And as I walk, I think about the abandoned bridge that runs beside the one I’m crossing, the solid Victorian pilings so resistant to the current’s pull. There is something reassuring in the way the phantom bridge accompanies the existing one, its pylons sunk in the ancient silt under the imaginary reach of its spans.
Yet living in London takes more adjusting than I’d expected; London strikes me as a city for the brave. Not for the faint of heart are its broken footpaths and heaving underground carriages, its rain-lashed railway platforms exposed to the wind. Here, resilience is not a quality. It’s a requirement to survive.
‘You have to be patient,’ says Daniela, a Chilean exile I have met through Carla, shouting over the Friday-night roar of a pub near Charing Cross. ‘Once you make friends here, everything changes. But you have to accept it takes time.’
‘How much time?’ I shout back at her over the smoke and the din and the jostling, lip-reading more than I can hear.
She has very dark eyes, and silver rings on all her fingers that clink on the glass she hands me from the bar.
She laughs and yells an answer into my ear. ‘What’s that expression the English use? How long is a piece of string?’
I’ve rented a basement flat in the west of London, and have a bit part in the great commuter struggle up and down the Central Line. I’ve seen the people at Amnesty about my family, and told them that there is also a missing child. They have my case on file; they are pressing it along with others in Geneva; but so far they have little to offer beyond sympathy and the shaking of heads.
Daniela, who works in radio, introduces me to one of her contacts, a trades union man whom I visit up near Tottenham Court Road. He has some good connections in Latin America, though they are limited; those who survived are still in exile, but he promises to consult his counterparts in Spain.
These fruitless meetings discourage me and compound my frustration; Daniela is the only person I know who understands.
Even so, it surprises me when one day she takes me by the hand.
The simple gesture marks a turning point, though it is difficult to say when it was that our relationship changed.
She is twelve years my junior and lost her husband, Sergio, when Chile lost Allende. Her father was born in England, so when she fled, she went first to stay with relatives outside London, and supports herself now doing shifts at the BBC.
Her eyes have laughter in them despite her sadness, and we have our foreignness in common; we step carefully around each other, aware that getting closer might also hurt.
What we most need is friendship, and in London we find ways to do the things we might have done back home. We go to Spanish-language movies; we listen to Latino music in the booths at Tower Records; we discover new jazz collections and tangos I’ve never heard. We frequent an Italian bistro I’ve found near Cambridge Circus that is just about as generous as the ones in Buenos Aires. She finds me a mate seller in Camden market, and we pass the hot tea back and forth in the gourd he also sold us, and laugh at the mistakes I make in English, and sleep together in my basement bed for solace, and then for joy.
I don’t tell Julieta about her, at least not right away. My relationship with Daniela still feels tentative; I don’t want my daughter advising me, or bossing, or making plans.
But I do tell Daniela about Julieta, how her family has just grown bigger with the arrival of Paulina, how I flew to Miami just days after the baby was born.
‘You’re proud of Julieta, aren’t you?’ Daniela says; and I realise, despite our difficulties, how much I am.
She tells me in turn about a schoolfriend who has just turned up in Toronto, someone she feared had been killed in Chile, and who has now shown up, alive.
And that reminds me of Hugo, and Diego and Marguerita and Heriberto, and the boisterous nights we spent at the Paradiso.
‘I’ve lost sight of all of them,’ I tell her. ‘I have no idea where any of them might be.’
‘Maybe you should go back and look for them.’
‘Perhaps,’ I say, and consider it properly for a moment. ‘Though I’d hardly know where to begin.’
‘It’s not just that though, is it?’ she says, and I know she understands what I cannot bear to articulate: that losing my wife and daughter and grandchild has been sorrow enough, without adding a roll call of friends.
I shake my head, grateful for her intuition.
‘I’m not that brave, Daniela,’ I say. ‘It was hard enough going back that once. I don’t imagine I will ever return.’
How little we know, how little we can foresee, I understand only later, after the phone rings late in the evening and I’ve answered, and spoken for a few moments, and hung up.
‘Is everything all right?’ It’s Daniela, calling from the bedroom.
My mind is racing. I have to go back to Argentina right away.
I go in to her and sit beside her, by her pillow at the top of the bed.
Daniela sits up. ‘What’s happened?’ she says, anxiety suddenly shadowing her face.
‘That was Eduardo. José’s father.’
I take her hand, see the soft silver glint of her rings.
‘He says they have found José.’
3
Buenos Aires
March 1986
It is dark inside the wardrobe when she climbs into it, so she holds the doors together with her fingers, allowing in a narrow spit of light. Inside there is the musty smell of wood and fusty clothing, and an old paper sticker glued to a panel that she carefully peels off with her nails.
There are all kinds of furniture and household objects in the warehouse. While her father attends to the inventory or is busy taking deliveries, she plays among the dining sets and the dressers as if she were in some Alice-in-Wonderland dolls’ house where everything was made life-size.
The building must have once been a kind of factory, because the space consists of a concrete floor with grease marks in some places, and high brick walls without any windows apart from a row just under the roof.
