Purgatory Read online

  When they came up to congratulate their brother after the ceremony, Simón told them how happy he was they’d come and asked them not to leave, but afraid they might miss their bus, they dashed off, carrying their hats and their shoes in either hand. Emilia and Simón did not stay long at the intimate reception thrown by the Dupuys either. They had been loaned an apartment in Palermo with balconies looking out over the forest. There was a fire burning in the grate and a record player with Beatles and Sui Generis LPs. Emilia loved ‘Michelle’ and asked Simón to play it over and over.

  When they lay stretched out in front of the fire and Simón kissed her throat, his fingertips searching for her breasts, she froze. Her blouse was damp with cold sweat. Until recently, she had abandoned herself to his embrace, pushed his hands into her pants so Simón could feel her wet desire. At such times it seemed to her that those lips too could speak, as though her whole body could talk dirty, but on her wedding night, her vagina remained closed, her thighs as rigid as glass rods.

  ‘Don’t be nervous. It doesn’t matter,’ Simón said. ‘Let’s just lie here and listen to the music. The apartment’s got three bedrooms. If you’d rather be alone, we can sleep in separate beds. It’s just one night. We’ve got the rest of our lives together.’

  ‘I’d like to listen to “Michelle” again,’ said Emilia. ‘I’m fine. It’s just nerves. I’ll get over it. I’m nervous because I love you so much.’

  In the years that followed, Emilia would remember that duplicitous sentence many times. Couples regularly say things to each other that are hypocritical or clichéd. Though it was true that as she said the words she did love Simón, her love felt irrelevant. Her overriding feeling was one of uncertainty, as though the whole world were drawing away from her, as though nothing – no substance, no smell, no scene – would ever be as it had been before.

  ‘Actually, let’s not listen to “Michelle” again,’ she said, ‘it makes me sad.’

  ‘Are you sad?’

  ‘No, what makes you think that? It’s the song that’s sad.’

  There was a comedy on television. Simón said maybe if they took their minds off things, focused on something else, they might get back to the way they felt before they were married. Might even forget that they were alone. He turned off the music and turned on the television. On the screen, a pale comedian was sitting on the floor of a cage on a pile of straw, wearing a black leotard through which his pitifully thin chest and his protruding ribs were clearly visible. From nearby cages came wild shrieks and roars. The comedian was obviously the only visible exhibit in a zoo – and clearly the least interesting, since people sneered, walked past his cage not even stopping to look at him, eager to see the lions or the monkeys. As the cage grew dark and light again, the sign outside changed to indicate the number of days the man had been fasting: 35 days, 40 days, and so on.

  Simón explained to Emilia that this was a comic version of Kafka’s short story ‘A Hunger Artist’. Every time the lights came up, fewer and fewer people stopped to look at the hunger artist. Visitors walked straight past his enclosure to look at the animals on either side. ‘Let me out of here!’ the actor screamed. ‘Stop torturing me!’ The screen faded to black and the words ‘62 days later’ appeared to the sound of canned laughter. Simón, who remembered the story, told Emilia that in Kafka’s version, the artist is proud of his record-breaking fasts and his main reason for staying in the cage is that he does not really like eating. Curiously, this version was even more Kafkaesque. On day 73, a guard came over and peered into the cage, poking the damp pile of straw with a stick looking for the comedian. Unable to see him, the attendant pressed his ear to the cage. A childlike, almost inaudible voice from the straw screamed, ‘Get me out of here! I’m disappearing!’ There was another burst of canned laughter. Eventually, a truck pulled up towing a wagon in which a restless panther was prowling. ‘There’s an empty cage here,’ the driver says. ‘Get it cleaned out, we’ve got a panther we need to house.’ Some people in the audience started shouting, ‘You can’t put a panther in that cage! There’s a starving man in there!’ while others yelled, ‘Go on, put him in the cage! Let him eat the bastard!’ Hands on his hips, the truck driver said, ‘Where is this hunger artist then? I want to see him!’ He threw open the cage, took a pitchfork and began sifting through the straw on the dirty floor. The camera zoomed in on a tiny heap of straw and the actor appeared, no bigger than an ant, screaming, ‘Don’t stamp on me!’ his voice so shrill, so faint, that only the microphone could pick it up. ‘Don’t trample me! I’m one of the disappeared!’ The sketch ended with a close-up of the sole of a shoe hovering menacingly over the actor as the audience applauded, roaring with laughter.

