Purgatory

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  I went over to the mirror and looked at myself. The photo of a young Simón smiled at the mirror from the nightstand. The room was a mess; it was strange that Emilia, usually so fastidious, allowed me to go in. Magazines lay open on the bed, the sort people read while they’re queuing at the supermarket, featuring huge photos of Jennifer Lopez pregnant with twins, Britney Spears in her rehab clinic. I would never have imagined Emilia had such a morbid curiosity about the lives of others, though it made sense: the Emilia who collected coupons and played bingo belonged to that niche. It is impossible really to know another human being completely, and I had only ever seen Emilia on one side of the eruv, I never knew what became of her when she crossed over. I talked to her from where I stood, trying to reassure her. ‘I’m standing in front of the mirror, Emilia. There’s no one here. All I can see is the idiot standing here talking to you, I can see a shadow beside me, but it’s the idiot’s shadow. Try as I might, I’ll never see Simón because the only reason for your Simón to exist is for you alone to see him.’

  When did that happen? When was it that Emilia phoned me asking for help? When did I go round to her house and stand staring at myself in the mirror, and leave without recognising my own body, feeling that memories that were not mine had entered into my body and I could not shake them off, memories that insisted on staying inside me even though I ran out? I didn’t make a note of it in my diary and recently the days have become confused. I haven’t seen her since then. I tried calling her at Hammond to talk to her about the novel I’m writing but they told me that she’d stopped coming in. I went by her house a couple of times and was surprised not to see her beat-up silver Altima parked on North 4th Avenue or in the parking lot at Rite Aid where she sometimes left it.

  More than once I was on the point of telling her something about my novel. But I held back, out of shyness, out of shame, for the nameless reason that drives all writers to hide what they are doing until it’s finished. I said nothing because I was foundering in a swamp of first drafts I still haven’t climbed out of. She is the character on which the story turns, she was even before I knew her, and now I’d rather not carry on with it until we have had a serious conversation. I’m not waiting for her to give me permission to continue – characters aren’t censors, they don’t interfere in what happens to them. But Emilia is not simply one of my characters, she is also a human being, someone I know, someone I run into at Stop & Shop, a friend who has confided in me. Or is she simply someone inside me the way Simón is inside her? Before going out to look for her I remembered the lines of Felisberto Hernández: One can betray only when one lives with others. But with the body in which I live, no betrayal is possible. This, Felisberto used to say, is a hopeless situation. I have to clarify things with Emilia, work out where she begins and I end. Not knowing makes me uneasy.

  Writing has always been a liberating act for me, the only place myself could roam without having to explain itself. While I write, I let myself go. Only after I have taken a few steps do I think about the boundaries of what I am doing: whether I am headed towards a novel or an essay, whether this is a story or a film script or a profile of the dead. I most often get lost when I try to go beyond the boundaries. Though the boundaries may resist, still I cross them. I want to see what’s on the other side of the words, in the landscapes that are never seen, in the stories that disappear even as they are being told. Perhaps if I devoted myself to poetry I might catch a glimpse of this horizon I can never reach. But I am not a poet, something I regret. If I were I would be able to name the true nature of things, unerringly find the centre rather than becoming lost on the margins. What am I going to say to Emilia when I see her?

  That human beings are responsible for everything except our dreams. Many years ago now, before I met her, I dreamed of her and I transformed that dream into the first lines of a story that I have carried with me from country to country, believing that some day I would have the dream again and I would feel the need to complete it. I dreamed that I went into a seedy restaurant where an elderly woman was sitting at one end of a long table staring at one of the people eating with her. At that moment, I knew, with the blinding clarity we have in dreams, that the woman was a widow and the man was her husband who had been dead for thirty years. I also knew that the husband was the man he had been, his voice, his age those of the time he died.

