buenos aires
august 1977
The air had grown colder. Lorena had been missing for two hundred and forty-eight days. Matías had turned three and didn’t say “Mamá” as often. He learned more words, new words, and referred to himself in third person. He knew all his colors; he liked to finger paint. His soft hair was badly in need of a trim. All these things Lorena should have experienced.
Every Thursday afternoon, Esme met Alba and the mothers in front of the Casa Rosada. People had begun talking about them—the locas de la Plaza de Mayo, the crazy women. Perhaps they were crazy, but more of them emerged each week with photos of their missing children. Everyone was distracted by football; the city was crawling with international journalists and correspondents as the country prepared to host the World Cup. Even the air particles seemed to be rooting for Argentina, threatening to carry away the collective memory of the desaparecidos like a faded scent on the wind.
The junta continued to tolerate their vigils, dismissing them as foolish; the women were too powerless to warrant a legitimate reaction.
“We’re going to start wearing pañuelos when we walk,” said Alba, fastening the corners of a white kerchief under her chin. “Like this.”
“They look like baby nappies,” said Reina.
“We need to be seen,” Alba insisted. “We need to make people think about what’s been taken from us so they might finally question the truth. We need to get their attention.”
“The junta are relying on people to stay quiet and scared,” said Reina. “If no one speaks up, they win.”
“‘First they came for the Socialists,’” Rosa recited.
“Exactly.”
On their first Thursday wearing white scarves, Rosa showed up. She carried a poster with a photo of Ines. Beneath her daughter’s name, she’d written: Four months pregnant when she went missing. Baby was due in May 1977. where is my grandchild? Esme was relieved, invigorated, and terrified by how many other women were walking. The white scarves seemed to amplify them.
The officers lingered nearby, bored and preoccupied. As she circled the pyramid, Esme moved closer to Alba, the sleeve of her wool coat brushing against the edge of Alba’s where is ernesto? sign.
Esme thought of Lorena now and felt stronger than she had before. They had organized the group well today. Their white scarves mattered. Perhaps someone in the Casa Rosada would see them and risk sharing some piece of information as to the whereabouts of those who had disappeared. Even if it was just to placate the crazy mothers.
On their fifth lap around the plaza, the click of a camera shutter caused Esme to turn her head. She caught sight of a man in a brown leather jacket crouching several yards behind two of the officers, his lens aimed directly at Esme and Alba. Esme’s heart raced. She envisioned photos, headlines—their children’s faces, published for all to see—and trembled with hope and dread.
One of the young officers spun around.
“Get the hell out of here,” he called, lifting his rifle to chase the photographer off.
Esme glanced across the circle. Twenty feet away, Hilde and Rosa hadn’t seen the commotion. The soldier turned to consult with one of his colleagues, and they both glanced up at the Casa Rosada, then back at the mothers. When a senior officer took a step toward Alba, Esme knew something was about to go terribly wrong.
“Come with me,” he said, wrangling Alba by the upper arm.
“Get your hands off me,” barked Alba, brave as ever.
“You’re making a scene out here. This display stops now.”
“Then tell me where you’ve taken my son. Tell us where our children are.”
“Let’s go,” said the officer, shoving Alba toward the perimeter of the square, where a long military bus was parked. At once, a dozen other officers broke up the circle, rounding the women up one by one.
“If you like attention so much,” said an officer, grabbing Esme by the forearm and jostling her toward the parked military bus, “you’ll get plenty of it down at the comisaria. You can all come in for questioning.”
Esme turned to look back over her shoulder, panicked. She caught sight of Rosa through the crowd as she was wrangled by an officer. Esme’s chest constricted. The officer shoved her behind Alba onto the cold bus and into a shabby leather seat near the back. All Esme could think of was Matías, home with the babysitter, his little fingers maneuvering the pages of his favorite book. I won’t be any later than five o’clock, Esme had told the girl. Her eyes filled with tears of anger. What had she done?
