by Jack Tollers
*
By the time he came down from his long siesta, Peter was feeling a bit sluggish and it was dark outside. He found Jimmy's sister, Veronica, curled up on a velvety easy chair, her bare feet tucked beneath her while she nonchalantly leafed through an old Vogue magazine. Jimmy was nowhere to be seen. Veronica lifted her eyes and was surprised to meet Peter coming down the stairs.
‘Hi! Why, I didn't know you were out and around.’
‘Yup,’ said Peter, vaguely looking around the place, ‘They actually do give us leave from time to time, you know. ‘
‘Jimmy said he would be taking me down to Bella Vista tonight... are you coming too?’
Peter sat down on a sofa in front of the girl and contemplated her with a critical eye. She was definitely not pretty. A tall, bony, lanky girl, Veronica was not very popular among Jimmy's friends, even if she could sometimes be rather funny in a detached, quietly ironical way. She wasn’t exactly ugly. Her face was all right, with wide green eyes and long eyelashes that were rather engaging along with her long fairish hair; but her forehead was too prominent and a faint scar of a harelip definitely ruined her looks. Nevertheless to Peter she was the sister he had never had and he was more fond of her than he liked to admit, to a degree that Veronica was never quite aware of. That evening she was dressed very simply with blue jeans and a light black jersey with a polo neck. There was a faint perfume in the air, which was a sort of trademark of hers.
‘Bella Vista? Where the hell is that?’ asked Peter feigning ignorance of the geographical location of an impossible place. In fact he knew Bella Vista quite well because half a dozen cadets from the military school lived there and he had been to one or two parties at their homes, not far away from the Academy, for that matter.
‘Oh, come on, Peter! Don't be such a snob will you? You know perfectly well where it is and Jimmy is taking me by car. So shall we count you in?’
Peter acknowledged the invitation with an impatient wave of his hand and got up and went to the kitchen to see if he could make himself some matés. It was always the same old story, he never felt entirely himself after a long siesta and it would take the better part of an hour before he would entirely recover his temper. He should have had a shower before coming down, he thought, but just couldn't muster enough energy to do so. Instead he had put on a sports shirt and his light blue jeans, a pair of moccasins, and no socks. It wasn't all that warm for such an outfit, but it all contributed to making him feel holiday-like. Manuel wasn't around so he put the kettle on the stove and sat on a small wooden table in a corner while he critically observed the kitchen, which exhibited its usual state of cleanliness and neatness. The door opened and Jimmy barged in with a broad smile, ready to talk to Peter at the top of his voice, knowing that the other chap would probably feel quite edgy when just up from his siesta. Apparently he felt no grudge against Peter because of their argument over the phone.
‘Ho, ho, ho! Maté, what? It's a bit late for that if you ask me. More like boozing time, don't you think?’
Peter shuddered at the mention of the stuff. They had had more than enough at lunch time, he thought, and the mere echo of Jimmy's words actually started the idea in his mind that after all maybe he was suffering from a bit of a hangover. An odd mix up, he thought, what with having whisky in the morning while Jimmy drank his green potion and now the roles reversed. But they had actually coincided on the red wine at lunch; so after all, maybe the hangover was worth it, he reflected. Elaborate he ordered himself, while Jimmy tinkered with something in the refrigerator. Well, maybe that was the way their lives would always be: most of the time tuned to different frequencies, but now and again on the same page—even if that meant serious headaches afterwards. For himself. Or perhaps for both of them? Enough, he told himself, enough of soul-searching.
He got up and served his first maté, the astringent infusion immediately lifting his spirits. They went to the living room with their respective gear, Peter a kettle in one hand and his maté in the other, Jimmy with a big glass and a soda siphon, and they sat at the coffee table in front of Veronica who hadn't moved and was reading intensely a romantic and sentimental story designed to entertain wistful women.
There is a mystery in the gathering together of three friends, and anyone who has experienced them knows that in the meeting of three something quite distinct makes all the difference. So it was with Peter, Jimmy and Veronica, a familiarity reflected in common jokes and long-standing friendship established a singular mixture of serious prospects and ideas wrapped in a package of light bantering and fast one-liners. Peter's presence somehow dissolved Jimmy and Veronica's usual brotherly-sisterly bickering, and Veronica's femineity softened the more aggressive moods of her masculine counterparts. On the other hand, Jimmy would always play on Peter's brighter side while Veronica could make her brother laugh in a way he wouldn't allow himself to do if alone with his sister. And so on. They felt comfortable with each other, not always quite conscious that recently their gatherings had a nostalgic ring to them that took them back to their golden childhood. The long hours playing at Estanciero, an Argentine variation of the North American Monopoly, or perhaps, spending long afternoons at the Ital Park, a now disappeared recreational park that was a sort of paradise for Buenos Aires’s children in those days (Jimmy's parents would frequently send them off with Manuel handing over some money to pay for the rides and a couple of ice-creams, mostly on Saturday afternoons). Naturally they weren't exactly aware of all this, but whenever the three of them were alone together, it always was, as it were, a joint trip back to the lost country of childhood.
