Purgatory

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 showers taken at the same time every day, the patience with which the minutes came and went, just as love had come only to go again. Sometimes, at night, she dreamed of lost love. She would have liked to stop such dreams, but there was nothing she could do about things that were not real. Before she went to sleep, she would say to herself: the only thing that matters is what is real.

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 projections² 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 Almendra³, 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 encyclopedia⁴ 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.

‘He looks just like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, don’t you think, hon? If he hadn’t died, he’d look like Clint in The Bridges of Madison County now.’

On the Friday when Emilia met Simón at Trudy Tuesday, she had left home at 7 a.m. as she did every morning. It took her forty minutes to drive from her apartment on North 4th Avenue to the Hammond offices in Springfield industrial park. She worried about avoiding the inevitable accidents on Garden State Parkway, the storms that could break suddenly over a two-mile area while in the distance the sun was still shining. Like a taxi driver, she drove with the radio tuned to 1010 AM, which kept her up to date on traffic tailbacks.

The suburbs were endless, indistinguishable, and if, as she sometimes did, she allowed her mind to wander she would somehow end up driving through a strip mall with branches of Wal-Mart, Pep Boys, Pathmark and Verizon Wireless laid out in an arc, beneath louring skies of identical clouds with identical squawking birds. Only the leaves of the walnut trees showed any imagination, distinguishing themselves in autumn as they fell.

Sometimes at the office, as her screen glowed with the colours of maps, print priorities and legends, Emilia would sit daydreaming about Simón whom she had not seen die. The death of a loved one is devastating. How much more devastating, then, was the death of someone you could not be sure was dead? How can you lose something not yet found? Emilia had seen the glimmer of an answer in a poem by Idea Vilariño dedicated to the man who abandoned her: I am no more than I now / forever, and you / now / to me / no more than you. Now you are not / and some day soon / I won’t know where you live / with whom / or whether you remember / You will never hold me / as you did that night / never / I will never touch you / I will not see you die.

Some years previously, someone had told her about a group of geographers who spent their winters in Nuuk, Greenland, mapping the effects of global warming and she had imagined Simón was on that expedition. It was a foolish fantasy, but for a few months, it had been a consolation. In the notebook where she jotted down her feelings, she wrote something that still pained her today: ‘If he came back, I would be able to see him die.’

During the Trial of the Juntas against the military leaders of the dictatorship, three separate witnesses claimed to have seen Simón’s body in the courtyard of a police station in Tucumán, his body showing clear signs of having been tortured, a bullet hole between his eyes. Emilia was in Caracas during the trials and did not know whether to believe the story or not. The witnesses seemed genuine, but their testimonies differed. She had been with her husband when he was arrested, her own testimony would have been very different from theirs: they had been arrested by mistake and released two days later, Simón a couple of hours before Emilia. She had seen Simón’s signature in the prison register indicating that he had left. Her father, Dr Orestes Dupuy, had checked the fact with the military governor himself.

To Emilia, her version was an indisputable fact. It was because she believed it that she did not set foot outside their San Telmo apartment in Buenos Aires for months, waiting for her husband to come home, waiting for him to call. She felt a terrible emptiness, spent the days staring out the window as the hours passed, learning by heart the relief map of the buildings, the shapes of the people moving behind their curtains. Her father had tried to persuade her to move back to the family home, but Emilia wanted things to be exactly as they had been when Simón was there. Every morning, she went to work at the Argentina Automobile Club, every evening when she came home, she made dinner, never forgetting to set two places at the table.

From time to time, she got distressing letters from people who claimed to have seen Simón on a street in Bogotá or Mexico City and demanded money in return for more information. There were phone calls, too, from people who told her that Simón was dead. These contradictory stories left her unable to sleep. She was still hopelessly in love and, what was worse, she realised it was a love that had no purpose, no object. Almost a year after Simón’s disappearance, by which time his name was barely mentioned, Emilia decided to distract herself and after much hesitation went to the Cine Iguazú to see Ettore Scola’s A Special Day, a film about a mother of six living in a seedy tenement building and her neighbour, a homosexual radio announcer, who care for each other as best they can while all the other tenants have left to go and take part in the parade to honour Hitler’s visit to Rome in 1935. The film had been running for about an hour when the air conditioning cut out. The afternoon was so humid that now the images were shrouded in a vapour that made them seem unreal. The air in the cinema became unbreathable, there was a sound of whistling, of feet stamping. Some of the audience got up and left. A woman who seemed to have just arrived came over and sat in the seat next to Emilia so abruptly she knocked over her handbag. As Emilia leaned down to pick it up, the woman hissed: ‘They murdered your husband in Tucumán just like they did mine. My husband died under torture. Yours got five bullets in his chest and one between the eyes to finish him off. We can’t go on like this, like nothing’s happened.’ ‘I don’t believe you,’ Emilia said. ‘You’re just a subversive.’ ‘I’m doing you a favour,’ the woman insisted, ‘I’m not asking you to do anything. In this country, we’re all dead already.’ At that moment, the house lights went out again, the air conditioning came on and the film started up. Somebody in the row behind them whistled. The woman got up and was lost in the darkness, Emilia moved to another seat where she sat, her whole body rigid, until the film was over.

More than once she had heard people tell her father that political subversives — who had been all but wiped out — were prepared to tell people anything they wanted to hear if they thought they could win them over to the cause. Obviously, this woman was one of them and, although Emilia dismissed what she had said as lies, she was haunted for a long time by the image of Simón’s body lying broken in a courtyard like a dog. She couldn’t stop herself picturing him lying with a bullet hole in his head, black with flies and with soot from the chimneys of the local sugar mills. The image went with her everywhere, as though her whole being was subsumed within this dead man whom no one had mourned, no one had buried. But she remained convinced Simón was still alive. Maybe he had lost his memory, maybe he was in a hospital and unable to get in touch.

Three days later, she was woken by the telephone.

‘It’s Ema,’ said a distorted voice.

‘Ema who?’

‘Ema, the woman from the cinema.’

‘Oh, you,’ Emilia managed to say. ‘Those things you said, they’re not true. I read the police report again. My father checked the facts himself.’

The voice on the other end of the line suddenly became bitter, mocking.

‘And you believe your old man? If he had his way, we’d never get out of this ocean of shit. There are thousands of women like you and me. Husbands who have disappeared, sons who never came back. We’ve lost so many. ’

‘Simón is alive. We’re not involved in anything, so there’s no reason for them to do anything to us. I haven’t lost anyone.’

‘Oh, but you have. And you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering why your husband never came back. And when you finally accept the fact that he’s dead, you’ll still wonder where they buried him. I would give anything just to be able to kiss my husband’s bones.’

Trembling, Emilia put down the phone. She didn’t know what to think. A few days earlier, taking the bus home, some woman had dropped a leaflet into her lap. As the woman had looked like a beggar Emilia paid no attention. She was about to give back the flyer when the woman got off the bus and disappeared into the crowd. Absent-mindedly, Emilia read a paragraph: ‘Between 1,500 and 3,000 people have been massacred in secret since the passing of the law forbidding the reporting on bodies being discovered.’ It was lies. All the newspapers said the exiliados were telling lies about the country. The flyer was proof. She ripped it in two and threw it on the ground.