Alba’s body filled the space in the bus seat beside her. The card stock strung around Esme’s neck had bent, creasing the photos of Lorena and José. Through the cloudy bus window, Alba’s where is ernesto? sign lay face up on the concrete.
Esme watched in horror as the rest of the mothers were forced onto the bus—Reina, Rosa, Hilde, and nearly a dozen others. Alba sat with both hands between her knees and elbowed Esme once, hard. Esme’s fear turned acrid; she was suddenly furious with Alba. This was all her fault. How stupid she’d been to get them all involved in this to begin with.
“Help me,” Alba whispered.
Esme watched Alba slide the pocket notebook from her purse, its pages filled with photos of the missing, names of dozens of other family members scattered across the city. God only knew what other information Alba had in there—attendees of “parties,” petitions, letters, informants. Alba was a fool to have brought it with her. All their organizing, all their work would be handed over to the junta like a gift the moment they disembarked from the bus.
The bus door creaked shut. The young officer walked the aisle threateningly, then turned to face forward, hovering two seats from the back, just in front of Esme and Alba. They were close enough to see the hairs along the back of his neck. Cold air streamed in through the top of the bus windows, which were hinged open.
Under the growl of the engine, Alba peeled a page from her notebook and began tearing it up into tiny pieces. She nudged Esme desperately, passing her a second page. Esme took it, shredding it silently but frantically between her fingers. As the bus rumbled toward San Cristóbal, Alba’s hands moved swiftly between their laps. Another page, then another. The photos, the notes, all the contact information Alba had so carefully collected were turned to scraps between their fingers. But there was no way to reach the open windows to discard the pieces without the officer seeing them.
By the time the bus pulled up in front of the federal police station, all that remained of Alba’s precious notebook was a coil binding and a few empty pages between cardboard covers. They both clutched piles of confetti. When they stood, Esme dropped half a fistful and stared down as the bits of paper turned brown and wet between the rubber grooves of the floor mat. She stepped over them. Alba left the bus ahead of her, and Esme kept her eyes forward, conscious of the trail of white scraps her friend left on the street behind the officer, just out of his view.
Inside the police station, the detained women filled the hallway. Esme could hear Hilde and Rosa down the hall asking the junta if they could call their husbands. Sending these crazy women home to their husbands seemed to resonate with the guards, but Esme couldn’t call Gustavo, and Alba never made mention of her husband.
A guard guided Alba and Esme to a holding cell with a group of others. He locked the barred door and turned his back.
“I’ve got to get home to my grandson,” Esme whispered to Alba.
“Keep your mouth shut,” said the guard. “You should’ve thought about that before you decided to make a spectacle of yourself.”
Alba sat down on a wall-mounted bench, her face stone. Esme remembered her expression that afternoon in the apartment: Let them take me.
One by one, slowly, Esme watched through the bars of the holding cell as the women in the hall were pulled aside and questioned, searched, made to complete forms on clipboards, show identification, provide personal information, and attest to the names of the others. The wall-mounted clock ticked forward from four thirty to five, five thirty to six.
Esme started to weep quietly, enraged with herself. At ten minutes to seven, the guard finally pulled Esme out of the cell and patted her down, asked her questions, made her fill out paperwork.
“Are you completely unaware of our current laws?” he asked finally. “You want to explain your involvement in these theatrics?”
Esme’s anger surged. Tell me where Lorena is, you bastard. She swallowed the words like stones. “I need to get home to my grandson.”
“Grandson?” The officer brightened. “Does he live here?” The tip of his pencil touched the line where Esme had written Lorena’s address. “Maybe we should bring him in for questioning too.”
Esme stared straight at him. She wanted to smack his smug face.
“Get back in the cell,” he said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, parading around like that.”
Please, God. Esme’s heart pounded. What if they did go to the house? What if they took Matías? He was just a little boy. Her eyes returned to the clock. Seven fifteen, then seven thirty. Matías would need dinner. A bath. His bedtime story.
