Purgatory

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  I know that, the day she left the room, Emilia left her father’s house and moved back to the apartment overlooking the Parque Lezama where she had lived those first short, happy months as a married woman. She went on working at the Automobile Club and visiting her mother two or three times a week. Lost in the mists of the old people’s home, every morning Ethel woke less of a person and went to bed less of a body. She was like Señor Ga24, a character created by Macedonio Fernández who has had a lung removed, his kidney, his spleen, his colon, and then one day Señor Ga’s valet calls the doctor and asks him to come and see to a pain in his foot; the doctor examines him, and shaking his head gravely tells him there’s too much foot and draws a line for the surgeon to cut. Emilia’s mother was like the country was back then; what she feared she would be like it would be twenty years later. I know that it was there, in San Telmo, that Emilia got the letter from her paternal aunt saying she had run into Simón in a theatre in Rio de Janeiro, the letter that convinced her to begin her search, to climb the seven terraces of her purgatory of love.

  The story was restless, it didn’t stop shifting, indifferent to the defeats, the deaths, to the ever more fleeting joys. Back then, I was living in Caracas learning from my reading of Parmenides that non-being is not a half-measure, that what is not necessarily must not be, I read little Heraclitus because Borges had already used him up, I was rereading Canetti, Nabokov and Kafka, I was working like a dog, writing books that other people signed, this was the life I had been given and since I had no choice I did not complain. Meanwhile, Argentina tried to reconquer the Malvinas, lost the war, the military dictatorship foundered in its own corruption, Raúl Alfonsín won the first democratic elections and Julio Cortázar returned to Buenos Aires to shake the hand of the new president, went back to Paris without managing to get an audience and died alone two months later; Borges, who was ill, left for Geneva and did not want to go back, he was buried in Plainpalais cemetery without ever being awarded the Nobel Prize; Manuel Puig died too, in a hospital in Cuernavaca, but that was much later; all the great Argentinian writers went abroad to die because there was no room in the country for more dead. The last census recorded a population of 27,949,480; housewives wept floods of tears over the misfortunes of Leonor Benedetto in the soap opera Rosa de lejos, and Alfonsín put the admiral, the Eel and their most conspicuous collaborators on trial; the Eel spent his trial reading – or pretending to read – The Imitation of Christ by the Augustine monk Thomas à Kempis; and three military coups threatened to bury democracy; and Alfonsín was forced to step down before his time because of rampant inflation and because children scavenging in garbage bins for food fell like pollen in the streets; and he was replaced by Carlos Menem who pardoned the comandantes, sold off the few assets Argentina still possessed, constantly, vainly, talked about the poor, and let those responsible for the bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina go unpunished; and Charly García jumped from the ninth-floor window of a Mendoza hotel into a half-full swimming pool, climbed out without a scratch and that night at his concert sang: ‘The person that you love could disappear, those who are in the air could disappear’; and I went back to Buenos Aires intending to stay there forever but I didn’t stay. Emilia’s cape never surfaced, I reread Parmenides and learned that being also hides in the folds of nothingness.

  As I pull up at the corner of Paterson and George it starts to rain. As I expected, Toscana no longer exists. The house on the corner is no longer a river nor does it weep25, I thought, quoting a poem that came to mind, but the river is still there. I feel sure that when I look out the window I will see a river flowing where once I saw the Pampa of Buenos Aires with cattle grazing, rolling their great eyes upwards now and then to the inclement heavens. Once again I feel that in maps we can be whatever we choose, grassland, Amazonian jungle, ancient city, but also that, inside us, maps can be whatever they choose, aimless asteroids, creatures from the future or the plush bar that now sits where Toscana once was, a bar called Glo¯ which, right now, at eight o’clock, is giving salsa lessons. I stand under the eaves waiting for Emilia for ten or twelve minutes and still the rain does not ease. Finally, I see her calmly emerging from the parking lot across the way. She is alone. I don’t want to pester her with questions about her disappearance, about why she has come alone. I am prepared for the unbelievable, since I know that Simón is dead and I realise now that I don’t know what happened between them, if indeed anything happened. I gesture to her to explain that it would be impossible for us to have a conversation in Glo-. By the door, there is a menacing sign informing us that the salsa class goes on until 9 p.m.

  ‘Let’s go to Starbucks, then,’ she says. ‘For the Aztecs, time is circular, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be circular for us too. Look around you, the place is full of Mexicans.’

  It’s true: the river has disappeared and a great dark sun now lours above the street, the Fifth Sun of the Aztecs. It was in Starbucks we first talked, that first Saturday we met, before we went to Toscana; time is gradually running backwards, a slow canon like those of Bach, a Musical Offering that leaps backwards in time, in tone, the worm Ouroboros ceaselessly devouring its tail and growing younger; step by step reality returns to its place, plays its last chords here where it played the first, we wander through nothingness with the certainty that it is nothingness and always at the end of the void appears the face of God, the Something.

