A History of Money: A Novel (18 page)

And besides, his mother has already received her inheritance, as has her husband, and every legal heir—anyone whose life has at some point been tethered to an inheritance, has pulsed in the shade of its promise; who’s been held in suspense, waiting eternally and reaching for a future that will surely grant them what’s theirs once and for all—realizes, after they inherit, the extent to which those earlier days are mortgaged against the euphoria they feel on becoming rich. And once the inheritance is theirs, all that remains is the fatal process of its erosion, be it abrupt or gradual, careful or crazed. His mother and her husband understood this well—too well, judging by the speed with which they embarked on the wealth-liquidation program of which the Beast was really less the cause than the prime example.

In just over five years, this imposing cuboid, which breaks through the trees like a concrete bunker as soon as you clear the bend in the road leading up the hill, ceases to be the hedonistic haven it was intended to be—and which it actually is, at least in the early days, while his mother and her husband and some close friends, all of them equally under the ex-rugby-guy-turned-architect’s inexplicable spell, still find the house’s exaggerated dimensions appealingly eccentric, a
luxury to be explored, and, like children setting about occupying a mansion recently vacated by their parents, sleep in one wing one night and another the next, eat dinner scattered among the various dining rooms, shower in a different bathroom every day, bump into one another while wandering the hallways, and set up camp on beach recliners in the deserted playrooms with their glasses of wine and their Mel Tormé and Tony Bennett records—and becomes a worry. There’s no less accurate definition, nothing more deceptive than describing a house as an “immovable good,” especially when it’s been built from scratch. People think that once the last baseboard has been put in, the last lampshade attached, the last screw tightened on the last doorknob, that’s that: the house doesn’t require anything more; it’s time for everyone else, the people who’ll be living in it, to take their turn now. After the Beast, his mother won’t stand for anyone repeating this fallacy. It’s the other way around. It’s not until a house is finished that it really begins to live, to need, to demand. That’s when its true, living, animal nature emerges. But by then it’s too late.

Every time they leave, tan and feeling the contented exhaustion and strange expert youthfulness that six weeks of sea and leisure work on their bodies, and she turns around in the car and sees the house receding and being swallowed by the trees again, like a film shown in reverse, she has the unsettling feeling that she’s leaving a precious gem out in the open, unprotected and at the mercy of whoever finds it first. This feeling, along with a few robberies in the area, convinces them to hire house sitters. A Uruguayan woman who lives in the neighborhood advises them to look for a couple (since single male house sitters tend to slovenliness and alcohol, especially in the winter, when the only living beings prowling the area are stray dogs and toothless old hippies who’ve lost their way), and tells his mother’s husband he should employ them legally, paying all the necessary taxes and insurance,
more because of the risk of inspection than out of any particular commitment to social ethics. Three months later, after a decidedly unrigorous interview process that his mother and her husband use primarily as an excuse to escape Buenos Aires, a jovial sort of family—in the stifled, Uruguayan vein of joviality, and with two antisocial but hyperactive kids—moves into the ground floor of the Beast, where they will live for almost a decade as taciturn witnesses to a decadence to which they never draw attention, no doubt because they fear that the first step toward curbing it would be to fire them, but which they see perfectly clearly from the very beginning.

There’s a change of government in Uruguay, and the incoming authorities, finding themselves in need of money, reappraise local tax rates throughout the country and then launch a ruthless attack on holiday resorts, where they know there’s a glut of easy and, moreover, foreign money. Municipal taxes suddenly skyrocket. Water, which had previously been practically free, is now pure gold. The weather rebels. There’s a series of inclement, treacherous summers, with furious downpours of rain that always catch them out just as they arrive at the beach, forcing them to change their plans and turn around, and then clear to reveal flawless, sunny skies just as they pull the car up to the garage back at the house, resigned to waiting it out. They’d console themselves with the pool, now that the problem of its inexplicable structural incline has been resolved (
rugby guy!
) and it’s possible to fill it properly with water—except that the brand-new owner of the adjoining property’s ruthless tree-felling (which they were the first to celebrate, thinking they’d get a much better view without having to spend a single penny) has made it unusable, like a runway, a tunnel for an anarchic wind that constantly threatens to break into a storm.

They begin to go less often, and for fewer weeks at a time. The Beast grows resentful. A particularly rainy winter (along
with a not-entirely-legal new construction growing a little higher up the slope, held up by rickety scaffolding) unleashes an avalanche of mud, rubble, and a few unsuspecting construction workers, burying part of the right wing of the house and exposing a certain inherent weakness in the foundations (
rugby guy!
), which let in much more humidity than they should, resulting in an unavoidable process of excavation and resealing that lays claim to tons of money (though money is
always
measured in tons when something needs to be fixed), as well as a summer and a half (measured by the Uruguayan clock) of use of the house. They start to lose their tempers. They’re burgled (while one of the sitters is in the house: they lock her in the laundry room, and the children, who are in the garden tempting guinea pigs out of their burrows with insecticide tablets, don’t even realize what’s happening). They hear a rumor that someone’s planning to build a B and B for backpackers on the spot that’s home to a grove of magnolias they love. It gets harder to find friends to go with them. The windows cloud over with salt residue: all they can see at breakfast is a sad, lumpy white veil, with the sea and the coast and the little terra-cotta tiled roofs behind it in a blur, like an old postcard of a forgotten place. The house is huge, pointless, impossible to heat. Drafts whip through every door and window. When a shutter (one of the beautiful Mediterranean shutters the rugby guy campaigned for so ardently) comes loose and begins to flap, they can spend up to twenty minutes trying to track it down, frozen stiff. Sometimes—usually at night, when they’re beset by the terrible insomnia that strikes during vacations and they each withdraw to contend with it alone, ashamed, like injured animals—they feel as lost and alone there as intruders.

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.”