by Claudia Pi
I received the letter on a Friday. All weekend I worried. I couldn’t imagine why they wanted to talk to me. I asked Juani: he didn’t know either. He’d never been kept in at break; he hadn’t been sent to see the head, or made to sign the discipline book. I followed him around the house. “Have you hit anyone? Did you swear?” I followed him into the bathroom and kept asking questions while he was showering. “Stop it, Mum.” He ended up in tears. I rang a friend to see if she had also been summoned. No, she hadn’t been called in. I rang another. Nor had she. I didn’t ring anyone else after that; I didn’t want the whole world to know about – whatever it was. But they found out anyway, at the tennis tournament that weekend. As we were changing ends, Mariana Andrade said, “So you have to go into school on Monday?” And she added: “I bet any day they’ll call me in, about the girl,” referring to Romina, with whom Juani spent a lot of time.
“How did you hear about it?”
“Leticia Liporacce told me, when I ran into her at the supermarket.”
And while I was wondering who might have told Leticia Liporacce, Mariana served an ace into the corner of the base line, a weak, flabby ball, soft as a balloon, but I never even saw it go by.
On Monday, I was there at nine on the dot. Lakelands is two highway exits away from Cascade Heights. There was a time when we fantasized about moving it inside our compound, as in other country clubs, where the children can go to school by bike or on skates. “It would be so lovely to recapture that neighbourhood thing we had as children,” said Teresa Scaglia at the parents’ meeting where the idea was proposed. But there was a lot of opposition: the school already had too many children from other gated communities and, even though none of those sent as many children as we did, their combined fees represented income that the school could not afford to lose.
The primary school and administration are housed in the main building. To one side of it is the secondary school and, behind that, the kindergarten. The school is virtually mixed. I say “virtually” because, although it takes boys and girls, they do not share classrooms or a playground. There are separate divisions for girls and boys. They’re only together in the kindergarten. In the playground the areas are divided by a double yellow line (like those road markings that indicate “no overtaking”) beyond which neither sex must stray into the other’s patch. Juani used to sit on one side of the line and Romina on the other and they communicated using sign language. However, a watchful teacher misinterpreted one of Juani’s gestures and after that he was forbidden to talk to his friend across the line, on threat of suspension. But they didn’t call me in that time – there was just a note in the folder, written in English, which I had to ask Dorita Llambías to translate.
The first time I went to register Juani, I asked the headmistress if the division of sexes was based on some pedagogic theory relating to psychological development and gender differences in learning. “Something like that,” she said. “In 1989 we had to start taking boys, because otherwise it was very difficult for families with lots of children to manage the school run and all the extracurricular patriotic ceremonies – and they also lost out on the sibling discount. So we went ahead and put them together, but immediately we realized that was a mistake; we had been naive. The girls started sitting with their legs apart, showing what shouldn’t be shown and swearing – typical male behaviour. Two months into the term we separated them and painted the yellow line. We pride ourselves on a capacity to react quickly and intelligently to this sort of thing.”
The school’s three buildings are brick-clad, with generous windows. A concern for security can be discerned in every detail: everything is on one level, to avoid the need for stairs and high windows; there are round door handles, security glass, air conditioning and central heating. There are three rugby pitches and two for hockey, a gym, changing area, a circular lecture theatre with seating on levels, a video room, laboratories, a big room for art and music. The library’s on the small side – bits of it have been eaten up to make new classrooms, as the school’s grown – but plans are afoot to expand it as soon as is feasible.
I sat and waited at the reception. The pine chairs were uncomfortably hard. The secretary brought me a coffee and apologized for the wait. Ronie had not wanted to come with me. “It’ll be for something trivial, Virginia. Don’t make me cancel stuff just to go and talk to a child psychologist.” And by “stuff” he meant some project, or a million-dollar deal he never managed to clinch, whereas I had cancelled two viewings which could have resulted in commissions sufficient to pay our utilities bills that month. I finished my coffee and looked at my watch. At barely five minutes past nine o’clock, the head’s door opened. The women smiled as they invited me in, but, for all their smiling, they didn’t seem in the least relaxed – quite the contrary. There were a few pleasantries, then they came to the point. After our appointment they had to go to a teachers’ meeting, and they didn’t want to be late. The way they looked at me suggested, before they had even said anything, that they pitied me. “This is awkward, Virginia,” said the headmistress. “I’d rather Sylvie explained, she’ll put it better than I can.” And so the school psychologist explained everything.
“Juani’s been inventing some strange stories. We’re concerned.”
I didn’t understand.
“Stories… with a sexual connotation, for want of a better word,” the headmistress tried to elucidate. I was still confused.
“Probably as a result of some kind of overexcitement inappropriate for his age,” explained the psychologist.
“Could you be more graphic?”
