Thursday Night Widows (19 page)

“We agreed on six the other day,” Lala replied. When the vet had nearly finished filling in the credit-card slip, Lala interrupted him. “No, wait a minute. What food should I be taking for this little darling?” The vet emerged from behind the counter, approached one of the shelves and pointed out the food recommended for the dog's breed and size. Lala followed him, while Carla waited at the counter. “And how long will one of these bags last me?”

“About three weeks.”

“Right, put two bags on the card too.” She went back to stand beside Carla. “You don't know how much these animals can eat.”

“No, I don't know,” Carla answered, thinking that Gustavo had better not find out that he was also financing the animal's food. Ariel plunged back among the shelves, surfacing by the tropical fish tank.

“Right, now we're ready,” said Lala to the vet, who tallied up the sums on his pocket calculator.

“Altogether, that's five hundred and eighty – could you sign here, please.” The man gave Lala the slip and she passed it to Carla. Carla signed.

“I can't wait to see Ariana's face when she gets home from school today!” Carla smiled and put her card away. The vet continued: “So, for forty-five days, no going outside, to avoid distemper.” Lala listened, all ears.

Carla interrupted: “I can go now, right?”

“Yes, you've already signed, haven't you?” Carla nodded. “Off you go then, Carli. See you soon.” Just as Carla was leaving the shop, Lala shouted from the counter: “And thanks, eh?” Carla made an effort to smile again. She looked for Ariel, to wave goodbye. But the boy didn't see her; he was standing, hand in pockets, in a corner, watching a hamster endlessly running on its wheel.

The day that Carla Masotta turned up at the agency happened to coincide with one of the worst days of my life. I had just come from an exchange of contracts, which should have made me happy, given that I had not
been able to finalize a deal for months now, and that commission was going to be a lifeline in the stormy waters to come. It was the autumn of 2001. Paco Pérez Ayerra had sold his house and rented another through my agency. He had financial problems or, rather, his company had financial problems. The economy minister had resigned and the new one appointed by the president had lasted only fifteen days. He made a speech, he asked for belt-tightening, he made a trip to Chile and, when he came back – no more job. The president had replaced him with the bald guy who had been the previous president's economy minister. This guy was now the leader of a rebellious breakaway party, making his affiliations as a minister rather unclear. I remember Paco saying that baldy's return would probably bring about change, because people abroad trusted him. All the same he preferred to have no registered assets against which claims could be made if it came to that. Citing “
force majeure
”, he insisted that only the buyer, not he, should pay a commission on the sale of his house – an argument which, of course, I could not accept. “This is how I make a living, Paco,” to which he answered, “that's not my problem.” Finally, grudgingly, we both agreed that he pay half the usual rate. But what really annoyed me wasn't that loss, but the fact that, while he was counting out the notes and writing down the serial numbers of the dollars as he received them from Nane, Paco put to one side all the oldest, most torn and dirty notes, until he had enough to meet my fee. Then he used those notes to pay me. “Right, is that all sorted then?” said Nane. “We can't let money cause any bad blood between us, can we?”

And I answered: “Everything's sorted, Nane,” while I put her husband's dirty notes away in my wallet.

Carla came into the office looking determined, but you could tell she was nervous. She sat down opposite me while I finished a phone conversation, without removing her dark glasses. I was talking to Teresa Scaglia, not yet knowing why she had called, because she kept going round in circles without saying anything.

“Yes, someone's just come in, but that's OK – carry on.”

Teresa thought it better to postpone the conversation. “I'll speak to you when you aren't so busy,” she said. Carla fidgeted in her chair. Her legs were crossed and she kept swinging the top one, involuntarily jogging the table. “If you like,” I said and hung up. I looked at Carla and smiled.

“I'm almost an architect,” she said. And I foolishly said “Well done, you,” because I didn't know what was intended by her visit or her observation, and I didn't want her to feel more uncomfortable than she was already.

“I need to work, I need to get out of the house, to have a project.” I said nothing. “I need you to give me a hand,” she managed to finish, before her voice broke. The telephone rang. I answered it: it was Teresa again.

“No, I'm still with the… client… but go ahead and tell me – if it's something important.” She didn't want to, repeating that she would ring later. Apologizing, I returned my attention to Carla. “And how can I help you?”

“I thought perhaps I could work with you in the agency.”

For her to propose this in a year when property sales had all but ground to a halt – notwithstanding a few
deals of the Pérez Ayerra variety – made me think that Carla might be even more cut off from the outside world than she herself suspected.

“Look, things are very hard. I don't know if you've been following developments in this market.”

“I don't have much to offer, which is why I'm not offering, I'm begging…” – she was crying behind the dark glasses – “I'm begging, and it's hard, but someone has to help me.”

I didn't know what to say; the truth was that I could not afford to take anyone on.

“It could be without a salary; I don't mind when you pay me, how much you pay me or even if you pay me at all. We can make whatever sort of agreement you like. But I need to work.”

Carla took off her dark glasses and showed me her black eye. “Gustavo…” she didn't finish the sentence because her voice faltered once more. Before I could think of something to say, the telephone rang. Yet again, it was Teresa and, yet again, the day's course was altered. “Yes, yes, tell me what it is, Teresa.” This time I lied that I was alone: it was better to listen and get her out of the way once and for all than to have the telephone ringing every five minutes.

“I know it's not really something to talk about on the phone, but I've had a knot in my stomach ever since I found out…”

“About what?” I said, but she didn't hear me.

“…and today I'm out of The Heights all day and tomorrow… did you know that tomorrow they're playing the Challenger Cup in…”

“Never mind, Teresa, don't worry. Tell me what's up.”

“Promise me you won't take it badly.”

“Just tell me.”

“Juani's name is on the Children At Risk list.”

“The what list?”

