Some bank tellers are closer to self-ownership, given that they can easily switch to another job paying just minimum wage, while the chairman of the very same bank is, typically, a pure slave. The employees at the bottom cannot be easily forced to commit acts of desperation, or, say, fit their beliefs to accord with an action they have taken because they have to do so within their profession, rather than act according to preset beliefs. Such self-spinning justificatory strategy is commonly known as cognitive dissonance, as the person finds justification to resolve the mismatch between the initial set of mind and his subsequent actions. A banker, for example, can take crazy (but of course legal) actions loading the world with risk just to get a bonus, then subsequently find the justification that he is helping spur economic activity and that he is indispensable to society. Or people can indulge buying lottery tickets and claim – and believe – that they are doing it "for their children".

So unless they became ambitious and decided to upgrade their social rank, security guards, drivers of corporate cars, waiters, hotel cleaning staff, construction workers and similar employees are professionally free as their jobs are fungible. The distance between their current job and another one paying the same amount is very small, and there is a huge reservoir of jobs at the bottom of the pyramid – where reputation matters little beyond a clean criminal record and an official absence of psychiatric condition.

The chairman of the company, on the other hand, is scared of the security analyst who can give him a bad report, of the board of directors, of journalists who can say something unflattering, of his own vice-president looking to oust him (as he did his predecessor). Falling means a severe loss of status. He would be able to live a life materially acceptable to many, but would be losing his expensive car, his wine collection, his opera subscription, his country house, and, correspondingly, his second wife – which is not acceptable.

Actually, according to Seneca, fear of loss and actual loss are almost the same thing. Possessions are there to punish people unless they have a mechanism to handle it, hence his entire body of applied stoicism. Seneca, one of the wealthiest people in his day, wrote obsessively on one of the five hundred desks he owned about the poisonous aspect of possessions.

Self-ownership has little to do with externally-perceived status, but rather one's position on what is called the internal hedonic and social treadmill. Say you move into a new house, bigger and more opulent than your previous one. After about six months you will adjust to it, reverting to a happiness baseline. But if you lost the income to support the house, had to return to your initial endowment and move back to the old dwelling, you would be worse off than if you did not move at all. Add to this the external social dimension that should someone erect a palace next to your little house it will immediately shrink into a hut, leading to the same pains as if you did not start anywhere. This is the argument usually provided about the notion that money does not give happiness, which is not quite true. It should be rephrased that some people do not gain in happiness beyond a certain level of material comfort and safety, and strangely such a level is usually not too far beyond minimum wage.

To attain self-ownership you need to feel that you have no downside, which is why philosophers have traditionally been light of possessions – Socrates himself was rather poor. But this is not necessary: Seneca was rich yet knew how to avoid mental dependence on wealth. He managed to eliminate his dependence on external goods by writing them off daily, in order to boast that, should the event take place, nihil perditi, "I lost nothing".

The Greeks saw the world in three professions: artisanship, the craft of war, and farming. Only the last two were worthy of a gentleman – mainly on account that they were not self-serving and were free of conflicts of interest. A vendor of funereal goods could not be trusted to wish for the good health of his fellow citizens.

The first banking card I had was in Madrid, in the mid-eighties, issued by the Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad (The Mount of Mercy Savings Bank). I was a nineteen-year-old youth from the Colombian middle-class (as Bolaño wisely classified us). Keeping that card in my pocket gave me an air of reliability, which didn't match the truth at all but was pleasing. I caught my reflection in shop windows and I felt different, and each time I saw a Caja Madrid cash machine I'd stop to consult my balance. I'd divide the figure between the remaining days of the month and go on in my furtive labour to the next cashpoint. I never withdrew anything, as I already had in my pocket the money allocated for the day.

The monthly figure I used to live on (a grant from the Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana) was 75,000 pesetas, equivalent at the time to 535 dollars. After discounting 18,000 for accommodation I was left with more or less one thousand, five hundred pesetas per day, which was OK, as I could eat cheaply at the university restaurant and I had the libraries for my reading. It wasn't much but I felt rich, as it was money I didn't owe to anyone and it came to me without effort. My two best friends of that time weren't so lucky. They were both Argentine. One of them used to sell little leather masks on street markets, which usually meant either going to bed on an empty stomach or coming to my house to share a can of meat and peas. The other one studied with me at the Philology faculty and received a little money from his family. But each time he drank a coffee he choked with guilt, as he could have bought ten coffees at the price in Córdoba. Needless to say they were both extremely thin.

On one occasion I went very early to the Caja Madrid and, when I introduced the card and entered the PIN number, a message appeared on the screen: "Happy Birthday". I've never seen that in any other part of the world and, to be honest, I was touched. Next came the discovery of being able to pay by card in shopping centres, which was quite unusual at the time. I was used to making such trips with cash either hidden in the hem of my trousers or rolled into a strip inside my pants, and this was a revelation. The first time I bought something with the card, perhaps a book, I went immediately to check my account balance and was surprised to discover the figure had not changed. It only changed the following day. That time lapse led me to fantasize about a simple scam: I could spend all the money on the card, and immediately take the same amount from the bank before it closed. Fortunately I never tried it.

Some years later I moved to Paris, where things got worse. The figure Crédit Lyonnais gave when I checked my balance was considerably lower. There was no way to make that damn figure grow as I didn't have a grant or other funding. I worked for a living giving limp Spanish lessons in a school called Langues et Entreprises. The students were French executives of companies with branches in Latin America. I was paid 85 francs an hour, or about 12 dollars. Sometimes I had a student at seven or eight in the morning, and worst of all I was expected to dress smartly. How can you be well-dressed in Paris on 12 dollars an hour? Well, by working 40 hours a week, you may say. But the lessons had to be divided between other Latin American and Spanish teachers, all as hungry as I was, which didn't leave us many hours each per week. I remember a sixty-year-old Argentine author, a successful novelist and playwright in Buenos Aires (or so he told us). For a sense of shame I won't mention his name, but there he was, the old man, frequently breathing through an oxygen mask. A proper Buenos Airean, he dressed as if about to go for dinner at the embassy, topping off his formal attire with a hat. But at the end of the day we shared the same reality: we were both poor language teachers with little in our stomachs.

