The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  With his left hand Dimitri slides his notebook out of his pocket, then pats a series of others in quest of a still-working pen. ‘Hey, perhaps they’re not letters at all,’ he says. ‘Maybe they’re Roman numerals.’

  She rolls her eyes. ‘What, so thirty’s my lucky number?’

  Pen between his teeth, he can’t respond for a moment as he slips the book back into his pocket. Then he has another idea.

  ‘Hey, what if it’s a serial number? You know, like an etching. Like a print.’

  She laughs out loud. ‘Oh, sure, number thirty off the production line. You’ll be saying they’ve cloned me next!’

  ‘Well, now you mention it . . .’

  She shakes her head. ‘And there I was, thinking I was unique.’

  He stops and looks at her, turns on her the flash of his smile.

  ‘You are unique,’ he says. ‘In fact, I think they’ve got to be three asterisks – you know: “Take note of this girl”.’

  ‘Only because she’s dangerous,’ says Ana, flushing and trying to frown as she releases the end of the tape-measure that makes him jump as it whips through the dust to his feet.

  8

  Acapulco, Mexico

  August 1997

  ‘It’s four hundred kilometres, Osvaldo,’ Daniela is saying. She is standing before the cupboard in the hallway, bath towels folded in a tower under her chin. ‘It’ll be four hours on the road at least, and that’s if the traffic is good.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I say. ‘But when did we last go to the coast?’

  In the thin air trapped beneath the volcanoes, the city is weary with humidity that makes the pollution harder to bear. It is not as bad as the windless days we had at the end of winter, when the pollution levels were peaking and the rains had not yet come. But Daniela, struggling daily through the city’s traffic-clogged arteries, is still emptying bottles of eye-drops against the slew of irritants in the air.

  She throws me a sceptical glance, then levers the bath towels in.

  ‘We both need a break,’ I tell her, ‘and we haven’t been to the sea since – when was the last time? It must be more than a year.’

  ‘We went to Xochimilco two weeks ago.’

  ‘Xochimilco isn’t the sea!’ I laugh, recalling the pink-and-yellow party boats chugging along the waterways between the market gardens, on the remnants of the Aztec lake.

  Suddenly she smiles. ‘You know what this conversation reminds me of?’ she says. ‘That time we went to Skye.’

  ‘It’s not nearly as far,’ I protest, then realise she is teasing me when she extracts a pair of beach towels from the pile. ‘Anyway, as I remember it, beach towels are purely optional for the places that get a mention on the Shipping News.’

  Beneath her lightness, I know she is concerned about my health. The doctors have run more tests on me but have found nothing to explain my lethargy, and I don’t know whether to be anxious or relieved. I know she fears the distance will exhaust me; she knows I fear she’s exhausting herself with all the demands of her work.

  Still, despite my constant tiredness, my spirits lift at the thought of seeing the coast. After the altitude of Mexico City, after its rainy-season chaos, a few days down at sea level will do us both good.

  It’s an odd-number licence plate day, so Hugo drives Cristina’s Golf and we set off together in a two-car convoy to the sea. A relative has been urging them to use his holiday house on the cliffs near Acapulco, so Hugo has invited us to join them for a few days. Nicolás is accompanying them because of his new-found passion for surf.

  The Autopista del Sol rolls in a long black stripe, off the volcanic plateau and down to the open plains. Hugo is a speedy driver but we manage to catch him up at the toll booths, and tail him to the roadside markets he has plotted for us to stop at on the way. At the first of them, on the outskirts of Tres Mariás, we drink cocoa-flavoured atole from ceramic cups under the benevolent eye of the Virgin of Guadalupe; at the second we order fried blue-corn tortillas and demolish them elbow-to-elbow with the truckers.

  ‘You know,’ I say, as Cuernavaca fades into the distance, ‘we should get Arturo and Carla to come over one of these days. And bring Santiago with them.’

  ‘Do you think they’d come? All these crime stories tend to put people off a bit.’

  ‘If they were with us they’d be fine. Maybe we could get Julieta to bring the family over too. Santiago and Mateo are nearly the same age. I’d love it if the two of them could meet.’

