Purgatory

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  ‘No, it’s more real than that. I feel that Simón is standing by the door to my room, not daring to come in.’

  ‘It’s because you never saw his body. That’s why.’

  ‘Who knows? The courts declared him dead and I did everything I could to kill him inside me. Because he had no grave, I was his grave. Now he wants to leave it.’

  ‘You should buy a cemetery plot for him, even if it’s only symbolic. Bury everything you have of his somewhere.’

  ‘I don’t have any of his clothes or his things any more. All I’ve got is a photo and a wedding ring. I couldn’t bring myself to bury them.’

  ‘Maybe the time has come to let him go . . .’

  ‘I’ve spent years doing everything I can to make him go. I came to Highland Park to escape from the past, and I almost succeeded. I didn’t go back to Buenos Aires, I stopped talking to my parents. Whole days would go by when I didn’t think of Simón once, didn’t even dream about him. The next morning I would feel guilty, but I would also feel a thrill of victory. Since then, he’s come back, little by little. If I just knew where his body was, I wouldn’t have to go through this agony.’

  We had ordered pumpkin soup and tuna salad, but we barely touched the food. Much later I realised that we were so cut off from the real world that it hardly mattered whether we were in Toscana or somewhere else. Emilia seemed desperate to tell her story, though just then she had more questions than answers, more wishes than questions. But her wishes could not be fulfilled, or perhaps they had already been fulfilled without her realising. Nothing is more terrible than to wish for something you believe you can never have.

  ‘It’s all in the past. Don’t torment yourself.’

  ‘I don’t. That’s the worst thing: I don’t feel any pain any more. I’ve grown used to the absence of the only person I ever loved. What’s strange is that I know I’m not the same person since I lost him and yet I carry on as though nothing happened. I feel despicable.’

  ‘You’ve no reason to. Nancy told me you spent fifteen years searching for him.’

  ‘Fifteen? I was searching for him even before I met him. Now I’m waiting for him to come searching for me. At Mass last Sunday Father Flannagan’s sermon was about purgatory. The Catholic Church used to teach that purgatory was a necessary purification for imperfect souls before they could enter paradise, that accepting suffering as an act of love for God and all forms of penitence was purgatory. That’s how things used to be. Not any more. The Church is more tolerant these days, Father Flannagan said. Now, purgatory is seen as a wait whose end we cannot know.’

  All things come to an end, I told her, even eternity. It was a cliché and as I said it aloud it sounded even more clichéd.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Not Simón. Simón is still there at the door to my bedroom. I know it’s him. He wants me to see him, to let him in. I don’t know how to do it.’

  ‘It’s not Simón in the doorway. It’s your love for him that won’t leave you in peace.’

  ‘Simón disappeared one morning in Tucumán. That was thirty years ago,’ she said. ‘For a while I lived out what seemed like a normal life in my parents’ house.’

  From time to time, Emilia got messages from people who claimed to have seen her husband dead in this place or that. She went on drawing maps as though nothing had happened. Nothing seemed strange to her. She herself could have sworn she saw Simón at the Country Show or among the visitors to the Buenos Aires Book Fair. He was her God and, like the God of the Church, he was omnipresent. Sooner or later he would return. She had only to be patient. But she could not stop herself worrying when she received these messages about the life he was living far from her. She would lie awake for days convinced that at any moment he would ring the doorbell and explain why he had disappeared without so much as a word. But he never did come, and over time the physical need she felt to hold him in her arms waned. She became resigned to solitude, to abandonment; she began to forget there had been a time when she felt neither alone nor abandoned.

  I asked where she had looked for him – cities, beaches, bars, hospitals. As she told me, something inexplicable happened to me. It has no bearing on this story but if I don’t mention it I’ll feel as though nothing that happened that afternoon was real. And it was. We were a couple of blocks from the train station and every now and then we’d feel a blast of wind from a passing train. I looked out the window of the restaurant and, in place of the grey shapes of the buildings, the discount clothing store, the university bookshop, the branches of the major banks that had always been there, I saw the gently rolling pampas outside Buenos Aires, with cows lifting their heads to the sky and lowing as though they too were leaving with the train. Emilia went on talking – about the beaches of Brazil, the mountains of Venezuela, the flea markets of Mexico City – and still I saw the pampas there where it had no business being. In that moment I believed that Simón stood in the doorway of Emilia’s bedroom on North 4th Avenue. I was prepared to believe whatever she told me. If I did not believe her, why was I listening?

