Trust

by Hernan Diaz

Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise: his was not a story of resilience and perseverance or the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross.

It may have been true that his inventory was sourced from the finest providers on the continent, but more than in the quality of his merchandise, the key to Solomon’s success lay in his ability to exploit an obvious fact: there was, of course, an epicurean side to tobacco, but most men smoked so that they could talk to other men. Solomon Rask was, therefore, a purveyor not only of the finest cigars, cigarillos, and pipe blends but also (and mostly) of excellent conversation and political connections.

Those who accused him of being excessively frugal failed to understand that, in truth, he had no appetites to repress.

In the end, he became a wealthy man playing the part of a wealthy man. That his circumstances coincided with his costume did not make him feel any better.

New York swelled with the loud optimism of those who believe they have outpaced the future.

even he could see that although mergers and consolidations had resulted in the concentration of the wealth in a handful of corporations of unprecedented size, there was, ironically, a collective feeling of success.

The sheer magnitude of these new monopolistic companies, a few of them worth more than the entire government budget, was proof of how unequally the bounty was distributed. Yet most people, no matter their circumstances, were certain they were part of the soaring economy—or would be, soon enough.

He brimmed with that most conventional and embarrassing of qualities—“taste.” Rask would look at him, thinking only an employee would spend the money someone else gave to him in such a fashion: looking for relief and freedom.

Back home, Benjamin directed his attention to the tangible foundations of his wealth—things and people, which the conflict had merged into one single machine.

And yet it was this dampened version of herself that her parents preferred—her father followed her uninspired work with great pleasure; her mother found her more approachable.

She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.

More than the threatening tone, what she found terrifying was the incoherence of his tirade, because she thought there was no greater violence than the one done to meaning.

Since they both lived on the outskirts of political reality, they did not immediately understand the grave implications of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination.

Mr. Stovall said that concerns over war were not uncommon in Europe. But every seasoned diplomat was well aware of the disastrous consequences of an open conflagration, and he therefore hoped reason and friendly interventions would manage to avert this major disaster. Within a few weeks, Austria, Serbia, Germany, Russia, and Great Britain had issued formal declarations of war. Soon, the conflict engulfed most of Europe.

Sheldon, it seemed, had taken Helen’s distracted silence for speechless awe.

She simply could not engage with the pleasantries and platitudes that moved her mother’s matrimonial campaign forward. This very inability led her to realize that braggarts like Sheldon Lloyd, consumed as they were in self-contemplation, could, paradoxically, afford her some degree of autonomy.

Intimacy can be an unbearable burden for those who, first experiencing it after a lifetime of proud self-sufficiency, suddenly realize it makes their world complete. Finding bliss becomes one with the fear of losing it.

Knowing that powerlessness has a way of turning into rancor—just as someone who undervalues himself eventually will blame others for his depreciation—she did her best to dissipate Benjamin’s anxieties.

Ever since her engagement had been announced, Helen had perceived a general change of attitude in all of them. Those who, in the past, had bothered to try to bridge the distance she had always imposed between herself and the world had done so unceremoniously. Now that same distance had become a literal symbol of her new station. People tiptoed across the gap, trying to confirm with every hesitant step that they were indeed allowed to approach her. Often confused with shyness or arrogance, her silence was now, she could tell, taken to be the becoming attitude for someone of her standing, and her ill-concealed ennui was all of a sudden welcomed as sophisticated detachment—it would have been vulgar for someone like her to show an interest in anything.

She was particularly interested in living authors, although she initially refused to meet them, knowing the distance between the work and the person could be covered only by disappointment.

It was not lost on her that by uniting her passion for the arts with her charitable endeavors she was reconciling her father’s intellectual fervor with her mother’s social skills.

It became a priority for these companies to develop effective medications for the wide spectrum of psychiatric conditions so far treated with little more than morphine, chloral hydrate, potassium bromide, and barbital. The multitude of soldiers who had returned from the front with deep psychological scars and clear signs of mental trauma—and no adequate therapies to address their symptoms—made this research particularly urgent.

If before 1928 few thought it possible that five million shares would ever be traded on the New York Stock Exchange in a day, after the second half of that year this ceiling almost became the floor.

The speed at which Benjamin enlarged his fortune and the wisdom with which Helen distributed it were perceived as the public manifestation of the close bond between them. This, together with their elusiveness, turned them into mythical creatures in the New York society they so utterly disregarded, and their fabulous stature only increased with their indifference.

Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail—we are ruined by forces beyond our control.

Whatever caused the slump that, in turn, became a panic, one thing was clear—none of those who had helped to inflate the bubble felt responsible for its bursting. They were the blameless casualties of a disaster of almost natural proportions.

She knew that looking away from the destitute families, the breadlines, the shuttered stores, and the despair in every thinning face was a gross form of self-indulgence, but she also understood that the anguish she felt when confronted by this bleak reality was yet another of her luxuries.

Her confinement to her home was part of the punishment—although she could see that this seclusion was, to a great extent, motivated by fear and shame and, therefore, self-serving. Still,

What mattered was that she was unable to stop thinking about her thoughts. Her speculations reflected one another, like parallel mirrors—and, endlessly, each image inside the vertiginous tunnel looked at the next wondering whether it was the original or a reproduction. This, she told herself, was the beginning of madness. The mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth.

The few who did, however, found that many of the assumptions regarding Rask’s dealings were not far from the truth. His answers to the senators’ accusatorial, convoluted questions were reduced, for the most part, to “yes, sir” and “no, sir,” but they confirmed that he had indeed divested from his most volatile vehicles in the months preceding the collapse, that he had flooded the market with sell orders the day before Black Thursday, and that he had shorted, quite spectacularly, the ensuing crash. Despite his interrogators’ inflamed rhetoric, it was apparent that none of his actions had been illegal.

Morning brought out a deeper sort of white from the changeless snows capping the peaks on either side of the valley, which, later, in the midday sun, would become blinding splinters.

Although she spoke it with remarkable ease, she also had vast lacunae, as is usually the case with those who have somewhat haphazardly taught themselves a language. Because she often had to pause and find circumlocutions to bypass grammatical voids and lexical gaps, she gave the impression of having slowed down, of having mastered, in some measure, her anxiety.

Only a fool would distinguish past from present in such a way. The future irrupts at all times, wanting to actualize itself in every decision we make; it tries, as hard as it can, to become the past. This is what distinguishes the future from mere fancy. The future happens.

And what is choice but a branch of the future grafting itself onto the stem of the present?

The developments of the market reached him only as “news,” which is how the press refers to decisions made by other people in the recent past.

Some people, under certain circumstances, hide their true emotions under exaggeration and hyperbole, not realizing their amplified caricature reveals the exact measure of the feelings it was meant to conceal.

Although this is the capital of the future, its inhabitants are nostalgic by nature. Every generation has its own notion of “old New York” and claims to be its rightful heir. The result is, of course, a perpetual reinvention of the past. And this, in consequence, means there are always new old New Yorkers.

Today’s gentleman is yesterday’s upstart. But behind these shifting characters there is a constant presence: the financier. Investing, lending, borrowing and, more widely, the efficient administration of capital is what sustained the city at each of those periods, regardless of what was being produced and sold.

The first one was that the ideal conditions for business were never given. One had to create them.

And his second and main discovery was that self-interest, if properly directed, need not be divorced from the common good, as all the transactions he conducted throughout his life eloquently show.

Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt. We spend the years between these episodes benefiting or suffering from their consequences until the arrival of the next forceful moment. A man’s worth is established by the number of these defining circumstances he is able to create for himself. He need not always be successful, for there can be great honor in defeat. But he ought to be the main actor in the decisive scenes in his existence, whether they be epic or tragic.

My father disapproved. Secretary was a demeaning occupation, he said. It promised independence but was another knot in the millenary subjection of women to the rule of men.

Yet even if in protest against “Italian” he had, not without difficulty, embraced English, he still found it an expressively deficient language, limited in its vocabulary and rustic in its constructions, never conceiving that these shortcomings were, in fact, his own.

“I have no country. I don’t want one. The root of all evil, the cause of every war—god and country.”

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After my mother’s death I found this new role, which I performed inexpertly and in an improvised fashion, natural. I had become the woman in the house. My father, the anarchist, found the fact that child labor was required to keep the gender status quo intact equally natural.

I have no doubt my father, who never lived with another woman after my mother, loved her very much. But it was not out of love or because of his inability to “let go” that he had left the things in her drawer untouched. It just never occurred to him to clean them out.

Authority and money surround themselves with silence, and one can measure the reach of someone’s influence by the thickness of the hush enveloping them.

All we have left to choose is different forms of terror. Terror and imperialism. That’s all. Fascist imperialism. Soviet imperialism. Capitalist imperialism. Those are our only choices now, it seems.