The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  The film is still inside, waiting for her to finish it, the negatives scrolled up tightly within their shell.

  In a long thin park that runs beside a railway line, Yolanda sits on a bench overlooking a lawn that’s reserved for children and a sandpit that’s reserved for dogs.

  Slouching towards adulthood, a huddle of teenagers are perfecting smoke-rings in a gap between the trees alongside the line. A couple of girls with beads in their hair twirl and untwirl on the swings. In the distance, smaller kids argue about the positioning of a goal.

  The tomato-coloured envelope rests fatly on her knees. She is readying herself for disappointment, yet hoping her hand was steadier than her heart as the shutter worked and the girl stood up and waved at her with her bird-of-paradise hands.

  At the store where she had gone to collect the photographs, they’d told her that her set of prints was lost.

  When she’d pressed the assistant to check again, he’d produced a basket overflowing with envelopes and lifted it onto the counter. A layer of them sheared off onto the floor.

  It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. She’d thrown the assistant a questioning look but he’d shrugged and avoided her eyes.

  So many of them: Could that be right? So many unclaimed lives?

  With shaking hands she’d helped him sort through the hillocks that quickly mounted on the counter. None of them bore the number on her receipt.

  Had they been destroyed or confiscated? Was someone in the photolab a spy?

  She’d kept her nerve and insisted he check once more among the weekly dividers. And suddenly he’d discovered it, lodged under the wrong day of the week.

  Behind her, a string of railway carriages rattles into the suburbs. A red and yellow ball lies abandoned in a puddle like a beach-toy at a miniature dolphin park.

  She puts on her reading glasses and peels the envelope open. The black-and-white squares slither onto her lap like fish.

  With them is a small paper pouch that she opens first to check that the negatives are inside. Holding them by their perforated edges she counts them: four-and-a-half strips of celluloid, the reverse imprint of ghosts.

  The most recent pictures are sitting on top of the pile. And there she is, this child who has lived in Yolanda’s mind so vividly for the past few weeks, confronting her with proof that she is real.

  There are three photographs of the girl. One is blurred but in the next she is sharply in focus. Yolanda shivers; the child has seen her, she is looking directly at her and smiling and raising her arms.

  And there she is again. In the third photograph she has her hands aloft, smiling still, though the smile is beginning to fade.

  ‘Here I am,’ the girl seems to be saying. ‘Look at all the colours I’ve become.’

  Yolanda drinks in every detail: her height, the shape of her face, the curve of her three-year-old’s arms.

  That is all. Two decent pictures, snatched from the reel of her life.

  But Yolanda pores over them. They are proof, but proof of what, exactly? That light glanced off her limbs, that light illuminated a forehead that might have been Osvaldo’s, that light reacted with chemicals to affirm that this child exists.

  Proof of everything, then. But proof of nothing, too.

  Yolanda’s throat constricts and there’s a rat-a-tat rhythm in her chest. She feels close to certain about this girl. She cannot bear to think that they had lost her almost as soon as she had been found.

  Blindly she shuffles through the rest of the pictures, scarcely seeing them, scarcely caring what’s there. Since Osvaldo left and Graciela disappeared she’s had no need for photographs; she’s had nothing she has wanted to celebrate, nothing she has wanted to record.

  Then, with something like wonder, she starts to look more closely at the other prints. There are photos of Julieta with her husband Felipe that Osvaldo must have taken the last time they were home in Argentina. There are a couple of shots from Easter in La Plata, her brother’s grandchildren on plastic tractors doing damage to the garden shrubs.

  She slows right down, preparing herself for what surely is yet to come. And suddenly there she is: Graciela in an old wicker chair on the veranda; Graciela in a sundress in the garden; Graciela in the background while a gaggle of children grapple with ice-cream cones.

  The sight of her daughter jolts her. She is beyond tears now but not beyond the shock of it, not beyond the ache. For a moment she is euphoric at the sight of her, and then what’s happened rushes back.