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"Maybe it was an accident," my father said. "Accidents happen all the time."

"I don't think it was an accident," I said.

"Are you sure you didn't imagine it?" my mother asked. "You have such an amazing imagination... maybe it took over for a second?"

I struggled to resist the compliment.

"No," I said. "It wasn't my imagination. This thing definitely happened."

It was Monopoly night and even though my father had rolled a seven, he hadn't yet moved his wheelbarrow. It just sat there, on the wrong square, abandoned.

Eventually, both of my parents got up and went into the kitchen.

"Mom? Dad?"

They didn't respond but I could hear them murmuring to each other on the other side of the door.

"He pushed me down the stairs," I said, for what seemed like the hundredth time of the night. "He pushed me, on purpose, in front of a lot of people. It was really crazy."

Eventually, my parents returned to the table. I noticed that my father was holding a beer. I had only ever seen him drink at weddings and funerals and I was mildly shocked. They both hesitated for a moment, hoping the other one would do the talking.

"The thing about Elliot," my mother said finally, "Is that he's different from most boys."

I felt a sudden stab of guilt.

"Oh geez," I said. "Is he retarded?"

"No," my father said. "Not exactly."

"What is it then?" I asked. "What's different about him?"

My mother cleared her throat.

"He's rich," she said.

My father nodded.

"He's very rich."

My parents rarely asked me how school was going. It's not that they weren't interested: the stakes were just too high. Glendale wasn't particularly glitzy by Manhattan standards. It cost significantly less than those top tier prep schools that lined Central Park and dotted the hills of Riverdale. But it was still an expensive school – the most expensive one my parents could afford. They never mentioned money around me, but our apartment wasn't very large and if I stayed up late, I could hear them talking about their financial struggles through our shared bedroom wall, in the hushed, low tone they reserved for that subject alone. They were paying an incredible percentage of their income to send me to Glendale and I think they were both secretly terrified that their investment was coming to naught.

If my parents told me my tuition cost a hundred dollars or a million dollars, I probably would have believed them. Money was meaningless to me, until it was converted into rock candy. My father had recently begun to give me five bucks a week, to teach me the value of a dollar, but the five-dollar bill he handed me each week might as well have been a voucher with the words "good for one medium bag of rock candy" printed on it because that's the only thing I ever considered buying with it. When I tried to visualize the amount of money I was wasting by going to Glendale, I pictured myself wading through an entire roomful of rock candy, like Scrooge McDuck, scooping up the pieces and tossing them over my head. It felt that obscene.

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Amidst the recent brouhaha over the Big Freeze there have been smaller headlines pointing cautiously towards economic recovery, higher consumer spending, an increase in mortgage applications. Has the trauma of financial meltdown altered us one iota? One is tempted to give a great Gallic shrug and say "Plus ça change". As soon as things begin to mend, we fall back into a state that Slavoj Žižek has termed "fetishistic disavowal" about a system which relies on the flimsy principle of bankers believing in a belief. We comfort ourselves with the convenient corrective narrative of ensuring tighter strictures in future so it Never Happens Again, and trust in the myth of having learned from our individual credit-happy recklessness. We think we have emerged chastened and sobered from the experience but somehow, I doubt it, you doubt it and almost everyone else really doubts it.

Our relation to filthy lucre and the way financial crises and the idea of loss affect people stretch beyond bread-and-butter economics. Much as we continue to further the abstraction, the movement of money via online banking and chip-and-pin technology, our relation to money is ultimately darkly rooted in our bodies and in early gratifications. Some of us withhold and hoard beyond reason and comprehension; and some of us, like Francis Bacon, enjoy a quasi-sexual thrill in the spread of the muck to the point of self-destruction. This is not to sound overly reductive. Particularities and idiosyncrasies will vary from person to person. But once upon a time we unrestrainedly produced something from our bodies, and were brought to realize that the control of this production was a highly powerful system of exchange. And, as the psychoanalyst Darian Leader says, "What the recent crisis has most definitely done is stirred up all those early experiences of having and not having".

Alongside the having is the guilt of having too much, and the fear of having it taken away. The myth of ownership is pregnant with the fear of loss. It's hardly surprising that during the successive banking crises of 2008, people took to thinking of emptying their bank accounts and stashing the cash under their mattresses. Some no doubt did. It answered a primitive call. We feel the impact of money physically. It causes pleasure and sickness and constitutes a major cause of many a sleepless night. And of course the fear of loss is far worse than the loss itself.

Loss is perhaps the most crucial of realities to assimilate, and it's paradoxical. Consider the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720 after the British government allowed one sole company to underwrite the entire national debt. The bubble in the traffic of stocks and shares involved everyone from maids to marchionesses. When it burst, mayhem ensued with a rash of suicides and rioting. However, studies made by nerve specialists at the time recorded an intriguing fact: the significantly higher incidence of breakdowns among those who sold their shares just in time to save themselves compared to those who were effectively ruined.

Might this be behind the discreet phenomenon observed by contemporary shrinks – that of a certain underlying relief among high-flyers who have lost considerable amounts? What we indubitably now know is that the capitalist system exists in a vampiric form; that we will return to our old ways of spending, that those who have lost jobs and houses will hope to recover enough to own and spend all over again. This is not simply inherent in an advanced capitalist consumer society; we are archaically linked in to money as real matter and its exciting and/or guilty evocations. Which is why in films good and bad, when people finally steal or acquire the suitcase of money, they splash it around the room along with the champagne.

