The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘Kids, let Daniela at least get through the doorway!’ says Felipe.

  ‘And,’ says Julieta, ‘whatever happened to saying hello?’

  ‘Hello, Daniela!’ they chime.

  I catch Julieta’s eye with a glance that transforms her frown into a complicit smile. She’s been a mother for ages but somehow it still astonishes me: the little girl I used to have to admonish for her exuberance, admonishing these children of her own.

  Daniela kisses everyone and flops into the nearest chair. She unlaces the boots she says she has practically slept in; she has brought back a spare set of footprints in the mud in the tread underneath.

  ‘It was fascinating, Mateo, in answer to your question,’ she says. ‘Though it was freezing cold and the roads down there would shake your fillings loose.’

  ‘I don’t have any fillings,’ says Paulina.

  ‘And no brains either,’ says Mateo, dodging his sister’s swipe.

  Daniela tells them about the villages they slept in: the frost on their blankets in the mornings; entire communities completely cut off by the rains.

  ‘Did the wild animals keep you awake?’ says Mateo.

  ‘Want to know what kept me awake? Roosters! They started crowing at four a.m.’

  ‘Four a.m.! That’s the middle of the night,’ says Paulina, who hates getting up in the mornings. Julieta has endless battles waking her in time for school.

  ‘Weren’t there any real animals?’ says Mateo. ‘Jaguars and pythons and things?’

  Daniela laughs. ‘One snake, but it was already dead and it wasn’t a python. And no jaguars – not any more – they’ve all gone,’ she says. ‘These days the most dangerous animals all live in the towns.’

  ‘Do jaguars live in the towns?’ Paulina says, eyes wide.

  ‘Dummy, she means people,’ Mateo says.

  Felipe fetches us beers from the kitchen. Paulina has climbed onto my lap, though by now she is too big for it; Mateo sprawls on the cushions at Daniela’s feet.

  ‘What a welcome!’ Daniela says, taking a beer and relaxing into her chair. ‘I can’t believe we’ve got you all here at once!’

  ‘Can I feed the parrot?’ says Mateo, leaping up to the window and leaning towards the tree. Having cocked its head, the bird is peering up at him, unused to entertainment from above.

  ‘You’ll have to ask the downstairs neighbours,’ Daniela says. ‘Actually, speaking of food, shall we stay in tonight or do you want to go out to eat?’

  ‘Out! Out!’ the kids say. They are crazy about Mexican food: they want quesadillas they want enchiladas they want chiles rellenos they want nopales.

  ‘Calm down, you kids – Pauli, you too,’ Felipe says. ‘Daniela’s just got back from travelling. She might like a night at home.’

  ‘No, let’s go out and celebrate,’ Daniela says. ‘There’s even an Argentine steak house round the corner if you feel like it. We can stay in and cook any time.’

  I smile helplessly at Julieta.

  ‘I think it’s been decided,’ I say.

  The apartment we have here is larger than the ones I had in Amsterdam or London; there is a sofa-bed in the living room and another room with bunk-beds for the kids. They have climbed into their pyjamas and wriggled under the blankets, and the chattering has finally quietened down.

  Felipe is already snoring in the living room. Julieta has at last stopped rummaging; she has found the earplugs she’d been looking for in her bag.

  I pull Daniela against me under the bedclothes. It feels good to have her back again in my arms.

  ‘Did you miss me?’ she says.

  ‘All the time,’ I say. And it’s true.

  She asks how my week has been. I fill her in on the sights we’ve seen in her absence: the pyramids, the Zócalo, the Opera Bar with Pancho Villa’s bullet hole in the ceiling. I tell her about my lecture, and how the Medical School has invited me to teach an additional class. Then she tells me about her reporting, how the material was so much better than they’d expected, how they might have to do a follow-up programme next year.

  We discuss our plans for Christmas, what we’ll need to buy from the market, the presents we still have to find. In the distance I hear the whining of a siren, then one of those five-tune car alarms repeating its full repertoire, then some shouting that soon fades away.

