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

with the government’s blessing, which are they likely to choose?
    The money must be there. Not twelve hours after the family announces that the helicopter hasn’t arrived at its destination, a procession of vehicles a kilometer and a half long brings local police, federal agents sent from the capital, and a squad of select union thugs, in total some four thousand men in 105 vehicles (including private cars with no license plates, patrol cars, and assault cars), armed with long guns and kitted out with the accessories of intimidation that will inspire frenzy throughout the country for the next eight years—fake Ray-Bans, hoods, peaked caps, green or navy-blue berets—to Villa Constitución, the city once named the capital of the red belt of the Paraná River, to do away with a troublesome trade union group and uproot a subversive plot against the nation’s heavy industry—a task that from that moment on they’ll pursue almost unchecked, paid alternately by the chief of staff and the head of labor relations at the iron-and-steel company to the tune of a hundred and sometimes a hundred and fifty dollars each a day, and enjoying the use of the plant’s helipad for the police helicopters, the parking lots for their cars, the plant’s dining rooms for affordable lunches and dinners, the comfortable houses, originally meant for executives,for sleeping, watching television, and playing cards, and the workers’ lodgings for interrogations and torture and stockpiling the loot from their daily raids.
    The money is there, but it can’t be seen, and he soon realizes that this is almost always the case. Maybe disappearing isn’t an unpleasant accident, one of many eventualities eagerly awaiting money, but actually its very logic, a fatal tendency it has. Maybe, he thinks, that’s the main similarity between money and life—more so even than the reproductive impulse, which they also share. It’s there, but it’s always embodied in or translated into something else: clothes, magazines, food, buildings, machines, school supplies, records, cinema tickets, thugs in dark glasses who stick their forearms out the window while they cock their Czechoslovakian guns. This is why he’s glad that his father prefers not to pretend and always walks around with his pockets full of banknotes: because he likes the anachronistic challenge this represents. He trusts only what he sees, and what he sees, what circumstances dictate that his father sees—just as others before him saw grains of salt, seashells, feathers, or gold—is printed paper.
    One day not long after the afternoon when he sees his first dead person—a day on which his mother, with a certain gravity in her voice, arranges a formal meeting with him, saying she wants to “talk to him about something,” even though they live in the same house—he starts to wonder whether the compensation the crostini lover’s widow received from the iron-and-steel company—as exceptional and possibly as ample a consignment as that which should have been on board the helicopter and which in a way condemned the dead man to death, since it’s used to pay for the troops who are meanwhile turning mattresses over, stealing wedding rings, and ripping off testicles in Villa Constitución—is paid in cash. He’s wondering this at the exact moment his mother appearsin the living room, freshly showered, with her head wrapped in one of the towel turbans that suit her so well, and hands him an envelope containing two typed pages, which she asks him to read and sign at the bottom.
    It takes him a little while to understand what it is he’s reading. “In the event of an accident …” “compensation …” “as a result of which …” “through the stipulated premium.” It’s the archaic, severe, alien-sounding music of technical jargon. He recognizes the characters in this drama—beneficiary, policyholder, insurer—but it’s not so easy to identify the relationships the text establishes