Thursday Night Widows (28 page)

I nodded, without giving a reason for my pained expression, which had nothing to do with the operation, nor with my husband's suffering, nor even with any surgical risks. It was the pins. It horrifies me to think of objects being inserted into the body and not decaying with the rest of it. It has always horrified me. Foreign bodies within us, that survive us. Pieces of metal, ceramic or rubber that will endure long after their function has become obsolete. When everything around them is wasted and decomposing.

The day my father died, my mother got it into her head to whip out his false teeth – much to my horror. “You can't take out Daddy's teeth,” I said. She replied: “It isn't Daddy, it's Daddy's corpse.” We had a terrible row. My father's sudden death almost seemed less important than what would happen to his false teeth. “Why do you want them?” I shouted at her. “To remember him by,” she said, apparently surprised that I should not understand. “You're disgusting!” I yelled at her. “Not half
as disgusting as the sight of his false teeth lying beside his dusty bones the day they have to be exhumed,” she said. And by way of a curse, she added: “I hope it falls to you to disinter them and not to me.”

And so it was. One afternoon they called from the Avellaneda cemetery. They needed someone from our family to authorize the exhumation of my father's bones, so that they could be reassigned to a smaller plot, because of limited space at the cemetery. By then I lived in Cascade Heights, and Avellaneda seemed very far away in time and space. I had hardly been there since we moved to the new house – the one we bought from Antieri's widow and where we live now. A member of the family had to be present during the exhumation, so I went. My mother by this stage had herself been scattered as ashes, in accordance with her last wishes. My father reposed in the earth. Until that day. And the sight of those teeth still clinging to a metal plate, in spite of the best efforts of worms and the passing years, evoked my mother's ironic smile more than it did my father. Pins, like teeth, would endure. And there they would remain, waiting for whoever dared disinter them. Then again, neither Ronie nor I, nor any of our friends in Cascade Heights, would come to rest at the Avellaneda, or at any other municipal cemetery. In private cemeteries there is no need to compress bones in order to make more room for death. You can always buy another plot. You can always make another cemetery. You can invent a new solution. There is enough land in the area to divide into plenty more parcels. But if that were not the case, if one day the private cemeteries were also obliged to make more room for death, or if one day we could no longer meet our expenses and we lost our plot, if
someone telephoned one day requesting the presence of a relative during the compression of what was left of Ronie, that person – whether myself, Juani or my grandchildren – would come face to face with the pins.

They are immortal intruders, I thought, as I waited outside the operating theatre. And I thought of other examples. I made myself think them up, so as not to think about Ronie's operation or Juani, who was still not answering the telephone. A stent, a pacemaker, some sophisticated prosthesis especially brought from the United States or Germany. An IUD. No, not an IUD, because an elderly woman would not have one fitted, and to think of a still-fertile woman inside a grave upset me so much that I had to reject the example. I wondered if valuable items such as a pacemaker or a stent might be removed from the deceased before burial. A kind of recycling. It surprised me that nobody in The Cascade had ever mentioned such things to me. I would not let them remove Ronie's pins. Then I thought of silicone implants, too. Silicone is another intruder able to outlive its host. Implants would survive burial, the body's wastage, the damp soil, the worms. In my grave someone will one day find two silicone globes. For what they were worth… They will find silicone globes in the graves of almost all my female neighbours, too. I imagined the private cemetery where they buried the women from Cascade Heights sown with silicone globes, orphaned now from the breasts that had owned them, six feet below that immaculate lawn. Bones, mud and silicone. And teeth. And pins.

I went out into the garden to smoke. I lit a cigarette. After that, another. Then another. I called Juani again. He didn't answer. He must be at home, though. He'll
be sound asleep and can't hear the phone, I thought. I wanted to think that he was sound asleep. But it was also possible that he was out and about. Or lying unconscious somewhere. Or he had come home and was sleeping soundly but not as a result of fatigue. From alcohol. Or that other thing. I find it hard to name it. Marijuana.
Cannabis
is what it said in the
American Health and Human Service
report that Teresa Scaglia gave me soon after finding out about the “difficult time you're going through”. No, not that; he had promised not to touch it and I “must believe in my son, because he can do it”. That is what the specialists brought into Cascade Heights to support families with “children at risk” said – that we had to believe in our children. But what did they know? That wasn't the problem – the problem was believing in ourselves.

The operation was a success, so the surgeon informed me. He told me about it in that same corridor, with his gown still on, as he removed his latex gloves. I waited for them to bring Ronie back to the room and for him to come round from the anaesthetic. I rang the house and this time Juani answered. I told him everything. He sounded strange, very alert – it was obvious that he had not been sleeping.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“No, nothing. I've got a headache.”

“What's up? Did you eat something that disagreed with you?…” He didn't answer. “Or did you drink something?… What time did you get back?”

“Stop it, Mum,” he interrupted.

“Ring me whenever you want.” He didn't ring.

What with the anaesthesia and the tranquillizers, Ronie slept for the rest of the morning. I dozed in an
armchair beside him. Finally I went downstairs to get some lunch. I didn't ring anyone to let them know what had happened. Neither clients nor friends. My mobile rang a few times but, after checking that it wasn't Juani, I didn't answer. At one point I did think of telephoning the club's guard to let him know where we were, but straight away I realized that that would be a nonsense. Perhaps it was a premonition. Because, as I was finishing my lunch in the hospital cafe, in came Dorita Llambías, who had just been visiting a friend of hers. She approached my table, shaking her head.

“What a terrible thing to happen, Virginia! What can you tell me about it?” She reached for my hand on the table and gripped it tightly. I realized that she was not talking about Ronie's accident.

