The Memory Stones Read online

  2

  Buenos Aires

  May 1976

  ‘Osvaldo!’

  Half the bar swings towards me as Hugo bellows my name.

  I move towards the corner they’ve taken over, smiling at the cluster of empty glasses, at the upturned faces of friends. Hugo, slightly drunk, embraces me, and I work my way around the table greeting each of them in turn.

  It’s a Friday night and a group of us have gathered at the Paradiso, the bar that Hugo gets us all to patronise chiefly because it’s three doors down from where he works. Gleaming with brass fittings, it has the old-world aura of a ship’s saloon, while the haze of smoke inside it makes the outside world more opaque than it already is. The beers, however, are passable, and the wine is sometimes excellent, and the bar’s number is taped to a newsroom pillar so that Hugo can be phoned there from the desk.

  And if ever a call should come in, Gustavo gesticulates as if he’s guiding in an aircraft till Hugo dashes to the receiver; he can sprint to the office and be back again before his beer goes flat.

  ‘What’ll it be, Osvaldo?’ Hugo is saying. ‘The next round’s on Heriberto, I believe.’

  It’s a running joke with all of us that Heriberto, a movie critic with vitriol for everything but 1940s Hollywood, finds endless ways to wriggle out of his turn.

  ‘After the pittance you pay for my pieces – when you happen to remember?’ says Heriberto. ‘You publishers are all the same, exploiting the bohemian poor.’

  Hugo guffaws. ‘Exploiting!’ he says. ‘Who’s doing the exploiting when a writer engaged on an exclusive contract recycles his opinions up the road?’

  ‘Slander!’ cries Heriberto. ‘You have no . . .’

  But Hugo waves his protests aside. ‘Actually, we’ve discussed it with accounting. Payroll has no objections to paying you in kind. And Gustavo here is more than happy to set you up a tab behind the bar.’

  Heriberto nearly chokes on his beer. ‘What, and have you lot guzzle away my meagre earnings? When what you pay me for the wisdom of years would barely cover what you feed those goldfish of yours?’

  Heriberto is short and portly and myopic, which letters-to-the-editor have unkindly suggested might explain his views on cinema; he wears a Borsalino battered beyond pretentiousness to cover his vanishing hair. He looks older than his ID says he is – an image he has cultivated since his twenties; now he is well past forty he has started to grow into the part.

  ‘Why not? Two birds with one shot,’ says Hugo, glasses flashing. ‘We wouldn’t have to bother about sending you a cheque and you wouldn’t have to worry about buying us rounds.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say “worry” was quite the right word,’ says Diego, chipping in.

  Heriberto, suddenly uncertain whether Hugo is joking, rummages in at least five pockets for his lighter, then holds it to his girlfriend’s cigarette.

  Sofia – or is it Sonia? From Heriberto’s glare when I greet her, I realise I’ve got it wrong again – is half his age and seemingly devoted to him, though I have trouble taking them seriously as a pair. A freelance writer with ambitions, she is a good head taller than Heriberto and buxom in her figure-hugging blouses; shamelessly, he strings her along by name-dropping about his connections on the national press.

  ‘Still, it’s a great idea, trading goods for services,’ Diego continues through the paisley whorls of smoke. ‘Though governments tend to hate it. You can’t tax a barter economy, after all.’

  Diego, whom Hugo and I have known since we were all at high school, we once teased for his stocky legs and his fashion-free taste in clothes. Now we rib him for being a dour economist, though in reality he holds unorthodox views that he defends like a conspiracy theorist; he still goes about in an orange pullover that no one can persuade him to discard.

  Gustavo is working around the table, empty glasses clinking as he two-by-twos them onto his tray.

  ‘Just a Quilmes, Gustavo,’ I say, in response to the eyebrow he’s raised.

  ‘Sure it’s a nice idea, this cash-free system,’ says Marguerita, with whom Diego has been in love since he reversed into her car at university, though he still hasn’t mustered the courage to propose. ‘But it can only work at a micro level – you know, for crates of tomatoes, film reviews and the like . . .’

  Heriberto, put out at hearing his profession placed on a par with market gardening, scowls as he returns the lighter to his jacket on the back of his chair.

