies (the guy has high blood pressure and diabetes and is incurably impotent). At the end of this tunnel, the Beast is a wasteland, a Xanadu with no electricity and almost no glass in the windows, where the wind plays outlandish harmonies and animals sleep and reproduce; which even the house sitters have fled (after auctioning off the little remaining furniture, their only means of getting their outstanding pay), and which isn’t even entirely theirs. Hoping that it’ll bring in an injection of capital, they signed 40 percent of the partnership over to two associates—another architect and the owner of a tourism company—who are even less sharp than they are.

  “That’s it. It’s over,” his mother tells him one afternoon, with her coat still on and her shaking hands twisting her purse out of shape while she sits on the edge of a two-seater wicker chair that, even though it’s impertinently ugly, is the only thing that could be called furniture in the studio-pigsty he moves into after Sonia throws him out: “We’ve split up. I’m living in a hotel. And I’m out of cash.” Standing up, he can only manage to ask: What does that mean. He’s wearing the orange terry-cloth robe that sometime later he will take to the hospital his father’s staying in, having grown tired of seeing him patrol the corridors in his old jogging pants. It’s the only thing he can think to say. He skims over the news about the separation. He’s thought about it so many times that it’s as though it had already happened. He’s not even interested in his mother. It’s that phrase that interests him. What does I’m out of cash mean? The phrase alone, in and of itself, beyond the expression of awestruck stupor on the mouth that says it, and beyond the low, subdued tone of voice it’s said in, the tone of someone speaking through sleep or medication. He knew it; he’s always known it. But now it’s his mother who knows it, while he—beaming and looking as simple and radiant as the picture of an idiot—is in disbelief. It’s like something we’ve witnessed a thousand times in films or in our dreams or in other people’s life stories suddenly happening in real life; something that can’t surprise us because we already know every detail. It doesn’t surprise us: it freezes our blood. Not the event
itself, but rather the supernatural, absolutely miraculous dimensional shift that must have taken place in order for it to break through the shell surrounding the world it normally occurs in and travel to ours and turn it on its head. “ ‘What does it mean?’ ” his mother repeats, now looking at him for the first time, with a mixture of disdain and compassion. And the answer: “Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Ah, if only he could have given the same response every time he’s been asked the same question. Why hasn’t he ever been able to? Why has he always preferred to have something to say rather than nothing? Who made him the guardian of the supposed meanings of things? There’s his disabled group, for a start, whose members are always so desperate to know everything. For a few months, no doubt to fool himself that he’s not a kept man, he agrees to watch and discuss films with a group of culturally curious sexagenarians, a sort of private film society. They meet once a week, always at a different member’s house. They don’t pay much, but the payment is rhythmical, regular—the closest he’s come to a job in many years. The disabled bunch—as he calls them, inspired by the leader of the gang, a brilliant, extroverted retired accountant confined to a wheelchair by a degenerative disease—are kind and welcoming. The women crown every meeting with a big ethnic feast (hummus, falafel, goulash with spätzle), offer to fix the button dangling from his jacket, and show him their family photo albums, casually pointing out the niece or granddaughter who might suit him. The men offer him cigars and slap him confidentially on the knee before asking him who he’s planning to vote for—almost all of them started out on the left, and though they no longer belong to that past, it still dictates their gestures, behavior, reactions, and manner of speaking, like a country they once fled and have no intention of going back to, though they owe it everything and will never forget it—or offer him their varied contact lists in case he needs a loan, a discounted refrigerator, or free printing for some wedding invitations. They all trust him, invest him with an authority he doesn’t have, and swallow in wordless, reverential silence the sprawling Soviet and Czech and Hungarian films he shows them in order to ingratiate himself to—or maybe finish off forever—their legendary militant youths.

