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

invade the room, thirsty for revenge for the fake toucan food they gave them that afternoon at the
jardim botanico,
really a few crumbs of old nougat that he accidentally smuggled from Buenos Aires in the pocket of his pants—that he, covered up to his chin and still terrified by the prospect of staying behind on his own, can’t help laughing. But why can’t he go with him? Why can’t they go out together, just like last night when they went to the juice bar on the
beira-mar,
the seafront, or the night before that, when they went to the cinema to see
O dolar furado
—he repeated the title loudly on the way out—the Portuguese-dubbed version of
Un dólar marcado,
the western starring Giulianno Gemma they’ve already seen together half a dozen times in Buenos Aires? “It’s grown-up time,” his father says, putting a hand just liberated in protest back under the sheet. “I have to see a friend.” “Now? At night?” he asks. Though he could swear that he’s only asking for information, a routine explanation, a faint but uncontrollable trembling in his lower lip tells him that the matter is more serious than that, that he might be about to cry. “It’s a friend who owes me money,” says his father. And he leans toward him, kisses his still-damp hair, and heads for the door, putting on his blue blazer as he walks. He sees him pause in the hallway by the door, where he takes one last look at himself in the mirror and, with two sharp tugs, rescues his shirt’s white cuffs, which had gotten caught under the sleeves of his jacket. Then he opens a dresser drawer, takes out a dark package, studiesit for a few seconds with his head bowed, puts it in a pocket, and leaves.
    He listens to his steps, which are muffled by the carpet, growing more distant and then suddenly quickening into the cocky little trot he always breaks into at the top of a flight of stairs, and he closes his eyes in resignation. It takes him a long time to get to sleep. He lies still in the bed, just as his father left him, ignoring the temptations stalking the room’s darkness, the TV, his comic books, the
garoto
chocolates in the minibar, and his collection of Brazilian cruzeiros, which he’s been accumulating since the beginning of the trip from change they’ve been given, and which are due their first audit. He’s scared that if he moves, something in his father’s life—in the mysterious, dangerous life he’s decided to lead without him, away from him—might change, or be endangered. This is the way he’s lying, as rigid as a dead man, as the dead man who can still make his head ring with the crostini-crackling that tormented him for whole summers when he’s laid out in his coffin eight years later, when sleep creeps up on him in the hotel’s dense silence, after it’s begun to grow light outside and the old, tattered exhausts of the first buses full of workers have started roaring two floors below. His father wakes him up, as usual, by ruffling his hair, hair that the pillow has straightened at will, according to the vagaries of sleep, and that’s now electrified, shooting locks charged with static in every direction. “Up, sleepyhead, or we’ll miss breakfast,” he says, standing up and turning his back to him, and then emptying his pants’ pockets onto the nightstand. He covers his eyes so that the light that bursts into the room doesn’t blind him. Then, very carefully, he opens his fingers just a tiny bit and watches him as though spying through the cracks of a blind: except for the blazer, which is hanging on the back of a chair, he’s wearing the same clothes he had on when he went out last night.
    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