Ana has never heard of this obedience thing and wonders how it will affect them at school.
But her father explains that it is a very good law that the president brought in a few years back to protect soldiers who followed their orders.
‘So why are they talking about it now?’ she says.
‘Oh, some crackpots are agitating to get rid of it.’
Still, Ana is puzzled. Aren’t soldiers meant to follow orders? She doesn’t understand why they need a special law about it. Nor, now that they have one, why anyone would want to take it away.
It’s in response to all her questions that her father decides to tell her about the war.
He explains how the armed forces were heroes who saved the country from terrorism and the communist peril. He says there are people who fail to understand what the police and military have done for them, and who think that those who defended the nation ought to be punished instead.
Ana is struggling to keep up. She’s heard about the war in the Malvinas; she was only small at the time but she can remember the streets full of flags.
‘So these people think those islands ought to be British?’
‘Not that war, Ana. I’m not talking about the Malvinas. I’m talking about the one that went on before.’
Ana is surprised. She had no idea there’d been another war.
‘It began before you were born, and was over by about the time you were starting school.’
‘Where did they have it?’ she says, scanning the farmland stretching flatly to the horizon. She imagines barbed-wire fences and trenches, and tanks rocking over the top of them the way she’d seen in films.
‘It was everywhere,’ her father says. ‘All of Argentina was under threat.’
Everywhere? She hasn’t seen any ruined buildings, or army tanks rusting in the streets.
‘But where did they have the actual fighting?’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ he tells her. ‘The whole country was crawling with subversives – they were hidden among the general population. They were murdering people and kidnapping people, they were stirring up trouble in the factories . . . We had to be smart and fight by different methods – by gathering information. By using intelligence.’
‘Intelligence?’
‘We brought them in for questioning. Cross-referenced what they told us. Built up a picture of who they knew and what they did.’
‘And did it work?’ She turns to look at him but his eyes stay focused on the road.
‘We got a lot of them, but that sort of battle – to purify the country – it’s never-ending, you know.’
‘So why do people want to punish the soldiers?’
‘There are people who don’t understand things properly, Anita. Human rights people. Lawyers. Those Grandmothers they sometimes talk to on TV.’
‘Like that lady who came to the warehouse?’
Her father stiffens. ‘What lady?’ he says.
‘You know, the one who screamed at you that time.’
‘Who?’ he says, and then remembers. ‘Oh, that woman? That was years ago! No, she was harmless. A loony.’ He taps the side of his head. ‘You know. Psychologically deranged.’ He clears his throat as he changes gear. ‘What I mean is, there are people out there who have never accepted what the country was up against, or even what their own children did. And now they are looking for revenge – for instance, by getting rid of laws like Due Obedience, and sometimes, by breaking up people’s families. Especially ones in the military and the police.’
Ana looks up. ‘Are we in danger, Papá?’ she says, suddenly afraid.
‘Of course not, Anita,’ he says, smiling at her sideways. ‘I’m just telling you so you know what’s going on.’
‘Then why doesn’t someone explain it to those people? They probably don’t know all the facts.’
‘They don’t want to listen, Ana. There are people like that. Brainwashed people. Fanatics. People you cannot reason with.’
Her uncle’s quinta lies just beyond Rosario and they pull in at the top of the drive. Apart from the stables, there is a big house with a swimming pool, and hammocks on the veranda, and a giant barbecue they use for the Saturday asado. Her aunt and uncle go there nearly every weekend.
Often Ana finds it tedious, being roped into rounds of table tennis with César, or going kayaking with him and Sancho on the river, while her father and uncle go indoors for their military chats. She’s not keen on the watchdogs either, German shepherds that growl at her, and force her to take the long way round to the stables to keep out of their path.
That’s because, more than anything, it’s with the horses that she wants to spend her time.
She grows to love the smell of straw and sawdust, and the astringent reek of ammonia, as she walks Jacinta in circles around the yard. Soon she has made such progress that she is allowed to go further afield.
