Purgatory

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  The affair between Emilia’s father and Balmaceda had been going on for about a year at the time Bonavena was murdered. The World Cup was coming up and women – with the exception of models and strippers – completely disappeared from the news. La Balmaceda was inconsolable at being suddenly eclipsed by virtue of being a widow and because of her lack of interest in the military junta. Her last novel had been published in 1974 and she was not writing another. Early in June, shortly before the start of the World Cup, she made another bid for fame, publishing an article in the Somos offering to ‘motivate’ – this was the word she used – the Argentinian players in the changing rooms and the gyms where they trained. The article, entitled ‘Country Comes First’ made her a laughing stock. Emilia’s father felt so humiliated by his lover’s blunder that he stopped taking her calls. Balmaceda wasted little time in replacing him with a tennis champion, posing with him next to his tennis trophies for the press, and later with a ship’s captain who eventually ended up with the land that had belonged to the husband now lost in space.

  She firmly resisted the mortifications of age. In photographs in Gente, day by day, month by month, it was possible to watch as her laughter lines, the bags under her eyes, the folds of her double chin, gradually disappeared; watch as her eyes became bigger, her lips fuller, as her tits and her ass defied the effects of gravity. Once the cycle was complete and she had recovered her lost youth, Nora stumbled on another profitable idea, one which once again sold thousands of books. In flights of mystical rapture she described a wrestling tournament between the angels: the seraphim who had six wings, and the cherubim who had only four. She wrote pages and pages of incomprehensible drivel (which people nonetheless reverently quoted by heart) which, she said, were dictated to her by beneficent angels lately returned from visiting God. Her greatest success came when she announced that she had witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary on the plains of Esteco, 1300 kilometres north-east of Buenos Aires. A prosperous city had been established there in the late sixteenth century, but by the time Nora Balmaceda drove past with a military escort in search of angels it was a barren wilderness. She had read somewhere that Esteco had been razed by the earthquake of 1692, and the winds of God’s wrath had wiped out its heathen inhabitants. On the banks of the Río Pasaje, where a six-foot menhir marks the spot of the former settlement, Nora had met a goatherd, a little girl who was visited by the Mother of God at dawn every Wednesday. The little girl told Nora that the Virgin appeared as a form without a face, a gentle voice, enfolded in a mantle of light. These visions, wrote Nora, could only be of the Blessed Virgin. ‘Our Lady has come back to this world to put an end to the brutality of atheist extremism and to redeem those who are prepared to repent.’ In her conversations with the little shepherdess, the Virgin had asked that a maximum security basilica (a basilica, not a chapel, Nora insited) be built nearby where she would personally cleanse misguided souls and guide them to heaven. The magazine in which her article was published saw its circulation triple and before the place could be overrun with penitent pilgrims, the junta dispatched sick prisoners from jails and ordered them to dig the foundations of this new temple. Two months after first meeting the little goatherd, Nora wrote that the girl had watched, overjoyed, as the prisoners ascended into heaven on a carpet of light. On a local radio station the prophet was heard to say, ‘Angels took them up to heaven.’

  Nora Balmaceda basked for a little longer in her rapturous success, dealt with the avalanche of foreign publishers begging to translate her books. In the midst of this frenzied whirl of success, she committed suicide by taking cyanide. She left no letter, no explanation and no will. Before she lay down to die, she put on a white organza blouse and made herself up as though going to a ball. On the nightstand there were two other sodium cyanide tablets. Her faded beauty was intact. No one claimed her body. There had been no sightings of her husband since his abduction by aliens and no relatives appeared. Dr Dupuy gave one of his assistants the task of having her buried with modesty and discretion. Later, he called a bishop friend of his and asked that the Church take possession of all her worldly goods.

  Stories that would chill the blood continued to circulate about the disappearances that took place during those years. In old bookshops in Buenos Aires, it is still possible to find copies of magazines telling the strange stories – written in the curious mixture of hypocrisy and collusion common to the period – of people who sailed out on the Río de la Plata only to vanish, leaving their abandoned boats adrift. Many, like Nora Balmaceda’s lost husband, were landowners. Before they set out on their last journey, these people bequeathed their lands and factories to the military leaders who had been their friends and protectors. The courts were inundated by lawsuits from siblings and spouses left penniless, but none was successful since the bodies of those missing never appeared. Where there is nothing to see, no one existed, government spokesmen explained. Such doublespeak has since slipped into ordinary speech having been a staple of journalism. Where there is nothing to see, no one existed – these expressions were repeated over and over on the radio and on television. You can sometimes hear them still.

