The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘It makes it easier for the denuncias,’ Constanza says.

  Yolanda shakes her head. Denunciations? Who would be reporting anything to them?

  ‘People will come up to you, Yolanda,’ she says. ‘On the Thursday marches. “Are you the Mothers?” they say. Or “Are you the Grandmothers?” And they’ll press a piece of paper into your palm, or slip a message into the top of your bag.’

  Yolanda’s eyes widen. ‘People are smuggling you information?’

  ‘Not all the time. But often enough. It makes sense when you think about it though, doesn’t it? Who else is there left to tell?’

  Yolanda takes this in. It sounds far-fetched, but maybe this way she will hear something. Maybe one day, someone will bring a tip-off for her.

  ‘Believe me, you don’t always want to receive them,’ Constanza continues. ‘Sometimes you unfold a scrap of paper and it’s a death threat. Don’t look at me like that. Of course we get them. At other times it’s misinformation, or outright lies. Sometimes they say things that are deeply hurtful. But we read them all and then look into them. And sometimes we get valuable information. Usually it’s anonymous, and it might just be a detail, but for one of us, it could be a life-changing clue.’

  Yolanda’s head is swimming. ‘What sort of things do they say?’

  ‘It could be anything. They might report on someone they believe is involved in these abductions. Or it might be something quite specific, a record of something they’ve witnessed, or just something that struck them as strange. Last week, for instance, someone told us they’d seen a toddler abandoned on the steps of the Casa Cuna, at the orphanage in Córdoba.’

  Yolanda takes a step backwards. ‘Are babies showing up like this?’

  ‘Not often, I don’t think, not that we really know. In this case we got in touch with the orphanage. It turned out that the denuncia was right – a two-year-old had been left there on the steps. But it’s delicate. If the child is old enough, it can sometimes remember its name, perhaps that of a sibling. But we can’t always be sure a particular child is one of those we’re looking for. We’re still working out how to proceed.’

  Yolanda reflects. ‘I don’t even know if Graciela had her baby,’ she says. ‘She was three months pregnant when she went into hiding; six months when the abduction took place. If they kept her in some kind of jail,’ and she shudders at the thought, ‘it’s quite possible she lost the child.’

  She doesn’t say it but she is remembering her own history: the miscarriages before Graciela. She swallows, and pushes her past grief from her mind.

  Taking her by the shoulders, Constanza fixes her with her cornflower gaze.

  ‘Yolanda,’ she says, ‘you can stop that right now. You don’t know it, and you cannot assume it. If she was pregnant when they took her, you have to start from the premise that she had her baby. Until someone informs you otherwise, you have to assume they are both alive.’

  Yolanda absorbs Constanza’s words. Still, she thinks, if they’ve been separated, if Graciela’s child has been dumped somewhere like the one they found in Córdoba, how could she hope to identify it? She knows nothing at all about it: not its gender, not its date of birth. She doesn’t even know its name.

  ‘You know, Constanza, no matter how I look at it, I still don’t understand. What use to them is someone like Graciela? What do they want with pregnant women, with nursing mothers? None of it makes any sense.’

  Yolanda’s eyes run across the sparkling altar; they travel over the candelabra, over the marble chapel of the Virgin, over the pillars and the ceiling vaults. She is not fooled by the pretty, stained-glass windows. They form a barrier like all the others that have walled her off from her daughter and her grandchild, an obstacle she would tear apart with her naked hands if only she knew where to start.

  Constanza hugs her because she has no answers and no other way to reply. And the gesture releases something that Yolanda has for long months been withholding, because the next moment she is weeping on Constanza’s shoulder, for the first time giving into it, letting herself weep.

  Her tears leave indigo patches on Constanza’s second-best dress, turning part of the scalloped neckline a darker shade of blue.

