Thursday Night Widows

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Thursday Night Widows Page 6

by Claudia Pi


  “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 – 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 – 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 – 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 – 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 – which, although they made a lot of mess, had given the children so much fun in summer – 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 – 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 – 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.

  11

  Romina and Juani first meet in the little playground at The Cascade. Even though they go to the same school, they have never crossed paths before. They meet one afternoon. Juani arrives on a bicycle, alone. He is one of the few children who go to the playground alone. Everyone else comes accompanied by the “girl who looks after us”: their families’ domestic servants. Juani doesn’t have one of those any more; he used to, but not now. There’s just a woman who comes to clean the house in the morning, when he’s at school.

  The children swing themselves far too high. Some of them twist the swings up, then spin madly around. Romina doesn’t look at them, so as not to feel dizzy. She uses a stick to draw in the sand. She draws a house and a river. She scratches them out. A very tall boy throws the swing over the top crossbar, to lift it further off the ground. Antonia pushes Pedro in one of the baby swings, while she chats to another maid. They are speaking the same language, but they sound different. The very tall boy grows bored and leaves. Juani gets onto the swing he has left. He untwists it. He swings on his own. Two little girls fight over another swing. One of them, in embroidered jeans, pulls the hair of the other one, who’s wearing a pink dress. The other one cries. Nobody looks at them, apart from Romina. The girl in the dress cries harder. She starts shouting. Then the maids who look after these two come over. “What a little devil you are,” one of them says to the child who isn’t crying. “Let your little friend have the swing – don’t make her cry.” The girl doesn’t want to; she clings on to the swing. The girl in the pink dress cries even harder. Juani gets down from his swing and holds out the chains to the girl who is crying. “Here you are,” he says. Romina watches, while drawing in the sand. “I want the other one!” the girl retorts. Juani offers his swing to the girl who isn’t crying. He suggests swapping it for the one favoured by the girl who is crying. The one who isn’t crying refuses. Annoyed, Juani goes back to swinging, higher and higher. “I’m going to tell your mummy,” says the Peruvian girl in charge of the child who isn’t crying and won’t give up her swing. “Bitch,” retorts the child and runs off. The one who’s crying stops crying then and runs after her. They tread on Romina’s drawing. They climb up the yellow slide and hurl themselves down it, laughing. The maids who look after them return to their bench and resume chatting. One complains that her patrona won’t let her have a siesta, and her legs are swelling up as a result. Juani swings higher and higher. Romina watches him. She covers her ruined picture with sand and looks at h
im again. From where she is sitting, it looks as though Juani is touching the sky with his brown shoes. One of his laces is missing. Romina stands up and goes over to the other swing. She swings herself. She tries to reach him. Just when she thinks she may reach him, Juani throws himself from the highest point and falls onto the sand. The swing continues to move haphazardly, now that it carries no weight. Romina would like to jump, but doesn’t dare. “Go on – jump. You’ll be fine,” says Juani from below. She goes back and forth, undecided. “Go on, I’m waiting for you.” Romina throws herself off. She lets herself fall through the air and, for the first time since she left Corrientes, she feels light. She falls onto the sand, twisting one foot. Juani gets up to help her.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” he asks.

  “No,” she says, and laughs.

  “What’s your name?” he asks her. She writes it on the sand: “Ramona”.

  12

  To stand at the tee on the first hole and let your eyes wander over a vista of never-ending green is a privilege that those of us who live in Cascade Heights sometimes take for granted. Until we lose it. People get accustomed to what they have – especially when what they have is wonderful. Many of us can go for months without playing a single hole, as if we didn’t care that the course was a few yards from our house and entirely at our disposal.

  You don’t have to be a golfer to enjoy such natural beauty – “natural” because it comprises grass, trees and lakes, not “natural” in the sense of belonging to a landscape that was here before we arrived. This used to be a swamp. The course was designed by engineer Pérez Echeverría, who famously sketched the plan for a club in the south while aboard a helicopter, as it flew over the forest that would need to be felled. Today it’s impossible to imagine that our fairways were once marshes. There are species of tree that had to be brought specially from nurseries in different parts of the country. The shrubs, planted by landscape gardeners, are tended every week and changed with the seasons. An automatic sprinkler comes on every night. And then there are fertilizers, insecticides, supplements. The river that crosses hole fifteen was here before we arrived. But we purified it. Now it’s a more turquoise green, thanks to water treatment, and the introduction of certain algae which keep the ecosystem aerated. The fish that were there before the purification have died. They were undistinguished fish, a sort of bream, brownish-coloured. We put in orange perch, which reproduced and became the new masters of the stream. There are ducks and otters, too. Although recently the ducks and otters are down in numbers. Some say it’s because people are killing them. For food. But that’s very unlikely. Even if someone tried it – the maintenance staff, caddies, gardeners, anyone who dared – it would be impossible for them to smuggle their catch past our security guards. Once they caught a caddie throwing a dead duck over the perimeter fence to a woman on the other side. He claimed to have hit it accidentally, with a killer shot from the fourth tee. But nobody believed him. I mean, the woman on the other side had all but brought her casserole dish. The committees for Golf and for the Environment served him a joint indictment.

  The lakes are, in fact, the sole true remnant of the marsh that was once here. But nobody would know that; there can’t be a golf course anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a lake. We use a system of pumps to drain rainwater collected in the irrigation channels around our community into the lake and thus avoid flooding; the water is pumped in and then the river itself carries it out of the club. The Municipal Government complained once that we were exporting the problem of surplus water to the neighbourhood of Santa María de los Tigrecitos, but there were a couple of meetings between their council and ours and somehow the matter was resolved. It would be like blaming the city of Córdoba for the flooding in Santa Fe. Some sort of inexpensive alteration had to be made. The last major investment was in chemical toilets, which became a requirement once the ladies took over the course. If a man’s caught short, he can urinate anywhere: behind a tree, in some bushes. Even on a golf course. Not so a woman.

