Purgatory

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  I first encountered her at Stop & Shop back when it was called Food Town. Before we realised we were both from Argentina and began to greet each other with polite mistrust, my only thought was to avoid being in the same checkout line as her. Not only did Emilia, like most of the older women in town, take her own sweet time squeezing the tomatoes and smelling the peaches, she also drove the checkout girls to distraction with avalanches of vouchers and coupons. The cashier would be bagging up the broccoli and the low-fat ice cream and suddenly Emilia would produce a coupon offering a $2 discount. Usually, she’d try to get a 100 oz tub of ice cream with just one coupon, and when the cashier refused, she’d start to bicker and the war of words would usually end with a supervisor rushing over to sort things out. By which time, of course, everyone else in the line had scuttled off in search of calmer checkouts. Whenever I ran into Emilia at the supermarket, I always made sure to leave before her, even if I arrived after her. She didn’t look like a woman in her mid-fifties. Anyone would have thought she was ten years younger. She was tall, thin, willowy, with that air common to so many Argentinian women of a teenage girl who refuses to grow up. She had a deep tan – the result of hours on a sunbed (there are seven tanning shops in town) and tried to hide her thinning hair with a brittle shell of hairspray. What I most noticed, though, were her eyes, a luminous, almost translucent blue, as with indefatigable curiosity she watched the slow pulse of the world – which in Highland Park moved as slowly as a tortoise. She had small breasts and a shapely ass which emphasised her long legs. She was an attractive woman, and she knew it.

  I met her because I’m interested in cartographers, who are very much like novelists in their determination to modify reality. I got my first insight into labyrinths and old naval maps in the geography department at Rutgers, but since no one there produces historical or comparative maps – which were what most interested me – I was directed to the offices of Hammond on Progress Street in Union, before they moved to Springfield. That afternoon, I spotted Emilia Dupuy in one of the programmers’ cubicles and I realised that she lived in the same town as I did, about half a mile from my house.

  At work, she was a different person. The woman I was introduced to at Hammond Atlas was nothing like the exasperating fifty-something-year-old at Stop & Shop. She was almost the antithesis: calm, obliging, sweet. She wore a pleated skirt that showed off her magnificent legs, her hair was piled into a simple bun that emphasised the graceful curve of her neck. Later, when I knew her better, I dared to tell her that I had never seen her as beautiful as she was that day. I told her I thought she should dress like that all the time, simple clothes, but she was shocked. ‘The woman you met in Union wasn’t me,’ she said. ‘My God, I hadn’t set foot in a beauty salon in nearly a week.’ I didn’t say so, but I’ve always thought that in the beauty salons that line Raritan Avenue – three to a block – women like Emilia allow their natural grace to be stripped away. I’ve seen women come out of these places with hairdos like towers, eyelashes drooping from the weight of mascara, false nails painted with garish designs, all of which – together with their brashly coloured shapeless dresses – would have earned them a role in a Fellini movie if Federico had ever met them.

  Emilia invited me to tea at her apartment on North 4th on Saturday afternoon. I accepted without a second’s thought for the simple reason that I wanted to see the plastic Stabilene sheets on which mapmakers marked out planimetric elements in the 1970s, and to talk to her about ‘scribing’, the process used in making large-scale maps back then.

  The two-family houses I’d seen in Highland Park, rented by students or visiting professors, were invariably sparsely furnished: makeshift bookshelves made of planks and cement bricks, a kitchen table where the computer sat alongside yesterday’s lunch plates, a few chairs, a television and a bed that would not have looked out of place in a monk’s cell. Emilia’s apartment, on the other hand, took up the whole top floor. Maps and plans were strewn everywhere, covering up the rugs and the ruched curtains. She had invited Nancy Frears too to avoid any malicious gossip among the neighbours. While Nancy was setting the table, Emilia excitedly gave me a tour of the apartment’s three small rooms: a bedroom hung with calendars, thermometers and photos of her nieces and nephews sending their love from San Antonio, Texas; a dining room with a small bookcase, a pair of overstuffed armchairs and a drawing table; and a tiny room about six foot by six foot whose focal point was an exercise bike. Opposite the bike was a hi-fi system and a pair of Bose speakers. I spotted albums by León Gieco, Almendra and Charly García between Bach suites and the chamber music of Charles-Valentin Alkan. I could easily imagine Emilia spending hours here, sculpting her legs and toning her abs.

