A History of Money

by Alan Pauls

  She’s wearing blue boat shoes with no socks. The ankle of one leg scratches the calf of the other, with the absentminded aptitude with which certain parts of the body do things without informing the rest. He decides to follow her. He doesn’t even have to think about it. He attends to everything else—the closure of the account and the last pesos they steal from him, which he pays impatiently, without saying a word, before just as impatiently squeezing the indifferent hand that’s presented to him through the hole in the window by way of goodbye—judiciously and imperceptibly, in a hazy background like the ones in which sleepwalkers carry out their simulations of gestures. He looks for the woman, wondering which of the bank’s secret folds must have swallowed her, and then sees her walking toward the door that leads to the safe deposit boxes. The buzzer sounds. The woman struggles with the door for a few seconds (seconds that he could use to go over and relay the secrets he no longer needs: the light yank toward yourself and subsequent push that open it) and then disappears to the other side. It’s like he can see her, like he’s already watching her on one of the security cameras that will be installed a few years later, before whose unsleeping eye the successors of the employee who served him will open other clients’ safe deposit boxes in order to prove before a third party, and before nobody, that they’re empty. He knows exactly what she’ll do in there. He knows how long she’ll spend isolated from the world, unassailable, her very being momentarily transformed into wealth; how long it will take her to pass through the bars, unlock the door to the unit, take out the elongated coffin, put her treasures inside, slot the box back in, sign the paperwork, and leave. And when she leaves, he’s waiting for her outside, looking inattentively at the window display of the bookshop next door. By now, there are no prices: values change so rapidly that booksellers have stopped trying to keep up.

  Five months later, he reappears in the same frame—the bookshop window (now with other books in it, priced in pesos rather than australs, because there are now ten thousand australs to the peso) and the same slice of the bank’s façade with its red granite column and the pane of a glass door with a spray can’s insulting stamp on it—with shorter hair, an anachronistic mustache that would be at home on a seventies porn star, and an elegant navy-blue wool duffle coat in place of the old sheepskin one. He goes into the bank, stands in front of the cashier’s window, and, showing no sign of emotion, says, “Box two, unit three.” As he tells his father, who follows his romantic adventures with a vague interest that’s too halfhearted to outlast the surprise of novelty, it’s possible that he followed her, approached her, and finally, after a quiet and tenacious courtship, made her fall in love with him for this purpose alone, because he’s obsessed by the metal coffin she’s unwittingly inherited from him and wants to be able to say, once more, the four words of banking jargon that designate it, or simply because he can’t bear the idea of having to stop saying them. This is what relationship experts call a connection, a word that casts as a romantic miracle something that in truth isn’t much more than a phenomenon of mechanical compensation, not fundamentally very different from those involving a long-sighted eye and the lens that corrects it, or a wooden platform that lengthens a short leg just the right amount. He’s in the game again. Will he be able to do it? His heiress—as he privately thinks of her, feeling the secret joy of a creditor mentally delighting in the obliviousness of a debtor who doesn’t yet know quite how much he owes—is forty-two, the wife of a playwright or a screenwriter or a folk lyricist, in any case a successful man endowed with the bad taste to die during a trip to the interior of the country (after a cow looking for something to graze on in the night cuts him off in the middle of the road); with the courtesy not to forget the relatives he leaves behind, to whom he periodically sends money from the beyond (as playwrights, screenwriters, and lyricists call their royalty payments); and with an intractable son with an acne-strewn face, who wears clothes two sizes too large, abhors his father’s literary heritage with all his heart despite never having read it (“What for, if I abhor him with all my heart?”), and is pretty much at war with the world, Sonia, the widow, and her Prince Valiant haircut. A fixation that dates to time immemorial: she already has it in the uniformly blurry photos of her fifteenth birthday party. And no, it’s not a wig, as he is suitably disappointed to discover the first time he holds the nape of her neck and draws her head toward him to kiss her, standing in the bright galley kitchen of what will soon, very soon, be his new home, a few seconds after the bulb shatters almost on top of their heads, throwing a veil of darkness on the encounter, and a few before the teenage vandal bursts in on his skates, only just avoiding knocking them into the papered wall.

