Outside, the heavens are about to open; the sky is black and thunder is grumbling over the volcanoes. Churubusco is going to flood again; Daniela is miles away in Chalco, recording something about industrial pollution – she’ll take hours to get home in the rain.
I lever the box onto the desktop and slide it towards me, my fingerprints transparent in its dust. This is where I store the items I am keeping for Liliana – not my search files, but the things she’ll need to know about who she is.
When I fled Argentina I couldn’t take anything with me, and when Yolanda died I couldn’t depart with anything that might give me away. So it was Julieta who retrieved the family albums, Julieta who made me copies of the photographs, Julieta who helped me gather these things to keep for her sister’s child.
Now I set about choosing pictures and organising them in a leather album, which I think of as a memory book. It will hold photographs for Liliana of her parents and her family, and the birthday cards her cousins made and sent to me to keep for her, and any other items we can find.
The last time Julieta came to visit, she brought an envelope of childhood pictures: Christmases with her cousins in La Plata, a holiday I’d long forgotten about in a house we must have rented by the sea.
There is a scallop-edged one in black and white of Graciela when she was a baby, sitting in a crocheted jacket inside her cot. She is staring into the camera with eyes so full of innocence I find it unbearable to meet her gaze.
There are others of her starting school, and one taken on her fifteenth birthday – a lanky teenager at home in the garden, with friends and Julieta and a guitar.
Under the arc of the reading lamp I sift through the other pictures: wedding photographs, various childhood scenes. Then I come to the one I love most of Graciela, the one Yolanda kept framed on her dressing table. It shows her under a willow tree, in probably the last photo ever taken of her, in the months before she disappeared.
José must have taken it when he stayed with us in Tigre, in that summer before the coup. There are times I cannot look at it, her flyaway hair turned curly in the humidity, her gaze drawn to something out of frame that’s about to make her laugh.
I contemplate it for a moment now, and feel again the low dull ache of her absence, the places too tender to touch.
Of José himself there are only a handful of pictures. There is one that Eduardo and Maria sent me of all three of them. There is one of José finishing high school, and one of him and Graciela at a barbecue with friends.
So little, I think, to leave her, out of which to weave a life.
Just then comes a crack of thunder so powerful that the city pauses in astonishment, then whitens with the rain. Above my desk the light bulb flickers, considers its own extinction, and succumbs. When the electricity comes back in a few hours’ time, I’ll have to remember to reset all the household clocks.
In an envelope there are copies of the ‘Missing’ notices that I’ve updated for the newspapers every year. I place them in the memory book, along with the letter we published on Liliana’s fifteenth birthday, and the other when she turned eighteen. I add in my yellowing copies of the articles the newspapers wrote about her, the mystery girl growing up with the wrong name.
In the darkened room I turn to the other objects. I have the alebrije Mateo chose for her, its appendages bundled together for her to construct. I have a shell necklace that Graciela once made for her sister, that Julieta found in a drawer.
And I have the clothes that Yolanda knitted for her grandchild, two a year for every year before she died. Julieta has wrapped them carefully with lavender and fresh tissue paper and I keep them in a basket of their own.
I try to imagine what else Liliana might need. Would she want report cards with remarks by Graciela’s teachers? Her name on a swimming certificate? Her handwriting on a postcard she once sent home?
I don’t have these objects and I don’t know if Julieta found them, or if they’ve been lost in the upheaval of our lives. But what is certain is that Liliana will want more than these mementoes. She will want anecdotes of mischief and misadventure. The cadence of her mother’s laughter. Memories that cannot be pressed into any book.
And as I sit there in the dimness, I reach for them, and reach again, and feel as if I am clutching at air. I cannot hear her intonation. I cannot remember the sound of her voice.
So this is how it happens, how people disappear. It is a transformation in those who are left to wait and wonder, a clouding of the mind so gradual you do not notice until its surface has turned opaque. There is no shock, no sudden realisation. Instead, it happens like this, on a Tuesday afternoon in an empty apartment, with a pile of fading photographs and the rain.
