We order eggs and bacon in a café near the station, filling in time before we go to pick up the car. Under her mug of tea, Daniela unfolds the map of Scotland, which suddenly looks more daunting now we’re actually there.
‘Three hundred and eighty kilometres to go,’ she says. ‘Ready for a little drive?’
The journey is a blur of forests and russet hillsides, of castles returning to the stone they once were hewn from, of mercury rivulets rushing to valley floors.
Rain curtains us in, then lifts to dazzling sunlight, to rainbows presaging other rainbows, and lochs that are linked to other lochs by rivers that that are shallow and fast. Cloud erases Ben Nevis from the landscape. We stop for coffee anyway and the publican, in a dialect Daniela later translates for me, tells the story of last year’s hikers who vanished off the mountain in the snow.
Fog envelops us as Daniela takes over at the wheel. Hail batters the roof like golf balls, then sunshine bleeds through the clouds. We pass ruins and restorations, and bridges to prickly islands, and sites of long-ago massacres that soaked the glens in blood.
Suddenly the road flies over a saddle of rock, and the earth plunges like it’s the Rift Valley floor. We pull over, stilled by the sight of it. The landscape, like a silver-nitrate photograph, is refracted through a thousand raindrops that the sun has tinted golden on the windshield – the world afire through a globe of ice.
‘You never told me it’d be like this,’ I say.
She smiles back at me, black eyes aglow in the orange light.
‘You never asked,’ she says.
It’s still daylight when we catch the ferry at Lochalsh and arrive at last on Skye. In Kyleakin we pick up the key and a few provisions, then follow the coastal road. We travel inland before the sea comes into sight again; the road gets narrower and narrower until it runs out altogether, ending in a jetty and a tumble of lobster pots.
There is a shingle beach and the house is set just back from it, a whitewashed fisherman’s cottage sheltered by a low stone wall and a tree. The mountains glare at us like intruders from across the water; behind the house, the top of the cliff is rusty with reddish grass.
We are too tired to cook so we unpack the car and drive back to the pub we noticed on the way. We toast our arrival with whisky from a local distillery that the barman through his whiskers recommends.
Over the next few days we explore. We puzzle over ancient standing stones whose existence seems to have outlasted what they mean. Rugged up in all our clothing, we scramble along the trails of mountain chains whose summits we never see. We hike to the Pinnacles on a coastal path that cuts through grass so green it looks electric.
Daniela clambers up to a cluster of rocks while I wait for her at the bottom of the path. I see her bobbing and disappearing between the outcrops before she emerges at the summit and waves. She sits there awhile staring out at the sea while, high above, an eagle slips and regains its hold on the wind.
From below, I watch her descend. Buffeted by a breeze that is full of the ocean, she inches along the path. Hunched into her anorak, she is alone against a backdrop of sea.
There is such solitude about her, I think, as she gets closer. Behind her vivacity there is a quietness as unknowable as the standing stones.
When she reaches me I take her in my arms. She stands there, hair in her eyes, hands thrust deep into her pockets, leaning her weight against me as I shelter her from the wind.
We stop at a pub beside a bridge medallioned with lichen, over a stream racing with runoff from the hills. Salmon is on the menu so we eat there, and sink into the warmth of an alcove, our faces still tingling from the cold. By the time we leave it is after nightfall; we carve tunnels with our headlights through the dark.
We turn onto the road that is meant to lead to our cottage, but familiar forms shift shape and make us doubt. Was this the farm? Was that the stand of trees? The road pushes back when I press on the accelerator so I ease off again, slowing into the undulations of the land. We round a curve, pass the bulk of a barn that is protected by trees meshed into a wind break, and come face to face with a stag.
I stop the car and dim the lights so as not to blind him. Antlers aloft, he towers over us like some mythical beast. He stands for a long time watching us as we watch him, none of us daring to move.
