Purgatory (6 page)

‘Cartographers,’ Emilia said. ‘Why don’t you check our credentials?’

‘All right, I’ll let you go through,’ the sergeant conceded. ‘But just remember, we’ve got our eyes on you. You still need to get past the checkpoint at Huacra. If they turn you back, I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes.’

The military checkpoint at Huacra seemed deserted. The stifling silence, the empty, almost surreal sentry boxes felt strangely jarring. The checkpoint marked the border between two provinces and was usually patrolled by at least twenty soldiers yet they could not see a living soul. The first red rays of dawn rose up on the left. A bitter cold leached through the canvas sides of the jeep. They drove on as far as the Río El Abra, or what they assumed was the river – a dry gorge with a crude concrete bridge they could just make out in the distance. Simón left the engine running and they waited for it to be light before beginning preliminary sketches for the map. ‘Have you checked the scale?’ Emilia asked. ‘See that embankment next to the bridge, we need to choose a symbol. Don’t fall asleep on me, Simón.’

Her husband lit a cigarette to keep himself awake but stubbed it out almost immediately. ‘There’s a terrible smell,’ he said. It was true. The stench was everywhere, spread across the landscape like a sheet. ‘Maybe it’s the vegetation,’ Emilia said. ‘Sometimes the trees are covered with fungus and bird droppings.’ ‘But it’s winter,’ her husband said. ‘The trees are bare, the whole place is a wasteland.’ ‘Then it must be putrefaction from the river,’ she said.

Rats, she remembered, abandoned their young under bridges when they went foraging for food. Who knew how many starving animals were under the bridge devouring each other? But the smell shifted and changed; sometimes it was like blood, at other times like breath flecked with spittle from a toothless mouth.

Smells are supposed to thrive in the heat, but the stench that morning seemed to draw its power from the chill air: it was a miasma which, instead of dissipating, seemed to become more dense, more tangible. Ice crystals formed on the windows of the jeep and Emilia’s joints began to ache. The air was slowly freezing and she wished that the smell, too, would freeze into flakes of mica. The wasteland was so monstrous, so absolute, that in the grey light of dawn things seemed to disappear, to vanish leaving only desolation: infinite placentas of abandonment, wounds that gaped beneath the jeep. ‘We’re going to get nowhere,’ said Emilia. ‘That’s because we’re already nowhere,’ said Simón.

When, finally, it was light enough to see, they could make out shadows moving towards the jeep, crawling along, scattering the loose gravel of the dirt road. Emilia had no time for horror movies or fantastical stories about supernatural creatures, but the creatures that morning reeked of sulphur and crackled like a cauldron of cicadas, a sound that came from the dawn of time, the sound of the wilderness spawning its poison.

‘Stay calm. There are people out there,’ Simón whispered, checking the doors to the jeep to make sure they were locked. As he did so, someone outside started jerking one of the door handles furiously.

The dawn came slowly. For a long time, it was merely a distant violet glow. Wind whipped sand against the jeep. A new, more piercing sound split the air. This moan, this whimper – whatever it was – grew louder; there were three, four voices coming from all directions, raucous and piercing. Suddenly they stopped, but only so the voices could come together in a shrill chorus like a needle that drilled into their eardrums.

‘There are people circling,’ Simón said again.

He took out the barbecue knife he always carried with him and climbed out of the jeep. The half-light of dawn was darker than the night had been and Emilia turned on the headlights. A woman dressed in rags and tatters was standing on the side of the road, rubbing her arms to keep warm. Next to her, two arthritic old women cradled a bundle wrapped in newspapers. Behind them, a woman with a mane of hair was trying to rouse a man sprawled on the ground with gutteral shrieks. A man stumbled along the dirt road towards the jeep wearing a threadbare raincoat that served little purpose since he was naked underneath. Behind him, another man pushing himself along on his hands and knees. Under the bridge were others, urinating, defecating. There were no fires, no shelter to keep them warm, nothing but the rage of that stench which was deeper than the night itself.