  Other, less durable symbols of those times have vanished. The alien spaceships that once lit up the four corners of the heavens never returned. Of the Basilica to Our Lady of Esteco, not even the ruins have survived. All around lie the skeletons of disused trains. There are no villages, no warehouses on the old gravel road which connected the plains of Esteco with distant Buenos Aires. The trucks don’t run any more, the villages have died out and the houses where no one lives are left to ghosts and rats. The one-horse town which, back in the 1970s, was the major market town in the area, was flooded when a dam was built. A number of elderly people refused to leave and took refuge in the church tower where they waited patiently for the waters to rise. A woman managed to climb onto the cross atop the steeple and huddle there. The fishermen who ply the reservoir can still see the rusted cross rising above the glassy waters; there is nothing else.

  While I was writing this page, I read an article about a Patagonian lake that disappeared overnight. The lake was situated near the Témpano glacier at 50º south, it was three kilometres wide and five metres deep. Forest rangers last saw it two weeks ago. When they came back, they found only a dry bed with an enormous crack running up to twenty-five metres deep. Some believe the lake evaporated. It’s the first lake ever to disappear into thin air, they said, forgetting that between 1977 and 1978 whole groups of lakes disappeared. This was how the lago de Sabón, the lago Pulgarcito and the lago Sin Regreso were lost, together, with other smaller lakes. At the time, military patrols witnessed them rise like hot-air balloons, shifted by the movement of geological plates, and spill into volcanoes in the Andes. They were erased from the maps and these lost zones were covered with the wavy blue lines that denote impenetrable snows. Foreign map-makers asked if they might have more information about these blank spaces and the Argentinian authorities invariably responded with Bishop Berkeley’s observation: ‘If it be not perceived, it exists not.’

  Their first meeting after thirty years goes just as Emilia imagined so many times. Simón says the very words Emilia dreamed he would say; he moves as though his body has limits that he cannot go beyond. Aside from that, everything is calm, unsurprising. ‘Is it you, Simón?’ she asked him. ‘Is it really you?’ and as she climbed the stairs she reached back and took his hand. The hand seems frail, lighter than she remembers it, smoother too. She hears him say: ‘I never stopped loving you, Emilia, not for a single day.’ She replies, ‘Me neither, amor. Not for a single day.’ At that moment she decides she will ask him to stay. She desperately wants him to linger in the eternity of love she has prepared for him, wants him to undress her now, to satisfy this desire she has concealed from everyone so that he might be the first to know it. When he penetrates her, she wants the world to stop turning, the daylight to pale like the waning moon now rising, for the suffering to cease to suffer, the dead to put an
end to death. This is what she wants, but will he want it too? She tells herself again that she should not want him so, with this selfish desire of those who have nothing, who can give nothing. She has searched for him until she was left without breath, without being, but who knows whether he searched for her with the same fervour, who knows what her husband expected to find? Thirty years have passed and they have many stories to tell each other. She wants to begin with the thing that worries her most.

  ‘Sit down, Simón. Could you do me a favour and sit down for a minute, my love? I’m not the person I was when you left and it’s important that you understand.’

  ‘I didn’t leave you,’ he says, ‘I’m here.’

  He speaks as though age, which has spared his body, has taken refuge in his vocal cords, his voice is stripped of the authority it had when he was chatting with his European friends in Trudy Tuesday. It doesn’t surprise her. Time is like water: when it ebbs in one place it flows somewhere else. This is precisely what she wants to talk to him about. Until a moment ago, all she wanted was to say nothing, to hold him. To lie down beside him and hold him. But the lost years fill her with doubts. She is afraid that if she tells him they are not the people they once where, she might sever the slender thread by which they are now connected. She doesn’t want to hurt him, doesn’t want to hurt herself, and this is precisely why she cannot control what she says.

  ‘You’re here because you pitied me because I searched for you so long. I combed every city where you were seen. I spent months in Rio de Janeiro, years in Caracas and in Mexico. I came here to this suburb because I couldn’t keep searching any more.’

