“Señora, have you seen this?”
Mariana went over and inspected the shirt. “It must have been a spark,” said Antonia.
“Some idiot's cigarette. That's one hundred dollars down the drain, for the sake of a pose⦔
Mariana returned the shirt to the bundle of dirty washing Antonia was carrying, and began to unwind the towel from her hair. Antonia studied the little hole beneath the armpit. “Would you like me to darn it?” she asked timidly. Mariana gave her a look. “Have you ever seen me wear darned clothes?”
Antonia left the room and went down to the laundry feeling cheerful. When Mariana stopped wearing things, she passed them on to Antonia, and this shirt was much better than anything she could have dreamed of giving her daughter for her next birthday. She inspected it before washing it by hand. The diamantes were set against the material in concentric circles that almost made her feel dizzy. None of the stones was missing and a couple of stitches would see to the hole.
When the shirt had completed its cycle of washing and ironing, Antonia took it up to Mariana's walk-in wardrobe and placed it in the compartment for black T-shirts. She knew that it would soon be hers â hopefully before Paulita's birthday â but she couldn't risk taking it without her employer's say-so.
A few days later, Mariana invited three neighbours to tea. Among other concerns, the women managed a centre offering free lunches to poor children, a few blocks away from the entrance to Cascade Heights. Teresa Scaglia, Carmen Insúa and Nane Pérez called themselves “The Ladies of the Heights”, and were setting up a foundation in that name. They tried to interest Mariana in joining their crusade.
“What we need more than anything is trainers,” said the one who had asked for a mango-and-strawberry infusion. “Otherwise, when it rains, half the children don't come to eat because they can't get through the mud barefoot. Can you believe it?”
“How awful,” said Mariana, as Antonia passed her a teapot with more hot water.
“You have to come one day, Mariana, and bring your children so that they can see it with their own eyes. Otherwise we're just bringing them up in a bubble.”
And Mariana nodded, wondering how Romina would react to seeing the children, because she had once been like them, or worse; she had been “Ramona” and she still was, in the depths of those dark, frightening eyes. Pedro, on the other hand, had always been hers, right from the start.
“Thanks, Antonia, put it just there,” she said to the maid, who was standing beside her with fresh water for the pot.
A few days later, Antonia went into Mariana's room one morning and found a pile of folded clothes on the trunk at the end of the bed. The second article from the bottom was the black T-shirt with diamante stones. The rest were old clothes of Mariana's or the children and two faded golf shirts of Ernesto's.
“Put those clothes in a bag and leave them aside for Nane Ayerra,” said Mariana. “She'll come to pick them up later.”
Antonia didn't understand: usually Mariana gave all the old clothes to her to take to Misiones and share out among her family.
“You know Nane, right? She's the pretty blonde one who came here for tea the other day.”
Antonia nodded, even though she didn't know, wasn't listening and couldn't understand why that shirt, which had so nearly been hers, was going to end up in the hands of a pretty blonde. Surely a woman like that was equally unlikely to wear darned clothes. Not daring to ask about it, she found a bag and put everything inside it. As she was about to leave the room, Mariana stopped her. “Oh, and if you're interested, on Friday we're having a jumble sale after lunch at Nane's house, to raise money for the children's free meals centre. It's exclusively for maids, so don't worry, the prices will be reasonable. All of us, no matter how much or how little we have, can do more to help, don't you think?”
Antonia nodded, but she didn't really know what she thought, because she hadn't fully understood. Or rather, she hadn't paid attention, because all she could think about was the black diamante top. Perhaps she could buy it. The Señora had said “reasonable prices”. She did not know, though, what price might be considered reasonable by her employer. She could manage ten. Or maybe fifteen, because the shirt was very high quality â the Señora had bought it in Miami. And with two stitches the little hole wouldn't show.
On Friday Antonia went to the jumble sale, during the siesta, after she had finished mopping the kitchen floor.
