Purgatory

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  ‘Your island is just a metaphor,’ says Emilia. ‘But the man with the slate, on the other hand, managed to make his maps a metamorphosis. In fact, now that I think of it, the man himself must have been a moving metamorphosis. He escaped along the tangent, allowed himself to be enveloped by his eternal noon. The man who left Nagasaki was not the same man who boarded the train to Hakata or the one who crossed the Mandelbaum Gate – which, as you know, doesn’t exist any more, and hasn’t since the Six Day War in 1967 – or the man you met in the old people’s home. You were lucky to run into him there. It could have been anywhere, or nowhere. At least you met one person you could talk to about maps. I’m surrounded by cartographers and I’ve never had a conversation like the one you had that night.’

  The doorbell rings insistently. Unhurriedly, Emilia goes downstairs and pays for the food. She sets the table and warms the sake. She reminds herself that she should barely pick at the food – the steam from the rice has already made her aroused and she does not want Simón to see her as an oversexed animal. ‘What happened to you in the old people’s home is like what happened to me in my dreams,’ she says. ‘I saw places that no longer exist, people who disappeared the moment I tried to slip inside them. I saw cities shift onto maps that had not yet been drawn. The seasons passed quickly in my dreams; winter at night was spring by morning, summer became autumn or west became south. Why don’t we eat, amor?’

  ‘Let’s eat later, let’s eat tomorrow,’ says Simón. ‘Right now, let’s just go to bed.’

  Emilia once more feels like the smitten girl who listened to ‘Muchacha ojos de papel’, who walked the streets of Buenos Aires with Simón’s hand in hers; she feels a great tenderness burst inside her, a door opening in a Japanese ideogram; she says something that she did not believe herself capable of, in a voice that comes from some other body, some other memory: ‘Fuck me, Simón. What are you waiting for? Fuck me.’

  4

  As one who believes and does not, saying: ‘It is, it is not’

  ‘Purgatorio’, VII, 12

  Every morning I glance through the online editions of the Argentinian papers. One day in autumn, before planning one of my classes, I was surprised to find myself reading that Dr Orestes Dupuy had died from a lung infection. He was eighty-six years old and had been in an intensive care unit for some time. I was convalescing from a serious illness myself but I wanted to go and see Emilia and offer her my insincere condolences. Neither she nor I would mourn Dupuy’s passing.

  I hadn’t seen her since our conversation over lunch at Toscana. I still hadn’t talked about the illness which had forced me to move away from Highland Park for a period and which I prefer not to dwell on. I had been seriously ill, I still don’t know how the doctors managed to keep me alive. My body was completely ravaged and the list of doctors who helped me is long: Jerome Richie, a urologist; Anthony D’Amico and Jan Drappatz, both oncologists; Peter Black, a neurosurgeon; and, most importantly for me, José Halperín, an old friend, someone with whom I shared my exile and through whom I met the others. I’m sure they remember me, if only because I constantly pestered them, sending them my books.

  Emilia sent a get-well card to the hospital and a Keith Jarrett CD, The Melody at Night, With You, which I loved. It’s been months since then and I still haven’t even called to thank her. I know she’s still living in the same apartment on North 4th Avenue, that she’s still working at Hammond. When I figured she would be home from work, at about 7 p.m., I called round. She opened the door, looking pale and wizened as though suddenly older than her years. I felt that she was genuinely pleased to see me, that, apart from Nancy Frears, she had no one she could talk to. I didn’t want to stay long, and was about to refuse the tea and cookies she brought out almost as soon as we had sat down, but I accepted so as not to offend her. One of the Jewish communities in town had asked her to redraw the map demarcating the eruv which had been destroyed in the flood of 1999. She was about to show me the drafts she had been working on when suddenly she broke down and cried. The situation was awkward, I didn’t know what to do. Had we been in Buenos Aires, I would have hugged her, but here in New Jersey, alone in her apartment, I had no idea how she would take it. She dried her eyes with a tissue, went to her bedroom for a minute, and when she reappeared she was calm once more. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m being silly. It’s just that I miss him so much. I miss him more with every day.’ She took it for granted I knew who she was talking about, but she explained anyway. ‘I miss Simón,’ she said. ‘Now that I’m really an orphan, I find it reassuring to think I haven’t lost Simón.’

