A History of Money: A Novel (13 page)

What his father does with the money is a mystery. He doesn’t tell him, and he prefers not to ask, convinced that if he finds out, his life will be made impossible by worrying about its fate. He also develops a superstition: he thinks that if he ignores the game his money’s participating in, he can neutralize the irrational nature of that game, or magically tip it in his favor. The only thing he knows, because it’s the first thing his father tells him, is that for the five months his money’s put to work—during which time, he says, his capital will achieve the highest return the black market can offer—there will be no receipts or documentation, nothing official, signed, sealed,
or dated; none of the stuff that would come with a fixed-term deposit at a bank or other financial institution to prove that the money exists and is earning dividends somewhere and belongs to him. He also knows that, strictly speaking, the fact that he gives his father a wad of a hundred new hundred-dollar bills doesn’t mean anything at all, and neither is there any meaning in the fact that his father puts it in his inside jacket pocket just as it is, without unwrapping it or counting it, as though he had been expecting it for years. It’s not his father’s hands that he’s placing the money in, a truth his father confirms before his very eyes some twenty minutes later in a European airline’s office, when he approaches the employee at the register, a young woman in a flight attendant’s uniform with the remains of old eyeliner on her eyelids, and after the obligatory swaggering, double entendres, and jokes that make her blush—the flirting routine that he’s been watching in action since he was a child accompanying his father on his work errands in the business district every Friday, and which he now sees as his father’s second language, a basic but crucial tongue without which none of his necessary daily transactions would turn out as happily as they seem to—his father plucks the ten thousand dollars he’s just given him from his inside jacket pocket and settles an account.

Trusting him means trusting that he knows whom to trust. His father is a link in a chain, a recruiter of cash. Without him, that money—though it’s only a modest sum—would never enter the game. But the chain is long and winding, and he doesn’t know the other links, and they probably don’t and won’t ever know one another, not because it’s safer that way or out of a desire to preserve hierarchies—these being the most common explanations for the obsession with compartmentalization that underlies the logic of many secret organizations, among them the armed organization that is said to have crashed the helicopter carrying the dead crostini lover, along
with the attaché case full of money and the pilot—but because they’re linked by nothing more than a number, a purely nominal entity, in this case ten thousand dollars, or to put it another way, one more among the millions of anonymous figures that set the game in motion and keep it going. This is all he needs to know about the logic of finance, a magma that will always fascinate and elude him. No, there’s no such thing as “his” money; “his mother’s husband’s money” doesn’t exist, nor “his father’s.” Money isn’t personal, it isn’t property, it doesn’t belong to anybody. Money is what’s always there before money. It’s a boundless ocean, nothing but horizon, into which millions of wads just like his flow every second, from every direction, losing their identities the moment they plunge in and surviving for months in a state of total formlessness and amnesia, every trace of their origin and even any quantity distinctions having been wiped out; in the best-case scenarios they return to being what they once were when a shore appears out of nowhere and, from it, someone remembers them and recognizes them and returns them to everyday circulation, enriched by the scars left by danger and adventure.

That’s the best-case scenario. In the worst, which is also the most frequent when the country is caught in the centrifugal force of a so-called
inflationary spiral,
the money is lost and disappears forever, is swallowed by the common ocean and only reminds the world of its existence when its owner—who awaits it anxiously for the agreed period and then, once that’s over, carries on waiting in vain for weeks or months more, knocking on doors that never open, dialing disconnected phone numbers, hunting down employees who are stunned by this madman they’ve never seen before—realizes that he’s lost it all, leaves his jacket folded neatly on a bench at the station, and hurls himself onto the subway tracks. More than once during those five months, after being
startled by the parade of bloodbaths he reads about in the newspapers—bankruptcies, banks folding, fugitive directors of finance companies, small investors who’ve been conned rioting until the police come and disperse them—he begins to feel a little like that furious man holding his hand to his forehead like a visor and desperately searching the open sea for some trace of his money. If he isn’t that man, if he just feels like him, that’s only because his father knows how to calm him down. His father brings the subject up before he does, as a topic of conversation rather than a source of terror, talking about the cash with a mixture of nostalgia and admiration, as though remembering a much-loved and very sensible relative who at a certain age decided on a change of life and is now the center of all manner of thrilling intrigues in far-off countries, which will change them forever but from which they’ll return safe and sound and even improved, stronger, capable now of facing the monsters they once fled. And having brought it up unbidden, he abandons it again just as easily, filing it away and returning to the routine they’ve shared for twenty years: a while at the office, then lunch at the fake Italian restaurant at Esmerelda and Córdoba, coffee in a bar at Florida and Paraguay, his rounds of airlines, agencies, and currency exchanges, a visit to the bookshop in the basement of the Jardín mall, goodbyes in Plaza San Martín.

