The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  I do not feel particularly reassured.

  ‘I’m out of my depth here, Hugo,’ I confess to him. ‘I’m not sure I have your stomach for things like this.’

  ‘These bands of steel, you mean?’ he says with a laugh, and pats the belly that has started to gain some prominence in recent years.

  But he understands what is making me nervous. My days are spent at the clinic, examining haematomas in the eyes of footballers and brawlers; it’s a world apart from lampooning a regime.

  ‘Do you want to withdraw them?’ he says.

  I hesitate. He is offering me an exit, but I don’t take it. Perhaps I am over-reacting. I don’t want to be seen as cowardly in the eyes of my oldest friend.

  ‘If I do, will you still publish your editorial?’

  ‘Publish and be damned, as they say.’

  I waver. I profess to share his values. It feels like a kind of test.

  ‘They are only cartoons, Osvaldo,’ says Hugo, trying his hand at doctorly reassurance. ‘If anything is problematic it’ll be my words and not your pictures. Your drawings are innocuous. If these generals want a shot at governing, they’re going to have to learn to take a joke.’

  In any case, he says, they have raised the matter with the publisher, who took a few minutes between meetings at Gazeta Hípica and Autos Hoy to consider it. They have calculated the cost.

  ‘The cost?’ I say.

  ‘Look, we’re an entertainment weekly – we print theatre reviews and list what’s on at the movies. It’s not as if we’re Clarín or La Nación. But I suppose if the generals aren’t happy they could seize a few copies if they feel like it. Close us down for a week or two. At worst, stop publication for a month.’

  I feel relieved. They have examined it and weighed the consequences. If they are going ahead, if Hugo’s publisher is standing behind him, I don’t feel quite so exposed.

  ‘Okay, Hugo. You can have them,’ I say.

  ‘Good man,’ he responds, and pats me on the back. ‘You should see the mock-ups. They’re going to look tremendous in print.’

  ‘I haven’t told Yolanda yet,’ I tell him. ‘I want it to be a surprise.’

  He smiles. ‘Perhaps you should fill her in beforehand,’ he says. ‘You know. Just in case.’

  He pays the bill, pocketing the receipt, and we embrace and go our separate ways.

  I am waiting at an intersection, negotiating the lunchtime traffic back to the clinic, when his last words come drifting back.

  Just in case, I think, and wonder: in case of what?

  Yolanda looks at me, when I tell her that night, with disbelief and anxiety meshing in the tiredness of her face.

  ‘They probably won’t even notice,’ I say, trying to sound more confident than I feel.

  ‘Osvaldo,’ she says. Her eyes are round with foreboding. ‘I’m sure Hugo knows what he is doing, but for pity’s sake be careful. Everything is different this time.’

  ‘Different how?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Their methods. Their brazenness. That man they pulled out of the restaurant the other day . . .’ She is struggling to put her finger on it. ‘They want to make sure we know we are vulnerable. They want to give us reason to be afraid.’

  Retribution in the event comes swiftly, and is not delivered in words.

  Hugo cannot ring me from the magazine the morning after publication, and I am not at the clinic; from the bar of the Paradiso he tries me at the hospital, and the switchboard pages me there.

  ‘I can’t talk for long, Osvaldo,’ he says, when finally we connect. Fresh from theatre, I am standing in the doorway of the nurses’ station at Recovery, which is where I’ve intercepted his call.

  From Gustavo’s phone he describes the ransacked scene. Phone lines yanked like ivy through the plasterboard. Typewriters smashed, their keys wrenched out like so many disarticulated words. Downstairs in the print room, where other magazines besides Focus use the presses, loading belts dangling in the void.

  ‘My God, Hugo,’ I say, as his words sink in.

  And in his office, in a puddle of water among the shards of glass on the floor tiles, the bodies of his goldfish, glistening like orange pulp.

  ‘I suppose you could say they’ve expressed their appreciation,’ he says.

  I look around at the walls of the nurses’ station, at the noticeboard with its rosters scattershot with coloured pins.

