by Alan Pauls
But where to start? If only they were still producing that beautiful Trotskyist monthly, all black type on red pages, that his friend’s older brother lobbies him to contribute to as a teenager, which he supports however he can, siphoning small donations from a monthly allowance that’s already too small to satisfy his basic needs, namely fast food, the cinema, and his first black-tobacco cigarettes. Of course, back then it’s not the money that makes him do it: neither what it means for the Trotskyist monthly’s finances (which are pinned together so precariously that much like his mother—the mother who’s disappeared and is showing no sign of life—they can’t allow themselves any luxuries, certainly not that of any extra costs, and much less that of reducing the contributions of sympathizers like him, no matter how insignificant they are), nor what it means to have money, given that to be precise he has none at all. No, he does it out of terror. (He understands this now, forty years later, once his mother has stepped aside and disappeared from view, emptying a vital space in which long-dormant forces can now wake up and congregate and do battle again, as if his mother’s suffering were ultimately nothing but the latest incarnation of what other people call or called the people.) Not terror in the sense of the intimidation (always tinged with a certain excitement) worked on him by his friend’s brother and his fellow militants, who are always full of talk of the working class, the bourgeoisie, the party, imperialism, the general strike, permanent revolution—words that he always hears in capitals and visualizes as charging colossuses, a gang of monumental monsters that can circumnavigate the planet in three paces and that reduce the world of girlfriends, football, records, and hanging out in plazas he shares with his friend to a sad, pygmy dimension; he sees the group in action together only once, at a meeting his friend manages to smuggle him into, which, like most Trotskyist gatherings, is spent in interminable smoking of cigarettes, drinking of coffee and maté, and, in the small hours, gin, and above all in “defining the situation,” an art in which there never has been nor will be anything to rival Trotskyism. No, it’s terror in the sense of terror: terror that he’ll be identified, kidnapped, hooded, tortured; terror that he’ll die like a dog, be thrown in the river or blown up, for having donated those centavos to a monthly publication that even he, though he supports it passionately and endorses everything it says, from the first word to the last, or maybe for precisely that reason, closes thirty seconds after he’s opened it, as determinedly and unashamedly as a surgeon closing a chest he’s just sawn open after peering into its rotten insides. When he happily hands that money over every month, it’s so that he can experience this terror in an infinitesimal dose, a fictional dose. What terror will move him to put his hand in his pocket now?
He receives a letter. In fact, it wakes him up (and in this detail alone there’s a hint that his mother might have something to do with it), because the bell rings at eight in the morning and a very young, walleyed mailman who’s even more captive to the forces of sleep than he is and who has a fresh vampire kiss on his carotid artery hands him an envelope on which he recognizes his mother’s handwriting, the handwriting that his mother, unlike every other person in the world who’s ever written anything by hand, has preserved unaltered, in fact it’s even more beautiful and elegant than it was in her youth, when in a handful of firm, even lines that look as though they were drawn with a ruler and don’t show the slightest trace of emotion or doubt she tells his father that she’ll be back at the apartment on Ortega y Gasset at six p.m., and she doesn’t want to find him there when she arrives, neither him nor his things. Inside the envelope is a homemade postcard produced by someone who’s not very skilled at handicrafts, intended to impress more than to trick; they’ve stuck a photo on a piece of card and forgotten to wipe away the extra glue, which has hardened on top of the picture and now seems to be sprouting from it like cysts. It’s a black-and-white photo. In that fervent way that failed artists will pounce on any existing image, especially if it’s printed, to stamp their miserable human mark on it, the same clumsy hand has accentuated the shading and relief with fine, reed-like interlocking lines, so that the whole thing seems to be wrapped in a sort of wire mesh. It’s a Victorian house, one of the mansions found to the north of the city, surrounded by trees and parks, which pride themselves on their longevity or ruminate on their decrepitude with arrogant indifference. It’s falling to pieces, but that doesn’t seem to bother his mother. Her only criticism is that you can’t see the river anymore. And the mosquitoes, which swarm down in rabid gangs at nightfall and surround her—without biting her: one of the privileges of queens in exile—while she sits in the gallery reading the extravagant manuals she takes out of the clinic’s library.
