The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  The doctor, who has treated them all since the girls were children, won’t know about Graciela’s disappearance. Circumspect, Yolanda has resolved to keep it to herself.

  Fat as a cigar, his fountain pen seems to scribble the Valium prescription on its own. ‘You must be thrilled at the prospect of becoming a grandparent,’ the doctor says, inking his signature with an expansive swirl that travels across the bottom of the page.

  Yolanda stares at him.

  ‘Julieta isn’t expecting,’ she says. ‘We’ve just spoken on the phone.’

  The doctor looks up from his prescription pad, pen poised as if it’s about to drop ash where he is meant to add the date.

  ‘I’m not talking about Julieta,’ he says. There is a puzzled expression on his face.

  Yolanda’s mind is whirring like a machine.

  ‘Graciela was at the end of the first trimester the last time she came to see me,’ he says. ‘I gave her some advice for the morning sickness and a referral to the best gynaecologist I know.’

  Yolanda is reeling. Graciela pregnant? She is not quite twenty. Yolanda can scarcely make sense of his words.

  ‘She was ecstatic, I must say,’ the doctor continues. Under bristly eyebrows, his glasses flash opaquely in the sunlight; Yolanda adjusts her position to see his eyes.

  ‘She couldn’t wait to tell her fiancé,’ he says. ‘She wanted him to be the first to know.’

  Concentrate, Yolanda tells herself. Stay calm. Collect the facts.

  ‘Can you tell me the date of that appointment?’ She tries to say it lightly, then holds her breath, centring by force of will the pieces of her that feel like they are flying apart.

  The family cards lie between them on the desk, four interlocked narratives of sickness and health nestling in a worn manila sleeve.

  She sees his perplexity shade into reluctance. He has said too much, he must be thinking; now he will be worrying where it will lead.

  She watches him twist a cufflink, a tiny red and gold chessboard, between his fingers.

  ‘Please,’ she says, praying that this family doctor is also a family friend.

  He looks at her with an expression she cannot decipher. She feels suddenly self-conscious in last year’s teaching dress, her untrimmed hair grown frizzy for lack of care.

  ‘As her mother,’ she adds, and fears the moment already lost.

  He hesitates. All she has asked for is the date. Is it patient confidentiality that’s worrying him? she wonders. Yet surely, in the case of pregnancy, for the patient’s mother an exception might be made.

  ‘Since you are next of kin . . .’ he says, twisting the harlequin cufflink the other way.

  Next of kin? she thinks. That’s what you say about the dead.

  He picks up the filing cards, salmon-pink and stapled together where new ones have been added over the years. Taking a moment to examine it, he slides out one that has ‘Graciela’ inscribed in blue letters across the top.

  ‘It was July the twenty-sixth,’ he says.

  She leans forward and he shows her where it is written, this last trace of Graciela, her beautiful second daughter who is missing, and who it seems is now expecting a child.

  Speedily Yolanda makes the calculation. ‘So she’s due in January,’ she says.

  He nods. ‘About January the twenty-second. In roughly one month’s time.’

  One month. So, she thinks, right now her daughter is eight months pregnant, and the doctor confirmed the pregnancy in July. On July the twenty-sixth, he’d said – and Yolanda knows that date. That’s the day when José disappeared.

  Had they spoken? Had Graciela told him he was going to be a father – or had she been waiting for him to get home? With Yolanda there’d been no time for talk of babies when the night was embroiled in panic, when the phone was engaged with Graciela’s frantic calling, when midnight passed and still he hadn’t come back.

  A day or two later Graciela had gone into hiding, and no one that Yolanda knew but Silvia, diaphanous Silvia in her gothic garb, had seen her for the next three months.

  Yolanda tries to remember. It was still too early, the last time she’d seen her daughter, drinking tea at the kitchen table in mid-July. The pregnancy wasn’t yet showing, and Graciela hadn’t yet mentioned it to anyone; after Yolanda’s own miscarriages, she would have been waiting until she was sure.