  This type of attack is common currency in the early days. The boy leaves him waiting, hangs up the phone, doesn’t pass on his messages. He tells him that Sonia isn’t home (when she’s just poured herself a glass of wine to wait for him), that she doesn’t want to see him (when she’s just put on perfume for him), that he’ll never set foot in the house again (when he already has two pairs of shoes in the closet). The bottle of champagne he brings (which he drives himself crazy looking for) shows up two days later among the cleaning things in one of the kitchen cupboards, empty, of course, and the tub of ice cream in the bottom drawer of his father’s desk, leaking its multicolored juices on the original manuscript of Danger, the oratorio the dramaturge was writing when he embedded the front of his Honda Civic in that cow’s flabby flank. After an unexpectedly passionate soiree on the couch, he finds chewing gum stuck in the buttonholes of his sheepskin coat. When he goes home and tries to open his door, he discovers that he doesn’t have his keys—the boy is at that moment using them to remove an antediluvian mat of hair and semen from the drain in the bathtub. He doesn’t allow it to intimidate him. He only has to see how the delinquent treats the supermarket delivery boy, the guy at the video store, and his guitar teacher to realize that it’s not personal, even if the delivery boy, the video store guy, and the guitar teacher don’t also get the accusations he shouts at the top of his lungs, seeming as though he’s on the verge of a fit, like some sort of epileptic Hamlet, of aspiring to a throne that isn’t rightfully theirs. Where does he—he, in whose eyes any new situation tends to look like evil and danger—find his lion tamer’s levelheadedness and strange detachment? Something makes him immune to this type of rage, something even he didn’t know he had, and like any lucky weapon—as he learns very early on thanks to the chapters of his superhero comics that reveal how the superheroes discovered their powers—it’s doubly effective because it’s power in its purest form, used without control or calculation. Little by little—like someone realizing that the dreams he’s been having, his ideas, the things he buys, the rituals he surrenders himself to, all of these signs, though they’re scattered in time and space, in fact constitute just one thing, one crucial need, to which from that moment on he will unhesitatingly sacrifice his life if necessary—he discovers that he likes being where he is now, in the middle, in neither a central position, like a lover barging into a wake and abducting the widow while she’s still warm from sobbing, nor a subordinate one, like a slave offering his services as compensation for her grief. In fact, he’s the one who intercepts the homemade ammunition of rolled-up bread filled with coins that the boy cheerfully fires at his mother, using his body as a shield. And he’s the one who holds talks with the hooligan when he shuts himself in his room. He comes and goes, gives and takes, announces and relays. And for once, luck is on his side. One afternoon, in one of the neighborhoods full of low-rise houses that still exist in Buenos Aires, he stumbles upon a near-deserted pharmacy and spies a bar of the astringent soap he used to stop an untimely bout of acne when he was twenty-six, sitting helplessly in one of its dusty windows like the star of a very old film that was never released. He goes in, buys every bar they have—so that the scent of sulfur intoxicates him on the way home—and promises to give one to the boy if he doesn’t follow through with his threat to make a bonf
ire of his clothes in the middle of his bedroom. The boy accepts. Three days later, his cheeks and the spot between his eyebrows—formerly no-man’s-lands ravaged by the sebum’s troops—are clean, soft, and smooth, and that night the boy comes home making out with a girlfriend of sorts. One night while they’re eating together (if eat is the right word for this slow, phlegmatic dissection of two eggplants parmesan), the boy asks permission to leave the table and isn’t given it, but as usual leaves anyway, dropping his napkin and showering the floor with breadcrumbs. Sonia sobs and dries her tears with a somewhat dirty napkin, and he consoles her and ends up sitting next to her, on her seat, both of them uncomfortable, while the eggplant that’s been left half-eaten because of her tears turns to liquid. At some point he gets up and goes to the bathroom, and on the way he catches the boy in his mother’s room, stealing money from her purse. He’s about to walk on by without saying anything, but suddenly he stands still and looks straight at him until the boy stops counting notes and looks back at him, startled.

