The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  It is her idea. More and more mothers have been joining the Thursday marches, some cautiously like Yolanda, others in distress and disarray. Some, like Yolanda and Constanza, are searching for grandchildren as well as children and have joined the group of Grandmothers; tip-offs that concern young children are usually channelled to them.

  Constanza pats the pile on the table. Five or six items, on lined paper and notepaper, and one scribbled in the margin of a newspaper, are waiting to be filed away. Denuncias the Grandmothers have looked into and that seem genuine, they are at once dangerous because their allegations are so sensitive, and useless because they are meaningless on their own. For the women who are searching for missing grandchildren, it’s like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle starting only with a middle piece of sky.

  Nevertheless, they are precious. The Grandmothers know, or pray, or believe that someday they will come across corroborating evidence. Something that will allow them to make a connection. They will cross-reference this information against a name, a date, a signature on a document, someone registered at a particular address. A memory alone might do it, if it confirms another memory. A hunch. Some other denuncia. A guess.

  Yolanda picks up one of the items. A single typewritten paragraph floats in the middle of the page.

  In my neighbourhood, in Bella Vista, at Garibaldi 941, a woman in her late 40s, the wife of a navy officer, claims God has heard her prayers. She says someone abandoned a baby in a cardboard box in a park on Easter Sunday, and that God has entrusted the infant boy to her care.

  And in blue biro on squared paper yanked from a notebook:

  I work at the public hospital in Quilmes. On 12 June I saw a woman in an advanced stage of labour being brought in by the police. She was some kind of special prisoner and we were forbidden to communicate with her. She was blindfolded throughout the delivery and gave birth with her hands in shackles. Immediately after delivery, the infant girl was listed as NN – no name – in the hospital register and deposited in the nursery. The woman was removed, and a few days later the newborn was taken away.

  Swallowing, Yolanda puts the paper down.

  ‘How many of these have you received?’ she says.

  ‘So far, since we started? Ones like those two?’ Constanza considers. ‘About eleven.’

  Eleven. Yolanda holds the paper missives in her palm. The weight of a child’s life, she thinks. As light as a butterfly’s wing.

  ‘Women are giving birth in handcuffs, and their infants are being taken away?’ Yolanda says. She cannot believe where her mind is leading her.

  Constanza stops what she is doing and peers over the top of her glasses.

  ‘We don’t know, Yolanda,’ she says. ‘Maybe these are exceptions. Take that hospital one. If it were common you’d think we’d have heard about it by now. But people are scared. Or they pretend they haven’t seen what they have seen. It’s hard to tell how widespread any of this is.’

  ‘Do you think the babies are being adopted?’

  ‘Perhaps we should call them appropriations,’ says Constanza.

  ‘Do you think that that’s what’s happening? Appropriations?’

  Constanza looks at her. ‘Would it surprise you?’

  Yolanda’s mind, already staggering from one possibility to the next, reels as she absorbs this one too.

  Constanza slides a box of plastic bags across the table and puts her hand on Yolanda’s arm.

  ‘You are the only person who knows about this,’ she says. ‘No one, not even the other Grandmothers, must know.’

  ‘Know what?’ Yolanda says. They are whispering, though neither has suggested that they should.

  ‘Where I put them,’ says Constanza.

  The Grandmothers’ greatest fear is that they will be raided. It is something they treat with the utmost gravity, terrified as they were two years ago by the abductions from the Santa Cruz church. Thirteen people disappeared at that time, including three of the founding Mothers and two French nuns who were close to them, betrayed by a military spy. There is danger for those who bring them information, they know that. There is danger for those who receive it. And there is the danger of failing to recover a child if any of these fragments are lost.

  No one, however, could think where to hide the clues. Filing cabinets and desk drawers were too obvious. Bank vaults were immediately ruled out. They’d thought of floorboards and skirting boards and even ironing boards at their last meeting, held as it happened at Constanza’s house with the radio and the vacuum cleaner on. Which was when she’d looked up from her kitchen table and contemplated her own back lawn.

