Free Thursday Night Widows by Claudia Piñeiro Page A

who look after these two come over. “What a little devil you are,” one of them says to the child who isn’t crying. “Let your little friend have the swing – don’t make her cry.” The girl doesn’t want to; she clings on to the swing. The girl in the pink dress cries even harder.
Juani gets down from his swing and holds out the chains to the girl who is crying. “Here you are,” he says. Romina watches, while drawing in the sand. “I want the other one!” the girl retorts. Juani offers his swing to the girl who isn’t crying. He suggests swapping it for the one favoured by the girl who is crying. The one who isn’t crying refuses. Annoyed, Juani goes back to swinging, higher and higher. “I’m going to tell your mummy,” says the Peruvian girl in charge of the child who isn’t crying and won’t give up her swing. “Bitch,” retorts the child and runs off. The one who’s crying stops crying then and runs after her. They tread on Romina’s drawing. They climb up the yellow slide and hurl themselves down it, laughing. The maids who look after them return to their bench and resume chatting. One complains that her patrona won’t let her have a siesta, and her legs are swelling up as a result. Juani swings higher and higher. Romina watches him. She covers her ruined picture with sand and looks at him again. From where she is sitting, it looks as though Juani is touching the sky with his brown shoes. One of his laces is missing. Romina stands up and goes over to the other swing. She swings herself. She tries to reach him. Just when she thinks she may reach him, Juani throws himself from the highest point and falls onto the sand. The swing continues to move haphazardly, now that it carries no weight. Romina would like to jump, but doesn’t dare. “Go on – jump. You’ll be fine,” says Juani from below. She goes back and forth, undecided. “Go on, I’m waiting for you.” Romina throws herself off. She lets herself fall through the air and, for the first time since she left Corrientes, she feels light. She falls onto the sand, twisting one foot. Juani gets up to help her.

    â€œDid you hurt yourself?” he asks.
    â€œNo,” she says, and laughs.
    â€œWhat’s your name?” he asks her. She writes it on the sand: “Ramona”.

12
    To stand at the tee on the first hole and let your eyes wander over a vista of never-ending green is a privilege that those of us who live in Cascade Heights sometimes take for granted. Until we lose it. People get accustomed to what they have – especially when what they have is wonderful. Many of us can go for months without playing a single hole, as if we didn’t care that the course was a few yards from our house and entirely at our disposal.
    You don’t have to be a golfer to enjoy such natural beauty – “natural” because it comprises grass, trees and lakes, not “natural” in the sense of belonging to a landscape that was here before we arrived. This used to be a swamp. The course was designed by engineer Pérez Echeverría, who famously sketched the plan for a club in the south while aboard a helicopter, as it flew over the forest that would need to be felled. Today it’s impossible to imagine that our fairways were once marshes. There are species of tree that had to be brought specially from nurseries in different parts of the country. The shrubs, planted by landscape gardeners, are tended every week and changed with the seasons. An automatic sprinkler comes on every night. And then there are fertilizers, insecticides, supplements. The river that crosses hole fifteen was here before we arrived. But we purified it. Now it’s a more turquoise green, thanks to water treatment,
and the introduction of certain algae which keep the ecosystem aerated. The fish that were there before the purification have died.