Thursday Night Widows (24 page)

Juani goes to make his statement. His friends go, too. Juani is suspended. Although nobody mentions it, in his
file there is a copy of the Children at Risk file. Marcos's father prefers to pay the fine. Tobias gets away without a sanction or a fine after denying that he was in Cascade Heights that night and providing three witnesses to the effect. His father's a lawyer.

One Thursday, one of those Thursdays on which our husbands were due to gather in the evening to eat and play cards, El Tano telephoned. He asked to speak to me, not Ronie. I was invited, along with Carla Masotta and Lala Urovich, to join the men for dinner at the Scaglias' home. Teresa would be there too, obviously. The “Thursday Widows”, as he had dubbed us, would be out in force.

In all these years, it was the first time that we were going to share our husbands' Thursday night fixture. I told Ronie and he was surprised – he hadn't known about it. “El Tano's been a bit weird recently,” he said. I had not noticed anything untoward, but then, for a long time now all my attention had been focused on Juani, and the rest of the world had been reduced to ghostly apparitions passing by. Thanks to Ronie, my mood had progressed from one of unbridled rage to self-pity, which may not have been any better for Juani but was at least easier to conceal. However I could not yet control my compulsion to spy on him and keep going through his things. And I wasn't sure whether or not this was a good thing to do.

“Haven't you noticed that El Tano's growing a goatee?”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“And he's taken up sunbathing.”

“He must want to look good.”

“That's what strange – he's always looked good,” said my husband. I feared that the dinner might be intended as recompense for “the shame of not only having a drug-addict son but of us all knowing about it, too” as Teresa had sympathized when she turned up at the agency two or three days after that unforgettable phone call alerting me to my son's risky behaviour. If that were the case, I would prefer to cry off sick than end up making myself genuinely ill, so I called her. But it turned out that she had known nothing either; she was as surprised as the rest of us by El Tano's invitation. “He says there's something he wants to share with me and with all of you, but he won't say what it is.” I felt a surge of relief: my woes were certainly not a matter for debating at a dinner in the company of friends (if that is what we were).

At nine on the dot we knocked on the door. Teresa greeted us, wearing a full-length black silk dress and the string of Spanish pearls that El Tano had given her for their last anniversary.

“I didn't know it was evening dress,” I said with dismay; there I was wearing jeans and a linen twinset from two seasons back.

“Neither did I. El Tano chose my clothes and wouldn't let me change a thing. I'm starting to worry,” she joked.

Ronie headed to the kitchen with the bottles of wine we had brought. Teresa and I followed a few steps behind. “Syrah,” I heard him say as he handed the bottles to El Tano. “I'm wondering if he's about to announce a trip, or something like that,” Teresa confided in a whisper.
“We've been talking about going to Maui, but I think this might be something much bigger, don't you?”

I answered “yes”, but without much conviction. Usually I find it easy to get inside a person's head, to guess at what he might be thinking or feeling. It's a useful knack in my line of work. “Understanding what kind of house a client wants to buy, and that that house may not be what I would buy myself, saves on time-wasting and misunderstandings,” I wrote in my red notebook after a difficult sale. But El Tano had always struck me as impenetrable – almost as much so as Juani – and although there were occasions when I felt I was beginning to understand him, almost immediately I would suspect that even this apparent empathy was a product of some deliberate ploy on his part.

In the kitchen, El Tano was preparing tandoori chicken for his guests. He had donned a white apron and chef's hat. Ronie was right – he seemed odd. But that wasn't on account of the goatee beard or the tan. It was because of his exaggerated body language. At times he seemed even to be counting his own steps. For all that he was resolute and powerful, El Tano had always been a measured fellow, very contained. If he wanted to make himself heard, he spoke quietly – he didn't need to shout. He had not needed to shout that day that he arrived at The Cascade and said, “I want that land.” If he was happy, he shared a Pomery with his friends and, if he was depressed, he stood them up. Or he humiliated them. But he was not given to fits of laughter, or hugging people, or shedding tears. And that night he looked as though he might well be capable of doing any one of those three.

