Thursday Night Widows (3 page)

There are no pavements. People use cars, motorbikes, quad bikes, bicycles, golf buggies, scooters and roller blades. If they walk, they walk on the road. As a general rule, if someone is walking and not carrying sports gear, it's a domestic servant or gardener. At Cascade Heights we call them “groundsmen” rather than gardeners, doubtless because not many plots are smaller than half an acre, and, at that size, a garden is more like an estate.

Look up and you won't see any cables. No electricity, telephone or television wires. Of course we have all
three, but the lines run underground, to protect The Heights and its inhabitants from visual contamination. The cables run alongside the drains, both of them hidden underground.

Water tanks, which also have to be concealed from view, are camouflaged by false walls built around them. Hanging out washing isn't permitted without prior approval from the Technical Department. They look at a plan of the grounds before approving a suitable place for a washing line. If a resident proceeds to hang up washing in an area which can be seen from neighbouring houses, and if someone reports the matter, he or she can be fined.

The houses are all different; no house is expressly planned as a copy of another – although that may be the end result. It's impossible for the houses not to be similar, given that they must obey the same aesthetic norms – those dictated by the building code and fashion alike. We would all like our house to be the prettiest. Or the biggest. Or the best designed. The whole neighbourhood is divided by statute into sectors where only one sort of house may be built. There is a sector where the houses must be white. There's a brick houses sector and a black slate roofs sector. One cannot build a house of one type in a sector designated as being for another type. An aerial view of the club shows it separated into three swathes of colour: one red, one white and one black.

In the brick sector are the “dormitory” apartments, set aside for those members who only come at the weekends and don't want to maintain a house here. From far away, the dorms look like three large chalets, but in fact there are a lot of small rooms squeezed into
those three blocks, with a neatly tended garden at the front.

There's another characteristic of our neighbourhood, and perhaps it's the most striking of all: the smells. They change with the season. In September everything smells of Star Jasmine. This isn't a poetic detail, but simple fact. Every garden in The Cascade has at least one star jasmine which flowers in the spring. Three hundred houses, with three hundred gardens, with three hundred jasmine plants, contained in a five-hundred-acre estate with a perimeter fence and private security: that's no poetic aside. It is the reason why the air feels heavy and sweet in spring. It's sickly for those who aren't used to it. But in some of us it engenders a kind of addiction, or attraction or nostalgia – and whenever we go beyond the gates, we're longing to return, to breathe in once more the scent of those sweet flowers. As though it were not possible to breathe well anywhere else. The air in Cascade Heights is heavy, palpable; we choose to live here because we like to breathe like this, with the bees buzzing behind some jasmine plant. And even though the perfume changes with each season, the desire to breathe that sweet air remains. In summer, The Cascade smells of freshly mown and watered grass, and of the chlorine in swimming pools. Summer is the season of noise. Splashes, the shouts of children playing, cicadas, birds complaining of the heat, the strains of music through an open window; someone playing the drums. Windows without bars, because there are no bars in The Cascade. There's no need for bars. Mosquito netting – yes, to keep the insects at bay. The autumn smells of pruned boughs, recently cut and still fresh; they never leave them to rot. There are men in green sweatshirts
with the Cascade Heights logo who collect the leaves and branches after every storm or gale. All traces of a storm have often disappeared by the time we've had breakfast and gone out to work, to school or for a morning walk. The first we know of it is the damp ground, the smell of wet earth. Sometimes we may wonder if the gale that woke us during the night really took place or belonged to a dream. In winter there is the smell of log fires, of smoke and eucalyptus. And then the most private and secret of all, the smell of the home itself, composed of mixed elements that are known only to each one of us.

Those of us who move to Cascade Heights say that we have come in search of “green”, a healthy life, sports and security. Trotting out these reasons means not having to confess, even to ourselves, the real reasons for coming. And after a while we don't even remember them. Entrance into The Cascade induces a certain magical forgetfulness of all that went before. The past is reduced to last week, last month, last year, “when we played the Inter-Club Challenge and won it”. Gradually we forget our lifelong friends, the places we once loved, certain relations, memories, mistakes. It's as though it were possible, in mid-life, to tear the pages out of your diary and begin to write something new.

