Thursday Night Widows (14 page)

The performance continued, after each game, on the terrace overlooking the tennis courts. Invariably the two men had a drink with their opponents and a chat. El Tano always paid, in spite of the losing party's protests that “he who loses buys the drinks”. The waiter who brought the drinks knew not to accept money from anyone other than El Tano Scaglia, who had given orders to that effect. An order from El Tano could not be disobeyed without consequences. While they waited for the drinks, El Tano exchanged his sweaty shirt for a dry one, and stretched against the wooden rail. Gustavo neither stretched nor changed his shirt but remained in a collapsed state in his chair, enjoying his victorious exhaustion. El Tano drank mineral water, and Gustavo, lemonade. And they talked about business: the sale of YPF to Repsol, cars to be bought and sold, the
extravagances of their wives, which they criticized, even though these served to demonstrate their own standing as high-end consumers. They talked about some tennis championship that might be taking place somewhere in the world, or about the ATP ranking. But El Tano always seemed more involved in the conversation than his partner. While Gustavo was physically present, it was clear that his mind was often elsewhere. Every now and then his eyes glazed over and, if someone pointed this out, he put it down to tiredness. But it wasn't that. It seemed that something was troubling Gustavo, that he was assailed by thoughts leading him to a dark place. At that time, none of us knew where. Nor did we even suspect that there was anything wrong. In The Cascade it's not unusual to know nothing about your neighbour, the person he was before coming to live here, or even the person he is now, in private, behind closed doors. Not even El Tano really knew about Gustavo. Nor Gustavo about El Tano.

Martín Urovich nearly always joined them on the terrace for a chat. Martín had been El Tano's partner before Gustavo arrived at Cascade Heights, and had taken his displacement in good part; he just wasn't on their level. It wasn't a question of playing style, but of the need to win. El Tano and Gustavo needed to win, and so they won – they were programmed for it. Martín Urovich was “programmed to fail”, as his wife once yelled at him, in front of some of us. But that was quite a lot later, when time had gone by and Martín was still without work, when Lala had convinced herself that he would never get any, and it was very close to that Thursday in September that we never talk about, unless someone asks us about it.

The Uroviches come from one of the founding families of Cascade Heights. Martín Urovich is the son of Julio Urovich and, in his day, when this was no more than a chunk of land divided up among friends, nobody ever asked about anyone else's religion. It was “Julio Urovich”, full stop. But as time went on, although no one ever acknowledged the fact, religion became another factor to take into account when considering the application of new members to The Cascade. This must be one of the few things I have never dared to write down in my red notebook: some of my neighbours do not welcome Jews. I've never written it down, but I have always been aware of it, which makes me complicit. It's not that they openly denigrate them, but if someone makes a joke, even quite a harsh one, they laugh and applaud the humour. For a long time perhaps I, too, failed to see the serious side. I'm not Jewish. Nor am I Korean. Only when Juani started to have problems did I get an inkling of what it might be like to look different in other people's eyes.

After so many years here, the Uroviches have come to occupy a fundamental role in our gated community: they are those Jewish friends that prove our liberal credentials. Anyway, Martín had married Lala Montes Ávila, a country-club girl all her life, from a Catholic family – so Catholic, in fact, that several of their friends in the community, on discovering that she was marrying the Uroviches' son, commiserated with her parents instead of congratulating them. “Don't go against her wishes, or it will be worse.” “If you let her have her way, they'll probably fall out in a couple of months and this will all be
water under the bridge.” “Send her to study in the United States.” “Come down on her like a ton of bricks.”

But Lala and Martín got married and nobody said anything else on the matter, at least not in public.

