I was sitting in the plaza in front of La Casa de Gobierno, not feeling much of anything. There were a few men standing around, acting so suspiciously that it was obvious at a glance they were pickpockets. To my surprise, once I had indicated that I was on to them, giving each man a look that said, ‘Yes, I can see you’re a pickpocket,’ they kept their distance. Now whenever my gaze met one of theirs he looked right back at me, as if we were acquainted. Was it that hard to make ends meet here, or were people just very laid back? I didn’t get it … an odd city, Buenos Aires.
I had taken a seat at the edge of a bed of flowers to watch the pigeons and an old lady selling pigeon food. She didn’t seem to have anything weighing on her mind. She had simply come to spend the day selling pigeon food. I guess that was more or less how I felt myself.
At the far side of the plaza, I could see the pink walls of La Casa de Gobierno – ‘The Government House’. Madonna sang there in Evita, didn’t she … God, how did I ever end up seeing a movie like that? … No sooner had this question occurred to me than I found myself remembering, once again. The rainy night when I rented the video and watched it in the living room. He came home in the middle of that awful movie. His right side was drenched – he said the wind had broken his umbrella. I brought a bath towel and gave his head and body a casual rubbing down, the way you might dry off a dog or a cat, then flopped back on to the sofa. The place smelled like rain, just from him having come in. Clear beads of water streamed down the windowpane. The road outside was quietly, blackly wet. It was an ordinary night, like all nights. He made a pot of coffee and handed me a cup. The cup itself we had bought together one Sunday, at an antique shop nearby. We had to make a lot of turns to get there, and … that’s right, there were flowers blooming, tons of them, all different colours, and the road looked white in the sunlight, so I felt I was in heaven. Orange, yellow and pink flowers. Green grass swishing in the wind. I had way too many memories – like standing between two mirrors, staring into their distance. Our history together, his and mine, had the near-infinite expanse of a world in miniature, and now I was cut off from all of it.
I had come to visit a friend who lived in this city.
My friend was learning to tango when she and her dance instructor, an Argentinian, fell in love and got married. Now she had a sort of business showing around visitors from Japan. She wasn’t an official guide or anything, but she seemed busy enough. She said she got paid at the end, after the tour was over, like a tip. Her husband was away just then, touring with some of his dance students, so I stayed at their house. My friend had to take some people around during the daytime, and it was night by the time she got back. I took it easy until she finished, day after day. It was fun to be so free; I wished I could live that way forever. Recoleta was especially nice, the part of town where she and her husband had their house – lots of trees and grass – and I felt great just wandering around. I walked and walked, trying to keep myself from thinking. Only when my legs began to ache and my mind grew numb did I feel I was finally myself again. A little wine at night was all it took to send me tumbling into bed.
For the time being this is fine, this is enough, I told myself night after night, sprawled out on an uncomfortable sofa bed in a house that wasn’t mine, the unfamiliar sounds of an unfamiliar city ringing in my ears. I have to give myself time, that’s all I can do. Like a wild animal lying very still in the darkness, licking its wounds, waiting, just waiting, nothing else, to give its feverish body time to heal. The best thing for me right now is to go on doing nothing like this, to let my spirit recover, little by little, until I learn how to breathe again and can think seriously about what to do.
‘There’s a procession of mothers wearing white scarves in the Plaza de Mayo today, starting at two,’ my friend said on her way out that morning. ‘Watching it isn’t exactly pleasant, but it makes me think about all kinds of things every time. All kinds of things, really. I mean, this is recent history we’re talking about. I think you’ll understand when you see them. You’ll think about your own parents, too, back at home.’
So I made my way to this plaza, to witness the procession. Soon the mothers – old enough by now to be grandmothers – began to gather, arriving alone or in little groups, their white scarves tied over their heads. A few journalists were there to cover the event, and a few policemen. The pink walls of La Casa de Gobierno looked blurry under the cloudy sky. They mixed ox’s blood into the paint to get that colour. Suddenly a tremendous flock of pigeons fluttered into the air, and the dozen or so old women in white scarves began slowly circling the plaza. Some old men walked with them, and there were a few others, presumably relatives. The women cradled old pictures in their arms. Photographs of grinning young men, young women dressed in their finest. Expressions so sweet and ordinary it was almost impossible to believe they had been swept up in something so terrible.
‘Are you from Japan?’ asked a middle-aged woman standing next to me.
She looked as if she might be Japanese, and spoke in Japanese.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘I came to this country as an immigrant. We live in the suburbs. It was awful back then. All of a sudden we found ourselves living under the junta, just like that. Many people vanished. Students who had once dabbled in leftist politics, Peronists.1 Participating in a demonstration, little things – that was all it took. Hardly any of them returned.’
She was Japanese, that was clear, but something about the way she was dressed, something in her expression and her make-up, gave me the sense that she had been away from Japan for a long time.
‘I saw a movie about it once.’
How did I end up seeing such a disturbing movie? There were images of kidnapped students being corralled, half naked; students being raped; having hoses turned on them; being abandoned, blindfolded. Those parents walking in the plaza in front of me must have been at their wits’ end then, unable to sleep at night; and yet they were living in their own homes as usual. During that period, these people lost something extraordinarily important, a sense of something, forever. Their sons and daughters lost their lives; they lost part of themselves.
‘A military truck drove into the forest near our house one night,’ the woman said. ‘We were so scared we wouldn’t even go outside. Soon we heard a horrible barrage of gunshots, people screaming and groaning, then another large truck came and it was quiet again. When we went into the forest the next morning, there was blood on the ground, all over. That’s how thirty thousand people disappeared.’