We waited until everyone had arrived before going through to the dining room. They'd given us champagne, and the alcohol in my empty stomach made me feel dizzy. I walked over to one of the big windows. A streak of lightning flashed across the sky and a few heavy raindrops broke the serenity of the water in the swimming pool. The wooden deck was splattered with wet stains. The smell of damp earth mingled with an aroma drifting from the kitchen. The maid had just finished bringing the first course to the table. Glasses containing spider crab and prawns with avocado, also prepared by El Tano. “Don't ask me for recipes – I never give them out,” he said, and he made a sign to the maid that I did not understand but she clearly did, because she quickly scuttled out with her head bowed. Thursday was her day off, but El Tano had asked her to stay, because “the little widows are coming” – although I don't suppose she got the joke. Everyone in our neighbourhood knows about the “golf widows”, whose husbands abandon them every weekend for at least four hours to play eighteen rounds on the course. Our nickname, inspired by them, was more private and might never have left our own circle had it not proved to be so prophetic.

As always, we women sat down together around one half of the table and left the other half for the men. El Tano's cherry-wood table is the biggest I've ever seen in my life. It easily seats twelve, and even sixteen can be squeezed in. “This time I want people to mix up,” said El Tano. Ronie shot me a complicitous look. If El Tano was prepared to make conversation with one of us women, then things had changed indeed.

“Let's hear it for the
asador
,” joked Gustavo when the second course was underway and El Tano had yet
to make his announcement. “Is ‘tandoori' the name of a species?” asked Lala. “You mean a ‘spice',” Ronie corrected her quietly, but he did not answer her question. Neither did anyone else. Some of us because we didn't know and others because they had not heard her. El Tano, doubtless, because the question irritated him. Of all the women, the one he respected least was Lala. “How can so much idiocy fit into one person's brain?” El Tano had marvelled one night to Ronie, after she had tried to join in a group discussion on what priorities should govern the budget in the coming year and had insisted that a significant portion be dedicated to the eradication of the Tillandsia plant. “It must be a spice, no?” she answered herself. Carla barely said a word all night. She had been taking time off the agency. It was more than a week since she had last been in. She claimed that she had had a lethal dose of flu and that she still felt weak, but I didn't believe her. She seemed sad, subdued. “Tired,” she had answered, when I asked her if she felt well. But the concealer she had used on her cheekbones did not altogether hide the purple skin underneath.

Before dessert, El Tano stood up at the head of the table and tapped his glass with a fork. “How disrespectful,” he grumbled, “in movies, when someone does this, everyone falls silent.”

“And do you believe in the movies, Tano?” asked Gustavo. “This is real life, Tanito, real life.” El Tano laughed; all of us laughed without really knowing why.

“Friends,” he said and, to Teresa, “my love, I want to share with you all a very important decision I've taken.”

“You're quitting tennis…” quipped Ronie.

“That, never. I'm quitting Troost,” he answered. And there was a silence. El Tano maintained his smile, and so did Teresa, but hers was empty, her eyes exaggeratedly wide open. I can't speak for the others, I was too preoccupied with my own reactions; I was finding it hard to understand – my neurons struggled against the champagne bubbles to establish what this Troost was that had suddenly left everyone dumbstruck, as though El Tano were a priest who had announced he was leaving Holy Orders.

“They've offered you something else…” Teresa managed to say, still smiling, presuming that her husband was about to take a new leap up the corporate ladder.

“No, no,” he answered very calmly. “I'm sick of dependent relationships. So I'm joining the ranks of the unemployed,” he laughed. Teresa appeared not to find the joke amusing.

“Watch your back, Gustavito, this business could be contagious,” El Tano warned. Martín Urovich appeared to blush, but I don't know – perhaps it only looked that way to me; perhaps I thought he ought to have done, that, in his shoes, I would have blushed. Maybe I even did blush on his behalf. Or on Ronie's, since he was also unemployed, fooling himself that he lived on rental income, when those rents were far lower than the costs they entailed.

