The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  Iodine and detergent. My heart clenches for a moment. I am back in my old hospital in Buenos Aires, inhaling the same aroma of neglect and care.

  I follow the hand-drawn signs to Pharmacology, and wait for an eternity by the lift.

  Will they do any good, these boycotts? I ask myself. Is there any way they could tip some balance that might bring Graciela back?

  Upstairs, I stop off at the washroom. I remove my second-hand coat and loop my too-long scarf through one of its sleeves. In the sepia light I straighten my tie, and with my handkerchief do my best to erase the chalky tidemarks from my shoes.

  The telephone shatters the silence like a cascade of breaking glass. Wrenched from sleep I fling myself towards it, since from my camp bed in the living room I’m the nearest, and get there after only two rings. It must be well past midnight; behind the unpleated shutters, the slumbering rooms are dark.

  ‘Allô?’ I try to say it the way that Carla does, though I can never get the inflection quite right. Groggily, I pat the bookshelf for the pen that’s always rolling off it. The notepad seems to have vanished again; I tug a newspaper off the seat of a chair.

  ‘Osvaldo?’

  The voice is so faint I can barely hear it.

  ‘Yolanda?’ I say. My mind heaves awake. Today is not the day we’d agreed to talk. She never calls me this late.

  I look up to see Arturo’s nose and his stripy knee in the gap of the bedroom door.

  ‘Is everything all right, amore?’

  Softly, he closes the door.

  There is a pause before her answer reaches me. Barely perceptible, it travels through the hissing and echoing while a dozen scenarios flash across my brain.

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I’ve woken you all, haven’t I? I’m sorry to call so late.’

  Where are you? What time is it there? Can you talk? We speak over each other and through each other, unable to find a rhythm in the phone line’s trip and lag.

  ‘It’s early evening here,’ she says. I grind my ear against the receiver. ‘It’s still light. I’m not far from home.’

  ‘Has something happened?’ I say. I’m whispering now, worried I’ll keep the household awake.

  ‘No, nothing’s happened,’ she says. ‘Nothing’s wrong – at least nothing new.’

  I’m fully awake and my heart is thudding, not sure whether or not to feel relief.

  ‘You sound different,’ I say. But the line is poor; I cannot identify what’s changed.

  ‘I just wanted to hear your voice.’

  Our words skid and slide towards each other in irregular formations, a necklace being strung from both ends.

  Something has happened, I think. Or she’s seen something. Something’s made her distressed.

  She pauses, then speaks so softly I scarcely catch it. ‘I just feel so afraid.’

  ‘Afraid?’ I say. ‘What’s made you afraid?’

  ‘Nothing. Everything. It’s all the time,’ she says. Her voice is trembling and she takes a breath as she tries to order her thoughts. ‘It’s not one thing. It’s what’s happened and hasn’t happened. You know, with Graciela. Not knowing anything. Not hearing anything . . . I get these feelings of foreboding, Osvaldo. I can’t see how this is going to end.’

  I can hear in her words the strain of it, day after day confronting what’s there and isn’t there to confront.

  ‘Yolanda,’ I say. I wish I could be there beside her, that she’d allow it, that she weren’t so alone.

  ‘I was downtown today, in Florida,’ she is saying. ‘They were dressing the Pacífico windows . . . the place was heaving with shoppers. Suddenly I found myself in front of that photo studio – you know, the one with the old cameras in the window . . . The street was sparkling in the sunshine, people were spending money and drinking coffee and buying their boxes of alfajores, and all I could do was stare at the photographs of the brides, and those cherub babies . . . And there was one photograph, a mother and child . . . Osvaldo, it looked so much like her . . . And when I looked up again I’d lost all sense of time. I couldn’t remember where I was or which way I’d been going, whether I’d been there a only few minutes or a couple of hours.’

  ‘Oh, Yolanda,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry, querida.’

