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

her daughter—that they’re just like the clothes they bought for her before she was born, and she accepts them and files them away in the closet where she keeps the still lifes, swans made of green glass, and cretonne curtains that have been lavished upon her since she got married. After thirty sleepless hours, she can’t even stir a cup of tea, let alone hold one, and the cup smashes to pieces on the kitchen floor. She starts to cry and confesses, and assoon as she has confessed she realizes her mistake. If there are two people in the world who cannot help her, they are her parents. Her mother is a tiny, bitter woman, who believes she’s given all she had to give—as little as that may have been—and who now limits herself to relaying her daughter’s dramas to her husband. Her father, a corpulent despot who communicates in growls and wears very high-waisted pants, receives the problems and bends them to his own will, using them to support the cause he will never tire of championing: demonstrating to his daughter that, for as long as she chooses to live away from them, her life will be a catastrophe. She pleads with her mother not to say anything, not to humiliate her in front of her father. Her mother, smiling at her, tells her not to worry. But it’s too late. The moment she gets home, the woman picks up the telephone, calls the factory, and passes her report on to her husband.
    There’s a young man from Tucumán at the factory, the brother of a foreman recently fired for stealing, whom his grandfather kept on partly out of spite, to torment the man he’d fired—from whose betrayal he never recovers, being an immigrants’-son-turned-boss and an incorrigible paternalist—and partly because it’s convenient. The boy is naïve; for a few coins he’ll do things that nobody else would do—errands, preparing
mate cocido,
acting as a chauffeur or night guard—and he has ambitions that his gratitude to the boss only strengthens. He’s enlisted for some overtime (yet more to add to the great quantity he’s already amassed, which even combined would never add up to a wage): to see what the boss’s son-in-law is up to. Six hundred of the pesos of the day, pesos moneda nacional: exactly the amount his father needs, four nights later, to stay in at a surprisingly, inexplicably adverse poker table, which something tells him it’s still not time to leave even though he’s been completely cleaned out. It’s five past five on a raw winter’s dawn, and his father’sgone out into the street to smoke in his shirtsleeves. A sweater would keep him warm. Gambling is better: it makes him invincible. He stubs his cigarette out on a paving stone, spits a resigned stream of smoke into the frozen air, the last of the night, and when he raises his eyes he catches a glimpse of the boy from Tucumán’s shadow moving across the street, or rather shivering from the cold in the alley he’s been standing guard in for some time. It takes him five seconds to work out that it’s
someone,
ten to cross the street, twenty to catch up with the boy from Tucumán after he tries to run away, half a minute to recognize him—he remembers him well: he’s the boy who laughed under his breath on one of the two visits his father has paid to the factory in order to please his father-in-law, when he said that his favorite thing about the place was the workers’ clothes—and a minute—prolonged by the bottle truck that drives past, making a racket that obliges him to repeat the arrangement he’s proposing a second time—to take from him the six hundred pesos he’s just earned. It’s only a loan, he tells him, underpinning the idea with subtle nepotistic insinuations. He’ll return it in two hours, without fail, in this same alleyway, only quadrupled. A little while later, she emerges from another strenuous bout of insomnia and finds him in the kitchen, sitting with the back of a chair between his legs, swirling a recently made cup of