by Alan Pauls
In 1966, in Argentina, the only people who would take a taxi on a 103-kilometer journey between resorts on a potholed road with no shoulder and no service stations, which is fed by tributary streams of bicycles, cars without lights, trucks with ravaged steering columns, and other mortal threats, are taxi drivers on vacation, people running away from the police, and compulsive gamblers drunk on the euphoria of an unexpectedly prosperous night at the casino. His father, who as far as he knows is none of these things, for the moment at least, though that might change, dives headfirst into that Rambler while it stands boiling in the sun of the most perfect day of the summer; he doesn’t ask any questions, not even whether the journey he’s just requested is actually possible, whether the taxi driver will accept it or not, or, most important, whether he has enough money to cover it. He takes all that as given, as though it had already happened. In fact, nobody devotes a single word to the matter during the entire journey. Certainly not his father, who now, after a whole month away from his son, wants to make up for lost time and find out about everything he’s done in his absence. Nor him, not a word. The prodigious recklessness that had captivated him a moment earlier now frightens him. He thinks that if he says anything, if he mentions what has just happened, even if only to confirm that it really happened and relive the elation he felt while it was happening, what happened might stop happening, history might retreat and everything disappear and return to nothing. And while all this goes on and he hears himself recounting the minutiae of his summer, pausing on the dead man, on his boundless passion for those crostini and above all on the repulsive noise he makes while he chews them—a detail that his father celebrates with a loud burst of laughter that’s inspired by vanity more than real appreciation or entertainment, so proud is he that his son, at six years old and in the heart of his stepfamily, has used the gift for microscopic observation he says has always characterized the men of the family, even though an important part of that lineage, his own father, used that gift, in which he seems to have excelled, to make his son’s life a true nightmare—his attention keeps wandering off entirely, attracted by the ticking of the taxi’s meter, on which the slides have started to fall, they’re falling, they will continue to fall, he thinks, for a long time, for the whole unheard-of eternity known as 103 kilometers, and they won’t stop until they’ve reached who knows what number.
He doesn’t have the faintest idea. Now, with the dead man’s face so near and another expansive wave of crostini-crackling assailing him, he can’t help but ask himself how much money there was in the attaché case of which there’s no news even when the police divers find the helicopter and the bodies at the bottom of the river, how much and, crucially, why the dead man was asked to take that money to the plant at Zárate in person, whether it’s to pay the supplementary under-the-table fee the police want to charge for carrying out the suppression agreed on by the management and the local heads of the force, or to placate the workers with a pay raise that will distract them from the radical demands they’re being pushed toward by the red faction of the union leadership, which plays an all-or-nothing game, or even to bribe the red faction of the leadership directly and resolve the whole matter without a bloodbath. But what he’d really like right now is to be able to remember how much the taxi ride to Villa Gesell cost. No hope: it’s a total blank. What he does know is that it’s the first large sum of money he’s aware of, or the first time he’s aware that money can be a large sum. Until then it was always small, portable, just another thing among many, only touched by a sort of ancient magic wand—so ancient that the few people who have seen it in action are dead—that gives it its ability to overpower everything else, to eat it up; the exact power he discovers his pieces wield over enemy pieces and vice versa a little later in front of a chessboard in the dining room of the Croatian hotel he dreams of while traveling by taxi to Villa Gesell. By taxi, to Villa Gesell, while outside the world keeps stupidly turning, indifferent to this feat.