  But what he’s interested in is the box, the safe deposit box, going to the bank every now and then and saying, “Box two, unit three,” and putting the key in the lock—the same lock he used in his former life, with the classic difficulty of never remembering which way to insert the key, whether the teeth should be facing right or left—and then taking it out, opening it, and seeking refuge in it under that intrusive gaze before tenderly filling it with all the things Sonia has asked him to store: jewels, bonds, deeds, foreign currency. This is it, this ridiculous, solitary ceremony that sometimes draws a few tears from him and leaves him feeling exhausted, as though he’s emerging from an emotional ordeal; this and not the money, despite the gigolo hypothesis his mother reproaches him with when he fills her in on the new developments in his life. “Wasn’t living off women always one of your secret fantasies?” she says, smiling from ear to ear, a little buzzed after a visit to the osteopath. As far as he’s aware, there’s no key to the nerve center of his secret fantasies, and if there is one, his mother has never had a copy, unless all mothers by law, by virtue of being mothers, have a direct line to the laboratories where their children’s secret fantasies are cooked up. He’s never given her one, anyway. How she arrives at this idea, where she plucks it from, and above all where she gets her conviction are not things he’s currently in a position to know. Maybe later, when the black hole of the Beast has devoured everything—money, other properties, savings, credit, even itself—and ruined her completely, and she doubles her stakes—his mother, who her whole life has barely even played the lottery, and who even then always banks on losing as little as possible by buying the cheapest ticket—and decides, at the age of sixty, to give up the only thing she has left, thirty-five years of marriage, and to go live alone in an apartment that at forty-five square meters is smaller than one of the en-suite bathrooms the ex-rugby-guy-turned-architect had the bright idea of installing in the Beast, and to resume the studies in translation that she abandoned almost as soon as she’d begun them, when she found herself alone, with a child, and chose to get married again so as not to fall back into the hellish web of her own family.

  It’s not the money; it’s the box (two), the object itself, which he always removes from the unit (three) as carefully and solemnly as an undertaker taking a niche out of a tomb. The box is his own death, his only possible counter or balance to the terrible void left in this woman and this boy by the successful dramatist when he dazzled that cow in the middle of the road (the police report notes that he was driving with his high beams on) and then plowed into it. (And what a relief it is, what a pleasure, almost, to literally occupy someone else’s place, his warm impression in the bed, his hangers in the wardrobe, the head of the table!) The box is his treasure, his secret fetish, his passion. If his life were a depraved film—one of those dark, melancholic curios whose sole purpose (to awaken the unmistakable tingling that reminds the crotch of its own existence) is hidden behind a catalog of tortuous clinical syndromes, just like an old compendium of sexual psychopathy—if this were such a film, his alter ego—probably older and balder, with gnawed fingernails, dandruff on his shoulders, and the cuff of one of his pant legs trailing on the floor—would tremble more than he does when he puts the key in the lock; he’d bite his lip a little as he withdrew the box and squeeze it to his body as he took it to the cubicle, as though stealing it or trying to suffocate it with the heat of his desire, and once in the cubicle, after taking the cover off with his greedy eyes wide open and standing in front of it with his stool jamming the door shut, he’d relieve himself until he passed out, depositing something money can’t buy, something nobody would ever think to steal, either because it’s worth nothing or because it’s of incalculable value. Not him. If he leaves anything in the box when he goes to the bank—other than what Sonia asks him to put in there, that is—it’s not drops of his pitiful life force, which he strangles with a slippery knot in the latex sheaths where they go to die two or three times a week, preferably in the morning. It’s knickknacks, things of no great value, personal effects that wouldn’t grab anyone’s attention if they were brought out into the light or placed in plain view on a dresser or a bookshelf: a notebook (his dream diary), a medal from the only chess tournament he ever competed in (he came in third, but he was barely sixteen, and the winner, whom he backed into a corner for the duration of their game but didn’t find a way to finish off, a worldly fifty), an envelope containing pictures from his childhood (beach, beach with a sausage dog, beach with his grandmother and the sausage dog), a die (which once rolled and landed on six, giving him his only ever five-of-a-kind), a green frog with black stripes, sky-blue brushstrokes, and disproportionately large eyes, made of tin and attached to a string, which releases the few remaining twists on its windup key and starts jumping around like crazy as soon as he closes the lid, as though it were fighting not to be buried alive among those title deeds, wads of pounds sterling, and pearl necklaces in velvet boxes.