It's no surprise that the old place to hoard cash was under the mattress – a space not miles away from the chamber pot. And it could be that's why we hate actual banks. They are no real substitute for the faintly grubby, faintly shameful nexus of the private and vulnerable. They only evoke it – like a Luis Buñuel scenario in which giant corporate lavatories are run by hoards of highly indifferent nannies.

Yakov "Yaki" Brayk was one of NiceDay's earliest adopters. He truly loved his money and had a hard time parting with it, but even more than he loved the millions he made selling weapons and generic drugs to Zimbabwe, he loathed those humid New York summers and that gross feeling you get when your sweaty undershirt sticks to your back. He bought a system, not just for himself, but for the whole block. Some people mistook this for generosity, but the truth is he did it just to keep the great weather with him all the way to the bodega on the corner. That bodega wasn't just where he got the unfiltered Noblesses they imported from Israel especially for him. No, more than anything, it marked for Yaki the boundary of his personal space. And the minute Yaki signed the cheque, that block turned into a weather paradise. No more grey rain, no more dog days. Just September, twelve months a year. And not, God forbid, one of those off-and-on, partly sunny, partly cloudy New York Septembers, but the dependable kind, the kind he grew up with in Haifa. And then out of the blue came the Chicago riots, and suddenly here were the neighbours telling him to cease-and-desist with the gorgeous fall post-haste. At first he didn't give them the time of day, but then came those lawyers' letters and someone left a slaughtered peacock on his windshield. That's when his wife asked him to turn it off. It was January. Yaki turned off the fall and instantly the day turned short and sad. All because of one dead peacock and an anorexic wife with an anxiety disorder who, as always, was able to control him through her weakness.

The recession went from bad to worse. On Wall Street, NiceDay hit rock bottom. So did shares in Yaki's company. Then they drilled a hole in the rock and went down a little further. It's funny, you'd think weapons and drugs would be strong during a worldwide recession, but that's not how it worked out. People were too broke to buy medicine, and they very quickly rediscovered an old forgotten truth: that weapons with chips are a luxury, just like electric car windows, and sometimes all you need is a stone you found in the yard if you want to smash in somebody's skull. They very quickly learned to manage without Yaki's rifles, much more quickly than Yaki could get used to the unseasonably cold and wet mid-March. And Yaki Brayk, or Lucky, as the tabloids liked to call him, lost his shirt.

He kept the apartment, the company accountant managed to retroactively put it in the anorexic wife's name, but all the rest was gone. They even took the furniture. Four days later, a NiceDay technician came to disconnect the system. When Yaki opened the door, he was standing there drenched with rain. Yaki made a pot of coffee and they talked for a while. He told the technician how, not long after the riots, he'd turned the system off. The technician said a lot of customers had done the same. They talked about the riots, when a furious mob from the slums had stormed the Indian-summery homes of the city's wealthier residents. "All that sun of theirs, it was driving us crazy," one of the rioters said on a news commentary show a few days later. "Here you are freezing your ass off, just trying to make your next gas bill, while those bastards, those bastards..." At that point, he burst into tears. The camera blurred his face to hide his identity, so you couldn't actually see the tears, but you could hear him wailing like an animal hit by a car. The technician, who was black, said he was born in that same neighbourhood in Chicago, but today he was ashamed to admit it. "That money," he said, "all that fucking money fucked up the whole fucking world."

After they'd finished their coffee, when the technician was about to disconnect the system, Yaki asked if he could turn it on just one last time. The technician shrugged and Yaki took that as a yes. He pushed a couple of buttons on the remote and out came the sun from behind a cloud.
"That's not real sun, you know," the technician said proudly. "What they do is image it, with lasers."

Yaki winked and said, "Don't spoil it. For me, it's the sun."

"A great sun," The technician nodded. "Too bad you can't keep it out till I get back to the car. I'm sick of this rain."

Yaki didn't answer. He just closed his eyes and let the sun wash over his face.

From the pavement, No. 168 did not look like a restaurant. It looked like something that was not a restaurant. In a brick house of about 1830, standing a little crazy to its neighbours, net curtains covered what had once been a shop front. On the door was a sign saying "Closed". You might ring the bell and sense from within a ghost or phantom habitation, but the bell was not answered. I once only saw other diners there and they were of such arbitrary character I feel that, but for the testimony of my wife and her brother, I might have imagined the place.

Had I been a restaurant inspector for the Guide Michelin, I would have awarded Kypros Kebab House three rosettes for the cooking and three rocking-chairs or four-posters (or whatever symbol they use) for comfort. I would have added a special category, represented perhaps by three feathers clipped from the wings of angels, as instances of pure happiness. I was astonished at the wisdom of men that, in the mediocre borough which I inhabited, they could invent such a place.

The proprietors were Kypros —, and his wife, Krystalla. Kypros, as the name he used commemorates, was of Cypriot origin, a small, fat man, of a certain age, with an air of perpetual surprise. Krystalla, who was no younger, had a sweet, soft voice and suffered from mysterious pains in her legs. I once or twice saw a girl passing down the stairs, more anglicized than her aunt and uncle, who was reading physics at Imperial College or something like that.

The room contained four or five tables. The walls were decorated with souvenirs of Greece or Cyprus, raffia plates with charioteers or a plaster Venus of Melos, which are generally held to be of bad taste, but did not seem so to me, and sinister testimonials. High on one wall was a portrait of Winston Churchill in the painterly style of Woolworth's "Weeping Boy". Cut off by a counter at the back was space for a sink and a gas ring and one person. Here, Krystalla conducted her operations.

The menu did not vary and perhaps had not varied since its inauguration. Once seated, we were served the olives known as Gigantes, sliced turnips, vine leaves, smoked salmon, smoked cod's roe, grilled Haloumi cheese in olive oil and salted cucumber; then grilled lamb chops with some salad or other; then loukoumi, sweet coffee and ouzo. For some reason, the china had embossed in gold the arms of the Greek royal house, which had fled into exile in 1967.

