Thursday Night Widows (20 page)

And then one day Gabina appeared. Gabina had worked for them in the early years of their marriage; she was a Paraguayan, broad, robust and efficient. Carmen would never have sacked her but, after their move to Cascade Heights, Alfredo had begun to find her appearance jarring. “She doesn't go with this house,” he complained. And since Carmen refused to fire her after so many years of loyal service, Alfredo demanded that, when they were entertaining guests, they hire someone “with a better look” to wait at table. No explanation was given to Gabina, nor did she need any. The enmity between master and servant grew to such a point that relations became unsustainable. Gabina resigned without being sacked, but she took a final liberty before leaving; she looked at Alfredo and said: “You are a little turd, Señor, and one day you'll
get covered in shit.” Alfredo barred “that Paraguayan from ever coming into The Cascade to work in anyone's house, I don't care whose”, so Gabina had to seek work elsewhere. And they did not hear of her again, apart from the telephone call she made every Christmas to the “Señora”.

When Gabina tried to return to the house, after the first Christmas Carmen had spent there alone, the security guard consulted Alfredo, in spite of knowing full well that he was no longer in residence. He rang him on the mobile. “
Noblesse oblige
,” answered the guard, when Alfredo thanked him for the call. But the weariness provoked in him by his ex-wife was greater than his annoyance with Gabina, so he authorized the Paraguayan's return, in the hope that someone “can take this millstone off my neck”.

The first thing Gabina did was to open the windows. And when she opened them, light shone in, exposing the grime, the dust and other imperfections which she set herself to correct, one by one. We all felt more relaxed, knowing that someone was looking after Carmen. And liberated from guilt, we pushed her even further to the back of our minds.

The day that she started to go out again found Carmen back in our conversations. She was seen strolling around the streets of Cascade Heights with Gabina; she went to the supermarket with Gabina; Gabina accompanied her to the pharmacy, to the hairdresser. And we all continued to be pleased about it. “She looks better, poor thing” was all we could think of to say about her.

But one afternoon, Carmen sat down with Gabina to have a coffee in the bar by the tennis courts. And Gabina was not wearing uniform, but her own clothes,
clothes the like of which no member of Cascade Heights would ever wear. And one Saturday they were seen having lunch together in the golf club restaurant. They were laughing. Paco Pérez Ayerra was annoyed by Gabina's guffaws, and complained to the waiter. “Look, are domestic servants allowed to eat here?” And nobody could find any written regulation forbidding it, prompting the matter to be taken up in meetings of the Council of Administration.

It was around that time that you began to hear people say: “What are those two doing together all the time? Could they be?…” “Oh stop it, don't be disgusting,” Teresa Scaglia said to someone who had whispered this in her ear, when Gabina and Carmen jogged past them one morning. “If we don't do something, next thing we'll find ourselves at the gym sharing a sauna with that Indian,” said Roque Lauría in a Council meeting.

The night that Carmen and Gabina went to see a film in the auditorium, Ernesto Andrade finally called Alfredo. Someone swore that when Carmen started crying, Gabina held her hand. “We didn't want to bother you, but this just can't go on, old friend.” Then Alfredo once more forbade Gabina to enter Cascade Heights. The problem was that this time Carmen already
was inside
. The Chief of Security came to speak to Carmen. “What law states that she has to leave my house? Do you have a judge's order, or something?”

“I have an order from your husband.”

“My husband is the one banned from entering this house,” she replied, and closed the door.

“She's lost her mind,” everyone started to say. “No doubt Alfredo, with his contacts, will be able to arrange a court order, an injunction or something. Poor Alfredo.”

Alfredo swung into action. The first thing he did was to cut off Carmen's money and stop paying her bills. He did not tell the children, because they were on a trip to the United States at the time, and “a piece of news like that would knock them sideways”. He would tell them about it once the matter was resolved. He asked the president of the Council of Administration to go and speak personally to Carmen, with the threat that she could be declared “persona non grata” in the neighbourhood. “Think of the children,” he said. She told him to go to hell.