At work that morning, in the mapping department of the Argentina Automobile Club, she was overcome by an intense feeling of unease. She hated this Ema. Your father is a shit. How could this woman say such things? No one questioned the integrity of Dr Dupuy. On his deathbed General Perón himself had heaped praise on him: ‘Read Dupuy,’ he had said. ‘He has written the most accurate analysis of my actions in government. And not just mine: he has proved himself the finest analyst of all governments.’

Since 1955, her father had been publishing La República, a privately circulated magazine keenly read by people of influence. Every word came from reliable sources; it was an invaluable guide to protecting one’s assets from the constant devaluations of the peso, for anticipating the rate of inflation. The financial pages of the international press agreed. ‘Only sound business deals come from the pages of La República.’ Not only did La República announce forthcoming military coups, it fanned the flames that fostered them. Dupuy personally wrote the editorials linking decadence to democracy and extolling the spirit of the nation. His editorials never explained whether the ‘spirit of the nation’ changed, whether it was immutable, or what it consisted of. The ‘spirit of the nation’ was handed down unchanged from one government to the next.

In the family mansion on calle Arenales where Emilia was born, her father had been an imposing figure who rarely addressed himself to her or her sister Chela. He would ruffle their hair, ask how things were going at school and, sometimes, if they were sick, would suddenly appear to talk to the doctors. Next to him, their mother seemed like a little girl.

In late March 1976, Emilia was drawing a map of the San Rafael glacier when she heard on the radio that the new military junta was planning to rebuild the country, reform the economy and — obviously — safeguard the spirit of the nation. The new junta announced all-out war on left-wing subversives and all those who refused to conform. Argentina had to be of one mind. There was no room for dissenters, for the half-hearted, for anyone who was seen to be different.

Three nights before what was called ‘the revolution’, Emilia had gone to her father’s study to take him the guest list for her wedding. Dupuy had asked her to take his waste-paper basket, empty it into the furnace and make sure everything was reduced to ashes. Stuck to the bottom of the bin was a page of handwritten notes. As she peeled it away, Emilia read the first lines: ‘What would Argentina be without the sword, without the cross? Who would wish to go down in history as the man who deprived the spirit of the nation of one of these twin bulwarks?’ When she went back with the waste-paper bin, Emilia gave him back the page she had rescued from the flames.

‘Forget you ever saw this,’ her father warned, not bothering to look up.

‘I thought the bit about the spirit of the nation was nice.’

‘Nice? Don’t talk such drivel. These are grave, important matters. The spirit of the nation is at stake and it can only be saved by force of arms. This country is Catholic and military. It is Western and white. Those who forget that “and” do not understand anything.’ He gave a dismissive wave. ‘You clearly don’t understand anything. You’d do better to concentrate on your duties as a wife.’

Emilia and Simón were married in the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen on April 24, one month after the coup d’état. The time of the ceremony was twice changed to foil any possible terrorist attack. Rather than entering by the main doors of the church and walking up the aisle, Emilia emerged from the sacristy on her father’s arm. In the front pew Simón’s two sisters, who had come up from Gálvez that morning, were wearing very low-cut purple-sequinned dresses, stilettos and pink hats. They wagged their heads like partridges, proud of their ample cleavage. They licked their thumbs and index fingers before making the sign of the cross, droning amen, amen, louder than the priest himself.

When they came up to congratulate their brother after the ceremony, Simón told them how happy he was they’d come and asked them not to leave, but afraid they might miss their bus, they dashed off, carrying their hats and their shoes in either hand. Emilia and Simón did not stay long at the intimate reception thrown by the Dupuys either. They had been loaned an apartment in Palermo with balconies looking out over the forest. There was a fire burning in the grate and a record player with Beatles and Sui Generis LPs. Emilia loved ‘Michelle’ and asked Simón to play it over and over.

When they lay stretched out in front of the fire and Simón kissed her throat, his fingertips searching for her breasts, she froze. Her blouse was damp with cold sweat. Until recently, she had abandoned herself to his embrace, pushed his hands into her pants so Simón could feel her wet desire. At such times it seemed to her that those lips too could speak, as though her whole body could talk dirty, but on her wedding night, her vagina remained closed, her thighs as rigid as glass rods.

‘Don’t be nervous. It doesn’t matter,’ Simón said. ‘Let’s just lie here and listen to the music. The apartment’s got three bedrooms. If you’d rather be alone, we can sleep in separate beds. It’s just one night. We’ve got the rest of our lives together.’

‘I’d like to listen to “Michelle” again,’ said Emilia. ‘I’m fine. It’s just nerves. I’ll get over it. I’m nervous because I love you so much.’

In the years that followed, Emilia would remember that duplicitous sentence many times. Couples regularly say things to each other that are hypocritical or clichéd. Though it was true that as she said the words she did love Simón, her love felt irrelevant. Her overriding feeling was one of uncertainty, as though the whole world were drawing away from her, as though nothing — no substance, no smell, no scene — would ever be as it had been before.

‘Actually, let’s not listen to “Michelle” again,’ she said, ‘it makes me sad.’

‘Are you sad?’

‘No, what makes you think that? It’s the song that’s sad.’

There was a comedy on television. Simón said maybe if they took their minds off things, focused on something else, they might get back to the way they felt before they were married. Might even forget that they were alone. He turned off the music and turned on the television. On the screen, a pale comedian was sitting on the floor of a cage on a pile of straw, wearing a black leotard through which his pitifully thin chest and his protruding ribs were clearly visible. From nearby cages came wild shrieks and roars. The comedian was obviously the only visible exhibit in a zoo — and clearly the least interesting, since people sneered, walked past his cage not even stopping to look at him, eager to see the lions or the monkeys. As the cage grew dark and light again, the sign outside changed to indicate the number of days the man had been fasting: 35 days, 40 days, and so on.

Simón explained to Emilia that this was a comic version of Kafka’s short story ‘A Hunger Artist’. Every time the lights came up, fewer and fewer people stopped to look at the hunger artist. Visitors walked straight past his enclosure to look at the animals on either side. ‘Let me out of here!’ the actor screamed. ‘Stop torturing me!’ The screen faded to black and the words ‘62 days later’ appeared to the sound of canned laughter. Simón, who remembered the story, told Emilia that in Kafka’s version, the artist is proud of his record-breaking fasts and his main reason for staying in the cage is that he does not really like eating. Curiously, this version was even more Kafkaesque. On day 73, a guard came over and peered into the cage, poking the damp pile of straw with a stick looking for the comedian. Unable to see him, the attendant pressed his ear to the cage. A childlike, almost inaudible voice from the straw screamed, ‘Get me out of here! I’m disappearing!’ There was another burst of canned laughter. Eventually, a truck pulled up towing a wagon in which a restless panther was prowling. ‘There’s an empty cage here,’ the driver says. ‘Get it cleaned out, we’ve got a panther we need to house.’ Some people in the audience started shouting, ‘You can’t put a panther in that cage! There’s a starving man in there!’ while others yelled, ‘Go on, put him in the cage! Let him eat the bastard!’ Hands on his hips, the truck driver said, ‘Where is this hunger artist then? I want to see him!’ He threw open the cage, took a pitchfork and began sifting through the straw on the dirty floor. The camera zoomed in on a tiny heap of straw and the actor appeared, no bigger than an ant, screaming, ‘Don’t stamp on me!’ his voice so shrill, so faint, that only the microphone could pick it up. ‘Don’t trample me! I’m one of the disappeared!’ The sketch ended with a close-up of the sole of a shoe hovering menacingly over the actor as the audience applauded, roaring with laughter.