Then, as suddenly as we’ve come upon him, he tosses his head and bolts. He rears out of the earth in a single movement, bucking as if in response to a secret summoning, and swerves through a gap in the trees. The smell of peat and sea-borne cold streams through the open windows; we roll forward to see if we still can see.
But he has vanished; the starless night has swallowed him. The only proof that we encountered him lies in the syncopated thudding of our hearts.
‘Did I dream that?’ Daniela says as we wind down out of the valley, the two of us still in awe.
‘I think we both did,’ I say.
For people who live here, such creatures must be as familiar as the landscape. For us exiled South Americans he is a thing of wonder, an enigma that stepped out of the wild.
Inside the cottage the air is freezing and the bed sheets have stiffened with the cold. Daniela’s rings clink like ice-cubes against the glass-topped table; she slithers under the blankets bringing a draught of icy air.
‘I have one word for you, if you’ll allow me,’ she says, slipping an arm across my ribcage, fitting her knees into the backs of mine.
‘Tell me then,’ I say, ready for any of a hundred things.
‘Shipping-news.’
‘Shipping News? That’s two words!’
‘Not if you use a hyphen – as in shipping-news report.’
‘Okay,’ I say, picking my battles, ‘so you were right about the weather – although to be fair, today it didn’t rain.’
‘You forget the wind-chill factor,’ she says, feet icy on the backs of my calves.
‘Okay, so it’s been a little chilly.’
‘Chilly!’ she says. ‘You’re talking to a Latina, remember!’
‘Come here,’ I say, turning to face her, and hugging her to warm her, hoping that that might also thaw the sheets. ‘Apart from the cold, do you think it’s been worth coming all this way?’
‘That’s a big “apart from”,’ she says, but then concedes: ‘I did like seeing the stag.’
‘The stag!’ I say. ‘Is that all?’
‘Is that all? That stag was amazing!’ she says.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘But has that been the only good thing?’
‘Well,’ she says. ‘Not only that.’
‘So – what else then?’
‘Well, the salmon was good.’
‘The salmon!’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Very fresh. Very good.’
‘And the walk on the cliffs?’
‘Oh, yes, that too, that was quite good,’ she says. ‘A little windy, maybe . . .’
She lifts her head and smiles at me in the darkness.
‘Quite good?’
‘Okay, yes, it was very good.’
‘And the standing stones?’
‘Oh, yes, I forgot them. So earnest, yet so forgotten. Yes, I liked those stones very much.’
‘And the pub with the bridge? And the whisky?’
‘Oh, yes, I liked them too. And the whiskery barman selling the whisky.’
‘So you like everything!’ I say. ‘You are having a good time!’
She laughs out loud. ‘Did you doubt it?’
‘I don’t know. I was worried. You were right – it is quite a long way. And there is a bit of a breeze . . .’
I have been teasing her but behind the teasing is another question that’s been hovering for a while between us, and she picks it up right away. She knows that I mean Sergio, her husband who was killed in Chile, how she feels about coming away with me.
‘Out there on the path today, when I was climbing those rocks and the cloud lifted for a moment and you could see right over the sea to those
other islands, and there was that eagle . . .’ Her voice becomes suddenly serious. ‘I couldn’t help thinking about him, you know.’
She has released me and is lying back on her pillow, staring up into the dark.
‘It’s like that sometimes. He comes back to me at certain moments. Sometimes he seems so present I can almost feel it. And then the sense of him recedes. And the strange thing is that it feels okay. Honestly. Here, and in London too, I am fine with it. It feels – I don’t know how to say it exactly – peaceful somehow. That he would be all right with it, with my being with you, with my going on living, that is.’
I rest my forehead against her shoulder and let her speak.
‘You must have moments like that too, sometimes,’ she says. ‘It must be strange for you to be here with me, as if I’m taking Yolanda’s place.’
I leave my head where it is and try to think how to respond. It’s been six years, but it is so rare, and therefore still so hard to hear her name. I will never forget; it is not possible . . . But Daniela leaves me that private space that I leave her, and just as I accept Sergio, she seems to accept Yolanda as part of who I am.
