A History of Money

by Alan Pauls

  All this changes nothing for him. Since that first time, when he ignored her objection to his Bolshevik girlfriend, his love life has unfolded far away from his mother, on another plane; it’s not shielded—since it’s not protected by anything too visible—so much as stubborn and invulnerable, protected by its own rules and protocols, like the tax havens that are becoming fashionable at around the same time, which are generally to be found on more or less remote islands, hermetic protectorates, tiny countries that are weak at first glance but have the unique strength of discretion, the ability to hoard secrets that the rest of the world goes out of its way to find out. He’s brought the whole system to such a state of perfection that nowadays he doesn’t even have to worry about safeguarding any information. He’s not afraid. He could tell her anything—and in fact he does, not only when he admits that his bottle-green shirt, old-fashioned manners, and short hair are the direct result of Sonia’s wishes, but also explicitly, when he describes her appearance (and has some difficulty explaining the concept of a Prince Valiant haircut, owing to his mother’s gross ignorance in the matter of comics) or her moral character (she gives money to everyone who asks her on the street, every time, without exception or justification, and she removes anyone who has a live-in maid from her social circle), or when he divulges her habits (an hour of yoga between morning sex and breakfast, limited TV, windows wide open in the middle of winter)—and the secret would still be right there, intact, inaccessible to his mother, like openly transmitted frequencies that are audible only to highly trained ears. One day while he’s waiting for her at the only serviceable table in the patisserie she’s arranged to meet him in—one of the unpredictable spots to which his mother is faithful to the point of fanaticism, simply because they offer her something she can’t resist, just one thing, something unusual but not necessarily indispensable, like two-ply toilet paper in the ladies’ restroom, for example, or white, pure-cotton tablecloths, or Renaissance music, or the sickly sweet whiskey liqueur on which she gets hooked on the ferry that takes her to the Beast—he starts to look through some photos he’s just had developed, souvenirs from a “getaway”—one of the widow-isms most likely to raise his mother’s hackles—to Misiones, which starts badly, on a precarious dinghy at Iguazú Falls that the delinquent, who’s been averse to lifejackets since childhood, threatens to slash with the Victorinox he convinced his mother to buy him from the shop in the hotel’s lobby, and ends worse, in a cell at the police station on the Triple Frontier, where he spends six hours in an animated trilingual conclave (Brazilian prostitute, Argentine dealer, Paraguayan smuggler), having been accused of screening a pornochanchada on twenty-five color TVs at an electrical appliance store in Foz de Iguazú. He’s wondering for the nth time why what he sees in the viewfinder when he takes a photo is never the same color as the nine-by-thirteen prints that are supposed to capture it, why, for God’s sake, he can now see things he thought he’d left out of the frame (the back of a yellow Renault 12; the hand—index finger extended, wrist covered in fake gold watches—of the tourist from Minas Gerais who hounded them with his affability and his bad breath), but not, though he searches desperately and even considers going back to the photo lab to complain, things he was sure he’d caught (the smiling, sleeping widow’s slightly aquiline profile on her pillow), when his mother arrives and stands by his side, looking down at the photos as he goes through them, and after savoring a few flashes of banal intimacy—the widow wearing her bathing suit, a poolside massage, eating breakfast on the balcony in a robe, dazzled outside the toucan enclosure at the bird sanctuary, smiling on her pillow, sleeping with her mouth half open—she sits down, takes off her sunglasses with a trembling hand, and says: “How can you take such ugly pictures? Isn’t it time you got yourself a decent camera?” No, he’s not afraid to tell and show her everything, because he knows that entrusting the secret to his mother, offering it up like this, freely, to her foolishness, is the best way to keep it.