She glows with pride when her father, who sometimes comes to watch her, praises her riding posture or her skill at keeping the horses under control. This time, watching her set off through the tall grass by the creek-bed, he cheers when she and Jacinta clear the fence.
Always, driving home on Sundays, the two of them stop for hamburgers, always at the same hamburger place. She barters her fluorescent tubes of mustard for his portions of tomato ketchup; they drink Coca-Cola through double straws and pull faces when the bubbles make them burp.
At an outside table on the homebound road on Sunday, they’re finishing their fries and are about to go back to the car.
‘How’d you like to have your own riding gear?’ her father says all of a sudden. ‘If you think you’d get good use out of them, you’re probably big enough now to have your own helmet and boots.’
Ana stares at him, for a moment unable to speak. She cannot think of any greater happiness. She leaps up from her side of the table and flings her arms around her father’s neck.
‘Thank you, Papá,’ she says.
When they get home, she goes to see her mother and finds her where she’d left her, still in bed. Her father says he is tired from all the driving and pours himself a whisky, then switches on the TV in the den.
Ana sits on the edge of her mother’s eiderdown. A feeling a little like guilt, a little like disloyalty, prickles at the back of her neck. She has much more fun with her father than she has ever had with her mother. She decides she will not mention the helmet and boots.
‘How was it, corazón?’ Her mamá turns towards her in her lilac nightdress, the same one she was wearing when they’d said goodbye.
‘Good, Mamá,’ she says. Ana sees the broken veins on her mother’s cheekbone, and wonders when the last time might have been that she’d brushed her hair.
‘Did you have a nice time with your cousins?’
‘It was okay. I played ping-pong with César again.’
‘Oh, dear – well I’m sure he appreciated it. How are your aunt and uncle?’
‘They’re good, Mamá; they send their love. Pascual’s knee is getting better. Lorena had to go into Rosario so I didn’t get to see her all that much.’
‘And did you ride Jacinta?’
‘Yes, Mamá,’ she says. ‘We went a long way up the creek. I saw a dead fox.’
‘I hope you were wearing a helmet, Anita. I don’t like your going off on long rides on your own.’
‘It’s fine with Jacinta, Mamá. She’s very gentle. She’s not a nervous horse.’
‘Well, you mustn’t do any jumping. I don’t want you carted home with a broken leg.’
Ana thinks about the fence, but doesn’t mention it. Her mamá hasn’t directly asked her . . . She wonders whether it’s dishonest not to say.
‘Mamá,’ she says instead, and pauses. ‘You should come with us next time.’
If her mother would only come to the quinta with them, she could see Ana ride for herself.
Her mother looks at her and smiles. ‘Next time I will, my darling,’ she says, patting Ana on the back of
her hand.
11
Mexico City
January 1992
‘Why don’t you write to her?’ Daniela says. ‘Why don’t you write her a letter and publish it in the Argentine press?’
The morning sun is filtering through the windows, through the branches of the jacaranda that has already lost most of its leaves. The shouts of a hawker selling day-of-the-dead effigies well after the Día de Muertos, and Judas puppets well ahead of Easter, reach us above the clatter of his wheels. Daniela leans over the window-ledge, over the branch pecked bald below us where the neighbour’s parrot perches, to see what the noise is about.
More than I’d ever dared hope, Daniela has taken to Mexico City and loves living in this old neighbourhood, where the cobbled streets and glimpses of mountains remind her of the place she grew up. On top of that, she has managed to pick up freelance work for Mexican and US radio, as well as for the BBC.
‘When is it that they burn the Judas dolls?’ she says. ‘I’d love to do a piece on that.’
She looks beautiful this morning, I think. She has cut her hair so it is just above her shoulders, and both of us are more relaxed than we ever were in London, despite this city’s panoply of stress.