We moved to The Cascade at the end of the 1980s. Argentina had a new president. We should not have had him until the end of December, but hyperinflation and the looting of supermarkets prompted the last one to leave office before the end of his term. At that time,
the move towards gated communities on the outskirts of greater Buenos Aires had not yet gained momentum. Few people lived permanently at Cascade Heights – or at any other gated community or country club. Ronie and I were among the first to risk leaving an apartment in the capital to move in here with our family. Ronie was very doubtful at the start. Too much travelling, he said. I was the one who insisted – I was sure that living in Cascade Heights was going to change our lives, that we needed to make a break with the city. And Ronie ended up agreeing with me.

We sold a weekend cottage that we had inherited from Ronie's family (one of the few things from that inheritance left to sell), then we bought the Antieris' house. It was, as I like to say, a “sweet deal”. And it was the first inkling I had that buying and selling houses was something I liked and for which I had an innate talent. Although in those days I knew much less about the business than I do now.

Antieri had committed suicide two months earlier. His widow was desperate to leave the house where her husband, and father of her four children, had blown out his brains. In the living room. A small “L” shaped living room with an incorporated dining area. In the early years at The Cascade and other country clubs, almost all the houses had small living rooms. The thing is, in those days – we're talking about the Fifties, the Sixties, even the Seventies – you wouldn't expect to have parties and entertain people in a house so far from Buenos Aires. The Pan American Highway as we know it today, with its dual carriageway and flawless asphalt, was still a pipe dream. If you invited friends or relations over it was for a proper country adventure – everyone made good use
of the garden, the sports area, you took them riding or to play golf. Later came the era of showing off imported carpets and armchairs bought in the best Buenos Aires stores. We moved in at some intermediate point – after the Sixties, but before the Nineties ethos took hold. Even so, it was obvious that we were much closer to the Nineties than the Sixties, and not just chronologically. We decided to knock down a wall and make the living room a few feet bigger, at the expense of a study we knew we would never use.

The Antieri episode took place one Sunday at midday. Even from the golf course they heard his wife's screams. The house is almost opposite the tee at the fourth hole, and to this day Paco Pérez Ayerra – who was the captain of the club at the time – likes to tell the story of the long drive that he sent out of bounds because the screaming started just as his one wood hit the ball. People said that Antieri had been in the military, or the navy – something like that. Nobody knew what, exactly. But definitely in uniform. They didn't have much to do with their neighbours, didn't do sports or go to parties. Occasionally we saw their girls out and about. But the parents had no social life. They used to come at the weekend and shut themselves up in the house. Towards the end, he was also spending the weeks there, alone, with the blinds down, cleaning his collection of weapons, apparently. He never spoke to anyone. So I don't think you have to look too far for a concrete motive, nor give too much credit to the rumour that went round claiming that Antieri had threatened to blow his brains out if the result of the 1989 election went the wrong way. The same threat was made by an actor who went through with it and was on all the news
bulletins afterwards; someone probably confused the two anecdotes and started the rumour.

When I first saw the house, what most impressed me was Antieri's study (the one we ended up knocking through). The order and cleanliness in there were intimidating. A fully stocked bookcase lined all the walls. The spines were perfect and intact, bound in green or burgundy leather. His guns, in all their various models and calibres, were displayed in two glass cabinets. They were polished and shining, not a speck of dust to be seen. While we were looking around the study, Juani, who was just five, took out one of the books, threw it on the floor and stood on it. The book's spine immediately gave way. Ronie grabbed him by the hair and pulled him away. He took him out of the room to chastise him without witnesses. Meanwhile I took care of the book, dusting off Juani's footprint. Returning it to the shelf, I noticed how light it was, and turned it over. It was hollow. There were no pages inside, just hard covers: a box of fake literature. On the spine I read
Faust
, by Goethe. I put it in its place, between Calderón de la Barca's
Life Is a Dream
and Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment
. All of them were hollow. To the right of these there were two or three other classics, then the sequence was repeated:
Life Is a Dream
,
Faust
,
Crime and Punishment
, in gold filigree letters. The same series was on every shelf.

