The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘Julieta, surely you’re imagining it . . .’

  ‘See, Papá, even now you refuse to face it. It’s even worse now that she has vanished, and you and Mamá have transformed her into some sort of saint.’

  I try to respond but she prevents me.

  ‘Don’t say anything, Papá. Just hear me out. I know you haven’t had an easy time, I understand, I really do. But never once have you come to visit us in Miami. Mateo’s two and a half now, and never once have you bothered to come. I know you’re sending money home but we’d have paid your flight – we said so several times. As it is, I’ve had to bring Mateo halfway round the world so that he can meet his only grandfather. Anyone would think you care more about this child of Graciela’s than you do about my son, about the grandchild you actually have.’

  I hadn’t realised. I hadn’t realised any of it. That it wasn’t enough to love her so much and simply assume that she knew.

  ‘Julieta, I’m so sorry,’ I say.

  ‘It’s okay, Papá. It’s not like anything’s changed. But it breaks my heart, that’s all. And do you want to know the worst of it? It’s not like I don’t care . . . about Graciela, I mean. She’s my little sister. God knows I love her too, despite everything, in spite of what I’ve had to forgive her. And the idea of there being a missing child . . .’

  She stops for breath. I can tell all this has been weighing on her, that it has cost her, too, these past years.

  ‘I’m just saying, Papá: don’t forget you have another daughter. Don’t forget you have a grandson, too.’

  On the second evening we’re in the kitchen preparing dinner when Felipe calls from Miami. I pass the phone through and close the door to give Julieta some privacy, and construct a fortress around Mateo with the piled-up sofa cushions.

  After a while, she nudges the door open with her toe.

  ‘Mateo,’ she says. ‘Come and say hello to Papá.’

  ‘Hello, Papá,’ he says as Julieta holds the receiver to his ear. Silence for a moment. ‘Yes . . . Yes . . . We nearly got run over by a bicycle. Then we went on a boat.’

  Julieta laughs and takes back the phone and explains about our tour of the canals.

  She mimes a question while she’s listening, asking if I want to say hello.

  ‘Felipe!’ I say. The receiver is warm from the ears that have been pressing against it. ‘How are you? I hear they’ve locked you up in your corner office.’

  He groans. ‘And swallowed the key. I wish it were a corner office – at least I’d have a bit of a view. How are things in Amsterdam?’

  ‘We’re all good. The rain’s held off. I don’t suppose there is any chance you can get away?’

  ‘I’m still trying, Osvaldo, but I’m not too hopeful. The new director’s just started’ – he drops his voice because he’s calling from work – ‘you know what they’re like.’

  ‘Well, we’re missing you here. But your wife and son are doing fine, if it’s any consolation. Mateo says the canals are like moats. He’s on the lookout for crocodiles.’

  After the call I go back to chopping vegetables. Julieta has already fed Mateo and is about to put him to bed.

  ‘I want Abuelo to tell me a story,’ Mateo says. He is standing in his fortress in his sheriff’s pyjamas, four books sliding down his belly.

  ‘Have you brushed your teeth?’ Julieta says.

  He gives her his Cheshire Cat grin.

  ‘Did you do pipí?’

  He nods.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, Mamá.’

  ‘Okay, then hop into bed and wait for Abuelo to tuck you in.’

  ‘Sounds like Felipe is pretty tied up,’ I say, as Mateo gallops off to his room.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she says. ‘In one way I am proud of him, but that company is turning me into a corporate widow.’

  She makes light of it, but I know how disappointed she is that he hasn’t come.

  ‘We’ll still have a good time, just the three of us,’ I say.

  I hug her briefly and dry my hands, and follow Mateo through the bedroom door.

  After five stories – the first one twice – my grandson finally agrees it’s time to sleep.

  ‘Will you make me some cartoons, Abuelo?’ he says before closing his eyes.

  My back stiffens. Has he overheard some conversation of Julieta’s? I haven’t touched a sketchbook since Hugo published my drawings, and do not intend to as long as Graciela remains missing.

