by Claudia Pi
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.”
8
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 a
fternoon, 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.”
9
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.
“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 – hopefully before Paulita’s birthday – 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 – 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 – the owner of the garage where the clothes were all laid out – 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 – 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 – 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 Señor
a’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.