  I tempt fate:

  ‘Hey, Emilia,’ I say, ‘how is Simón going to know we’re not at Toscana, at Glo- – how will he know we’re waiting for him here?’

  ‘He always knows where to find me. And if he loses me, I know where to find him. We lost each other once. It will never happen again.’

  While we wait, I try to forget that I’m anxious. An unfamiliar feeling of vertigo overtakes me and I try to stave it off with tales like the one I am telling her now. ‘Years ago I had a dream,’ I tell her. ‘I was in a seedy dive bar. In the dream, it was noon. By the window, I saw several women about your age sitting at one end of a long table peering into corners in which other creatures came and went like flickering shadows. The shadows called to the women but could not make them hear. The women tried to embrace the shadows but could not touch them. The bar began to empty out, night ushered in the blaze of morning, the sun stripped to become night, and the women and the shadows went on trying to embrace, went on calling to each other in vain until they occupied my whole memory.’

  I tauten the string. I say:

  ‘As I told you, I eventually wrote that dream but in an even more dreamlike way. In my story you are all the women in that bar and all the shadows are the loved one who returns: Simón. But I don’t see it like that any more. I need to make some changes to those pages. I’ve read the notes you left with Nancy. I went over the transcripts of the trial of the comandantes. I’m going to put the facts back into the reality they came from. Simón is not coming tonight. According to the transcripts, three witnesses saw him murdered—’

  ‘Simón is not dead,’ she interrupts me angrily, as though my words could somehow kill him all over again.

  ‘You told me he was with you, that I’d get to meet him tonight. How much longer are we going to wait for him?’

  ‘It’s not up to me. He’ll do what he wants to do. And I know what I want to do, I want to follow him wherever he goes. I love him more with every day that passes. Without him, I don’t exist.’

  ‘I’d like to meet him. Anyone who can inspire such deep, such enduring love is from another world.’

  ‘Simón is the same as he always was. One, continuous and indivisible, motionless, occupying the same space ever since time is time.’

  Either I’m not hearing what I’m hearing or Emilia is unconsciously quoting Parmenides. I follow the thread of her memories, decide to go with them wherever they lead. I ask her: ‘When did you find him? The last time I saw you, you were still looking for him.’

  ‘Friday, a week ago. W
e spent the weekend alone in my apartment until Sunday night and then we left together. I was afraid of routine, of reality, of the repetition that destroys everything. He didn’t care if life just took its course. He’s – how can I explain this? – on the margins of life, watching as things shift, disappear, are reborn.’

  Then I listen as she tells me what she experienced. She tells the story as I will write it: the meeting at Trudy Tuesday, the journey back to the apartment on North 4th Avenue in the Altima, forgetting the Altima at the Hammond offices, her surprise at discovering that Simón stills loves her with the beauty and the passion he did thirty years ago. ‘Better than it was back then,’ she says, ‘because now he knows how I think, he can anticipate my every wish.’ She tells me about her disastrous wedding night, the joy of her honeymoon, Dupuy’s services to the Eel and everything that followed. Her cowed obedience to her father’s orders, the cowed obedience of the country to every crack of the military whip. She tells me about her mother’s madness, the visits to the old people’s home, Simón’s stay in an old people’s home (perhaps the same one, perhaps another) where he learned the laws of the eternal noon. ‘I have everything I ever wanted now,’ she says, ‘I’m happy.’

  The Amtrak station is a few blocks away. I think I heard the whistle of trains several times while Emilia was talking but now I can hear only the bellowing of a passing train which returns us to the night where we never were. She drops her car keys on the table and says: ‘Give them to whoever you like. To Nancy, to the police. I’ve parked the Altima in the lot just over there, on level two.’

  ‘What about you? What are you going to do?’

  ‘I already told you. I’m happy. That’s all I want.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Simón is waiting for me in a boat by the riverbank. We’re going to sail upriver together. Who knows, maybe we’ll run into Lieutenant Clay, sailing up the river to find Mary Ellis. We’ll fire a harquebus in a salute to Mary Ellis. I’ve always loved happy endings.’

  ‘The river is very low,’ I tell her. ‘A lot of boats have been running aground. If you lean out over the bridge, you can see them. You won’t be able take a boat anywhere now, certainly not a sailboat. The river’s narrow, it’s barely a trickle.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘It will grow broader and deeper just for us.’

  Notes

  1 kaffeklubben: a remote island near Greenland.