At eight fifteen, the interviewing officer came to the holding cell with his coat on, ready to go home for the day. He had a safe home somewhere, Esme guessed, where his family and children were waiting for him each evening. She was just another task on his daily list. He was going to leave her here.
“That’s it for tonight,” he told the guard. “We’ll finish questioning in the morning. If you’ve already been questioned, you can go, but think twice before you pull a stunt like this again.”
Esme’s heart raced as the guard unlocked the cell door.
“The rest of you, get comfortable. You’re sleeping here tonight, and it’s going to be a long one—the heat is on the fritz.”
She looked back at Alba, who was sitting on the bench, her face drawn.
“Go,” said Alba.
* * *
By the time Esme caught the last bus home and arrived at the house, it was after nine o’clock. The windows were dark. When she unlocked the door, all the lights were off. There was no one inside.
She turned on the lamps in every room, no longer able to restrain her sobs. What a foolish woman she was—a terrible mother, a terrible grandmother. She couldn’t even ask God to forgive her now. Matías was an innocent boy. Her job was to protect him for Lorena, and she’d failed. She called his name, but her voice fell flat against the silence.
Esme ran out of the house, back down the front walkway, and along the sidewalk to the neighbor’s door. It was past curfew, but Esme didn’t care. She lifted the knocker several times, crying openly now.
When the bolt of the lock unhitched from inside, the babysitter’s mother appeared in the doorframe in a velour robe. She assessed Esme with her arms crossed, then shook her head in disdain. She turned back toward the dim light inside and left the door open for Esme to follow.
There, asleep on the couch in the living room, was Matías.
“You’ve got some nerve,” the woman said. “My daughter’s still in school. She has homework to do in the evenings. She’s a responsible girl. A good girl.”
“I’m sorry,” said Esme, already on her knees beside the couch, collecting Matías in her arms, kissing his temple.
“We won’t be put in this situation again,” the woman went on. “We’re not like you. Don’t come back here.”
Esme gathered Matías up, the full weight of him in her arms.
If they took your daughter away from you, she thought, you might be more like me than you think.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, and carried Matías quietly home.
She wouldn’t do it again. Esme promised herself now: no more meetings, no more vigils, no more petitions, no other mothers. That was it. She was done. She had a second chance, and she would never leave Matías again. Ever.
* * *
Rosa called on Sunday asking Esme to meet her at Café Tortoni, her tone urgent.
“I have news, Esme. It’s about Lorena. Bring Matías if you need to. We’ll invite Hilde to watch him. But you have to come today.” Rosa’s voice quivered. “We have to go somewhere together, you and me. We won’t have this chance again.”
Esme bundled Matías in the stroller and made her way to Café Tortoni. She took a seat at the table next to Rosa, who was toying with the gold crucifix around her neck. Hilde stubbed out her cigarette and leaned over to entertain Matías with her bracelet. Esme had the urge to run home with Matías and lock the door behind her.
“What is it?” Esme whispered hastily to Rosa once they’d placed their order.
Rosa shook her head. She was afraid to talk in public; they were all under scrutiny. Alba had been released the day after the round up, but only after nearly catching pneumonia from sleeping in that cell. Beneath the table now, Rosa passed a small slip of paper to Esme. She unfolded it with her thumbnail. On the paper were a few scribbled words; it looked as though it had been torn from a longer list of names someone had written in haste.
Lorena Ledesma. Seen alive in prison, early June.
Esme’s eyes flooded with hope as she crumpled the paper. She stared down at her saucer, and her muscles went slack.
“I’ll have the special,” Hilde said to the server. “What will you have, Esme?”
“The same,” Esme choked.
“Hilde, why don’t you take Matías for a walk in the plaza after lunch?” said Rosa. “Esme and I are going to the library.”