“No, please, I don't exist unless I'm inside a corporation. I need my Big Father,” Gustavo answered finally. And Martín Urovich said: “We're considering moving to Miami.”

“Don't give me that crap!” El Tano snapped.

“We're going to Miami,” said Lala. Without looking at her, El Tano said to Martín: “Are you serious?” Martín
shook his head. Lala's eyes filled with tears and she went to the bathroom.

“Does anyone want more tandoori?” asked Teresa.

“Are you happy?” I asked Martín, but El Tano answered me.

“Ecstatic,” he said. “I've been planning this for a while. I'm sick of making money for other people; I want it all for myself.”

“And what are you thinking of doing?” Ronie asked.

“I don't know yet. I've got a lot of projects in mind and luckily they gave me a very good severance deal, so, with money in the bank, I can take time to think about which one I get started on first.”

“So everything was coldly calculated…” said Gustavo.

“Coldly calculated,” El Tano replied.

“Before any new project, remember our trip to Maui,” Teresa reminded him.

“That's going to be my very first project,” said El Tano and he kissed her. It was the first time I had ever seen El Tano kiss his wife in public. She was also surprised, I'm sure. And then he proposed a toast. We raised our glasses and waited for El Tano to pronounce the name in whose honour we should clink glasses. This silent moment of anticipation, with our glasses still held aloft, seemed to go on too long.

“Let's drink… to freedom,” he said, then immediately corrected himself: “no, even better, let's drink to ‘real life'… that's it, to real life.” And all the glasses met each other halfway across the table. Those same glasses that reappeared beside the swimming pool, that September night on which the Thursday Widows prophecy came true for three of our number. They were the glasses that El Tano only used on very special occasions. Such as that one.

In The Cascade, Romina feels like a misfit. Juani also feels like a misfit. That must be why they fit together so well. And they make plans to travel the world one day, when they have finished school. He doesn't like sport; he can spend hours holed up in his room listening to music, reading or doing God knows what. And for the adults of Cascade Heights, that counts as strange. Romina also spends a lot of time shut up in her room. But then she also has dark skin. It's pointless to deny it. Not even Mariana denies it – she mentions it to anyone who wants to listen. She's adopted. When she's out in the sun, Mariana makes her wear factor fifty. “Even if only on your knees – if they look like two lumps of coal at this time of year, imagine what they're going to be like in the summer.”

Pedro is also dark, but less so than his sister. Sometimes Romina wonders if Mariana's given him something to whiten his skin. Once she found her washing his hair with camomile and since then she's been forbidden to enter the room while her brother's getting his bath. Pedro wears the clothes Mariana likes and speaks how she would like him to speak. And then Mariana behaves as though Pedro were the fruit of her body, as though she had never been told that her eggs were empty. And Romina hates her for it because that lie robs her of much more than a brother.

Romina and Juani meet every night. After having dinner, they go to their respective rooms, close the doors and climb out of the windows. Ever since Romina cut her leg with that beer bottle, she has to give too many explanations if she wants to go out with Juani at
night. That's why she slips out without telling anyone. They meet halfway. Sometimes at the pedestrian crossing by the twelfth hole. Sometimes opposite the Araucaria tree on the roundabout. They go for a walk. Through the windows of their rooms, the quiet night, undisturbed by anyone out pacing the streets of Cascade Heights, looks too inviting. It's a shame to go to sleep. On nights when there is a full moon, the tops of the tallest trees are flecked with silver, as though painted. You would think the moon out-shone the city. The air feels less contaminated. And the silence. What Romina and Juani like best about their nocturnal escapades is the silence. The only sound to be heard is the song of the grasshoppers and frogs. The frogs, tiny and almost transparent, keep croaking all night. And both of them like summer. And jasmines. Romina more than Juani; it's her favourite flower and she taught him to how to pick out its perfume from the nocturnal melée.