Thursday Night Widows

by Claudia Pi

  She kept trying to get him on the phone; she was out of cheques and she needed him to bring back a new cheque book. The secretary wasn’t there either. “They must be in some motel,” she thought, as she put on make-up in front of the mirror.

  At 3 p.m., Teresa Scaglia sounded the horn of her four-by-four. Carmen came out. “Lala’s coming too, and Nane Pérez Ayerra,” said Teresa with enthusiasm, as Carmen climbed into the jeep. It surprised Carmen that Nane would be interested in this sort of thing; she was very sporty and spent most of the day playing tennis or in the gym. “No, she hasn’t got a clue what it’s about, but she’s laid up with a pulled muscle in her leg, so she thought she’d come along.”

  The auditorium at Lakelands School was jam-packed. Carmen counted only three men in the audience. All the rest were women. A heady confusion of imported perfumes pervaded the air and she felt herself submitting again to the torpor of her earlier siesta. But this sensation was not sweet, or red.

  The speaker came onto the stage to ringing applause. Carmen applauded, too. He did not have any oriental features. He surely was not Chinese. In fact he described himself, according to the simultaneous translation feeding into Carmen’s right ear, as “a Master of Feng Shui in Palo Alto, California”. Looking around her, she saw that very few women were wearing the earpiece, not even Teresa, who knew only a smattering of English, gleaned on her shopping trips to Miami.

  “I am not going to teach you the traditional Feng Shui practised in the East, but a westernized Feng Shui,” said the speaker. He paused for dramatic effect – evoking that moment of suspense on television shows, before the commercial break – then said: “I wouldn’t dare try to transform the wonderful houses I have seen around here into pagodas.”

  The audience laughed, appreciating his flattery. “Let us take from Feng Shui that which is useful to us, and leave the rest for others.”

  Carmen latched onto the word “others” and missed the next sentence. She wondered if the others referred to Chinese people, or to those who had not come here to listen to the master, or to her own father, who, after her mother left him, had lived alone in a one-roomed flat in Caballito, paid for by Alfredo, and who was buried now in a plot at the memorial cemetery, also paid for by Alfredo. The others might also be her husband’s secretary, in this case “the other woman”. Or her mother, to whom she had not spoken since her father’s funeral, and whom she regarded as even more dead than him. The women who took part in those Burako tournaments that she had once organized with Lala or Teresa were not “others” because they were here, and they acknowledged her. The “others” were never defined, or perhaps they were lost in translation.

  The second line to make her lose concentration was “the home is like a human being’s second skin”. Carmen shivered. Her skin pricked and she rubbed her arms. She felt hot and cold all at once, like when she was a child and had a fever. Like when she had goose pimples and her mother chided her to put on a sweatshirt. Like the first few times with Alfredo. Her eyes sought out the three men in the audience. None of them was up to much, she reckoned. If you wanted to take a lover in the neighbourhood, the best option was probably the architect in charge of improvements on your house, and the worst, the gardener. Middle ranking: tennis teachers, caddies, personal trainers, a friend’s child’s piano teacher – probably not outside Monday to Friday, in and around Cascade Heights. It was better to steer clear of the married men (and in Cascade Heights all the men are married). The alternative entailed complications greater than Carmen would be able to bear. The worst-case scenario, if the affair came to light, would mean one of the parties having to move. Like when Adam and Eve were cast out of Paradise, she thought, deaf now to the words of the Feng Shui master. Alfredo had, in fact, had an affair inside The Heights, but it was with a woman who was “in the process of separation”, who had rented the Uroviches’ house for a summer and who returned, when autumn came, to the city, relieving Carmen of the need to continue pretending she didn’t know about it.

  “Living in a house means: being at home, feeling happy and secure in a familiar environment which has, to a great extent, been designed by you.” Carmen absorbed this observation in silence. Alfredo may have coughed up the money, but she was the one who had designed their house; she had chosen every piece of furniture and decided every colour. So whether or not she felt good about the result was her responsibility alone; she wasn’t a little girl any more. She had learned long ago that complaining and crying don’t bring relief, or raise the dead, or return a uterus. The Feng Shui master was finishing his spiel about feeling good inside. He meant inside a house, not that other inside, the one she felt empty within her. Alfredo had barely contributed to the design of their house. He had taken an interest only in the study and the cellar and there he was precise on every point. He personally chose the humidifiers, the thermometers and the position of the racks. It was Alfredo who had taught her to smell wine, to wait for the bouquet to be released, to reject a wine that was not yet ready. “And now he complains,” she thought.