To drink, there was retsina and mains water. I remember a guest of ours, who had not the taste for retsina, asked for Chablis. Kypros was thunderstruck at the unnatural character of the request. There was no Chablis, any more than there was tripe and onions. His commerce was quite rigid. Another guest inquired, elbows on the table, eyes shining at the lure of trivial intelligence: "Tell me, Kypros, how do you do these fantastic chops?" After a profound delay, Kypros chose out of many answers the one that most nearly corresponded to the truth. "I go to Soho to the butcher. I buy lamb chops. I give them to Krystalla. She cook them."

The place was so obscure as to be somewhat exclusive. I had been introduced by my future wife's brother, whose Christian name (Constantine) appeared to please or soothe the old couple's submerged royalism. Constantine was introduced by somebody or other and so on back and forth, like two mirrors that have been placed opposite each other. One other characteristic completed the place's exclusivity. The Kypros Kebab House was unimaginably expensive, and quite unpredictable.

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He smacked his lips and said: "God that's good. They only give you water in those fucking canteens. Why do they do that? A man needs a bit of fuel, especially in winter. Afterwards you get out of there and you want to put something in your body. If they'd only give me a little glass of wine or a beer with the food, I wouldn't need another drop. Can I have another?"

I agreed, but I knew that if he had an alcoholic's metabolism, he'd get drunk on very little. We needed to interrogate him quickly.

"Listen Anselmo, what's the man in the photo called? Who was he, where did he live? Tell us everything you know about him, even the little details."

"That's Tomas the Wise. Poor guy! I thought he must be dead, because I haven't seen him in days, but it seems wrong to me, you know? I'm a very ordered man."

"Tomas the Wise?"

"Everyone called him that because he was a clever man who knew how to solve problems and tell stories. He even knew Latin."

"Where did he live?"

"Here and there."

"Where did you see him?"

"Well, we slept in the same place – I don't recall where."

"Why don't you remember? Don't you always sleep in roughly the same place?"

"Yes, we always slept on a piece of wasteland in La Sagrera. Hey, where's my beer?"

We reminded the waiter. I noticed that his hands were trembling. He fell on the second glass as if it were his salvation. An impulse made him start talking again.

"You know, the only thing I'd ask for in life – if someone said to me 'Ask for what you want' – the only thing would be a boat filled with rice."

The three of us looked at each other in blank incomprehension. Garzon gestured minutely with his eyes, indicating that he would like to take over.

"We'll see, Anselmo. We were talking about Tomas the Wise, the poor bastard who's been murdered. You have to help us find out who did it, and to do that you need to tell us everything you know about him."

"Well, he gave me a present. He liked presents. And sometimes he bought me a beer."

"Was he good with money?"

"He had new boots but he told me that he didn't care, because money couldn't make you happy. You won't believe me, but my mother was very good at bowling. She always played in a very elegant bowling alley in Barcelona, and she ended up being the French champion. Not Spain, France!"

He looked at us proudly, one finger in the air, his eyes lively.

"Tomas, talk to us about Tomas."

"Tomas was as smart as King Alfonso the Wise. One day they wanted to steal his boots and he said 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.' Jesus Christ also said that. One day I saw Jesus Christ with my own eyes, he was dressed in yellow and his hair was curly and I..."

It was impossible that he could have got drunk so quickly. That disconnected, delirious way of speaking had to be his usual mannerism. Garzon tried to refocus him.

"Did you see Tomas with anyone, were there any men trying to find him?"

"One of my friends built himself a bath with taps shaped like snakes."

He kept getting further from our subject, apparently lost in an increasingly hallucinatory conversation. Perhaps if we followed the current, we'd end up coming back to what we wanted to know about.

"How interesting! You have a friend who can create such complex objects?"

"I'll show you the present that Tomas the Wise gave me. I have it here."

We stayed quiet, holding our breath, while the old man searched in his rucksack. He took out an absurd collection of objects, which he put on the table: a seashell, a pincushion, different coloured buttons... I thought that we were wasting time until suddenly he brandished a folded scrap of paper that looked as though it had been in the bag for some time. Opening it carefully, he handed it to me. I saw a handwritten mathematical formula, perhaps an equation, that with my scant knowledge of the subject I could not identify.

"Isn''t it beautiful? Tomas knew how to do this and one day he said to me, 'This is a little bit of knowledge that I'm giving you, because knowledge is very important in this world'."

I didn't know what to think. These were without doubt the calculations of a cultured person. I looked at Garzon. The Deputy Inspector grasped the man by his arm.

"Anselmo, this is going to lead us to Tomas's home. We're going to take you in the car with us, OK?"

"And what will you give me, a boat filled with rice?"

"Another beer, we'll give you another beer, and you'll lend us this bit of paper for a while."

Translated by Alice Waugh from the Petra Delicado novel Un barco cargado de arroz.

Almost every society displays forms of "social derogation" of some groups, and the responses elaborated by such groups often lead to enterprising attitudes and innovations that are eventually spread to society at large. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, for example, economic development was the result of the religious beliefs and the marginalized condition of the Huguenots. In Russia, so-called Old Believers, who did not adapt to the revision of the official Church ritual, seceded and were persecuted. They became prominent in the accelerating economic growth that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century. Similar patterns are found in India, where the marginalized community known as the Parsees provided a number of entrepreneurs out of proportion to its size and social weight. The economic rebirth of Japan and the subsequent Restoration in 1868 were largely due to the entrepreneurial spirit of "outer clans" which had been held in a socially inferior position for two and a half centuries.

What these entrepreneurs seem to share is not so much their condition as "aliens", as their being "eccentric" with respect to the ruling groups. Being both outside and inside the official order encourages them to experiment with new undertakings and economic explorations. They are tantalized by power, to which they have only partial access. Nevertheless, they have a degree of access to resources and, furthermore, have no fear of failure, since their being inured to ostracism protects them from disapproval. They are "insider deviants", to whom a wide range of possibilities and practices are open.

