Thursday Night Widows (6 page)

Then it was time for the last trick. The magician asked for a note. Ronie put his hand in his pocket and produced only coins. “Look who got paid today!” cried Insúa, and he laughed heartily to leave no doubt that this was meant as a joke, and that no one should take offence. Someone in the audience moved to open his wallet, but El Tano motioned him to stop. Without moving from his seat, he took out a one-hundred-dollar bill and held it out towards the magician; it was rolled up lengthways, like a bill that is destined to be tucked into the cleavage of a dancing girl. To reach it, the magician had to weave his way around the spectators while El Tano made no effort other than to hold the note in the air. The magician's hands were sweating, and the note stuck to him. “Thank you, sir… that's most kind,” he said, and he returned to the improvised stage, trying not to step on anyone.

The trick consisted of noting down the bill's serial number, folding it, placing it in a box and burning it by
inserting a cigarette into the box. The note would then reappear, completely undamaged.

“Years ago, instead of this trick, I used to do the one where the lady assistant gets sawn in half,” said the magician as he placed the note into the box. “But I've come to realize that the dollar-bill trick creates much more tension in certain audiences.”

We laughed. It was the first joke that had hit the mark. Even El Tano laughed, and some of the tension dissipated. The magician went on with his work. He asked Mariana Andrade for the cigarette she was smoking. He inserted it into the little box that held the note; the smoke became darker and denser. The cigarette passed through the box and emerged on the other side, slightly crushed. A bead of sweat ran down the side of the magician's face and I feared that the trick had failed. But no. The magician returned the cigarette to its owner, then made Ronie open the box, take out the note, unfold it and show it to the audience as it should be: perfect, intact, valid. He checked the serial number: it was the same bill. This drew hearty applause, inspired less by the trick itself than by a certainty that the show was approaching its end. The magician extended the note to El Tano, who said: “You may as well keep it. I'm sure all this is costing me a pretty penny anyway.” The note hovered in the air between them for an instant, then the magician folded it more neatly and carefully than he had when he was doing the trick, and put it in his pocket. He bowed and said once more: “Thank you sir, that's most kind.”

We were the last to leave and they took us to the door. As they stood in the doorway, El Tano had his arm around his wife – as he had all night – and the gesture still seemed ambiguous.

“We've had a great time – thanks,” I said, as one does.

“It was really nice, wasn't it?” replied Teresa.

I looked at Ronie, waiting for him to say something and, when he didn't, I quickly covered his silence. “Yes, it was really nice, thank you.”

It annoyed me that Ronie could not make his own contribution – even a monosyllabic one – to the pleasantries. I looked at him again, and gave him a little kick. There was another short silence, then he said: “Do you know what your problem is going to be here, Tano?”

El Tano wavered.

“You've got no rival.”

The three of us were quiet; I don't suppose any of us understood what he intended by this remark and I even felt a bit frightened.

“There's no one here to give you a good game; you're going to end up getting bored. We need new blood, people who can play tennis at your level, Tano.”

El Tano smiled, then. So did I. “I expect you to bring this up with prospective buyers, Virginia. Item one on the admissions form: excellent standard in tennis. Otherwise, no deal.”

And so for the last time, before the night ended, we all laughed at a joke that none of us found funny. We made our final goodbyes, then walked slowly away, barely making a sound on the dewy grass. Behind us, we heard the click of the Scaglias' door closing. A heavy door with a lock that sounded like some piece of precision clockwork.

We walked a little further in silence and, when I felt we were far enough away, I said: “I bet you he's giving
her shit about that magician.” Ronie looked at me and shook his head. “I bet you he's wondering who would make a good tennis partner.”

Virginia spent her first years at Cascade Heights looking after Juani and enjoying the sports, the woodland walks and her new friendships. She was one of us. If she ever sold or rented us a house or a plot of land during that time, it would have been a one-off transaction, in which she intervened only because she knew one of the parties concerned.

Six years later, when Ronie lost his job, she became more formally involved in the property market. For years she had managed an estate on behalf of some friends of the family, and now she was due a sizeable payment which would allow them to live comfortably for a while. This might be a shorter or longer-term arrangement, depending on the rate of their outgoings from that point on. And Ronie took it in that spirit, regarding the fallow period as an open-ended sabbatical. By the time it ended, he reckoned he would be earning an income. Mavi feared otherwise, while saying nothing. She suspected that her husband would have difficulty finding a new job, and she did not want to see her savings bleed away with no source of funds to staunch the haemorrhage. At work they had told Ronie that they needed to “cut costs”, and within a month of firing him they had brought in a recently-graduated agronomist and were training him to do the job that he had done himself with no degree.

Meanwhile, like some trick with mirrors, another man had assured himself of a job. He was our own leader, the President of Argentina, who, thanks to a piece of constitutional reform, need no longer step down after four years in office, but could be re-elected for another term. Ronie was not so lucky. In that death-stricken year, many people lost their jobs – but others fared even worse. A year after the bomb that devastated the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association, the President's son was killed in a helicopter accident; there was an explosion at a munitions factory in Río Tercero which killed six people. And we lost some of our idols – that boxer who had once thrown his wife out of a window, and the first Argentine Formula One champion seen off by the entire neighbourhood of Balcarce, who set fire to the engine of his car during the funeral. But at that time death had not yet come closer to us, it had not touched our circle of friends.

