Purgatory Read online

  ‘It breaks my heart just listening to you,’ Emilia said.

  ‘That’s not the worst. Every night I’d tour the bars, I’d go in, sit down, order a beer and play “Muchacha ojos de papel” endlessly on the jukebox in the hope that the song would make her appear. One night, I told the whole story to the guy behind the bar, I showed him the photo of her I kept in my wallet. I think I saw her in Trelew, he said. Why don’t you try there? Trelew was a slightly bigger town about fourteen kilometres west and the people there seemed more wary. I visited all the places I had in Rawson, but this time I also asked in the prisons. I don’t know how many times I made that tour in every town in the surrounding area, in Gaiman, Dolavon, Puerto Madryn. When I got back to Buenos Aires, I was sure that she’d be there, waiting for me. I never saw her again.’

  ‘You’re still waiting for her.’

  ‘Not any more. There comes a moment when you finally resign yourself to losing what you’ve already lost. You feel as though it’s slipping through your fingers, falling out of your life, you feel nothing will ever be the same again. I still think of her, obviously, but I don’t wake up in the middle of the night any more, worrying that she’s lying somewhere ill, or dead. Sometimes I wonder if she really existed. I know I didn’t dream her. I still have a blouse of hers, a pair of shoes, a make-up bag, two of her books. Her name was Emilia too.’

  Emilia and Simón were married two years later. Simón gave up working for the newspapers and joined the map-making department at the Argentina Automobile Club where Emilia had been working for some months. They were happy, and happiness was exactly as she had imagined it would be. They talked easily about things that would have made other couples uncomfortable, and upon this mutual trust they built their home life. If she did not discover the same intense pleasure in sex she had heard her friends talk about, she said nothing, assuming that this too would come in time.

  Only after Simón disappeared on a trip to Tucumán did she begin to feel racked with guilt that she had not made him happy. She felt painfully jealous of the other Emilia, for whom Simón was perhaps still searching. There were nights when she woke up with the feeling that her husband’s whole body was inside her, sounding her deepest depths, until it reached her throat. It was a pleasure so physical it made her weep. She would get up, take a shower, but when she went back to bed the spectre of the beloved body was still there, emblazoned within her.

  Finding him again thirty years later unsettled her. In the past, when she had still been searching for him, she imagined that when she found him, they would quickly slip back into their old routine and carry on with their lives as though nothing had happened. But now, a sort of abyss separated them, a chasm made deeper by the fact that Simón had not aged a single day while she bore the full weight of her sixty years.

  Emilia had felt no sense of foreboding when she got up that morning. She liked to lie in bed, to stretch languidly, to linger for a while before heading out to work. It was the best part of the day. After she showered, she would carefully apply her make-up, despite knowing that she was doing it for no one. As the day wore on, the lipstick would fade, the mascara fall from her lashes in tiny flecks. At least once a week she went to a beauty salon to have a new set of sculptured nails applied. She had replaced the previous nails – an orange and violet mosaic pattern – two days earlier and the new ones had a delicate pattern of blue wavy lines. She always breakfasted on toast and coffee, glanced at the headlines in the Home News. Her only friend was Nancy Frears, a librarian at Highland Park. Chela, her younger sister, lived in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and their three children, and though they called each other on birthdays and at Thanksgiving, they hadn’t seen each other for years. A couple of summers earlier, when Emilia had had her hernia operation, it had been Nancy, not Chela, who stayed with her, helped her shower, tidied the apartment. She could, of course, have found friends who shared similar interests, but she was loath to change the life she lived. A couple of geographers from Rutgers University she sometimes ran into on the train she took to Manhattan had invited her to go to the movies or to dinner. She enjoyed chatting with them on the train, but did not want to take the friendship further. To Emilia, sharing a movie with someone was like sharing a bed. In cinemas, people cry, they sigh, they reveal the flayed flesh of their emotions. She had no desire to be on such intimate terms with the geographers from Rutgers. With Nancy, on the other hand, she didn’t mind. Nancy’s friendship was like a cat or a comfortable eiderdown. Besides, for Nancy, Emilia represented a pinnacle of refinement she could never attain; when they were together she constantly felt she was learning something new, even when Emilia read her poems she did not understand or took her to little art-house cinemas to see classic Mizoguchi films.