  From our conversation at Toscana, I’d assumed that her search for her husband was ancient history. Emilia had arrived in Highland Park, weary of following one false lead after another, of believing that he was waiting for her somewhere, hidden inside a map. She had laughed at that, it was nonsense, she said, a sort of private game she played, one of those comforts, like a pair of winter gloves, you keep and then forget, but now I realised that she was being serious, that she was still waiting for Simón. ‘I hardly sleep,’ she said. ‘I wake up several times in the middle of the night. Sometimes, I see him leaning in the doorway, and when I turn the light on and he’s not there, I go over and sniff the door frame, sniff the floor like a dog for some trace of a scent he’s left behind. A car will park outside, someone will get out and I’ll rush to the window to see if it’s him. It’s never him. The night Papá died, Chela called me from San Antonio. She asked if I wanted to go back to Buenos Aires with her, the funeral was going to be postponed for a couple of days. I told her I couldn’t leave, that Simón was coming back at any moment. Chela asked me if I was feeling OK; she didn’t insist. I called Hammond, left a message saying there had been a death in the family and that I wouldn’t be in to work the next day. I really believed that, when he heard that my father was dead, Simón would come back. I stayed awake until dawn, watching two old Argentinian movies, Tiempo de revancha14 and La fiesta de todos. In the first, Buenos Aires is a sordid, crumbling city filled with the concrete pillars of half-constructed avenues. Watching it reminded me of the morning I saw those same ruins, saw the families left homeless in the wake of the demolitions. In La fiesta de todos, there’s a brief shot of Papá on the VIP stand at River Plate Stadium on the day Argentina won the World Cup. Later there’s a shot of me in profile, scanning the crowds. Hoping I might spot Simón in the stands somewhere, I watched the video over and over. It was a waste of time.’

  I felt sorry that I couldn’t talk frankly to Emilia, because, like the witnesses at the trial of the comandantes, I believed her husband had been murdered in Tucumán the same night he was arrested. A warrant officer had testified that he had witnessed the commanding officer personally kill Simón Cardoso, put a bullet in his forehead. Two others testified that they had seen him before he was taken out to the courtyard to be executed, shuffling along, his body broken from the torture. The human rights organisations investigating the case were convinced that Dupuy was behind the killing but could find no conclusive evidence. The body was never found. Details of the case were published in Diario del Juicio15, Emilia had probably read them but did not believe. Even the flicker of a doubt would have destroyed her because, if her husband was dead, it meant her father was guilty, her mother was complicit; it meant that she was the daughter of two murderers. If that were true, she would rather she had never been born, rather she had been a foundling, a baby in a children’s home, a piece of trash without a name. What I knew but could not bring myself to say created a yawning gap between us, a wordless, desolate no-man’s-land like the borderland by the Mandelbaum Gate. It was something I regretted, because I had begun to think that she was very like me. We had both fought against death in our own ways, and neither of us was prepared to surrender. For me, the only way to go on living was to pretend that death would never happen, to embrace each happy new morning. Emilia, braver than me, refused to allow the tragedy of her past to destroy the present and
so she carried on with her routine, hoping and believing that doing so brought her closer to the fateful day when he would finally come and find her. When she said ‘I miss him so much’, her voice sounded like a branch breaking. She was not the same person who had lunched with me at Toscana.

