by Claudia Pi
The day that Gustavo Masotta appeared at the door of my office, I was on my way to a meeting to get a final answer on the re-enrolment. I had been waiting for this answer more anxiously than for the closing of any property deal. I realized that the fact I had often been late with school fees was not going to help my case. But I always had paid in the end, and with interest.
“I’ll wait for you,” Masotta said.
“The thing is, I don’t know how long the meeting will take,” I said. In fact I was not so much worried by how long it would be than by the mood I might be in when I returned. My temper is not particularly good, but it is predictable. I was not about to accept that Juani should change school; I already felt somewhat different to our friends, and I didn’t want to widen the gap. Lakelands boasted that it could “guarantee the best English of any school in the area”. I wanted Juani to speak English just as well as all the other children who lived around us – and they all went to Lakelands. I’ve often asked myself if Ronie’s difficulty in re-entering the work market has something to do with his lack of fluency in English. I didn’t speak a word of it either, but then it wasn’t necessary for selling houses. And I did not want my son to end up selling houses. It was fine for me – I liked it – but not for Juani. For Juani I had imagined a different future – I didn’t know what, but something different to mine.
Gustavo passed me the last folder. He had bitten fingernails, which did not chime with an otherwise well-groomed appearance. The side of his thumb was even bleeding, as though he had just pulled off a hangnail.
“Honestly, I can wait. I need to resolve this matter.” I wondered what he meant by “this matter”. It didn’t sound as though he were talking merely about renting a house. But my matter mattered to me more.
“Why don’t we meet at the weekend? It’s practically dark now and Cascade Heights looks so much better in daytime. Artificial light doesn’t do justice to this place; it’s truly unique.” I passed him my card, giving him no option but to postpone our meeting to a more convenient time. Then I got into the car and drove off.
I realized that I had probably lost a client, but if I didn’t lose him then, I would doubtless lose him when I returned, raging that anyone should call attention to my imperfections, or those for which I was responsible: my son’s imperfections. Over time the consequences of those imperfections had turned my rage to pain – not emotional pain but a real, physical pain, a stabbing sensation in the middle of my chest, as though my sternum were about to split down the middle.
As I drove off, I saw my potential client in the car’s rear-view mirror. He was still there, standing outside my office, moving his hand over his face in a particular way, as if he were also enraged, and by something greater than my refusal to give him an appointment. Then the road followed a bend towards Lakelands, and I could see him no longer.
The whole thing took an hour and a half. They made me wait, then spoke for longer than I had anticipated. It turned out that Juani had passed the exams they had set him – I was about to punch the air, then I heard the word “but”. Juani was an average boy, they said, and the level of the rest of the class was so high that they thought the demands on him were going to be too great, “because at this school the regime in eighth grade is arduous and the pace very demanding and there is no individual help available at this stage. They’re not little any more. We look for individual effort; if you can take the pace, all well and good. If not, you’re better off in a less demanding environment. It’s like a form of natural selection that we allow to operate, do you understand?”
And I understood.
“We don’t want to have to take into account a child’s difference from the others in order for him to succeed; we’re looking for parity across the board,” said the headmistress, smiling.
“I’d like Juani to try it,” I pressed on.
“I don’t know if that’s for the best…”
“Nobody can know until he does it, and I think he should have the chance.”
“I disagree.”
Then I got angry. “Put your disagreement and the reasons for it in writing and I won’t ask for anything else. I’d like to have something formal that I can show… wherever.”
The headmistress approved our re-enrolment. I hurried out of the meeting, anxious to tell Ronie that they had allowed his son to remain in the school. But I couldn’t find my mobile. When I arrived at the entrance to The Cascade, a guard stopped me. “That gentleman has been waiting for you.” And he pointed in the direction of Gustavo Masotta. “He says he found your mobile, but he didn’t want to leave it with me. He’d prefer to give it you in person.”
I parked and got out of the car. In the distance, Gustavo held up the mobile and waved it for me to see. It was mine. “Right after you’d gone I turned round and nearly stepped on it. It was on the pavement. You must have left it there while you closed the door.” And he imitated my kicking ritual. “I didn’t know if it was safe to leave it in the guards’ room.”
“If it’s not safe then we can’t be too clever: we pay those people a fortune. I’m sorry that you had to go to all that trouble.”
There was a pause. Both of us seemed to be waiting for the other’s next move. Finally he spoke: “Right, well, we’ll be seeing each other at the weekend, no?”
I showed him what he wanted to see that same night. I was in a good mood, thanks to Juani’s re-enrolment; besides, he had waited more than an hour and a half to give me back my mobile and I felt that the least I could do was show him around a couple of houses and take the edge off his ill-disguised urgency. I suspected that he was recently separated and looking for a new place to bed down. It’s rare for separated people to choose to live in The Cascade, unless they have children and don’t know what to do with them at the weekend. Or if it’s a separated woman who has been left to fend for herself in the house which is defined as “the former matrimonial home”. Single people don’t tend to choose our neighbourhood. There’s no doubt that The Cascade can be an isolating place and that’s not necessarily a bad thing – quite the opposite, sometimes. But one has to acknowledge its distance from other worlds: for some people that may be its greatest virtue, while for others it can become a nightmare.