But what relation can there be between the kind of money capable of eating up a bar of milk chocolate, a packet of baseball cards, an eraser, or the bus ticket to Villa Gesell that’s now going through its death throes at the bottom of his pants’ pocket, and the money you’d need to get together in order to eat up something invisible, something as out of scale as those 103 kilometers to Villa Gesell? He’s seen money, of course. At the age of six he has even lent it. He has what he calls my safe, an old first-aid box with a cracked red cross and a loose lid, in which he keeps his capital, coins, small or torn notes, change that his mother and his mother’s husband and even his father sometimes let him keep. It’s to him and his safe—which infuses his money with the smell of bandages, adhesive tape, and Merthiolate while it sleeps—that his mother turns when she needs change for a tip or some small expense, which happens more often than she would like but still always takes her by surprise and fills her with a dramatic sense of adversity, setting her hurriedly rummaging in her purse while the doorman, the newsstand guy, or the grocery store’s delivery boy stand waiting, until she comes up with nothing, not a single coin. His safe: how he treasures those casual donations when he gets them, and how little he seems to remember receiving them later on, when, the fourth or fifth time his mother asks him for a loan—she’s always short of change, though it’s impossible not to be in a city and a country where small sums of money are and always will be precious commodities—he delights in reminding her of all those she has yet to repay—every single one to date—and warns her to settle her account.
How much. He starts wondering even while he sits in the backseat of the taxi, curled up against his father, who has rolled his window all the way down and is sticking out a defiant arm that’s perfectly browned before his vacation has even begun. He looks at the meter hanging on the taxi’s console and allows himself to be entranced by the mechanical regularity with which those ancient numbers, already ancient even then, replace one another in the machine’s two little windows, like candidates voluntarily renouncing a starring role—that of the definitive figure for the journey—even though nobody has taken the trouble to judge or reject them. If only he knew, he could lose himself in what will later be one of his favorite pastimes (which he puts to use every time he has to pay for any countable goods): prorating. He could prorate the total cost of the journey according to the minutes taken, and know the price of not only the 103 kilometers to Villa Gesell, but also each kilometer, or the time the Rambler takes to cover each kilometer. But he doesn’t know. He won’t know until an hour and forty-five minutes later, when they arrive in Villa Gesell and the taxi parks outside the hotel run by Croatians, and his father, with the remarkable dexterity picked up who knows where that gives his gestures a prodigious insouciance, as if he were performing them in a medium with no possible obstacles—air or water—puts a hand in his pocket and pulls out the wad of notes to pay.
He’s awed by the wad: just the naked wad, no wallet nor one of the elegant clasps that he sees many years later in a TV series that reconstructs with insane attention to detail the period when he and his father traveled by taxi to Villa Gesell—the same period, if you can call it that, only in the middle of New York, in the ghetto inhabited by a few pioneers of depredation who, meager as they are, and even conscious of their own irredeemable mediocrity, can already see how far the world will pass into their possession in the years to come. The characters using the clasp are successful forty-somethings dressed exactly like his father, in tweed checked jackets, white shirts always fresh from the laundromat, and ankle boots with buckles on the side, and all of them have his father’s unfailing complicity with their pants’ pockets, which makes it seem less like the pockets were designed for their hands and more the other way around, their hands for these pockets. How many notes must there be? Forty? Fifty? Folded in two, with the largest on the outside and the smallest on the inside, always in strictly decreasing order (and one last slot on the inside, after the smallest notes, reserved for his true monetary weakness:
foreign currency, predominantly dollars, Swiss francs, pounds sterling, lire, whichever he’s handled most lately at the travel agency where he works), the wad is so bulky that when he’s holding it his father can’t close his hand, he can’t even put the tips of his fingers together. And it’s heavy, as heavy as a thing, a solid, not just the pile of printed papers it actually is.
