Emilia was due to map the Pasaje de las Garantías too, and went to see it. It was desolate, empty, grey as the surface of the moon and filled with craters. Maybe the motorway had scared the neighbours away. This was one of the few areas where work had been finished. At either end rose two prefabricated houses surrounded by dying gardens. One was little more than a cave which still stood in spite of the louring concrete pillars. Behind, beneath the sweeping cement curves, in a fantasy version of an old glasshouse, a few stubborn plants continued to compete for their share of oxygen and moisture under metal panels already beginning to rust. She thought she could see the glitter of freesias struggling up through the weeds. She bought a bunch of flowers from a stall on the avenue nearby. She felt a desperate desire to see her mother smile, for some small flame of happiness to spark in her life, a desire for Simón to suddenly descend from an alien sky, for people to dance on the pavements, for anything that would make her grief go away.
After Chela’s wedding, Ethel spent a brief period in the family mansion on calle Arenales. Emilia shut herself up in the bedroom with her, soothed her with Schubert quartets and waltzes from the distant past when she had been courting; she changed her nightdress, put perfume on her, and at dusk she walked with her through the darkened corridors. She was just the same, or perhaps not, but the differences were imperceptible. She stared at her daughter with the same incomprehension, addressed her formally, called her by the names of friends now dead, muttered unintelligible words. When her daughter hugged her, the muscles beneath her fragile skin tensed as though she were a frightened tortoise. It seemed as if nothing mattered to her, as they stepped outside into the sunshine to take her back to the home.
Emilia paid the heavy price that Dupuy had demanded. She lived now in the family home as in another tomb, waiting for her mother’s next visit: these fleeting bursts of happiness were her reward, her consolation. Leaving the apartment in San Telmo vacant was a waste, so she rented it for short-term lets to tourists. She left the furniture there so that she could go back whenever she needed or simply so she could shut herself up there and cry.
There were only a few weeks remaining before the World Cup began. One Sunday, her father insisted that she accompany him to rehearsals for the opening ceremony. ‘We’ll show the world how disciplined we are,’ he said. ‘They need to see us as we really are: tempered steel, a model of piety and order. Forty years ago in Berlin, German athletes had used their bodies to form the name of the fatherland and the swastika emblazoned on the flag. Now, the world will see that the young men of Argentina are every bit a match for those Gods of the Stadium. We shall do exactly as they did, hundreds of boys will spell out the hallowed word A-R-G-E-N-T-I-N-A. It will be a feat, since some of those letters are difficult. The G and the N require at least two somersaults.’ Sometimes, Emilia thought, he talked to her like a dim-witted child, just as he had always spoken to her mother. ‘Argentina, the name spelled out on the pitch with the grenadier marching band marking time. Magnificent, don’t you think? We need to go. The comandantes and their wives will be there for the gymnastic displays, I can’t be seen to be there alone, and they’re fond of you, Emilia. They know about your mother. This is a celebration and women must be present.’
Dupuy had no interest in football but the World Cup, as he tirelessly repeated, was a patriotic crusade. He was already seated on the cloud of this imminent achievement and he had no intention of coming down. He would come home late with foreign magazines and newspapers he had furiously red-pencilled. He did not stay for dinner; his daughter barely saw him. ‘Everywhere, there is an unjustified hatred of us,’ he complained, ‘a vicious campaign against Argentina. What the subversives failed to do with bombs they’re trying to do with poisonous words.’
European magazines published cartoons showing a football surrounded by electrified fences like those in Auschwitz; ridiculed the Eel, dressing him up as Death carrying a scythe. ‘Such disrespect is simply intolerable.’ The doctor was indignant. He dreamed of having the authors of these abuses arrested and watching them being tortured to death. He resented the fact that they were out of reach of his justice. He paid ‘the finest penmen in the country’ to write eulogies for the papers about the peace and happiness that flourished in the country hosting the World Cup, articles intended to bury the calumnies of Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig and the other Marxists who wrote for rags like Le Monde, La Repubblica, Paris Match, L’Express and Il Manifesto. He phoned the journalist who had unsuccessfully portrayed the Virgin Mary for him the previous Christmas and ordered her to visit the offices of the antagonistic magazines and discover what was at the root of this vicious hostility towards Argentina, who had paid these pen-pushers their thirty pieces of silver. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘ask them if they’re basing this on confessions from subversives, tell them it’s all lies, that before they print such garbage they should come and see for themselves that we live in peace and happiness; our doors are always open.’
