The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  My mind moves like a concertina, in and out of reality, observing everything, forgetting everything, then remembering why I have come.

  I move as if underwater, slow motion in a time before sound. I climb the steps and turn the key that left Argentina with me, and pause on the threshold of the past.

  Then I shut the door behind me and stand in the afternoon stillness, letting the tide break over me in this homecoming that is really a farewell. The autumn sunlight filters through the windows, a world revolving in the motes of dust.

  She is still here.

  She is all around me in the silent house that no one has entered since she locked the door four days ago and left it, not knowing she was never to return.

  I walk towards the kitchen, passing the girls’ old room. Graciela’s guitar still leans against the bedstead. Julieta’s bear still slumps on the windowsill. The line is still faintly visible across on the floorboards where Julieta, in territorial assertion at the age of twelve, divided the room in two.

  ‘Yolanda,’ I say quietly, wanting her to know I’ve come home.

  Her breakfast plate is leaning in the dish-rack. Her coffee cup is sitting where she left it, her one last kiss upon its rim. I pick it up, and close my eyes, and press the cold hard china to my lips.

  I move through the silent house, a ghost of myself in search of another ghost.

  She is still here; I can feel her presence everywhere. She is in the wrinkles in the tablecloth, the folded-back pages of the newspaper, the leaf litter that has blown in through the garden door.

  ‘Yolanda,’ I say, more loudly now, calling to her, wanting her near.

  From the cupboard where it belongs in the kitchen, I remove the glass jug and fill it, and water the plants in the living room, mindlessly, pointlessly, just wanting them to live.

  I lift a jar from the bathroom shelf and open it, and suddenly jasmine blossoms in the air. This is the night-blooming scent of her, when I closed my eyes and waited for her, as she talked the school day out. The container is cold and heavy, an egg of cobalt glass. I trace the groove she has traced along the inside, my finger where her fingertips once were.

  ‘Yolanda,’ I say, and call her name to the emptiness, refusing this new intimacy of loss.

  I sit on the bed that was once our bed and stare through the sliding glass door. Weeds have invaded the flower-beds; the garden is looking forlorn. By her bedside I open the book she was halfway through and close it again, the page she was reading still marked.

  She was here, she is here, she has gone out just for a moment, any minute now she will be back.

  There are photos of the girls on the dressing table: one I’ve never seen, of Graciela under a willow tree in Tigre, and a wedding photo of Julieta and Felipe. In the bedside drawer I find her reading glasses, and the tablets the doctor gave her to help her to sleep. And beneath them lies an envelope, a brown one that is velvety with age. I take it out and open it, careful that the edges don’t tear.

  What’s inside I haven’t seen for thirty years. I don’t recognise it, then recognise it with a rush.

  It is the drawing I did when I first met her, the first sketch of her I ever made. I hold it now, amazed that she still has it, remembering as I turn it towards the light. I see where the tentative lines grow confident, the hatching lightest in the shadow beside her face. I was trying to capture something so elusive. I was trying to draw the way she lifted my heart.

  She’d kept it. She’d held on to it all these years.

  ‘Yolanda,’ I whisper. ‘Stay awhile, amore. There is no hurry. Stay with me, now I’ve finally come home.’

  The wardrobe door is ajar and her clothes are lined up neatly: the things she wore on school days, the things she wore to go out. And in the drawer where she’d always kept it, I find the cashmere scarf that she’d bought when we went to Italy, that she’d worn at the Trevi fountain, that she’d worn to remember Rome.

  I take this thing she loved and fold it inside my shirt inside my jacket, its softness and her perfume close to my skin.

  Then I pull her pillow from its place beside mine and hold it. I inhale her scent and hold it to my chest and breathe it in again, breathing in all that was good in her, the weight of her when I held her, the weight of her life on my life.

  And in the moving air of this silent room she comes and sits beside me, and enfolds me in her arms. And together we wait in silence until the knowledge comes, till the weeping comes in shudders, till the raw, animal hurt of it comes.