  “Disturbances in sleep patterns, lack of equilibrium, marital strain and even illnesses can all be traced back to negative Feng Shui,” she heard the master say, on the heels of some other observation that was now already lost in a soporific mist induced by the mingled perfumes in the auditorium.

  At half-past five, her mobile rang. Several women opened their handbags, to check that it was not theirs. Carmen, tangled in the wire of the translation earphone, was slow to answer. A woman sitting in front of her turned round to give her a disapproving look. The Feng Shui master took this opportunity to tell his audience never to charge up their mobiles on the bedside table, because that attracted negative chi into the bedroom.

  It was Tadeo, one of the twins, who was waiting for her to take him shopping for clothes, as they had agreed. Carmen apologized. “Something came up at the last minute. Didn’t the maid tell you?” Tadeo was annoyed. “If you want, take a taxi and go with her.” Tadeo slammed down the phone and she returned to the auditorium where the master was saying something in English, the only words of which she understood were “Bill Clinton”. Carmen put the headphones back on in time to hear that “the furniture in the Oval Office at the White House was arranged in a negative way that brought many marital problems to the American President”. It was too obvious, she thought, to look for explanations in the way her husband’s office was furnished. Even so, she couldn’t help it.

  One of the three men stood up and left. The master watched him leave. Wanting to land a retaliatory blow on this deserter, he said, in the tone of one pronouncing a revealed truth: “Experts from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have been consulted by the leaders of great Western economic empires, to guarantee the success of their dealings.” Carmen remembered her grandfather, a communist Galician who had escaped to Argentina as a stowaway, and wondered what he would have made of westernized Feng Shui. Looking around her, she realized that she had never met the grandparents or, in most cases, even the parents of any of the friends who were with her. Then again, she had not brought her father to Cascade Heights either, preferring to visit his apartment once a month, when she took him money for the rent. Rumour has it that Nane’s father was imprisoned for fraud at some point. Nobody knows the exact details, but it’s definitely true that her house in The Cascade is in the name of her mother. At least that’s what Mavi Guevara said, in confidence.

  Now Nane put up her hand to confirm to the audience that “in my husband’s company, they made a tour of all the facilities with a Feng Shui consultant and they ended up building a Ta Ta Mi on the terrace to dispel the negative energy”. The master was pleased by this “most opportune and illuminating interruption”.

  “Someone should look over the Guevaras’ house, right?” said Nane, and Teresa and Lala laughed, but Lala added: “Don’t be a bitch – anyway, if Martín doesn’t get a job soon, I’ll be the one forced to realign the chi in my house.”

  “Or forced to work,” quip
ped Teresa.

  “Not in a million years!” said Lala, laughing.

  “In your case it’s a short-term thing, but how long have the Guevaras been living off Virginia’s wages? Perhaps Ronie really isn’t getting work because of bad Feng Shui,” Nane insisted.

  “It wouldn’t hurt to rearrange the furniture,” agreed Teresa. “In this life you have to try everything.”

  Carmen thought that in this life she would like to try marijuana; as a girl, she had never dared and now she didn’t know how to get hold of it. Once, on television, on a rainy afternoon she had spent in bed because she couldn’t get up, she had seen a boy on a talk show explaining that he smoked joints because they produced more or less the same effect as wine, but without the hangover. And she was a bit concerned about her hangovers. A couple of times her children had seen her the worse for wear, because the new maid didn’t know how to manage the situation as Gabina had and, any time Carmen was a bit wobbly, she went running to the children for help.