  Nancy’s favourite quotation was a line from Ezra Pound she had chanced upon in the library. She was drawn to the hidden meaning she sensed in the cadence of the line: How ‘came I in’?5 Was I not thee and Thee? It had a mysterious lilt; she asked Emilia to help her decipher it, and without even changing the order of the words, they managed to shed some light on it. ‘What is it about this line you find so moving?’ Emilia wanted to know. ‘What is unsaid, but hinted at in the folds between the words.’ Sometimes her friend was not so stupid.

  Nancy had survived a stultifying marriage. Sid Frears, her late husband, had been a travelling salesman selling synthetic adhesive who left her alone for months at a time. After fifteen years of marriage, pancreatic cancer had carried him off. Nancy had not the slightest interest in changing her life. Sid’s life insurance policy, invested at a fixed interest during the boom years, ensured her an annual income of $22,000. She decided she did not need to work. Her only work was voluntary: from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she worked at the library. ‘What would I want to go out to work for?’ she said. ‘So I don’t feel alone? I’m not that kind of person, Millie. I like my own company. I read People magazine every week, I listen to the Beach Boys, and if I want to fart, I fart. There’s no one to complain.’

  More than once, Emilia caught her staring at the photo of Simón on her beside table. Comparing him to Sid and shaking her head. ‘You had a good thing going there, huh, Millie? Was he good in bed?’ Emilia would have liked to tell her that sex with Simón in her imagination was better than it had been in reality, but this was something she would tell no one, something she did not dare admit even to herself. Sometimes, when they got back from bingo, Nancy would gaze at Simón’s broad forehead, his pale, honest eyes, his firm nose.

  ‘He looks just like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, don’t you think, hon? If he hadn’t died, he’d look like Clint in The Bridges of Madison County now.’

  On the Friday when Emilia met Simón at Trudy Tuesday, she had left home at 7 a.m. as she did every morning. It took her forty minutes to drive from her apartment on North 4th Avenue to the Hammond offices in Springfield industrial park. She worried about avoiding the inevitable accidents on Garden State Parkway, the storms that could break suddenly over a two-mile area while in the distance the sun was still shining. Like a taxi driver, she drove with the radio tuned to 1010 AM, which kept her up to date on traffic tailbacks.

  The suburbs were endless, indistinguishable, and if, as she sometimes did, she allowed her mind to wander she would somehow end up driving through a strip mall with branches of Wal-Mart, Pep Boys, Pathmark and Verizon Wireless laid out in an arc, beneath louring skies of identical clouds with identical squawking birds. Only the leaves of the walnut trees showed any imagination, distinguishing themselves in autumn as they fell.

  Sometimes at the office, as her screen glowed with the colours of maps, print priorities and legends, Emilia would sit daydreaming about Simón whom she had not seen die. The death of a loved one is devastating. How much more devastating, then, was the death of someone you could not be sure was dead? How can you lose something not yet found? Emilia had seen the glimmer of an answer in a poem by Idea Vilari
ño dedicated to the man who abandoned her: I am no more than I now / forever, and you / now / to me / no more than you. Now you are not / and some day soon / I won’t know where you live / with whom / or whether you remember / You will never hold me / as you did that night / never / I will never touch you / I will not see you die.

  Some years previously, someone had told her about a group of geographers who spent their winters in Nuuk, Greenland, mapping the effects of global warming and she had imagined Simón was on that expedition. It was a foolish fantasy, but for a few months, it had been a consolation. In the notebook where she jotted down her feelings, she wrote something that still pained her today: ‘If he came back, I would be able to see him die.’

