The Rhythm of Memory

by Alyson Richman

  She had been the same way back in Chile. A collector. Their home in Santiago was enormous, many times the size of her present apartment, but still she had covered every open wall with a painting or drawing and every shelf with something she had found. She took the skins of hollowed-out avocados and strung them over her tiled stove. She filled jars with colored sand and kept a basket filled with seashells by the bathtub, scattering them into the water so the children could pretend, even in wintertime, that they were swimming in the sea.

  They could not bring most of these items with them when they left. Time—and the Chilean authorities—had not been generous with them, leaving Salomé only a few days to pack their belongings. So when they closed the iron gate of the house for the last time, Salomé left it in very much the way she and her family had lived. Often, she wondered what the renters had done when they’d arrived. Whether they had slipped into her house, worn the clothes hanging in the closets, or used the soap that had been left in her grandmother’s dish. She often pondered if the family who sent her a check each month ever thought about her family, all that had happened to them and why they had been forced to leave. Or whether they had purposefully chosen not to think of them and, instead, only to marvel at their great fortune to be able to live in such a big, beautiful house.

  She had finally unpacked the Victrola a few months before, deciding it was time to go through some of the boxes she had left packed for so many years. She had screwed the black horn to the wooden base and replaced the worn diamond needle with one she found at a secondhand shop. The children, now grown, came over, as did her ex-husband, Octavio. And in her modest apartment, with the smell of eucalyptus fragrant around them, they all danced. They put Pablo Ziegler on, and Rafael danced the tango with one of his sisters, Blanca.

  “Do you remember when we found that old thing?” Octavio asked his ex-wife, nestling a glass of wine in his hand. He wondered if now, with so many years having passed, his wife finally appreciated that he had packed the Victrola.

  Salomé smiled as she allowed the music to embrace her. She tapped her foot over the wooden floorboards, the heel of her sandal twisting back and forth.

  “It’s wonderful to be able to listen again and have only good memories return,” she said softly. And as she closed her eyes, Salomé remembered how she and Octavio had played the antique record player when they were first married. He had led her across the floor of their new home, thrusting open the French doors leading to the veranda, and the melody from the old machine had filled the rooms of the empty house and floated into the garden, overgrown with fruit trees and wild roses.

  From that night on, she had begun to collect tango records. El Cantón, Piazzolla, and Calandrelli were all stacked by the Victrola’s side. And how she adored them. She loved it when her husband would place the needle down and the record would begin to spin and the music would permeate the air. The children loved it too. They taught themselves to dance by watching their parents. They mimicked the wrapping of their hands, the entwining of their legs, and the swiveling of their heels. But, after Salomé’s disappearance and her subsequent return, the music in their home had stopped. The Victrola remained where it had always been, but the records were no longer played.

  There are some things that a woman knows she cannot tell even her family. It is part intuition and part self-preservation. Salomé had always believed that God had made women with wombs so that, after they had children, they had a place to store their secrets.

  And indeed Salomé’s secrets were not to be shared. Memories of a mother’s kidnapping and torture were stories a child should never hear.

  She never told them what was done to her back in Chile, although she knew that the children divided their lives into two halves: from the time before their mother was taken, and from the time when their family exile began. When everything changed.

  Salomé believed she could limit her children’s pain by never telling them what she had endured. So, she kept it all to herself, until it became too much, and she sought the expertise of a doctor. He was now deceased and her secrets were hers alone. Not even Octavio knew her story in its entirety.

  But now, as Salomé sat alone in her apartment listening to Satie, she could not ignore the letter, postmarked in Great Britain, that had arrived in that afternoon’s mail. The phrasing was blunt and to the point: “We are collecting the stories of the victims of Pinochet’s regime,” the letter from an international human rights group stated in cold black letters. “It is in the interest of history and for justice that the atrocities caused by General Pinochet be recorded and that he be held accountable in a court of law for the murder of thousands…”

  Salomé knew that, days before, a Spanish prosecutor had requested that England extradite General Augusto Pinochet, the man she held responsible for ruining her beloved country, nearly destroying her, and forcing her family to flee in the night to the shores of a cold, foreign country. Now, perhaps, he would be held responsible for his crimes against her and the rest of humanity.

  But it seemed almost painfully too late. Now with nearly twenty-five years having passed, she was being asked to remember. And it was not that she feared her memory would fail her if she testified. Far worse. It was knowing the impact it might have on her children. She knotted her fists into her stomach to try to alleviate the sudden pain she was experiencing. “It’s only nerves,” she told herself. But those secrets she had kept buried for so many years were relentless. She could not ignore them, just as she could not turn a blind eye to the letter calling for her testimony. She would need to decide if she was finally going to unearth those memories she had kept tucked away since her therapy had ended. She knew she was strong enough to face the demons of her past, but she feared the pain it might cause her children and even her ex-husband.