The women no longer went out. They spent a month closeted in there. Two months. Three. All of us who walked by their house looked inside, trying to understand. To start with, they were still receiving deliveries from the supermarket, or the pharmacy. “The money's going to run out soon,” one of us said.

“But if Alfredo has closed down all the accounts, how come they can still shop in the supermarket?”

“They must be paying with a Paraguayan Express card.”

“Give me a break!”

And then one morning somebody noticed that Carmen's car wasn't there. Nor was it there the following day. Nor the one after that. In fact, the women had left before dawn one morning, driving together through the Club's automatic barrier. “Your instruction was that Señora Gabina Vera Cristaldo could not enter Cascade Heights, but never that she could not leave,” the guard who had been on duty that night explained to his superior. It wasn't enough to save him his job.

Alfredo came at the weekend to open the house. In the days between the discovery of the women's flight
and Alfredo's arrival, we had felt a growing trepidation about what he was going to find inside. Dirt at the very least; evidence of what those women had been doing there, on their own so long; damage in what had once been his home. For that reason, several people offered to go with him. They broke down the front door. Alfredo had a key but it didn't work: Carmen had had the lock changed. The Chief of Security confirmed that “in the guard's register there is a record of a locksmith entering the Club two weeks ago”.

“She never gave a thought to her children,” someone said. Inside the house there was not enough light to see the interior. Alfredo pressed the light switch, pointlessly, as he himself had allowed the electricity to be cut off through non-payment of bills. Someone went over to draw the curtains and, as the panels were folded back, the light filtered in and the group was frozen in their advance, immobilized by the sight before them.

The painting of the woman lying in the canoe was no longer there. Instead all the walls of the house had been covered with photographs. The biggest of these was of Alfredo, an enlargement of a wedding shot. Then there were smaller ones: one of Paco Pérez Ayerra; another of Teresa Scaglia torn out of Country Woman magazine; the Andrades in a snap from the last club party; the president of Cascade Heights; various women in a photo from the last Burako tournament Carmen had organized; her fellow members of the painting group (apart from Carla Masotta, who had been carefully cut out of the picture) and some of other neighbours. On every photograph, pins had been stuck into the person's eyes. On some, such as Alfredo's, into the heart, too. And beneath each photo was an altar. “This is a real piece of work,” said one
of the guards, and Nane Pérez Ayerra grasped the gold cross dangling over her chest. Everywhere there were little pieces of knotted cloth, images, heads of garlic, feathers, stones, seeds. Alfredo approached his own “altar”. It was a Villeroy Boch plate, covered in dry shit, on which a red candle had melted away.

“I'm not a junkie – what are you saying, Mum?” says Juani.

“I'm not the one saying it, the Security Commission lists say it.”

“Those idiots think that smoking a joint makes you a drug addict.”

“You smoke marijuana?” Virginia asks, crying. Juani doesn't answer. “Did you smoke marijuana, for fuck's sake?”

“Yes… once.”

“Don't you realize that leads to cocaine and cocaine takes you to heroin and heroin…”

“Stop it, Virginia,” Ronie intervenes.

“Where did we go wrong?” she weeps.

“Oh, Mum…”

“We don't want you to smoke, Juani,” his father tells him.

“I smoked once, that's all.”

“Don't do it again.”

“Everyone smokes, Dad.”

“But not everyone's on the list – you are!” his mother yells.

“Stop, Virginia.”

Virginia sobs, banging the table with her fist. “Tomorrow he's starting therapy and if that fails we'll send him into rehab.”

“What do you mean ‘therapy', Mum? I smoked a joint, that's all.”

“That's all? That's all, you bastard, and you're on a list of drug addicts?”

“But what is it you're worried about – that I smoked a joint or that I'm on that list?” She slaps him hard across the face. Ronie pulls her away.

“Calm down, you won't solve anything like that, Virginia.”