  When I woke up, I was excited, imagining the pleasure that elderly woman would feel to be loved, to be made love to by a much younger man. I didn’t care whether he was her husband or not. It seemed to me to be an act of poetic justice, since in most stories, the situation is reversed. I started writing, not knowing where my search would take me. I didn’t know what the husband was doing in that seedy restaurant, nor why time, for him, seemed to have been suspended. Those thirty years of separation – I thought – somehow echoed the emptiness of the thirty years I had spent exiled from my country and which I hoped to find, when I went back, exactly as I had left it. I know that it is an illusion, naive in the way all illusions are, and perhaps that was what attracted me, because those lost years will always haunt me and if I narrate them, if I imagine every day I did not live, perhaps – I thought – I could exorcise them. I wanted to remember what I didn’t see, recount the life I would have had, looking after my children, loving them, wandering through the cities of Argentina, reading. I wanted the impossible, because I could not have lived oblivious to the torture victims, to the prisoners held without trial, to the slaves in the death camps working for the greater glory of the admiral and the Eel. I wanted to be Wakefield, to disappear completely from the world and come back home one day, open the door and find nothing has changed. I wanted to know what it would have been like, the life of a writer forbidden to write. The questions tormented me, gave me no peace, and in desperation, I set about answering them. The phrase sounds melodramatic, but it is true nonetheless. I wrote quickly, page after page, eager to find out what happened next. I worked at a frantic pace unfamiliar to me. In general I can spend hours agonising over a single sentence, sometimes a single word, but in this book, almost without realising it, the writing consumed me, gambling in a race against death. True to form, death came looking for me. I had written about eighty pages when illness laid me low. In hospital, I began to see things differently. I thought about all the things that disappear without our even noticing, because we know only what exists, we know nothing of those things that never come into existence; I thought about the non-being I would have been had my parents conceived me seconds earlier or later, I thought of the libraries of books never written (Borges tried to make up for this absence in ‘The Library of Babel’), but all that remained was the idea, there was no flesh, no bones, a magnificent, lifeless idea. I thought about the Mozart symphonies silenced by his untimely death, about the song running through John Lennon’s mind that December night when he was murdered. If we could recover the unwritten books, the lost music, if we could set out in search of what never existed and find it, then we should have conquered death. While I was lying there waiting for death I thought that perhaps this was the way to get my life back. So I abandoned the novel I had been writing, and started this novel, which is filled with what does not exist and at its heart, still, is Emilia, who had taken my hand at Toscana and guided me through her labyrinth. You might say I found her before setting out to look. For her, it breathed new life into her hopes of seeing Simón again; for me, it breathed new life into this book.

  I was describing her, bent over her drawing table, over the half-finished map of the eruv, when she called to ask me if it was Simón reflected in her mirror. I already said, I think, that I saw only myself and the photo of Simón as a young man on the nightstand behind me. For more than a week now, I have made no attempt to find Emilia. Sooner or later, I feel sure, she will call because the memories I carry within me are her memories too, and she will ask me to leave them where they are. Before I lost her, I thought I saw a light on in her apartment and I rang the doorbell. I must
have been mistaken, because no one answered. I looked again and the lights were off.

  Sunday night, Emilia orders in Japanese food again and she and Simón eat in silence. On the table is a bottle of sake she bought at Pino’s and, without realising, the two of them drink half the bottle. The delicate rice wine enfolds them in a giddiness like marijuana, it is a pleasure Emilia adopted from two late films by Ozu that she watched on DVD. Just as Ozu’s women anaesthetise their troubles with sake, Emilia has spent the day letting go her remaining troubles, dealing with the last one on her computer. Before dinner, she sent a brief note to her head of Human Resources at Hammond. ‘I need to be out of the office for a few days,’ it said, and at the bottom, ‘Personal reasons.’ She is no longer able to bear the routine of work. She does not want to go back to grid squares of maps, she cannot bear ever to leave this person who has come back to take her away. She has suffered more than she can bear. The world is cruel to those who love, they say. It distracts them, deflects them from the love that is the true centre of life. Why miss out on love and turn towards something else? What to do with all the wasted love that has gone unlived? Now, it does not matter to her to know what happens next. All that matters is that she does not move from the point she has reached. I’m happy, she says to herself over and over, I could go to the depths, the heights of this happiness, but not beyond it.

  Simón is very pale. She sees a languid smile play on his lips. It worries Emilia that the smile came to his face just as dusk is blotting out the shape of things and she will lose the image, perhaps forever. This is the trouble with love, she thinks: that cherished expressions disappear, looks which, in memories, could be those of anyone. She gets up and puts on one of Jarrett’s concerts. The volume is turned down very low and she would like Simón to touch her. He has been affectionate to her, though she has noticed a certain reserve in his tenderness. Their lovemaking has been better than it ever was; love between them has always been easy, what has been difficult is tenderness. Thinking about it, perhaps this is the price to be paid for the remoteness she too felt in their first months of marriage. Only in Tucumán was she able to surrender herself, to realise that when his body entered into hers, she also entered into his. That one night was also the last: until yesterday. The solitary ecstasy of the past has been repeated and she never wants it to end, she wants to exhaust herself with love as though life were this and only this, the endless orgasm she has dreamed about for thirty years. Let him touch her, then. Simón is now sitting on the bed and she lays her head on his shoulder. ‘Touch me, amor, touch me,’ she says.

  But Simón talks about other things. ‘When I was far from you I thought I would find you inside a map.’ Emilia interrupts him: ‘This might sound strange, but I thought the same thing.’ Simón: ‘I saw you standing in the map. I didn’t know where you were because the vectors had been erased. It was a desert with no lines.’ And Emilia: ‘In that case it wasn’t a map.’ Simón: ‘Maybe it wasn’t, but that’s where you were.’ And Emilia: ‘If it was a map with no landmarks, you could have left a trail of names, drawn trees for reference, I would have found you. Once, in Mexico, I followed a trail of white pebbles convinced that, like in Hansel and Gretel, when I came to the last one, I would find you. In Caracas, I named all the streets in a neighbourhood so you could find me: Iván el Cobero, Coño Verde. At the top of the hill was a small square. I called it Simón Yemilia. The neighbours thought I named it Simón after Simón Bolivar; I added Yemilia because a lot of girls around there are called Yemila, Yajaira, Yamila, but I knew you would know I meant Simón y Emilia, I knew that if you were ever there, ever looked at a new map of Caracas, you would be able to find me. Why don’t you touch me?’

