The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  They? Does he mean José’s university friends? Does he mean Graciela went too?

  He anticipates her question before she voices it.

  ‘A few of them have been going along together, and I understand that Graciela recently joined in. I spoke to Francisco – he’s a friend of José’s – who said that she was planning to start her own class, although for some reason she didn’t accompany them last time.’

  Yolanda takes in this news. Graciela had been unwell at the weekend, she remembers now, and had cancelled lunch on the Sunday; it makes sense that on that Monday, she might have decided to stay home.

  ‘It can hardly be that though, can it?’ she says. ‘Teaching the alphabet can hardly be considered a crime.’

  Or could it? She turns it around in her mind. How would the regime see it? Surely not as organising, or radicalising the poor . . .

  ‘This literacy programme – is it run by the student union or by some group at the Fac?’ Suddenly she is worried. She wonders whether political tracts were distributed with the books they took to the poorest barrios; whether some party provided the funds.

  ‘José hardly ever talks about his volunteering,’ Eduardo says, ‘so honestly I don’t know how it works. But he would be in it for the teaching, not for the student politics; he wouldn’t care whose backing it had.’ His German accent thickens with emotion. ‘He’s never been one for joining things, Yolanda. But he does have his convictions. “How can anyone improve their life if they can’t even read?” – he said that to me once. And also that this teaching was the best thing he’d ever done.’

  Yolanda smiles to hide her own anxiety and puts her hand on his sleeve.

  ‘We will find him,’ she says after a moment, waiting till she can trust her voice. She has promised to help them draft some letters, and go with them to the Interior Ministry next week. ‘We just have to be methodical. Someone will know where he is.’

  Eduardo nods, and they stand in silence a moment, looking out at the rain in the trees.

  ‘Have you heard from Graciela?’ he says to her, just as she moves to go.

  She looks at him, at the paw-like hands protruding from his woollen jacket, the one she guesses he keeps for special occasions, and has worn today for visiting the police.

  Yolanda lowers her voice. ‘Not since the note. But that was more than a week ago.’ She says it like a confession, confiding in him because she needs to talk to somebody and cannot keep it any longer to herself. ‘I am sick with worry, Eduardo,’ she tells him. ‘I have no idea if she’s safe.’

  They stand together in lines outside government ministries. They go to army barracks and police stations and jails. They speak to parish priests and to any church official who will receive them;to newspapers, thinking the editors might know something, or write something, that they might be keeping a tally of names.

  Weeks go by. Nobody has any information. Nobody has any news.

  They would file a petition for habeas corpus, if they could find a single lawyer who wasn’t afraid.

  A mistake has been made, Yolanda thinks. The spelling of José’s surname. A page from a list of prisoners that has somehow been misplaced.

  She hadn’t imagined, none of them had, a silence this profound. It’s as if he had plunged into a well so deep that it had swallowed even the echo of his fall.

  If Yolanda’s outside world has widened, at home her world has shrunk.

  All week she has been irritable at school. When the sixth-years complain that she hasn’t returned their assignments, she snaps at them and doubles their homework load. It’s unlike her, she knows it. She sees them exchanging glances from under the springy canopies of their hair.

  She has to remind herself how much she loves being a teacher, that her exhaustion is not their fault. But sometimes, when she has spent her entire morning queuing, or being shunted between the offices of bureaucrats, she has no patience for their adolescent games.

  She makes an effort for a single pupil. She has learned what happened from Borovich, who takes Gabriel for physics; it was indeed Gabriel’s father who was marched off the factory floor. She is harder on Gabriel than all the others because he’s the brightest and she will not let him squander it; what has happened to his family has destabilised him, but she refuses to let him slide.

  Though Julieta phones her weekly from Miami, Yolanda is still not used to this: to Graciela being God knows where, to the hollow feeling Osvaldo has left at home.

  The night he left Yolanda paced the rooms of the life they had built together, knowing that without his weight beside her, she would find it impossible to sleep.

