A History of Money: A Novel (6 page)

This scene is replayed three times, identically, over the course of the trip, but the cloud of mysteries it brings with it pursues him for years. He can never understand how his father can call someone who owes him money a “friend.” It’s not the notion of debtors that he finds problematic; in fact, that’s not new to him. How many times has he heard his father shout that people owe him money? Everyone owes him money, all the time. It’s as though the world were split in two: his father, alone, and the huge wave of debtors that persecutes him. What he can’t understand is why he declares it the way he does. There’s an element of complaint in it (as though the money he’s owed is a curse that can only be cast by yelling), but also a certain disconcerting pride that transforms the status of creditor into a privilege, a miraculous gift of the type that fate bestows on the heroes of apocalyptic films, like being fertile in a world sterilized by nuclear radiation, or the ability to speak or think on a planet populated by beasts. It’s really the money itself that he finds disturbing. He can never imagine friendship and money coexisting without feeling scandalized. It’s as though, by dint of some extraordinary cosmic misalignment, two radically foreign kingdoms have come together in an unknown territory, and it’s anybody’s guess what sort of unwonted plants and creatures will result. And since it’s impossible for him to grasp, he naturally starts to jump to conclusions.

His father said “a friend” to ease his mind, to alleviate the worrying effect of “owes me money,” the only charged and therefore true part of the sentence. But how can “a friend” share any reasonable sequence of events with the dark package that his father takes out of the drawer and puts in his pocket each of the three nights he goes out alone, leaving him in the eye of a storm of omens from which only sleep can free him? If “a friend” can’t share a phrase with “owes money,” what kind of phrase would it take to unabashedly unite “a
friend” and “a revolver”? Because that’s what his father takes with him every time he goes to see the friend who owes him money, a revolver, an 1873 Colt Peacemaker six-shooter with a walnut handle, just like the one Montgomery Wood, the hero of
O dolar furado,
uses when he tries to avenge his brother’s murder. Which means his father is in danger. How did he not think of it earlier? That’s obviously why he goes out alone. He leaves the Hotel Gloria, travels the length of the city in a taxi—one of the demented race cars that serve as taxis in Rio de Janeiro—and, with his Colt 1873 at the ready, tiptoes into a gloomy, unfamiliar apartment where everything from the arrangement of the furniture to the location of every last light switch and bell, everything that could either serve his purpose or hinder it, is obedient to someone else’s will: that of the friend who owes him money. Which is to say his worst enemy, who won’t only not return his money but will make the most of his local advantage, will surprise him, split his head open with the sharp edge of a rock or a trophy, and leave him sprawled on the floor, drowning in his own blood. Sometimes, years later—long after the enigma has been solved, when there’s no longer anything to fear—he replays the scene to himself, more out of the peculiar inertia of internal fictions than anything else, and he’s flooded with a very potent retrospective terror that can change the past instantaneously, at the lightest of brushes, and he lies awake for hours, his eyes wide open, until, when he’s as exhausted as he was at eleven years old, he hears the frenzied cawing of the birds breaking the morning silence.

How much money can his father be owed? What sum could justify the ritual of those three sadistic nights: his being put to bed—almost like being locked away in a basement—and condemned to the nightmare of insomnia; his father spritzing himself with cologne and dressing and styling his hair so carefully; the revolver being put in his pocket. To say nothing
of everything else, all of it as ominous and misshapen as a series of expressionist photograms: the taxi, the city in darkness, the apartment, the head split open by the corner of the trophy, the puddle of blood. How much more money than the dead man was carrying in the helicopter? How much less? The same amount? (In his mind, and this is an illness he won’t be cured of until much later, and even then only by chance, any unknown quantity of money is by definition the same sum.) Three times this scene is replayed, and three times his father gives the same answer when, at the breakfast table the next morning, he gathers his courage and takes advantage of the state of idiotic beatitude his father sinks into on seeing the encyclopedic variety of fruits on offer at the hotel to ask him the question that has been macerating in his terrified imagination for, what, ten, twelve hours? Whether he finally got the money his friend owed him. All three times, the same answer: No. All three times, the same explanation: He couldn’t find him. He went to his house, he rang the bell, nobody answered.

