Thursday Night Widows (2 page)

“Who jumped in?” I asked.

There was no answer and the truth was that I didn't really care who had jumped in, but I cared about the
silence, which was like a wall I kept banging into every time I tried to get closer. Tired of making futile efforts, I decided to go downstairs. Not because I was annoyed, but because it was obvious that Ronie wasn't with me at all, but across the street, throwing himself into the pool with his friends. While I was still at the top of the stairs, the jazz that was wafting over from El Tano's house stopped, right in the middle of a riff, breaking it off.

I went down to the kitchen and rinsed out my glass for longer than was necessary, my head filling up again with more thoughts than it had room for. Juani was on my mind, not Ronie, no matter what distraction methods I used to avoid thinking about him. Like those people who count sheep to get to sleep, I focused on work that was pending at the estate agency: whom I was going to take to see the Gómez Pardo house; how I was going to secure finances for the Canetti sale; that deposit I had forgotten to charge the Abrevayas. Then up again popped Juani – not Ronie. Juani, in even sharper focus. I dried the glass and put it away, then took it out again and filled it with water; I was going to need something to help me sleep that night. Something to knock me out. There must be a pill in my medicine cabinet that would do the trick. Fortunately I had no time to take anything, because just then I heard hurried footsteps, a shout and the dry, hard thud of something striking the decking. I ran out and found my husband lying on the ground covered in blood and with one of his leg bones protruding through the skin. I went dizzy, as though everything around me were spinning, but I knew I must get a grip on myself because I was alone and I had to look after him, and thank goodness I hadn't taken anything because I was going to have to make a
tourniquet – and I didn't know how to do that – to tie a rag somehow, a clean towel, to staunch the blood and then call an ambulance; no, not an ambulance because they take too long – better to go straight to the hospital and leave a note for Juani: “Daddy and I have gone to do something but we'll be back very soon. If you need me, call the mobile. Everything's fine. I hope you are too, love Mummy.”

While I was dragging him towards the car, Ronie cried out in pain, and the cry galvanized me.

“Virginia, take me to El Tano's!” he shouted. I ignored this, believing him to be delirious, and somehow I manhandled him into the back of the car.

“Take me to El Tano's, for fuck's sake!” he shouted again before passing out (from the pain, they said later in the hospital – but that wasn't it). I drove fast and badly, ignoring the speed bumps and signs that said “Slow down. Children playing.” I didn't even stop when I saw Juani bolting across a side street with no shoes on. Romina was behind him. As if they were running away from something – those two are always running away from something, I thought. And forgetting their roller blades somewhere or other. Juani is always losing his stuff. But I could not start thinking about Juani. Not that night. On the way to the entrance gate, Ronie woke up. Still woozy, he looked out of the window, trying to see where he was, but seemingly unable to make sense of things. He wasn't shouting any more. Two streets before leaving The Cascade we passed Teresa Scaglia's SUV.

“Was that Teresa?” Ronie asked.

“Yes.”

Ronie clutched his head and began to cry, softly at first, a kind of lamentation which grew into stifled
sobbing. I saw him in the rear-view mirror, curled up in pain. I spoke to him, trying to calm him, but this proved impossible, so I resigned myself to the litany, just as one resigns oneself to a gradually encroaching pain, or to conversations full of empty words.

By the time we arrived at the hospital, I was no longer paying attention to my husband's weeping. But it continued nonetheless.

“Why are you crying like this?” asked the duty doctor. “Is it very painful?”

“I'm scared,” replied Ronie.

