‘I need to tell you what happened,’ the girl says.
She will not be delayed, Yolanda thinks. Whatever it is, she is going to wade right in.
Yolanda hesitates between the kitchen and the living room, holding a glass of water, forgetting what she is doing mid-step. She can hear a distant tinkling, like a bell in some mountain temple: the sound of ice trembling against the side of the glass.
Graciela Graciela Graciela, she thinks. Let her be safe, let her come to no harm. Let her remain how Yolanda remembers her, the whimsical second daughter who came to them when she thought there’d be no more children, Graciela the graceful, the one she’d always wanted to protect.
The girl begins. There is no stopping her now.
She was bringing them provisions; she had missed the train. She arrived on the very last one, the late one that came from the city terminus, and took the side entrance to the building because it was quicker when you were coming that way. Unusually, the elevator was out of order, so she had had to take the stairs.
Yolanda forces herself to concentrate over the roaring in her ears.
Silvia could hear voices, then shouting as she climbed the steps and found the lift jammed open – it was whining in high-pitched protest on an upper floor. The apartment door was ajar, she could see into it from the stairwell; all the other doors remained shut. Then a wave of sound reached her with a time lag, like an explosion on a far horizon: there came a thudding and a screaming and a cascade of smashing that hit her like the crunch of her own bones.
Through gritted teeth Yolanda can imagine it: the shattering of glass under metal; a boot grinding the carpals of a hand.
Then, through the sliver of doorway, Silvia glimpsed what she didn’t want to see: a knee in Tomaso’s back; Tomaso’s arms being trussed with electrical cable; Tomaso’s head wrenched backwards by the hair.
And in the seconds that passed in a kind of paralysis, she noticed another thing: that the men who were inside the apartment, driving another boy’s head into the carpet, had dressed as if for a party, disguised in platinum-blond wigs and jokers’ masks.
Silvia is twisting her fingers as she relates this, compressing them till the rings indent the phalanges and the metalwork cuts off the flow of blood.
Yolanda cannot bear to watch. She cannot bear to hear.
The girl couldn’t think what to do so she continued up the staircase as if she had been headed all along to a higher floor. She went up and up till there were no stairs left and no higher floors to reach. Every step felt like a betrayal, but some other instinct was driving her; she could think only of getting away.
At the top of the stairwell she found a door and opened it, and went out on to the building’s roof. There, behind a ventilation duct, she crouched under the rolling black clouds.
Shaking, she prayed they hadn’t seen and wouldn’t follow her. She was trembling so violently she was sure the building was rocking; surely all of Flores knew she was there.
So it happened in Flores, Yolanda thinks. She remembers the pink envelope. Here in Buenos Aires. Only a few barrios away.
There was someone called Tomaso; there was another student; but where was Graciela? Yolanda hardly dares breathe.
‘Suddenly there were noises down in the street – a sound like the howling of dogs, and shouts and car doors opening – so I peered out over the parapet, and that’s when I saw them come out.’
Silvia releases a sound that is almost a sob.
‘There were eight of them, those men,’ she says, ‘they had Graciela and Tomaso, and Tomaso’s friend Guillermo, and another girl whose name was Susana, I believe. They got everyone. They marched them out with their hands bound behind them and blankets thrown over their heads, and straight away they shoved them into those cars.’
‘And they made them wait while four of the men went back and stripped the apartment. They took the television and the stereo. They took the crates of records. They carted out the barbecue set and a bike.’
And from above, she said, she could see the masks – a laughing clown, a Miss Piggy snout, a Planet of the Apes gorilla – where they’d pushed them up off their faces.
Silvia swallows hard when she has finished. The skin of her fingers is yellow where she has squeezed them against her rings.
Yolanda is staring at her. Graciela was there. Her mind cannot move beyond it, beyond this simple fact.
Slowly, she drags her thoughts back to Silvia. Who is this girl? she wonders. A friend of her daughter’s? An acquaintance? The traitor who gave them away?
‘I’m sorry,’ Silvia says, unable to read the expression on Yolanda’s face. ‘I only knew Graciela a little – we met at the Fac last year. I don’t know who those men are, or where they’ve taken everyone. I just thought you would want to know.’
Yolanda sits with her head in her hands for a long time after she has seen the girl to the door. The ice melts into a ring under the glass on the polished tabletop and turns dark in the layering dusk.
She had feared it but she has not prepared for it. She is incapacitated by what the girl has said.
She feels the earth turn and the night fall and somewhere a tide receding as she sits on into the darkness, trying to think what to do.
6
Paris
October 1976
‘I’ll come back, Yolanda. I mean it. There’s no question of your doing this alone.’
I am sitting on Arturo’s lumpy sofa in Paris, winding the spiral phone cord around my finger, pressing the black receiver against my ear.
Far away, at the end of the line in Argentina, other voices are chattering over our call.
It’s five days since I picked up the phone and heard her utter them: four words like nails hammered into my chest.
They have taken her.
Knowing immediately who she meant. Shock, and then denial. Around me, a world in collapse.