Echoing historians and economists, Georg Simmel remarks that the emancipated Roman slaves were predisposed towards monetary transactions because they lacked any chance of achieving citizen status. Already in Athens, at the very inception of pure monetary transactions in the fourth century, the wealthiest banker, Pasion, had started his career as a slave. In Turkey the Armenians, a despised and persecuted people, were frequently merchants and moneylenders, as, under similar circumstances, were the Moors in Spain. There is no need to emphasize, says Simmel, that the Jews are the best example of the correlation between the central role of money interests and social deprivation. The issue is that, while it is easy to deny despised groups access to status, it is extremely hard to exclude them from the acquisition of money, because so many possible paths constantly lead to it.

There is a difference, however, between entrepreneurs and experts in money transactions: the former acquire material goods such as land, productive tools and machinery, while the latter accumulate an indeterminate, inert, abstract means of exchange. Material goods cannot be easily expropriated, whereas money can. Hence those marginalized groups continued to be despised because the dynamics guiding monetary exchange could always relieve them of their means. The "democratic" aspect of money soon became evident, insofar as this peculiar means of exchange lends itself ideally to robbery. Pecunia non olet: who can tell the origin of monetary wealth? In Roman as well as modern law, money that has been stolen cannot be taken away from a third person who has acquired it in good faith. Business transactions would otherwise be considerably disrupted.

With money exchange finally purified from guilt, sin and crime, human relationships and monetary interests came to coincide. Money is now the absolute means, the unifying point of innumerable sequences of purposes, and possesses some traits that we find in God. The essence of the notion of God is that all diversities and contradictions in the world achieve a unity in Him, because He is the coincidentia oppositorum. The original opposition to monetary matters among old clerics and a range of diverse believers was perhaps due to their appreciation of the similarity between the highest economic and the highest cosmic unity. There was an awareness of the dangerous competition between monetary and religious interest.

The money form, which went relatively undisturbed through the "robbery" stage of economic development, soon moved on to the "bribery" stage. This is when the polarization of wealth started to accelerate, slowly bringing monetary iniquity to the appalling levels seen in the present time. More than any other form of value, money makes possible the secrecy, invisibility and silence of exchange. As Simmel remarks, by compressing money into a piece of paper, by letting it glide into a person's hand, one can make her wealthy. Formless and abstract, one can invest it in remote locations, and thereby remove it from the gaze of neighbours. Anonymous and colourless, money does not reveal its source, it does not require a certificate of birth. Odourless, secretive, unfixed, its moves are swift and silent.

Global military expenditure in 2008 totalled $1,464 billion, $217 for every person on the planet, an increase of 45% over the preceding ten-year period. Today the United States spends almost a trillion dollars a year on national security with a national defence budget of $709 billion in 2008. In Obama's first budget cycle this will increase to just over $760 billion, almost the combined spending of the rest of the world.

The trade in arms is worth about $60 billion a year. It is the most corrupt of all trading activities, accounting for over 40% of corruption in world trade. The combination of the sheer magnitude of the contracts, the very small number of people who make the purchasing decisions and the veil of national security lends itself to bribery and corruption on a massive scale. Some governments are active participants in this corruption while many more are content to countenance the behaviour. Almost all of them make decisions with huge financial implications that are neither cost-effective nor in the best interests of their countries. As a consequence, the trade often undermines accountable democracy, transparent governance and the rule of law in both buying and selling countries.

The arms trade fuels and often sustains conflicts. Not just in the most obvious sense but also in the remarkably high incidence of political and military blowback, where the weapons land up in the hands of those they were meant to defend against.

In his farewell address in 1961, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general, warned that "[with] the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry... in the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

On the bike he goes to visit friends or to play pétanque and cards or to look down from a bridge at the traffic on the autoroute. He is sprightly and has a bushy moustache, the bottom of it pure white, like his hair. He makes many jokes and their bantering humour is recognizably Italian.

It's hot, I say to him, I'm going for a swim in the municipal swimming pool, coming? He shakes his head and says: I know! A lot of water in it and very little meat!

When he smiles you mistake the white in his moustache for the white of his teeth. He has steady eyes. You can watch him closely watching. His hands are as deft as his eyes are sharp. He can fix and repair almost any everyday appliance and he does so for himself, for his grown-up children and for any neighbour who has the modesty to ask him.

Each evening he notes in an agenda his brief observations about the day. He started doing this when he retired twenty-five years ago. He records the weather when it's exceptional, the date when he plants something in his small back garden, repairs made, maintenance tasks accomplished, the death of an old friend, gossip about neighbours in the street, and, above all, any work which he has observed being well or carelessly done on the little houses or along the residential roads he passes by each day. When he considers the work exceptionally well done, he marks it with a tick. For work badly done he reserves a number of violent adjectives. (Carelessness for him is a reminder of the farce that life risks to be.) Sometimes he notes what he has eaten. Occasionally he sticks in a newspaper cutting, usually a photograph of a faraway place.

For thirty years Luca worked for Air France as an aircraft performance controller.

In the garden he grows tomatoes, lettuces, rocket and asters. The name aster, he points out, means "star" in Greek.

The bicycle was given to him by his mother when he was fifteen years old. Both parents were Italian, father a tailor, mother a dressmaker. They came to the same Parisian suburb in the 1920s, after Mussolini's March on Rome and the Fascist takeover.

During the Second World War and the German Occupation of Paris, the father named his dog Hitler. When taking it for a walk along the local, crowded shopping street, he would shout: Heel Hitler! Then, Down Hitler! Do you want a thrashing?

When he first arrived from Italy the father found a shed, measuring 30 square metres, near the Croix de Berny, and there the whole family lived and worked in their own sweatshop, making women's dresses to measure for French housewives, whose husbands were among the first French artisans to buy little houses of their own on the outskirts of the city rather than live in apartments.