The Scaglias' house may not have been the best in Cascade Heights, but Virginia always said that it was the one that most caught the eye of her clients at the estate agency. And if anyone knew about the best and worst houses in the neighbourhood, it was her. Tano's house was unarguably one of the largest in our gated community (we liked to call it a “country club”), and therein lay the difference. Lots of us were secretly envious of it. The exterior boasted pointed brickwork, black slate roof tiles in various tones and white woodwork. Inside, arranged over two levels, were six bedrooms and eight bathrooms, not including the maid's room. Thanks to the architect's contacts, the house had been featured in two or three decor magazines. On the top floor there was a home theatre and, next to the kitchen, a family room with rattan furniture and a table made from wood and oxidized metal. The living room looked onto the swimming pool
and if one sat in the sand-coloured armchairs which faced the wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor window, one had the impression of being outside on the wooden deck that extended from the veranda.

In the garden, each shrub had been positioned with careful regard to its colour, height, bulk and movement. “It's like my calling card,” said Teresa, who had abandoned graphology shortly after she moved to Cascade Heights in order to take up landscape gardening. And, even though she did not need to work, she was always on the hunt for new clients, as if their conquest signified much more to her than simply a new garden to tend. In her own garden, there were no dried-up or diseased plants, nothing that had grown by chance because a seed blew in and landed there, no ants' nests or slugs. Her lawn was like an immaculate carpet, intensely green, with no changes in hue. An imaginary line, an exact point at which the grass changed colour, marked the end of the Scaglias' garden and the beginning of the golf course: the seventeenth hole. The view from the house was completed by a bunker to the left and to the right a “hazard” – an artificial pool of glassy water.

That night, Teresa had entered the house through the door from the garage. She didn't need to use keys: in Cascade Heights we never lock the doors. She says that she was puzzled not to hear her husband and his friends – our friends – laughing as usual. Drunken laughter. And she was pleased not to have to go and say hello; she was too tired to smile at the same old jokes, she said. Every Thursday the men got together to have dinner and play cards, and for a long time it had been traditional for the wives to go to the cinema. Except for Virginia, who had bowed out some time ago, with different sorts of excuses
which no one bothered to analyse too much; quietly we all attributed her absence to money problems. The Scaglia children were not at home either, that night. Matías was spending the night at the Floríns' house, and Sofía – much against her will, but at her father's insistence – had gone to stay with her maternal grandparents. And it was the maid's day off. El Tano himself had said that she should have Thursdays free so that there would be nobody in the house to bother him and his friends, interrupting their card game for whatever reason.

Teresa went upstairs, dreading to find the men sleeping off an excess of wine and champagne in the home theatre, while pretending to watch a film or some sporting event. They were not there, however, which meant that there was no risk of running into them on the way to her room. The house felt deserted. She was intrigued, rather than worried. Her husband's friends must be somewhere nearby, she thought, unless they had left on foot; pulling into the drive, she had had to avoid Gustavo Masotta and Martín Urovich's SUVs, parked outside her house. Now she leaned over the balcony and, in the darkness, she thought she could see some towels on the wooden deck. September was barely over, but it was a pleasant night and, now that El Tano had installed a boiler to heat the water, the usual quandaries regarding swimming and weather no longer applied. No doubt they had sobered up in the pool and were getting dressed in the changing room. So, because she did not feel like thinking about it any more, she put on her night dress and got into bed.

At four o'clock in the morning she woke up alone. The left side of the bed was undisturbed. She walked
to the front of the house and, through the window, saw that the SUVs were still there. The house was still silent. She went downstairs and into the living room and confirmed that what she had seen from the balcony were towels and T-shirts lying on the deck. But there were no lights on around the pool, and it was hard to make anything else out. She went to the family room; there was nothing unusual here: empty bottles, ashtrays full of butts, cards strewn across the table, as though the game had only recently ended. Next she went down to the pool house and in the changing room she found the men's clothes lying on a bench; some scrunched-up underpants were lying on the floor; one sock without its mate was hanging from a tap in the shower. Only El Tano had neatly folded his clothes and left them at one end of the bench, beside his shoes. They couldn't have gone for a walk at this time of night in their swimming trunks, she thought. Then she went towards the swimming pool. She tried to put on the lights, but they were not working in this area, as if the circuit breaker had cut in, she thought, but later she found out that it had been the thermal overload trip, not the circuit breaker. The water was calm. She felt the towels and realized that they had not been used – they were slightly damp to the touch, but otherwise dry. Three empty champagne flutes, arranged in a row at the edge of the pool, caught her off-guard. Not because the men had been drinking there – they drank all over the place – but because these were the crystal glasses from her wedding set, the ones that El Tano's father had given them and which El Tano himself reserved for very special occasions. Teresa moved to pick them up, before they could be toppled by the morning breeze or by a cat or frog. If it weren't
for this sort of accident of nature, life at the Cascade would be almost free of risks. That was what we used to believe.

