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

coffee in his hands. He’s just shaved, he looks younger than ever, and he smiles like an awestruck child. “I was dead. A real beating: I hadn’t won a single hand,” he tells her, his eyes wide. “The guy from Tucumán your father hired to follow me ended up rescuing me.”
    Gambling is his thing—just as other men might take drugs, shoplift, cross-dress, or drive at 200 kilometers per hour—and he’s alone in it, and everything that will ever be known of him while he’s in his thing until they both die off will only emerge by error or accident. Because “things” areworlds, and no world can close itself off completely, no matter how perfect it is. That morning, in the kitchen, his mother realizes that there will never be space in him for her. It has nothing to do with her, with what she does or does not do. The proof is his absolute lack of guilt, the almost jovial ease with which he skips over the trouble of a confession and assumes something that for her, until that moment, had been a mystery, and had tortured her unbearably. He’s never mentioned his gambling before for precisely the reason that he’s talking about it now, which is also why he’s talking about it in the way he is, like someone thinking aloud, without any need for interlocutors. His silence has never been a secret. That’s why he never felt the urge to confess. For his mother, this is the first and perhaps the only night of gambling, and it’s charged with surprises and revelations. For his father, it’s one more in a series. That’s why he’s talking about it as though his mother had known all about each of those other ones that led up to it.
    And now he knows, too. He’s almost more aware of it than his father himself, given the mimetic impulse awoken in him by certain indeterminately sick people, the undiagnosed or those trapped in the webs of confusing diagnoses (melancholics, perverts, dreamers, idolaters, procrastinators), with whose ills he claims both a rare intimacy, as though he had suffered them in some other life, and a peculiar distance, characterized by compassion and astuteness and more befitting a doctor than a patient. “At the casino, my darling,” his mother tells him after bursting out laughing, and once the first moment of astonishment has passed, he peeps around the door she’s cracked open for him and sees a rapid panorama of it all, the gold and red of the carpets, the flashing lights on the slot machines, the waiters carrying trays of drinks between tables, the employees in bow ties and waistcoats taking piles of chips out of boxes, the tables surrounded by gamblers on their feet, the baize tabletops, the cards coming out of the
sabot,
and,with his back to him, his jacket off and hanging from the back of his seat, two halos of sweat around his armpits, and his head enveloped in the smoke from his own cigarette, his father, leaning very far forward, his shoulders sunken and his elbows resting on the edge of the table.
    Sometimes he can’t help himself, and he lets slip a question about roulette wheels, croupiers, cheats, or the secret, silent rooms where he imagines big winners go to exchange their chips for money. Other times he skips straight to action, thinking he’s much more likely to rouse his father by making himself an example and demonstrating everything he doesn’t know and wants to learn. And so he finds any reason to start shuffling cards, and shuffles badly, exaggerating his clumsiness, trying to stir his father’s pride and convince him to teach him, or deliberately loses card games in an attempt to awaken his pity or his fury and so finally extract the drops of his expertise that will save him from more humiliation. They’re feeble, hopeless efforts. His father responds indifferently, with evasions that he accepts without protest. After a while he stops trying. Lost cause. But how he rejoices in those moments when something unexpected, a random, utterly unintentional spur, dents the shield