  2 Rand McNally cylindrical projections: the ‘standard’ map of the world in which meridians are mapped to equally spaced vertical lines and circles of latitude are mapped to horizontal lines.

  3 Almendra: probably the most famous 1960s and 70s Argentinian rock band.

  4 Taoist encyclopedia: A description of Pangu, the first living being in Taoism. The Mundaka Upanishad describes him: ‘This is the universal Self, the Virat; his head is the shining region of the heavens; his eyes are the sun and the moon; his ears are the quarters of space, his speech is the Veda full of knowledge; his vital energy is the universal air; the whole universe is his heart; his feet are the lowest earth.’ When Pangu died, his breath became the wind and clouds, his voice the rolling thunder, and his eyes the sun and the moon. His hair and beard became the stars in the sky, his skin the flowers and trees, the marrow in his bones became jade and pearls, and his sweat the good rain that nurtured the earth.

  5 How ‘came I in’?: from Ezra Pound: ‘The Tomb At Akr Çaar’ (Faber, 1955).

  6 brainless burlesque dancer: Bataclana (a stripper) – María Estela (Isabelita) Martínez de Perón was a nightclub dancer before she married. General Perón. She took power as acting president after his death and was deposed in the coup of 1976.

  7 Raya morada: this may refer to the Franja Morada – a university-based political movement in Argentina.

  8 ‘El discurso de Ayacucho’: A piece of patriotic rhetoric routinely learned by school children, written by Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1738).

  9 Caracazo (or Sacudón): the name given to the wave of protests, riots and looting and ensuing massacre that occurred on 27 February 1989 in the Venezuelan capital Caracas and surrounding towns. The riots – the worst in Venezuelan history – resulted in a death toll of anywhere between 275 and 3,000 people.

  10 Valle de la Luna: Ischigualasto is a geological formation and a natural park associated with it in the province of San Juan, north-western Argentina.

  11 I want everyone to know: lines from a poem by Julia Prilutzky called ‘Quiero Llevar Tu Sello’.

  12 Montoneros (Movimiento Perónista Montonero): an Argentine Perónist urban guerrilla group, active during the 1960s and 70s.

  13 People’s Revolutionary Army: Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP).

  14 Tiempo de revancha (1981) is a serious, sober film directed by Adolfo Aristarain about the price of remaining silent during the Dirty War; La fiesta de todos, a short documentary directed by Sergio Renán, is a piece of blatant propaganda funded by Videla to hide the ‘disappearances’ by depicting Argentina as a paradise during the 1978 Football World Cup.

  15 Diario del Juicio: the testimony given at the 1985 Trial of the Juntas/Juicio a las Juntas, collected daily and published in newspaper form as El Diario del Juicio (‘The Newspaper of the Trial’) by Editorial Perfil, currently republished online at http://eldiariodeljuicio.perfil.com.

  16 a book by Donald Rayfield: Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (Random House, 2005).

  17 the annoying gaggle of women: the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ who for years campaigned about Argentina’s disappearance.

  18 ‘Hail Mary, most pure’: Ave María purísima is said in the confessional to the priest and is the equivalent of ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned’; the priest’s response being ‘sin pecado concebida’.

  19 José María Muñoz, the commentator for the 1978 World Cup.

  20 Horangel: famous Argentine astrologer.

  21 ‘Hear, mortals, the sacred cry!’: the first line of the national anthem.

  22 Carmona: a character in Martínez’s novel La mano del amo (1983).

  23 ‘La hermanita perdida’ (‘Little Lost Sister’): a poem (later a song) about the Malvinas/Falklands War.

  24 Señor Ga: a character in Macedonio Fernández’s very short fable, ‘Un paciente en disminución’.

  25 The house on the corner . . .: these lines are from a poem by Juan Gelman, ‘La casa de la esquina ya no es un río ni llora’.

  A Note on the Author

  Tomás Eloy Martínez was born in Argentina in 1934. During the military dictatorship (1976–82), he lived in exile in Venezuela where he wrote his first three books, all of which were republished in Argentina in 1983, in the first months of democracy. But it was his later books, including The Perón Novel, Santa Evita and The Tango Singer, that made his international reputation. In 2005 he was shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize, and until his death in January 2010 he was a professor and director of the Latin American Program at Rutgers University.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Perón Novel

  Santa Evita

  The Tango Singer

  A Note on the Translator

  Frank Wynne has won three major prizes for his translations: the 2002 IMPAC for Atomised by Michel Houellebecq, the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Windows on the World by Frédéric Beigbeder, and the 2008 Scott Moncrieff Prize for Holiday in a Coma by the same author. He is also the translator of many other books, including An Unfinished Business by Boualem Sansal and Kamchatka by Miguel Figueras, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.