by Claudia Pi
Martín Urovich nearly always joined them on the terrace for a chat. Martín had been El Tano’s partner before Gustavo arrived at Cascade Heights, and had taken his displacement in good part; he just wasn’t on their level. It wasn’t a question of playing style, but of the need to win. El Tano and Gustavo needed to win, and so they won – they were programmed for it. Martín Urovich was “programmed to fail”, as his wife once yelled at him, in front of some of us. But that was quite a lot later, when time had gone by and Martín was still without work, when Lala had convinced herself that he would never get any, and it was very close to that Thursday in September that we never talk about, unless someone asks us about it.
19
The Uroviches come from one of the founding families of Cascade Heights. Martín Urovich is the son of Julio Urovich and, in his day, when this was no more than a chunk of land divided up among friends, nobody ever asked about anyone else’s religion. It was “Julio Urovich”, full stop. But as time went on, although no one ever acknowledged the fact, religion became another factor to take into account when considering the application of new members to The Cascade. This must be one of the few things I have never dared to write down in my red notebook: some of my neighbours do not welcome Jews. I’ve never written it down, but I have always been aware of it, which makes me complicit. It’s not that they openly denigrate them, but if someone makes a joke, even quite a harsh one, they laugh and applaud the humour. For a long time perhaps I, too, failed to see the serious side. I’m not Jewish. Nor am I Korean. Only when Juani started to have problems did I get an inkling of what it might be like to look different in other people’s eyes.
After so many years here, the Uroviches have come to occupy a fundamental role in our gated community: they are those Jewish friends that prove our liberal credentials. Anyway, Martín had married Lala Montes Ávila, a country-club girl all her life, from a Catholic family – so Catholic, in fact, that several of their friends in the community, on discovering that she was marrying the Uroviches’ son, commiserated with her parents instead of congratulating them. “Don’t go against her wishes, or it will be worse.” “If you let her have her way, they’ll probably fall out in a couple of months and this will all be water under the bridge.” “Send her to study in the United States.” “Come down on her like a ton of bricks.”
But Lala and Martín got married and nobody said anything else on the matter, at least not in public.
The very afternoon that I closed the deal with the Ferreres, I knew the thing was doomed. I had left them in the clubhouse; they looked happy and they wanted to have a drink and spend a bit more time in Cascade Heights, the place they had chosen to make their home. I went home, also feeling happy, mentally calculating the exact sum that was owing to me in commission. I had just sold them a half-acre corner plot, which had been put on the market by the Espadiñeiros when they decided to get divorced. Beside the Laforgues’ house. As I stepped into the house, the telephone rang. It was Lila Laforgue, a woman of about sixty who lived permanently in Cascade Heights, a “life member” as she liked to style herself (somewhat pretentiously, given that we all knew that their house and club shares were in her name because her husband was disqualified and suspected of bankruptcy fraud). “Tell me, are they from the old country?”
This term threw me. In a free association of ideas my mind raced from “old country” to “gauchos” and from “gauchos” to “peasants”, “ranchers”, “cows”, “bulls”, “The Argentine Rural Society”, “tractor”, “horses”…
“Russians, Virginia, are they Russians?”
Then “Russians” brought me sharply back down to earth.
“You mean from the Russian community?” I asked her.
“Because, it’s not that I have anything in particular against them – after all, we’re great friends of the Uroviches – but it’s the density that worries us. In a few years this is going to look like a kibbutz. And right next to our house.”
“I don’t think so – they’re called Ferrere.”
“Sephardics. I knew a Paz who was one, a Varela who was one. They trick you with those surnames and they end up making you look a fool.”
I risked an interruption. “They seem like lovely people – a young couple with a little boy.”
“Yes, I saw them. She looks like one of those Russians who’ve come down in the world. Tell me, does that percentage rule no longer apply?”
Years ago, in Cascade Heights, when the place still functioned more as a weekend country club than as a permanent residence, there was a ruling that limited the representation of any one ethnic group to ten per cent of our total community. Any ethnic group. Apparently Julio Urovich himself was on the Council when the ruling was passed, though I never dared ask him about it. In other words, if the numbers corresponding to one specific group exceeded ten per cent, the next person from that community who wanted to join Cascade Heights would have to be rejected. The explicit objective of the ruling was to prevent the club being converted into the “exclusive domain” of one predominant group. In practice, the only applicants rejected at the time were Jewish. Representatives of the black, Japanese and Chinese communities (to name distinctive racial groups) had never reached their ten per cent, or anywhere near it. And I don’t think anyone had ever been asked if they were Muslim, Buddhist or Anglican. I certainly wasn’t. But, for whatever reason, at some point in the history of Cascade Heights, the decision had been revoked.
