Not under her name but down the margin she drew crosses like three small kisses, the middle one misaligned the way the marks were misaligned at the back of her daughter’s ear.
What was she thinking? Inés had asked herself. That her daughter might one day wonder about those crosses? That in case of separation, someone might match the letter to the child?
Inés had had her doubts. She didn’t believe such letters were delivered, even before she’d heard mention of a list. She’d had no proof of anything. But she didn’t believe they took the babies home.
10
Buenos Aires
February 1977
A piece of paper, a scrap really, lies where it has fallen beside the rubbish cans, slipping from the top of an open sack when it was tossed into the garbage men’s truck. A blast of exhaust sends it cartwheeling across the car park like somebody’s runaway shopping list escaped from a pocket or a bag.
It snags on the crenellated trunk of a cedar tree and is pinioned there, quivering, torn a little along one fold. The breeze is loath to release it, but once it does it slides down the trunk and lodges amongst the leaf litter, in the woody crook of a root.
Dear Mamá, Papá . . .
There it loiters, waiting for the wind to change. The breeze doesn’t shift, but its conviction fades, and in one freak gust it lifts the paper and propels it over the car park’s edge. Aloft, it gathers momentum and spirals higher on a counter-current all to itself. It sails over the outsized links of the anchor chain cranked taut to halt arrivals, but lowered for vehicles to roll across with a head-banging double thud. It toys with the branches of a ceiba tree before a downdraught pulls it lower, and it skims the last metres to the boundary fence over stripes of freshly mown grass.
I can’t tell you of my joy at feeling close to you, thinking of you reading these brief lines.
The barrier is a net of diamond wire and the paper is pegged against it by the wind. Thrumming like a moth it hangs there, while the words inscribed on its underside slowly dissolve. Js become Is, Ms become Ns, and even the Xs in the margin become the shadow of themselves as minute quantities of graphite dust rub off in the afternoon breeze.
I want you to know that I am all right, as I hope you and Julieta are too – that is the most important thing.
The paper struggles against the mesh for several moments, but the wind is boring into it, insisting until something gives and the flimsy scrap slips sideways and is suddenly through.
Mamá, Papá, I need to ask your help.
School is not yet out. The ice-cream van is edging through the traffic. Ants are carving supply channels through the grass beside the pathway while a flock of parrots chatter their green parrot chatter at the top of the trees.
I need you to look after my daughter, your beautiful granddaughter Liliana, till I can return and care for her myself.
Windborne! The letter soars and dives and tumbles along the serpentine footpath; it clings to the shin of the first passer-by. It’s a woman who is strapping a toddler into a pushchair, but to her the paper is refuse that she shakes off with an irritated kick.
The thought of being separated from her is more than I can bear.
She doesn’t notice the mineral words dissolving; she doesn’t notice the address where it could still be sent. She doesn’t notice that the longer words, like granddaughter and separated and important, are vanishing from the page.
Will you tell her every day how much I love her? That she is the centre of my universe, the reason for my life?
Lighter now, since its ballast of verbiage is shrinking, it floats in dreamy circles towards the trees. It catches the eye of the toddler, who stretches his arm towards it and giggles at the way it spirals against the afternoon sky. The woman, who has found a bench and is sitting there, thinks he is gurgling at the parrot flock and returns to her movie-star news.
José will be so proud of her. Tell him that I love him with all my heart, that not a day goes by without him in my thoughts.
Somewhere along an avenue the letter flutters earthwards, relinquished by the inconstant breeze. A second later it is sucked into the slipstream of a speeding vehicle, then is pulled under a semi-trailer’s wheels. Torn, dirtied, embossed with grit, its words are barely legible under the herringbone print of tyres.
I miss you all and love you always,
Graciela
The letter rips in half. One piece tumbles towards a storm-water drain where it washes over the edge and disappears.
The other, stuck beneath the shoe of a passing pedestrian, resurfaces on the floor of the twenty-nine bus. It travels behind the ticket punch, is crushed under sneakers and boots and shopping bags, until the vehicle rolls at last into the terminus sheds. There, a cousin of the driver who has lost his job at a factory slops out the bus with a mop and soapy water, and the pulpy tatters disintegrate when he washes them down the steps.
eart
alw
ciela
11
Buenos Aires
October 1976
A double thud as we pass into the shadow world.
Suffocating under blankets, under boots on the floor of a vehicle,
Separately we all feel it, all those who enter here.
Chained for hours in the corridor, my body cries, then numbs.
When they come for me, I have lost the ability to stand.
I don’t –
Sliding, when I hit the wall.
Room for two in there? Laughter.
A blow, and the howling is mine. I am inside this animal sound.
The room falls silent, deferential. Then it resumes.
Sing for me, sweetheart. Come on, a nice little tune.
Singeing. The stench of urine. Beyond, some strange perfume.
We are not human.
Swollen-bellied, I squat naked on a paint-tin in my blindfold before an audience of guards.
The metal bedframe cuts.
Face down this time, beneath my blindfold, I glimpse the splashes on his shoes.
My ears tear with someone else’s pleading, with weeping.
