The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  They take Lucas’s ID card and hand it back again; Ana’s they stare at for some time. The guards make her feel nervous though there have been uniforms around her all her life.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Lucas says after the gendarmes have left, when she asks him if he ever feels the same. He slings his arm around her shoulder and grasps her breast through her clothes. ‘We’re going to need a bit of a siesta when we get there, don’t you think?’

  She pulls away and doesn’t reply.

  Dust scuds across the highway. She watches the guards march away an Indian they have escorted from the bus.

  Later, she thinks, perhaps it is just tiredness, the overnight flight and the hours on the road, that made her irritable with Lucas. There is so much they have in common: their military families, the Tennis Club, even the place where they live. When his mood is good she likes his sense of humour. Then there is this thing about the look of him, the cool, sharp edges of his masculinity, that catches her somewhere between the ribs.

  He straddles her at midday on the green chenille bedspread of the hotel in Perito Moreno, even before they’ve had time to take a shower. His urgency overcomes her doubts; she loves him after all, she reminds herself; her body slips into line.

  Bed sheets kick and slap on the washing lines, while the poplars jab their boar’s-hair branches at the sky. Ana remembers how they looked at sunset, stripped of leaves and luminous, like giant paintbrushes dipped in copper light.

  At the end of town, Lucas, who picked up their hire car that morning, turns the vehicle around by the edge of a swampy lake. A few metres into the water, a sign that says ‘Ice Skating Forbidden’ has been hammered to the top of a stake.

  They have more than 100 kilometres to go before they reach their destination. The pallid sun has given up for the day and, though it is still too early in the season, the radio is warning of snow.

  Outside Perito Moreno they turn onto the RN40, an undulating ribbon of asphalt secured with white stitching to the earth. Ana thinks of it stretching behind them, all the way northwards to the border with Bolivia, and southwards down the leeward side of the Andes to the tip of Patagonia and the sea.

  Out on the empty roads Ana had wanted to practise her driving, but she can see that prospect fading now that Lucas is behind the wheel. She can sense his exhilaration as the car flies over the tarmac, speeding through the gap between land and cloud.

  After the urban corridors of Buenos Aires, with its vertical planes that obliterate the skyline, she feels her mind expand as the horizon grows. Oxygen fills her lungs and her pulse is racing as she opens the window, the sound of the engine lost in the rush of wind.

  ‘Imagine living out here,’ Lucas says. ‘You’d go crazy in a place like this.’

  She glances at him, and suddenly the feeling is back again, that sense of being out of sync. But then she smiles. That is so like Lucas, she thinks. Only he could feel hemmed in by all this space.

  ‘You’d have to find something outdoorsy to do,’ she says. ‘Breed horses. Take tourists on expeditions.’

  ‘You’re not serious, are you?’

  ‘Why not?’ she says, teasing.

  Before he can reply the car makes a sudden swerve. Ana thrusts her hand onto the dashboard to steady herself as the seatbelts yank and Lucas swears and jerks at the wheel and tries to avoid the gravel. Something russet flies in front of the fender and dives into the scrub.

  ‘That was a pampas fox!’ she says. ‘Aren’t they practically extinct around here?’

  ‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ he says.

  She watches the triangular head bobbing until it vanishes among the shrubs and the stones.

  ‘You okay?’ she says, her hand on his arm.

  ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Should have got him though.’

  She shoots him a sideways look.

  ‘Just joking, Ana,’ he says with a cryptic laugh.

  Twice they see armadillos scurrying like ambulances along the tarmac, and a falcon picking at the carcass of a third on the edge of the road.

  They leave the highway on the unsurfaced road that leads to Bajo Caracoles, following it down into a canyon whose floor is scribbled with salt. Then suddenly they are up and out of it again, travelling along the lip of the crevasse. Far below, pockets of water glint like Indian costumes; the riverbanks blaze with gold as the trees that cluster there, the only ones they have seen since Perito Moreno, turn autumnal in the shelter from the wind.

  They park where the road runs out. No one else has driven or walked in from the estancia, on Ana’s map the only habitation for miles.