  His washing was still entwined with hers in the laundry; his elbows still creased the jacket where it hung on the back of his chair.

  She put his things away. She dried the cup he’d had his coffee in that morning. She folded his underwear and paired his socks and placed them in their corners of the drawer. She bookmarked the page and closed the book that he had left facedown on the floor.

  She was putting his things in order and it comforted her. There would be no footprints in the bathroom in the morning, no warmth on his side of the bed. Yet performing these tasks in some way brought him closer, as if she could still speak to him through the myriad private gestures out of which they had woven a life.

  Downstairs, his papers still lay on the desk where he did their accounting, on the desk where he must have worked on his cartoons.

  The records he’d last played for them were scattered across the sideboard, and one by one she fitted them into their sleeves. A seventy-eight sat mutely on the turntable, its butterfly label pinned under the Perspex lid. A triangle of light came on as she lowered the needle onto the record, waiting for the song he loved to start.

  ‘Toda mi Vida’ – a tango by Aníbal Troilo. They’d danced to it before they got married, and now she listened closely, to the heartfelt words of loss and longing and love. When it came to an end she picked up the needle and played it again, trying to hold the essence of him, conjuring him back through this sound.

  And as she listened she looked at the drawings they’d hung above the sideboard, cartoons that he’d done years ago of the girls. She’d smiled at his depiction of Graciela, all giddy on the swing that she had wound up in the playground, of Julieta stuck on a pony that refused to budge.

  She turned the volume up so she could hear it when she went into the laundry, allowing the melody to accompany her through the house. She passed the dining room and the room that the girls had grown up in, the shelves with their childhood things. She wanted the music to fill her, to fill all the spaces they had occupied, the intimate geography of their lives.

  She stood before the washing basket, enveloped in the song as she unwound the arms of his shirts from around her clothing, releasing the slow tangle of his embrace.

  She laid out his undershirts on the bench top and folded them and unfolded them and folded them again, and when she was done she closed her eyes and smoothed the soft material, remembering the contours his body made, his warmth against the skin of her palm.

  Osvaldo.

  Crying would not help things, she knew that.

  She wanted him far away in safety. She needed him there by her side.

  4

  Paris

  October 1976

  There is a surreal quality to my life in Paris. On Saturdays the markets jostle with shoppers selecting from infinite varieties of apples, buying butter in slabs from the cheesemongers, sizing up the quality of the shellfish heaped upon pillows of ice. The pâtisserie windows glister with constructions that emerge in polyhedrons dangling from golden strings.

  I move through it but on the outside of a city intent upon pleasure, present though my thoughts are elsewhere. I see but do not hear the buskers on their accordions; I see the cheeses displayed like pieces on a chessboard, but am not curious how they taste.

  My alibi is a shopping list that Carla drew up this morning: artichokes and pumpkin, mushrooms
and asparagus, and strict instructions for only the red Anjou pears. Baguettes I can pick up later, on condition that I get them from the baker she knows. The fruit stalls are indecent with colour as I join the line in front of them, out of place in this rainbow-hued world.

  I’ve been in France for five months now, cobbling together an existence that still feels tentative because I cannot tell how long I am going to stay. My horizon stretches only to Yolanda’s phone calls, and my thoughts turn constantly to home.

  Yet not even this tenuous foothold could have been achieved without François’ help. We met a decade ago in Rome, when Yolanda and I attended the congress of the medical association that François and I belong to, and which is held in a different city every year.

  The last one we went to was in Nice, in February just before the coup. That congress proved a lifeline in ways I could never have imagined, since the visa I’d had to obtain for it was still valid when I’d had to escape.

  ‘Three kilos . . . three,’ I tell the Tunisian who serves me, as he leans onto his pumpkin-slicing knife. When he weighs the enormous wedge that he has cut for me, his estimate proves exactly right.