  Two

  VESTERÅS, SWEDEN

  NOVEMBER 1998

  He recognized it was her calling even before she uttered her first word. He could detect her breathing. She revealed herself by that first hesitant pause she always took before saying his name.

  “Octavio,” she said quietly. “I need to see you.”

  He had waited a long time to hear her say those words, and although they were murmured softly—barely audible to a less tuned ear—he heard them as if they were fireworks exploding over the wire.

  “It’s rather urgent,” she added.

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” he said.

  He hung up the phone and went to change into fresh clothes. He combed back his graying curls, patted scented tonic onto his cheeks and neck, and smoothed out the creases in his trousers with his palms.

  Every time he went to see her, he performed the same ritual. His memorized ablutions. It was as if he were in his student apartment once again and he was nervous with anticipation at the sight of her. He needed to look his best.

  He fingered his trouser pocket, checking to see that the small silk pouch that Salomé had embroidered for him so many years before was still there. It remained his most treasured talisman. The stitches that had quilted his name were worn and loose, but it was still dear to him. A faded, tattered reminder of a love that, no matter what others might think, he, in his heart, knew had endured.

  Pulling on his coat and adjusting his scarf around his collar, he turned off the light and locked the door to his house. Once outside, he buried his chin into his coat’s collar and shuffled briskly to Salomé’s apartment.

  Salomé’s voice had been urgent on the phone and he wondered what had motivated her to call him at such a late hour. In a few minutes he would be at her door and he would know the answer. He only hoped that, once there, his presence would bring her some comfort.

  Every time he saw her, his heart seemed to break a little more. She would stand in the threshold, her thick hair still majestically black and cascading down her shoulders. Her tiny, curvaceous body, usually wrapped in a bright sheath of silk, still looking very much like that of the teenager he had fallen in love
with long ago. Over the years, he had tried to mask his feelings. He had even practiced his greeting to her over and over in his tiny bathroom mirror, hoping to ensure that it didn’t betray his longing. For some time now he had tried to be a friend to his former wife, to understand her more fully. But only recently had he been able to reconcile the two Salomés he had in his mind: the young girl he had courted through poetry and the grown woman who had suffered tremendously because of him. For the rest of his life, Octavio would agonize over whether he had made the right decision. For his high principles had placed his family in exile, caused his wife to be kidnapped and tortured; in the years that had passed, he had lost almost everything he had had before the coup. He could not deny that his wife and even his children had forever been changed by what had happened to them so many years ago in Chile. But, even if none of them had noticed, Octavio believed so had he.

  Three

  LAS VERTIENTES, CHILE

  NOVEMBER 1964

  The first time he saw her, she had walked outside the convent to pick up the fallen oranges. Her dark blue uniform grazing below her soft, smooth knees. Around her feet, the small yellow and orange fruit nestled, and the smell of the freshly cut grass and the perfume of ripe citrus lingered heavy in the air. She knelt down and pulled out her skirt to fashion a basket, filling the cloth with the fallen fruit.

  She was truly a vision. Long black hair, slender arms, and skin the color of crushed almonds. She turned her head slightly to recover from the sun, and it was then that he first caught sight of her face. He saw past the slight wrinkling of her nose, and the slight squinting of her eyes, and saw her poetic brow, delicate nose, and full, ripe mouth. He imagined the weight of her thick, black hair, envisioned his hands undoing her combs, and the canopy of curls falling over his palms, and spilling onto his knees. She was so beautiful that he, almost a grown man, could have wept.

  He attempted to whistle, but the sound he made was too weak to reach her ears. She was lost in her activity, for this was the happiest moment in her day.

  What the mother superior considered a chore, she considered a luxury. The other girls’ responsibilities were far more tedious: assisting the cooks in the kitchen, cleaning the bathrooms, or raking one of the church’s several gardens. Salomé was only asked to gather oranges and bring them to the kitchen, where they would later be squeezed into juice.

  Here, among the heavy green boughs and the yellow-dotted ground, she savored her time alone. Sometimes, when the fruit was particularly ripe, she would pierce the rind with her fingernail and place her lips over the hole, sucking the juice out, in one long swallow. Other times, she would cross her legs while the oranges lay heavy in her lap, and she would admire the flight of a butterfly or the silver-green fire in a wing of a praying mantis.

  Little did she know that, from a balcony only twenty-five meters away, a university student stood alone with his mouth open and his heart pounding, absolutely consumed by love.

  Every day, he anticipated her arrival as she emerged, like clockwork, from the stone convent walls at a quarter past nine. He began to groom himself for her. Hoping that one day she would look up and see him, a figure in the distance, standing on his balcony alone.

  He wore wrinkled shirts to his classes, saving the pressed ones to wear for the few minutes each day while he watched her. He shaved before her arrival, combing his thick, black hair behind his ears and patting his cheeks with a perfume he hoped would reach her by air. Weeks went by, but she never took notice of him. And then, when he had nearly gone mad with wild desperation, he finally devised a way in which they could meet.