  ‘We’d need a whole hacienda for everyone,’ says Daniela over the top of her sunglasses. ‘Are you sure you could cope with the whole extended clan?’

  ‘Why not?’ I say. ‘Mexico is full of enormous families. And haciendas. We could get them over for Christmas perhaps, or Easter. We could find a place in Valle de Bravo, or maybe Tepotzotlán . . .’

  The Pacific rears up to meet us as we wind through the Sierre Madre, down into Acapulco, then out along the coastal road. Palm trees shimmy like dancers above the shacks on the city’s outskirts as we climb the headland, parallel to yet out of sight of the sea.

  I open my window wide. The air pours in with smells of mulch and ozone, and overripe mangoes caramelising in the tropical sun.

  We overshoot the turnoff, and almost reach the lagoon on the far side of the promontory before we can double back. Then we lurch down a track that’s been ribbed and cratered by rain and other vehicles, sea-sawing between glimpses of blue.

  Ahead of us, Hugo taps his horn to signal our arrival. Eyes opaque with cataracts, in a cowboy hat that could swallow him, a caretaker shuffles towards us and drags open the one-legged gate. We park the cars at the back of the house and leave them purring in the shade.

  From this side, the house looks simple: whitewashed walls and a bamboo fence scribbled with passion-fruit vines. Hibiscus flowers blaze from the bushes that screen the house from the wind.

  The generator chugs to life and the caretaker turns on the hot water; he nods without expression as he takes his leave. Dust billows at his feet as he shuffles back up the driveway, hemming his trousers with ivory chalk.

  I place Daniela’s bag with mine on the edge of the decking while she goes to fetch her sunglasses from the car. Hugo and Cristina are inside, doing the ritual furnishing-check for scorpions; Nicolás, in the kitchen, is rummaging around for something to eat.

  The front of the house is nothing like the back of it – it is a sleight of hand performed with glass and light. Sliding doors open it partly or entirely to the ocean. From the bridge of a ship at nightfall, the windows must glow molten in the setting sun.

  In a glass bowl on the wooden table, a fallen moth is embalmed in a sunken candle. Worn wicker chairs slump like old ladies at a Christmas party, spirals of cane pooling around their ankles like stockings.

  I turn to face the water and then step backwards, arrested by the view.

  From the end of the decking the edge of the world drops away. I take in the gulf of air, the silver lip of the horizon, the shifting corrugations of the sea. The loss of perspective is vertiginous; I feel higher even than the clouds. Far away, a cargo ship labours along the curvature of the earth; beyond it, the azure world disintegrates into mist.

  An ocean gull hangs beneath me, coasting weightless on the thermals, then leans into the wind and climbs. For a moment, before the current lifts and carries him past me, we are eye to eye in the breeze. I can almost see my reflection in the convex jet of his pupil; his shadow as it passes over me is cool as an eclipse.

  Daniela sees him too as she comes to stand beside me; I can feel the smooth bands of her rings when I take her hand. Neither of us speaks as we listen to the crash of the sea and the riffs of the wind that snatch away the crying of the gulls.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I ask her after a moment; she had insisted on driving all the way.

  ‘I feel fine,’ she says, exhaling and stretching her back. ‘As long as all this oxygen doesn’t knock me out.’

  Fa
r below, black rocks glisten in the tide-heave, combing the kelp like hair.

  ‘What a place for a house,’ she says, staring into the distance.

  I nod, and circle her with my arms.

  In the evening the five of us have dinner out on the terrace, our bodies thirsting for the breeze. It is hotter here than in Mexico City; the wind has dropped since sundown but the temperature has barely fallen; inside the house we are in for an airless night.

  Heaped in a translucent midden on the serving dish, empty prawn shells glister like broken light bulbs. Candlelight plays on the bellies of the weeping beer-bottles; the rings they leave on the wooden table evaporate as we watch.

  The conversation rises and falls, our laughter carrying in the dark. Nicolás surprises us all by turning in early; he’s got a friend to see in the morning to sort out a board. Cristina, meanwhile, tells us about the house, how it was left to her uncle long ago by the architect he built it for, a man with a passion for dolphins; how she spent half her childhood watching for them from the deck.

