by Claudia Pi
At the end of the class, one of the women offered her a lift home. Carla was the only one who had arrived on foot. Her house was just a few blocks away, and she would have liked to walk them, but it seemed impolite to turn down the offer. Her companion apologized for the state of the car, explaining that she had three children and might, any time now, decide to have a fourth. “What about you? How many do you have?”
“No, we don’t have any yet,” said Carla.
“Better not leave it too late,” came the pronouncement, “because you never know how hard it may be to get pregnant.”
The following Wednesday, Carla began to draw on the canvas. She was finally beginning to feel some enthusiasm; in a few days it would be Gustavo’s birthday and she thought that her first painting would make a very meaningful present for him. The teacher said that in the first instance she should let whatever she wanted flow out. And Carla could draw only stripes. The following Wednesday it was also only stripes, black ones in varying widths, that her classmates observed without making any comment. Beside her, Mariana Andrade was painting a still life. It was an illuminated table, covered with a tablecloth on which there were some apples, a bottle, grapes and a jar which was lying on its side but not spilling any liquid. It amazed Carla that someone could paint an apple that so closely resembled an apple.
Dorita Llambías, who had been working until that moment on her own canvas, apparently oblivious to her neighbour’s progress, asked, “What are you copying today, Mariana, a Lascano?” Mariana looked up with irritation and only then did Carla see the colour plate that was on her lap, from which she was working. Liliana looked closely at the plate. “That’s not a Lascano. It’s a bad copy.”
Now Carla felt ashamed to have judged Mariana’s apple as being so perfect, when for the teacher not even the one in the original was good. Dorita called over from her easel, “Carla, since you don’t know any of my previous paintings – come and tell me what you think of this.”
Carla went over and saw a kind of plain, on which the brush strokes were rather too apparent for her taste. Among the clouds one could make out the shapes of hands and feet, in different sizes. “I know, it’s hellish: the same things keep appearing to me. Everything comes out with a surrealist slant. Because I don’t feel the need to copy, do you understand?”
Carla understood and returned to her stripes. She stood staring at them. She wondered what they represented and why that was what came out of her, rather than feet and hands wrapped in clouds. She did not even know if what she was painting had any aesthetic value. Liliana had told her not to worry about that for the moment. But it began to dawn on her that this was in fact important and she was being patronized as a beginner. As Carla was mulling this over, Mariana said: “If I were you, I’d try a still life, an arrangement of fruit, or something like that. I don’t know your house, but I doubt that’s going to go with your living room.” She came closer and added in a low voice: “Look at Dorita, surrealism coming out of her ears but you wouldn’t want to hang the result even in the lavatory.”
The following Wednesday was the day of the “painting girls”’ monthly tea. It was Carmen Insúa’s turn to host, and everyone was there. The class ended five minutes early, so that they could leave everything clean and tidy. Carla travelled in Mariana’s car and they were joined by Dorita, whose SUV was having its three-thousand-mile service. They covered the six blocks almost in silence. Carla remembers only that one of the women said, “I hope that the tea will be tea.” And that the other said nothing, but made a reproachful gesture.
They parked behind Liliana’s car, and the others parked behind them. Six cars and nine women, parking as close to the kerb as possible, hoping to avoid having their tea interrupted by security staff on account of one of them blocking the road.
The table was set and looked impeccable. A Villeroy Bosch service graced the white linen tablecloth. Sandwiches, nibbles and, on a hostess table to one side, lemon pie and a cheesecake. Beyond that there was a tray with glasses and two bottles of champagne in silver ice buckets full of crushed ice, which Mariana took pains to point out to Carla, with a disapproving sigh, as if she had guessed as much.
“Wouldn’t you prefer something cold to tea?” asked Carmen, serving herself a glass of champagne. Dorita and Liliana exchanged glances.
“Hey, I love the painting. Very sober,” said Mariana, indicating the Labaké. And under her breath, Liliana said to Dorita: “Did the silly cow say ‘sober’? Can you believe it!”
