Purgatory (2 page)

At Hammond, she had forty minutes for lunch, though half an hour was usually more than enough. The other cartographers brought sandwiches and ate in the empty offices, amusing themselves toying with vectors, creating imaginary rivers that flowed down Central Park West, railway lines that ran along the New Jersey Turnpike between exits 13A and 15W. She watched them move their homes to distant locations, to the shores of temperate seas, because, if he chooses, a cartographer can distort the way of the world.

When she was twelve, she too had drawn relief maps of cities, adopting a bird’s-eye view. Maps in which houses were flattened, the ground was level. She dreamed up Gothic cathedrals, cylindrical mountains with slopes sculpted by the wind into curves and arabesques. She transformed broad shopping streets into Venetian canals, with tiny bridges arching across the roofs; created unexpected deserts dotted with cacti in church gardens, deserts with no birds, no insects, only a deathly dust that desiccated the air. Maps had taught her to confound nature’s logic, to create illusions here where reality seemed most unshakeable. Perhaps this was why, having hesitated between literature and architecture, when she finally got to university she had felt drawn to cartography, in spite of her difficulty understanding Rand McNally cylindrical projections
²
and remote sensing using microwaves. As a student, she proved a skilled draughtswoman but a poor mathematician. It took her nine years to complete the course which Simón, whom she was to marry, finished in six.

She met Simón in a basement on the avenida Pueyrredón where Almendra
³
, a local rock band, played their hits – ‘Muchacha ojos de papel’, ‘Ana no duerme’, ‘Plegaria para un niño dormido’ – to their adoring fans. The moment Emilia’s fingers brushed Simón’s by chance, she sensed that she would never need any other man in her life since all men were contained within him, though she did not even know his name, did not know if she would ever see him again. This chance brush of fingers signified warmth, completeness, contentment, the sense of having felt a thousand times what she was actually feeling for the first time. On this stranger’s body was written the map of her life, a representation of the universe just as it was set down in a Taoist encyclopedia
⁴
two centuries before Christ. ‘The curve of his head is the vault of heaven, his delicate feet are the lowest earth; his hair, the stars; his eyes, the sun and moon; his eyebrows Ursa Major; his nose is like unto a mountain; his four limbs are the seasons; his five organs, the five elements.’

After they left the gig, they wandered the streets of Buenos Aires aimlessly. Simón took her hand so naturally that it was as though he had always known her. They arrived, exhausted, at a bar only to find it was closing up and it took them a long time to find another one. Emilia phoned her mother a couple of times to tell her not to worry. They were unsurprised to find they were both studying cartography and that both thought of maps not as a means of making a living but as codes which allowed them to recognise objects by means of symbols. It was a rare thing in young people, and they were barely twenty-five, but they were at an age when they did not want to be like others and were astonished to discover they were like each other. They were also surprised to discover that even when they said nothing, each could guess the other’s thoughts. Though Emilia had nothing to hide, she felt embarrassed at the idea of talking about herself. How could she explain she was still a virgin? Most of her friends were already married with children. There had been boys at school who had fallen for her, two or three had kissed her, fondled her breasts, but as soon as they had wanted to take things further, she had always immediately found something that repelled her: bad breath, acne, greasy hair. Simón, on the other hand, felt like an extension of her own body. Already, on that first night, she would have felt comfortable undressing in front of him, sleeping with him if he had asked. The thought did not even seem to have occurred to him. He was interested in her for what she said, for who she was, though she had barely told him anything about herself. He seemed eager to talk. He had dated a couple of girls in his teens, mostly because he felt that he should. He had not made them happy, nor had he been happy until, three years earlier, he had found a love he had thought would last forever.

‘We met the same way you and I met,’ he said. ‘We were at an Almendra concert in the Parque Centenario, and when Spinetta sang “Muchacha ojos de papel”, I gazed into her eyes and sang the chorus to her: “
Don’t run any more, stay here until dawn
.” ’

‘You should always use that as a chat-up line.’