The sketch left them feeling even more depressed. They decided to sleep in separate rooms and kissed each other goodnight without passion. In the morning they were due to take the 10 a.m. flight to Recife for a two-week cruise down the Brazilian coast — a wedding present from Emilia’s father.

They had been on the cruise for several days when, over breakfast, they heard that the actor in the sketch had issued an unqualified apology to the viewers and the authorities. ‘Sometimes my jokes are in bad taste,’ he said, ‘and this time I have stupidly contributed to the campaign of vilification against our country. I am unworthy to live among you. The people of Argentina are a peaceful people, and I failed to respect that peace. To joke about the disappeared is to play into the hands of the subversives.’ One of the ship’s officers, who had seen the apology on television, mentioned it over breakfast. ‘The poor bastard had circles under his eyes so black that they looked like they were painted on,’ he said. ‘Hijo de puta,’ commented a deeply tanned older woman sitting next to Emilia. ‘People like that don’t deserve to live. If I were a man, I’d kill every last one of them.’ Everyone went on eating breakfast in silence.

The inchoate love Emilia had felt on her wedding night cured itself the following day in the narrow uncomfortable berth of the cruise ship put out of Recife. When Simón’s hand brushed her belly as he stowed the luggage, she felt a smouldering desire she had kept buried deep inside her ever since she had her first period. Now, finally, she could satisfy it without virginal coyness or Catholic guilt. She fell back on the berth and begged Simón to rid her once and for all of her cursed hymen. But Simón did not feel the same urgency. He wanted to prolong the moment, to separate it into languid fragments of desire, to enter Emilia’s body with his every sense. ‘Let’s take it gently, amor,’ he said. ‘It’s your first time.’ She was impatient and couldn’t understand why her husband wanted to delay the moment of penetration. ‘No, not gently, do it now,’ she urged him. Was this Christian? She wanted nothing in that moment as much as she wanted to be hurt, defiled, broken. When she had been a little girl of seven or eight, the family cook had explained to her that losing her virginity would be like dying. That the pain she felt would be the same pain she would feel when she died, but that with it would come all of God’s pleasures.

She allowed Simón to undress her; to discover for the first time the pinkish birthmark, round as a ten centavo coin, on her right buttock; to linger over the small folds of cellulite that had appeared on one of her thighs — while still she was a virgin, she had thought to herself, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin with cellulite — to trace with his tongue the almost invisible line of hair that ran from her navel to the centre of her being. Her eyes were closed when he, now naked, parted her lips with his tongue and mingled his saliva with hers. Feeling his gentleness, smelling his scent, Emilia’s heart began to race, she had never felt it pound so hard, she didn’t think it could take much more, but it was beating harder still when Simón slipped his tongue between her thighs.

‘Don’t. ’ she said. ‘It’s salty.’ He looked up from between her legs and smiled. ‘How do you know it’s salty?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, he buried himself in her depths until her inner labia gripped him. ‘Now, please. ’ Emilia whimpered. ‘Give it to me now, please.’ Simón penetrated her gently, moving towards her hymen, more gently than she had imagined. She heard a brief moan and then the surge of his ejaculation overcame him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wanted it to last a lifetime.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she reassured him. ‘We can do it again in a little while.’

‘I’ve hurt you. You’re bleeding.’

‘Good. I’m supposed to bleed. I won’t even feel it tomorrow. And besides, like you said, we’ve got our whole lives together.’

After a while, Emilia shifted towards him, kissed his throat, behind his ear. Without saying a word, she took his penis and stroked it delicately.

‘I can’t,’ Simón said. ‘It’s got a life of its own, this thing. Sometimes it stays limp like that for hours.’

‘It’s OK, it’s OK, don’t think about it. You can do it.’

Simón rummaged in a suitcase, took out a cassette deck and pressed Play. From the machine, in spite of the poor quality of the recording, came a sequence of simple piano chords of extraordinary purity, music that sounded like nothing else in the world.

‘When I’m alone, Keith Jarrett’s improvisations get me excited. With you, they’ll get me even more excited.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Emilia smiled. ‘You’re saying he’s improvising this?’

‘From beginning to end.’

‘It’s so perfect. He must have the whole melody memorised.’

‘No. This is Jarrett’s great discovery. He turned up at the Köln Opera House without the faintest idea of what he was going to play. He was tired, he’d spent a whole week playing concerts and he was surprised to find that the music came to him in waves. Before that night, he was a great jazz pianist, but that night he created a genre all his own. His music is a constant, an absolute. The coughing from the audience, the creak of the piano, nothing is prepared. Maybe Bach or Mozart created galaxies like this, improvised harmonies that drift now through the darkness of time, but none of them have survived. That night at the Köln Opera House can never be repeated. Jarrett himself couldn’t do it. It’s an evanescent concerto, born to live and die in that very moment. It will become a commonplace, a cliché, to be listened to by lovers like us, but the human race will go on needing it.’

They lay back on the berth. After seven minutes, Jarrett began to moan as though fucking his instrument. Simón’s penis remained inert.

‘Let me hold you,’ Emilia said.

She went on stroking him with one hand while slowly caressing herself with the other. After a moment, his moan joined Jarrett’s.

After the phone call from the woman from the cinema, Emilia spent the morning wondering what to do. She could barely bring herself to concentrate on the maps which she was supposed to be working on, converting them from 1:450,000,000 scale to 1:450,000. She longed to talk to her father, but she was afraid of how he might react. He had become increasingly volatile and unpredictable. That afternoon, in the family home on calle Arenales, she finally confided in Chela. As always, her sister told her mother, who told Dupuy, who came to see her some two hours later trembling and angrier than she had ever seen him. He stood, glaring at Emilia.

‘How can you be so naive? Don’t you understand that we are at war? That your family could be attacked by subversives at any moment? You should have told me what happened in the cinema the moment it happened. You have no right to make a fool of me in front of my friends. I won’t tolerate such behaviour.’

‘What did I do? So, I didn’t mention it for a couple of days. I’m not psychic. I don’t know what’s going on.’

‘No, and you don’t know how to look after yourself either. It was a trap. They were trying to get information out of you, trying to inveigle their way into this house. They want to blow our brains out, all of us.’

‘So what am I supposed to do if this woman calls again?’

‘She won’t. She was picked up in a cafe near your place. She’d been spying on you, she was armed. A patrol surrounded her and when they told her to surrender her weapon, she tried to resist. They tried to stop her, but she shot herself.’

Two months after seizing power, the president came to her parents’ house for dinner. He was accompanied by his wife, her stiff, swollen legs covered by a long skirt, and by the chaplain of the Military Vicariate. Since Emilia was his eldest daughter and had just come back from her honeymoon, Dr Dupuy condescended to invite her on the condition that she and her husband refrain from making any political comments. This peremptory command unsettled Simón who did not want to go. Outside the family house was a confusion of cars and soldiers in service uniforms.