  Each night, he pored through volumes of the world’s greatest poets until his candle burned out and he could find no more light. When he discovered a particular verse that captured his own feelings of love and ardor, he copied it in his neatest hand onto tiny scrolls of parchment paper he had cut. Three weeks later, Octavio had transcribed more than two hundred poems.

  In the middle of the night, with several dozen slips of paper in his pockets and a small knife in his hands, he went to the gates of the convent and stood where the orchard began. He climbed the trees and rustled the branches. He shook the boughs until the oranges fell to the ground. Then, with the moonlight above him, he carved out each fruit’s navel, rolled up the love poems, and inserted them within.

  The next morning, he rose, having slept less than an hour. He stood on the balcony and waited for her to arrive.

  She came, wearing her simple blue uniform. A wicker basket dangled from her arm. He noticed how, when she sighed, her rib cage swelled underneath her cotton blouse, how her whole body bent in exhaustion at the sight of so many oranges.

  She knelt down to examine the first fruit of the day and immediately smiled as she noticed the thin cigarlike roll of paper tucked neatly within. After searching to see if anyone was around, she withdrew the first poem:

  Acogedora como un viejo camino

  Te pueblan ecos y voces nostálgicas

  Yo desperté y a veces emigran y huyen

  pájaros que dormían en tu alma.

  You gather things to you like an old road.

  You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices.

  I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated

  that had been sleeping in your soul.

  She recognized the poem from Neruda’s 20 Poemas de amor y una Canción Desesperada, “Para mi corazón,” and wondered who would have placed it in the orange. When she knelt down to pick up another piece of fruit, there again was another scroll of writing. When she unraveled it, therein was a love poem by Mistral.

  She looked around again to see if anyone was there, thinking one of her classmates had played a trick on her. But she saw no one. As she looked straight ahead, she noticed the entire ground was littered with oranges. Each one with a thin roll of paper protruding from its center. Each one with its own magic wand.

  From as far away as he stood, Octavio could hear her joyful laughter, and he leaned over the balcony to gain a better view.

  For several weeks, Octavio continued to court Salomé through the poem-filled oranges. In between his studies, he transcribed so many poems that his wrists grew weary and the nib on his fountain pen bent from overuse. Still, he wrote to her until he had exhausted all of his volumes of poetry. But there were so many things he had not yet said. Realizing he could no longer rely on the cushion of another man’s words, he held his head for many hours, struggling to form his desires into words. He listened to his heart and poured out its contents. He wrote of her black eyes and dark hair. He wrote of her majestic gait, her long, regal neck, and her slender arms. He imagined their first kiss and the warmth he might find in her embrace. If he had been musical, he would have composed a song for her, written an aria, and created a concerto in her honor. Had he brushes, he would have tried to re-create her image in a palette of rich, creamy paint. But, as he only had pen and paper, he continued to write.

  One evening, when he rested on his arms, his eyes heavy with exhaustion and his pen nearly dry, he wrote to her for the last time. “In a star-filled sky, I wish to see you. I will bring oranges to lay down at your feet. Come to me, dearest to my heart. I shall wait for you and sing you poems of love.” He carefully inserted the poem into the orange, then slipped in a second paper that specified a place where they could meet.

  His heart soared with wild anticipation. He only hoped that she would come.

  Four

  LAS VERTIENTES, CHILE

  NOVEMBER 1964

  Holding one of her early-morning oranges tightly to her breast, Salomé Herrera lowered her chin, grazed her cheek over the fruit’s cool pebbled skin, and wondered if it was really true, that this evening, in only a few hours’ time, she would meet the man who had sworn her as his one and only love.

  She had been dreaming since she was a little girl of her shining and amorous knight. She had always believed he would find her and take her away in his strong and protective arms. Her evocative n
ame had contributed to nurturing a far more adventurous spirit than another girl might have had coming from a bourgeois background such as hers. Yet the circumstances of her conception had created an aura about her.

  She had grown up hearing how her parents had named her in honor of the great heroine who had danced the dance of the seven veils. According to family legend, her mother had dressed as Salomé on the night of her daughter’s conception. Doña Olivia, at the height of her beauty, had swathed herself in transparent veils of lilac and blue, her hair plaited high over her head with a single pearl strung over her bronzed forehead, as she attended with her husband a lavish costume party for the doctors of Santiago.

  When their daughter was born nine months later, and she was brought to her parents wrapped in a crisp, white blanket, her brown forehead peeking out from beneath its many layers of starched cotton, her eyes sparkling and bright, both Doña Olivia and Don Fernando agreed without any discussion that the girl would be named Salomé.

  Now seventeen years later, the young girl’s heart was pounding. She closed her eyes and tried to envision her poetic admirer.