A History of Money: A Novel

by Alan Pauls

  And so when he goes to his father’s apartment, it’s not really to clean, as he tells the doorman when he bumps into him in the lobby, nor to get his father’s few possessions in order, as he tells his mother, nor to fill the two industrial-size trash bags he takes with him with all the things that need to be thrown out, but rather to find proof that the debt existed. The apartment is filthy. He can tell it is as soon as he gets inside and starts groping his way through the darkness, feeling a little uneasy—he’s only now realizing how foreign this space is to him, how infrequently he came here to visit his father—and smelling the rancid perfume of confinement and damp wood—ah, his father’s passion for wood, which was almost as fervent as his feelings about paper—as well as a harsh odor like old wool that gets inside his nose and tickles it. He lifts the blind halfway, until something blocks it and the cord suddenly stops dead in his hands: yellowish walls, a whole baseboard of accumulated grime, the floors stained and carpeted with dust. A cockroach scurries away, its body slightly tilted. He crushes it under his foot and a galaxy of corpuscles shatters in the air and dances in the ray of sunlight shining through the window. His father is dead and the sun is shining through the window.

  He opens the fridge, finds the half lemon and the limp lettuce sitting alone on the cracked glass shelf, as orphaned as he is, and looking at him with an air of irritation that suggests he’s just interrupted an intimate scene, and closes it without touching them. He will never touch them, not even when the time comes to get rid of the fridge, when a neighbor buys it for spare change, along with some old speakers, an adjustable nightstand, a weighing scale, a Continental typewriter, and an unused nutcracker with the price sticker still on it—a lot the neighbor puts together himself after inspecting the apartment in a professional sort of way and carries away on his back as casually as if it were a bag of feathers. If he could put a date on this filth, he thinks, he could also date the moment his father started to die. It’s not when he’s taken into hospital; not the diagnoses or the operations or the secret diet of whiskey and pretzels he shares with his poker rival at the hospital on a few of his nights there. It happens while he’s still in his apartment, in possession of all his faculties, and surrounded by the minimal cast of objects now surrounding him—things he didn’t even want or choose, things that had belonged to his mother, for example, which he never had the courage to throw out and so dragged from one year and one apartment to the next, and which survived it all and ended up prevailing over him—the moment he looks around with his hands on his hips and decides he won’t clean, that it’s not worth it. And falls into his TV chair. That’s when his father starts to die.

  Everything is dirty but in its place. Dust and order are only incongruous in living things. They always come hand in hand in those approaching death. Records in alphabetical order by artist, the same as the books. The first hangers for coats, the next for jackets, the last for pants, never mind that every garment has the coarse texture of objects that nobody has touched for years—a covering of filth that sticks to the fingertips like wax. He finds his notebooks on the coffee table, at an angle to the corner. There’s a trail of semicircles and parentheses printed on the wood leading up to them, marks left by wet glasses and cups, the universal symbols of neglect. He opens the first one excitedly, hoping to find his father’s handwriting, the strange mixture of upper and lower cases with random serifs that look like loose threads, always leaning to the right and growing gradually smaller, as though something were crushing his hand as it moved—handwriting that he’s never liked but which he nevertheless copied for a long time, even though his teachers and his girlfriends, who were apparently incapable of deciphering his essays or making out the names and numbers on the notepads next to the phone, reproached him for it on countless occasions.

