Purgatory

176 Pages·2011·1.01 MB·English

by  Tomás Eloy Martínez

PURGATORY

A Novel

Tomás Eloy Martínez

Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne
In memoriam Susana Rotker, ten years after.
. . . what is fleeting remains, it endures.

FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO
‘To Rome Buried in Her Ruins’
Contents

1 Treating shadows like solid things
2 In dream I seemed to see a lady, singing
3 Flame that follows fire as it changes
4 As one who believes and does not, saying: ‘It is, it is not’
5 Fame is nothing but a breath of wind

Notes

A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
A Note on the Translator
1

Treating shadows like solid things

‘Purgatorio’, XXI, 136

Simón Cardoso had been dead thirty years when his wife, Emilia Dupuy, spotted
him at lunchtime in the lounge bar in Trudy Tuesday. He was in one of the
booths at the back chatting to two people she didn’t recognise. Emilia thought
she had stepped into the wrong place and her first impulse was to turn round, get
out of there, go back to the reality she had come from. Fighting for breath, throat
dry, she had to grip the bar rail for support. She had spent her whole life looking
for him, had imagined this scene a thousand times, and yet now that it was
happening she realised she wasn’t ready. Her eyes filled with tears; she wanted
to call his name, run over to his table and take him in her arms. But it took all
her strength simply to hold herself up, to stop herself from crumpling in a heap
in the middle of the restaurant, from making a fool of herself. She could barely
summon the energy to walk over to the booth in front of Simón’s and sit in
silence waiting for him to recognise her. As she waited, she would have to feign
indifference though her blood pounded in her temples and her heart lurched into
her mouth. She gestured for a waiter and ordered a double brandy. She needed
something to calm her, to still the fear that, like her mother, she was losing her
faculties. There were times when her senses betrayed her; she would lose her
sense of smell, become disoriented in streets she knew like the back of her hand,
drift off to sleep listening to silly songs that, she didn’t know how, seemed to be
coming from her stereo.
She glanced over at Simón’s booth again. She needed to be sure it was really
him. She could just see him between the two strangers, he was sitting facing her,
talking animatedly to his companions. There could be no doubt: she recognised
his gestures, the curve of his neck, the mole under his right eye. It was
astonishing to discover that her husband was still alive but what was inexplicable
was that he had not aged a day. He seemed stuck at thirty-three, even his clothes
were from a different era. He was wearing bell-bottoms – something no one
would be seen dead in these days – a wide-collared, open-necked shirt like the
one John Travolta wears in Saturday Night Fever, even his long hair and his
sideburns were relics of a different age. For Emilia, on the other hand, time had
passed as expected and now she was ashamed of her body. The dark circles
under her eyes, the sagging muscles of her face were clearly those of a woman of
sixty, whereas on Simón’s face she couldn’t see a single line or wrinkle. In the
countless times she imagined finding him again, it had never occurred to her that
age would be an issue. But the disparity between their ages now forced her to
reconsider everything. What if Simón had remarried? It pained her even to think
that he might be living with another woman. In all the years of waiting, she
never doubted for an instant that her husband still loved her. He had probably
had affairs – she could understand that – but after the hell they had endured
together, never for a moment had she imagined that he might have replaced her.
But things were different now. Now, he looked as though he could be her son.
She studied him more carefully. It frightened her how inconsistent this
appearance was with reality. He looked half as old as the age – sixty-three – that
surely appeared on his passport. She remembered a photograph of Julio Cortázar
taken in Paris late in 1964, in which the writer – born at the beginning of the
First World War – looked as though he might be his own son. Perhaps, like
Cortázar, Simón had fine wrinkles visible only close up, but his comments,
which she could hear, were defiantly youthful, even his voice sounded like that
of a young man, as though time for him were an endless loop, a treadmill on
which he could run and run without ageing a single day.
Emilia resigned herself to waiting. She opened the Somerset Maugham novel
she had brought with her. As she tried to read, something curious happened.
Coming to the end of a line, she would run into an invisible barrier which
stopped her going on. Not because she found Maugham boring; on the contrary,
she loved his writing. It was similar to an experience she had had watching
Death in Venice on DVD. In an early scene, as Dirk Bogarde sits, troubled, on
the Lido watching Tadzio emerge from the sea, the scene had cut back to the
conversation in Russian – or was it German? – between the bathers and the
strawberry sellers. At first, assuming the director was giving an object lesson in
critical realism, deliberately repeating the holidaymakers’ vulgarities, Emilia