  Technically—which is how his mother always discusses the matter—he does live off the widow, of course. But it all happens so fluidly and so naturally that he never even has time to feel any shame about it. He’s given access to everything, bank accounts and checkbooks, his name is added to credit cards, even fixed-term deposits and investments are open to him, though these being provinces of the world of money that he has no idea what to do with, he sticks to carrying out orders. He’s frugal, much more frugal now that he “has money” (his mother’s quote marks) than he was when his money was really his, or when he didn’t have any. His mother can’t bear it. For example: they meet for lunch. His mother, an amateur gourmet, has picked the dining room of a former convent in the middle of the business district, a territory into which she sometimes ventures with purely provocative intentions, to challenge her son’s comfort in his assumption that the neighborhood has one owner and that owner is his father. While she loses herself in the menu amid sighs of pleasure, as tempted by the monastic selection of dishes as a moth by a flickering light, he unfolds his napkin with a vaguely magician-like gesture, without so much as looking at the menu, and orders a plate of mixed vegetables, or a boiled potato with olive oil, or some white rice. “Enough, you fraud,” his mother rebukes him, snapping her menu closed so that it releases a silent explosion: “Don’t pretend to be some kind of fakir; your widow isn’t watching you; order something decent.” He pays, as he’s always done. But when did “always” start? And why? And who decided on this arrangement, if he, its primary victim, can’t remember agreeing on anything with anyone, try as he may? Maybe if he thinks harder … The change. Ah, the change! Maybe this agreement is nothing but the continuation by other means—the “higher stage,” in the words of the older brother of the only friend he successfully drags to the Communist Party cinema, an enterprising Trotskyist who uses the lowest, most extortionate means (photos of Leon Davidovich’s skull split open by Ramón Mercader’s ice pick, among other things) to extract a monthly membership
fee from him for a year and a half, telling him it goes toward funding the party’s journal—of his old, proverbial role as lender of emergency small change. Maybe.

  For the time being, he doesn’t argue. He’s too intrigued by his mother’s interest in his romantic situation. By this eagerness, which is made up of suspicion and rivalry at once … By this strange anticipation … The last time he remembers experiencing anything similar, he’s sixteen years old and has just started going out with an extraordinarily earnest girlfriend, a militant member of a leftist youth group who never reads books of fewer than six hundred pages, has a perfect instinct for gifts (a pair of flippers, a telescope, a fountain pen that will last him twenty-two years), and visits him with businesslike regularity every time he gets sick. The moment his mother leaves them alone, she shoots a disapproving look at his box of antibiotics and, with one of her two-lipped magic tricks—kissing, indoctrinating: which comes first?—tries to convert him to the dogma of homeopathy. “I know you’re not going to like what I’m about to say, but I’m going to say it anyway,” his mother tells him that night, moments after his wonder girlfriend leaves, not before gathering a heap of snotty tissues with surprising fortitude and throwing them in the trash. “Don’t even think about marrying that girl. Listen to me: live a little first, then get married.” After that, there’s nothing, not a single word either for or against, never anything more on the subject, and with good reason: she must become immune to such worries when he doesn’t pay any attention, either then, in the case of the precocious Bolshevik Florence Nightingale, with whom he ends up moving in and spending nearly ten years afloat in a voluptuous, feverish world, or the next time, with the musical therapist, or ever. And when he succumbs to his last love, the one that falls apart over the same eleven months it takes to finish the house that’s supposed to shelter it, she’s so preoccupied, so absorbed by the crazed progress of the Beast, that she doesn’t even remember to give him the reed blinds she promised him for the gallery. And yet the widow obviously interests her. She’s very careful not to show it, as though asking about her directly would be a sign of weakness or an admission of defeat. But her attention to the changes that spring up in him betrays her. Nothing escapes her. She notices when he wears a shirt in an unexpected color, or slips in a new word that’s still a little rigid and crisp in the sentence, like new sheets, or absorbs and neutralizes her anxiety attacks effortlessly and with a show of good humor, though they used to infuriate him, and every time all of her alarm bells go off at once, mobilizing her legion of molecular spies around the only foreign body liable to have inspired these developments. Sometimes she interprets the delinquent’s behavior as a sign. Maybe it entertains her to see her son dealing with a misfit of the type he never was at that age; whatever the reason, whenever he relays the stories of his crimes to her—in minute detail, as though trying to underscore the difference between the nightmare he’s suffering as an innocent, utterly unsuspecting substitute father and the heavenly, low-key child she once had—she so rejoices in hearing them that the perfectly irrelevant advice she insists on repaying him with afterward, while she’s still trembling with laughter, sounds to him like disguised arguments for the defense. In any case, while she pieces together the widow’s personality from the bottle-green shirt he shows up in, the new haircut that suddenly makes him seem like a child, and the chivalrous impulses he lavishes upon her, she also builds a mental picture of it based on the boy’s misdeeds—without, of course, ever revealing to him the identikit she’s assembled, a freakish cameo that’s part manipulative harpy, part passive-aggressive monster, in line with the jargon of the psychological parish of which she’s been a devotee for decades, with the most counterproductive results.