Read Online A History of Money: A Novel by Alan Pauls, Ellie Robins - Free Book Online

shameless even in matters of bodily intimacy, such as taking a bath or defecating—both of which he always does withthe bathroom door open—or farting—one of his hobbies, in which he takes no heed of spatial limitations or social restrictions, and which he practices and teaches as devotedly as a crusader—but rigidly reserved when it comes to gambling. He can talk about it, share anecdotes about the casinos he frequents and the gamblers he knows, admit how much he won on his best night and how much he lost on his worst, and even manage to make the figures sound convincing. But his father never allows anybody to see him gambling. Nobody, least of all his loved ones, not even those who haven’t the slightest objection to it—namely him, who as soon as he finds out that he gambles stops disdaining him as a coward and, though he knows he’s deluded, starts to respect him again, to adore him, to envy the intimacy of this new world he’s just discovered he reigns over. He doesn’t want anybody near him when he gambles—period. Neither nearby nor hoping to emulate him. This is the source of the indolence that floods him—his father, who in any of his other strong suits, numbers, of course, and reading between the lines of newspapers, tennis, sports in general, predicting the success or failure of a play, is a born pedagogue if not an outright evangelist, a man who will not rest until he’s emptied himself of everything he has to teach—whenever someone, usually him, begs him to impart a little of his great knowledge, like how to assume a poker face, ruses for winning at roulette, ways of dissembling, shuffling and dealing techniques, the stance to adopt in casinos, which drinks to order, how to pick out rivals with better cards than yours, how to talk to the person throwing the ball at a roulette wheel so that the right numbers come up. Once more, it’s all vague and general or already common knowledge. The cloth is green; you drink whiskey, neat or with ice; it’s a good idea to give a chip or two to the staff when a ball lands in your favor, and also to play at more than one table at a time; knowing how to lie is crucial. In other words, nothing. He can’tdecide whether his father refuses to share his knowledge so as not to cement his reputation as a gambler, out of shame—like a victim of some moral disease who believes that passing on what he has learned since catching it will pass on the disease itself—or because he’s scared that if he shares it, his knowledge will take root in another gambler, a conscientious apprentice who, when chance brings them together at a card table someday, will clean up using the very techniques that he taught him. In any case, he will have to content himself with the version of his private gift that his father is prepared to share in public, which remains as opaque, as scandalously far from its original as the mercilessly mutilated versions of certain films that circulate under the censorship of the day: a sly, inconsequential bluff in a game of
truco
among friends, a rapid sleight with the dice cup at the beach club that gets him five of a kind, the whist tournaments played in the club’s game room, in the middle of the day, while children play between the tables and old people nod off in groups, for a cash prize that, if he wins it—which according to his reputation at the club he does two out of every three times—is not enough to pay for the coffees he’s drunk while competing.
    It’s the same for his mother. Recently married, with him already on the way, the unplanned fruit of one of the skirmishes they get entwined in before they’ve thought about whether they’re in love, though they’re both already equally fixated on the idea of getting away from their respective families as soon as possible, she notices that her perfect stomach, which is as flat as a board and blessed with the kind of skin people dream of—one of those stomachs that always appears in black and