Purgatory (8 page)

They got to the airport just in time for the four o’clock flight. Simón was probably waiting for her in Buenos Aires, Emilia’s mother told her, where else could he be? ‘But then why doesn’t he answer the phone?’ asked Emilia, who had been calling the San Telmo apartment every fifteen minutes. ‘He probably took the bus back,’ her mother replied, ‘it’s a twenty-hour journey, he won’t get there until tomorrow morning.’ ‘But without leaving a message, without asking after me? That’s not like him,’ said Emilia. ‘Fear changes people,
hija
,’ her father observed. ‘If he’s afraid, then by now he’s running away from everything, even himself.’ It was only as they boarded the plane that Emilia realised her father had not bought a fourth ticket. She thought it best to say nothing and spent the next two hours staring at the clouds through the window.

Years later, when Simón still had not reappeared, she read an article in
Gente
that said Argentinian husbands often disappeared suddenly, without giving any explanation. They suffer from Wakefield’s syndrome, a psychoanalyst explained, an allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story in which an upstanding London gentleman leaves his wife one day for no reason, moving to a house one street away from where he watches her go about her day-to-day routine until he grows old. Emilia knew in her heart that Simón was not like that; he would come back to her as soon as he could.

At the time, thousands of people disappeared for no apparent reason. Ambassadors disappeared, the lovers of captains and admirals, the owners of businesses coveted by the
comandantes
. Workers disappeared from their factory gates; farmers from their fields, leaving tractors running; dead men from the graves in which they had been buried only the day before. Children disappeared from their mothers’ wombs and mothers from the children’s memories. The sick who arrived in hospital at midnight had disappeared by morning. Frantic mothers rushed out of supermarkets searching for children who had slipped through black holes between the shelves. Some turned up years later, but they were not the same. They had other names, other parents, a history that was no longer theirs. And it was not only people who disappeared; rivers, lakes, train stations, half-built cities vanished into the air as though they had never existed. The list of things that were no more and those that might have been was infinite.

In an interview with a Japanese journalist, the Eel was forced to address the question of this rash of disappearances. ‘Firstly we would have to verify that what you say existed was where you say it was. Reality can be very treacherous. Lots of people are desperate for attention and they disappear just so people won’t forget them.’ Emilia watched the interview on television, listened as he articulated every syllable, slowly nodding his bald head.

‘A
desaparecido
is a mystery, he has no substance, he is neither alive nor dead, he does not exist. He is a “disappeared”.’

And as he said
he does not exist
, he rolled his eyes to heaven.

‘Don’t use that word again,’ he went on, ‘you have no basis for it. It is forbidden to publish it. Let it disappear and be forgotten.’

Emilia left Simón standing in the doorway of Trudy Tuesday and – not letting him out of her sight – crossed the road to pick up her silver Altima from the parking lot at Hammond Atlas. She was not afraid that he would leave again – after all these years it made no sense. ‘I’ll go pick up the car.’ Emilia whispered to him. ‘We’ll go home.’ She did not even need to wait for an answer. On the far side of Route 22 she turned to make sure he was still standing where her senses had left him. He wasn’t there. She saw him walking north, a smudge of light, a haze raised by the afternoon sunshine.

‘Simón!’ she called, but he did not hear her. Perhaps he could not hear her over the constant stream of trucks from Newark. A taxi stopped on the corner and, without hesitating, Emilia jumped in and told the cab driver to follow her husband. Simón was crossing a bridge less than two hundred metres away and she quickly caught up with him. When she opened the taxi door he climbed in, smiling, as though nothing had happened. Still panicked, her heart in her mouth, Emilia stammered her Highland Park address and explained to the driver the quickest way to get there. The enthusiasm her husband had shown some minutes before as he chatted to the Scandinavians seemed to have completely drained away. Now he huddled in the back seat like a timid boy, stealing glances at Emilia. He was carrying the case she had given him thirty-one years before: a wide, soft brown leather bag, perfect for overnight trips: the same case that, according to the prison register, had been returned to him at the police station in Tucumán. Back then, Simón had three original maps on fine card in the case, the names already printed, and plastic Stabilene overlays on which to apply the geographical symbols. Emilia would have liked to ask him whether he kept the past, too, in the case, frozen, the prisoner of a time that would not go away. It had been years now since cartographers had used Stabilene overlays. Nowadays, maps were the creations of computer programs, metaphors that had no place in reality.