  Before I could persuade Emilia to talk to me about the Stabilene film used in map-making thirty years ago, or allow me to run my fingers over samples of coloured Mylar sheets – orange, yellow, green, midnight blue – I first had to brave the thick tangle of gossip and family tragedy Nancy had amassed on the residents of Highland Park: the screaming matches between the Flemms – professors of electrical engineering – that spilled out onto the street, a juicy tale of adultery and ruinous stock market investments; the scandal provoked by the sermon in which Father Landowski denounced the secret abortions of two Catholic teenagers; the shock imprisonment – for only nine hours – of local policeman Tom Nizmar’s eldest boy for stealing a CD from Barnes & Noble. There was nothing that Nancy did not know, including the exact time I came out onto the porch to pick up the Times and the fact that I was disappointed when it was delivered late on Sundays. I asked how she managed to know so much about people who lived miles away and she informed me that you had only to keep your ears open in any beauty salon to be able to predict – with a tiny margin of error – who was getting married, who having a baby and which businesses in Highland Park were about to go belly up.

  It was Nancy who asked me if I’d ever seen Large Lenny on Main Street. I didn’t know who she meant until she described him. ‘Sure, I know him,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen him walking up and down at all hours like a madman.’ Lenny, she told me, really was mad. He was six foot ten tall and weighed about 370 pounds. He’d burst into elementary-school classes and rail against abortion and euthanasia. ‘I am the way, the truth and the life,’ he’d say. ‘The life that I give in heaven no one can take away on earth.’ Now and again, the police would take him into custody for disorderly conduct, but he was always released within a couple of hours because his constant bellowing of verses from the Gospels terrified the local cops.

  Large Lenny would follow the kids when they got out of school, proclaiming: ‘Be not deceived, children, be not deceived. Many will come claiming to speak in the name of the Father, saying that the end of the world is nigh, but they are liars. Do not listen to them. Listen only to me.’ After school, the kids would always have stale cookies and bits of chalk in their bags and would throw them at Lenny to try to get him to shut up, but Large Lenny would not leave the Scriptures in peace. Nothing could stop him. When night fell and people took refuge in their houses, they could still hear the giant’s supplications over the noise of Passover celebrations, bar mitzvahs, over the din of the television. ‘Come from your lairs, your burrows, and touch me,’ he’d roar. ‘I am not a spirit, because a spirit has no flesh, no bones, and I do, as you can see!’ ‘You’d have to be blind not to see you, lardass!’ they would call from their houses. ‘That’s enough now. Go home to bed!’

  Three or four times a month the mayor’s office would get a petition asking that Large Lenny be committed to an asylum. Nothing ever happened, however, because it would be a drain on public funds and also because his meanderings along Main Street brought in tourists from Princeton and Metuchen. ‘Large Lenny might not be in his right mind,’ Nancy said to me, ‘but he’s gentle as a butterfly.’

  I left before it got dark, just as Nancy was trying to convince me that, with a bit of patience, it was possible to win a fortune playing bingo and the lottery. By t
hen, I had managed to persuade Emilia to lend me some Stabilene sheets and partially completed maps her husband had drawn.

  As she showed me out, she asked if I would mind meeting up now and then for a chat. ‘I can’t remember the last time I heard an Argentinian voice,’ she said. I promised to call her, almost out of a sense of guilt. A week later, I bumped into her outside the Bagel Dish Café opposite the pharmacy and, having nothing better to do, agreed to join her for coffee. Without Nancy Frears around, Emilia turned out to be exactly as I expected: an intelligent woman preoccupied by the misfortunes of the world. She had just read Philip Roth’s novel about Charles Lindberg and offered to show me the house where the hero’s son had been kidnapped in 1932. ‘If you like,’ she said, slipping into the familiar Spanish tuteo, ‘I can introduce you to the nice old man who lives there now. He’s convinced he’s Lindberg’s lost child – he certainly acts like a child.’ ‘What do you mean, a child?’ I asked. ‘Twenty months old,’ she said, ‘the age Lindberg’s son was when he was taken.’

