The Blue Line (22 page)

BUENOS AIRES

Boreal Winter

2000

U
lysses was sitting at the dining room table chatting with Olivier. The air was just turning brisk. Julia got up to shut the door to the garden and adjusted her sweater. She finished clearing away the plates, tidied up the kitchen, and came back to sit down with them.

“Your grades are excellent,” Olivier was telling Ulysses. “I shouldn't think you'll have any difficulties, whatever you decide to do.”

“But I don't know what I want to do,” Ulysses answered. “That's my whole problem.”

“It's only to be expected. You've been studying for a long time.”

“And I'm not sure I want to go any further.”

“It's like I said: the hard part isn't getting into med school; it's sticking with it.”

“You must be kidding, Olivier! It's all hard.”

They exchanged a smile.

“But that doesn't change anything,” Ulysses went on. “I like what I do. I probably wouldn't have studied medicine if it hadn't been for you, but . . .”

“I think it's in your blood,” Olivier broke in. “I've watched you: you're very good, and it's not because of me.” He added proudly: “Even if I did change your diapers.”

“Yeah, you changed my diapers and then you vanished into thin air for one heck of a long time,” Ulysses retorted.

Olivier pretended to give Ulysses a slap on the head. “You're feisty today!” he said, laughing.

“He's right,” Julia intervened, putting her arms around Olivier's neck. “It's the truth, isn't it?”

Olivier and Ulysses rolled their eyes at each other, chuckling.

“Right, sure, that's exactly what happened, Mom. Let's just pretend you didn't say that!” said Ulysses, getting up to leave.

“Wait, we haven't finished,” Julia said, trying to catch hold of his arm.

“I have to go. I promised my friends I'd meet them in half an hour.”

“Your friends or your girlfriend?” Julia asked, standing up.

“My friends. I'll go see my girlfriend afterward.”

Olivier headed for the door too. “Do you have your keys?”

Ulysses shook a bunch of keys in Olivier's face.

“Very funny. But your mother's not the one who gets up at midnight to let you in.”

Julia gave Olivier a kiss on the cheek.

“Oh! I nearly forgot. I'm taking the car, okay?”

“The gas tank's almost empty,” Olivier warned him.

“Be careful, angel,” Julia added as she shut the door after him.

Olivier and Julia looked at each other, shaking their heads.

“It won't do him any harm to get a bit of fresh air. He works too hard,” said Julia.

“True, but he'll have to stick with it if he wants to do a fellowship.”

“Six years is a long time. Maybe he needs a break.”

“Yes, I was thinking the same thing. I could take him with me over the holidays. He could help me out at the clinic.”

“It wouldn't really be a break,” Julia said, taking his hand. “I did think of getting him an internship at the institute. But on second thought . . .”

“Aha! I see you've got an idea in mind.”

“No, not really. In any case, I'm not sure it's a good idea.”

“Go on, tell me.”

“I think that, in a way, Ulysses is spoiled. Maybe too spoiled. We live in this beautiful house, he has everything he wants. . . .”

“So?”

“I was thinking he should find out how people in other countries live.”

“Africa?”

“No. Actually, I was thinking Argentina.”

Olivier sank down onto the living room couch. Julia looked at him in silence, then went to make some coffee. She returned with two cups and a bar of dark chocolate. She placed everything on the side table and switched on the lamp. Olivier had his head between his hands and a serious expression on his face.

“Listen, I hope this isn't about your old ghosts coming back.”

Julia stirred her coffee. “No. Not really. In fact, I just received a letter from the consulate. My visa application has finally been accepted. I can go to Argentina again.”

“And you want to take Ulysses with you?”

“I think I'd like him to go first. Without me.”

“Why is that?”

“Maybe so he can discover an Argentina that's free of the weight of the past. He has all his cousins who would love to meet him. I've talked to Anna about it. She'd be thrilled to have him stay.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like everything's already been decided.”

“Absolutely not. First of all I wanted your approval. And then Ulysses has to want to go.”

—

Olivier and Julia drove Ulysses to the airport. He left with nothing but a backpack, ignoring Julia's pleas to take some Christmas gifts with him. He had organized a trip to Patagonia with his cousins and would be celebrating Christmas at Mama Fina's house in Buenos Aires with Anna and Pablo, who had been living there for years, and the twins and their families, who would come to join them. It was the end of a millennium, after all, as well as his twenty-fourth birthday, and Ulysses wanted to experience it his own way.

—

Julia returned home feeling down.

