by Claudia Pi
“We’re seeing each other tonight at Ernesto Andrade’s – had you forgotten?”
“No, I didn’t forget.”
He hung up and went back upstairs. He went into the dressing room. He switched on Carla’s telephone and checked the calls she had made that day and the one before. The agency. His own mobile. Her voicemail. A Cascade Heights guard. The agency again. A number he did not recognize. He rang it and waited for an answer. “Cine Village, good afternoon…” He rang off. Another unfamiliar number. He dialled and a man’s voice answered. He let him say “hello” several times, but didn’t recognize the voice. It could be a client of the agency, or not. Perhaps it was one of those men Carla met in chat rooms, in the early morning when she couldn’t sleep, although she had denied she visited chat rooms, even when he had grabbed her hand on the mouse, twisted it, and bent her arm up behind her back until she cried out in pain. He went out to the garden. He watered the grass. He cleaned the pool again; the wind had scattered a few leaves into it. He had never liked Virginia Guevara. Ronie, yes – but she struck him as untrustworthy. She had asked too many questions that day that she leased him the house. She made stupid comments. She had lied – he didn’t remember in what way – but she definitely had lied. Just as she might be lying now. “I told her you called, hasn’t she rung? The thing is, oddly, we have a lot of work on today. The sun’s out and everyone wants to move to our country club.”
He took the car out to drive around The Cascade. Systematically, he swept down each road, the verticals, then the horizontals, the cul-de-sacs, then back to the horizontals. He didn’t see her. Any of those cars parked in front of any of those houses could belong to the man to whom his smiling wife, with her black high heels and transparent cotton shirt, was now showing a bedroom. He returned to the house. On one corner he almost bumped into Martín Urovich, but he raised his hand and continued. Seven o’clock. He went into the kitchen. To the bar. He poured himself a whisky. What if, instead of showing houses in The Cascade, she had gone to the cinema with someone? He went back out to the garden. He kicked away a branch that had fallen beside the quebracho wood path. First to the cinema, and afterwards – what? He went back inside. He went back up to the room. He checked the incoming calls on Carla’s mobile. She had deleted them. Why did she delete them? He poured himself another whisky. He took the glass out to the garden and threw himself down on a lounger. He drained the glass in one gulp. He went back inside to get the bottle. There was still enough for another three or four whiskies. He left it on the ground, close to him. And afterwards – what? It was half-past seven and she had not called him all day. She doesn’t even care how I am, he thought. He shook the bottle over his glass; two drops fell out, then nothing. He went back into the house to fetch another bottle. He opened it. It was difficult opening it. He heard the noise of an engine in front of the house. He looked out of the window: it was someone using his drive for a manoeuvre. Someone. Not Carla. He remembered that Carla had been looking very pretty recently. Prettier than usual, tanned and toned from the gym. With the transparent cotton shirt. He went back out to the garden. He walked over to the swimming pool. A breeze moved on the water, but no more leaves had fallen in. He lay back down on the lounger. The telephone rang. He got up to answer it and, in his haste, knocked over the bottle. He ran to the house. “Shall we pick you up on the way to Ernesto’s?” asked El Tano, at the other end.
“No, that’s fine…”
“Seriously, are you all right?”
“Yes, don’t worry.”
“Are you going along later?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I don’t know, Tano, I don’t know yet.”
He went back up to the bedroom and into Carla’s dressing room. He sat on the floor. He looked at her clothes, and now he suspected that the combination of colours and textures hanging from the rails concealed some message he must decipher. He spoke to them. Why is she doing this to me? He squeezed a dress with yellow flowers. He emptied his glass into his throat. I don’t deserve this. He pulled open a black shirt, making all the buttons pop off. Then he lunged at the hangers, anyhow, grabbing two or three at a time, and hurling them at the end wall. Finally, the rails and the shelves were empty and he sat alone in the narrow dressing room, drunk and surrounded by colourful fabrics and hangers. He wept. On his knees, he wept, embracing the flowery dress. When no more tears came, he dried his face with the same dress. He kicked open the door of the dressing room, denting the wall, and went out. To walk in the grounds. The noise of the crickets in the night confused him. The sky, fuller of stars than he had ever seen it, weighed on his forehead. An engine rumbled in front of the house. But this time he did not go to see who it was; the effort of getting up from the lounger would take too long. The engine was switched off. There came the sound of a car door closing, and suddenly Carla appeared on the path that was made of strips of quebracho. Hurried. Pretty. Toned from the gym. Her hair tousled. Why was her hair tousled? She was walking on the wood to avoid the heels of her black shoes sinking into the recently watered lawn. First to the cinema, and afterwards – what? She wasn’t wearing the cotton shirt. She had on a different one, in a bold colour, yellow or orange – in the dark it was hard to tell.