Yolanda has rung from yet another locutorio. She picks telephone offices at random for the sake of anonymity, and because it’s far too risky to call from home. But today the glass between the cubicles provides no insulation, and our conversation breaks into non-sequiturs that snag on other lives.
I have thought it out. I am insisting, though she forbade it from the first call.
‘I can do it clandestinely, Yolanda. I should have done it the minute you called.’
‘Are you out of your mind, Osvaldo?’ Her voice is ragged with fatigue. ‘I forbid you to take such a risk.’
I have no strategy, no plan. I know only that I am wasting time, that I should already have gone.
‘For pity’s sake, Osvaldo,’ she says when I can hear her again over the babble of interference. ‘You’re on their list yourself.’
And if the literacy project had nothing to do with it? What if they took Graciela only because they couldn’t find me?
But Yolanda has no time for my sense of guilt. She is not interested in how responsible I feel.
‘What did you have in mind – a prisoner swap?’ She lowers her voice. ‘You don’t see it, do you? What’s going on is not lawful, Osvaldo. They’re not playing by those rules.’
People are being snatched from buses and wedding receptions, she tells me, from football stadiums and in pre-dawn raids at their homes. If I come back, and she is adamant about this, then I will be joining their ranks.
‘Yolanda, you have to see it from my point of view . . .’
She cuts me off. ‘And you from mine,’ she says.
‘How can I live with myself if I don’t look for her?’
‘How can I live with myself if you do?’
I don’t ask how she is coping with the searching. I don’t ask how she manages it on top of school. I don’t ask what it’s like to try again at doors she has already knocked on, to wait in line for officials who never receive her, to clutch in her hand a number that never gets called.
All I hear is rejection. Her prohibition against my coming home.
In the gulf t
hat yawns between us, we cut our dialogue short. The receiver clatters as she hangs up the phone.
I hug myself in the cold of the night-time apartment. Graciela Graciela Graciela. Her name reverberates down all the years I have known her. How can Yolanda expect me merely to stand by?
I miss my wife but I am angry with her, and hate this rift, and hate the way our conversations these days seem to end.
I stand in the bleakness of the living room, the light bulb sending its pale illumination across the courtyard, my daughter’s absence stabbing at my heart.
We will get through this, I tell myself. We will find her. We have made it through so many things.
We got through the two miscarriages.
We got through Julieta’s accidents: the time she crashed her bicycle, the time she broke her arm in a fall from a horse.
We got through Graciela’s illness when she was a five-year-old, when her scarlet fever was diagnosed only just in time.
We got through our financial troubles. We got through the first years of my practice; through Yolanda’s changes of school.
The next time we speak, I tell her I won’t come home. I tell her I still miss her, that I’m sorry we keep arguing, that I will do what I can from here.
She says nothing for a moment, and when she speaks again, her voice is full of sadness.
‘I love you so much, Osvaldo. Not a single moment of a single day goes by without my wanting you back.’ She pauses, then goes on. ‘I can’t tell you how hard it is for me to say this, but if you love me at all, if you love Graciela, I need you to make me a promise: that until this situation is over, you will not try to return.’
7
Buenos Aires
November 1976
Shuffling feet. Women in low-heeled shoes and raincoats. Men in office lace-ups, briefcases planted like milestones on the ground.
The line spills down the steps of the government building, hugs the wall under its balconies, and disappears around its eastern flank. She thinks of it as a breadline for information, all of them queuing for a small ration of hope.
Yolanda, who has been here since six, is among the first twenty people in the line-up, which means she has a chance of being seen. Turning, she recognises a face or two behind her and nods at them: all of them like earthquake survivors searching for a name.
‘Who are you looking for?’ they ask each other, for there is plenty of time to fill. The refrain ripples up and down the queue that leaps from the Interior Ministry to the police commissariats, from the Defence Ministry to the law courts, from the prisons to the offices of the church.
My daughter. My son. My brother. My sister. My husband. My father. My wife.
They inch forward in pairs or singly, feet aching, backs hurting, rehearsing the words they will use. Like Yolanda they’ve risen early, taken buses in the dark or the first metros, arriving hours before any of the staff.
When finally it is Yolanda’s turn, the dough-faced bureaucrat thrusts a clipboard list at her and tells her to run through the names. She can tell, even before he passes her the register, that he is ranked too low to help them, and high enough to keep them at bay.
Neither José nor Graciela is recorded there, even when she checks a third time, even making allowances for misspelling.
‘Why aren’t they included?’ she asks him. What does he advise her to do?
‘If they are not on the list, then they have not been arrested, Señora. Perhaps they have taken a vacation.’
Yolanda stares at him in stupefaction, until she realises she hasn’t misheard.
‘They have not gone on vacation,’ she says slowly. ‘They were taken away, separately, by plain-clothes police.’
‘Señora,’ he says, ‘if they were arrested by the police then they would be in prison and their names would be on the register. Since their names do not figure on the register, then we have to conclude that they cannot be under arrest.’
‘Then where are they?’ she says.
Other family members are pressing forward in the line-up, impatient for their turn.
The man sighs and rubs his brow as if dealing with a particularly obtuse child.
