The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘Ah-ha,’ I say. ‘So really it’s travel insurance.’

  She smiles and shakes her head. ‘Off you go now. Have a safe journey. Don’t talk to strangers,’ she says.

  ‘And I thought we were the strangers around here.’

  She laughs. ‘Then don’t let anyone talk to you.’

  As I hug her goodbye, I realise suddenly how I love her for her lightness, as I love Arturo for his friendship despite our differences, despite the strains in the way we live.

  ‘Suerte, amigo,’ Arturo says, blinking in the doorway. ‘Good luck with it. I hope you find your man.’

  A tangerine dawn is breaking over the railway yards when the night train from Paris pulls in at Termini station. The early swallows are already lassoing the sky.

  I’ve only been once to Rome and that was a decade ago, for the congress where I first met François. Because Yolanda was with me, the city now flashing past the taxi windows is familiar not just in its own right, but for the way I saw it with her.

  I remember it framed by the lens of my camera: Yolanda wearing the cashmere scarf she’d bought in the via Condotti; Yolanda doing a movie-star pose on the rim of the Trevi fountain.

  I didn’t get robbed on the train. I did get cheated by the taxi driver, who tripled my fare with a scenic tour that skirted the Spanish Steps and the Coliseum.

  I am too tired to dispute it. We who visit from elsewhere excuse Rome everything because of her grandeur, I tell myself as he deposits me in a gloomy street at the back of St Peter’s Square.

  From Paris I’d booked a room in a pensione that a dour woman with a cross on her bosom mercifully lets me occupy right away. Doilies froth over glossy surfaces in a building with a cage for a lift. Room number eight, scorning the baroque promise of reception, overlooks a lightwell colonised by pigeons; a row of loggias glowers down at them over the top of the Vatican wall.

  I take a shower and sleep for the next three hours. When I awake I am ravenous, and go outside to find coffee and something to eat.

  This afternoon I have an appointment with a bishop. I am not a religious man but Bishop Traversini has connections in Argentina, and I hope he might have word for me, some sign at least, some news about Graciela.

  A fleet of Vespas takes off with a roar at the traffic lights. I stand for a moment in their slipstream, taking in the sharpness of the Roman air and the fumes and the southern light.

  That I have this appointment at all is serendipitous. Though the French won’t let me practise as a doctor, the Latin Americans in Paris occasionally ask me for consultations, and since few can afford a specialist, I try to help them out. A friend of Carla’s called one Saturday night in a state of panic, and as soon as I examined her twelve-year-old – he’d hurt his eye while messing around with a power drill – I realised he needed surgery right away. With François’ help, we got him to Emergency at a hospital where a colleague of his could operate, and undoubtedly saved his sight in that eye.

  The boy’s mother had wanted to repay me but I refused to hear of it; it was the surgeon who deserved her thanks. But after she spoke to Carla and learned my story, she realised how she might be able to help.

  She had, it turned out, a relative who was close to a bishop in Rome. A few days later, through Carla, she sent me an Italian phone number with instructions to dial it in a month.

  ‘We would expect to see you at the Vatican in person, Señor Ferrero,’ the secretary had said when four weeks later I’d called. ‘If it’s convenient for you, Bishop Traversini’ – he spells out the name to ensure I’ve noted it correctly – ‘will receive you this coming Thursday, at three in the afternoon.’

  There are still a couple of hours before my meeting. A queue of sightseers is shuffling towards the Vatican Museums and I fall in with them, and soon find myself inside. Moments later I am gazing upwards at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, tumbling upwards into its infinite skies.

  I stand there for a long time looking up at it, looking up at the hand of God. Fingers entwined, Yolanda and I once stood on these floors and marvelled until our necks were aching, at the magnificence of the sight.

  Then, it was all discovery, and we were awed by the artist’s work. This time, it’s as if some other painter had taken over, or I myself were looking through different eyes.

  Now, I can scarcely see the beauty. Instead, what swims before me are endless cycles of creation and destruction, of death and disaster and expulsion, like the one that has my country in its grasp.