  She doesn’t say it, but she thought we’d know by now – we both did. It is the middle of February and January the twenty-second, which we’d believed was Graciela’s due date, had been a sort of deadline; I think we’d both convinced ourselves that by the end of the month we would have heard something, that surely they’d have ordered her release.

  In the darkness I survey the shapes around me: the sofa sagging like an ancient warhorse, the cone I have made of my bed cover, the glint of the breakfast bowls. I don’t know what to say to make things easier. I don’t know how to make us feel less far apart.

  ‘You know what’s hard?’ she says. ‘It’s that for everyone else, life goes on as normal: the buses run and the shops are open and people go out to restaurants. They laugh, they watch the football, they’re out buying their flashy cars and designer clothes. I feel like I exist in some parallel universe. I can’t sleep at night without my tablets, and when I get to sleep I dream that we have found her, and every morning I have to relive her loss.’

  ‘Amore,’ I say, not knowing how to comfort or help.

  I dream about Graciela also – a recurrent dream where she is a little girl running fast and giggling over her shoulder, running without looking towards the edge of a road where she cannot hear my shouting, where she misreads my panic for encouragement as I hurl myself towards her, where it’s all a game, until she runs across.

  Sometimes it’s my own cries that wake me, that must also bother Carla and Arturo; other times I jolt awake and find myself bathed in sweat.

  There is no answer so I just listen to Yolanda speaking. The two of us are imprisoned in our separate circles, unable to go backwards or advance.

  ‘Are you looking after yourself?’ I ask her after a while. I think about the things I want to tell her – about the boycott, the rival cancer congress – but know I cannot raise them without multiplying her fears.

  More than anything I want to tell her that I’ll come back: a word from her and I’ll be on the next flight home. But she has made me promise not to raise the subject; she has made it clear that it’s not something she is willing to discuss.

  Instead she tells me about school: how the old fifteen-minute flag ceremony in the morning now takes the best part of an hour; how rote-learning is to be favoured over reasoning; about her request to work part-time. She thinks she can get by on half her salary as long as I can continue to send money home.

  ‘You know I will,’ I say.

  I am shivering now in the stillness. I stretch the cord as far as it will go and burrow back down in my bed.

  ‘And what about you?’ she says. ‘Is work all right? Are you doing okay over there?’

  ‘As well as I can without you.’

  I picture her as she’s speaking, the formal way she has of sitting, the angle of her chin as she holds the receiver to the soft incline of her head.

  ‘It’s not that easy, for either of us,’ she says.

  And she wants to ask, I can tell because they are my questions too, but she stops herself because she knows there are no answers, that I have no answers to give.

  How long till we find Graciela?

  What has happened to our grandchild?

  How long will this separation last?

  ‘Yolanda,’ I say. And it comes out now in a way there is no stopping, all the things I have been wanting to express.

  I tell her how much I love her, how without her I feel lost to myself. I tell her how stricken I feel about our family, and about these endless months apart. I tell her how ashamed I feel when I remember my pledges when we got married: how I’d vowed never to leave her, how her happiness would always come first.

  ‘None of it’s your fault, Osvaldo,’ she says
. ‘The world has been upended and none of us saw it coming. What could any of us have done?’

  At that instant I want so much to take her in my arms. But we have only our words, and when the words run out we drift on through the silence, listening to the sound our breathing makes, and to the hollow sounds the cable makes that might be in the air or underwater, and to the quietness of the earth revolving, which is all the intimacy we have.

  I have to sleep, she has to go home from wherever she is ringing. I worry about her, alone in the darkening streets.

  ‘Will you be all right, amore?’ I say.

  I can hear her smile and the way it’s laced with sadness when she answers.

  ‘Sleep well, mi amor,’ she says.

  9

  Buenos Aires

  November 1977

  From a distance they look like doves in their white headscarves.

  Every Thursday they have started turning up there, circling the square opposite the Casa Rosada, because as long as martial law is in force it is forbidden to assemble and stand. In their sandals, in their sturdy shoes and compression stockings, they walk in silence holding their big photographs, and those who don’t have photographs hold up hand-drawn signs instead.