  The sketch left them feeling even more depressed. They decided to sleep in separate rooms and kissed each other goodnight without passion. In the morning they were due to take the 10 a.m. flight to Recife for a two-week cruise down the Brazilian coast – a wedding present from Emilia’s father.

  They had been on the cruise for several days when, over breakfast, they heard that the actor in the sketch had issued an unqualified apology to the viewers and the authorities. ‘Sometimes my jokes are in bad taste,’ he said, ‘and this time I have stupidly contributed to the campaign of vilification against our country. I am unworthy to live among you. The people of Argentina are a peaceful people, and I failed to respect that peace. To joke about the disappeared is to play into the hands of the subversives.’ One of the ship’s officers, who had seen the apology on television, mentioned it over breakfast. ‘The poor bastard had circles under his eyes so black that they looked like they were painted on,’ he said. ‘Hijo de puta,’ commented a deeply tanned older woman sitting next to Emilia. ‘People like that don’t deserve to live. If I were a man, I’d kill every last one of them.’ Everyone went on eating breakfast in silence.

  The inchoate love Emilia had felt on her wedding night cured itself the following day in the narrow uncomfortable berth of the cruise ship put out of Recife. When Simón’s hand brushed her belly as he stowed the luggage, she felt a smouldering desire she had kept buried deep inside her ever since she had her first period. Now, finally, she could satisfy it without virginal coyness or Catholic guilt. She fell back on the berth and begged Simón to rid her once and for all of her cursed hymen. But Simón did not feel the same urgency. He wanted to prolong the moment, to separate it into languid fragments of desire, to enter Emilia’s body with his every sense. ‘Let’s take it gently, amor,’ he said. ‘It’s your first time.’ She was impatient and couldn’t understand why her husband wanted to delay the moment of penetration. ‘No, not gently, do it now,’ she urged him. Was this Christian? She wanted nothing in that moment as much as she wanted to be hurt, defiled, broken. When she had been a little girl of seven or eight, the family cook had explained to her that losing her virginity would be like dying. That the pain she felt would be the same pain she would feel when she died, but that with it would come all of God’s pleasures.

  She allowed Simón to undress her; to discover for the first time the pinkish birthmark, round as a ten centavo coin, on her right buttock; to linger over the small folds of cellulite that had appeared on one of her thighs – while still she was a virgin, she had thought to herself, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin with cellulite – to trace with his tongue the almost invisible line of hair that ran from her navel to the centre of her being. Her eyes were closed when he, now naked, parted her lips with his tongue and mingled his saliva with hers. Feeling his gentleness, smelling his scent, Emilia’s heart began to race, she had never felt it pound so hard, she didn’t think it could take much more, but it was beating harder still when Simón slipped his tongue between her thighs.

  ‘Don’t . . .’ she said. ‘It’s salty.’ He looked up from between her legs and smiled. ‘How do you know it’s salty?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, he buried himself in her depths until her inner labia gripped him. ‘Now, please . . .’ Emilia whimpered. ‘Give it t
o me now, please.’ Simón penetrated her gently, moving towards her hymen, more gently than she had imagined. She heard a brief moan and then the surge of his ejaculation overcame him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wanted it to last a lifetime.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she reassured him. ‘We can do it again in a little while.’

  ‘I’ve hurt you. You’re bleeding.’

  ‘Good . . . I’m supposed to bleed. I won’t even feel it tomorrow. And besides, like you said, we’ve got our whole lives together.’