  Alone among the chattering tourists, I am shaken when I get to the end. I am a humanist more than a believer, yet even I can hear the drumroll that descends from those lofty ceilings, pounding out its message: There is no escape.

  Suddenly I need to get out. I plunge from the chapel into the soaring vaults of St Peter’s, and seek a pillar to lean against among the tour groups and the pilgrims and the guides. In the whispering basilica I close my eyes and stand for an age with the cold stone knuckling my backbone, listening to the scrape of chairs and the click of cameras in front of the Pietà.

  With clarity it comes to me: I don’t want Michelangelo’s magisterial vision. I don’t want this eternal struggle between good and evil that not even his God can contain. I want ordinary life in all its insignificance. Pleasures so small they scarcely register. Banality. The minutiae of routine.

  Like the tiny figures in the background of a Flemish painting. Anonymous ice-skaters. Swimming children. Farming people dancing or ploughing the land.

  Like Yolanda recounting her day to me on her side of the bed in the evenings.

  Like Graciela and Julieta teasing me and passing the mate across the garden table.

  Like stopping at the baker’s at closing time to pick up the loaf they have kept for me, the aroma of yeast accompanying me as I walk home to my daughters and my wife.

  Theatrical in their blue and gold stripes, the Swiss Guards allow me into a courtyard where a young priest comes to meet me and guide me through the Vatican maze. His robes sway like backstage curtains as we navigate staircases and cloisters with hidden gardens. Citrus trees strung with lemons glow like fairy lights.

  We stop before double doors of oak. The priest knocks twice, then opens them in unison without waiting for an answer; they give onto an enormous chamber with a view over the rooftops of Rome. The priest nods once before retreating, closing the doors while stepping backwards like an usher at an opera-house box.

  Before me, the bishop dressed in a long black cassock and a purple sash stands with his face to the window. When he turns I see he is quite a bit older than I am, a clean-shaven man with cropped white hair that clings to his head like lichen.

  His hands, thick-fingered, are as broad as a farmer’s. I wonder how he manages the small black buttons that cascade from his larynx to his shoes.

  He grips my hand in his peasant’s paw and greets me with warmth in his eyes. ‘Osvaldo Ferrero?’ he says.

  ‘Eminence,’ I say, and instinctively bow my head. I sense the generosity in him despite the austerity implied in the jet-black sweep of his robes.

  We make small talk about my trip from Paris, about the brisk spring weather in Rome. He asks where I am from in Argentina, and in his rumbling voice informs me that he spent many years there as a missionary, and feels a great affection for my land.

  ‘Will you walk with me?’ he says after a moment. It’s more of a command than a question, but he says it gently; it’s understood that I’m to follow his lead.

  We descend another flight of stairs and emerge inside a courtyard with a fountain. He takes a diagonal path towards it and I accompany him to a low stone bench among rose bushes that have been mercilessly pruned.

  My mind has been on a rollercoaster for days now, dreaming about Graciela’s homecoming, wondering what the bishop might say. Yolanda, who’s been through countless versions of this meeting in Argentina, cautioned me repeatedly against hope.

  ‘For them, this is just another appointment,’
she’d insisted, even as I made her promise to ring me immediately after my return. ‘If he’s seeing you at all, he’s only doing it as a courtesy to Carla’s friend.’

  Still, now that I’m in Italy, inside the Vatican, inside this courtyard, I can’t help thinking: could they have made me travel so far in vain?

  I sit beside him in the lemony sunshine and wait for him to speak. The fountain textures the quiet with its pattering; the water arches back on itself, forming a shape like a glass hibiscus as it falls.

  He must know something, I think to myself. My heart is thudding. There must be something he has managed to find out.

  From somewhere inside his cassock he produces a pair of mittens the size of bed-socks, and wriggles his great paws inside.

  ‘Circulation,’ he says, almost in apology. ‘At my age, one tends to feel the cold.’

  I nod. The air is clear as crystal. Far above us, with its angel’s-eye view of life on earth, an aeroplane traverses the sky.