Graciela is alive in my memory, but my memory is starting to fail.
It’s like diving for coins in the ocean. The things I try to remember slip between my fingers, they flash silver in the sunlight as they tumble through the blueness, discs of brightness blinking till they are swallowed by the dark.
What remains is all sensation. The softness of her skin as an infant. Awareness of her walking beside or behind us, and turning to find she isn’t there.
I replace the lid and make room for the box and the memory book higher up the bookcase, pulling out volumes and piling them up on the desk. And as I lift and slide, it comes to me that forgetting is like a second disappearance, a slower one, that feels like a kind of betrayal.
Lightning flares again and illuminates the apartment. Thunder rolls so loudly that I duck my head. Beyond the study window, the world turns opalescent in the rain. Eyes peer from huddled doorways. Housemaids scurry up the steps of a battered pesero that ploughs through the lakes now fanning from the rubbish-choked drains.
Tethered to its perch, the panicked parrot squawks and screams for rescue. Moments later a door bangs open; the oldest boy dashes out to undo his lead. Bowed against the elements, he rushes back inside again, the bird perched like a falcon on his arm.
Against his back, against his skin in the downpour, the shirt that clings to his shoulders is transparent as a chrysalis wing.
6
Athens
July 1997
An overhead fan splices the darkness that pours through the open curtains. She is lying on the cool white sheets after her shower, exhausted by the flight, by the deluge of sensations, waiting for her hair to dry and her limbs to dry in the slow, revolving air.
Athens. Ana repeats the word to herself with a kind of wonder, dizzy with its heat and energy and light.
She has not yet completed her journey, but nearly. She has changed hemispheres, swapped winter for summer, left the safe circle of her world behind and exchanged it for something unknown. She is daunted and exhilarated, disoriented and jet-lagged, and wonders how she will ever be able to sleep.
The plane from Buenos Aires had landed early, and from her hotel room that morning she had set out to explore.
After the gloom of the Argentine winter, Athens was blinding. She couldn’t tell if it was the dazzle of light off stone or the sun off the sea that affected her; the heat, or the rush of coolness as she stepped past a courtyard or an open door. She’d shucked off her sandals in a corner of the museum to feel its marble coolness under her feet. She’d drunk iced coffee in perspiring glasses in a city with a talent for shade.
There was, she thought, some current in the air that had infected her from the moment she’d arrived. It was in the bare-armed youths roaring past on motorbikes, in the streaming hair of their girlfriends as they gripped their thighs with their thighs. It was in the tang of the sea that wafted through the tobacco smoke and the pollution, in the way the skeletal Parthenon seemed to follow her down every street.
After nightfall, on the beachfront opposite the hotel, she had walked barefoot through the shallows trailing streams of phosphorescence, marvelling at the starbursts of white and purple light. Later, back in her room, she’d found that the seawater had embroidered her shins with small white c
ircles of salt.
Her flight to Thessaloniki is due to leave mid-morning; the desk has promised her a wake-up call in case she oversleeps.
She phones her parents briefly, just to let them know she has arrived; hanging up, she feels suddenly alone. She is missing Lucas. They are still together, and since the trip to Colonia she has done everything to reassure him that she cares. Even so, he was distant with her right up till her departure, and declined to come to the airport to say goodbye.
Her mother, too, had taken some convincing about this journey, still hoping Ana would renounce this archaeology whim and go back to studying law.
‘But you’re only nineteen, corazón!’ she’d said, when Ana had first informed them about her plans.
‘I’ll be twenty by then, Mamá,’ she had responded, steeling herself against this holding, the emotional trap of their love.
She would lose a semester at the Faculty, she knew that, but later she’d be able to make up the units she’d missed. She’d been tutoring the neighbour’s children for the past two years and had pooled the money with her savings to cover the fare.