It was a warm night in mid-May and the president, invariably described by the newspapers as ascetic, seemed exultant, almost triumphant. He greeted Emilia with a dispassionate kiss on the cheek, offered his hand for Simón to shake without looking at him, all the while relating the successes of the day. When he spoke, he enunciated each syllable as though mistrustful of his listeners’ intelligence. From time to time, he gave Dupuy a sidelong glance and the doctor nodded his approval. Except for photos from the 1930s, Emilia had never seen a man wear his hair so plastered down with hair cream. The monsignor flirted with Simón. As he expounded on the meaning of the symbols on the golden chasuble he was to wear for the first time for the Corpus Christi procession, he toyed with the crucifix pinned to his chest. His shrill, bird-like voice was remarkable and he fell silent only when the president began to explain how, in less than two months, the government had managed to reduce inflation by more than 20 per cent.

‘The National Reorganisation policies are beginning to take effect,’ he said with the punctiliousness of a teacher. ‘We have managed to keep salaries under control and the union protests are over—’

‘Not before time,’ the president’s wife interrupted. ‘Troublemakers and drunks, the lot of them. The minute they got their wages, they’d spent their last centavo in the bars. Well, now they’ll learn what it means to behave decently.’

‘Praised be the Lord,’ said the chaplain.

The champagne moved the conversation on to subjects more likely to appeal to the ladies. All of them, including Emilia, used the same perfume, Madame Rochas, as though it were a sign of distinction. Chela and her mother discussed whether Lancôme creams were better than Revlon. The president’s wife settled the matter.

‘I’ve always favoured Lancôme,’ she said, ‘from the very first time I used it. I wouldn’t use anything else now.’

‘Why do any of you need to use creams at all?’ the chaplain interjected. ‘You all have such wonderful complexions.’

Ethel, the mother, smiled appreciatively. ‘It’s quite clear, Monsignor, that you are interested only in spiritual beauty. We women are forced to make do with what scant beauty God has blessed us with.’

‘I have friends who went to Europe who told me that they have fabulous creams over there that we’ve never even heard of,’ said Chela.

‘They’ll get here. Everything in its own time, niña,’ said the president. ‘Argentina used to be cut off from the world but we’re going to open the doors to imports so that our industries learn to compete.’

‘I’d really like to visit Europe,’ said Chela.

‘Who wouldn’t?’ the president’s wife sighed. ‘My dream is to meet the Holy Father; every day, he grows more like Pius XII. He has such a gentle, such an aristocratic manner about him, and such strength of character.’

The monsignor brought his hands together and raised his eyes to heaven.

‘The Lord never fails those who love Him. Your dream will come true sooner than you think; plans for just such a trip are already well advanced.’

‘Every night, I pray to God to keep the Holy Father healthy. Once we’ve dealt with the extremists, the first thing we’ll do is go to Rome to give thanks. But just now we can’t go anywhere. We have to look after our home.’

Dinner was served and the monsignor, seated at the head of the table, said grace. He prayed for a swift victory for the nation’s armies and, his beatific smile almost caressing the president, intoned: ‘Through me, and through the arm of our comandante Our Lord Jesus Christ, bless the process of national purification which makes it possible for us to eat in peace.’

‘Amen,’ said the president. He lifted his untouched glass of champagne. Everyone else did likewise. ‘To peace.’

For a while, no one spoke. The president’s wife praised the asparagus soufflé and the spider crab which Dr Dupuy had had shipped all the way from Tierra del Fuego. The chaplain accepted a second helping and, eyes half closed, savoured the food.

‘Congratulations, my dear doctor. This is delicious.’

Dupuy accepted the compliment with a chilly smile and turned to the president.

‘Did you have a good day, señor?’

He made a small gesture which the waiters immediately understood. They were to serve another round of Dom Perignon. Though in private, Dupuy addressed the president informally, he was careful to observe protocol when others were present. Behind the president’s display of strength, he knew, the man was sensitive and insecure.

‘I can’t complain. I spent the morning addressing the World Advertising Congress and I’ve rarely heard such an ovation. The business community is thrilled by what’s happening here. They say that in a couple of months we’ve managed to get the subversives on the ropes. We’ve flushed the rats from their nests. We inherited a country in chaos, now we live in an orderly society.’

Ethel felt compelled to intervene.

‘Every night I prayed to God that you and your men would take power quickly. The Argentinian people were horrified to see the country in the clutches of that brainless burlesque dancer⁶. We were afraid that by the time you came to power, the country would be in ruins. I’ve been terribly impressed by how quickly you’ve restored order. Even Borges — a man of few words — said how proud he is of the army that saved the country from Communism. I heard him on the radio only a couple of hours ago.’

‘Ah, yes. I had lunch with Borges and a number of the intelligentsia. My advisers invited them so we could discuss cultural matters. Only one of them proved intractable — though it was the one person we least expected — a priest, a certain Father Leonardo Castellani.’

‘I thought he was dead,’ said Dupuy. ‘He must be at least eighty.’

‘Seventy-seven I was told. I see you know the man.’

‘Not really. I’ve read some of his writings. He translated a section of St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and wrote a number of rather good crime novels. He was told that the Jesuits would punish him and indeed he was expelled from the order and sent into reclusion in a monastery in Spain. It was only a few years ago that the Vatican permitted him to say Mass again.’

The president had barely touched his food. He was so thin, the other comandantes called him the Eel. It was a nickname that did not displease him. Even as a young cadet, he had been slippery, cold, inscrutable. Though he had not sought it, he had accepted the highest office in the land for the sake of the military. Even now, at the height of his power, he was still an eel, noted for his secrecy, his cunning, his good luck.

‘I had no idea the priest would prove so turbulent. I shall have to rebuke my advisers for inviting him. From the moment I saw him, he did not strike me as a man of God. He has a glass eye. A frozen, cadaverous eye. Over dessert, he had the gall to suggest that I release a former student of his from prison, someone named Conti. He ranted and raved like a man possessed.’

‘He always was possessed,’ Dupuy offered.

‘He started shouting that this student of his was a great writer who had been tortured half to death after his arrest.’

‘My God. What did you tell him?’ This from the wife with the swollen legs.

‘I told him the truth. I told him my government is at war against Communist subversives, but it does not resort to torture or to murder. Professor Addolorato, who was sitting on my right, managed to save the day. “How could you even think of bringing such an outlandish accusation to this table, Father?” he said.’

‘Addolorato is a fine man,’ his wife agreed.

‘You don’t know how grateful I am to him. The priest was about to launch into another diatribe, but Addolorato told him to calm down. “We are all living through troubled times,” he said, “let’s not distract the president with such trifling matters.” ’

Simón stopped eating and, for the first time, joined in the conversation. Dupuy and Ethel were afraid he would say something rash. And indeed he did.

‘Torture, comandante, is not a trifling matter, regardless of the ends for which it is employed.’

The president twisted his mouth into an expression of disgust, but it was Dupuy who reprimanded him.

‘This is none of your business, Simón.’

‘This is everyone’s business. I can’t be expected to hold my tongue when a crime is being committed.’

‘Calm down, hijo.’

The monsignor raised the index and middle fingers of his right hand as though exorcising Simón. ‘There are things which, though they may seem like crimes, are actually simple justice. You need to understand. The momentary pain of one man, one sinner, can save the lives of hundreds of innocent people. Try to think of it that way.’

‘The question is not one of quantity, Monsignor. As far as I am concerned to torture a single human being is the same as torturing all of them. As I’ve heard it said in the parish church in my town: when they crucified Christ, they crucified all humanity.’

