A History of Money: A Novel (7 page)

It’s the same for his mother. Recently married, with him already on the way, the unplanned fruit of one of the skirmishes they get entwined in before they’ve thought about whether they’re in love, though they’re both already equally fixated on the idea of getting away from their respective families as soon as possible, she notices that her perfect stomach, which is as flat as a board and blessed with the kind of skin people dream of—one of those stomachs that always appears in black and white and extreme close-up in the artistic photography of the day, looking like a beach or a lunar landscape—is stretching and beginning to bulge as steadily as her husband’s nightly returns to the apartment on Ortega y Gasset grow later. The night she realizes, the telephone is silent, the cleaner
at the office tells her that everyone has left, the meal is cold and already inedible, the cinema plans aborted. One night he doesn’t show up until twenty past four in the morning. When he appears, with a long day’s stubble and a halo of cigarette smoke strong enough to knock her flat, he says he got into an accident in the street: he left the office and was crossing the street when some idiot drove right over him. He didn’t get out of the police station at Suipacha and Arenales until half an hour ago. She doesn’t know what to think. She doesn’t know him. She only knows about him, and about the clumsy but comforting force of his Germanic lunges, about everything in him that exasperates and disappoints her, about the collection of flaws that define him, and everything that she will dedicate herself to criticizing for the forty years she spends without him, free of him. She can picture the altercation in the street, although she knows from experience that if it really happened, it wasn’t because of an abuse of his pedestrian’s right of way, unless by right of way her husband understands what he obviously does understand—the right to cross the road when and where he likes, preferably wherever the traffic is densest, when the cars have a green light and no pedestrian with half a brain would think to cross, let alone as defiantly and arrogantly as a true artist of danger.

She thinks he has a lover. His mother is young and beautiful; she’s as voracious as every woman on the run and has the rancor of an aristocratic lady in exile, forced to dress in secondhand clothes and eat reheated food. The ideal candidate to be tied down with a child by the first scoundrel to seduce her while he swans around elsewhere. It happens to all of them. Why should she be the exception? His mother never even mentions it. Every time she feels the urge to ask, she has the sensation of treading on very fragile ground, like a carpet made of glass. It’s as though she’d been born without skin. She’s frightened by her clothes every time they brush against
her, of the noise her throat makes when she swallows, and of the tremulous half-moons of light that the sun projects onto the ceiling when it breaks through the crown of the banana palm whose branches overrun the balcony. Some mornings she wakes up and doesn’t even have the courage to open her eyes. But the thing that terrifies her most is giving him a reason to get rid of her—and she thinks anything could be a reason. One night she goes to bed alone. Every minute she passes without him is a minute lost in the torture of waiting for him, sinks her a meter further into a dark morass that won’t kill her but does poison her with hatred. At ten past six in the morning, she hears a key scratching at the door. She shifts onto her side in the bed, turning her back to him, and pretends to sleep. She doesn’t want to speak to him, doesn’t want to see him. Only to
sense
him, as though she were hidden behind a door with a knife under her clothes, waiting for the perfect moment to sink it into his chest. He doesn’t make any pretenses. He doesn’t even try to be quiet so as not to wake her. He takes off his clothes—a cufflink jangles against the bronze base of the bedside lamp—showers with the door open, gets dressed, goes out again. She doesn’t go back to sleep. She will never forget the sound of those keys.

In the middle of the morning, her mother comes to visit. She brings new clothes for the baby, another of the ensembles covered in belts, ruffles, and bows that she buys compulsively, enchanted by the idea—an accurate one, incidentally, which makes it even more depressing to her daughter—that they’re just like the clothes they bought for her before she was born, and she accepts them and files them away in the closet where she keeps the still lifes, swans made of green glass, and cretonne curtains that have been lavished upon her since she got married. After thirty sleepless hours, she can’t even stir a cup of tea, let alone hold one, and the cup smashes to pieces on the kitchen floor. She starts to cry and confesses, and as
soon as she has confessed she realizes her mistake. If there are two people in the world who cannot help her, they are her parents. Her mother is a tiny, bitter woman, who believes she’s given all she had to give—as little as that may have been—and who now limits herself to relaying her daughter’s dramas to her husband. Her father, a corpulent despot who communicates in growls and wears very high-waisted pants, receives the problems and bends them to his own will, using them to support the cause he will never tire of championing: demonstrating to his daughter that, for as long as she chooses to live away from them, her life will be a catastrophe. She pleads with her mother not to say anything, not to humiliate her in front of her father. Her mother, smiling at her, tells her not to worry. But it’s too late. The moment she gets home, the woman picks up the telephone, calls the factory, and passes her report on to her husband.