Again, that bestial howling.
Suddenly the world turns to wire every nerve in me is burning.
I think: my unborn child.
Hijo de puta, she loves it. The little whore, she’s begging us for more.
Time bends out of all proportion. I am molten metal. A laboratory of pain.
When they bring me to: sniggering.
Purple saucers! Check out what happens to their tits.
Again it starts. The screeching air convulses.
Then darkness, such soft darkness. I am floating floating floating
Then they haul me back to the light.
The Wolf, that’s what they call him. The one they all defer to.
That perfume. Does he pomade himself in the bathroom, then kiss his wife goodbye?
Somewhere, outside these walls, the ice-cream vendor passes.
When the morning sessions are over, I hear his tinkling tune.
José, are you here? Are you somewhere inside?
I scratch your name into the floorboards.
Caress the broken splinters with my lips.
I lose count of the times.
It’s not facts any more, or names. It’s some other thing they want.
The parilla, they call it. The barbecue. Its neat crosshatching of burns.
I am thirsty, so so thirsty. The others here all warn me not to drink.
Musk, is that what it is?
Cloying, when he works himself up.
Dance for me, honey. I’m saving the last tango for you.
I’m here, José, don’t go –
At 200 volts the cattle prod makes the television go static.
When the football’s on, the guards upstairs complain.
Words peel apart from meanings: the Operating Theatre. The Clinic.
Oh yes, the Maternity Ward.
Peel till there are no words left.
&
nbsp; Just different registers of screaming that echo down the Avenue of Joy.
And in this special hospital, a doctor’s standing by.
I recognise his hands, the stethoscope’s cold lick.
He has changed his beard again. The thin disguise of his hair.
The Wolf is back. I know him by his smell.
All night long the dogs bark. Their jaws rip holes in the dark.
Confess, my child, the priest says.
Car horns sound. Far away, a wedding, or a victory.
Then, from some bright stadium, a paroxysm of cheers.
Confess, when I have forgotten my own name?
What priest is this, who inhabits the Underworld?
Through the corner of my blindfold I see where the shackles weep.
Bruising. The sweet puckering of burns.
God’s busy, they tell us. We are The Almighty.
You are this vermin. This filth.
My hair is ash. I panic as it disintegrates in my hand.
Hooded, I know it’s night from the sound of moaning, sometimes the sound of sobs.
José, mi amor. Come closer –
There is nowhere it doesn’t hurt to lie.
A clanking sound as someone struggles with their chains.
Medieval, the new guard said, stumbling in on us by accident today.
The baby, they decide, requires vitamins. They deliver me a salad and a steak.
This is power: these arbitrary acts.
To give. To take away. To choose.
Someone called Roberto died this morning.
They brought his body up to us to give him the kiss of life.
Downstairs in the Operating Theatre, they couldn’t tell if he still had a pulse.
The night guard gives me a caramelo.
Pregnancy excites him. He wants me for himself.
When he is done, he wipes himself and talks about his wife.
We are beyond purgatory now. This is the inferno.
A child is hope, which makes it worse.
In this darkness, close to mine, I cradle its beating heart.
You cannot escape if you are already dead.
Inés, what will happen to my baby? But Inés shakes her head.
Dear God, please spare this infant. Please let this baby live.
The iceman cometh, again I hear his tinkling.
The iceman taketh away.
PART III
THE DOUBLE HELIX
1985–1992
1
Amsterdam
March 1985
Far away in Vatican City, the telephone rings many times. I’m about to hang up after the fifteenth ring when somebody picks up at the other end.
I ask to speak to Monsignor Traversini. After the conversation with Inés there is more I want to ask him. Perhaps he can help us again.
‘Mi dispiace, signore.’ A man’s voice, cultivated, urbane. ‘We have nobody here of that name.’
I try the Vatican switchboard, spelling out Traversini three separate times. I try the Vatican press office. He appears on nobody’s list.
‘He’s a bishop,’ I tell them. ‘Surely he figures somewhere in your files.’
‘Perhaps he has retired by now.’ The voice I’ve reached this time is trying to be helpful. ‘Or perhaps he was just a temporary visitor to Rome.’ The bishop, he suggests, might have returned to pastoral work; the Vatican, after all, is such a crossroads; there are always so many people passing through.
Julieta, on reflection, thinks it may be just as well I cannot reach him. My questions might alert someone to our search.
The long darkness is dissipating in Argentina. The Malvinas are lost, the economy is still in tatters, but the Junta has been gone for more than a year. The commission of inquiry that Inés spoke to delivered its findings six months ago, and now it has published its report into the disappeared.
I have a copy of it here on my table in Amsterdam. Nunca Más, it’s titled, ‘Never Again’, and most of it I cannot bring myself to read. In the privacy of my canal-house rooms I open it, examine a few pages, and close it again. Sometimes I have to go for a walk outside.
They have identified more than 300 secret prisons. They have interviewed the few survivors, who have spoken of unutterable things. They have documented 9,000 disappeared and are still counting. And among the 50,000 pages of depositions that fed the report’s 500 pages, there are accounts of babies born to captive mothers, just as Inés described.