  ‘I see what you mean about their sense of humour,’ I say. ‘I guess it’ll be a collector’s item now.’

  Her back to me, a senior nurse is sifting through the admissions files, pretending not to overhear.

  ‘I doubt it, amigo. Too dangerous. In any case, they’ve pulled the entire print-run. From here to Ushuaia you’re not going to find a single copy on sale.’

  A shiver passes through me: awareness of what we have done, the huge mistake.

  ‘Will you be okay?’ I say.

  The nurse’s back straightens almost imperceptibly.

  ‘It’s a warning, and we’re paying attention,’ he says. ‘That should go for you too.’

  Before I can reply, his voice changes swiftly, becomes brusque. ‘I have to go, Osvaldo. Listen to me: take care.’

  This sharpness isn’t like him. I wonder if suddenly he has company at the bar.

  ‘You too, Hugo,’ I say. But my words are lost under the sound of the hung-up phone.

  That morning, running late, I took the Subte to the hospital, preferring the crush in the underground to the peak-hour traffic on the road. Late in the day there are complications, then an emergency operation; I am unable to leave the hospital before dark.

  Ford Falcons are all over the roads in Buenos Aires; the patotas, however, have a particular affinity for those in khaki green. Yolanda and I see the hit squads all the time, we all do; sinister as reptiles, they patrol the streets with gun barrels jutting from their windows and wires where their number plates once were.

  That evening, when I emerge from the underground station, one of the patotas turns its attention to me.

  With its windows down, the car crawls a few paces behind me, block after block, all the way up Scalabrini Ortiz. I tell myself not to look, to walk calmly, not to engage. But from the corner of my eye I glimpse their guns and my heartbeat accelerates. When I turn into a one-way street I lose them; it takes me all my willpower not to run. They may not know who you are, I tell myself; don’t give them any reason to find out. Then, before I’ve realised, they are back. It is winter; night has fallen and the streetlights flicker on, casting their jaundiced glow upon the world. I pass a laundrette window and see the car’s reflection: elbows, sunglasses smeared with lamplight, the dull black metal of their guns.

  I reach the ironwork gate outside our house and the Falcon stops. The engine hums. Thick-fingered, I fumble with the key. In it slides at last, and I sense their expectation. They are waiting for me to look at them – as they know I will, they are sure of it – when I go to close the door. I move slowly, an actor playing myself as the man I was before my cartoons had ever been thought of, but the urge is stronger than I am, and after all an innocent man would turn.

  Casually, I lift my eyes. I let my glance slide their way.

  The man at the kerbside window is ready for me. I’ve seen his weapon but he doesn’t use it. Instead, he raises his hand through the open window and points at me, grinning behind his sunglasses, curling his fingers into the shape of a gun.

  I am still shaking when I find Yolanda in the kitchen. She hugs me for a long time, stilling me as I lean into the warmth of her, the scent of jasmine fading under the dust of classroom chalk.

  ‘They followed me,’ I whisper.

  I feel her shoulders tense.

  I tell her what Hugo told me about his offices. She saw the cartoons yesterday on her way to school, before the magazine vanished from the stands. She understands how we might have thought them humorous; she understands how the generals did not.

&n
bsp; ‘What was he thinking? What were either of you thinking?’ she says, and I know she is as angry with Hugo as she is with me.

  ‘He gave me the chance to retract,’ I tell her. I feel foolish now; how stupid I was not to see. ‘He’s probably in more trouble than me.’

  ‘You’re both in trouble, Osvaldo. You’d better have no doubt on that score.’

  I feel a wave of coldness coalescing, as it did when I spoke to Hugo, the implications surfacing on my skin.

  ‘It might have been a coincidence,’ Yolanda says. She is talking about the Falcon, the men who trailed me along the kerb. ‘But if they weren’t sure before, they will be now. They’ll have put it together. Now that they know your face.’

  She breathes deeply and sets me away from her, cupping my elbows the way she does when she has something important to say. Under the kitchen light, her eyes are flecked with brilliance, gold and red flashes on green.