  The other Grandmothers are not here today, so Yolanda and Constanza get to work. They roll the messages in separate sheets of baking paper and slip each one inside a double set of plastic bags. The bags they seal with the elastic bands that Constanza has been collecting for the purpose. Then, from where it is drying in the dish rack, they take a re-sealable jar, now empty of cherries, and finish it off with the hair dryer. Finally, they place the scrolls inside it and screw on the watertight lid.

  Then, with a trowel she wields as deftly as a cake-knife, Constanza carves a jar-size circle in the grass. They take it in turns to saw through the roots and dig out the dirt, then press the jar down into the topsoil, burying it there like a tulip bulb that they hope will bloom in the spring.

  Constanza sits back on her heels and catches her breath.

  ‘How many of these have you done?’ says Yolanda softly, casting an eye over the lawn.

  ‘Oh,’ says Constanza, winking. ‘It depends on the weather. The amount of rainfall. There may be one or two others planted round about.’

  Afterwards, they press the grass back like a pastry lid, patting it down with the toes of their shoes. The excess soil they sprinkle on the flower-beds under the pomegranate tree. Then they count their steps to the back door, and count their steps to the fence. Double-checking the distances with a tape measure that Constanza retrieves from her sewing basket, they stash the coordinates in the back of an atlas, to be guarded like a treasure map of hope.

  2

  Buenos Aires

  September 1979

  Nothing could be more important than this rock.

  ‘Ana darling . . . Don’t make Mamá late, corazón . . .’ Then some longer words that don’t have any meaning, just notes and colours and whooshing sounds that make Ana think of the wind.

  Her hands on the stone, she is squatting beside the flower-bed, the hem of her skirt getting damp in the pointy grass.

  This one is a little bit heavy, and at first she thought it wouldn’t move at all. But now she has found an edge, and she has all of her fingers under it and is pulling, and just when it seems impossible, it gives and rolls onto the lawn.

  Wriggle wriggle wriggle!

  Ana’s eyes dart everywhere, looking at everything that scurries and slithers and crawls. Exposed to the light, earthworms twist like acrobats. Ants stream in all directions rescuing ant-sized grains of rice.

  She giggles, she claps her hands. It is so funny how they go.

  A centipede – ‘Mamá, come and look!’ – curled in a tight black coil. A fat white slug that simply sits there, not knowing what to do.

  Filaments lie tangled up with other ones, all flat in the space that is smooth as a bowl and the opposite shape to the rock. Inside it there are patches like cotton-wool, and cobwebs the same colour as the dirt.

  ‘Ana sweetheart. I’ve popped Liliana in the car. Do you want us to leave you behind?’

  She pretends that her ears are full so that there isn’t any room for hearing, like going underwater in the bath.

  Earwigs! They thought they could hide by sitting still but now they are in a frenzy. They have snippy pincers for cutting things though she’s never seen how they work. She tries to catch one to pick it up but it’s too fast for her fingers to grip.

  There are some baby snails that don’t go anywhere. They think that no one can see them if they stick
to the bottom of the rock.

  ‘Ana Lucia – for the last time! Come and get in the car!’

  Sometimes, when she pretends she doesn’t hear things, she has noticed that they end up going away.

  Oh! She nearly missed the beetle with horns on its head and a shell that’s good for hiding in the mushroomy dark.

  But the funniest of all are the woodlice. They scuttle in all directions until you touch them, when they roll up into little grey peas.

  Suddenly from nowhere, from somewhere high above her, something clamps her under the armpits and she is flying up through the air. She doesn’t want to look at the trees or see the streaky colours; she doesn’t want to go anywhere in the back of the car. She kicks her legs like a beetle when it’s been flipped over onto its back. She fills up her lungs and releases a yowl and shuts out the stripy world.

  When she lets the light come in again, it has gone all blurry. But she can see the sparkle of an earring, the whorls in her mamá’s ear.

  She knows her mamá is cross from the way they’re walking. The ground is juddering up and down and the wail that Ana is making keeps jumping about.