“And how in God's name do you plan to solve it?”

“Everyone my age smokes, Mum.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Why do you think they call us the ‘potheads'?”

“They call you
what
?”

“Not just me – all of us.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Who sold it to you?” Ronie asks. Juani says nothing. “Who sold it to you, for Christ's sake, so that I can go and smash his face in?”

“Nobody, Dad.”

“So where did you get it?”

“I was offered it.”

“By?”

“Anyone, I don't know – someone goes out, buys it, brings it back and we all smoke it.”

“I don't care if everyone smokes it, I don't want
you
to smoke it.”

“Dad, I smoked two or three times at the most.”

“Don't smoke it again.”

“Why not?”

“Because you'll end up in hospital with an overdose!” screams his mother.

“Because I don't want you to,” says Ronie. Juani says nothing, stares at his trainers, puts his hands in his pockets. “You've tried it. You know what it's like. Do you need to keep smoking it?”

“No, I haven't smoked it for a long time.”

“Well, don't smoke it again.”

“OK.”

“‘Don't smoke again' – is that how you sort things out?” says Virginia.

“And how would you like to sort them out – by screaming like a madwoman?”

“I suppose now you're going to say my shouting's to blame for him taking drugs!”

“I don't take drugs, Mum.”

“Smoking marijuana is taking drugs.”

“So is taking Trapax.” Virginia throws another blow, which Juani dodges, then she runs sobbing upstairs. Ronie pours himself a whisky. Juani gets his roller blades and puts them on.

“Where are you going?” his father asks.

“Over to Romina's.” They look at each other. “Can I?”

Ronie doesn't answer. Juani leaves. Ronie goes upstairs to talk to Virginia. He finds her searching Juani's room: checking every drawer, all pockets, backpacks, under the bed, inside magazines, books, CD cases, behind the computer. Ronie watches, but lets her get on with it. She searches everything that day and the next, and the one after that. “When will you stop searching?” he asks her.

“Never,” his wife replies.

El Tano was checking his emails. There was a note inviting him to a course on “Business management in the new millennium”; an email from an old university friend, attaching a CV “in case you hear of anything”; a chain letter that must not be broken and which he broke by hitting “delete”; a bulletin from an economic service explaining how Standard & Poor calculated a country's risk index, and two or three other bits of junk. No responses to any of the searches put out on his behalf by the headhunters. Actually, there was one: “This search has been momentarily suspended. We'll keep in touch. Thank you.”

He had some time in hand, so he scanned the headlines on the main newspapers, looking for a piece of news, or anything to make him feel – emotionally rather than rationally – that things might be starting to change. And if they did change, if confidence could be restored, the Dutch might return with new faith. And if that happened, they would probably take him on again, because there wasn't really anything against him, he had not been fired for incompetence. On the contrary, the Dutch were more than satisfied with his performance in the company. He was not to blame. Nobody is to blame for ceasing to be necessary. And if things changed, and if the Dutch were confident again and if he were necessary again and they asked him to take charge once more of Troost in Argentina, and if everything could be as it had been before, he would have no reason to refuse. That was not to say that he had no pride. Quite the opposite: he felt pride in his job, not in just any job, in
that
one. Or another,
better one. Not another one the same, because, as his father had taught him, no one exchanges one job for something at the same level. One changes in order to better oneself, to progress, to keep advancing. That was the way it had always been. And so it should be. For his father and for him, too.

At ten minutes to eight, he turned off the computer and went to have breakfast. Teresa, in her dressing gown, was serving
café con leche
to the children. She always took charge of breakfast, while the maid hovered nearby, in case she was needed. “Anyone want more toast?” Nobody answered, but Teresa put two more slices in the toaster anyway. El Tano walked over to the kitchen counter and picked up a brochure. It was an offer to travel to Maui, with a five-star hotel, all inclusive, and an optional night in Honolulu. El Tano stared at the brochure. He didn't read it, just looked. Blue and green. “Ask your secretary to look into that.”