  When Emilia began to tell me her life story, I was writing a novel set in Buenos Aires and the last thing I wanted was to hear anything that would put me off: other people’s memories can stir up private memories which I find distracting. But it was impossible not to be captivated by the skill with which she wove the tangled web of her story; by the measured, confiding tone that implied this was something she would not tell anyone else in the world. Sometimes, if I closed my eyes and followed the story, like a sailboat going where the wind takes it, it was like being alone with a good book because, like Maugham (Emilia had at least ten volumes of Maugham in Penguin Classics), she was a master of concealing the essential in order to reveal it gradually.

  She was an avid reader with a keen intelligence. She could appreciate the similarities between Kafka’s early work and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and gave a detailed account of Guillermo Sánchez Trujillo’s study on the influence of Crime and Punishment on The Trial, which theorised that Dostoevsky’s novel provided Kafka with a template that allowed him to recount the break-up of his engagement to Felice Bauer. Our conversation was a series of endless, aimless stories, but we didn’t care because this was why we were here, to talk about things that would be meaningless to anyone else in the town. I contributed my own share of trivia, mentioning – though it had nothing to do with the conversation – Dante’s influence on Borges’ mature poetry, something that seemed self-evident to me. I was about to explain why when Emilia interrupted me and recited long passages from Infierno and Purgatorio, interweaving them seamlessly with verses from El otro, el mismo and Elogio de la sombra, collections which Borges published just before he turned seventy. I don’t know which Spanish translation of Dante she was quoting, but I know that what she did was a revelation, it made them seem like the work of a single poet. ‘In both of them,’ she said to me, ‘and contrary to what the romantics and the symbolists believe, the state of blessedness and joy can attain an intensity that is more moving than that of suffering.’

  I felt so comfortable in the hour and a half I spent with her, so surprised by her erudition, by the enthusiasm with which she bounded from one subject to another, that I invited her to join me for coffee at Starbucks in New Brunswick the following Saturday. When I called her at the Hammond offices on Friday to confirm, she asked me to swing by and pick her up half an hour earlier. She had something she wanted to show me, she said, and a story she wanted to tell me.

  When I arrived, she was standing waiting for me on the stoop wearing jeans and sneakers with her hair pinned up. Only in that morning light did I notice that her eyes looked tired, her eyelids heavy, as though one half of her was hidden beneath the waning moon of her face.

  ‘You know Loews cinema on Route 1?’ she asked me.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Everyone does.’

  ‘Then you’ll know that there’s a grave in the middle of the parking lot.’

  I was surprised, because I didn’t know, though I park there every time I go to the movies. Sometimes, on summer nights, I drive up to the hill overlooking Raritan and gaze down at the gently flowing river and the lights on the far shore where my house is.

  ‘What grave?’ I asked.

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

  The vast wasteland of concrete behind the cinema stretched out in front of us. I parked next to a squat brick wall with an iron railing running around the top, as unremarkable as the oblique, lukewarm mid-morning sunshine. I had driven past dozens of times assuming it was an electrical substation, or a vent for the cinema’s air-conditioning system.

  ‘This is where they buried Mary Ellis,’ Emilia said. ‘According to legend, beneath her ashes are the ashes of her horse. If you come closer you can see her gravestone.’

  I’d vaguely heard of Mary Ellis at some teachers’ meeting, but always assumed she was a fictional character, someone from some unfinished novel by one of the Brontë sisters. But the delicate marble bust depicted a real woman with a long nose and ringlets in her hair, and underneath, her dates, cut into the stone: 1773–1794.