‘I’m not going to leave your side,’ she told him. ‘I don’t need to be back at work until Monday.’ It was Friday.

Simón stared out at the soulless monotony of suburbia, the Taco Bells and the Dunkin’ Donuts spilling fat, satisfied families onto the street, the Kinkos, the Pathmarks, the Toys R Us and the other endless, sprawling temples to consumerism. Emilia talked incessantly. ‘Ever since I moved to this country, I’ve been amazed by the food, the huge perfect-looking tomatoes, the lettuces that never wilt, the shelves of fruit that call to you like sirens as soon as you step into a grocery store. Now I understand why Disney’s Snow White was bewitched by her stepmother’s apple. A tasteless apple that brings eternal sleep. Don’t you feel that, Simón? None of the food here has any flavour to it. The stuff they sell here is a genetic fantasy, a breeding ground for every future disease.’ Every now and then, the cab driver would turn and ask, ‘Everything OK, lady? Did you say something?’ ‘No, everything’s fine.’

For a long time her husband sat, saying nothing, staring out at the bleak expressway. I have to be careful, Emilia thought. I’m desperate to make up for lost time, but maybe he’s not. I don’t want to crowd him, to pressure him. Sooner or later we’ll go back to being the people we used to be. And even if we don’t, it doesn’t matter. At least we’ll be together. A day, two days, the rest of our lives. Once that fact sank in, they would talk, tell each other all the things they had not been able to share. There was so much to tell! I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, she thought, I never gave him up for dead, not even when those three witnesses stood up in court and swore they had seen his body, tossed like garbage in some courtyard somewhere. I never stopped loving him, I was never unfaithful. All through the terrible years I knew he would come back, I searched for him, I waited, I knew . . . I’d almost say I won him back, but to talk about the man I love like that would be to diminish him; my Simón is not a trophy.

The sun is setting quickly; soon now the darkness will envelop them. Usually by the time Emilia leaves work at Hammond it is already dark; she has rarely had an opportunity to see the twilight, the crimson and yellow death throes of the autumn trees, the blurred shapes of the identical buildings along the expressway as they flash past. In a few moments, everything will disappear, the afternoon light, the falling leaves; everything but Simón, sitting here beside her.

Always as she leaves the offices at Hammond, even on the worst nights – when it rains and snows and when the ambulances wail incessantly – she is met by evangelical preachers chanting their litanies – O Lord, O Lord – as they wave collection boxes at passers-by. Their ominous chanting still plagues her as she lays her head on her pillow because the sounds of the day always return to her at night as though they had retreated and were waiting for this moment to spread through the smooth surfaces of her head: the sounds of this day and other distant days. She would like to rid herself of these futile memories, but she has had no choice but to carry them with her wherever she goes. Once she was unaware of them. Time has brought them back. As the years passed, the memories receded. Now, with Simón sitting next to her, she has nothing to fear.

‘What a perfect day,’ she says, not expecting him to reply.

And indeed he does not reply. Barely fifteen hours ago, she was sitting with Nancy Frears in her apartment on North 4th Avenue watching
The Ghost and Mrs Muir
on television – an old romantic comedy in which Gene Tierney, who is recently widowed, moves with her daughter into a haunted house by the sea and falls in love with the ghost. Nancy had left at about eleven o’clock and Emilia had read for a while, some poems by Gonzalo Rojas which moved her with their fierce eroticism:
Lowing, bellowing female my beautiful / love entering God, made animal / anointing the brain of her old man/ torrents running over him
. The words had inflamed her; she still has life enough in her to be aroused, to masturbate, to belong to herself as she has never wanted to belong to anyone else.