When the creatures saw Simón walking towards them, they howled piteous, meaningless words. The skin of the man in the raincoat was black with filth and grime. From a distance, he did not seem human. Emilia, recognising that they were as sick with dread as she was, got out of the jeep, throwing a blanket around her shoulders. As she approached the two old women, she heard a feeble wail and realised that wrapped in the bundle of newspapers was a baby. She offered them the blanket without a moment’s hesitation. As she walked the scant hundred metres from the jeep to where they stood, day had finally broken. The sun now rose at a dizzying speed as if to compensate for the delay. An icy wind whistled, whipping up the sand.

In the distance, the strange creatures went on howling the same words over and over, the tone, the volume shifting.
The guy with the frizzy hair jus’ shitted hi’self.
Or:
’ey, you, gi’s some money for a drink. Can’ you see ’m dyin’ of thirst?
And in unison.
We’re all Raya morada
⁷
here, that’s why they rounded us with nets like stray dogs. Raya morada, Raya morada
. Even more incomprehensible was the strange behaviour of the men, who threatened each other, bared their toothless gums or sobbed as though some terrible memory had crawled up their noses. Pressing a finger to one nostril they blew their noses then stopped to see whether the snot had landed on the gravel or their clothes. When they had calmed down, the woman with the shock of hair, who was easily the most articulate, explained to Simón and Emilia that they had been picked up in military raids shortly before midnight from the doorways and the church porches where they slept.

There were some eighteen or twenty of them and they had been living on charity. Some pretended to be mad, making people laugh playing guitars that were nothing more than broom handles or writing poems on pieces of newspaper. Others were genuinely mad. The man in the threadbare raincoat believed he had been transported back from the Last Judgement to a time when there was no God, since there was no need of God now. He believed he was surrounded by angels through whom he could communicate with the dead and he was never bored because he spent his time talking to them about family secrets and mysterious diseases.

They had been shipped out to Tucumán in trucks used by dog-catchers and dumped in the bleak wasteland here in Catamarca, under the El Abra Bridge, between piles of hospital waste – bloody bandages, cotton pads smeared with pus, vesicles, appendixes, pieces of stomach, ulcerated intestines, kidneys with tumours and the other insults visited by disease on the human body. Even on the bitterest nights, clouds of blowflies laid their eggs in the waste and flocks of carrion hawks fought viciously for scraps of human detritus. The feverish stench drove out all oxygen and clung to the bodies of these beggars with a tenacity that would last forever.

Simón offered to drive them in groups to the military checkpoint at Huacra. He was prepared to put off starting work on the map until the afternoon and spend the morning making as many trips as necessary, but they told him that two of the men had already made the trip during the night only to arrive, their feet bloody and raw, and be bundled into an army truck and brought straight back out into the desert. Simón suggested it might be better to go for help to a village called Bañado de Ovanta, twenty kilometres east. ‘I’ll go with you,’ said Emilia. ‘We need to bring back bread, coffee and blankets for these people before they die.’

The journey was very different. The blazing sun now obliterated everything; they could barely make out the blots of Ñandubay trees and cacti. Clearly, there were mistakes on their map because they wound up not in Bañado de Ovanta, but back at Huacra. Later, Emilia would often wonder whether they had got lost by accident or whether someone had switched the signposts. They had been driving for twenty minutes when in a ravine on the right-hand side of the road they saw the two dogs they had noticed as they left Huacra. Everyone knows that images, when they reappear inverted, herald disaster.

Disaster occurred almost immediately. They found themselves surrounded by a hundred uniformed soldiers who forced them out of the jeep at gunpoint. The buttons on the soldiers’ jackets strained from the pressure of paunches bloated by beer and noodles. The checkpoint, which had earlier been clearly deserted, was now teeming with soldiers going in and out of a corrugated-iron shack at the rear of a large courtyard.

