A History of Money: A Novel Read Free

fused with that crackling sound, and the crackling, in turn, with the gust of unease that unfailingly assails him, and then with the urge to get up from his seat, jump on the table, put a knife to the dead man’s throat, et cetera. It’s this sound that comes to him when anyone mentions the dead man’s name in conversation, this sound that eclipses all others, including the din of the cicadas, when he leans out the window of his room in the mansion in Mar del Plata and sees the notorious Italian convertible coming to a halt in front of the closed door; that forces itself upon him every time he arrives home from school to find, scattered all over the house, the signs that betray his presence, convincing him to go to his room by the route on which he’s sure to avoid meeting him: the blue blazer with its gold badge hanging from the back of a chair, the packet of cigarettes with the solid-silver Dupont lighter on top, and the reddish-brown leather attaché case with his initials burned into the skin, branding-style, which he always carries with him, which they say he was also carrying with him the morning he boarded the helicopter heading to Villa Constitución, and of which there is no trace whatsoever when, after combing half the delta, the four police divers finally find the helicopter and bodies at the bottom of the San Antonio River. Vaporized, disappeared in a puff of smoke, along with everything that is believed to have been inside it, papers, documentation, pay stubs, checks, and, most important, the bundle of money entrusted to him that morning to be taken to the plant in Zárate, undeclared money, obviously, given the rather underhand ends for which it’s destined, though its presence in the attaché case is confirmed in low voices by a couple of employees of the powerful iron-and-steel company he works for, which has been hit for more than three weeks bya union conflict and is now disrupted by sudden stoppages in production, by the election by absolute majority of an internal committee that’s redder than the blood that will soon flow, by threats to seize the plant for an indeterminate period, and by the death in rather mysterious circumstances of one of the conflict’s key figures, the only person capable of either resolving or detonating it.
    How those last few days of January drag. At times, as a very young boy, intrigued by the way in which fifteen minutes on the clock can pass in slow motion or in the blink of an eye according to the time of day, the situation, the people he happens to be with, the weather, the light, his mood, the activities to come or just past, it occurs to him that maybe time isn’t universal at all but rather supremely subjective, a sort of local good that each family and each house and even each person produces in their own way, with their own methods and instruments, and in the most literal sense of producing, investing physical strength, labor, raw materials, everything that the evanescent consistency of time would seem to make irrelevant, as if it were more a domestic craft than the elusive passage that everyone insists it is.
    As soon as the last week of January begins, the world gets heavier, and the hours begin to crawl along, gasping, as though climbing an endless hill. Rather than bringing the next one along, each day is an obstacle that delays and conceals it. Eventually time stops altogether—real time, whose passage he notices only for the way it draws in the only thing he wants in the world, to leave Mar del Plata once and for all, and with it the crackling of the crostini in the dead man’s mouth, the mansion, the requirement to be silent during siestas, the boredom of those lunches and dinners at which he invariably stays mute and almost stationary, intimidated by the rules of an etiquette he doesn’t understand and by the extravagant variety of cutlery laid out beside his plate, whichhe has no idea how or when to use, even though more than once, at the height of his