So they’ve arrived, and it’s time to pay. Overcome by a rush of fear, he starts to shrink into his corner of the backseat, a paradise of fragrant pleather where he’s just spent almost two happy hours enjoying the pioneer’s brazen sense of superiority (other people swim the English Channel, he unites Mar del Plata and Villa Gesell in a taxi!), but which his terror now transforms into a suffocating hell, a stew of heat and the purring of the motor and the smell of burnt gasoline. He thinks: What if there isn’t enough money? Because his father might have miscalculated. He might simply not have calculated, eager to make up for the disappointment caused by his late arrival and the missed bus. But he soon sees him lean forward, put a forearm on the back of the seat, and take a closer look at the meter, where the now still numbers are offering their final verdict, and his father’s direct approach to the situation calms him somewhat. Everything happens very quickly. The taxi driver leans over, notes the figure on the meter, and starts to look for its monetary equivalent on a plastic tariff sheet. There’s an identical sheet hanging from the back of the seat on their side, but once again his father decides to ignore it: when it comes to reckoning accounts, he trusts his brain’s skill and speed more than the verdict of a printed form, especially one jointly produced by the taxi drivers’ union and the Ministry of Transport, both nerve centers of swindling. And in this particular instance, he also knows full well that there is no tariff to cover something as unscripted as a Mar del Plata–Villa Gesell. It’s a silent, pathetic duel. The taxi driver’s rheumatic finger is still quivering in a wilderness of red and black numbers, hunting a figure it’ll never find, when his father announces the definitive price in a low voice, as though to himself, or for an invisible but very close witness, then selects five or six notes, separates them from the wad, and pays.
Nobody counts money like his father. Counts in the sense of accounting, which when it comes to his father—a man who went to a technical school and graduated with just one skill, a rare talent for what he himself calls numbers, which he flaunts rather immodestly in public, the only thing he permits himself to boast about (being enemy number one of all vainglory)—means purely mental calculations, in which the use of any supplementary instrument is forbidden, including taxi tariff sheets, naturally, but, moreover, machines, calculators, abacuses, manual counters, to say nothing of the electronic bill-counters the size of espresso machines or water dispensers that, years later, are made so trendy by inflation and the foreign-currency black market, machines produced by Galantz and Elwic, MF Pluses by Cirilo Ayling, pride of Argentina—prosthetics that represent the worst, the lowest rank of human spinelessness and dependency—and also pencil and paper and even so-called natural mechanisms like fingers. But also counts in the sense of physical action, as in counting notes. He’s struck by this at a very early age, one day when he spends an afternoon off school accompanying his father on his rounds through the city’s business district, where he works, and sees him cashing checks at banks, buying tickets at airline offices, and trading foreign currency at currency exchanges, and he will never cease to be struck by it, even in the last days at the hospital forty-two years later, just before the lung failure that condemns him to an oxygen mask and tubes, when his father selects two fifty-peso notes from an already significantly depleted wad, having decided to give them as a tip, “before it’s too late,” in his words, to the morning nurse, who surprises him by speaking German to him while changing his IV, giving him an injection, or taking his temperature. Nobody else has his aplomb, his proud, elegant efficiency, which transform the act of paying into one of sovereignty and are enough to make you forget that in truth it’s always a secondary, reactive act. When he counts money, it’s as if he were counting it simply to count it, for love of the art, as they say: because of the beauty of it, never because the logic of the transaction requires it of him. He never slips up, never lets one note stick to another or get stuck or folded, not to mention tear. His fingers are always dry—if he occasionally wets the tips with his tongue, which he says is a habit of bad bank cashiers, dishonest shopkeepers, and misers, it’s always in mockery, just as he mocks the tricks people use to make up for abilities they naturally lack, and he always caricatures the ritual, giving it a bad actor’s pompous gestures—and they move nimbly, without hesitating or pausing; on the very rare occasions on which they stop and start again, either because something else has distracted them or because they’ve been dizzied by their own speed and got lost, they resume the operation just as coolly as before, as though nothing had ever happened, like a musician taking up a score again at the phrase that tripped him up and playing on.