“What are you talking about, Dorita?”

“What, haven't you heard?” she said, and I noted in her voice an unmistakable excitement at being the bearer of news. She drew nearer, the better to break it to me.

“Last night there was an accident at the Scaglias' house – an electrical problem. El Tano, Gustavo Masotta and Martín Urovich were found drowned in the swimming pool. In reality they weren't drowned – they were electrocuted. It seems they were electrocuted by an extension cord.”

I could not begin to make sense of her words: it was as if everything around us were moving about. I held on to my chair so as not to fall off it.

“Can you believe it – grown men messing around with cables and water?”

“Were all three of them electrocuted?”

“Yes, it seems that the cable fell into the water and they died instantly.”

Scenes from the previous night flashed before me, like a film reeling forwards. The open fridge in front of me; Ronie coming into the house after abandoning the Thursday night fixture at El Tano's; the stairs; the terrace; the lounger beside the balustrade; my lounger beside his; the silence; the lights in the Scaglias' pool; the ice cubes falling to the floor and slipping away; the jazz permeating the poplars' lament; and especially his silence, my irritation, his anger; the fall on the stairs; his howl of pain.

“Poor Teresa and the children. Who's ever going to want to get back in that pool now?” said Dorita.

I thought of Ronie fleeing from that house that night, as though he foresaw the tragedy. Ronie, another death-defying survivor. The same as his pins. “When God is not present, he just isn't and there's nothing we can do about it. But what a stupid way to go and die, no?”

“Very stupid,” I said, and I went to find my husband.

Within the same hour that Ronie was discharged from hospital, his friends' bodies were travelling in caravan along the Pan-American highway to a private cemetery. Virginia pushed her husband – his leg now plastered – in the wheelchair without any help along the hospital corridors. She had requested this: that no one go with them. The time spent negotiating the path through the hospital garden to the car would help her prepare for the task in hand, she thought. When they arrived at
the car, she put the brakes on the chair, moved to face Ronie, then crouched down in front of him, grasping his hands.

“There's something I have to tell you.”

Ronie listened without saying anything. “The night before last there was an accident at the Scaglias' house.”

Ronie shook his head. “El Tano, Gustavo and Martín all died of electrocution.”

“No,” said Ronie.

“It was a dreadful accident.”

“No, no it wasn't.” Ronie tried to stand up, but immediately fell back into his chair.

“Keep calm, Ronie.”

“No, it wasn't like that. I know it wasn't.” He began to cry.

“The gardener found them yesterday morning at the bottom of the pool.” Ronie tried again to stand up, but Virginia stopped him. “Ronie, you mustn't put weight on your leg because of the—”

He interrupted her: “Take me to the cemetery.”

“It won't do you any good.”

“Take me to the cemetery or I'll walk there myself.” This time he did stand up and it was all Virginia could do to stop him from taking a step.

“Are you sure you want to go?”

“Quite sure.”

“Well then, let's go together,” she said. She helped her husband into the car, then put the wheelchair in the boot and sat down at the wheel beside her husband. She looked at him, stroked his face and started the engine, ready to do as he asked.

It was a sunny day. Spring had come to the tulip poplars which, still leafless, abounded in great violet flowers. Some of us parked on the verge. A full fifteen minutes before the ceremony was due to start, the underground parking was already full and security guards had been stationed along the side of the road, so that we could safely leave our cars there.

“I didn't recognize you. Have you changed your car?”

Everyone was there. It would be quicker to name the absentees than to run through the list of all those present. The Lauridos were travelling in Europe: “After what happened with the Twin Towers, people are so paranoid that now everything's on offer; hotel rooms are going for a song – you have to grab these chances while you can”; the Ayalas were staying with their son in Bariloche; Clarita Buzzette was recovering from pneumonia. The entire administrative staff from The Cascade were there; the tennis teachers, the golf Starter. Nothing like this had ever happened to us before. Never had there been so great a misfortune within our gates.

“It defies belief…”

“Poor Teresa…”

“It was an electric shock, wasn't it?”

We waited beside the chapel for the bodies to arrive, casting glances at each other, unsure what to say. And yet we all said something. “Haven't seen you for months.”

“Let's hope next time we meet in happier circumstances.”

Someone asked after Ronie and Virginia Guevara. Somebody else said that he had been discharged from hospital that morning. We speculated on the chances of
Ronie coming to the funeral. “No, I don't think so. It would be a very traumatic experience for him.”

“Poor thing, he's already been through enough.”

“Who's got your kids today?”

The police had handed over the bodies in the shortest possible time. Aguirre, the Chief of Security at Cascade Heights, had spoken personally to the superintendent. “On his private line – he's a friend.” There was no need to heap more distress on the widows. Doctor Pérez Bran, a long-standing member of the community, offered to speak to the presiding judge.

“And why did a judge have to be involved?”

“It's standard: there were three deaths.” Pérez Bran knew him: he was moving various cases through his court. The judge assured him that the matter would be expedited. The police carried out routine inspections. “Why Culpable Homicide? If no one was to blame?…” They should call it “Unintentional Homicide”, the word “culpable” is too misleading.

“And why ‘homicide'? They ought to put ‘accident'.”

“That definition doesn't exist in the Code.”

“Which code?”

“The Penal Code.”

“Well they should add it; if the thing's an accident, it's an accident. Why don't people call things by their name in this country?”

“Is that El Tano's mother?”

“No idea.”

They had wanted to listen to music. They were listening to music. Diana Krall, apparently. But El Tano had wanted it closer: he had pulled the cable, the stereo had detached itself and the extension cord had fallen into the swimming pool. “Didn't the switch trip? You
know those appliances have to be checked at least once a year.”