There were two or three girls there that she knew from taking the bus on Saturday lunchtimes. She said hello, but didn't want to chat to them. The pretty blonde woman â the owner of the garage where the clothes were all laid out â was there with three other women she recognized, having seen them at her employer's house. They were chatting, laughing and drinking coffee. Every now and then, one or other of them came over to give the price of an article of clothing. One of the girls from the bus chose a coral-red silk dress. It was pretty, but it had two small stains on the hem, probably caused by bleach. If it had been blue, Antonia could have fixed that; once she had accidentally stained Romina's blue gym bottoms with bleach then used a biro to colour in the mark and Mariana had never noticed. Romina herself had suggested this, when the girl found her worrying about the mark. Romina was always helping her; the girl was a bit gruff, but intelligent â not like her, she thought. That red was going to be difficult, though. They charged the girl from the bus five pesos. If that was the going rate, Antonia reckoned that she was going to be able to buy the shirt. But she couldn't see her employer's sparkly top anywhere. She checked all the piles, without finding it. She wanted it so much, she plucked up the courage to ask one of the ladies.
“A black T-shirt⦠I don't think there is one.” The lady asked one of the others: “Have you seen a black T-shirt that would be right for her, Nane?”
“No, there's nothing in black,” put in Teresa. “But why do you want black? That colour won't suit you â it's going to drain you. Wear something that picks you up a bit, that makes your face glow. Try looking in that pile.”
“It's not for me, it's for my daughter,” said Antonia, but once more they were chatting among themselves and did not hear her.
Antonia continued to look through the piles, but without hoping to find anything. It was the Señora's black top or nothing. That was what she wanted, to give to Paulita for her birthday. “Thank you,” she said at last and left empty-handed. Over the following days, Antonia thought more than once about the shirt that was not hers. She wondered who must have taken it. At the weekend, she asked the girls on the bus, but nobody had seen it. Finally she put it out of her mind. “At the end of the day, a shirt isn't going to change anyone's life,” she thought.
And then Halloween came round. Mariana had bought sweets to give to the children who came to their door that evening. She had bought Romina a witch's outfit, so that she could go trick-or-treating round the neighbours' houses. But since coming home from school, the girl had been shut up in her room and Mariana didn't feel like coaxing her down. Pedro was still too little to go out, and burst into tears when he saw people dressed up. Lots of people knocked on the Andrades' door that night. The children of friends, Romina's classmates, “Children who like good, clean fun,” said Mariana to her daughter, by way of a reproach. She had bought the sweets in the supermarket a few days before and hidden them in the desk in the sitting room, which was where Mariana hid everything she did not want to be eaten. By nine o'clock, three groups of children had already come by. At a quarter past nine, the doorbell rang again. Antonia went to answer the door with an instruction to share out the remaining
sweets and send the children away. Mariana didn't like interruptions at dinner time. Outside was a gaggle of girls who had emerged from the boot of a four-by-four driven by Nene Pérez Ayerra. She too got out of the car and asked Antonia to call her employer. She had to ask twice, because Antonia now stood transfixed by the sight of her daughter, a girl of about eight, who was dressed as a witch, with silver fingernails, pointed fangs and a trickle of red paint running from the side of her mouth. She was wearing a black, floor-length skirt and the top with little diamante stones that had belonged to the Señora.
“I just had to show you this,” said Nane when Mariana came to the door.
“No way that's my top!”
Antonia said: “Yes, it is,” but nobody heard her.
“You know what girls are like at this age. She saw it when I was laying things out for the jumble sale and she decided on a whim that she wanted it for Halloween, so I took it out of the sale. But she knows that after Halloween she has to give it back to me â right?”
The girl said nothing: she was busy filling her little basket with sweets from the bag held out by Antonia.
“I'll let her get her way this time then put it into the next sale.”
“Come on â if she likes it that much, let her hang on to it. It's a present from Auntie Mariana,” she said, and bent to give the girl a kiss.
