The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  Earlier, Arturo had come to meet my train. We’d hugged and then stopped for a beer at one of the brasseries opposite the Gare du Nord.

  ‘So who is this Inés you are so certain I have to meet?’ I asked him after a moment, as the waiter set our glasses down on their matching cardboard mats.

  Arturo waited for him to leave us, then moved closer and lowered his voice.

  ‘She’s an ex-desaparecida, actually,’ he said. ‘I only learned she was coming ten days ago – she’s seeing that UN committee on disappearances, the one in Geneva I’m trying to help.’

  I nodded, slowly taking this in.

  ‘They held her clandestinely in Pozo de Quilmes and Banfield. And she was in ESMA for a very long time.’

  I stared at him. The Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada. The biggest torture centre the regime had devised.

  ‘There’s more, Osvaldo,’ he said, and hesitated before continuing. ‘They made her work as a kind of midwife when she was inside.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Arturo,’ I said softly.

  ‘I know, I know. I would have told you before you got here but I didn’t want to discuss it over the phone. I met her on Monday. She says she is here to see Danielle Mitterrand, then she is going to London and on to Geneva. I thought you might want to speak to her yourself.’

  My mind spun. Had Arturo told her anything about me? Did she know why he had invited her to his home?

  ‘Even if she does have any information, do you honestly think she’ll want to chat about her experiences over dinner?’ I said, protesting.

  ‘We can go gently, and maybe later on she will feel up to discussing things. You’re a doctor, Osvaldo, you know how to talk to people. I think it’s worth asking. There might be something she can recall.’

  I appreciated the good intentions, but how could he contemplate such a thing?

  ‘Osvaldo,’ he said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘She’s here because she wants to help.’

  Now, with Inés’s arrival imminent, I feel anxious. If she knows anything, if she can tell me any detail . . .

  Carla pops her head around the kitchen door again, her hair turned curly by the steam.

  ‘I’ve met her too, Osvaldo,’ she interjects, after I ask Arturo how easy he found Inés to talk to. Carla sends me a reassuring glance. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  Inés Moncavillo is late for dinner because she has walked. She walks everywhere now, no matter where she happens to be or what country she happens to be in. In Paris a week, she has walked all over the city, and out of the city on a radius that spikes into the suburbs, along railway tracks and bleak arterial roads. Wherever she has to go, at whatever time it is, in whatever weather, she walks. And if she has nowhere to go she sets out anyway, walking till some ring road stops her, or she is turned back by the start of a motorway or by roads that end in cul-de-sacs in deserted loading yards.

  A petite woman with hardness in her eyes, she looks a decade older than her thirty-nine years.

  Arturo buzzes her into the building and finds her standing stiffly under the light bulb on the landing after she’s rapped at the apartment door. Outside it has been raining, and water sparkles like broken glass in the weave of her too-heavy coat. She wears it belted tightly around her abdomen like a carapace, wrists poking out of the ends of her sleeves like forks.

  There is an edge to her, some mistrust or impatience that borders on intolerance. She tenses as we greet her in the entrance; even before we are introduced I feel discouraged about the prospect of her help.

  At dinner we talk about life in Europe, about university politics and office politics and Argentine politics, about acquaintances who are and who are not going home. Inés sips her wine but barely touches the food that Carla sets before her, as if eating were a pleasure she denies herself, or the part of herself that has not yet been freed.

  Carla goes to check on Santiago. I stack the dishes and ferry them into the kitchen where I build my own Tower of Pisa, on top of the salad bowl on top of the saucepan on top of the stove.

  Arturo produces a bottle of whisky and we sit amid the debris at the table, amid the rinds of cheese and the mandarin peel and the woody husks of walnuts, talking until long into the night. The candles sink to the rims of the wine bottles, then plunge into the darkness beneath. Their extinction forms a hiatus that might have ended the evening, had Carla not found replacements in a drawer.

