Purgatory

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  ‘How long was it before you realised Simón wasn’t in Caracas? In your shoes, I would have given up within a year.’

  ‘Five years, two months and twenty-one days. From December 15, 1983, until March 8, 1989. And if I left Venezuela, it wasn’t because I chose to. It was chance.’

  The waiter at Toscana reappeared and asked if we wanted anything else. We were the only people left in the restaurant. Outside on the street, usually busy in the afternoons, there was only the hum of traffic. It was after two o’clock but Emilia seemed unaware of the time and indeed the world. In the grey flashes of light from the street I saw her as, two centuries earlier, the villagers of New Brunswick must have seen Mary Ellis: standing alone on the banks of the Raritan waiting for a man who would never come.

  ‘We should go,’ I said.

  ‘Please, can we just stay a few more minutes? Don’t leave me in the middle of the chance event that forced me to leave Caracas. The story isn’t very long. It begins with an anonymous letter. I’ve no idea how the postal system in Venezuela works these days, but back then mail was sporadic – all the more so after the Caracazo9 uprising. On the Saturday after the riots, the mood of the city was solemn. No one dared to go out for fear of another wave of violence. The post offices were all closed and yet, bizarrely, that Saturday, I received a registered letter from Buenos Aires with no return address. I opened the envelope warily. Inside, there was a cutting from a Mexican newspaper, Uno más Uno, an article by someone called Simón Cardoso. It could have been by anyone of that name, but the article – which was about the hunt for and the arrest of the head of the Mexican Petroleum Workers’ Union, a man known as “la Quina” – was illustrated with a map of Ciudad Madero on the Gulf Coast, and in the map I recognised the mistakes my husband always made with place names. I never did find out who sent me the cutting, or how they found out my address – Chela was the only person who knew it. By the time I got the letter, the article was two or three weeks old. I couldn’t wait. By then, I was deputy head of the cartography department, I was taking home twelve hundred dollars a month and managing to save five hundred. What with the chaos that followed the riots, flights took off as and when they could. I spent days sleeping on the floor at the airport. At 6 a.m. on March 8, a voice on the tannoy announced a flight departing for Mexico City, via Panama. I wept, I screamed, I invented illnesses, deaths in the family, anything so they would give me a seat. That’s how I arrived in Mexico City, as penniless as when I left Rio. With my savings suddenly worthless, I holed up in a hawkers’ guest house near Zócalo and started looking for my love all over again, though I didn’t hold out much hope. I spent more than two years chasing mirages – newspapers that had been shut down, scandal sheets that had never started up, prying into illegal agencies that created maps of Utopia for the dreamers who wanted to cross the border into the United States. I risked my life in brightly lit rooms where, with state-of-the-art computers, the finest cartographers in the world helped drug traffickers find little-travelled routes between their laboratories and their secret airstrips. I helped them out as much to boost my earnings as to gain the protection of the drug bosses who, through their contacts at immigration, could find out who entered and left Mexico.’

  ‘You could have stayed there.’

  ‘I could. But then, one morning, I woke up convinced that I would never find Simón. He was alive but he couldn’t see me. I had to stop looking for him so that he could look for me. It was a revelation. He had to come back the way he had left. I felt that that was how things were, how they had always been, and they could never be otherwise. I’d spent years and years chasing a chimera. I’d allowed myself to be led by signs dangled before me by other people rather than being led by what I felt inside. It was too late to get back the time I’d lost. But at least I could help make sure Simón could see me, draw him to me, position myself within the same orbit. Maps,’ she said. ‘If I can put myself on the same map as him, sooner or later we’re bound to meet. When I say it out loud, it sounds silly, but to me it seems self-evident. If time is the fourth dimension, who knows how many things exist that we cannot see in space–time, how many invisible realities. Maps are almost infinite, and at the same time they’re unfinished. The maps of Highland Park, for example, don’t include the eruv, they don’t include those residents who will be born tomorrow. In order to be able to see Simón, I needed to drop off – or rise above – a map, if possible every map. I was still based in Mexico City at the time. I got up, I went to Sanborns restaurant in the Casa de los Azulejos, and I started sending letters to every mapping company in the US and Canada. I wanted to get as far away as I could. If I’d been offered a job in Hawaii or Alaska, I would have taken it. Two weeks later, I got a reply from Hammond. They had a vacancy for an assistant in Maplewood, New Jersey.’

