The Rhythm of Memory

by Alyson Richman

  Uninterested in taming things that were meant to grow wild, Salomé was far less diligent in maintaining the sisters’ garden. The lush and intricately planned yard that the spinsters had cultivated over the years had fallen upon two owners who had no patience for weeding or planting new bulbs. While it had once bloomed different flowers each season, peonies in the summer, dahlias in the fall, the garden soon grew like an enchanted forest with untamed vines wrapping over the fence and fruit trees overloaded with unpicked bounties.

  Living in such bohemian and lush surroundings, Salomé found her creative energies heightened during the last months of her pregnancy. She painted one of the upstairs bedrooms yellow, using the saffron threads she used to tint her paella as her inspiration. She crocheted white curtains with outlines of elephants and giraffes into the intricately woven pattern.

  Doña Olivia brought the cradle in which she had rocked her own daughter, and Salomé painted it with lemon leaves and lemon fruit, inspired by her own garden, which was now fragrant with the scent of verbena and rose.

  At night, when Octavio returned home exhausted from the studio, his eyes dark with fatigue and his jaw tired from rehearsing his lines, he still had time to hold Salomé in his arms and stroke her full belly underneath her long, white nightgown.

  He would bring her head between his two brown hands and kiss her delicately on the mouth.

  “My precious Fayum,” he would whisper to her. “Tell me our love will be forever.”

  “Our love will be forever, my darling,” she would whisper back to him. She would turn her brown eyes up to his, her delicate lashes fluttering in the moonlit room.

  And then he would sigh. His naked chest rising and falling in small undulations. “One day this house will be filled with children and you and I will grow old together.”

  “Yes,” she would say. Salomé knew these were her husband’s nightly musings. The affirmations he needed to maintain his hectic schedule of filming and rehearsing.

  Octavio hated talking about his daily activities. His hours were spent meeting various publicists, managers, and impatient producers. It embarrassed him. And Salomé sensed his tension. She herself was dreading the completion of his first film, for she knew that once the studio began its promotion, she and her husband would have even less time to themselves.

  They each agreed to make the most of their weekends when he was not busy with work at the studio. Octavio suggested that they scatter some vegetable seeds in the garden in the hope that they might have a small harvest to coincide with the birth of their first child. He mixed a sack of tomato and squash seeds and carried his pregnant wife through their already blossoming backyard—encouraging her to throw the seeds into the air.

  “You’re ridiculous, Octavio.” She giggled as he walked over the vines of wild strawberries and petunias. He was holding her tightly in his arms and pressing his nose into her thick mane of hair.

  “You smell better than all the roses in our garden,” he said.

  “Octavio.” She giggled again, as she withdrew another fistful of seeds. “Do you think they’ll grow?”

  “Of course they’ll grow, my little Fayum.”

  He stood still for a moment before letting Salomé down. He placed her on her feet so that she now stood in the middle of the garden. Behind her the branches of the large fig and avocado trees framed her delicate face. “This is fertile ground here,” he said as he tapped her belly with the back of his hand and smiled.

  “I want to sit here and watch the sunset with you,” she whispered as she placed the burlap sack of vegetable seeds by her toes.

  That evening Octavio smoothed out a large blanket in the middle of their garden. He took Salomé in his arms and brought her close to his chest. And as the sky turned pink and gold, the sun sliding into the Andes, he told her again and again how much he loved her.

  They fell asleep to the sound of the crickets. And when they awakened, they were struck by the glimmer of the stars, the fireflies circling above, and the light of each other’s eyes, radiant in the night.

  Twelve

  SANTIAGO, CHILE

  JULY 1966

  Unable to get away from the set in time, Octavio missed the birth of his first child. Doña Olivia and Don Fernando accompanied their daughter to La Clinica Santa Maria in Santiago and waited nervously in the waiting room as the hours passed and Salomé went through the pains of labor.

  Before traveling by car to the clinic, Doña Olivia had telephoned her son-in-law to tell him that the baby was on the way. The studio assistant told her that Octavio was in the middle of a shoot and that he would get there as soon as the last scene was completed to the director’s satisfaction.

  Octavio didn’t arrive, however, until the following morning; wearing his clothes from the previous day, unshaven and weary, he came to Salomé’s bedside, carrying a bouquet of pink and white peonies.

  “I’m sorry, Fayum…I couldn’t get away.”

  Salomé nodded, trying hard to fight back her tears. Unable to look at Octavio, she gazed down at their infant son, who was now nursing at her breast. “I named him Rafael,” she whispered as she nursed the tiny boy.

  “God heals all,” Octavio said, acknowledging that he remembered the significance of the name’s meaning. “He’s beautiful.”

  Octavio reached down to caress the child’s forehead. “Just like his mother…”

  “Please, don’t…Octavio,” Salomé whispered. She knew if she spoke any more, she wouldn’t be able to restrain herself. Her eyes were still red from exhaustion and she knew if she told Octavio how truly disappointed she was, she would be unable to stop her tears.

