The Foreign Girls Read online

  Soon afterwards, Ramiro took me upstairs. He kissed me and suggested we go to his house. I told him that I was with the girls and couldn’t leave them alone. He said that I shouldn’t worry, that they could walk back to the hotel if they couldn’t find anyone to take them back, but that he suspected they wouldn’t be leaving alone. They could even sleep over here, at the house.

  Long story short, I went home with Señor Kolynos. We had a good time. The next morning I felt a bit awkward. Not about him, but about the girls. I felt as though I had betrayed them. A stupid reaction, because the last thing I needed was to be giving them chapter and verse on everything I did or didn’t do. I got angry with myself. I went to the hotel, packed my case, paid the bill and left. I was going to leave a note for the girls but that felt like giving explanations, something I wanted to avoid.

  At 8 a.m. I set off for Cafayate. I’ve just arrived. I’m in a really pretty hotel. The owner, yet again, comes from Buenos Aires. Have I really travelled eight hundred miles to meet people from Buenos Aires?

  This place is beautiful. I’m going to enjoy the provincial peace. I’m sorry about leaving the girls, but I needed some space. I’ll write them an email. Perhaps we can meet up in Salta, or in Jujuy itself. Yes, I know, I’m impossible to please. It’s only half a day since I saw them and already I miss them. I’m going to wait for them here.

  Kolynos? He was a summer storm. Not even that. I don’t think we’ll see each other again.

  V.

  *

  from: Verónica Rosenthal

  to: Paula Locatti

  re: Re: Kolynos and the party

  The girls are dead. Petra and Frida. They killed them, raped them, treated them like animals. It was after the party. I’m to blame for all of it, everything that happened to them. If I hadn’t left them there, they’d be alive. Yesterday the bodies were found lying in some undergrowth. Why the fuck did I leave them alone? I’m going back to Yacanto del Valle. I’m going to find out who the bastards were. I swear if I find them first I’ll kill them. I’ll tear them apart.

  1 New Moon

  I

  Flying made her sleepy. Any time she had to take a long flight, she slept for a large part of the journey and only woke up to eat or go to the bathroom. People must think she took sleeping pills, but it was just the way she was. She couldn’t even stay awake on a two-hour flight like the one she was on now to Tucumán. Only the shudder of the plane as it touched down at Benjamín Matienzo airport made her open her eyes. Verónica stretched and looked out of the window at the other planes on the ground, the trailers stacked with suitcases and the airport workers moving around.

  After collecting her luggage, she went to the car rental office. She had reserved a Volkswagen Gol to take her as far as Jujuy. A small and practical car. In Buenos Aires she made do with borrowing her sister Leticia’s car every now and then, because she didn’t like driving in the city, but the prospect of a journey through Argentina’s north without having to rely on buses and timetables, taking back roads and stopping whenever she liked, was appealing enough to persuade her to hire a car.

  The rental company employee asked her name.

  “Verónica. Verónica Rosenthal.”

  Together they walked to the parking lot. The employee made a note in the file of a couple of scratches on the body-work, showed her where the spare wheel was and how to remove it, reminded her that she must return the car with a full tank and finally handed over the keys and relevant documents.

  Verónica switched on the GPS she had rented along with the car and entered the address of her cousin Severo’s house in the centre of San Miguel de Tucumán. She lowered the window and felt the breeze on her face, in her tousled hair. A kind of peace swept through her body.

  She hadn’t felt like this for a long time. During the last few difficult months there had been only one objective: to get through the day. She had been like a patient in a coma, except that she walked, she talked, she got on with her job. She didn’t want anything, seek out anything, need anything. She tried not even thinking. How long could she have gone on like that?

  Verónica’s 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 train 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 in 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 t
hem 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 had 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.

  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.

  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 was Wi-Fi in the house, but Verónica barely used it. The automatic reply set up on her account was the perfect alibi not to keep on top of emails. She didn’t really feel like surfing the internet, either. She’d rather read, or watch movies. She had brought some books with her (Laure Adler’s biography of Marguerite Duras, Murakami’s 1Q84 and Ernest Hemingway’s Complete Short Stories). She had begun 1Q84 with great enthusiasm, but had been losing interest and finally decided to abandon the novel after finding the language used in erotic scenes too medicalized. Perhaps the problem was with the translator, rather than the Japanese author.

