The following day, Nancy Frears insisted on seeing me; she asked me to come by her apartment on Montgomery Street. The minute I walked through the door, she threw herself into my arms and started sobbing. ‘Where can poor Millie have gone? Have you heard anything?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘I don’t know anything either. I drop by the chief of police’s office as often as I can. No one there wants to say anything, but you get to hear things around town. If you were a woman, you’d understand. You hear people gossiping at the salon, in the drugstore, over at Jerusalem Pizza. They say someone saw her on the street talking to herself, dressed up like she was going to a party. Someone saw her on Saturday morning at dawn taking the train to Newark. What would she be doing up at that hour? Her car still hasn’t turned up. They’ve issued a description of the car and the licence plate to all the toll routes and hotels for two hundred miles. All the patrol cars have the details too, of course. We should get some news soon. She has to eat, to sleep, to take a bath. Can you wait a minute? I need to go to the bathroom. It’s my stomach, I get gas, you know. Never gives me a minute’s peace.’
She reappears with a file of clippings. Emilia gave them to her to look after a while ago and she shows them to me to see if I recognise anything. I see the pamphlet again, the samples of Stabilene film which cartographers carried with them everywhere thirty years ago. Inside the pamphlet I see a copy of the ‘Rules concerning the making of cartographic documents for the Automobile Club’ typed on an old-fashioned typewriter. I don’t stop to read it since the predictable articles in it have long since expired. What surprises me is the carefully hand-drawn page at the end. On it there are three squares splitting off like tree branches from a central square. Each space is filled with elegantly calligraphed text. One of them reads: ‘Choice and selection of the nomenclature for the colour blue’, and the uppermost square reads: ‘Rough sketch to scale of Ruta 77 as far as the Abra River’. I assume that it is Simón’s handwriting, large, meticulous well-spaced letters. If Simón did write it, it would explain why Emilia has treasured this useless, yellowing scrap of paper all these years. Or perhaps she keeps it because it is the last vestige of his contact with the world: this sheet of paper, his fingerprints on the steering wheel of the jeep, the sketch of the Río El Abra that was taken from them in Huacra, the tremulous signature on the prison register. As I touch the sheet, I barely feel it, it is as though the paper is air; of course I know that my senses are gradually disappearing, I know that my eyesight is failing, that my ears hear only what they want to hear: Kiri Te Kanawa singing Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, the voices of my sons, Keith Jarrett playing the piano, the murmur of snow as it falls.
I don’t say this to Nancy, but sometimes I think Emilia’s senses also disappeared and that is why she is not here. Our senses constantly feed our memory, and beyond that memory there is nothing. The body enters into a continuous present in which pass, one by one, all the seasons of the joys that went unlived.
5
Fame is nothing but a breath of wind
‘Purgatorio’, XI, 100
I open the cuttings file Nancy Frears gave me and notice that some of them are missing. I know that when she gave it to me there were photos of Emilia with her father at the funeral of the film director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson and at a gala given by the comandantes for the king and queen of Spain, but I’m confusing what I see with the things Emilia told me. There are many ant trails in my memory and on this point all of them seem to get entangled. I call one of my doctors and ask if these distractions mean anything. ‘We’ll know if there’s any need to worry after we’ve examined you. Are you writing?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ I tell him, ‘a novel.’ ‘In that case, be careful. It’s your imagination that’s making you ill.’ I go back home, and start going over the papers and the notes I have collected.
I started at the end: with the photograph of Dr Dupuy taken in the main studio of Canal 7 during the twenty-four-hour benefit programme in aid of the soldiers fighting in the Malvinas. It is date-stamped in the top right-hand corner, May 20, 1982, with the time, 23.12. Emilia watches from a distance as her father comes onto the set. It looks to me as though at any moment she might turn her back on him. She finds it difficult to hide her hostility, her displeasure. They have not lived in the same house now for three years, and I know that Emilia would have left Buenos Aires if an increasingly slender umbilical cord did not tie her to her mother, whose body is now little more than a sigh. I don’t have the dates clear in my head, but I think I remember that Ethel Dupuy died shortly after the programme: she left this world as suddenly as she had entered it. Emilia told me she was cremated in a private, almost secret ceremony and that she herself, ‘just me, no one else’, scattered her ashes in the Río de la Plata, its waters swollen with all the dead.
