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

gets to the coffin and sees the corpse all made up and dressed as if it’s going out for the night, the first thing that crosses his mind is a remark too shameful to say aloud: “Okay, that’s enough. Let’s put an end to this farce. You can get up now.” The truth of a lifeless body lacks nothing. It’s irreducible, as hard as stone. But it’s precisely this kind of impassive superciliousness that demands all the surrounding spectacle, the zealous care and beautification that turn every dead body into a strange mixture of puppet, waxwork, and actor. Even so, for all their artificiality, our first dead bodies are like a note struck by a pianist before he begins to play, which melts away no sooner than it has been heard but lingers throughout the whole piece as a key, guiding and making sense of it; they radically and permanently alter the world as we know it, injecting it with the sole possibility—the possibility of elimination—that was unimaginable to us the second before we came face-to-face with that corpse, because it was the opposite of the world itself.
    And in this case, there’s also the matter of the money. Where is life—his father’s old question, which the dead man makes flesh, exposing it to the fragility and menace that colorthe world after every brush with misfortune—often gets mixed up with the other question, where is the money, which snakes through the wake in an undertone (in the way that vulgar, malicious, or funny conversation sometimes circulates in solemn and serious situations, deliberately disturbing the solemnity in order to make it more bearable, or maybe to remind us what cheap stuff it’s made of) and sparks a few deliberations when a guest appears who should theoretically be able to answer the question, someone high up at the iron-and-steel company, a police official, the two or three army and navy officers who arrive in uniform, preceded by a compact phalanx of guards, and who restrict themselves to squeezing the hands of anyone who approaches them as soon as they see them coming, as though they were the chief mourners—though they never met the dead man in person and they’re quick to leave as soon as they’ve stood at attention next to the coffin—and not the people who have been there for hours, wasting away in the sickly light of that apartment. Where. Where is the money.
    They won’t be the ones to tell, if they even know the answer. There’s nothing to make them. The only person who could do that is the dead man, who might have found out before everybody else, when he goes up to the roof of the iron-and-steel company’s Buenos Aires headquarters, boards the helicopter sitting there with its blades spinning, sits down, and signals to his assistant to give him the attaché case containing the money, only to discover that the assistant is empty-handed and now closing the helicopter door with a slam and telling the pilot to take off. They were relying on him. He’s remained loyal to the company’s interests for how many years? Twenty? How many times has he saved them from using forceful measures? How many union leaders has he shut up? He’s the ideal man for this undertaking, the only one capable of understanding its exceptional nature, a naturethat calls for emergency operating procedures justified by an equally exceptional situation that’s raging out of control. Nobody ever imagined that he would oppose out of principle, or that he even had his own principles independent of the company’s. But when the time comes, he objects to all of it: the means, the end, the very idea. His loyalty remains intact, but there are certain lines he is not willing to cross. It comes as a surprise. The real problem, which there’s no fixing, is that it also comes too late. It becomes clear not only that he won’t do it, but also that he knows too much. If it comes down to a loyal soldier with moral sensitivities and a perfect plan that will pacify the whole region and that comes