“Hello,” she said. He stood next to the lounger and watched her come closer. “I’m running a bit late.” He watched her come closer. “We’ve got the Andrades today, haven’t we?” Gustavo walked towards her. Slowly, teetering a little. “I forgot my mobile.” He stopped in front of her. Pretty. Tanned. Tousled. And afterwards? She made as if to kiss his cheek, but an instant before she could, Gustavo, his fist closed, landed a punch. An upper-cut, right on the jaw.
35
The Discipline Committee asks to see Mavi and Ronie. Not on their own account. On Juani’s. Nobody mentions drugs. Or the list. Or the potheads. The file’s heading is “Exhibitionism in Public Areas”. He and two friends pulled down their trousers in front of the flag pole. It was in the early hours of Saturday morning, after a party. And there were girls present, according to the report. “Girls who were cheering,” says Juani later, when Mavi and Ronie ask him to explain.
“Don’t even think about saying that when they ask you about it,” warns Ronie. The Committee is going to take a statement from the boys and, if they are found guilty, apply an appropriate sanction. “Guilty of hanging a moon? In front of our friends? Is this a wind-up or are you being serious?”
“It must not just have been your friends, because someone’s reported you.”
“We were just farting around.”
“Don’t say that in your statement either.”
“So what should I say?”
Their appointment is a week later. Their case is heard and evaluated. If the Committee finds them guilty, it has to settle on a suitable sanction and propose one of two options: option one – suspension; the offender may not take part in sporting activities or use the shared facilities for a set length of time. Option two – payment of a fine and continued free access to the social and sporting facilities “to prevent the culprit and his friends from roaming the vicinity, with all the problems that idleness brings”. If the second option is chosen then the father pays the fine and the son avoids suspension.
Mavi and Ronie speak to Juani several times before the day of the hearing. They get their interrogation in first, to iron out any doubts or hesitations. They practise with him, giving him pointers. “It was a prank, you didn’t know there were girls there, you didn’t mean to upset anyone,” Ronie recites.
“Had you been drinking? Had you been smoking?” asks Mavi. Ronie glares at her; Juani says nothing. She repeats the question regardless; she knows what they are going to ask.
“Beer,” says Juani with irritation, “but I wasn’t drunk.” Mavi starts to cry.
“Mum, have you never had a beer?”
“I’ve never pulled my trousers down in front of anyone.”
“I have,” says Ronie and now it’s her turn to glare at him.
“You’d been smoking,” she says again, as if she hadn’t heard any of what went before.
“Mum, it was for a laugh – can’t anyone understand that?” And she does not understand it. Nor does she listen. Nor does she know what to think any more.
