buenos aires
november 1988
It had been a long day in a painful season. Everything happened in seasons now—seasons of grief, seasons of hope. That very morning, Esme lifted the receiver of the black rotary phone in the grandmothers’ office, and its thick click preceded a man’s flat voice: There’s a bomb in your office. You’re all as dead as your children.
There were people who despised the grandmothers—their relentless memory, their mandates for blood samples, the way they reminded people to remember the truth and learn who they really were, whether they wanted to know or not. It didn’t deter Esme. She had come too far and had too far left to go to be thwarted by empty threats. She and Matías had lived for nearly a decade without Lorena. Every missing grandchild they found felt in some way like Esme’s own, and even if she’d lost Lorena forever—God, would she ever even know?—she would never stop searching for Ana.
Besides, something else preoccupied Esme as she made her way home from the office in the warm afternoon air, the wide concrete slabs of sidewalk passing under her feet. After two years of waiting, President Alfonsín’s administration had finally agreed to discuss the grandmothers’ proposal for creating a national center for genetic information—a data bank where they could put all the samples Dr. King and the forensics team had helped them collect over the years. A place where anyone who doubted their identity could go to find out if they were the child of a desaparecido. It was a small concession in comparison to the grandmothers’ broader requests of the government, but if done properly, it could work. If the search for Ana extended beyond Esme’s lifetime, her granddaughter needed to be able to find her genetic family.
She couldn’t get too hopeful. There was so much to negotiate and so little chance they would prevail at the scale they needed. Who would pay for the costs, the equipment, the staff? The city of Buenos Aires? The Ministry of Health and Social Action? The government would merely throw scraps, but the grandmothers would persist. It had to be done.
Esme’s key ring jangled as she searched for the mortise key that would open the new front gate she’d had installed to protect the house. She was distracted by her thoughts, engrossed with working the new gate key into its hole, wiggling the unfamiliar thing until she felt it latch. Even as it clacked loose and the gate door released, she was immersed in a contemplative haze, scarcely conscious of the tall presence appearing at her side. Startling to her senses, she gripped the wrought iron of the gate with one fist and felt the fear course through her veins, cold and familiar. You’re as dead as your children. Still clutching the metal, a long-awaited dread overcame her, and she was suspended in this moment of panic, unable to fully surrender to its inevitability. Finally, she turned her body to face the man, braced to scream for her life.
“Esme,” he said. “It’s me.”
Esme’s eyes gained focus as she studied his face, his pale forehead moist with perspiration, the damp, coarse locks of his hair, his brown eyes red-rimmed. She was flooded with terror, confusion, a flash of fury—and then, a thrill.
“Claudio?” Pink, chapped patches marked the apples of his cheeks. He looked gaunt. “What in the devil—?”
“I know,” he said in a low voice, his shoulders slumped. “I . . . please, can I come in?”
Aghast, Esme quickly assessed her options. She had never been scared of Claudio, but his presence now invoked a residual fear, one deeply instilled by the dictatorship: the risk of contracting his subversion, the contagion of his danger. The junta wasn’t watching anymore. Argentina had been a democracy for years. And yet.
“No,” she said.
Here was Claudio, alive in front of her—but where was Lorena? She wanted to rail against him, to physically assault him. Esme wanted to say the words that would hurt him the most, kill what was left of him, whatever wasn’t already dead inside. Here he was, right here in front of her. How satisfying it would feel to tell him what he already knew. You should’ve been more careful! You should have protected her! If it weren’t for you, Lorena would be here with me—with her son!
“Please,” he said.
Esme noticed the thinness of his legs beneath his jeans, the way his knee quivered as he stood, how one arm hung limp at his side. There was nothing she could do or say to him that hadn’t already been done or said. It was the same way with the military officers who were finally being convicted, only to be given paltry sentences in white-collar prisons. How terribly unsatisfying, doling out justice upon the vulnerable and weak, when what was truly needed was a reversal of time, a fair fight with a stronger, more viable version of the enemy, one who wielded the same power and wrath they’d once had.
Esme would never get a fair fight.
“Why did you come here?” she said.
“I needed to ask for your forgiveness. I needed to know what happened to them. It’s destroyed me, all this time. Please, Esme. May I come in?”
Esme shut her eyes tightly. There was so much that had happened since she’d seen Claudio last. She’d scaled so many mountains of hope and descended into so many valleys of grief, she couldn’t possibly explain it to him. She had no idea where Claudio had been, with whom he affiliated himself or what he wanted from her, but there were only two choices now: open the door and move forward or close off the past and let it rot away.
She pushed the gate open.
“Hurry up,” she said.
