A History of Money Read online

  In less than a minute—the time it takes the driver to pull away, maneuver around the car in front, and turn onto the road under the hostile gaze of the ravens from the funeral parlor—they’ve cleared up the confusion about the cars. No, the car isn’t part of the procession: it was just parked where it shouldn’t have been. It’s the cab the stranger picked up at Ezeiza Airport, which he just flew into from Brazil, heading straight to his father’s funeral and now to the cemetery. No, there’s no need to get out. On the contrary: it’s an honor for the stranger to share this journey with him (sneeze), sad as it is. He smiles at the stranger dopily. They’re driving down a boulevard lined with auto-parts stores. The driver steers almost without touching the wheel, giving it the merest grazes with his fingertips, like a gloved magician or someone who specializes in treating infectious diseases, and seems to shift gears with nothing but a gesture, not making any contact with the stick. “This is Avenida Warnes, isn’t it?” says the stranger, admiring the display cases full of tires, the Formula One streamers in the windows, the signs tattooed with the names of car manufacturers, and the blow-up dolls waving to attract clients. He hasn’t come to Buenos Aires for twenty-two years, and (sigh) he wasn’t able to meet up with his father that time either. He offers him a soft, sweaty hand that’s wearing a wristband made of small, multicolored beads. “Beimar,” he says. “Milo Beimar.”

  “Beimar … Beimar …,” his mother repeats, as though turning over a suspicious mouthful. The name means nothing to her. She can picture him at the funeral: his elegant, wellcut, expensive suit and his mafioso’s black shirt and tie, and that carrot-orange tan that looks like it came out of a bottle of Sapolán Ferrini. But his face is like a white wall. She remembers wondering who he was, but she wondered that about 90 percent of the faces she came across at the funeral. She didn’t recognize anyone, and that didn’t surprise her. It was like that even when she was married to his father. A new face every day, people appearing and then disappearing without a trace, voices calling, asking for him, and then hanging up, never to call again. She never even has time to register their names, so she can’t ask him about them. What happened to Barbat? And Desrets? Don’t you see Desrets anymore? They’re like imaginary friends. At a certain point she starts to think they’re all extras, bit players that his father, who’s always been so sensitive to what other people think, hires to simulate a social life, a network varied enough to create the impression that he’s a man of the world—an impression he can’t live without—in just the same way that his monogrammed shirts and cufflinks claim a lineage he doesn’t have.