  The weather is closing in. The wind that whips along the canyon carries the hint of ice.

  She stands in front of the cave wall, eyes streaming with cold. Lucas lasted only a few minutes before retreating, shoulders hunched like a boxer’s as he barrelled back up the pathway into the wind. But Ana, having come all this way after wanting so long to be here, is riveted by what she sees.

  From every rock face, from a time that seems as ancient as the stone itself, they reach towards her: hands outlined in every colour, hands stretched open and striving upwards, hands like a cloud-lift of birds. She stares at the wall before her, trying to ignore the ringing in her ears. There are small hands like those of children, and hands with one finger missing, and hands superimposed upon other hands as if clapping or being held.

  On the flight down from Buenos Aires she had imagined black and white and ochre, but not purple and vermillion, not these yellows and oranges and greens. She had not expected these multiple reverberations, colour overlaying other colours, new signatures laid upon the old.

  She holds her own hand up to them. It could fit into the ghost of their hands.

  Ana closes her eyes for a moment. She is overcome by a kind of vertigo, as if time were collapsing inward. These distant people, she thinks, had trodden the ground she is standing on; they had sheltered under this overhang of rock. They had expressed their sense of being in the most immediate way imaginable, stencilling their bodies onto stone.

  She turns towards the mouth of the cave and looks down into the canyon, to the riverbed that will fill with the springtime thaw. Millennia ago they’d have descended a path like this one, and at the bottom of it, raw in the icy water, they’d have washed away the positive, leaving the negative like an insignia on the wall.

  She shivers; the temperature is dropping; Lucas will be waiting back at the car. She is about to hurry after him when something catches her eye.

  On the rock wall she sees one, and then another one – solitary stick-figure hunters, and then a group of them, circling in on their prey. Further along the rock face she discovers more scenes: ambushes, guanaco herds in flight, a full moon hanging whitely over the now-still beasts. Tracks have been drawn like footprints across the ancient geology, like a map on the canyon wall. She sees arrow-headed spears, and stone-carved bolas strung with sinew flying towards the animals. It is all there, it is all spelled out, drawn in mineral oxides on the rock.

  And what it tells, she thinks, must be the world’s oldest story: the story of how they survived.

  She feels shaken as she mounts the trail towards the car park. It’s as if some powerful force were pulling her off her trajectory, confronting her with some mystery she has to solve.

  Behind her, the grey sky darkens over the canyon, tarnishing the silver ponds and the golden trees. The radio station was right, she thinks. Any time now it will snow.

  ‘Thanks for waiting,’ she says, as she slides into the front seat beside Lucas. The door slams shut in the wind.

  He is twisting the radio dial for music, careening into walls of static. He has become moody again, she can sense it; she cannot work out what is wrong.

  He gives up on the radio and starts the engine. The car swings up the gravel track.

  ‘Frankly, I don’t know what you see in all this deadness,’ he says after a moment. In the side mirror she is watching the crevasse get swallowed
up by the land. ‘Petrified forests. Fossils. Rock paintings by Stone Age Indians. Everything is over, here; it’s vanished, finished, extinct.’

  So he hasn’t felt it, she thinks. He didn’t see it, when to her the place was thrumming with life. In a way it doesn’t matter, she tells herself; she doesn’t share all his passions either, his obsession with Boca Juniors most of all. She knows how lucky she is to have him; she’s not blind to how other girls react. What really counts is what she feels about him, she knows that, not whether they always agree.

  They swoop out of the canyon and up into the folds of the plain. As they round the last curve, the horizon opens vastly before them, the great steppe offering itself to the cloud. And there ahead of them, in the lee of the hill on the roadside, cream-bellied and ochre-flanked against the tundra, a hundred guanaco stand grazing, watchful and timeless and graceful, under the purple sky.

  One of them stands alone and higher than the others, close to the crest of the hill. Ears back, clear eyes scanning the distance, her nose twitches at the scent of the wind.

  All the while, as Lucas sleeps and the Blue Star rumbles northwards through the nightfall, Ana thinks about the cave, she thinks about the paintings, she thinks about the hands she saw of people who so long ago disappeared.