The Discipline Committee comprises three country club members. They deal with any infraction reported within the community. The talk is always of “infractions” rather than “crimes”, because technically there are no crimes in Cascade Heights. Except for those that may be committed by servicemen, domestic staff or other workers, but in those cases, the matter proceeds along different lines. As regards members of The Cascade, if one of them, or their children, relations or friends commits a crime, no formal report is made to any authority outside the gates of the neighbourhood. We try to resolve everything behind closed doors. Behind the barriers. Theft, collisions, assault: all kinds of infractions come before the Discipline Committee. And solutions are always found, because there is a willingness to find them. If you get embroiled in a fight with some person in the street, in a bar or a cinema, and you hurt him, you may end up in prison. But if the fight is with your brother, in the garden of your own home, then of course it’s different. No one would dream of taking such a dispute beyond the confines of that house and that family. The same is true of our community. Cascade Heights is like one big family with one big garden. And as such, the family itself must investigate the offence and choose the punishment. Through the auspices of the Discipline Committee. Federal law, as it applies to the world outside, the tribunals and law courts, almost never intervenes here. In private cases, if no charges are brought, there is no crime. And in a case for public action, the prosecutor either never finds out or turns a blind eye. No one in Cascade Heights would ever report something in a police station. Not only is it not the custom, but it’s very much frowned upon. Everything is sorted out behind the bars. Complaints are brought to the country club’s administration; the club makes a judgement; the club hands down a sanction or an absolution.
The real police never even set foot in here – neither the Buenos Aires force nor the federal police – only the private security guards paid for by members. There are some drawbacks to that arrangement: the youngsters take liberties and smoke marijuana in the youth club or on the further-flung tennis courts. They don’t need to hide from anyone other than their parents – sometimes not even them. Like the adults, they know that whatever they do, the worst that can happen is that their infraction goes on record and they have to appear before the Discipline Committee. Just as Juani must now for exposing himself.
“Do I really have to go and make a statement?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“What a bunch of hypocrites.”
“This isn’t about them, it’s about you,” says the mother, sobbing.
“It’s about everyone,” says the father.
“And what do they want me to tell them?” asks Juani, and immediately answers his own question: “I pulled my trousers down, OK, that much I can tell them, but there’s nothing else I can say that those three windbags are going to understand.”
Juani goes to make his statement. His friends go, too. Juani is suspended. Although nobody mentions it, in his file there is a copy of the Children at Risk file. Marcos’s father prefers to pay the fine. Tobias gets away without a sanction or a fine after denying that he was in Cascade Heights that night and providing three witnesses to the effect. His father’s a lawyer.
36
One Thursday, one of those Thursdays on which our husbands were due to gather in the evening to eat and play cards, El Tano telephoned. He asked to speak to me, not Ronie. I was invited, along with Carla Masotta and Lala Urovich, to join the men for dinner at the Scaglias’ home. Teresa would be there too, obviously. The “Thursday Widows”, as he had dubbed us, would be out in force.
In all these years, it was the first time that we were going to share our husbands’ Thursday night fixture. I told Ronie and he was surprised – he hadn’t known about it. “El Tano’s been a bit weird recently,” he said. I had not noticed anything untoward, but then, for a long time now all my attention had been focused on Juani, and the rest of the world had been reduced to ghostly apparitions passing by. Thanks to Ronie, my mood had progressed from one of unbridled rage to self-pity, which may not have been any better for Juani but was at least easier to conceal. However I could not yet control my compulsion to spy on him and keep going through his things. And I wasn’t sure whether or not this was a good thing to do.
“Haven’t you noticed that El Tano’s growing a goatee?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“And he’s taken up sunbathing.”
“He must want to look good.”
“That’s what strange – he’s always looked good,” said my husband. I feared that the dinner might be intended as recompense for “the shame of not only having a drug-addict son but of us all knowing about it, too” as Teresa had sympathized when she turned up at the agency two or three days after that unforgettable phone call alerting me to my son’s risky behaviour. If that were the case, I would prefer to cry off sick than end up making myself genuinely ill, so I called her. But it turned out that she had known nothing either; she was as surprised as the rest of us by El Tano’s invitation. “He says there’s something he wants to share with me and with all of you, but he won’t say what it is.” I felt a surge of relief: my woes were certainly not a matter for debating at a dinner in the company of friends (if that is what we were).
At nine on the dot we knocked on the door. Teresa greeted us, wearing a full-length black silk dress and the string of Spanish pearls that El Tano had given her for their last anniversary.
“I didn’t know it was evening dress,” I said with dismay; there I was wearing jeans and a linen twinset from two seasons back.
“Neither did I. El Tano chose my clothes and wouldn’t let me change a thing. I’m starting to worry,” she joked.
