The Memory Stones Read online

  The Memory Stones

  CAROLINE BROTHERS

  For Lorna

  La muerte me enseñó que no se muere de amor. Se vive de amor.

  Death has taught me that you do not die of love. Love keeps you alive.

  Juan Gelman, En el hoy y mañana y ayer (In today and tomorrow and yesterday)

  There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

  Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

  And Demeter, goddess of the harvest, furious that none of the gods would help her, descended from Mount Olympus to scour the earth for her daughter. Crops withered. The fields lay barren as Demeter searched and grieved for the loss of Persephone, abducted by Hades and imprisoned in the Underworld. Finally Zeus, alarmed at the desolation befalling the earth, sent his messenger Hermes to bring Persephone back. But the woman who returned was not the same maiden who had vanished. For those who sup with the Dead must remain forever with them, and she had done so; though restored to the Living, she was obliged to return to Hades’ realm for long dark months each year.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue Endings and Beginnings

  Part I The Night of the Dogs

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part II The Garden and the Wilderness

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part III The Double Helix

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part IV The Cave of the Hands

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part V The Heracles Crown

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Epilogue All That You Are

  Endnote

  Historical note

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Also available by Caroline Brothers

  PROLOGUE

  ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

  Buenos Aires

  Late June 1999

  A young woman running through an airport, heels clattering like marbles dropped on a floor. Around her, flight numbers and desk numbers and gate numbers juddering on screens.

  Crowds surge towards her and she strives against them; they part then close behind her like a stream. Harried, she’s searching for something, some window, some counter, a place to buy a ticket; then shouldering herself – Permiso! Permiso! – to the front of a check-in line.

  Overhead, words flare and blink in manic unison: NOW BOARDING. No, she has no luggage. No cigarette lighters. No knives. NOW BOARDING. ALL PASSENGERS. LAST CALL.

  A thud, and an emblem flowers in her passport like a bruise. Turning, there is one last stretch and she hurtles into it, crimson raincoat flapping at her sides. Signs bleed like they’re underwater, for duty-free things, for Argentine leather, perfumes. The departure lounge is empty; the staff are switching off their terminals; a suspended screen is flashing in alarm or consternation: GATE CLOSING. GATE CLOSING. She hurls herself through. GATE CLOSED.

  The entrance to the plane is a fish-mouth and she tumbles into it, staggers down the ribs of seats. Her door-keys drag like ballast from the life that she is fleeing, a deadweight in the pocket of her coat.

  She is in shock; the tangible world is real and at once unreal to her; her swollen mind is numb and she cannot think. She is running to escape the falling, and flying to escape the running; amid the splintering that’s both inside her and outside her all that matters is the lift-off into flight.

  Mexico City

  July 1999

  Sunlight is filtering through the leaves of the jacaranda, between the slats of the wooden blinds. The sounds of a Mexican morning – the thwack of the doorman’s broom inside the stairwell, the hawkers’ calls as their barrows rattle over the cobbles – have at last receded, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

  I am trying to prepare a class while the apartment is empty, but find I cannot settle to the task. My mind has been numb for days after all that has happened, the surge of possibility and then the silence, the hope that I’d held for so many years unravelling in so few hours.

  Perhaps it is the way the light falls that triggers it, an impression of other trees and other sunlight, that this morning carries me back. My thoughts become untethered, vaulting over the years that have intervened till they alight on this one thing. A memory, just one memory. A season, which at the time we didn’t know would be memorable at all.

  It was 1976 and the summer, which that year had been so reticent, descended as if by ambush, trapping us in a prism of heat and light. Outside Buenos Aires, the dusty roads that vanished into the pampas now dazzled with mirages; on the eastern side of the city we were hemmed in by the river that stretched to the horizon, blinding under a merciless southern sun.

  We’d lived through heatwaves before, but this was different. There was something fierce in the relentless rise of the mercury, something sullen in the humidity’s leaden drag. Traffic lights begrudged their slow permissions. Ambulances veered down the weary streets with wails that stretched then sagged like old elastic.

  In the airless night we silently cursed our wakefulness, and searched for a strip of mattress not afire with our own body heat. By dawn, defeated, Yolanda would rise to prepare the coffee; I’d follow her into the kitchen, hollow-eyed. But Graciela, oblivious to everything – the sun, the assault of jackhammers on the footpath, the radio we had on low for the weather forecast – slept on through the morning, undisturbed.

  That summer, our youngest daughter was transformed. The exams were over and she was home for the weekend, back in her childhood room. She padded around the house in her nightdress, forgetting where she’d been going before she got there: the end of the song she’d been humming; an anecdote she’d started to recount. She strummed her guitar, or lay on the grass staring up at the trees, dreaming. She was nineteen, and radiant, and in love.

  Everyone who could get away had gone to the coast, to Mar del Plata, to Punta del Este, to villas or apartments or beach shacks down by the sea. That year, for a change of light and scenery, we’d rented a house in the delta and were going to Tigre.