  Very soon, though, their reserve dissolves and they grow more confident, and when they come across a dense, studied image on the screen that they don’t understand but can tell is full of meaning, fit to burst with it, they finally pluck up their courage, raise a shaking hand, and ask: “What does that mean?” That’s how it begins: the disaster, the epidemic, the domino effect. What does that mean, that sled that’s lashed by snow in the glass globe that falls out of the dead man’s hand? And what does that mean, that old workboot with no laces that’s been left in that ruined anti-aircraft shelter? What about the darning the heroine devotes herself to in the final scene, when she’s surrounded by toothless, homeless wasters? And the old spinning top that never stops turning? And the two song verses the protagonist tries in vain to remember, which come back to him only at the end of the film? And that broken window, that stained petal, the clock that tells the time backward in that old bar in a Portuguese port?

  He answers, of course. He answers like the good slave he is to the only real job he’s ever had, a job nobody offered or assigned to him, which nobody hired him for and in which he never has to answer to anyone, a job he’s born with and will die with: taking responsibility for the meaning of things. But he can’t stand these people. He’d desert them, leave, slamming the door behind him so that it shook and possibly cracked the beautiful crystalware the disabled bunch keep unused in heavy, dark-wood dressers that are always threatening to collapse, which they somehow managed to bring from Europe in one piece, the same wild Europe that slaughters all of their relatives, or fills them with lead, or gases them—he’d desert them if he weren’t suddenly distracted by the new member of the group, a tall, thin man with an aquiline profile who’s as stern as an undertaker and has a vague record of militancy (he’s rumored to have provided printing machinery to the Montoneros), who spent six years in exile in Brazil, where he first heard and uttered the word reciclaje, selling out, and then came back and made a fortune, initially importing blank videotapes, then later manufacturing them in a remote Patagonian plant, until he retired and used his remaining stock of tapes to start a small distributor of art-house films called La Tierra Tiembla, whose titles—Soviet avant-garde, Italian neorealism, German expressionism, Jancsó, Wajda, Jackal of Nahueltoro—are listed in alphabetical order in a brochure the accountant slips into his pocket one night, all of them at his disposal for the group’s meetings, all he has to do is ask. The other members of the disabled bunch call him the King, an innocuous abbreviation of the King of Magnetic Tape (but the King, being modest and antimonarchical, must never find out). Whatever his powers might be, the King doesn’t contain the epidemic; quite the opposite, in fact. The what-does-it-means gain force. Maybe the element of novelty he adds to the group makes the desire to participate and to know even stronger; maybe the fact that the films they’re now watching and discussing come from within the group gives them more of a right to make themselves heard. Chaplin: what does it mean. Ashes and Diamonds: what does it mean. Stalker: what the hell does it mean! One more and he’ll explode. He really will leave this time. He’ll take the money for the last session and never see them again. But now it’s Ivan the Terrible—one of La Tierra Tiembla’s star titles, along with La tierra tiembla—and if he left before that, as he intends to, he’d miss the best thing of all. He’d miss the King of Magnetic Tape’s lesson.