  She scrutinises the photographs for signs of it: signs of the coming turbulence, signs of the stalking night. It isn’t there between the trees or in a corner of the garden; no fleeting figure hovers at the edge of the frame. Yet it was present, she has no doubt; the spores of catastrophe were all around them, hidden in the fullest light of day.

  Across the park, the kids are shouting again as the football flies through the air. The smoking teenagers are scuffing the dust and eyeing the girls on the swings. To all of them she is invisible, a nondescript woman alone on a bench against a background of railway trees.

  None of them sees her stand. None of them sees her thrust an envelope into her handbag and hurry along the footpath towards the overpass, towards the homebound train.

  Dusk falls. The puddle on the edge of the playground, deserted now, lies too low to be stirred by the wind. But the tiny beachball shifts, and shivers, and rolls a little distance through the water, describing a slow revolution in the breeze.

  5

  Buenos Aires

  October 1981

  The house is squeaky with balloons. They have been bouncing around the den and in the dining room; they have come to rest on the soft chairs in the living room; there is one behind the door in the toilet, and five on the stairs, and a blue one and a yellow one that escaped and burst on a tree.

  There have been fizzy drinks and empanadas and cupcakes, and a game of pass-the-parcel; and now a dozen seven-year-olds are tearing around on the grass.

  Intimidated by the bigger children, Ana lingers in the kitchen with the housemaid, who is tossing half-gnawed pizzas into the bin. Her papá and Sancho’s papá have gone out to get more lemonade, leaving the women to fuss over the goodbye gifts and Ramón in charge of the party-goers outside.

  Today is Ana’s cousin’s birthday and Ana is the smallest guest. Sancho’s friends are two years older than she is, and stronger and quite a bit rougher, making her reluctant to join in their games. Instead she hides out in the kitchen, and busies herself with an army of jellies that jiggle as she wobbles them on the tray.

  This is the moment she has been dreading since the morning, when she woke up and remembered, when her tummy first started to hurt. It didn’t go away when she helped wrap Sancho’s present. It didn’t go away even after all the pink meringues.

  Ramón, who is her papa’s best friend and Ana’s godfather, always makes them play it – even when it is somebody else’s birthday – and he always makes Ana go first.

  ‘There you are!’ he calls to her, spotting her behind the jelly tray, blindfold dangling from his hand. ‘Get over here, Ana – hurry up! We’re waiting for you to start!’

  Ana thinks he looks even fatter without his uniform and the police hat with the shiny badge that he leaves in the front of his car. She doesn’t like calling him uncle because he isn’t one, though it’s what everyone makes her say.

  The next thing she knows he has yanked the blindfold so tight that it hurts her eyes. The red and purple lozenges that smear the inside of her eyelids make her queasy; she feels panicky when she cannot see the light.

  Then Ramón’s big hands are patting her chest and shoulders, turning her around and around. The pain in her tummy turns into a kind of stabbing; she feels dizzy behind the blindfold and her scalp feels like it’s burning where her hair has been caught in the knot.

  Ramón for some reason finds the way she reacts amusing; she can hear him making his sideways sort of laugh. Then the wo
rld is pressing in on her and she starts breathing very quickly; agitated, she stumbles on the lawn.

  Now it’s the children’s turn. With sticky hands they pick her up and spin her, chanting the rhyme about hens and thimbles and haystacks, before scattering all over the yard.

  ‘Stop!’ she calls a moment later, knowing that the only way out is forwards, that she has to go through with the game.

  Giddy, Ana fights a wave of nausea, listens hard over the thudding in her ears. Something’s rustling to the left of her, quite close to the hydrangeas; then someone suppresses a giggle to her right. She lunges, arms flapping at emptiness; the garden sinks and rises like a boat.

  Then somebody sneezes and abruptly she changes direction, following her outstretched arms. She trips, to gales of laughter, but then discovers that the obstacle is attached to a leg. Patting the arm and shoulders, she comes to the wingnut ears.

  ‘César!’ she cries and her guess is correct, because someone is yanking her blindfold off and now it is César’s turn.

  The other kids tie the blindfold over his eyes as Ana – freed, breathing fast, and surprised to find she is nowhere near the hydrangeas – rubs her own eyes in the too-bright sun, looks up at the cauliflower clouds.

