“I don't know,” he answered. Lala cried. And in the midst of her tears she remembered her father, and dried her eyes.
“Let's sell the house and take that money with our savings to Miami and try something there â a business, anything. Over there money is a means to get more money, here it's just an invitation to get fleeced.”
And the costs would not be so high. Ariana could go to a state school because “you can do that there â they're better than private ones here. And she's easygoing, she
adapts well; the change won't be hard for her, quite the opposite, you can't imagine how much Ariana's going to learn there.” They would rent a small place for a while; they would not have the expense of a nanny, or any other staff. They would cut back on outings, or even suspend them for a while. “And what if we made those same adjustments here?” MartÃn asked.
“Here? What is there here for us now? Staying would be our downfall, MartÃn, âhere' no longer exists for us. Can you see yourself living in a one-bedroom flat and sending Ariana to Bernasconi School in Parque Patricios?”
“I went to Bernasconi.”
“But it isn't the future that we'd planned for our children.”
“You can't speak English.”
“You don't need to in Miami. Everyone speaks Spanish. It will be like here, but better. Things will be like they used to be, when everything was still OK.” And suddenly she wasn't crying any more.
The auction-house people came the day before the date announced in the advertisements and organized everything. “Mark the things you want to take with you and we'll put a price ticket on everything else,” said the man in charge of the garage sale, which was going to convert into hard cash the contents of what had been their home for the last eleven years. Ariel had stubbornly insisted that he was not going, that he would stay behind and live with his paternal grandparents. He and the golden retriever (for which Lala had never finished paying Carla Masotta). Ariana was envious: if she were old enough, she too would stay back with Ariel. But she was not old enough. “I'm taking my Barbies,” she said.
“No one's taking anything,” Lala replied.
“Why not?”
“Aren't you a bit big for Barbies?” Ariana didn't understand. She looked at her father.
“Why not, Daddy?” MartÃn did not answer her.
“Because you need to learn that nothing is for ever,” said her mother.
The sale was going to take place in all the rooms in their house, although the advertisement alluded only to one: the garage. “Garage Sale. Family Moving Overseas: Battery Golf Buggy; Callaway Clubs, as new; Audio Equipment (Marantz, Sony); 2 Head Titanium Rackets; 2 Pentium PCs, Walkman, Discman, Minicomp, DVD, many more electrical items; Lamps, Ornaments, knick-knacks.” What would “knick-knacks” be, she wondered. “Automatic Washing Machine, front-loading; Curtains, Towels, Blankets, Clothes Male/Female, Medium Size; Children's Clothes; Treadmill; Perfumes; Soft Toys, Barbies; Sundries. Come and Have a Rummage.”
Lala threw the newspaper down on the table. Nobody had told them they could put: “Come and Have a Rummage”.
“It's a formality, Señora, we always put it,” they had answered. It was eight o'clock on the Saturday morning. “For One Day Only, Saturday 12th, 9 a.m. â 5 p.m.”
“Not my Barbies,” wept Ariana, on discovering that a price tag had been affixed to the forehead of her Nurse Barbie. Lala sent her to play at SofÃa Scaglia's house. Ariel had disappeared the day before with the announcement that he would not be back until late. MartÃn had gone off with El Tano; he had invited him to play tennis for the first time in years. “If I stay here I'll just be in the way.” He had borrowed a racket, because
his own one was now stacked alongside the golf clubs, with a price tag stuck to the grip, which read US$100. But she did not want to go away. She wanted to see who bought what, the way they handled things, the way they walked through her house, how they discarded the things that did not interest them, how they haggled over prices or asked for discounts if they were buying several items.
She had finally gathered the strength to make her selection and now it was in the hands of the sale company. “I don't want to take anything; sell whatever can be sold and the rest you can throw away.” For that reason â although she was surprised â she said nothing when she saw two piles of her old underwear on the bed, complete with price tags. By midday, the entire pile of Victoria's Secret knickers was sold. The Argentine knickers, meanwhile, were bought by Insúa's new wife, “for the girl who works in our house. If you saw the state of her underwear⦠I don't know how they get by.”
A half-finished deodorant, a half-empty bottle of whisky, opened boxes of English tea, bottles of scent that had already been started: everything was carted off by friends, neighbours or strangers who had seen the advertisement. They left behind only a blanket bearing an iron-shaped burn mark and some clothes that were woefully out of season.