“What do you think of it, Liliana?” Carmen asked anxiously. Liliana paused for a moment then said: “As a piece of work, it’s fine. It’s fine.”
Carmen seemed relieved and said, “Do you know the dealer told me it’s already worth twenty per cent more than when I bought it?”
“Yes, that could be. There are some people who do inexplicably well out of very little. Perhaps he has a knack for striking rich seams, do you think?” said Liliana, inserting a canapé into her mouth.
“But didn’t Labaké win the last National Painting Prize?” asked Carmen with some concern. “That’s what they told me when I bought it.”
“And you think that’s not fixed?” said Liliana. “Please pass the tea.”
Carmen appeared confused, as if there were something she would like to say, but the champagne prevented her processing the words. She opted to say nothing and pour herself another glass. Carla stood up and went to look at the painting. It was dominated by the colour ochre (identical in tone to that of Carmen’s armchairs) which had been given an unusual texture and worked with hessian and other reliefs. Carla liked it, very much. It seemed to show three trees, bare but not dried-up, the roots of which plunged into the sand, where they met ears of corn and a very small canoe, and inside the canoe was a woman who was completely still, but alive. A completely still woman. And on the sand, two open ears of ripened corn. The woman in the canoe looked even harder to draw than the apple and, faced with the certainty that there were things she would never be able to do, Carla felt an urge to weep.
“Thank you very much for the tea. Next time let’s do it at my place. And I loved the painting,” Carla said as she left. As Mariana started the car, Carla saw Carmen, through the window, pouring the remains of the other glasses into hers and knocking them back.
“She’s getting worse,” said Dorita. And Mariana heaved a sigh. “Do you know that she paid for that painting by selling all the jewellery Alfredo had given her?” Dorita added.
“No, seriously?” said Mariana. “What was she thinking of?”
“I don’t know, I heard Alfredo nearly killed her.”
“Hardly surprising.”
“I liked the painting,” Carla felt emboldened to say.
“I don’t know,” one of the others said. “I don’t know anything about paintings. But I do know about jewellery. Did I tell you I sell jewellery at my house? You’ll have to come round.”
Carmen wasn’t present at the next class. Liliana asked if anyone knew where she was. Nobody answered, but everyone exchanged glances. Even Carla, so as not to be left out. Liliana judged her stripes canvas to be finished. Carla had started driving to the course. After this class, she loaded the painting into the car and drove the five blocks to her house, feeling tense, as though afflicted by a worry she didn’t fully understand. Gustavo was not home yet. She took the picture to the storage room and found a chair to serve as an easel for it. She studied it. Gustavo’s birthday was in a couple of days and Carla was not sure that this canvas was what he would have wanted to receive from her. And she didn’t want Gustavo to be annoyed. Not any more. She tried adding one or two more stripes and thought of adding a touch of colour, but nothing convinced her. She cried. She went back into the house and looked up Liliana’s telephone number in her diary. She asked if they could meet the following morning. “Right then, come to the house at about nine o’clock, after you’ve dropped the children at school.”
“I don’t have any children.”<
br />
“Oh – really?”
Carla drove to Liliana’s house. She rang the bell and the Richards’ maid invited her in. She took her to the living room and served her coffee. Liliana appeared a few minutes later. “My husband’s birthday’s coming up. I don’t want to give him the same thing as usual – clothes he doesn’t wear, books he won’t read; this year I want to give him a painting. One of yours.”
Liliana looked surprised: in all her life, no one had ever bought one of her paintings. Not even a relative.
“He’s been very supportive of this whole workshop thing, and I thought it would be a way to thank him for that. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to pay what it’s worth.”
Liliana made a reassuring gesture which allowed her to conceal a certain vanity. “Let me show you my work, then afterwards we’ll see what you can pay.”
