Thursday Night Widows (10 page)

She could barely concentrate on what they were saying. At least if she were also scheduled to play
Burako
, her mind would be occupied with something. She liked playing. Both
Burako
and Rummy. Today, though, she wouldn't have been able to put together a basic sequence. Usually she liked to make an
escalera
– a “staircase” of tiles showing consecutive numbers, preferably all red. Winning did not matter to her as much as making these sequences, the longer, the better. But she wasn't playing this time. She dialled Alfredo's number again. His phone was still switched off. She asked someone for a cigarette. She had given up smoking a few years ago, but she still felt the need of it, the same as if she had never stopped. She would also have liked a glass of wine, but that would be inappropriate here. While she waited for a couple to finish their game, she took Alfredo's credit card statement out of her bag and looked over it again, hoping to have misread the details: Hotel Sheraton, three hundred dollars, 15 August.

She felt the same void in her stomach that she had experienced the morning she discovered it, left on Alfredo's bedside table, for anyone to see. After that first time she had read it ten, twenty-five, a thousand times. And it always said the same thing: Hotel Sheraton, three hundred dollars, 15 August. The exact date that she had been in Córdoba to play in a Burako tournament, in aid of what or whom she no longer remembered. She had called him that night and no one had answered. The children had been in Pinamar with the parents of some
school friends, and the nanny they had at the time had just suddenly handed in her notice. Alfredo said that he had gone to bed early with a pounding headache. Of course he hadn't said where, or with whom. She had believed him. That was the weekend of the club's most important golf tournament, and Alfredo wouldn't have missed it for the most seductive woman in the world. Or perhaps he would.

“Mark us down for one thousand, five hundred and seventy points. Who do we play next?” Carmen looked at the chart. She couldn't find the right place. The names of the different couples merged into one another. She noted down the figure. “You're with couple number nine, once they've finished playing on table ten,” she said uncertainly. Teresa, who had been watching her, took the chart on which she had jotted down the score. She crossed out the “three hundred” Carmen had written in. “Did you say one thousand, five hundred and seventy?” she asked the players before they left the table. Carmen stood up. Teresa was looking at her, but she could not explain what she was doing on her feet. Then she said, “I'm going outside to have a fag,” and she went out, taking her mobile and the credit card statement with her.

From the terrace opposite the ninth hole, she rang the hotel, claiming to be Mr Alfredo Insúa's secretary. “Mr Insúa says that the three hundred dollar total deducted from his card is incorrect and that he'd like a breakdown of the charges,” she lied. They told her that they would fax through a copy of the bill. Carmen gave her home number, then hung up and went back to sit with Teresa. “Everything OK?” her friend asked. “Yes, everything's great,” she replied.

A woman playing at the table by the window that looked onto the winter garden complained that her rivals were signalling to each other. The other pair got annoyed. There was an argument. Everybody watched, but no one intervened. Carmen rang Alfredo's mobile again. One of the women got up from the game and stormed off. This time the mobile did ring. The annoyed woman's partner tried to stop her leaving. Alfredo said “Hello,” but Carmen couldn't think what to say and hung up. Both women ended up leaving – the annoyed one and her partner. Alfredo was going to know that it had been her ringing. The abandoned players now came to the table. Carmen was alone, Teresa having left the tea room in order to organize the prize-giving.

“What incredible cheek those women had – did you see them? Put down that we won by a walk-over. You can get walk-overs in this, just like in tennis, can't you?” Carmen's phone rang and she answered it without responding to the woman. It was Alfredo. “Yes, it cut out – there must be a bad signal here.” Alfredo told her that he would be home late and that she shouldn't wait up for him. Carmen crossed off her chart the names of the couple who had left. “Yes, all right. I still have quite a lot to do here anyway, and then we'll have to count up the takings… Yes, it's gone really well…”

The winning ladies each went away with a necklace made of silver and zircons, donated by the Toledo jewellery shop. Everyone applauded, while Teresa and Carmen helped them to fasten the necklaces. The women posed for a photograph, one alone and one with the organizers. The tea seemed to go on for ever. Carmen called home and talked to the maid; this one had been with them for several months but, ever since
Alfredo had made her sack Gabina, who had always worked for her, she hadn't been able to find anyone as trustworthy and, for different reasons, none of them lasted long.