  He likes this idea of his mother’s. It’s tortuous and precise, with just the amount of spite any idea needs in order to go out into the world and hit its mark. But bit player or otherwise, Beimar was and is somebody. For a start, he was the Man Who Owed His Father Money—and the moment he says it, he sees the title printed on a cheap horror-film poster, in big red letters that flicker like flames—or (a subtle change in viewpoint, or genre, to children’s horror) the Man His Father Goes to See Every Night in Rio de Janeiro, Leaving Him Waiting Up Alone at Hotel Gloria. To sum up the fragmented service record that Sapolán itemizes through his sneezes between Avenida Juan B. Justo and a cemetery on the outskirts of the city in Ingeniero Maschwitz, which has no tombs or headstones and looks like a golf course, a pristine carpet of grass so green and smooth that there’s no earth on Earth capable of growing it: Milo Beimar, a precocious, provocative underground filmmaker, expelled for reasons of sexual rivalry—half an hour of wild sugar harvesting in the former cane capital, Tucumán province—from the tiny, secret group that captured this landscape for the first scenes of the revolutionary documentary The Hour of the Furnaces, and from Argentina on political-criminal grounds; the bearer, on boarding at Ezeiza Airport, of a flawless fake passport, a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro, and a suspicious handful of genuine dollars (all three things the fruits of his father’s machinations); an exile in Brazil, where he becomes a convert to the cinema of the advertising industry, drowning in money and drugs, the new drugs of the late seventies; a wreck, in the eighties, from the money and drugs of the seventies, which cost him a septum, a marriage, and all of the assets, minus what goes to his wife, acquired during ten years’ work in the advertising department at the Globo network. That’s where he is—with no job, no money, and no family, living on handouts in the maid’s quarters of the spectacular Ipanema apartment of the junior writer at the agency whose scripts he spent a decade filming—when his luck changes. One night after leaving a friend’s house (one of the few he has left besides the junior writer), completely deranged after hours spent watching TV, drinking bad beer, and smoking good Brazilian marijuana, he walks aimlessly for a few blocks (it’s a cool night, there’s a pleasant breeze blowing from the lagoon and drying his sweat, and passing from east to west in the moonless, starless sky is a Boeing 747 that will plunge headfirst into the Atlantic in the early hours of the next day), and is suddenly struck by the blood-sugar dip he was expecting later, when he was already safe and sound in his little cave at the junior writer’s place, within easy reach of the demented quantities of ice cream his host keeps in the freezer for just such occasions. His mouth is very dry, and the edges of his lips sting. In a sudden moment of synesthetic self-awareness, he sees them shining in the darkness, outlined by four very fine lines of yellow lightbulbs, which flicker like a landing strip in the middle of the night and then go out one by one, as though his lips were about to fade away. He’s dying for something sweet, and there’s no store in sight. The only thing he has on him is two sticks of the sugar-free mint gum that several pseudo-dentists with bright eyes and very taut skin have recently started to promote on TV using whiteboards, pointers, and misleading arguments written by the junior writer who’s taken him in and his underlings at the agency. Better than nothing. He puts both sticks in his mouth at once. A minute later—by which time they’ve lost all trace of their flavor—he has no craving for sweets whatsoever. His blood-sugar levels have completely stabilized. He goes to sleep. The following morning, he wakes up early, showers, and uses a public phone box—since there’s nobody less trustworthy than the junior writer—to call the lawyer who handled his divorce, to whom he owes two or three times what he owes his father, and fill him in on his nocturnal discovery. Two months later, the two of them seal an unofficial deal, in absolute secrecy, with the company that produces the sugar-free mint gum: the company transfers several million to his almost empty checking account (a sum he’s lived on ever since, is now living on, and will probably continue to live on without needing to work until he dies), and, for his part, he promises to withdraw the lawsuit claiming large-scale fraud and endangering the public health that his lawyer wrote in a morning and half of an afternoon.

  And now the brilliant illumination of that toxic, hopeless night seems suddenly to be delivering a check—like a holy apparition breaking through a canopy of black clouds—which Beimar fills out with his crude handwriting, signs, rips out with a sharp, expert pull, and then hands to him in the cab on the way back from the cremation. It finished less than half an hour ago, and already he can barely remember it, as though the flames that charred his father’s body had also swallowed all trace of the ceremony. He’d go so far as to swear that it didn’t happen at all, that it was just a figment of his imagination, if it weren’t for the urn sitting next to him on the backseat of the car and the prayer card he’s holding between his thumb and index finger. How did it get there? One of the ravens must have given them out to the mourners at the end of the ceremony. He hasn’t taken his eyes off it since they left; he’s in awe of the artistic technique—it’s a retouched photo of his father, tinted with pale colors like something from a comic book or a picture from a children’s story—which softens his features and gives him the smiling bonhomie of a saint. Until he has to switch hands to take the check that Beimar hopes will settle this debt he’s had for, what, forty years now?

  Someone once told
him—perhaps to ease his mind, perhaps because they were sick of hearing him complain about his family’s erratic financial management—that you don’t inherit debts. The phrase has an immediately soothing effect on him. It has the impersonal air of incontestable law, at once understated and apodictic. He later confides it to a friend, with a relief as eager as if he were sharing news of a recently discovered cure that will save his life, and the friend tells him that no, indeed, you don’t inherit them—as long as the dead person doesn’t leave anything to pay them with when they die. It’s an unexpected nuance, but it doesn’t worry him. He knows that other than the dry lemon; the withered lettuce; two old suitcases full to bursting of photos, postcards, and letters; the tweed jackets in the wardrobe; and his jazz records, his father has left nothing. But with the check in his grasp, he feels a certain alarm. Now there is something. What if the creditors who haven’t lifted a finger so far because, like him, they assumed that there was nothing, suddenly show up en masse, like armies of hungry ants? He’s comforted by the fact that there’s no evidence of the check’s existence, or of the debts’; there are no receipts, no documents, nothing, no witnesses, no testimony. It’s just one more of the informal transactions carried out in furtive tête-à-têtes, between individuals and outside of any legal framework, following unwritten rules, rules that might never even have been established—arrangements that are more like secret trysts than financial deals and which little by little, on a macroscopic scale, are beginning to occupy more space and gain a footing, and which end up prevailing as an alternative order, a corrupt order that’s as contagious as a plague-infested body but also as vital and powerful as the legal body it was born to compete with.