She led Carla to an outdoor room, all glass – an old greenhouse that had been converted into Liliana’s atelier. Heavy drapes protected the paintings from the sun, hindering the growth of those few plants that remained. She showed her about twenty paintings, most of them made many years ago. On some of them the signature had clearly been altered. Carla’s eye was drawn to one of these alterations and Liliana preempted the question that she would never have dared to ask. “Before I married I was Liliana Sícari. Now I’m Liliana Richards. I changed the LS into an LR. Richards sounds better for an artist, don’t you think?”
There was an easel propped against the back wall bearing a half-finished canvas. Carla approached it, lifted the cloth that covered it, and found herself looking at an ochre painting, with sand, and a long narrow canoe, inside which there were three women, with some ears of corn growing out of the canoe and towards a sky that was also ochre, and two trees, small but with long roots plunging into ochre sand. And pieces of hessian, here and there, stuck on with oil paint. It was a recent work, signed LR, with no alterations. “I like this one,” said Carla.
Liliana hurriedly covered it with the cloth again. “That one’s not finished,” she said. Carla had lied: she wouldn’t have picked it out. It would be like buying the same dress or swimsuit as Carmen, but in a seconds shop, and she would never do that. She looked at the others again and chose a still life that wasn’t an original, but seemed validated by having been copied so much. She realized now that there were Liliana’s still lifes, Mariana’s, Lascano’s, the plates that Mariana copied, and surely many more that she didn’t know about, copied ad infinitum by women she also did not know. Moreover, she was certain that Gustavo would agree with them that a still life looks good on any wall. “I don’t know, if it’s for Gustavo, let’s say three hundred dollars and leave it at that. Does that sound reasonable?” Carla paid, put the canvas in the car and left.
At home, Carla carried the painting to the storage room, removed her stripes canvas from the chair and substituted Liliana’s. She took a brush and, with great care and a little black ink, transformed the LR into a CL, for Carla Lamas. But then she felt a pang and changed it again, to CM, for Carla Masotta; she didn’t want the use of her maiden name to spark a row with Gustavo. She was proud of the alteration: it was neatly done. She was always neat.
On the evening of Gustavo’s birthday, she had dinner ready for him in the dining room that they used only for entertaining people when Gustavo insisted and Carla had no choice but to receive his guests. They dined by the light of a candelabra, with music and the painting hanging on the end wall.
“I love it!” he said, and he kissed her. “And how is the workshop going?”
“There’s your evidence.”
“I mean the people – what are they like? Any potential friends?”
“Yes, I think I’m fitting in.”
Gustavo raised his glass for a toast. She raised hers, they clinked glasses and made a toast, to Gustavo’s birthday, and to friendship.
22
Every year on the 8th of December, the day of the Immaculate Conception, all the houses in Cascade Heights are decorated for Christmas. White lights are trailed around trees, pergolas and front doors. Through open-curtained windows, the lit-up Christmas trees wink on and off. People favour different kinds of pine, all of them big. The colours of Christmas baubles are never mixed: they are either all yellow or all red, silver or blue. Some people prefer red bows. Or apples. The Administration puts up a crib in the wood, complete with figures that are close to life-size. And every year a gardener, caddie or workman forgoes his family dinner in exchange for a tip collected by the neighbours, dresses up as Father Christmas and drives around the houses on this private estate delivering presents from the back of the maintenance truck. Truth be told, the only thing missing is snow.
That year, even though it was the last Christmas of the century, the decorations were no different from usual. The thing is, when one is used to making a huge effort, to make just a little bit more effort is almost impossible. The end of the century manifested itself, not so much in the trees and cribs, but in a feeling that floated through conversations at The Heights. There was talk of all kinds of computing catastrophes; someone was making backups and copies of all his cards, codes and bank account details, while someone else was withdrawing everything from the bank to bring it home for the holiday, fearful that his statement would appear blank on the 1st of January 2000.