“It was your idea, darling. You have only yourself to blame.”

“I know. It's just that it's hard to watch him go.”

“Don't make a big thing out of it. Two weeks is nothing. And besides, it'll give us a chance to ring in the year 2000 as a couple.”

She gave a faint smile and crouched down in front of the fireplace to light a fire. She turned around at the sound of a cork popping. Olivier was pouring champagne with a practiced hand.

“Might as well start celebrating right now,” he said as he approached, holding two flutes.

“Okay. Let's drink to our new life together.”

“It's taken me long enough to convince you! If Ulysses hadn't helped me, I'd still be at it.”

“I couldn't before. I had to make sure I'd exhausted every possibility.”

“Was it the letter from Amnesty International?”

“That might have helped,” Julia said thoughtfully, sitting down on the arm of Olivier's chair.

The organization had mobilized a network of volunteers to champion Theo's case, and they had proven to be very active. Scattered all over France, they took it upon themselves not only to request information from the Argentine authorities but also to demand answers from relevant international bodies. They had managed to bring the case to the attention of a number of journalists, thanks to whom the officials had taken an interest in Theo's file, which otherwise would have been forgotten entirely.

For her part Julia had written hundreds of letters and received an equal number of discouraging replies. She had traveled within Europe and to the United States to ask for help. Invited to participate in a number of international conferences to raise awareness of the fate of the
desaparecidos
, she had met high-ranking people such as Thorvald Stoltenberg, the UN high commissioner for refugees at the time, and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. They had all tried to help her, but in vain.

Adriana's disappearance was extremely frustrating. Anna had never stopped trying to find her. But since she didn't
know Adriana's alias, she had hit a brick wall. Each time she requested information she found herself at the bottom of an endless list, because there were thirty thousand other files like Adriana's, more than fifteen thousand cases of people executed by firing squad, and one and a half million exiles, and on top of that, the person she was looking for was not even a relative of hers.

The final letter from her Amnesty International contacts had eventually arrived. Julia put it away in her desk drawer without even opening it, locked the drawer, and went out for a walk.

—

The phone rang. Julia hurried across the living room to answer. She wasn't expecting Ulysses to call her this soon, but she'd been hoping he would.

“Mom, thank goodness you picked up! I've got something urgent to ask you.”

Julia smiled. “Yes!”

“Mom? Are you there?”

“Of course I'm here, my angel. Now, I want to know how you're doing. How's it going with your cousins? Have you met the twins' kids yet?”

“Yes. I'm very happy. I love this country. But I'm calling about Theo.”

Julia sat down.

“Mom?”

“I'm listening, angel.”

“It's nothing bad, don't worry. But I had a visit from a young woman called Celeste Fierro. She works for a forensic anthropology team.”

“A what?”

“Mom, forensic anthropology. There's a group of young researchers. They're a mixed bag—archaeologists, anthropologists, doctors, biologists, computer scientists. Well, anyway, they've started up a DNA collection program.”

“What? What does that mean?”

“They investigate the bodies they find in mass graves. They use the DNA from the remains of the bodies they exhume to identify them and find their relatives. I don't know how they heard I was in Buenos Aires, but the young woman came to see me to ask me for a blood sample. They've already exhumed more than a thousand corpses from mass graves. More than half of them are still awaiting identification.”

“I see. Yes, of course, you must do it.”

“I'm going to, obviously, but Celeste, the young woman, asked if you're coming to Argentina. They want to see you too.”

“But my DNA won't be of any use to them.”

“They don't need your DNA, Mom. They need concrete information.”

“What kind of information?”

“They only have bones to work from. So they try to find out things like the person's height, their medical record,
whether they were ever in an accident or had an illness or an operation, that sort of thing.”

Julia was silent.

“They also need to know about the torture, and Castelar. . . .”

“Is this the government's new pet project?”

“No, Mom. It's a private organization.”

THE FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY TEAM

Austral Summer

2001

A
lmost a year to the day since Ulysses' first visit there, Julia found herself looking for the offices of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. The meeting had been scheduled for 11:00
A
.
M
. It was a hot day, and Julia was wearing her emerald green printed cotton dress and a round straw hat with an upturned brim, which gave her a retro look. The taxi dropped her off on a noisy shopping street in front of a dilapidated building covered with graffiti. It wasn't the modern tower block she'd been expecting; perhaps she'd imagined it would resemble the institute where she worked in Paris.