Esme looked up at Rosa. She didn’t want to leave Matías, even with Hilde, but she sensed Rosa’s urgency. There was more to know.
“There’s a book I wanted to find,” Rosa went on. “It’s that one we talked about, Esme, remember? That one about the nurse?”
Esme glanced over at Hilde, who lit another cigarette and nodded.
“I can’t remember the title, but I thought you could help me find it.”
Once they’d paid the check, Esme kissed Matías and made Hilde swear on her own grandchild that she’d be careful with him. As they made their way to the library, Esme linked her arm through Rosa’s and whispered anxiously.
“Will the nurse be there?”
Rosa nodded. “My cousin Enrique arranged it.”
“Was she the one who saw Lorena? How do you know she’ll talk?”
“Shh. Her bread’s been buttered. We just have to be careful.”
Esme dug out her old library card from her purse. Inside the building, sections on politics and philosophy had been blocked off by the junta, the shelves cleared. Esme took a seat next to Rosa at one end of a large leather-top writing table in the common area. She hitched one ankle over the other and leafed through a periodical. Rosa found a government-sanctioned classic novel and pretended to read innocuously.
Within the hour, a stocky woman approached the other end of the table with a reference book in her arms. Her straight black hair was cut bluntly in a bob, and her glasses were so thick they distorted her eyes.
Esme looked up. Rosa’s eyes widened, and she gave Esme a slight nod.
“I’d like to sit here,” the nurse said to Rosa, “but this table is a bit crowded.”
Rosa looked at the five empty seats, then at Esme, then back up at the nurse pleadingly.
“She’s a friend,” said Rosa.
Esme let her eyes drop to an article in the periodical, running them over the same words again and again, trying to become minuscule, invisible enough for the nurse to let her stay. At last, the nurse sighed and sat down on the same side of the table as Esme.
“I was hoping one of you could help me. I have trouble reading this small print.” She opened the reference book and flipped to a certain page. It was an encyclopedia of plant life.
Esme scooted her chair closer to the nurse. Rosa shifted to the seat across from them, settling in with her novel again.
“I won’t be here long,” the nurse whispered. “I’ve always been fond of Enrique, but we only discussed Ines, no one else. I’m just doing this once.”
An armed guard at the corner of the room glanced over at them, then pivoted his head, his gaze passing over what he saw: a few uninteresting women posing no visible threat.
The nurse’s index finger chased the lines across the page as though she were reading silently to herself, but instead she began to speak in a low, flat voice.
“I don’t know what part you want to hear,” she droned. “But they keep them on the top floor of the building, la capucha, and it’s all very orderly, efficient. If you watch long enough, you can see the junta carrying supplies in and out in broad daylight. It’s only invisible because no one chooses to notice it. But it’s all there. It’s all true.”
It’s all true. Those words alone were enough to empty the air from Esme’s lungs.
The nurse’s finger continued to move steadily over the words on the page. Esme looked on, mumbling a word here and there when the nurse prompted her for “help.” Moss. Spores. Vascular Fern. Cultivar. She noticed the preposterous thickness of the nurse’s glasses. A disguise, Esme realized.
A librarian wheeling a cart of books stopped nearby to return one to a shelf. The three women fell quiet for a long moment, as though Videla himself were standing over their shoulders.
“This is such an interesting story,” whispered Rosa, holding up the novel.
The librarian turned around. “We’ve got several others by the same author,” she said, pointing to a back section on the far side of the room.
“Thank you,” Rosa said with a smile. “I’ll have a look.”
When the librarian rolled the cart away, Rosa didn’t break character. “I won’t spoil the ending for you,” she said to the nurse, “unless you’ve already read this one. Do you remember? Something happened to the woman—” Rosa’s whisper softened until it was nearly imperceptible. “Lorena Ledesma. Back in June?”
The nurse raised her eyes from the book to Esme.
“You’re her mother?”
Esme nodded.
“I remember that one,” she murmured.