“Children At Risk.”

“I don't follow you.”

“It's a list made by some sort of Commission with information that is given to them by carers.”

“Who do these carers give information to?”

“To them, and they give it to the Council – that's how I know, because someone at the Council – and please don't ask me who it was – told El Tano in confidence and I just had to tell you, Vir, because otherwise how will I ever look you in the eye again?”

The more she explained, the less I understood. Opposite me, Carla blew her nose noisily on a paper handkerchief. “If it had been the other way around, I would have wanted you to tell me.”

“To tell you what?”

“That one of my children was on the list.”

“Teresa, can you tell me once and for all what this list is, and who these children at risk are?”

“Drug addicts, Vir, Juani is on a list of drug addicts.”

I felt my body stiffen. “Hello, hello… are you there? I knew I should have waited and told you in person. Speak to me, Vir, don't leave me like this, when I'm miles away from The Cascade… Vir…”

I cut her off. I sat opposite Carla Masotta in silence, without making any move, petrified. The telephone rang. I picked up the handset and crashed it down on the base. It rang again. I let it keep ringing until it stopped. It rang again. Then Carla stood up and pulled out the cable at the socket. “What's happened?”

“My son… is on a list…”

“What sort of list?”

“A list,” I repeated. She waited until I was able to articulate a complete sentence. “A Commission draws up a list of all the children who take drugs,” I heard myself say, without even knowing why I was telling her. A woman I barely knew, a woman who was not one of my friends, whose husband hit her hard enough to give her a black eye. Someone who had happened to come into my office on the day that Teresa rang to say that my son's name was on a list I knew nothing about.

“And does your son take drugs?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“Ask him.”

“What's he going to say?”

“Can't you believe him?”

“I'm confused.” We were both silent for a moment.

“And is it legal?” she asked.

“What, taking drugs?”

“No, making lists like that,” she said and stood up to pour me a glass of water. “Would this Commission have a List of Husbands who Hit their Wives?” she asked.

“I don't think so,” I answered and, in the midst of our own tears, we burst out laughing.

Finally, the Insúas separated. Carmen Insúa was one of the few women to remain living in Cascade Heights after a separation. It wasn't easy to stay on. The first obvious source of unease after the separation was that feeling of being out of place at parties and on excursions where the rest of us were couples. Her deeper discomfort did
not manifest itself until later. Because, when she had moved to Cascade Heights, Carmen, like other women, had distanced herself from a world that continued to function elsewhere and to which she was linked only by the daily tale spun for her by her husband, on his return from the office. That isn't to say that she never went back to the city, but that now she went there as a tourist, visiting a place that did not belong to her, as though peeping at it from behind a curtain. When there is no husband to arrive home, trailing victories and failures from the other place, the illusion of his wife also being a citizen of that territory is ended. Then the abandoned wife has two options: to go out once more and claim her place in that oblique world, or to renounce it. And Carmen Insúa, we all believed, had opted for renunciation.

Our initial fear, when we heard that Alfredo had left her, was that Carmen's drink problem would worsen but, just as we began to find justifications for her compulsive drinking and to feel sorry for her, Carmen became mysteriously teetotal. People say the first thing that Alfredo took away from the house was his collection of wines, and perhaps this was less to protect his wife than his bottles, which could otherwise have ended up smashed against a wall.

At the beginning, most of the inhabitants of The Cascade took her side. We visited her; we invited her to our houses and we tried, perhaps too hard, to include her in rather silly diversions. Such as the fancy-dress party at the Andrades' house, at which Carmen ended up crying in a corner, behind her Cleopatra mask, while the rest of us danced to The Ketchup Song. Or that long weekend when the Pérez Ayerras insisted on taking her
to Uruguay on their boat, knowing full well that she suffered from seasickness.

Alfredo Insúa had left her after twenty years of marriage – several of them marked by infidelities that she bore with stoicism – alone, with two sons who would also leave her, once they had finished school. He left her for his business partner's secretary – just to be different. We all began by saying “What a bastard Alfredo is”. But the first weeks passed and some of the husbands who were still seeing him, through work, began to observe that “there are two sides to every story”. “It's no fun living with a drunk.” “She probably drank to help her cope with all the crap Alfredo threw at her.” “What crap?”

Soon Alfredo was to be seen back at The Heights, playing golf or tennis with one or other of us, or at an event in someone's house to which Carmen was deliberately not invited. Two or three months after the separation, only the women said “what a bastard Alfredo is”, while the men kept quiet. Until, one day, nobody said it any more. And then there was a day when the men were knocking about a golf ball, or having a drink after a tennis game, that people began to say: “Alfredo really had no choice.”

A little while after that, he presented his new wife in society, a girl of less than thirty who was pleasant, pretty, nice and endowed with “a pair of tits that could take your eye out”, one of us joked. One weekend he took her to Uruguay in the same friends' boat on which Carmen had vomited a few months earlier. And the new one didn't vomit. After that trip, Alfredo and his new partner appeared with increasing regularity at parties in The Cascade, while Carmen became a recluse in her house. Until she was hardly ever seen.

That was when we all started to talk about Carmen's depression. “I don't know, but maybe she was better when she drank.” And Alfredo contrived, with very little effort and the excuse of her depression, to get the children to live with him. Carmen stayed in that house alone. A house as big as ever it was, but now with no furniture, nothing in the freezer, no chatter or clamour. She gave away the crockery, cutlery and some pieces of furniture. The few people who went into her house reported that the only object in the sitting room was a yellow painting of a naked woman in a canoe. Some of us feared that, if Carmen did something foolish, we might be alerted only when a putrid smell began to seep out of the house. Because her maids also left her. Their turnover was faster than ever. Alfredo – who was now “poor Alfredo” – always sent a replacement, as a guarantee against receiving inopportune news.