  After a while, Emilia shifted towards him, kissed his throat, behind his ear. Without saying a word, she took his penis and stroked it delicately.

  ‘I can’t,’ Simón said. ‘It’s got a life of its own, this thing. Sometimes it stays limp like that for hours.’

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, don’t think about it. You can do it.’

  Simón rummaged in a suitcase, took out a cassette deck and pressed Play. From the machine, in spite of the poor quality of the recording, came a sequence of simple piano chords of extraordinary purity, music that sounded like nothing else in the world.

  ‘When I’m alone, Keith Jarrett’s improvisations get me excited. With you, they’ll get me even more excited.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Emilia smiled. ‘You’re saying he’s improvising this?’

  ‘From beginning to end.’

  ‘It’s so perfect. He must have the whole melody memorised.’

  ‘No. This is Jarrett’s great discovery. He turned up at the Köln Opera House without the faintest idea of what he was going to play. He was tired, he’d spent a whole week playing concerts and he was surprised to find that the music came to him in waves. Before that night, he was a great jazz pianist, but that night he created a genre all his own. His music is a constant, an absolute. The coughing from the audience, the creak of the piano, nothing is prepared. Maybe Bach or Mozart created galaxies like this, improvised harmonies that drift now through the darkness of time, but none of them have survived. That night at the Köln Opera House can never be repeated. Jarrett himself couldn’t do it. It’s an evanescent concerto, born to live and die in that very moment. It will become a commonplace, a cliché, to be listened to by lovers like us, but the human race will go on needing it.’

  They lay back on the berth. After seven minutes, Jarrett began to moan as though fucking his instrument. Simón’s penis remained inert.

  ‘Let me hold you,’ Emilia said.

  She went on stroking him with one hand while slowly caressing herself with the other. After a moment, his moan joined Jarrett’s.

  After the phone call from the woman from the cinema, Emilia spent the morning wondering what to do. She could barely bring herself to concentrate on the maps which she was supposed to be working on, converting them from 1:450,000,000 scale to 1:450,000. She longed to talk to her father, but she was afraid of how he might react. He had become increasingly volatile and unpredictable. That afternoon, in the family home on calle Arenales, she finally confided in Chela. As always, her sister told her mother, who told Dupuy, who came to see her some two hours later trembling and angrier than she had ever seen him. He stood, glaring at Emilia.

  ‘How can you be so naive? Don’t you understand that we are at war? That your family could be attacked by subversives at any moment? You should have told me what happened in the cinema the moment it happened. You have no right to make a fool of me in front of my friends. I won’t tolerate such behaviour.’

  ‘What did I do? So, I didn’t mention it for a couple of days. I’m not psychic. I don’t know what’s going on.’

  ‘No, and you don’t know how to look after yourself either. It was a trap. They were trying to get information out of you, trying to inveigle their way into this house. They want to blow our brains out, all of us.’

  ‘So what am I supposed to do if this woman calls again?’

  ‘She won’t. She was picked up in a cafe near your place. She’d been spying on you, she was armed. A patrol surrounded her and when they told her to surrender her weapon, she tried to resist. They tried to stop her, but she shot herself.’

  Two months after seizing power, the president came to her parents’ house for dinner. He was accompanied by his wife, her stiff, swollen legs covered by a long skirt, and by the chaplain of the Military Vicariate. Since Emilia was his eldest daughter and had just come back from her honeymoon, Dr Dupuy condescended to invite her on the condition that she and her husband refrain from making any political comments. This peremptory command unsettled Simón who did not want to go. Outside the family house was a confusion of cars and soldiers in service uniforms.

