We stand under the pine trees in the graveyard, staring at the garden of crosses, the white tops of the graves. The breeze comes in off the water and strokes the feathery branches, carrying the sounds of life from beyond the walls.
She is not here, I know that. The investigators have been thorough in their analyses. Graciela was not with him in this place.
But José’s bones have lain in the loamy soil, anonymous, unknown to us, even while some part of us had hoped that he might have survived. For ten years his parents have longed for him and been unable to grieve for him, existing in the half-light of his absence, as do all of us who yearn for the disappeared.
‘The ache of it,’ Eduardo once said, ‘is how I know my heart is still alive.’
We go to the waterside at Colonia together, knowing now the extent of it, knowing at least the end. The waves tangle and untangle the reeds; they slap and fall against the rocks.
I’ve seen those pages in the official inquiry, felt the shudder in the investigators’ words: the stupefying Pentothal injections; the night flights over the river that runs to the sea.
I’m a medical man, these days a drug-selling man; I know what Pentothal does. Did they blink awake in the shock of cold air, falling? Did their nerves shoot pain at the crack of bone on water, fracturing on waves like cement?
‘Let’s take him home,’ Eduardo says, his crevassed face more worn than the cemetery stone.
They give us the splintered bones of his son in a box, to bury or burn.
On the Argentine shore we stand on the grassy embankment and cast rose petals by the handful into the river that’s as wide as a sea. Despite his coughing, Eduardo says a blessing as the dots of red recede like so many footprints, dancing their invisible dance on the silty tide.
We watch them bob and toss as the current tugs them into a trail that recedes towards the horizon. We watch until the light fails and our eyesight falters, till the ribbon of brightness drifts towards the vanishing point where the sky lifts off from the sea.
Attended by the young woman they increasingly rely on, Maria is with us in her wheelchair, disoriented, a blanket over her knees.
Eduardo goes over to her and bends his giant frame down to her and takes her in his arms.
‘It’s all right, mi amore,’ he says to her, not sure if she knows why they’ve come. ‘He’s going on his journey, sweetheart. It’s time to let him go.’
And from the depths of the things she’s losing, memory, vocabulary, through his own grief and heartbreak, she astounds him by finding the words.
‘Adieu, Cheché,’ she says.
6
Buenos Aires
March 1986
Before I return to London I have one last thing to do.
Eduardo, since he’s been there before, comes with me in the taxi. The hospital’s rust-red towers soar above the glass-and-concrete entrance where the nurses loiter smoking; the smell of disinfectant greets us as we walk through the door.
In the entrance Eduardo hesitates before recollecting the way. I take in the head-down march of the junior doctors, the orderlies’ rubber-soled squeak on the polished floors. A trolley rattles past us, and the sound of it catches me in an updraught of nostalgia at being back in an Argentine hospital, back where I once felt at home.
We negotiate endless corridors. An old woman and a child kneel in the hospital chapel, draughts tugging at the candle flames. At the billing offices, the accountants’ windows are lined with streaks of Sellotape, as if marking the height of floodwaters, where notices have been taped up and then removed.
At last we find ourselves in Immunology – a passageway with seven doors and a fire hydrant glowing at one end. On the wall, a cartoon mosquito warns of dengue fever. Children slither over the backs of the seats while a cleaner in blue overalls skims a mop over the floor.
We sit in silence amid the hubbub, waiting for my name to be called.
After a while Eduardo clears his throat.
‘He was a good person, Osvaldo,’ Eduardo says.
I look at him, at his big bear’s head, the great span of his workman’s hands.
‘I know, Eduardo,’ I say.
The past few weeks have exhausted him, the repeated explanations about José since Maria cannot remember what he has said. He looks taller now than I remember him, and I realise he must have lost weight.
‘He loved your daughter very much.’
‘I know he did,’ I say, and then fall silent. A taciturn man, he has things on his mind I sense he is wanting to say.
‘I think it was because of that, because of his kindness, that he died,’ Eduardo says after a moment. ‘You know. The teaching. Those places they went.’
He stops, trying to bind the facts he knows into something that might help them make sense.
Then he shakes his head. ‘I can’t stop thinking there must have been something we failed to teach him, something that might have saved him, or at least have preserved him from harm.’
‘What could you have taught him, Eduardo?’
‘I don’t know. Some quality that might have armoured him. Scepticism. Less idealism, perhaps.’
‘And made him into someone other than he was?’
He looks at me with pain in his tired eyes. ‘Yet maybe he would still be alive.’
Though José had been missing for a decade, for Eduardo, for his family, it is as if he has only just died.
‘José was twenty-two, Osvaldo,’ he continues. ‘When I think about his childhood . . . It went by like that, in the blink of an eye. It was all we had. He was with us for such a short time.’
I think about the years of silence, how the long unknowing has been neither help nor preparation. I think how language fails us. How there is no word like ‘widow’ or ‘orphan’ for the parent who loses a child.
I put my hand on his arm.
Then suddenly the nurse is calling my name. We rise in unison and traipse down the line of doors.
I tell her I am there for the database; that I want to give a genetic sample; that I – that the two of us – are looking for people who have disappeared.
