by Claudia Pi
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.
5
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.
It took Teresa a few yards to grasp that there was nothing she could do. She opted for walking on tip-toe – a compromise solution I’ve seen other city women try – and settled for looking from afar, instead of walking around the plot hand in hand with her husband. Meanwhile, El Tano strode ahead, his hands in his pockets, planting his feet firmly in the ground. It was clear that he was marking his territory with every step. If he had been an animal, he’d have pissed on it. There was no doubting his body language: this was the land he had been looking for. His stance should have made me think cheerfully of the commission that was close at hand, but instead it unnerved me and I told him that I would have to check with the owner that the land was still for sale.
“If it’s not for sale, why are you showing me it?”
“No, yes – it is for sale, or it was. Caviró Senior, the owner, placed it with my agency a couple of months ago but, I don’t know, I’d like to be sure.”
“If he placed it with your agency, that means it’s for sale.”
And that would be the case in many places, but not in The Cascade. In The Cascade one has to learn to operate with a certain flexibility. Sometimes people tell you they want to sell, then a son turns up, claiming a stake, or they fear selling will bring social embarrassment, or they can’t agree with their wives. And the agency has to pick up the pieces. In this case, that’s me, Virginia, or “Mavi Guevara”, to use my business name. Some people put a house or plot up for sale to test the market, or because they want to know how much it’s gone up in value since they bought it, or because a valuation is too abstract a measure for them, and they need to see in front of them someone who wants what they have and has the cash in hand to get it. And then they say no, they don’t want to sell.
“I want this land,” El Tano said again.
“I’ll do what I can,” I remember answering.
“That’s not enough,” he said in a calm voice that was nonetheless so steely it immobilized me as surely as his wife had been immobilized by her heels anchored in the soil. I didn’t know what to say. El Tano advanced as though pushing the point of his sword towards a rival who had already fallen to the ground and was ready to relinquish the fight.
“I want this land.”
I hesitated for no more than a moment then, to my own amazement, I heard myself say: “Consider it done. This land will be yours.”
And this was neither a pat phrase, nor a declaration of intent. Nor did it have anything to do with my concrete ability to achieve such a thing. Quite the opposite. It was an expression of my absolute conviction that this man standing in front of me and whom I had only just met, El Tano Scaglia, was sure always to obtain everything that he wanted from life.
From death, too.
6
The car stopped in front of the barrier. Ernesto wound down his window, swiped his electronic card for the first time and the barrier was raised. The guard on duty acknowledged them with a smile. The girl watched him from her seat. The guard waved to her, but she did not respond. Mariana also wound down her window and took an exaggeratedly deep breath, as though this air were better than any other. It was not as sweet as she had noted it two years ago, when she first came to The Cascade. On that occasion she had come through the visitors’ entrance. And it had been spring, not autumn, as it was now. They had asked for everything, even her I
D number, before letting her in. They had made her wait fifteen minutes because no one could be found to authorize her visit. That time she had been going to a barbecue at the home of one of Ernesto’s clients. It was someone who owed her husband a favour because he had made it possible for this man to enter into some business for which he would not have qualified without Ernesto’s help. Those sorts of favours also count as debts, thought Ernesto, especially when they allow the debtor to make a lot of money. That day, the day of the barbecue, they decided that Cascade Heights was where they would like to live when they had children. And now they had two of them. They would have preferred one, but it was either that or keep waiting. And Mariana could not wait any longer. Before the judge had given them the children a month ago, she had reached her wit’s end. They had even been on the point of buying a child in El Chaco: someone had mentioned a surrogate mother to them. Then by chance it turned out that another client of Ernesto’s knew this particular judge who was able to get the ball rolling.
The Andrades’ car advanced slowly along the tree-lined road that skirted the golf course. The streets of The Cascade competed in displays of red-and-white foliage. Not even the world’s greatest artist could produce a painting to compare with their view from the window, thought Mariana. Red balsam, yellow ginkgo biloba, reddish-brown oaks. Pedro was sleeping in his car seat, beside his sister. The girl thought it a little cold with the window open, and tucked the baby’s blanket round him. Then she crossed her legs and arranged her new skirt over them. Looking out of the window, she saw a sign that said “Children Playing. Maximum Speed 10 mph”, but she made no sense of it because she did not know how to read.
Mariana turned away from the scenery and glanced in the rear-view mirror at the children, pretending to smooth down a lock of hair; she wondered how the fraternal bond was going to develop between these two children she scarcely knew. She had thought of the baby’s name years ago, when she and Ernesto were still engaged. The girl had come with a name already given: Ramona. Mariana could not imagine how anyone, in this day and age, would give such a name to a girl. Ramona was a name for something else – not a child. During all those years of waiting and having treatments, she had thought of various possibilities: Camila, Victoria, Sofía, Delfina, Valentina, even Inés, after her paternal grandmother. But the girl had come with her own name, and the judge had not authorized a change. For that reason, Mariana had decided to call her “Romina” without asking for anyone’s authorization, as if this change were simply the result of some confusion over vowels. Fortunately the girl had been unable to tell the judge the baby’s name – if he had one – and referred to him only as “baba” instead of “baby”.
