Purgatory (27 page)

Simón is very pale. She sees a languid smile play on his lips. It worries Emilia that the smile came to his face just as dusk is blotting out the shape of things and she will lose the image, perhaps forever. This is the trouble with love, she thinks: that cherished expressions disappear, looks which, in memories, could be those of anyone. She gets up and puts on one of Jarrett's concerts. The volume is turned down very low and she would like Simón to touch her. He has been affectionate to her, though she has noticed a certain reserve in his tenderness. Their lovemaking has been better than it ever was; love between them has always been easy, what has been difficult is tenderness. Thinking about it, perhaps this is the price to be paid for the remoteness she too felt in their first months of marriage. Only in Tucumán was she able to surrender herself, to realise that when his body entered into hers, she also entered into his. That one night was also the last: until yesterday. The solitary ecstasy of the past has been repeated and she never wants it to end, she wants to exhaust herself with love as though life were this and only this, the endless orgasm she has dreamed about for thirty years. Let him touch her, then. Simón is now sitting on the bed and she lays her head on his shoulder. ‘Touch me,
amor
, touch me,' she says.

But Simón talks about other things. ‘When I was far from you I thought I would find you inside a map.' Emilia interrupts him: ‘This might sound strange, but I thought the same thing.' Simón: ‘I saw you standing in the map. I didn't know where you were because the vectors had been erased. It was a desert with no lines.' And Emilia: ‘In that case it wasn't a map.' Simón: ‘Maybe it wasn't, but that's where you were.' And Emilia: ‘If it was a map with no landmarks, you could have left a trail of names, drawn trees for reference, I would have found you. Once, in Mexico, I followed a trail of white pebbles convinced that, like in
Hansel and Gretel
, when I came to the last one, I would find you. In Caracas, I named all the streets in a neighbourhood so you could find me: Iván el Cobero, Coño Verde. At the top of the hill was a small square. I called it Simón Yemilia. The neighbours thought I named it Simón after Simón Bolivar; I added Yemilia because a lot of girls around there are called Yemila, Yajaira, Yamila, but I knew you would know I meant
Simón y Emilia
, I knew that if you were ever there, ever looked at a new map of Caracas, you would be able to find me. Why don't you touch me?'

Jarrett's music circles around the same clusters of notes, sometimes lingering on a single note, and outside, the night itself has stopped moving; only inside Emilia, as in a dark heart of a volcano, life still ebbs and flows.

She can't remember Simón ever fucking her the way he is fucking her now. Her body is ablaze, she arches herself, raises her body so he can penetrate all the way to her throat, she licks him, devours him, and what she feels is so intense, so overpowering, that she feels coursing from her tongue the foam from the tongue with which he kisses her. Emilia soars so high that Simón's fires reach deeper than her body, they are fires of pure sex, flames that come and go leaving no ashes. By now she has lost count of how many times she's come, they've climaxed, she's orgasmed, how do they say it in other languages,
ancora
,
more
,
encore
,
ainda mas
, don't go,
querido mío
, don't leave. On and on until the first breath of morning seeps through the window, on and on until she can't go on any more and clutches the pillow wet with tears.

The Jarrett concert stays with her all night. The CD ends but she does not notice. She knows the slow final cadences by heart and so the melody slips unnoticed towards silence. She hugs Simón to her, fearful that reality will fade out like the music. The room is still dark, the faint brightness she saw when she woke disappears. Perhaps we can't see the sun, she thinks. A dirty grey day like most of the days this autumn. She doesn't know whether or not to get up. She allows herself to be carried along by the joy of knowing that he is sleeping here, in the room, and that he will not leave her again to waste her life in the maps at Hammond. Why wake him? This body lying next to her is the only map she needs to get her bearings in time. And thinking about it, what need has she of time when time has folded in on itself and now fits inside the body of her beloved. When she first set out to look for him she could not have imagined that there could have been so many circles in her purgatory, nor that when she reached one another would appear above it, and then another. Her eternal noon was an everlasting purgatory.

 

