The Rhythm of Memory (2 page)

She had grown so used to the sight of darkness that it took several minutes before she realized that, while her senses were alive, she was still seeing black.

She fumbled to remove the blindfold that had been tied tightly around her head. The morning sun was just coming up and Salomé squinted into the valley where the city’s lights still twinkled in the haze.

Her fingers fell into the soil. Her knees, shaking and badly scraped, dragged underneath her tired frame. She tried to gather herself, ignoring her bruises and her broken bones, to wander in the early hours of dawn and find her way back home to her husband and children, who lay sleeping in their beds nearly ten miles away.

She walked through the iron gate, her last ounces of strength nearly exhausted. As her hand went to turn the handle of the front door, her body collapsed like a basket weakened by the rain; a whisper of an echo falling to the ground.

Octavio rushed to investigate the disturbance on the front porch, cautious that it might be someone who had come to harm either him or the children. When he opened the door and found his wife splayed out before him, he fell to his knees.

As he held her to his chest, he could feel the sharp wings of her shoulder blades, the narrow barrel of her rib cage. She was so delicate that he was afraid to move her, fearful she might tear. So, she lay in his arms, lavender and shriveled, a dying delphinium, dehydrated and torn.

Octavio had no time to wash and care for his wife before their children arrived at the front door and saw her. They barely recognized their mother. Her hair was wild and matted below her shoulders. Her dress was torn and her left breast was partially exposed from a long rip that extended across half the neckline.

She was a fraction of the size she had been before they had
taken her. Never a large woman, she had been petite but curvaceous. Now, she appeared almost childlike. A tattered orphan whose complexion was marred by swatches of dirt and patches of bleeding bruises.

Octavio guided his wife into the kitchen and sat her down on one of the dining room chairs. She could see her children before her. She was unable to muster even the slightest sound. She wanted to tell them how much she had missed them, how she had dreamt of them every night since she had been away, but her voice faltered. She could not speak. She just remained in the chair, her fingers shaking in her lap and her eyes staring wide.

Salomé didn’t want the children to be afraid of her. She could only imagine what a sight she must be to them. She couldn’t remember the last time she had bathed, the last time a comb had been run through her hair. All she wanted to do was to sleep and be able to embrace those three small faces she had missed.

It was her eldest child, however, who had the courage to embrace her as she so desperately craved. Rafael did not hesitate. He walked right up to his mother and hugged her.

She did not wince as her eldest squeezed her, even though his embrace felt so powerful that, inside, she screamed. He pulled back her hair, ignoring the lice and the tangles, and kissed her cheek. “Welcome home, Mama,” he whispered, and whirled around to make sure that his younger sisters would not be afraid and would also welcome her back.

First, the middle one came up to her, then the youngest. Each of them fighting hard to ignore her smell and to smile.

Salomé began to cry. Not because of her physical pain, for she had grown used to that. She cried because Octavio, their children, and their home appeared the same as when she had left. But she had returned so very different.

That was a deceptive impression, for they had indeed changed over the past two months. And even before that. From the moment the coup had begun, the Ribeiro-Herrera family’s idyllic world had ceased to exist. The effects of the coup and the consequences of Octavio’s actions were still unraveling before them.

As Salomé struggled to embrace her children, her own mother returned. Doña Olivia walked into the kitchen carrying two loaves of bread. Octavio had not asked her to do the errand, but she had risen early, as she often did. She had grown used to her inability to sleep and tried to at least make herself useful in her waking hours. But she had not anticipated seeing her child upon her return. Resting on a stool, her daughter, with a penitent Octavio kneeling at her side.

Doña Olivia dropped the loaves of bread and rushed to embrace her child. She took the towel from Octavio and pressed her daughter’s palms to her own cheeks, weeping as she touched her daughter’s face, cursing the monsters who were responsible for such a horrendous crime.

Over the next week, Salomé was cared for and waited upon by her mother as if she had been reborn an infant. Doña Olivia brushed her daughter’s hair each morning and recombed it each evening, so that it finally returned to its original luster. She perfumed it with a spray made from diffused gardenia and bee balm, and curled the ends into tiny ringlets by twisting the strands tightly around her finger.

On the outside, Octavio’s wife appeared like a wounded empress. Her regal bone structure was even more evident than before, for now her maternal roundness had vanished. Over the week, her almond skin resurfaced and the bruises were absorbed.
But still she remained fragile. She refused to speak of the details of her kidnapping, and Octavio did not press her. He was just so grateful that she had been returned. He knew that they were already more fortunate than so many others. For, each of the two times Salomé was kidnapped, she was eventually returned. Should there be a third time, they might not be so lucky.

On the eighth night following her return, Octavio held his wife and told her that they would have to leave Chile. “It is not safe for us here any longer,” he whispered to her while she lay in their large, canopied bed. “Sweden has accepted our application for political asylum.”

Salomé heard him but did not answer. But, the next day, she rose from her bed and began packing. Octavio noticed, as he labeled the five boxes to be shipped to Sweden, that his wife had not packed their old Victrola. He thought that strange, but he did not question her. Although she might not want the old machine now, Octavio thought one day she might regret not having it. So he opened one of the half-filled boxes and packed it anyway, believing someday his wife would thank him for his foresight.

V
ESTERÅS
, S
WEDEN

N
OVEMBER
1998

More than twenty-three years had passed before Salomé could listen to music without being reminded of the terror it had once caused her. It seemed ironic, then, that on the afternoon that the letter arrived, her old Victrola was humming in the background, the needle skipping over Satie’s lonely notes.

After carefully reading the words, she folded the letter neatly into thirds and placed it in her desk drawer. Her skin was cold and her body shivered.

She went over to the gramophone, rested her hand on the shiny black horn, and released the arm. The music ceased as the record slowed its spin. Salomé was soothed by the silence that followed, relieved that the only sounds the music masked were the icy gusts rattling a half-opened window.

Inside there was darkness and outside it was dusk. It was only 3
P.M
., but night had already arrived in the Swedish sky.

Aside from the cold air that penetrated the apartment, Salomé’s apartment appeared tropical. When her children visited, they knew that, no matter where their mother lived, she possessed a divine ability to re-create their Santiago childhood home. The rooms smelled of dried geranium leaves, eucalyptus, and wild mint, for she had hidden tiny sachets filled with these fragrant leaves
throughout the house, and had covered the walls with old cinema posters of their father, from when he had been famous. She had created small collections from things she had found—things that people had disposed of thinking they were of no value. But she treasured them, those displaced things, and amongst the shelves lined with beach glass and dried lemons and pears, she gave them a home.

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.