A History of Money: A Novel Read Free Page B

langoustine—are also an insult, and where thedead man gets up to his old tricks, rebuking the waiters before he’s even sat down for the scandal of a breadbasket that’s overflowing with buns, kaiser rolls, bread sticks, and water biscuits, but that still lacks his favorite crostini, an oversight he takes personally, like a direct provocation, and which is sufficient cause for him to add the establishment to his ever-longer blacklist of restaurants. He disregards his mother, who tells him there’s no better place to lose them, and takes them to the beach, even though they force him to forgo his bathing suit—in whose pockets he might put them and then, at any moment, succumb to distraction, forget that he has them, and take them into the sea with him, with predictably horrendous consequences—and to roast in his pants at ninety-five degrees in the shade, condemned to contemplate the water from afar. He even keeps them with him while he sleeps, but not in his pajama pockets, where they’d be liable to fall out or be stolen by some stealthy person during the night. He keeps them clutched in his fist like a lucky charm, so that when the day finally comes, they’ve been folded and unfolded so many times, stuffed so deeply in his pockets, subjected to so much grazing and fondling, hidden in so many impregnable refuges, that the departure date and time and the seat numbers and even the name of the bus company are barely legible. This is the sorry state they’re in the afternoon he finally walks out the door of the mansion in Mar del Plata carrying his little navy-blue suitcase—alone, as he always insists to his mother, less out of a desire to be independent than to deny her those last twenty meters, which he’s convinced she would use to try to dissuade him from going, something she is very far from wanting to do, so thrilled is she by the prospect of a whole month off the job of being a mother—and then walks the long gravel path that leads to the street, clambers up onto the stone wall that extends from the front gate, and, still holding his suitcase, settles down to wait for his father to arrive.
    It’s one of those radiant, perfectly idyllic days with no clouds or wind that are the reason summer exists, and nobody wants to waste it. Apart from him, and he’s not sorry. A blind joy swells his chest, leaving him breathless. He watches the procession of families passing by on their way to the beach, umbrellas, deck chairs, and polystyrene coolers in tow, delighted at the prospect of hours of sun, and notes the sorrowful look they all give him when they see him waiting by the gate, dressed from head to toe in street clothes and carrying a suitcase, like an orphan or some kind of invalid who’s forbidden to go to the beach. He scorns them silently. He compares his happiness at the thought that in just half an hour he will be with his father, on board the bus to Villa Gesell, with the banal enthusiasm on those faces that will return in two or three hours charred by the sun, and he feels like the luckiest person on earth. But fifteen minutes go by, and then twenty, and then another twenty-five, and he realizes with a faint shudder that he has exhausted the games he’d been using to distract himself from his impatience. He’s already massacred the trail of ants that had managed to scale his bare thigh and carry their cargo of leaves to the other side. He’s messed with the leaves of the privet that crowns the stone wall so much he’s practically pruned it. He’s sung, he’s counted—cars with even and odd license plates, bicycles, stray dogs, seconds—and he’s been wiping the snot from his nose and expertly, without even looking, sticking it all on the wall, sealing the slight indent that separates the blocks of stone. Half an hour passes: no sign of his father.
    At one point he turns and looks behind him, toward the house, and, after making sure that his mother isn’t stationed at a window, watching him, he