  ‘We’ll see, Mateo,’ I tell him, smoothing his hair. ‘Now, how about you pretend you’re a sleepy stowaway, just like the boy in the book?’

  Ginger and garlic fill my small Dutch kitchen with aromas of the tropics. Julieta smiles as I join her over the stove.

  Our talk the night before has affected us, but it may also have done us some good. Julieta seems less edgy with me, though our relationship will still take time to repair.

  At dinner our conversation drifts back, as perhaps it must, to the absence at the centre of our lives. All day we’ve been stepping around it as if around a chasm in the fog.

  ‘You know, I see her sometimes,’ I tell Julieta.

  She is sharing out the last of the prawns she has grilled for us and stops, spoon poised in mid-air.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she says.

  ‘I see Graciela. In the street. Once, in the Paris metro. I know it sounds improbable. I doubt it myself sometimes.’

  ‘It must have been someone who looked like her, Papá. It happens to me too.’

  ‘It felt like more than that, though, this time. It was the day before you arrived. I only saw her from the side but I felt so certain. She was with somebody, some man. I followed them until they went into a building on the Herengracht. I even wrote down the address.’

  ‘Oh, Papá,’ Julieta says gently. ‘It makes no sense.’

  So I tell her the little I know – what I’ve learned from anecdotes passed on by other exiles. That occasionally they liberate a detainee, one they consider ‘ideologically recuperated’. That they make them check in regularly with their minders, like an offender on parole.

  ‘Maybe Graciela is among them,’ I say. ‘Maybe she’s one of the ones they’ve released.’

  Julieta puts her hand on my forearm. ‘What would she be doing in Amsterdam, Papá? Why wouldn’t she have got in touch?’

  ‘Maybe they’ve imposed some deal on her – you know, that she can go abroad on condition that she severs all ties.’

  ‘What, like some sort of witness protection programme?’ She bites her lip. ‘I don’t think it’s possible, Papá. I don’t think they do that sort of thing.’

  ‘I tell you, Julieta. It had to be her.’

  I don’t tell her how it affected me, the likeness in every detail, from her gait to the colour of her hair. How I raced along the Herengracht trying to catch her, out of breath, a cramp in the soft place under my ribs. How long I stood waiting opposite the building, among the passers-by and the cyclists and the end-of-workday traffic, before I realised she wasn’t coming back out.

  ‘And she just happens to be here in Amsterdam? Where you’re living?’ Julieta shakes her head, then speaks slowly. ‘Papá, don’t do this to yourself – you’ll go crazy. You know, I hate to say this, but it’s been so long and we’ve had no word . . .’

  I anticipate what she’s about to say and halt her before she says more.

  ‘You know, don’t you, that for ages your mother was getting phone calls?’

  Julieta looks up sharply. ‘What are you talking about? What calls?’

  ‘From some man, some friend of Graciela’s apparently, asking us to send money on her behalf. First it was to settle some debt she’d run up. Then it was for other things. You know she sold your grandmother’s jewellery. She sold things from the house. She sold the car.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Julieta says. ‘Why did she never tell me?’

  ‘What would you have said? To stop doing it? As long as there was any possibility
Graciela needed us, she would give them whatever they asked. That’s why she has stayed on in the house, though I’ve urged her to join me here. And though she hates those calls, she doesn’t want to miss one – in case Graciela really does need our help. And if one day Graciela herself should ring . . . Your mother can’t bear to think of her trying to call and there being nobody to pick up the phone.’

  ‘But she never has, has she?’

  ‘No. Not as far as we know. And in March, whoever the man was stopped ringing. Though I suppose it could resume at any time.’

  ‘It’s been five years, Papá,’ Julieta says. Then, quietly: ‘You know what I’ve been thinking? That if there really is a child, as the bishop said, then maybe that’s what we should concentrate on. I know Mamá’s looked for birth records, for any kind of document. There was that dead end at the kindergar-ten . . . But now that the child is older, there must be other things: health cards, vaccination cards, school records . . . There must be something that will lead us back to Graciela.’