  ‘Where is my daughter?’ the placards say. ‘Where is my son?’

  This is the end of the road. This is where the mothers come when there are no more avenues to try.

  A hundred pigeons take flight. They billow over the monument like a mainsail, then circle it before vanishing into the sky.

  Should she join these women? Yolanda asks herself. Would it do any good?

  She wonders what Osvaldo would think, what sharp-tongued Julieta would say. Though she’d had misgivings when her eldest daughter told her they were moving to Miami, again and again she gives silent thanks that Julieta and her husband are half a continent away.

  Julieta had wanted to come home as soon as she’d heard about her sister, but Yolanda would not countenance it. She couldn’t bear the strain of it, a second daughter unsafe.

  Then she thinks about Graciela, her precious second-born, whom she loves as much as but differently from her first. More like her father than Julieta ever was, Graciela will now have been a mother for the best part of a year, experiencing these transformative months of her life with no one from her family by her side.

  That is what Yolanda tells herself, what she needs, what she has to believe. In the depths of her heart she knows there are other alternatives, but none that do not end in a chasm of pain.

  Yolanda scans the faces in the square. There are mothers, housewives and grandmothers, ordinary women and professional women, mothers of teenagers and mothers of retirement age.

  Demure in their white headscarves, they could be the Junta’s ideal of womanhood if it weren’t for their lack of passivity. Yolanda knows, because she shares their fury, that they will march until their children are returned.

  Rain begins to fall, fine as a summer mist. The women walk in silence, forming a circle around the pyramid in the square.

  Surely it is safe, Yolanda thinks, watching them pace like schoolgirls in their knee-length skirts and sensible, buttoned-up coats. Surely there would be an outcry, she tells herself from her vantage point in the portico of the cathedral. Surely it would be a step too far if they started arresting mothers before the Casa Rosada.

  Yolanda was in her early twenties and not yet married but clearly she remembers it, the last time Evita addressed the crowd from the balcony overlooking the square.

  ‘Osvaldo,’ she says. She is in another locutorio, her exasperation evident despite the faintness of her voice. ‘I’ve been to all the ministries. I’ve been to army barracks and police stations, court houses and orphanages. I’ve been out to El Devoto and the other jails.’

  He knows her list is long because he, too, has made suggestions. He has racked his brains for the names of former patients, for colleagues at other hospitals, for anyone they could call upon to help. Together they identified lawyers and churchmen, journalists and bureaucrats, even friends with some distant relative in the army.

  ‘You have to believe me,’ she is telling him. ‘There is no other place to turn.’

  He has no idea who these women are, why she thinks they could help, how she imagines this could possibly be risk-free. Yet far away in France, with only a telephone line between them, he cannot dissuade her from going to the Plaza de Mayo – even if, as she insists at first, it is only to stand and watch.

  The next Thursday she goes again. This time, everything is different; the air is crackling with tension; Yolanda can see but can’t get a sense of what’s going on. The women are marching again in silence but this time their banners are screaming: ‘Que Aparezcan Con Vida Nuestros Hijos’ – ‘We Want our Children Back Alive’. She turns, and suddenly horses are bearing down on them; the mothers trip and scramble but refuse to disperse. They are insisting: they want a meeting with the Junta, and will not leave until their demands have been met.

  On the third Thursday she watches from closer by. The women are walking in their circle around the pyramid; Yolanda peers at them over a copy of La Nación. The ‘Mother, Home, Child’ section is full of Futura Mamá ads; her heart constricts at the displays of maternity clothes.

  She is awash with conflicting feelings. Instinct urges discretion but discretion has yielded nothing. By marching, the mothers are insisting on visibility – that she understands immediately, having been dismissed so many times herself. Yet to her mind, they look terribly exposed.

  She is afraid of visibility, afraid of the horses, and especially she is afraid of the police.

  It takes her one more Thursday to find the courage. Pedestrians are hurrying past the cathedral, commuters are rushing to the Subte, the police are taking positions for a show of force. This time the mothers are holding life-size paper cut-outs of the missing. And at their front, a new banner catches her eye.

