‘You will still be you,’ he tells her. ‘Whoever you are. Whoever you turn out to be.’
EPILOGUE
ALL THAT YOU ARE
1999
Buenos Aires
October 1999
A young woman walks into the Palace of Justice building. Her hair is shorter now; she has cut it because everything is changing anyway and nothing after this moment will be as it was before; even so, she is dismayed to find that her curls are no easier to tame. Her skin still has colour in it, and the memory of salt, and the feeling of morning sunlight on the surface of the sea.
In the back of her mind, something bright is shimmering: the golden leaves and acorns that might have been Heracles’s crown. In her pocket she has a shard of pottery, sanded, sea-eroded, and a small round pebble with mica in its veins. There is a scratch on her arm, fading now, where a beach-kitten clawed his way into her affections. Her eyes look bluish-green because she has spent so long in the sunshine, but they are weary with all she has been deciding.
She makes her way into an office. Her back is straight because she has settled on a course of action, and now she is determined to see it through. She has given blood; the judge has the results; but even before she went for the test, she knew.
She sits in a high-backed chair that is upholstered in leather and dimpled with fat leather studs. She hasn’t spoken to Victor or Bettina but she will speak to them; she knows if she goes to them now, to these parents she has always loved, then she will falter, that in the tumult of her feelings, on the high narrow bridge she is crossing, she will lose the courage to do what she has to do.
Beside her, a few paces away, sits an elderly man with his hair brushed back, and glasses in tortoiseshell frames. Does she look like him? she wonders. Is there something in the arc of his forehead? The shape of his face? His hands?
She sits side-on to him, observing him and wondering. If he had truly wanted to find her, she says to herself, then why had he waited so long?
He looks at her, over the fifty years and the generation that lies between them. He is seventy-two and she is twenty-two and she has disarmed him. He is terrified that she will vanish again, that he will lose her again. He is like a child again, dumbfounded by an apparition.
Nevertheless, he holds himself with dignity. He is trying to contain the emotion he feels and the immensity of all that he’s been carrying, on his own behalf and of those who didn’t make it to this place.
They have found her. She is here. She is here.
It’s in the slightest things. The height of her. The way she holds herself. He wants to stare but stops himself though every part of him is yearning.
There was a child that lived.
She has turned to him and is looking at him with eyes that are new but are also familiar. Graciela, he thinks for a second. His heart ricochets. She has Graciela’s eyes.
She can tell he has dressed carefully this morning. He has knotted a tie around a collar that is too loose for him. He has shaved and put on a jacket that she suspects has been bought for the occasion, but she can see how thin he is. A stick figure of a man. Nothing to him but sinew and bone.
She doesn’t know what he expects of her, this grandfather, but for love it is far too soon. She feels defensive towards him, this stranger who has upended her life.
Then she remembers what Dimitri said last night when he called to encourage her: that her life was upended long ago, perhaps even before she was born. She has been falling so long she scarcely remembers it starting; perhaps since the day she stood in awe in the cave in Patagonia, when the past had first called out to her. Or perhaps a long time before.
And she is scared of what she will have to slough off, some part of it, or all of it, she doesn’t know yet; a lifetime, and all she has known of love.
But when she looks again she meets his eye and senses the kindness in him. Perhaps it will be all right, she thinks. Perhaps he will understand.
There is damage all around them, they both know that. It will take time. It will all take time.
He puts his hand to his jacket pocket, checking for the hundredth time the flatness against his shirt. He has the photograph of her father that Eduardo has entrusted to him. He has the picture that José took of her mother under the willow tree in Tigre, so long ago he wonders if it was really theirs or somebody else’s life. And he has the photographs Yolanda took of her that time when she saw her painting, one autumn under a jacaranda tree when she was a tiny girl.
Will she shun him? Will she scorn him? Will this time be the last time he sees her face?
He holds himself back; he will not be the first to speak. He has waited this long, as Teodoro said: what matter a few seconds more? He doesn’t want to hurry her, he doesn’t want to frighten her. He will do nothing that causes her to flee.
And yet he cannot help it: loving her, though they haven’t met and he doesn’t know the slightest thing about her; loving her, because anything else is now beyond him; loving her, because he doesn’t have a choice. Her preciousness to him is inexpressible: the mere fact of her being alive.
She is not Graciela, he knows that. And yet within her, something of Graciela still lives.
When she speaks to him she will ask him the simplest things. Who her parents were, she wants to know. Who she was at the start of her life.
He hasn’t known how to prepare. He has spent two decades searching for her, believing in her when it was scarcely possible to imagine her, and now he feels at a loss. He can focus on only one thing.