  Marguerita, these days an established actress, has a husky voice to go with her Spanish features, and a weakness for French silk scarves that some dealer in San Telmo ferrets out. Jet-eyed under the sweep of her black eyebrows, she has the quickest mind of all of us, and dissects our arguments with the kind of intensity that Heriberto reserves for the Hipódromo racing guide.

  Hugo likes to hear her take on things, which he adds to all the other opinions he accumulates so that you never quite know which are his.

  Diego, however, disagrees with her about the limits of the cashless economy, and swiftly their dispute escalates. The rest of us scramble to keep pace.

  I’m sorry Yolanda hasn’t accompanied me this evening – she intervenes only judiciously, but appreciates the sparring like a high-speed spectator sport. And she likes the Paradiso, with its chandelier dangling bell-shaped from the ceiling; it reminds her, she says, of the salóns where, years ago, we used to go to dance.

  Tonight, however, she is buried under a backlog of marking, so she has sent her love to the rest of us and dispatched me here on my own.

  Hugo was my best man when Yolanda and I got married, though he insists he has never been tempted to indulge in such folly himself.

  ‘One malfunctioning relationship is enough,’ he says, whenever we quiz him about the girlfriends he has presented to us over the years. ‘You know I’m wedded to my job.’

  We form a band, of sorts, Yolanda and me with Diego and Marguerita, Hugo and Heriberto. Others have come and gone, moving in and out of our loose circle, but our best discussions and our most boisterous evenings take place when all of us are there.

  I have my back to the bar, but in the mirror I can see Gustavo, our shipboard master of ceremonies, sliding a cassette out of the tape deck and slotting another one in. We try to curb his penchant for some of the more maudlin tangos; Hugo is convinced he puts them on on purpose when our arguments start to heat up.

  Since the coup, however, the atmosphere at the Paradiso has changed. It is the first time I have been here since the generals announced they were taking over, and the difference is perceptible even to me. It is not just the ban on certain pieces of music, forcing Gustavo to weed out Discépolo and Pugliese, even some of Gardel’s tangos, from his collection. It’s as if something has interfered with the barometer, pressure added to the air we breathe.

  ‘This curfew’s bad for business,’ Gustavo mutters darkly, bottles of Quilmes weeping as he sets them down. He curses the fact that the buses now stop before midnight; he predicts the demise of the Paradiso, of café life itself.

  The bar, it is true, is almost empty – unusual for a Friday, particularly in so busy a part of town. Idle behind the counter in his jacket and starched white apron, Gustavo complains that even his regulars are dwindling; if they show up at all it is singly, or at most in pairs.

  ‘Nothing but espressos, that’s all they want,’ he says, eyebrows lowered in one of his heavier scowls. ‘I haven’t served a bottle of Malbec in days.’

  I don’t know whether it’s the same all over the country, but here at least, no one seems to vent about the news unless it’s football, or launch into a debate about politics with a stranger at the table next door. At lunchtime these days the outdoor cafés are deserted; with the ban on assembly, even the students are staying away.

  Weeks have passed since the generals seized power and I’ve scarcely spoken to Hugo since they did. ‘!CAYÓ ISABEL!’ the headlines screamed, and nobody seemed to be sorry she was gone. Yet strangely, the relief we’d a
ll been expecting hasn’t come.

  We’ve had coups before, of course, but I’m unsure what to make of this one: the endless parades of jeeps down Corrientes, the edicts descending so fast we can barely keep up. Communiqués interrupt the television broadcasts, and repeat till our minds turn numb on the radio waves. I sense it’s not what’s said so much as what they stand for, but I have no gift for unscrambling the military’s codes.

  I do know that ‘subversion’ is the word they use for terrorism, but there hasn’t been a bomb in ages now, and since the army has taken over, it’s hard to believe that the terrorists haven’t all been caught.

  In practical terms, what bothers me most are the random roadblocks, which three times now have made me late at the hospital; the police are either arrogant or jittery, and you’d better watch your movements when you reach for your ID.

  ‘They’ve removed Isabel, they’ve taken power,’ I say to anyone at the table who’s listening. ‘Surely now they can lift this state of siege?’

  ‘Lift it? Why would they?’ says Heriberto, glad of the change of subject, Borsalino nodding as he speaks. ‘It suits them better to keep us battened down.’