  We find that we are both whispering; then I follow her into sleep.

  ‘When are we going to meet Liliana, Abuelo?’

  Paulina is sitting under my desk as I organise my papers, catching the ones that slide off onto the floor. Felipe and Julieta have gone souvenir-hunting with Mateo in San Angel; Paulina, still adjusting, she says, to the altitude, slept in this morning and missed them. Daniela is going through her interviews while the house is still.

  I stop what I am doing and look at my granddaughter, a curious, fuzzy-haired nine-year-old in pyjamas sprinkled with stars.

  ‘I guess that’s something fate will decide.’

  ‘That’s not a very good answer,’ she says. She is her mother’s daughter, I note, unafraid to say what she thinks.

  I smile and explain that finding her isn’t something predictable, that we are doing whatever we can to put luck on our side.

  ‘When we find her,’ she says, ‘will she stay with you in Mexico or will she come and live with us?’

  ‘You can invite her,’ I say. ‘But she’s nearly a grown-up now. She is about to turn eighteen.’

  For Paulina, that presents no obstacle. ‘I can’t wait till we find her,’ she says, crawling out and sitting cross-legged on the rug. ‘It will be like having a big sister. I get sick of having a brother all the time.’

  I ask her to pass me a birthday card that has slipped out of the folder onto the floor. I’m filing the ‘MISSING’ notices in with the cards that she and Mateo have sent for Liliana over the years.

  ‘What do you think she’ll be like?’ I ask.

  Paulina’s answer is immediate, as if it’s a question she has already considered and resolved.

  ‘She’ll be very tall, with jet-black hair that she can sit on because she has decided not to cut it until she is found.’

  ‘The problem, though, is that she may not know she is lost.’

  ‘Sooner or later she’ll guess. She’ll notice she doesn’t look like anyone in her family, that no one has the same nose as her and no one has the same-colour hair. Then, she’ll start looking for clues.’

  I nod as she hands me a drawing Mateo did two years ago, when Liliana turned sixteen. ‘I hope you are right, Pauli.’

  I’m sorting through all the papers I’ve collected about Graciela and José and Liliana, placing them in the filing cabinet that we lugged home from Tepito one weekend. I need to find things easily; I need to order my correspondence with Teodoro, with Amnesty and the OAS and the UN committees in New York and Geneva, and the documents I gathered with Yolanda over the years.

  But there is another reason for this sorting. I want it all to be accessible. Before they leave I want Julieta to be able to locate these papers, if ever she has to take over where I’ve left off.

  ‘Abuelo?’

  ‘Yes, Paulina.’

  ‘How will we know she’s Liliana when we find her, if nobody has seen her before?’

  The way she asks the question, the way she tilts her chin towards me in the sunlight: for a second it could have been Julieta when she was a child. I set aside the papers I am holding and pull her onto my knee.

  ‘We might be able to tell. There might be a feeling, something about her that we’ll recognise. She might look a bit like her mamá did when she was about the same age. But nowadays there are ways to check scientifically; with a drop of her blood she can do a test to make sure.’

  ‘Like the princess who pricked her finger on the spinning wheel?’

  I smile. ‘A bit like that,’ I say.

  ‘So is her blood the same as our blood?’

  ‘It will have elements she got from our fam
ily and others from the family of her papá. That’s what the scientists look for. To see if the elements match up.’

  ‘What if they make a mistake?’

  I put my arms around her and hug her. ‘They do it very carefully and they check it lots of times. And they ask another laboratory to test it too, to make sure the results are the same. The chances are so small that if you do get a match, then you can rely on it ninety-nine point nine nine nine per cent.’

  I’m relieved she doesn’t ask how Liliana went missing. Julieta must have found a way to explain it to the children, because Paulina doesn’t ask what happened to Liliana’s parents, or about the circumstances in which she disappeared.

  ‘Now, Miss Bedbug,’ I say, setting her back on her feet, ‘some of us have work to do. Are you planning to get dressed before the others get back, or do we get to admire you in your star-spangled pyjamas all day?’