Without realizing it, we had crossed a line and I found myself addressing him informally, as “vos”.
“What sort of size property are you looking for? Have you got children?” I asked, as we delved into the streets of The Cascade.
“No, it’s just two of us – my wife and me. We’ve been married for five years, but no kids yet.”
“Maybe you’ll get the urge here. This is a wonderful place to enjoy with children.”
He didn’t answer, but wound down the window and gazed into the street. As we drove on, I began thinking about the moment I had accepted that Juani would be my only child. Before getting married, I had dreamed of having at least three, but once Ronie had lost his job, our efforts were concentrated on maintaining what we already had, rather than taking on anything new. And what we had could be measured in square feet, holidays, comfort, private schooling, a car, sports; not in children. At least there was one to continue the family line.
“I bet your wife gets broody here. Cascade Heights is like a bubble of fertility.” I don’t know if he was listening to me. At various points during that drive, I had the feeling that he was not listening. He was quite determined to find a house to rent that very night; as we went up and down the streets, he kept picking out details that I would have dismissed as unimportant, and it was clear that anything I might say for or against a property would make not a blind bit of difference to his decision. “Carla doesn’t like dark paintwork,” “Carla hates glass-panelled doors,” “My wife doesn’t like lacquered floors,” “If Carla saw the fittings in the main bathroom, she’d die.” These were just some of the arguments he used to reject a string of potential homes.
Finally one turned up trumps. “I think she’ll like this,” he said, when I show
ed him the Garibottis’ place. Built all on one level, it was smaller than the average Cascade Heights house, but with some very tasteful features: bespoke fittings, pine floors, antique ironwork. It certainly wasn’t typical of a gated community. It was more like something you’d find in Boston.
“I’ve got another one to show you, at about the same price, but a little more modern and with a much bigger garden.”
“No, this garden’s ample. I’ll rent this one, it’s fine. How much do I have to leave as a deposit?”
“But wouldn’t you like your wife to take a look at it first?”
“No,” he said, and he looked at me with an ambivalence that seemed to convey strength and weakness in equal measure. He fumbled for something else to say, as though such a round “no” needed elaboration. “I don’t want her to know; it’s a surprise. A surprise present.”
It was obvious that he was lying. “Oh, a surprise. Your wife’s going to be thrilled!” I lied back. During my years at The Cascade, I had seen many surprise gifts, and lost my capacity for astonishment. There was the Mercedes Benz jeep that Insúa gave to Carmen during a dinner party for various friends at his house and which appeared as they were eating, approaching over the parkland, driven cross-country by a chauffeur, with a white bow and everything. The jeep was sporting the white bow, not the chauffeur. There was the production company Felipe Lagos set up for his second wife, at the end of a course she had been taking in cinematography. There was the shopping trip to Miami for Teresa Scaglia and a friend, funded by El Tano as a present for her last birthday, and with a cruise thrown in. But to rent a house, thirty miles away from your present home, without first consulting your wife? That seemed too farfetched. Buy a house, maybe, but rent one? No way.
While I was preparing the paperwork for Gustavo Masotta’s deposit, I watched him pacing the ground outside. He was breathing deeply, as though he would have liked to draw all the available air into him. A man alone, who had just chosen the house he was going to share with his wife, who did not need to confirm his decision with her, and yet was absolutely adamant that everything, to the last detail, should meet with her approval.
He came into the house and collapsed into a chair next to me. We both signed the agreement, I took his deposit and informed him how much my commission would be. He wanted to pay it straight away. I told him no, that I would not speak to the owner until that night or the following day, and that, if everything was in order, next week they could sign the rental agreement and pay the balance. “I want to move in this weekend.”
“Well, we need to tidy up the paperwork and have the house thoroughly cleaned. The owner will have to remove some items.”
“I’ll handle the cleaning. And he can leave whatever he wants, it doesn’t bother me.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“I need to move in as soon as possible.” This wasn’t a request – his tone of voice made that clear. It reminded me of the obstinate way in which El Tano had demanded a certain plot of land for his house, and not another – no other one would do. They were both purposeful, but in other respects their bearing was very different. Gustavo did not have that same quiet confidence of getting what he wanted. There were suspicion and pain in his resolve. Not in El Tano’s. And yet there was something in Gustavo Masotta that reminded me of El Tano Scaglia, something that drew them together like magnets, in spite of their being so different.
“Do you play tennis, by any chance?” I asked him, as we were leaving.
“I used to play it, a long time ago, before I got married. I was seeded.”
“In that case, once you’re settled in, let me know. I’d like to introduce you to El Tano Scaglia, one of our members who plays tennis spectacularly well and hasn’t been able to find anyone of his level to play with.”
“I hope I don’t disappoint him,” he said, and this sounded like false modesty. “But that would be good for me. I need to meet new people.”