Antonia was waiting for them in the doorway when they arrived; she had just been arranging the flowers sent by Virginia Guevara in a vase, which she had placed in the centre of the new pine table. She wore a blue uniform with white embroidery on the cuffs. It was also brand new – when they lived in Palermo she had not worn a uniform. She had not lived in, either. But with the move, and the arrival of the children, she had been obliged to accept the change or lose her job. The car made a sound like summer rain as it pulled onto the gravel drive, and the girl shivered. She saw through the window that it was a sunny day. “It’s raining invisible stones,” she thought. Mariana was the first to get out of the car. She went up to Antonia, giving her her handbag to hold and a bag containing a few items of clothes that had not been brought over in the move, the previous day. Then immediately she returned to the car, opened the back door and undid the seat belt on the baby’s chair. The girl watched Mariana pick up her brother. She murmured something like “come here, little one,” then lifted him out of the car. The baby’s blanket fell onto the gravel.
“Isn’t he looking lovely today, Antonia?”
Antonia nodded.
“Go and make him up a bottle. He must be starving.”
Antonia went into the house with the clothes and the handbag. Mariana, holding Pedro in her arms, glanced back at the car, as though looking for something.
“Ernesto?” she said, and Ernesto emerged from behind the boot, pushing a pram on which he had piled up tennis rackets and a suit-carrier. They went into the house together and the little girl saw the door close behind them. She studied the house through the polarized car window, thinking it the most beautiful house in the world. It seemed to have been made from toffee and cream, like the one in the story they had told her, in the church at Caá Cati. She would have liked to get out of the car and run across the lawn that looked like a carpet – but she couldn’t, because she did not know how to unfasten the seat belt. She tried and failed to release it and was scared to break something and get a beating; she didn’t want anyone to hit her any more.
Time passed. The girl entertained herself by watching people go by in the street: a lady with a dog on a lead; a woman who wore the same uniform as Antonia, pushing a baby in a pram; a boy on his bicycle and a girl on roller skates. She would like to go on skates too, one day, she thought. She had never seen a pair of skates up close, and the girl went by too fast for her to get a proper look. She did see that they were pink, though, and that was her favourite colour.
The front door opened and Antonia came out and went to the car. “What are you still doing here. Come on, come on,” she said, undoing the seat belt with an effort – because she, too, was unused to the mechanism. She took the girl by the hand and into the house. Her new home.
On the Monday following their move, the girl was starting school. She had never been to school before. Mariana and Ernesto had managed to get her into the first grade at Lakelands – the school to which they had always dreamed of sending their first child – even though she had no previous knowledge of the language. By “the language”, they meant English. It wasn’t going to be easy for the girl, because term had begun two months ago. The head mistress told them that this was a challenge they would have to face together: the school would give the girl one-to-one attention to help her acquire the same English skills as her classmates, but Mariana must organize extra tuition, to ensure that these skills were reinforced. They did not talk of a teacher, but of a “coach”. Mariana agreed. They had to give it a go. Pedro was going to go to Lakelands anyway, from grade one, just like any child. And, for practical reasons, it made sense for Pedro and the girl to go to the same school.
Mariana did not have very high expectations of Romina’s first steps in school. She had learned not to get her hopes up as a way to deal with frustration during the years of fertility treatments when, month after month, she would go to the bathroom fearing the worst and finding her fears confirmed: the stain that blotted out all hopes, turning the calendar back to day one. Then, in the United States they had diagnosed “irreversibly empty follicles” and she was grateful for their frankness. She wanted to adopt the same policy with the girl’s schooling: banish all hopes, expect the worst and ward off future frustration by anticipating it. When the moment came, however, she could not help but feel anxious. She got everything ready the night before, ironing the uniform herself, to be sure that the pleats of the skirt were perfectly symmetrical, then she left the clothes neatly folded on a chair: the white blouse, the blue sweater with its bright red-and-green detail, the kilt. The girl was asleep. Even in the darkness of the room, her black hair shone.
Mariana went down to the family room, switched on the television and lit a cigarette. Ernesto was working on the computer. She flicked between one channel and the next without knowing what she was watching. All she wanted was for time to pass, for it to be the next day, and the one after, and another one, until the day arrived when she forgot from where, and from whom, her children had come. Especially the girl. It was different with Pedro – he was barely three months old. He would soon forget smells, a particular breath, a voice, a heartbeat, a blow. She would be able to mould him as he grew. Not so the girl. Her eyes had seen too much already. You could tell. Mariana found it hard to meet her eye – it scared her. As i
f those dark eyes could show her some of the things that they had once seen.
The alarm went off at half-past seven. Mariana got up, got dressed and went down to breakfast. Only then did she ask Antonia to wake Romina, take her some breakfast and get her dressed. Then she herself would go up to brush her hair. Ernesto was not going to go with them to the school. He would have liked to go: at these events one always meets someone who may end up being a useful contact, or a good client, and he wanted to get to know the community to which he now belonged. But Mariana had asked him to stay at home with Pedro. He had coughed all night, and she was worried. And Ernesto knew from experience that no business opportunity was worth having Mariana worry.
Mariana went up to the girl’s room. She brushed her hair as best she could; it was black, glossy and thick as wire. A hairdresser had been waiting for them the day they brought the children home from Corrientes. At that time they still lived in the flat in Buenos Aires. In less than five minutes the baby’s head was completely shaved. But Mariana could hardly do the same to the girl, much though she would have liked it. That day the girl had played with her brother’s shorn locks, scattered on the kitchen floor, while Mariana, to one side, gave instructions to the hairdresser.
“Not so short,” he remonstrated. “She has lovely hair.”
Mariana hesitated and looked at the girl as she sat on the floor staring at the tiles. Antonia’s broom scratched over the girl’s hand, as she swept up her brother’s dead hair.
“Well then trim the ends, but at least thin it out a bit.”
But the hairdresser couldn’t. Every time he approached her with the scissors the girl started screaming.