She isn’t sick. She doesn’t want visitors (but she wouldn’t say no to cards: could he pass by the cab firm and give her new address to Mr. W.?). And no, she doesn’t need money. Her lotto winnings will last her a while (although what prize wouldn’t be peanuts compared with what she’s lost over years of playing?). Anyway, in circumstances that don’t bear recounting now but that still make her blush whenever she remembers them, the past, “a cruel tormentor, though still more generous than men,” was kind enough to regurgitate into her life her psychiatrist from twenty-five years ago, a pioneer of lysergic therapies who has cancer (though even bald she’s the most beautiful psychiatrist on earth) and whose last experiment is to assemble, or try to assemble—because not all of the candidates receive the proposal with quite the carefree delight his mother does, putting two or three things in a bag and taking the train straight to San Isidro—the victims of the treatments she gave in the seventies, all brilliant, promising young things broken by acid and psychotropics, and house them for free in her clinic, indefinitely, taking advantage of the fact that her last paying patient—a deaf, almost hundred-year-old woman, the only daughter of a Central European marchand whose painting collection she blows on the horse races—died a few months earlier, leaving a small (20 × 25) pastel by the young Matisse among her clothes, wrapped in paper from a Viennese pastry shop. She doesn’t need anything. She could swear she can’t even remember what needing is. The whole world has been reduced to nothing but tasteless idiocy. Only in a sanatorium can she do the only thing she knows how to do, the only thing she wants to do, the only thing she has time for now: wait for money to rain down on her.
First his father. Now his mother. He puts the key in the lock, shoves the door with his knee—it’s July, and the wood has swollen with the winter damp—and wonders whether clearing parents’ apartments is his purpose, his secret calling, his true mission in the world. In fact, the trash bags he brings with him are left over from the cleaning he didn’t have to do at his father’s apartment. When he goes in, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Sell it, throw it all away, donate it, keep some of it? He hasn’t been given clear instructions. His mother’s fake postcard breaks off on the threshold of the matter, just after she’s asked him to take care of emptying and handing over the apartment before the end of the month, so that she doesn’t have to pay another month’s rent. “I’m being called,” she writes, as though they were talking on the phone—a type of chiasmus that she also uses the other way around, inserting epistolary tics in the most pedestrian phone conversations—and he thinks he can hear the soft, muffled-sounding peal of an evening bell ringing to the north of the city, through the trilling of birds and the stirring of treetops in the breeze from the river, for the benefit of half a dozen survivors dressed in expensive, white, worn-out clothing, who don’t know one another but who doubtless have common enemies, objects of curses and rancor, inviting them to come to dinner, or for a seven o’clock vermouth, or to play some complicated, drawn-out board game in whose dynamics lurk surprising psychological implications.
He picks up the mail that’s accumulated under the door. Promotional leaflets, local pamphlets, the Auto Club magazine (addressed to the owner of the apartment), a couple of out-of-date bills, among them the unopened electricity bill with the monstrous sur
charge that inspired the last of her desperate requests for money. There’s nothing here that’s addressed to his mother, nothing in this whole glut of paper that uses her name. Neither does anything betray her in the strict, anodyne, perfectly impersonal order that reigns here, which now that he’s in his mother’s space for the first time he realizes is very similar to that of short-term rentals designed entirely around middling criteria—size, layout of furniture, decoration, appliances, materials—on which nobody could ever leave their mark, even if they set their minds to it, so indifferent is everything in them to the lives that might come and inhabit them.