  What she is saying makes sense, I think: somehow to follow the child. Yet still, what we lack is a lead.

  We have finished dinner, and the emergency candles Julieta found in a cupboard have almost burned down to their stubs.

  ‘We should turn in,’ I say, glancing at my watch. ‘It’s after midnight. We can do the dishes in the morning. Do you think you’ll be able to sleep?’

  ‘I’ll take something if I can’t,’ she says, and gives me a jetlagged smile.

  I hear her brushing her teeth in the bathroom, and recognise the same andante rhythm she used as a child. When she kisses me goodnight I smell the mint of her toothpaste, the faint apple-scent of her hair.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come, Julieta,’ I say.

  ‘Me too,’ she says, and squeezes my hand. ‘Goodnight, Papá. Remember to get some sleep.’

  She closes the door and I go over to the window, and gaze down at the silent world. A white mist is rising from the water, turning the street lamps into silkworm cocoons.

  Below me, the water is blacker than the sky. Its surface reflects the fairy lights and the gingerbread houses opposite, transforming the half-moon bridges into perfect Os.

  All across the sleeping city, across the spider’s-web map of its waterways, bridges stand like this one, spanning the canals with arches that transform themselves into circles only on nights as still as this.

  They look like tunnels, I think. Like secret passageways. Gates to a parallel world.

  The sky is a fat grey hammock slung low to the horizon and the hump-backed bridges rise to meet it halfway. Pedestrians cross like tightrope walkers balanced between two parabolas, their reflections shimmering below in the brackish glass.

  On one of the canals a dredger is working, hauling abandoned bicycles out of the murk. It swings its neck out over the water, pincers loose as a dislocated jaw. Toxic iridescence fans outwards like paisley plumage, smearing the surface with its sheen.

  The dredger pivots swiftly, then plunges its Jurassic neck into the silt. Nuzzling the floor a moment, it strikes some submerged obstacle, locks on to it, and pulls.

  Bent frames and twisted handlebars cling to the sludge beneath the water, reluctant to relinquish their hold on the velvety filth. But the dredger insists, pulls harder, and noxious bubbles escape its sulphurous kiss. Bilge water streams as the dredger lifts and rotates slowly, then releases its haul of debris onto a barge. Rotting metal clatters down the pile like broken femurs; tibias and scapulas catch in the spokes and chains.

  Osvaldo quickens his pace and hurries past it, averting his gaze. It spooks him in ways he can’t enunciate, the naked ribs, the stench of fetid water, this vision of the macabre.

  7

  Amsterdam

  April 1982

  Disoriented with sleep, I fumble for the telephone. Its shrillness disassembles the dark.

  At first I can’t identify who is speaking; it takes me a moment to register it is Julieta, back in America these past five months, dragging me from the warmth of my bed. But Julieta never rings this late; like Yolanda, she is careful about gauging the time.

  Since her visit here with Mateo we have called each other more often – we try to do so every couple of weeks. I am grateful for this new closeness, despite the fact we live so far apart.

  But her voice this time is strange and I have to force myself to concentrate. She is flying to Buenos Aires at midday; Yolanda’s brother telephoned her from La Plata; it was Ricardo who asked her to call.

  Have I understood correctly? Could I have heard?

  She says it again but I don’t believe her.

  ‘It was her heart, Papá . . .’ Sentences reach me down the line in pieces; I try hard to catch them and pin them down. ‘. . . Ricardo thinks the lift must have been out of order . . .’ What lift? I think. Where was she? ‘. . . They found her in the stairwell, on the sixth floor of a building in Belgrano . . .’ I can’t think of anyone we know in Belgrano, a single reason that would take Yolanda there. ‘. . . She was on her way to Patricia’s . . .’

  Patricia, I think. A Grandmother. One of her friends.

  What Julieta says next is distorted by her weeping. ‘They called an ambulance and took her to the hospital, but when they got there . . .’ She halts; she is struggling for breath. ‘She didn’t make it, Papá. They tried to revive her. But she was gone by they time they arrived.’