  Our course is re-sown every year. You won’t find that in every club. Most of them only re-seed the tee of each hole. Pencross on the greens and Bermuda on the fairways. The re-seeding, together with the cost of the machines, the staff involved, the irrigation and draining systems, etc., mean that maintaining the golf course accounts for one of the most congested columns in our budget. The tennis players grumble about it. There’s some mutual goading between aficionados of the two sports. People complain that the club spends much more money on golf than tennis and that it all comes out of the same fees and the same pockets. But investment in the course does not benefit the golfers alone. Members of our community can stroll on the links, have a drink on the terrace at the ninth hole (with its enviable views), listen to music while watching the sun set over the fifteenth hole or even go on a photographic safari to take pictures of wild birds. The Environment Committee has provided a great outreach service by placing at each hole a wooden sign with photographs of the birds you can expect to see, showing their markings and characteristics. But, quite apart from the enjoyment that each one of us may take in it, there is an important economic benefit in having a course – as we all know. The value of our houses is directly related (whatever the percentage is, it must be significant) to their proximity to good links. The same house, in a neighbourhood without a course, would be worth much less.

  Years ago, playing golf was an exclusive activity. In other countries it still is. Not so in Argentina. It’s expensive, but the Convertibility Law has narrowed all manner of gaps and “expensive” no longer has to mean “exclusive”. In the golf bar there are wooden shields bearing the names of the winners of the club’s annual tournaments. And over the years, the engraved surnames have become progressively less grand. In 1975, one Menéndez Behety was the champion. In 1985, a McAllister. And in 1995 it was a García. Not García Moreno. Not García Lynch. Not García Nieto. Just plain old García. On Wednesdays the course fills up with Japanese players. On Thursdays it’s hired out to companies. When Koreans enquire, the Starter has instructions to say that the course is full or to lie about the cost of the “greens fee”, which is levied on all nonmembers who wish to play a round. Apparently ours is not the only course to make Koreans unwelcome. Other golfers complain that they tend to shout, fight, throw their clubs around and bet monstrous sums of money, provoking violent outbursts. But, Koreans aside, at the start of the 1990s it was already clear that golf would not much longer remain the preserve of gentlemen. Fewer and fewer men bother to don the requisite polo shirt and pleated trousers. Even some of our members shout. Some of the women think it acceptable to play in a sleeveless top. There are members who throw their clubs in disgust when they drop one too many shots on a tournament-winning hole. There are players who are slow and won’t let anyone past, and players who complain vociferously about the slow ones and aren’t above sending an intimidating ball in their direction. There are players who withhold score cards with more shots than expected in order to keep up a socially desirable handicap. Such golfers do not care whether they play well or not; the only thing that matters to them is keeping their handicap at ten or below. On the other hand there are players who conceal score cards with fewer strokes than expected in order to keep a high handicap that will give them an advantage in tournaments. In short, players are increasingly likely to lie on their score cards. You get all kinds. The last straw was Mariano Lepera. In the Club Cup he got a hole-in-one, then tried to deny it in order to avoid buying a round of champagne. He had teed-off at the sixth hole, and the ball, after describing a perfect arc, fell onto the green, bounced three times, rolled around, then dropped into the hole marked by a flag. It was one shot, without a doubt. No more swings were necessary. Only one. On any course, anywhere in the world, it is a courtesy and unwritten law (to which no one has ever objected) that a golfer who scores a hole-in-one must buy a drink for everyone on the course at that moment. Usually champagne. Sometimes whisky. For every player from the fi
rst to the eighteenth. Mariano Lepera asked the Starter how many people he had brought out that morning and made a quick calculation: 120 players at roughly five pesos each: 600 pesos. “Over my dead body.” And off he went, before anyone could get their order in. That’s just not done. Or it wasn’t done. Nothing happens to you – it’s not like there’s a sanction – but it’s not gentlemanly. That’s why they have hole-in-one insurance policies. Any insurer will provide one. Most of us get offered it when we take out housing insurance. Fire, theft and – for a few more centavos a month – hole-in-one. You’re insuring a particular kind of misfortune, which is neither fire, theft nor third-party damage. Really, you’re insuring a moment of joy, because anyone who can get a ball in the hole from 150 yards should consider himself very fortunate. The fact that there’s a national register in which these lucky few can have their names recorded goes to show how special it is. Although most people prefer to put their names in the United States register to get international recognition. The procedure’s simple: a letter, a few forms. It’s plain silly not to get the insurance and take full pleasure in your triumph. In life there may be few chances to get a hole-in-one, but there are many to prove oneself a gentleman.

  13

  It was a shock the first time I was called to Juani’s school. To Lakelands. I opened the red folder and between two letters – one inviting me to a ceremony for National Flag Day, and another reminding me to submit fees – there was an official summons on paper with a letterhead. Lakelands’ letterhead is a shield with four words in English around it. I never remember exactly what the words are. “In God We Trust” says Ronie drily. Dear parents, please come to the School Office at 9 a.m. on Monday, 15 June to talk about, a series of dots, then, written in hand: Juan Ignacio Guevara. Juani. I had never before been formally summoned to talk about my son. I started to worry. Juani was in fifth grade. The letter was signed by the headmistress and the school’s psychologist.

 

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