  ‘I wasn’t in any of those cities. You looked for me in places where I never was.’

  ‘Then tell me where you were, tell me where I should have looked. What I want to say to you is that, all the while I was searching, I was growing old. I don’t know how to make you see what I can’t see myself. I’m the same person I was when we fell in love, I feel the same passion, I’m still the same romantic, I still love flowers though no one gives me flowers any more, I love the same music I loved then, and when I go to the cinema, it feels as though you’re sitting next to me, holding me, feeling what I feel.’

  ‘But we’re not the same people.’

  ‘That’s what I was coming to. I’m the same person I was, but my body is not the same. Life has made me younger, but my body has gone the way of every woman’s body.’

  She asks him if he would like tea. She puts water on to boil and takes down two cups and a tray. ‘Lemon? Sugar?’ This is how she likes her tea. As does he, she knows that already. The sky is heavy with clouds swollen with rain. Night is about to fall, as all things which belong to the natural order falls. Emilia will not see it fall because some days ago, tired of having the students next door peering in at her, she covered the windows with adhesive paper. She finds it unbearable to have to expose her failing, fading body to the eyes of heartless strangers.

  ‘If we’d lived together, you’d be used to the way I look and I wouldn’t feel the embarrassment I feel right now. You look the same as you always did. Me . . . well, you can see for yourself. I would have liked to be the woman I used to be, amor, but I grew old. You’ll be disappointed. It’s been seven years since I had my last period. When I get up in the morning I have bad breath. I stink in places where once I didn’t smell at all: my armpits, though I shave them and wash them carefully. Sometimes I smell of pee. The lips of my vagina have withered and even when I masturbate they’re dry. Are you surprised I still masturbate at my age?’

  ‘Nothing surprises me. You’re wet now.’

  ‘Aren’t you? It’s desire. Can you tell? It’s something I thought I’d never feel again. Every time I missed you, I felt a physical ache. I felt it many times down the long years. Loneliness fell on me like a penance. I felt it coming and I consoled myself with the illusion of sex, with the illusion that I still could.’

  The telephone rings: three, four times. Whoever is calling is impatient. The phone cuts off then rings again.

  ‘Don’t answer it,’ says Simón. ‘Don’t go.’

  On the caller ID screen Emilia reads the number of the Hammond offices. It is 7.30 p.m. If they are calling her, it has to be an emergency that only she can deal with. She lifts the receiver. It’s Sucker, the security guard, a gaunt old man who shuffles when he walks.

  ‘Are you sure it’s mine?’ Emilia groans. ‘It can’t be mine.’

  The voice on the other end of the line is shrill and irritated. In the fifteen years since she was hired to work at the Maplewood office, the security guard’s routine has never been broken. Inertia keeps him at his post.

  ‘It’s your car, Ms Dupuy.’

  Dipthongs confound him. He pronounces it Dew-pew-y like a kid in nursery school.

  ‘That’s strange. When I left the office, I drove home in my car. Hang on a minute. I’ll just go and check that it’s parked where it usually is. I’ll call you right back.’

  ‘It’s your car, Ms Dupuy. A 1999 silver Altima. I checked the licence plate. If I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t have bothered you.’

  ‘Maybe it was stolen. I’ve got no idea. But if it is my car, I can’t come and pick it up. It’s Friday night. I’ve got people coming round. Can’t it wait?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, but it can’t. You need to pick it up tonight or first thing tomorrow morning. There are trucks coming to pick up the school atlases from the warehouse at seven o’clock on the dot and your Altima is blocking the doors.’

  That morning, when she arrived just before 9 a.m., all the parking spots at Hammond had been full. There was nowhere on the street to park, and she had had to park the car in front of the warehouse. When she clocked in she left a message with the security guard to let her know if she needed to move it. She had been nervous; Simón was waiting for her on the other side of Route 22. She hasn’t forgotten the ride back to Highland Park. Nor what happened since. She is not dreaming, she can’t be, Simón is still sitting in front of her, raising the cup of tea to his lips. This is her reality, the only reality. She has not strayed into a map drawn by lunatics. Nothing now can stop her from being happy.

  There is smoked salmon in the freezer, and it’s time to make dinner for her husband. There are some endives and the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc she bought two weeks ago at Pino’s. She can put it in the freezer while she sets the table.

