A History of Money: A Novel (8 page)

Maybe this is his father’s real life, this hidden one, the one they never see, this strange combination of gated paradise and toxic cellar, of orgiastic oasis and forced-labor camp, of which all they can ever hope to know comes from the leaks his father allows to escape every so often, almost against his will, like a medium opening his mouth and speaking and closing it again only when instructed to by the spirit speaking through him. It’s a slightly distressing idea: it forces him to think of the father he can see, first the everyday one (while he’s still married to his mother), then the weekend one (after the order to leave Ortega y Gasset), as a sort of body double for some invisible other, a replica that mechanically, as though following an instruction manual, carries out everything that should be done by one father, the original one, who is apparently too busy guessing cards, doubling bets, and frightening rivals with hands he doesn’t have to do a father’s work.

Eventually, though, he ends up getting used to it. Gambling is a world, and it works. It has its own rules, schedules, customs, uniforms, backdrops, props. Like every world—no matter what dangers it contains—its founding principle is that it’s habitable. It might be distressing, but he now knows, or can guess, where his father is when he doesn’t find him
where he hopes to find him, where he and maybe his mother before him most need him, sitting by his side in the middle of the night when he has one of the nightmares that take hold of him without waking him up and make him sit up very straight in his bed, like Pinocchio, his eyes open and as unseeing as coins, or calling the pediatrician after taking the thermometer out of his armpit, or cleaning the bits between his toes. It’s much worse, really, to imagine him crossing Rio de Janeiro at night in a brightly colored Volkswagen Beetle flying at the speed of light in search of a nameless, faceless debtor who no doubt couldn’t have anything further from his mind than paying the debt he’s about to be reminded of.

Besides, it’s been clear since very early on, since before he could think for himself, as they say, that if there’s anyone who can determine where life is, it’s his father. In fact, he makes himself the authority on its everyday allocation (though his own existence demonstrates, perhaps in spite of itself, that there’s nothing less certain or less obvious than the things we take for granted when we talk about life) and, like a surveyor, traces the frontiers—or rather reveals the invisible ones that were always there—between simulations of life and real life, shams and experiences, disguises and the naked truth. Even when he was a young boy, accompanying his father on his rounds through the business district was like taking a crash course in the art of appraising other people’s lives. (Although “appraising” carries a trace of optimism: his father is a brutal evaluator, for whom nuances are pure affectation or gradations of fear. For him, there are two options: you’re either alive, or you’re dead.) You can start anytime. At the office, for example. He’s come straight from school to see him; they’re about to go out for lunch. The first lesson (like almost all of them) is conducted on the move, subtly imparted while they cross the office diagonally on the way to the elevator, fully exposed—particularly him, with his shyness, his bangs, and his
pants’ knee patches torn by the schoolyard’s rough paving: an exotic animal, like all creatures from the outside who end up in the world of work—to the scrutiny of the other employees. While he walks and gives out general greetings, nodding his head and smiling, his father lets him in on the death certificates he’s already signed: “The fat woman with the hairband: dead. The guy typing with two fingers: dead. That one selling coffee: dead. That ugly woman who talks to you like you’re three years old: dead, dead, dead.” The sequence shot follows them into the elevator that jolts them downstairs, taking in the operator, who’s practically asleep (dead), through the lobby, with the doorman who’s shuffling envelopes with greasy fingers (dead), into the street, with the redheaded guy selling candy at a kiosk (dead), the woman selling flowers (dead), and the newsstand owner closing his stand to go eat (dead). All dead. This is essentially the whole lesson. Dead: which is to say—according to the variety of existentialism prevailing in the region at the time, a civil servants’ kind of existentialism, with the expert on accountants’ woes Mario Benedetti in the role of Albert Camus, his novel
The Truce
in that of
The Rebel,
and his own father in that of official spokesperson for the dogma—perpetual hostages in the cells of a wretched, obligatory, monochrome life (gray being the color of
horror vacui,
according to the palette of the era) that offers no surprises nor any prospect of change. As time goes by, he thinks he comes to understand that life—which seems so universal, so evenly distributed—is actually a rare good that shows up where he would not at first have expected to find it: in children, beggars, stray dogs, crazy people—the only ones, according to his father, who meet the sole condition that makes life real: having the nerve to challenge everything. The barefoot boy putting a dirty hand through the window of a car stopped at a light; the beggar howling in an alley, covered in bags of trash; the puppy boldly sniffing the vulva of an
arrogant Afghan hound; the madman and his private world of burning souls and organs consuming one another: these are the few happy anomalies his father seems to recognize in this general theater of the dead. There’s more life there, he says, in that human wilderness, in those bodies covered in calluses, scabs, scars, than anywhere else.

