A History of Money: A Novel by Alan Pauls, Ellie Robins Read Free Book Online Page A

principle that his father will never understand: that nobody can dedicate themselves to such numbers and give nothing to the law in exchange, and that the tax ID number is the most innocuous nothing that can be given. But when the accountant tells his father that the number has finally arrived, he doesn’t go outside, bathe, or answer the phone for three days; he lies sprawled on his TV chair with his back turned to the machine, so depressed by the magnitude of his own lack of principle that he doesn’t even have the energy to press the ON button on the remote. And nevertheless, when they find the lover of crostini dead at the bottom of the river, horribly swollen by the more than three days he’s spent in the water, and without the attaché case that reportedly contains the bundle of dollars everyone wants to know about, the only person to bring up the subject of the money and, after performing some mental magic, estimate how much has been lost or stolen—whether from the bottom of the river when the helicopter is found or earlier, sometime between takeoff and the crash, nobody knows—is his father, his crackpot father, who never saw the dead man in person. As far as he knows, nobody in his stepfamily mentions it, though they’re so closely linked to the dead man by friendship, by business, and by class interests that it’s difficult to imagine them not knowing what role he played in the powder keg in Villa Constitución, what mission he was on when he boarded the helicopter thatmorning, and also, of course, how much money he had been given to achieve it.
    But someone, one of them, must know something. Know, even though they won’t tell—because, as he hears said more than once in the mansion in Mar del Plata, only those who don’t have money talk about it: those who had it once and lost it, and those who made it through unpleasant means, which is to say those who made it at all, rather than inheriting it. Maybe the widow doesn’t have much to say; she might have been kept in the dark by the logic of secrecy and the parallel worlds surrounding militant leaders’ immediate families and the intimate circles of prominent businessmen at the time, ordinary people, wives, husbands, children, siblings, who find out who they’ve been sharing their homes with, their beds, their plans, their vacations, only when someone calls them and asks them to come to the morgue and identify the bodies. And meanwhile this same logic is beginning to rule everything, the specific and the general, the life of companies like the one that employed the dead man for so long and life throughout the whole country, with its Martinoli yachts flying through the air, its industrial belts in flames, and its cross-eyed economy, which has forked into one laughable official dimension, with an anemic, purportedly ruling currency, and another, the so-called black one, where the virus of the dollar releases its toxic fumes.
    Yes, everything tends to the shady, the double, and what happens on one side of the mirror isn’t necessarily known on the other, even when the repercussions might be felt there, might make an impact or even pose a danger. One winter’s night at the Hotel Gloria, his father, taking more trouble than he has in the four preceding days of their vacation in Rio de Janeiro, hurries him into the shower, has his dinner brought up to the room, puts him to bed and tucks him in, and, after turning out every light but the one on the nightstand, tellshim that tonight, also for the first time in four days, he’s going out on his own, without him, and that it’s very possible he’ll be back late. When he gets back, he wants to find him asleep. And then, raising his voice a little, exaggerating the note of admonition until he’s almost singing, he delivers a string of assorted warnings and pieces of advice, at times so varied—don’t raid the minibar; don’t use the bed as a trampoline; be careful of the flock of toucans that might suddenly