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

the executives are finally freed. He follows the dramatic twists in these operations delightedly, as enthusiastically as many of his friends—generally the ones who make fun of him or walk out on him whenever he suggests going to the Communist cinema to see an Eastern European film cycle—follow the local soccer tournament, and is never more jubilant than when the captives regain their freedom and appear, exhausted but happy, on the front pages and in TV news bulletins, surrounded by a cordon of police and cameras. It’s not their liberation that moves him, exactly. Neither is it the fact, repeated right and left in the bourgeois press, that with their freedom the prisoners regain the most vital element of life and therefore life itself, which during their captivity in those so-called people’s prisons had been reduced to sleeping, pissing, shitting, chewing on some repulsive gruel, walking in circles around tiny rooms, half-hearing their neighbors’ radios, and being interrogated. He’s not interested in the humiliating miseries of their survival. After all, don’t the companies of which these captives are the brains, the figureheads, the proud spokesmen condemn their thousands upon thousands of workers to live precisely the same life, a life that’s almost
sub
-life, that all but falls below the minimum threshold of life? And not for the two weeks or three months that they themselves are forced to live it, but for years, whole decades, a whole lifetime, so that for them it’s not some perverse substitute for life but life itself, the only one they have, and so the one that, pitiful and foul and inescapable as it may be, demands to be celebrated. No, what delights him, splashed as flagrantly on the newspapers’ front pages as the layers of makeup on actors’ faces in photos stuck to theater doors, is the transformation that has taken place in the captives. There they are, driving around in the latest cars, flashing tailor-made suits and Italian shoes and signing checks with gold fountain pens, when a perfectlytimed commando operation uproots them from their lavish lifestyle. Days, weeks, months later, when they’re released and brought before those dazzling flashes, they’ve turned gray, their scalps have been eaten away by lice, they haven’t shaved for weeks, their skin is chafed. They’re dirty, they’ve grown thin, you can see the bones in their faces. They look as defeated as condemned men, and have the glassy-eyed, evasive air of alcoholics, the heavily medicated, victims of abuse. They wear poor-quality sports clothes, outfits improvised from the garments given to them by their captors, all of them mismatched—the shirt untucked, shoes with no laces, nicotine stains on their fingers (those that smoked before being kidnapped carry on puffing like chimneys, and those that didn’t adopt the habit with a deadly thirst); their fingernails are broken and dirty, the fingernails of people who’ve spent every day digging in the vain search for an escape. They’re disoriented, they have trouble remembering, they stammer. They look like wild animals or the mentally retarded.
    But to him—whose closest encounter with the department of kidnapping and extortion and everything that moves in its orbit (executives at monster corporations, commando units, rifles, people’s prisons, hoods, ransoms, fake military uniforms) is the figure
four million,
as yelled by the dead crostini lover in the grip of a wave of terror, and of course the dead crostini lover himself, whom he sees for the last time one summer lunchtime in Mar del Plata, ranting and raving about the garish orange they’ve painted the chairs at the beach club while filling his mouth with crostini, and then, from one minute to the next, in a dark suit and makeup, squeezed by the narrow walls of a coffin—to
him
the physical and mental deterioration, the loss of energy, and the premature ageing that abductees undergo while they’re being held, and which