Thursday Night Widows (11 page)

It was in the block next to the Health Centre that Virginia spotted a small unit, once a video club. In its window there was a hand-made sign contrived out of an old poster for a Stallone film, on which someone had added a blue moustache and the words: “For Rent”. Its size and state of repair made it a viable option for her agency. Some people say she gave it serious thought, that
she came close to leaving her contact details. But Teresa Scaglia made her reconsider. “Do you really think that someone with the kind of car we drive is going to stop there and dare to get out?” Any one of us would have given similar advice. Perhaps in a more roundabout way, employing a few euphemisms, or dropping our voices, for we are less brazen than Teresa Scaglia. But it was obvious that that place wasn't going to work. It's unusual for anyone from Cascade Heights to stop off in Santa María de los Tigrecitos. Generally we get out of there as fast as the speed bumps will allow. The people who live there use the shops; not us. If we keep our distance, it is because of the dirt streets, the lack of adequate parking places and, above all, the distance from the security booth at the entrance to Cascade Heights. Every day you hear about robberies in Santa María de los Tigrecitos. Some people say that they steal from each other. They themselves say that the thieves come from outside the area. Hard to know for sure.

In the end, Virginia's problem was resolved by a stroke of luck. The husband of the woman who lived in the cottage diagonally opposite the entrance gate, with its back to the security post, walked out on her and their three small children. The woman opted to move in with her mother and Virginia rented the cottage from her at a minimal rate, on the understanding that she would quit it as soon as a buyer turned up. A buyer that she herself would procure, as soon as she found a more suitable venue for her estate agency. The cottage was habitable, with an acceptable kitchen, two rooms that she would ignore for the moment and the living/dining room in which she would install the office. A desk, three chairs, a sofa, a rattan table that Teresa Scaglia wasn't
using and gave to her, and a wardrobe with drawers, which she converted into a filing cabinet. A rug that she no longer used at home and a pair of ethnic vases gave the office a “Cascade feel”. Before moving in, she replaced the burned-out bulbs, got the office painted white and exchanged the old oven for a portable stove. The only thing she was unable to change before her launch day was the front door, which was wooden, heavy and so swollen from damp that it would only ever close if you kicked it.

Finally, just as people had given up thinking it possible, a suitable rival appeared for El Tano Scaglia: Gustavo Masotta. He pulled up outside my newly opened business, opposite the entrance to The Cascade, after hours, and found me kicking the hell out of the warped front door to make it close. My method was to aim a sharp knock at the latch and a kick at the base, almost simultaneously, and next to turn the key, which would then move smoothly in the lock, as though the difficulty had never existed. It was a daily ritual, performed automatically and so often that I now hardly cared about the carpenter not turning up to shave off the excess wood. In a way I quite enjoyed it, in the same way that it can be enjoyable to recognize a defect in oneself and to keep it secret from everyone, hoodwinking them.

Up until that afternoon, the deception had worked well – I had been careful not to kick the door in front of any clients. So I felt really peeved when I became aware of Gustavo Masotta's presence. I first saw him
when he came forwards to help me pick up some things I had left on the ground, in order to dedicate myself more comfortably to the door ritual. My red notebook, a pile of folders, my mobile, some loose papers, the keys for houses that were up for sale or rent, envelopes containing my own and my clients' amenities bills, hand cream (I hate to have dry hands) and a yogurt that I hadn't had time to eat. All this clobber amounted to a fairly accurate display of my habitual disorganization. Neglecting preliminaries, I said, “It's warped,” and pointed at the door. He didn't say hello either. “I need to rent a house for a year or two,” he said, picking up my things from the ground.

“An estate agent's commission, no matter how small, should be so desirable, fortuitous and unforeseeable a prize that it merits working out of hours” – that's what is says in my red notebook, under the chapter heading: “Commissions and other Headaches”. However, that afternoon I had an appointment at Juani's school and I had been worrying about it all day. At the end of the last term they had been reluctant to let me register him for the next academic year. Juani was going into the eighth grade, but the school psychologist felt that he was less ready than his classmates. She had been vague about this, not saying exactly in what respect he was different. I believe that that episode of the drawing showing Fernández Luengo on top of his dog (some years old now) still counted against him in the files. Although she would never have dared mention that. I should have listened to Ronie at the time. He had insisted that we ought to go to the school and tell the truth of the matter, but I hadn't wanted that. What Fernández Luengo got up to in his own house was his business
and there was no justification in Juani spying on him through the window. That's what I said to Ronie. But it wasn't the whole story. I was scared. I knew that it would be no small thing to fall out with my neighbour. On the index card for his house I had written his name in red letters. He was a powerful lawyer, one of the country's top authorities on contraband. On how to avoid imprisonment for dealing in contraband. He knew everyone important at Customs and Excise and at the Federal Courts. I feared that he could do something to harm us, if he found out about what our son had done. I didn't know what that might be – I mean, I don't even shop in Duty Free – but I was scared, all the same. He could slander me and make it impossible for me to sell any more houses in The Cascade. Or he could talk down Ronie and sabotage the few business possibilities he had. Or he could invent something terrible about Juani: make a victimizer of the victim. I persuaded Ronie not to say anything. In any case, there was no fear of Juani ever repeating the incident. We had taken pains to explain the consequences. “If you ever draw anyone starkers again – I don't care who – I'll break your nose,” said Ronie. And we moved him into another bedroom, smaller, but overlooking our garden. That episode aside, there were no concrete reasons not to let us enrol Juani for another year. His Spanish grades may not have been brilliant, but they didn't deserve this punishment. In English he had problems only with geography and history. I must confess that I hadn't paid much attention to that: I never realized that knowing which king succeeded which other one in England, or what the climate is like in Northern Ireland, could be so vital to his development. But exclusion from
this school certainly would matter, because, for better or worse, it meant exclusion from the world that we inhabited. Technically, they could not make him retake the year because he had passed in Spanish, so, after much beating around the bush, they suggested I move him to another school “so that neither you nor he have to suffer the sacrifice of making him study during the holidays”. Neither Ronie nor I agreed with that. We made him study English geography and history all summer long. He refused to have a tutor but got help from Romina – the Andrades' daughter – who, to her mother's surprise, was one of the brightest among the girls. They had become good friends since she first appeared in the neighbourhood and at school. “Birds of a feather flock together,” the mother said to me one day and I wasn't bold enough to ask her to explain the comment.