  There was a half-hour break, during which wine and cheese were served. Carmen didn’t drink anything. This was her children’s school: she was frightened of what she might do. The wine was a Valmont, banned from Alfredo’s cellar – “It’s vinegar. Anything under twelve pesos is vinegar.” Surrounded by plates of brie and Roquefort, the master was overwhelmed by women waving freehand drawings of their houses at him. It struck Carmen that, in the ranking of potential lovers, a Feng Shui expert could claim membership of an even higher category than architects. Not on the grounds of looks, but of exoticism. The organizers were handing out leaflets with events scheduled for the rest of the year: “How to Grow Orchids” in September; “The Art of Wine-Tasting” in October; “Understanding Nietzsche” in November; “Boundaries and Children” to close the year, in the first week of December, with the same psychologist who presented that talk show on which Carmen had seen the boy who smoked marijuana. She looked around her: people were moving about, holding glasses that were still almost full. The burgundy-coloured liquid swayed to the rhythm of laughter and chatter. And she wondered if she might perhaps just wet her lips… but she didn’t dare.

  Five minutes before the second half of the lecture, waiters began to collect the glasses. Some wine remained in almost all of them; a few of them had not even been touched. Carmen made up her mind to wait until everyone had gone in, then to drink half a glass in the lavatories. She was determined to do it. But Teresa grabbed her arm and led her back inside the auditorium. “It’s interesting, isn’t it?” said Teresa, nibbling a piece of Gruyere. “Very interesting,” said Carmen, whose mind was still on the half-empty glasses left on the table.

  The Feng Shui master spent the rest of the seminar analysing some sample houses. Different views were presented on state-of-the-art slides, each of which bore the words “Pa Kua Orientation”. This same phrase had been repeated various times during the talk, but Carmen could not begin to remember what it meant. The master was explaining the significance of different corners in a house, while indicating air flow with a wooden pointer. He spoke of the place reserved for Career or Profession; the corner of Knowledge; the corner of Children. When he explained about the area reserved for Wealth, Nane said: “I always thought my architect was a halfwit – and he’s still complaining that we never paid him for the extras. Right in the Wealth corner, he put a closet that’s always locked! Can you believe it?”

  “You’ll have to pull it down or make a Ta Ta Mi on the terrace,” suggested Lala.

  “Why don’t you try leaving the door open first?” said Teresa. “It would be a real shame to start making alterations to your house now that you’ve got it so pretty and everything’s perfect. Did I tell you that they’re going to photograph ours for La Nación’s architecture supplement?”

  “Seriously?”

  The Californian master used his last slide to illustrate, in detail, the corner attributed by Feng Shui to the Couple and Marriage. It was in the back part of the house, at the right. Just where Alfredo had built his wine cellar. He explained how important it was that the energy in this area should be positive – ying and yang, but positive – that it should flow unobstructed, that negative effects be neutralized with mirrors, crystals and bamboo. One must avoid, on all accounts, the presence of blocked chi or vital energy – that is, chi that cannot flow, areas where movement and access are difficult, areas that are damp, or cluttered, airless, dusty, dark and lifeless. Like a wine cellar.

  It was nearly ten o’clock by the time Teresa Scaglia dropped Carmen off at home. Alfredo’s car wasn’t there; it was too early for him to be back. Carmen knew that her children would be holed up in their respective rooms, on the Internet, and the maid would be in the servant’s room, reading the Bible. “You know, the best thing about evangelical maids is that they don’t steal – their religion forbids it,” Teresa had told her, when she recommended this girl a few months back. But she still preferred Gabina. She went to the kitchen, grabbed a glass and a corkscrew and continued to the cellar. She opened the door. Inside it was even damper and colder than the night outside. She looked at the bottles: not just any one would do. Her eyes passed over the Rutini, then stopped on the Finca la Anita. She took out the bottle. A 1995 vintage. She hesitated, then returned it to its place. Six bottles further on she settled on one of the three Vega Sicilias that Alfredo had brought back from his last trip to Madrid. That trip that he had wanted to make alone, because he had a very important deal to close and didn’t want any distractions. It still had the price tag: two hundred and seventy euros. Almost as much as that night in the Sheraton, the one that was recorded for evermore on her husband’s credit card statement. The one that he had spent with someone, perhaps with the same woman with whom he had bought this wine in Spain. Perhaps with some other woman. She opened the bottle. She was about to pour some wine into the glass, then thought better of it. Instead, she raised the bottle, toasted the health of Feng Shui and of Chinese people everywhere, then drank deeply from it, pausing only to draw breath.

