by Claudia Pi
“Yes, someone’s just come in, but that’s OK – carry on.”
Teresa thought it better to postpone the conversation. “I’ll speak to you when you aren’t so busy,” she said. Carla fidgeted in her chair. Her legs were crossed and she kept swinging the top one, involuntarily jogging the table. “If you like,” I said and hung up. I looked at Carla and smiled.
“I’m almost an architect,” she said. And I foolishly said “Well done, you,” because I didn’t know what was intended by her visit or her observation, and I didn’t want her to feel more uncomfortable than she was already.
“I need to work, I need to get out of the house, to have a project.” I said nothing. “I need you to give me a hand,” she managed to finish, before her voice broke. The telephone rang. I answered it: it was Teresa again.
“No, I’m still with the… client… but go ahead and tell me – if it’s something important.” She didn’t want to, repeating that she would ring later. Apologizing, I returned my attention to Carla. “And how can I help you?”
“I thought perhaps I could work with you in the agency.”
For her to propose this in a year when property sales had all but ground to a halt – notwithstanding a few deals of the Pérez Ayerra variety – made me think that Carla might be even more cut off from the outside world than she herself suspected.
“Look, things are very hard. I don’t know if you’ve been following developments in this market.”
“I don’t have much to offer, which is why I’m not offering, I’m begging…” – she was crying behind the dark glasses – “I’m begging, and it’s hard, but someone has to help me.”
I didn’t know what to say; the truth was that I could not afford to take anyone on.
“It could be without a salary; I don’t mind when you pay me, how much you pay me or even if you pay me at all. We can make whatever sort of agreement you like. But I need to work.”
Carla took off her dark glasses and showed me her black eye. “Gustavo…” she didn’t finish the sentence because her voice faltered once more. Before I could think of something to say, the telephone rang. Yet again, it was Teresa and, yet again, the day’s course was altered. “Yes, yes, tell me what it is, Teresa.” This time I lied that I was alone: it was better to listen and get her out of the way once and for all than to have the telephone ringing every five minutes.
“I know it’s not really something to talk about on the phone, but I’ve had a knot in my stomach ever since I found out…”
“About what?” I said, but she didn’t hear me.
“…and today I’m out of The Heights all day and tomorrow… did you know that tomorrow they’re playing the Challenger Cup in…”
“Never mind, Teresa, don’t worry. Tell me what’s up.”
“Promise me you won’t take it badly.”
“Just tell me.”
“Juani’s name is on the Children At Risk list.”
“The what list?”
“Children At Risk.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“It’s a list made by some sort of Commission with information that is given to them by carers.”
“Who do these carers give information to?”
“To them, and they give it to the Council – that’s how I know, because someone at the Council – and please don’t ask me who it was – told El Tano in confidence and I just had to tell you, Vir, because otherwise how will I ever look you in the eye again?”
The more she explained, the less I understood. Opposite me, Carla blew her nose noisily on a paper handkerchief. “If it had been the other way around, I would have wanted you to tell me.”
“To tell you what?”
“That one of my children was on the list.”
“Teresa, can you tell me once and for all what this list is, and who these children at risk are?”
“Drug addicts, Vir, Juani is on a list of drug addicts.”
I felt my body stiffen. “Hello, hello… are you there? I knew I should have waited and told you in person. Speak to me, Vir, don’t leave me like this, when I’m miles away from The Cascade… Vir…”
I cut her off. I sat opposite Carla Masotta in silence, without making any move, petrified. The telephone rang. I picked up the handset and crashed it down on the base. It rang again. I let it keep ringing until it stopped. It rang again. Then Carla stood up and pulled out the cable at the socket. “What’s happened?”
“My son… is on a list…”
“What sort of list?”
“A list,” I repeated. She waited until I was able to articulate a complete sentence. “A Commission draws up a list of all the children who take drugs,” I heard myself say, without even knowing why I was telling her. A woman I barely knew, a woman who was not one of my friends, whose husband hit her hard enough to give her a black eye. Someone who had happened to come into my office on the day that Teresa rang to say that my son’s name was on a list I knew nothing about.
“And does your son take drugs?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Ask him.”
“What’s he going to say?”
“Can’t you believe him?”
“I’m confused.” We were both silent for a moment.
“And is it legal?” she asked.
“What, taking drugs?”
“No, making lists like that,” she said and stood up to pour me a glass of water. “Would this Commission have a List of Husbands who Hit their Wives?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I answered and, in the midst of our own tears, we burst out laughing.
28
Finally, the Insúas separated. Carmen Insúa was one of the few women to remain living in Cascade Heights after a separation. It wasn’t easy to stay on. The first obvious source of unease after the separation was that feeling of being out of place at parties and on excursions where the rest of us were couples. Her deeper discomfort did not manifest itself until later. Because, when she had moved to Cascade Heights, Carmen, like other women, had distanced herself from a world that continued to function elsewhere and to which she was linked only by the daily tale spun for her by her husband, on his return from the office. That isn’t to say that she never went back to the city, but that now she went there as a tourist, visiting a place that did not belong to her, as though peeping at it from behind a curtain. When there is no husband to arrive home, trailing victories and failures from the other place, the illusion of his wife also being a citizen of that territory is ended. Then the abandoned wife has two options: to go out once more and claim her place in that oblique world, or to renounce it. And Carmen Insúa, we all believed, had opted for renunciation.