‘Strange – I don’t know. A bit, sometimes. But it doesn’t feel contradictory . . . Perhaps these things are just different,’ I say.
I don’t know how to express what I feel without it sounding like a demand for reciprocity, so I think a moment more.
‘I’ve wanted so much to go away with you,’ I say finally. ‘And if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here on this weathery island, travelling so far north it’ll soon be south, subjecting you to freezing winds and a bed of frosty sheets.’
‘You’re not subjecting me to anything, Osvaldo,’ she says, taking my hand and bringing it to her face. ‘Everything that’s happened, I’ve wanted to happen.’ She pauses a moment. ‘I’m happy we’re together,’ she says.
9
London
January 1990
The rain has stopped and the streets, rinsed clean, are gleaming; tyres suck at the tarmac, and exhaust fumes from the buses and taxis billow on the clarified air.
Night has already fallen when I go to meet Daniela and find her waiting at the entrance to Bush House. I kiss her and ask her about her day as we set off through the city; the rings I expect to feel cold on my skin are warm from the heat of her hand.
We cut through Covent Garden and head towards Cambridge Circus. The West End’s neon turns the puddles to cathedral glass that is shattered by the passing cars. We are heading to the Italian bistro that, even on a Friday evening, always finds a way to fit us in.
Beads of moisture race down the steamed-up windows; inside, the tables are crammed with students going on to the movies or the Comedy Store.
We tear open the packets of grissini, and suddenly, fleetingly, I am reminded of the girls as children: of the breadstick duels they engaged in, the orchestras they pretended to conduct.
We start on the wine before the cannelloni arrives in dishes that sear the tablecloth as if marked by a burning tyre. Pepper is added from a grinder the length of an axle and the Parmesan comes in a bowl with a hubcap lid.
The warmth inside the restaurant is soporific. When the cinema rush thins out we order espressos, and Daniela fights and then succumbs to the temptation to smoke.
The food and wine make me feel expansive, and though I hadn’t intended to revive the issue this evening, the subject seems to arise of its own accord.
‘Daniela,’ I say, my hand on hers. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about Mexico again.’
She looks up at me, curls of smoke tangling with the rain-damped twists of her hair.
‘Thinking what about Mexico again?’
Too late, I realise I should have waited. But now that I’ve started, I have to plough on.
‘About going,’ I say.
She throws me a guarded look, trying not to anticipate my words.
‘Going – what – for a visit? For a holiday? Forever?’
I take a breath, and tell her. ‘I want to go back to Latin America.’
Suddenly the things that have been building come pouring out, unstoppable as the morning’s rain. That I’m getting older. That I want to move to some Spanish-speaking place that isn’t Argentina. That I’m tired of living this rootless, provisional life.
I can see her face adjusting. Her dancing eyes are wary, trying to gauge how set upon this I am.
‘We all miss home, Osvaldo, and moving to Mexico won’t change it. It will only give you another place to miss.’
Her rings catch in the skeins of her hair as she runs her fingers through it, then she folds her hands on the table in the form of an X.
‘I know, Daniela. But I can’t keep doing what I’m doing. This job, this whole commercial thing . . . It was only meant to be for a little while.’
‘Perhaps principles are a luxury for an exile,’ she says, surprising me with the bitterness of her tone.
I know how hard she works to make ends meet in London, how in Chile she’d once had a career that she believed in, how her shifts at the BBC are never enough. I know how long it has taken to have her own programme, and now that she has one, what a difference it has made. I feel a rush of shame at what I’m asking, knowing what she would have to give up.
‘I don’t suppose any of us asked to be an exile,’ I say. ‘I just didn’t expect to lose so much of myself.’
‘And Mexico is going to fix that?’ she says. Her cigarette is turning to ash between her fingers. ‘You’d go back to surgery over there?’