  18

  El Tano glanced up before hitting the ball. He saw his rival flit to the left, like a shadow. Only in the split-second that the ball succumbed to inertia and began to fall, when for a tiny instant it seemed to hang in the air, did he hit it. It was a slam directed at the right corner of the court, almost touching the base line. Where there was nobody. A precise shot, not forced, but swift and effective, rendering useless all his opponent’s efforts to cover the back of the court in time to reach the ball. Gustavo celebrated the point. He always applauded the same way, clapping against his racket. All of us loved to see El Tano and Gustavo Masotta play doubles – it was like watching choreography. There was always a crowd to watch their matches, always one of us to tell the others about their latest feat. “Nice one, Tanito, your house speciality,” said Gustavo. El Tano’s tributes to his partner were much more restrained: they were barely perceptible gestures, visible only to those who knew him.

  El Tano and Gustavo played together every Saturday at ten o’clock in the morning. Physically, they made an odd couple: El Tano was short and stocky, with almost transparent skin and curly hair that had once been blond; Gustavo was tall, slender and dark. Virginia Guevara had introduced them and on that same day they played a singles match. Having practically killed each other, afterwards neither of them would say who had won. Legend has it that they deliberately halted the game in the third set, when they were drawn on five games apiece, so that there would be no clear winner. It had been Gustavo’s turn to serve, and when Gustavo served, he won. Delivered from height and strength, the power of his service was frightening. But there must have been a reason why he agreed to be a bit vague about who was the better player.

  From that day on they became an inseparable doubles pair. El Tano would get up early and reserve a court. Gustavo would come later, on the hour, or a few minutes late. Over time, partners usually rotated, but not them: they always played together. None of us would ever have dared ask one of them
to form a pair; it would be like voicing a desire for the most beautiful woman in the club to her jealous husband. They got on well; their mutual respect took the edge off any differences and it was not obvious that El Tano was nearly ten years older than Gustavo, either on the court or off it. Each, in his own way, brought to the partnership elements that made them a tough pair to beat. El Tano was all precision, cold blood, wealth of experience, flawless technique, untiring legs; his tactic relied less on his own game than on making capital from an opponent’s error. It was pure strategy: he played a game of tennis as though it were a game of chess. Gustavo’s style was more impetuous, yet more magnificent; some people, if they were bold enough (or quite sure that El Tano would not get to hear of it), said that Gustavo was the best player in Cascade Heights. He had a physique that lent itself naturally to the sport, he put everything into it and was capable of turning around the most unpromising score. His speciality was to serve, run to the net, then smash the ball straight at his rival’s feet, leaving him unable to respond. The violence of these shots was frightening, and yet the harm they did his opponents was kept in check. You could tell, though, that this exaggerated care was studied, controlled and imposed on his own desire. As the game went on, he managed his own violence less effectively, and then, if Gustavo hit a ball when you were close to the net, all you could do to avoid getting hurt was to shield yourself with the racket.

  The performance continued, after each game, on the terrace overlooking the tennis courts. Invariably the two men had a drink with their opponents and a chat. El Tano always paid, in spite of the losing party’s protests that “he who loses buys the drinks”. The waiter who brought the drinks knew not to accept money from anyone other than El Tano Scaglia, who had given orders to that effect. An order from El Tano could not be disobeyed without consequences. While they waited for the drinks, El Tano exchanged his sweaty shirt for a dry one, and stretched against the wooden rail. Gustavo neither stretched nor changed his shirt but remained in a collapsed state in his chair, enjoying his victorious exhaustion. El Tano drank mineral water, and Gustavo, lemonade. And they talked about business: the sale of YPF to Repsol, cars to be bought and sold, the extravagances of their wives, which they criticized, even though these served to demonstrate their own standing as high-end consumers. They talked about some tennis championship that might be taking place somewhere in the world, or about the ATP ranking. But El Tano always seemed more involved in the conversation than his partner. While Gustavo was physically present, it was clear that his mind was often elsewhere. Every now and then his eyes glazed over and, if someone pointed this out, he put it down to tiredness. But it wasn’t that. It seemed that something was troubling Gustavo, that he was assailed by thoughts leading him to a dark place. At that time, none of us knew where. Nor did we even suspect that there was anything wrong. In The Cascade it’s not unusual to know nothing about your neighbour, the person he was before coming to live here, or even the person he is now, in private, behind closed doors. Not even El Tano really knew about Gustavo. Nor Gustavo about El Tano.