  ‘I think he’s right,’ says Marguerita. ‘Have you noticed how no one is saying anything about elections? This is it. It’s how they plan to rule.’

  Though politics is Argentina’s greatest obsession after football, I have no natural feel for it, like being born tone deaf or colour blind. Beyond my family, what matters to me most is my profession: the treatment of my patients, changes at the hospital. Politics in the wider sense has always seemed abstract.

  Now, as I sit with my friends at the Paradiso, ears half-tuned to the lilt of conversation, I feel a sense of unreality at this new chapter in our country’s life.

  ‘What makes you think this lot will be any different?’ someone is saying. ‘Generals are always rescuing us from ourselves.’

  ‘Not from ourselves, for themselves,’ somebody quips, and everyone at the table laughs.

  As they talk, I find a pen in my pocket and start doodling on the back of an envelope, as I sometimes do to relax or to while away time. As a child, I filled sheets of butcher’s paper with drawings of made-up creatures, and progressed to pictures of classmates when I got to school. To impress Yolanda, in the first months of our romance I did sketches of our fellow students, and caricatures of the anatomy professor we all lived half in fear of; later, I teased our girls with cartoons of them as kids. Once in a while, for want of a better subject, I’d turn my hand to a politician: Onganía, say, or Evita or Perón. But it was never anything more than an idle pastime, and never something I considered in a professional light.

  But now, as I drift in and out of the conversation, something surfaces through the diktats and the menace, through the Junta’s tone and the barking voices that track us along the radio dial. Suddenly I am remembering my schooldays, how the master treated the slow kids in the classroom: the humiliation, the patronising tone of voice. Perhaps it is that, some residual anger, that drives the strokes of my pen.

  Three blind mice.

  On my hospital envelope I scribble away at the Junta’s three top generals. While the others pursue their arguments, I depict our leaders in a series of ridiculous poses, with and without their hats and medals and uniforms, testing how far my metaphor holds up.

  With his beady eyes and pointed chin, the Army general looks more like a rodent the longer I stare at his photo in Hugo’s Clarín. I give him a stripy T-shirt, a generous sprinkling of stubble, and a giant sack that he’s hoisted over his shoulder, ‘A-R-G-E-N-T-I-N-A’ stencilled down the side. Suddenly the ratón has become a ratero; the mouse, a thief – but a blind one, blundering around with his bag of loot since I’ve blacked out his burglar’s mask.

  Around me the discussion grows more animated; words like ‘capital’ and ‘import substitution’ wash over me, then something about some bulldozers in the shantytowns. I barely notice when Gustavo selects a slow Di Sarli tango to calm us down.

  I am absorbed now by the nose of the Navy general – its bulbousness surely a cartoonist’s gift. I curl his bushy eyebrows over the rims of his blind-man’s glasses; I garnish him with cauliflower ears. I place him on the quarterdeck of a frigate, his tail a-droop in the ocean air. White cane aloft, he’s issuing orders to fire the frigate’s cannons, while from the stern, sailor rats are rushing to abandon ship.

  The music swells and the voices drop. I drift in and out of an incident Marguerita is recounting: something about a police raid on the Fac she lives next door to, something about some students taken away in vans.

  The third blind mouse has radar ears and is blindfolded with the Argentine flag. Since he’s the Air Force General, I draw him playing Blind Man’s Bluff with his pilots, who buzz him in their aircraft before bailing out in parachute descents.

  ‘Phenomenal!’ cries Heriberto, surprising me with his approval, cantankerous old critic that he is. Swaying slightly, he slaps me on the back and calls me ‘Amigo!’ and whisks my scribblings out from under my hands.

  Sonia and Marguerita lean forward to admire my artistry; Marguerita adds some shantytown dogs of her own. Diego, cheeks aflame in the radiance of his sweater, says he likes the first one, even if I’ve left the economy out.

  Hugo loves them.

  ‘Osvaldo,’ he says, ‘we have got to publish. Do them up in ink for me, in black and white; get them to me by Monday if you can.’

  The next two issues have already been planned but he wants them for the first one after that.

