Thursday Night Widows

by Claudia Pi

  That night, Teresa had entered the house through the door from the garage. She didn’t need to use keys: in Cascade Heights we never lock the doors. She says that she was puzzled not to hear her husband and his friends – our friends – laughing as usual. Drunken laughter. And she was pleased not to have to go and say hello; she was too tired to smile at the same old jokes, she said. Every Thursday the men got together to have dinner and play cards, and for a long time it had been traditional for the wives to go to the cinema. Except for Virginia, who had bowed out some time ago, with different sorts of excuses which no one bothered to analyse too much; quietly we all attributed her absence to money problems. The Scaglia children were not at home either, that night. Matías was spending the night at the Floríns’ house, and Sofía – much against her will, but at her father’s insistence – had gone to stay with her maternal grandparents. And it was the maid’s day off. El Tano himself had said that she should have Thursdays free so that there would be nobody in the house to bother him and his friends, interrupting their card game for whatever reason.

  Teresa went upstairs, dreading to find the men sleeping off an excess of wine and champagne in the home theatre, while pretending to watch a film or some sporting event. They were not there, however, which meant that there was no risk of running into them on the way to her room. The house felt deserted. She was intrigued, rather than worried. Her husband’s friends must be somewhere nearby, she thought, unless they had left on foot; pulling into the drive, she had had to avoid Gustavo Masotta and Martín Urovich’s SUVs, parked outside her house. Now she leaned over the balcony and, in the darkness, she thought she could see some towels on the wooden deck. September was barely over, but it was a pleasant night and, now that El Tano had installed a boiler to heat the water, the usual quandaries regarding swimming and weather no longer applied. No doubt they had sobered up in the pool and were getting dressed in the changing room. So, because she did not feel like thinking about it any more, she put on her night dress and got into bed.

  At four o’clock in the morning she woke up alone. The left side of the bed was undisturbed. She walked to the front of the house and, through the window, saw that the SUVs were still there. The house was still silent. She went downstairs and into the living room and confirmed that what she had seen from the balcony were towels and T-shirts lying on the deck. But there were no lights on around the pool, and it was hard to make anything else out. She went to the family room; there was nothing unusual here: empty bottles, ashtrays full of butts, cards strewn across the table, as though the game had only recently ended. Next she went down to the pool house and in the changing room she found the men’s clothes lying on a bench; some scrunched-up underpants were lying on the floor; one sock without its mate was hanging from a tap in the shower. Only El Tano had neatly folded his clothes and left them at one end of the bench, beside his shoes. They couldn’t have gone for a walk at this time of night in their swimming trunks, she thought. Then she went towards the swimming pool. She tried to put on the lights, but they were not working in this area, as if the circuit breaker had cut in, she thought, but later she found out that it had been the thermal overload trip, not the circuit breaker. The water was calm. She felt the towels and realized that they had not been used – they were slightly damp to the touch, but otherwise dry. Three empty champagne flutes, arranged in a row at the edge of the pool, caught her off-guard. Not because the men had been drinking there – they drank all over the place – but because these were the crystal glasses from her wedding set, the ones that El Tano’s father had given them and which El Tano himself reserved for very special occasions. Teresa moved to pick them up, before they could be toppled by the morning breeze or by a cat or frog. If it weren’t for this sort of accident of nature, life at the Cascade would be almost free of risks. That was what we used to believe.

  Teresa barely glanced at the still water as she collected the glasses. Two of them knocked together as she picked them up, and the ringing sound of crystal made her shudder. She examined them to make sure they were not broken. And she walked back to the house. She walked slowly, taking care not to let the glasses knock against each other again, and oblivious to the knowledge that the rest of us would learn about the next day: beneath the warm water, sinking to the bottom of the pool, were the bodies of her husband and his friends, and all three of them were dead.