“OK, but in that case you'll have to choose one of your own shirts and give it to me instead,” Nane told her daughter, “because we all have to learn to do our bit, even when we're little, if we want this world to change â don't we?”
But the girl could not answer, because her mouth was engaged in the business of trying to chew a gigantic toffee. Meanwhile Antonia was still standing there, staring at the T-shirt. She counted five diamante stones missing from the concentric circles. Luckily, the gaps did not stand out very much â two were at the side, close to the seam, two close to the hem and one under the bust. It was a shame: none of them had been missing before. At any rate, with fewer diamantes, in the next jumble sale the price of the shirt would be even more “reasonable”, as her employer put it. Damaged goods are always cheaper, she thought.
10
One summer, the playground at Cascade Heights was completely overhauled. That time of year was chosen to do the work, because there are fewer residents in the neighbourhood and many of the people who are here are holidaymakers, renting one of our houses while we spend the summer somewhere else. The worst choice of holiday destination that year was Pinamar, where the summer season was much affected by the murder of a photographer who had dared to take a picture of a private postal-services tycoon as he strolled on the beach.
The Children's Commission had presented to the Council of Administration a detailed report on each piece of equipment to be replaced. The principle thrust of their argument was that, with other sectors of our club evolving, the playground must not be allowed to remain frozen in time. And they closed their presentation with
this observation: “Let's not be blind; children are our future.”
The contract went to a pair of architects who specialized in children's play areas, having designed playgrounds for two shopping centres and for several other gated communities in the area. They drew up a project, put forward three budgets, and the most reasonable of these was approved. Finally the wood and iron equipment, which had been in place since our community's first days, was replaced with plastic installations reminiscent of Fisher Price. It was sad when the maintenance team dismantled the slide, which was the longest any child in The Cascade had ever seen. But the report made it clear that the replacements would be the safest and most up-to-date available, and that they would require less upkeep. So they changed them. They put new plants along the borders of all the paths and replaced the drinking fountains â which, although they made a lot of mess, had given the children so much fun in summer â with purified-water dispensers. That was not part of the original plan, but was incorporated after a television programme claimed that water tables in the area were contaminated â with some substance which never turned up in any analysis.
The playground was not only home to new equipment, but to new sounds as well. For the voices around the sand pit had been gradually transmuting, without anyone really noticing it, until one day a new cadence held sway. The noise of children laughing and shouting was the same, but the adult voices were different now. Up until the start of the 1990s, Paraguayan accents had been the rule, along with the sing-song inflection of some far-flung Argentine province. But in the 1990s,
the Peruvian accent began to dominate â if “dominate” is the right word, because this voice was particularly sweet, calm and polite. “Put that down, now, or you'll get all dirty.” “That little boy is a naughty so-and-so.” “That little girl is always half-undressed.” “I saw that little girl get right in the sand and cause a nuisance.” But all this was said quietly, as if they did not wish to annoy anyone. And around them the usual hubbub of laughter and shouting continued, ebbing and flowing through myriad plastic circuits.
The new playground boasted yellow, red and blue slides, tunnels and walkways. There were monkey bars that you could hang from and swing your way across from one side of the sand pit to the other. There were swings in wood-effect plastic for older children, and in green plastic, with a safety bar, for the younger ones. There were basketball hoops, a see-saw and a roundabout. They put in a house, on wooden pilings, with a blue roof and yellow door, which was imported direct to Cascade Heights from the Fisher Price factory in the United States. It was a kind of tree house, with nets in the windows (so that the children could look out without risking a fall), from which you could reach the slide, via a hanging bridge. The playground, cleaner than ever, was now brilliantly decked-out in primary colours. All that was left of the old incarnation were the chains on the swings; these were thick chains of the kind that are no longer manufactured. The architects had not been able to convince anyone that the new plastic rope was tough enough to allow the twisting and vertiginous swinging that these chains did.