  But for some reason, though he’s ecstatic to find that’s he’s rich, and through the best possible means, the only means he and his mother find irresistible, incomparable—rich by the work and good grace of the dead—he doesn’t cash the check straight away. He puts it off time after time, justifying this behavior to himself with all manner of flimsy excuses. He’s scared, that’s all it is. Even without imagining the creditors’ eyes flashing as they lie in wait in the bushes, he always ends up nervously replacing the check in the bottom of the drawer he put it in on his return from the cemetery. Looking at the bottom of the drawer is enough. The check is proof, testimony, documentation. On his way to the bank the day he makes up his mind, he stops and thinks: What if it’s fake? What if it bounces? What if as soon as she reads the account holder’s name or types in the number, the cashier frowns and stops smiling, asks him to wait a moment (“the system’s crashed”), and uses the finger she’s been skinning with her teeth since she was thirteen years old to push the red button hidden beneath her desk, thus alerting the half dozen undercover Interpol agents guarding the bank?

  But nothing happens. Or it does, though not the thing he fears most, the thing that terror has turned into a foregone conclusion in his mind—the only place, incidentally, where he trusts that things happen—but something else instead; it’s not necessarily better than what he feared, but it’s different and thus unrecognizable, a mirage and a nightmare at the same time, and for a few days he sinks into an amorphous shock, a kind of imbecility, living an unreal life, a life that’s not his own and that he wouldn’t be able to describe, as though the deeds that have been done, far from returning him to reality, have imprisoned him in the abstract wasteland through which he’s now wandering, which is neither imagination nor reality but what’s left—desolate and bright and utterly unnuanced—after the kingdom of the former has been lost and the latter is the land of dullness par excellence, and thus intolerable.

  He doesn’t even think about the basics: the calculation Beimar must have carried out in order to arrive at the figure he writes without a moment’s hesitation on the top right corner of the check, as though he’s had it in his head for a long time, since long before a mutual friend called to tell him about the death of his father, whom he hadn’t seen in more than thirty years, and he decided to take the first plane to Buenos Aires in order to get to the funeral on time. “You’ve been conned, for sure,” his mother tells him when he admits that he took the check without asking any questions. He omits to tell her the amount, out of prudence, but as soon as he decides to keep it to himself, the word itself flashes in his head momentarily—amount—seeming pregnant with strange possibilities and more valuable than any sum of money it could possibly designate. He doesn’t tell her how much, just that it’s enough, and she doesn’t ask any questions. But it’s precisely the modesty of the word enough, its reasonableness, that makes her suspicious. No one suddenly repays a thirty-year-old debt that nobody has claimed with a sum that’s just “enough.” And anyone who pays such a debt so reasonably is without doubt paying less than he owes; much less than he’d owe if the accounts were done properly, including the interest, late fees, and fines necessary to bring such a long-unpaid debt up to date. He gives her some credit—because the fantastical amount awakens equally fantastical speculations in him—but otherwise takes it for what it is: the knee-jerk reaction of someone for whom money is, by definition, something of which there’s never enough, which is even more true with money that comes from men, that despicable breed of deserters, cowards, and loners, and above all else of incurable misers. She’s a sensitive judge of large and small amounts, and she’s good—very good, as though the skill or common sense she lacks in practical financial matters flourished in application to idle, utterly inconsequential musing—at working out whether the amount charged for some good or product is sensible or inadmissibly excessive. But don’t come to her saying that a sum of money is “enough.” Not to her, please. By the way, she needs a little cash to collect her reading glasses: a broken arm, a new prescription, something of that sort that she announces hurriedly and doesn’t bother to explain, as though to explain would be to humiliate herself and undermine the entitled tone in which she always addresses him. He hesitates for a second. Without looking at him, she does what she does every time she asks: allows herself to be absorbed for a few seconds by the very slightly loose clasp on her purse, some stitches coming undone on her sleeve, a new freckle on the back of her hand, any one of the banal surprises she seeks refuge in whenever she’s taken a risk, as earnestly as a child who believes she can make herself invisible by closing her eyes. “How much do you need?” he asks, looking for the first age spot on the back of his own hand. “Two hundred and fifty. Two seventy would be better, so I can take a taxi straight there. The optician closes in fifteen minutes.”