I cannot read it, yet force myself to look. On every page I search for Graciela, by name or implication. And because I cannot find her, I imagine her in every account of horror; I see her face in every unbearable line.
And what I read, and what Inés has told me, becomes something I cannot shut away. I dream of botched Caesarean sections, of basement torture chambers, of instruments devised for obscene permutations of pain.
I see lilies floating down a river, and Graciela, my sweet daughter, floating with them, clasping her child as they drown.
It is fury I feel, and then revulsion, and after that, an immense, bone-marrow kind of sorrow, that human beings should be capable of this.
And then the anger returns. I cannot believe, I refuse to, that silence should be the end of it. That nothingness is all there shall be.
The opposite of life is not death, I realise; it is disappearance. It scorns us with its impunity. It incarcerates us in its no-man’s-land of silence. It denies us the ability to act.
Well, for Graciela, for Liliana, I reject it. There must be answers, even if they’ve been hidden somewhere, even if buried under layers of stone. There must be a crack where a blade of grass might push towards the sunlight . . . And that is when I decide to make a stand.
First I discuss it with Julieta, now pregnant with her second child. I raise it with my brother-in-law Ricardo, and with José’s father Eduardo, though he is struggling with Maria’s ill health. I tell Constanza and Teodoro, my lawyer in Buenos Aires. I explain what I intend to do.
I draft it one Saturday morning at my window, a dredger clawing its way down the canal outside. Here, among the peaceable Dutch, I take a step, a small one that’s all but certain to be ineffectual. But it’s the only way I can think of to fight back.
MISSING: CAN YOU HELP?
NAME: Liliana Thurmann Ferrero, though it is possible she is not registered under this name.
AGE: 8 years old.
PLACE AND DATE OF BIRTH: Buenos Aires, 26 January, 1977.
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: Green eyes. Three small cross-shaped scars behind her right ear.
WHEREABOUTS: Possibly an orphanage. Possibly in the care of people unaware of her family’s search.
Her relatives appeal to the conscience and goodwill of anyone who can help them find their missing child.
If you have any information about this girl, please contact Teodoro Bonifaccio at Perez & Bonifaccio Abogados, Avenida Tucumán 1427, 12o piso, Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires 1050.
Teodoro sends the notice to all the national newspapers in Argentina, and all the local papers in Buenos Aires, including those devoted purely to sports. It appears in their Saturday editions.
Constanza collects them all and mails them in one fat bundle; I pick them up in Amsterdam where she sends them care of poste restante.
I spread them out on my desk and shuffle through them, scanning the flimsy pages of print. MISSING MISSING MISSING, they cry as I arrange and rearrange them, as if reordering them might make sense of the inexplicable, or bring an answer to what is really a double plea.
Liliana: may you, or someone who cares about you, see this message.
May it bring you and your mother safely home.
2
London
March 1986
The laboratory I work for is expanding, and is setting up an office in London; before the winter is over the company proposes to transfer me there.
I’ve grown attached to Amsterdam, to the plain-speaking Dutch and my attic
rooms overlooking the ziggurat skyline, and now I feel reluctant to leave. Yet my manager is persuasive; they are offering me a promotion; and part of me feels ready for a change.
My schoolboy English is rusty, the city’s range of accents is overwhelming, and Londoners seem to be permanently on the run. But Medipharm signs me up for a month of language classes, and the job is mainly administrative, liaising between London and Paris from an office in the centre of town.
Our building, a recent renovation, is white and light and open, branding us with clinical flair. Yet it is an anomaly in this part of the city, tucked away in a courtyard in a maze I keep getting lost in, in the streets behind New Fetter Lane.
The revolving door ejects us into a lane that burrows into Fleet Street’s fume-laden fug. Double-deckers churn like paddle steamers past the newspaper buildings. Upholstered like old hookers in tat and ash-pocked velvet, pubs sway on their timber haunches, their rooms giving onto other rooms that worm into the city’s heart.
The sales reps are young and eager, and we have to get started somewhere, so we divide up London’s hospitals using a map and a list of the saints. Once Mark, Mary, Thomas, George and Bart are allocated, we move on to the Royals, and include with them the Princesses, Kings and Queens. The rest are named after universities, boroughs or body parts: Hearts and Eyes go quickly, and we share out those that remain.
There is some trading according to drug type and geography, then the teams submit their lists to me, and I coordinate strategy with marketing, finance and sales.
Every so often I stare out of my window at the transparent English rain. And I wonder sometimes how I got here, when it was that the temporary became so permanent, and how it happened that, in my life as in my profession, I feel as if I’ve lost my way.
To lift myself out of my brooding I go walking. At lunchtime I cover the length of Fleet Street, passing the obsidian façade of the Daily Express building and the unicorn spire of St Bride’s. Then invariably I head south, across Blackfriars Bridge as far as the griffon statue, even when St Paul’s is shrouded in cloud. It does me good to watch the play of light or rain on water, the way the tidal flow of the river connects with something larger than itself.
The Memory Stones Page 16