‘You cannot compare the two. There was only one Christ. He was God made flesh.’

‘True, but two thousand years ago, nobody knew that.’

Emilia’s breathing was ragged and she was beginning to sweat. She looked as though she might faint. Everyone turned and she felt embarrassed to be the centre of attention.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m feeling a little dizzy.’

‘Simón, take her up to her room,’ the father commanded. ‘Give us a moment to compose ourselves.’

‘It’s probably the champagne,’ said Emilia. ‘I don’t drink. I’m not used to it.’

The mother too got up from the table, looking nervous.

‘I’ll just go and see what’s happening.’

The president’s wife smiled, dismissing the episode lightly.

‘Perhaps she’s expecting. Perhaps her little dizzy spell might be considered a godsend—’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Dupuy interrupted, embarrassed. ‘Neither she nor her husband are ready to start a family. I’ve said as much to both of them and they agree.’

‘Babies come without being called,’ the monsignor said. ‘We must respect the will of the Almighty.’

From that point, the dinner began to go downhill and by the time the mother came back with the good news that Emilia was much better and had fallen asleep, there was nothing more to say. Dupuy was left with the unpleasant feeling that the president blamed him for the pall cast by his son-in-law over the evening.

As he was leaving, the monsignor asked Dupuy in confidence whether he had had Simón’s background thoroughly vetted. ‘He’s a member of your family, Doctor, so he can’t be a Commie, though — God forgive me — he talks like one.’

More than once, Dupuy had noticed that his son-in-law made no attempt to keep his irresponsible thoughts to himself. He would have to bring the boy to heel. With things as they were, there was no place for dissidence, for argument. How could Simón not understand that in saving the country from toppling into the abyss, any and all means were acceptable? If it was necessary to torture people to purge the country, then there was nothing to be done but torture them. The sacrificial sufferings of Joan of Arc and of Miguel Servet had served only to make the Church stronger. True, good men sometimes paid for sinners, but such things were inevitable in wartime. The junta could not publicly admit to the summary trials and executions since this would simply allow the enemy to launch into an endless, disruptive debate. The only thing to be done was exterminate the subversives quickly and quietly. If a military leader preferred to take them prisoner and use them as slave labour, so be it, provided he did so in secret. This priest with the glass eye had had the gall to raise the case of a disappeared Christian with the president. Let him bring up the subject as often as he liked. No one would listen to him. Right-thinking people were sick to death of violence. What they wanted was peace and order. The spirit of Argentina which Dupuy wrote about so often in La República had risen from the dead, it was sanctified. Dios, Patria, Hogar — God, Country, Family — were words which Dupuy believed should be inscribed on the white band of the national flag beneath the Sun of May. He would suggest as much in his next editorial for the magazine. Using the Socratic method which was by now his trademark, he would say: ‘If the Brazilians have forged their democracy with the motto Ordem e Progresso, which is emblazoned on their flag, and the United States have the words In God We Trust engraved on their banknotes beneath their own protective emblem, why should Argentina not publicly declare that it is founded on three hallowed words: God, Country, Family?’ It would be a timeless lesson which would forestall any onslaught by totalitarian subversives. They do not believe in God, nor in the family, and the country for which they are fighting is Soviet or Castroist rather than Argentinian: a strange country, a Communist country.

Simón disappeared in Tucumán at the beginning of July. The days were mild and the nights frosty. He and Emilia had been sent to Tucumán by the Automobile Club on an easy mission, virtually a holiday. They were to map a ten-kilometre stretch of an invisible route — nothing more than a dotted line on the map — to the south of the province. ‘It’s changed a lot, that province,’ Dupuy told them. ‘Until recently, it was a brutal, feudal place. The subversives had the gall to declare it a free American territory. Can you imagine? Now, it’s a wealthy, peaceful province: there are no more terrorist attacks, no more kidnappings. The kerbs are painted blue and white; everywhere you go, there is order. In less than four months, the military government has worked miracles.’

At Tucumán airport, there was an Automobile Club rental jeep waiting for them. They spent the night at a hotel in the centre of town and at 5 a.m. they started driving south. The early hour, the brittle air, the emptiness of the streets: all these details which seemed so trivial were the first things Emilia would later remember. The shimmer of dew on the fields of sugar cane. The shadows of dogs moving under the street lamps. The tobacco leaves lying lazily in thick mats. Every few kilometres there was a military checkpoint and at every one they had to present their papers and explain why they were going where they were going. They were stopped in Famaillá, Santa Lucía, Monteros, Aguilares, Villa Alberdi. At the checkpoint at La Cocha, a sergeant emerged from the toilets, trousers halfway round his ankles, and barked at his men to check the jeep again. ‘Check under the seats,’ he told the guards. ‘These fucking subversives hide their weapons in a false bottom under the seats.’ ‘We’re cartographers, we’re with the Automobile Club,’ Simón explained. ‘We make maps.’ This made matters worse. They were hustled into a storeroom and subjected to a barrage of meaningless questions. ‘How do we know your papers aren’t forgeries? Why did you rent a jeep instead of a car like anyone else?’ In the corners of the storeroom were piles of corn cobs and rats. They were huge, grey, menacing. To allay the doubts of the guards, Simón sketched the route they were to map, from Los Altos to the banks of the Río El Abra. He explained that most maps omitted landmarks and that the course of Ruta 67 was not accurately mapped. He and his wife were here to rectify these mistakes. ‘There was a plane overflying the area yesterday,’ the sergeant said. ‘It came by twice, flying very low. I suspect they were taking photos. Right now I’m thinking maybe they had something to do with you. That’s how they plan terrorist attacks, spying missions, people who pretend they’re just passing through. Cardologists, natologists, everyone pretending to be something they’re not. Cartologists like you.’

‘Cartographers,’ Emilia said. ‘Why don’t you check our credentials?’

‘All right, I’ll let you go through,’ the sergeant conceded. ‘But just remember, we’ve got our eyes on you. You still need to get past the checkpoint at Huacra. If they turn you back, I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes.’

The military checkpoint at Huacra seemed deserted. The stifling silence, the empty, almost surreal sentry boxes felt strangely jarring. The checkpoint marked the border between two provinces and was usually patrolled by at least twenty soldiers yet they could not see a living soul. The first red rays of dawn rose up on the left. A bitter cold leached through the canvas sides of the jeep. They drove on as far as the Río El Abra, or what they assumed was the river — a dry gorge with a crude concrete bridge they could just make out in the distance. Simón left the engine running and they waited for it to be light before beginning preliminary sketches for the map. ‘Have you checked the scale?’ Emilia asked. ‘See that embankment next to the bridge, we need to choose a symbol. Don’t fall asleep on me, Simón.’

Her husband lit a cigarette to keep himself awake but stubbed it out almost immediately. ‘There’s a terrible smell,’ he said. It was true. The stench was everywhere, spread across the landscape like a sheet. ‘Maybe it’s the vegetation,’ Emilia said. ‘Sometimes the trees are covered with fungus and bird droppings.’ ‘But it’s winter,’ her husband said. ‘The trees are bare, the whole place is a wasteland.’ ‘Then it must be putrefaction from the river,’ she said.