“Are you sure it was revoked?” persisted Lilita. “Why does no one tell us about these things? Isn’t there a selection committee, or something? There should be. I don’t mean just for the Jews. I don’t like discrimination, generally speaking, but it would be good to be able to have a bit of choice about who comes in. These aren’t vertical properties, where one only ever meets someone in the lift. Here one shares many things, there’s more integration and I don’t want to integrate with people I would not naturally consider as friends. Do you understand? I’m not saying they’re good or bad, but they aren’t people I would choose. And I have a right to choose, don’t I? This is a free country.”
She waited for me to say something and, when I didn’t, she carried on: “I’m sure that in other clubs there is some sort of mechanism for selection. Even if they pretend otherwise. They’ll tell you it’s natural selection, but it’s not. Go and look on the registers to see if you can find an Isaac or a Judith.”
“An Isaac or a Judith”. Here we have a Julio Urovich and his descendents; Paladinn’s wife, who I think is called Silberberg, the Libermans and the Feigelmans. But not in other clubs, it’s true. I have friends, colleagues from other estate agencies, who work in some of the other private neighbourhoods Lilita mentioned, and they tell me what goes on. When someone with a Jewish surname arrives in the office, the first thing they do is discourage them, to save everyone – buyers and sellers alike – from embarrassment later on. They walk them past the community’s chapel, even if it’s not en route, and they tell them that all the local children go to some or other Catholic school. They show them houses that are either unsuitable or beyond their budget. If necessary, they resort to using phrases such as “this is a secular club, of course, but the great majority of the families here are Catholic”. It gets complicated when the clients have a mixed marriage and it’s the woman who’s Jewish. The thing tends to go unnoticed until the time comes to sign contracts. By then my colleagues have been busy spending their commissions, partying and bragging, and it’s only when they’re finishing up the paperwork that they spot the woman’s name and realize they’ve lost something they never really had. Then they have to decide whether to carry on, and see the sale rejected at the last moment with various excuses, or to tell their clients the ugly truth upfront. Almost nobody opts for the truth; instead they allow events to take their own course after the official version of the rejection, which is always ambiguous, acknowledging no blame. But you can never be one hundred per cent sure beforehand. Who would dare to
ask a potential client, “Excuse me, sir, is your wife a Jew?” Sometimes there are indications one way or another: silver crosses, Basque rosaries, the choice of children’s names, the number of children, the schools at which they’re planning to register them. And there are always people with a sixth sense for these things – predators, like Lila Laforgue.
“It’s Litman, not Pitman… it’s with ‘l’ for… for Laura,” Señora Ferrere explained to me on contract day. “Laura Judith Litman,” she clarified.
I wrote down Litman without looking up. I felt heat rising in my face while the words ran through my mind: “Neither an Isaac, nor a Judith”. It was shame that prompted my embarrassment. “I’m really happy to be coming to live at Cascade Heights,” she said, obliging me to meet her eye. She smiled at me.
Some months later Lila Laforgue rang me again. “I told you they were from the old country.”
“Oh really?” I pretended not to understand.
“I saw the boy playing in the pool, naked. He’s got a cut-off willy.”
20
They call her for dinner a hundred times, but she doesn’t go down. Ramona doesn’t go down, because that’s what she calls herself, even if they have changed it to “Romina”. Not on her identity card – they couldn’t change that. But they registered her for school as Romina Andrade. Everyone calls her Romina. Except for Juani, because she asked him not to. She told him that, when she was born, she was given the name Ramona by her mother, whose face she can scarcely remember now. Juani has dubbed her “Rama”, a hybrid that can go unheeded by the woman who insists on being called “mummy”. She obviously likes calling things by the wrong name, thinks Romina. I am not Romina, and Mariana is not my mother. Both of them know as much, even though Mariana obliges her to answer “yes, Mummy” and “no, Mummy”. She won’t allow her simply to answer “yes” or “no”, like other children, or to shake her head. Mariana finally elicited her complete answer by dint of a physical blow. But the beating is not what hurts her most. It pains her more to think that they have stolen Pedro from her. Pedro no longer knows who “Ramona” is. Nor does he want her to tell him anything about what she remembers – it even annoys him. “Don’t lie to me any more, sis,” he says, and runs out kicking his rugby ball. And she loves him all the same, more than anything in the world, even if he does not know who he really is.
If Romina kept a diary, she would not write in it every day, she’s sure of that. A daily diary would be deathly boring because, in this place, there are days when nothing whatsoever happens: “I got up, I had breakfast with the woman who adopted me, who was going to a tennis tournament, she told me that she was taking two rackets in case her powerful passing shot broke one of the strings, I had two tests then a free period, I felt ill in the third break, I went home with Valeria’s mum, who had also played in the same tournament with my ‘mother’ (whose racket string had, in fact, broken immediately), but who came home earlier because she was knocked out in the quarter finals, I watched television, my little brother pissed me off, I had supper alone in my room, I went to bed, end.”