  ‘Dónde Están Los Centenares de Bebés Nacidos en Cautiverio?’ it says. Ice slithers down Yolanda’s spine as she re-reads it. ‘Where are the Hundreds of Babies Born in Captivity?’

  Hundreds? Can that be right?

  Awareness strikes her like a cascade of freezing water. Whatever this is, whatever they’re caught up in, she knows she cannot do this on her own.

  There is a signature beneath the banner, and she takes note of it: the Grandmothers, the Abuelas, of the Plaza de Mayo.

  Grandmothers? Well, she is a grandmother now, she must be, and she is one of these women, whether she marches with them or not. She grasps it now in the most visceral way, the knowledge hard inside her like a stone. She is mother and probably grandmother to people who have disappeared.

  As soon as the march is over Yolanda moves against the stream of pedestrians, keeping her eye on the sign being rolled away. The women are embracing each other and parting; they are pairing up and peeling off towards the Subte; she has to reach them before they disperse.

  She catches them up at the zebra crossing. Among them is a woman a little older and a good head shorter than Yolanda is, round-faced behind glasses that are perched on a small, blunt nose. Yolanda sees, when the woman removes her headscarf, that her hair is silver where the gold is growing out.

  Suddenly she remembers the rosebuds she saw at Maria’s house, their colour fading because, in the panic after José’s abduction, no one had thought it important to water the plants.

  The woman has cheeks like winter apples and, around her wrist, a green elastic band.

  In the way she stands – short-legged and sure-footed in her brown no-nonsense footwear – Yolanda is suddenly reminded of her own mother, and feels drawn to her because of a welling need for mothering herself.

  The woman looks up at her approach. Yolanda is startled by her eyes; against the grey of the city, they blink from behind her glasses in a flash of cornflower blue.

  ‘Who have you lost, querida?’ the woman says, before Yolanda can introduce herself with the words that
she’s been practising for days.

  Yolanda is taken aback. Was worry etched so deeply into her face?

  ‘My daughter,’ she says. The words come out hoarsely, and the rest in a kind of whisper. ‘Her fiancé. And maybe their child.’

  The blue eyes scrutinise her, and make their lightning assessment. ‘Meet me at the Santa Cruz church on Saturday, any time in the afternoon.’

  Yolanda nods with gratitude; she is swaying with relief. Perhaps these women can help her. Perhaps she need not feel so completely alone.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, steadying herself on the woman’s extended arm.

  ‘When you get there, just mention my name: Constanza.’

  She flashes Yolanda a smile as the lights change, then hurries off across the intersection, a diminutive figure with a rolled-up banner, dwarfed by the passing cars.

  In the end it had happened so quickly: a single question, the instant trust.

  Yolanda is awash with gratitude.

  After all these months, somebody, finally, has said yes.

  ‘Dios mio,’ Constanza says. She clicks her tongue. ‘It just won’t do. Haven’t you got a bigger one than that?’

  Yolanda shivers into her jacket. Inside the church the air is chilly. They are standing among the rows of pews and the woman she met at the Plaza de Mayo is studying her handbag with a frown.

  Yolanda gives her a puzzled look. She never carries her shoulder-bag downtown; though petty crime has all but ceased since the coup, she isn’t one for taking chances; anything larger than the one she is carrying would only be inviting trouble.

  Constanza disagrees. ‘That one’s no use at all,’ she says. ‘You need something you can leave open at the top.’

  ‘I could pin a sign on it too, saying “Pickpockets Here”!’

  Constanza chuckles, forgetting that they’re in a church. Yolanda notices how much she likes the sound of it, thinks how little laughter there’s been over this past year.

  ‘It’s just the opposite,’ Constanza says. ‘It’s so people can put things in.’

  ‘You’ve lost me now, Constanza,’ Yolanda says. She bites her lip the way she does in the classroom, when a pupil comes up with an answer they both know doesn’t make any sense.