They could. They opened Juani’s exercise book and asked me to read from it myself. It was a composition. His teacher had asked him to write on the subject of “My Neighbours”. And Juani had written about the Fernández Luengos. “The ones who live by the tennis courts. The ones who have a black Pathfinder and a blue Alfa Romeo” – or so he referred to them, in a composition that was riddled with spelling mistakes. He wrote that he knew they had two children who went to his school, but that he couldn’t remember their names. And that they had a dog, the name of which he did know: Kaiser. “That’s what they shout at him: ‘Kaiser get down! Kaiser, drop that or I’ll kick your (beep)!’”
I was relieved that he had put “beep” and not “arse”, but the relief didn’t last long. He didn’t even mention Mónica, Fernández Luengo’s wife, but concentrated entirely on him. On Fernández Luengo senior. “The one I know best is the dad because he’s the one I most often see. I get up and look at him through my window, which is opposite his study.” In his essay, Juani related how he saw his neighbour working until late at his computer, which was always switched on, day and night. And he went on: “Sometimes Fernández Luengo takes off his clothes and sits back down in front of the computer with nothing on. He leaves his clothes lying on the floor, all scrumpled up.” It was an injustice, he said, that this was possible in their house, while in his it was obligatory to place dirty clothes in a basket in the bathroom. The last paragraph delivered the coup de grâce: “When he’s naked, he stops holding the mouse and puts his hands between his legs. I see him from the back, and from the side a bit. He goes on and on touching himself. He moves as though he were on a swing then finally he goes still. One night while he was doing that, Kaiser came in and started to bark and my neighbour threw a shoe at him. Another time, instead of the shoe, he threw himself on top of Kaiser and wouldn’t let him go. The End.” Below there was a drawing of a naked fat man mounting a dog.
I was struck dumb. The women looked at me. I didn’t know what to say. “Does Juanito watch a lot of television on his own?” Yes, he had always watched television on his own, ever since he was little. “Is it possible that he’s watched an adult channel, without your knowledge?”
“We don’t have cable.”
“Is he in the habit of lying about this sort of thing, or is this the first time?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you c
heck your computer’s history?”
“What is the ‘history’?”
They weren’t too sure either, but the computing teacher had suggested they ask me. “Could he have had access to any pornographic sites?”
“I don’t know. We don’t have a computer at home – I use one at the estate agency.”
“What about at a friend’s house?”
“Does he drink a lot of Coca-Cola before bedtime?”
“Is there any family matter that could be affecting him?”
I started to feel dizzy. Low blood pressure, confusion, uncertainty – or all of these combined – clouded my vision and affected my balance.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“No, thanks.” They advised me to make an appointment with a psychologist. It sounded more like an order than advice.
“Given the delicacy of the matter, it’s vital to act quickly. In cases like this, time is of the essence: we have to find a solution as soon as possible, before someone lodges a complaint.”
“Who would do that? Fernández Luengo?”
“No, Fernández Luengo won’t be informed. We could hardly tell him about such a thing. Him or anyone else. But some of Juani’s friends saw the drawing. And we can’t be sure that they won’t mention it. Parents are scared by this sort of thing; they fear some sort of threat towards their children, and we have to reassure them that their little ones are not at risk.”
Did she say “little ones”? “And what risk might they be running?”
“None that we cannot control – for the moment. If we thought otherwise Juani would no longer be a member of this school.” The enunciation of this threat was like a sharp slap.
“Let us know as soon as you have the psychologist’s report. Is there anything else you’d like to ask?”
I thanked them and got up to go. “Keep on top of him a bit more,” the school psychologist advised, as I was leaving the room. And that doodle of Fernández Luengo on top of his dog sprang into my mind.
I didn’t go to work that day, feeling guilty and ashamed, by turns. At times, I was also very angry. I took out the paper where Juani had done what he’d done and couldn’t believe my eyes. I got hold of the name of a psychologist, but I couldn’t bring myself to call her. I didn’t know how to begin to explain what had happened. Even to Ronie. A few times I started to ring, then hung up. Then I was unsure if I was supposed to be consulting an educational psychologist or a plain psychologist. I ate dinner alone with Juani; Ronie was coming home late. Even when he arrived, I still could not bring up the subject. I watched him, and wondered where I had gone wrong. Or was it Ronie? What had we, together, done wrong? Many things, for sure.
Juani went to bed. “Keep on top of him more.” Well, the truth was that I had not been on top of him much recently: I worked all day, until late – showing houses, singing the praises of empty plots, arranging mortgages – and the boy was growing up alone, “abandoned to God’s mercy” as my mother would say. True enough, abandonment in a place like Cascade Heights differs substantially from abandonment in other parts. Here you can leave children pretty much to their own devices without worrying about those dangers that preoccupy mothers in the outside world. There’s no possibility of kidnappings inside our neighbourhood, nor of burglars entering your house; a child of Juani’s age can come and go from the club house by bike, on their own, at any time of day; if they’re at the youth club, there’s always a teacher watching them and the security guards doing their rounds. They’re used to dropping in on neighbours – even ones they don’t know particularly well – or getting lifts in other people’s cars. The atmosphere here is very trusting. That mantra about “never talking to strangers” does not apply here. No one who lives in Cascade Heights is a stranger – or at least, they will not remain one long. Anyone visiting has been checked at the entry gate and that fosters a sense of security. Or the illusion of security. As the last decade of the century progressed, we began to protect ourselves ever more stringently behind bars. More formalities were required before a visitor could be authorized to enter; there was an increasing presence of security guards at the gate; more and bigger weapons on display. For several months now it had been standard to request – confidentially – a criminal records check on gardeners, builders, decorators and any other workers who came regularly to our country club. The measure was introduced after it was discovered that an electrician contracted by the maintenance team had served a term for rape ten years ago, and none of us had had a clue.