  How in God’s name was she coping? Was she ill? Had she been suffering from constant nausea, as Yolanda had done herself? With mounting panic she wonders in what conditions her daughter is living, if she is getting the care she is needing: fresh food, vitamins, light.

  Yolanda looks up. Over his glasses the doctor has been scrutinising her, and she looks him straight in the eye.

  He knows, she thinks. He has guessed.

  Can she trust him? She longs to, but isn’t sure of him; she has no knowledge of where he stands. Here in the doctor’s office, where she has sat so often with that pain in her chest or a feverish child on her knee, she decides to take the risk.

  ‘I don’t know where they are holding her.’

  In desperation she has blurted it out, and blindly she ploughs ahead. A door is ajar and she keeps her foot inside it because no one else has helped her, because everyone else has patronised or humiliated her, and every path has ended in a wall.

  ‘Since she is pregnant,’ says Yolanda, the precariousness of Graciela’s situation dawning, ‘is there some place she might have been sent?’

  His mind is clicking over, she can see it: he has made a mistake; he shouldn’t have mentioned the pregnancy; he doesn’t want to get involved. He has his connections – that much she assumes – but like everyone else, he’s afraid.

  ‘I’m sure the authorities will be able to help you,’ he says. The door to his concern slams shut as if yanked by a draught.

  The appointment is suddenly over because he is standing, he is handing her the prescription, he is smiling his urbane smile. A moment later he is ushering her past the defeated pot-palms, out towards his secretary, out into the remnants of the day.

  That night, in the slow moments before the Valium lifts and rocks her, a new thought enters Yolanda’s mind.

  Could he have known about Graciela’s disappearance before she made the appointment? Had he let slip about the pregnancy on purpose? Had he wanted her to know?

  She calls from a phone box on Avenida Callao. Over the roar of the traffic, Osvaldo reels from the news.

  ‘Graciela’s expecting a child?’

  Yolanda begins enquiring at the maternity hospitals. Sometimes she can manage three of them if she starts out early on a day she isn’t teaching, but there are scores of smaller clinics on her list. She makes her way to the public wards and tries to catch the midwives, who generally prove more helpful than the obstetricians. Have they examined any women in jail?

  They look at her as if she were out of her mind.

  She persists; this is her one best hope and she will not be deterred. Do you recognise this woman – she is now in her third trimester? She is eight months pregnant. Look at her, surely you’d remember her face? She thrusts the picture on top of clipboards, into reluctant hands. They barely glance at the photograph. It is one that José took of Graciela last summer, the most recent one Yolanda has of her, Graciela framed by a willow tree at Tigre. Please, she begs, do you recognise her, is there nothing you recall? The doctors are uncomfortable; caught off guard, they can’t dislodge this woman who won’t withdraw without an answer. They avoid her, they try to evade her questions. Do you have an appointment, Señora? Have you registered at Reception? We don’t discuss our patients. Can’t you see these people are waiting? I will have to call security. Please step aside. Señora, we are trying to work.

  She weeps into the telephone. It is hopeless. There are too many clinics, too many doctors, too much suspicion and fear.

  They keep track of the weeks. They count down the January days.

  The baby, Yolanda thinks, must be somewhere wi
th its mother, once they guess that the time has come. Its birth must be recorded somewhere, and with it, Graciela’s name.

  At the start of February, with the summer sun beating down on the tiled footpaths, Yolanda begins checking the hospital lists. She tries register offices for lists of new-borns, and paediatric wards in case of complications. After a while, she turns to the orphanages. She turns to the adoption courts.

  There is one place they’ve both thought of but cannot bring themselves to mention. Then one day Yolanda tells Osvaldo she has taken a map and circled all the cemeteries. She tells him it is just to make sure.

  8

  Paris

  January 1977

  My first winter in Paris. I cross the grimy courtyard, past the garbage bins huddled in their derelict shelter. Under a ferrous sky, pigeons shiver on the window ledges. The cobblestones are oily as dead birds.

  Darkness departs reluctantly in these low January days. Dawn doesn’t break; the mornings creep up stealthily, a pale extension of night.