Rats, she remembered, abandoned their young under bridges when they went foraging for food. Who knew how many starving animals were under the bridge devouring each other? But the smell shifted and changed; sometimes it was like blood, at other times like breath flecked with spittle from a toothless mouth.

Smells are supposed to thrive in the heat, but the stench that morning seemed to draw its power from the chill air: it was a miasma which, instead of dissipating, seemed to become more dense, more tangible. Ice crystals formed on the windows of the jeep and Emilia’s joints began to ache. The air was slowly freezing and she wished that the smell, too, would freeze into flakes of mica. The wasteland was so monstrous, so absolute, that in the grey light of dawn things seemed to disappear, to vanish leaving only desolation: infinite placentas of abandonment, wounds that gaped beneath the jeep. ‘We’re going to get nowhere,’ said Emilia. ‘That’s because we’re already nowhere,’ said Simón.

When, finally, it was light enough to see, they could make out shadows moving towards the jeep, crawling along, scattering the loose gravel of the dirt road. Emilia had no time for horror movies or fantastical stories about supernatural creatures, but the creatures that morning reeked of sulphur and crackled like a cauldron of cicadas, a sound that came from the dawn of time, the sound of the wilderness spawning its poison.

‘Stay calm. There are people out there,’ Simón whispered, checking the doors to the jeep to make sure they were locked. As he did so, someone outside started jerking one of the door handles furiously.

The dawn came slowly. For a long time, it was merely a distant violet glow. Wind whipped sand against the jeep. A new, more piercing sound split the air. This moan, this whimper — whatever it was — grew louder; there were three, four voices coming from all directions, raucous and piercing. Suddenly they stopped, but only so the voices could come together in a shrill chorus like a needle that drilled into their eardrums.

‘There are people circling,’ Simón said again.

He took out the barbecue knife he always carried with him and climbed out of the jeep. The half-light of dawn was darker than the night had been and Emilia turned on the headlights. A woman dressed in rags and tatters was standing on the side of the road, rubbing her arms to keep warm. Next to her, two arthritic old women cradled a bundle wrapped in newspapers. Behind them, a woman with a mane of hair was trying to rouse a man sprawled on the ground with gutteral shrieks. A man stumbled along the dirt road towards the jeep wearing a threadbare raincoat that served little purpose since he was naked underneath. Behind him, another man pushing himself along on his hands and knees. Under the bridge were others, urinating, defecating. There were no fires, no shelter to keep them warm, nothing but the rage of that stench which was deeper than the night itself.

When the creatures saw Simón walking towards them, they howled piteous, meaningless words. The skin of the man in the raincoat was black with filth and grime. From a distance, he did not seem human. Emilia, recognising that they were as sick with dread as she was, got out of the jeep, throwing a blanket around her shoulders. As she approached the two old women, she heard a feeble wail and realised that wrapped in the bundle of newspapers was a baby. She offered them the blanket without a moment’s hesitation. As she walked the scant hundred metres from the jeep to where they stood, day had finally broken. The sun now rose at a dizzying speed as if to compensate for the delay. An icy wind whistled, whipping up the sand.

In the distance, the strange creatures went on howling the same words over and over, the tone, the volume shifting. The guy with the frizzy hair jus’ shitted hi’self. Or: ’ey, you, gi’s some money for a drink. Can’ you see ’m dyin’ of thirst? And in unison. We’re all Raya morada⁷ here, that’s why they rounded us with nets like stray dogs. Raya morada, Raya morada. Even more incomprehensible was the strange behaviour of the men, who threatened each other, bared their toothless gums or sobbed as though some terrible memory had crawled up their noses. Pressing a finger to one nostril they blew their noses then stopped to see whether the snot had landed on the gravel or their clothes. When they had calmed down, the woman with the shock of hair, who was easily the most articulate, explained to Simón and Emilia that they had been picked up in military raids shortly before midnight from the doorways and the church porches where they slept.

There were some eighteen or twenty of them and they had been living on charity. Some pretended to be mad, making people laugh playing guitars that were nothing more than broom handles or writing poems on pieces of newspaper. Others were genuinely mad. The man in the threadbare raincoat believed he had been transported back from the Last Judgement to a time when there was no God, since there was no need of God now. He believed he was surrounded by angels through whom he could communicate with the dead and he was never bored because he spent his time talking to them about family secrets and mysterious diseases.

They had been shipped out to Tucumán in trucks used by dog-catchers and dumped in the bleak wasteland here in Catamarca, under the El Abra Bridge, between piles of hospital waste — bloody bandages, cotton pads smeared with pus, vesicles, appendixes, pieces of stomach, ulcerated intestines, kidneys with tumours and the other insults visited by disease on the human body. Even on the bitterest nights, clouds of blowflies laid their eggs in the waste and flocks of carrion hawks fought viciously for scraps of human detritus. The feverish stench drove out all oxygen and clung to the bodies of these beggars with a tenacity that would last forever.

Simón offered to drive them in groups to the military checkpoint at Huacra. He was prepared to put off starting work on the map until the afternoon and spend the morning making as many trips as necessary, but they told him that two of the men had already made the trip during the night only to arrive, their feet bloody and raw, and be bundled into an army truck and brought straight back out into the desert. Simón suggested it might be better to go for help to a village called Bañado de Ovanta, twenty kilometres east. ‘I’ll go with you,’ said Emilia. ‘We need to bring back bread, coffee and blankets for these people before they die.’

The journey was very different. The blazing sun now obliterated everything; they could barely make out the blots of Ñandubay trees and cacti. Clearly, there were mistakes on their map because they wound up not in Bañado de Ovanta, but back at Huacra. Later, Emilia would often wonder whether they had got lost by accident or whether someone had switched the signposts. They had been driving for twenty minutes when in a ravine on the right-hand side of the road they saw the two dogs they had noticed as they left Huacra. Everyone knows that images, when they reappear inverted, herald disaster.

Disaster occurred almost immediately. They found themselves surrounded by a hundred uniformed soldiers who forced them out of the jeep at gunpoint. The buttons on the soldiers’ jackets strained from the pressure of paunches bloated by beer and noodles. The checkpoint, which had earlier been clearly deserted, was now teeming with soldiers going in and out of a corrugated-iron shack at the rear of a large courtyard.

The pot-bellied soldiers hustled them into a shack that served as a guardhouse. None of them wore badges indicating their rank, though from their ages they could only be corporals or sergeants. There might have been a captain; checkpoints usually had a captain in charge. Emilia tried to catch Simón’s eye but he would not look at her. He seemed lost, his eyes blankly staring, bewildered, unable to believe what was happening to them. Many years later, she thought that this was the moment when her husband began to disappear from the world.

A clerk with a toad-like double chin and breath that stank of beer asked them for their papers and laboriously copied down the details, sucking his pen after every letter. Emilia, accustomed to the inertia of bureaucracies, watched his sluggish routine calmly. Simón hugged his knees like an abandoned child.

The interview turned nasty as soon as they brought up El Abra. At the mere mention of the name, the clerk swallowed his words and trailed off into silence. Their attempted explanations about maps and scales only served to make things worse. What were you doing at El Abra? What were you doing waiting for dawn in open country? Who were you meeting? What were they bringing? When? Emilia and Simón had nothing to tell but the truth and explained again that they were working on a map for the Automobile Club. They had told the same account, used the same words at every checkpoint and had nothing more to add. But still the officer was not satisfied. He demanded they repeat it over and over. Why? What for? How many of you are there? He was determined to find out why anyone would travel two hundred kilometres from Buenos Aires to map nothing. ‘Since when did the Automobile Club start wasting money on such bullshit?’ ‘It’s the truth,’ Simón insisted. ‘Besides, it wasn’t our idea.’