‘Señora, this is not a bureau of missing persons. Your daughter and her fiancé are grown-ups; they are responsible for themselves. If you really think they have vanished, if you’re sure they won’t show up next week with a Florida suntan, then I suggest you report them as missing to the police.’
At the diocese, where she is received – after days of petitioning – by a bishop who is a cousin of the wife of Yolanda’s brother, the discourse is more or less the same.
‘What were they up to, Señora?’ the churchman says. ‘No one is arrested without good reason. Perhaps they have involvements of which you are unaware.’
His fingernails are yellow and longer than a guitarist’s; he bends each one and flicks it back while he pretends to listen, sunk in his purple chair.
‘Graciela has not “been up to” anything, Your Excellency,’ Yolanda is saying. ‘She has been swept up in some crackdown by mistake.’
The bishop continues as if she hasn’t spoken. ‘Pernicious influences are afoot, Señora. We must be vigilant, and keep watch over our children at all times.’
Yolanda, who has hardly eaten for days and scarcely slept, wonders if he’s heard anything she has said.
‘Your Excellency, my daughter and her fiancé are not children. Graciela will be twenty in a month.’
‘We are all children in the eyes of God,’ the bishop says. A yellow fingernail bends so far back she winces, and waits for it to snap. ‘It behoves all parents to inform themselves of their children’s whereabouts, and of those with whom they associate. A moment’s inadvertence, they mingle with the wrong people’ – his hand circles in the air – ‘then suddenly they have strayed from the righteous path.’
Yolanda feels her anger mounting. She has seen the Junta’s warnings, like some twisted joke, on television: Do you know what your child is doing right now? She swallows hard to keep her emotion in check.
‘Of course, if your daughter is innocent,’ he continues, ‘if nothing is weighing on her conscience, she’ll have nothing to fear and no reason to have run away.’
‘With the greatest respect, Your Excellency,’ Yolanda says, ‘Graciela has not run away. She was abducted. You are a man of conscience, a man of influence. I am begging you to intercede on my behalf, to find out where my daughter is being held.’
‘If your daughter was engaged in subversive activities, then I will intercede for you in prayer.’
Subversive activities? Yolanda flushes. Anger roars inside her, and the desperation that has been building in her for days. But she holds it, she manages to hold it. Instead, she shapes it into a retort that she delivers with an equanimity long-honed before classrooms of recalcitrant boys.
‘My daughter is not a terrorist, if that is what you mean to suggest,’ she says. ‘She is no guerrilla and she is not a subversive. She is a student at the University of Buenos Aires. She is studying psychology; her fiancé is majoring in modern languages. I had hoped you might have found, by virtue of the privileges conferred upon you by office, something more to offer us than your prayers.’
He responds without missing a beat, without lifting his eyes from his fingernails, without raising the tenor of his voice.
‘God’s hand moves in mysterious ways, Señora.’ A fingernail the colour of nicotine clicks against the cushion of his thumb. ‘If God wants your daughter to be found, He will ensure it. Be humble and have faith. Go in peace. Do not question His will.’
He rises from his velvet armchair to signal the meeting is over. As he does so, it comes to her in a flash of intuition: he knows. If not where Graciela is, he knows what’s going on. He knows exactly how to find out.
In his imperious robes he means to usher her through the doorway but Yolanda holds her ground, resisting the extreme awkwardness of the moment, facing him over the carpet that creeps in
florid opulence across the floor.
‘I will not take one step from this room without your solemn oath, as a man of God, that you will find out where my daughter is, as well as the man she intends to marry.’
‘Are you threatening me, Señora?’ His expression has lost its bland impassiveness; she sees a mix of mockery and displeasure in his face.
‘Your Excellency, I am imploring you.’
He sighs, as if with tedium. To placate her, she thinks later, or merely to get her out of his office, he tells her to return in a month. He will enquire, he assures her. He will be sure to inform her if there is any information to convey.
At home, she marks the day a month hence on the kitchen calendar. Mid-December, she thinks. For the church, a charitable time.
Four weeks later she returns to the diocese offices. The secretary to the secretary to the bishop regrets to advise her that, the affairs of the church being at once so manifold and so pressing, the bishop will be prevented from receiving her that day.
Nor can he do so the next day, or the next, nor on any of the days that follow, nor during any of the subsequent weeks.
The secretary to the secretary to the bishop advises that he has added her name to his list. The bishop will see her most certainly, the moment he has anything to report.
It is nearly Christmas when she learns of it, more than two months since Silvia’s visit to her home.
‘All I want is something to help me drop off at night,’ she tells the doctor. ‘Osvaldo’s away and I need something to steady my nerves.’
It’s a Saturday morning and Yolanda is in the consulting room, observing the Japanese prints on the doctor’s wall. There is a famous one, of a wave that is breaking over some boats in front of Mount Fuji, the sky alive with water and flying foam. She has seen it a hundred times, but now she properly looks at it, and is surprised to see that the boats contain tiny people, men in pigtails clinging to the deck as if all they could do was pray for the storm to pass.
The Memory Stones Page 5