A History of Money: A Novel (17 page)

Technically—which is how his mother always discusses the matter—he does live off the widow, of course. But it all happens so fluidly and so naturally that he never even has time to feel any shame about it. He’s given access to everything, bank accounts and checkbooks, his name is added to credit cards, even fixed-term deposits and investments are open to him, though these being provinces of the world of money that he has no idea what to do with, he sticks to carrying out orders. He’s frugal, much more frugal now that he “has money” (his mother’s quote marks) than he was when his money was really his, or when he didn’t have any. His mother can’t bear it. For example: they meet for lunch. His mother, an amateur gourmet, has picked the dining room of a former convent in the middle of the business district, a territory into which she sometimes ventures with purely provocative intentions, to challenge her son’s comfort in his assumption that the neighborhood has one owner and that owner is his father. While she loses herself in the menu amid sighs of pleasure, as tempted by the monastic selection of dishes as a moth by a flickering light, he unfolds his napkin with a vaguely magician-like gesture, without so much as looking at the menu, and orders a plate of mixed vegetables, or a boiled potato with olive oil, or some white rice. “Enough, you fraud,” his mother rebukes him, snapping her menu
closed so that it releases a silent explosion: “Don’t pretend to be some kind of fakir; your widow isn’t watching you; order something decent.” He pays, as he’s always done. But when did “always” start? And why? And who decided on this arrangement, if he, its primary victim, can’t remember agreeing on anything with anyone, try as he may? Maybe if he thinks harder … The change. Ah, the change! Maybe this agreement is nothing but the continuation by other means—the “higher stage,” in the words of the older brother of the only friend he successfully drags to the Communist Party cinema, an enterprising Trotskyist who uses the lowest, most extortionate means (photos of Leon Davidovich’s skull split open by Ramón Mercader’s ice pick, among other things) to extract a monthly membership fee from him for a year and a half, telling him it goes toward funding the party’s journal—of his old, proverbial role as lender of emergency small change. Maybe.

For the time being, he doesn’t argue. He’s too intrigued by his mother’s interest in his romantic situation. By this eagerness, which is made up of suspicion and rivalry at once … By this strange anticipation … The last time he remembers experiencing anything similar, he’s sixteen years old and has just started going out with an extraordinarily earnest girlfriend, a militant member of a leftist youth group who never reads books of fewer than six hundred pages, has a perfect instinct for gifts (a pair of flippers, a telescope, a fountain pen that will last him twenty-two years), and visits him with businesslike regularity every time he gets sick. The moment his mother leaves them alone, she shoots a disapproving look at his box of antibiotics and, with one of her two-lipped magic tricks—kissing, indoctrinating: which comes first?—tries to convert him to the dogma of homeopathy. “I know you’re not going to like what I’m about to say, but I’m going to say it anyway,” his mother tells him that night, moments after his wonder
girlfriend leaves, not before gathering a heap of snotty tissues with surprising fortitude and throwing them in the trash. “Don’t even think about marrying that girl. Listen to me: live a little first, then get married.” After that, there’s nothing, not a single word either for or against, never anything more on the subject, and with good reason: she must become immune to such worries when he doesn’t pay any attention, either then, in the case of the precocious Bolshevik Florence Nightingale, with whom he ends up moving in and spending nearly ten years afloat in a voluptuous, feverish world, or the next time, with the musical therapist, or ever. And when he succumbs to his last love, the one that falls apart over the same eleven months it takes to finish the house that’s supposed to shelter it, she’s so preoccupied, so absorbed by the crazed progress of the Beast, that she doesn’t even remember to give him the reed blinds she promised him for the gallery. And yet the widow obviously interests her. She’s very careful not to show it, as though asking about her directly would be a sign of weakness or an admission of defeat. But her attention to the changes that spring up in him betrays her. Nothing escapes her. She notices when he wears a shirt in an unexpected color, or slips in a new word that’s still a little rigid and crisp in the sentence, like new sheets, or absorbs and neutralizes her anxiety attacks effortlessly and with a show of good humor, though they used to infuriate him, and every time all of her alarm bells go off at once, mobilizing her legion of molecular spies around the only foreign body liable to have inspired these developments. Sometimes she interprets the delinquent’s behavior as a sign. Maybe it entertains her to see her son dealing with a misfit of the type he never was at that age; whatever the reason, whenever he relays the stories of his crimes to her—in minute detail, as though trying to underscore the difference between the nightmare he’s suffering as an innocent, utterly unsuspecting substitute father and
the heavenly, low-key child she once had—she so rejoices in hearing them that the perfectly irrelevant advice she insists on repaying him with afterward, while she’s still trembling with laughter, sounds to him like disguised arguments for the defense. In any case, while she pieces together the widow’s personality from the bottle-green shirt he shows up in, the new haircut that suddenly makes him seem like a child, and the chivalrous impulses he lavishes upon her, she also builds a mental picture of it based on the boy’s misdeeds—without, of course, ever revealing to him the identikit she’s assembled, a freakish cameo that’s part manipulative harpy, part passive-aggressive monster, in line with the jargon of the psychological parish of which she’s been a devotee for decades, with the most counterproductive results.