  ‘The first news of Simón that seemed genuine came from one of my father’s sisters,’ she went on.

  She was no longer looking at me. I felt like one of her maps. On a map you can be whatever you want to be: the pampas, the Amazon rainforest, a ruined city, an imaginary island.

  ‘My aunt said she’d seen Simón at the Ipanema Theatre in Rio de Janeiro where she was working as assistant set designer. She’d gone over to say hello but Simón had run off. As soon as I heard this, I decided I had to go there. I spent six months in Rio going from one theatre to another and then from one map company to another. Nobody had heard of him, the whole story was a sick joke.’

  I asked her whether she had tackled her aunt about it.

  ‘I sent her a letter. She never replied. My sister Chela thinks my father put her up to it, asked her to lie to me to get me out of Buenos Aires. The country was in chaos at the time and I think my father, who’d always been so sure of himself, was afraid that I might become a troublesome witness. The thousands of dead, the concentration camps, the unmarked graves left behind by the military junta were just beginning to come to light and my father had sanctioned every one of those crimes. It was more than that – he did not think of them as crimes. After what we now call the dictatorship took power, my father became a rich man, a very rich man. The junta advanced him loans he never repaid, gave him million-dollar commissions, subsidies for public works that had no useful purpose. For my father, it was constantly raining money. He bought land in some of the most fertile areas of the pampas, luxury flats in Paris, in New York, in Barcelona.’

  ‘Maybe you could move into one of his palaces,’ I said with a sarcasm I instantly regretted.

  ‘I left Buenos Aires with only the clothes I stood up in and what money I’d saved from my job. Later, I found there was money in my accounts that wasn’t mine and I spent it, but only so I could go on searching for Simón. My father owed him that. My father doesn’t know where I am now or what I’m doing. The only person who knows is Chela, but if she ever tells him, I’ll lose my only sister forever.’

  ‘Just now, when you said “what we now call the dictatorship”, I thought you were a collaborator too. I’m sorry. Because what we went through was a dictatorship, the most vicious dictatorship Argentina ever suffered, and God knows we’ve suffered a few. But since you were a victim of it, why do you still refuse to accept they murdered Simón? More than one witness testified as much, it was established at a trial that no one disputes.’

  ‘Because they didn’t murder him. I didn’t believe it when I left for Rio and I don’t believe it now. Simón is alive. It’s been thirty years and he is still alive. I know. I can feel him inside me. The witnesses saw what they wanted to see. If they blew his head off, as they say, how could the witnesses have recognised him? The only person who could have was me. But I didn’t see him. Simón is alive. I know it. When he comes back, he’ll explain why h
e left and everything will make sense. Shall I go on?’

  ‘Sure, go ahead.’

  ‘After the Malvinas War, the dictatorship collapsed. By then, Chela was living in Texas with her husband and I didn’t want to leave my mother all alone in Buenos Aires. The air was thick with old grudges demanding retribution. My father had been one of the junta’s most visible collaborators – though he had also been one of the first to sing the praises of democracy – and he was probably afraid that I would mention Simón.’

  ‘Nobody could have blamed you. Your husband was one of the disappeared. You were a victim.’

  ‘Nobody did blame me. I blamed myself for having been stupid and gullible, for having been a collaborator, in my own way. My conscience wouldn’t leave me alone. My father wouldn’t leave me alone. He would come and stand by my bedside, stroke my shoulder, my hair. He’d never been demonstrative but now suddenly, whenever we were alone, he was overly affectionate. In the end all I felt for him was disgust, pity and disgust. There was nothing left for me in Rio and I missed my mother. I wanted to go back to Buenos Aires to take care of her. I checked the bus timetables – back then it was a twenty-hour trip – and decided to leave as soon as possible when suddenly I got a phone call from Caracas. Some woman I didn’t know asked if I was related to Simón Cardoso. I’m his wife, I told her. “I’m Nurse Coromoto at the Centro Médico La Trinidad,” she said. “Your husband was brought into the emergency department two hours ago suffering from paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. We’ve already given him IV digoxin.” “I don’t understand a word you’re saying,” I interrupted her. “You don’t understand? Simón Cardoso is suffering from serious cardiac arrhythmia. He needs intensive care but claims that he has no money. If no one is prepared to cover the cost of his treatment, we’ll have to send him to a public hospital where he’ll be lucky to be treated at all.” The nurse’s voice was clipped, harsh, urgent. I begged her to admit Simón for forty-eight hours. I would leave immediately, I told her, and I would pay for everything. I’d never even been to Caracas. And I had no money left and was not about to call my father.’