  I wander like a phantom through the protocol of funerals, embracing strangers, sharing words of comfort I do not feel. Julieta is there, red-eyed and trying to be strong. Ricardo is there, bewildered by the shock of it, stumbling through his loss. Elisa, his wife and Yolanda’s sister-in-law, holds on to him; acquaintances bring condolences and support.

  We bury her at the cemetery in La Plata, not far from the house where she grew up. There are Grandmothers standing with us beside the rose bushes; for the first time I meet Patricia and Constanza, eyes of startling blue in an ashen face. Eduardo and Maria – José’s parents – come to the ceremony but not to the graveside; for Maria it has proved too much. There are school teachers, a physics teacher called Bukovich or Borovich, and one of her former pupils who said he was studying medicine, whose name, I think he said, was Gabriel.

  There are smiles amid the mourning. People see me, and greet me, and then they touch me: they squeeze my arm or embrace me in disbelief that I am here and still alive, that Yolanda is the one who is gone.

  I have too little time with Julieta. I hug her tightly, wordlessly, both of us needing comfort, neither of us with anything to give.

  I leave Argentina shortly afterwards, clinging to my alibi like a friend. Ricardo and the Grandmothers urge me to hurry; they insist it is still unsafe, that I must not stay to sort out Yolanda’s affairs.

  Somewhere, on the other side of the world, a British fleet is sailing towards the South Atlantic. As my plane takes off from Montevideo, I stare out of the aircraft window, down at the upholstery of clouds. Beneath them, the world keeps turning. I feel estranged from it. Bereft.

  Julieta stays in Buenos Aires ten days longer, and calls once she has returned to the United States.

  ‘I found out what happened, Papá,’ she tells me.

  Both of us had been disturbed by it: why Yolanda was found lying on a staircase when the lift hadn’t been out of order at all.

  ‘She took the stairs because the Grandmothers always take the stairs,’ says Julieta. ‘They do it for security reasons. So the doorman can’t tell where they’re meeting from the number above the elevator door.’

  A little at a time, like a patient testing a limb after an operation, I allow myself to think about my wife. I let glimpses of her slip between my fingers like a child with its hands to the light.

  I think about the heart that let her down. I think about the way she would never give up. I think about her dying alone in the stairwell, the Abuelas waiting one floor above and wondering. I think about Constanza arriving after her, and finding her there where she lay.

  ‘Julieta,’ I say, and want to continue, and find I cannot speak after all.

  ‘You know, Papá,’ she says after a moment. She is learning to do this now, to rescue me at times when the words won’t come. ‘There is one thing I discovered when I was going through the house.’

  She tells me about a box she found in the bottom of the linen cupboard, how it was tied with purple ribbon, how there were layers of clothing folded in tissue paper inside.

  ‘I didn’t know she’d taken up knitting again,’ she says.

  The box was full of children’s clothing, all of it made by hand. There were tiny sweaters and woollen hats and scarves with stripes or fringes, a double set of everything, in colours for a boy and a girl. Yolanda had made each a little larger than the previous one, working her way through the sizes, with the smallest at the bottom of the box.

  Yolanda had told m
e about the things she had knitted for Graciela; about the day she had waited for hours in the gardens for a man who had never shown up. But she never told me that afterwards she had continued; that year after year she had knitted things for her grandchild without knowing if it was male or female, preparing for the day it was found.

  It takes Julieta a moment to find the words. ‘I was going to give them away,’ she says, ‘unless a sweater or two fitted Mateo. But maybe we should keep them . . .’

  ‘Let’s hold on to them, Julieta,’ I say.

  8

  Buenos Aires

  June 1983

  ‘Mamá, look!’ she says. ‘It’s wobbly!’

  Ana tests it again with her tongue. It gave her a shock the first time she found it could swing like a hinge, its sharp edge jutting over her gum. She can feel the fibres stretching when she pushes it, and for a second panics that it might not spring back into place.

  ‘Mmmmm,’ her mother says, then looks up from her gardening magazine. She makes big eyes at the fang-face Ana is pulling. ‘Don’t play with it, sweetheart. It will come out when it’s ready all on its own.’