  A switch on the wall sheds its mandarin glow and I lean on it and count a beat, waiting for the click that releases the lock on the door. I swing my body behind the handle and hang there a moment, counterpoised to the great weight of it, before stepping out into a corridor of sound.

  I am still unused to the assault of it: the wail of sirens, the churn of buses, the motorists’ hair-trigger horns.

  A flotilla of headlights navigates the dimness. My eyes stream from the cold, and the cough I’ve acquired – in this foreign land I am prey to every illness – feels like it could shake my ribcage loose. I hunch my shoulders against the breeze that fingers my collar, that wheedles through buttonholes and seams.

  New Year has come and gone; the forecast has turned Siberian and the mairies have strewn the thoroughfares with grit. Discarded after Christmas, moulting fir trees slouch against the limestone. The footpaths crunch with pine needles and salt crystals as I set off for my first appointment as if walking through a forest by the sea.

  Right now in Argentina it is summertime. People will be on holiday at the beach.

  I picture Yolanda waiting beside hospital elevators, intercepting the orderlies for word of Graciela. Ever since her abduction we’ve been turning in frantic circles, our nights disturbed by terrors we dare not name.

  Along the boulevard I glance at the still-closed doors of travel agents and hairdressers and search for her reflection, the shining eyes and the freckles that vanish in the winter months. I search for her at the bakery and in the line at the dry cleaner’s; once I think I see her strap-hanging at the back of a bus. Reflexively, in this city where I recognise no one, where nobody shares my memories, I look for her in every stranger’s face.

  And now – I cannot fathom it. The possibility of a child.

  Did she go full-term? I wonder. Hands swollen with cold, a gang of Moroccan fruit sellers is unloading crates of artichokes from a truck. Did it all go well? I ask myself, and shudder as I remember her own complicated birth.

  I am haunted by my worst imaginings. They are with me before I wake, before a lighter shade of darkness prises through the living-room shutters and hauls me into another recalcitrant day. They are with me as I stand in the icy bathroom, speckling the sink with hyphens as I shave. They are with me as I spoon coffee into Carla’s battered percolator, as I spill its talcum softness onto the worktop, as I map mental routes between the meetings that punctuate my ineffectual hours.

  I am tormented by my inability to help her, by the fear that I might be to blame.

  Black ice: they’ve been predicting it on the radio. They discuss it like an omen from the underworld: an occult force that could snatch the living away. This morning, however, the roads are dry; sediment streaks the gutters like an afterwash of aspirin. Underfoot, puddles shatter like quartz and the TV antennae rasp the lowering sky.

  Beyond the intersection I approach the metro entrance, its twin lamps peering bloodshot into the feeble light of dawn. Tempted by the underground warmth, I vacillate, then decide to continue on foot. The salt is going to leave tidemarks on the shoes I polished this morning, but if I walk fast I can be on time and save on the metro fare.

  Arturo and Carla have lent me a pair of driving gloves, and a knitted scarf that seems to grow longer with every wearing. I have a woollen hat that Carla gave me, and a cashmere coat that we picked out at a charity shop in Passy. Thanks to them I am kitted out for winter; I move about this hard-edged city enveloped in other people’s lives.

  I have been camping in their two-roomed apartment for half a year and never once have they suggested it’s been too long. I fold away my makeshift bed in the mornings, and although it’s harder in the winter months, I make sure I am always the first one up and try not to be home too much.

  Hungry for news, they are always inviting new arrivals back for dinner, if we’re not visiting the Argentines who form the nucleus of our social life. Carla, dressed in the poncho that Arturo gave her for Christmas, passes around the mate or her dulce de leche creations, while Arturo puts Piazzolla on the turntable, or a tango if he’s in the right mood. Deracinated, homesick, and worried about our families, we gravitate towards each other in search of reassurance, or just to hear our language spoken in our sibilant accent, while we learn to match our heartbeats to the rhythm of those who are safe.

  And the conversation almost always turns to politics: what’s happening in Argentina; what, over here, we can do. I find myself paying attention to their discussions, listening for any development that might bring Graciela home.