  And now, at last, Inés begins to open up.

  There are certain things she wishes to make public, she tells us; others she’ll share only with the families of those who didn’t make it, partly to alleviate what she feels is the burden of having survived. She has notebooks in which she writes down details that come back to her, even after having given testimony, since her memories often surface unbidden.

  Reaching for her handbag, she pulls out a school exercise book that seems incongruous for what it must contain. It is crammed with minute handwriting, as if the words themselves were cowering on the page. Inside she jots down names as they return to her; lists dates when she can remember, crosscheck or deduce them; describes the voices of torturers whose faces she couldn’t see.

  She wants to purge her mind of them, so that her sweating, dread-filled nightmares might give way to ordinary dreams. Externalising them onto clean white sheets of paper she hopes will bring her a measure of peace.

  Then, in the flickering darkness, she tells of unspeakable things. She has passed through the gates of hell and learned that everything that lies beyond them was created by the hand of man.

  Dying holds no terror for her now, nor sickness, nor physical pain. She has been to the frontier of endurance and passed over it. The cruelty was in the hauling back.

  What she fears are not electric volts in the tenderest parts of her body, nor rape, nor bilge-water drowning, nor being slammed against cold metal doors. She fears none of their other methods with their playground appellations for searing the body with pain. Like some secular Inquisition, it was not even about obtaining information. Instead, it was a perversion that ravaged bodies in order to break what lay inside them: the kernel that made them human. Then it eliminated the bodies, too.

  No, it is not dying, nor anything physical she fears. It’s the return to the tribe of the living, now that she knows what it’s capable of.

  ‘We are God,’ they’d told her. ‘No one remembers you.’

  And from inside, from beyond the gates of the underworld, she and the other prisoners could hear the world they had left. Chained in their attic kennels, high above the officers’ mess and the basement torture rooms, the shouts of school kids drifted up to them, the cheers of fans at their football games.

  With a fingernail, with the sharp edge of their shackles, through the blackness behind hoods and blindfolds, they had scratched the names of their loved ones into the walls. Intimate as Braille, the letters had turned out crippled, lopsided, yet the deformed calligraphy of yearning had kept alive the memory of who they once had been.

  Carla blinks back tears in the candlelight. Arturo squeezes her hand.

  Inés tells us she is one of the few to have survived the torture centres, and attributes that to her usefulness in the birthing room at ESMA, the naval academy that doubled as one of the Junta’s most iniquitous dungeons, when those who ran that particular realm of darkness discovered she’d had training as a nurse.

  Once liberated – perhaps because they considered her implicated, or ideologically ‘recuperated’, or simply because they were convinced of their own impunity – she stayed in Argentina just long enough to testify before the National Commission on Disappeared Persons before departing. She has no intention ever to return.

  She tells us the things she told the people from the commission, the things that would not fit into their final report. She wants there to be no secret about what happened. She wants it to be known where the disappeared went.

  Then she speaks of the women she helped
in childbirth, of the women she says saved her life. But it was not the existence of the birthing room that protected her. Rather, amid the savagery that surrounded them, it was the shreds of her own humanity that those women allowed her to cling to – by giving her the chance to assist another living being.

  Sometimes delivery happened in a corridor; more often, on a table in what must once have been a sort of kitchen, the mothers sometimes in blindfolds, sometimes in chains.

  Prurient as pubescents, the guards muscled in to leer. Once, when a birth was breech and she’d called for a doctor, they tossed her a plastic cup. Often, after a child was delivered, they’d force the exhausted mother to clean the afterbirth off the floor.

  I can’t bring myself to ask her, but finally I must. And somehow, even before she answers, I’ve guessed.

  Yes, among the women she’d helped in labour, there had been a green-eyed one with chestnut hair and freckles slowly fading for lack of sunlight, a woman whose name she recalls as Graciela.