Now, I am the one wondering where Emilia has gone. Nancy Frears phoned the police, who are thrilled to be presented with a mystery in this town without mysteries. Two officers accompanied by the chief of police in person broke down the door of her North 4th Avenue apartment and found not a living soul. The bed was made, the books and CDs neatly organised, the hi-fi and the computer had not even been unplugged. There were no signs of a break-in or a robbery. The only conspicuous detail was that Emilia had not taken out the garbage bag in the kitchen and by now it was beginning to smell. On the table were the remains of some sushi, a seaweed salad and some Chinese fortune cookies. Nancy phoned Chela, but, according to her answering machine, the Echarri family were out of the country. I'm the last person to have seen Emilia and the police asked me to come in and make a statement. As I explained, a fat cop took notes, stopping from time to time to eat the half-finished pizza oozing grease all over the cardboard delivery box. The officer wanted to know if Emilia had been suicidal, suffered from some terminal illness or mentioned that she might be going on holiday. The interview lasted half an hour, and before he handed me the statement to sign, he asked if there was anything else I could think of that might be helpful. I was surprised to hear myself telling him that thirty years ago in my country many people disappeared without leaving a trace and that Emilia's husband had been one of the disappeared. ‘She never gave up hope of finding him again,' I said. ‘She could never bring herself to accept that he might be dead.' ‘What about you, what do you think?' asked the officer. ‘I believe he's dead. Emilia's not the only person to hope that someone she loves will come back from the dead; there are thousands like her, clinging to an illusion. Imagine the pain of not knowing where your daughter is, not knowing who took her. And if she were dead, imagine the desolation of not knowing in what dark corner of the world her body is.' ‘In this country, it is the job of the police to find out what happened,' said the officer. ‘We are paid by the state to do just that. This woman's disappearance might be a crime, a kidnapping, she might have committed suicide, she could have gone away to join a sect. We can rule out kidnapping, since it's been several days and there's been no ransom demand. We can rule out the idea that she's been taken by gangsters running a prostitution ring, since, quite frankly, the woman is too old. Also she has no priors and there's no reason to suspect she was a drug mule or involved in trafficking. She has a perfect résumé, no offences, no problems at work, she got on well with her neighbours. It makes no sense,' the officer went on. ‘Here, people don't just disappear into thin air. Give it a week or two and we'll find out what happened.' ‘It doesn't always work out that way,' I said. ‘You see photos of missing people on milk cartons all the time, kids, old people.' ‘Most of them have mental health problems,' insisted the policeman. I said goodbye, left a card with my details on his desk and asked him to get in touch if they found out anything.

The following day, Nancy Frears insisted on seeing me; she asked me to come by her apartment on Montgomery Street. The minute I walked through the door, she threw herself into my arms and started sobbing. ‘Where can poor Millie have gone? Have you heard anything?'

‘Nothing,' I said.

‘I don't know anything either. I drop by the chief of police's office as often as I can. No one there wants to say anything, but you get to hear things around town. If you were a woman, you'd understand. You hear people gossiping at the salon, in the drugstore, over at Jerusalem Pizza. They say someone saw her on the street talking to herself, dressed up like she was going to a party. Someone saw her on Saturday morning at dawn taking the train to Newark. What would she be doing up at that hour? Her car still hasn't turned up. They've issued a description of the car and the licence plate to all the toll routes and hotels for two hundred miles. All the patrol cars have the details too, of course. We should get some news soon. She has to eat, to sleep, to take a bath. Can you wait a minute? I need to go to the bathroom. It's my stomach, I get gas, you know. Never gives me a minute's peace.'

She reappears with a file of clippings. Emilia gave them to her to look after a while ago and she shows them to me to see if I recognise anything. I see the pamphlet again, the samples of Stabilene film which cartographers carried with them everywhere thirty years ago. Inside the pamphlet I see a copy of the ‘Rules concerning the making of cartographic documents for the Automobile Club' typed on an old-fashioned typewriter. I don't stop to read it since the predictable articles in it have long since expired. What surprises me is the carefully hand-drawn page at the end. On it there are three squares splitting off like tree branches from a central square. Each space is filled with elegantly calligraphed text. One of them reads: ‘Choice and selection of the nomenclature for the colour blue', and the uppermost square reads: ‘Rough sketch to scale of Ruta 77 as far as the Abra River'. I assume that it is Simón's handwriting, large, meticulous well-spaced letters. If Simón did write it, it would explain why Emilia has treasured this useless, yellowing scrap of paper all these years. Or perhaps she keeps it because it is the last vestige of his contact with the world: this sheet of paper, his fingerprints on the steering wheel of the jeep, the sketch of the Río El Abra that was taken from them in Huacra, the tremulous signature on the prison register. As I touch the sheet, I barely feel it, it is as though the paper is air; of course I know that my senses are gradually disappearing, I know that my eyesight is failing, that my ears hear only what they want to hear: Kiri Te Kanawa singing Mozart's Mass in C Minor, the voices of my sons, Keith Jarrett playing the piano, the murmur of snow as it falls.

I don't say this to Nancy, but sometimes I think Emilia's senses also disappeared and that is why she is not here. Our senses constantly feed our memory, and beyond that memory there is nothing. The body enters into a continuous present in which pass, one by one, all the seasons of the joys that went unlived.