‘What are you, Cardoso, a Communist? A Montero? A Bolshevik?’

‘I’m none of those things.’

‘You know what Communism is?’

‘I think so. It’s what they have in Russia, in Poland, in East Germany.’

‘Exactly. Godless countries where everything belongs to everyone. Even wives and children belong to the state. There’s no such thing as private property. Anyone can take anything belonging to someone else.’

‘Is it really that simple?’

‘I ask the questions here. Yes, it’s that simple. Where there’s no God, there’s no decency. You like the idea of some thug coming in off the street and fucking your wife up the arse just because he can?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘The Communist state gives everyone the right to do things like that. You could just as easily go to his house and return the favour, fuck his wife.’

‘I’ve never heard anything like that.’

‘Well, take my word for it. In Russia, even kids at school know this stuff, they’re used to it, they don’t know any better. Here, we teach people respect. God first of all. Then country, then family. It’s the Argentinian holy trinity.’

‘If you say so, I believe you.’

‘That’s better, Cardoso. Believe me. Where did you make contact with the subversives?’

‘I already told you, we didn’t see anyone. Only the homeless people.’

‘And you’re telling me they just suddenly appeared out of nowhere?’

‘We didn’t know there was anyone out there.’

‘That’s right, be a wise guy. Who are you trying to kid? Either you give me a straight answer right now or we’ll interrogate your wife while I fuck her right in front of you. Maybe I can make her come.’

‘I’ve told you everything. My wife and I don’t know any subversives.’

‘You can’t answer for her. Do you know any subversives, Dupuy?’

‘No, no one,’ said Emilia.

‘How would you recognise a subversive? This fucker you came with is a subversive, a dangerous subversive. We’ve got a file on him.’

‘He’s my husband. You can check, ask anyone. You’re making a terrible mistake.’

‘You’re the one who made the mistake when you married this Commie fucker. You had a meeting somewhere round here, didn’t you, Cardoso? The moishe you were supposed to be meeting gave you up. Just tell me where you stashed the maps and the weapons you brought. Tell me, and you can go. You can both go. Don’t waste my time.’

‘I’m not going to lie to you. We didn’t come here to meet anyone. We were sent to map the area. I explained all this to the officers at the last checkpoint. As soon as we finish, we’re leaving. Two hours, maybe three. Nobody told us we couldn’t.’

‘You think I’m some fuckwit? In the last week, we’ve caught five Trotskyites armed to the teeth. They were carrying a whole library of maps. They told us everything. Terrorists use maps to prepare their attacks, to get in and get the fuck out quickly, am I wrong?’

Emilia bowed her head, hopeless. What was happening was a farce, something that had no place in the real world. She tried to reframe things, to return to a sensible, safe place. She said: ‘I am the daughter of Dr Orestes Dupuy. You have no right to treat us like this.’

‘You think so, puta? We don’t give a shit about some Dupín here. This is a war, you get that? I can kill you right here, right now, give any excuse I like. I can say you were trying to escape, that you tried to take my gun off me, I can say the first thing comes into my head. Out here, you have no name; you don’t exist.’

Simón didn’t know how to appease the toad. He was desperate for this nightmare to end, for them to leave him in peace. With the country in the state it was in, who cared about maps?

Another paunchy officer appeared in the doorway and asked the pencil-pusher if he needed any help.

‘Help? With this little whore?’ the toad said. ‘Are you shitting me? I could fuck her three times over and still have dick to spare. See the Commie fucker who came in with her? He’s already given up.’

Simón’s head had slumped onto his chest. Lashed to a chair with the toad’s belt, he could barely move. The clerk rolled up his sleeves and went back to sucking his pen. He was preparing himself for more questions. He took the pot of coffee heating on the stove and threw it in Simón’s face.

‘You going to tell who you brought those fucking maps for? What about the weapons we found in the jeep?’

Maddened by pain and fear, Simón hauled himself to his feet, still lashed to the chair, and struck out wildly. It was a senseless thing to do, he couldn’t hope to achieve anything, he didn’t even succeed in loosening the belt. He slumped onto the floor with the chair on top of him. The noise attracted the attention of the paunches outside. Two of them quickly hauled him to his feet and slammed him against the wall. Emilia watched her husband slide down in slow motion. It seemed unbelievable to her that life should play them such an ugly trick, just when they were beginning to be happy. A few insignificant lines on a map had brought them to this place by chance, and now chance was destroying them. The world refused to be mapped, and those who violated this principle paid their price in tears. She heard a crack like breaking bone. Simón’s nose was swollen, his lip split; a trickle of blood stained his shirt.

Two green Ford Falcons, engines running, were waiting for them at the perimeter fence of the checkpoint. Emilia was bundled into the first car next to a guard in plain clothes. The pot-bellied officers pushed and manhandled Simón towards the other, her husband shuffling along, his legs faltering and uncertain.

This was Emilia’s last glimpse of him, the image that in future she would dream of so often. But in her dreams, Simón was never Simón, but one of the other men they had encountered that day. Or a city that rose and fell. Or a flickering candle flame.

On the drive back to Tucumán, the sky grew dark. Every few kilometres the weather shifted and changed. At times, a furious storm burst, bringing clouds of steam rising from the asphalt. Further along, the sun shimmered and the air shattered into slivers of ice. They came to a point where a convoy of carts hauling sugar cane blocked the road. The officer guarding Emilia got out of the car to try and deal with the obstruction only to come back shaking his head. ‘There’s no way through,’ he said. ‘Two mules dropped dead in the road and there’s no one to move them. We’ll just have to drive round.’

He turned on the two-way radio and informed the checkpoint that they would be making a detour. The cane fields were deserted; the horizon veered from purple to a deep, ominous yellow. They drove along a crude dirt track, the car constantly getting stuck in potholes. Emilia no longer cared where she was being taken or when they would get there. She cared only about Simón. Over and over, at seemingly endless intervals, she asked the guard about him, but the man stared out at the eddying dust and did not answer. Maybe it was pointless to resist, Emilia thought, after all everyone else in the country had already given up. The military were the aristocracy of the spirit of Argentina, and that aristocracy was once more trooping out of its barracks to save the country. How many times had she heard her father recite ‘El discurso de Ayacucho’⁸, in the same antiquated bombastic tones as the national poet who had penned it? Written in 1924, it was a piece of rhetoric which every schoolchild was forced to learn by heart. Every word of it was burned into her brain and circled there still.

As night began to fall, they were forced to stop by a passing train. Slowly, clumsily, the train approached. On freight cars smooth as still water, corpses were being shipped as though they were merely cargo. Except for the three wagons behind the engine, the bodies were exposed to the elements, indifferent to the obscenity of death. The wagons at the front were shrouded in black plastic which billowed open in the wind to reveal a hand, a head, a leg. Ash from the stubble fields whirled around the freight cars in dark flecks: a host of dying butterflies.

