A History of Money: A Novel by Alan Pauls, Ellie Robins

All dead. This is essentially the whole lesson. Dead: which is to say—according to the variety of existentialism prevailing in the region at the time, a civil servants’ kind of existentialism, with the expert on accountants’ woes Mario Benedetti in the role of Albert Camus, his novel
The Truce
in that of
The Rebel,
and his own father in that of official spokesperson for the dogma—perpetual hostages in the cells of a wretched, obligatory, monochrome life (gray being the color of
horror vacui,
according to the palette of the era) that offers no surprises nor any prospect of change. As time goes by, he thinks he comes to understand that life—which seems so universal, so evenly distributed—is actually a rare good that shows up where he would not at first have expected to find it: in children, beggars, stray dogs, crazy people—the only ones, according to his father, who meet the sole condition that makes life real: having the nerve to challenge everything. The barefoot boy putting a dirty hand through the window of a car stopped at a light; the beggar howling in an alley, covered in bags of trash; the puppy boldly sniffing the vulva of anarrogant Afghan hound; the madman and his private world of burning souls and organs consuming one another: these are the few happy anomalies his father seems to recognize in this general theater of the dead. There’s more life there, he says, in that human wilderness, in those bodies covered in calluses, scabs, scars, than anywhere else.
    He agrees in silence, because at a certain age any more or less self-assured show of authority is met with agreement. Even so, he would like to learn, to know where his father got his skill for tracing the dividing line, which signs to look out for and how to read them in order to decide what is genuine, free, sovereign life, and what is the parody that attempts to usurp it. Even at this age, he likes solid reasoning. He can admire the edge of a decision, or the timely impact of a bombshell, but what captivates him about both is also what frightens him: how sudden they are, and how soon they’re over. Besides, if the taxi driver who spends his whole life cursing the other cars on the road is dead, as dead as the cashier who serves them at the bank, who spends hours counting other people’s money without even lifting her head, and as the waitress in the phony Italian restaurant where they usually have lunch, who’s red with embarrassment at the prostitute’s uniform she’s made to wear, a shirt undone to her belly button and a tight skirt that hardly covers her buttocks—if all these people who for better or worse breathe, peel open their eyelids every morning, and feel the icy thrusting of water at their gums, and are scared, and speak to other people are dead, oh so dead, as his father says of the ugly woman at the office who waves a useless hand in the air to ingratiate herself to him from a distance, and generally of more extreme cases, those that no earthquake or revolution could resuscitate, what about that close family friend of his mother’s husband, who leaves behind a widow and two orphans, also leaving his mother’s husband in a state of shock, dreamingabout his body at the bottom of the river for months, until he feels as though he can’t breathe and wakes up, his heart having almost stopped beating, pressing his pillow into his face with his own hands.
    He’s his first dead person. Like all first dead people, he has the rare quality of being simultaneously implausible and inevitable. The moment he arrives in the overheated room where the wake’s being held, everything—the whispering, the soft light coming from the lamps on the floor and the tables, the furtive sound of every movement, the uniform color of the clothing, the air of monotony enveloping everything—prepares him to come face-to-face with a dead person, forces him to believe in it, to accept without a shadow of a doubt the evidence that he is dead. But when he