Our initial fear, when we heard that Alfredo had left her, was that Carmen’s drink problem would worsen but, just as we began to find justifications for her compulsive drinking and to feel sorry for her, Carmen became mysteriously teetotal. People say the first thing that Alfredo took away from the house was his collection of wines, and perhaps this was less to protect his wife than his bottles, which could otherwise have ended up smashed against a wall.
At the beginning, most of the inhabitants of The Cascade took her side. We visited her; we invited her to our houses and we tried, perhaps too hard, to include her in rather silly diversions. Such as the fancy-dress party at the Andrades’ house, at which Carmen ended up crying in a corner, behind her Cleopatra mask, while the rest of us danced to The Ketchup Song. Or that long weekend when the Pérez Ayerras insisted on taking her to Uruguay on their boat, knowing full well that she suffered from seasickness.
Alfredo Insúa had left her after twenty years of marriage – several of them marked by infidelities that she bore with stoicism – alone, with two sons who would also leave her, once they had finished school. He left her for his business partner’s secretary – just to be different. We all began by saying “What a bastard Alfredo is”. But the first weeks passed and some of the husbands who were still seeing
him, through work, began to observe that “there are two sides to every story”. “It’s no fun living with a drunk.” “She probably drank to help her cope with all the crap Alfredo threw at her.” “What crap?”
Soon Alfredo was to be seen back at The Heights, playing golf or tennis with one or other of us, or at an event in someone’s house to which Carmen was deliberately not invited. Two or three months after the separation, only the women said “what a bastard Alfredo is”, while the men kept quiet. Until, one day, nobody said it any more. And then there was a day when the men were knocking about a golf ball, or having a drink after a tennis game, that people began to say: “Alfredo really had no choice.”
A little while after that, he presented his new wife in society, a girl of less than thirty who was pleasant, pretty, nice and endowed with “a pair of tits that could take your eye out”, one of us joked. One weekend he took her to Uruguay in the same friends’ boat on which Carmen had vomited a few months earlier. And the new one didn’t vomit. After that trip, Alfredo and his new partner appeared with increasing regularity at parties in The Cascade, while Carmen became a recluse in her house. Until she was hardly ever seen.
That was when we all started to talk about Carmen’s depression. “I don’t know, but maybe she was better when she drank.” And Alfredo contrived, with very little effort and the excuse of her depression, to get the children to live with him. Carmen stayed in that house alone. A house as big as ever it was, but now with no furniture, nothing in the freezer, no chatter or clamour. She gave away the crockery, cutlery and some pieces of furniture. The few people who went into her house reported that the only object in the sitting room was a yellow painting of a naked woman in a canoe. Some of us feared that, if Carmen did something foolish, we might be alerted only when a putrid smell began to seep out of the house. Because her maids also left her. Their turnover was faster than ever. Alfredo – who was now “poor Alfredo” – always sent a replacement, as a guarantee against receiving inopportune news.
And then one day Gabina appeared. Gabina had worked for them in the early years of their marriage; she was a Paraguayan, broad, robust and efficient. Carmen would never have sacked her but, after their move to Cascade Heights, Alfredo had begun to find her appearance jarring. “She doesn’t go with this house,” he complained. And since Carmen refused to fire her after so many years of loyal service, Alfredo demanded that, when they were entertaining guests, they hire someone “with a better look” to wait at table. No explanation was given to Gabina, nor did she need any. The enmity between master and servant grew to such a point that relations became unsustainable. Gabina resigned without being sacked, but she took a final liberty before leaving; she looked at Alfredo and said: “You are a little turd, Señor, and one day you’ll get covered in shit.” Alfredo barred “that Paraguayan from ever coming into The Cascade to work in anyone’s house, I don’t care whose”, so Gabina had to seek work elsewhere. And they did not hear of her again, apart from the telephone call she made every Christmas to the “Señora”.
When Gabina tried to return to the house, after the first Christmas Carmen had spent there alone, the security guard consulted Alfredo, in spite of knowing full well that he was no longer in residence. He rang him on the mobile. “Noblesse oblige,” answered the guard, when Alfredo thanked him for the call. But the weariness provoked in him by his ex-wife was greater than his annoyance with Gabina, so he authorized the Paraguayan’s return, in the hope that someone “can take this millstone off my neck”.
The first thing Gabina did was to open the windows. And when she opened them, light shone in, exposing the grime, the dust and other imperfections which she set herself to correct, one by one. We all felt more relaxed, knowing that someone was looking after Carmen. And liberated from guilt, we pushed her even further to the back of our minds.
The day that she started to go out again found Carmen back in our conversations. She was seen strolling around the streets of Cascade Heights with Gabina; she went to the supermarket with Gabina; Gabina accompanied her to the pharmacy, to the hairdresser. And we all continued to be pleased about it. “She looks better, poor thing” was all we could think of to say about her.
