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

numbers are offering their final verdict, and his father’s direct approach to the situation calms him somewhat. Everything happens very quickly. The taxi driver leans over, notes the figure on the meter, and starts to look for its monetary equivalent on a plastic tariff sheet. There’s an identical sheet hanging from the back of the seat on their side, but once again his father decides to ignore it: when it comes to reckoning accounts, he trusts his brain’s skill and speed more than the verdict of a printed form, especially one jointly produced by the taxi drivers’ union and the Ministry of Transport, both nerve centers of swindling. And in this particular instance, he also knows full well that there is no tariff to cover something as unscripted as a Mar del Plata–Villa Gesell. It’s a silent, pathetic duel. The taxi driver’s rheumatic finger is still quivering in a wilderness of red and black numbers, hunting a figure it’ll never find, when hisfather announces the definitive price in a low voice, as though to himself, or for an invisible but very close witness, then selects five or six notes, separates them from the wad, and pays.
    Nobody
counts money like his father. Counts in the sense of accounting, which when it comes to his father—a man who went to a technical school and graduated with just one skill, a rare talent for what he himself calls
numbers,
which he flaunts rather immodestly in public, the only thing he permits himself to boast about (being enemy number one of all vainglory)—means purely mental calculations, in which the use of any supplementary instrument is forbidden, including taxi tariff sheets, naturally, but, moreover, machines, calculators, abacuses, manual counters, to say nothing of the electronic bill-counters the size of espresso machines or water dispensers that, years later, are made so trendy by inflation and the foreign-currency black market, machines produced by Galantz and Elwic, MF Pluses by Cirilo Ayling, pride of Argentina—prosthetics that represent the worst, the lowest rank of human spinelessness and dependency—and also pencil and paper and even so-called natural mechanisms like fingers. But also
counts
in the sense of physical action, as in counting notes. He’s struck by this at a very early age, one day when he spends an afternoon off school accompanying his father on his rounds through the city’s business district, where he works, and sees him cashing checks at banks, buying tickets at airline offices, and trading foreign currency at currency exchanges, and he will never cease to be struck by it, even in the last days at the hospital forty-two years later, just before the lung failure that condemns him to an oxygen mask and tubes, when his father selects two fifty-peso notes from an already significantly depleted wad, having decided to give them as a tip, “before it’s too late,” in his words, to the morning nurse, who surprises him by speaking German to him while changing his IV, giving him an injection, or takinghis temperature. Nobody else has his aplomb, his proud, elegant efficiency, which transform the act of paying into one of sovereignty and are enough to make you forget that in truth it’s always a secondary, reactive act. When he counts money, it’s as if he were counting it simply to count it, for love of the art, as they say: because of the beauty of it, never because the logic of the transaction requires it of him. He never slips up, never lets one note stick to another or get stuck or folded, not to mention tear. His fingers are always dry—if he occasionally wets the tips with his tongue, which he says is a habit of bad bank cashiers, dishonest shopkeepers, and misers, it’s always in mockery, just as he mocks the tricks people use to make up for abilities they naturally lack, and he always caricatures the ritual, giving it a bad actor’s pompous gestures—and they move nimbly, without hesitating or pausing; on the very rare occasions