All this changes nothing for him. Since that first time, when he ignored her objection to his Bolshevik girlfriend, his love life has unfolded far away from his mother, on another plane; it’s not shielded—since it’s not protected by anything too visible—so much as stubborn and invulnerable, protected by its own rules and protocols, like the tax havens that are becoming fashionable at around the same time, which are generally to be found on more or less remote islands, hermetic protectorates, tiny countries that are weak at first glance but have the unique strength of discretion, the ability to hoard secrets that the rest of the world goes out of its way to find out. He’s brought the whole system to such a state of perfection that nowadays he doesn’t even have to worry about safeguarding any information. He’s not afraid. He could tell her anything—and in fact he does, not only when he admits that his bottle-green shirt, old-fashioned manners, and short hair are the direct result of Sonia’s wishes, but also explicitly, when he describes her appearance (and has some difficulty explaining the concept of a Prince Valiant haircut, owing to his mother’s gross ignorance in the matter of comics) or
her moral character (she gives money to everyone who asks her on the street, every time, without exception or justification, and she removes anyone who has a live-in maid from her social circle), or when he divulges her habits (an hour of yoga between morning sex and breakfast, limited TV, windows wide open in the middle of winter)—and the secret would still be right there, intact, inaccessible to his mother, like openly transmitted frequencies that are audible only to highly trained ears. One day while he’s waiting for her at the only serviceable table in the patisserie she’s arranged to meet him in—one of the unpredictable spots to which his mother is faithful to the point of fanaticism, simply because they offer her something she can’t resist, just one thing, something unusual but not necessarily indispensable, like two-ply toilet paper in the ladies’ restroom, for example, or white, pure-cotton tablecloths, or Renaissance music, or the sickly sweet whiskey liqueur on which she gets hooked on the ferry that takes her to the Beast—he starts to look through some photos he’s just had developed, souvenirs from a “getaway”—one of the widow-isms most likely to raise his mother’s hackles—to Misiones, which starts badly, on a precarious dinghy at Iguazú Falls that the delinquent, who’s been averse to lifejackets since childhood, threatens to slash with the Victorinox he convinced his mother to buy him from the shop in the hotel’s lobby, and ends worse, in a cell at the police station on the Triple Frontier, where he spends six hours in an animated trilingual conclave (Brazilian prostitute, Argentine dealer, Paraguayan smuggler), having been accused of screening a
pornochanchada
on twenty-five color TVs at an electrical appliance store in Foz de Iguazú. He’s wondering for the nth time why what he sees in the viewfinder when he takes a photo is never the same color as the nine-by-thirteen prints that are supposed to capture it, why, for God’s sake, he can now see things he thought he’d left out of the frame (the back of a yellow Renault 12;
the hand—index finger extended, wrist covered in fake gold watches—of the tourist from Minas Gerais who hounded them with his affability and his bad breath), but not, though he searches desperately and even considers going back to the photo lab to complain, things he was sure he’d caught (the smiling, sleeping widow’s slightly aquiline profile on her pillow), when his mother arrives and stands by his side, looking down at the photos as he goes through them, and after savoring a few flashes of banal intimacy—the widow wearing her bathing suit, a poolside massage, eating breakfast on the balcony in a robe, dazzled outside the toucan enclosure at the bird sanctuary, smiling on her pillow, sleeping with her mouth half open—she sits down, takes off her sunglasses with a trembling hand, and says: “How can you take such ugly pictures? Isn’t it time you got yourself a decent camera?” No, he’s not afraid to tell and show her everything, because he knows that entrusting the secret to his mother, offering it up like this, freely, to her foolishness, is the best way to keep it.

