A History of Money: A Novel (19 page)

Ah, if only he could have given the same response every time he’s been asked the same question. Why hasn’t he ever been able to? Why has he always preferred to have something to say rather than nothing? Who made him the guardian of the supposed meanings of things? There’s his disabled group, for a start, whose members are always so desperate to know everything. For a few months, no doubt to fool himself that he’s not a kept man, he agrees to watch and discuss films with a group of culturally curious sexagenarians, a sort of private film society. They meet once a week, always at a different member’s house. They don’t pay much, but the payment is rhythmical, regular—the closest he’s come to a job in many years. The disabled bunch—as he calls them, inspired by the leader of the gang, a brilliant, extroverted retired accountant confined to a wheelchair by a degenerative disease—are kind and welcoming. The women crown every meeting with a big ethnic feast (hummus, falafel, goulash with spätzle), offer to fix the button dangling from his jacket, and show him their family photo albums, casually pointing out the niece or granddaughter who might suit him. The men offer him cigars and slap him confidentially on the knee before asking him
who he’s planning to vote for—almost all of them started out on the left, and though they no longer belong to that past, it still dictates their gestures, behavior, reactions, and manner of speaking, like a country they once fled and have no intention of going back to, though they owe it everything and will never forget it—or offer him their varied contact lists in case he needs a loan, a discounted refrigerator, or free printing for some wedding invitations. They all trust him, invest him with an authority he doesn’t have, and swallow in wordless, reverential silence the sprawling Soviet and Czech and Hungarian films he shows them in order to ingratiate himself to—or maybe finish off forever—their legendary militant youths.

Very soon, though, their reserve dissolves and they grow more confident, and when they come across a dense, studied image on the screen that they don’t understand but can tell is full of meaning, fit to burst with it, they finally pluck up their courage, raise a shaking hand, and ask: “What does that mean?” That’s how it begins: the disaster, the epidemic, the domino effect. What does that mean, that sled that’s lashed by snow in the glass globe that falls out of the dead man’s hand? And what does that mean, that old workboot with no laces that’s been left in that ruined anti-aircraft shelter? What about the darning the heroine devotes herself to in the final scene, when she’s surrounded by toothless, homeless wasters? And the old spinning top that never stops turning? And the two song verses the protagonist tries in vain to remember, which come back to him only at the end of the film? And that broken window, that stained petal, the clock that tells the time backward in that old bar in a Portuguese port?

He answers, of course. He answers like the good slave he is to the only real job he’s ever had, a job nobody offered or assigned to him, which nobody hired him for and in which he never has to answer to anyone, a job he’s born with and will die with: taking responsibility for the meaning of things. But
he can’t stand these people. He’d desert them, leave, slamming the door behind him so that it shook and possibly cracked the beautiful crystalware the disabled bunch keep unused in heavy, dark-wood dressers that are always threatening to collapse, which they somehow managed to bring from Europe in one piece, the same wild Europe that slaughters all of their relatives, or fills them with lead, or gases them—he’d desert them if he weren’t suddenly distracted by the new member of the group, a tall, thin man with an aquiline profile who’s as stern as an undertaker and has a vague record of militancy (he’s rumored to have provided printing machinery to the Montoneros), who spent six years in exile in Brazil, where he first heard and uttered the word
reciclaje,
selling out, and then came back and made a fortune, initially importing blank videotapes, then later manufacturing them in a remote Patagonian plant, until he retired and used his remaining stock of tapes to start a small distributor of art-house films called La Tierra Tiembla, whose titles—Soviet avant-garde, Italian neorealism, German expressionism, Jancsó, Wajda,
Jackal of Nahueltoro
—are listed in alphabetical order in a brochure the accountant slips into his pocket one night, all of them at his disposal for the group’s meetings, all he has to do is ask. The other members of the disabled bunch call him the King, an innocuous abbreviation of the King of Magnetic Tape (but the King, being modest and antimonarchical, must never find out). Whatever his powers might be, the King doesn’t contain the epidemic; quite the opposite, in fact. The what-does-it-means gain force. Maybe the element of novelty he adds to the group makes the desire to participate and to know even stronger; maybe the fact that the films they’re now watching and discussing come from within the group gives them more of a right to make themselves heard. Chaplin: what does it mean.
Ashes and Diamonds
: what does it mean.
Stalker
: what the hell does it mean! One more and he’ll explode. He really
will leave this time. He’ll take the money for the last session and never see them again. But now it’s
Ivan the Terrible
—one of La Tierra Tiembla’s star titles, along with
La tierra tiembla
—and if he left before that, as he intends to, he’d miss the best thing of all. He’d miss the King of Magnetic Tape’s lesson.