In the photo, you can see the programme’s presenters in the background: they sit pensively on plastic chairs. I suppose they are charged with keeping alive the patriotic fervour the dictatorship has whipped up in the populace to mask the poverty, the inflation, the sense of imminent ruin. At the start of that year, the comandantes of the junta, feeling the country slipping through their fingers, grasp desperately for a lifeline: they invade the icy islands, send soldiers trained in the tropics of the Argentinian north-east where cold is unknown. Those in power are different now, the successors to the admiral and the Eel, though their imaginations are still bleak, empty horizons. The British fleet is on the far side of the world and no one expects them to take the trouble to defend a few shitty rocks inhabited by nothing but cormorants and wind, wind and 2,200 of Her Majesty’s subjects, melancholy penguins and wind. Against all expectations, the English launch a counter-offensive; Dupuy calculates that, within eight to ten weeks, defeat is inevitable. Even so, he wants the new comandantes to stay at the tiller until the state has weathered the storm. They need to stand firm – but how? When they are as stupid as all the others, as blind to everything that is not white and red and yellow? The stupidest of them are still stealing orphans from hospitals, snatching babies from the wombs of women in labour. There are still many gullible enough to see the country only as the happy, world-beating country depicted by the biddable media. Talk about our crushing victories in the air and on the sea, Dupuy instructs them. Show them photographs of pitiless, corrupt British soldiers. Show them Thatcher with fangs like Dracula. Run the headline: we’re winning! People are celebrating our armies’ victories, pouring into the streets wearing armbands, waving flags just as they did during the 1978 World Cup. Our onslaughts are lethal, the newspapers repeated in unison. Thatcher, they said, is running scared. Professor Addolorato uttered dirges on Spanish radio stations which Dupuy was forced to republish in La República: ‘My poor country is fighting an unequal battle against the third largest power on the planet, supported by American imperialists. The Argentina waging this war is not what the ignorant and ill-informed call the military dictatorship. No, all of Argentina is locked in this struggle: its women, its children, its old people.’ An eloquent opportunist, Dupuy is forced to concede. The British leak the news that Argentinian soldiers are falling at the front without even defending themselves, not from heroism or from enemy shrapnel but because they’re dying of cold. They have little ammunition, their rations of food have run out. Dupuy announces that he is going to launch a huge appeal for solidarity. Live on the same television channels that broadcast the World Cup, the greatest artists and celebrities in the nation will take donations: jewellery, money, chocolates, anything and everything, patriotism must be transformed into largesse and, more importantly, into a chorus of praise to the comandantes. He is still inspired by Orson Welles’s lessons in the art of illusion. What a son of a bitch, Welles, he thinks with a mixture of admiration and resentment. The bastard put him in a difficult position with the Eel and the admiral. Shortly after rejecting his offer to direct the documentary that would have heaped praise on it, he mocked Argentina and filmed The Muppet Movie, a pathetic trifle
for retarded children. Dupuy has heard that he makes his living falling back on his past as a clown. What he cannot forgive is that it was his voice used in Genocide, a tasteless documentary about the Nazi concentration camps in which, in passing, there is mention of prison camps in Argentina. He had better not dare try to set foot in Buenos Aires.
The success of the twenty-four-hour solidarity appeal is beyond his wildest expectations. At precisely 6 p.m. every television in the country is turned on; even those in hospital join in singing the national anthem. The great Libertad Lamarque cries as she recites the poem ‘La hermanita perdida’23. Famous actors and comedians come down from their pedestals and sell flowers in the streets. The television studios are besieged by old women who have spent sleepless nights knitting scarves and socks for the poor soldiers who are freezing. In a few short hours, there is a staggering pile of jewels, heirlooms, first communion medals, wedding rings. In the grocery shops there is not a tin of meatballs, sardines or beans left on sale – anything that can be eaten has been handed over. ‘So that our brave boys can go on fighting,’ sings Lolita Torres to the cameras through the night.