  She was in complete denial. She had to know about the atrocities her father was alleged to have committed when the dictatorship began to fall apart after the Malvinas War. It was then that the dam burst and the horrors of the past were brought to light: the prisoners who had been tortured, blinded, tossed into rivers or into mass graves; the newborn babies kidnapped, the rapes, the struggle to the death against enemies that did not exist. Dupuy was in each and every circle of that hell: he helped make them possible, gave them his blessing, told Jimmy Carter’s envoys that they were fictions dreamed up by subversives. In the final editorial he wrote for La República, he announced that the magazine was to cease publication because these days people would rather listen to the radio or watch television than read anything. He was a man of words, he said, and he did not care whether his speeches were printed or spoken so long as he had free speech. He admitted that, in the past, he had been guilty of serious sins of omission (he still talked in terms of sins), a fault, he said, he shared with millions of Argentinians. He apologised for paying more attention to the peso’s flotation against the dollar than to the bodies floating in the Río de la Plata. ‘I am responsible for those mistakes, as are thousands of my compatriots.’ The editorial concluded with a sentence that was a model of abject cynicism: ‘The dictatorship that we, the Argentinian people, endured was more criminal, more corrupt than any that has come before. It kept us in ignorance of the atrocities committed even as it allowed itself free rein to commit them. Thanks to God’s great wisdom, the nightmare is finally coming to an end.’

  He agreed to television interviews in which he sidestepped difficult questions and, now, stripped of his fascist conviction, extolled the virtues of democracy and tolerance, pronounced himself a Christian who was prepared to discuss even those ideas and beliefs he found distasteful, without explaining what these might be. Though he took great pains to upset no one, some of his actions were brought up during the trials. He was spared punishment, but not rejection. The director of an orphanage for girls declared that the doctor used to visit the inmates from time to time, choose one of the prettiest and take her for a drive in his car. None of them ever returned. They were young girls, little more than teenagers, learning to sew, to cook, to do accounts. They had no families to claim them, they lived in the orphanage isolated from all contact with the outside world. I read the woman’s statement in the Diario del Juicio, and for days afterwards the horror of it made me feel physically sick, it made me feel ashamed to think what we had silently allowed to happen, to think of the depths to which the human race could sink. When I told my neighbour Ziva Galili about it, she said that Lavrentiy Beria, one of Stalin’s butchers, had been accused of similar atrocities. Just before the Second World War, he had been the head of NKVD, the Soviet Union’s internal security police. At the end of the day, he and his henchmen would go hunting for girls on the streets of Moscow, of Kokoschkino, of Noginsk, or whatever far-flung suburb his duties as a spy took him to. When he found a girl he liked, he ordered the car to follow her discreetly without attracting attention. Suddenly, he would attack. One of his henchmen would block the girl’s path, throwing open the car door, while another bundled her inside where Beria would examine her more closely. If the examination proved satisfactory, he would take the girl to a secret house, gag her and tie her up. After the rape, the least submissive girls were thrown into the Moskva River, the others were sent to the army brothels in Siberia. I had read fragments of this chilling story in a book by Donald Rayfield16 about Stalin’s ‘hangmen’ and their abuses. In the book, I had seen a disturbing photo of Beria when he was about forty in which he looked very like Dr Dupuy: the same broad forehead, the same lascivious mouth, a nose like the beak of a bird of prey. Democratic openness made it possible for a number of newspapers to mention other sordid stories about Dupuy, but they were quickly snuffed out by the avalanche of civil and criminal suits he filed to defend himself. Many of those who could have denounced him had been his accomplices and even the teachers at the orphanage were not prepared to identify him as the man who took away the girls.

  In late 1977, Dupuy had been the adviser to whom the comandantes most often turned, the only one they were prepared to accept as a moderator in their power struggles. One November night he was summoned to the presidential palace. It was seven months before the start of the World Cup and everything had already been completed: the stadiums, the hotels for visiting journalists, the motorways, the TV station which would broadcast the games in colour. Dupuy assumed he had been summoned to mediate in another of the endless wranglings for power. He would be blunt, tell them to sort it out themselves. Or perhaps they would ask him to discreetly get rid of the annoying gaggle of women17 who gathered at the Pirámide de Mayo every Thursday afternoon right under the their noses, demanding the return of sons who were lost or dead. Whatever the mission entrusted to him by the comandantes, he would know how best to deal with it, which would make all three of them happy.