Why, then, does he drop the mail? He’s disoriented; everything seems strange and precise, like the backdrop to a dream. There’s no sign that she’s been here, that much is true. But it’s not the meticulous, terrible sort of emptiness that comes with cleaning after a funeral, either, which renews a space only at the price of amplifying the echo of the tragedy that took place in it. After all, his mother has always boasted about her talent for making it seem as though she was never there. And anyway, she’s alive, more alive than ever in her sumptuous, damp, unheated exile, under rotting rafters that barely support the ceilings. Maybe that’s exactly what’s upsetting him: the idea that she’s saved herself, and that, saved, she’s farther from him than if she were dead. He looks around him. There’s not a thing out of place. He doesn’t know where to start. Instead of opening the blinds, he turns on all the lights. He doesn’t want air. He wants this scene to remain just as his mother left it. Maybe he thinks that if he keeps it closed off, without any contact with the outside world, it will gradually lose its air of civilization, will heat up, ferment, and rot—with him inside. There are no messages on the answering machine: only his mother’s voice feigning interest in receiving them, along with the long pauses she leaves between words as though she were talking to a foreigner or someone with learning difficulties, when in fact she’s just worried that she’s misunderstood the machine’s instruction manual and is doing something wrong. He opens drawers more or less at random, just to feel like he’s doing something, like the trip hasn’t been a waste. A few sheets of blank paper, two black pencils, a couple of envelopes, a card from a local real estate company. Worse than a hotel room.
He goes into the bedroom and flops facedown on the bed. He’d like to go to sleep and dream about something extravagant and enlightening—an adventure in a castle with vertiginous stairs, ping-pong tables, tortoises fornicating or headbutting each other, and a fog that rises up and ambushes it all—then wake up not knowing where he is and gradually come back around, resting his eyes on the things around him until he recognizes them and, finally, remembers everything. The feet of the nightstand, for example, with their stylized taper, like a knock-kneed cartoon heroine’s legs. The wire from the bedside lamp, which twists and runs out of view as though hiding. The painted baseboard, which has started to warp and will soon come away from the wall. A patch of gray carpet. A piece of yarn or cable tracing a red Z on the carpet. He picks it up: it’s one of the fine, flexible wires coated in plastic that people use to throttle bags and containers. He turns over and lies faceup, so that a blade from the ceiling fan is pointing directly at his chest, and only then does he notice the one personal touch that’s at odds with the place’s neutrality: that smell. Wafting in the background is an old, dirty perfume, ancient but not overpowering: the unmistakable aroma of objects that have passed through many hands, like the smell of worn-out secondhand clothes, for example, especially when they’ve been shut away in a closet for a long time. Or the smell of money.
There are no worn-out clothes in his mother’s closet. Or there are, but they’re all impeccable, recently washed, dresses and coats fresh from the dry cleaner’s and wrapped in plastic sheaths, pants ironed, shoes shining, everything hanging perfectly on the dark, wooden, slightly concave hangers that seem to be designed for shoulders and backs from another age, but which his mother is still willing to travel the length of the city to buy. The closet is full of clothes, full to bursting, so full that he wonders what could possibly have been removed, which two or three items she put in her suitcase the day she decided to admit herself to the clinic. When he looks down at the two rows of shoes covering the floor—the second on tiptoes with the heels resting against the wall to make a little more space—he sees something glinting, a sort of spark at the bottom of some low rain boots. He bends down—a raincoat caresses his head and messes up his hair as he enters a cloud of leather—and unearths a little packet of clear cellophane, like the ones that come with candy or party favors inside, tied at one end with a red wire like the one he found on the rug.
There’s money inside, a few creased notes. He holds it up to his eyes with a look of surprise and suspicion, the same look people use with worrying gifts whose wrapping gives away but also contradicts their contents, the sumptuous packaging evidently having been the object of great care even though the contents are so worthless that it’s difficult to even think of them as a gift, or the other way around, the wrapping an emergency measure, improvised using cheap materials, and the contents an incalculable joy. But a gift? He’s not even sure that it’s intended for anyone, and not simply a method of safekeeping. He pulls the closet doors wide open and lets in the light from the room, and after squatting and scanning the two rows of shoes, he finds another packet hidden in a pair of loafers, and another squashed under the sole of a sandal, and yet another being badly crushed by a pair of knee-high boots.