On the morning of Christmas Eve, Teresa made sure, as she did each year, that the Club’s administration had taken delivery of the fireworks they would let off after midnight, at the ninth hole. Every year El Tano donated quantities of fireworks for the enjoyment of his friends in Cascade Heights. It wasn’t that he was a particular fan of pyrotechnics, nor did he do it for the joy of the display itself, but his pursuit of perfection had made him an expert. One year he had hit on the idea of presenting this gift to his friends in The Heights – to fill the Christmas sky with fireworks – and from then on, each year, he raised the bar. He researched which ones were the best to buy, the safety procedures that must be met, the places where you could see the best fireworks in the world. The displays in Sydney and Tokyo were his favourites. And he endeavoured to imitate them. He used the best fireworks available in Argentina, and one year he even imported some from Miami and eventually had to retrieve them from Customs by bribing an official Fernández Luengo knew because “people are getting ready to pop open bottles, and we still haven’t got clearance!”
Teresa returned home. The marquee had been ready since the day before. The Scaglias always put up a marquee for gatherings of more than thirty people, ever since the first communion of their younger daughter on a day of torrential rain, which had ended with mud all over their pine floors and the deep-pile carpet upstairs. They had hired crockery, as well tables and chairs decked in white – each table with a centrepiece of jasmines – and a false wooden floor, to protect the lawn. The food was contracted out to a catering company Teresa had used for previous birthdays and parties. The maid had been told she was free to go after 5 p.m. Teresa would have liked her to clean her bedroom’s en-suite bathroom before leaving. She still hadn’t had a chance to shower, and wouldn’t until after she had wrapped the presents. But she was not in the mood to listen to the maid complaining about how busy the buses are on holidays, and how last Christmas she had not got home until everyone was drinking the midnight toast. The catering company was bringing its own serving staff. And the crockery could be returned dirty. In truth, apart from the bathroom – which only she would see – there was nothing much to worry about at this stage.
The maid came upstairs, changed and ready to leave. Teresa was in her room, wrapping up presents. “Señora, do you need anything else?”
“On your way out, drop in at Paula Limorgui’s house and tell Sofi to come home by seven at the latest, to get changed.”
“Yes, Señora… and happy Christmas…”
“Thank you, Marta; don’t forget to take the authorization I left on the table, or Security won’t let you take out the pan dulce.”
As so
on as she had finished wrapping up everything, Teresa hurriedly rang Administration, to ask them to come and pick up the parcels. Sofía had just turned seven and still believed in Father Christmas. Matías, who was fifteen, said it was because she didn’t want to miss out on any presents, but Teresa assured him that was not the case – she had been equally innocent at Sofía’s age and even older. Presently the bell rang; it was Luisito, the boy who watered the tennis courts. It was his turn to be Father Christmas this year. He was not all that keen, but his wife had insisted – they needed the money and, if they couldn’t raise a glass at midnight, they’d raise it some other time. Teresa told him to come upstairs and help her bring down the Barbie house for Sofía. Luisito asked permission to leave his shoes, which were covered in brick dust, at the foot of the stairs. She had bought Matías a sandboard, but it wasn’t necessary for Father Christmas to hand that over in person. In fact, Matías would kill her if that happened, given his mood these days.
The guests arrived punctually at nine o’clock. Except for El Tano; he came twenty minutes later, having stayed on at the golf club making sure that the fireworks were properly spaced and ready for midnight. The only family members invited were El Tano’s father, with his new wife, and Teresa’s brother, with her husband and children. The rest were people from Cascade Heights, neighbours who, like them, had opted to spend the holiday among friends. Gustavo Masotta and his wife, the Insúas and a few others. The Guevaras had been invited, but they wanted to spend the evening with Ronie’s parents. And the Uroviches celebrated Christmas with the Catholic branch of their family. The waiters circulated with trays of savouries, ham and champagne. On every table there was a little menu detailing each dish. Starter: vittel toné – a traditional cold meat dish. Main Course: duck à l’orange. Dessert: ice cream with blueberry sauce. And to finish: an arrangement of dried fruits, preserves and pan dulce.