This answer seems possible, logical. That could happen, he thinks, while his little right hand—which is very skilled at drawing and sculpting monsters out of modeling clay and other such feats of dexterity, but astonishingly clumsy when it comes to more basic practical matters—struggles to spread butter on a long, vaguely oval slice of pumpernickel that looks like the sole of one of his shoes. But the third time he hears it, he freezes, stunned, with the piece of bread suspended midway between the plate and his mouth. What did he say? What’s he talking about? It’s not the fact that he’s being lied to that shocks him. It’s the wild disproportion he senses between the answer—which, incidentally, his father gives without even thinking about it, totally unfazed, while his hands pile up slices of
abacaxí
on his plate and his eyes flit eagerly to the platters of mango, papaya, guava, passion fruit, fruits that drive him crazy, as he often says in Buenos Aires,
where they’re nowhere to be found, but whose names he can’t remember, and never will be able to—and the three nights of torment he’s been made to endure. Something inside him darkens, as when a cloud drags its long, slow shadow across a scorched terrace. He no longer thinks of his father as a nocturnal adventurer who distracts night watchmen, forces windows, and slips, armed, into other people’s houses to reclaim what is his at the risk of violent retaliation and even death. What if he’s a coward? He considers the possibility for a second, and the image that had filled him with happiness earlier, when he woke up and almost crashed into it—his father by his side, safe and sound and acting as though nothing had ever happened, sitting on the edge of his bed in the early morning to recruit him for a breakfast orgy of fruit—becomes a proof of disgrace. He survived, which means he didn’t have the courage to see it all the way through. He goes out, stops the taxi, gives the address, but when the taxi driver repeats it, loudly, the alarmed tremor in his voice makes him hesitate. The neighborhood’s dark streets frighten him. He sees a light on in one of the apartment’s windows and worries that his debtor friend is not alone. He arrives just as the other guy is coming out, and realizes that he didn’t remember him being so tall, so stocky, so ready for anything.

The more he thinks about it, the surer he is that he’s been tricked. But by now, after three nights of lying awake until dawn with his heart in his mouth, thinking he’s been left fatherless in a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro, what apart from the scene he fears most could possibly satisfy him? This is how the imagination operates: by submitting its guinea pigs to extreme challenges of its own invention and recognizing their heroism only when they succumb, never when they survive. It’s also how the period operates: those who make it back from the dead come back because they’re cowards, because they’ve sold out or paid up, because they’ve struck a deal
with the enemy, never because they’ve overpowered it. Not the dead crostini lover: at least he goes all the way down and doesn’t come back. His father came back; he lives to tell the tale, as they say. But what type of tale would he have to tell to repay the torment he’s made him suffer? Certainly not the string of abstractions he throws out when, and only when, it occurs to him to interrogate him during the remainder of the vacation. Never a single detail. The streets don’t have names, the neighborhoods are “there,” “on the other side of the
lagoa,
” “before you reach the bridge.” Nothing happens at a precise time. All the recurring events—the taxi, the house, the friend who never answers the intercom—are vague and insipid, like an illustration of a phrase in a foreign grammar book. Occasionally he thinks he’s uncovered an unexpected nuance, a change in his father’s tone of voice, some new piece of information that casts doubt on an earlier version of the facts: the neighborhood isn’t that far away, he lets his taxi go when he gets there (when earlier he had preferred to make it wait), a lit-up balcony with plants appears where earlier there had only been the black square of a window. What type of plants? Ficus? Ferns? Dwarf palms? What emerges here is never the truth. It is, rather, the impression that anything that comes out of his father’s mouth is and always will be a lie.