Seeing him going about his business so naturally, his fears dissolve. He figures none of this could be happening if his money were in danger. At least one habit would have to change. His father wouldn’t eat as quickly as he always does, pitting himself against an invisible opponent. He wouldn’t clean his plate with little pieces of bread and then throw them in his mouth. He wouldn’t joke about soccer with the maître d’. He wouldn’t leave his customary exorbitant tips. He wouldn’t stop to look at shoes in a shop window. He wouldn’t discuss the Finance Ministry’s announcements in
the distant, sarcastic tone of someone who knows they don’t apply to him, as though he came from a foreign country. Somehow this energetic, slightly restless normality soothes him. No matter what happens, things always find a way to run their own course. And so he ends up forgetting about the money, and when he’s reminded of it by something he wants or suddenly realizes he needs, something that costs more than he carries in his pocket or keeps in the old shoebox in his wardrobe, the blow has a visible effect on him, and he feels a stab of frustration, but his discomfort eases as soon as he sees this missing money for what it is: a homeland he’s had to leave for reasons of force majeure, though he remains committed to it and it awaits him with open arms, more opulent than ever.

This lasts for five months. Until one day while getting out of a taxi his mother realizes that, as usual, she doesn’t have any small change—a phrase she uses only when she’s the one who doesn’t have it—and asks him to pay, and then has a sudden moment of illumination right there on the sidewalk and asks him if he shouldn’t be getting his money back right around now. At the time, he lets himself be drawn in by the mockery poisoning his mother’s tone, and then ignores it in order to take his mind off his fear, just like he does every time something shocks him. But later, when they’ve said their goodbyes and his mother turns and begins to walk away slowly, with her already slightly tired gait, her arms hanging almost still by her sides, and her head held low, as soon as he’s safely out of her sight, the first thing he does is open his diary and flick as fast as his anxious fingers will go through days already lived, bills paid, and bar napkins full of to-do lists that he emptily promises himself he’ll transfer to the diary, until finally he’s looking at the page for that day and at the crucial hour ringed with a fluorescent circle and surrounded by large exclamation marks, like an inspired chess combination—and he discovers that his mother is right. Today’s the day. How,
why she’s so mindful of the date he’s supposed to get his money back, even though he thought he’d taken great care to keep this information from her, having foreseen the toxic use she could make of it, he doesn’t know. His mother always seems to be bragging that she knows everything about his father and him, the double act that comes together as rapidly as the marriage breaks down (which is to say very rapidly), and in particular that she knows all about the things they hide from her, that she knows about them before they’ve even happened, and though she often gets it wrong and ends up putting two and two together and getting five, and taking as given things that exist only in her own imagination, he’s not insensible to the conviction with which she lets him know that she knows; it always makes him founder and doubt himself, makes him double- and triple-check things he was sure of, things he’d confirmed seconds before meeting her. This is probably the only thing she has left of the unfortunate, fleeting kingdom the three of them once shared, and she carries it everywhere with her: a certain bent for suspicion; the desire to know what the enemy is plotting.