  ‘When they abducted my son and daughter-in-law,’ Constanza tells her after a moment, ‘the men, whoever they were, thrust the baby into the arms of a neighbour and took his parents away. But the next day the patota returned. They knocked on the neighbour’s door and demanded the baby too. What did they want with a baby, Yolanda? He was seven months old but they came back for him – and nobody, it seems, saw anything, nobody knows a thing. The neighbour who kept my grandson overnight – she couldn’t even describe the men. And of course no one has any clue where his parents are, or where my grandson was taken. Well, frankly, Yolanda, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe nobody knows.’

  The two of them sit side by side on the hard wooden planks of the pew.

  ‘People don’t just vanish into thin air, you know. The Junta aren’t magicians. We will find them, Yolanda. God knows, we will shame them into giving our children back.’

  Yolanda squeezes Constanza’s hand. She knows this woman is right. But she can’t help feeling as if she’s lost in a blizzard in some Antarctic wasteland, and that all her senses have been confounded by a world of depthless white.

  ‘Well, there is something about a snowstorm,’ Constanza says, when Yolanda tries to describe her disorientation. ‘I should know, I was caught in one once when I was a girl, up there where I come from in Bariloche.’ Constanza toys with the elastic band around her wrist. ‘If there are two of you, you have one thing that you don’t have on your own, and that’s perspective. It changes everything. You can see where you are in relation to the other person, and you can see the lie of the land. That’s your starting point. It’s the beginning of finding your way out.’

  Yolanda smiles through her tears, and nods. They sit on in the vaulted silence, breathing the aroma of wax and incense, reflecting on the rage and sorrow that have delivered them to this place.

  After a while Constanza gets to her feet.

  ‘One important thing I forgot to tell you,’ she says. ‘These accessible handbags I was telling you about – they have another use.’

  She opens hers and tilts it so that Yolanda can peer inside. There is the sound of clinking and rolling, and something glints in its depths.

  It is Yolanda’s turn to stare.

  ‘Marbles?’ she says.

  ‘I borrowed them,’ says Constanza, her blue eyes twinkling in the stained-glass light that is splashing onto the flagstones at their feet. ‘From my other grandson. We all carry them now – they’re for under the hooves. In case the police try anything with those horses again.’

  10

  Buenos Aires

  December 1977

  It’s a Sunday morning and Yolanda is sitting on the end of the bed. She has the door open onto the garden, letting in the tentative sunshine, though the ground outside is soggy from the overnight rain.

  In their pots outside her window, the geraniums have exploded into flower. She tries not to look beyond them to the flower-beds that reproach her with their exuberant crop of weeds.

  The house is quiet, as it’s always quiet these days. This morning she isn’t going to do the weeding. She isn’t going to file her correspondence, or climb the ladder to clear the guttering, or attend to the faulty faucet above the sink. She is tired. She is worried about what distance is doing to her marriage. She is anxious about her daughter. She wants her family near.

  She has brought out all the photo albums, the fat white ones of their wedding, the family ones with their layers of filmy paper, and the tall thin ones that the girls themselves arranged.

  She has spread the books out in rough chronological order across the bedspread and is going through them page by page.

  Here is the wedding photograph of her parents. It was retouched by the studio artist, which is how she knows that the
roses her mother carried that day were yellow, matching the bud in her father’s lapel. Here is Yolanda as a five-year-old in her favourite frock – she recalls how the fabric thickened where those daisies were embroidered onto it – sitting on the steps of her childhood home. Ricardo, her brother, who is standing beside her, must have blinked at the wrong moment. She smiles now at those maroon-coloured knitted shorts.

  From its corner holders she slips out a photo of herself beside Osvaldo, taken when they had first started stepping out. There are flowers on the table, and cards to mark their places, though she can’t for the life of her remember where it was. Osvaldo has his arm across the back of her chair and the shutter has gone just as he is about to speak. She sees how round her face was, how smooth her skin, how very young she looked. She frowns a little at the hairdo. Ah, but she still remembers how glorious she felt in that dress.

  And Osvaldo, slender, with darker hair, and lots of it. She traces the side of his face with her fingertip. When he looked at her, how her heart caught. How it spun.