  Jarrett’s music circles around the same clusters of notes, sometimes lingering on a single note, and outside, the night itself has stopped moving; only inside Emilia, as in a dark heart of a volcano, life still ebbs and flows.

  She can’t remember Simón ever fucking her the way he is fucking her now. Her body is ablaze, she arches herself, raises her body so he can penetrate all the way to her throat, she licks him, devours him, and what she feels is so intense, so overpowering, that she feels coursing from her tongue the foam from the tongue with which he kisses her. Emilia soars so high that Simón’s fires reach deeper than her body, they are fires of pure sex, flames that come and go leaving no ashes. By now she has lost count of how many times she’s come, they’ve climaxed, she’s orgasmed, how do they say it in other languages, ancora, more, encore, ainda mas, don’t go, querido mío, don’t leave. On and on until the first breath of morning seeps through the window, on and on until she can’t go on any more and clutches the pillow wet with tears.

  The Jarrett concert stays with her all night. The CD ends but she does not notice. She knows the slow final cadences by heart and so the melody slips unnoticed towards silence. She hugs Simón to her, fearful that reality will fade out like the music. The room is still dark, the faint brightness she saw when she woke disappears. Perhaps we can’t see the sun, she thinks. A dirty grey day like most of the days this autumn. She doesn’t know whether or not to get up. She allows herself to be carried along by the joy of knowing that he is sleeping here, in the room, and that he will not leave her again to waste her life in the maps at Hammond. Why wake him? This body lying next to her is the only map she needs to get her bearings in time. And thinking about it, what need has she of time when time has folded in on itself and now fits inside the body of her beloved. When she first set out to look for him she could not have imagined that there could have been so many circles in her purgatory, nor that when she reached one another would appear above it, and then another. Her eternal noon was an everlasting purgatory.

  Now, I am the one wondering where Emilia has gone. Nancy Frears phoned the police, who are thrilled to be presented with a mystery in this town without mysteries. Two officers accompanied by the chief of police in person broke down the door of her North 4th Avenue apartment and found not a living soul. The bed was made, the books and CDs neatly organised, the hi-fi and the computer had not even been unplugged. There were no signs of a break-in or a robbery. The only conspicuous detail was that Emilia had not taken out the garbage bag in the kitchen and by now it was beginning to smell. On the table were the remains of some sushi, a seaweed salad and some Chinese fortune cookies. Nancy phoned Chela, but, according to her answering machine, the Echarri family were out of the country. I’m the last person to have seen Emilia and the police asked me to come in and make a statement. As I explained, a fat cop took notes, stopping from time to time to eat the half-finished pizza oozing grease all over the cardboard delivery box. The officer wanted to know if Emilia had been suicidal, suffered from some terminal illness or mentioned that she might be going on holiday. The interview lasted half an hour, and before he handed me the statement to sign, he asked if there was anything else I could think of that might be helpful. I was surprised to hear myself telling him that thirty years ago in my country many people disappeared without leaving a trace and that Emilia’s husband had been one of the disappeared. ‘She never gave up hope of finding him again,’ I said. ‘She could never bring herself to accept that he might be dead.’ ‘What about you, what do you think?’ asked the officer. ‘I believe he’s dead. Emilia’s not the only person to hope that someone she loves will come back from the dead; there are thousands like her, clinging to an illusion. Imagine the pain of not knowing where your daughter is, not knowing who took her. And if she were dead, imagine the desolation of not knowing in what dark corner of the world her body is.’ ‘In this country, it is the job of the police to find out what happened,’ said the officer. ‘We are paid by the state to do just that. This woman’s disappearance might be a crime, a kidnapping, she might have committed suicide, she could have gone away to join a sect. We can rule out kidnapping, since it’s been several days and there’s been no ransom demand. We can rule out the idea that she’s been taken by gangsters running a prostitution ring, since
, quite frankly, the woman is too old. Also she has no priors and there’s no reason to suspect she was a drug mule or involved in trafficking. She has a perfect résumé, no offences, no problems at work, she got on well with her neighbours. It makes no sense,’ the officer went on. ‘Here, people don’t just disappear into thin air. Give it a week or two and we’ll find out what happened.’ ‘It doesn’t always work out that way,’ I said. ‘You see photos of missing people on milk cartons all the time, kids, old people.’ ‘Most of them have mental health problems,’ insisted the policeman. I said goodbye, left a card with my details on his desk and asked him to get in touch if they found out anything.