She accumulates a nest of discoveries. There’s a green enamel button and some peso coins she dived for under the armrests of sofas, and a silver star from a necklace, and a screw-on coral earring she retrieved from the back of a drawer. She has made a chain from paperclips and dislodged a photo from where she found it, stuck down the inside of a desk.
Risking splinters and the sharp ends of nails, she explores for secret compartments in the backs of drawers, in the panels of the writing desks.
After hunting for things, what Ana likes best is hiding in the wardrobes. Some have keys in their curlicue locks but others have to be tied shut with string. From the inside, all of them smell different; Ana decides it’s because of differences in the dust. Some have sawdust dust, others have old-clothes dust, or resiny dust, or dust that’s more like grit from the bottom of shoes.
Now that the client who was browsing among the dressing tables has left, the coast is clear for Ana to pull out her secret objects; she holds the photograph up to the strip of light. A young man with heavy brows and curly hair stares back at her, a blurry puppy wriggling out of his arms. He wears a skinny shirt tucked into his flares and his name, Ana knows, is ‘Leo’ because it is written in blue biro on the back.
She imagines all sorts of things: that Leo is her special friend, or perhaps an older brother with whom she embarks on adventures. Today she pretends that the two of them have stowed away on a galleon after finding a stash of treasure made up of coins and silver stars. Pirates, however, are also after the bounty and believe Ana and Leo have stolen it, so they’ve commandeered the ship and locked all the crew in the hold. Ana hears a bell and the sound of footsteps – the pirates must be scouring the deck in search of them. She is vaguely aware of talking; of somebody giving orders; there are rising voices and suddenly a woman’s screech.
Ana freezes where she is hiding, presses her eye to the crack in the door. A woman in a purple scarf is shifting in and out of
the light. She sees a man put his hand on her sleeve, but the woman only shrugs it off. The woman’s shrieks grow louder; she is hurling insults at Ana’s father; she has to concentrate to hear what is being said.
‘I remember you!’ – that much Ana picks up through the wooden panelling – ‘You were the one in charge.’ Then there are some swear words, and others Ana doesn’t recognise. ‘And you remember me,’ the woman says next. ‘By God, you sadist, you do.’
Words are flying like bullets and Ana is paralysed. Should she run to defend her father, or stay hidden inside the wardrobe, or rush outside for help?
When she looks again, the man is tugging at the woman’s elbow but this time she wrenches her arm free. Then she leans across the counter, her purple scarf all twisted, and spits in Ana’s father’s face.
‘Get out of here!’ he roars at her. ‘Get off my premises right now.’
‘Or what?’ she says. ‘Come on then. What do you think you might do?’
The world falls silent for a moment, then Ana hears more footsteps, the tinny sound of the bell.
Ana stays where she is, head between her knees, tension still crackling in the air. But her legs are starting to get cramps in them and she needs to stand and stretch.
She clambers out of the wardrobe, stashes the pirate treasure in its hiding place and goes in search of her father at the front of the store. She finds him combing his hair before an antique mirror, a wet patch like a medallion on his shirt.
‘Why was that lady screaming, Papá?’ she says.
His reflected eyes, so brown they are almost black, look back a little wildly through the glass.
‘Oh, she’s just another nutter, Ana. One of those crazies. There are plenty of them around these days, now that Democracy’s flushing them out onto the streets.’
She wants to ask what it was that the lady called him. It was a new word, an adult word, and Ana suspects a bad one, but she knows he doesn’t like her learning words like that.
He drags the black-toothed comb across his skull, but the lines come out all crooked, like her homework when she does it on the bus.
He sees, and he sees Ana see. Then he smiles.
The comb scrapes across his head again, over the pink canopy of scalp. But the furrows this time are perfect, the narrow ridges properly aligned.
Ana is awash with relief. There is nothing he is afraid of, not even lunatics on the attack. She feels proud of him, and safe with him. There is nothing he cannot master, she thinks to herself, no circumstances he cannot control.
4
Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay
October 1976
A couple of stories appear in the Uruguayan newspapers. Tiny pieces, really, just a few lines at first in the human interest columns of the Montevideo dailies that keep an eye on the provinces, towns like Rosario and Colonia del Sacramento, which lies opposite Buenos Aires on the Río de la Plata shore.
The local papers, of course, make quite a fuss about it; the bodies, after all, are washing up on their doorstep, and it’s only human to be shocked by the macabre, or when events occur that disrupt the natural order of things. And when male and female cadavers start lodging in the reeds along the river, naked, bloated, and with quite a bit of damage . . . that, to the coastal residents, is an aberration in the order of things.
The first one bobs ashore just below the Santa Rita ramparts at Colonia. It is found on a Saturday morning by a couple of kids who have cycled there with fishing rods strapped to their bikes. Having had no luck with the spinners they’ve been casting from the breakwater, one of them decides to try his hand upstream.
The cry he releases into the morning soon brings his schoolmate running. When he gets there, he finds his friend is throwing up into the grass.
Their fathers are alerted; the police and an ambulance are summoned; the body is wrapped in heavy-duty plastic and carted off to the morgue. The hospital pathologist examining the corpse looks grave in the photographs printed in Sunday’s paper, and troubled behind his solemnity when interviewed on local TV.