He agrees in silence, because at a certain age any more or less self-assured show of authority is met with agreement. Even so, he would like to learn, to know where his father got his skill for tracing the dividing line, which signs to look out for and how to read them in order to decide what is genuine, free, sovereign life, and what is the parody that attempts to usurp it. Even at this age, he likes solid reasoning. He can admire the edge of a decision, or the timely impact of a bombshell, but what captivates him about both is also what frightens him: how sudden they are, and how soon they’re over. Besides, if the taxi driver who spends his whole life cursing the other cars on the road is dead, as dead as the cashier who serves them at the bank, who spends hours counting other people’s money without even lifting her head, and as the waitress in the phony Italian restaurant where they usually have lunch, who’s red with embarrassment at the prostitute’s uniform she’s made to wear, a shirt undone to her belly button and a tight skirt that hardly covers her buttocks—if all these people who for better or worse breathe, peel open their eyelids every morning, and feel the icy thrusting of water at their gums, and are scared, and speak to other people are dead, oh so dead, as his father says of the ugly woman at the office who waves a useless hand in the air to ingratiate herself to him from a distance, and generally of more extreme cases, those that no earthquake or revolution could resuscitate, what about that close family friend of his mother’s husband, who leaves behind a widow and two orphans, also leaving his mother’s husband in a state of shock, dreaming
about his body at the bottom of the river for months, until he feels as though he can’t breathe and wakes up, his heart having almost stopped beating, pressing his pillow into his face with his own hands.

He’s his first dead person. Like all first dead people, he has the rare quality of being simultaneously implausible and inevitable. The moment he arrives in the overheated room where the wake’s being held, everything—the whispering, the soft light coming from the lamps on the floor and the tables, the furtive sound of every movement, the uniform color of the clothing, the air of monotony enveloping everything—prepares him to come face-to-face with a dead person, forces him to believe in it, to accept without a shadow of a doubt the evidence that he is dead. But when he gets to the coffin and sees the corpse all made up and dressed as if it’s going out for the night, the first thing that crosses his mind is a remark too shameful to say aloud: “Okay, that’s enough. Let’s put an end to this farce. You can get up now.” The truth of a lifeless body lacks nothing. It’s irreducible, as hard as stone. But it’s precisely this kind of impassive superciliousness that demands all the surrounding spectacle, the zealous care and beautification that turn every dead body into a strange mixture of puppet, waxwork, and actor. Even so, for all their artificiality, our first dead bodies are like a note struck by a pianist before he begins to play, which melts away no sooner than it has been heard but lingers throughout the whole piece as a key, guiding and making sense of it; they radically and permanently alter the world as we know it, injecting it with the sole possibility—the possibility of elimination—that was unimaginable to us the second before we came face-to-face with that corpse, because it was the opposite of the world itself.

And in this case, there’s also the matter of the money. Where is life—his father’s old question, which the dead man makes flesh, exposing it to the fragility and menace that color
the world after every brush with misfortune—often gets mixed up with the other question, where is the money, which snakes through the wake in an undertone (in the way that vulgar, malicious, or funny conversation sometimes circulates in solemn and serious situations, deliberately disturbing the solemnity in order to make it more bearable, or maybe to remind us what cheap stuff it’s made of) and sparks a few deliberations when a guest appears who should theoretically be able to answer the question, someone high up at the iron-and-steel company, a police official, the two or three army and navy officers who arrive in uniform, preceded by a compact phalanx of guards, and who restrict themselves to squeezing the hands of anyone who approaches them as soon as they see them coming, as though they were the chief mourners—though they never met the dead man in person and they’re quick to leave as soon as they’ve stood at attention next to the coffin—and not the people who have been there for hours, wasting away in the sickly light of that apartment. Where. Where is the money.