5

Fame is nothing but a breath of wind

‘Purgatorio’, XI, 100

I open the cuttings file Nancy Frears gave me and notice that some of them are missing. I know that when she gave it to me there were photos of Emilia with her father at the funeral of the film director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson and at a gala given by the
comandantes
for the king and queen of Spain, but I’m confusing what I see with the things Emilia told me. There are many ant trails in my memory and on this point all of them seem to get entangled. I call one of my doctors and ask if these distractions mean anything. ‘We’ll know if there’s any need to worry after we’ve examined you. Are you writing?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ I tell him, ‘a novel.’ ‘In that case, be careful. It’s your imagination that’s making you ill.’ I go back home, and start going over the papers and the notes I have collected.

I started at the end: with the photograph of Dr Dupuy taken in the main studio of Canal 7 during the twenty-four-hour benefit programme in aid of the soldiers fighting in the Malvinas. It is date-stamped in the top right-hand corner, May 20, 1982, with the time, 23.12. Emilia watches from a distance as her father comes onto the set. It looks to me as though at any moment she might turn her back on him. She finds it difficult to hide her hostility, her displeasure. They have not lived in the same house now for three years, and I know that Emilia would have left Buenos Aires if an increasingly slender umbilical cord did not tie her to her mother, whose body is now little more than a sigh. I don’t have the dates clear in my head, but I think I remember that Ethel Dupuy died shortly after the programme: she left this world as suddenly as she had entered it. Emilia told me she was cremated in a private, almost secret ceremony and that she herself, ‘just me, no one else’, scattered her ashes in the Río de la Plata, its waters swollen with all the dead.

In the photo, you can see the programme’s presenters in the background: they sit pensively on plastic chairs. I suppose they are charged with keeping alive the patriotic fervour the dictatorship has whipped up in the populace to mask the poverty, the inflation, the sense of imminent ruin. At the start of that year, the
comandantes
of the junta, feeling the country slipping through their fingers, grasp desperately for a lifeline: they invade the icy islands, send soldiers trained in the tropics of the Argentinian north-east where cold is unknown. Those in power are different now, the successors to the admiral and the Eel, though their imaginations are still bleak, empty horizons. The British fleet is on the far side of the world and no one expects them to take the trouble to defend a few shitty rocks inhabited by nothing but cormorants and wind, wind and 2,200 of Her Majesty’s subjects, melancholy penguins and wind. Against all expectations, the English launch a counter-offensive; Dupuy calculates that, within eight to ten weeks, defeat is inevitable. Even so, he wants the new
comandantes
to stay at the tiller until the state has weathered the storm. They need to stand firm – but how? When they are as stupid as all the others, as blind to everything that is not white and red and yellow? The stupidest of them are still stealing orphans from hospitals, snatching babies from the wombs of women in labour. There are still many gullible enough to see the country only as the happy, world-beating country depicted by the biddable media. Talk about our crushing victories in the air and on the sea, Dupuy instructs them. Show them photographs of pitiless, corrupt British soldiers. Show them Thatcher with fangs like Dracula. Run the headline:
we
’
re winning
! People are celebrating our armies’ victories, pouring into the streets wearing armbands, waving flags just as they did during the 1978 World Cup. Our onslaughts are lethal, the newspapers repeated in unison. Thatcher, they said, is running scared. Professor Addolorato uttered dirges on Spanish radio stations which Dupuy was forced to republish in
La República
: ‘My poor country is fighting an unequal battle against the third largest power on the planet, supported by American imperialists. The Argentina waging this war is not what the ignorant and ill-informed call the military dictatorship. No, all of Argentina is locked in this struggle: its women, its children, its old people.’ An eloquent opportunist, Dupuy is forced to concede. The British leak the news that Argentinian soldiers are falling at the front without even defending themselves, not from heroism or from enemy shrapnel but because they’re dying of cold. They have little ammunition, their rations of food have run out. Dupuy announces that he is going to launch a huge appeal for solidarity. Live on the same television channels that broadcast the World Cup, the greatest artists and celebrities in the nation will take donations: jewellery, money, chocolates, anything and everything, patriotism must be transformed into largesse and, more importantly, into a chorus of praise to the
comandantes
. He is still inspired by Orson Welles’s lessons in the art of illusion. What a son of a bitch, Welles, he thinks with a mixture of admiration and resentment. The bastard put him in a difficult position with the Eel and the admiral. Shortly after rejecting his offer to direct the documentary that would have heaped praise on it, he mocked Argentina and filmed
The Muppet Movie
, a pathetic trifle for retarded children. Dupuy has heard that he makes his living falling back on his past as a clown. What he cannot forgive is that it was his voice used in
Genocide
, a tasteless documentary about the Nazi concentration camps in which, in passing, there is mention of prison camps in Argentina. He had better not dare try to set foot in Buenos Aires.