  3

  Cascade Heights is the neighbourhood where we live. All us lot. Ronie and Guevara moved here first, just before the Uroviches; El Tano came a few years later; Gustavo Masotta was one of the last to arrive. As time went on, we became neighbours. Our neighbourhood is a gated community, ringed by a perimeter fence that is concealed behind different kinds of shrub. It’s called The Cascade Heights Country Club. Most of us shorten the name to “The Cascade” and a few people call it “The Heights”. It has a golf course, tennis courts, swimming pool and two club houses. And private security. Fifteen security guards working shifts during the day, and twenty-two at night. That’s more than five hundred acres of land, accessible only to us or to people authorized by one of us.

  There are three ways to enter our neighbourhood. If you’re a member, you can open a barrier at the main gate by swiping a personalized magnetic card across an electronic reader. There’s a side entrance, also with a barrier, for visitors who have received prior authorization and can supply certain information, such as identity card number, car registration number and other identifying numbers. For tradesmen, domestic staff, gardeners, painters, builders and all other labourers, there’s a turnstile where ID cards have to be presented, and bags and car boots are checked. All along the perimeter, at fifty-yard intervals, there are cameras which can turn through one hundred and eighty degrees. There used to be cameras that could turn three hundred and sixty degrees, but they were invading the privacy of some members whose houses were close to the perimeter fence, so a few years ago they were deactivated, then replaced.

  The houses are separated from one another by “living fences” – bushes, in other words. But these are not any old bushes. Privet is out of fashion, along with that erstwhile favourite, the violet campanula that grows by railway lines. There are none of those straight, trimmed hedges that look like green walls. Definitely no round ones. The hedges are cut to look uneven, just this side of messy, giving them a natural appearance that is meticulously contrived. At first glance, these plants seem to have sprung up spontaneously between the neighbours, rather than to have been placed deliberately, to demarcate properties. Such boundaries may be insinuated only with plants. Wire fencing and railings are not permitted, let alone walls. The only exception is the six foot-high perimeter fence which is the responsibility of the Club’s administration and which is shortly going to be replaced by a wall, in line with new security regulations. Gardens that back onto the golf course may not be contained on that side even by a living fence; close to the boundary, you can make out where the gardens end because the type of grass changes but, from a distance, the gaze is lost in an endless green vista and it is possible to believe that everything belongs to you.

  The streets are named after birds: Swallow, Mockingbird, Blackbird. The grid lay-out typical of most Argentine towns does not apply here. There are lots of cul-de-sacs, ending in little landscaped roundabouts. These dead-end streets are more popular than the others because they have less traffic and are quieter. We’d all love to live in a cul-de-sac. Outside a gated community, it would be hair-raising to have to walk down that sort of street, especially at night; you’d be afraid of being attacked, or ambushed. But not in The Cascade – that wouldn’t be possible; you can walk wherever you like, at any hour, safe in the knowledge that nothing bad will happen to you.

  There are no pavements. People use cars, motorbikes, quad bikes, bicycles, golf buggies, scooters and roller blades. If they walk, they walk on the road. As a general rule, if someone is walking and not carrying sports gear, it’s a domestic servant or gardener. At Cascade Heights we call
them “groundsmen” rather than gardeners, doubtless because not many plots are smaller than half an acre, and, at that size, a garden is more like an estate.

  Look up and you won’t see any cables. No electricity, telephone or television wires. Of course we have all three, but the lines run underground, to protect The Heights and its inhabitants from visual contamination. The cables run alongside the drains, both of them hidden underground.

  Water tanks, which also have to be concealed from view, are camouflaged by false walls built around them. Hanging out washing isn’t permitted without prior approval from the Technical Department. They look at a plan of the grounds before approving a suitable place for a washing line. If a resident proceeds to hang up washing in an area which can be seen from neighbouring houses, and if someone reports the matter, he or she can be fined.

