Purgatory

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  She gets up at five o’clock so she can catch the 5.35 express from New Brunswick. She doesn’t turn the light on but slips away silently, hurriedly scribbling a note that she leaves on the pillow next to Simón. ‘I’ll be back in time for breakfast. Get some sleep. I love you.’ As she crosses the bridge over the Raritan and stares out at the ocean, she can just make out a purple glow appearing over the horizon and she imagines herself, like Mary Ellis, staring out through the window at nothing. She feels a slight twinge in a tooth she had filled a few weeks ago and remembers she needs to make another appointment to see her dentist. She’ll do it on Monday. Monday without fail.

  Monday, she thinks again. Suddenly, the week is hurtling towards her with the terrible weight of reality. Every time she moves away from the present, time fills up with half-finished images that need to be completed and the responsibility fills her with dread. There are no cars, no trucks on the road, all the lights are out in the buildings and dawn creeping over the horizon is enough for the weight of time to torment her. Monday, she says once more. Monday. When she met Simón in Trudy Tuesday, the weekend seemed to stretch out endlessly, but now in the early hours of Saturday morning, every second seems fleeting. She wishes she could stop time, chain it to the wall in shackles. She has not even thought about whether her husband needs to be at work too. She doesn’t know what mapping company he works for, didn’t think to ask him for an address, a phone number. Only now does she realise how fragile her happiness is, how slender the thread by which her life hangs.

  The station is deserted and the train, as always, arrives on time. A fine mist hangs over the trees. Although the leaves are turning yellow and orange as they do every autumn, squalls, sudden thaws, and brusque heatwaves presage further storms and hurricanes. Natural disasters hold a mirror up to this country which has sown so much hatred, so many wars, thinks Emilia. In the past six years, the culture of the United States has rolled back half a century to the shadows of Senator Joe McCarthy and Tricky Dicky Nixon. It’s not worth living here any more.

  There are two elderly women and a young black man in her carriage. Barely have they leaned their heads against the window than they fall asleep. Emilia, however, is determined to face every second of the day with her eyes wide open, gazing at the sweetness of her life. As the trains rolls through Elizabeth, she watches the church steeples carving out a space in the greyish light of morning and although she has never taken the train at such an early hour she feels as if she has lived this scene before. It is as if the sleeping boy, the sleeping women have been here in this shadowy nook forever, as though everything that has happened in the sixty years she has lived has been a preparation for this inconsequential moment. Perhaps I am already dead, Emilia thinks, and what I am seeing is my hell or my purgatory. Every human being, she thinks, is condemned to linger forever in a sliver of time from which he can never escape. Her fragment of eternity, then, is here with three sleeping strangers on this suburban commuter train at 5.50 a.m.

  The feeling fades as they draw into Newark station. She needs to hurry if she is to catch the number 70 bus out to Livingston Mall in Springfield. She has not made this fifteen-minute journey often. The sordid suburban scene depresses her, the sadness of people at dawn, the loneliness of the trees, the certainty that nothing will ever happen here because – she thinks – there are places so devoid of meaning that even the most insignificant events cannot blossom there. The last straw is that, when she finally arrives at the office, there is a hearse blocking the Altima. She rings the bell for Hammond but no one answers. It is a quarter to seven and the security guard is not answering. How inconsiderate. It’s Saturday and she could be lying in bed with her husband but for the unexpected call the night before. She arrives punctually as requested, rings the bell insistently. When she turns, she sees a giant of a man in a heavy coat appear from nowhere and come slowly across the parking lot to the limousine.

  ‘Morning,’ he says.

  ‘Good morning,’ she replies. ‘It’s about time.’

  The giant starts up the hearse and drives off without a word. Emilia would have liked to ask him what he was doing here but didn’t dare. As a child, she shrank from undertakers and they still terrify her. All that matters is that her car is now free and she can take Route 22 back. The autumn sun rises quickly. She remembers leaving the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the freezer last night, the endives and the smoked salmon on the table. Dinner was ruined, but she doesn’t care. The happiness she feels is venal, simoniacal, yet it compensates for all her losses. In buying heaven she has sold hell. But she needs to come back to earth if she is not to go on losing. So delirious with love is she that she even forgot to ask her husband what he wanted for breakfast. She is sure that, like her, he will want black coffee and toast.

  In her North 4th Avenue apartment, the silence is abysmal, unbroken even by the startling hiss of the lights as she turns them on.

  ‘Are you awake, amor?’

  Simón is not in the bedroom or in the kitchen. Perhaps when he woke he didn’t realise where he was and left. What if he’s forgotten her? She sometimes forgets things she did only yesterday while still remembering her childhood. She knows this happens to people as they grow older and Emilia is now on the slippery slope – very soon she’ll be eligible for a senior’s discount on the train and at the cinema – but Simón is barely thirty-three and his memory is unscathed.