  She wanted to tell him that she couldn’t remember the last time they had held hands, that those nights they had fallen asleep in the garden, under the canopy of stars, seemed like ages ago. She wondered if he had even noticed that their garden now had patches of tomatoes and squash. They had appeared only weeks before, but she had been unable to pick them herself because of bed rest. She imagined now that the vegetables were spoiling on their vines.

  She wanted to ask him where his priorities were now. She wanted to chastise him for not getting away from his silly movie and coming to her side, as he had always promised. But she had known for quite some time that their child’s birth was coinciding with the final scenes of the movie and that her husband could not control his schedule, let alone the direction of his life, at this moment.

  It was just that she missed him and the way things had been only a year before. She had dreamt that when their child was born, he would be only steps outside the delivery room.

  Now, as their life was changing so quickly, she was yearning for something to be constant between them.

  “My love is constant,” he had told her time and time again as she voiced her concern and her desire for her poet to return.

  “Can’t we at least get away for a weekend before the baby comes?” she had asked him more than once.

  “This will only be for a short time, Fayum,” he had said, trying to comfort her. “After the film wraps, we’ll get away…just the two of us.”

  But she knew that those were naive words. Octavio was committed to at least two more movies after Buenos Dias Soledad. And she would have their baby by then. No longer would it be “just the two of us.”

  “We will plant an orange grove,” he promised her as he drifted off to sleep. “I will write more poems when I have more free time,” he whispered.

  She never said aloud that she knew that it would never happen. That she could already anticipate the responsibilities of motherhood and foresee how he would respond to the responsibilities of fatherhood.

  Somehow the pressures of life had caught up with these two people who had always believed they were destined for an uncomplicated life grounded simply on love.

  But whereas Salomé could see the decisions that Octavio was making would affect their relationship, her husband seemed to still maintain his idealism that, one day, all would
return to the way things were when they had first courted. She thought him naive, but well-intentioned. She only hoped he would not wake up one day and regret he had taken a path on which there were consequences he was ill-prepared to bear.

  Thirteen

  GÖTEBORG, SWEDEN

  MARCH 1969

  Samuel Rudin hadn’t been prepared for the Scandinavian winter. He missed the Peruvian sun. He missed the mountains. He hated rising in the morning and seeing darkness. Nearly every night, as he lay in his bed, his eyes closed shut and his fists clenched to his sides, he shivered himself to sleep. In his mind, he counted down the days until midsummer.

  His apartment, a modest place cloistered in the old town, along the south side of the Göta River, was lonely and sparse. And when he returned there from seeing his patients, political refugees who had come to Sweden hoping for a better life, he would boil himself a cup of hot water, stir in a spoonful of Nescafé, and slouch into his sofa. Often, he would find his mind wandering back to his few memories of Paris, the long boat ride to Peru, the deterioration of his mother’s mental health, and the depression that hung over his family like a wide bolt of mourning cloth. He saw his life like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, certain events disjointed from the main configuration. He frequently did not know what to do with the memories whose edges were not smooth and neat, the ones that didn’t fit snugly into the picture he wanted to have in his head.

  He had gone through psychoanalysis in school, where the roles were reversed and he was forced to be the patient. At first, he could not detach himself from the doctor within. He could hear himself answering the questions in a way that would reveal little of himself, as he was afraid that he might say something that might flag him as a poor candidate for the psychiatry residency. But after a few sessions his analyst told him that it was in his best interest to be honest with himself. “Every student believes he can outsmart his shrink,” he told Samuel through a thick Baltimore accent. “But believe me, if you are truly interested in psychiatry, you will reach down and reflect on your own life and the reasons behind all of your choices. In the end, it will make you a better doctor, I assure you.”

  At first, it was hard for Samuel to talk about his childhood. There were events that he had pushed out of his memory, such as the time when he was nine and had returned home hungry from school. Having been unable to find one of the maids, he went in search of his mother only to find her slicing small lacerations into her wrists.

  The family villa in Miraflores was not particularly large. Its grandest feature was the spiral stairwell that began in the modest vestibule and wrapped to the second-floor landing, where the family bedchambers were hidden behind heavy teak doors. Down the long corridor to the left was Samuel’s parents’ room; he had walked there quietly, thinking that perhaps his mother, who often slept during the afternoon, was asleep.

  He remembered that he found the door ajar, that he pushed it open quietly, careful not to disturb his mother’s slumber. But he did not find her in her tall, canopied bed as he imagined, but rather at her dressing stand. Her robe carelessly off one shoulder, her back bent like an archer’s bow over a pair of frail, shaking hands.

  In his memory, he sees her in profile. She, in front of her rosewood vanity, the three-paneled mirror reflecting her in a kaleidoscope of angles. Her black hair, now lined with silver, piled behind a pink scarf that is wrapped tightly around her small, delicate head.