  My desk is piled high with folders. Apart from the reams of correspondence, there are articles about laws laid down and then rescinded, about sentences pronounced and then revoked. I shift aside the papers that have yet to be put in order to give myself room to think.

  Liliana is turning eighteen. When she does she will no longer be a minor. If there were some way I could reach her, if I could write to her and this time if she saw it, legally she would be entitled to act.

  I decide to write her another birthday letter. It has to be for the twenty-sixth of January, though I know she may not know the true date of her birth.

  In longhand, I try to formulate my thoughts.

  My dearest Liliana, I begin, then hesitate. Will ‘dearest’ seem presumptuous? I scratch it out and replace it with ‘dear’ instead.

  I describe how she’s been missing her entire life, how we searched for her even before she was born. I tell her about her parents: who they were and what they did, how proud of her they’d have been. I beg her, if she has any doubts about who she is, to listen and act upon them, no matter how confused she might feel.

  Daniela reads it over for me. We tussle over words like ‘lies’ and ‘truth’ and ‘pride’ and ‘love’ and ‘missing’: which ones to include, which ones would be better left out.

  When it is done, she suggests I send it to the television and radio stations that took up the matter three years ago, as well as to the Argentine press.

  Daniela and Paulina go out to meet the others, and I sit on alone in my study, watching the slats of sunlight travel over the rug on the floor.

  I want, I need to find my grandchild. I need to see her; I need just once to hold her in my arms. To me, her absence perpetuates an imbalance in the world, a misalignment in the seasons or the stars.

  I do my best to imagine her, just as the children have done. She is half her father’s daughter, I tell myself, not just Graciela’s child. Yet though she barely knew her mother, she may be all of Graciela that has survived.

  I take my glasses off and rub my eyes. Leaf shadows agitate the strips of fading sunlight; soon it is going to be dark. After England, night falls quickly – it still disconcerts me. Here in the impatient tropics, there is no time for dusk.

  I’m faxing the letter to Teodoro when I hear my family return.

  Mateo, face aglow, has his hands full of alebrijes. Luminous with kaleidoscopic markings, wood-carved dragons with lobster tails breathe fire across the kitchen table. Lizards like psychedelic unicorns scratch at horned and spine-covered monsters – surreal escapees from a dream.

  ‘Out of my kitchen, the lot of you!’ Daniela says, brandishing some weapons of her own.

  Mateo transports his painted army to the living room, trailing detachable quills and dragon flames.

  ‘Someone had to imagine them before they could exist,’ he tells me, explaining the story of the hallucinations from which the first alebrijes were born.

  Then, he hands me a parcel. A colourful claw carved from a tree-branch pokes through the racing news.

  ‘That one’s for Liliana,’ he tells me. ‘I chose it specially. I think it is one she would like.’

  2

  The Cave of the Hands, Patagonia

  April 1996

  Though her mother still hasn’t adjusted to life without her roses, and though she was sad to say goodbye to Adriana and Paco, Ana is pleased they have moved from the suburbs to this light-filled apartment downtown. Her father, years ago and without telling them, had entered their name on a waiting list for officers; merit, or perhaps his car accident, which left him in hospital for months on end, had accelerated their rise to the top of it, and suddenly they had the option of moving in.

  Ana finished her bachillerato a year ago and, with it, the long commute to school. In the summertime lull between school and university, she found herself spending more and more time at the club. Lots of people in their new building were members – they were all military families and knew each other anyway – and that included Lucas, who lived three floors above them, and whom Ana occasionally encountered at family events.

  The Tennis Club has a fifty-metre swimming pool and that’s where she started to notice him properly, while he was training for competition and she was trying to better her own speed. The glimpses she caught of him played havoc with her concentration. There he was, collecting his towel from the poolside; there again, fair hair every which way, calves and pectorals shifting under tawny, summertime skin.

  There was something in his profile that fascinated her, some purity in the cut of his cheekbones that was repeated in the line of his jaw.