‘What do you mean, publish a letter?’ I say.
Since learning what I learned from Inés, for me the end of January has never been an easy time. It’s the anniversary of Liliana’s birthday, and it reminds me how fast the years are passing without any breakthrough in my search. The ‘Missing’ notice I update each year for the newspapers raises my hopes for days beforehand, only to have them dissipate in the silence that ensues.
‘In Toluca I hear they blow them up with fireworks,’ Daniela is saying. The Judas figures fascinate her; the ones the hawker is trundling past our apartment, papier-mâché devils with horns and sombreros, are roughly as big as an infant and painted a fire-engine red.
‘Daniela?’
She turns back to me from the window.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘A letter, yes, why not? You could write to her “on the occasion of her fifteenth birthday” and publish it in the papers. It occurred to me on Sunday when all those quinceañera girls were gathering outside the church. Don’t they make a big deal of it in Argentina when you turn fifteen?’
She’s right about the fifteenth birthday parties, though they’re nowhere near as elaborate as the fiestas here. Still, the idea of a published letter makes me nervous. I feel reticent about making public the details of what until now has been a family affair.
‘I don’t know, Daniela. Don’t you think we ought to be careful who we alert?’
‘Your Missing notice may have already alerted them, Osvaldo. And, anyway, isn’t exposure the whole point?’
‘And if it’s seen by whoever she’s living with?’
‘Well, isn’t that what you want? If they’re good people they might respond to you. And if they’ve appropriated her – well, what are they going to do? And who knows? Maybe someone who recognises her will tell her about it. Maybe she will see it herself.’
I stand beside Daniela at the open window. Wood pigeons are brooding in the jacaranda’s upper branches; soon the parrot will notice and scare them away. I put my arm about her waist and lean my forehead against her head.
‘And if it has the opposite effect? Frightening her. Pushing her into hiding, as it were . . .’
‘Then you won’t have lost anything, will you?’ she says. ‘And at least she’d have something to think about while she hides.’
In the back of my mind I’m nervous on other grounds. A public appeal might entail unspecified dangers, after all the amnesties and the pardons they’ve been handing out.
‘Not if you go through Teodoro,’ Daniela says, when I finally give voice to those fears. ‘You don’t have to publish your name.’
Our conversation is punctuated by the whistle of a passing knife-sharpener, then by the racket of the gas deliveryman, whose passage is signalled by the chain of metal rings he drags along the cobbles behind his truck.
‘We could record some good sound if we went to Toluca.’ Daniela is thinking aloud. ‘We could use the Judas dolls to explore Mexican ideas about betrayal, which would lead us to La Malinche, and maybe La Llorona, the mythical woman who weeps for her missing children, and how the two of them sometimes get confused.’
I’m listening with only half an ear to this talk of weeping women and Judas dolls. Daniela’s idea of a letter is starting to make sense.
I show what I have written to Daniela, since she is better than I am at expressing her thoughts in words. Both she and Julieta suggest a couple of improvements before I fax the page to Teodoro. He promises to show it to Constanza and José’s parents, and get a copy to Yolanda’s brother Ricardo in La Plata.
There is a bit of a commotion in the media when the letter appears. Though Teodoro sent it in as an advertisement rather than a news item, it gets picked up by national radio, and a couple of papers write stories about it of their own.
Extracts from my ‘Birthday Letter to my Unknown Granddaughter’ – Daniela suggested the title – appear under headlines like ‘Where is Liliana?’ and ‘Girl with the Wrong Name’.
Again, Constanza bundles up the copies and posts them to Mexico City; the letter, she says, even got a mention on the television news.
Over the following days I jump at every phone call, and invent excuses to visit the post office, though Teodoro, I know, would have called if there’d been any word. To get out of the house I make trips to the local bakery, returning with pastries we have no need for, and make detours that go past Sanborns to pick up newspapers that have no news.