By nightfall all that remained were the beds, their toothbrushes, the clothes they had on, some bags containing purchases that, for various reasons, would be taken away the next day, and the two suitcases in which Lala had put the few items that would make the journey north with them. The four-by-four parked in front of the
house was no longer theirs; they would have the use of it until they left and then it would serve to cancel a debt with Lala's parents. They were going to live like this for a few days, until they had to hand over the house, then for a time they would be at MartÃn's parents' house, and from there, once they had their visas, they would go north.
“Who took my Barbies?” Ariana asked her mother.
“They aren't your Barbies any more.” Ariana pursed her lips and tried not to cry. “People have to grow up, Ariana.”
“They could have left me one,” she whimpered.
“It would have been worse,” said her father.
They went to bed. In the middle of the night, Ariana woke up. Finding her brother's mattress empty, she made a tour of what was left of her house. Among the bags that were due to be picked up the next day she found one in which, through the plastic, she could make out the shape of her Barbies. The sealed bag was labelled with a piece of paper that said “Rita Mansilla”. Ariana knew her: she was the grandmother of one of her friends who lived nearby. She imagined this friend brushing her dolls' hair. One by one, stroking their manes. Meanwhile she, in Miami, would be spending the grandmother's money on all those much more interesting things that her mother claimed were to be found there â things she could not imagine, let alone name. She opened the bag. There were ten of them: five blonde Barbies, three brunettes and two redheads. The Barbie nurse was blonde, the same as her. It was her favourite. When she grew up, Ariana wanted to be a nurse, if they had them in Miami. They must have them. If not, she would come back to The Cascade to be with
Ariel. Or rather, back to Ariel, but not to The Cascade, because he definitely wouldn't keep living here, she thought. The bag with the Barbies also contained a pair of boots and three white pairs of briefs belonging to her mother. She went to her bedroom to get some scissors from her school rucksack, then, returning to the opened bag, she sat on the floor and began to cut off the dolls' hair, one by one, until all were shorn. Blonde curls mingled with dark and red ones on the pine floor. Clumps of hair in artificial colours were strewn all around her. She cut a lock of her own hair, from the fringe, and mixed it with the dolls' hair. Then she gathered it all up in her hands and put the bundle of hair into her pyjama pocket. She looked at her dolls for the last time, returned them to the bag â trying to avoid their contact with the briefs â then tied the knot and went back to sleep.
42
After his meeting with Alfredo Insúa, and that business of the viatication, El Tano had started thinking more than ever about insurance. And about death. Death was somehow abroad in the atmosphere. Two aeroplanes had knocked down the Twin Towers as though they were a house of cards, and nobody could shake off their bewilderment. On the day of the attack, El Tano's children were at home; the towers' collapse coincided with National Teachers' Day, so there was no school â but they went to a birthday party before lunch.
“Make sure that they haven't cancelled it because of the Towers,” El Tano had said to Teresa.
“What's that got to do with anything, if was in New York?” she countered, and then went out with the children to the party that awaited them. And El Tano had the house to himself again, to carry on thinking.
His life policy was with Troost. But his policy did not have an early-withdrawal clause. It was the same sort of policy they provided for the company's executives all over the world. And he had been fine with that: it never occurred to him that he might need the money sooner. He had thought that everything would carry on as before. Or better. Every time he had changed jobs, throughout his professional life, it had been in order to get a better salary and a job with more responsibility and challenges. It wasn't as if he had AIDS or some other illness that would lead to a certain death, such as the ones with which Alfredo Insúa negotiated discounts on life insurance. But all life leads to certain death, he thought. A death at some given moment, be it the right moment, or the wrong one, but certain, nonetheless.
He sat down in front of the computer. Through the window he saw Teresa arrive home and get to work, exchanging the dead shrubs in their garden for new plants, fresh from the shop. The plants were still in plastic bags from the Green Life nursery. He read the words “Green Life” through the window. His father called and asked how those new projects were coming along.
“Really well,” he lied.
“I wouldn't expect anything less. You learned in a good school,” said his father, then he invited him on a trip to Cariló in October, so that they could find summer houses to rent together in January. “You are going to Cariló this year, aren't you?”