  And there they are, outside the church on their wedding day. Hugo, as best man, is standing beside Osvaldo, and there is Franca, her dear old friend from schooldays, and Yolanda herself with roses in her hair. Later, at the reception, Osvaldo had leaned across to her and whispered that he’d just got married to the most beautiful woman in the world.

  She leaps ahead, and comes to pictures of the girls. Julieta the adventurer, always first on a jungle gym or a horse. And there was Graciela – forever trotting after her – suddenly a teenager on the beach. And Julieta again, so grown-up already – Yolanda’s heart ached that night, she remembers – her eldest daughter going out on her first date.

  She folds back the rice-paper pages, each photo opening a tunnel into the past. Graciela again, dancing on her fifteenth birthday. Julieta’s wedding – there’s Hugo chatting to Osvaldo. She loses herself in reverie, remembering, loving her life.

  She pulls the last album towards her, and an envelope slides out of the back. The paper is old and fragile, and tears as she pries it open; inside she finds a collection of Osvaldo’s cartoons. She must have slipped them in there for protection, then forgotten where she’d put them; from time to time she had wondered when they’d turn up.

  Then suddenly she is laughing aloud. She remembers these drawings now she sees them: Graciela doing a headstand in the garden, legs wobbling, eyes popping, blood rushing to her head. And Julieta – who didn’t like this one, Yolanda remembers – doing a cartwheel, straight into a pile of dog turds on the beach. There are more, some scribbled in biro on the backs of envelopes, others done on holiday when he’d had more time.

  He will be pleased to know she’s found them; she must remember to tell him next time she calls.

  As she slides them back in she notices a second envelope wedged inside the first one, and works it free, the paper soft as cotton in her hand.

  She opens it, and there it is. After all these years, when she had searched in drawers and in the backs of books and believed it lost, she has found it. The first drawing Osvaldo had done of her, a sketch and not a caricature. The one he’d done in secret, and had worked and reworked to present to her on her birthday. The one that made her realise she’d fallen in love.

  ‘Amore,’ he’d said, and she remembers the first time ever he’d used it, the Italian endearment he reserved for no one but her.

  So long ago it was. Yet seeing it now, she is suddenly that girl again. She remembers her, she remembers her ardent heart.

  She looks out at the dripping garden, at the sun filtering down through the trees.

  Somehow she will find a way, she tells herself. She will stitch this family back together. Surely soon it will be safe for Osvaldo to come home.

  11

  Paris

  March 1978

  Three brown eggs are bouncing in a saucepan on the stove.

  Carla is in our tiny kitchen, her chestnut hair tied back amid the billowing steam. She is cramming brie into a baguette with her right hand and lowering the gas with the left. Both she and Arturo are apprehensive about my journey and I am touched by their concern.

  It’s only as I prepare to leave it that I realise how much of a family we’ve become. There’s been no milestone to indicate it; it’s happened without our noticing how or when. Thrown together by circumstance and held there by necessity, we’ve been rubbing along in this too-small space as if we’d never lived any other way.

  I will be away for only a couple of days but Arturo is full of warnings. The night train to Rome, he insists, is notorious for thefts.

  ‘It’s endemic in the couchette cars,’ he tells me, eyes streaming from the hay fever he is so susceptible to in France. ‘Even the cops are in on it. Everyone’s taking their cut.’

  It sounds far-fetched to me, but Arturo, who now breaks out into a riff of sneezes, is adamant about this point.

  I’m travelling light, I reassure him. I don’t even own a suitcase and I don’t have money to spend on a sleeping berth.

  Arturo’s caution, I know, is his way of reminding me to be vigilant in other ways. Still shaken by the disappearance of two close friends in Argentina, he takes these matters seriously, but over the past few weeks he has been more than ever on edge.

  A wave of paranoia swept the Argentines here a month ago after Cecilia, an ex-detainee only recently arrived in Paris, recognised one of her torturers at a meeting to which Arturo had also gone. The man had passed himself off as an exile, had spoken with one or two people, then vanished as soon as he realised his cover was blown.