  In the emptiness between Caleta Olivia and the oil pumps outside Comodoro, she realises she will have to go back.

  Not now, but sometime soon. To study the site. To work if she can with the archaeologists, and dig for what evidence is there. She wants to look for paint-pipes and the fragments of pigments; to uncover the remnants of cooking fires and spearheads and bolas – the evidence of survival, the instruments of life.

  She didn’t expect the cave to affect her so forcefully. It frightens her a little when she considers it, this feeling that seems to pull her to the past.

  She thinks about ignoring it. Then she thinks about embracing it, about making this her path.

  Lucas would hate it, she thinks. Her parents would be disappointed. To drop her law studies for this? They would see it as a terrible mistake.

  But her friend Camila would love it. She would applaud Ana for striking out and being different. And Sister Rosario would encourage her, of that she has no doubt. The only nun Ana’s kept in touch with since her school days, Sister Rosario would support her but also challenge her. She would say to her, as she always did: ‘What else, Ana? What more is there? What does it mean?’

  At dusk, the cave is empty. The only sound is the moaning of the wind in the entrance as it funnels down off the plain. The lizards are already hibernating; even the ants are huddling in their tunnels underground.

  A lone guanaco negotiates the rocks of the canyon, old enough now to be expelled by the female herd. His toes leave tear-shaped prints in the sand as he picks his way down to the waterhole that winks glassily from the canyon floor.

  Pegged to a crag above the cliff face, a falcon watches the guanaco descend. Night comes early this close to winter but there is light enough; he waits to see whether this passing beast will frighten any small creatures out of the brush.

  A fox that nearly collided with a car at midday trots across the tundra. The scent trails led her further afield than she’d intended, but she is back on home territory now and knows where the hunting is good.

  On the crest of a hillock she pauses. In the fading light the plains roll into the distance. Like the guanacos she’s been following, she stops and sniffs the air.

  The wind, though she doesn’t know it, was named Kóshkil by a long-lost people whose language vanished when they did, with the exception of this last word. It whistles and howls in memory across the remorseless steppes.

  This night, far to the south, it ruffles a forest of beech trees that fringes a river of ice. Restless, under unfathomable pressure, the ancient glacier stirs on its comfortless bed.

  At first it is just one crystal that gives, but that is all it takes, one frozen crystal whose microscopic geometry slips, then all of them start to go. The façade creaks as the invisible fissure rips upwards, cracking through forty, fifty, sixty metres of ice. Below the surface, the secret hairline fills with water that prises it further open; the glacier tenses and rasps.

  For a moment everything pauses, as if nature is holding its breath. There is a trembling as if in hesitation, then something rumbles, and the rumbling becomes a roar that echoes across the valley as the entire ice wall buckles and gives way. It shears off like the collapse of a row of skyscrapers, plunging and then rearing in an explosion of powder and glass. Shards of crystal plunge into the waters, then shoot back up before subsiding into the milky waves. Dust billows and falls; keels of ice collide amid the confusion. Mass and matter and gravity conspire in the shock of sundering, with only the beeches and the Jurassic earth arrayed in silent witness.

  Halfway down the canyon the guanaco pauses, all senses suddenly alert. Through the pads of his feet he feels a tremor that has come to him over enormous distances, the vibrations travelling down to him through contiguous seams of rock. He leaps and bolts like a hare.

  Forepaw curved to the air, the vixen doesn’t dare move. She is aware of something shifting, some realignment underway. Periscope heads poke out of rodent burrows; ants stream from their underground nests in spite of the cold. Puzzled, wary, she waits another heartbeat. Peering between the tussocks, her golden eyes feel warm against the chill of the wind.

  Then, under the thickness of her pelt, she shivers. The wind that was transparent becomes suddenly visible; in the movement all around her she sees it, whiteness streaking past her like spears. Across the glacier across the steppe across the canyon that the people visited, across the territory where she dug her burrow and last season weaned her cubs, across the highway where a bus is speeding northwards from the lake where nobody ice-skates, the clouds release their burden. It begins to snow.