  During the Trial of the Juntas against the military leaders of the dictatorship, three separate witnesses claimed to have seen Simón’s body in the courtyard of a police station in Tucumán, his body showing clear signs of having been tortured, a bullet hole between his eyes. Emilia was in Caracas during the trials and did not know whether to believe the story or not. The witnesses seemed genuine, but their testimonies differed. She had been with her husband when he was arrested, her own testimony would have been very different from theirs: they had been arrested by mistake and released two days later, Simón a couple of hours before Emilia. She had seen Simón’s signature in the prison register indicating that he had left. Her father, Dr Orestes Dupuy, had checked the fact with the military governor himself.

  To Emilia, her version was an indisputable fact. It was because she believed it that she did not set foot outside their San Telmo apartment in Buenos Aires for months, waiting for her husband to come home, waiting for him to call. She felt a terrible emptiness, spent the days staring out the window as the hours passed, learning by heart the relief map of the buildings, the shapes of the people moving behind their curtains. Her father had tried to persuade her to move back to the family home, but Emilia wanted things to be exactly as they had been when Simón was there. Every morning, she went to work at the Argentina Automobile Club, every evening when she came home, she made dinner, never forgetting to set two places at the table.

  From time to time, she got distressing letters from people who claimed to have seen Simón on a street in Bogotá or Mexico City and demanded money in return for more information. There were phone calls, too, from people who told her that Simón was dead. These contradictory stories left her unable to sleep. She was still hopelessly in love and, what was worse, she realised it was a love that had no purpose, no object. Almost a year after Simón’s disappearance, by which time his name was barely mentioned, Emilia decided to distract herself and after much hesitation went to the Cine Iguazú to see Ettore Scola’s A Special Day, a film about a mother of six living in a seedy tenement building and her neighbour, a homosexual radio announcer, who care for each other as best they can while all the other tenants have left to go and take part in the parade to honour Hitler’s visit to Rome in 1935. The film had been running for about an hour when the air conditioning cut out. The afternoon was so humid that now the images were shrouded in a vapour that made them seem unreal. The air in the cinema became unbreathable, there was a sound of whistling, of feet stamping. Some of the audience got up and left. A woman who seemed to have just arrived came over and sat in the seat next to Emilia so abruptly she knocked over her handbag. As Emilia leaned down to pick it up, the woman hissed: ‘They murdered your husband in Tucumán just like they did mine. My husband died under torture. Yours got five bullets in his chest and one between the eyes to finish him off. We can’t go on like this, like nothing’s happened.’ ‘I don’t believe you,’ Emilia said. ‘You’re just a subversive.’ ‘I’m doing you a favour,’ the woman insisted, ‘I’m not asking you to do anything. In this country, we’re all dead already.’ At that moment, the house lights went out again, the air conditioning came on and the film started up. Somebody in the row behind them whistled. The woman got up and was lost in the darkness, Emilia moved to another seat where she sat, her whole body rigid, until the film was over.

  More than once she had heard people tell her father that political subversives – who had been all but wiped out – were prepared to tell people anything they wanted to hear if they thought they could win them over to the cause. Obviously, this woman was one of them and, although Emilia dismissed what she had said as lies, she was haunted for a long time by the image of Simón’s body lying broken in a courtyard like a dog. She couldn’t stop herself picturing him lying with a bullet hole in his head, black with flies and with soot from the chimneys of the local sugar mills. The image went with her everywhere, as though her whole being was subsumed within this dead man whom no one had mourned, no one had buried. But she remained convinced Simón was still alive. Maybe he had lost his memory, maybe he was in a hospital and unable to get in touch.

  Three days later, she was woken by the telephone.

  ‘It’s Ema,’ said a distorted voice.

  ‘Ema who?’

  ‘Ema, the woman from the cinema.’

  ‘Oh, you,’ Emilia managed to say. ‘Those things you said, they’re not true. I read the police report again. My father checked the facts himself.’

  The voice on the other end of the line suddenly became bitter, mocking.

  ‘And you believe your old man? If he had his way, we’d never get out of this ocean of shit. There are thousands of women like you and me. Husbands who have disappeared, sons who never came back. We’ve lost so many . . .’

  ‘Simón is alive. We’re not involved in anything, so there’s no reason for them to do anything to us. I haven’t lost anyone.’