  Her cousin Severo’s library had stopped expanding sometime in the 1970s but was very good all the same. He had an almost complete collection of Emecé’s Great Novelists series. She was surprised to find Informe Bajo Llave by Marta Lynch, an author she had never thought of reading. She found the novel, with its story of a writer in love with a military man during the dictatorship, both dark and passionate. She had also selected a Ken Follett novel and Graham Greene’s Dr Fischer of Geneva for her vacation reading.

  The DVD collection contained many movies Verónica had never seen. Unlike most of her friends, she wasn’t a cinephile, but she liked going to the cinema and watching the odd movie on television. She wasn’t partial to any particular era or style of movie, so her cousin’s giant screen was able to tempt her with such offerings as All About Eve, that classic story of ambition and treachery. It was the first time she had seen a whole Bette Davis movie, and Verónica thought her the most wonderful actress ever to appear on screen. She also watched All That Jazz (the alphabetical organization of the DVDs guided her choices), GoodFellas, Ginger & Fred, In the Name of the Father and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  She never got up before eleven, and then the first thing Verónica did every morning was make herself coffee with the Nespresso machine. That said, she usually suffered a brief episode of insomnia at around 7 a.m. She woke up feeling anxious, as though some forgotten nightmare had left shards in her brain. Perhaps it was simply that she wasn’t used to the birds’ dawn chorus. She got up, had a piss, smoked a cigarette and read her Duras biography by the light of the bedside lamp (she didn’t want to open the curtains yet). Half an hour later she was fast asleep again, and those extra three hours of sleep were restorative.

  Verónica would take her coffee and cigarette to the veranda, along with whatever book she was reading, and stay there until after noon. Then she connected her iPod to the music system speakers, made a sandwich or a salad, opened a beer and put on the television. No news bulletins or gossip programmes. Verónica preferred those reality shows where couples swapped their homes, a chef explored the gastronomic possibilities of insects from Burundi, a badly behaved dog was retrained, a woman with a crane hijacked a car or a policeman transformed himself into a rock star.

  It was always past three by the time she swapped her T-shirt and underwear for a bikini and headed off for the pool. Even though the house was distant from its neighbours and the pool shielded from view, she didn’t dare swim naked. Around the pool, there were some exceptionally comfortable loungers for lying on and drifting off to sleep. She couldn’t read in the sun – had never liked it. Every so often, then, she went to sit in one of the armchairs on the veranda and read more of her book. When it started getting dark she filled a thermos with hot water and made herself a maté. She defrosted some bread, took a jar of dulce de leche out of the fridge and carried the whole lot back to the recliners on the deck. Normally she wouldn’t have allowed herself bread with dulce de leche, but this was a vacation. No sugar in the maté – she liked it bitter.

  Verónica could easily spend a couple of hours there. After eating the bread, and when there was no more water in the thermos, she gazed off
into the distance. That was the best moment for her. She let her mind empty, stared at the horizon, the distant houses, the mountain greenery. She listened to the sound of birds and parrots as the air filled with a sweet perfume. A light breeze gave her goosebumps. There was nothing in her head. All thoughts, feelings, fears and anxiety completely disappeared. If she had been dead and a part of nature, a jumble of cells scattered through this landscape, she would have felt no different.

  It was usually dark by the time Verónica went back into the house. She had a hot shower (she couldn’t stand to wash with cold water, even in summer), dried her hair, which had not been cut for nearly six months, and put on pants and the T-shirt she slept in. With the television or her iPod on in the background, she uncorked a bottle of wine first, then heated up a pizza, put some absolutely delicious frozen Tucumanian empanadas in the oven, or boiled some German sausages, which she ate with sauerkraut from a jar. When her supper was ready, she put it on a tray to eat in front of the television, with that night’s choice of movie.

  She never drank more than half a bottle of wine. In the study where the spirits were kept, she had searched unsuccessfully for a bottle of Jim Beam. There wasn’t any – no Jim Beam Black and no Jim Beam White. But cousin Severo had a nice selection of British whiskies.

  This is no time for dogmatism, Verónica told herself, picking up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. Between Scotch and nothing, I prefer Scotch.

  She finished the movie drinking whisky and smoking, then, half asleep, made her way to her room. Sometimes she would read for a bit longer, other times she would collapse straight into the unmade bed. Right away she would fall asleep and keep sleeping until insomnia struck again at seven o’clock the following morning.