She was too early. She was tempted to get a coffee and do a bit of exploring. A swarm of stalls offering photocopying, printing, and binding services, stores selling electronics, and an invasive billboard gave the area the feel of a bazaar.
Pedestrians and cars moved around amid the noise and the pollution. Julia pushed open the heavy wooden door and entered the building. Inside, the air was cool and the noise from the street was muffled. Light filtered into the lobby through etched glass panels. Facing her was an old-fashioned cage elevator with a folding metal door, which didn't look entirely reassuring. She was overcome by the desire to leave without going any farther.

The office was located on the second floor. It could also be reached by a steep, narrow staircase that was as run-down as the building's facade. The floor was partitioned off into a series of small offices, with the exception of two spacious rooms that had skeletons laid out on display tables. Farther along there was an archive room with stacks of numbered, color-coded boxes containing human remains that were in the course of being identified. The walls, marked and grubby through wear and tear, contrasted with the newly painted mauve doors. The grayish computer terminals visible through some of the office doors that had been left ajar suggested a careful allocation of resources. It took only a glance for Julia to locate Celeste Fierro's office.

According to her watch, it was exactly 11:00
A
.
M
. She decided to wait for a few more seconds. Then she knocked on the door, struggling to keep her composure, which made her realize how nervous she was. She was immediately called in and greeted by a young woman with a pleasant smile who was wearing gray pants and a sky-blue lab coat.

She quickly realized she was dealing with a skilled professional whose youth belied her in-depth knowledge of the case. Celeste Fierro was in charge of the
desaparecidos
of Castelar. She knew all the details inside and out: the identity of every prisoner held in the police station, the cells they had occupied, and the duration of their detention. She could describe the layout of the place as if she'd been there herself and recite the names of the prisoners and the guards from memory.

When Julia sat down opposite Celeste, she felt as if her past were looking her in the eyes. Speaking in a calm voice, Celeste told her about each of her fellow prisoners. She had taken out a bulky file containing thousands of names and photographs, including faces Julia recognized. A digital matrix of names, places, and dates completed her database.

By comparing the accounts she gathered, Celeste Fierro had developed an information-verification system. She could accurately establish the names of the dead and of the survivors and thus, by a process of elimination, the names of the
desaparecidos
. This list served as a starting point for the fieldwork carried out by the anthropologists in mass graves and cemeteries.

Interviews with survivors were therefore just as important as the scientific work. They enabled the anthropologists to cross-check information and to broaden their range of conclusions. Celeste told Julia that it was through her sister Anna's evidence that Theo had been identified as the prisoner in cell number 4, whom none of the Castelar survivors could recall
ever seeing. Julia was informed that Paola had died and that Rosa had committed suicide. She also learned of the death of Oswaldo, the young man in the cell across from hers, whom she used to talk to when Sosa was on guard duty.

“Do you remember a girl named Maria? She was detained in Castelar at the same time as you.”

Julia struggled to concentrate on the young woman's question.

“Maria? No, there wasn't any Maria; I'm sure of it,” she answered. “But I remember a young man called Augusto. I ran into him again in Villa Devoto before I was deported.”

“Yes, in fact, I'm meeting with him next week,” Celeste said, peering at her file.

“That's such good news! I'm glad he finally got out. I'd like to see him.”

“Good, I can arrange that. It'll be very important. But this girl Maria,” Celeste insisted, “she must have been with you. She was very young at the time; she must have been barely fourteen, curly auburn hair . . .”

Julia felt a chill run through her. She hesitated, instinctively afraid of flipping a coin that would decide her fate.

“There was a young girl and yes, she was fourteen, but she was blond,” Julia began, turning very pale, her mouth suddenly dry.

Celeste faded into the background, pushing her chair into a gloomy corner of the room.

“I became very close to her. Her name was Adriana. I'd like to know . . . I believe my sister saw her once. Have you found her?”

The young woman studied Julia, gauging her ability to take in the information she was about to give her.

“No,” she replied slowly. “We haven't found the remains of an Adriana. But a few years ago, Maria came to give evidence. She didn't seem to remember anyone. That can happen sometimes, after traumatic experiences such as yours. But she did tell us the date she was arrested, and so we were able to find out which group she was imprisoned with. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to tie in her evidence, because we have no Maria in our files. I'll have to ask Augusto if he remembers Maria. You seem to be the only two female survivors. It would be useful if you got in touch with her too. I have her contact details; she works for a human rights organization.”

Julia stared for a long time at the telephone number Celeste jotted down on a sheet of paper.