‘Over time the song lost its charm; these days I think it sounds corny. But it worked with her. Everything between us was perfect until we decided to move in together. We’d been thinking about it for months. It would have saved us both a lot of money.’

‘You didn’t want to do it just to save money.’

‘Of course not. We were soulmates, at least that’s what I thought. We were working in the same office, drawing maps and illustrations for newspapers. Graphic artists were pretty well paid at the time. My family lived in Gálvez, a little town between Santa Fe and Rosario, and hers were from Rawson in Patagonia, so we were both alone here in Buenos Aires. Neither of us had many friends. Then one day her father called and asked her to come home. Her older sister had cancer – Hodgkin’s lymphoma – and she’d had a relapse. She was weak from the chemotherapy and needed someone to look after her. I went to the bus station with her; she cried on my shoulder right up to the minute she had to get on the bus. I cried too. She promised she’d call as soon as she arrived, said she’d be back in two or three weeks, as soon as her sister’s course of chemotherapy was finished. I felt devastated, it was like my whole world had crumbled. She didn’t call the next day, I waited a whole month and she didn’t call. I was desperate to see her, but I didn’t know what to do. Back then, Rawson seemed so remote it might as well have been on another planet. I couldn’t bear to be alone in my tiny apartment. I spent most of the time wandering the streets, reading in cafes, walking until I was exhausted. All this was during the first weeks after Péron came back from his long exile; there were marches and demonstrations all the time. I got so depressed that, when the cafes closed, I didn’t know what to do. I was so preoccupied I started making mistakes at work. They would probably have fired me, but there was nobody else in the graphics department. In the end, I couldn’t bear the silence any longer so I went to the telephone exchange on the corner of Corrientes and Maipu intending to call every single family in Rawson with her surname. As it turned out there were only six, but none of them had ever heard of her. This seemed weird, because Rawson is a small town, and everyone pretty much knows everyone else. I waited another month, but still there was nothing: no letters, no messages, nothing. In the end, I decided to ask for time off work to go to Patagonia. I figured that once I got to Rawson I’d have no trouble finding her. I took the bus – a twenty-hour journey along a flat deserted road that somehow seemed to symbolise my fate. The minute I arrived, I started searching for her. I went to the hospitals, talked to oncologists, checked the lists of patients who had died recently. No one knew anything.’

‘It breaks my heart just listening to you,’ Emilia said.

‘That’s not the worst. Every night I’d tour the bars, I’d go in, sit down, order a beer and play “Muchacha ojos de papel” endlessly on the jukebox in the hope that the song would make her appear. One night, I told the whole story to the guy behind the bar, I showed him the photo of her I kept in my wallet. I think I saw her in Trelew, he said. Why don’t you try there? Trelew was a slightly bigger town about fourteen kilometres west and the people there seemed more wary. I visited all the places I had in Rawson, but this time I also asked in the prisons. I don’t know how many times I made that tour in every town in the surrounding area, in Gaiman, Dolavon, Puerto Madryn. When I got back to Buenos Aires, I was sure that she’d be there, waiting for me. I never saw her again.’

‘You’re still waiting for her.’

‘Not any more. There comes a moment when you finally resign yourself to losing what you’ve already lost. You feel as though it’s slipping through your fingers, falling out of your life, you feel nothing will ever be the same again. I still think of her, obviously, but I don’t wake up in the middle of the night any more, worrying that she’s lying somewhere ill, or dead. Sometimes I wonder if she really existed. I know I didn’t dream her. I still have a blouse of hers, a pair of shoes, a make-up bag, two of her books. Her name was Emilia too.’

Emilia and Simón were married two years later. Simón gave up working for the newspapers and joined the map-making department at the Argentina Automobile Club where Emilia had been working for some months. They were happy, and happiness was exactly as she had imagined it would be. They talked easily about things that would have made other couples uncomfortable, and upon this mutual trust they built their home life. If she did not discover the same intense pleasure in sex she had heard her friends talk about, she said nothing, assuming that this too would come in time.