Teresa barely glanced at the still water as she collected the glasses. Two of them knocked together as she picked them up, and the ringing sound of crystal made her shudder. She examined them to make sure they were not broken. And she walked back to the house. She walked slowly, taking care not to let the glasses knock against each other again, and oblivious to the knowledge that the rest of us would learn about the next day: beneath the warm water, sinking to the bottom of the pool, were the bodies of her husband and his friends, and all three of them were dead.

Cascade Heights is the neighbourhood where we live. All us lot. Ronie and Guevara moved here first, just before the Uroviches; El Tano came a few years later; Gustavo Masotta was one of the last to arrive. As time went on, we became neighbours. Our neighbourhood is a gated community, ringed by a perimeter fence that is concealed behind different kinds of shrub. It's called The Cascade Heights Country Club. Most of us shorten the name to “The Cascade” and a few people call it “The Heights”. It has a golf course, tennis courts, swimming pool and two club houses. And private security. Fifteen security guards working shifts during the day, and twenty-two at night. That's more than five hundred acres of land, accessible only to us or to people authorized by one of us.

There are three ways to enter our neighbourhood. If you're a member, you can open a barrier at the main gate by swiping a personalized magnetic card across an electronic reader. There's a side entrance, also with a barrier, for visitors who have received prior authorization and can supply certain information, such as identity card number, car registration number and other identifying numbers. For tradesmen, domestic staff, gardeners, painters, builders and all other labourers, there's a turnstile where ID cards have to be presented, and bags and car boots are checked. All along the perimeter, at fifty-yard intervals, there are cameras which can turn through one hundred and eighty degrees. There used to be cameras that could turn three hundred and sixty degrees, but they were invading the privacy of some members whose houses were close to the perimeter fence, so a few years ago they were deactivated, then replaced.

The houses are separated from one another by “living fences” – bushes, in other words. But these are not any old bushes. Privet is out of fashion, along with that erstwhile favourite, the violet campanula that grows by railway lines. There are none of those straight, trimmed hedges that look like green walls. Definitely no round ones. The hedges are cut to look uneven, just this side of messy, giving them a natural appearance that is meticulously contrived. At first glance, these plants seem to have sprung up spontaneously between the neighbours, rather than to have been placed deliberately, to demarcate properties. Such boundaries may be insinuated only with plants. Wire fencing and railings are not permitted, let alone walls. The only exception is the six foot-high perimeter fence which
is the responsibility of the Club's administration and which is shortly going to be replaced by a wall, in line with new security regulations. Gardens that back onto the golf course may not be contained on that side even by a living fence; close to the boundary, you can make out where the gardens end because the type of grass changes but, from a distance, the gaze is lost in an endless green vista and it is possible to believe that everything belongs to you.

The streets are named after birds: Swallow, Mockingbird, Blackbird. The grid lay-out typical of most Argentine towns does not apply here. There are lots of cul-de-sacs, ending in little landscaped roundabouts. These dead-end streets are more popular than the others because they have less traffic and are quieter. We'd all love to live in a cul-de-sac. Outside a gated community, it would be hair-raising to have to walk down that sort of street, especially at night; you'd be afraid of being attacked, or ambushed. But not in The Cascade – that wouldn't be possible; you can walk wherever you like, at any hour, safe in the knowledge that nothing bad will happen to you.