A History of Money: A Novel

by Alan Pauls

  She dreams about money, often about just seeing or touching it. When she returns from these dreams, she always feels a vague ache, as though she’s been grazed by the wing of one of the lascivious monsters that poke their snouts between curtains and prowl around sleeping women in paintings. Even when she’s engrossed in her work, totally absorbed by whatever she’s doing, deep in the state of repetitive anesthesia to which her daily life has long been reduced, it only takes one unexpected sign—the shriek of the buzzer or the phone, both of which, to her bullheaded pride, ring ever less frequently within the four walls of her house, and even then generally only to announce an irritation like the knife sharpener, a traveling salesman, a couple of preachers, or a telemarketer—to jolt her from her stupor, startle her awake, and have her standing in front of her bedroom mirror, quickly preening herself and putting on something different, a silk scarf or the only hoop earrings she hasn’t sold, the enormous black glasses that make her look like a grasshopper, anything that will create the right impression for the lawyer or notary she supposes has come to see the mysterious beneficiary of the concession, the donation, the legacy that some dead man or woman has entrusted them in their dying wish to pass on.

  As soon as she finds out that someone from the past is looking for her, she forces her memory into action; she spends a whole afternoon cleaning the cobwebs from that storehouse full of useless junk and doesn’t give up until she recognizes the person’s name, can picture their face, and finally, lost in the folds of a school-day morning, a birthday, or a scene from a childhood vacation, finds the secret favor, the mark of complicity, the support she once offered disinterestedly, simply out of friendship, for which the recipient of her generosity has now come to repay her, sixty years later. Peeping into her own childhood, her youth, she notices that everything is slightly different: there’s the same theater of torment, the same darkness, the same damp cold that soaks her to the bone, but while she drags her feet like an anguished soul, without anybody seeing, sometimes without even being aware of it herself, her little frozen hands drop a few seeds like secret messages to posterity.

  Suddenly, a small court of new friends springs up around her. They circle her with a languid intensity, like the old moths they are, and die out quickly, in the time it takes for her crazy hopes of inheriting something from them to vanish. She introduces him to one old misanthrope who’s as shrunken as a raisin and very elegantly dressed, with whom she says she shares a Sunday-morning ritual of reading the papers in a bar. That and Verdi’s Luisa Miller are the only things they have in common. He is irascible, vain, rude. He’s never bought her a coffee. He won’t give up a single supplement—not even the women’s one—until he’s finished reading the whole paper. But he’s all alone, and very sick, he probably won’t make it through the winter, and it would be unforgivable to let his box at Teatro Colón, his car and driver, and his weekend place in Colonia be orphaned. When he asks her what it is that she likes about these circumstantial relationships (he knows her, and he’s grown tired of seeing her ill-temperedly reject every stranger that approaches her), she cites either intimate reasons—she likes to be able to talk to a man, for example—or bluntly selfish ones: she wants to take this trip; she needs the air, the thermal baths, the quiet. She won’t be able to finish the translation that’s been giving her so much trouble anywhere but at this Trappist retreat in Córdoba, but when she gets back after a two-week vow of silence and military discipline, dying of hunger and not a single line further in her work, she soon sets about flaying the depressive lesbian she really went to accompany, who drove her crazy talking about her millions and her travels, but realized when she went to pay for their stays at the monastery, as promised, that she had forgotten her wallet. She’s always the one who finds a new bar, stops saying hello to them, and loses their phone numbers, once she’s sick of everything she has to put up with in order to spend time around them, and disgusted with herself, with the absurdity of her own aspirations. She emerges feeling sad and gloomy, as though hungover, but she chronicles her misadventures with a humor, an attention to detail, and a cruelty he would never have imagined in her.

  More than once she calls for help and asks him to meet her in the middle of one of her broke girls’ get-togethers, as she calls the gatherings full of nostalgia, cake, gin, and free-flowing gossip that she enjoys with half a dozen fellow travelers at an old-fashioned café in the basement of the oldest, most antiquated mall in the city, whose perfunctory music—bossa nova, Henry Mancini—she professes to love, along with the brothel-worthy insouciance with which the waiters’ jackets and pants—modeled on bellboys from old hotels, in red with black buttons and black with vertical red stripes down the sides—accentuate the muscles in their backs and buttocks. More often than not, he shows up to find them talking about money, in sentences that, more often than not, start, “When I had money …” The rest of the time, for variety’s sake, it’s “When you had money …” His mother always sits in the same spot, facing the door that leads to the street. This way she can see him arrive and get up in time to cut him off before he comes too close, and the rescue can be executed out of sight of the other women (who, of course, start discussing it immediately).