  She didn’t know how to approach him; she didn’t think she could dare. At home she waited in terrified hope for the elevator doors to open, relieved yet disappointed if he wasn’t inside. She gravitated to the pool at times when he might be training, according to when she’d seen him there before. And at some point he must have recognised her, because one day he was short of change for the Coke machine and asked if he could borrow some coins.

  Droplets nestled silver on the ledge of his collarbone. He looked at her through wet eyelashes, the irises washed to the palest sea-glass blue.

  He was the first person she had ever kissed with any feeling, ten days later on their beach towels at the back of the Tennis Club lawn. They’d ended up with grass clippings in their hair and embossed on their shoulders, noticing only afterwards that the grounds had been freshly mown.

  They’ve been together a year now – Ana, who has started law at university, counts from the day of the coins by the swimming pool; for Lucas it began the first time they went to bed. And Ana, at nineteen still diffident about her private life, has just told her parents that the two of them are planning their first holiday alone.

  ‘Do you love him, darling?’ her mother says, testing the moisture in the soil around the orchids in their pots.

  ‘Of course, Mamá,’ Ana says, knowing exactly what she means.

  Her father has been friends with Lucas’s father since they trained at the military academy, so he has no qualms when Ana tells him that she and Lucas are going to Patagonia, to a place she’s been dying to visit because of a poster, to see some ancient rock art in a cave.

  In a turboprop operated by the army, they fly south from Buenos Aires to Comodoro Rivadavia on tickets that Lucas’s father managed to secure. From the midnight airport they catch a taxi to the bus station, where they have four more hours to wait.

  They slump against each other on a row of plastic chairs that dip and rock with every fidgety move.

  Too tired to sleep, Ana observes the somnolent station from an angle; it takes her a moment to decipher the bus company signs. ‘El Condor’, she reads over one of the shuttered windows. Beside it, ‘Lineas Puntuales: A Blue Star on the Road’. A wall-map of Patagonia is dotted with ñandú birds, and right whales off the coastline, and llama-like guanacos picked out in plaster relief.

  High above the entrance hovers the silver-rayed Virgin of Luján, blessing the travellers who pass beneath her in her stiff, isosceles skirts.

  At
twenty-past four, the first bus pulls into the station. As Ana sits up, the names of the coach companies skid like Scrabble letters back into their horizontal lines.

  ‘Do I have to open my eyes?’ Lucas asks.

  ‘In a moment,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you.’

  In the corners of the bus station there is movement. Shadows she hadn’t noticed before change shape and then turn vertical; as if from the dead, bodies rise from the tiled floor. Oil workers, farmers, Indians, they rub their eyes and gravitate towards the counters, waiting to purchase their fares.

  A light goes on at the Blue Star office window. Ana gives Lucas a nudge.

  Ten minutes later, the coach’s hydraulic doors sigh open and the two of them are scrambling up the steps. Video screens stare blankly as they burrow into their anoraks and pray for the heating to work.

  Torn between exhaustion and curiosity, Ana struggles against sleep and is defeated. As the bus rolls south, her mind is filled with mysteries that later she isn’t sure she has witnessed: the pitch of the night-time Atlantic; old men peddling newspapers under deserted street lamps; oil pumps probing the land like water birds, bloodshot eyes unblinking in the dark.

  She awakens to dawn in what feels like another country: to skies drenched lemon-yellow and purple over landscapes like the bottom of the sea.

  Mesas loom like reefs against the horizon, washed over by the night’s retreating tide. Horses wade through the stringy light like creatures escaped from a myth. And in the distance, the shock of the cordillera, its razorback ridges juddering down South America’s seahorse tail.

  They pass a shrine to Gauchito Gil, the folk saint’s chapel shimmering against the tundra under its drapery of crimson rags. Scarlet ribbons flap like wartime bandages against its blood-red breezeblocks in the wind.

  Suddenly, in the middle of the highway, the bus decelerates, then groans to a halt. The day is overcast and there is no town, not even a building in sight.

  Two men in khaki uniform mount the steps and work their way down the aisle. The metal of their weapons jars in the fuggy warmth.