  The houses are all different; no house is expressly planned as a copy of another – although that may be the end result. It’s impossible for the houses not to be similar, given that they must obey the same aesthetic norms – those dictated by the building code and fashion alike. We would all like our house to be the prettiest. Or the biggest. Or the best designed. The whole neighbourhood is divided by statute into sectors where only one sort of house may be built. There is a sector where the houses must be white. There’s a brick houses sector and a black slate roofs sector. One cannot build a house of one type in a sector designated as being for another type. An aerial view of the club shows it separated into three swathes of colour: one red, one white and one black.

  In the brick sector are the “dormitory” apartments, set aside for those members who only come at the weekends and don’t want to maintain a house here. From far away, the dorms look like three large chalets, but in fact there are a lot of small rooms squeezed into those three blocks, with a neatly tended garden at the front.

  There’s another characteristic of our neighbourhood, and perhaps it’s the most striking of all: the smells. They change with the season. In September everything smells of Star Jasmine. This isn’t a poetic detail, but simple fact. Every garden in The Cascade has at least one star jasmine which flowers in the spring. Three hundred houses, with three hundred gardens, with three hundred jasmine plants, contained in a five-hundred-acre estate with a perimeter fence and private security: that’s no poetic aside. It is the reason why the air feels heavy and sweet in spring. It’s sickly for those who aren’t used to it. But in some of us it engenders a kind of addiction, or attraction or nostalgia – and whenever we go beyond the gates, we’re longing to return, to breathe in once more the scent of those sweet flowers. As though it were not possible to breathe well anywhere else. The air in Cascade Heights is heavy, palpable; we choose to live here because we like to breathe like this, with the bees buzzing behind some jasmine plant. And even though the perfume changes with each season, the desire to breathe that sweet air remains. In summer, The Cascade smells of freshly mown and watered grass, and of the chlorine in swimming pools. Summer is the season of noise. Splashes, the shouts of children playing, cicadas, birds complaining of the heat, the strains of music through an open window; someone playing the drums. Windows without bars, because there are no bars in The Cascade. There’s no need for bars. Mosquito netting – yes, to keep the insects at bay. The autumn smells of pruned boughs, recently cut and still fresh; they never leave them to rot. There are men in green sweatshirts with the Cascade Heights logo who collect the leaves and branches after every storm or gale. All traces of a storm have often disappeared by the time we’ve had breakfast and gone out to work, to school or for a morning walk. The first we know of it is the damp ground, the smell of wet earth. Sometimes we may wonder if the gale that woke us during the night really took place or belonged to a dream. In winter there is the smell of log fires, of smoke and eucalyptus. And then the most private and secret of all, the smell of the home itself, composed of mixed elements that are known only to each one of us.

  Those of us who move to Cascade Heights say that we have come in search of “green”, a healthy life, sports and security. Trotting out these reasons means not having to confess, even to ourselves, the real reasons for coming. And after a while we don’t even remember them. Entrance into The Cascade induces a certain magical forgetfulness of all that went before. The past is reduced to last week, last month, last year, “when we played the Inter-Club Challenge and won it”. Gradually we forget our lifelong friends, the places we once loved, certain relations, memories, mistakes. It’s as though it were possible, in mid-life, to tear the pages out of your diary and begin to write something new.

  4

  We moved to The Cascade at the end of the 1980s. Argentina had a new president. We should not have had him until the end of December, but hyperinflation and the looting of supermarkets prompted the last one to leave office before the end of his term. At that time, the move towards gated communities on the outskirts of greater Buenos Aires had not yet gained momentum. Few people lived permanently at Cascade Heights – or at any other gated community or country club. Ronie and I were among the first to risk leaving an apartment in the capital to move in here with our family. Ronie was very doubtful at the start. Too much travelling, he said. I was the one who insisted – I was sure that living in Cascade Heights was going to change our lives, that we needed to make a break with the city. And Ronie ended up agreeing with me.