  He finds figures. Or rather they leap into view, insects hungry for a three-dimensional life they might have been dreaming of for years. Series, strings, whole columns of numbers that start on the first line, aligned to the left, and carry on line after line to the bottom of the page, then go up and start at the top again, like echoes of the column just completed, then carry on again to the bottom of the page and start again on the first line, to the right of the column they’ve just finished, and so on for pages and pages. Every now and then there’s a variation that turns the page into a kind of extraordinary oasis, a vision of graphic freshness: shorter columns, with accompanying words that allow him to decipher them—words like “travel costs” and “extras,” like “income” and “expenditure,” words like “Enrique,” “electricity,” “tips.” From time to time there’s a loose sheet slotted in, a letter on letterhead, folded diary pages, Post-its, bar napkins, flyers from the street, discoveries that gleam with promise for a moment, and which he pounces on excitedly before putting them back again, sadly, as soon as he realizes that they haven’t escaped the awful reach of these accounts: expenses from a weekend in Tigre written on the back of a flyer from a riverside grill, an inventory of outstanding payments on an envelope from a large hotel, a list of commissions earned over the course of a month on the rectangular card of a bookmark. From the first page to the last, from the first notebook to the last—there are seven, all the same brand and bought in the same place, an old bookshop near the courthouses—the figures grow smaller and more pinched, filling the empty passages that had made it possible to distinguish them, determined to colonize every last bit of space with their swarming. Finally, in the last notebook, the only spiral-bound one, the columns twist and brush against one another, the numbers are illegible, the pages skies full of backlit locusts.

  Sitting there on the arm of the TV chair, leaning over those seven open notebooks, he cries all the tears he didn’t cry at the hospital, or at the funeral, or on the afternoon almost a week later when he suddenly gives a worried start in his kitchen while making coffee, as though remembering something important that slipped his mind too long ago, and thinks, “I have to call my father!”—and in that same moment the evidence that he’s dead forces itself upon him. The apartment is so quiet that he can hear every tear hitting the paper. The numbers shatter and blur into blackish, reddish, violet-tinted streaks that tremble and ripple gently for as long as it takes the paper to absorb them, and are then still. He remembers a scene from a film about the life of Chopin: the gradual, delicate dripping of real pulmonary blood that splatters the keys while he passionately attacks them. For a moment he marvels once more at his father’s pride and belligerent boastfulness in proclaiming that he’s never had a bank account and never used checks, that he flat-out rejects every credit card offer he receives, even the most advantageous ones—the worst of all, he says, faithful as ever to the principle that evil is never as ruthless as when it wears a benevolent face. He doesn’t want to be controlled by money. He doesn’t want to see his life reduced every month to a summary drawn up by some poor bank worker with a dirty collar and pants coming undone at the cuffs, one of the walking corpses dragging their feet that his father teaches him to recognize on the street while he’s still a boy and urges him to avoid. He doesn’t want other people to know who he is because they know what he buys, what he spends his money on, how much he pays for the things he wants; much less does he want them to tell him what they know. But all things considered, those seven notebooks are precisely the thing he detests, only written by his own hand: his autobiography in accounts. In a certain sense, this is his life’s work: the only testimony he sees fit to leave of himself, the document that shows where he invested his resolve, his faith, his scrupulousness, his concentration—all the valuable powers he would so often lament not having. With a little attention and an ounce of common sense, anyone looking at these books could reconstruct everything his father is and does during the last years of his life, all the things that nobody who was there with him could ever reconstruct from what they saw or witnessed by his side. Anyone—but not him; he knows he won’t even take the time to clear a path through this jungle and track down the onl
y thing he cares about: how much Beimar originally owed. And that same afternoon, after trying on two tweed jackets, attempting to wash away the layer of mildew and rust in the toilet with a long stream of piss, and definitively breaking the blind, he drops the notebooks in the bottom of a trash bag. It’s not the striving for an impossible cleanliness—the cleanliness of dying without a single peso but with the books balanced—that makes him cry. It’s not the candor with which his father ends up denying himself the very freedom he accuses the world of trying to take from him. He cries because he’s just caught him in private, in this fragile, obscene intimacy, and seen him doing uninhibitedly, with no concern for modesty, exactly as he really wants to, the only thing he does because he can’t help it, because he would die if he didn’t. He cries because he’s never seen him this way before, naked, surrendered to his cause, the cause of numbers; and he cries for the absurd, solemn fervor of it, and for the stubborn, comfortless solitude to which it always condemned him.