  ‘Mary Ellis’s diary is in the Princeton manuscript library,’ Emilia told me as we sat down in Starbucks on George Street with our cappuccinos. ‘According to their records, nobody ever bothers to read it. The information about her childhood I’ve managed to find in encyclopedias on New Jersey is not very reliable, but what Mary herself wrote – her story – is as moving as Cathy Earnshaw’s confession in Wuthering Heights. Mary, as she herself says many times, was the man she loved. At eighteen, she became engaged to a young lieutenant called William Clay. Mary was an orphan, she had no dowry and lived with a paternal aunt in a house in New Brunswick. Once or twice a week she would ride down to the riverbank to meet with Clay alone. The townsfolk talked. When the pastor of the local Presbyterian church gave a sermon about couples who outraged decency and courted the wrath of God, a number of accusing faces turned to stare at her. But Mary didn’t think the sermon referred to her. She was about to get married; she was happy. Two weeks before the wedding, Lieutenant Clay asked her to meet him urgently at their usual place by the river. There, he told her that he had been called up to quell a farmers’ uprising in Pennsylvania and was due to ship out that night. “Within the month,” he told her, “I will come back for you; I’ll hoist a yellow shawl on the mainmast and announce my arrival with two shots from a harquebus. Then we shall be able to marry.” As proof of his love, Clay gave her the magnificent black horse he had inherited from his father. A month passed, and then another. News eventually reached New Brunswick that the uprising had been quelled in a matter of hours without a shot being fired and the troops had been given leave. After she heard this Mary would saddle the black horse every afternoon and ride to the clifftop overlooking the Raritan. Her diary begins here, in the first week of her wait. She gives a detailed account of her daily two-mile ride, describes the countryside in rain or fog and her trepidation whenever a ship hove into view.’

  ‘I don’t know much about you,’ I said, ‘but I can’t imagine why you find Mary Ellis so fascinating.’

  ‘There’s no need to imagine. We have one thing in common: neither of us ever saw the man we loved again. Two years later, Mary found out that Lieutenant Clay had married the heiress to a South Carolina plantation. Yet still she went every afternoon to the same place by the river for a meeting with no one. Her diary after this is confused. She was losing her mind. In the autumn of 1794, when the waters of the Raritan rose to record heights, Mary rode out to the clifftop and, with her horse, leaped into the torrent without even leaving a note.’

  ‘She didn’t need to.’

  ‘When her body was found at Perth Amboy near the mouth of the Raritan, Mary was still clinging to her horse, her feet still in the stirrups. No cemetery was prepared to give her a Christian burial so devout hands buried her on the hilltop and her horse with her. The grave was constantly covered with flowers and became a place where young girls would go to tell their tales o
f lost love, so the governor of Jersey declared the plot of land sacrosanct. In the years that followed, the land around it was used as a pig farm, later a restaurant, then a flea market. Now it’s a cinema, though lovers no longer come to visit the tomb. But every time someone stops in front of the grave, they see the image of a woman, scanning the horizon, waiting for her lover to return.’

  ‘So this is the story you wanted to tell me,’ I said.

  ‘No. I wanted to show you Mary Ellis’s grave, but the story I called you about is my own. You said you don’t know very much about me. From that first time we talked in the Bagel Cafe I’ve been thinking I’d like to tell you something more about me. But I don’t know if we’ll have time right now. It’s noon. You need to get back to the university.’

  ‘I’m free until two o’clock.’

  I invited her to split a salad at Toscana, a quiet, discreet restaurant nearby. I regretted the offer almost immediately. Words poured from Emilia in that frantic torrent of those who spend too much time alone. I was afraid I would be bored.

  The wind had picked up; the only people walking along George Street were a few idle students and shop workers finishing their shift. I was overcome, as so often, by a feeling of melancholy at being so far from my own country, in this foreign suburb in which nothing ever happened.

  Within ten minutes, Emilia had filled in the trivial details of her friendship with Nancy Frears, the emptiness of her weekends, her routine of bingo, Mass on Sundays, trips to the beauty salon. Books and films, she told me, had saved her life. She said sometimes she was terrified that, like Mary Ellis, she would lose her mind.

  ‘More than once I’ve woken up in the middle of the night with the feeling that my husband is in the room.’

  ‘There’s nothing strange about that. It happens to all of us. We’re dreaming and when we wake up the dream lingers for a while.’