A History of Money: A Novel (24 page)

Some nights she calls him, asks for the money, and then lowers her voice a little, her timidity just barely shot through with lust, to ask if it would be too much trouble to request the driver who came last time, Walter, Wilson, Wilmar, in any case a Uruguayan with prominent cheekbones and an enormous nose, a relic from the fifties who wears V-necked sweaters, checked shirts buttoned all the way to the top, and freshly shined shoes, who always declines her tips with a vague air of surprise, looking like the last bastion of civilization declining a barbarous old custom, while tilting his head to one side and brushing the brim of his hat with two fingers. A week later, the whole system is endangered. At quarter to four, his mother calls him sounding raw. Where is the driver? He should have been at her house an hour ago. Why didn’t he send him? But he has a crystal-clear memory of ordering the cab. He calls the firm, and a cavernous, cigarette-sanded voice tells him that the delivery—a sealed envelope with the recipient’s name clearly handwritten on it—was handed over at two forty-five on the dot at the agreed address. Incidentally, says the voice, after a long, deep hack that seems to produce a couple of centuries’ worth of mucous sediment, is sir a close relative of the lady who received it? In that case, could he explain to her that the company’s drivers—least of all Wilson, who doesn’t drink and is married with two splendid daughters—are not allowed to drink alcohol with clients in hallways at two forty-five in the morning? He calls his mother. “The money never came,” she says, blowing her nose. “You
can think what you like: it’s their word against mine.” She’s indignant but also shivering from the cold, and from total exposure, as though she were calling from a barren land swept clear by a freezing wind.

This scenario is repeated twice. Both times—partly because he can’t bear to hear his mother whimpering down the phone, and partly because every discussion with the man with the cavernous voice ends the same way, abruptly, with a hail of coughs that nearly makes him pass out—he ends up getting out of bed and going to her place to give her the money, the second version of the money he’s already given her. On both arrivals he’s surprised by the metamorphosis that’s taken place in her: she’s glowing, calm, looking as though she’s just stepped out of some sort of miraculous floral bath, and dressed as if she’s going out, and she asks if he’d like to have breakfast with her. But there’s a third time, identical to the earlier ones in every detail, and this time he decides it’s gone too far. After enduring a sprinkling of exclamations from his mother (“I told you, darling! They’re crooks!”), he puts on his coat and goes to the cab firm’s office in a fury, and right before he pushes the door open, he recognizes Wilson-Wilmar-Walter—his hat poking out, narrow turnups on his suit pants, his dress shoes’ leather gleaming like porcelain—polishing his cab’s steering wheel with an orange flannel while the radio spits out a song that’s as gooey as pomade:
“Pretty little baby / Vidalitá / Sad baby girl / How little is left / Vidalitá / Of what you once were.”
He stops dead. How long has it been since he last shouted at someone? How long since he was so close to another human face? The last things he remembers from the skirmish are an extreme close-up of the button on Walter’s checked shirt hanging loosely from a thread that won’t last long, the soft echo of an old-fashioned cologne, and a small, probably malignant mole in the shape of a club stuck to his prominent nose like a sticker. But what
right does he have to stockpile these shreds of reality while the one who’s fainting and bringing his orange flannel to his chest as though in adoration and staring at him with confusion in his eyes while his knees give out is delicate Wilmar, poor Walter, incorruptible Wilson, all three of them innocent, all three victims who as he’s been told a thousand times will take any journey, no matter how dangerous, be it to Barracas, Fuerte Apache, or Lugano, but not to that frazzled diva who comes downstairs with a bottle of Grand Marnier and two glasses to accept the envelopes her son sends her.

The last he hears of his mother—news she tells him herself, when she calls to ask for cash for her taxi, and which he files away next to the image of the button on the checked shirt, the cologne, and the mole (false alarm: it was benign)—is that she goes to visit him in the hospital—angina: nothing his Uruguayan even temper can’t negotiate without struggle or complaint, and with a casual, flea-market kind of grace—and that there, under the hospital’s high surveillance, the patient of the three Ws ends up accepting the clandestine drink he’s always rejected on his mother’s doorstep. After that, there’s no news for a while. He realizes this one afternoon when he’s at home alone and the silence seems to solidify around him. He sees then that those imperious requests, those early-morning phone calls that so exasperated him but that he ended up putting up with, were the only contact he had had with his mother for a long time. And now that he hasn’t received one for days, a strange terror floods him. He’s scared to call her. Scared that he’ll call her and she won’t answer; scared of going to her apartment, ringing the buzzer, and getting no response; scared of convincing the super to open the door and finding her in bed with the remote control in her hand, or stretched out on the black tiles in the bathroom, struck down while plugging in the hairdryer. In truth, he’s scared that finding her like this might be his mother’s last wish for him. It’s not
exactly a suicide scene that he’s imagining: given her sense of the ridiculous, she could never have done something so deliberate, so solemn and laborious, without laughing and ruining it halfway through. No: what he fears is a chance, accidental death that has nevertheless been imagined so many times that the spectacle of its consummation couldn’t, now, exist without him, its recipient and the only reason she’s imagined it so many times. And, of course, he wonders how she’s getting by without asking him for cash. He begins to run through all the possibilities that occur to him, rapidly, like a slide show—his mother as a beggar, his mother as a thief, his mother filling out a translation with long, pointless periphrases to increase the number of words she’ll be paid for—but they’re immediately eclipsed by another thought: what
he
will do with the money he doesn’t give to her. What will he use that trickle of bills for now? Not that it even amounts to much. It was a drain, yes, but more because it was so relentless, so rhythmical, than because of the quantities involved. And yet even so, that modest but unforeseen surplus makes him feel affluent and magnanimous, fills him with new energy and an obvious, textbook philanthropic urge, the type that’s born of money itself rather than any particular sensibility, will, or ethic—of money and the special logic it obeys of its own accord once it reaches certain thresholds of abundance, which he so reviles in rock stars, successful artists, heads of technology corporations, and other contemporary magnates. Yes, he could be a benefactor. Why not? He could inject some cash into a factory and turn its structure upside down. And then money would finally replace revolution.

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.