  ‘Ana, what did you promise me this morning?’ Her mamá’s voice has that funny spiky sound. ‘What did you promise you would do when your mamá called?’

  But Ana isn’t listening. She is thinking about the rock lying upturned where she left it, and all the creatures scurrying away through the grass.

  3

  Buenos Aires

  September 1979

  Yolanda’s ears are buzzing, her heart is racing, she has been unable to concentrate all day. She is desperate to call but has to wait until she can get to a public telephone; it is evening in Paris when she manages to rush out during a break between classes at school.

  ‘She’s safe, Osvaldo!’ she cries. ‘She’s safe! She’s safe! She’s all right!’

  ‘Yolanda?’ Osvaldo says. ‘What are you saying? Slow down!’

  In the middle of the night Yolanda received a phone call. The man wouldn’t leave any number; she has no way to telephone him back.

  ‘He wouldn’t even leave his name,’ she says. ‘For security reasons he said he couldn’t. It doesn’t matter, Osvaldo. He knows her. He’s seen her. She is all right. After all our worrying! He says Graciela is fine.’

  Osvaldo’s voice is cautious, but it might simply be the distance. He wants to know exactly what the man has said.

  ‘That he was a friend of Graciela’s. That she had asked him to call on her behalf. That she can’t ring herself but she is safe and is being well looked after. That she sends her love and asks us not to worry.’

  ‘Not to worry? Yolanda, it’s been over two years.’

  But Yolanda isn’t listening. ‘He even called her “Ela” – he knows her childhood nickname! And he said that she needs our help.’

  ‘What kind of help?’

  ‘He said she has run up a debt.’

  ‘A debt? What sort of debt?’

  ‘He didn’t go into the details. Maybe he doesn’t know. We didn’t talk for long. He just said that she had asked if we could give her some financial support.’

  ‘It’s odd though, don’t you think? You know how she is with money. It’s not like her to borrow . . .’

  ‘It’s not like her to vanish, either. It’s not surprising she’s had to ask for help.’

  ‘How much does she need?’

  ‘He said she needed two thousand dollars.’

  ‘Two thousand dollars?’

  ‘That’s what he said. He said “Two thousand dollars should tide her through.’’’

  ‘What did he say about the baby? When can we see them? Where did he say that they were?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s like that, Osvaldo. I don’t have the impression she’s somewhere we can visit. Otherwise I’m sure he would have said.’

  ‘But did you ask him?’

  ‘I asked about the baby. But as soon as I did, he said he had to go. “I’ll ring you back,” he said, and then he hung up.’

  ‘Jesus, Yolanda.’

  ‘Maybe it’s dangerous for him to ring us. Perhaps he can only phone at certain times.’

  ‘Perhaps. But it makes no sense to me. We hear nothing for two years, she has a baby somewhere, and the next thing we know she gets some friend to call you to ask for money? Why wouldn’t she call us herself?’

  ‘Maybe she can’t, Osvaldo. What do we know? Nothing is normal any more.’

  ‘Yes, but borrowing two thousand dollars? It’s not the sort of thing she’d do.’

  ‘Well, she will have had expenses for the baby. What if the child’s been ill? Or she has? She’ll have had to buy medicines, clothes, things like bottles and nappies . . .’

  ‘So you are going to send it?’

  ‘How can we refuse? God knows what state she’s in. She’s probably in one of those re-education facilities down in the south, where they won’t have any supplies.’

  ‘What re-education facilities?’

  ‘Down in Chubut, or Santa Cruz. Somewhere in Patagonia. Some of the Mothers talk about them. Not that anyone seems to know very much about them, but that’s where some of them reckon their kids have been sent.’

  ‘You think she’s in Patagonia?’

  ‘I don’t know, Osvaldo. She could be. She could be anywhere. I’ll ask this man when he calls.’

  ‘And in the meantime, where are we going to find a spare two thousand dollars?’

  ‘I’ll sell something. I have my mother’s wedding ring. The engagement ring you gave me. There’s that necklace of my mother’s, the gold one . . .’

  ‘I could ask for an advance at Medipharm.’