But if his mother disdains his photos, that’s only because it’s a different secret that keeps her up at night; one that won’t be found in those stupid, poorly composed pictures, but elsewhere: encrypted in bank statements, in the sums of money that arrive to enlarge them every three months with Swiss regularity, even though nobody’s lifted a finger to bring them into existence.
The money of the dead.
This is what drives her crazy, and he knows it: Isn’t it what drives him crazy, too? Could there be a better, more perfect type of money? Cash that falls from the sky, that rains down of its own accord, without anyone winning it or taking the trouble to send it or claiming it; pure, beneficent cash from the beyond, as impersonal as the seasons, blossom, the tide. They share this unutterable envy, an envy from which there’s no solace and which reaches almost criminal heights in his mother—who, as a young woman, in a moment of harebrained inspiration
during the stupefied interval between her two husbands, conceived a plan to seduce a jazz trumpeter, an affectionate, smooth-chinned guy, on the autism spectrum but extraordinarily prolific and capable of composing three flawless standards in the time it takes a taxi to drive him to the family company where he’s made to earn his keep. It’s awoken in them by the beneficiaries of rights and royalties, privileged creatures who are superior to any aristocrat or well-to-do bourgeois, and above all superior to the piranhas that make their killings on the money market: inventors and their children, authors and their descendants, the heirs of visionaries who had one idea and put it into action and sent it around the world, so that from then on it was the idea and not them, the visionaries, with their sweat, their tears, and their blood, whose existence would be dedicated to making money.

“Why?” his mother shouts (having put her sunglasses back on, as she does every time she suffers an attack of emotion) while reaching across the table, setting the bottle of oil swaying, and shaking him by the lapels of his tweed jacket—Sonia’s latest addition to his wardrobe. “Why the hell weren’t you an author? Why weren’t you a genius, a writer, a scientist, one of those precocious, sickly musicians who die young, before they’ve met a woman or had children, and leave the rights to all their work to their mothers?” If she talks with such fury and grief now, while she’s still enjoying the money from
her
dead people and all she has to do is wake up with an idea one morning and translate that money into whichever language she likes (it having already been translated from the package her father leaves her when he dies, when, yes, he’s an old man, but more significantly he’s full of poisonous rancor after submitting to half a dozen unsuccessful cataract operations, and is almost blind but still sufficiently clearsighted to realize before he dies that everything he’s leaving, the steel factory in Villa Devoto, the apartment in Belgrano R,
the chalet in Miramar, the two cars, will be lost entirely, that in truth he’s leaving it to ruin and disaster), whether she wants to translate it into things, possessions, journeys, even ambitious undertakings like the Beast, which is initially just one of many investments that claim her dead relatives’ money, and then soon enough the main one and then the only one, so thoroughly does the project that starts as a summerhouse and ends up as a mansion-mausoleum, a palatial catastrophe, end up devouring everything she has, including money in the bank, of course, and also the apartment in Belgrano R, the chalet in Miramar, et cetera—if she talks like this now, while she’s still swimming in money, as the phrase has it, what will she say in seven, eight years’ time, when there isn’t a single drop of water left in the pool, when not much more remains of her dead relatives’ money than of everything else she’s managed to preserve of them—dust-encrusted fossils, vague memories, the distorted echo of a voice babbling nonsense in the dark.

Yes, inheriting has its appeal. As a former heir, an unborn heir, an heir who’s dead on arrival and whose calling is to wait for something that will never come to pass, he knows this firsthand. He knows the impatience, the unhealthy hunger, and the arrogance of those who know it’s only a matter of time.
Sooner or later
: the heir’s motto, the phrase every heir repeats at night as a talisman to calm the nerves before sleep, at the end of humbling days that demand now, immediately, what they still don’t have, what a heart attack, cancer, or a drunk bottle-truck driver turning a corner at full speed will someday give them—sooner or later. An heir’s laugh is acid and deafening. It’s the laugh of he who laughs last, a cackle of resentment and long-brewed vengeance that leaves nobody unscathed. But if only that were all there was to it. Because even inheriting carries a responsibility. You have to live up to an inheritance. If his mother gives in to the widow’s pull
on her despite her natural reserve and the armor-plating provided by her pride, it’s because she realizes how much further this other woman has managed to go. Compared with the miracle she’s pulled off—money that periodically
falls from the sky,
gusts of cash that blow in like the wind, renewing themselves constantly and inexhaustibly, like letters written in death by her besotted folklorist, when his love has been immortalized in the same formaldehyde solution that stops his body from decomposing—compared with this, inheriting seems like a flawed model, one of the many ingenious ideas reduced to nothing but a pathetic, throwaway draft by haste, greed, or ineptitude, or a fateful combination of the three.