There’s a young man from Tucumán at the factory, the brother of a foreman recently fired for stealing, whom his grandfather kept on partly out of spite, to torment the man he’d fired—from whose betrayal he never recovers, being an immigrants’-son-turned-boss and an incorrigible paternalist—and partly because it’s convenient. The boy is naïve; for a few coins he’ll do things that nobody else would do—errands, preparing
mate cocido,
acting as a chauffeur or night guard—and he has ambitions that his gratitude to the boss only strengthens. He’s enlisted for some overtime (yet more to add to the great quantity he’s already amassed, which even combined would never add up to a wage): to see what the boss’s son-in-law is up to. Six hundred of the pesos of the day, pesos moneda nacional: exactly the amount his father needs, four nights later, to stay in at a surprisingly, inexplicably adverse poker table, which something tells him it’s still not time to leave even though he’s been completely cleaned out. It’s five past five on a raw winter’s dawn, and his father’s
gone out into the street to smoke in his shirtsleeves. A sweater would keep him warm. Gambling is better: it makes him invincible. He stubs his cigarette out on a paving stone, spits a resigned stream of smoke into the frozen air, the last of the night, and when he raises his eyes he catches a glimpse of the boy from Tucumán’s shadow moving across the street, or rather shivering from the cold in the alley he’s been standing guard in for some time. It takes him five seconds to work out that it’s
someone,
ten to cross the street, twenty to catch up with the boy from Tucumán after he tries to run away, half a minute to recognize him—he remembers him well: he’s the boy who laughed under his breath on one of the two visits his father has paid to the factory in order to please his father-in-law, when he said that his favorite thing about the place was the workers’ clothes—and a minute—prolonged by the bottle truck that drives past, making a racket that obliges him to repeat the arrangement he’s proposing a second time—to take from him the six hundred pesos he’s just earned. It’s only a loan, he tells him, underpinning the idea with subtle nepotistic insinuations. He’ll return it in two hours, without fail, in this same alleyway, only quadrupled. A little while later, she emerges from another strenuous bout of insomnia and finds him in the kitchen, sitting with the back of a chair between his legs, swirling a recently made cup of coffee in his hands. He’s just shaved, he looks younger than ever, and he smiles like an awestruck child. “I was dead. A real beating: I hadn’t won a single hand,” he tells her, his eyes wide. “The guy from Tucumán your father hired to follow me ended up rescuing me.”

Gambling is his thing—just as other men might take drugs, shoplift, cross-dress, or drive at 200 kilometers per hour—and he’s alone in it, and everything that will ever be known of him while he’s in his thing until they both die off will only emerge by error or accident. Because “things” are
worlds, and no world can close itself off completely, no matter how perfect it is. That morning, in the kitchen, his mother realizes that there will never be space in him for her. It has nothing to do with her, with what she does or does not do. The proof is his absolute lack of guilt, the almost jovial ease with which he skips over the trouble of a confession and assumes something that for her, until that moment, had been a mystery, and had tortured her unbearably. He’s never mentioned his gambling before for precisely the reason that he’s talking about it now, which is also why he’s talking about it in the way he is, like someone thinking aloud, without any need for interlocutors. His silence has never been a secret. That’s why he never felt the urge to confess. For his mother, this is the first and perhaps the only night of gambling, and it’s charged with surprises and revelations. For his father, it’s one more in a series. That’s why he’s talking about it as though his mother had known all about each of those other ones that led up to it.