  Graciela Ferrero – she remembers because of how young she was, and because all of them made it their business to memorise names and surnames, to know who else was there.

  She’d arrived when she was six months pregnant and given birth at the end of January – to a baby girl with eyes she must have inherited from her mother.

  So it was true. The words that have held so much hope come back to me, tracing the ellipses the swallows made as they swooped over the vaults of St Peter’s, over the cloisters and the Vatican gardens. There was a child that lived.

  I am flooded with emotion, but dare not interrupt.

  Inés consults her notebook, the cramped columns of dates. ‘It’s here,’ she says. ‘I’ve listed it. It would have been January the twenty-sixth.’

  And then something comes back to her that she had forgotten until this instant: Graciela had taken the suture needle, the only instrument they were allowed by the military doctor, and marked the new-born infant behind the ear.

  Inés thinks for a moment, folds her arms into a cradle. Yes, it was the right ear, she is sure.

  ‘It was almost beyond her,’ Inés says, ‘it was almost beyond the two of us to scar that perfect child. But I held her as tight as possible while her mother made the incisions, cutting three small crosses into her skin.

  ‘“Somebody will remember her,” Graciela said when at last we’d stopped the bleeding. It was the sort of thing you’d notice, she said, at a clinic, or perhaps an orphanage, if for any reason her daughter should go astray.’

  So she’d foreseen the possibility, I think. She had guessed. And blindly, maybe desperately, she’d sought a way that her child could be identified.

  ‘Then,’ Inés says, ‘she sang. She sang to the child and whispered to her, four syllables of a single word. Over the following days she must have said it a thousand times, over and over like an incantation, singing it to her like a lullaby, burning it into her memory, singing to her her name.’

  And then she sings, as Graciela had sung, but in a voice so ravaged it could barely carry the notes:

  Liliana Liliana Liliana,

  Liliana my love, luz de mi vida,

  Light of my life, Liliana.

  The building is in darkness except for our window. The lacerated melody lingers in the stillness, a promise unpinned by any hope.

  So, I think, it was a girl. She has a name. She has a place and a date of birth. She has her mother’s love inscribed upon her skin.

  After more than seven years of knowing nothing, this suddenly seems so much.

  ‘They were together for about ten days,’ Inés continues. ‘Despite being so thin, Graciela managed to breastfeed her, but the infant was so hungry that they had to get bottles delivered from outside.

  ‘When they took the baby away they told Graciela, as they told the other mothers, that they would take it to her family. They told her to write her parents a letter that they would deliver along with the chid.

  ‘The day after that was a Wednesday, and that was the night she was transferred.’

  Transferred?

  Transferred where? To some other secret dungeon? One of those re-education facilities Yolanda used to talk about? I cling to the ambiguity, knowing but refusing to countenance what else this word could mean.

  Graciela, I think. My brave, beautiful daughter.

  I weep for a while; I think we all do. It is some time before I am able to speak.

  ‘Is there more?’ I manage to ask. I look at Inés, and know immediately that there is. There are things that will have happened to Graciela that, because I am her father, she will try never to tell me, that she will try to protect me from.

  We sit for a long time in the semi-darkness. Carla hugs Inés, but Inés cannot bend into her arms.

  When I can, I thank her: for telling me the things she has remembered, for reliving things that otherwise would have been lost.

  She nods and sits another moment in silence, a waif-like figure reflected between the glasses and the candles in the window, a survivor, still struggling to return.

  There is something else I need to know from her, though I am almost too frightened to ask.

  ‘Did you ever hear what happened to the baby, to Liliana?’ I manage to say. As I say it I wonder if I am the first person, apart from her mother, apart from Inés, ever to have used her name.

  But no, she never heard where the child went.

  ‘There was a rumour,’ she says, ‘about a list being managed by the obstetrician at the naval academy – I once overheard a conversation between two of the guards. The impression I got was that it was all top secret, something reserved for police and military couples, and perhaps for others who were friends of the regime.’