“Has anyone rung to ask for a fax signal?… OK… if they call and ask to send a fax, you stay beside the telephone and, as soon as the page has come through, you tear it off, fold it and put it in the drawer of my bedside table. Do you understand? OK, repeat that back to me, please.” The maid repeated her instructions. Carmen couldn't hear part of it because one of the participants had come to ask for some change she was owed. She hung up. She looked for the change. She was two pesos short. “That's fine, give it to the children's centre.”

Later on, the room was left empty and smelling of cigarette smoke. Two cleaning ladies were sweeping up and arranging the tables. Teresa and Carmen were counting up the money. Carmen's mobile rang. It was her maid; the fax had arrived, she had stayed beside the telephone while the paper came out – no, the children weren't there – she had torn the page off, folded it and put it in the drawer of the bedside table. Carmen hurriedly put their takings in the metal box and locked it. It was more than they had been expecting. A little more than her husband had spent that night in the hotel. “It's heartening to know that there are so many generous people around, isn't it?” said Teresa. “Yes,” she replied. “There are a lot of generous people around.”

They switched off the lights and went out. She was about to get into the car, then had an idea and went over to Teresa's car. “Do you want to go and get something to eat? Alfredo's back late tonight.”

1998 was the year of suspicious suicides. There was the man who had paid bribes to the Banco Nación, the navy captain who had brokered sales of weapons to Ecuador and that private mail empresario who had been photographed by the murdered photographer. None of these events had a direct impact on our lives, or on the life of The Heights, other than to draw the eye, briefly, of someone reading about them in a newspaper or watching them on the television news.

We had our own things to talk about. Like Ronie Guevara, for example. By now we all knew what Virginia would not acknowledge – just as a cuckolded husband is always the last to hear the news: Ronie was never going to contribute anything more to the family finances than a few very expensive pipe dreams. She was the bread-winner, and keeping her estate agency secret was damaging her prospects. People were apt to confuse her work with “favours” and, on more than one occasion, someone had expressed surprise, or even taken offence, when she tried to charge a commission. “I know the owner too, so why should I have to give you a commission?” they reasoned. One man, instead of paying her, turned up with a handbag made in his own factory, which came nowhere near covering Virginia's costs and was “really ugly, too”, in Teresa Scaglia's words. “When the moment comes to put money on the table, one's ‘friend' enters straight away into another category, for which I have yet to find an adequate name,” Virginia wrote later, in her red notebook.

The price of land was climbing in line with the economic euphoria of the 1990s, and Virginia wanted
a piece of that euphoria. Everyone wanted a piece. All of us speculated on how much the value of our houses was rising each day and how much higher it might go. When we multiplied the surface area of our homes by the value of a square foot, we experienced a euphoria unequalled by almost any other: the pleasure principle of an algorithm. Because we weren't planning to sell our houses to anyone. It was the maths alone, that simple multiplication, that caused us joy.

The time had come for Virginia to establish an official estate agency. Cascade Heights regulations forbid members to carry out any sort of commercial activity on the site itself and, although many do, it is on the tacit understanding that this be discreet. In places like this, envy leads to complaints, and complaints to penalties. To put a sign outside her house saying “Mavi Guevara, Estate Agency” would have breached the tacit agreement. On the other hand, operating discreetly was no longer enough for her. The solution was to put her sign up outside the perimeter fence, close enough to be seen by people who were coming to look for property in Cascade Heights, and for her to expand the business that way.