‘Who's throwing the party tonight?’ Jimmy enquired.
‘Oh, you don't know her. It's a friend I've only recently made. It’s her birthday.’ She smiled knowingly. ‘You know, we made friends at the Guides.’ Veronica used to go once a week to the Girl Scouts meetings at the San Martín de Tours parish, one of the fashionable parishes in those days. Peter and Jimmy thought them quite ridiculous though they had to admit that they liked the way the uniform suited one or two of Veronica's friends who sometimes came back from their Saturday meetings for tea.
‘You know the definition of Scouts?’ Peter quoted with a grin, ‘a group of small nits dressed up as grown ups, lead by a grown up dressed like a nit.’
‘Ha, ha. We are not amused.’ Veronica enjoyed the Guides gatherings, and would always stand up scoutishly for her one part religious, one part sporty and one part social association. In any case, she cared very little about what these two thought about the Guides. All the same, she was in high spirits that evening and wanted to go to her friend's place, so she prudently sailed away from the subject.
‘It's one of those huge run down houses in Bella Vista. Tonight’s host has an enormous family, you know, a dozen brothers and sisters, no—’
‘A dozen brothers!’
‘Well, I don’t know, but they’re actually about ten brothers and sisters in all. Yes, and no money, and a big weedy garden with an old ‘olympic’ swimming pool, and huge trees that tower over—’
‘Ten brothers!’ Peter exclaimed who had not even one.
‘Well,’ said Jimmy, ‘we can always throw someone into the pool if the going gets good.’
‘Yup,’ Peter grinned, ‘especially if old Suter appears.’ Suter was a military cadet who lived in Bella Vista with whom Peter and Jimmy had no patience. In their opinion he represented the worst sort of military goon, self-centred and rather haughty, who typically thought that having acquired a uniform and a few stripes put him into a superior class.
‘What's wrong with Suter, may I enquire?’ asked Veronica who had danced once or twice with him and found him quite handsome.
Peter moved over to the gramophone and started to sort through another pile of records. ‘Well, allow me to say that he's a conceited brat. And on the solemn side too, you know...’
‘And solemnity is fools’s glee’, Jimmy quoted.
‘That's naughty of both
of you,’ Veronica said chidingly. ‘You should try some charity one of these days... You start deriding the Girl Guides and now you're hammering on and on at poor old Suter... What's wrong with you this evening?’
Peter suddenly shouted merrily, while he turned on the gramophone: ‘Hey, look what I've found!’ He put on a new record and walked towards the kitchen while challenging the two Elizalde's to guess who was singing what.
When he came back with a glass, brother and sister were dancing and trying to keep pace with Django Reinhart's rendition of "I'll see you in my dreams". He filled his glass and sat on the floor next to the gramophone laughing at the way Jimmy and Veronica convoluted round the sitting room trying to Charleston in a proper way.
After the record finished, while looking for another one, Peter asked: ‘So tonight it's Bella Vista, what? And what sort of a party do we expect? A small gathering or a big one? Will there be any dancing, do you think?’
Veronica lit a cigarette, sat comfortably on her sofa, got rid of her moccasins once more and gathered her legs under her.
‘Well, my friend says they expect quite a lot of people. Apparently she’s celebrating her birthday but also, so I gather, it's a farewell party of sorts for a brother of hers who is going to be a priest... No, I wouldn't expect any dancing but knowing her family, there would be a lot of guitars and singing.’
‘A priest?’ asked Jimmy, intrigued. ‘Where is he going up to for his studies?’
‘I don't know, but I must say it's a shame; he's awfully good looking, you know.’
‘Well,’ said Peter ‘if there's nothing else, we'd better get going. In the worst of cases I'll get chatting with the awfully good looking would-be-priest and find out what the deuce is the matter with him. Your friend’s home sounds rather bizarre, if you ask me, what with a dozen children and your friend being a Guide and everything, and coupling a birthday party with her brother’s calling—they seem to be sort of queer people.’
‘Oh, you’ll see’ Veronica said with a smile, ‘I believe you’ll rather like them all, once you get used to the remarkably odd collection of characters that seem to assemble in that house.’
Presently Veronica went to her room to change while Jimmy got on to the phone to find out if any other friend would join their Bella Vista spree.
Peter had discarded most of the records until he stumbled on Cole Porter. He was amused with the lyrics of "Let's fall in love":
Even some Argentines without means, do it.
He sat on the sofa and smiled. But after a while he wasn't really listening anymore.
He couldn't get that girl out of his head.