  ‘Osvaldo,’ she says. ‘Listen to me now. They may have made a mistake tonight, but they are not going to make another. We both know they are not playing games.’

  I cut her off, seeking to reassure. ‘I’m not important enough, Yolanda. I’m not political. I’m just a doctor.’ It is only when I say it aloud that I realise how feeble it sounds.

  ‘They came for a teacher at school today, for something much less than this.’

  I look at her, and know what she is about to say. Already I feel the things I love slipping from my fingers like leaves.

  ‘Tonight. Right now. Before the curfew.’ Her words are an urgent whisper. ‘Take your passport. Go to the Aeroparque.’

  ‘Yolanda,’ I start to say, but she silences me with a look.

  ‘If they find you, they won’t forgive you, Osvaldo. There isn’t going to be a second chance.’

  3

  Buenos Aires

  July 1976

  Yolanda receives a letter.

  It is brought to her on a Wednesday afternoon, after the final bell, while she is sitting in the stillness of a classroom pungent with orange peel and adolescent sweat. Chalky light hopscotches through the windows; her head is bent over the hieroglyphics of a fifth-year biology test.

  At the back of her mind she is worrying about certain changes being announced to the curriculum. The Little Prince has already been removed from the library, and now she’s been told that creationism is about to be introduced. She hasn’t dared ask about her units on reproduction and evolution, but if they have to change she would rather not teach them at all.

  She looks up at the sound of footsteps scuffing the quiet corridor. She sees a dome of bouffant hair bobbing along the inside windows where the second years have put up their projects on plants.

  A gangly teenager taps twice on the door’s glass pane then lopes towards her, a pale pink envelope in his hand. Gabriel has always been one of her better students; lately, though, his concentration has deteriorated. The paper he has submitted, somewhere in the pile she is correcting, will determine whether or not they’ll have to have a talk.

  ‘Some man at the side gate handed me this,’ he says.

  She raises an eyebrow.

  ‘He asked who studied biology, and when I stepped forward he told me to give it to you.’

  Away from the jostle of his peers, she notices for the first time how quickly he has grown: a beanpole adolescent with angry skin, tripping over his feet into manhood. He stands before her in his guardapolvo that is suddenly too small for him, his too-long arms dangling from its too-short sleeves.

  She smiles and takes the envelope he holds out to her, as if she has been expecting its arrival all along. In a script she doesn’t recognise, she sees her name, Sñra Yolanda Ferrero, spelled out in slanted capitals. As she turns it over, some half-heard talk floats back to her from yesterday in the common room, something that had happened to a pupil’s father, a union man, and it occurs to her that perhaps that father was Gabriel’s. She will have to ask the physics teacher discreetly: an endless font of gossip, Borovich seems always to have the gravity and relativity of what’s going on mapped into a theory, like astrophysics.

  She turns the envelope back again, puzzling at the lettering, at the strange pink stationery, when suddenly it occurs to her that Graciela might be involved. In a rush, the outside world, kept at bay beyond the sanctuary of the classroom, returns like an incoming tide. Graciela has been distraught since Monday, when José failed to come home to her; last night she wasn’t even answering the phone.

  Osvaldo, thinks Yolanda. Not for the first time she turns to him before remembering he is nowhere within reach.

  ‘Thank you, Gabriel,’ she says in her schoolteacher’s voice, grateful that the role still steadies her when all else seems awry.

  Gabriel is already retreating towards the door. She waits for him to tread, as she knows he will, on the squeaky floorboard, watches him step backwards to open the door.

  ‘Gabriel, before you go . . .’ she says.

  He pivots towards her with surprising grace.

  ‘Did the man say anything else?’ she says, her mind suddenly focused. ‘Did he say who he was?’

  ‘Nope. Just some guy. He took off on his motorbike right away.’

  Was that all? She was always hammering at her students to be observant, to be precise in their descriptions. Although they were making progress in the classroom, she could see it was going to take longer for them to apply the lesson to life.