He had thousands of postcards printed, the postage pre-paid so that children in the schools could write a message he had devised to the footballers who would be visiting. The teachers would dictate the poignant reproachful words: ‘Though you are far away, you dare to judge us. You are prepared to believe the words of criminal subversives who are destroying our country and not the patriotic soldiers risking their lives to preserve something this country is proud of: peace.’ It was the responsibility of the teachers to ensure that the cards were sent and to inform on any pupils who refused to comply. ‘In the new Argentina there is no place for those who stain our history,’ wrote Dupuy in his editorial for La República. The more the World Cup approached, the more passionate his patriotism, his faith in the system, his conviction that the three hallowed words he dreamed of inscribing on the flag – God, Country, Family – were already engraved on what he called the spirit of the nation, or the soul of Argentina, it didn’t matter.
Emilia was bored by the World Cup and it showed. A couple of years later, when Chela and Marcelito Echarri saw her in a brief shot from the film La fiesta de todos, they laughed at the fact that the camera had caught her in the middle of a yawn. She had flu and was coming down with a fever; she would have preferred to take her mother home and lie down next to her, but Dupuy wanted her to accompany him to the final at the River Plate Stadium and she could not refuse.
The match was due to start at 3 p.m.; the whole city was moving in slow motion and the driver from La República came to pick them up at 1.30 p.m. Crowds thronged the streets, blocking access to the stadium; vast human anthills swarmed, swathed in the Argentinian flag, wearing headbands, woolly hats emblazoned with the national coat of arms, wrapped up in blue-and-white scarves, all the trappings of patriotic fervour. Buenos Aires was affected by a madness of euphoria. Two policemen on motorcycles opened the way for them. Hundreds more were stationed around the grounds to look after VIPs. A number of fans jumped security barriers and applauded Dupuy when they recognised him. ‘What a pleasure, what a privilege to have you here for the celebration, Doctor,’ they shouted. Emilia’s father succumbed to temptation, popping his head out the car window to shake hands with the fans. It was difficult to know who was who, they seemed fused like Siamese twins by their frenzy and fanaticism. A woman struggled through the wall and rushed over to him. ‘Doctor, Doctor, you’re my last hope,’ she said, or rather shouted. ‘My daughter was taken away from our house when she was six months pregnant. My grandson has probably been born by now who knows where. Make them give them back to me, Doctor, I can’t go to my grave without seeing her again. Her name is Irene. Irene Cruz. You can do it, Doctor, you can.’ She tried to stroke his hands, the words swallowed up by her sobs. Dupuy did not even look at her. His attention was fixed on the crowds clapping and cheering. The woman held out a card to him as the police lifted her bodily and dragged her off through the milling crowd. Emilia took the card and looked at it – a phone number, two names, an address in Villa Adelina. ‘What are you going to
do, Papá?’ she asked. ‘What do you want me to do?’ said Dupuy and ordered the driver not to stop again. Inside the stadium, he took a seat behind the comandantes; Emilia sat with their wives on one of the stands nearby. She saw her father whisper something to the Eel. The woman’s card trembled in her hand like a living thing and Emilia quickly tucked it into the waistband of her skirt.