  ‘Come on, Hugo,’ I say, embarrassed. ‘I’m not a proper cartoonist; this isn’t a professional’s work.’ The pictures are not even sketches; they are more like the sort of jottings I’d do on the back of a telephone pad.

  ‘All the better, Osvaldo. It’s precisely because you’re not a professional. You’re a doctor, and people trust their doctors. They know you’re not political. They know you’re on their side.’

  ‘That’s rubbish, Hugo, as well you know,’ I tell him, laughing. ‘Doctors have opinions, just like anyone. Doctors vote.’

  ‘Not under dictatorships they don’t,’ says Marguerita.

  ‘My point exactly,’ says Hugo. ‘In any case, you know what I mean, Osvaldo. As a profession you médicos are seen as neutral. No axes to grind. Unaligned.’

  In their wire rims, Hugo’s circular glasses throw up triangles of chandelier light. Give him an idea and he’ll run with it on pure adrenaline; he is beaming now as if we were still eleven-year-olds playing nick-knock on the neighbours’ front doors.

  There is vanity at work, I admit it; I’m not insensitive to the praise of my friends. I think of that afternoon’s patients: a case of severe glaucoma; a boy who’d collected a black eye in the playground – I’ve had a spate of them at the clinic since the coup. There are different rewards for the work of a cartoonist, I can see that – a satisfaction that’s more immediate than the process of healing and care.

  ‘They don’t look too childish?’ I ask Hugo. I think of my colleagues at the hospital, and wonder how they might react.

  ‘Of course not – but what would it matter if they did? If they puncture the pomposity . . . Come on, Osvaldo! It’s only a bit of fun.’

  Hugo flatters me with his excitement and wears me down with his arguments, and in the end I concede. In any case, it’s not as if that many people will see them; Focus is an entertainment weekly with a modest circulation, even if its listings are the most reliable ones in town.

  ‘Whatever you do, make sure he coughs up,’ says Heriberto, wagging a finger. ‘Never let it be said I didn’t warn you . . .’

  ‘Of course we’ll pay – ignore him,’ says Hugo. ‘Just don’t go flogging your work off to the competition.’

  Hugo promises to write an editorial to accompany my drawings. Diego, making amorous eyes at Marguerita over the glow of his tangerine jumper, describes a mid-air circle with his finger, and Gustavo brings us another round so
we can toast the edition’s success.

  Around us, things are evolving fast.

  Without our noticing when it happened, fear has insinuated itself into our lives. Suddenly our restless nights are punctuated by the pop-pop of gunshots, curious-sounding at first, then unmistakable, sometimes just a block or two away. Yolanda, ever a light sleeper, clings to me when they wake her and I hold her, and can’t be sure if it’s her heart that is racing or it’s mine. In the thin hours of dawn we rise red-eyed with sleeplessness and drink black coffee at the kitchen table. Yolanda makes anxious phone calls to Graciela, and reassuring ones to Julieta in Miami, where she’s been living with her husband for the past year.

  The security guards who appeared in our street some time ago still patrol the houses of our neighbours, acquaintances with corporate jobs and kidnapping fears. Driving home after dark, we are stopped by police with searchlights, and once, a twilight shoot-out makes us reverse all the way up our road. At school Yolanda hears whisperings; at the hospital there is talk about ‘hunting accidents’; there are the colleagues of friends who, from one day to the next, fail to turn up at work.

  But no one ever talks about what is happening. Life goes on in the city as if we alone have heard the gunshots, and if others ever witness anything it is not discussed.

  My sketches start to worry me. I call Hugo from the clinic; he tells me we have two more days till they go to press. Since I am in the neighbourhood, he drops out of a planning meeting and we duck in for a sandwich at the Paradiso.

  Gustavo is looking more cheerful; he has just clocked on and welcomes us, making a show of pouring our beers.

  Hugo listens to my concerns and takes them seriously. At the weekly meeting, he says, they talked about changing the headline, about softening the editorial thrust. They went back and forth over whether to pull the text and simply use the pictures, or whether to ditch the entire spread. It’s a listings magazine, someone insisted, not Timerman’s Opinión; others were better placed to analyse the regime. But in the end, they decided that self-censorship wasn’t their remit; that if press freedom were ever in need of champions, it was then and not when times were easy; that exercising excessive caution would be doing the Junta’s work.