A rainy Friday. A spacious, comfortable apartment in a prosperous, though not opulent, neighborhood. Waterproof jackets and umbrellas dripping penitently in a half bathroom. Steam rises from cups of coffee and tea and smoke from the King’s Cuban cigar while he gazes at the screen wearing a broad smile of satisfaction, just like he does every time they watch a film from his list. As teacher, he stands guard near the machine, his leg trembling with impatience. He has the remote control in his hand, his finger ready to fire as soon as one of the usual hunters of meaning—the chocolatier’s pallid sister; the man who owns a printing company and never stops rubbing his nose; even the accountant, so emboldened by his colleagues that for some time now he’s been launching his what-does-it-means along with grand, accusatory gestures, as though the wheelchair were a pulpit and he a latter-day tribune—raises a hand and spits out the stupid question that he will once more, perhaps for the last time, to his shame, do everything he can to answ—but sshhh!: they’ve just crowned the young, embattled tsar. The crown has already closed around his head, he’s already been given the scepter (or rather has grabbed it from the archbishop himself with a hand that’s covered in rings, in a decidedly inelegant show of greed) as well as the globe with the cross on it, and the hairy old maniac is already singing his hymn in a voice that comes from beyond the grave, and now two members of the court enter the scene and take up position on either side of Ivan, two steps up, and a pair of servants gives them two large bowls, which they hold by their shoulders. The chorus erupts. The courtiers tip the bowls, and a rain of gold coins falls on
the tsar’s head, it falls, and falls, and won’t stop falling, a long cascade of gold that skims the crown and his shoulders and spills onto the floor, and when it seems as though the gold will never stop raining down, the chocolatier’s sister lifts her soft buttocks very slightly from her mustard-colored corduroy chair, points at the television, and says, “What does it mean?” Having seen it coming, he presses
PAUSE
immediately, without even turning to face the television again (he knows the film by heart), and solemnly, or wearily, stands up to speak (it’s the last time, he thinks, the last!), and when he opens his eyes after emerging from the brief blackout he dips into in search of literature on coronation rituals, he sees eight faces contorted by stupor, eight stunned masks, plus one—the King’s—that’s frozen in an expression of horror, and which then suddenly turns red and breaks into a coughing fit. Out of pure momentum, he starts to speak: “Well, on days of celebration in the tsars’ Russia, gold was …” The disabled bunch’s faces all remain exactly the same. Nobody’s listening to him, nobody even registers his existence, bewitched as they are by the monstrosity before them. At this point he turns around and sees on the screen a washed-out close-up with the enlarged grain of an amateur recording, in which two colossal cocks, as knotted as tree trunks, are charging simultaneously on a woman lying facedown. He’s not sure whether he lets go of it or it slips out of his fingers, but the remote control falls facedown on the floor, also stunned, and the tape starts rolling again. A change of scene. Shot from a meter, maybe a meter and a half away, the picture is crystal clear, as clear as the cascade of gold that pours down on the young tsar of all Russia or the Portuguese shouts of ecstasy that spark into the living room like obscene fireflies: a dark-skinned stud, standing up with his legs slightly bent, fills her ass, while the other one, a white guy, lies beneath her, ramming against her cunt and squeezing the flesh on her buttocks with his long
masturbator’s fingers. Five seconds later, the Brazilian trio return whence they came, like a monster being swallowed by the lips of the cave that spat it out, and the golden coins start their interminable falling again.

How she—her, his mother—would love for that to happen now, with all her helpless heart: for money to rain down on her. She says it just like that, with her eyes lost in the ceiling moldings as though waiting for the first notes to drop from the little crevice someone’s crudely restored with plaster, where a spider is sleeping at the bottom of its web, curled up into a ball, while the smell of its prey slips into its dreams. It takes him a while to figure out how little this desire has to do with ambition, or with the sort of lovingly cultivated toxic rancor a queen would accumulate over the course of decades of exile spent putting on a public display of indifference to news from home, and then by night clipping and saving that same news in the always slightly damp, or suffocating, or noisy privacy of her rented room. Actually, his first thought when she confesses her bankruptcy is that what she’s really confessing to is a crime, a crime of lèse-majesté like child abuse or massacring a people, and that the victim of that crime is him, her son, who’s been dispossessed of everything that’s rightly his by the simple act of confession. He might owe her his life, as they say. But she owes him money. A lot of money. For an exhausting fraction of a second full of early mornings, aspiring lawyers loaded down with files, echoing hallways, and coffee from machines, he imagines himself taking his mother on, bringing her to justice; he even hears himself delivering his dispossessed son’s plea before the judge, who’s suddenly downgraded—because true justice is impervious to the imagination—to a narrow-shouldered secretary with dandruff who stops typing to ask him, “
Excess
has an
x
and a
c
, doesn’t it?” But who would he call as his witnesses? His grandfather. His grandfather, repatriated for the solemn
duration of the hearing by means of spiritualist subterfuge … His grandfather, of whom sometime later, when there’s still less left of the nothing she confesses to having that afternoon, his mother will tell the story with a face that’s red with fury, as though it had happened moments ago and not fifty years in the past, of the time she came home from school and, still excited after the indoctrination she had received in the subject that morning—“Saving is the foundation of fortune”—asked him for a savings book, and he, giving her a little push as though she were blocking his line of vision, told her that he had “a bank account, not little savings books.”