The very afternoon that I closed the deal with the Ferreres, I knew the thing was doomed. I had left them in the clubhouse; they looked happy and they wanted to have a drink and spend a bit more time in Cascade Heights, the place they had chosen to make their home. I went home, also feeling happy, mentally calculating the exact sum that was owing to me in commission. I had just sold them a half-acre corner plot, which had been put on the market by the Espadiñeiros when they decided to get divorced. Beside the Laforgues' house. As I stepped into the house, the telephone rang. It was Lila Laforgue, a woman of about sixty who lived permanently in Cascade Heights, a “life member” as she liked to style herself (somewhat pretentiously, given that we all knew that their house and club shares were in her name because her husband was disqualified and suspected of bankruptcy fraud). “Tell me, are they from the
old country
?”

This term threw me. In a free association of ideas my mind raced from “old country” to “gauchos” and from “gauchos” to “peasants”, “ranchers”, “cows”, “bulls”, “The Argentine Rural Society”, “tractor”, “horses”…

“Russians, Virginia, are they Russians?”

Then “Russians” brought me sharply back down to earth.

“You mean from the Russian community?” I asked her.

“Because, it's not that I have anything in particular against them – after all, we're great friends of the
Uroviches – but it's the
density
that worries us. In a few years this is going to look like a kibbutz. And right next to our house.”

“I don't think so – they're called Ferrere.”

“Sephardics. I knew a Paz who was one, a Varela who was one. They trick you with those surnames and they end up making you look a fool.”

I risked an interruption. “They seem like lovely people – a young couple with a little boy.”

“Yes, I saw them. She looks like one of those Russians who've come down in the world. Tell me, does that percentage rule no longer apply?”

Years ago, in Cascade Heights, when the place still functioned more as a weekend country club than as a permanent residence, there was a ruling that limited the representation of any one ethnic group to ten per cent of our total community. Any ethnic group. Apparently Julio Urovich himself was on the Council when the ruling was passed, though I never dared ask him about it. In other words, if the numbers corresponding to one specific group exceeded ten per cent, the next person from that community who wanted to join Cascade Heights would have to be rejected. The explicit objective of the ruling was to prevent the club being converted into the “exclusive domain” of one predominant group. In practice, the only applicants rejected at the time were Jewish. Representatives of the black, Japanese and Chinese communities (to name distinctive racial groups) had never reached their ten per cent, or anywhere near it. And I don't think anyone had ever been asked if they were Muslim, Buddhist or Anglican. I certainly wasn't. But, for whatever reason, at some point in the history of Cascade Heights, the decision had been revoked.

“Are you
sure
it was revoked?” persisted Lilita. “Why does no one tell us about these things? Isn't there a selection committee, or something? There should be. I don't mean just for the Jews. I don't like discrimination, generally speaking, but it would be good to be able to have a bit of choice about who comes in. These aren't vertical properties, where one only ever meets someone in the lift. Here one shares many things, there's more integration and I don't want to integrate with people I would not naturally consider as friends. Do you understand? I'm not saying they're good or bad, but they aren't people I would choose. And I have a right to choose, don't I? This is a free country.”

She waited for me to say something and, when I didn't, she carried on: “I'm sure that in other clubs there is some sort of mechanism for selection. Even if they pretend otherwise. They'll tell you it's natural selection, but it's not. Go and look on the registers to see if you can find an Isaac or a Judith.”

