146
PARTISAN REVIEW
speed increased as I passed through the empty squares and along the
empty streets. At length, weariness deposited me at a corner. I saw
a crude iron grating and, beyond, the black and white flagstones of
the Concepci6n. I had wandered in a circle and was now a block
away from the store where they had given me the Zahir.
I turned back. The dark window told me from a distance that
the shop was now closed. In Belgrano street I took a cab. Sleepless,
obsessed, almost happy, I reflected that there is nothing less material
than money, since any coin whatsoever (let us say a coin worth twenty
centavos) is, strictly speaking, a repertory of possible futures. Money
is abstract, I repeated; money is the future tense. It can be an even–
ing in the suburbs, or music by Brahms; it can be maps, or chess, or
coffee; it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold;
it is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the isle of Pharos. It is
unforeseeable time, Bergson time, not the rigid time of Islam or the
Porch. The determinists deny that there is such a thing in the world
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