  As time passes, she grows impatient, as though something were beginning to drain away from her. It’s a tyrannical impatience that predates her requests, making them angry and as abrupt as orders. It’s no longer enough for him to say that he’ll get the money to her. She feels as though she’s being treated like a child, like rather than helping her he’s simply trying to distract her and soothe her anxiety, as though needing money were nothing but the façade of some greater problem that’s at once deeper and more vague and can be relieved only with kind words rather than money. She wants to know when, where, how. Any distance between the request and its satisfaction is too great. Things could get in the way, anything could happen. He could have an accident, she could have a heart attack, the economy could collapse, the peso crash, all in the space of one night, and the cash would never reach her. She needs it now, immediately. And anyway, she won’t be able to sleep, and then she’ll feel groggy and won’t be able to work (she translates on average three thousand words a day, which means that losing a day of work means losing three hundred pesos) or even get dressed, and she’ll end up going back to bed, exhausted, not to sleep, because she knows there’s nothing more elusive than lost sleep, but to lie there on her back with her eyes wide open, asking herself the same question she always asks: How long will she wait this time before taking the pills that will knock her out?

  Irritation notwithstanding, the urgency poses less of a problem when the bouts of need strike at reasonable hours. They agree on a time and a place, which enables him to reorganize his activities around the rescue mission, and he observes them scrupulously, out of pragmatism more than any sense of responsibility, like doctors who are punctual only in order to save themselves their patients’ reproaches. She thanks him—in her own way, of course, avoiding any explicit display, or rather drowning it in a show of compassion, saying how sorry she is for the inconvenience the emergency must have caused, the commitments he must have had to postpone, et cetera. But very soon, something about the meticulousness with which he carries out these missions—a bureaucratic zeal that’s as efficient and reliable as it is impersonal, being apparently immune to specific circumstance—starts to enrage her, and suddenly becomes the target of her spite. She treats him as she would an irreproachable but insipid employee, giving him double-edged praise and exalting his virtues while making sure he’s aware of the enormous area of requirements he does not satisfy. Seeing him arrive fresh from the shower very early one morning, dressed with the middling elegance that’s perfect for a long day filled with a variety of demands, it occurs to her to suggest, half laughingly, that she pay him: not for the money he gives her (about whose return she never says a single word, though they’re always “loans”) but for bringing it to her. It would be simple: he could just keep a small
percentage of each sum he brings. But soon the nocturnal calls intensify, and at ten past three in the morning, when his arms are dead and his eyes full of sleep, and the city is frozen, the good offices of the exemplary messenger aren’t so appealing, and the smile with which he receives and disarms her sarcasm during the day becomes a weary grimace. Nevertheless, he agrees once, having been alarmed by the crisis pitch of her voice and the racket drowning it out—the telephone receiver being dropped, some glass smashing, Verdi playing at crazily fluctuating volumes—and then a second time, and while he makes his midnight journey like a dealer of cash, something dawns on him with absolute certainty, simultaneously scandalizing him and filling him with awe: there aren’t any other sons crossing the city at this hour to take money to their mothers. He promises himself he won’t do it again, and the decision alone is a relief. But he knows how much he’ll miss the bright light that floods his mother’s face when she gets out of the elevator on each of those insane early mornings and comes toward him to open the door, holding herself very upright and smiling, as if she’d regained the only thing whose loss she’d ever truly cried for—much more, even, than her fortune: the radiant beauty of youth.

  He offers to send the money by cab from then on. “That’s all I need!” she shouts from the other end of the phone: “Here I am, terrified that the cash will never get here, and you want to give it to a bunch of thieves.” He persuades her: there’s a cab company he trusts, he knows several of the drivers, he’s used them to send things before and never had any problems. The system seems to work. It’s simple, efficient, and, insofar as it’s based on money—the charge account he opens with the cab company—unequivocally professional, a trait for which his mother has always had a particular weakness, partly because it makes the tortuous misunderstandings that come hand in hand with personal relationships impossible. She likes professionals. She trusts their uniforms, their overalls, and their diplomas, and above all the fact that their expertise can be accessed only with money. She’s always won over by loquacious doctors with gray sideburns who write with gold pens, shuffle technical terms like cards, and can check her lymph nodes with their eyes closed, but she doesn’t throw herself at their feet until she receives the signed, sealed bill for their services; when the diagnosis, treatment, and soft parting pat on the shoulder have been reduced to a number, no matter how inflated it is—the higher the better.

  Some nights she calls him, asks for the money, and then lowers her voice a little, her timidity just barely shot through with lust, to ask if it would be too much trouble to request the driver who came last time, Walter, Wilson, Wilmar, in any case a Uruguayan with prominent cheekbones and an enormous nose, a relic from the fifties who wears V-necked sweaters, checked shirts buttoned all the way to the top, and freshly shined shoes, who always declines her tips with a vague air of surprise, looking like the last bastion of civilization declining a barbarous old custom, while tilting his head to one side and brushing the brim of his hat with two fingers. A week later, the whole system is endangered. At quarter to four, his mother calls him sounding raw. Where is the driver? He should have been at her house an hour ago. Why didn’t he send him? But he has a crystal-clear memory of ordering the cab. He calls the firm, and a cavernous, cigarette-sanded voice tells him that the delivery—a sealed envelope with the recipient’s name clearly handwritten on it—was handed over at two forty-five on the dot at the agreed address. Incidentally, says the voice, after a long, deep hack that seems to produce a couple of centuries’ worth of mucous sediment, is sir a close relative of the lady who received it? In that case, could he explain to her that the company’s drivers—least of all Wilson, who doesn’t drink and is married with two splendid daughters—are not allowed to drink alcohol with clients in hallways at two forty-five in the morning? He calls his mother. “The money never came,” she says, blowing her nose. “You can think what you like: it’s their word against mine.” She’s indignant but also shivering from the cold, and from total exposure, as though she were calling from a barren land swept clear by a freezing wind.