“Yes, when you come to live here you always need to meet new people. It’s the same for all of us. Everyone else, your old friends, seem very far away.” He looked at me and smiled, then his gaze was lost once more in the view through the window. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him and I wondered if I really had forgotten my mobile, or if everything had been orchestrated by Gustavo in his urgency to rent a house that very evening. And I had no doubts as to the answer.
17
It was eleven o’ clock in the morning and Carmen was still in bed. She couldn’t summon the energy to get up. The night before she had lain awake troubled by images from a news item which showed a plane failing to gain altitude then tacking along the coast before crashing into the Golf Association’s driving range. The same driving range where Alfredo played golf every Friday, she had thought. Nearly one hundred dead, she thought that she had heard. She had finally fallen asleep, but now the prospect of facing the morning bore down on her. The maid (a new one) knocked on the frame of the door and, without stepping into the room, said, for the third time that morning: “Shall I bring your breakfast, Señora?”
Carmen gave up. She got out of bed and went to have a wash. “Bring me a glass of Rutini to the bathroom.”
She was trying to give up smoking again and, rather than eating more – which was what had happened the first time – found she could not start the day without a glass of wine. Especially not this day. She turned on the shower and stepped under the hot water. The first drops stung her body. Outside the sun had already melted the morning frost in the garden. She wondered how to spend the rest of the day. No particularly tempting idea came to mind. The only thing she had learned to do during her years in The Cascade was to play Burako, which she had loved, but recently the game had lost its charm. Making escaleras no longer appealed. It was like knitting was for other women: something to keep your hands busy. Placing the tiles down on the table smacked of self-deception – here was uselessness disguised as productivity. For years she had been putting off various projects, persuading herself that she would come to them once her children were at school all day. Then, she told herself, she would put herself first and concentrate on her own work. But now the twins were about to leave secondary school and Carmen had still not managed to get her teeth into anything. She liked interior decorating, but Alfredo judged that the courses available at tertiary level were “not up to much, a waste of money”. She liked drawing and painting. Perhaps the time had come to sign up for one of Liliana Richards’s painting classes. Or maybe it would be better to leave it for a few months. She wasn’t sure. She also liked psychology. She had never had analysis, but had begun to feel an interest in the subject during sessions with a psychologist after her operation. “Total hysterectomy,” the doctor had said and, although she had not heard these words before, she understood their implication. Since the operation, she had not gone back to help in the children’s centre at Santa María de los Tigrecitos. “Go on, it will make you feel better,” said Alfredo. But she didn’t go back. She would have liked to be a psychologist. Or to study counselling, a shorter course, like Sandra Levinas. Alfredo approved of that idea. Her husband liked Sandra Levinas; he said she was “cute”. But any of these options would require her to take exams in the subjects still pending from secondary school and, given that nobody knew she hadn’t finished school – least of all Alfredo – it was going to be very hard to do that without arousing suspicion.
At noon, she went down to the garden. She moved a lounger into the sun and lay down on it to read the decor magazine that came every month. At half-past twelve the maid appeared and asked, “Does Señora want lunch?” Carmen asked for a lettuce and watercress salad. “Bring it to me out here,” she shouted, just as the woman was going into the house. Ten minutes later the maid returned with a tray. On it was a medium-sized salad bowl containing the specified greens, which were dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, “the way Señora likes it”, as well as cutlery, a cloth napkin, a glass, a jug of water and also a plate of chargrilled
steak, “in case Señora feels like it”.
Carmen sent back the steak; it struck her as impertinent that the maid should meddle with her diet. This woman was no Gabina – she did not even know how to cook. “Bring me the Rutini that I had this morning, the whole bottle,” she said severely, and the maid took away the steak, then returned with the wine, making no further comment.
After lunch, she fell asleep in the sun. She dreamed. A heavy dream, as sweet and warm as the sun that sedated her. Sleep clung onto her, not allowing her to surface. She dreamed in red. But with no pictures, no story. It was the maid who woke her up, with a telephone call. “Señora, Teresa Scaglia is on the phone,” she said. On the ground beside the lounger, the glass had toppled over and dregs of wine had stained the magazine. Carmen took the phone. Teresa was inviting her to a seminar on Feng Shui in an hour’s time at her children’s school, “in aid of a home for needy children. Didn’t you hear about it?” Carmen asked if it was for the “Los Tigrecitos” centre. “No, some other poor children, not ours.” Teresa had a spare ticket. She talked her into it: “You love decoration, and I’m telling you, these tickets were one hundred pesos each, so it’s got to be good, even if it is for charity.”
While Carmen got changed, she tried to contact Alfredo. He was in a meeting and couldn’t speak to her. Invariably, at around midday, Alfredo claimed to be in meetings, and switched off his mobile. She had found no further clues in the credit card statements, nor did she need to: it was increasingly obvious that Alfredo was cheating on her with someone, and that he didn’t care if she knew about it. Perhaps he even wanted her to know, she thought. But what did he expect her to do? She was not going to look the other way.