  With Hugo, who seems more cynical these days, there is still so much to catch up on, as if talking could patch over the ways in which we have changed. Yet there is an understanding to the friendship we’re rebuilding, perhaps because we knew each other as children, before life took over and bent us different ways.

  Still, there is one thing I’ve been wanting to put to him, and the fact we haven’t already broached it makes it that much harder to start. But finally, when Daniela is stretching her legs and Cristina is hunting for cigarettes, I find a moment to ask.

  ‘Hugo,’ I say. ‘Have you had any word from Heriberto, or Marguerita and Diego, or any of the others we used to know?’

  Hugo’s dancing eyes turn sober.

  ‘I lost touch with Heriberto about the same time you did, Osvaldo, and for a long time I thought he had disappeared. But then a year or two ago I heard a rumour – someone said he got out more or less when we did and went to Barcelona, where he is still critiquing movies under a pseudonym.’

  ‘Do you think it’s true?’ I say.

  Hugo shrugs. The way he raises the tufts of his eyebrows puts even more creases in his brow.

  Heriberto, I think. His battered Borsalino and poison pen that laid waste to modern film.

  ‘I hope he made it,’ I say. I hope he got to Barcelona and is raging pestilential against all Hollywood post-1949. ‘What about that girlfriend of his . . . Sofia, wasn’t it? Did she go with him to Spain?’

  ‘Sonia, I think,’ says Hugo, smiling and shaking his head. ‘Sofia was one of her predecessors. It drove her crazy when you mixed up the names.’

  I colour slightly. I remember vaguely, now that he says it – and Hugo, or maybe Heriberto, kicking me under the table for getting it wrong.

  ‘I haven’t been able to trace her,’ he says. ‘But I don’t have a lot of leads for her – I didn’t know her very well at the time.’

  I hold my breath. ‘And Diego? And Marguerita?’

  Daniela comes back and sits beside me, leaning her shoulder against mine. Cristina’s cigarette glows redly, tracing neon subtitles in the dark.

  Hugo clears his throat. ‘All I know is that they went underground pretty soon after they shut down the magazine: new names, new jobs I presume, a new town . . .’ He stops for a second. ‘Can you picture it: Diego, disguised as a redhead with the help of a self-dye kit?’

  He smiles, then frowns as we think of him: Diego, our brainy, impractical friend.

  Then, his voice drops. ‘After all these years they haven’t resurfaced,’ says Hugo. ‘I’ve asked around whenever I’ve been back. I’ve even tried to visit Diego’s parents, but when I eventually found the house, the neighbours said another family had moved in long ago.’

  His words trail off.

  Diego, dear Diego, our short-legged schoolfriend with his long-sighted theories for setting the world to rights. And Marguerita, with her incisive mind and what Diego called her Spanish temperament, who rendered him too tongue-tied to propose.

  ‘The last time I saw them was with you, Osvaldo,’ Hugo says. ‘That night at the Paradiso.’

  The candle sinks into its rind. A lace-wing moth darts over the flame that flutters to some rhythm of its own.

  How long ago it was, I think, how unknowing we all were. None of us had had any clue how close we were to the abyss.

  ‘What about Gustavo?’ I say after a moment. ‘Do you think he’s still predicting the end of café life as we know it, while measuring out those cognacs at the bar?’

  It’s an eternity since I’ve thought about Gustavo, forever at the helm in his impeccable apron, complaining as he swapped out the cassettes.

  ‘I’ve never returned to the Paradiso,’ Hugo says. ‘And now, when I look back, I wonder . . .’

  ‘You wonder?’ I say.

  ‘You know,’ says Hugo. ‘If he was trustworthy. I always felt he was at the time, but now – I don’t know. I honestly don’t.’

  ‘Trustworthy?’

  ‘With so many of them working for the police . . .’

  ‘Gustavo?’ I can’t think it, I can’t bear to, not Gustavo. Informing? On Diego and Marguerita and Heriberto? On Hugo, too? On me?

  The sea crashes on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs. I only become aware of it now, of the sound of the waves, though they have been breaking beneath us all along.

  We sit for a time thinking our separate thoughts, and after a while Hugo and Cristina announce they are turning in.