And now he knows, too. He’s almost more aware of it than his father himself, given the mimetic impulse awoken in him by certain indeterminately sick people, the undiagnosed or those trapped in the webs of confusing diagnoses (melancholics, perverts, dreamers, idolaters, procrastinators), with whose ills he claims both a rare intimacy, as though he had suffered them in some other life, and a peculiar distance, characterized by compassion and astuteness and more befitting a doctor than a patient. “At the casino, my darling,” his mother tells him after bursting out laughing, and once the first moment of astonishment has passed, he peeps around the door she’s cracked open for him and sees a rapid panorama of it all, the gold and red of the carpets, the flashing lights on the slot machines, the waiters carrying trays of drinks between tables, the employees in bow ties and waistcoats taking piles of chips out of boxes, the tables surrounded by gamblers on their feet, the baize tabletops, the cards coming out of the
sabot,
and,
with his back to him, his jacket off and hanging from the back of his seat, two halos of sweat around his armpits, and his head enveloped in the smoke from his own cigarette, his father, leaning very far forward, his shoulders sunken and his elbows resting on the edge of the table.

Sometimes he can’t help himself, and he lets slip a question about roulette wheels, croupiers, cheats, or the secret, silent rooms where he imagines big winners go to exchange their chips for money. Other times he skips straight to action, thinking he’s much more likely to rouse his father by making himself an example and demonstrating everything he doesn’t know and wants to learn. And so he finds any reason to start shuffling cards, and shuffles badly, exaggerating his clumsiness, trying to stir his father’s pride and convince him to teach him, or deliberately loses card games in an attempt to awaken his pity or his fury and so finally extract the drops of his expertise that will save him from more humiliation. They’re feeble, hopeless efforts. His father responds indifferently, with evasions that he accepts without protest. After a while he stops trying. Lost cause. But how he rejoices in those moments when something unexpected, a random, utterly unintentional spur, dents the shield protecting his father and his world and reopens for a second the door his mother once opened; when a tiny but dazzling flash of that forbidden realm escapes and reaches him, like music escaping a party and reaching some far-off room, and he feels as though a seed is being planted in him. It happens rarely, generally with movies, TV programs, plays, books that at some point touch on the subject of gambling, gamblers, the practice of betting. Everything will be fine, the scenes will be flowing as normal, the film more or less entertaining, the book well or poorly written, the play moving forward—until someone shows up and cuts a deck of cards, or a character tells a story about a night at a casino while sitting at the table after dinner,
or a ball takes a few hesitant leaps on the slope of a spinning roulette wheel, and his father, who had been following the developments in silence, entrenched in his indifference, suddenly stiffens, as if struck by an invisible dart, and all of his senses, which until that moment have been floating and dispersed, surface again on his face as though called up for battle, and then fire on what he’s been looking at. In a fraction of a second, he’s transformed into what he’s always been but had been keeping in reserve: the defender of an experience that nobody else knows firsthand, and about which only he possesses the ultimate truth. Being a film fanatic, for example, he readily defends the liberties taken by cinema in the name of art as instances of poetic license that no demand from reality can ever rightfully challenge, and yet he’s feverishly sensitive when it comes to films about gambling. Everything strikes him as sloppy and ludicrous, not because it’s artificial but because it’s wrong. His arguments, when he makes them—when he doesn’t restrict himself to giving a sarcastic little smile instead, a gesture of disdain he aims at the television, the scene, the screen where the outrage is being committed—are unspecific, always general, often sententious. They’re really vetos, laws that can only be formulated negatively. “Nobody who’s ever played baccarat looks at women while he’s playing,” he says. Or: “For a true gambler, cash is
never
a problem.” Or: “Gamblers don’t have lucky rituals.” Or: “There’s no such thing as a nice croupier.” Or: “No gambler wins or loses everything in the first hour of play.” Or: “Nobody ever plays everything.” He’s also riled by the overall aesthetic effect, the gleaming, almost glossy image with which cinema beautifies gambling, where the backs of the playing cards twinkle like mirrors and the ice in the glasses like diamonds, the green baize looks like English grass, and the good gamblers are always elegant while the bad ones are monsters covered in scars and given to the vilest tricks,
incapable of doing or deciding anything without the help of the entourage of baleful assistants monitoring the table incognito. But the heart of the reproach is something else, something more fundamental, more radical. What sickens his father is that they’re always secondhand versions, hearsay, pale echoes of echoes. They might keep audiences pinned to their seats, smash the box office, and claim to be based on true stories, but to his father—to anyone who’s been submerged in the original experience—it’s obvious that nobody involved in the concoction of these swindles has ever been there. None of them has lived the gambling life. And it’s this lack of life that poisons these representations with an irremediable falseness.