Ronie agreed with the plan, and at that time he could often be heard talking enthusiastically at gatherings of friends about the future of estate agency in the area and the growth potential of his wife's business. But that was as far as his commitment went: he did not accompany her in the search for premises that would help her “make the leap”. She got in the car and drove around the area scanning each block for the closest thing to a commercial lot she could find. All of us pass back and forth through these streets, at least once a day, but we
never pay attention to them until we need something from them. Now, for the first time ever, Virginia looked closely.

The area outside Cascade Heights' perimeter fence is quite different from a commercial neighbourhood. There are vacant lots, areas of wasteland. In some cases buildings have been abandoned half-built, then left to the ravages of time and dereliction, people carting away anything that could be useful to them. Three properties, all next to each other, have been deserted because of burglaries and maintenance costs which were too high to be justified by their infrequent use. Diagonally opposite the entrance to The Cascade, there is a small house owned by a young couple who could not afford to live inside the barrier. They built their home with an eye to the development they believed would transform the area around Cascade Heights (this has yet to take place) and in the shadow of a security guard booth which faced the other way but was nonetheless reassuring.

A little further down the road that leads to the highway, the neighbourhood of Santa María de los Tigrecitos begins. This district is characterized by simple, jerrybuilt houses, almost all of them made by the people who live in them – or by their relations or friends. Residents in this area depend on the work that we provide for them at Cascade Heights. The reports published by our Security Committee – which recommend supporting these neighbours – refer to it as a “satellite community”; their work opportunities fluctuate in line with the growth rate of our community and that, according to reports, directly affects our own security.

The houses in Santa María de los Tigrecitos spring up in as unruly a fashion as the shrubs in Cascade Heights,
but their disarray is not a matter of surreptitious design, as it is in our gardens. In Los Tigrecitos people do what they can: they throw up a house that bears no relation to the ones on either side; in some cases there is no relation even between one room and the next. You can make out the different stages of construction from outside: a window that was made after a room was finished, and which does not fit with the dividing wall; the upper floor that was built on top of what had originally been intended as a roof; the bathroom that could finally be accommodated, but without adequate ventilation. A railing might be painted violet and the wall beside it red, or bright blue. And next door there might be another house with unrendered brickwork. The more substantial houses have a parking area at the front and the humble ones make do with earth floors in every room, while their owners wait for the work that's going to pay for the cement.

There's a little market: a butcher, a baker, a bar with pool and table football. Santa María de Tigrecitos amounts to no more than six blocks on either side of a paved street which leads to the highway. We paid for this street ourselves through a supplementary charge on our expenses. On both sides of the street, the density and quality of the housing seem to evaporate the further you venture down its dirt side roads. Every so often the river, which is covered once it emerges from The Cascade, overflows, flooding the dirt roads.

On the main street leading to the highway, there are pavements, but not outside every house. They are not paid for by the municipality, but by the home-owners themselves, so some are broken and others have been repaired with slabs of different colours. Outside the
butcher's – next to the blackboard offering the kind of bargain cuts of meat that we in Cascade Heights never eat – the locals sit together on wooden benches to drink maté. On the next block there are more locals, apparently waiting for something. Or nothing. And more of them sit on the other side of the road. They're watching the cars go by. Some of them can tell immediately who is driving through, just from the model and number plate. “You drive a blue BMW 367, right?” said an assistant to the carpenter working for Eduardo Andrade – who immediately reported the comment to the Council of Administration, for consideration by the Cascade Heights Security Committee.

At the heart of the neighbourhood, by way of a civic centre, are the football pitch, the school and a chapel that belongs to the same parish as the chapel inside Cascade Heights, with the same priest presiding over mass. Further on is the Health Centre, which houses a vaccination clinic and crèche. And all over the place, sprouting willy-nilly like mushrooms after a rainfall, there are houses. And more houses. A lot of houses crammed into a small area. They are home to large families, one of whose number travels the ten blocks to our security barrier every day, to work within our confines as a gardener, caddie, domestic servant, builder, decorator or cook.