  ‘I have been informed of your situation, of your great suffering,’ the bishop begins, and suddenly every fibre in my body is alert. ‘I know you are in need of information about your daughter. Unfortunately the circumstances in Argentina are very complicated. I’m afraid we have not been able to ascertain very much.’

  My heart falls so heavily it must be audible. He is preparing me for the disappointment Yolanda intuited even before I caught the train. He knows nothing. He has found out nothing. He has nothing, after all, to share.

  I breathe in, and breathe in again, trying to steady my mind. But my thoughts are already racing backwards, back towards Roma Termini, back up the spine of Italy, back across the south of France and north to the station in Paris. Already I am back in our poky apartment, back where Carla and Arturo will have finished lunch and be laying out their books to start their afternoon’s work.

  I will thank the bishop for his trouble. I will take my leave. Politely, I will walk away.

  ‘This is what I can tell you,’ he continues. ‘There was a child that lived.’

  I freeze. The planet halts its slow rotation.

  ‘A child that lived?’

  ‘That is what I am able to tell you.’

  ‘A child? Is it a girl? Is it a boy?’

  He looks at me with eyes that return only the reflection of my own.

  ‘This is all I have learned; it is all I have been told. Had it been possible to find out more, I would have informed you of any further facts.’

  My mind is spinning. Though he is speaking carefully, I cannot absorb his words.

  ‘A child that lived – does that mean the child is living still?’

  ‘I understand your anguish, Señor Ferrero . . .’

  ‘Your Eminence, I implore you. The child’s mother, my daughter, Graciela?’

  Preserve this, I say to myself. Hold tight this slender thread.

  ‘Señor Ferrero, I am sorry. This is all the information I have for you. I hope it brings you some peace.’

  I am desperate now; he will walk back to his office, the double doors will close and it will be as if this dialogue never took place.

  ‘Could you go back to them?’ This is my one last chance and I am pleading. ‘I beg of you, Monsignore. Would you ask them again?’

  He has a line of communication. He has only to keep it open to find out more.

  But he is standing and he is waiting for me to stand. When I do, he places his hand upon my forearm and stills me with the anchor of its weight.

  ‘Your family is in my prayers,’ he says. There is empathy in his eyes. ‘I do not underestimate your pain.’

  He will not do it. Or cannot.

  I watch his figure recede across the courtyard, slender in his long black robe with its shock of purple, a good man who perhaps discovered long ago that goodness, too, has its limits. Nevertheless, he has tried, and he has managed to prise open a door. Yet it isn’t enough – how could it be? Peace? He must have known I’d find scarce solace in his words. I am furious with him, and grateful to him, and shaken by the violence of what I feel.

  Graciela! I want to shout her name from the bell towers, from the obelisk and the great dome of St Peter’s, from the cupolas and the bridges and the ruined monuments of a city unashamed of its scars.

  I look up in search of the horizon, but it is obscured by the high stone walls. Beyond the fountain beyond the courtyard beyond the parapets and defences, swallows swoop in vertiginous orbits, painting a Sistine chapel in the sky.

  The bishop leaves me a few moments of solitude before sending the priest back down.

  We walk in silence, our footsteps echoing through the endless passageways, the hem of his cassock darting again at his heels. And as we walk, the words of the bishop return to me like a flame in the depths of the labyrinth:

  There was a child that lived.

  THUD! The cork rockets skywards and plants a round grey kiss-mark on the ceiling. It remains overhead like a full stop between one life and another one, a turning point we have sealed with an explosion of joy.

  It is the night of my return from Rome. Arturo, dumb with happiness, is standing beside the table, champagne cascading over his fist.

  Carla had declared at dinner that she had important news. Bolognese spirals decorated our mismatched plates, nubs of bread lay strewn among the dishes, and dregs of Bordeaux lingered in the glasses that were recycled mustard jars.

  Carla hadn’t touched her wine; she was beaming and clasping Arturo’s hand.