And another thing, though this occurs to him only later, when he’s already back in Buenos Aires: If he never finds the friend who owes him money, why doesn’t he come back to the hotel? Where does he spend the rest of those three nights? “At the casino, my darling,” his mother says. Or rather releases amid the musical laugh she lets out after hearing his account of those three dismal nights at the Gloria, in particular at the phrase he quotes directly, as if his father were speaking through him—
A friend owes me money
—which she finds irresistibly comic. At first he doesn’t intend to tell her about it. He is eleven years old. He has spent eight of those
years—since the day his father, freshly bathed, as he always is for the decisive moments in his life, filled a bag with his white monogrammed shirts, his sports magazines, his cufflinks, his bottle of lavender water, his packet of imported cigarettes, his suede buckled shoes, and his shaving brush, and left the apartment on Ortega y Gasset forever—avoiding the role of double agent. He knows too well the explosive potential that certain pieces of information acquire when they pass from one camp to another. But then maybe that’s exactly why he tells. Maybe when he gets back, tanner than he’s ever been before or ever will be again, and sees his mother emptying his suitcase, and a little
carioca
sand falls out of a sock and trickles onto the carpet, maybe at that moment he realizes how much bitterness he has stored up. Casino? He stands staring at his mother in wary astonishment, like a con artist looking at a more skillful rival.

His father dies and not once in almost fifty years has he seen him gambling. Crying, yes, and being humiliated, and punching through the cheap wood of a hotel room’s closet door, and secretly doing all manner of pathetic things, and standing with his hands on his hips, wearing an air of absolute perplexity, to examine the Fiat 600’s engine as it smokes on the shoulder, and putting a piece of toilet paper on a shaving cut to stop it from bleeding, and lying to hide his shame, and furiously rubbing the first age spot to appear on the back of one of his hands. But that scene—the scene of his father sitting at a card table with a glass of whiskey, a cigarette smoking while it lies in a notch on the ashtray, one hand palm down and motionless on the green cloth, the other holding three poker cards in a fan at forty-five degrees, also facedown—will always be denied him. And his father will be the one who denies it, though he’s open in everything, shameless even in matters of bodily intimacy, such as taking a bath or defecating—both of which he always does with
the bathroom door open—or farting—one of his hobbies, in which he takes no heed of spatial limitations or social restrictions, and which he practices and teaches as devotedly as a crusader—but rigidly reserved when it comes to gambling. He can talk about it, share anecdotes about the casinos he frequents and the gamblers he knows, admit how much he won on his best night and how much he lost on his worst, and even manage to make the figures sound convincing. But his father never allows anybody to see him gambling. Nobody, least of all his loved ones, not even those who haven’t the slightest objection to it—namely him, who as soon as he finds out that he gambles stops disdaining him as a coward and, though he knows he’s deluded, starts to respect him again, to adore him, to envy the intimacy of this new world he’s just discovered he reigns over. He doesn’t want anybody near him when he gambles—period. Neither nearby nor hoping to emulate him. This is the source of the indolence that floods him—his father, who in any of his other strong suits, numbers, of course, and reading between the lines of newspapers, tennis, sports in general, predicting the success or failure of a play, is a born pedagogue if not an outright evangelist, a man who will not rest until he’s emptied himself of everything he has to teach—whenever someone, usually him, begs him to impart a little of his great knowledge, like how to assume a poker face, ruses for winning at roulette, ways of dissembling, shuffling and dealing techniques, the stance to adopt in casinos, which drinks to order, how to pick out rivals with better cards than yours, how to talk to the person throwing the ball at a roulette wheel so that the right numbers come up. Once more, it’s all vague and general or already common knowledge. The cloth is green; you drink whiskey, neat or with ice; it’s a good idea to give a chip or two to the staff when a ball lands in your favor, and also to play at more than one table at a time; knowing how to lie is crucial. In other words, nothing. He can’t
decide whether his father refuses to share his knowledge so as not to cement his reputation as a gambler, out of shame—like a victim of some moral disease who believes that passing on what he has learned since catching it will pass on the disease itself—or because he’s scared that if he shares it, his knowledge will take root in another gambler, a conscientious apprentice who, when chance brings them together at a card table someday, will clean up using the very techniques that he taught him. In any case, he will have to content himself with the version of his private gift that his father is prepared to share in public, which remains as opaque, as scandalously far from its original as the mercilessly mutilated versions of certain films that circulate under the censorship of the day: a sly, inconsequential bluff in a game of
truco
among friends, a rapid sleight with the dice cup at the beach club that gets him five of a kind, the whist tournaments played in the club’s game room, in the middle of the day, while children play between the tables and old people nod off in groups, for a cash prize that, if he wins it—which according to his reputation at the club he does two out of every three times—is not enough to pay for the coffees he’s drunk while competing.