  ‘Do I look like a savage tiger in the jungle?’

  ‘You look like a very scary tiger indeed.’

  ‘What’ll happen if I swallow it by accident?’

  ‘Oh, darling. It will just go through you like a birdseed and there’ll be a great big gap when you smile.’

  ‘But how will the Tooth Mouse find it?’

  ‘If that happens, we’ll still leave him a glass of water. He knows when little girls have lost a tooth.’

  Ana can’t stop exploring it – it’s as if her tongue has a mind of its own. The tooth is much bigger than a birdseed, she tells herself; if she swallowed it she would feel it travel all the way down. She imagines it looping through her insides like the pipe-slide at the swimming pool; she imagines it sticking in her belly and taking root. If she died and they had to cut her open, they’d find a tooth-tree growing inside.

  At lunchtime, she has to chew sideways so that her loose tooth doesn’t go down with a pasta shell. Her mamá cuts her apple into bite-sized shapes and caramelos are Strictly Not Allowed.

  But at school on their purple cushions she can’t help it: while their teacher is reading aloud to them, Ana’s tongue keeps worming to the spot. She turns to María Magdalena who is sitting beside her and makes her giggle when she gets the tooth to move.

  The sing-song voice continues but Ana, absorbed by the mechanics inside her mouth, has missed a bit of the story and now she has lost the thread. The tooth is bending further; she pushes some more to see how flat it can go. Suddenly she feels a snap, and something enormous lodges on the cushion of her tongue. She spits into her palm and is surprised at the diminutive trophy, hardly even the size of a bead. Its underside is hollow and slightly pinkish, and there is a flavour in her mouth like salt or something metal; she hadn’t realised that teeth could taste of the sea.

  María Magdalena makes her open her hand to show her, and soon the rest of the children are crowding around.

  The teacher stops her reading and peers over. She wraps the tooth in a handkerchief and puts it in a pencil case so Ana can carry it home.

  Now her tongue keeps travelling to the empty spot. Her mamá said a new tooth would grow in place of the missing one, but so far nothing has happened; the space still feels smooth and soft. When her papá comes in to kiss her goodnight she bares her teeth like a deep-sea shark and pokes her tongue through the gap.

  At night, in her elephant pyjamas, Ana switches on the bedside lamp. The tooth has grown bigger in the glass of water it’s sitting in so that the Tooth Mouse can find it in the dark. Carefully, she picks up the glass and carries it, using both her hands, to the end of her bed where Liliana, whose eyes blink shut when she lays her down, is sleeping among the other dolls in her pram. Ana apologises for forgetting to show her earlier, but luckily it’s not too late.

  In the morning the tooth has vanished. Sitting in the water at the bottom of the glass is a coin that seems to ogle like her Polish grandmother does when her reading glasses are on.

  ‘What can I buy with this, Papá?’ Ana says.

  ‘Not a lot,’ he tells her, because a Bad Thing called Inflation is eating it up. But he promises to convert it into something nice if she tells him what she would like.

  She has her answer ready; she has had it in mind for weeks.

  ‘I want a baby sister,’ she says.

  He stiffens, and looks at her with an expression she cannot decipher.

  ‘That’s not how babies get here,’ he says.

  9

  Paris

  October 1984

  ‘Osvaldo,’ he says. ‘Can you come back to Paris? There is someone here I think you need to meet.’

  I am thrilled to hear Arturo’s voice. Though we spoke a lot after Yolanda died, our conversations have grown sporadic, so I am all the more delighted to find his message, in the secretary’s neat handwriting, on a square of office notepaper on my desk.

  I didn’t realise how much I had been missing them until I rang him back and Santiago picked up the phone.

  ‘I’ll get him,’ my godson says in his six-year-old’s voice, the receiver clattering in my ear. ‘Pa-a-a-a-pá-á-á-á!’ I hear him shout, the receding syllables hiccuping as he runs.

  ‘Amigo!’ Arturo says. In my office cubicle I am ambushed by emotion. I am glad he cannot see my eyes.

