A History of Money: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

her to settle her account.
    How much. He starts wondering even while he sits in the backseat of the taxi, curled up against his father, who has rolled his window all the way down and is sticking out a defiant arm that’s perfectly browned before his vacation has even begun. He looks at the meter hanging on the taxi’s console and allows himself to be entranced by the mechanical regularity with which those ancient numbers, already ancient even then, replace one another in the machine’s two little windows, like candidates voluntarily renouncing a starring role—that of the definitive figure for the journey—even though nobody has taken the trouble to judge or reject them. If only he knew, he could lose himself in what will later be one of his favorite pastimes (which he puts to use every time he has to pay for anycountable goods): prorating. He could prorate the total cost of the journey according to the minutes taken, and know the price of not only the 103 kilometers to Villa Gesell, but also each kilometer, or the time the Rambler takes to cover each kilometer. But he doesn’t know. He won’t know until an hour and forty-five minutes later, when they arrive in Villa Gesell and the taxi parks outside the hotel run by Croatians, and his father, with the remarkable dexterity picked up who knows where that gives his gestures a prodigious insouciance, as if he were performing them in a medium with no possible obstacles—air or water—puts a hand in his pocket and pulls out the wad of notes to pay.
    He’s awed by the wad: just the naked wad, no wallet nor one of the elegant clasps that he sees many years later in a TV series that reconstructs with insane attention to detail the period when he and his father traveled by taxi to Villa Gesell—the same period, if you can call it that, only in the middle of New York, in the ghetto inhabited by a few pioneers of depredation who, meager as they are, and even conscious of their own irredeemable mediocrity, can already see how far the world will pass into their possession in the years to come. The characters using the clasp are successful forty-somethings dressed exactly like his father, in tweed checked jackets, white shirts always fresh from the laundromat, and ankle boots with buckles on the side, and all of them have his father’s unfailing complicity with their pants’ pockets, which makes it seem less like the pockets were designed for their hands and more the other way around, their hands for these pockets. How many notes must there be? Forty? Fifty? Folded in two, with the largest on the outside and the smallest on the inside, always in strictly decreasing order (and one last slot on the inside, after the smallest notes, reserved for his true monetary weakness: foreign currency, predominantly dollars, Swiss francs, pounds sterling, lire, whichever he’s handledmost lately at the travel agency where he works), the wad is so bulky that when he’s holding it his father can’t close his hand, he can’t even put the tips of his fingers together. And it’s heavy, as heavy as a thing, a solid, not just the pile of printed papers it actually is.
    So they’ve arrived, and it’s time to pay. Overcome by a rush of fear, he starts to shrink into his corner of the backseat, a paradise of fragrant pleather where he’s just spent almost two happy hours enjoying the pioneer’s brazen sense of superiority (other people swim the English Channel, he unites Mar del Plata and Villa Gesell in a taxi!), but which his terror now transforms into a suffocating hell, a stew of heat and the purring of the motor and the smell of burnt gasoline. He thinks: What if there isn’t enough money? Because his father might have miscalculated. He might simply not have calculated, eager to make up for the disappointment caused by his late arrival and the missed bus. But he soon sees him lean forward, put a forearm on the back of the seat, and take a closer look at the meter, where the now still