  A streak of light appears under the bathroom door. It comes from the window that overlooks the house next door. Timidly she calls out: ‘Are you in there, Simón?’ Her husband immediately replies: ‘Yeah, I’m here. I was wondering where you’d got to.’

  He is wearing the pyjamas he wore on their trip to Tucumán. He must have kept them in his case all these years. Maybe he’d like to go with her to Menlo Park and buy some new clothes. She hums the opening bars of The Köln Concert as she makes coffee. She feels a rapturous joy flow through her body, the same electrical trill she felt the day they were married. When Simón opens the bathroom door, she rushes over to kiss him.

  ‘I left my car over at Hammond,’ she tells him, ‘the security guard was right. It’s a beautiful morning. Let’s go somewhere, amor, somewhere far from this world.’

  Simón concentrates on his rye-bread toast and his coffee. He reaches over and strokes Emilia’s hand as it hovers in the air.

  ‘Have you heard of the eternal noon?’ he asks.

  ‘Once, a long time ago,’ says Emilia. ‘I’ve forgotten what it means.’

  ‘I learned about it in the old folks’ home.’

  ‘You were in an old folks’ home?’

  ‘Seven years. I worked there. I’ll tell you about it some other time.’

  For Simón to talk about some other day, about a future with her, assuages her anxiety at the mention of the retirement home. Ever since they put her mother in one, the most expensive they could find, she has never been able to forget the experience of that spectral kingdom where no one spoke or dreamed or existed.

  ‘A retirement home,’ she echoes. ‘Seven years. I can’t believe you were a resident.’

  ‘I worked there, I told you. I’m too young to be a resident.’

  ‘And that’s where someone told you about the eternal noon.’

  ‘It was a writer; he used to pace up and down the courtyard with a slate. He’d published novels and books of short stories, he’d been famous in his day, at least that’s what he said. He showed me a drawing of a circumference touched by a tangent that extended off the edges of the slate. When the other patients were sunning themselves in the courtyard, the man with the slate would say: come with me now to the eternal noon. He explained that the circle was time, constantly revolving and the point of contact with the tangent represented the unmoving present. Our gaze tends to focus on that which moves, but if for a moment we were to stop and contemplate the present, noon would be eternal. The scenery changes and the seasons pass, the writer used to say, but the window that frames the scene is alwa
ys the same.’

  ‘I think I read something like that somewhere, in Schopenhauer or Nietzsche: The sun itself burns without intermission, an eternal noon.

  ‘I don’t know it. I stayed there in the courtyard, looking after the guy with the slate until the sun set. Night fell and we didn’t notice. For us, it was still noon.’

  ‘You didn’t move?’

  ‘We couldn’t move. If we moved, time would move too.’

  ‘Wasn’t it torture,’ Emilia says, ‘that stasis?’

  ‘Quite the opposite. The stasis was life. Even eternal noon comes to an end, just as waiting does in purgatory. You linger there for eternity, but on the far side of eternity is paradise.’

  ‘If something ends, it’s not eternal.’

  ‘It’s all a question of geometry. The guy with the slate and me, we literally escaped along the tangent. While the wheel of time kept turning, we were outside. As Zeno writes: What moves does not move in the place in which it is or in the place in which it is not. We were motionless in the present and yet moving forward. Towards what, we didn’t know, and that was the best thing about it: the freedom to be suspended, not waiting for anything or anyone. You see where I’m heading?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To you. It was a return. We could die now and it would be all right.’

  ‘Why? I don’t want to die any more.’

  3

  Flame that follows fire as it changes

  ‘Purgatorio’, XXV, 124

  Though Simón has changed in subtle ways, imperceptible to those who don’t know him, Emilia loves the man he was and the man he is now equally. It is both men’s lips that kiss her, both men’s breath which, having kissed her, heave a gentle sigh. Her husband moves with the wariness of a cat, as though expecting one of the two bodies to overtake the other.

  Sometimes, both are one, as they were the night before when he made love to her with a new urgency, or this morning when he told her the story of the writer and his slate. But then, he lapses into silence, watching her, smiling at her with an unfamiliar face as though he had to bring the smile from some faraway place. At such times she does not know what to do with the love she feels for both men, nor which of them she should go to first. She realises that after thirty years her husband is not the same. But it worries her that the man he was before has retreated into this other creature she hasn’t been able to get to know. The Simón who disconcerts her can predict her desires, knows her thoughts before she does, understands the tensions of her body much better than the first. One is the obverse of the other, or the other way round, and she does not want to choose. Chance has bestowed on her unexpected gifts and she has no reason to scorn those that are to come. She deserves every possible gift as recompense for what she has suffered. And more than anything, she deserves the love of her former husband and the pleasures she has discovered with the present husband lately arrived. I’m lucky, she thinks. She does not dare to say the words aloud because happiness attracts envy and hard on the heels of envy comes misfortune.