But one afternoon, Carmen sat down with Gabina to have a coffee in the bar by the tennis courts. And Gabina was not wearing uniform, but her own clothes, clothes the like of which no member of Cascade Heights would ever wear. And one Saturday they were seen having lunch together in the golf club restaurant. They were laughing. Paco Pérez Ayerra was annoyed by Gabina’s guffaws, and complained to the waiter. “Look, are domestic servants allowed to eat here?” And nobody could find any written regulation forbidding it, prompting the matter to be taken up in meetings of the Council of Administration.
It was around that time that you began to hear people say: “What are those two doing together all the time? Could they be?…” “Oh stop it, don’t be disgusting,” Teresa Scaglia said to someone who had whispered this in her ear, when Gabina and Carmen jogged past them one morning. “If we don’t do something, next thing we’ll find ourselves at the gym sharing a sauna with that Indian,” said Roque Lauría in a Council meeting.
The night that Carmen and Gabina went to see a film in the auditorium, Ernesto Andrade finally called Alfredo. Someone swore that when Carmen started crying, Gabina held her hand. “We didn’t want to bother you, but this just can’t go on, old friend.” Then Alfredo once more forbade Gabina to enter Cascade Heights. The problem was that this time Carmen already was inside. The Chief of Security came to speak to Carmen. “What law states that she has to leave my house? Do you have a judge’s order, or something?”
“I have an order from your husband.”
“My husband is the one banned from entering this house,” she replied, and closed the door.
“She’s lost her mind,” everyone started to say. “No doubt Alfredo, with his contacts, will be able to arrange a court order, an injunction or something. Poor Alfredo.”
Alfredo swung into action. The first thing he did was to cut off Carmen’s money and stop paying her bills. He did not tell the children, because they were on a trip to the United States at the time, and “a piece of news like that would knock them sideways”. He would tell them about it once the matter was resolved. He asked the president of the Council of Administration to go and speak personally to Carmen, with the threat that she could be declared “persona non grata” in the neighbourhood. “Think of the children,” he said. She told him to go to hell.
The women no longer went out. They spent a month closeted in there. Two months. Three. All of us who walked by their house looked inside, trying to understand. To start with, they were still receiving deliveries from the supermarket, or the pharmacy. “The money’s going to run out soon,” one of us said.
“But if Alfredo has closed down all the accounts, how come they can still shop in the supermarket?”
“They must be paying with a Paraguayan Express card.”
“Give me a break!”
And then one morning somebody noticed that Carmen’s car wasn’t there. Nor was it there the following day. Nor the one after that. In fact, the women had left before dawn one morning, driving together through the Club’s automatic barrier. “Your instruction was that Señora Gabina Vera Cristaldo could not enter Cascade Heights, but never that she could not leave,” the guard who had been on duty that night explained to his superior. It wasn’t enough to save him his job.
Alfredo came at the weekend to open the house. In the days between the discovery of the women’s flight and Alfredo’s arrival, we had felt a growing trepidation about what he was going to find inside. Dirt at the very least; evidence of what those women had been doing there, on their own so long; damage in what had once been his home. For that reason, several people offered to go with him. They broke down the front door. Alfredo had a key but it didn’t work: Carmen had had the lock changed. The Chief of Security confirmed that “in the guard’s register there is a record of a
locksmith entering the Club two weeks ago”.
“She never gave a thought to her children,” someone said. Inside the house there was not enough light to see the interior. Alfredo pressed the light switch, pointlessly, as he himself had allowed the electricity to be cut off through non-payment of bills. Someone went over to draw the curtains and, as the panels were folded back, the light filtered in and the group was frozen in their advance, immobilized by the sight before them.
The painting of the woman lying in the canoe was no longer there. Instead all the walls of the house had been covered with photographs. The biggest of these was of Alfredo, an enlargement of a wedding shot. Then there were smaller ones: one of Paco Pérez Ayerra; another of Teresa Scaglia torn out of Country Woman magazine; the Andrades in a snap from the last club party; the president of Cascade Heights; various women in a photo from the last Burako tournament Carmen had organized; her fellow members of the painting group (apart from Carla Masotta, who had been carefully cut out of the picture) and some of other neighbours. On every photograph, pins had been stuck into the person’s eyes. On some, such as Alfredo’s, into the heart, too. And beneath each photo was an altar. “This is a real piece of work,” said one of the guards, and Nane Pérez Ayerra grasped the gold cross dangling over her chest. Everywhere there were little pieces of knotted cloth, images, heads of garlic, feathers, stones, seeds. Alfredo approached his own “altar”. It was a Villeroy Boch plate, covered in dry shit, on which a red candle had melted away.
29
“I’m not a junkie – what are you saying, Mum?” says Juani.
“I’m not the one saying it, the Security Commission lists say it.”
“Those idiots think that smoking a joint makes you a drug addict.”
“You smoke marijuana?” Virginia asks, crying. Juani doesn’t answer. “Did you smoke marijuana, for fuck’s sake?”