  She turns, and as she does, she sees Ramón is watching. He grins his strange grin down at her from the step by the kitchen door.

  6

  Amsterdam

  November 1981

  Delayed after a stop in Iceland, the flight from the USA is late and it takes them an age to clear immigration and recover their bags. I’ve had meetings all day and my back is aching as I lean against a pillar, watching for them to emerge through the Arrivals door.

  Medipharm moved me to Amsterdam five months ago, asking me to supervise their junior reps and manage a few of accounts of my own. This evening, on their first visit since I moved to Europe, Julieta and my grandson will arrive.

  It will be the first time I meet Mateo, a pint-sized bundle of energy hurtling headlong into life. I am thrilled at the thought of seeing him, and impatient to see Julieta. But my anticipation is mingled with apprehension: Julieta has been angry with me for some time.

  Finally the doors slide open and there she is, the boy on her hip, a gigantic suitcase dwarfing them on a trolley she is struggling to turn. She stops for a moment, looking for me among the handsome, blond-haired families and the chauffeurs with their cardboard signs. Then, when she sees me hurrying towards her, her face breaks open in a smile.

  I feel a surge of love for her that overshadows our partial estrangement; I blink back tears and hug them both for a very long time before I can trust my voice.

  ‘Meet your abuelo, Mateo,’ she tells the boy, proffering his head for me to kiss.

  ‘Hello, young man,’ I say to him, taking his curled-up hand.

  He opens eyes that could swallow the universe and fixes me a moment, then closes them, exhausted by being awake.

  Julieta lifts him to my chest and I hold him to me, the way I first learned to hold her. My grandson, I think. Around us the airport blurs as I marvel at the tiny fingernails, the curve of his lengthy eyelashes, the whorls of his seashell ears.

  After the excitement of flying – ‘We are next to the clouds, Mamá!’ – jetlag has felled him. His head slumps onto his mother’s neck as I pass him back into her arms.

  ‘He didn’t sleep much on the plane,’ she says by way of apology. ‘It’s good we’ve arrived at this hour though – with any luck he’ll sleep right through the night.’

  ‘Julieta,’ I say, and start over because my voice is catching. ‘Let me look at you.’ I hadn’t realised how much I’ve missed her, how overwhelmed I would feel just seeing her face.

  Her light brown hair is shorter now and darker, and she has dressed smartly despite the length of the flight. And suddenly a memory comes back to me, as random as it is luminous: Julieta at Mateo’s age, running towards me in her new white shoes, leaving skating tracks across the dewy grass.

  ‘How are you, Papá?’ she says. She is standing back, scrutinising me in turn. ‘It’s wonderful to see you at last.’

  We tread carefully so as not to spoil this moment, both of us anxious for it to be smooth. The ‘at last’ rankles but I let it pass. She is here – the two of them are – that is all that matters; at least we have made a start.

  I have a two-roomed apartment up three flights of stairs that rise abruptly as if inside a ship. From the rafter above the bed I have made up for him, I have strung my summer mosquito net so Mateo can dream he is sleeping under the rigging.

  We take a bottle of wine into the living room, leaving Mateo’s door ajar. Later I will bunk down here on the sofa, with the flicker of the canal’s reflections playing along the top of the wall.

  I pull the two spare blankets out of the cupboard and hand one to Julieta; we drink to our reunion enfolded in tartan squares.

  We step around the subjects we know are delicate. Julieta asks me about life in Holland; I ask her about her plans to return to work. She tells me about Felipe, how the record company has put him in charge of all of Latin America, how these days he spends half his life on planes.

  I’d have liked to have seen him again, and to have heard his views on developments in Argentina. In another way, however, I am glad that she and Mateo have come alone. It’s been far too long since my daughter and I have had a chance to talk.

  And now that it can, the conversation turns towards more difficult things.

  Never shy about stating an opinion, Julieta believes Graciela was abducted because whoever did so failed to get their hands on me. She says the cartoons I drew were reckless; my giving them to Hugo, culpable. And she holds me responsible for everything that’s happened since.

