5 Acts of Money

One day she was invited to a literary gathering organized each week by a wealthy woman from Bogotá. She found the address up in the hills overlooking the city and entered an apartment big enough to house a theater. Of the forty or fifty women who had been invited to attend, she was the only one who did not yearn to meet a poet. Pierced and wounded by beauty, these millionairesses longed to know beauty, just as Psyche longed to know Cupid. An old man on a rostrum was reading aloud.

She thought about the aspirations that brought people to the world of plenty. In the past, indianos, the name given to Spaniards who returned home from the Americas having made their fortune, would grow palm trees in their gardens and have pineapples carved in the lintels of the doors to their houses, which they built with the millions they made selling slaves. 

Once rich, the new millionaires set about stealing the beauty that belonged to others. What happened was more complicated than the attempts of new money to become old, or the bourgeoisie's desire to pass for aristocracy. Beauty, the attainment of metaphors, was the ambition of all money, new and old alike. Every millionaire was an arriviste. The gold he owned inevitably reminded him of that other gold, the gold above and the gold on the other side, the metaphorical gold that the Americas had been.

(Carolina Sanín - Five Acts of Money)