I nodded without speaking, watching the procession.
It occurred to me that the pigeons and the pickpockets, the immigrant beside me, the tourists, we were all just here. You could tell, looking at them ambling around the plaza in their white scarves, that those mothers no longer thought their children might come home. Maybe this was their way of expressing the constant, unending frustration they carried in their hearts, of giving form to the time they had lived through, of refusing to let what had happened get lost in the oblivion of simply being here, like this, right now. Cradling pictures of their daughters and sons, the old women chatted among themselves. That made me feel the reality of it all the more. That’s how it goes, I thought. This is time passing. This is the colour of sorrow.
Sorrow never heals. We simply take comfort in the fact that our pain seems to fade. How flimsy my own sorrow is, compared with what these parents feel. It has no real basis, none of this outrageous injustice to support it. It just keeps drifting on in its indistinct way. And yet that doesn’t mean one is more valuable than the other, or deeper. We are all in this plaza together. I let myself imagine.
One morning, her son, at the height of his teenage cockiness, goes off to school as always, hardly taking a sip of coffee, long and lanky in his favourite jeans. To his mother, he looks the same as he always has, ever since he was a boy. That look is where all her memories reside – it’s only natural. He never mentioned to her that he once participated in a demonstration, just for a little while, and maybe just because his friends were going. He never comes back. What would that feel like? No one can say for certain what happened until after the rash of political upheavals that follow in the wake of the coup d’état. No one tries to help, because everyone is too scared. Terrible rumours keep circulating, throwing her into confusion; there are no good rumours. Those fortunate enough to make it back from the internment camps live in terror, and the stories they tell make her hair stand on end … I was at high school when it happened, but it’s too far away. This isn’t a story of the Inca Empire. It didn’t even take place during wartime. I was living in Japan then, living at home with my parents, rebelling against them, staying out until morning, doing things, when this happened, here, on this earth. It’s too big, too much – I felt as if I might faint.
I thought.
Why, right now, here under this languid, overcast sky, are all these afternoons we live, theirs and mine, intersecting in this way, in this unremarkable plaza?
I noticed a plump woman among the circling mothers who looked like my own mother. The longer I looked at her, the more similar she seemed, except for the colour of her eyes. As I stared, I began to think she moved in the same way, too.
Whenever I caught a cold, my mother would mix up a drink for me, dissolving honey in hot water, adding a splash of whisky, squeezing in the juice of a lemon. She was still doing that for me when I was at high school. On one of those evenings when children were bleeding and being tortured here, I was being pampered by her. Maybe that is what this world is? Precisely that? For some reason, my mother called her drink ‘bee honey’. No matter how many times I pointed out that it was really more like ‘honey lemon’, she said her name was better and kept it. I seemed to feel the hot, sweet taste of it filling my mouth. It’s the same all around the world. A mother’s scent. A whiff of the female body, and something heavy, sweet, endlessly deep. That scent was here now, filling the plaza, circling it, because there was no other outlet, going around and around.
‘It’s ridiculous! You can’t break up over something like that!’ My mother cried on the other end of the line. ‘Married life lasts a long time, all kinds of things happen. Even if you do break up in the end, at least give it two or three more years.’
‘I won’t have a second chance if I get any older than I am now,’ I replied.
‘At your age, two or three years doesn’t matter,’ my mother said.
An unrelated scene came to mind: me pressing my face into the sofa, wailing, after our cat died; my mother running her hands roughly, but with a gentleness in the tips of her fingers, through my hair.
If only my husband no longer loved me! If only his love would simply vanish! If only his lover were a nasty, unpleasant woman! But in real life, things don’t work out so neatly. He conveyed his love by calling me here every night since my arrival. He sounded unsure of himself, had none of the casualness of my mother’s hands – was that the distance between us? I thought we had become a family, but in reality we were just two strangers doing our best to compromise. And yet I had a feeling I would back down that night, finally, urged on by all the years we had spent together; I would start wanting to tell him, when we talked on the phone, about the feelings that were churning inside me after seeing these mothers. It was so confusing … Tonight, holding this confusion inside, I would lie down once more on that sofa bed, in my friend’s house. I had the feeling, though, having seen these mothers with my own eyes, not in a movie, not reading about them in a book, but seeing them, hearing their voices and noticing how their skirts swayed in the breeze, seeing how they laughed as they chatted – all that had come together inside me to form a core, something that could change me, just a little. Suddenly I saw myself, what I was like as a human being, from a place very, very far away.
A few other mothers, also dressed in black and wearing white scarves, had set up a stall on the far side of the plaza. I walked over. They were selling videos, pamphlets, postcards, T-shirts. A sign explained that the profits went to support their activities. I had picked up a T-shirt, planning to buy it, when one of the white-scarved mothers started talking to me. I wasn’t sure what to do, since I don’t speak Spanish, but a young woman nearby, probably a journalist, translated into English for me.
‘She’s saying that an “S” size might be better. People are wearing T-shirts kind of small these days.’
I couldn’t help smiling. Such strength, and of course she had once had a child of her own … Mothers are mothers no matter what country they come from, after all, and that’s a very sad thing to be. Will I ever become a mother myself? Will I ever be able to see these people, to think of them, in a different light? With nothing decided, everything seemed oddly renewed. I bought the T-shirt, said thank you and left the plaza behind.