‘I never stopped loving you, Emilia, not for a single day,’ says Simón. The roar of the expressway drowns out his barely audible voice. ‘I never stopped loving you either,
amor
. Not for a single day.’ Her mind is racing, there is so much to think about before they get home. But perhaps it is better to stay calm, to wait, to see how they feel being together. They have said that they still love each other. It is not much, and yet it is everything. She is afraid that Simón will be disappointed when he sees her as she is, the crumpled scrap of paper adversity has made of her.

As they turn off Route 22 to the even more arid plain of the 287, lined on either side by hotels vast as cemeteries (who but a ghost would think to stay out here in the middle of nowhere?) some ten or twelve miles from her house, she realises that she smells, that she is dirty, that her hair is thick with sweat. She showered before leaving home that morning, shaved her armpits the night before, and yet she exudes smells that only a second shower can staunch. If all goes well, maybe she could ask her husband to take a bath with her? No. She glances at him, so placid, so quiet, and her embarrassment immediately disappears. She will ask him what he wants to do, hope that he will ask her to come to bed with him tonight. She will give herself to him, follow him wherever he wants to go just as he has followed her to this corner of New Jersey without her even asking. He seems familiar with his surroundings, he doesn’t even seem surprised when she points out the shadows of Johnson Park where she jogs on Saturdays and Sundays. Two blocks from her place, Simón finally speaks: ‘
All yet seems well; and if it end so meet / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet
.’ ‘Shakespeare, isn’t it? Your English is very good. How did you learn?’ ‘Television,’ he answers. ‘Six hours a day.’ And she says, ‘I worked on mine listening to audio books. Solitude leaves you time for everything.’

Emilia’s apartment is dark: a small balcony overlooking the street, a living room, bathroom, kitchen, bedroom. The dining table is strewn with maps. In the kitchen there are dirty dishes and smells that have been lingering, festering since morning. She has let things go, she didn’t call the landlord to get him to fix the damp patches where the wallpaper is peeling. She watches her husband climbing the stairs behind her, reaches out her hand. ‘Is it you, Simón? Is it really you?’ She grips his hand, slender, weightless, soft as she remembers it. As she climbs the last stair, she is overcome by desire, the torrential desire that has been building in her belly ever since she first began to miss him; she wants to feel his body, to hold him, she cannot bear this passion inside her any longer. As though reading her thoughts, Simón’s voice comes to her aid: ‘Not for a single day did I stop loving you,’ he says. ‘Me neither,’ Emilia replies, ‘not for a single day.’ And with her whole being she says the words again so even the threadbare walls can hear. ‘Not for a single day,
amor
.’

2

In dream I seemed to see a lady, singing

‘Purgatorio’, XXVIII, 40

Like Emilia, I’ve lived in Highland Park since 1991, on the deserted slope of the hill overlooking the Raritan River. In the mid eighteenth century, the Raritan was a bustling thoroughfare. These days, it’s a trickle of water, a nesting place for thousands of Canadian geese whose honking disrupts the peace of the little town. Although, in September 1999, the geese vanished for no apparent reason. The sky grew dark, all nature fell silent. Nobody was prepared for what happened next. That night, Hurricane Floyd swelled the waters of the Raritan, which rose so much in a few hours that the river burst its banks, flooding the whole of Johnson Park a hundred yards from where I live. The nests of the geese – heavy, rugged straw things – were swept away by the current. The basements of all the houses overlooking the park were flooded. Whole libraries and photographic studios were wiped out and the maps marking out the
eruv
so crucial to the Orthodox people in town were destroyed. The following morning, everyone turned out to see the damage. The sun was so glorious that morning that even those who had lost things in the storm treated it like a pleasant autumn stroll. After all, it was impossible to estimate the extent of the damage, most of which was irreparable. A week later, life in Highland Park was the same as it had ever been. The waters of the Raritan had retreated and once more skirted the periphery of the town. The geography department at the university drew up a new map for the mayor’s office that included two small islands which had appeared in the oxbow when the water subsided. Space calmly resisted the onslaught of time. Little had changed. The boundaries of Highland Park still comprised the sixty blocks it had before the storm, including the park, eighteen places of worship and some fifteen thousand souls.