Emilia marches on the television studio with the mothers and wives of the disappeared. Like them, she has covered her head with a white scarf. She hopes her father will see her, will have her thrown out. Nothing would ease her contempt better than a good scandal. But this is something that will not happen, because Dupuy wants only to forget his daughter, to force her, he doesn’t yet know how, to go far away. In the streets, the crowds wave flags. In another photo taken in the studio, I can make out Nora Balmaceda. I barely recognise her. I’ve seen her picture in magazines and in a couple of documentaries, always with her rosebud mouth larded with lipstick and her eyelashes thick with mascara. But what appeared that night on television was her corpse. She is standing, barely able to hold herself up. I don’t believe, like so many of the others I recognise in the photograph, she would go so far to hide her story. On the contrary, she would be only too happy to tell it as long as there were cameras pointed at her. She would tell all: the novels she didn’t write, her travels, her affairs with famous sportsmen, her affair with the admiral. On her right, an elderly woman, still clinging to her flag, is picking up her false teeth which have fallen on the floor. What patriotic fervour, what religious devotion there is in that photograph. In the last photo, a messenger with slicked-back hair and patent-leather shoes is standing next to Dupuy and whispering something in his ear. He is in civilian clothes, wearing a suit that looks as though he borrowed it, and just this detail is enough to recognise that he is a military orderly. The photo is marked May 21, 1982, at 12.03 a.m. The messenger must be telling Dupuy that the British Army has surrounded the Argentinian troops defending Port Stanley and that the government has ordered them to defend it to the last man.
The war carries on for a few more days, and then it is over. The president shuts himself away in his office, drinking bottle after bottle of Old Parr, and then resigns. On the heels of the invented triumphs comes despair. ‘We have lost a battle, let us not lose the country,’ Dupuy says in a radio interview. He is the only major figure who dares to show his face. That same afternoon, he meets with the comandantes who have survived the disaster and asks them what they want him to do with the donations from the solidarity appeal. ‘Is there much?’ they ask. ‘Oh yes,’ he tells them, ‘almost sixty million dollars, and 140 kilos of gold which I’d suggest melting down into ingots. There are tons of tinned foods, chocolates, sacred pictures, letters for the soldiers and two whole hangars bursting with winter clothes.’ The comandantes look at each other, confused. Dupuy sets them straight. ‘Almost all of it is rubbish. The scarves and woollen vests are in bright colours and might easily draw attention to the soldiers. The best thing to do is dump it all. Not the gold and the money, obviously. As for everything else, we should ship it out on two Hercules planes, though we’d be running the risk of the British getting their hands on everything, including the planes.’ ‘What do you suggest, Doctor?’ asks one of the comandantes. ‘I suggest we cover our backs, save face. If anyone asks about the contributions, we tell them we sent everything we could and that, since the islands were in British hands, we don’t know what they did with them. We can also say that everything else was put into accounts reserved for the armed forces and the missions. We won’t exactly be lying. We have to give up a percentage to dispel any doubts. I would also suggest that this operation be classified a state secret. If it were up to me, I’d order that history books be immediately rewritten to include these heroic deeds before people start publishing all sorts of bullshit. I’d say that London had plans to invade Tierra del Fuego and that we were merely defending ourselves against the first and third largest powers in the world.’ ‘Professor Addolorato has already said that,’ one of the comandantes pointed out. ‘In that case, get Addolorato to write the books.’ Dupuy was offended. ‘All I know, señores, is that when the truth is unfavourable, it must be made to disappear as quickly as possible.’ He withdraws, leaving a copy of La República on the new president’s desk. On page one it reads: ‘The time has come for humility. Let us give politicians the opportunity to govern. Let us offer them the wisdom of our military leaders. This country must go on being a country of freedom, of the cross and the sword.’
Some of the other photos in the file sadden me. I see Emilia and Dr Dupuy standing next to the coffin of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson. I read the date: September 8, 1978. The celebrities gathered in the funeral chapel are almost the same as those who, four years later, will be caught up in the fever of the solidarity appeal for Las Malvinas. The same as those who cheered at the World Cup until they were hoarse. The darkest year of that murky dictatorship was 1978. In December, the comandantes celebrate their three world triumphs: in football, in hockey and in beauty, when a twenty-one-year-old girl from Córdoba is voted Miss World. I don’t think Torre Nilsson would have approved of how his funeral chapel is staged in the photographs: the dark cedar coffin with eight ornately carved handles to carry it, the crucifix that looks as though it might drop onto his head, the wreaths and flowers that shroud him in their heavy perfume, the poster for Martín Fierro hanging next to the crucifix (he must have requested the poster: he considered Martín Fierro his finest film, I still think it was one of his worst). He would have been ashamed that in death, this most private moment, his wasted, shrunken body should be exposed for all to see.