‘That’s why we’re here, Dr Ferrero,’ she tells me. Her voice is clinical but not uncaring. ‘That’s why they set us up last year.’
Peering over her green-framed glasses she explains to me the procedures, how the genetic maps they are building require as many relatives as possible to take part.
I tell her about Yolanda’s brother, and about Julieta who is living in Florida. If Julieta cannot come to Buenos Aires, the nurse informs us, there is a partner hospital she can use in the United States.
I fill in the forms while the nurse examines my documents. I transcribe names and numbers, provide addresses and secondary contacts, put my signature to the necessary permissions.
The tourniquet pinches for a moment; I ball my fist as she swabs my arm and inserts the needle into my vein.
And suddenly, watching the thread climb blackly up the needle, I am gripped by the absolute conviction that Liliana exists. She lives not just in my imagination, not just in Inés’s memory of her birth. She is alive, with my genes and Yolanda’s, with Eduardo’s and Maria’s, in her body; our missing children are living on in her.
The nurse extracts the needle and makes me sit a moment longer – in case of dizziness, she says. Eduardo is standing by the window, staring out towards the Parque Centenario that is half hidden by the monkey-puzzle trees.
It’s like starlight, this database, I want to tell them. It’s like shining a lamplight down the generations that follow on from us and believing that whatever we want to call it, this leap of faith, this feat of genetic biology, might re-establish origins and set things right.
Then, the immensity of this endeavour overwhelms me. Liliana is just one child in the universe. Finding her will defy every law of probability, and all this database can do is confirm or deny.
Eduardo has his back to me, immersed in the world outside. When I glance up at
him, I see his shoulders shake. Just for a moment, just a tremor, imperceptible to anyone who wasn’t already watching, to anyone who didn’t already know.
Then I remember the other reason for these samples, how they have already proved their worth.
And their worth may extend to Graciela. I dread the thought of receiving the call that Eduardo must have answered, that this vial of blood might be needed for an outcome that would extinguish any last hope of her being alive.
The nurse who left us for a moment returns with water in two paper cups. As she passes me one, I realise that dizziness was not what worried her. In the privacy of this small office, she has witnessed these emotions before.
Eduardo turns back from the window and thanks the nurse and places his cup on the table. He has composed himself; it’s as if nothing had taken place.
‘Don’t lose heart,’ the nurse says to us. She gives a slight bow of her head, then looks at us over the green frames of her glasses as she steps back to open the door.
My flat is chilly and smells of the damp when I get home from the airport; London is only grumblingly awake. It’s too early to call Daniela so I boil the water for mate and wait by the basement window. The shins of the early commuters flicker past the railings as they hurry along the footpath above.
The letter I wrote on the plane is still in my pocket. I flatten it out and examine it, the nudges and bumps of turbulence apparent in its uneven lines. Almost without thinking, I reach for a sheet of paper and begin to transcribe.
I stop, pen poised mid-sentence. I can almost see her; she is standing in my blind spot, only just out of sight. I can hear the swish of her clothing; I can see her shadow shifting on the wall. I don’t dare turn but go on writing, each loop and stroke a kind of summoning, conjuring my grandchild into being.
What is it going to take, I wonder, to find the bridge that spans our separate worlds?
The envelope sits there, propped against the windowsill, for weeks. I stare at the blue letters of her name, Liliana Thurmann Ferrero, that has José’s name and Graciela’s name, which is also my name, within it. I stare at the wide white space below it filled with everything I don’t know about her: a name without a person, a letter in want of an address.
7
Buenos Aires
September 1987
Her mother has returned from the nursery with a new type of rose. She unwraps it from the newspaper, hacks through its plastic pot with the secateurs, then sets it aside while she works at deepening the hole.
Ana glances at the angry leaves, at the anorexic branches malevolent with thorns. She is mystified by what her mother sees in roses, even the ones she’s taken such care over grafting; the stems themselves are treacherous, the plants as ugly as skeletons for most of the year.
Her mamá catches the look in Ana’s eye and laughs. Those small brown nobbles will soon start sprouting leaves, she tells her, and the blooms will be exquisite, their scent more lovely than any perfume.
Then she hides the tag with a picture of the rose bush blossoming – she wants to keep the colour a surprise.
Ana can’t remember the last time she had an hour alone with her mother; sometimes it feels as if her mamá doesn’t live with them at all. She doesn’t help Ana get ready for school in the mornings; it’s her papá who sets out the tostadas and the breakfast jam. After school, and though the nuns insist she has to practise, Ana can’t sit at the piano because her mamá is having a sleep or is fighting a headache – it’s the first thing that Luisa, hurrying from the laundry in her pale blue apron, tells her when she opens the door.
This morning, her father went out early to see his accountant; her mother ventured downstairs soon after he left. It’s the first time Ana has seen her out in the garden in ages, despite the fact that roses are her favourite thing.
Ana has missed her. When was the last time they varnished their toenails China Town red, she wonders, or flipped through the pages of magazines to size up the fashions abroad?