  It was a warm night in mid-May and the president, invariably described by the newspapers as ascetic, seemed exultant, almost triumphant. He greeted Emilia with a dispassionate kiss on the cheek, offered his hand for Simón to shake without looking at him, all the while relating the successes of the day. When he spoke, he enunciated each syllable as though mistrustful of his listeners’ intelligence. From time to time, he gave Dupuy a sidelong glance and the doctor nodded his approval. Except for photos from the 1930s, Emilia had never seen a man wear his hair so plastered down with hair cream. The monsignor flirted with Simón. As he expounded on the meaning of the symbols on the golden chasuble he was to wear for the first time for the Corpus Christi procession, he toyed with the crucifix pinned to his chest. His shrill, bird-like voice was remarkable and he fell silent only when the president began to explain how, in less than two months, the government had managed to reduce inflation by more than 20 per cent.

  ‘The National Reorganisation policies are beginning to take effect,’ he said with the punctiliousness of a teacher. ‘We have managed to keep salaries under control and the union protests are over—’

  ‘Not before time,’ the president’s wife interrupted. ‘Troublemakers and drunks, the lot of them. The minute they got their wages, they’d spent their last centavo in the bars. Well, now they’ll learn what it means to behave decently.’

  ‘Praised be the Lord,’ said the chaplain.

  The champagne moved the conversation on to subjects more likely to appeal to the ladies. All of them, including Emilia, used the same perfume, Madame Rochas, as though it were a sign of distinction. Chela and her mother discussed whether Lancôme creams were better than Revlon. The president’s wife settled the matter.

  ‘I’ve always favoured Lancôme,’ she said, ‘from the very first time I used it. I wouldn’t use anything else now.’

  ‘Why do any of you need to use creams at all?’ the chaplain interjected. ‘You all have such wonderful complexions.’

  Ethel, the mother, smiled appreciatively. ‘It’s quite clear, Monsignor, that you are interested only in spiritual beauty. We women are forced to make do with what scant beauty God has blessed us with.’

  ‘I have friends who went to Europe who told me that they have fabulous creams over there that we’ve never even heard of,’ said Chela.

  ‘They’ll get here. Everything in its own time, niña,’ said the president. ‘Argentina used to be cut off from the world but we’re going to open the doors to imports so that our industries learn to compete.’

  ‘I’d really like to visit Europe,’ said Chela.

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’ the president’s wife sighed. ‘My dream is to meet the Holy Father; every day, he grows more like Pius XII. He has such a gentle, such an aristocratic manner about him, and such strength of character.’

  The monsignor brought his hands together and raised his eyes to heaven.

  ‘The Lord never fails those who love Him. Your dream will come true sooner than you think; plans for just such a trip are already well advanced.’

  ‘Every night, I pray to God to keep the Holy Father healthy. Once we’ve dealt with the extremists, the first thing we’ll do is go to Rome to give thanks. But just now we can’t go anywhere. We have to look after our home.’

  Dinner was served and the monsignor, seated at the
head of the table, said grace. He prayed for a swift victory for the nation’s armies and, his beatific smile almost caressing the president, intoned: ‘Through me, and through the arm of our comandante Our Lord Jesus Christ, bless the process of national purification which makes it possible for us to eat in peace.’

  ‘Amen,’ said the president. He lifted his untouched glass of champagne. Everyone else did likewise. ‘To peace.’

  For a while, no one spoke. The president’s wife praised the asparagus soufflé and the spider crab which Dr Dupuy had had shipped all the way from Tierra del Fuego. The chaplain accepted a second helping and, eyes half closed, savoured the food.

  ‘Congratulations, my dear doctor. This is delicious.’

  Dupuy accepted the compliment with a chilly smile and turned to the president.

  ‘Did you have a good day, señor?’

  He made a small gesture which the waiters immediately understood. They were to serve another round of Dom Perignon. Though in private, Dupuy addressed the president informally, he was careful to observe protocol when others were present. Behind the president’s display of strength, he knew, the man was sensitive and insecure.

  ‘I can’t complain. I spent the morning addressing the World Advertising Congress and I’ve rarely heard such an ovation. The business community is thrilled by what’s happening here. They say that in a couple of months we’ve managed to get the subversives on the ropes. We’ve flushed the rats from their nests. We inherited a country in chaos, now we live in an orderly society.’