We got the house for next to nothing. Offers from various other interested parties fell away, as people found out that a man had shot himself there. The wife didn't mention it, nor did the estate agent in charge of the sale. But somehow the story always came out. It made no difference to me, to tell the truth: I'm not
superstitious. To cap it all, when it came to exchange contracts, it turned out that some papers pertaining to the estate weren't in order, so the widow had to shoulder all the costs, hers and ours. I even made an extra two hundred pesos when I sold to Rita Mansilla the hollow books which the widow hadn't wanted to take and which were gathering dust in the basement.

So the house ended up costing us only about fifteen thousand dollars more than the weekend getaway we'd sold, and this new place comprised a ground area of half an acre, about an eighth of which was covered; there were three en-suite bathrooms and staff accommodation. It was full of light, now that Antieri was not there to put down the blinds. Before we moved in, we painted all the rooms white, to make it lighter still. That was a favourite trick in the Buenos Aires property market, but in The Cascade, I came to realize, such devices were not necessary. In The Cascade, the sun comes in anyway, through the open windows; there are no tall buildings to cast long shadows, no dividing walls to block out the light. Only the plots with a high number of trees are likely to have a problem with light and shade, and that wasn't the case with us.

It was the first good property deal I closed in my life, and it whetted my appetite. At first, it was almost like a game. If I found out that someone was hard up, or that a couple was separating, that some unemployed husband had found a job abroad and was leaving with his family – or perhaps they were going anyway, without an offer of work, because he was tired of having no job and a golf course and swimming pool to maintain – straight away I started thinking of people who might be interested in the house and I got in touch.

It was about two years later that I sold a plot of land to the Scaglias. This was a few days after the Minister for Foreign Affairs became the Finance Minister he had always been destined to be and persuaded Congress to pass the Convertibility Law.
¹
One peso would be worth one dollar: the famous “one for one” that restored Argentines' confidence and fuelled an exodus to places like Cascade Heights.

There are some events, not many, fewer than one might suppose, that actually change the course of our lives. Selling that land to the Scaglias, in that March of 1991, was without any doubt one such event.

I remember it as if it were yesterday. A pair of brown crocodile shoes preceded her out of the car. Teresa Scaglia took barely a step and the stiletto heel of one of them sank into the very ground I was hoping to sell the couple. Seeing that Teresa was embarrassed, I tried to play the incident down:

“It happens to all of us city girls once,” I said. “It's hard to give up your heels. Believe me, it's one of the hardest things. But if you have to choose between heels and this…” I gestured extravagantly towards the trees and landscape around us.

El Tano appeared not to have noticed his wife sinking into the soil. He was walking two or three yards ahead
of her. But it would be wrong, I think, to say that he was a man in a hurry. Or, if he did seem rushed, then that was symptomatic of an impatient disposition rather than the pressures of time. It was as if he did not want to wait – for his wife, or for anyone else. El Tano walked on and I waited a moment for Teresa. To think that woman ended up being a landscape gardener! When she first arrived at Cascade Heights, the only thing she knew about the subject was that she liked plants. Teresa extracted her heel from the soft earth and tried to clean it on the grass while, inevitably, the other heel sank in. All her efforts were in vain. The heel she had cleaned was doomed to sink in again, the other one was going to come out muddy and, clean it as she might, would then get dirty again. But to point out this information, denying her capacity to absorb it for herself, would have seemed as disrespectful and impatient as her husband's haste. I was already feeling anxious: the commission on the sale of this land was earmarked for various improvements pending in my own home. I wondered which option to choose. The first time I had sunk into The Cascade I had ended up taking off my shoes and looking round the site in my stockinged feet. We were young and Ronie had laughed: we both had laughed. But Teresa and I are very different. All the women here are very different, even though some people make the mistake of believing that women who live in a place like this grow to resemble one another. They call us “country-club women”. That stereotype is wrong-headed. Yes, it's true that we go through the same sorts of experience, that the same sorts of thing happen to us. Or that the same sorts of thing do
not
happen to us, and in that respect we are similar too. For example, we all find it
hard, at the start, to give up certain habits: there is no room here for high heels, silk hosiery or curtains that drop to the floor. In another context, any one of those details would signal elegance, but in Cascade Heights they end up signalling dirt. Because heels sink into the lawn and emerge covered in soil and grass; because stockings ladder when they come into contact with rough-edged plants, MDF or rattan garden furniture; because much more dust blows into houses than into apartments and it gets spread around by children, dogs or long drapes – and everything looks filthy.