  ‘Oh, but you have. And you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering why your husband never came back. And when you finally accept the fact that he’s dead, you’ll still wonder where they buried him. I would give anything just to be able to kiss my husband’s bones.’

  Trembling, Emilia put down the phone. She didn’t know what to think. A few days earlier, taking the bus home, some woman had dropped a leaflet into her lap. As the woman had looked like a beggar Emilia paid no attention. She was about to give back the flyer when the woman got off the bus and disappeared into the crowd. Absent-mindedly, Emilia read a paragraph: ‘Between 1,500 and 3,000 people have been massacred in secret since the passing of the law forbidding the reporting on bodies being discovered.’ It was lies. All the newspapers said the exiliados were telling lies about the country. The flyer was proof. She ripped it in two and threw it on the ground.

  At work that morning, in the mapping department of the Argentina Automobile Club, she was overcome by an intense feeling of unease. She hated this Ema. Your father is a shit. How could this woman say such things? No one questioned the integrity of Dr Dupuy. On his deathbed General Perón himself had heaped praise on him: ‘Read Dupuy,’ he had said. ‘He has written the most accurate analysis of my actions in government. And not just mine: he has proved himself the finest analyst of all governments.’

  Since 1955, her father had been publishing La República, a privately circulated magazine keenly read by people of influence. Every word came from reliable sources; it was an invaluable guide to protecting one’s assets from the constant devaluations of the peso, for anticipating the rate of inflation. The financial pages of the international press agreed. ‘Only sound business deals come from the pages of La República.’ Not only did La República announce forthcoming military coups, it fanned the flames that fostered them. Dupuy personally wrote the editorials linking decadence to democracy and extolling the spirit of the nation. His editorials never explained whether the ‘spirit of the nation’ changed, whether it was immutable, or what it consisted of. The ‘spirit of the nation’ was handed down unchanged from one government to the next.

  In the family mansion on calle Arenales where Emilia was born, her father had been an imposing figure who rarely addressed himself to her or her sister Chela. He would ruffle their hair, ask how things were going at school and, sometimes, if they were sick,
would suddenly appear to talk to the doctors. Next to him, their mother seemed like a little girl.

  In late March 1976, Emilia was drawing a map of the San Rafael glacier when she heard on the radio that the new military junta was planning to rebuild the country, reform the economy and – obviously – safeguard the spirit of the nation. The new junta announced all-out war on left-wing subversives and all those who refused to conform. Argentina had to be of one mind. There was no room for dissenters, for the half-hearted, for anyone who was seen to be different.

  Three nights before what was called ‘the revolution’, Emilia had gone to her father’s study to take him the guest list for her wedding. Dupuy had asked her to take his waste-paper basket, empty it into the furnace and make sure everything was reduced to ashes. Stuck to the bottom of the bin was a page of handwritten notes. As she peeled it away, Emilia read the first lines: ‘What would Argentina be without the sword, without the cross? Who would wish to go down in history as the man who deprived the spirit of the nation of one of these twin bulwarks?’ When she went back with the waste-paper bin, Emilia gave him back the page she had rescued from the flames.

  ‘Forget you ever saw this,’ her father warned, not bothering to look up.

  ‘I thought the bit about the spirit of the nation was nice.’

  ‘Nice? Don’t talk such drivel. These are grave, important matters. The spirit of the nation is at stake and it can only be saved by force of arms. This country is Catholic and military. It is Western and white. Those who forget that “and” do not understand anything.’ He gave a dismissive wave. ‘You clearly don’t understand anything. You’d do better to concentrate on your duties as a wife.’

  Emilia and Simón were married in the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen on April 24, one month after the coup d’état. The time of the ceremony was twice changed to foil any possible terrorist attack. Rather than entering by the main doors of the church and walking up the aisle, Emilia emerged from the sacristy on her father’s arm. In the front pew Simón’s two sisters, who had come up from Gálvez that morning, were wearing very low-cut purple-sequinned dresses, stilettos and pink hats. They wagged their heads like partridges, proud of their ample cleavage. They licked their thumbs and index fingers before making the sign of the cross, droning amen, amen, louder than the priest himself.