From the age of nine Luca began to sell evening newspapers after school outside the nearby metro station. He would get home an hour before bedtime. When he was older he would wander over to the digs in the marshes where casual labourers extracted buckets of gypsum which they sold to a nearby plaster factory. These marshes extended then to where his house now stands.

It was wet, badly paid, dirty work, he remembers. Then he smiles and says: The crystalline structure of the gypsum sometimes set me dreaming of El Dorados – you know calcium sulphate is the same stuff, more or less, as our bones are made of? You didn't know that! Here, I'll give you a memento! He goes over to a cabinet of narrow drawers in a corner of his garage, opens one and takes out a small fragment of crystal. Monoclinic prismatic, he says, and hands it to me. May it bring you luck...

When he was thirteen he started helping out as a mechanic's mate for an Italian who had a garage repair workshop. At that time there were many Italians in the area, employed on construction sites for the extension of Orly airport. And it was an Italian comrade who, a year or so later, got Luca a trial run working as a riveter on the assembly line of a small Forman aircraft factory next to Orly. He was taken on. He got his first month's wages.

He had told them nothing about the job at home. He handed the wages over to his mother. She said: How did you get so much? Have you told your father? You stole it!

Luca shook his head. His mother nodded. And the following week, without a word to anyone, she went and bought him a bicycle. The one I drew this morning.

He hadn't told his father out of a kind of filial respect for the father's pride. The father now had another dog – both Hitlers were dead. This one he called Money. In the sweatshop after supper the father would hold up a piece of panettone before the dog and say: Sit up and beg, Money! That's it! Into your basket, Money!

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Another of Golding's novels, The Inheritors, actually pinpoints the moment of the Fall itself, as one "unfallen" tribe of early hominids encounters another, more dangerous and destructive culture. This second tribe, because of its greater capacity for language, has made the crucial transition to conceptual abstraction and technology. And this involves developing more deadly weapons. It is as though this more evolved community has cut its bonds with Nature and entered upon the precariousness of history proper, with all its ambiguous gains and losses. The Fall, with impeccable theological correctness, is thus portrayed as a fall up rather than down. It is a felix culpa, or fortunate fault, in which human beings "lapse" upward from the natural world and the innocence of the beasts into an exhilarating, sickeningly unstable history. It is, to adopt the title of another of Golding's novels, a free Fall – one bound up with the fatal, double-edged freedom which advanced linguistic consciousness brings in its wake.

Free Fall is the title of Golding's most subtle investigation of original sin, a condition which has nothing to do with slimy reptiles and forbidden fruit. "Original" here means "at the root", not "in the beginning". The novel perceives that being "fallen" has to do with the misery and exploitation that human freedom inevitably brings in its wake. It lies in the fact that we are self-contradictory animals, since our creative and destructive powers spring from much the same source. The philosopher Hegel considered that evil flourished the more individual freedom did. A creature equipped with language can develop far beyond the restricted scope of non-linguistic creatures. It acquires godlike powers of creation. But like most potent sources of invention, these capabilities are also deeply dangerous. Such an animal is in constant peril of developing too fast, overreaching itself and bringing itself to nothing. There is something potentially self-thwarting or self-undoing about humanity. And this is what the biblical myth of the Fall is struggling to formulate, as Adam and Eve use their creative powers to undo themselves. Man is Faustian Man, too voraciously ambitious for his own well-being, perpetually driven beyond his own limits by the lure of the infinite. This creature cold-shoulders all finite things in his hubristic love affair with the illimitable. And since infinity is a kind of nothingness, the desire for this nothingness is an expression of the Freudian death drive.

The Faustian fantasy, then, betrays a puritanical distaste for the fleshly. To achieve the infinite (a project known among other things as the American Dream), we would need to leap out of our wretchedly disabling bodies. What distinguishes capitalism from other historical forms of life is that it plugs directly into the unstable, self-contradictory nature of the human species. The infinite – the unending drive for profit, the ceaseless march of technological progress, the ever-expanding power of capital – is always at risk of crushing and overshooting the finite. Exchange-value, which, as Aristotle recognized, is potentially limitless, holds sway over use-value. Capitalism is a system which needs to be in perpetual motion simply to stay on the spot. Constant transgression is of its essence. No other historical system reveals so starkly the way in which potentially beneficent human powers are so easily perverted to baneful ends.

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Mum did love money. My mother was a hoarder: she had a secret trove that I came upon after her death. My mother the money-lover. Yes: Mummy and money.

I expect you can see her already, in black and white: thin ledger-line for a mouth, tight purse-string frown, sharp eyes with a glint of metal.

My mother liked to snatch money from holes in the wall. She liked new notes. She loved the solidity first, the thick heft of the bundle sliding towards her out of the dark and into the sunlight, then the slight snap as she slid and crinkled the top note with her index finger, then the same to the others, slithering one over another till the money was alive, a slippery sheaf of dry susurrations hissing false promises: one day you will be free.

Because my mother, a very bright woman full of jokes and puns and ideas and knacks for doing things swiftly, a woman of effortless efficiency who could have run a company, did not earn money.

Because she had married my father, a teacher and old-fashioned male who didn't want his wife to work. Instead she had three children and managed the house, the finances, the plumber, the garden, the boredom, the vanished expectations, the loss of the quick bright life she began as the youngest of seven in a row of terraced houses in the country left free to wander in the woods and fields beyond the long thin garden and the chicken shed. My grandpa and grandma were tired of bringing up children by then. Like only one other of the seven children, my mother passed the eleven plus and went to the grammar school, where she was clever and an athlete, Victrix Ludorum on sports day, but her parents never came to watch her, so Aileen triumphed alone.