  ‘You must have been desperate.’

  ‘I was, and I couldn’t think about anything except how to get there. By the time I hung up, I was crying. It had been seven years since Huacra and the empty hours and days were finally beginning to be filled, to have a purpose, a direction. I went to Galeão airport at five in the morning and asked at every counter for the quickest flight to Caracas. I found a flight leaving Rio at eleven and connecting in Bogotá and bought a ticket with a credit card I’d never used before and didn’t know how I would pay off. As soon as the banks opened, I went to withdraw the last three hundred dollars I had in my account. I was told I had a balance of five thousand dollars. My father, again. Sooner or later I would have to pay the money back, but at that point I didn’t care how.’

  ‘So your father knew where you were?’

  ‘No. He’d been putting money in my account for months, though I never asked him for anything. He just did it, like he always did. To him, I was just something that bought and spent. Caracas unsettled me. I felt strange, as though I’d just arrived in Luanda or Nauru. The city centre was teeming with hawkers and office workers speaking some sort of onomatopoeic language in which I could only make out scraps of Spanish. In travel agencies and cafes and countless discount shops I asked for directions to the Centro Médico and every time I was sent off in a different direction, to some remote area: Antímano, Boleíta, El Silencio, Propatria. I had so much trouble finding the place I began to wonder if it really existed. I mentioned La Trinidad to an assistant in a clothes shop and she said that she thought there was a big clinic out there that dealt with infectious diseases. I decided to take a chance. I hailed a cab and the driver refused to take me, as did the next four or five taxis. They said that it was too far, that they’d have to drive out through the dark hills. When I finally did manage to persuade a driver, I realised how dangerous it was. La Trinidad is about fifteen kilometres from the Plaza Bolívar, at the end of a tangle of winding streets perched on a cliff overlooking a ravine. The taxi’s engine coughed and sputtered, but it kept going. By the time we arrived it was almost midnight. The duty nurse took pity on me; she checked the computer for patients recently admitted or discharged. No one named Simón Cardoso appeared on the list and she went back several years.’

  ‘It was a hoax. Like Rio.’

  ‘I didn’t think so at the time. At the time I didn’t even realise that Rio had been a set-up. I hadn’t had anything to eat for hours and I fainted. When I came round, I asked for Nurse Coromoto. The only person by that name who worked at the clinic was in the accounts department. I assumed I’d come to the wrong hospital. It was the logical explanation. Why would anyone go to the trouble of phoning me from Caracas in the middle of the night to tell me the one lie that could persuade me to leave Rio. What difference did it make whether I was in Brazil or Venezuela?’

  ‘Your father again. Do you know why he was doing it?’

  ‘No. Maybe to torment me, to keep me away. He didn’t trust me.’

  Sitting in Toscana listening to Emilia it seemed to me she was three distinct women, first, the woman who was gravely telling me about her tragic past, dwarfed by her father’s looming shadow but determined not to be cowed, not to allow this dark force to destroy her will to survive. Next, the woman who wore white-and-purple-patterned false nails that made her slender fingers look unspeakably vulgar. And a third, who complemented the other two – the first perhaps more than the second – an intelligent woman who would recite the poems of Gonzalo Rojas and John Ashbery, who recited Marianne Moore’s zoological creatures drawing out the words until they became disconnected from reality, until they were no more than words: we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat . . . a tireless wolf under a tree.

  ‘It’s easy to get lost in Caracas,’ I said to her. ‘When I lived there, there were lots of clinics and neighbourhoods called Trinidad: Lomas de la Trinidad, Hacienda de la Trinidad, Trinidad Santísima.’