Inside, Claudio took the maté she offered, holding it with both hands like a precious gift. He bowed his head. From where he sat on the floral sofa, he answered her questions quickly, softly, as though reciting a penance. He’d been imprisoned in Córdoba and tortured for several months. At some point, for reasons he couldn’t explain, he received supervised freedom. A “recuperation project,” the junta called it, implemented as the dictatorship was beginning to fall apart. Claudio had tremors and still couldn’t fully lift his right arm, a result of the torture.
“Did you see them while you were in prison?” Esme asked.
He looked down and shook his head.
“Where have you been since?”
“I went into exile after my final release.” He’d been in Cuba, then Spain for close to a decade, living with a woman he’d known from the Montoneros.
“Are you married?” asked Esme. She envisioned him passing the years in some foreign land by the sea, and the anger suddenly flared up in her chest again.
Claudio shook his head, stared at the carpet. “It didn’t work out.” When he raised his eyes to Esme’s, they were wet and desperate. “Did they ever find her?”
Esme sighed. “They found José,” she said. “Never Lorena.” They sat quietly for a long time before Esme spoke again. “A person can only go on so long without answers before they have to find their own. I’ve gone years now, but I won’t make Matías go on like this forever. I have to believe she’s gone. A mother should know when her child has left this earth.”
Claudio pulled his lips in, turned his head, and gazed up through the living room wall.
“I know it means nothing to you now,” he said, “but I loved her too. Lorena was a fighter. She wanted to do something. She wanted to help.”
“She didn’t want this. Not for me. Or her boy.” Esme wiped her eyes and straightened up. “She was pregnant, Claudio. She had a baby girl in prison. The child’s name is Ana. I’m still searching for her—for my granddaughter.”
“Ana?”
Esme nodded.
Claudio set his maté down on the coffee table and put his head in his hands. Without hesitation, he started to sob. Esme reached for a box of tissues.
“Here,” she said, suddenly embarrassed for him. Esme felt a wave of fatigue, irritation. Claudio’s unexpected presence surfaced a pain she would need to tend alone. She didn’t owe him any condolences.
Claudio sniffed. “Esme, I’m sorry. I beg you to forgive me.”
“God help you, Claudio. I think it’s best if you go.”
Claudio nodded, stood up quietly. “I’m not asking for anything. I have a place just outside of the city. You don’t have to see me if you don’t want to. But if you find Ana, please promise me you’ll let me know. I’m begging you, Esme.”
“All right,” Esme said noncommittally.
On his way out, Claudio paused in front of a drawing Matías had done of a cityscape, architectural and abstract, hanging on the wall.
“What’s he like?” asked Claudio.
Esme hesitated. She reached for a framed school photo of Matías and held it up to show Claudio. She gripped the frame tightly, prepared to slap Claudio’s hand away if he reached for it. He could see Matías, but he couldn’t touch him.
“He’s just like José,” said Esme.
Claudio stood before the picture with both arms hanging at his sides, reverent.
“Can I send him a letter?”
Esme tensed. “How can I stop you? You already know where we live.”
* * *
Claudio’s first letter to Matías was postmarked from La Plata. A birthday card, three weeks early. The next came several months later and included a few sheets of soccer-themed drawing paper and a bookmark. After that, the letters came more frequently, once with a memory game that Matías was far too old to be interested in, another with a magazine article about a rock band. Claudio addressed the envelopes to Matías directly and signed them Tío Claudio.
Esme put all the letters in a desk drawer. When they filled it, she moved them to a box on the floor of the closet. Then, one Thursday afternoon when Matías was a teenager and Esme was spring cleaning, she threw the entire thing in the waste bin on the side of the house. By then, the letters had stopped coming altogether.
Matías turned on the radio and flopped onto the sofa. He was going through a growth spurt, becoming tall and lanky like José. Esme tied her white headscarf under her chin. She was headed out to the Plaza de Mayo to meet Hilde and Rosa.
“I’ll be back in time for dinner,” said Esme, “but you can get it started if you’re hungry. The meat is in the refrigerator.”
“Why do you still go there, abuela? What’s the point in walking anymore?”
Esme paused in the doorway and met Matías’s eyes, still too wise for such a youthful face. She recalled holding him, back in the early days, just after Lorena and José were taken. She remembered rocking him, telling him stories while he sat on her lap, showing him pictures of his parents. Those wise brown eyes, looking up at her.
Matías will find his baby sister.
When she spoke now, her voice was full of conviction.
“Because we’re still searching, Matías. You know that. We haven’t found your sister yet, and it’s up to us to make sure people remember.”
He looked wounded. “I know,” he said.
As Esme made her way toward the plaza, the cloudless sky stretched above the cathedral. A statue of the Virgin Mary sent an ache of longing through her. Another season was coming; more change was on the horizon. Matías was becoming a man, and Esme still had plenty of unanswered prayers. She’d heard that her old priest had left the parish recently after so many years. Perhaps she would go back to mass on Sunday and find out for herself.