Nobody wastes time writing about nothing. That is what Romina does not want. Nothingness. She isn’t sure what she wants, but she knows it’s not that. “Let someone else write about nothing.” And at fourteen, or fifteen (the judge could not establish her actual date of birth), she already knows that telling is not the same as living. It is harder to tell. Life gets lived, full stop. To tell, you must be able to order things and that is what she lacks, the ability to order internally her ideas, the things that happen to her. Fortunately she has Antonia to order her room. But she feels that the rest of her life is a mess. She feels that she is sitting on a time bomb. And a time bomb must, one day, explode.
It almost went off last night. She was at party in the country club where Natalia Wolf lives. Two exits on the highway from Cascade Heights. She drank beer, a lot of beer, all the beer. At four o’clock in the morning, she threw up. A few people were sick, not just her. Not Juani; he’d gone home early. She called Carlos, the “trusted” minicab driver, the only one “mummy” lets her call. Carlos had to carry her into the car. Not for the first time. Romina travelled in the back seat; it was hot and the smell of vomit overcame her. She asked Carlos to put on the air conditioning, but it didn’t work, so she took off her shirt. “A bra is like a bikini, anyway,” she reasoned. She threw the shirt out of the window, to get rid of the smell. She looked down at herself. “Bigger than a bikini, in this case,” she thought. “And the guy’s looking straight ahead, and who cares if I’ve got two non-existent tits.” She fell asleep. When they got to the entrance gates, the guard was alarmed and called her father. He warned him to be prepared, “Señorita Andrade has just entered the Club and is proceeding to your address, naked and apparently on drugs.”
“I didn’t take drugs,” Romina said, when Mariana and Ernesto confronted her.
“The guard said you came home on drugs and naked.”
“In my bra, and not on drugs.”
“The guard says you were.”
“The guard is an idiot who’s never gone anywhere near a joint.”
Ernesto slapped her across the face. She stumbled. But she was not drugged. She had drunk a lot of beer, for sure. But she doesn’t do drugs. She has smoked marijuana two or three times, but the last time it affected her badly and she hasn’t tried it again. Beer hits the spot, she doesn’t need anything more. She likes gin, too. Not as much, but she does like it. Especially the one Ernesto hides in the dresser in the living room. Vodka occasionally, rarely. Nothing else.
They’re calling her to dinner again. Antonia says to come down, that “mummy is furious”. And “mummy” furious is a fearsome sight.
21
Some time after moving into Cascade Heights, Carla followed Gustavo’s suggestion and signed up for the Fine Arts course which took place in the clubhouse, on Wednesdays, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Gustavo had been pressing her to do this for a long time. He was not concerned that his wife should develop any special talent for art – indications were that she had none – but that she should try to fit in and, as he put it, “make friends as a springboard to a new social life”. A social life that was different from the one they had come here to leave behind. El Tano had passed him the information about the course. Carla would have preferred to go back to Buenos Aires and finish her degree in architecture, but Gustavo was not in favour of this. “You’d have to make a gigantic sacrifice – you always found it hard studying for a degree. And when we have our first child, you’ll drop out, I know you.” She knew that he could not promise her a child. And equally, finishing her degree was a promise she could not be sure of keeping.
While Carla scarcely knew two or three people, wives of Gustavo’s friends, he was already totally integrated into the new community. It was easier for Gustavo: he liked sport, and in Cascade Heights that smoothes the path to friendships. Children also open doors. But they had no children. Carla was very different to Gustavo – shy, withdrawn, almost frightened of people. On several occasions, acquaintances of Gustavo had tried to get her involved, inviting her to different events, but she always found an excuse to stay away. She only had two friends now, both from her school days. One of them lived in Bariloche, and the other, she didn’t know where, because they had not seen each other since Gustavo argued violently with her husband – about what she no longer remembered. All the others were Gustavo’s relations. Carla’s reclusive tendencies had increased after a miscarriage ended her pregnancy at five months, the longest a baby had ever survived within her body and something neither of them wanted to talk about.
On Wednesday, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, Carla set off for her first painting lesson. The teacher, Liliana Richards, also a resident of Cascade Heights, introduced her to the rest of the group. They appeared to have known each other all their lives, although Carla later found out that most of them had not been in The Cascade longer than two or three years. She knew some of the
women by sight. She must have crossed paths with them in the store or in the restaurant at the clubhouse, because she didn’t go anywhere else in the neighbourhood. She believed she may have had dinner with some of them, one night at the Scaglias’ house. Liliana gave Carla a brief explanation of the methods they were using, emphasizing that in her workshop “these do not include patinas, découpage, or stencils, or any of those lesser techniques”. In her workshop they made “paintings”. And it surprised Carla to hear the word used. Carmen Insúa interrupted: “Oh, speaking of paintings, you have to come and see the Labaké I bought, Lili.”