Zijn verhaal draait om Alves Reis en begint in 1916. Op z’n twintigste zoekt Reis z’n geluk in de Portugese kolonie Angola met slechts een zelfgemaakt diploma van de (niet bestaande) ‘Polytechnic School of Engineering of Oxford University’ op zak. Alleen het zegel van een notaris op dit diploma is echt. Als enige ingenieur met een universiteitsdiploma krijgt Reis de supervisie over de Angolese spoorwegen.
Terug in Portugal heeft Reis een nieuw plan. Zelfs de schrijver van het Cabinet-artikel heeft moeite om het helemaal uit te leggen, maar het komt neer op ‘valsemunterij’, met dit verschil dat het gaat om ‘echte’ bankbiljetten. Die laat Reis namelijk drukken door Waterlow & Sons, het Engelse bedrijf dat alle papiergeld maakt voor de Bank van Portugal. Een vrachtwagen vol ‘valse’ 500-escudo biljetten liet Reis (& kompanen) op de zwarte markt van Lissabon omwisselen voor Amerikaanse dollars en Engelse ponden.
Ik zie de film al voor me… Met Johnny Depp in de rol van Reis en Terry Gilliam als regisseur of de Coen-broertjes. Kaufman kan met dit materiaal ook een prachtig script schrijven, maar die zal nog wel staken.
Maar goed, het gaat me hier om de waarde en onwaarde van geld. De schrijver van het Cabinet-artikel heeft hierover het volgende te melden:
[…] Alves Reis frequently asked himself why the notes Waterlow produced for him should be worth any less than the ones they printed for the Portuguese state, and this question remains valid from a theoretical, if not legal, standpoint. Through what act of transubstantiation did theirs become “real money”? Certainly not by virtue of some reserve of metal or foreign currency. Like virtually every other nation, Portugal produced many times more in notes than they had lying around in so-called tangible wealth. The “value” of money is ambiguous in a paper era. After all, civilization is more or less predicated upon a fetishization of gold, with its accompanying religious associations of the marriage of sun and earth. So strong is the tendency to identify value-as-such with this metal that it is only since the Depression that the Western world has formally severed the connection. Humankind seems sentimentally attached to the idea that in order to be of value, money must also have value. The trouble, of course, is that the two do not always run on parallel tracks. If, for example, massive amounts of gold are discovered in the Yukon, or you happen to stumble onto a New World choking on its silver, the value of those metals will decline far below the value they represent as money. Conversely, in the early 1960s, when silver was suddenly scarce, the value of the silver in a silver dollar jumped to $1.25, and that venerable metal had to be permanently expunged from the coin of our realm. [...] Despite its analytical, mathematical aura, it may be that economics is in an analogously ungroundable position. Here, too, the meaning is in the use. Basic questions admit of contradictory answers. How much money is there in the world, for example? There are at least three ways to count, none satisfactory in its own right. Ination is another minor scandal. If you ask how much a dollar in Alves Reis’s day is worth in ours, the answer ranges from $10.48 using the consumer price index to $48.26 using per capita GDP, all the way up to $121.03, based on something called “relative share of GDP.” (Calculating ination involves obvious irrelevancies: No quantity of 500-escudo notes in 1925 could buy you an iPod or a course of penicillin.) […] Monetary signiers are at least as much a product of belief, trust, desire, and social practice as linguistic ones. Severed from a limiting referent such as gold or real estate, these signs traverse the globe at warp speed. Under these conditions, a nation cannot be too protective of its symbols, because it is difficult even to say what a “counterfeit symbol” might be. One could argue that Alves Reis was not so much a counterfeiter as a kind of monetary plagiarist.
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