  Julieta, our eldest, had flown down from Miami and gone on ahead of us, staying with a friend in San Isidro on the way.

  The rest of us, abandoning the car, took the train from Retiro station, rattling past the shantytowns and along the marshy coastline to the port. The boat from the fruit dock wound through the reedy waterways, past stilt-houses tottering between the pine trees, past private jetties with doll’s-house roofs at the ends of them where the speedboats and the water-taxis moored.

  ‘This is Venice before anyone thought about building Venice,’ Graci
ela had said as we’d glided through the silty water, past men hunched over fishing rods and women cocooned in hammocks on the ends of the piers. ‘This is Venice before they buried it under stone.’

  They weren’t the last words she spoke to me, but they might have been. Amid the chatter of everyday existence, they are the last that I remember, these words from another epoch, an echo from another life.

  More than two decades have passed since that last summer – the last I was ever to spend in a country that had always been home. For years now I’ve been living in Mexico City, thousands of kilometres to the north. But if ever I find myself pulled onto a boat in Xochimilco, and we’re drifting among the reeds and islands that once were the Aztecs’ gardens, I remember her, I remember Tigre, I remember those days before the world lurched sideways, the last days before everything went dark.

  In Tigre, in the lushness of the delta, there was a breeze, and if the breeze faltered there was the emanation of coolness that the river carried with it on its long journey south towards the sea. It had come to us from the rainforests of Brazil, through the gorge at Salto del Guairá in the years before its eighteen mighty waterfalls were dynamited and dammed. It had plunged through the arena of Iguazú, its cascades gleaming white-lipped through the jungle, the air alive with butterflies and the crash and roar of the falls. Then south again, Paraguay in one arm, Argentina in the other, until, reddened with silt, it meandered into the delta and lolled into the Rio de la Plata that was not really a river at all, but rather an estuary that spilled into the Atlantic’s inky shoals.

  Ours was a holiday house on the eastern side of the Abra Vieja, a narrow finger of the delta, lent to us by a colleague at the clinic. It had pointed eaves half hidden by the pine trees, and stilts concealed by hydrangea shrubs with blooms like babies’ heads.

  Even before we docked there, I knew which room she would choose. From the water you could see straight into it, to the iron bedstead and wooden dresser tucked under the isosceles roof. Sunshine was pooling on the bedclothes; flung there by the river, diamonds of light scattered across the wardrobe’s mirrored door.

  The sealed-up rooms when we’d entered them were hoary with desiccated moths. We threw open the windows and shutters; we swept the dustsheets off the furniture in wide flamenco swirls.

  Outside, lilies clustered like bridesmaids, and irises shimmered in profusion in the garden of the house next door. The neighbour’s house was locked up for the summer, but Graciela was already advancing with a kitchen knife, and soon returned in triumph with her quiver of pilfered spears.

  Easter lilies, then, and irises that fanned like paintbrushes over the belly of the milk jug, stolen flowers with purple petals that dripped onto the tablecloth like tears.

  Afterwards, all through siesta, Graciela waited for the water-taxi’s thrum. Too distracted to read, she was deaf to the din of cicadas, to the squeals of children leaping into the swimming hole, sending clouds of insects spiralling into the air.

  When finally José arrived, her lassitude evaporated. We heard her laughing as she showed him around the stilt-house, as they photographed each other under the droopiest willow tree. Later we heard her protests as, hand after hand and just as her sister used to, he called her bluff with the truco cards.

  Julieta joined us early in the evening. We ate at a table in the garden, leaf debris helicoptering onto the tablecloth, and afterwards we lingered, sleepy with wine and the exhaustion we’d been carrying with us for days. Yolanda told old stories of the delta, of its pirating past and the fugitives who’d hidden there, of the jaguar hunters who’d given Tigre its name. And when the stories ran out we stayed on listening to the stillness, to the calls of the owls and the lapping water, while the fireflies burnt their time-lapse trails in the air.

  She’d been so full of plans. Not just for the weekend. Not just for what to buy when the fruit launches docked or where to swim in the late afternoon. Graciela already knew, with a conviction that sobered me in someone so young, that this man José whom she’d known for a year was the one that she wanted for life.

  In the early hours of the morning, long after we’d gone to bed, the stars went out. Magnesium flashes of lightning turned the trees to skeletons and, far away, thunder rolled over the rooftops of Buenos Aires. I rose to fasten a rattling window. All around the islands, the water was electric with rain.

  The delta was a drug; it helped us forget. It was an oasis after the tensions of the city. We could see it gleaming in the distance if we turned into one of the waterways that threw open the horizon, but in Tigre it had still been possible to believe we were a world away. All over Argentina people were braced for another coup; in the darkness of the churches people prayed for it; nobody believed that Isabel could last another week.

  I remove my glasses and, setting them down on my notes for next week’s lecture, press my fingers into the corner of my eyes.

