A History of Money: A Novel Read Free Page A

torpor, shaken by the impulse to do something, anything, to dispel the clouds of drowsiness, he suddenly begins to classify them, reordering them by size, color, and shine, or uses them to draw lines in the white-linen tablecloth, until someone—never his mother, who took the decision from the word go to turn a blind eye when it comes to family-law disputes, but rather some member of his so-called stepfamily, a step-grandmother, step-uncle, or even the step-cousin who, though hardly a year or two older than him, speaks to him with incontestable authority, like a lieutenant to a private—scolds him from the other end of the table. Because the other time, the one that’s marked by the clock, the succession of meals and outfits, the sun’s work on skin, the bodies bathed, or the tiredness on people’s faces, the time that seems to advance, dragged along by the more or less regular meter of the days, has been reduced to a mere formality, a fiction intended to hide the paralysis of things.
    The only relief comes from the safe-conduct that will get him out of there. The two bus tickets, his and his father’s, which he keeps himself, in his own hands. He can’t wait. He won’t even allow his father to buy them and bring them when he comes to fetch him at the gate of the mansion in Mar del Plata every February 1, as dictated by the equitable summer schedule—January for her, February for him—his parents draw up a few months after they separate, by common agreement, as they say, if it’s fair to call common an agreement orchestrated by the lawyer of just one of the parties, hers, under which his mother, making a show of a fortitude and conviction that she doesn’t possess, sets the agenda, and his father complies without objection, cowed by the same mixture of weariness, incompetence, and guilt with which he left the family home, renouncing his right to a lawyer, to his share of the blue 1957 Auto Unión, and to his percentage ofthe second-floor walk-up where they have lived together for a little more than two nightmarish years—both wedding gifts from his father-in-law—but not to the money with which his father-in-law entices him to leave the family home, which it would seem he needs to pay a backlog of debts.
    He’s overcome by impatience. As the day of the journey draws near—it’s the middle of the month, and a new set of holidaymakers is arriving—he worries that they’ll run out of tickets and the trip will have to be postponed. And so he goes to buy them himself, in person, much too far in advance, from the bus station in Mar del Plata. The first few times, his mother goes with him. He’s old enough to understand the whole process perfectly, and the order it comes in—father, leave, travel, bus, ticket, buy—but he’s still so small that even on tiptoe he can’t maneuver his head into the ticket vendor’s line of vision. Later he goes by himself, on his bicycle, happy because this way—without witnesses—the idea of escaping Mar del Plata gains an invigorating dose of illegitimacy, even though it’s his mother who pays for the tickets and chooses which bus they’ll take; but also with his heart in his mouth, steering the bicycle with one hand and using the other, shoved as deep as it’ll go into his pocket, to count the bills two or three times per block to reassure himself that he hasn’t lost one.
    Those newly bought tickets are guarded, kept like a secret. He takes them everywhere with him, into town, to the cinema, on bike rides and expeditions to abandoned lots, even to the restaurants by the port that he sometimes goes to with his stepfamily, proto–theme parks in which a couple of anchors, a few miserable buoys, some fishing rods hanging from the ceiling, and two or three drunk-looking papier-mâché sailors watching over the dining rooms are intended to capture the maritime world to which their menus—always limited to the same handful of options: mussels Provençal, sole meunière,