waited for the next scene only for the sequence of Tadzio emerging from the sea,
shaking himself dry, to stubbornly reappear once more to the delicate strains of
Mahler’s Fifth. Two nights later, when she should already have returned the film,
Emilia played the DVD again and this time was able to watch it through to its
poignant conclusion. She was aware that age had made her more dull-witted, but
it was something she felt sure she could rectify with a little more attention.
The voices of the strangers in the booth behind her were irritating. She wanted
to concentrate on Simón’s voice, anything that distracted from it seemed
unbearable. In a restaurant where it was rare to hear anything other than a nasal
New Jersey drawl, the strangers’ approximate English was peppered with
interjections and technical words in some Scandinavian language. They were
talking about Microstation map-making software, a program also used at
Hammond, where she worked. Unwittingly, one of the two began to recite the
clichés every cartography student learned in their first lecture. ‘Maps,’ he said,
‘are imperfect reproductions of reality, two-dimensional representations of what
are in fact volumes, moving water, mountains shaped by erosion and rock falls.
Maps are poorly written fictions,’ he went on. ‘Too much detail and no history
whatever. Now, ancient maps were real maps: they created worlds out of
nothing. What they didn’t know, they imagined. Remember Bonsignori’s map of
Africa? The kingdoms of Canze, of Melina, of Zaflan – pure inventions. On
Bonsignori’s map, the Nile rose in Lake Zaflan, and so on. Rather than orienting
explorers, it disoriented them.’
The conversation shifted from one subject to another, a ceaseless torrent of
words. Emilia remembered Bonsignori’s map. Was she imagining it, or had she
seen it in Florence or in the Vatican? The voices of the two men grated on her
nerves. She could not quite make out their words, they seemed to reach her ears
tattered and ravelled. A sentence that seemed about to make sense was suddenly
interrupted by the roar of a fire truck or the animal wail of a passing ambulance.
One of the strangers, a man with a hoarse, weary voice, suggested they stop
beating about the bush and talk about the Kaffeklubben1 expedition.
Kaffeklubben? thought Emilia. Are they crazy? That tiny godforsaken island to
the north-east of Greenland, that Ultima Thule where all the winds of the world
veer towards perdition? ‘Let’s try and organise the expedition as soon as
possible,’ the gravelly voice insisted. ‘In Copenhagen people think there’s
another island even further north. And if it doesn’t exist, there’s nothing to stop
us imagining it—’
‘Let’s think more about that, let’s think more,’ Simón interrupted them. Emilia
started. Though she recognised his voice, there was little trace of the Simón she
had known in these words. Here was a man who spoke English fluently, who
articulated final consonants – think, let’s – with an English diction beyond the
scope of her husband, who could never even manage to read an instruction
booklet in a foreign language.
What makes a person who he is? Not the music of his words nor his
eloquence, not the lines of his body, nothing that is visible. This was a mistake
she had made more than once, rushing down the street after some man who
walked like Simón, who trailed a scent that reminded her of the nape of his neck,
only to catch up with the man, to see his face and feel she had lost Simón all
over again. Why can’t two people be identical? Why do the dead not even realise
they’re dead? The Simón deep in conversation barely three feet from where she
sat was exactly the same man as he had been thirty years ago, but not the man he
had been ten minutes earlier. Something in him was changing so quickly she did
not have time to catch up. Dear God, could he be slipping away from her again,
or was it her? Was she losing him? Don’t leave me again, Simón, querido. I
won’t leave your side. A person’s true identity is his memories, she reassured
herself. I remember all his yesterdays as though they were today, she said to
herself, and everything he remembers about who I was is still a part of who he is.
Remind him, draw him out, don’t lose him.
Emilia got to her feet, walked over, stopped in front of him and looked into his
eyes.
‘Querido, querido mío, where have you been?’
Simón looked up; held her gaze, smiled, untroubled, unsurprised, said
goodbye to the Scandinavians then turned again and looked at Emilia as though
he had seen her only yesterday.
‘We need to talk, don’t we? Let’s get out of here.’
He offered not a word of explanation, did not ask how she was, what she had
been doing all these years. He was nothing like the polite, attentive Simón she
had shared her life with long ago. Emilia paid for her brandy, slipped her arm
through her husband’s arm and they walked outside.

For years, everything Emilia did had been in preparation for the moment when
she would see Simón again. She forced herself to keep fit, to be beautiful as she
had never been. She went to the gym three times a week and her body was still
limber, firm except around her waist and in her face where she had found it hard
not to put on weight. Since moving to Highland Park, New Jersey, she had
slipped into a regular routine, one that seemed sensible to her: the meals and