  An eye surgeon with a passion for Piazzolla, François came to collect me when I phoned from Orly airport, and he and Hélène introduced me to their friends. François had met Arturo years ago in Paris, in a line for Piazzolla tickets when Arturo was here researching, and the two had stayed in contact ever since.

  Exiled like me from Argentina, Arturo lectures part-time at one of the history institutes; Carla works as a translator for a publisher in Spain. In their first-floor, inner-courtyard apartment, they’d needed a tenant to make ends meet.

  And it was François, again, who’d helped me find a job. My qualifications are not recognised in France so I am barred from medical practice; I was cleaning cinemas in the Latin Quarter when François arranged an interview at a friend’s pharmaceutical firm. I have no vocation as a salesman, but I also know how lucky I am that they decided to give me a chance.

  Now I keep my one suit pressed by hanging it over a chair in the living room, and knock at the doors of doctors who were once my peers. Medipharm sees marketing value in my experience as a practitioner; I spend my days convincing the profession of the superiority of Medipharm drugs.

  They only have white asparagus, and Carla didn’t specify, so I add a bunch to my hillock of brown paper bags.

  ‘Anjou pears – the red ones,’ I say, holding up six fingers when the Tunisian asks.

  It’s only temporary, I tell myself; the job means I can pay the rent and still send money home. And in any case, with any luck, I’ll be back in Argentina within a year.

  The visa I obtained for the congress expired months ago. Though my grandmother was French and French is my second language, France owes me no assistance, and I appeal to the Italians instead. My grandfather, who’d had a choice between New York and Buenos Aires, emigrated to Argentina in the 1900s, and because of him I qualify for an Italian passport; thanks to Italy, I am able to extend my stay. Every few months I cross the border to renew my interim visa until my Italian papers are ready; Medipharm schedules me visits to clients en route.

  I pay the Tunisian and arrange the bags of vegetables in my basket, pumpkin on the bottom, mushrooms as Carla instructed on the top.

  In this place of safety I am trying to put some order in my life, yet still I find I cannot be at peace. My eldest daughter’s anger keeps pursuing me – perhaps because it echoes what I already feel.

  ‘How could you abandon Mamá and Graciela?’ Julieta had said, when I’d called to tell her I was now in Paris. And when I told her the reasons: ‘How could you have been such a fool?’

  I could picture the colour rising on her cheekbones, the cleft in her otherwise strong chin. She couldn’t know how little I needed her admonitions, how bitterly I already reproached myself.

  I reach the front door and buzz myself into the building, vowing to leave my unhappiness outside.

  It is only when I have carried the basket upstairs to the apartment, and Carla has come to the door and thanked me and taken the basket from me, that I realise I have forgotten the bread.

  I sit up in the darkness on my borrowed folding bed. The bookshelves lean over me in the dimness; I see the sofa looming like a hunchback, the unsteady standing lamp.

  I have dreamed again of Yolanda. I slept in happiness and woke again to the loss of her. She is not here; we did not properly say goodbye.

  Closing my eyes, I try to re-enter the dream. Shreds of it trail around the corner, recede like lamplight under a door.

  It is no good – I cannot go back into it, so I try instead to remember it. I still my mind and concentrate, willing myself back into its warmth.

  I’ve known her half my life, and in my dream I’m aware this is a leave-taking, so that the dream unfolds like a slow farewell to all the women I remember her to have been.

  I take the hand of the shy young student I met at university, who’d hesitated beside my row of seats as she left the lecture hall. She turns, and there she is, in her emerald dress all loveliness, the Yolanda I took out dancing on Saturday nights. She steps away from me, then moves towards me with the rhythm of the music, and becomes the blushing Yolanda who married me with tiny yellow roses in her hair. This time I turn, and when I look back she has become the Yolanda who bore our daughters, the woman I feared I’d lost but who came back to me after Julieta’s complicated birth. I see her in the hospital, with Graciela the miracle baby when no more babies were possible, or so we’d been led to believe. As I pull her towards me she becomes the forthright one, the Yolanda who makes me laugh with simply a look, who can convince a classroom of teenaged boys that they can all be better than they are. And coexisting with that woman is another Yolanda, the pragmatic one, the intuitive one, the Yolanda who sent me away.