  And then his mother succumbs to a delirium of requests. She doesn’t just need help buying herself a heater or a new coat at the beginning of winter any longer, or having new carpet put in the little apartment she moves into, or finally replacing the contraption on which she struggles to complete her translations, a slow, purring machine that frequently quakes with distant digestive crunching, which she inherited from the stereotypical rich friend who suffers an attack of generosity three times a year, for no other reason than that she wants a change of scenery, and begins to give things away left and right, using members of her court to liberate herself of all the trash cluttering her palace: furniture, lamps, works of art, clothes, electrical appliances she has no idea how to use and has never even taken out of their boxes.

  Sometimes late at night—very late, at the hour when the only things that happen unexpectedly are mistakes and tragedies—the phone starts to howl, and he answers it still half asleep, thinking that if he can find his glasses on the nightstand, where he thinks he left them, and put them on, even if they’re upside down, he’ll be able to hear better, to understand what he hears better, or pretend to for this interlocutor who can’t see him, and then his mother’s voice spills a few drops of desperate lucidity into the labyrinth of his ear. She doesn’t shout, she’s not forceful, everything she says is very measured, but her voice comes to him from another hemisphere, a strange, polar world, or the desert, somewhere where it’s always daytime and everybody’s always awake. It’s two o’clock. While going through a pile of bills she thought she’d already paid, she’s come across a warning from the electric company: they’re threatening to cut her off if she doesn’t pay her balance tomorrow. At three thirty, the vacuum’s swallowed an electrical adapter, or a keychain, or a ball of yarn, and is now snoring and coughing and blowing instead of sucking. Where will she find the money to get it fixed, since she hadn’t planned for this? At six, she’s just discovered, to her horror, a warning of extra costs in fine print on her monthly maintenance breakdown from her building’s management.

  It’s the wonderful world of contingency, simultaneously varied and monotonous, that bursts in with each of these nocturnal cries for help. His mother, the only undeniably necessary presence in his life, a fundamental, originating, indisputable element, is now a realm of accident and uncertainty that ruins every plan. Sometimes, when he’s resigned himself to suffering these early-morning attacks, he thinks that perhaps he’d like them more if they took a different form. He misses—as though he’s ever actually experienced these things—a certain turmoil, the drama of hearing someone shout and their voice break, the operatic kind of desperation that can shift huge bodies of air around immense spaces with its pompous gestures, all key elements of an emotional realism that he doesn’t necessarily believe in—he is his mother’s son, after all—but which he wants to think would compensate, at least in strictly theatrical terms, for his being washed up onto the brittle shore of wakefulness once he hangs up the phone, after promising to get the money to her first thing in the morning. But his mother hates, has always hated, theater’s bombast, its eruptions, its sentimentalism, its sense of exaggeration. She asks, and she really is desperate, but the rhetorical model for her desperation isn’t a scene of catastrophe—which though they’re striking and sultry are also vulgar and always a bit humiliating—but rather rocky insomnia, which has everything she needs in order to be as dignified as a deposed queen: calm, dryness, tension, and the impression—which only seasoned connoisseurs can really appreciate—that everything is fine, in its place, in order, where it should be—apart from one thing, just one, something that’s not at all obvious—an eyelid that’s been fluttering for hours, her trembling hands, the blinding clarity of small or distant objects—but that will end up blowing everything to pieces.

  One day it’s a root canal, the next the annual fee on her credit card, the next she’s a little overdrawn on her savings account. By the time he chooses to notice what’s going on, he’s become a crucial figure, a lifesaver, a financial ambulance who shows up, or should show up, with fresh money in his pocket as soon as he receives the alert. He’s become a drug to his mother. Sometimes he travels halfway across the city to pay for a cheap breakfast that’s been holding her up in a shabby bar, and the face she greets him with when he gets there sends a shiver down his spine. She’s always at the worst table in the place, the one closest to the restroom, in a draft, or threatened by the corner of a murderous window, looking very serious and concentrating very hard on something that only she can see or hear or feel, and she always has her coat on and her hands clamped around her bag, as though she thinks she’s about to be robbed. She says horrible things about the waiters, complains about the volume of the TV, and pushes her half-eaten meal away with a gesture of disgust, while a terrible volatility brews around her mouth, disrupting the thread of grooves that has accumulated above her upper lip over the years.