He has said it a thousand times, he has said it over and over, he has rehearsed it because this of all possible outcomes is the only thing he is certain she will want to ask him, and he wants her to be proud of it the first time it reaches her ears. Two surnames, one each for her mother and her father, and the first name, which was the last thing and the only thing her mother was able to bestow.
And if anyone happens to be passing by the courtroom on this bluest of Argentine mornings, or be waiting alongside those who have long been waiting for her, with Eduardo and Constanza, with Julieta and Daniela, just outside the door, they might hear it too because he will say it with only the slightest tremor, with everything that has been in his heart over all these years of searching, with all he knows of constancy, with all he knows of love.
She turns to him, this woman who is his granddaughter who has unmoored him.
Her voice is calmer than she feels inside but it breaks, because she cannot hold it.
‘Tell me who I am,’ she asks him. ‘Tell me my name.’
ENDNOTE
Between March 1976 and December 1983, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo estimate that approximately 500 children were born in clandestine detention centres or taken from their families and appropriated by members of the security forces and friends of the Junta. Most were subject to false adoptions and brought up with falsified identities. At the time of writing, the Grandmothers had recovered 119 of them, some in other countries in Latin America. Roughly 400 remain missing to this day.
The incidence of child theft has a long and dark history, and over the past century it has recurred for political, ideological, racial, religious and criminal reasons around the world. The theft by Nazi SS officers of an estimated 300,000 ‘racially valuable’ children from orphanages or from their parents in Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Belorussia, Ukraine, Slovenia and the Soviet Union during the Second World War is perhaps the most notorious example, but it is not the only one. Australia, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland and the United States are all among countries that have experienced eras of child theft. In some instances, cases are estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
In 1989, thanks largely to the efforts of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, what have become known as the Argentine clauses were incorporated into the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Those clauses, articles 7, 8 and 11, enshrine in international law the rights of children to the protection and preservation of
their identity.
The convention remains the fastest and most widely ratified human rights treaty in history.
HISTORICAL NOTE
In the course of this novel, I have taken liberties with some elements of the historical record, shifting chronology in the following cases:
in France, the idea of organising a boycott of the 1978 World Cup in Argentina arose in October 1977 rather than January as I have it in this account;
I have imagined the sighting of an Argentine military spy, at an exile group meeting in Paris in March 1978, after the case of Alfredo Astiz, the naval officer who had already infiltrated and betrayed the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. In fact Astiz was recognised in Paris a month later, in April 1978, and was later found also to have been present at the counter congress on cancer, held in Paris in October that same year;
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince was officially banned from Argentine schools in September 1980, but I have advanced its proscription at Yolanda’s school to July 1976, since titles by Saint-Exupéry were included in the big book burning in Córdoba in April 1976, the first of at least three such incidents. The Junta also drew up lists of songs and performing artists whose work was censored, an eventuality reflected in Gustavo’s curtailing of the music he played at the Paradiso;
the request by the Spanish investigating magistrate Baltasar Garzón for the extradition of 48 Argentines suspected of crimes against humanity during the 1976–83 dictatorship took place in 1997, rather than in 1999 when Ana learns of it in the novel;
in this book Osvaldo gives a blood sample to the Argentine genetic database in 1986, when the database was in fact set up a year later, in 1987. However the grandparent index, whereby a genetic sample from an individual’s grandparents could be used to establish identity in the absence of such material from the parents, came into use several years earlier, in 1984, and was therefore in existence when both Osvaldo and Eduardo gave blood at the Hospital Durand in Buenos Aires;
I have accelerated the pace at which the results of DNA tests were typically returned. Although today it is much more rapid, in the 1990s and 2000s, some cases took as long as a year.
The golden oak-leaf crown, which according to one hypothesis may have belonged to a possible son of Alexander known as Heracles, was discovered in the agora at Aigai, in northern Greece, in 2008. I have shifted its discovery back a full decade, to 1998.
