The Foreign Girls. Sergio Olguin

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      Contents

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       Prologue

      from: Verónica Rosenthal

      to: Paula Locatti

      re: Radio Silence

      Dear Paula,

      This is going to be one long email, my friend. Apologies for not replying to your previous messages nor to your request, so elegantly expressed, that I “stop sending fucking automatic replies”. Originally I intended not to answer any emails during my vacation and anyone who wrote to me was meant to get a message saying I wouldn’t be responding until I got home. But what has just happened to me is shocking, to put it mildly. I need to share it with someone. With you, I mean. You’re the only person I can tell something like this. I thought of ringing you, even of asking you to come, because I didn’t want to be alone. But I also can’t behave like a teenager fretting about her first time. That’s why I decided not to call but to write instead. On the phone I might beg you to come. And, to be honest, there’s other stuff I want to tell you, things I could never bring myself to say in person, not even to you. Written communication can betray our thoughts, but oral so often leads to a slip of the tongue, and I want to avoid that. There’s a slip in the last sentence, in fact, but I’ll let it go. 12

      As I was saying, what I write here is for your eyes only. Nobody else must find out what I am going to tell you. Nobody. None of the girls, none of your other friends. It’s too personal for me to want to share it. Come to think of it, delete this email after you’ve read it.

      I told you that I was going to start my trip in Jujuy, then go down from there to Tucumán. Well, I didn’t do that in the end. A few days before I set off, my sister Leticia reminded me about the weekend home that belongs to my cousin Severo (actually, he’s the son of one of my father’s cousins). He’s not only a Rosenthal but also part of ‘our’ legal family: a commercial judge in Tucumán. I think he’d love to work in my dad’s practice, but Aarón has always kept him at arm’s length. He’s forty-something, married to a spoiled bitch and father to four children. Anyway, Severo has a weekend cottage on the Cerro San Javier, and whenever he comes to Buenos Aires he insists that we borrow it. I checked and the house was available for the time I needed it, so I decided to change my route: to start in Tucumán, stay a week in Cousin Severo’s house and then go on to Salta and Jujuy. I thought it wouldn’t be a bad thing to spend a quiet week there, resting and clearing my mind after the very shitty summer I’d had.

      So I arrived at the airport in San Miguel de Tucumán, picked up the car I’d rented and swung by the courts to see my cousin and collect the keys to the house. I spent half an hour in his office exchanging family news (his eldest son starts law this year – another one, for God’s sake). I graciously declined his invitation to lunch and, with barely suppressed horror, another invitation to have dinner at his house with the wife and some of the four children. He gave me a little map with directions (even though I had rented a GPS with the car – although God knows why, since you can get anywhere just by asking) and a sheet of paper with useful telephone 13numbers and the Wi-Fi code. He told me that a boy came to clean the pool once a week and there was a gardener too, but that they came very early and had their own keys to the shed, that I wouldn’t even know they were there (and he was right, I’ve never seen their faces). He offered to send me ‘the girl’ who lives in their house in the city, but I declined this invitation.

      If you saw my cousin’s house you’d go berserk. It’s hidden away behind a little wood on the hillside. A typically nineties construction, Californian style: huge windows, Italian furniture, BKF butterfly chairs (uncomfortable), a Michael Thonet rocking chair which, if it isn’t an original, certainly looks the part, a spectacular view (even from the toilets), a Jacuzzi in almost all the bathtubs, a sauna, a well-equipped gym, huge grounds (looking a bit sparse now that autumn’s on its way), a heated swimming pool, a changing room, a gazebo which is in itself practically another house and lots, lots more. Plus full cupboards, a wine cellar and more CDs