I shake my head. ‘It’s not very likely now. But I might be able to teach at one of the medical schools. As far as I know’ – I try feebly to joke – ‘anatomy hasn’t much changed.’
‘Have you thought about Spain?’ she says after a moment. ‘You could go to Madrid, or Barcelona. It’s less expensive than London, and it would feel more Latin. At least we wouldn’t be so far apart.’
Something slips inside me. She is not coming. She will not leave with me.
‘I can’t see any point in moving to Spain,’ I tell her. ‘I might as well be in France or Holland or England. It’s just as far from home.’
‘Home,’ she says. ‘For me that’s England now.’
She doesn’t want to go back to Chile, she has always said so, even now that Pinochet has gone.
‘Daniela,’ I say. I reach for both her hands across the table. ‘I want you to come to Mexico with me.’
Her gaze goes deep inside me, touching all the histories of my heart.
‘And start all over again in a whole new country, with neither home nor income, where the currency collapses every six years?’
‘It’s Latin America,’ I say. ‘We both know it’s full of problems. But so is the United States. So is Europe . . . I don’t fit in here, Daniela, not really. The language, the humour – God, I even miss the weather. I know you miss them all too.’
‘Don’t start, Osvaldo. You know it’s not fair.’ She withdraws her hands, sits back.
But I want this, and I don’t want to go without her, so I continue.
‘Why shouldn’t we have these things, Daniela? In Mexico we’d both be closer to where we come from. I’d be closer to Julieta and her children. You’d find work in Mexico City. And it’s full of other exiles, people like us.’
She doesn’t interrupt so I keep going.
‘At work, the company has expanded and now they want to restructure; they’ve been talking about it for a while. Soon they’ll want to retire me in any case. If I talk to them, I’m sure we could sort out something. Maybe we could even buy a place in Mexico City, some place big enough to give you an office at home.’
‘I don’t know a soul in Mexico City,’ she says. Her voice is flat. She is leaning way back in her chair.
‘We’ll find people. Arturo, Carla, they’ll have friends there. Maybe people at the radio . . .’ I take a deep breath. ‘It’s not only for emotional reasons, Daniela. I don’t know if it
’s selfish, but it would be easier for me, you know, with regard to Liliana, to Graciela. It would help to be in the right hemisphere, in the right time zone, in case there are things I need to do . . .’
I pause to let my thoughts catch up.
‘But it’s not only that,’ I say. ‘I’m tired of drifting. I want to shape the next part of my life. Te quiero, Daniela. I love you, and I want you to be part of it. That’s why I want you to come.’
She remains silent, then notices the ash that’s inching towards her fingers. She stubs the cigarette out like a full stop.
‘Have you decided when you’re going?’ she says.
I flinch at the ‘you’. Her voice is soft but I know that she is upset.
‘Nothing’s decided, Daniela, nothing. This is the first time I’ve formulated it properly. I wanted to see what you thought, if you could contemplate it.’ I take another breath. ‘I don’t want to choose between Mexico and you.’
‘Don’t do this, Osvaldo. This is your decision. You can’t make it all hinge on me.’
‘But that’s how I feel,’ I say, helpless, not knowing what else to say.
She is toying with her espresso cup, trying to thread the handle with the spoon.
‘I can’t decide just like that, Osvaldo,’ she says. ‘I have a life here. I need to think.’
‘Will you do that?’ I say, heart lifting because she hasn’t said no, hoping. I take her hand and hold it across the scars on the tablecloth. ‘Will you do that?’ I say. ‘Will you at least give it some thought?’
10
Province of Santa Fe, Argentina
April 1990
‘What’s “Due Obedience”, Papá?’ Ana says.
They are in the car, just Ana and her father, driving to her uncle’s quinta in Santa Fe. They’ve had the radio on but her papá, who gets annoyed by all the lies the journalists broadcast, switches it off a few moments into the news.
The Memory Stones Page 19