  We chat for half an hour. The circle of exiles we used to know in Paris is diminishing. He mentions various names, how the homesick ones went back soon after the election, buoyed by newfound hope of rebuilding their lives. For others, though the Junta has gone, the feelings are still too complicated, the losses and betrayals too raw.

  Arturo and Carla are among those who are planning to stay in France. Arturo has a chance at tenure and Santiago has just started school. Once he has settled in to it, Carla will work full-time for the Spanish publisher she’s been translating for as a freelancer since she arrived.

  Santiago at school already! Arturo says they are still living in the same first-floor apartment but they are looking for a bigger place. That, he confides, is partly for another reason: they are trying for a second child.

  Hearing him reminds me that I too have decisions to make. I am fifty-seven now and cannot imagine ever again living in Argentina. Yet here in Europe I feel rootless, and increasingly adrift.

  Julieta continues to phone me every few weeks, as she has since she and Mateo came to stay. She and Felipe keep inviting me to visit them in Miami, and I did go once, but no matter how much I love seeing them, I’ve never made it a regular thing.

  Julieta I know is worried; she thinks that I have buried myself in the past. She says I should socialise more, even think about remarrying. She doesn’t understand I have no interest in what she calls moving on.

  I feel bullied by her insistence and dig in my heels in silence; our differences risk resurfacing between the seams of our patchwork entente.

  I don’t know whether Arturo senses any of this: my stagnation, my rudderless years. What neither of us could have foreseen is how this phone call would become a watershed in my life.

  ‘Come to Paris,’ he says again. ‘Stay with us. There is someone here I believe you need to see.’

  It is strange being back in the old apartment. The cork mark is still up there on the ceiling; the old sofa still subsides towards the living-room floor. Carla has had her hair cut short while Arturo is properly balding; Santiago, in Luke Skywalker pyjamas, is constructing Lego-block towers on the stretch of floor where once I’d had my bed.

  We embrace; we smile and blink at each other, observing the small ways we have changed. Santiago gives me a distracted hug before the Leaning Tower of Pisa collapses into a mountain of rubble.

  ‘We’ve missed you, Osvaldo,’ Carla says, as Arturo uncorks a bottle of Bordeaux.

  ‘We have mate if you prefer,’ he says, remembering.
/>   I shake my head. ‘Wine would be perfect,’ I say. I don’t add it, but I need something to steady my nerves.

  A sort of museum now ornaments the bookshelf. With a stab of nostalgia I take in the tango figurines, the silver bombilla in its handmade mate gourd, the pair of salt-carved llamas from Jujuy.

  ‘Welcome back to Paris,’ says Arturo, raising a proper wine glass in place of a mustard jar.

  ‘And to your home away from home away from home,’ Carla adds.

  ‘To you both, and to my godson,’ I say.

  Carla is cooking something to do with aubergines and vanishes into the kitchen with her glass. Then she pops her head back out through the door.

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t acquired too many Michelin stars since last time,’ she says with a wry expression on her face.

  ‘Well, as long as they haven’t taken any away . . .’

  She smiles and her head disappears.

  ‘We had an asado on the balcony of a friend’s place out in the suburbs last weekend,’ Arturo tells me, ‘until the neighbours got upset about the smoke and complained to the fire brigade.’

  ‘They let you keep your steaks at least, I hope?’

  ‘Fortunately, though they could have done with another five minutes. Santiago was the only one who didn’t mind – he got a tour around the block in the cabin of the firemen’s truck.’

  ‘They showed me how to turn the siren on and make the ladder go up and down,’ Santiago says, looking up from his building site.

  ‘And did you get to fight any fires?’ I ask.

  ‘Not this time. They said I have to wait till I am big.’

  Arturo smiles. ‘Inés will be here in a moment,’ he tells Santiago. ‘Now go off and brush your teeth.’

  ‘I already did that, Papá,’ he says, adding the final crossbeam to a helicopter landing pad.

  ‘Good boy. When she gets here you can say hello but then I want you to skedaddle off to bed.’