Flares erupted around her; the whole stadium was jumping up and down, chanting Argentina! Argentina! She felt herself infected by this fervour, she felt it would be despicable to rush from the stadium to find Irene Cruz’s mother and hug her. Who knew in what pit of hell her daughter and her unborn grandson lay buried while the crowds on the stand chanted Argentina! Argentina! Who knew whether simply approaching this woman might not condemn her to death. A few metres away, Dupuy was smiling, regaling the Eel with stories of intrigue in the high command even as he told the comandantes what they should do and even what they should say on the radio on the day of victory. Around Emilia, everyone in the crowd, even the most anaesthetised, were on their feet, shouting insults at the Dutch team, wrapping themselves in flags and painted bed sheets. ‘Argentina, champions of the world!’ roared El Gordo Muñoz through transistor radios. ‘Great and glorious, Argentina, Hear, mortals, the sacred cry!21’ Emilia struggled from the arms embracing her, took Señora Cruz’s card, tore it to shreds and tossed it into the air to join the rain of streamers and confetti darkening the five o’clock sky.
I was still trying to work out what exactly the eruv was when Emilia asked me to go and see her. Autumn lingered on, it was late November but it was not yet cold. Water was freezing in the lakes of Vietnam, the oases of Libya, but in Highland Park, where the first snows usually fall about this time of year, the defiant warmth of summer refused to leave and the neighbours went jogging in the park in T-shirts. The map of the eruv Emilia had drawn had now been posted on the Internet: Donaldson Park and the Raritan River were outside its boundaries. My friend Ziva pronounced it eiruv, or ieruv, as the Russians do. One of the rabbis in town took the trouble to explain to me that it was a symbolic wall separating public space from private. On the Sabbath, it is forbidden to move things from one to another. Some communities forbid women from wearing jewellery and even sunglasses unless they need to. He gave me an example: on Saturday – Shabbat – it is forbidden to build. To open an umbrella, he explained, is similar to erecting a tent. Consequently, on Saturdays, it is forbidden to move beyond the bounds of the eruv with an umbrella. Highland Park is less than five square kilometres and a large section of the black neighbourhood is inside the eruv because the Almighty belongs to everyone, even those unfortunate enough not to believe in Him.
When I rang her doorbell, Emilia had just recovered from a panic attack and seemed about to have another. I don’t know how she made it down the stairs to open the door. I took her arm and helped her back into the hall. I find anything to do with mental illness distressing, I never know what to do to help. I’m terrified of saying the wrong thing and bringing down the whole fragile thing that is the mind. Emilia had turned on every light in the house. Her body was shaking as though her whole world had come crashing down. She wanted to tell me something but she was stammering so much I couldn’t understand her. I suppose that, if anyone had seen it, my clumsy, frantic attempts to help her would have seemed ridiculous. I brought her a glass of water, asked her if she wanted me to call an ambulance. She drank the water and hysterically told me not to call an ambulance. She sat for a moment saying nothing, hugging her knees to her chest. I had always felt that she was three distinct women: the old woman who showered the cashiers at Stop & Shop with coupons, the woman who was in love with Simón, and the little girl Dr Dupuy had destroyed. All three were there in front of me and I didn’t know which one to talk to. I waited until her breathing was calmer and asked her if she had any medication in the house that would help her sleep. I was going to give her some, stay with her until she fell asleep and see how she was the following day. She told me she had some pills in the bathroom cabinet she kept for emergencies and I went to look for them. There were about ten or twelve pill bottles containing the full panoply of pharmaceutical flora and fauna: Estradiol, a hormone replacement for women post menopause, Benadryl, Lexotanil, a sleeping pill from Argentina, Clonazepam and Vicodin, drugs used to calm anxiety and knock you out. Most of the drugs were dangerous, and there was more than enough for Emilia to commit suicide if she had a mind to. But she was not going to kill herself while she was still waiting for Simón.
Simón, once again, had been the reason for her call. ‘Please, I’m begging you, go into my bedroom,’ she said, ‘see if he’s hiding in there somewhere. I looked in the mirror and I didn’t see myself, I saw him standing there instead. For days now I’ve been working on a map and I get up to go to the bathroom or make a cup of coffee and when I come back the map is full of mistakes, or it’s been completely erased and I can’t start over again.’
‘Maybe you were distracted and you erased it yourself,’ I said. ‘Happens to the best of us. Maybe you made the mistakes yourself and didn’t realise. You’re not taking cocaine or LSD or something like that? You’ve got enough drugs in that bathroom cabinet to stun an elephant.’