‘Oh, come on, it’s only six weeks, Bettina,’ her father had said. Ana had thrown him a look of gratitude for rallying to her cause.
She’d been close to him for as long as she could remember; she’d always been her father’s little girl. Time and again he’d rescued her from her mother’s failings: when her costume for the chacarera dance on National Day somehow got forgotten; when enrolment forms and excursion permissions got binned with the fashion magazines.
Occasionally, however, she wondered whether his encouragement was for her alone, or was just another salvo in the low-intensity conflict her parents had been waging for much of her life.
Still, when the time came for Ana’s journey, all three of them had driven to the airport – the first time they’d gone anywhere together in years. They’d said farewell in the departures hall, her mother softly dabbing at her eyes.
‘Mamá,’ Ana had said, embracing her. ‘Don’t be sad – try to be happy for me.’
‘I know, sweetheart, of course I am,’ had come the reply. She’d made an effort to smile then and managed to blink back her tears.
Ana was wearing the two fine silver bangles her mother had surprised her with as a good-luck gift the night before her journey. She slid them back up her arm.
Her father had hugged her and told her to take good care of herself, and to telephone when she arrived.
His limp had all but vanished these days, though she pretended not to notice if occasionally she saw him wince. Her love for him had deepened over the years since he’d had his accident, when she’d appreciated how fragile he really was.
She would have to hurry through this, she’d said to herself, or her resolution would come undone.
She’d left them there on the concourse. The automatic doors had opened and shut behind her; when they’d opened again she’d turned for one last glimpse of them and seen them walking towards the exit, two repelling magnets unable to touch.
Ana felt a pang of protectiveness towards her mother then, and shame at her own powerlessness to help. Whatever it was that seemed to hover over her, Ana sensed it was coming back.
As the engines revved, she had flattened her feet to the floor and aligned her body with the aircraft, with its colossal effort to lift them into the sky. She could feel it gathering speed along the runway. Then the wheels let go and the world she knew rushed sideways, as if the scenery of her childhood had been painted onto a tarpaulin that some mighty force of suction was hauling into the sea.
Under the hotel fan Ana sits up, fastens her sarong around her, and switches on the bedside lamp. Her documents are all together in a folder, beside the silver bangles on the table, and she takes them out for a dozenth time to check.
After flying north in the morning, she has an eighty-kilometre bus ride to a tiny place called Veria in the hills. In her notebook she has only a name, Anastasia Konstantinopoulos, that sounds more like a city, and a destination that sounds more like somebody’s name.
It is a Saturday afternoon when Dr Anastasia Konstantinopoulos, intrigued as she later explains by the ex-convent girl who’d written on pastel airmail paper from South America, comes to find her at the airport in Thessaloniki. She intercepts Ana in the middle of the arrivals hall, a young woman pale with jet lag and the Argentine winter against the suntanned, summertime crowd.
‘Ana Bielka?’
‘How did you know it was me?’ says Ana, who hadn’t been expecting to be met.
Anastasia, sunglasses perched in a mane of black hair, smiles and taps her temple. ‘Intuition,’ she says.
The airport is on the far side of the city and they crawl for ages through the pre-siesta traffic, a flash of blue at the bottom of every side street, before reaching the road that will carry them to the mountains, west.
They take the back roads at high speed with the windows down because Anastasia hasn’t had time to get the air conditioning fixed. Hair flying, Ana rides in the passenger seat with her mouth half-open to ensure enough oxygen gets in.
Over the noise of the wind, Anastasia, in a turquoise shirt that matches the sea that keeps eluding them, tells Ana about the dig house they’ll be living in and the city that they are excavating, and all the dramas enacted within its walls.
She tells her about the palace, built to dominate the valley and resonate in kingdoms far beyond. She tells her about the theatre, where actors performed Euripides and a bodyguard assassinated a king. She tells her about the necropolis, where the marble vaults of the Ancient Macedons lie among grave jars from the Iron Age, dug there eleven centuries before.
