The walls and surfaces were decorated with photos of Mazarine’s mother’s Argentinian husband Raoul, who’d died a year before, leaving a small fortune made by a chain of shops that sold ranch-style gear modelled by Raoul in the pictures: leather hats, fringed suede jackets, cowboy boots. Inside a walk-in wardrobe, Raoul smiled down from the wall, a jaunty, weatherbeaten gnome dressed for the pampas. On the thick carpet below was a pair of men’s shoes, so tiny as to suggest that Raoul had been about three feet tall.
The flat was cluttered with furniture but extremely neat and clean, and there was no sign of Joe either, no evidence of anyone apart from Mazarine’s mother and the cleaners, who’d left a bucket and mop and a bag of cleaning fluids by the kitchen door. The rooms smelled of disinfectant.
Out on the terrace, two cigarette butts had been crushed into an ashtray hidden behind a plant pot. Mazarine said her mother didn’t smoke, but the butts had probably been left by the cleaners.
‘Perhaps Nestor’s murdered them,’ I said stupidly, and then stared at her, shocked at myself.
‘Frances,’ she murmured. ‘You’re tearing yourself apart.’
It struck a slightly false note; she wasn’t given to melodramatic statements. I looked at her without trust, certain she was keeping something from me. She was solicitous, following me around the apartment, touching me, keeping up a commentary, trying to win me back.
After our search, we stood on the terrace, at a loss. The dog walker was back, shepherding his charges along the pavement, watched by the armed police at the corner.
‘What about the neighbours?’ I said. ‘Even if Nestor’s no use, they might have seen Maya.’
‘I guess we can knock on doors and ask,’ she said. She tried to put her arm around me.
‘That wouldn’t tell us where they are now.’ I moved away.
‘But we’re in the right place. We haven’t lost the thread.’
‘Well, sure, as far as Joe’s concerned,’ I said, staring at her bleakly.
Ariadne’s thread. I thought of Werner Bismarck. If I ever got back to Auckland, I would certainly need his services, since I was no longer sure I was sane.
We went out into the city; what else could we do? On the way down we knocked on the neighbours’ doors. Some people were audibly in and looking at us through the peephole, but wouldn’t respond. Mazarine said they were mostly elderly, wealthy, and wary of robbers. To the few who answered I showed a picture of Maya on my phone, but they shook their heads, wanting no trouble, and hurriedly shut the door.
Making a wide loop around the city, I used my phone to navigate through the teeming streets, over the Avenue 9 de Julio, the largest urban thoroughfare in the world, named after Argentina’s Independence Day, Mazarine informed me, not too jet-lagged to launch into a little lecture.
Away from the affluent areas around the apartment, the narrow streets were crowded and shabby, old air conditioners dripped water onto our heads and rubbish stirred around our ankles, but something struck me: I stopped and said to Mazarine, ‘Have you noticed the number of bookshops?’
‘I know.’
It was remarkable, and made you wince about home, where bookshops seemed almost to be dying out, surviving only by dumbing down their contents to stationery and pulp fiction. The bookshops of Buenos Aires were numerous, and they looked seriously highbrow too. I couldn’t decide whether to be depressed or heartened by the comparison. At least books were surviving somewhere.
In the Plaza de Mayo we stood silently in front of a row of banners set up by the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo — the Mothers of the Disappeared.
Mazarine said, ‘Wait.’ We sat down on a wall, and she gestured at the banners. ‘That we’ve ended up here.’
I understood what she was saying. The group was formed by Argentine mothers of people murdered by State terrorism during the military dictatorship in the seventies and eighties. They’d set up this protest in front of the Casa Rosada, the Presidential Palace, and maintained it to this day. It was eerie that we’d come here, and unnerving to read the numbers painted on the banners, one of which was 30,000, the full count of people the mothers estimated were lost.
Mazarine said, ‘After they started protesting, some of the mothers disappeared, too. Their bodies washed up on beaches near the city.’