She was a scholarship girl. They queued separately for school dinners, which they did not pay for. In her fifties this memory still shamed my mother: being without money, being known to have no money, for in her childhood there never was any money and never anything new, of her own. Everything she wore had already been stretched or stained or snagged by the other two sisters before her who owned them first, a hurt and a gap that even a little money could have addressed. But there was none. For the milk was watered and the fried eggs cut in two and the shoes were too tight and the socks were holed and everything fell through the holes, which could never be mended.

My mother loved money with a passion that only those who know what it is to have no money at all can understand. My mother loved money and always praised my father for earning it. "Dad's a good provider," she frequently reminded us sulky and critical kids. "Thanks to him, we don't have to worry about money."

Then he died, leaving her with less than £10,000 and no pension. She offered us money to help us fix up our first house: we accepted, and then she had even less. Eight months later she was dead.

And here is a picture of my mother alive and in colour. Olive skin, dark red cheeks: wavy thick hair to her shoulders; slim waist but curved out like a guitar above and below; and her lips still plump and young in her seventies when she died leaving behind a Barrett-built 1970s bungalow and her secret hoard – she was a hoarder, my mother, my dear, my dearest mother – boxes of unused birthday cards and postcards, booklets of stamps like butterflies waiting to fly, just waiting to wing their way to us, her children, all for us, everything for us, nothing less than all that she had for us, always, and nothing else.

My mother was a woman who loved money. My mother was a woman who loved to give money away.

My mother gave everything away.

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here."
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6

As most perceptive readers will agree, the distinctive characteristic of the human world is its insanity. Ants scuttle in ordered lines, back and forth, with impeccable propriety. Seeds grow into trees that shed their leaves and bud again with conventional circularity. Birds migrate, lions kill, turtles mate, viruses mutate, rocks crumble into dust, clouds shape and reshape mercifully unconscious of what they build and destroy. We alone live consciously knowing that we live and, by means of a half-shared code of words, are able to reflect on our actions, however contradictory or inexplicable. We heal and help, we sacrifice ourselves and show concern and compassion, we create wonderful artifices and miraculous devices to better understand the world and ourselves. And at the same time, we build our lives on superstitions, hoard for no purpose except greed, cause deliberate pain to other creatures, poison the water and the air we need to live, and finally bring our planet to the verge of destruction. We do all this with full awareness of our actions, as if walking through a dream in which we do what we know we should not be doing and refrain from doing what we know we should do. "May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life?" wrote Lewis Carroll in his diary on 9 February 1856.

In the seventh chapter of her travels through the insane world of Wonderland, Alice comes upon a table placed under a tree and laid out with many settings. Though the table is a large one, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse are crowded together at one corner, having tea, the sleeping Dormouse serving as a cushion for the comfort of the others. "No room! No room!" they cry out when they see Alice coming. "There's plenty of room!" Alice says indignantly and sits down in a large armchair at one end. The table manners of Alice's reluctant hosts are obviously mad. First she is offered wine by the March Hare. But "I don't see any wine," she remarks, looking around. "There isn't any," the March Hare says, and offers her more tea. "I've had nothing yet," Alice replies in an offended tone, "so I can't take more." "You mean you can't take less," intervenes the Hatter, "it's very easy to take more than nothing." Then the seating arrangements are constantly shifted to suit the Mad Hatter's whimsy. Whenever he wants a clean cup, everyone must move one place along to one with a soiled setting; obviously, the only one to get any advantage out of the changes is the Hatter himself. Alice, for instance, is "a good deal worse off than before", as the March Hare has upset the milk jug into his plate.

As in the real world, everything in Wonderland, however mad, has a logical underpinning, a system of rules that are often themselves absurd. The conventions of Alice's society have led her to believe that the behaviour of her elders and betters, wherever she might find herself, is rational. Therefore, attempting to understand the logic of her strange dream world, Alice expects rational behaviour from the creatures she meets, but, again and again, she is merely confronted by their "logical" madness. "Throughout my life," said Bertrand Russell on his ninetieth birthday, "I have been told that man is a rational animal. In all these many years, I have not once found proof that this is so." Alice's world mirrors Russell's assertion.

An amateur anthropologist, Alice assumes that an understanding of the social conventions of Wonderland will allow her to understand the logic of the inhabitants' behaviour, and therefore attempts to follow the proceedings at the table with some measure of reason and good manners. To the absurdities presented, she counters with rational questions; to the questions asked, however absurd, she tries to find rational answers. But to no avail. "Really, now you ask me," she says, "I don't think..." "Then you shouldn't talk," snaps back the Hatter.

As in our world, the manners of the inhabitants of Wonderland carry implicit notions of responsibility and value. The Hatter, emblematic of the perfect egotist, opposes free speech (except his own) and disposes of property to which he has no claim (the table belongs, after all, to the March Hare). Nothing matters to him except his own comfort and profit, and he therefore shows himself unwilling to admit even to his own possessions for fear of being held accountable. (During the trial at the end of the book, he refuses to take off his hat because, he says, it isn't his: "I keep them to sell," he explains, "I've none of my own. I'm a hatter.") By valuing what he has only for what he can sell it for, the Hatter need not care about the consequences of his actions, whether they concern a trail of dirty dishes or the established conventions of a court of law.

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Yes. One eschewed negativity. To hell with negativity. This is what one uttered, within the sanctity of one's own brain.

Still and all, still and all. The truth. Yes the truth; breathe in and breathe out: the truth is I knew it was not good, I was not good. Otherwise, otherwise I would not have been there, not like this.

Something less than good.

Good!

What other terms do we have? Pleasant. Nice. Joyous. Smashing. What else? I could not think of many more. Unlike bad. Evil, crappy, unpleasant, shit, horrible, terrible, malevolent, worsening, maleficent, malodorous, pestilent, horrendous. Hell's bells, a million of them. Thus the human condition. But truly, my condition was not great, otherwise

oh man, man man, man man man

I opened my eyes. I had to. It is good to open the eyes; one's eyes; mine; my fucking eyes.