‘There are at least three hundred burial mounds at Aigai,’ says Anastasia, ‘the most famous, of course, being the cluster of royal tombs.’
Ana’s eyes widen as Anastasia recounts what they’d discovered inside: golden grave goods tumbled to the floor where the wooden tables had crumbled; an oak-leaf crown of beaten gold in a golden chest that was inside a marble sarcophagus. And under the crown, among the disintegrating fibres of purple cloth, the bones of Philip, the murdered monarch – the father of Alexander the Great.
Ana tries to imagine the moment: the sealed tomb broken open, air rushing into airlessness, a step where no one had trodden for two thousand years.
‘One day,’ she says, ‘would it be possible to take a look?’
Anastasia nods. ‘The four royal tombs have all been emptied for restoration, but there is one I could probably take you into. Sadly, it was looted in antiquity, but the decoration is magnificent. We call it Persephone’s tomb.’
‘So you know who occupied it?’
‘No, the name comes from the mural inside it. You’ll see.’
The coastline curves away behind them and the plain they are traversing loses itself in endless fields of corn. Gradually, as they near the mountains, the corn gives way to orchards that grow denser the further west they go. They cross three rivers before they wind up through the foothills of Mount Pieria. Thessaloniki has long since slipped below the horizon, and not even the climb towards Veria can give them a glimpse of the sea.
They pass the Veria turnoff and traverse the low slope of the hills. Roadside chapels and banks of oleander flash past them as they drive down into Vergina and out the other side of it before turning onto a dusty road. It crosses a stream and some fallow fields before sweeping in an arc up the hill.
‘This, we believe, is the old Aigai road,’ Anastasia says. ‘Those roofs you see in the distance – that’s Palatitsia. For centuries, long after Aigai was obliterated, the name of that hamlet was the only indication that there had ever been a palace here.’
Soon they come to a cattle grid, and a gate that is obscured on either side by a pair of anarchic figs. Fruits like hard green doorknobs thrum against the sides of the car.
They pull in at the front steps of a villa that rises behind a giant terracotta urn. An enormous bougainvillaea s
urges out of it, splashing its crimson blooms across the wall.
Ana climbs out of the car and stretches, and breathes in the summer air. The afternoon is pulsing with cicadas; the breeze is husky with dried grass. Beside the house, the scrolled up flowers of a spreading bush – angel’s trumpets, somebody later tells her – point like exclamations at the sky.
‘Welcome to Greece,’ says Anastasia, smiling broadly. ‘The house is a bit rough and ready, but isn’t too uncomfortable. First we’ll get you settled, and I’ll introduce you to the others at dinnertime, and tomorrow we can discuss what you’d like to do.’
Ana thanks her and is about to ask about her backpack when a student saunters over, rubber flip-flops slapping on the steps. Over dusty shorts, he is wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt whose insignia is so faded that it looks like he’s got it on inside out. His limbs are brown from working in the sunshine, and around his neck is a red bandana that is clearly a relic from better days.
He and Anastasia chat in Greek for a moment, then she hands him the keys so he can retrieve Ana’s luggage from the car.
‘I have to make a couple of phone calls, so Dimitri will show you around,’ says Anastasia, plucking a leaf from a basil plant as she mounts the veranda steps. ‘Not only is he a first-rate archaeologist, he’s the only one who knows where everything is.’
The dig house has two floors, with wide balconies overlooking the valley on one side, and the slopes of Mount Pieria on the other. Like the rest of the buildings in the village, the walls are mustard-yellow and the roof tiles terracotta, as if all of them had been built from a single kit.
‘It’s an old farmhouse they had renovated a while back,’ Dimitri says when Anastasia has gone inside. ‘It’s quite cool inside in the summertime, but in winter it gets freezing up here.’
He looks a little older than she is, and speaks English with an accent she cannot identify, and shakes his hair from his eyes with a sideways movement like someone who has water in his ears.
The Memory Stones Page 24