I got up abruptly. ‘Let’s go.’ I didn’t want to think of a modern State efficiently going about the murder of thousands of people. I remembered a detail from old news reports, that the regime had perfected a trick of taking people out on helicopters and dropping them far offshore — the great stretch of blue-brown water, the Río de la Plata, turned into a giant graveyard.
‘You want to believe it can’t happen,’ she murmured.
I had trouble dragging her away; she went on staring at the banners.
‘Come on.’
She resisted, taking hold of my arm. Her solemn, pedagogical tone again: ‘But you have to believe it can happen, Frances. This is what governments can do.’
‘Yes. I get it.’
We stopped in a café and ate in silence, both of us weary, stumped, unable to decide what our next move should be. I sensed Mazarine was guiltily aware she had more reason to be cheerful than I did; she knew I was on the brink of desolate fury that she’d brought me all the way here only to find evidence of her child, and not mine.
I watched people circling a monument to the fallen of the Malvinas war. The women were warily dressed down, with no visible jewellery; they wore their backpacks on their chests and scanned the street with watchful looks. There were thieves cunningly dressed as tourists, tourists optimistically disguised as locals. Parts of the city were beautiful, and even the shabby areas had a kind of battered elegance, yet I felt an atmosphere of tension and sadness, perhaps as much to do with the authoritarian history as the poverty. Or was the sense of oppressiveness due to my own anxiety? I put the question to Mazarine, who looked relieved that I’d stopped glaring, and roused herself, clearing her throat, to launch into one of her commentaries.
It was a tough society, she said. There was poverty, corruption, instability, as well as the hardships of the recent history: authoritarian rule, the Perón years, the cruel army dictatorship. It had taken her mother time to adjust; at first, she’d stayed only because she was devoted to Raoul. Now she was happy here, although, like many affluent residents, she took holidays in Punta del Este to escape the wearying threat of crime.
I thought of the mothers of the disappeared, and the oblique connection, that we too were mothers of children who were lost. Back out in the streets, following Mazarine through the crowds, I conceived a thread of narrative stretching from the silent treatment to disappearance, from the internal regime of families to suppression of truth by the State, and I almost interrupted Mazarine’s spiel (she would have made a wonderful tour guide) to burst into a small monologue of my own: I had an idea about fiction being a realm where time was not linear, but rather a place where elements were linked only by ideas, so you could start at one point, Inez’s silent treatment, and end up at the protest of the mothers of the disappeared, and none of this had been planned or anticipated, none of it. Long ago I’d had an idea for a series of books in which the narratives were linked in the shape of a flower, with a central point and petals growing off it, because stories aren’t necessarily linear, they don’t consist of then and then and then. Life was so complex, though, and the lines of story were so numerous that the flower might come to resemble something deeper and more impenetrable: a labyrinth.
I saw then that if I ever wrote my first novel, it would be about women, and I would dedicate it to three women with love: to Maya, to my cousin Aria, and to Mazarine.
But what use was this, thinking in terms of fiction? This was not a story, our problems were real. I stayed silent, and followed my guide.
We walked as far as the Women’s Bridge before deciding to head back, Mazarine complaining about her feet again, both of us feeling the chill, although the a
fternoon had brightened up, the cold sun shining. I used my phone to steer us through the maze of streets towards Recoleta, Mazarine limping behind me.
On the Avenue President Manuel Quintana, I paused to wait for her, shivering in the sudden breeze at an exposed corner. We’d crossed out of urban shabbiness into a pocket of affluence and calm. There were a five-star hotel and an art gallery, shaded by a tree that looked like a giant magnolia, and a line of grand apartments, each with its own uniformed doorman. A pair of glamorous policewomen passed us, carrying big guns, their hair swinging in ponytails.
Mazarine caught my arm, shivering. ‘It’s cold.’
A woman was crossing the pavement in front of us. As we approached her she stumbled, her body twisting; she threw out her arms and fell, her tall, thin figure subsiding quite gracefully onto the ground, not a heavy fall but an emphatic sprawl, her bag crashing off her shoulder and possessions scattering.