They’re all small amounts, petty cash, and always different and very specific quantities that seem to correspond to some immediate need: twenty-five pesos, forty, thirty-two, two hundred and twenty, a hundred and ten. It’s not saved cash. It’s unspent cash: cash that was originally meant to pay for something, or settle something, but was stopped at the last minute and kept here, in this hothouse his mother confined it to, where she’s been leading this sterile life for how long now? How long has his mother been collecting money? Those hundred and twelve pesos, for example. That’s the exact amount on the electricity bill he picked up off the floor as soon as he came into the apartment, the one that prompted his mother’s last request for money. It’s that cash. Not just the same amount but the same notes he gave her: two fifties, a ten, and a two. On one of the fifties he recognizes the text from a superstitious chain his mother read aloud through laughter when she received it. He presses farther into the closet, possessed by a strange fury and willing to scour it to the last square centimeter. He finds more money, nests of it scattered between sweaters, in a drawer full of bras, hidden among socks and on the T-shirt shelf, where they’re sprouting like mothball mines or Easter surprises. It’s always his money: everything he’s ever lent her, everything he’s given her to spend, pay, cover, save herself from the emergencies she was drowning in. They turn up in the drawers of her nightstand, among earplugs and broken pairs of glasses; in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, cuddling up to bottles of painkillers; in the kitchen, in the cutlery drawer and the pantry and even the oven—two little silver packets gleaming in the darkness, sitting in the middle of a baking tin like precocious stars in a black-light theater—and when he begins to open these little packets, he discovers that the money goes back in time, regresses, getting younger and older at the same time. There are notes and coins here from five, ten, twenty, forty years ago: australs, Argentine pesos, pesos ley, pesos moneda nacional, in unpredictable and at the same time strangely obtuse amounts—3,205; 22,000; 440; 27. They’re like pieces of a puzzle, singular sums with irregular edges that only fit in certain holes, precise times and places at which his mother’s life is bound to his. He’s rolling in money now. He has more money than he’s ever had before or will ever have again. But it’s lost money, at once barren and glorious and as devastating as the fossils that, when they’re first excavated, seem to say something so unique about the world that they’re celebrated as providential discoveries for humanity, but later, when they’re scrupulously, patiently exa
mined, bring sorrow and end up dashing all hopes, because the language they say it in is dead, not impenetrable but literally dead, only ever spoken by two people, almost always without knowing they were speaking it, and often without knowing what they were saying, or why, or what special value, what sparkle, what dark privilege graced this thing they blindly mistook for common currency.
A Note on the Text
The fictional events in this novel unravel over decades of real tragedy in Argentina. It is widely known outside of the country that a military junta seized power in 1976 and went on to wage a Dirty War, “disappearing” tens of thousands of dissidents and people believed to be dissidents. That tragedy didn’t occur in isolation; it was preceded by five other coups d’état in the same century, and took place amid extreme instability in all spheres, notably the economic and industrial as well as the political—though obviously distinctions like these are often academic.
Between the first summer we see here in Mar del Plata in 1966 and the conclusion of the novel around four decades later, Argentina had five currencies, whose names recur in the novel: pesos moneda nacional, pesos ley 18.188, pesos argentinos, australs, and the peso convertible—introduced in 1992 and still in use at the time of writing, though it’s usually simply called the peso. Each new currency was introduced because the last had been devalued by vertiginous inflation.
For individuals, the instability of the local currency led to a reliance on the U.S. dollar that persists today. For many Argentines wishing to safeguard their cash, converting into dollars has long been a no-brainer—a reaction to economic instability that further devalues the peso.