I reached again for the notepad, to hell with it man, one reaches for it, grasps. Impaired memory. The lapse into melancholia was to be guarded against and one did. One guarded against it. One exercised oneself, one's faculties. Yet reaching for the notepad happened prior to the thought itself. A surely remarkable phenomenon. Ergo

Now aware of the intestines. Interrupting the thought, the last thought. Aware of my intestines.

In what respect aware: simply aware, that is all. But overwhelmingly so.

What about them? Clogged tubes. Clogged tubes.

The chart hung on the rail at the foot of the bed. If only I could read it. Telescopes: patients are not supplied with them thus one cannot read from a distance. But for something horrendous why not inform the patient? Patients too are people.

I used a notebook to monitor the situation, noting symptoms, physical changes, thoughts, feelings. Anything at all. Wee doodles and drawings. Any damn thing I pleased. It was my damn notepad and my damn situation; my physicality. Drawings. Any damn thing.

I wanted to draw a face. Why not. Yes. In summation of my plight I would draw a face.

I knew a face. A face. I knew a face. Where was the pencil? My thought of the moment as pictorial representation: set it down set it down set it down. Urgency urgency fucking pencil the nurse had removed the damn thing as per fucking usual stop swearing.

Who is swearing. Okay. Behind the cup. The pencil lay behind the cup. The nurse may have nudged it. I myself, I myself. I reached towards it, towards the pencil.

The tension! My heavens. Absolute – as between the pencil and the urine sample, not to knock them over, the shaky hand, the quivering knuckles.

Knuckles? My fucking knuckles! The knuckles of late middle age. Prehistoric-looking things; tiny clumps of black hair. How in the name of that which aspires to holiness do children consent to hold such a hand!

Even more astonishing, that a woman should allow such a hand to touch her skin, stroke her skin, to trace, these lines and surface of the skin who ever drew the surface of the skin, had any artist ever managed that. The greatest artists are the greatest but who among them had ever succeeded in drawing the surface of the skin oh my merciful heavens, the density of this, this skin. Skin is a surface.

It is. If the thought ever occurred in the past it had gone from my memory, vanished into that internal and all-encompassing ether which maketh manifest one's internal space. But what does "manifest" mean!

The urine sample. Even here in the hospital bed we surmount obstacles. Was it not crazy? All of it was. See the hand, the pencil, the bottle. Yea though I did reach it without mishap.

If I had gone to the lavatory I would have experienced pain. What about the pain, or pains. Pains growing from my belly or were they in from my belly, its lining. If the cancer was there, cancer of the lining of the belly.

What else could it be! Tell him tell him tell him! he screamed.

I refer to myself. Do not keep the patient in the dark. We have to deal with eternity so give us a break with that which may be known, that can be rendered manifest.

Manifest? There we have it again.

A boulder come to rest. I imagined it wedged there, the cancer entity, unyielding. I would have had to swallow it. How had I managed this! The journey down my gullet. But it had sunk and was at rest until then began its movement. The movement of the cancer entity. Feel my cancer. Touch it. This living thing, a growth that is organic but not organic. But it must feed. Upon what must it feed? Why, one's entrails, one's intestines, one's blood and tissue, one's bonemarrow; all manner of edible substances. One's body is a feast, veritably so. Tumours grow and spread. How come? How come I had never learned about the subject? Not properly. Surely it should have been required reading for all. People die of cancer every second. If cancer it was. Of course it was.

So why had I not gone before? Had fate been smiling upon me!

Was I one of the lucky ones. Oy yez oy yez. Read all about it.

What are the statistics? Horrible.

Why had my parents not emigrated from this godforsaken hellhole where death and disease and malformity

Or grandparents! What kind of grandparents were they! Did they even deserve such a nomenclature! Ancient old bastards. No, they were undeserving. They were not grandparents at all. Not-so-grandparents, this is what they were. Cowards. Why did everybody not emigrate. At an early age. Maybe they preferred to die young. Cowards cowards and again cowards. Them and their fucking offspring. Die die!

The damn notepad. Draw a face. Whose face?

Or the urine sample, I reached for that instead of the notepad and would have held it to my lips. Yes. Might one die from drinking urine? Of course not. Especially not one's own. You would just seem like a pervert. But not if it was your own. Then you would just be mad. Mad! I'm mad I tell you, mad!

Look, the guy's mad. He has a ghastly expression on his countenance.

Drinking piss. What a life. Cancer is better than that. At least I had my brains, they had not been gnawed. I imagined the movement of the cancer to resemble a gnawing activity.

There are these myriad afflictions we humans experience. All sorts of them. I was fortunate never to have had more than a couple. Not the worst. Not even close to the worst. A quaffer of urine! Oh mercy mercy, mercy me.

But apparently mothers did this of their offspring. They expressed an urge to quaff their babies' piss and some went ahead and did it. They kissed their babies' bums! Or was it licked? My god surely not! They held their babies up and rubbed their noses in their wee bums! Incredible behaviour. Yet womanly, motherly. Apparently.

A wee baby's bum. What is wrong with that, they have had their bath and there they are all nice and clean and laughing away or gurgling. Babies gurgle.

You would hardly describe such behaviour as perverted; not if it pertained to mummy, performed in the maternal spirit. But take some unshaven unkempt middle-aged grandpappy cunt. In other words I myself. I would get fucking lynched man!

Fate.

Or else had one been a murderer, slave to the baser forms of violence; a wild beast, acutely dangerous to other human beings, and that violence was directed against children and very elderly invalids. One of these dirty evil bastards whose testicles one would willingly chop to safeguard others. Damn right. I would wield the axe. I had no compunction. I would shovel the ashes into the chamber, out of the chamber, whatever it took. Slam shut the door sir slam shut the door. It tolleth for you, you.

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