  We sold a weekend cottage that we had inherited from Ronie’s family (one of the few things from that inheritance left to sell), then we bought the Antieris’ house. It was, as I like to say, a “sweet deal”. And it was the first inkling I had that buying and selling houses was something I liked and for which I had an innate talent. Although in those days I knew much less about the business than I do now.

  Antieri had committed suicide two months earlier. His widow was desperate to leave the house where her husband, and father of her four children, had blown out his brains. In the living room. A small “L” shaped living room with an incorporated dining area. In the early years at The Cascade and other country clubs, almost all the houses had small living rooms. The thing is, in those days – we’re talking about the Fifties, the Sixties, even the Seventies – you wouldn’t expect to have parties and entertain people in a house so far from Buenos Aires. The Pan American Highway as we know it today, with its dual carriageway and flawless asphalt, was still a pipe dream. If you invited friends or relations over it was for a proper country adventure – everyone made good use of the garden, the sports area, you took them riding or to play golf. Later came the era of showing off imported carpets and armchairs bought in the best Buenos Aires stores. We moved in at some intermediate point – after the Sixties, but before the Nineties ethos took hold. Even so, it was obvious that we were much closer to the Nineties than the Sixties, and not just chronologically. We decided to knock down a wall and make the living room a few feet bigger, at the expense of a study we knew we would never use.

  The Antieri episode took place one Sunday at midday. Even from the golf course they heard his wife’s screams. The house is almost opposite the tee at the fourth hole, and to this day Paco Pérez Ayerra – who was the captain of the club at the time – likes to tell the story of the long drive that he sent out of bounds because the screaming started just as his one wood hit the ball. People said that Antieri had been in the military, or the navy – something like that. Nobody knew what, exactly. But definitely in uniform. They didn’t have much to do with their neighbours, didn’t do sports or go to parties. Occasionally we saw their girls out and about. But the parents had no social life. They used to come at the weekend and shut themselves up in the house. Towards the end, he was also spending the weeks there, alone, with the blinds down, cleaning his collection of weapons, apparently. He never spoke to anyone. So I don’t think you have to look too far for a concrete motive, nor give too much credit to the rumour that went round claiming that Antieri had threatened to blow his brains out if the result of the 1989 election went the wrong way. The same thr
eat was made by an actor who went through with it and was on all the news bulletins afterwards; someone probably confused the two anecdotes and started the rumour.

  When I first saw the house, what most impressed me was Antieri’s study (the one we ended up knocking through). The order and cleanliness in there were intimidating. A fully stocked bookcase lined all the walls. The spines were perfect and intact, bound in green or burgundy leather. His guns, in all their various models and calibres, were displayed in two glass cabinets. They were polished and shining, not a speck of dust to be seen. While we were looking around the study, Juani, who was just five, took out one of the books, threw it on the floor and stood on it. The book’s spine immediately gave way. Ronie grabbed him by the hair and pulled him away. He took him out of the room to chastise him without witnesses. Meanwhile I took care of the book, dusting off Juani’s footprint. Returning it to the shelf, I noticed how light it was, and turned it over. It was hollow. There were no pages inside, just hard covers: a box of fake literature. On the spine I read Faust, by Goethe. I put it in its place, between Calderón de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. All of them were hollow. To the right of these there were two or three other classics, then the sequence was repeated: Life Is a Dream, Faust, Crime and Punishment, in gold filigree letters. The same series was on every shelf.

  We got the house for next to nothing. Offers from various other interested parties fell away, as people found out that a man had shot himself there. The wife didn’t mention it, nor did the estate agent in charge of the sale. But somehow the story always came out. It made no difference to me, to tell the truth: I’m not superstitious. To cap it all, when it came to exchange contracts, it turned out that some papers pertaining to the estate weren’t in order, so the widow had to shoulder all the costs, hers and ours. I even made an extra two hundred pesos when I sold to Rita Mansilla the hollow books which the widow hadn’t wanted to take and which were gathering dust in the basement.