  There is little enough reporting of Argentina in the newspapers we get in Paris, but every mention I do my best to absorb. I scour the Spanish papers that Arturo retrieves from the institute as we try to pierce the censorship, and analyse the rumours that pass for facts among the exiles here.

  The problem, according to Arturo, is that here in Europe, the coup in Argentina is not understood the way Chile’s was, where the death of Allende, and the killings in the stadium, made everything so clear. Because Isabel had been so incompetent a president, because Argentina before the coup had been swept by waves of violence, the perception here is that the Junta’s arrival was welcome and long overdue.

  ‘That’s only because our generals learned their lesson from Pinochet,’ Carla is saying. ‘Our lot are keeping their abuses hidden from view.’

  ‘Except for the occasional glimpse behind the curtain,’ says Arturo. ‘Nothing controls better than fear.’

  ‘Well, it’s a brilliant strategy, really. Disappearance allows them to wash their hands. No body, no crime, after all.’

  And it’s working, I think to myself. The stories that are seeping out of my homeland fill me with terror. As the north wind howls down the chimney flues at midnight, I tremble for Graciela, and pray for her, and cling to the hope that motherhood will win her release if innocence isn’t enough.

  ‘We’ve got to find a way to get this talked about,’ says one of the exiles, blowing his nose as he battles another French cold. ‘Writing letters is all very well, but we’ve got to get more coverage in the press.’

  Over mate, someone suggests enlisting help from showbiz – Montand and Signoret have shown they’re sympathetic. Then somebody mentions athletes, and suddenly we’re discussing the World Cup.

  ‘A boycott? Of next year’s Cup in Argentina?’

  ‘Are you crazy? They’ll try to stop us. Overwhelm us with propaganda.’

  ‘We’d need slogans. Something powerful . . .’

  ‘And posters. Something visual . . .’

  ‘A logo to counter theirs.’

  ‘And FIFA?’

  ‘What about FIFA? We can’t expect anything from FIFA.’

  ‘No – I mean what leverage would we have?’

  ‘We’d have to go straight to the players. The captains, the strikers . . .’

  ‘And make a start with Sweden. Some place that still has principles.’

  ‘The Dutch too. And West
Germany, since they are the reigning champions.’

  ‘I don’t know about Germany. After what happened at the Games in Munich . . .’

  ‘You mean what happened at the Games in Berlin, if you want to bring in the Olympics.’

  ‘That’s brilliant, we should use that: the ’thirty-six Games and the Junta’s Cup.’

  I replay the conversation as I approach the overpass, the Paris ring road roaring underneath.

  It occurs to me, for a second before I dismiss it, that I could pitch in with a few cartoons. But I have vowed never to draw again – at least not until Graciela comes back.

  The day has lightened; the cars are switching off their headlights; the street lamps flicker in unison and die. A northerly wind is wheeling off the plain beyond the airport; I wind my excessive scarf in an extra loop.

  In fact I’m already involved, informally at least, with another kind of boycott: of the international cancer congress that Videla, the Junta’s leader, has just announced. They plan to hold it in Buenos Aires shortly after the World Cup as proof of the Junta’s concern for human life.

  A couple of French oncologists have approached the association of Argentine doctors and proposed a ‘counter congress’ on the same dates. They want to hold it in Paris as a protest, and as a show of solidarity with their colleagues in Argentina, since a number of them have vanished since the coup.

  Ahead of me, the hospital’s ad hoc ugliness rears above the underpass. My fingers are ice inside my gloves and the footpath’s cold is seeping into my feet.

  My instinct is to discuss these matters with Yolanda, and reassure her that I’ll do nothing to put her at risk. But another part of me understands that the less she knows the better, and that anything I do must be discreet.

  An ambulance yodels past me, complaining through the traffic as it carves a path over the intersection and in through the emergency gate.

  Inside, the bustle of a hospital morning: orderlies wheeling patients towards the elevators, drip bags wobbling like jellyfish as they bump over the linoleum floor.