Plans were afoot to replace the perimeter fence with a solid wall, ten feet high. There had been talk of erecting a double fence: barbed wire on the outside, then something a little more elegant within it – but most of the members thought this inadequate. What we all wanted was a wall, so that nobody passing by could look in at us, let alone at our houses or cars. And also so that we did not have to look out. However, the wall had yet to be approved, for aesthetic reasons. For five months they had been arguing over the merits of brick versus concrete blocks.
One thing was certain, and that was that Juani watched a lot of television on his own and drank litres of Coca-Cola.
As soon as Ronie got back, I told him. I started at the beginning, but he wouldn’t let me finish. I never got to tell him about the headmistress’s worries, or the treatment they had advised me to seek, or the caffeine in Coca-Cola, or the dog. Especially not the dog.
“Don’t tell me Fernández Luengo jerks off in front of the computer!” he said, laughing. Then he sat down to eat.
14
Carmen Insúa wrote down the names of the participants on her chart and took their ten-pesos registration fee. She made an effort to smile at each new face. But she didn’t want to be there. She could hardly bear to be sitting and not moving. Her body urged her to pace up and down, to smoke, to drink coffee. This morning it had crossed her mind to invent an excuse and not show up – but she couldn’t do that. Nobody missed the Cascade Heights annual Burako tournament, all proceeds of which went to support the children’s centre in the neighbouring barrio. She certainly could not miss it, being no mere organizer, but a founder member of the “Ladies of the Heights”.
In between registering two lots of partners, she tried telephoning Alfredo’s mobile. It was switched off. Her legs jiggled restlessly beneath the little table that was serving as a desk. Accidentally, she kicked it, and Teresa Scaglia had to lunge for the sheets and ball-point pens before they ended up on the floor. “Please don’t make me play against Rita Mansilla,” one of the participants came to ask. “We said some terrible things to each other in the tennis tournament the other day.”
She could barely concentrate on what they were saying. At least if she were also scheduled to play Burako, her mind would be occupied with something. She liked playing. Both Burako and Rummy. Today, though, she wouldn’t have been able to put together a basic sequence. Usually she liked to make an escalera – a “staircase” of tiles showing consecutive numbers, preferably all red. Winning did not matter to her as much as making these sequences, the longer, the better. But she wasn’t playing this time. She dialled Alfredo’s number again. His phone was still switched off. She asked someone for a cigarette. She had given up smoking a few years ago, but she still felt the need of it, the same as if she had never stopped. She would also have liked a glass of wine, but that would be inappropriate here. While she waited for a couple to finish their game, she took Alfredo’s credit card statement out of her bag and looked over it again, hoping to have misread the details: Hotel Sheraton, three hundred dollars, 15 August.
She felt the same void in her stomach that she had experienced the morning she discovered it, left on Alfredo’s bedside table, for anyone to see. After that first time she had read it ten, twenty-five, a thousand times. And it always said the same thing: Hotel Sheraton, three hundred dollars, 15 August. The exact date that she had been in Córdoba to play in a Burako tournament, in aid of what or whom she no longer remembered. She had c
alled him that night and no one had answered. The children had been in Pinamar with the parents of some school friends, and the nanny they had at the time had just suddenly handed in her notice. Alfredo said that he had gone to bed early with a pounding headache. Of course he hadn’t said where, or with whom. She had believed him. That was the weekend of the club’s most important golf tournament, and Alfredo wouldn’t have missed it for the most seductive woman in the world. Or perhaps he would.
“Mark us down for one thousand, five hundred and seventy points. Who do we play next?” Carmen looked at the chart. She couldn’t find the right place. The names of the different couples merged into one another. She noted down the figure. “You’re with couple number nine, once they’ve finished playing on table ten,” she said uncertainly. Teresa, who had been watching her, took the chart on which she had jotted down the score. She crossed out the “three hundred” Carmen had written in. “Did you say one thousand, five hundred and seventy?” she asked the players before they left the table. Carmen stood up. Teresa was looking at her, but she could not explain what she was doing on her feet. Then she said, “I’m going outside to have a fag,” and she went out, taking her mobile and the credit card statement with her.
From the terrace opposite the ninth hole, she rang the hotel, claiming to be Mr Alfredo Insúa’s secretary. “Mr Insúa says that the three hundred dollar total deducted from his card is incorrect and that he’d like a breakdown of the charges,” she lied. They told her that they would fax through a copy of the bill. Carmen gave her home number, then hung up and went back to sit with Teresa. “Everything OK?” her friend asked. “Yes, everything’s great,” she replied.