The day that Gustavo Masotta appeared at the door of my office, I was on my way to a meeting to get a final answer on the re-enrolment. I had been waiting for this answer more anxiously than for the closing of any property deal. I realized that the fact I had often been late with school fees was not going to help my case. But I always had paid in the end, and with interest.

“I'll wait for you,” Masotta said.

“The thing is, I don't know how long the meeting will take,” I said. In fact I was not so much worried by how long it would be than by the mood I might be in when I returned. My temper is not particularly good, but it is predictable. I was not about to accept that Juani should change school; I already felt somewhat different to our friends, and I didn't want to widen the gap. Lakelands boasted that it could “guarantee the best English of any
school in the area”. I wanted Juani to speak English just as well as all the other children who lived around us – and they all went to Lakelands. I've often asked myself if Ronie's difficulty in re-entering the work market has something to do with his lack of fluency in English. I didn't speak a word of it either, but then it wasn't necessary for selling houses. And I did not want my son to end up selling houses. It was fine for me – I liked it – but not for Juani. For Juani I had imagined a different future – I didn't know what, but something different to mine.

Gustavo passed me the last folder. He had bitten fingernails, which did not chime with an otherwise well-groomed appearance. The side of his thumb was even bleeding, as though he had just pulled off a hangnail.

“Honestly, I can wait. I need to resolve this matter.” I wondered what he meant by “this matter”. It didn't sound as though he were talking merely about renting a house. But my matter mattered to me more.

“Why don't we meet at the weekend? It's practically dark now and Cascade Heights looks so much better in daytime. Artificial light doesn't do justice to this place; it's truly unique.” I passed him my card, giving him no option but to postpone our meeting to a more convenient time. Then I got into the car and drove off.

I realized that I had probably lost a client, but if I didn't lose him then, I would doubtless lose him when I returned, raging that anyone should call attention to my imperfections, or those for which I was responsible: my son's imperfections. Over time the consequences of those imperfections had turned my rage to pain – not emotional pain but a real, physical pain, a stabbing
sensation in the middle of my chest, as though my sternum were about to split down the middle.

As I drove off, I saw my potential client in the car's rear-view mirror. He was still there, standing outside my office, moving his hand over his face in a particular way, as if he were also enraged, and by something greater than my refusal to give him an appointment. Then the road followed a bend towards Lakelands, and I could see him no longer.

The whole thing took an hour and a half. They made me wait, then spoke for longer than I had anticipated. It turned out that Juani had passed the exams they had set him – I was about to punch the air, then I heard the word “but”. Juani was an average boy, they said, and the level of the rest of the class was so high that they thought the demands on him were going to be too great, “because at this school the regime in eighth grade is arduous and the pace very demanding and there is no individual help available at this stage. They're not little any more. We look for individual effort; if you can take the pace, all well and good. If not, you're better off in a less demanding environment. It's like a form of natural selection that we allow to operate, do you understand?”

And I understood.

“We don't want to have to take into account a child's difference from the others in order for him to succeed; we're looking for parity across the board,” said the headmistress, smiling.

“I'd like Juani to try it,” I pressed on.

“I don't know if that's for the best…”

“Nobody can know until he does it, and I think he should have the chance.”

“I disagree.”

Then I got angry. “Put your disagreement and the reasons for it in writing and I won't ask for anything else. I'd like to have something formal that I can show… wherever.”

The headmistress approved our re-enrolment. I hurried out of the meeting, anxious to tell Ronie that they had allowed his son to remain in the school. But I couldn't find my mobile. When I arrived at the entrance to The Cascade, a guard stopped me. “That gentleman has been waiting for you.” And he pointed in the direction of Gustavo Masotta. “He says he found your mobile, but he didn't want to leave it with me. He'd prefer to give it you in person.”

I parked and got out of the car. In the distance, Gustavo held up the mobile and waved it for me to see. It was mine. “Right after you'd gone I turned round and nearly stepped on it. It was on the pavement. You must have left it there while you closed the door.” And he imitated my kicking ritual. “I didn't know if it was safe to leave it in the guards' room.”

“If it's not safe then we can't be too clever: we pay those people a fortune. I'm sorry that you had to go to all that trouble.”

There was a pause. Both of us seemed to be waiting for the other's next move. Finally he spoke: “Right, well, we'll be seeing each other at the weekend, no?”

I showed him what he wanted to see that same night. I was in a good mood, thanks to Juani's re-enrolment; besides, he had waited more than an hour and a half to give me back my mobile and I felt that the least I could do was show him around a couple of houses and take the edge off his ill-disguised urgency. I suspected that
he was recently separated and looking for a new place to bed down. It's rare for separated people to choose to live in The Cascade, unless they have children and don't know what to do with them at the weekend. Or if it's a separated woman who has been left to fend for herself in the house which is defined as “the former matrimonial home”. Single people don't tend to choose our neighbourhood. There's no doubt that The Cascade can be an isolating place and that's not necessarily a bad thing – quite the opposite, sometimes. But one has to acknowledge its distance from other worlds: for some people that may be its greatest virtue, while for others it can become a nightmare.