  No, he doesn’t ask himself how Beimar arrived at the figure, nor does he make any of his own calculations, nor even ask his mother to help him out with any. He gives her the money for the glasses—end of story—and then stops a taxi for her and watches her get into it slowly, seeming a little bewildered, with the irritated or affronted air that tends to come over her whenever she has to negotiate worldly things, like taxi doors, for example, and her purse, the height of her seat, the hem of her raincoat, the distance to the door handle she has to pull closed once she’s sat down; things that weren’t made with her in mind, as she realizes for the nth time with a despondent sigh before distilling her indignation into her tone and giving the taxi driver the address like an impatient boss: not her when she was young and beautiful and queenly and didn’t need them (but when, dear God, when was that?), nor her now that she’s no longer queen and she needs them more than ever. Rather than crunching numbers he’d get lost in halfway through, before he’s gotten anywhere, disoriented by the multitude of things he doesn’t know, he prefers to be lost from the start, deliberately, thinking of the winding, treacherous path the money took before coming to him, a little, he thinks, like an astronomer—as though the world of astronomy were more familiar to him than financial calculations—working out how many light-years a star must have traveled before becoming what it is now, a mere spark on the black cloth of the sky. It doesn’t matter what his father did for him—and Beimar doesn’t say a word
on this subject, only repeating the phrase what your father did for me like a litany—or what it cost at the time; he thinks of it as a meteor traversing history at varying speeds, sometimes breakneck and unstoppable, other times with difficulty, crawling along and battling fierce resistance like a kind of intrepid hero on horseback—like the protagonist of a novel he reads with great interest when he’s young and feels the saddest disappointment on finishing, but which doesn’t really have an effect on him until many years later, when he’s stopped thinking about it, at which point it makes such a strong impression that he decides he’s never read nor ever will read a better book in his life—a meteor that passes unceasingly through superhuman epochs, tearing through them like a wild beast tearing through paper rings at the circus, and changing all the time—personality, class, and especially gender, but never age—and which at a not-particularly-memorable bend in this tortuous road comes across a fearful blond boy who, though he never sees it, can’t stop thinking about it, about the shapeless phantom it is to him, while he tries to get to sleep in the hotel room in which he’s been left all on his own. How contemptible, how unpleasantly obtuse the dollar seems, the so-called green or simply bill (as though it alone had the right to be made of paper), being always so cautious and always exactly the same, in comparison with this champion of metamorphosis on whose skin history never stops stamping its mark: pesos moneda nacional, pesos ley 18.188, pesos argentinos, australs, simply pesos … One of today’s pesos, he thinks, for example just one of the three hundred he gives his mother that afternoon—figuring that, since she finds it embarrassing to ask, if she asks for two hundred and seventy she must really need at least three hundred—would be worth ten billion of the who-knows-how-many pesos moneda nacional his father paid for the fake passport, the ticket to Rio de Janeiro, and the wad of real American dollars that saved Beimar’s skin and helped him to start a new life. But astonishing as it is, this equivalence is also neutral, it doesn’t mean anything, in fact it disregards and tries to erase from memory the prodigious catalog of adventures that made it possible, the dead ends, forests, and abysses it’s founded on, the danger and madness that have fueled it.