  But if his mother disdains his photos, that’s only because it’s a different secret that keeps her up at night; one that won’t be found in those stupid, poorly composed pictures, but elsewhere: encrypted in bank statements, in the sums of money that arrive to enlarge them every three months with Swiss regularity, even though nobody’s lifted a finger to bring them into existence. The money of the dead. This is what drives her crazy, and he knows it: Isn’t it what drives him crazy, too? Could there be a better, more perfect type of money? Cash that falls from the sky, that rains down of its own accord, without anyone winning it or taking the trouble to send it or claiming it; pure, beneficent cash from the beyond, as impersonal as the seasons, blossom, the tide. They share this unutterable envy, an envy from which there’s no solace and which reaches almost criminal heights in his mother—who, as a young woman, in a moment of harebrained inspiration during the stupefied interval between her two husbands, conceived a plan to seduce a jazz trumpeter, an affectionate, smooth-chinned guy, on the autism spectrum but extraordinarily prolific and capable of composing three flawless standards in the time it takes a taxi to drive him to the family company where he’s made to earn his keep. It’s awoken in them by the beneficiaries of rights and royalties, privileged creatures who are superior to any aristocrat or well-to-do bourgeois, and above all superior to the piranhas that make their killings on the money market: inventors and their children, authors and their descendants, the heirs of visionaries who had one idea and put it into action and sent it around the world, so that from then on it was the idea and not them, the visionaries, with their sweat, their tears, and their blood, whose existence would be dedicated to making money.

  “Why?” his mother shouts (having put her sunglasses back on, as she does every time she suffers an attack of emotion) while reaching across the table, setting the bottle of oil swaying, and shaking him by the lapels of his tweed jacket—Sonia’s latest addition to his wardrobe. “Why the hell weren’t you an author? Why weren’t you a genius, a writer, a scientist, one of those precocious, sickly musicians who die young, before they’ve met a woman or had children, and leave the rights to all their work to their mothers?” If she talks with such fury and grief now, while she’s still enjoying the money from her dead people and all she has to do is wake up with an idea one morning and translate that money into whichever language she likes (it having already been translated from the package her father leaves her when he dies, when, yes, he’s an old man, but more significantly he’s full of poisonous rancor after submitting to half a dozen unsuccessful cataract operations, and is almost blind but still sufficiently clearsighted to realize before he dies that everything he’s leaving, the steel factory in Villa Devoto, the apartment in Belgrano R, the chalet in Miramar, the two cars, will be lost entirely, that in truth he’s leaving it to ruin and disaster), whether she wants to translate it into things, possessions, journeys, even ambitious undertakings like the Beast, which is initially just one of many investments that claim her dead relatives’ money, and then soon enough the main one and then the only one, so thoroughly does the project that starts as a summerhouse and ends up as a mansion-mausoleum, a palatial catastrophe, end up devouring everything she has, including money in the bank, of course, and also the apartment in Belgrano R, the chalet in Miramar, et cetera—if she talks like this now, while she’s still swimming in money, as the phrase has it, what will she say in seven, eight years’ time, when there isn’t a single drop of water left in the pool, when not much more remains of her dead relatives’ money than of everything else she’s managed to preserve of them—dust-encrusted fossils, vague memories, the distorted echo of a voice babbling nonsense in the dark.

  Yes, inheriting has its appeal. As a former heir, an unborn heir, an heir who’s dead on arrival and whose calling is to wait for something that will never come to pass, he knows this firsthand. He knows the impatience, the unhealthy hunger, and the arrogance of those who know it’s only a matter of time. Sooner or later: the heir’s motto, the phrase every heir repe
ats at night as a talisman to calm the nerves before sleep, at the end of humbling days that demand now, immediately, what they still don’t have, what a heart attack, cancer, or a drunk bottle-truck driver turning a corner at full speed will someday give them—sooner or later. An heir’s laugh is acid and deafening. It’s the laugh of he who laughs last, a cackle of resentment and long-brewed vengeance that leaves nobody unscathed. But if only that were all there was to it. Because even inheriting carries a responsibility. You have to live up to an inheritance. If his mother gives in to the widow’s pull on her despite her natural reserve and the armor-plating provided by her pride, it’s because she realizes how much further this other woman has managed to go. Compared with the miracle she’s pulled off—money that periodically falls from the sky, gusts of cash that blow in like the wind, renewing themselves constantly and inexhaustibly, like letters written in death by her besotted folklorist, when his love has been immortalized in the same formaldehyde solution that stops his body from decomposing—compared with this, inheriting seems like a flawed model, one of the many ingenious ideas reduced to nothing but a pathetic, throwaway draft by haste, greed, or ineptitude, or a fateful combination of the three.

  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.