I met him one night in October 1958 in a restaurant near that very funeral chapel. I was surprised to discover he was even more shy than me – in itself something of a feat – giving up each word with infinite care as though they were joys that he was losing forever. I chattered away, telling him about the deaths I had seen at the cinema and those I had been dreaming about for weeks. ‘Some deaths are ridiculous,’ I told him, ‘and I forget them as soon as the film is over: the living dead, zombies, ghosts. I’m more moved by the personification of Death in Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal, and the funeral of a village girl I saw recently in Carl Dreyer’s Ordet.’ I told him the scene had made me cry and that later I was disappointed because the girl came back to life. Torre Nilsson smiled magnanimously. ‘Ah, Ordet,’ he said. ‘I think in the film Dreyer is denying the idea of death, portraying it as a sort of divergence from life, like an eclipse, after which it is possible to reappear.’ ‘What is irreparable,’ I said, ‘is the obscene way in which the dead are put on display. From that there can be no return.’ I am remembering that phrase as I look at the photos of Dupuy, the admiral and Addolorato standing before his defenceless body feigning grief.
In another of the photos, Emilia is greeting an actress who appeared in a number of Torre Nilsson’s early films and who, for years, had vanished off the face of the earth. The woman looks frightened, as though she has just been caught doing something terrible and wants to hide away. Until twenty years ago, the newspapers carried on publishing stories about what had happened to her, all of them false. Once she was dead, they lost
interest and she fell into oblivion. Sometimes I see the startled expression of that former actress staring back at me from a poster in the film club, always the same face, eyes gazing into the middle distance, lips twisted in a foolish smile. Emilia mentioned her in passing that morning we went to see Mary Ellis’s grave. She told me that Torre Nilsson had taken her and turned her into a unique character, terrified of sex, constantly afraid of being raped. Later, other directors took advantage of her naive defenceless image to transform her into the perfect victim: a teenage girl who has her virginity taken in a brothel, a country girl who swears eternal love to a rogue in an empty church convinced that, though there are no witnesses, this oath is enough for them to be legally married. Going from one melodrama to the next confused her. One day she woke up not knowing who she really was and ran off the set of her last film. She got on the first bus she saw and disappeared without a trace. She never told anyone what happened in the months that followed. She had no family, only a neighbour she occasionally went out with for pizza. Maybe she was living in a hotel in a small town, maybe she ran away to the beach because when she came back she was very tanned. No producer every called her again. She went back to her old house, to her old routine of going out for pizza with her neighbour and became a dressmaker. Ever since she was a girl she had liked drawing dresses, cutting out patterns, embroidering, making costumes for her dolls. She opened a small shop, took in two stray cats and never spoke about the past again. She emerged from her obscurity only to say goodbye to the director who had discovered her and changed her life. She had intended only to spend a few minutes in the funeral chapel, to leave a flower, say a prayer. The dead man mattered less to her than that part of her life which had already died. On the huge poster hanging beside the door of the chapel she saw herself, cowering in the shadows of two men. Seeing herself like this, on display, it seemed as though this funeral was hers too and she almost fled. Emilia saw the woman leaving, looking as though she was about to faint, and went to help her. It took a moment before she recognised her. She was no longer the teenage girl in the poster. She was overweight, dishevelled and looked like a middle-class housewife. She had met her long ago in the house on calle Arenales when the actress had come with Torre Nilsson to ask Dupuy to intercede with a reactionary censor who was busy cutting swathes out of the finest films of the day, from Buñuel and Stanley Kubrick to Dreyer and Fellini. Childbirth and kissing, however reverently done, could not be seen anywhere near a church. He had banned two of Torre Nilsson’s films and was threatening to bowdlerise a third. ‘I don’t know what my father said to him,’ Emilia told me. ‘All I remember is that the girl was crying when she left. At the time, she looked like a schoolgirl – she wore a blouse with a big lace collar and ribbons in her hair. She had the same astonished expression she had in her films, as though her body shifted untouched from fantasy to reality. The trembling woman in the funeral chapel was a different person, she was short and fat with a double chin.’ Emilia took pity on her and took her outside for some fresh air. Then she invited her to go for coffee at a cafe on the corner and sat with her until she had calmed down. That was all. Emilia didn’t tell me that it was at that moment the photograph I’m looking at now was taken. The rest of the story I know from the notes and cuttings she left in North 4th Avenue.
Purgatory Page 21