The way she said it prompted Rosa to lock eyes with Esme in alarm.
“The baby had a birthmark on her right thigh.”
Esme’s throat tightened. “Baby?”
The nurse looked warily up at Rosa, whose eyes were wide.
“They’re running their own Sarda,” said the nurse. It was Buenos Aires’s best maternity hospital. “That’s how they see it, at least. The spoils of war.”
Esme tremored, hunching forward in her chair. If it weren’t for her will not to be seen by the officers, she might’ve collapsed on the table.
“Lorena wasn’t pregnant,” Esme uttered under her breath.
The nurse looked dumbfounded by her ignorance, then gave a shallow nod. “She named the baby Ana.”
“That’s impossible,” said Esme. “It couldn’t have been her.”
The nurse pointed to a paragraph about botanicals and nodded resolutely.
Esme rocked back and forth in her seat a little, clasping her hands so tightly she thought her bones might break. Her head was spinning. She wanted to jump up from her chair and shake the woman, scream every question in her mind, but if she so much as stood up, the officer in the corner might look her way or approach. She kneaded her hands in her lap with great force.
“She was pregnant?” Esme breathed.
“Your daughter told me her name. That’s how I remember her.”
Esme’s jaw clenched. “Where is Lorena? What happened to her?”
The nurse lifted her finger from the page as though she’d suddenly remembered something useful. “She said she wanted the baby returned to you.” Her mouth tightened. “I didn’t see her again after the birth, but there was a doctor at Campo de Mayo who made arrangements for the babies through the church.”
The novel wilted in Rosa’s hand. “The church?”
Esme’s mouth had fallen open now. She couldn’t move.
“I’ve got to go,” said the nurse, suddenly shutting the botanicals book and sliding it to the center of the table. She moved to stand up, then hesitated and looked straight at Rosa. “I wanted to be a caregiver. Ask Enrique. I never thought I’d be filling syringes with sodium pentothal. But Hell is full of people with good intentions, I suppose.”
As the nurse walked away, her muted footfalls faded across the thin carpet until the library door groaned shut behind her.
Esme bowed her head. Tears filled her eyes. Rosa hooked a hand under her arm.
“Let’s go.”
The tears began to fall down Esme’s cheeks and neck, saturating her eyelet collar. She couldn’t stop envisioning Lorena in prison, pregnant, and she couldn’t stop hearing the nurse’s words: She wanted the baby returned to you.
Rosa bracketed Esme’s shoulders, pulling her upright. “Get up.”
“I need some air,” whispered Esme.
“There’s air all around you,” Rosa hissed. “Stand up. You have to be strong.”
“Where is she, Rosa? Where’s the baby? What did they do to her?”
Rosa shook her head, propping Esme upright. “You can’t fall apart, Esme. Not here. Not yet.”
* * *
When Esme finally got home, she pulled Matías into a chair and cuddled him to comfort herself until he no longer wanted to be held. He squirmed out of her arms and pointed to a photo of his parents on the end table.
Esme picked up the frame.
“Do you know who this is?” she asked, holding it in front of him.
Matías hesitated. Esme’s eyes welled. She prayed he’d answer. That too much time hadn’t passed.
“Mamá,” he said. “Papá.”
Esme let out a single sob that came from the depth of her heart, then sniffed deeply, gathering herself. She hugged him tight.
“Yes, that’s right, my love. That’s your mamá, María-Lorena. And your papá, José. I’m going to tell you the story of how they first met. And then I’m going to tell you a story about your mother when she was a little girl. And then we’ll draw some pictures of them to help us remember.”
Matías was delighted.
“And guess what else, Matías?”
He looked up at Esme in anticipation.
“You have a baby sister. Her name is Ana. And we’re going to find her. That will be our adventure. What do you think about that?”
His eyes seemed to understand everything.
“Matías find,” he said.
“That’s right, my love. Matías will find his baby sister.”