  This scenario is repeated twice. Both times—partly because he can’t bear to hear his mother whimpering down the phone, and partly because every discussion with the man with the cavernous voice ends the same way, abruptly, with a hail of coughs that nearly makes him pass out—he ends up getting out of bed and going to her place to give her the money, the second version of the money he’s already given her. On both arrivals he’s surprised by the metamorphosis that’s taken place in her: she’s glowing, calm, looking as though she’s just stepped out of some sort of miraculous floral bath, and dressed as if she’s going out, and she asks if he’d like to have breakfast with her. But there’s a third time, identical to the earlier ones in every detail, and this time he decides it’s gone too far. After enduring a sprinkling of exclamations from his mother (“I told you, darling! They’re crooks!”), he puts on his coat and goes to the cab firm’s office in a fury, and right before he pushes the door open, he recognizes Wilson-Wilmar-Walter—his hat poking out, narrow turnups on his suit pants, his dress shoes’ leather gleaming like porcelain—polishing his cab’s steering wheel with an orange flannel while the radio spits out a song that’s as gooey as pomade: “Pretty little baby / Vidalitá / Sad baby girl / How little is left / Vidalitá / Of what you once were.” He stops dead. How long has it been since he last shouted at someone? How long since he was so close to another human face? The last things he remembers from the skirmish are an extreme close-up of the button on Walter’s checked shirt hanging loosely from a thread that won’t last long, the soft echo of an old-fashioned cologne, and a small, probably malignant mole in the shape of a club stuck to his prominent nose like a sticker. But what right does he have to stockpile these shreds of reality while the one who’s fainting and bringing his orange flannel to his chest as though in adoration and staring at him with confusion in his eyes while his knees give out is delicate Wilmar, poor Walter, incorruptible Wilson, all three of them innocent, all three victims who as he’s been told a thousand times will take any journey, no matter how dangerous, be it to Barracas, Fuerte Apache, or Lugano, but not to that frazzled diva who comes downstairs with a bottle of Grand Marnier and two glasses to accept the envelopes her son sends her.

  The last he hears of his mother—news she tells him herself, when she calls to ask for cash for her taxi, and which he files away next to the image of the button on the checked shirt, the cologne, and the mole (false alarm: it was benign)—is that she goes to visit him in the hospital—angina: nothing his Uruguayan even temper can’t negotiate without struggle or complaint, and with a casual, flea-market kind of grace—and that there, under the hospital’s high surveillance, the patient of the three Ws ends up accepting the clandestine drink he’s always rejected on his mother’s doorstep. After that, there’s no news for a while. He realizes this one afternoon when he’s at home alone and the silence seems to solidify around him. He sees then that those imperious requests, those early-morning phone calls that so exasperated him but that he ended up putting up with, were the only contact he had had with his mother for a long time. And now that he hasn’t received one for days, a strange terror floods him. He’s scared to call her. Scared that he’ll call her and she won’t answer; scared of going to her apartment, ringing the buzzer, and getting no response; scared of convincing the super to open the door and finding her in bed with the remote control in her hand, or stretched out on the black tiles in the bathroom, struck down while plugging in the hairdryer. In truth, he’s scared that finding her like this might be his mother’s last wish for him. It’s not exactly a suicide scene that he’s imagining: given her sense of the ridiculous, she could never have done something so deliberate, so solemn and laborious, without laughing and ruining it halfway through. No: what he fears is a chance, accidental death that has nevertheless been imagined so many times that the spectacle of its consummation couldn’t, now, exist without him, its recipient and the only reason she’
s imagined it so many times. And, of course, he wonders how she’s getting by without asking him for cash. He begins to run through all the possibilities that occur to him, rapidly, like a slide show—his mother as a beggar, his mother as a thief, his mother filling out a translation with long, pointless periphrases to increase the number of words she’ll be paid for—but they’re immediately eclipsed by another thought: what he will do with the money he doesn’t give to her. What will he use that trickle of bills for now? Not that it even amounts to much. It was a drain, yes, but more because it was so relentless, so rhythmical, than because of the quantities involved. And yet even so, that modest but unforeseen surplus makes him feel affluent and magnanimous, fills him with new energy and an obvious, textbook philanthropic urge, the type that’s born of money itself rather than any particular sensibility, will, or ethic—of money and the special logic it obeys of its own accord once it reaches certain thresholds of abundance, which he so reviles in rock stars, successful artists, heads of technology corporations, and other contemporary magnates. Yes, he could be a benefactor. Why not? He could inject some cash into a factory and turn its structure upside down. And then money would finally replace revolution.