A History of Money: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

even though an important part of that lineage, his own father, used that gift, in which he seems to have excelled, to make his son’s life a true nightmare—his attention keeps wandering off entirely, attracted by the ticking of the taxi’s meter, on which the slides have started to fall, they’re falling, they will continue to fall, he thinks, for a long time, for the whole unheard-of eternity known as 103 kilometers, and they won’t stop until they’ve reached who knows what number.
    He doesn’t have the faintest idea. Now, with the dead man’s face so near and another expansive wave of crostini-cracklingassailing him, he can’t help but ask himself how much money there was in the attaché case of which there’s no news even when the police divers find the helicopter and the bodies at the bottom of the river, how much and, crucially, why the dead man was asked to take that money to the plant at Zárate in person, whether it’s to pay the supplementary under-the-table fee the police want to charge for carrying out the suppression agreed on by the management and the local heads of the force, or to placate the workers with a pay raise that will distract them from the radical demands they’re being pushed toward by the red faction of the union leadership, which plays an all-or-nothing game, or even to bribe the red faction of the leadership directly and resolve the whole matter without a bloodbath. But what he’d really like right now is to be able to remember how much the taxi ride to Villa Gesell cost. No hope: it’s a total blank. What he does know is that it’s the first large sum of money he’s aware of, or the first time he’s aware that money can be a large sum. Until then it was always small, portable, just another thing among many, only touched by a sort of ancient magic wand—so ancient that the few people who have seen it in action are dead—that gives it its ability to overpower everything else, to
eat it up
; the exact power he discovers his pieces wield over enemy pieces and vice versa a little later in front of a chessboard in the dining room of the Croatian hotel he dreams of while traveling by taxi to Villa Gesell. By taxi, to Villa Gesell, while outside the world keeps stupidly turning, indifferent to this feat.
    But what relation can there be between the kind of money capable of eating up a bar of milk chocolate, a packet of baseball cards, an eraser, or the bus ticket to Villa Gesell that’s now going through its death throes at the bottom of his pants’ pocket, and the money you’d need to get together in order to eat up something invisible, something as out of scale as those 103 kilometers to Villa Gesell? He’s seen money, of course. Atthe age of six he has even lent it. He has what he calls
my safe,
an old first-aid box with a cracked red cross and a loose lid, in which he keeps his capital, coins, small or torn notes, change that his mother and his mother’s husband and even his father sometimes let him keep. It’s to him and his safe—which infuses his money with the smell of bandages, adhesive tape, and Merthiolate while it sleeps—that his mother turns when she needs change for a tip or some small expense, which happens more often than she would like but still always takes her by surprise and fills her with a dramatic sense of adversity, setting her hurriedly rummaging in her purse while the doorman, the newsstand guy, or the grocery store’s delivery boy stand waiting, until she comes up with nothing, not a single coin. His safe: how he treasures those casual donations when he gets them, and how little he seems to remember receiving them later on, when, the fourth or fifth time his mother asks him for a loan—she’s always short of change, though it’s impossible not to be in a city and a country where small sums of money are and always will be precious commodities—he delights in reminding her of all those she has yet to repay—every single one to date—and warns