  ‘We’re expecting a baby,’ she’d said.

  They had wanted to tell me on the eve of my trip to Italy, but because I was preoccupied had decided to await my return. Now I was back they couldn’t contain it a moment longer; they wanted to tell me before anyone else.

  I am stunned for a moment, then thrilled for them; they are shy, nervous and excited as they accept my congratulations; then we are embracing and uncorking the champagne.

  We rinse our glasses and toast the age-old marvel of it, the fact of it, like a flag in the earth, where everything had felt so tentative before.

  ‘God, amid this uncertainty,’ says Arturo, blanching a little and grinning like a kid. ‘We must be crazy. Are we crazy, Carla? Osvaldo, tell us we aren’t completely insane.’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I raise my glass in honour of the fact that you are both totally out of your minds.’

  ‘You hear that in there?’ Arturo says, his ear on Carla’s belly. ‘You’d better prepare for the worst.’

  ‘He’s told her to tap twice for “yes”,’ Carla explains. ‘But I didn’t hear anything, did you?’

  ‘It could be a he,’ Arturo says. ‘Anyway, he’s probably asleep.’

  ‘With this racket? Not likely,’ I say.

  ‘My God, Osvaldo, I’m going to be a father!’ Arturo shoots me a panicky look, as if the act of telling has brought the reality home. ‘I don’t have a clue what to do.’

  ‘What about me?’ says Carla, laughing. ‘At least you don’t have to give birth.’

  We drink to the delight of it, to optimism, to happiness that seems so elusive these days. I throw my arms around the three of them and enfold them in another embrace.

  Carla only sips at her glass but Arturo and I are a little drunk, and we laugh a bit and cry a bit together. It is the release of something we’ve shared without ever discussing it: the constraints of our patchwork existence, the struggle for a foothold in Europe, the anguish of too much loss.

  ‘We want you to be the godfather, Osvaldo,’ Arturo says after a moment.

  ‘Would you do it?’ says Carla. She says it solemnly, both of them staring at me with round eyes.

  I realise that their elation is mingled with trepidation: about being parents, about embarking on this adventure with nobody present from home. And I am touched that, perhaps because of what has happened in my family, they want to include me in theirs.

  ‘I would be honoured,’ I say with a bow.

  ‘Of course there w
ill be a lot of responsibilities,’ says Arturo.

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ says Carla, cutting him off with a dig in the ribs. ‘No matter what he likes to imagine, he won’t be palming off his parental duties onto anyone else.’

  Perhaps, I think later, staring at the shadow-play on the ceiling as I stretch out on my camp bed by the bookshelves, perhaps this explains why Arturo has been so wary lately of standing up for what he believes. We live on tenterhooks about what’s going on in Argentina; we all live with our residual fears. But Arturo is going to be a father. He has a new life to protect.

  For me, at just over fifty, the joy I feel for them is genuine, but I realise as I try to untangle it that it’s not a pure thing. It is shadowed by what I wake to every morning: the worry about my own family, the missing that has become a constant ache.

  So Graciela has had her baby, even if the bishop could tell me nothing more. Perhaps this annunciation in Paris is a kind of affirmation: a promise that things will someday return to normal; that it isn’t foolish, after all, to hope.

  They haven’t dared ask what I learned in Rome; tomorrow there’ll be time enough to talk. Yet it seems to me that tonight in celebrating the promise of Carla and Arturo’s baby, I was also welcoming my grandchild into the world.

  One other thing I realise is that the arrival of Carla’s baby will have practical implications for me. It will bring to an end the household we’ve created, despite our occasional chafing, despite the strange dynamics of being three. It feels like a coda to this phase of my exile. I will have to find another place to live.

  PART II

  THE GARDEN AND THE WILDERNESS

  1979–1984

  1

  Buenos Aires

  August 1979

  There are roses, hydrangeas, a mate bush that could be used for making tea if you felt industrious, and a pomegranate tree – she is proud of this – that last year bore its first fruit. But the best thing about Constanza’s garden is that it isn’t overlooked.