  She never calls to ask him to pay. She wants the money herself. She wants the exact amount she needs, no matter whether she’s paying for a carrot-and-lettuce salad, a consultation with an osteopath, or an overdue bill for some plumbing work that takes her bathroom out of service for a week. He arrives, his mother tells him how much she needs—they’re always very precise amounts, often including centavos—and once she’s got her hands on the money, she suddenly gets impatient, keeping her mouth shut or giving him short, reluctant answers; treating him distantly and with disdain, like an acquaintance who’s taken too many liberties with her, and with the resentment and the same combination of pride and spite with which addicts spurn their dealers as soon as the fix they would have done anything for just ten minutes earlier is safely in their pockets.

  Why doesn’t he just give her what she might be asking for: a reserve? There’s no great mystery in living hand to mouth, on the bare minimum. It’s an art that doesn’t require juggling skills, as is often supposed, but rather modest virtues: sobriety, a little order, a certain degree of calculation. But for someone who’s used to relying on what’s known as support, someone who has always enjoyed the indulgent protection of means, savings, and investments; who has permitted herself the luxury of not knowing what they are, where they are, how much they’re worth, or how they grow, but not the peace of mind they confer, not the levity with which they would allow her to face the future, feeling as radiant and optimistic as a traveler arriving in a foreign city very early in the morning, after an exhausting journey, and washing and going straight out, without sleeping, to lose herself on unknown streets—for someone like this, who’s been blessed for years by the existence of such a secret supply, it could be the most terrible of all nightmares. She who has lost everything has lost much more than her fortune. She has lost the precious margin of time her fortune granted to her, the interval, the magic buffer that shielded her from the immediate experience of things. Losing everything condemns her to a hell worse than poverty: the hell of living in the present.

  He simply doesn’t trust his mother. If he were to
give her the famous reserve, he thinks, not reproachfully, in fact forgiving her because the logic is so familiar to him, she would be incapable of saving it, she’d spend it all immediately, in a kind of trance, out of fear of dying and leaving behind, untouched, some capital that could have made her happy, or in the grip of the frenzied desire for revenge that’s always waiting, in varying degrees of hibernation, in every ruined woman. She’d soon be just as desperate as before: drowning in the hardships of daily life, eaten away at by fear of her most dreaded specter—the unexpected expense—and then devoured by the guilt of having spent the money that would have allowed her to confront it.

  She admits as much herself when she tells him that in her dreams about having money—which she has more and more frequently, and not only at night, while she sleeps in the spartan setting she’s chosen for herself in an attempt to, as she says, take the bull of money by its horns, but also during the narcoleptic episodes she succumbs to at all hours of the day, on the bus or in the rheumatologist’s waiting room, sometimes even while she’s translating, in between two intractable paragraphs—there’s only one thing that can definitively ruin the dream, much more effectively, even, than knowing that she’s sleeping (another frequent occurrence): the certainty that any amount of money would be too little, far too little for her aspirations, too little to fill the hole that need has opened in her chest over the years. My thirst for revenge has grown too strong. A reserve would be an option if it were possible to turn back the clock and start again from zero. But his mother doesn’t have zero in her. There’s always some prior balance that grows a little every day, silently and ceaselessly and out of all proportion—minus five, minus twenty, minus a thousand—which any reserve would have to redress. But what kind of perverse reserve would deny the future—by definition the only thing it should be concerned with—because it’s obliged to settle the debt of the past?