‘No, I’ve never been tempted by things like that,’ she said. ‘Maybe later, when I’m too old for anything else. Besides, I almost never make mistakes when I’m drawing maps. It never happens to me at work, why would it happen when I’m here? As soon as I come through the door, I feel like there’s someone else here. Everything is exactly where I left it but nothing is the same. I don’t know if my senses are playing tricks on me and I need to know what you see, what you hear, since your senses are fine.’
‘I’ll go and look at myself in the mirror,’ I said. ‘But don’t put too much faith in me. My senses are shot, too. I think I’m losing my sense of touch, my hearing is going and so is my sight. I wrote a novel twenty years ago in which cats were stealing my character’s senses; by the time he died, he had none left. Now it feels like he’s come back for revenge.’
‘I read that one,’ she said. ‘The character’s name is Carmona22.’
I was pleased she still remembered a book that few people had ever heard of. Besides, I was the least suitable person to bring her back to reality. I asked her whether she saw Simón or whether she thought she saw him.
‘I don’t understand the difference,’ she said. ‘I don’t talk to him, I can’t touch him, but I know he’s there. Ever since I saw him standing in the doorway – that doorway’ – she pointed to the door leading to the bedroom – ‘he hasn’t left, he doesn’t want to leave. He’s saying something to me, but I can’t understand him.’
‘I don’t understand you either, Emilia,’ I said. ‘You need to be clearer in explaining what you remember. When you tell me things, there are blind spots, contradictions, things that couldn’t have happened when you think they happened. I’m completely confused when you talk to me about your mother’s visits to the house on the calle Arenales, about when you moved back from the San Telmo apartment, how many times Chela’s wedding was postponed, about your father’s machinations. Maybe my senses are as damaged as yours. You need to go and see a doctor. I can’t help you. Just like you, I see things that aren’t there, but it doesn’t make me worry for my sanity. There are figures and feelings that are far removed from reality, or they’re part of a reality different from ours. Have you ever been to the Jewish museum in Berlin?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve never been to Germany.’
‘I visited the museum in 2005, and I have no wish ever to go again.’
‘Was it a painful experience?’
‘It was painful in a sense, but that’s not why. I experienced the same unreal sensations you’re talking about. I heard voices, I sat down on a terrace next to my dead father, there were past lives inside me struggling to come out. I’d read somewhere that the museum is an architectural masterpiece, and it is. I can’t explain why, there are lots of bo
oks about it. I don’t want to overwhelm you talking about the angles, the weird vertical planes, the ceilings that seem to be falling in on you, the silences that open and close up as you walk through, but you quickly find yourself in a different reality, one that you feel you could be lost in forever. For years, you’ve lived in exile, moving from place to place, Emilia; you think you know what it is, but you couldn’t begin to explain it, there are no stories, no words in this desolate terrain because everything within you remained outside the moment you crossed the threshold. You might say that at that moment you entered purgatory, if what came before was hell (and it wasn’t, at least for me it wasn’t), if after was paradise, which never came. And when the wandering is over, when you go back to the home you left behind, you think you’re closing the circle, but visiting the museum you realise that the whole journey has been a one-way trip, always leaving. No one returns from exile. What you forsake, forsakes you. To the south of the museum is what’s called the Garden of Exile, forty-nine columns that rise (no, they don’t rise – every verb seems inadequate: rise, extend, stretch away?), forty-nine hollow columns of decreasing height; an oblique vision of life. Out of each column emerges a tree: you can’t tell where the tree comes from, all you can see is the desperate struggle of the branches to reach the light, to meet the sky they once lost. Pity moves you to walk between the columns so the trees will not feel so alone. You walk. The ground is cobbled and sloping, an edge of the world towards which things slide until finally they fall. By the time you’ve taken two steps, you are nowhere, there are no columns, there are no trees, there is no sky, the compass that guided you has disappeared, your reason for existing has been wiped out, you are nothing and you have stopped in a place from which no one ever returns. Exile.’
Purgatory Page 19