Ten days later, he has the money again—in cash. He doesn’t get it back at once, all together, as he had expected, but rather bit by bit, in four installments, first two small ones, wrapped in newspaper, and then two larger ones in brown paper bags, some of it in heaps of Argentine money, some of it in dollars, the smallest and most wrinkled notes mixed with larger, newer ones, among them some so new and so crisp that he wonders whether he’s being given freshly counterfeited money. They’re rapid transactions, with no preamble nor any particular show of emotion, which his father carries out as if he doesn’t want to leave any trace of them, briskly and in all the normal settings: the office; a bar full of cooking smells and staff with dandruff gesticulating in their shirtsleeves; even the street door to his building, where his father briefly stops the
taxi he’s passing in, hands him the final packet of cash through the window, without getting out, and goes on his way, giving him no time to react, not even to say thank you. Broken up like this, the handover leaves a vaguely disappointing taste in his mouth. Which isn’t so bad, after all that’s happened. As is often the case with trivial but unexpected feelings, which can eclipse much stronger but more predictable ones simply because they come as a surprise, the disappointment dulls and dispels his anxiety, which is what he should reasonably have felt when his father originally told him that the return of his money would be staggered. But the urgent, scatterbrained, sloppy nature of the collection also blunts his relief at having recovered the money and, more importantly, the happiness he should feel at the miracle of its multiplication. He has almost three times what he started with, much more than anyone else could or does make by putting the same initial amount in a bank at the same time, while he gets his fingers dirty counting his small fortune. It’s a pity that the miracle withers a little when he spreads the cash out on the table and contemplates an assortment of piles, sizes, colors, currencies, and textures that don’t go together and will never—and this is what makes him saddest—have the unity, the wholeness of the original bundle of dollars, scrawny as it was.

He’d like to thank him, at least. He seeks him out in the next few days, asks him to lunch, to see a film, to meet him for a drink. He could swear that his father is avoiding him. The few times he does see him, always at the office, the only place he can be sure of ambushing him, and always hurriedly, because every single time, his father has to get to a meeting or has people waiting for him, he takes advantage of the few minutes he has and talks. At the mere mention of the money, his father busies himself with something else—a phone ringing in a nearby office; the mess of bar napkins covered in scrawling, coffee receipts with notes on the back, and phone
numbers written on bits of ripped newspaper that he calls
my diary
—or frowns and even seems to get annoyed, like those very modest or very vain people who love recognition when it takes them by surprise, but who get prickly about praise for talents they already know they have.

He’ll have to wait years to find out the truth behind his father’s behavior: until his father is in the last stage of life—last in the strictest sense, meaning the stage of hospitalization, because as soon as he’s admitted to the hospital and he sees the retinue of doctors and nurses crowding around him—him, the man who’s set foot in a medical practice only twice in seventy-two years, and both times for the most extraneous reasons, to collect payment for some tickets to Cancún the first time and a poker debt the second—he knows there’s no going back, that he’ll only be exiting this stage feetfirst. Though it’s true that the explanation comes from his father, out of his mouth, one night when it’s his turn to sit beside the bed, it’s not exactly his father who confesses. It’s not the same man who comes to the hospital of his own accord a week earlier, in any case. That man is very tired and bathed in sweat. His thighs are cramping up with a pain like nothing he’s ever felt before, and his blood pressure’s through the roof, but he’s also sufficiently with it to stop the taxi without interrupting the sermon on soccer and politics with which he’s been persecuting the driver, a combination he excels in and to which his blood pressure is particularly sensitive. His reaction to the dizziness that overcomes him in the street—the latest in a series of episodes he’s been keeping secret—proves that he’s still in his right mind: he goes straight to the hospital—an absolutely astonishing decision for him, given the disdain he’s always so famously professed for the medical world, and the equally famous good health, or pride, that has enabled him to manage without his son—and after arriving and being confined to a wheelchair that he initially rejects but is
soon thrilled by, like a bad-tempered child who’s figured out how to turn some stupid adult treasure against its owners, he objects to every method by which the doctors propose to stabilize him, treating them as though they’re completely useless, fleeing them in his chair, and launching himself at full speed down the ramps in the emergency room. Between the wild, irascible man who checks in to that citadel of medicine of his own will and drives its residents crazy, and the glassy-eyed ghost who suddenly starts remembering everything aloud in the intensive care unit where he spends almost two weeks (how he was never sure whether he’d be able to get the money back; how many times during those ten days he nearly called him to confess that he had lost it all; how many he felt he couldn’t face it and considered disappearing off the face of the earth), there come an angioplasty to which he submits with contagious and belligerent good cheer, the disastrous coronary symptoms that flare up as a result of the angioplasty, and almost five hours of open-heart surgery, five hours of brutal butchery from which it’s not clear to anybody how he will recover, if he’s lucky enough to, and from which he does ultimately recover a minimal kind of life, stuffed full of tubes and with his chest slit from throat to diaphragm and wrapped in a corset made of bandages that are soon soaked with blood.