We were both immediately at her side, reaching down. As we hauled her up she was surprisingly light, her upper arm felt to me like a stick. She straightened between us, scanned our faces with apprehension and then, reassured by our frowns of concern, smiled in embarrassment and relief.
‘All right?’ we both asked at the same time, and she answered in English, ‘Yes, all right.’
She inspected the minor scrape on her elbow, and shook her head: Not so bad.
Mazarine retrieved the woman’s handbag and gave it to her. She thanked us, brushing dust off her clothes. I picked up a shopping bag, pushing stuff back into it.
‘Careful,’ I said, handing it to her.
She thanked us again and we moved away. Mazarine and I smiled at each other; we both felt bolstered and warmed by the exchange, with its welcome chance to help and the mutual goodwill.
In the grand, ornate doorway just beyond us, a uniformed guard was sitting on a stool, watching as we sent the woman on her way.
‘Ecuadorean Embassy,’ Mazarine said, reading the sign as we passed him. ‘Are we far off? I’m freezing.’
We found our way back just before my phone ran out of battery, and Mazarine went straight to run herself a hot bath, saying she was about to die of hypothermia. I paced around the apartment feeling oddly wired, my confused body clock having suddenly decided it was time to wake up and get busy. When she emerged, I’d opened my laptop, searched through emails and social media, and had got myself into such a stew of frustration I felt like shouting at her.
She limped towards me, her head wrapped in a towelling turban, wearing a crimson bathrobe that had perhaps belonged to tiny Raoul, so brief it barely covered her bum. The warm scent of her hair and skin came off her. I rode out a wave of directionless anger that subsided when I looked down at her shapely legs and the sore foot, which she’d swathed in a fresh bandage. There was an indefinable quality in her physical presence, something comical and touching and yet dignified, that got to me, quelled my fury and made me feel helpless. I remembered the way Emin had banged his fist on his chest and slowly said her name; even through his coldness and enmity he had to acknowledge her, had to hand it to her, Mazarine.
We drifted around the neighbourhood like two ghosts, camping in the luxurious apartment, not sleeping in the master bedroom with its portraits of Raoul, which we both agreed would be weird, but in a guest room that opened onto its own terrace, so that we woke in the morning with sunlight streaming through the thin blinds and the massed shapes of spiky pot plants casting their shadows across the bed.
Mazarine tried questioning the neighbours again and came up with nothing, and even re-interrogated Nestor, while I searched the apartment yet again for some clue, gloomily certain that she’d dragged me here without justification, and that my best chance of finding Maya would be to head back to London. I told her I would contact the police in London unless she gave me a proper reason for not doing so, and she went on insisting it was a bad idea, and that they wouldn’t be interested since Maya had emailed, arguing with such conviction that I hesitated. Losing my temper, I slammed a door and lay on the bed, cursing my weakness. I was a bad mother. What could anyone have expected, since I was bad in myself? I was disgusted by my own confusion and indecision.
We both had the urge, irrational but irresistible, to go out looking. Stumped by our situation, we could only fall back on unthinking instinct — our children were lost and so we went in search, scanned faces, plunged into crowds, wandered through avenues and alleys and wintry parks, losing ourselves, finding our way, spurred on by foolish hope; at each corner we turned I knew I would see Maya coming towards me, her eyes lighting up, arms outstretched. We navigated with the phone when we needed to, although Mazarine was familiar with the central areas and I got the lie of the land around Retiro and Recoleta fairly quickly.
I went on noting my mental glasnost, and expanding on my sense of it; a whole new layer of data had opened up to me. I found myself looking at women with warmth and interest, the difference being especially noticeable with women my age and older. I assumed that was because I’d always felt benign and easy with younger women and girls: Maya and her contemporaries. I noticed women, speculated about them, was no longer too shy to address them in shops and cafés despite the language barrier, either trying some halting Spanish, with whispered prompts from Mazarine, or using English with the odd woman who spoke it.