But after the initial excitement, nothing transpires. No fifteen-year-old gets in touch with Teodoro, nobody writes to say they know who she is. The letter floats away unanswered, like a feather on the surface of the sea.
What does arrive is an envelope sent by courier, postmarked the United States. It is large and yellow and contains a note from Julieta, as well as two hand-drawn cards.
‘It was the kids’ idea,’ she tells me in her spiky handwriting. ‘When I told Felipe you were writing a birthday letter for Liliana, the kids piped up saying they wanted to send one too.’
The cards have been folded into separate envelopes, and both have Liliana’s name across the front. Paulina has plotted the letters in pea-green marker pen, with circles above the ‘i’s and hearts in a crayon procession around the edge. Mateo, who is left-handed, has written the ‘L’s in Liliana sloping backwards, like a skater slipping backwards over ice.
Julieta has left the envelopes unsealed, guessing I would want to have a look inside.
Paulina, at six and a half, has drawn a giant rainbow with flowers and hearts floating in an open sky. Julieta must have given her some help with the spelling.
Happy Birthday Liliana,
I am sad that you are lost but when you are found I will show you my tadpoles.
Love from Paulina
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mateo’s is decorated with hand-drawn animals, alligators and jaguars and guanacos – which he loves all the more since hardly anyone knows what they are.
Dear Liliana,
Happy Birthday to you.
We are looking everywhere for you. I hope you read the newspapers in Argentina, because Abuelo put an ad in there. You may not have noticed because you might not have recognised your name.
When we find you, if you want you can come and live at our house. We live in Miami USA. If you don’t speak English we will teach you. It’s good here, except for my sister.
I hope to see you soon,
Lots of love from
Mateo xoxoxoxoxoxox
I stare at the cards and smile at the way they imagine her, at how naturally they accept she exists. For them, I suppose, the age of storybooks is not so distant: Hansel and Gretel escape, after all; Red Riding Hood finds her way home. Perhaps it is less of a leap of faith than I’d imagine
d, for them to assume she’ll be found.
And as I read their words and look at the drawings they have done on shirt-box cardboard, something shifts in me too. They have dislodged Liliana from abstraction; she is a person they draw cards for and make plans for; they fill me again with hope.
There is a P.S. at the bottom of Mateo’s card. ‘Put yours here,’ he has written, with an arrow to the cardboard’s edge.
I turn it over. On the back, in orange crayon, he has traced the outline of his hand.
PART IV
THE CAVE OF THE HANDS
1994–1998
1
Mexico City
December 1994
It is our third winter in Mexico City and our jacaranda is shedding its leaves early this year. Last year’s seedpods hang like pilfered purses from its branches, while its roots dislodge the footpath tiles as if the tree itself were straining to get away.
Tethered to his perch, the parrot perfects his rumba moves behind camouflage getting thinner by the day.
More and more I love these Mexican winters. It is chilly in the mornings but by noon the temperature has climbed back up to the twenties; the sun still has some warmth in it and there are months to go before the seasonal rains.
Julieta has brought Mateo and Paulina to stay with us for Christmas, and Felipe has managed to accompany them this time, too.
Daniela, who has been working down in Chiapas, has just at this moment returned. Watching from the window, Mateo sees her alight from her Beetle taxi; then I’m embracing her in the doorway, smelling the wood-smoke in her clothing, my face in her jungle-combed hair.
As I relieve her of her recording equipment, I sense how tired she is, how difficult the week has been. But she is thrilled to see the children, who have adopted her as their abuela. Mateo, fifteen now, is closest to her and she spoils him like a grandson, but talks to him like a man.
‘Daniela, can we get a piñata, a real one?’ says Paulina, jumping up to hug her as soon as I step away.
Mateo is hard on his sister’s heels. ‘What was it like in the jungle?’ he says, his excitement spiking in a high-pitched note that sends Paulina into a fit of giggles.
The Memory Stones Page 20