The Foreign Girls. Sergio Olguin
colleagues at the magazine, her family and friends would have had no hesitation in describing her as a successful journalist. When she had started working in journalism it had been with the dream of exposing corruption, injustice, lies. She had been not quite twenty with everything ahead of her, both in her own life and in the wider world. If someone had told her then that at the age of thirty she would take down a criminal gang that gambled on the lives of poor children, she would have been proud. That was exactly the kind of journalism she wanted to do. And she had done it. She had put a bunch of men behind bars who were responsible for the death and mutilation of boys. She had exposed and eliminated a gambling racket that nobody had investigated before her. No kid would ever again stand on a 25train track waiting for ten thousand tons of metal to come thundering towards him. But she had also paid a price she had never imagined: Lucio, the man she loved, had been killed, a victim of the same mafia.
She had published her article while her grief over Lucio’s death was still raw. The repercussions were such that, in the days following the publication of her piece in Nuestro Tiempo, she had been expected to appear on various television and radio programmes. She had given the requisite answers to her colleagues’ questions, smiled at the end of every interview and thanked them for inviting her on. How could she have told them the truth? How could she put into words the anguish of knowing that one of her informants, Rafael, had so nearly been murdered? What would have happened if one of those condescending colleagues had asked what she had done to save the lives of Rafael and the doorman of the building where she lived? She could have answered: It wasn’t easy. I had to commandeer a work colleague’s car to get there in time. I found four professional assassins about to slay Rafael and Marcelo and had no option but to drive into them. Run over all four of them.
The journalist would have considered this with an expression of utmost compassion. They would have asked how she had felt at the moment she crushed the assassins.
Relief, knowing that two people I loved weren’t going to die at the hands of those brutes.
But nobody would ask those questions, nor did she want them to. She preferred the generous silence her boss and her colleagues had brought to the reporting of her article. The fearful silence of her father and sisters. The complicit silence of her friends. The critical silence of Federico.
She had spent the summer going between the newsroom and home, home and the newsroom. Knowing that her colleagues with children preferred to take their vacations 26in January and February, she had asked for leave in March. She spent much of the summer helping Patricia, her editor, writing twice as many lifestyle pieces as usual, filling pages. The bosses would be happy.
For some time Verónica had been thinking of making a trip to the north of Argentina. She had been to Jujuy with her family as a child but didn’t remember much about it. It was her sister Leticia who had said she ought to go to their cousin Severo’s weekend house. Strictly speaking, Severo Rosenthal was the son of a cousin of their father’s who had moved to Tucumán decades earlier. Severo had studied law at the Universidad Católica Argentina in Buenos Aires, and during those years her parents had treated him like a son: he often went to eat at the Rosenthal home; some nights he even stayed over. Verónica would have been not yet ten at the time.
After he graduated, Severo worked for a time at Aarón Rosenthal’s law firm, but soon afterwards he returned to Tucumán. Supposedly he was going back to the provinces to do what he eventually did: forge a career in the provincial courts. But when Aarón talked about his cousin’s son he often said that he had “got rid of him” because he was “slow on the uptake”. Whatever the truth, Severo was now a commercial judge. He had married, had children. And along with these accomplishments he had acquired a spectacular weekend house that was every now and then at the disposal of the Buenos Aires Rosenthals, perhaps to repay them for the many meals they had shared with Severo in his student days.
When Leticia found out that Verónica was planning a trip to Tucumán, Salta and Jujuy she urged her to spend a few days in that house. She also gave her two other instructions.
The first was “Steer clear of the Witch.” That was how she referred to Severo’s wife, Cristina Hileret Posadas, who was from a traditional northern family. The Rosenthal sisters 27had never liked her, not that they considered Severo a great catch or anything. But to fall into the clutches of someone so bitter, bilious and pessimistic, whose only redeeming feature was having family money, struck them as a terrible fate – even for Severo.
Her second piece of advice was this: “You should definitely visit Yacanto del Valle. The town is really pretty. Plus the Witch has a cousin who lives there, and he’s hot.”
For the first time in many years, Verónica was considering following her older sister’s advice.
II
She wasn’t used to driving on mountain roads, so she couldn’t enjoy the views as she climbed the road that led to her cousin’s house in Cerro San Javier. And even though her cousin had given her the GPS coordinates as well as a map with directions, she was convinced she was going to get lost. But here she was: in front of the gate to The Eyes of San Miguel, as the property was called, a name that Verónica found unnerving, to say the least. That a Rosenthal should give his house the name of a Christian saint was already controversial. She understood the choice better when she parked the car and walked round to the property’s back entrance. From that vantage point there was a spectacular view of the city of San Miguel de Tucumán, nestled in a valley in the distance. Closer were the hills of the San Javier sierra, dotted with big houses similar to her cousin’s.
She took off her sandals and sat on the edge of the swimming pool with her feet in the water. For a while she took in the view, feeling the afternoon sun draw a light sweat onto her elephant-grey Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt. There was still heat in these end-of-summer days.28
With wet feet, Verónica walked from the garden to the back door of the house. She opened the door and disconnected the alarm. Despite having assured Severo that she would put it on every time she left the house, she didn’t plan to reconnect it until the last day. She hated alarms in houses, cars or on telephones.
She took her suitcase and bag out of the car and dropped them on the living-room floor. The house smelt of hardwood, cinnamon and spices. Verónica was amazed by the living area with its inviting Italian armchairs and wall-mounted fifty-inch television. A shelving unit covered all of one wall but wasn’t stuffed with books: spaces had been left for artistic objects. Some pieces of furniture seemed to have been bought in antique shops. A Tudor-style cupboard, two BKF chairs, a Louis XV sideboard, a Thonet rocking chair. The eclectic mix of antique and contemporary pieces worked well in this house with its picture windows, with its fireplace in one of the few walls that didn’t have a window onto the garden. Was the Witch responsible for the decor? Were these pieces inherited from her family in Jujuy and Salta? Could she have bought them from some neighbour in need of ready cash? Stolen them? When it came to the Witch, anything was possible.
The kitchen was stunning, with an extraordinary variety of appliances Verónica had never even known existed. The island with its lapacho-wood counter was larger than the table in her place in Villa Crespo. The kitchen alone was bigger than her apartment.
There was more food in the larder than you’d find in a bunker designed for surviving a nuclear attack. And there were two fridges. One of them was all freezer, in fact, and packed with frozen food. Cousin Severo had gone out of his way to save her the trouble of visiting a supermarket.29
Verónica looked around the rest of the house, trying to decide which bedroom she was going to sleep in. She crossed a room with a pool table, a drinks cabinet and a cupboard containing a box of cigars. The room smelled of good tobacco.
Finally she settled on a room with a double bed and an en-suite bathroom boasting a Jacuzzi and more enormous windows. It particularly amused her that she could sit on the lavatory, pissing or shitting while contemplating the horizon. It seemed like the strangest thing ever – but she liked it.
III
There