“Mavi Guevara” was the first estate agency to be run by someone who really knew The Cascade. Someone we knew too. María Virginia Guevara. Virginia: we neither called her by her full name nor by the shortened version, because “María Virginia” was associated with a time before we knew her and “Mavi” was a hybrid created for business purposes. Before Virginia appeared on the scene, we used to buy and sell houses through the agencies in San Isidro, Martínez or in Buenos Aires, and it felt very impersonal: nobody knew anyone and the agents talked about the houses as though they were separable from the ground on which they stood. Virginia embraced a very different style. She knew better than anyone that each house hid treasures. And flaws, too. She knew that the streets do not run in parallel lines
here, as they do in the city, that their layout does not correspond to the usual format. After showing three houses, your average estate agent could easily confuse east with west and end up calling the guard as Cascade Heights dissolved into a maze from which he could not escape even by retracing his own footsteps.

Strangers to The Cascade are like the fairy-tale Hansel, whose breadcrumbs got eaten up by birds: their sense of direction gets eaten up. They're trapped in a pattern of streets where everything looks the same and different at once. Virginia, on the other hand, could find the exit with her eyes closed. Any of us could. We know from memory the spinney above which the sun rises, the house behind which it sets. In summer
and
winter – because they aren't the same. We know at what time the first bird sings and the whereabouts of bats or weasels. That was something Virginia always kept in mind when showing a house: the bats and the weasels. When they come to The Heights, potential buyers sometimes imagine they have landed in paradise and, if they haven't been warned, they can get a hell of a shock when they come across one of these creatures. Our three barriers cannot keep the bats and weasels out, nor can the perimeter fence. You get used to them and you even grow to like them, but the first encounter makes quite an impression and it's disenchanting in a way. Those of us who come from the city arrive here with lots of fantasies about country life but lots of fears, too. “And in the estate-agency business we want to feed the fantasies and banish the fears” – that's a line in Virginia's notebook from the chapter headed “Bats, Weasels and other Creatures of The Cascade”. She's added in brackets “(at least until the contract's signed)”. Virginia used to carry this red,
spiral-bound notebook everywhere; it was like a log book charting all that she learned about the business of estate agency. If bats and weasels were bad, a hare, on the other hand, was a bonus when showing a house – especially to families with children: “that tends to be the sort of nature they like to see”.

With the passing years, and her accumulated experience, Virginia's red notebook grew in value. It came to have mythic status in our community. It was part of the Mavi Guevara legend. We all knew of its existence, but nobody had read it – although some claimed to have done so. We feared that we may have been included in it, and also that we may not have been. And we hazarded (wrongly) that all of us together could build up a picture similar to the one taking shape within its pages, simply by stringing together isolated remarks we had heard from Virginia over the years, and by inventing some other plausible ones. By repeating such maxims as we remembered, we began to build up an imaginary, oral version of the red notebook, which we defended as the truth. And Virginia did not refute it. “Behave yourself, or you're going down in my red notebook,” she would threaten, laughing. She claimed to jot down everything, even when she was not sure of the usefulness of some notes. The outflow of the irrigation channels. Which garden is prone to flooding. Who is the best electrician in the area. And the best locksmith. Which neighbour is impossible to deal with. Which one neglects his pet. Which one neglects her children. People say she even notes down the names of men who are cheating on their wives or who underpay their maids. But it must all be gossip because – what does any of that have to do with buying or selling a house?

As well as the red notebook, Virginia used to carry an index file containing white, lined cards. The Insúas. The Masottas. The Scaglias. The Uroviches. Every house was indexed, whether it was for sale or not. She started including the ones that were not for sale after learning that some newspapers hold on file the obituaries of certain famous people who have not yet died. “Forward planning,” she used to say, “and less macabre in my case than theirs.” And even though some people objected to their inclusion in her
premortem
file, time always proved her right. Crises of one kind or another meant that houses which had been bought as a lifelong investment must suddenly be sold. The kind of money that buys you into a place like this can vanish in the blink of an eye. And Mavi was neither a prophet of doom nor eaten up with envy – which is what Leticia Hurtado shouted in her face, shortly after their house was sold at auction. She simply could see, before anyone else, the way things were going – to the extent that she even kept a card on her own house.

There came a time when, outside almost all the houses sold or rented in Cascade Heights, there was a sign reading “Mavi Guevara, Estate Agency”. In terms of customer service, no one could compete with her. Virginia never ended a meeting without having a coffee with her client, or chatting about something other than business or without having at least a vague sense of who this person was signing papers on the other side of her desk. “I wouldn't feel able to sell a friend's house to just anybody. In Cascade Heights all the houses either belong or have belonged to friends. And every new arrival is a potential friend.” People say this is written on one of the first pages of her notebook. Apparently
she showed these lines to Carmen Insúa, one afternoon, when Carmen was no longer the woman she once had been. “Every point in a property transaction has to be crystal clear. Nobody can risk getting on the wrong side of someone, because, in Cascade Heights, sooner or later, all paths meet.” And after she fell out with Carlos Rodríguez Alonso – who refused to pay the stipulated commission on the sale of his house, protesting that they were friends and that he had thought she had given him certain information “as a favour” – apparently she added in the margin of the aforementioned note: “Can you ever really become friends with someone you got to know through his wallet?” And she answered the question herself in a note at the foot of the page: “All misery is routed through the wallet.”

Romina had already set off for school. She had gone in a minicab because getting up early put Mariana in a bad mood and was a recipe for a disastrous morning. Romina was not exactly sunny first thing, either. When Mariana had to start taking Pedro, of course she would get up early, but in the meantime she thought that it was nicer for the girl – her daughter now – to go in a taxi with Antonia, rather than to suffer her morning mood.

Mariana got into the shower and stood under the jet of water until she felt herself waking up. By the time she emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, Antonia had already returned from the school, tidied her bedroom and left a breakfast tray on the bedside
table; now she was picking up the clothes left scattered around the bed. These women obviously have a different biorhythm, thought Mariana; they are pack mules. And she lay down on the bed for another five minutes. Antonia bent down to pick up the diamanté spandex T-shirt that Mariana had worn the night before, and noticed a small hole in it.