They won’t be the ones to tell, if they even know the answer. There’s nothing to make them. The only person who could do that is the dead man, who might have found out before everybody else, when he goes up to the roof of the iron-and-steel company’s Buenos Aires headquarters, boards the helicopter sitting there with its blades spinning, sits down, and signals to his assistant to give him the attaché case containing the money, only to discover that the assistant is empty-handed and now closing the helicopter door with a slam and telling the pilot to take off. They were relying on him. He’s remained loyal to the company’s interests for how many years? Twenty? How many times has he saved them from using forceful measures? How many union leaders has he shut up? He’s the ideal man for this undertaking, the only one capable of understanding its exceptional nature, a nature
that calls for emergency operating procedures justified by an equally exceptional situation that’s raging out of control. Nobody ever imagined that he would oppose out of principle, or that he even had his own principles independent of the company’s. But when the time comes, he objects to all of it: the means, the end, the very idea. His loyalty remains intact, but there are certain lines he is not willing to cross. It comes as a surprise. The real problem, which there’s no fixing, is that it also comes too late. It becomes clear not only that he won’t do it, but also that he knows too much. If it comes down to a loyal soldier with moral sensitivities and a perfect plan that will pacify the whole region and that comes with the government’s blessing, which are they likely to choose?

The money must be there. Not twelve hours after the family announces that the helicopter hasn’t arrived at its destination, a procession of vehicles a kilometer and a half long brings local police, federal agents sent from the capital, and a squad of select union thugs, in total some four thousand men in 105 vehicles (including private cars with no license plates, patrol cars, and assault cars), armed with long guns and kitted out with the accessories of intimidation that will inspire frenzy throughout the country for the next eight years—fake Ray-Bans, hoods, peaked caps, green or navy-blue berets—to Villa Constitución, the city once named the capital of the red belt of the Paraná River, to do away with a troublesome trade union group and uproot a subversive plot against the nation’s heavy industry—a task that from that moment on they’ll pursue almost unchecked, paid alternately by the chief of staff and the head of labor relations at the iron-and-steel company to the tune of a hundred and sometimes a hundred and fifty dollars each a day, and enjoying the use of the plant’s helipad for the police helicopters, the parking lots for their cars, the plant’s dining rooms for affordable lunches and dinners, the comfortable houses, originally meant for executives,
for sleeping, watching television, and playing cards, and the workers’ lodgings for interrogations and torture and stockpiling the loot from their daily raids.

The money is there, but it can’t be seen, and he soon realizes that this is almost always the case. Maybe disappearing isn’t an unpleasant accident, one of many eventualities eagerly awaiting money, but actually its very logic, a fatal tendency it has. Maybe, he thinks, that’s the main similarity between money and life—more so even than the reproductive impulse, which they also share. It’s there, but it’s always embodied in or translated into something else: clothes, magazines, food, buildings, machines, school supplies, records, cinema tickets, thugs in dark glasses who stick their forearms out the window while they cock their Czechoslovakian guns. This is why he’s glad that his father prefers not to pretend and always walks around with his pockets full of banknotes: because he likes the anachronistic challenge this represents. He trusts only what he sees, and what he sees, what circumstances dictate that his father sees—just as others before him saw grains of salt, seashells, feathers, or gold—is printed paper.

One day not long after the afternoon when he sees his first dead person—a day on which his mother, with a certain gravity in her voice, arranges a formal meeting with him, saying she wants to “talk to him about something,” even though they live in the same house—he starts to wonder whether the compensation the crostini lover’s widow received from the iron-and-steel company—as exceptional and possibly as ample a consignment as that which should have been on board the helicopter and which in a way condemned the dead man to death, since it’s used to pay for the troops who are meanwhile turning mattresses over, stealing wedding rings, and ripping off testicles in Villa Constitución—is paid in cash. He’s wondering this at the exact moment his mother appears
in the living room, freshly showered, with her head wrapped in one of the towel turbans that suit her so well, and hands him an envelope containing two typed pages, which she asks him to read and sign at the bottom.