  She blames me for her sister’s disappearance. She blames me for breaking up the family. She blames me for leaving Yolanda to cope on her own.

  I listen in silence until she is done. I do not try to defend myself, but I try at least to explain: how the board of Focus had weighed things up and decided to publish anyway; how fleeing had been an attempt to protect her mother and Graciela, as much as to save myself.

  But she cannot hear or isn’t finished. ‘What could you possibly have thought you were achieving?’ she says. ‘It was a military Junta, for God’s sake. Did you think you could save the world with your stupid cartoons?’

  Julieta is used to speaking freely. She can’t imagine what it’s like when that freedom disappears.

  ‘At the time we didn’t know,’ I tell her; ‘we couldn’t have known; we believed it was important to speak out.’ It was still too soon; we couldn’t have foreseen the consequences of our actions. ‘Do you think I could have imagined for one second that Graciela could get swept up in it? That we’d have gone ahead had any of us known?’

  ‘Well, you should have guessed: you, Hugo . . . those friends of yours who were so obsessed with politics?’ Emotion flares in patches on her cheeks. ‘You should have seen where it was heading. I can’t believe how naïve the lot of you were.’

  Hugo, Diego, Marguerita . . . Yolanda has heard nothing of any of them since I left.

  ‘That’s easy to say now, Julieta. But we lacked the benefit of hindsight at the time.’

  ‘Hindsight? How about foresight? How about insight?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone could have had that sort of insight, not at that moment,’ I say slowly. ‘As it is, I have to live with my guilt.’

  And yet, I think, there are things Julieta doesn’t know about her sister. I am not trying to excuse myself, but there were other factors that might also have imperilled her, even without my cartoons.

  Julieta hadn’t known, so I tell her now, about José’s teaching in the slums. She has heard stories from Felipe, after his business trips to Argentina, about unionists being arrested in their place of work. But she wasn’t aware that teaching literacy in the villas was also considered subversion. She didn’t know that Graciela went there with José regularly, t
hat she had plans to start a class of her own.

  ‘It might mean nothing or it might mean everything,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not trying to shift the blame.’

  There are other things, too. Psychologists, I’m beginning to realise, like journalists, like lawyers, were being targeted as a profession. Though she was only a student, psychology was Graciela’s field.

  Julieta is quiet as she thinks through the implications. ‘We might never know,’ she says, ‘since there seems to be no record of her being arrested, let alone of any charges being brought.’

  For the millionth time I ask myself whether there could be some door we haven’t tried.

  Julieta shivers, and pulls the blanket around her. ‘It was always so hard having her as my little sister,’ she says.

  I look up, startled by her words.

  ‘She was everyone’s favourite, wasn’t she? The baby everyone adored.’

  ‘Julieta,’ I say. ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘It’s true, Papá. You and Mamá both know it. I know it probably better than anyone, having shared a room with her for all of those years.’

  ‘We’ve never loved one of you more than the other, Julieta – you must know that. You are very different people, that’s been obvious since you were tiny. But you cannot think that because of it, we loved either of you any the less . . .’

  ‘You say that, Papá, but that’s not how it felt. You gave her so much attention. You were both so protective of her. I don’t know, perhaps she really was more fragile after that scarlet fever episode. Or maybe it’s because she came along after Mamá was told she’d never have another child.’

  ‘Oh, Julieta,’ I say. ‘You were our first-born, and I can’t tell you what we both felt – how extraordinary it was, how you transformed us the day you arrived.’

  ‘It’s not that, Papá. It’s everything that came later. Though I was older, it was as if I were constantly overshadowed in your affections. I always had to earn the things that came to Graciela as a gift. It didn’t make things easy between us . . . Then, when we were growing up, my boyfriends started getting crushes on her. Do you remember Alejandro? Do you remember Marcelo, who I’d been so in love with – the one she went out with before José? Do you know how she met him – do you? She couldn’t help it, Papá. Graciela was like a kitten – she needed attention. Why do you think I pushed Felipe to take this job in Miami? When she started to look at him like that, I couldn’t bear it. We left before anything could happen.’