  Outside the study window, the breeze disturbs the leaf-shadows that fall like feathers onto the rug on the floor.

  There was too much we couldn’t know, too much that was inexplicable yet to come. But at least we had this: this place, this moment in our lives. At least we were granted Tigre.

  I fold it away with care, a small envelope of time to which I entrust this one last salvageable thing. For this is how I remember her, how I choose to remember, how it soothes me to remember her. Blurred, diaphanous, memory leads us astray, it orphans us in the past, but this I keep always close to me, hard against my heart, its silver surface smoky as a daguerreotype and lustrous, even as it fades.

  PART I

  THE NIGHT OF THE DOGS

  1976–1978

  1

  Buenos Aires

  March 1976

  Out of the darkness, two sounds: the scrape of metal on concrete, and a low, lupine kind of snarl.

  I watch through the bathroom window. After the first night I have started to wait up for them: for the flick of a tail, the flitter of shadow across stone. I observe them from above with the lights turned off as they slink through the deserted streets. Under the curfew the quietness is eerie; against the silence, their noise sets my nerves on edge.

  No one knows where they come from, whether they are feral dogs that have infiltrated the city, or city dogs that hunger has turned wild. They invade the night-time suburbs like scavengers in the wreck trail of disaster. From the window I see them streak across the playground, heads down, tails low, in furtive silhouette. Lured by opportunity, they salivate at weakness, aroused by the possibility of spoils.

  Since the day of the coup there has been no garbage collection, and the rubbish cans now totter under their burden of sacks. Each day more accumulate, so that the cans swell into hillocks and then small islands, the bloated bags on top of them as taut and obese as seals.

  And nightfall is when they come to feed. One moment quietness, then suddenly that metal sound, and shadow creatures are tearing at the carcasses, eyes a-glitter, breath steaming through ivory jaws. They trapeze on bony haunches, seeking the moist organs inside. The air trembles. The membranes spill their warm intestines; the gutted plastic releases its stench of rot. Drooling, the hangers-on emerge from hiding and trot towards the action; others lurk in the shrubberies to pace, to watch and wait.

  Some nights the excitement boils over; some nights feast degenerates into fight. I’ve seen it: the flash of fang as hunter rounds on plunderer, as young blood turns against the old. Beneath the branches, in the stippled streetlight, they converge in a seething mass. Then the mass shifts shape and staggers sideways, and suddenly something snaps. Growling, yelping, some cur breaks free in triumph; the vanquished skitter and skulk away. They limp into the bushes with limbs slickly gleaming in the lamplight; when morning comes, the footpaths are smeared with detritus, and dotted with scarlet trails.

  ‘Come to bed, Osvaldo,’ Yolanda says.

  I turn, and see her standing in her nightdress by the doorway, watching me watching by the window, as if vigilance alone
could protect.

  ‘I’m coming now, amore,’ I say, and go to follow her.

  But then another shadow passes by the window, between the patterns the ceiba trees are casting on the footpath, and I cannot pull myself away.

  It is the dogs above all that fascinate me, even more than the army tanks. It doesn’t occur to me that there might be some connection, that the feral and the disciplined might not be opposites after all, but merely different facets of the same thing.

  The tanks we felt before we saw them, a low vibration that made the leaves of the pot palms shiver and the lids on the saucepans jiggle as if over steam. At first I thought it was an earthquake: things were tilting; things were coming unhinged. But the sounds grew louder, and new ones followed: the scrape of steel as the behemoths ground around the corner, gouging out the cobblestones like teeth. Then, at the intersection where the cobbles gave way to asphalt, the grinding turned to a rumble that grew louder as the column drew nearer; behind it, personnel carriers purred. Conscripts crouched in the back of them with anxious eyes and guns that spiked the air like accusations. There they are, I thought, our soldiers, bodyguards of the nation, summoned to subdue the unquiet land.

  And subdue it they have, quarter by quarter, street by street locking us down. On television we saw the tanks encircling the Casa Rosada; overnight, Isabel had been hustled away. Even now, in daylight raids, people are being wrenched from suburban houses, helicopters throbbing overhead.

  Across the city, army trucks are stationed on every corner. Machine-guns peer like telescopes down the wide, deserted streets.

  All this, yet it’s the dogs that haunt me, the way they appear at night where by day the soldiers have been. The mangy gang-land dogs, the watchdogs and the runaways and the lap dogs, the shantytown dogs with washboard ribs out running with the greyhounds and the mongrels, agile beasts and cunning ones that are reckless now with instinct and eager to do better than just survive. They hunt in packs, these mastiffs and these slack-papped bitches, they remember their old proclivities and unleash them. They pick over the reeking garbage like hyenas, all of them, the household pets and the abandoned ones that are everyone’s last priority now that the coup that has long been expected, that many have secretly yearned for, now that the coup itself has finally arrived.