  I sit on the arm of the sofa in the moonlight. The trees whisper, the water mirrors the night outside my window, here on the dark side of the world.

  ‘This can’t be true, Julieta,’ I say when I can find my voice. ‘Ricardo is mistaken. They have confused Yolanda with somebody else.’

  At the end of the line Julieta is fighting her tears. ‘Papá, listen to me,’ she says. ‘Ricardo had to go to the hospital. They asked him to identify her.’

  There is a noise like buzzing in my ears. I find my fingers wrapped around the telephone cord, its spirals like a tourniquet around my hand.

  When she speaks again, I feel as if I’m returning from some great distance. My mind spins and gains no traction. I cannot grasp this aberration in the order of things.

  ‘I’m catching the first flight down there – Felipe is taking care of Mateo,’ she is telling me. ‘What will you do, Papá? Is it too dangerous for you to go back?’

  Woodenly, I tell her I will find a way.

  I hang up the phone. My mind reels through states of numbness, then roars refusal. Yolanda was fifty-two last birthday. We spoke only two days ago.

  Let night resume its circumnavigation of the planet; when dawn breaks, let her live, let her still be alive.

  But Julieta’s words swoop down at me from the rafters. Fragments of her sentences bounce back at me from the walls.

  In the stairwell.

  Didn’t make it.

  It was her heart.

  I arrive to a paroxysm of patriotism in a city that has been transformed.

  Flags flutter from the tops of skyscrapers and from people’s balconies; they fly like capes from the statues in the parks. They decorate schools and traffic islands; they sprout from aerials and the mirrors of trucks. Blue and white stripes hang everywhere like a veil over the ravaged economy, like a veil over the ranks of the missing, like a veil over the well of my loss.

  Amid the fervour, I forget to be afraid. I didn’t expect the sort of euphoria that I remember from four years earlier, after the boycott failed and the World Cup matches went ahead and were broadcast on French TV. This time, the banners are about the Malvinas, those islands pinned like butterfly wings to the blue of the South Atlantic. Slogans like ‘Abajo el colonialismo!’ and ‘Las Malvinas son Argentinas!’ hang from apartment windows; they decorate the trunks of the trees. ‘Down with colonialism!’ I read as we crawl through the traffic. ‘The Malvinas are Argentine!’ leaps in giant capitals across a wall.

  The British are nothing if not tenacious, I think to myself; what makes the generals so confident
they’ll let the Falklands go?

  Nothing, anymore, seems real. Beyond the taxi window the world unfolds apart from me, like the film of some stranger’s life. I am inside myself but also outside it, functioning automatically, but disintegrating inside.

  I’ve flown from Amsterdam to Montevideo and crossed the river by the ferry to Buenos Aires, not daring to risk a direct arrival by plane. I am still in shock. But it was not shock that protected me when I disembarked with my false identity. Instead, it was the recklessness of grief.

  As we roll through the febrile capital, familiarity and alienation sweep over me in waves. I am home, I can scarcely believe it, yet never have I felt so estranged. I am not Osvaldo Ferrero, the man who escaped six years ago, creeping home in secrecy to bury his wife. No, I am this other man, the one in my false passport, and I am grateful for this alibi that proved easier to obtain than I’d ever surmised. I lean on him, this Vicente Carlucci, I will myself to be him as we pass the sports fields and the Aeroparque, the cafés and the mansions on the tree-lined avenidas; I inhabit his life as we travel these bitter streets.

  Six years. And to come back for this . . . I should never have listened to Yolanda’s warnings. I should have taken the risk.

  We pull up beside a police car at the traffic lights. I stare ahead as the occupants observe me through the window, and breathe again when finally they pull away.

  Soon we reach my barrio. The newspaper kiosk has disappeared from the corner where it huddled between the footpath and the traffic lights, blocking the view of the street from the Colibri. Behind its window I see the ancient waiter shuffling as he always shuffled between the tables, then claiming his old observation post at the bar. But the footpath florist, her buckets bright with gerberas, has vanished; her slow-burning plumes of incense no longer linger on the polluted air.