  ‘It’s getting late,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I was exhausted by the conversation and I still had no idea what she was trying to tell me.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she agreed. ‘I’m sorry for keeping you.’

  I drove her back in silence. The streets of Highland Park were hung with banners advertising hot-air balloon flights, fireworks and free ice cream in Donaldson Park. The town was about to celebrate its 102nd birthday.

  As we pulled into North 4th Avenue, we saw Large Lenny weaving from one sidewalk to the other carrying thick red candles that were burning his hands as they melted. He seemed insensible to the pain, staring at some fixed point in the middle distance. But however disconnected he was from the world, something had made him cry. Tears spilled silently from his eyes and followed a roundabout course to drip from his jaw. A gang of kids was following him, firing pebbles at him with elastic bands. Emilia couldn’t bear it.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ she shouted. ‘Can’t you see he’s crying?’

  ‘I’m not crying,’ the giant corrected her. ‘I forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

  ‘Are you OK, Lenny?’ Emilia comforted him. ‘You want me to take you home?’

  The question was ridiculous, no one knew where Large Lenny lived. Everyone assumed one of the local synagogues gave him shelter, but it was impossible to know which since he visited all of them.

  ‘I thirst,’ he answered.

  We had arrived at the door to Emilia’s house and she went upstairs to her apartment to get him a bottle of cold water. A couple of neighbours were peering out of their windows. In the distance, I heard the announcer’s voice from the sports field. Some high-school students were playing a match.

  ‘Blow out those candles, Lenny,’ I said. ‘You’re burning your hands.’

  ‘They have to be lit. For the res’rection.’

  When Emilia brought the water, the giant set the candles down on the porch and drank straight from the bottle, the water coursing noisily down his cavernous throat.

  ‘Large Lenny thinks someone’s come back to life,’ the downstairs neighbour informed Emilia. The guy gave a little laugh, and from some nearby balconies came a chorus of jeers.

  ‘Who’s the dead guy? Him?’

  ‘I am no longer of this world,’ said the giant. ‘Someone who was lost is coming back to the world and if these candles don’t show him the light he won’t find his way.’

  ‘Where is this person?’ Emilia asked, going along with his train of thought. ‘So we can help them . . .’

  ‘You don’t need to, that’s what I’m saying. You should know that better than me.’

  Large Lenny handed back the empty bottle and headed off towards Main Street still shouting verses from the Gospel according to Luke, but I was no longer listening. I went home.

  When they got back from their honeymoon, Simón and Emilia thought they were Parmenides’ ‘One Being, eternal’, a being that would never move from itself into the past or towards anything else; things are never as we expect them to be, things are not even as they appear.

  The taxi driver who picked them up at the airport told them that Ringo Bonavena had been murdered outside
a brothel in Reno, Nevada, the week before. The flat-footed boxer with the rippling muscles and a voice like a little girl’s had been killed by a single shot to the chest. Ringo would never again sing ‘Pajarito pío pío’. ‘He was killed by a gangster,’ the driver told them. ‘Imagine it: the eighteen-stone brick shithouse who KO’d Ron Hicks in the first minute, the guy who held out fifteen rounds against Cassius Clay, died because of some dumb argument with a bodyguard in some two-bit whorehouse, excuse my language, señora. They flew his body back last Friday. You wouldn’t believe the number of people lined up to see him. Yesterday there was thousands of guys standing in the rain.’

