Purgatory (31 page)

After her mother became ill, the room, like many in the house, fell into disuse. Dupuy ordered that the clothes be given to the Sisters of Charity and had the shelves and the rail removed, postponing until later the delicate task of removing the mirrors, replastering and repainting the room. He would have it done while he was away on business, when he wouldn’t be bothered by the comings and goings of builders, the hammering, the paint, the dust.

That morning, it occurred to him that the room could also be used to punish. Very few people have a phobia of mirrors, but in those who do the effect is magical and immediate: a strange and subtle form of torture. Emilia had struggled like an animal whenever Ethel had asked her to go in. To him, and perhaps to Ethel, it had merely been an amusing game. But their daughter’s terror was genuine. Mirrors gave her nightmares, made her lose control of her body. He was glad he had not had them removed. Now they would be the perfect means by which his daughter could pay for her crime. He knew her all too well. She was a resentful girl who had thought she could keep the queen’s cape as a trophy. This was why she had taken advantage of the crowds to exchange one for the other. She didn’t give a damn about the irreparable damage it would cause her father’s spotless reputation. If she were not a Dupuy, he would have turned her in and let the police do whatever they wanted, but while she still bore his name he could not do so. The mirrors would break her once and for all and, if he was lucky, turn her into a vegetable like her mother.

Collapsed in a heap next to the dressing room, Emilia no longer struggled. Dupuy pushed her inside, threw a blanket at her and said, as he closed the door: ‘You’re not coming out of there until the other cape is found. And if there is no other cape, you’re never coming out. You’re dead to me. And you can forget about your mother.’

Though sounds from outside the room were muffled, Emilia thought she heard him leave. She would not let herself be beaten by her fears. She had already been locked up for a whole night and she had survived. Simón was with her, Simón was her rock. So as not to lose her head, she would keep her mind a blank. No thoughts, no images, like Buddhists. Only the zero that was God. She would die of exhaustion, of fever, of madness, of anything rather than let her father hear her scream or beg or grovel. Her throat felt dry. She would hold out. (The night light was not as bright as her childhood memories of it.) If there was anything of her in the mirrors, she did not see it. She could make out a few blurred images of some other being. In primary school, she had been told to read
Through the Looking-Glass
where reality was reversed. Alice did not disappear, but she was unreachable; no one could catch her. Ever since, she had had recurring dreams about that strange world. On the last page of
Through the Looking-Glass
it says that people in a dream can also be dreaming of us and that if those dreamers should wake we would flicker out like a candle. Emilia did not care whether she flickered out if the dream meant having Simón back. It even occurred to her that Simón might be drawing maps of the infinite in which words and symbols were reversed. She was exhausted, her throat burned with thirst. She lay on the floor of the dressing room, leaned her head against one of the mirrors and gradually fell asleep in the secret hope that the glass and quicksilver would melt into a silver cloud just as it did in
Through the Looking-Glass
and she could leap across the threshold to a place where everything would begin again.