  Yolanda. I’d awoken with her scent on my skin, the curve of her spine under my hands. She was so vivid I ached for her; she was so present I’d reached for her in my sleep. She had changed all the time and I hadn’t seen it happening; she’d kept growing beside me and I hadn’t known. Gathered from all these women who were still alive within her, her wisdom had outpaced mine and grown deeper, until it had become the anchor to my life.

  The reality is that the night I left, there had been no time for farewells. Pressured by the curfew, we’d thought only of the moment. I’d hugged her and held her close, but hadn’t imagined a separation that was anything other than short-lived.

  Yet it is lasting; soon it will be half a year. In her absence the dream had brought her closer, but then it let her go.

  And as it recedes, a wave of coldness rushes over me that has nothing to do with the draught blowing down through the chimney, nothing to do with the chill of the room. I didn’t say goodbye. Not to Yolanda, not to Graciela. Julieta was living in North America, but Graciela – she was just a few barrios away. I could have made the detour. I could have just stopped by.

  It was a calculation. It might have been too dangerous for both of us. I had to get to the airport. It would have used up precious time.

  It was, it was, it would have. Yet the fact remains: I didn’t even try.

  5

  Buenos Aires

  October 1976

  A face that Yolanda doesn’t recognise peers between the wrought-iron curlicues, through the frosted glass of the door. A young woman, a stranger to her, is hovering on the front steps.

  ‘I am Silvia, the girlfriend of José’s friend Tomaso. May I come in?’

  Yolanda swallows. She studies the girl and scans the street as she closes the door behind her.

  It has been three months. Three months since José was abducted. Three months since Graciela went into hiding. Three months without word of where she is.

  There is something disturbing about this girl, Yolanda thinks, fighting a sudden reluctance to let her inside.

  Insect-thin, the girl has shadows under her eyes and clothing that seems to
unravel the more she speaks. A twisted scarf slides backwards off the blue-black hair it is meant to hold in place. It, the cobwebbed cardigan, the skirt over laddered stockings: all are black, or an historical black, faded to a washing-machine grey. Among the silver rings that click as she moves her fingers is a gothic cross that catches on her sweater so that the front of it is ragged with pulled threads. Behind clotted mascara her pupils are wide and her skin has the greyish tinge to it of a smoker on minimal sleep.

  A night-flier, Yolanda says to herself, unable to dispel the image; a clawed creature with membranes for wings.

  ‘I’m sorry to show up like this,’ says Silvia. A row of silver bangles, oxidising black, jingle tinnily on her arm. ‘I got your address from José’s parents. I wanted to come in person.’ She pauses. ‘It’s about Graciela,’ she says.

  Yolanda freezes where she is standing in the hallway, her welcome dying before she can shape it into words. Graciela – what about Graciela? Something is wrong; with immediate conviction she knows. And in the same flash, she realises she doesn’t want to know. As long as she can stop this girl from speaking she can inhabit the ‘Before’ when nothing has yet happened, like holding back the turning of the tide.

  She moves mechanically through the gestures of hospitality as she shows the girl into the sitting room. She forces her feet to carry her to the kitchen, gropes for water jugs and glasses, for coffee cups and the mate tin and those small hard almond biscuits. She opens cupboards and closes them again, opens drawers and shuts them again, delaying things by looking for things, anything to postpone listening to what this torn-winged messenger in her living room has travelled here to say.

  Nothing, the girl doesn’t want anything besides water; she wants, she needs, to talk. Yolanda needs not to hear. She stands in the kitchen with her forehead against the door of the refrigerator, its hum matching the thrumming somewhere inside her, readying herself for what cannot be readied for.