  He realizes now, as he withdraws into his memory, that he has always believed that his mother was the most beautiful creature. That he could accept her mental deterioration far more easily than the waning of her physical charms. She would always be that beautiful Frenchwoman in his mind, with perfect lipstick—the one with the black velvet suit and the white satin cuffs. Not the one dependent on sleeping pills, not the one who now wore oversize housecoats. The one of Paris, long ago.

  But now, the memory of his standing at the threshold and seeing his mother’s spine twisting beneath the satin robe like the brittle branch of an ancient oak tree, her perfume bottles scattered over the tabletop and the drawers in disarray, returned.

  “What did you see?” the therapist asks Samuel.

  “I didn’t see anything until she turned around and looked at me. Her face was all streaked with running makeup, her breast only barely covered by the quilted collar of her robe. In one hand, I saw Father’s razor blade. In the other, I saw a small river of blood running from her wrist.

  “I don’t believe she was trying to kill herself, I think she was only trying to release her pain.”

  Samuel winced. “I remember that when the doctor came, he bandaged Mother up and sedated her. I overheard him speaking with Father, telling him that the family was lucky this time, that she was trying to signal for help.”

  “And did she receive help?”

  Samuel was quiet for a few moments. The vinyl sofa was beginning to feel sticky beneath him. The therapy was exhausting him.

  “No.” He paused and let out a deep sigh. “Father believed that this kind of ‘help’ was better kept between the family and the servants. He was afraid of the stigma it might bring upon the family.”

  The doctor wiggled his pencil in the air. “How does your father feel about your decision to go into psychiatric medicine?”

  “He’s indifferent, I suppose.”

  “Indifferent?”

  “Well, our relationship has been strained since my mother passed away. Since I didn’t join my two brothers in the family business back in Peru, I think he feels there is little he can talk to me about.

  “I don’t want to make textiles and worry about whether a shipment is going to arrive on time or production costs are on schedule,” Samuel said as he readjusted himself on the couch. “I find that tedious and boring. I want to help people. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Simple?” his analyst questioned him, trying to evoke some self-reflection in this young psychiatry resident. “I think the reason that you are interested in helping people, especially considering your family background, is anything but simple.”

  Those days of sitting on the analyst’s couch were over, and finally Samuel found himself where he’d always wanted to be—with a practice that was devoted to helping victims of war. Most of his patients had come to Sweden from volatile political climates such as in Algeria and Czechoslovakia. Some of the older ones were Polish Jews who had spent the past twenty-five years speaking to no one, not even their children, of their time in the camps. Somewhere deep inside, he hoped he might meet a French Jew—someone who might know what had happened to his maternal grandparents and his uncle’s family, as if this knowledge would somehow appease something deep within him. Something that he knew had quietly destroyed his mother.

  But Samuel had no such luck. The immigrant community was small, and most of his patients were more recent survivors from countries he had never even visited.

  He realized that one never gets used to hearing stories of torture. Yet, the strength of the human spirit continued to amaze him. He learned to trust his intuition and to guide his patients back into memories that had often been shut for years.

  Just by looking at the face of a new patient, Samuel could often gauge the extent of his or her torture. Ironically, the women who looked the most placid, the most vacant, were usually his most troubled victims. They were the ones who held everything deep within, speaking not one word of their vicious torture, the rapes, they had kept secret for years. If he had stuck them with a needle, they wouldn’t have uttered a sound. That was how deep the pain was for them.

  In a white-walled room, with a few small paintings of innocuous landscapes that were meant to calm, he sat and spoke with them. He spoke five languages, French, Spanish, English, German, and his Swedish, which, though not perfect, was getting better. Mostly, he was there to listen. But he was also there to steer them through their memories, so they could get on with their lives and learn to reconcile the atrocities of their past.

  At
first, he was skeptical about the position. He spoke limited Swedish and knew little of the customs or the land. But upon his arrival, and after his first few days on the job, Samuel realized that his foreignness was an advantage. When an immigrant walked into the room and saw that the doctor too was an outsider, he or she relaxed.

  There was absolutely no way Samuel, a very Sephardic-looking Jew, could be mistaken for a Swede. He had inherited his parents’ dark looks. His skin was olive, his hair black, and his thin, narrow face had a natural intensity to it.

  In Peru, he blended in with the local coloring, although the natives’ features were far more Indian than typical Spanish. In Sweden, he felt like a shadow walking the streets, his curly hair bobbing in an ocean of blond. His prominent brow, his wide, dark eyes, and small, curved nose often making him feel self-conscious. The few weeks he had spent in Stockholm had been an entirely different experience for him. There, he discovered students from almost every country congregating in the streets, the cafés, the energy escalating, and the leftist philosophies floating through the air.

  But in Göteborg, it was quiet. The cafés were filled with couples drinking tea and eating small cakes, the bars filled with businessmen and their sons. Samuel rarely went out after work, instead choosing to return home and drink his Nescafé in solitude.

  One sunny afternoon, Samuel found himself noticing a beautiful young woman not far from the city park. He had brought with him one of his medical journals and a brown bag of seed to feed the birds. She was sitting quietly by herself, a slender girl wrapped in a blue velvet scarf.