The pot-bellied soldiers hustled them into a shack that served as a guardhouse. None of them wore badges indicating their rank, though from their ages they could only be corporals or sergeants. There might have been a captain; checkpoints usually had a captain in charge. Emilia tried to catch Simón’s eye but he would not look at her. He seemed lost, his eyes blankly staring, bewildered, unable to believe what was happening to them. Many years later, she thought that this was the moment when her husband began to disappear from the world.

A clerk with a toad-like double chin and breath that stank of beer asked them for their papers and laboriously copied down the details, sucking his pen after every letter. Emilia, accustomed to the inertia of bureaucracies, watched his sluggish routine calmly. Simón hugged his knees like an abandoned child.

The interview turned nasty as soon as they brought up El Abra. At the mere mention of the name, the clerk swallowed his words and trailed off into silence. Their attempted explanations about maps and scales only served to make things worse. What were you doing at El Abra? What were you doing waiting for dawn in open country? Who were you meeting? What were they bringing? When? Emilia and Simón had nothing to tell but the truth and explained again that they were working on a map for the Automobile Club. They had told the same account, used the same words at every checkpoint and had nothing more to add. But still the officer was not satisfied. He demanded they repeat it over and over. Why? What for? How many of you are there? He was determined to find out why anyone would travel two hundred kilometres from Buenos Aires to map nothing. ‘Since when did the Automobile Club start wasting money on such bullshit?’ ‘It’s the truth,’ Simón insisted. ‘Besides, it wasn’t our idea.’

‘What are you, Cardoso, a Communist? A
Montero
? A Bolshevik?’

‘I’m none of those things.’

‘You know what Communism is?’

‘I think so . . . It’s what they have in Russia, in Poland, in East Germany.’

‘Exactly. Godless countries where everything belongs to everyone. Even wives and children belong to the state. There’s no such thing as private property. Anyone can take anything belonging to someone else.’

‘Is it really that simple?’

‘I ask the questions here. Yes, it’s that simple. Where there’s no God, there’s no decency. You like the idea of some thug coming in off the street and fucking your wife up the arse just because he can?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘The Communist state gives everyone the right to do things like that. You could just as easily go to his house and return the favour, fuck his wife.’

‘I’ve never heard anything like that.’

‘Well, take my word for it. In Russia, even kids at school know this stuff, they’re used to it, they don’t know any better. Here, we teach people respect. God first of all. Then country, then family. It’s the Argentinian holy trinity.’

‘If you say so, I believe you.’

‘That’s better, Cardoso. Believe me. Where did you make contact with the subversives?’

‘I already told you, we didn’t see anyone. Only the homeless people.’

‘And you’re telling me they just suddenly appeared out of nowhere?’

‘We didn’t know there was anyone out there.’

‘That’s right, be a wise guy. Who are you trying to kid? Either you give me a straight answer right now or we’ll interrogate your wife while I fuck her right in front of you. Maybe I can make her come.’

‘I’ve told you everything. My wife and I don’t know any subversives.’

‘You can’t answer for her. Do you know any subversives, Dupuy?’

‘No, no one,’ said Emilia.

‘How would you recognise a subversive? This fucker you came with is a subversive, a dangerous subversive. We’ve got a file on him.’

‘He’s my husband. You can check, ask anyone. You’re making a terrible mistake.’

‘You’re the one who made the mistake when you married this Commie fucker. You had a meeting somewhere round here, didn’t you, Cardoso? The
moishe
you were supposed to be meeting gave you up. Just tell me where you stashed the maps and the weapons you brought. Tell me, and you can go. You can both go. Don’t waste my time.’

‘I’m not going to lie to you. We didn’t come here to meet anyone. We were sent to map the area. I explained all this to the officers at the last checkpoint. As soon as we finish, we’re leaving. Two hours, maybe three. Nobody told us we couldn’t.’

‘You think I’m some fuckwit? In the last week, we’ve caught five Trotskyites armed to the teeth. They were carrying a whole library of maps. They told us everything. Terrorists use maps to prepare their attacks, to get in and get the fuck out quickly, am I wrong?’