  At 9.30 a.m. the air seemed dirty, thick with fog and smelling of disinfectant. The car inched down the avenida del Libertador towards the San Telmo apartment which was as unfamiliar, as impersonal to Emilia and Simón as a hotel room. They had been so taken with the apartment when they had viewed it, with the balconies overlooking the Parque Lezama, that Dr Dupuy had bought it for them as a wedding present, and insisted they should not move in until it had been completely redecorated and furnished. Emilia’s mother picked the paint colours for the walls, the dining set, the bedroom curtains, the carpets, the crockery and the cutlery. Simón had insisted that they at least be allowed to bring the drawing tables, the encyclopedias and the cartography manuals they had had when they were still single, so some part of their identity would be preserved.

  The redecoration had taken longer than expected, forcing them to spend a month in Punta del Este after their long cruise back from Recife. They arrived exhausted but excited. It was Sunday and there was something melancholy about the light in Buenos Aires. Ringo Bonavena’s body had been flown home so that he might be added to the list of national saints, a pantheon which already included Gardel, Perón and Evita. The streets around the Plaza Roma were crowded with parked cars from the funeral cortège, all decked out in black crape and floral wreaths. As they passed Luna Park, they were overtaken at top speed by a Mercedes-Benz with tinted windows which jumped the traffic lights. Emilia recognised it as her father’s car and told the driver to park wherever he could find a space in the fleet of funeral cars. She wanted to surprise her father; what she could not know was that it was she who would be surprised, because Dr Dupuy stepped into Luna Park Stadium with his arm around the waist of a woman who – from behind at least – looked young and glitzy. Simón reluctantly got out of the car; he did not want their return in Buenos Aires ruined by an ugly scene between father and daughter, but, as she told the story thirty years later, Emilia had known exactly what she was doing. Nothing, she believed, not even shame, could perturb her father.

  When the stadium doors were opened, all eyes turned to the catafalque which now occupied the area at the foot of the empty bleachers where the boxing ring had been. The coffin was lit by four church candles, the kind that stream wax, and by the red and green glow of garish spotlights. Bonavena’s mater dolorosa gently stroked the face of the son who looked so much like her, as though touching her own death. In a timeless mirror, events continued to repeat themselves. A television presenter knelt before the mother, took her hands and kissed them. Hadn’t they seen this scene before on Telenoche or Videoshow? Everything was the same and yet everything was different, as though events had been rewound to be played out again. So the crowds of onlookers lining the streets to watch Bonavena’s cortège pass waited with the same impatience they had twenty-five years earlier when they had waited for Evita’s coffin, but this time there could be no miracle: though the events were the same, in shifting from one era to another they were recreated in a new form.

  Dr Dupuy stood before the coffin for a moment and, turning, found himself face to face with his daughter. Emilia didn’t recognise the woman on his arm, but Simón recognised her immediately. He had read an article in a doctor’s waiting room describing her as a woman who collected powerful lovers, a writer of romantic novels that sold in their thousands though no one knew anyone who actually bought them.

  ‘This is Nora Balmaceda,’ Dr Dupuy introduced her. This, they knew, was the end of their honeymoon.

  They didn’t have time to say anything because just at that moment the undertakers set about sealing the zinc coffin with blowtorches and Ringo’s mother fainted. ‘That’s the sixth time,’ Emilia informed Señora Balmaceda; she had heard about the previous five fainting spells on the morning news. ‘But I didn’t tell her that until afterwards,’ Emilia recalled in Highland Park, ‘because the minute she saw that grieving lump of lard collapse, Nora Balmaceda rushed over to help her.’ She managed to put her arms around her just as the paparazzi – at Dr Dupuy’s signal – froze the scene with their cameras. The picture made the front page of the late editions, printed as big as the photo of the cortège at the intersection of the avenida de Mayo and the Nueve de Julio. Even the caption – ‘A mother and a writer united in grief’ – had been dictated by Dupuy.