Ronie headed to the kitchen with the bottles of wine we had brought. Teresa and I followed a few steps behind. “Syrah,” I heard him say as he handed the bottles to El Tano. “I’m wondering if he’s about to announce a trip, or something like that,” Teresa confided in a whisper. “We’ve been talking about going to Maui, but I think this might be something much bigger, don’t you?”
I answered “yes”, but without much conviction. Usually I find it easy to get inside a person’s head, to guess at what he might be thinking or feeling. It’s a useful knack in my line of work. “Understanding what kind of house a client wants to buy, and that that house may not be what I would buy myself, saves on time-wasting and misunderstandings,” I wrote in my red notebook after a difficult sale. But El Tano had always struck me as impenetrable – almost as much so as Juani – and although there were occasions when I felt I was beginning to understand him, almost immediately I would suspect that even this apparent empathy was a product of some deliberate ploy on his part.
In the kitchen, El Tano was preparing tandoori chicken for his guests. He had donned a white apron and chef’s hat. Ronie was right – he seemed odd. But that wasn’t on account of the goatee beard or the tan. It was because of his exaggerated body language. At times he seemed even to be counting his own steps. For all that he was resolute and powerful, El Tano had always been a measured fellow, very contained. If he wanted to make himself heard, he spoke quietly – he didn’t need to shout. He had not needed to shout that day that he arrived at The Cascade and said, “I want that land.” If he was happy, he shared a Pomery with his friends and, if he was depressed, he stood them up. Or he humiliated them. But he was not given to fits of laughter, or hugging people, or shedding tears. And that night he looked as though he might well be capable of doing any one of those three.
We waited until everyone had arrived before going through to the dining room. They’d given us champagne, and
the alcohol in my empty stomach made me feel dizzy. I walked over to one of the big windows. A streak of lightning flashed across the sky and a few heavy raindrops broke the serenity of the water in the swimming pool. The wooden deck was splattered with wet stains. The smell of damp earth mingled with an aroma drifting from the kitchen. The maid had just finished bringing the first course to the table. Glasses containing spider crab and prawns with avocado, also prepared by El Tano. “Don’t ask me for recipes – I never give them out,” he said, and he made a sign to the maid that I did not understand but she clearly did, because she quickly scuttled out with her head bowed. Thursday was her day off, but El Tano had asked her to stay, because “the little widows are coming” – although I don’t suppose she got the joke. Everyone in our neighbourhood knows about the “golf widows”, whose husbands abandon them every weekend for at least four hours to play eighteen rounds on the course. Our nickname, inspired by them, was more private and might never have left our own circle had it not proved to be so prophetic.
As always, we women sat down together around one half of the table and left the other half for the men. El Tano’s cherry-wood table is the biggest I’ve ever seen in my life. It easily seats twelve, and even sixteen can be squeezed in. “This time I want people to mix up,” said El Tano. Ronie shot me a complicitous look. If El Tano was prepared to make conversation with one of us women, then things had changed indeed.
“Let’s hear it for the asador,” joked Gustavo when the second course was underway and El Tano had yet to make his announcement. “Is ‘tandoori’ the name of a species?” asked Lala. “You mean a ‘spice’,” Ronie corrected her quietly, but he did not answer her question. Neither did anyone else. Some of us because we didn’t know and others because they had not heard her. El Tano, doubtless, because the question irritated him. Of all the women, the one he respected least was Lala. “How can so much idiocy fit into one person’s brain?” El Tano had marvelled one night to Ronie, after she had tried to join in a group discussion on what priorities should govern the budget in the coming year and had insisted that a significant portion be dedicated to the eradication of the Tillandsia plant. “It must be a spice, no?” she answered herself. Carla barely said a word all night. She had been taking time off the agency. It was more than a week since she had last been in. She claimed that she had had a lethal dose of flu and that she still felt weak, but I didn’t believe her. She seemed sad, subdued. “Tired,” she had answered, when I asked her if she felt well. But the concealer she had used on her cheekbones did not altogether hide the purple skin underneath.