  She leaves Simón skipping from one piece of music to another, from Mozart’s sublime Mass in C Minor to that stupid song by Frankie Valli they heard every day during their honeymoon, ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’, and goes to take a shower. At dawn, as she drove the Altima back from the Hammond offices, she remembered that on both sides of the Delaware are little towns full of antique shops where they could lunch al fresco.

  She puts on a pair of jeans, a polo-neck sweater and the jacket she wears on days out. She comes up behind her husband, wraps her arms around him and kisses the back of his neck which smells of the cheap aftershave he used to wear when they were dating. His clothes are the ones he was wearing yesterday. And, apart from his long sideburns, there’s not a trace of stubble on his face. She takes his hand and leads him downstairs.

  ‘Amor, I’d like to show you the little town where we’re going to live.’

  The weather forecast on the radio claims the temperature is going to remain mild until nightfall. The sky is cloudless, the humidity low. On Saturday mornings, couples stream along Main Street towards the synagogues, never moving outside the limits of the eruv. The heathens of the town make the most of their day off to go shopping at the supermarket and take their laundry to the Korean dry-cleaner. ‘What will we do if we run into Nancy Frears?’ Emilia asks. She has told her husband about this suffocating friendship which she is thinking of breaking.

  ‘We go over and say hello, surely. I’m bound to meet her sooner or later. Life goes on.’

  Raritan Avenue is deserted. The doors of Jerusalem Pizza and Moshe Food are closed – no one ever believes that Highland Park has stores with such names, but anyone can check – they’ve pulled down the shutters of Shanghai Kosher and Sushi Kosher. The place that sells Israeli gifts and the stores that sells bridal gowns (there are two, both thriving) show no signs of life either. It is Saturday morning and the devout inhabitants never cease to magnify the Lord. Emilia is surprised, however, that there are no cars, since Main Street is usually bumper-to-bumper. She does not even see anyone at their window. From time to time, a delivery truck stops at the traffic lights. It’s 10 a.m., the sun is shining, but there’s nobody to realise it. Only the squirrels coming and going among the trees, gathering up the last nuts of the fall.

  ‘We’re going to New Hope,’ says Emilia. ‘I parked the Altima on Denison Street a couple of blocks from here.’

  Simón does not answer. Why would he say anything, if he simply wants what she wants?

  They get to the Delaware Bridge just before noon. On the western bank, in Lambertville, there is a short street of antique shops. People are buying ramshackle chairs, ornate mirrors with faded paint moulding, umbrellas with wooden handles, cradles decorated with angels blowing trumpets. There is a cluster of curious onlookers in front of a shop window displaying replicas of an imaginary Mayflower and other heroic ships in bottles sealed with wax. They cross the bridge on foot. On the eastern bank of the river, New Hope, its twin, shares the same illusions as Lambertville. The brick mansions on the corners are proud to have weathered two centuries: 1805, proclaims the foundation stone on the post office; 1784 is carved on Benjamin Parry’s house. In the window of a store selling mirrors, Emilia contemplates her reflection in the bevelled-glass door.

  The reflection in the glass makes her conscious of her age, the heavy, slightly hunched shoulders, the broad matronly hips that refuse to be tamed by hours in the gym. She would like to go on standing here next to Simón and freeze this moment forever. But she does not have the courage to face the image of herself as an old woman, which is why she decided at the last minute not to bring a camera.

  In the Italian restaurant overlooking the river, she has reserved a table by the window. They take their seats; she orders a bottle of coarse house Chianti and a single plate of pasta. The glimpse of her reflection, slightly overweight, has convinced her to go back on the diet she gave up three weeks ago, vowing this time to be strict with herself. Simón cannot tear his eyes from the river. The sun, shining full on him, blurs its contours. Moves over his body like a huge eraser.

  She too gazes at the current moving languidly towards the same blind space which waits ahead for her, folding itself into something that does not know whether it is darkness or light, leaving the bank where everything happens.

  Shortly after Simón’s disappearance, Emilia’s mother, in her own way, also disappeared. Waking one morning she saw the doctor knotting his tie in the mirror and did not recognise him. She asked him who he was, told him to get out of her room.

  ‘Ethel, querida, I’m your husband,’ Dupuy told her. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Surely you can see I am still in my nightdress, señor? Could you please leave? I’m a married woman.’

  Her father called Emilia at the Automobile Club and ordered her to come back to the house immediately. He did not know what to do with his wife and it seemed to him that, before he called the doctor, it would
be prudent to wait for the symptoms to manifest themselves more clearly.

  ‘Emilia is going to come and take care of you, Ethel,’ he told his wife, kissing her forehead. ‘I’ve got meetings all morning.’

  ‘Thank you, señor. I don’t need anyone to take care of me. As soon as you’ve gone, I’ll get up.’

  When Emilia arrived, her mother was still in bed. She did not recognise her daughter either, but she easily accepted Emilia’s offer to bring her a glass of milk and some biscuits from the kitchen. Seeing her return with the tray, her mother reacted oddly, greeting her again as though she had just arrived.