  A list? I think. Of course: a waiting list. My mind revolves. Did money change hands? Did the wives come up to the academy to select an infant? Or were their husbands simply allocated a child when their turn came around?

  My stomach churns. I cannot still my thoughts.

  Arturo goes to pour another round of whisky, but Inés slides her hand across her glass.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ she says. ‘I should probably be going soon.’

  She rebuffs Arturo’s offer to call a taxi, though he presses her to take one to be safe.

  ‘I will walk, I need to walk,’ she says. Then, aware she has spoken sharply, she makes an effort to soften her tone. ‘It’s all right, Arturo. I know it’s late, but I prefer to go on my own.’

  My legs give out when I go to stand. Graciela has gone but I cannot mourn her; Liliana lived but vanished within the first few days of her life.

  Inés turns back before leaving and gives me her hand. It is bony and cold in my own.

  ‘I know these things are not easy to listen to, Osvaldo,’ she says. ‘All the same, I hope they have been some use.’

  And suddenly I understand what she is struggling with, and how badly I misjudged her at the start. What I took for antipathy is the thing that has come undone in her. Out of what she has left of faith in human nature, she has travelled back into the darkness in order to give me her help. But she is also trying to fix the broken circuits, to relearn the patterns of empathy. She is trying to relearn how to feel.

  I look her directly in the eyes. ‘Thank you for what you did for Graciela,’ I say.

  She smiles her first smile of the evening, and slightly bows her head.

  ‘You would have been proud of her,’ she says.

  And then she is gone, a solitary figure lost among the great boulevards of Europe, walking, because at last she is free to do so, endlessly into the night.

  I stand for a moment in the darkness of the landing, wanting a few minutes alone before returning inside.

  I need to talk to Yolanda. She will want to know every detail. We will comfort each other and bolster each other and resume the search together. Then, with a jolt, it returns.

  This is how it happens, how it always happens: I reach for her before remembering she is gone.<
br />
  All the same, when the lights are out and I’m back in my old camp bed between the Lego watchtowers, I try out the syllables in the silence, sounding out the rhythm in them, feeling their shape on my tongue.

  ‘Li-li-an-a, Lili-Ana, Liliana.’

  Four lilting syllables that make me think of lilies, of the flowers her mother so loved.

  And suddenly I am back in the delta, back in that long-ago summer with the heat and the fireflies in the lushness, with the lapping of the water from the passing boats and the shouts of the swimming children. There is the reflection of the river in the windows, and the smell of silt, and strains of music drifting across the islands. And I am back with the lilies and irises she collected for the house on the water, back with the flowers she stole from the garden in Tigre.

  ‘I want to mark her, Inés,’ she whispers. ‘As a sign, so somebody sees.’

  Inés is remembering. She is walking through the streets of Paris long after midnight, and as she walks she replays the scene she had forgotten but tonight has remembered, and now cannot help remembering. She walks and walks, heading south along wet avenues with the traffic lights reflected on the footpaths, till she arrives at the edge of the river and it is dawn.

  The longboats are still sleeping. The obelisk that came all the way from Egypt rises behind her; further along the riverbank, the lime trees in the Tuileries stand in their tall straight rows.

  She had forgotten that incident with the needle, and wonders how that could be. She remembers the ferocity of Graciela’s love, and the despair in it, because in some part of her – of this Inés is certain – Graciela knew.

  Inés had clasped the baby to her. She remembers the wet mouth at her neck; she remembers the small heart hammering against her own. As Graciela broke the skin and cut her, deep enough to make her bleed, broad enough to scar her, Inés gripped the writhing infant and talked to her, trying to still the bellowing grief that seemed to express their own immense distress.

  It was done.

  Ten days later, Graciela picked up the pencil and wrote. Though she must have known, she would have clung to the smallest hope. She’d shown the letter to Inés when she had finished it – then taken the paper back.