Glasses glinting above his sideburns, he speaks into a fuzzy microphone. He says that the body he’s examining, of a young man in his twenties, is in poor condition after spending several days afloat.
‘But what I find most disturbing,’ he adds, ‘are all the broken bones.’
There is speculation about a car crash, or a savage murder by hammer blow before the body was tossed to the waves. Barstool pundits extemporise about new forms of thuggery, and ghoulish jokes start surfacing about the diet of the river fish.
There are changes to restaurant menus to account for the withdrawal of the local bream.
But there is nothing to identify the body, no rings or tattoos or any items of clothing, no evidence beyond what might be derived from examining the victim’s teeth.
Even in a quiet place like Colonia, the talk might eventually have faded away had no more bodies turned up. But two days after the first discovery, a woman wheeling her pram on the south side of town faints when she sees that a second cadaver has floated in to shore. This time the body is a woman’s, naked too, and dragging in the reeds. From the way her head is lying, her neck appears to be broken, and one of her arms seems to be bent the wrong way.
Over the coming days, another seven corpses nudge in to land, four of them close to Colonia and the other three further down the coast.
All joking dies away; a serial killer must surely be on the prowl. Parents triple-check the locks on doors and windows, and accompany their children to and home from school. The mayor imposes a draconian curfew. Teenagers invent a game of dare that involves nocturnal walks with flashlights, but most of them are too skittish to venture far. The hard-pressed hospital pathologist takes photographs and copious notes to assist with his post-mortems, but his descriptions correspond to no one reported missing to the police.
Then, early one morning, a contingent from the Uruguayan army arrives. The pathologist is told to halt his examinations and to cease updating the press. Reporters from the national papers, and even from the international news agencies, are repelled at the doors of the hospital, and camera crews who insist on gaining entry get roughed up by paramilitary thugs.
Meanwhile, residents start to complain that their phone calls are being cut off.
The army captain orders the bodies removed from the morgue at the hospital, though the post-mortems are not yet complete. Simultaneously, the sextons at the cemetery outside Colonia and at another downstream from Montevideo are each told to prepare a pit. When the bodies are delivered to their graveyards, they are entered as ‘NN’ in the register –the initials that are applied to indigents, and to those of no known name.
There they are interred while the police conduct an investigation, but it is closed in a matter of days.
Very occasionally, another body shows up to disturb the peace. The local authorities, however, have learned their lesson and keep the matter quiet, and the corpse is discreetly added to the cemetery’s common grave.
The rest is down to the sextons who, having looked death so often in the face, have a sense of something larger, and a feeling of responsibility towards those entrusted to their keep. And the sextons are offended. It insults their professional pride and their sense of civic duty that so little effort has been expended on identifying the newcomers in their care.
They make sure that what details they have are entered into the registers correctly. And when the five-year tenure expires, and the NN graves are meant to be turned over for use by newer claimants, they make alternative arrangements because they take a long-term view of things, and know that someone some day will come looking for the missing, especially when those missing are individuals as young as these.
Occasionally a rumour reaches them: that the currents have brought a body or two ashore on the opposite coast. But fifty kilometres lie between them, and they are too wise to go about making enquiries across the river, and the rumour is never confirmed.
/> What none of them, not those who had curtailed the examinations, nor those who had silenced the reporters, nor those who had imposed a swift solution to conceal the disturbing evidence, what none of them had known was that the sextons, in fact, were not mistaken: that people would indeed turn up at the cemetery gates and ask them to reopen the collective graves.
Nor could any of them have guessed at the advances that would be made one day in the field of genetics, in anthropology and in archaeological forensics; or that DNA could be made to speak with such precision, even in the face of missing generations; that samples would be collected and answers sought.
So it was that the Uruguayans had found José years before a team of Argentine forensic anthropologists turned up to enquire about the NN graves. At the time, nobody in the town on that side of the river had had any way of identifying who he was.
He isn’t the first to have shown up dead in a country he never visited in life. But when the hospital pathologist examined him, and found every bone in his body broken – the multiple fractures to the ribs, the pelvis fissured, the ulna shattered and even the femur broken – he could only fill in the dental templates as best he could in the diminished time available, with no time to investigate the savage perforations on his skin.
Instead, he entrusted the body to the sexton at the cemetery near Colonia, along with the others they had fished from the reeds and the rocks.
5
Colonia del Sacramento
March 1986
Because there are so few members of José’s family, I fly from London to Montevideo to be with his father, and arrange to meet him directly in Colonia. Maria, too unwell to travel, has stayed behind in Buenos Aires. Her mind is slowly clouding and Eduardo, with health worries of his own, isn’t completely sure she has understood.
I make copies of the documents Eduardo has collected: the results of the DNA tests, the old and new dental records, what notes the forensic investigators have made. At the cemetery they copy the relevant pages of the register, and let us photograph his burial place. Eduardo and I do not discuss why we are doing this; it is not something it occurs to us to discuss. Gathering these last traces of José’s existence seems to help us believe that what has happened has happened; for Eduardo, these are the last things he can do for his son.
The Memory Stones Page 17