  ‘I found that out in the weeks that followed. I rented a cheap apartment in Chacaíto, the only part of the city with sidewalks and cafes. Every morning at seven o’clock I’d set off on my tour of hospitals and clinics looking for Simón. I didn’t always manage to get help. It was just before Christmas and people were in no mood to hear about other people’s misfortunes. I told my story to the nurses and the doctors, but they barely listened. Thousands of Argentinians had come to Caracas before me, all telling the same story. After a few weeks it occurred to me to print flyers with Simón’s photo and stick them up in the kiosks around Sabana Grande in case someone recognised him. The few people who got in touch wanted me to give them money, wanted me to come alone. They were con artists pure and simple. I was taken in by some of them and frittered away the last of my savings.’

  ‘You could have got a job. It was possible to get work back then.’

  ‘I did, I applied to be a cartographer with the Venezuelan Oil Company and they gave me the curious job of naming the intricate network of roads carved into the hills around the city like an amphitheatre. I spent my mornings walking up endless flights of steps, losing myself in the winding lanes that led to barns or sawmills, to storehouses of cardboard, carefully noting down the nicknames given them by locals, mostly names related to local characters: Iván el Cobero, Paloma Mojada, Coño Verde, La Cangrejera, things like that. What had been a series of dotted lines, an undocumented circulatory system, I drew together with a skein of words. I divided my time between this hare-brained task and my trips to the hospitals. I could feel Simón slipping through my fingers, but at night, as soon as I fell asleep, he appeared in my dreams. I was reading a lot of Swedenborg at the time, and took to heart his idea that human beings are merely “cyphers”, a vestige of the writings of God which allows us to be other, to be elsewhere, if God should decide that what He has written means something different. More than once I went to the Cinem
ateca de Caracas to see Hitchcock’s Vertigo, with Kim Novak as a ghost so carnal that you accept her death precisely because it is an oxymoron. But the true corpse in the movie is obviously James Stewart, a man who loses the woman he loves not once but twice. I couldn’t bear to be Stewart, I couldn’t bear to lose Simón a second time. I would have been better off forgetting, but I realised that I would never be able to forget. I had grown used to being alone, to fending for myself, to ignoring the sexual innuendos of the men of Caracas who didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word “no”. Like I said, I lived only to find him.

  ‘In the Cinemateca, a film critic came up to me on the pretext of talking about Hitchcock. He was the first man I’d found attractive since Simón, the only one I might have fallen in love with. When he looked at me, it was as though I was the only woman on the planet; he devoured me with his eyes, not sexually but with a genuine desire to discover who I was. He had that cinnamon-coloured skin so many Venezuelans have, and pale, piercing eyes. After the screening of Vertigo we went to the Ateneo de Caracas for coffee. He was careful and precise in his words. He pointed out to me the wealth of clues Hitchcock gives in the first scene that Scottie – James Stewart’s character – is impotent: the way he uses his cane, the detail that he hasn’t had a girlfriend for two years. We talked for over an hour. When we left, he invited me to go to the beach with him the following Sunday – something that in Caracas is part of a game that inevitably leads to sex – and I was on the point of accepting. In the end I told him I’d think about it and call him. When I got back to my apartment in Chacaíto, I realised I was about to make a mistake. I would have liked to be able to spend time with him, to feel less alone, but his advances would have become more persistent, in the end we would have quarrelled. There was nothing natural about my ascetic life, yet I felt completely at peace. I thought I was avoiding men for fear that Simón would reappear just as I was about to start a new relationship, but it wasn’t that. The truth was that I wasn’t available to anyone but him. Losing him had not only quenched my sexual desire, it had snuffed out all my desires. I would not be myself again until I found him. I didn’t go back to the Cinemateca and for weeks I didn’t answer my phone or go back to the beach. I don’t know how this guy found out I worked for the state oil company, but he ended up leaving me a slew of messages. Over time, the fear I might run into him subsided and I took to going back to the beach though only to more remote beaches where I thought it was less likely that I would run into him. In Oricao or Osma, I roamed wild untamed paths with the singer Soledad Bravo, who would sing as the sun was sinking into the sea, in a voice as huge and golden as the papayas.’