In May 2012 I attended a session in the trial of the ex-generals Jorge Videla and Reynaldo Bignone and the former ESMA obstetrician Jorge Magnacco in the courtrooms at Comodoro Py in Buenos Aires; testimony in and around the case, which established the theft of children as a systematic process under the 1976–83 dictatorship, and my visits to some of the former clandestine detention centres in Buenos Aires – particularly ESMA – inform the section in Graciela’s voice, and the part in which Inés Moncavillo recounts her experiences.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The late Argentine poet Juan Gelman was the first of various sources of inspiration for this novel, and I owe him heartfelt thanks for the long afternoon we spent talking in Mexico City back in April 2004. Osvaldo’s visit to the Vatican I borrowed from his experience; the quotation here comes from the introduction to his anthology, En el hoy y mañana y ayer, published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
In Argentina, I had the honour of holding several discussions with Estela de Carlotto, President of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo; with Rosa Rosinblit, the group’s Vice President; and with Taty Almeida, one of the founding Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. To each of these extraordinary women, my most heartfelt thanks. Warmest thanks must also go to Victoria Montenegro, Juan Cabandié and Macarena Gelman, each of whom contributed to my understanding of the diverse paths by which some of Argentina’s stolen children have found their way home.
Leopoldo Kulesz, Hugo Paredero and Luba Lewin have been the most generous of friends, both during my time in Argentina and beyond. Romina Ruffato and Caroline Uribe were always ready with expert responses to my questions, and Diego Lluma very kindly arranged for me to spend a memorable day in the shantytown, Villa 21. Yamila O’Neil graciously provided me with a sense of what life is like for a young generation living with disappearance. In Patagonia, Hugo Campañoli was an expert guide to the Cave of the Hands.
Innumerable kindnesses were also extended to me in Greece. Angeliki Kottaridi and Ioannis Graekos, of the 17th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, showed me over the dig site and the museum at Aigai, and allowed me to witness the opening of a jar grave. Kathy and Yanni Koutelieris, Petros Demeris, Yanna and Michael Hignett and Theo Nomikos extended variously friendship, insights into archaeology, explanations of the declensions of Greek names and knowledge of island life. My imagining of Vasilis’s island workshop was partly inspired by that of the late ceramicist Yanni Komboyannis, a gifted artist and generous human being.
In Mexico, I owe sincerest thanks to the poet Pedro Serrano, not least for the seasons of jacarandas, and to Carlos Beltran, for explaining the workings of mitochondrial DNA and for references concerning the Argentine diaspora.
In France, Alicia Bonnet-Kruger was a font of knowledge about the Argentine exiles, most generously sharing her own life story and her moving letter to the Argentine Congress. Cacho Kruger and Frieda Rochocz were also unstinting with their knowledge and accounts of their own experiences.
For background to Osvaldo’s profession, I received expert guidance from consultant ophthalmologist Dr Richard Packard in London, and from Dr Robert Kaufer and Dr Gunther Kaufer in Buenos Aires. Any misapprehensions that have worked themselves into the text, however, are my responsibility alone.
Frédéric Niel has been a generous and erudite sounding board from the novel’s beginning. Antoine Colonna, Chris Nicholson and Fiona Ortiz opened the first, crucial doors that opened so many others in Argentina. Ann Brothers, Caroline McLeod, Sylvain Piron, Gyongyi Biro, Paul Myers, Ann Collier, Chris Knight, Brian Childs, Patricia Ochs, Andrew Johnston, Henry Jackson, Chris Welsch and Marti Stewart all sustained me variously with their insight, humour and goodwill. To each, my most heartfelt thanks.
To Barbara Trapido, Gillian Stern, Linda Healey and David Miller I owe special thanks for their thoughtful readings of the novel’s earlier drafts. Helen Cross, Joan Michelson and Neva Micheva provided insightful comments on parts of the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to Ellen de Bruin, Paul Steenhuis and Clay Adam, whose friendship provided a vital counterbalance to the dark places I sometimes had to enter during my research.
I would like to express my gratitude to Ledig House in upstate New York for the residency which allowed me to complete an important part of this novel, and to the International New York Times, which kindly gave me leave to attend. Sangam House in India generously provided time and space to complete the final revisions.
Everyone at Bloomsbury has been a delight to work with, but I must particularly thank Angelique Tran Van Sang, Rachel Mannheimer and Lynn Curtis for their meticulous editing, and Alexandra Pringle for her insightful observations at every stage from this novel’s earliest days.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Caroline Brothers was born in Australia. She has a PhD in history from University College London and has worked as a foreign correspondent in Europe and Latin America, and as a journalist at the International New York Times. She is the author of War and Photography, and the novel Hinterland. She divides her time between London and Paris.
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Hinterland
Two young boys cross a river in the middle of the night. The river is also a border, and their lives depend on this journey. With nothing but the clothes on their back, Aryan and his little brother Kabir travel by truck, boat, train, bus and on foot across a Europe they desperately
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First published in Great Britain 2016
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Caroline Brothers has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
Excerpt here from The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. Copyright ©1927 by The Wilder Family LLC. Licensed by arrangement with The Wilder Family LLC and The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc. All rights reserved.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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