When she woke, she saw that someone had left a bottle of water in the room while she was asleep, a full teapot, some toast and some cheese. Bringing food all this way and bending down to set them on the floor was not something Dupuy would do. If someone else knew she was locked in here, it was a sign that she would not be left to die. But they were obviously not going to let her out either. The mirrors formed a smooth wall with no cracks, concealing the lines of the door. She felt as though she were in a tomb, sealed up forever. Her eyes were now able to make out the empty space weakly lit by the lamp paradoxically called a night light. Emilia ate and drank only what she needed and put the water that remained to one side. She felt more confident. Seeing herself endlessly reflected in the mirrors had a hypnotic effect. She brushed her face against the smooth, indifferent surface. I can see my whole body, standing, she thought. My face sees the whole body, disappears into the mirror and finds paths there, but what about the rest of my body? Why is there no sense of sight in the mind that thinks, the nose that smells, the vagina that pulses? Was she one being or was she many? If many, how would Simón ever manage to find her? Perhaps he could see her from the other side where reality was inverted and was trying to reach her, unable to recognise her among all the reflected Emilias. She remembered a movie with a scene at a funfair, in a Magic Mirror Maze. A man was trying to kill another man; a woman was trying to kill one of the men or maybe both of them, she wasn’t sure now, but in the mirrors there were lots of men, whole cities of people, lights that multiplied. Emilia thought that with a little patience she could loosen a block of the parquet, take it out and use it to smash the mirrors. She ran her fingers along the floor, feeling for a crack, but it seemed solid. Near the edge, her fingers chanced upon something unexpected. Taking it in the palm of her hand she saw it was one of her mother’s hairpins which had survived being swept up or sucked up by a vacuum cleaner. That something of her had refused to leave was some sort of secret message, a sign that if something persists, endures, it is because it was created to last. She moved closer to the mirror and saw her mother take Simón’s hand, saw her walking with him towards the white nothingness, saw them both reflected in the ceiling mirrors calling to her. She wanted to go with them but she did not know how to get to the other side, how to pass through. Desperately, she pounded on the mirrors begging them not to leave. ‘I’m coming,’ she screamed, ‘I’m coming, tell me how to get to there.’ They went on walking towards the void, not hearing her, until the whiteness of the other side opened its ravenous lips and devoured them. Suddenly, Emilia saw herself transformed into a thousand hateful people, her whole being waging war on itself, this being that had never struggled to enter reality. ‘Wait for me, I’m coming, I’m coming.’

I know that, the day she left the room, Emilia left her father’s house and moved back to the apartment overlooking the Parque Lezama where she had lived those first short, happy months as a married woman. She went on working at the Automobile Club and visiting her mother two or three times a week. Lost in the mists of the old people’s home, every morning Ethel woke less of a person and went to bed less of a body. She was like Señor Ga
²⁴
, a character created by Macedonio Fernández who has had a lung removed, his kidney, his spleen, his colon, and then one day Señor Ga’s valet calls the doctor and asks him to come and see to a pain in his foot; the doctor examines him, and shaking his head gravely tells him there’s too much foot and draws a line for the surgeon to cut. Emilia’s mother was like the country was back then; what she feared she would be like it would be twenty years later. I know that it was there, in San Telmo, that Emilia got the letter from her paternal aunt saying she had run into Simón in a theatre in Rio de Janeiro, the letter that convinced her to begin her search, to climb the seven terraces of her purgatory of love.

The story was restless, it didn’t stop shifting, indifferent to the defeats, the deaths, to the ever more fleeting joys. Back then, I was living in Caracas learning from my reading of Parmenides that non-being is not a half-measure, that what
is not
necessarily
must not be
, I read little Heraclitus because Borges had already used him up, I was rereading Canetti, Nabokov and Kafka, I was working like a dog, writing books that other people signed, this was the life I had been given and since I had no choice I did not complain. Meanwhile, Argentina tried to reconquer the Malvinas, lost the war, the military dictatorship foundered in its own corruption, Raúl Alfonsín won the first democratic elections and Julio Cortázar returned to Buenos Aires to shake the hand of the new president, went back to Paris without managing to get an audience and died alone two months later; Borges, who was ill, left for Geneva and did not want to go back, he was buried in Plainpalais cemetery without ever being awarded the Nobel Prize; Manuel Puig died too, in a hospital in Cuernavaca, but that was much later; all the great Argentinian writers went abroad to die because there was no room in the country for more dead. The last census recorded a population of 27,949,480; housewives wept floods of tears over the misfortunes of Leonor Benedetto in the soap opera
Rosa de lejos
, and Alfonsín put the admiral, the Eel and their most conspicuous collaborators on trial; the Eel spent his trial reading – or pretending to read –
The Imitation of Christ
by the Augustine monk Thomas à Kempis; and three military coups threatened to bury democracy; and Alfonsín was forced to step down before his time because of rampant inflation and because children scavenging in garbage bins for food fell like pollen in the streets; and he was replaced by Carlos Menem who pardoned the
comandantes
, sold off the few assets Argentina still possessed, constantly, vainly, talked about the poor, and let those responsible for the bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina go unpunished; and Charly García jumped from the ninth-floor window of a Mendoza hotel into a half-full swimming pool, climbed out without a scratch and that night at his concert sang: ‘
The person that you love could disappear, those who are in the air could disappear
’; and I went back to Buenos Aires intending to stay there forever but I didn’t stay. Emilia’s cape never surfaced, I reread Parmenides and learned that being also hides in the folds of nothingness.