  3

  Mexico City

  April 1996

  A flock of pigeons takes flight from the parish churchyard, looping once over its nougat walls. The jacaranda beside the bell-tower has burst into flames of purple; the colour leaps from house to house as if setting the city on fire.

  Our jacaranda, too, has exploded into flower; against the window Daniela is framed like an Impressionist painting, and when we go outside we are bathed in amethyst light.

  All across this suburb the scene is repeated, as if some signal had sounded and every jacaranda had obeyed. The sight of them lifts my spirits and fills me with a sense of possibility, as if the colour missing from the bleached-out sky had been restored in these clusters of bells.

  There’s a medical laboratory within walking distance of our apartment. The fatigue I’ve been feeling for the past few months doesn’t appear to be lifting, and my doctor has finally agreed to order some tests.

  I’m on my way home when some sort of commotion interrupts my thoughts. I scan the square around me, not sure I can trust my hearing, but nobody seems perturbed. Waiters in long aprons stand smoking outside the Guadalupana; beyond the whitewashed eucalypts, shoeshine boys joke and tout for business, their chairs like the perches that umpires use on the court of a tennis Grand Slam.

  There is nothing, no conflict and no disturbance, no one calling for help.

  When I hear it again, I am level with the carts of the chicharrón sellers, pork scratchings stacked like loofahs beside their tubs of quartered limes. This time, I am sure I hear my name. I turn, and see someone hurrying towards me, waving and limping slightly and holding his ribs with his hand.

  I stare at him, and look again. The figure is familiar, but I cannot place him. I peer into his face as he nears.

  ‘Hugo?’

  I almost do not recognise him. Aged, eyes shielded by black-framed glasses, it is Hugo, my old schoolfriend Hugo, Hugo hobbling towards me like some latter-day Lazarus, the Hugo I haven’t seen for twenty years.

  ‘Osvaldo!’ he says, puffing and nursing his stitch. ‘You set a cracking pace, old man.’ />
  ‘Hugo?’ I can’t stop saying it, as if repeating his name will tether him to the earth and make this apparition real.

  Then suddenly we are laughing and embracing and I am holding him by the shoulders to steady myself and banish my disbelief. Those are indeed Hugo’s eyes behind the thick-rimmed glasses; and it’s Hugo’s face, but crinkled as a paper bag.

  ‘When did you start wearing lenses like that?’ I say. Then both of us laugh out loud.

  ‘Long gone, those little wire spectacles, Doctor. Though I must admit I’m still getting used to these.’

  I can feel his back muscles working through the fabric of his jacket as he shakes his head and hugs me again and again.

  He’d been talking to someone at the Gandhi bookshop when he saw me pass the window; it had taken a few moments to extricate himself, before he could rush down the street. When I didn’t stop the first time he bellowed, he thought he’d been mistaken; the second time, all the pigeons took off and the street kids turned to stare.

  Sight’s not enough; I have to grip his forearm; I need the sensation of sinew and muscle to convince myself he is real.

  ‘Do you live? What are you doing? How long have you been here?’ We speak through each other and over each other like politicians on the morning radio, unable to hear or be heard.

  The outdoor terraces are set for lunch so we go inside a restaurant and order tequilas at the bar. The garden is an array of volcanic rocks and a row of cactus plants.

  ‘I can’t believe it, Hugo. The last time we spoke . . . I thought they’d come for you, too.’

  ‘Oh, they came for me all right. But it’s a long story,’ he says.

  He has lived in Mexico since getting out of Argentina, and when he arrived, just to be safe, he decided to change his name.

  ‘So what do they call you here?’

  ‘Enrique.’ He laughs at my raised eyebrow. ‘After Disépolo. Because they banned his music. But in this era of democracy, I answer to Hugo, too.’

  I take the measure of how much he has changed. His eyes still sparkle, and in his wrinkled face I recognise his boyish smile. But his formerly light brown hair is silver, what’s left of it, so that his eyebrows now seem bushier than before. They curl like feelers over the rims of his new glasses, as if they might somehow help him to see. But the incipient paunch he once fretted about has vanished, and the breeze billows under his jacket as he moves.