“Of course,” he lied again. He hung up. On the computer, he pulled up the page of his bank account, typed in his name and code. He looked at the totals, then tapped these figures into his calculator and totted them up. He added the money that he had in a foreign bank account. They were bonds and had lost much of their market value, thanks to the increased country risk. If he waited, they might rally, but he wasn't sure that he could wait. He looked on his computer for the Excel spreadsheet on which he kept a budget of the family's expenditure. He divided the grand total of his bank balances by that of his monthly outgoings. Fifteen months. If they continued this rate of spending, they would start to have problems in fifteen months. All of them. The children, Teresa and himself. That wasn't even taking into account the sum they would need to pay for the house they rented every summer in Cariló. And summer was getting closer. He studied each of the different columns of the budget in turn, trying to identify an expense that could be eliminated. He could stop paying the school fees, as MartÃn Urovich had finally done, at the start of the year. Or eliminate the nanny, like Ronie Guevara had. But he was neither MartÃn Urovich nor Ronie Guevara. If he stopped paying communal expenses, he would appear on the list of debtors. And if he continued living in Cascade Heights, it was inconceivable that his children might stop their sporting activities and drop their tennis lessons, or that Teresa might stop going to the gym or having a weekly massage. Cinema, clothes, music, wine: it was all necessary if they wanted to maintain their lifestyle. And El Tano could not picture himself living any other sort of life. MartÃn Urovich's exile struck him as one of the many stupid actions on which his friend
based the organization of his life. MartÃn opted to get out of the system by choosing another country, on another continent, with another language. There he would have to send his children to state school and dispense with a nanny; he'd have to rent a much smaller house, stop going to the cinema and taking tennis lessons. But at least he would be in Miami, far enough away that no one would witness his disgrace. Even if he ended up living in the most godforsaken neighbourhood, it was still Miami. That was cowardice on his part, thought El Tano. The worst kind of cowardice. He could not allow his family to fall from grace, here or anywhere else in the world. The point was not that one should fall unobserved, but that one should not fall at all. There must be something else he could do. He made the calculation again: fifteen months. Perhaps less, if the bonds continued to fall and he did not dare sell them. Fifteen. With a five-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy that couldn't be touched unless something nasty happened. He knew that he was not worth that much. But company politics dictated that all Troost Chief Generals, anywhere in the world, be insured at that level. And when El Tano had left, he had negotiated the continuation of that policy for another eighteen months. That deadline was about to be reached. In three months' time it would be a year and a half since his Dutch employers had dismissed him. A year and a half without working. A year and a half waiting for some head-hunter to call him, sending off CVs, waiting for answers. A year and a half. Fifteen months. Five hundred thousand dollars. And with no date fixed for a certain death.
43
After falling down the stairs, that night on which he had been so fixated by his friends swimming in El Tano Scaglia's pool, Ronie had to be admitted to hospital. They rushed him to an examination room and took X-rays. I called home to let Juani know that we were going to take longer than I had expected and that the hurried note I had scribbled in the midst of Ronie's screams â “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” â was no longer sufficient. At least not for me. I knew that Juani would not call me and I wanted to hear from him. I needed to hear from him if I was to stay calm enough to look after Ronie and his broken leg. The answering machine came on. I hung up. I wondered if he might still, at this time of night, be running around barefoot with Romina, as he had been when we passed them before leaving The Cascade. Or if they had put their skates on again. Where they might have been running. Why. Were they fleeing someone or something? Or were they the ones giving chase? Perhaps they were running for the hell of it, with no particular destination. I tried to put these thoughts out of my head. I looked for a cigarette in my bag then, not finding any, I set off to look for a kiosk. Three men in white were coming down the corridor towards me. I recognized the duty doctor, and later I found out that his companions were a traumatologist and the surgeon who was going to operate on Ronie. They stopped when they came to me. Facing them alone â these three strangers in white coats â I felt for the first time that everything going on around
me was more than I could take in. And the feeling extended beyond my husband's broken leg. But at that time I never suspected how far. Wanting to be clear, the men explained what they were going to do calmly and in unnecessary detail. It was not simply a matter of putting a cast on the broken leg and stitching up the wound, they said. This was an exposed fracture; El Tano would need an operation, under general anaesthetic, to reset the bones and put in pins. My face crumpled, my legs felt as though they might give way. The surgeon kept talking, word upon word â tibia, fibula, compromised articulation â but the traumatologist realized that I was upset and tried to reassure me. “It's almost a routine intervention, very straightforward, don't worry.”