As I pull up at the corner of Paterson and George it starts to rain. As I expected, Toscana no longer exists.
The house on the corner is no longer a river nor does it weep
²⁵
, I thought, quoting a poem that came to mind, but the river is still there. I feel sure that when I look out the window I will see a river flowing where once I saw the Pampa of Buenos Aires with cattle grazing, rolling their great eyes upwards now and then to the inclement heavens. Once again I feel that in maps we can be whatever we choose, grassland, Amazonian jungle, ancient city, but also that, inside us, maps can be whatever they choose, aimless asteroids, creatures from the future or the plush bar that now sits where Toscana once was, a bar called Gl
o
¯ which, right now, at eight o’clock, is giving salsa lessons. I stand under the eaves waiting for Emilia for ten or twelve minutes and still the rain does not ease. Finally, I see her calmly emerging from the parking lot across the way. She is alone. I don’t want to pester her with questions about her disappearance, about why she has come alone. I am prepared for the unbelievable, since I know that Simón is dead and I realise now that I don’t know what happened between them, if indeed anything happened. I gesture to her to explain that it would be impossible for us to have a conversation in Glo
-
. By the door, there is a menacing sign informing us that the salsa class goes on until 9 p.m.

‘Let’s go to Starbucks, then,’ she says. ‘For the Aztecs, time is circular, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be circular for us too. Look around you, the place is full of Mexicans.’

It’s true: the river has disappeared and a great dark sun now lours above the street, the Fifth Sun of the Aztecs. It was in Starbucks we first talked, that first Saturday we met, before we went to Toscana; time is gradually running backwards, a slow canon like those of Bach, a
Musical Offering
that leaps backwards in time, in tone, the worm Ouroboros ceaselessly devouring its tail and growing younger; step by step reality returns to its place, plays its last chords here where it played the first, we wander through nothingness with the certainty that it is nothingness and always at the end of the void appears the face of God, the Something.

I tempt fate:

‘Hey, Emilia,’ I say, ‘how is Simón going to know we’re not at Toscana, at Gl
o
-
– how will he know we’re waiting for him here?’

‘He always knows where to find me. And if he loses me, I know where to find him. We lost each other once. It will never happen again.’

While we wait, I try to forget that I’m anxious. An unfamiliar feeling of vertigo overtakes me and I try to stave it off with tales like the one I am telling her now. ‘Years ago I had a dream,’ I tell her. ‘I was in a seedy dive bar. In the dream, it was noon. By the window, I saw several women about your age sitting at one end of a long table peering into corners in which other creatures came and went like flickering shadows. The shadows called to the women but could not make them hear. The women tried to embrace the shadows but could not touch them. The bar began to empty out, night ushered in the blaze of morning, the sun stripped to become night, and the women and the shadows went on trying to embrace, went on calling to each other in vain until they occupied my whole memory.’

I tauten the string. I say:

‘As I told you, I eventually wrote that dream but in an even more dreamlike way. In my story you are all the women in that bar and all the shadows are the loved one who returns: Simón. But I don’t see it like that any more. I need to make some changes to those pages. I’ve read the notes you left with Nancy. I went over the transcripts of the trial of the
comandantes
. I’m going to put the facts back into the reality they came from. Simón is not coming tonight. According to the transcripts, three witnesses saw him murdered—’