  ‘Okay, Gabriel. Thank you,’ she says, dismissing him with a nod.

  She holds the envelope up to the light and shakes it, as if foreknowledge might be the harbinger of luck. Then, blunt-fingered, she saws it open in a jagged frill.

  Mamá, I am fine. Don’t worry about me. I am with friends. I can’t say any more, except that I’m praying for J. and thinking of you and Papá and Julieta. All will be well. Love you. Graciela.

  Yolanda reads the note over and over. She exhales audibly, doesn’t realise she has been holding her breath.

  Graciela is in hiding: she understands it right away. Someone must have persuaded her it wasn’t safe to stay. She had insisted, when Yolanda had implored her to come home to her, that she couldn’t leave their apartment, that José might try to telephone, that she needed to remain where she was.

  The letter, thank heavens, is in her daughter’s handwriting. She must have asked someone to find an envelope and deliver it, someone who had also written the address. Yet the colour of the envelope is so girly – was that somehow significant? The same pink as the geraniums in the garden . . . Could she be somewhere with a floral name? Flores, Florida, Floresta, suburbs all . . . Yolanda shakes herself, stilling her overwrought mind.

  Her daughter is probably holed up on the coast somewhere. Or in some small town inland.

  Relief floods her bloodstream, it flushes her face. Graciela is all right, thank God she’s all right; she is safe.

  Yolanda’s spine stiffens.

  She is not all right. Why else would she send word like this? Why else would she have to flee?

  For the third time in a week Yolanda goes to see José’s parents. Some years older than she is, they’ve been lurching between panic and paralysis since the day of his disappearance. They can’t understand why no one is able to help.

  ‘Arrested! Cheché hasn’t been arrested!’ Maria is saying, emotion mounting in her voice. ‘If he had been arrested, then someone would know where he was!’

  Rain has been hammering the city since morning. Maria’s hair is windblown and she has forgotten to remove her raincoat, which is dripping onto the floor. She is still holding the bag of food and clothing she had packed for José and taken to the police station, and has had to bring home again.

  Neighbours who used to chat to them now cross the street when they hear what has happened to their son.

  On the table, unwatered, miniature rosebuds are dying in a pot of soil. Unopened mail is piling up in the kitchen. A yellow-eyed tabby ropes itself around their ankles in the hope of
being fed.

  ‘He’s been abducted, not arrested, Yolanda,’ Maria says in a kind of sob. ‘That student we talked to said they were plain-clothes men who took them. No uniforms. No number plates. No names.’

  Yolanda gets home exhausted by these visits on top of her day at school. Their helplessness unnerves her. And as for Graciela . . . She is too frightened to think.

  Eduardo, José’s father, sits in ashen silence, waiting for Maria’s shuddering to stop. He is undone by her hysteria, Yolanda sees that, is barely able to cope with his own fears.

  Was José on someone’s list? she wonders. Or was he swept up by mistake?

  It is delicate; she doesn’t know how to ask them; she doesn’t want them to think she’s been showing up only for her daughter’s sake. But she needs to know if José has been involved in anything, if only to assess what danger Graciela might be in.

  On the doorstep, at last, she finds a way.

  ‘Have you spoken to any of his friends?’ she asks Eduardo. He is a tall man, and was probably a striking one in his youth. He’s like an ancient lion, she thinks, heavy-faced and dignified despite his dulling hide. ‘Are they involved in any kind of group?’

  Eduardo knows what she is asking and her heart constricts when she sees the pain in his eyes.

  ‘José is a good son,’ he says. The lines in his cheeks look like crevices scoured into rock. ‘Extremist politics has never been Cheché’s thing.’

  Yolanda flushes. She hadn’t meant to imply that he’d embraced violence – only that certain affiliations, anything with even the vaguest link to peronismo, might prove a dangerous thing.

  Grave-faced, Eduardo clears his throat. ‘They have been going to the villas miserias, however,’ he tells her after a moment. ‘It’s the only thing I can think of. They’ve been teaching literacy in the slums.’