“An Isaac or a Judith”. Here we have a Julio Urovich and his descendents; Paladinn's wife, who I think is called Silberberg, the Libermans and the Feigelmans. But not in other clubs, it's true. I have friends, colleagues from other estate agencies, who work in some of the other private neighbourhoods Lilita mentioned, and they tell me what goes on. When someone with a Jewish surname arrives in the office, the first thing they do is discourage them, to save everyone – buyers and sellers alike – from embarrassment later on. They walk them past the community's chapel, even if it's not en route, and they tell them that all the local children go to some or other Catholic school. They show them houses that are either unsuitable or beyond their budget. If necessary, they
resort to using phrases such as “this is a secular club, of course, but the great majority of the families here are Catholic”. It gets complicated when the clients have a mixed marriage and it's the woman who's Jewish. The thing tends to go unnoticed until the time comes to sign contracts. By then my colleagues have been busy spending their commissions, partying and bragging, and it's only when they're finishing up the paperwork that they spot the woman's name and realize they've lost something they never really had. Then they have to decide whether to carry on, and see the sale rejected at the last moment with various excuses, or to tell their clients the ugly truth upfront. Almost nobody opts for the truth; instead they allow events to take their own course after the official version of the rejection, which is always ambiguous, acknowledging no blame. But you can never be one hundred per cent sure beforehand. Who would dare to ask a potential client, “Excuse me, sir, is your wife a Jew?” Sometimes there are indications one way or another: silver crosses, Basque rosaries, the choice of children's names, the number of children, the schools at which they're planning to register them. And there are always people with a sixth sense for these things – predators, like Lila Laforgue.

“It's Litman, not Pitman… it's with ‘l' for… for Laura,” Señora Ferrere explained to me on contract day. “Laura Judith Litman,” she clarified.

I wrote down Litman without looking up. I felt heat rising in my face while the words ran through my mind: “Neither an Isaac, nor a Judith”. It was shame that prompted my embarrassment. “I'm really happy to be coming to live at Cascade Heights,” she said, obliging me to meet her eye. She smiled at me.

Some months later Lila Laforgue rang me again. “I told you they were from the old country.”

“Oh really?” I pretended not to understand.

“I saw the boy playing in the pool, naked. He's got a cut-off willy.”

They call her for dinner a hundred times, but she doesn't go down.
Ramona
doesn't go down, because that's what she calls herself, even if they have changed it to “Romina”. Not on her identity card – they couldn't change that. But they registered her for school as Romina Andrade. Everyone calls her Romina. Except for Juani, because she asked him not to. She told him that, when she was born, she was given the name Ramona by her mother, whose face she can scarcely remember now. Juani has dubbed her “Rama”, a hybrid that can go unheeded by the woman who insists on being called “mummy”. She obviously likes calling things by the wrong name, thinks Romina. I am not Romina, and Mariana is not my mother. Both of them know as much, even though Mariana obliges her to answer “yes, Mummy” and “no, Mummy”. She won't allow her simply to answer “yes” or “no”, like other children, or to shake her head. Mariana finally elicited her complete answer by dint of a physical blow. But the beating is not what hurts her most. It pains her more to think that they have stolen Pedro from her. Pedro no longer knows who “Ramona” is. Nor does he want her to tell him anything about what she remembers – it even annoys him. “Don't lie to me any more, sis,” he says, and runs out kicking his rugby ball. And she loves
him all the same, more than anything in the world, even if he does not know who he really is.

If Romina kept a diary, she would not write in it every day, she's sure of that. A daily diary would be deathly boring because, in this place, there are days when nothing whatsoever happens: “I got up, I had breakfast with the woman who adopted me, who was going to a tennis tournament, she told me that she was taking two rackets in case her powerful passing shot broke one of the strings, I had two tests then a free period, I felt ill in the third break, I went home with Valeria's mum, who had also played in the same tournament with my ‘mother' (whose racket string had, in fact, broken immediately), but who came home earlier because she was knocked out in the quarter finals, I watched television, my little brother pissed me off, I had supper alone in my room, I went to bed, end.”

Nobody wastes time writing about nothing. That is what Romina does not want. Nothingness. She isn't sure what she wants, but she knows it's not that. “Let someone else write about nothing.” And at fourteen, or fifteen (the judge could not establish her actual date of birth), she already knows that telling is not the same as living. It is harder to tell. Life gets lived, full stop. To tell, you must be able to order things and that is what she lacks, the ability to order internally her ideas, the things that happen to her. Fortunately she has Antonia to order her room. But she feels that the rest of her life is a mess. She feels that she is sitting on a time bomb. And a time bomb must, one day, explode.