No, it’s not ambition; it’s an absolute lack of hope, a sudden, frozen emptiness that opens in her chest when it becomes clear that she doesn’t have a peso left. This is what condemns his mother to wait for the demented miracle of money raining down from the sky. Less out of conviction than because they’re within her grasp and as fresh as ulcers, she starts with reasonable miracles, clinging desperately to the idea that sooner or later the Beast will be sold, no matter what state it’s in, no matter what time and the winters and the humidity and weeds and gangs of squatters with backpacks have done to it, and that she’ll recover at least some of what she lost. She hasn’t been back for a long time; she hasn’t witnessed half the metamorphoses it’s gone through; she can’t even picture it any longer. Every image she has of it is out of date. She remembers it only in dreams, on the rare occasions that she manages to sleep uninterruptedly, and the payback for those interludes stolen from insomnia—a miracle that’s almost more unheard-of than money raining down: she has her own table set aside in the hotel bar, and the night guard knows to switch on a light and serve her some tea or a glass of cognac when she comes downstairs with eyes like saucers at three or four in the morning—is a vision played at high speed of a type of creeping citadel growing constantly and in every
direction, including down into the earth, following a system of interlocking cubes through which all manner of frightened little creatures pass in and out: moles, armadillos, guinea pigs from some useless experiment, which a psychotic stylist has decided to dress up in tiny rugby shirts. “It must be worth something,” she thinks. And if there’s no value in the house, in the grounds, the cement, the floor tiles, the window frames, the flagstones, or the mosaic tiling, then there must at least be some—just like in tales of adventure in which, for all his charisma and virtue, the hero always owes much of his appeal to his nemesis’s monstrosity—in the tragic role the Beast has played in her life; in the way in which the house lays waste to everything in the space of ten years.

Sitting in the hotel’s picture window in her nightgown, with her beautiful Italian raincoat hanging from her shoulders, getting a little tipsy from the cognac fumes, she daydreams about someone who hunts for grisly scenes in real estate, one of the vultures that patrol the stars’ neighborhoods in Hollywood with checkbook and pen at the ready, searching for ruined or abandoned mansions with blood spattered on the marble in the bathroom, the gold ceilings embroidered with bullet holes, poolhouses decorated with brain matter. Why not. Why shouldn’t she be blessed by one of these evaluators of misfortune. It must be worth something. But if anyone were to ask her what “something” means, how she measures “something,” she wouldn’t know what to say.
Nobody
would know what to say—just as committees of experts brought together to value the masterworks of idiotic artists, or idiotic works by masterful artists, don’t know what to say and can never reach an agreement. When she comes back down to earth and reassesses, and decides that only modesty will save her, she imagines small amounts, just a bonus, the difference that would understatedly but decisively remove her from this nightmare from which she can’t seem to
wake up. But she waits, and she waits, and that modest little amount that would make her happy never comes, and once again the Beast becomes everything to her, responsible for taking everything she had and capable of giving it all back, and at those moments she opens her hotel room’s window in the middle of the night, in her nightgown, with her Italian raincoat falling off her shoulders and onto the floor, still completely unwrinkled, no creases at all except the ones the designers intended to be there, and she yells at the world, at the sleeping world of Calle Uriburu, the astronomical figure for which she’s prepared to talk—only to talk, she won’t guarantee anything beyond that—about selling the house. It’s clear, in any case, that the one possibility his mother never considers, neither in her moments of modesty, when she just wants to forget, nor when she’s overcome by the desire for revenge and she screams for the whole world to be signed over to her, is the ridiculous, paltry, disproportionately sad figure they end up getting from a Uruguayan construction firm, the last on a long list of buyers—and the only one that agrees to actually
see
the house—who disappear one after another when they see the photos: ten thousand dollars, to be halved with her ex-husband.