A gust of wind snatches the sheet of newspaper the shrub came wrapped in and flings it across the lawn. Ana chases after it and stomps on it with her sneaker. Then she bunches it into a cabbage and goes to kick it between the fence posts when her mother intervenes.
‘It’s dirty, darling,’ she says to her. ‘Be a good girl and drop it in the bin.’
The gardening bin sits around the side of the house on the way to the passion-fruit vine. It is already full of rose cuttings and dead branches that are no use on the compost heap.
Ana tosses the newspaper ball on top of it, and just before the lid crashes down she glimpses an intriguing word. ‘MISSING’, it says, and after it, ‘CAN YOU HELP?’. She is just about to retrieve it to see if a reward is offered when she hears her mother call.
‘Anita!’ she says. ‘Can you come and give me a hand?’
Ana releases the handle and the lid falls shut with a thud. She bounds over the grass and skids to a stop an inch from the Autumn Damask, earning her a momentary frown.
Her mother is holding the new shrub by the base where the thorns are scarce.
‘Will you take it for me? Carefully now. I can’t do it with just one hand.’
Ana pulls on her gloves – with a frisson of fear that a spider might be lurking in the fingers – and replaces her mother’s grip. She is surprised to find how heavy the plant is for what is mostly a collection of sticks.
Grit and soil rain onto the grass as her mother fans out the roots. Then she takes the shrub back and lowers it into the hole.
‘There,’ she says, rubbing an itch on her nose with the back of her wrist. Ana, who has already yanked her gloves off, leans over to help her scratch.
‘Thank you, corazón,’ her mamá says with a smile.
Ana, who can hear Adriana shouting at Paco to stay away from the pool while the pump is working, basks for a moment in her smile. Ana is not allowed next door any more, not since the accident she had in the swimming pool, but she still likes their neighbours and sometimes drops by quietly to say hello.
The watering can sounds like the arpeggio she hasn’t practised when Ana goes to fill it at the tap. Her elbows lock under the weight of it as she wobbles across the garden, trying not to water her feet.
After the watering comes a layer of straw to ensure that the roots stay warm.
‘It’s like putting a baby to bed,’ says Ana, watching her mother pat everything down.
‘It is a bit like that,’ her mamá says, with a laugh. ‘When you arrived it was a toss-up, you know, but you were lucky – we decided to give you a cot.’
Ana pictures her infant self in a pile of hay, and giggles; it’s been ages since her mother has made her laugh. Her mamá smiles and kisses her on the forehead, and that is when she tells her about the baby.
How, a few years after she married Ana’s father, she got pregnant. How the baby arrived too early. How it died soon after it was born.
Ana is stunned. She is ten years old and has always believed herself an only child, the pivot of her parents’ world. She can’t imagine sharing them with anyone with a prior claim.
‘Would I have had a brother or a sister?’ she asks after a moment, her ears still buzzing with the shock.
‘You’d have had an elder brother, my darling,’ her mamá says. She gives Ana a squeeze with the crook of her arm because her gloves are all covered in dirt.
Suddenly, Ana thinks about Leo, the secret boy whose photo she keeps hidden in the back of a warehouse drawer.
‘What was his name?’ she says.
‘We didn’t get around to naming him, sweetheart. He died too soon. We couldn’t even get him baptised.’
Ana ponders her words.
‘And where is he buried?’ she says.
‘We couldn’t bury him either, querida. I don’t think your papá wanted to. The hospital just took him away.’
Ana’s head is awhirl. It gives her a funny feeling to think about having a brother; she wonders in which room he
would have slept. It makes the balance of their family life feel different, their rapport somehow unsettled, as if a shadow family were hovering behind the family they were.
8
Isle of Skye, Scotland
September 1988
‘Scotland.’
‘Sussex.’
‘The Hebrides.’
‘Brighton.’
‘Skye.’
We’ve known each other for two years now, but never have we managed to go away. When Daniela tells me she has a weeklong break in her schedule, I tally up the days I’m owed by the company and suggest that we travel some-where.
‘The Isle of Skye?’ Daniela cocks her head over the map of Britain we’ve unfolded on the kitchen table. ‘Brighton’s so much closer, you know . . .’
‘The further the better,’ I tell her, tracing the craggy relief of an island that is shaped like a half-submerged hand. ‘Since we have this opportunity . . . let’s go and see what’s there.’
After so much time in cities, I am drawn to how I imagine it: all mountains and wind-rush and sea.
‘You do realise,’ she says, with the one-dimple smile that appears when she has yet to be persuaded, ‘that it’s one of those places they mention on the Shipping News.’
Daniela once met the person who presents it, while standing in line at the BBC canteen. Later, we’d tuned in to the midnight broadcast to hear its incantation, like eavesdroppers on some ancient Saxon rite.
‘So we won’t be short of weather,’ I say.
‘That’s one thing you can count on,’ she says.
We catch an overnight train from London, shooting past cities with famous names and streets I cannot picture, ascending the spine of a country I barely know. Sometime around dawn we cross an invisible border and are stunned by views of the sea. Then we’re stumbling into Edinburgh, disoriented by the earliness of the light.
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