  Cecilia could only be calmed with sedatives. The rest of us were shocked to learn how easily we’d been infiltrated, how relative our safety; how each of us was potentially being watched.

  Perhaps that’s when Arturo’s attitude to the World Cup boycott changed.

  ‘The more noise we make,’ he’d said when we were discussing it a few days ago, ‘the less they are going to tolerate it, and the more dangerous it is going to get.’

  His new-found reticence startled me. This wasn’t the Arturo I knew.

  ‘But, Arturo,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think it’s the least we can do?’

  I was thinking about Graciela and her baby, I was thinking about the disappearances, what we’d heard about the secret jails.

  ‘What matters are results,’ he’d said. ‘Take that slogan, “Football between the Concentration Camps’’. All that does is wave a big red flag that is going to invite retaliation.’

  ‘And over here, what are they going to do?’

  ‘They’ve sent their hitmen out, Osvaldo. You saw what happened to Firmenich in Mexico.’

  ‘Firmenich’s a guerrilla leader. And that raid was a debacle – the Junta got caught red-handed, sending their goons into a foreign country. They’re not going to try that again.’

  ‘They’re capable of anything, we both know that. Just ask Cecilia what she thinks.’

  I could see how tired his eyes were; his hay fever was debilitating, and he had developed a twitch that kept making him blink in an effort to cover it up.

  ‘We have to face facts,’ Arturo continued.

  ‘The generals are incredibly sensitive about their image at the moment. With the French worked up about those two nuns who got abducted, and that Swedish guy making all that noise about his disappeared daughter, they desperately need this Cup. They’ll do anything to ensure it’s not derailed.’

  ‘Look, the boycott might not come off – we know that, Arturo. But the campaign will at least get people talking. Even if the matches do go ahead, Argentina will be packed with foreign journalists. And after the games, they’ll be looking for stories to write.’

  ‘So get to them privately, before they go,’ Arturo said, before dissolving into another bout of sneezing.

  ‘I just think we need to keep our heads below the parapet. There are other ways to fight.’

  I didn’t agree, but I didn’t want to argue with him either. I did
n’t understand why suddenly he’d become so obdurate when I knew where his sympathies lay.

  Perhaps it is the European winter, dragging on interminably when by rights it should be spring. The three of us seem attenuated somehow, our faces pale, our nerves all the time on edge. Our conversations dart like dragonflies, unable to settle anywhere for long.

  Proximity has made us intimate in myriad private ways. We know each other’s preferences for breakfast; we know the colour of each other’s underclothes as they dry on the bathroom rails. Perhaps, I think, my absence will be good for us. It will give them both some privacy. It will give us all some space.

  ‘Here, take this,’ Carla says with a smile. She places the baguette she has wrapped in foil on top of my borrowed travel bag, along with an apple, an empanada and the eggs.

  ‘By the way,’ Arturo says, ‘if they do steal your bag on the train, apparently you can reclaim it from the police in Ventimiglia the next morning – minus any valuables of course.’

  ‘I’ll remember that, amigo,’ I say, as we fold each other in a hug. He has lost weight since the day that François introduced us; the thatch on his head is thinner now and his shoulderblades saw through my embrace.

  Carla, whose birthday we’d celebrated the month before with thirty-four candles on an orange cake, slips something into my pocket as we stand for a moment by the door.

  ‘It’s a secret weapon, Mr Bond,’ she says in response to my puzzled look.

  I pat my hip and discover an origami envelope about the size of a postage stamp. There is something in it when I shake it: it makes a scratchy sound, like sand.

  ‘It’s for the railway Mafia,’ she tells me. ‘If you catch them fishing around for your passport you can fling a pinch of pepper in their eyes.’

  ‘So it’s not for their hard-boiled eggs?’

  ‘Well, it was meant to be for yours. Though I suppose you could use it for ransom if they won’t give you your passport back.’