  Back then, anything was possible. Propaganda manufactured illusions of happiness in the wasteland of misery. Every week, magazines published eyewitness accounts of astonished gauchos who had seen fleets of flying saucers in the night sky. Schoolchildren were taught the topography of Mars, Ananke, Titan, Enceladus and Ganymede with as much dedication as they had been forced to learn by heart the names of the rivers of Europe and Siberia during the Second World War. The emissaries from alien planets, they were told, came in peace, took a number of human specimens to study their emotions and after some years – twenty, a hundred, no one knew how many – returned them to earth or kept them permanently in specialised zoos. A government minister had personally seen two large saucers collecting human specimens in the barren wilderness of the Valle de la Luna10. The alien crew, he said, were small creatures with large heads ringed with a halo of light that seemed to protect them from our oxygenated atmosphere. With benign expressions, they were herding some twenty people they had undoubtedly collected in the cities into their spaceships. They invited the minister to join the expedition but he explained that his governmental responsibilities made it impossible. This account, from such a solemn governmental source, dispelled the doubts of even the most sceptical. News items about flying saucers were everywhere. Voluntad, a monthly magazine, interviewed six pilots who had encountered alien fleets while at the controls. One pilot, who flew the route between Río Gallegos and Ushuaia – virtually the end of the world – had even managed to photograph two spherical objects with their spindly landing gear.

  Over Christmas, Nora Balmaceda became one of the chosen. Even the hardest of hearts in the country were moved by her tale – a tale that proved infinitely more successful than her romantic novels. She had persuaded her husband, a pallid heir to ten thousand hectares in the Humid Pampa, to spend Christmas of 1976 in San Antonio de los Cobres, some four thousand metres above sea level, and then drive down to Salta to see in the new year. On 26 December, they set off in their jeep towards Las Cuevas, forty kilometres south-east, taking the steep, rocky course of Ruta 51 at a moderate speed. It took more than two hours to cover the first two-thirds of the journey. Arriving in the tiny village of Encrucijada they stopped to urinate. A milky glow of stars was stealing across the nine o’clock dusk. Not a thing was moving, not even an insect, and the silence – as Nora told the newspapers – was thick as syrup. Her husband went around the hood of the jeep while she went to pee in the shelter of the escarpment. They were heading back to their vehicle when, from nowhere, they were blinded by a dazzling light that spilled its sulphurous breath over them. Nora managed, with some difficulty, to climb back into the jeep. Through the windshield she saw tiny hairless humanoid creatures floating in a firestorm of yellow flame. Suddenly, the light was snuffed out and she was left in an inexplicable state of torpor. Perhaps she fell asleep, though only for a minute or two. When she came to, she found herself several hours’ drive away in Rosario de Lerma at the wheel of the jeep. Her husband had disappeared. The only possible explanation was that this light, by some preternatural magnetic f
orce, had drawn him up into the heavens. Every TV channel showed the same footage: Nora, tearful, inconsolable, transfigured as she described her visions of another world. ‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t give to take my husband’s place,’ she said. ‘He has found his Shangri-La, has entered the seventh circle of paradise, he has discovered the supreme wisdom of God.’

  Nora was photographed in widow’s weeds for Gente. The title of the article – in which Dr Dupuy’s hand was evident – was borrowed from Quevedo: ‘Love Constant Beyond Death’. Through her lawyers, Nora declared her intention to seek control and use of her husband’s lands until he should return from space. After speedy proceedings, the courts ruled in her favour declaring the case ‘Another close encounter of the third kind’.

  Spielberg’s film of the same title was causing a furore in cinemas at the time. Spielberg’s aliens communicated by means of musical notes and – unlike those at Encrucijada or the Valle de la Luna – did not abduct objects or people. But whatever the form and the language of the alien visitors, in Argentina their existence was accepted as an article of faith. On the cover of the Dimensión Desconocida, the actor Fabio Zerpa formulated a question which the priest echoed in his Sunday sermon: ‘Are we so vain as to believe we are the only children of God in the universe?’