‘How many languages do you actually speak?’ I asked, after she’d solemnly corrected me in a mall.
She smiled, modest. ‘Actually, Frances, my Spanish is much worse than you think.’
The mall we’d strayed into, Patio Bullrich, was expensive, and I watched Mazarine peering at peso notes, hesitating over the purchase of a small filled roll; she still had the reflex of caution about money, despite the sale of her house. I elbowed her lightly, put my choice on the counter and said I would pay, feeling pleasure in it, wanting to give her things. Although I wasn’t affluent either, I was developing a fantasy list: things I could buy for her.
Taking my arm, suddenly cheerful, she said, ‘Did I tell you about the trip Mamma and I took to the jungle? We went to the Iguazu Falls, on the border of Argentina and Brazil. In the jungle there are giant cicadas; they make a noise that sounds like women’s voices. It sounds like they’re considering you, malevolently. They say, Si si si.’
There were moments when we forgot why we were there, and strolled as frivolously as a couple of tourists, Mazarine pointing out landmarks, giving mini-lectures and history lessons, or sometimes describing interesting criminal trials she’d participated in back home, or telling funny stories about her mother and Raoul, and when she made me laugh I was brought up short with happiness, as carried away with the idea of friendship as I was with the certainty of loving her. But just as quickly my pleasure in her company could zoom away, leaving me in disbelief: how far I’d ended up from my previous notion of myself. And always the dizzying hole in the space around me, the absence of Maya. It was a space darkened with guilt: how could I take this wanton pleasure in Mazarine, how could I revel in my new freedom, in this exciting expansion of my senses, when my girl was lost?
Mazarine was poignantly plagued with ailments; no sooner had her sore eyes recovered than her blisters came back, then she was laid low with a stomach bug and spent a morning crouched in the bathroom, finally sending me out in search of an emergency remedy. During a grimly comic exchange in the chemist (the pharmacist and his assistant both repeated a word I’d used and laughed) I was given something called Loperamida, which I passed to her through the bathroom door, along with painkillers and bottles of sports drink, after which she recovered from the violence of the original attack, although remained pale and unwell, and lay on the sofa while I tiptoed around the apartment, feeling tender and pent up and troubled. Aside from Maya, I hadn’t had so much love for a person since Patrick; it nearly swamped me at moments, and made me nervous. I felt exposed.
On an afternoon of light rain, when a humid mist had crept through the streets, bringing some relief from the sha
rp dry cold, we walked to the corner shop to buy food. I’d found a bottle of wine in the kitchen the night before and had drunk quite a lot of it; now I supposed I should replace it, although, in my current state of tension, I’d likely drink the replacement too. Mazarine, whose body was a temple, disapproved of drinking as a tension-reliever; she hadn’t touched a drop since we’d got tipsy in the bar at Charles de Gaulle.
She was newly recovered from her illness and was planning to celebrate the return of her appetite by cooking a meal in her mother’s designer kitchen. Ignoring her chatter about recipes I followed her up the aisle of the shop, adding a few items and worrying again about money.
While drinking the night before I’d argued with her, thrown scorn on her theory that Nestor had simply missed seeing Maya and that she and Joe were together, and had resolved to book a flight back to London. I still felt she was holding something back and this drove me insane, although fighting with her had made me miserable, and I’d crept drunkenly into bed at midnight and woken her up, seeking reconciliation, to which she’d wearily assented.
The shop owners were having a fractious exchange with a man in a boiler suit. He tapped his clipboard and wouldn’t go away, and the owner shook his head and let out a hiss of irritation through his teeth. He and his wife argued briefly; he waved the deliveryman aside.
Scanning the goods I was handing up, he paused and said something to his wife.
Mazarine glanced up and spoke to him, questioning.
He asked his wife, who shrugged, agreeing. They were looking at me.
‘What is it?’
She grabbed my hand. ‘They say they’ve seen the same tattoo.’
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