  ‘I’ll put some music on,’ she says. ‘Mozart? Jarrett? I haven’t listened to Jarrett for ages.’

  ‘Whatever you like. I’m going to touch you.’

  ‘Touch me,’ Emilia encourages him. And he comes towards her.

  Her husband unbuttons her blouse; his fingertips gently brush her nipples. Her breasts sag and her once erect nipples are flaccid and wrinkled. They blossom again under Simón’s touch. Slowly, he slips his hand under her skirt, strokes her thighs, slips down her panties. Without knowing how she got there, Emilia finds herself naked, lying on the bed with him – he too is naked, hovering above her tremulous body. Everything happens exactly as she would have wanted. The lips of her vagina part, suddenly engorged and proud. Simón is erect. And it looks as though he has grown in the years he was away; he looks thinner too. He mounts her with a skill Emilia has only ever seen in her father’s pure-bred stallions as they desperately straddle the mare’s back. She feels him deep within her, feels the constant pressure on her clitoris from his careful, measured rhythm. She is so happy to have him inside her, she wants him to go even deeper, but she shudders, lets out a triumphant howl and lies there breathless and quivering. ‘Don’t stop,’ he begs her, ‘let’s keep going.’ ‘If it were up to me, we’d go on forever,’ she says. She feels moved. She had expected their lovemaking to be the way it used to be, but it is better now, it is the wild, tender lovemaking of two teenagers. In the first months of their marriage, they struggled desperately to come at the same time as though each time were the last, but when their embrace was over they felt they needed to star
t again, to make it better. They both constantly felt it was possible to go a little further only to stop, awkwardly, at some barrier which the other would not allow them to cross. Now she knows that she was the one afraid of falling over the edge: he would have done anything. How much can a body take? Emilia wonders. How much can my body take?

  She realised that love could be different the afternoon they arrived in Tucumán, before the absurd incident in Huacra. They feverishly undressed the moment they got to their hotel room, the sort of shabby, ill-kept room their bosses invariably reserved for them. The bed was uncomfortable, with a hollow in the middle of the mattress where the springs had worn out, but they threw themselves onto it, one on top of the other, heedless of everything, licking each other, devouring each other, urged on by the animal scent of their sex. It had happened only once and yet the memory has stayed with her, vivid and intense, everywhere, tormenting her. Now she does not need it any more. She half sits up on the bed and extinguishes the memory like a bedside lamp.

  Simón gets up, goes over to the stereo. In the tower of CDs he finds Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, a record which they used to listen to in the apartment in San Telmo.

  ‘Are we going to listen to that?’ she says. ‘They play Part Two all the time in the office. They’ve played it to death, it’s become like background music. Right there – next to your hand – is the Carnegie Hall Concert. It came out last year – I think you’ll like it.’

  ‘I know it. It’s magnificent, but it’s not the same thing. The Jarrett of The Köln Concert is still who we used to be.’

  He comes back to the bed. The gentle rain of notes drips onto their bodies. Emilia lets the night slip past and all that passes is the night. From time to time, she gazes, incredulous, at her sleeping husband: the mole beneath his left eye is the colour of ripe figs, there are tiny, almost imperceptible lines at the corners of his mouth, and it amazes her to think this body belongs to her, anyone would think it obscene that a sixty-year-old woman should be hopelessly in love with this boy of thirty-three. It is an unexpected gift from fate and, now she thinks about it, perhaps it is fate’s reward for all her years of waiting. She would rather have this wild, insatiable love than the life she would have had if everything had gone according to plan: a marriage held together by convention, moved by the rhythm of family celebrations, of talk shows, of late-night films. Her phantom widowhood immersed her in the stupor of so many TV soap operas that she cannot remember what she was in the middle of watching when Simón disappeared. Rosa de lejos? No, that came later. Maybe it was Pablo en nuestra piel, where she cried inconsolably at the scene where Mariquita Valenzuela and Arturo Puig say goodbye at the airport and, with tears in his eyes, he recites: I want everyone to know11 I love you / leave your hand, love, upon my hand. When she wakes, she considers telling him about that scene. Back then, people let themselves be numbed by sentimentality to forget the death that was all around them. The flying saucers, the soap operas, football, patriotism: she will tell him about all the straws she too clutched at, poor deluded shipwrecked fool.