  ‘Leave the glasses – we’ll do them in the morning,’ Cristina says as we bid each other goodnight.

  Hugo, silhouetted in the half-light, slides the curtains across the windows; Cristina switches on a lamp inside the door.

  Daniela and I lean against the rails at the end of the decking, staring out at the now-black sea. The lights of a single fishing boat shine bravely, dwarfed by the mighty dark.

  ‘Do you think you’ll be able to sleep after all that talk?’ she says when the house is quiet.

  ‘Perhaps not right away,’ I say. ‘I might stay out here for a little while.’

  ‘Do you mind if I stay out with you?’

  I turn to her. ‘Come over here,’ I say.

  I thread my arm around her waist as we stand there, her hair soft against my face, watching the fishing boat turn and head out to sea.

  ‘It’s a kind of guilt, isn’t it?’ Daniela says after a moment. ‘Being here, with all that we have. Being alive.’

  ‘I know,’ I say, and hug her to me. ‘And at times it seems to me so random, who gets and doesn’t get to survive.’

  She turns to look at me, her dark eyes catching some light I haven’t noticed, bright against the duskiness of her skin.

  ‘It’s never going to go away, is it?’ she says.

  I can only shake my head.

  The imperfect moon has climbed higher now and hangs over the ruffling sea. It looks like the doorway to another universe, a manhole with its cover off, the stars like dazzling rust-holes in the sky.

  I think about my missing daughter, knowing in some part of me that she must be gone, yet unable to let her go. I think about my missing granddaughter, out there somewhere, twenty now, and starting to shape her life.

  I think about where I’m standing, on a cliff on the edge of the vast Pacific, and still not high enough to see.

  ‘I wonder if we’ll ever find her,’ I say. ‘Liliana, I mean. This whole process, this stop-start searching . . .’

  Moths flop against the window, maddened by the beacon Cristina has placed inside the door.

  ‘Do you ever contemplate the possibility that it might not happen?’ says Daniela, speaking gently. ‘You know, that you might never get to meet?’

  ‘All the time, Daniela. Every day of my life I struggle with it, the hopelessness of it, my inability to accomplish this one thing.’

  Acapulco glows behind the headland, throwing its otherworldly halo into the sky. The moon scatters its lumine
scence like a trail of aluminium onto the sea.

  ‘At the same time, though,’ I continue, and pull her closer, ‘I can’t give up. Even if I wanted to. Even if I decided to.’ I look at her, trying to explain. ‘It’s not just atonement. It’s as if this search, this need to find her, is about something bigger than my own life.’

  I think about my parents, who died so long ago, about my father’s battles to earn a decent living on our behalf. I think about the despairing soil his own father left in Italy; how my mother’s family fled during the First World War. And it angers me, and it steels my resolve, because the disappearance of Graciela, and absence of Liliana, feel like the negation of all that they had struggled for, of all they’d renounced and endured and striven for: so that their descendants could survive.

  ‘I understand, Osvaldo, truly. If I didn’t know what had happened to Sergio, if there’d been the slightest doubt . . . I know that I could never have let it rest.’

  And it occurs to me that the conversation tonight must have been hard for her to listen to, that our wondering about our vanished friends must have stirred up memories she doesn’t talk about that people her own hall of the missing.

  I hold her against me and rest my head against hers. I think how the battles she fought before I knew her must have wounded her before they made her strong.

  ‘Daniela,’ I say, but cannot finish the sentence.

  She lifts her face a little from my shoulder.

  ‘What is it?’ she says.

  I shake my head, then kiss her, and murmur ‘te amo’ into her hair.

  9

  Aigai, Greece

  August 1997

  They hear him before they see him chugging up the hill with a throbbing sound that causes even the tractor-drivers to turn. He slogs up the final rise and rattles over the cattle grid, shaving a handful of figs off the trees by the gate. He skids to a stop in a two-door car that is even more battered than Anastasia’s; the handbrake when he yanks on it cries out like a creature in pain.

  With one hand on the windshield that is missing a windscreen wiper, he levers himself over the gearstick and into the passenger seat. Weaving an arm through the passenger window, he cranks open the door from outside.