Unlike his rivals in the art of counting—cashiers, people who work at currency exchanges or in the money market, even his own colleagues at the travel agency—whose fingertips are black by the end of the day, tanned like leather by the layer of grime left by the money they’ve been handling all day, his father can count notes for hours without getting his fingers dirty. Even the rubber bands that fasten folded wads of notes—which his father always maneuvers with the fingers of one hand, like a one-armed juggler—lose their propensity for stickiness and dirt in his hands. It’s as though money leaves no mark on him whatsoever. As soon as he thinks that phrase, he feels as though it’s not the first time he’s heard it, and he realizes that if it sounds familiar, that’s because it isn’t his. He has heard it often from his mother’s mouth, though she doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing by it as he does. In fact, it’s this very phrase that she uses a month later, when he returns from his February in Villa Gesell to the apartment on Ortega y Gasset—so tan that when he stands barefoot against the wall for her to measure how many centimeters he’s grown while he was away from her, as she always does and always will, his feet would be lost against the dark wood floor if it weren’t for his toenails, which shine like ten little luminous blots—and, showing off a capacity for memory that’s as merciless as that of an abused woman, which his mother likes to do whenever she recalls the last time she saw him before his father took him away, she abruptly takes up the story of the missed bus and the taxi ride and says how nice, that if they went around spending it like that—paying three hundred for something any father with any sense of responsibility would have gotten for twenty by arriving on time for a meeting arranged months in advance—anyone would be immune to the marks of money. But isn’t that what she herself does years later, when, in one brief, sparkling decade of celebration, ambition, and bad business, she squanders the small fortune that she inherits from her own father?
Meanwhile, he has to wash his hands every time he handles money. When he’s at the zoo, for example, on one of the sessions of animal observation and sketching that often fill his Saturday mornings. He decides to buy a packet of the little cookies for animals, in the shape of animals, that are his downfall, and which he usually finishes in the blink of an eye, first the bears, his favorites, then the monkeys, the tapirs, the crocodiles, and so on, until the bottom of the packet is a morgue full of horrifying stumps: an elephant’s trunk, a pecarí’s hoof, the spiral tail of a pig. For a moment he feels like he’s taken a terrifyingly bold step, like crossing a frontier from which nobody ever returns, or at least not in the same form they left in. He asks himself what will become of a boy fed on cookies for animals in the shape of animals. And while he’s thinking about it, he puts the change from the cookies in a pocket—the route varies, as do the animals he sketches, but the one rule on every visit to the zoo is the agreement he has with his father, who goes with him, that he pays for everything he eats there himself, with his own money—and returns to the enormous, exhausting white page he’s
just spread out on top of his drawing case. He’s only just begun to trace the softly curved rump of the zebra in front of him when he’s ambushed by a trio of black fingerprints, stamped on the heart of that dazzling whiteness like a depraved wellspring. Day ruined. He puts his pencil down and looks desolately at his fingers, the tips dirty from touching the notes, a few lone crumbs stuck to the slightly sticky skin like forgotten mountain climbers on a pink slope. Then he rips the paper in one brutal movement, crosses his arms while falling to the ground, and buries himself in one of his gloomy, bad-tempered trances, which can last for hours, or days, and from which nobody knows how to rescue him.
How his father does it, he doesn’t know, he’ll never know. He certainly takes good care of his hands. He washes them frequently no matter where he is, but particularly at the office, and always with his own soap, which he keeps in the second drawer of his desk and takes into the bathroom with him, where he scrubs them furiously and joyfully; and he files his nails—including the cubist one, which he caught in the drawer of a steel file cabinet when he was a young boy, so that now it looks like a pitched roof, one side black, the other white with a hint of pink, split down the middle by a sharp white line—with a dedication that couldn’t be further from his treatment of his toenails, which he surrenders to an unchecked growth that always ends up ruining his socks. But it can’t be just that. It’d be easier to understand if he dealt in checks, promissory notes, credit cards, any of those sanitized substitutes for money that are beginning to come into use at the time, the task force of an arrogant, cutting-edge economy, which he sees members of his stepfamily already juggling familiarly, particularly his mother’s husband, whose checkbook covers are tattooed with the same beautiful uppercase initials that appear on the haunches of the cattle grazing on his land to the south of the city. But his father is cash, a hundred percent. Of course, he’s familiar with all the modern forms of payment, because of his work, and because he doesn’t live in a cave, but he’s very careful to use them and treat them with the same aristocratic disdain with which he condemns calculators and, a few decades later, when they wouldn’t do him any harm, glasses, hearing aids, and walking sticks.