  ‘And by the time you’ve paid the transfer fees and the exchange commissions it’ll be half gone. It’s probably better if I handle it here.’

  ‘But your mother’s jewellery? They’re the only things of hers you have.’

  ‘She would have wanted me to use them like this, Osvaldo: for our family, for Graciela. It’s why she left them to me.’

  ‘Be careful, Yolanda.’

  ‘Be careful of what?’

  ‘I don’t know, exactly. It doesn’t feel right to me.’

  ‘Don’t worry, he’s a friend of Graciela’s; he wants to help . . . My God, Osvaldo – after all this time! I always knew she’d find a way to get in touch.’

  A few months later, at half-past eleven, the same voice comes rasping down the line.

  ‘Hello, Yolanda,’ he says.

  ‘Where’s my daughter?’ Yolanda says. ‘I want to know where she is.’

  He hangs up.

  She trembles afterwards at her boldness. She paid the two thousand dollars. She took out a loan and made the other payments he also asked for. Now she is tired of this game.

  The calls continue, irregularly, as the late summer turns to autumn and then to winter. Sometimes he doesn’t telephone for weeks. She never knows when the calls will come, or how much he will ask her to provide.

  She has long since sold her pieces of jewellery. She has sold the television and her sewing machine and the other household appliances. One day, she sold the car.

  He tells her Graciela is sick. The next time he tells her she is improving but her health is still precarious. One day, just making conversation, he asks what the house is worth.

  Yolanda is ill with worry. She fears Graciela has been separated from her baby – why else would the man not have mentioned it, or asked for money for the things it requires?

  Even so, and after everything, his next request still takes her by surprise.

  The phone rings just after midnight, on a wind-lashed winter’s night. She’s been tracking the forecast for places like Trelew and Ushuaia, watching the temperatures in Patagonia plunge. Each time, she cannot help it, she hopes the caller will be Graciela herself.

  She recognises his smoker’s voice. Though she’s drowsy with sleep, the porteño accent is familiar now, even if she still cannot estimate his ag
e.

  ‘She wants you to knit her a pullover,’ he tells her.

  She isn’t sure she has heard correctly.

  ‘She says she is feeling the cold.’

  And so Yolanda, who hasn’t knitted since the girls were children, rummages in the upstairs trunk she has long been meaning to empty, and fishes her needles out.

  ‘You’re not going out in this?’ Borovich says, seeing her pulling on her raincoat in the common room as the trees whip around in the wind.

  With rain-soaked shoes she dashes through the downpour to the knitting shop and selects the finest wool – fibres that are not itchy, because Graciela always did have sensitive skin. She decides on green to match her eyes, and a roll-neck pattern because it’s warmest, and asks for advice on keeping the tension loose.

  For three nights and four days she works at it, purl and plain, purl and plain, as she twists the strands together, straining her eyes in the lamplight over the cable stitch of her love.

  When he doesn’t call back she decides to continue. She knits a scarf, and a hat, then wonders if she could manage a pair of mittens. She wonders if there is time for a second pullover, and starts it, since one might not be enough. When she is done, she wraps the items in tissue paper, and ties them with purple ribbon, and puts them in a basket beside the front door.

  When finally he calls back, the man says he will be in Buenos Aires on Wednesday and promises to deliver the parcel if Yolanda can bring it to him by noon. He tells her to meet him in the Botanical Gardens, just beyond the greenhouse, beside the statue of the Roman wolf.

  Two days later she goes to her assignation. The park is nearly deserted late on a weekday morning, the red gravel paths turned soft by the overnight rain.

  Fattened by neighbourhood widows, runaway cats glare at her from the roots of the tipu trees. In frozen vigil, an eagle waits in the spokes of a monkey-puzzle tree; she notices it high above her only after feeling its stare on her back.

  Yolanda shivers into the sleeves of her coat as she stands before the statue, observing the expression on the she-wolf’s face as it suckles the orphaned twins. She has sold the watch her father gave her for graduation, but the plastic one she’s wearing tells her there are still ten minutes to go.