For years she’d been convinced that her mother had been alive when they’d taken her from The Greek Cafe in Buenos Aires. After all, they’d shot her in the stomach – not the head or the heart – before throwing her into the backseat of the idling Falcon. She’d chased the car as it pulled away, in a futile effort to lock onto her mother’s steady gaze for the final time, those eyes that had fixed on hers as she’d pounded her fists on the window.
Afterwards, a puddle of blood lay in the centre of the sidewalk. She went to it and stared down, the outline of her mother’s faceless frame reflected back at her. She could hear the flapping wings of a bird passing in the sky above, her ears buzzing as if a swarm of bees had suddenly taken up residence within their canals. Her coat was covered in her mother’s blood. Turning her palms up, she saw that they too were red. For a moment, she had the impulse to press them on to the sidewalk tiles, like finger painting at kindergarten earlier that day, or the prints left by celebrities on a walk of fame, disembodied hands fossilized for eternity.
A wonder about eternity filled her now. Eternity and infinity were concepts she’d been chewing on since learning about the number eight. When, back home, she’d asked her mother about the ending of things, she had answered with the question that was bothering her now, “If time is finite, then what comes after?”.
A pair of arms grabbed her and she kicked with all her might. She bit too. Beads of blood rose from the top of the snatcher’s hand and the taste of lead had filled her mouth. Her mother had shot at her abductors and she’d watched one of them fall. Now she too was drawing blood. Hands balled into fists, she tried to strike out at the men. There were four of them. In suits and dark glasses, guns pulled, their mouths cursing her through gritted teeth. They carried her, all twisted up, and threw her into the back of a waiting Peugeot 505. Face down on the floor, she’d felt the bottom of one of their shoes at the base of her skull and the barrel of a gun digging into her sacrum.
Her spinal cord was a slithering serpent pinned down by its extremes. The car tore through the streets, faster than the speed of sound, which was easy to surpass, she’d learned. Was it eternity she was feeling – or mere moments? She’d lost all grasp of that human construct called time, designed to measure the immeasurable, and somewhere in the thick of it they’d dumped her on steps beneath a carved wooden door from another era. She stood there, staring at her bloodied palms again, and this time pressed them down onto the sidewalk. She heard the door open and looked up and met the eyes of a gasping nun who, peeking up and down the street, grabbed her, took her in, and then locked the door behind her. For a month she’d stayed at the orphanage, mute until her grandmother, who’d pounded the pavement for thirty sleepless nights, found her. On Thursday afternoons for years afterwards, she’d walk around the Plaza de Mayo hand in hand with her grandmother and other women, chanting, “You took them alive, return them alive!”
Now, almost forty years later, she was looking down at the spot where her mother had been murdered. She’d yelled the slogan with conviction but accepted long ago that the mother’s open eyes she’d glimpsed inside the Falcon had been devoid of life – that she’d witnessed her mother’s assassination, not just her kidnapping. It was a relief, in a way, knowing that the last pair of eyes her mother had looked into had been her daughter’s, not a torturer’s. But despite being certain of her death, she’d spent all her subsequent years irrationally searching for the body of a woman whose lungs still filled rhythmically with air, whose iambic heart still pumped blood through its four chambers, whose spirited hands still held her daughter’s, still able to dance a mean chacarera famous in the province of Tucuman’s militant circles.
A nun in full grey habit was walking against the tide of pedestrians, right over the spot where she’d imagined her own rendering in the puddle of her mother’s blood. She remembered how the chase had left her red hand prints on the Ford Falcon window as it pulled away and she was impressed, now, at the psyche’s ability to retain such a memory in its countless folds, only to release it four decades later at the scene of the crime.
“This is where the earth swallowed my mother whole,” she said out loud to those who’d accompanied her, secretly hoping that the passing nun would hear and stop to offer solace, perhaps a prayer. “This is where my mother disappeared,” she clarified. The nun’s habit swung like a bell now, a pendulum as she navigated the great cobble-stoned, working class avenue on which The Greek Cafe was situated. She returned her gaze to the abyss into which her mother had fallen. Intact or ground to pieces, her skeleton was sand between her fingers, likely beneath cement or in a common grave, somewhere in unidentified, infinite space. For without edges or cliffs to fall from, or particular oceans or rivers to land in, was she not in infinite space?
The ceremony was brief. A tile had been removed from the sidewalk where she could place her own red one, the blazing sun around which the other grey tiles would now spin. Its inscription read:
“Maria Luisa Cervino, ‘La Negra’, Popular Militant from Tucuman, was shot down and kidnapped here in front of her daughter. Detained and disappeared on August 5th, 1977, by state terrorism. Barrios for Memory and Justice. ‘I live for joy, I fight for joy, I die for joy... may sorrow never be associated with my name.’– Julius Fucik’.”
It had been a second revolutionary act, to add the words “in front of her daughter”. Hundreds such tiles could be found on the city’s sidewalks but this was the first to acknowledge the children of the disappeared.
Pictures were taken, songs sung, hands held, flowers left. Bystanders stopped and nodded, murmured their support.
When it was all over, she took a seat at The Greek Cafe and noticed that the burgundy place mat promised her a perfect Coca-Cola, the proclamation flanked by two Acropolis pillars.
“Well, that’s reassuring,” she thought to herself, wiping the sweat from her forehead.
The oppressive heat was a counterpoint to the cold winter day on which her mother disappeared. “I’ll have the perfect Coca-Cola,” she said to the dark-skinned waiter, old enough to be have been here in 1977. She was on the lookout for witnesses now, anyone who might lift the shadows from the men’s faces, shadows that had obscured their tell-tale features and devoured eyes, mouths, and cheekbones. She wanted someone to tell her more about the day that a twenty-eight-year-old woman was sitting with her five-year-old daughter at this very table when two cars pulled up. She needed someone to corroborate just how the mother had ordered her daughter to stay inside, not to follow her out, how the woman had pulled a gun as she ran through the door, the little girl running after her, hanging on to her mother’s leg as the woman had opened fire, until the men shot her down. Which is what the mother had wanted, she’d come to recognize. She’d wanted to be murdered for the sake of her daughter, who’d clung to her with all her might. For she’d known that if the men had taken her alive, then they would have tortured the daughter in front of her mother to get her mother to talk.
The daughter, in her forties now, was ready for others to deliver the cold, bare facts and to travel with her to her magnetic north that was the fixed point of the red tile now. She wanted witnesses to put features on the assassins’ faces and walk the route of her mother’s final moments on that cobblestone Villa Devoto street.
The perfect Coca-Cola was set on her place mat and she took a sip, ice cubes bumping against her parched lips. She noticed that the ad on the bus stop outside ordered one to undress. “Disrobe” was the lone word against a lime green background. She pondered that. Specifically, she wondered whom the hell she would disrobe for in her world. The woman she loved was straight, so that held no promise. But perhaps the instruction telegraphed to her through the window was not suggesting that she disrobe for the sake of intimacy but that one could disrobe without onlookers. She pondered the idea but knew that finally she had become tired of living her story in the prison of her solitary confinement. In absolute silence. It was she who was her mother’s star witness, hers that was the future generation for which her mother had died, and now she seeking other participants in this, the defining narrative of Argentina.
The waiter approached and asked if she needed anything else and she took a deep breath.
“Yes, I do,”she said. “I need to tell you a story. And I need to know if you were part of it.”
Carmen Aguirre is the author of Mexican Hooker #1, published by Portobello, £12.99