  By the time he arrived for the meeting, it was almost midnight. The corridors of the presidential palace were deserted: Dupuy had negotiated these hallways many times and knew he had to move carefully. Every twenty or thirty metres, someone would step out of the shadows and demand that he produce his papers. As he walked, the air became hotter and hotter. He leaned for a moment on the balustrade of the gallery and looked down at the palm trees in the courtyard. The night swelled, the darkness swelled (there is no other way to explain the slow inflammation of reality), and pollen stained the floor tiles a cloying yellow. An aide-de-camp came to meet him and walked with him to the dining room where the comandantes were finishing their meal. They seemed nervous, upset. The table was littered with press clippings from foreign papers, cartoons, stark headlines about the secret concentration camps, the torture, the numbers of the disappeared. One of the cartoons depicted the Eel with a little moustache like Hitler’s and the same lock of hair falling across his forehead. The artist had taken pains to make sure the hair looked shiny and stiff with hair cream. Dupuy had the impression that the commander-in-chief of the navy was amused by this display of rubbish. He was a strapping, muscular, arrogant man, the opposite of the Eel. He apologised to Dupuy for summoning him at such a late hour and asked him to take a seat.

  ‘We don’t want to take up too much of your time. I’m sure you’ve realised why we asked you to come. We need your help, your imagination.’

  ‘A vicious campaign has been unleashed against us,’ the Eel interjected. ‘It needs to be stopped as soon as possible. In a few months, the whole country will be on display for all the world to see. Our every move is going to be examined under a microscope.’

  ‘I assume you’ve read my latest editorial in La República refuting this sleazy campaign.’

  ‘ “Rights and Humans”? It was a model of intelligence, Doctor, as your writing always is,’ said the admiral. ‘However, what you write unfortunately only influences opinion in this country. And the country needs no convincing. They realise that when they attack the government, they attack the nation. What we cannot control are the lies spread abroad—’

  ‘The vicious campaign against Argentina,’ interrupted the Eel. ‘You’ve seen the cartoons attempting to ridicule me.’

  ‘Your editorial has been translated and sent via our embassies to foreign newspapers,’ said the admiral. ‘We have offered a lot of money to have them published. Most of them replied saying they won’t publish, not even as a paid advertisement.’

  Dupuy felt embarrassed by the comment.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Doctor,’ the Eel intervened. ‘A number of extremists have escaped and have been making harmful statements about us. They’ve been travelling all over the world smearing our good
name. They’re tireless. Even the BBC in London has broadcast a documentary full of lies. We plan to sue them, but who knows whether it’s wise to aggravate them, whether it will only give them more rope to hang us with.’

  ‘To do nothing would be much worse. But how can I be of help, señores?’ Dupuy asked. ‘You know more about counter-intelligence strategy than I do.’

  ‘We can’t destabilise subversives by the book,’ said the admiral. ‘What we need is a little imagination. That’s why we’ve called you in. What are your thoughts?’

  ‘Nothing, just at the moment. I’ll give the situation careful consideration and come up with a quick, effective solution. Something that will silence the liars once and for all.’

  ‘A lightning flash that will win over the sceptics. Another Star of Bethlehem,’ said the Eel.

  ‘A blinding flash, certainly, but something lasting,’ Dupuy amended, ‘something that will leave its mark on history. A century from now, any memories of us will be vague. To some in Argentina we will be heroes, not to others. But when they look on what we achieved, we will be remembered with respect, as the Borgias are in Florence, as Napoleon is in France. Of this sleazy campaign of lies against Argentina, on the other hand, no one will remember a thing. We will refute them now with something that will last forever. With a monument, but not one carved in marble. A monument that is imperishable. If you will excuse me, señores, I need to think.’