Only after Simón disappeared on a trip to Tucumán did she begin to feel racked with guilt that she had not made him happy. She felt painfully jealous of the other Emilia, for whom Simón was perhaps still searching. There were nights when she woke up with the feeling that her husband’s whole body was inside her, sounding her deepest depths, until it reached her throat. It was a pleasure so physical it made her weep. She would get up, take a shower, but when she went back to bed the spectre of the beloved body was still there, emblazoned within her.

Finding him again thirty years later unsettled her. In the past, when she had still been searching for him, she imagined that when she found him, they would quickly slip back into their old routine and carry on with their lives as though nothing had happened. But now, a sort of abyss separated them, a chasm made deeper by the fact that Simón had not aged a single day while she bore the full weight of her sixty years.

Emilia had felt no sense of foreboding when she got up that morning. She liked to lie in bed, to stretch languidly, to linger for a while before heading out to work. It was the best part of the day. After she showered, she would carefully apply her make-up, despite knowing that she was doing it for no one. As the day wore on, the lipstick would fade, the mascara fall from her lashes in tiny flecks. At least once a week she went to a beauty salon to have a new set of sculptured nails applied. She had replaced the previous nails – an orange and violet mosaic pattern – two days earlier and the new ones had a delicate pattern of blue wavy lines. She always breakfasted on toast and coffee, glanced at the headlines in the
Home News
. Her only friend was Nancy Frears, a librarian at Highland Park. Chela, her younger sister, lived in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and their three children, and though they called each other on birthdays and at Thanksgiving, they hadn’t seen each other for years. A couple of summers earlier, when Emilia had had her hernia operation, it had been Nancy, not Chela, who stayed with her, helped her shower, tidied the apartment. She could, of course, have found friends who shared similar interests, but she was loath to change the life she lived. A couple of geographers from Rutgers University she sometimes ran into on the train she took to Manhattan had invited her to go to the movies or to dinner. She enjoyed chatting with them on the train, but did not want to take the friendship further. To Emilia, sharing a movie with someone was like sharing a bed. In cinemas, people cry, they sigh, they reveal the flayed flesh of their emotions. She had no desire to be on such intimate terms with the geographers from Rutgers. With Nancy, on the other hand, she didn’t mind. Nancy’s friendship was like a cat or a comfortable eiderdown. Besides, for Nancy, Emilia represented a pinnacle of refinement she could never attain; when they were together she constantly felt she was learning something new, even when Emilia read her poems she did not understand or took her to little art-house cinemas to see classic Mizoguchi films.

Nancy’s favourite quotation was a line from Ezra Pound she had chanced upon in the library. She was drawn to the hidden meaning she sensed in the cadence of the line:
How ‘came I in’?
⁵
Was I not thee and Thee?
It had a mysterious lilt; she asked Emilia to help her decipher it, and without even changing the order of the words, they managed to shed some light on it. ‘What is it about this line you find so moving?’ Emilia wanted to know. ‘What is unsaid, but hinted at in the folds between the words.’ Sometimes her friend was not so stupid.

Nancy had survived a stultifying marriage. Sid Frears, her late husband, had been a travelling salesman selling synthetic adhesive who left her alone for months at a time. After fifteen years of marriage, pancreatic cancer had carried him off. Nancy had not the slightest interest in changing her life. Sid’s life insurance policy, invested at a fixed interest during the boom years, ensured her an annual income of $22,000. She decided she did not need to work. Her only work was voluntary: from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she worked at the library. ‘What would I want to go out to work for?’ she said. ‘So I don’t feel alone? I’m not that kind of person, Millie. I like my own company. I read
People
magazine every week, I listen to the Beach Boys, and if I want to fart, I fart. There’s no one to complain.’

More than once, Emilia caught her staring at the photo of Simón on her beside table. Comparing him to Sid and shaking her head. ‘You had a good thing going there, huh, Millie? Was he good in bed?’ Emilia would have liked to tell her that sex with Simón in her imagination was better than it had been in reality, but this was something she would tell no one, something she did not dare admit even to herself. Sometimes, when they got back from bingo, Nancy would gaze at Simón’s broad forehead, his pale, honest eyes, his firm nose.