  A rainy Friday. A spacious, comfortable apartment in a prosperous, though not opulent, neighborhood. Waterproof jackets and umbrellas dripping penitently in a half bathroom. Steam rises from cups of coffee and tea and smoke from the King’s Cuban cigar while he gazes at the screen wearing a broad smile of satisfaction, just like he does every time they watch a film from his list. As teacher, he stands guard near the machine, his leg trembling with impatience. He has the remote control in his hand, his finger ready to fire as soon as one of the usual hunters of meaning—the chocolatier’s pallid sister; the man who owns a printing company and never stops rubbing his nose; even the accountant, so emboldened by his colleagues that for some time now he’s been launching his what-does-it-means along with grand, accusatory gestures, as though the wheelchair were a pulpit and he a latter-day tribune—raises a hand and spits out the stupid question that he will once more, perhaps for the last time, to his shame, do everything he can to answ—but sshhh!: they’ve just crowned the young, embattled tsar. The crown has already closed around his head, he’s already been given the scepter (or rather has grabbed it from the archbishop himself with a hand that’s covered in rings, in a decidedly inelegant show of greed) as well as the globe with the cross on it, and the hairy old maniac is already singing his hymn in a voice that comes from beyond the grave, and now two members of the court enter the scene and take up position on either side of Ivan, two steps up, and a pair of servants gives them two large bowls, which they hold by their shoulders. The chorus erupts. The courtiers tip the bowls, and a rain of gold coins falls on the tsar’s head, it falls, and falls, and won’t stop falling, a long cascade of gold that skims the crown and his shoulders and spills onto the floor, and when it seems as though the gold will never stop raining down, the chocolatier’s sister lifts her soft buttocks very slightly from her mustard-colored corduroy chair, points at the television, and says, “What does it mean?” Having seen it coming, he presses PAUSE immediately, without even turning to face the television again (he knows the film by heart), and solemnly, or wearily, stands up to speak (it’s the last time, he thinks, the last!), and when he opens his eyes after emerging from the brief blackout he dips into in search of literature on coronation rituals, he sees eight faces contorted by stupor, eight stunned masks, plus one—the King’s—that’s frozen in an expression of horror, and which then suddenly turns red and breaks into a coughing fit. Out of pure momentum, he starts to speak:
“Well, on days of celebration in the tsars’ Russia, gold was …” The disabled bunch’s faces all remain exactly the same. Nobody’s listening to him, nobody even registers his existence, bewitched as they are by the monstrosity before them. At this point he turns around and sees on the screen a washed-out close-up with the enlarged grain of an amateur recording, in which two colossal cocks, as knotted as tree trunks, are charging simultaneously on a woman lying facedown. He’s not sure whether he lets go of it or it slips out of his fingers, but the remote control falls facedown on the floor, also stunned, and the tape starts rolling again. A change of scene. Shot from a meter, maybe a meter and a half away, the picture is crystal clear, as clear as the cascade of gold that pours down on the young tsar of all Russia or the Portuguese shouts of ecstasy that spark into the living room like obscene fireflies: a dark-skinned stud, standing up with his legs slightly bent, fills her ass, while the other one, a white guy, lies beneath her, ramming against her cunt and squeezing the flesh on her buttocks with his long masturbator’s fingers. Five seconds later, the Brazilian trio return whence they came, like a monster being swallowed by the lips of the cave that spat it out, and the golden coins start their interminable falling again.

  How she—her, his mother—would love for that to happen now, with all her helpless heart: for money to rain down on her. She says it just like that, with her eyes lost in the ceiling moldings as though waiting for the first notes to drop from the little crevice someone’s crudely restored with plaster, where a spider is sleeping at the bottom of its web, curled up into a ball, while the smell of its prey slips into its dreams. It takes him a while to figure out how little this desire has to do with ambition, or with the sort of lovingly cultivated toxic rancor a queen would accumulate over the course of decades of exile spent putting on a public display of indifference to news from home, and then by night clipping and saving that same news in the always slightly damp, or suffocating, or noisy privacy of her rented room. Actually, his first thought when she confesses her bankruptcy is that what she’s really confessing to is a crime, a crime of lèse-majesté like child abuse or massacring a people, and that the victim of that crime is him, her son, who’s been dispossessed of everything that’s rightly his by the simple act of confession. He might owe her his life, as they say. But she owes him money. A lot of money. For an exhausting fraction of a second full of early mornings, aspiring lawyers loaded down with files, echoing hallways, and coffee from machines, he imagines himself taking his mother on, bringing her to justice; he even hears himself delivering his dispossessed son’s plea before the judge, who’s suddenly downgraded—because true justice is impervious to the imagination—to a narrow-shouldered secretary with dandruff who stops typing to ask him, “Excess has an x and a c, doesn’t it?” But who would he call as his witnesses? His grandfather. His grandfather, repatriated for the solemn duration of the hearing by means of spiritualist subterfuge … His grandfather, of whom sometime later, when there’s still less left of the nothing she confesses to having that afternoon, his mother will tell the story with a face that’s red with fury, as though it had happened moments ago and not fifty years in the past, of the time she came home from school and, still excited after the indoctrination she had received in the subject that morning—“Saving is the foundation of fortune”—asked him for a savings book, and he, giving her a little push as though she were blocking his line of vision, told her that he had “a bank account, not little savings books.”