A History of Money: A Novel by Alan Pauls, Ellie Robins Page B

they’ve overpowered it. Not the dead crostini lover: at least he goes all the way down and doesn’t come back. His father came back; he lives to tell the tale, as they say. But what type of tale would he have to tell to repay the torment he’s made him suffer? Certainly not the string of abstractions he throws out when, and only when, it occurs to him to interrogate him during the remainder of the vacation. Never a single detail. The streets don’t have names, the neighborhoods are “there,” “on the other side of the
lagoa,
” “before you reach the bridge.” Nothing happens at a precise time. All the recurring events—the taxi, the house, the friend who never answers the intercom—are vague and insipid, like an illustration of a phrase in a foreign grammar book. Occasionally he thinks he’s uncovered an unexpected nuance, a change in his father’s tone of voice, some new piece of information that casts doubt on an earlier version of the facts: the neighborhood isn’t that far away, he lets his taxi go when he gets there (when earlier he had preferred to make it wait), a lit-up balcony with plants appears where earlier there had only been the black square of a window. What type of plants? Ficus? Ferns? Dwarf palms? What emerges here is never the truth. It is, rather, the impression that anything that comes out of his father’s mouth is and always will be a lie.
    And another thing, though this occurs to him only later, when he’s already back in Buenos Aires: If he never finds the friend who owes him money, why doesn’t he come back to the hotel? Where does he spend the rest of those three nights? “At the casino, my darling,” his mother says. Or rather releases amid the musical laugh she lets out after hearing his account of those three dismal nights at the Gloria, in particular at the phrase he quotes directly, as if his father were speaking through him—
A friend owes me money
—which she finds irresistibly comic. At first he doesn’t intend to tell her about it. He is eleven years old. He has spent eight of thoseyears—since the day his father, freshly bathed, as he always is for the decisive moments in his life, filled a bag with his white monogrammed shirts, his sports magazines, his cufflinks, his bottle of lavender water, his packet of imported cigarettes, his suede buckled shoes, and his shaving brush, and left the apartment on Ortega y Gasset forever—avoiding the role of double agent. He knows too well the explosive potential that certain pieces of information acquire when they pass from one camp to another. But then maybe that’s exactly why he tells. Maybe when he gets back, tanner than he’s ever been before or ever will be again, and sees his mother emptying his suitcase, and a little
carioca
sand falls out of a sock and trickles onto the carpet, maybe at that moment he realizes how much bitterness he has stored up. Casino? He stands staring at his mother in wary astonishment, like a con artist looking at a more skillful rival.
    His father dies and not once in almost fifty years has he seen him gambling. Crying, yes, and being humiliated, and punching through the cheap wood of a hotel room’s closet door, and secretly doing all manner of pathetic things, and standing with his hands on his hips, wearing an air of absolute perplexity, to examine the Fiat 600’s engine as it smokes on the shoulder, and putting a piece of toilet paper on a shaving cut to stop it from bleeding, and lying to hide his shame, and furiously rubbing the first age spot to appear on the back of one of his hands. But that scene—the scene of his father sitting at a card table with a glass of whiskey, a cigarette smoking while it lies in a notch on the ashtray, one hand palm down and motionless on the green cloth, the other holding three poker cards in a fan at forty-five degrees, also facedown—will always be denied him. And his father will be the one who denies it, though he’s open in everything,