It was almost dark when the first Ford Falcon arrived in the suburbs of Tucumán. The broad avenues were lit up; the facades of the houses gleamed as though freshly painted. In the freezing air, the city huddled in on itself. Cars moved slowly; people walked with heads bowed, hugging the walls. The stillness was so deliberate it seemed artificial. Across the boulevard that divided the north of the city from the south hung a banner showing a photograph of three strapping, dishevelled, thuggish young men and, underneath, the words: We will not allow the extremists to destroy the country. Help us eliminate them. A block further on was a poster with an illustration of a hard-working broom bearing the legend, in blue and white: Order and Cleanliness. Death to Subversion.

Order and Cleanliness was one of her father’s propaganda slogans for the government Emilia remembered. How many other slogans had he penned that she was not aware of? God, Country, Family she knew was his, though it belonged to everyone now.

She was taken to the police station where they fingerprinted her and made her sign a piece of paper admitting that Simón had rented the jeep. ‘Under instructions from the Automobile Club Argentina’ Emilia explained in a note at the bottom. Flanked by two guards, she was led down into a vast basement lined on both sides with a row of cells from which there came not the slightest sound. Emilia was locked up in the furthest cell. As soon as the guards left her, she lost all track of time. It took a long while for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. She could make out a cot bed bolted to the floor; in the corner was a bucket from which came the stench of geological strata of urine. The wall opposite was dizzyingly high, at least eight metres, and converged with the wall behind her meaning the cell was shaped like a pyramid. At some point, a guard passed a jug of water through the bars and she gulped it down in one breathless swallow. Her throat was dry, filled with sand and fear.

Just as she was about to fall asleep, a ghostly glow jolted her awake again. On the high wall opposite, some invisible machine was projecting dreamlike images. The pictures came and went, disappearing like shooting stars. She thought for a moment that she was seeing things and remembered a line from Dante she had read at school: Poi piovve dentro all’alta fantasia. It was true: it was raining in her imagination, but raining so hard that the forms and shapes blurred and melted almost as soon as they appeared. She saw Simón rushing headlong into a fire, but that too was one of Dante’s images. She saw a newborn baby being strangled with an electrical cord. The umbilical cord was still attached, and the baby’s face was crumpled in a rictus of terrible pain. The image swelled as though about to encroach on the real world; it grew larger and larger before dissolving into a poster whose typeface reminded her of old cinema newsreels: Baby butchered by subversive criminals. She saw the three persons of the Holy Trinity devouring one another: the Father devouring the Son, and the resulting two-headed monster devouring the dove that was the Holy Spirit, then the dove taking flight and, using his beak as a scythe, beheading the other two. And then she saw herself watching these things, and it was only then that she realised the images were not inside her head, that somewhere there was a hidden projector, though she could not understand why. Who would spend money creating such images? Could anyone else see them?

Every so often the images were repeated, always in the same order, as though part of an infinite loop. At dawn — she assumed it must be dawn by now — they vanished like flotsam carried out on the tide. She tried to sleep, but a radio somewhere nearby kept repeating the lottery results over and over. ‘Two thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight. Eight hundred thousand pesos,’ the presenter announced. ‘Two thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight. Eight hundred thousand pesos,’ echoed the darkness at the end of the corridor. Reality retreated, becoming more and more remote, its place taken up by the only two senses Emilia trusted: smell and touch. But were these senses free or were they too prisoners of some alternative reality which moulded her imagination as it pleased?

She woke again just as someone pushed a mug of steaming maté, a hunk of bread and some fried pork strips through the bars. The litany of lottery numbers continued, but the images on the wall had disappeared. If she wanted to survive, she thought, she had to stay calm, to clear her mind completely, to dissociate herself from what was happening to her body. Difficult as it seemed, she needed to sink into a trance. This would give her the strength to face the worst, if the worst should come. If she allowed herself to feel any emotion, she would be lost. Finally, when she could feel nothing she decided she was safe.

On the third day, a warder ordered her to wash and brush her hair.

‘You’re free to go, kid,’ he said. ‘Round here, rich people always land on their feet. Your parents are waiting for you outside.’

She was blindfolded and someone took her by the arm and led her across what felt like a damp courtyard to a room that smelled of sweaty clothes. Before closing the door he ordered her to count to twenty before taking off the blindfold. When her eyes adjusted to the dim light that flattened everything, she could make out a small sofa, a wooden desk, a few chairs. On the walls hung coats of arms, a photo of the Eel, a portrait of General San Martín. For no apparent reason, a memory buzzed in her brain like a maddening bluebottle, a phrase she had heard for the first time in primary school: the battle, the treaties, the obligatory hero. All across the country obligatory heroes were multiplying like saints in the Catholic Church. For every battle never waged, a new hero was created; for every miracle never performed a new saint was venerated. The battle, the saints, the obligatory hero.

A door opened behind her letting in a sudden burst of light and her mother’s bird-like voice.

‘Emilia, hija! Just look at the terrible mess Simón has got you mixed up in.’

Reluctantly, she allowed herself to be hugged. She had always taken comfort in her mother’s warmth but she was shocked by this accusation against her husband.

‘It’s not Simón’s fault, he’s as much a victim of this mess as me. Where is he? I want to see him.’

‘You can’t see him like that,’ her mother said, ‘you look a fright. Go and get yourself cleaned up. We brought you some clean clothes.’

In the bathroom, the shelves groaned under the weight of shaving equipment and imported perfumes. The blouse and the bra her parents had brought from Buenos Aires were her sister Chela’s and a little too big for her. Her mother had been right, she did look a sight — her face was haggard, she had deep bags under her eyes, her hair was greasy and dishevelled. She did her best to make herself presentable, but there was not much she could do. In the room next door, a voice she didn’t recognise was making abject apologies to her father.

‘Two days, Dr Dupuy, yes, I know, it’s unforgivable. Almost all our men were out on patrol and the officers here at headquarters are terribly ignorant. They work twenty hours straight. They’re so exhausted they don’t know good from bad when they see it. It was late at night when your daughter was brought in and there was no duty officer. If you want, we’ll look into the matter, get to the bottom of this, doesn’t matter whose head rolls.’

‘Tell General Bissio I want to see him,’ her father demanded.

The general too apologised profusely, though only by telephone. He was in the mountains trailing a band of guerrillas, he explained, and did not want to keep Dr Dupuy and his family waiting in this inhospitable barracks with thieves and whores. He ordered that Señora Cardoso be shown the prison register proving that Simón had been released two hours earlier, at 8 a.m.

The father patted his daughter’s waist then moved away. It had been this way since her adolescence. The vague gesture of affection made Emilia feel tainted. She read the list of items that had been returned to Simón: a Citizen wristwatch; a wedding ring; a pack of Jockey Club cigarettes; a brown leather bag; 27,000 pesos in thousand-peso bills; an Automobile Club ID card; a 1:5,000 scale map of the southern section of the province.

Dr Dupuy had tickets for the four o’clock flight to Buenos Aires, but Emilia did not want to leave immediately. Simón, she insisted, was bound to turn up at any moment. Her father headed off to the airport where he would wait in the restaurant while she and her mother went to check whether the rented jeep had been returned. Yes, they were told, it had been returned the previous day by a soldier. Another soldier had picked up Simón’s suitcase from the hotel where they had spent their one, brief, night together. The bill had been paid, though no one at the hotel could remember by whom. The concierge and the girls working on the reception desk were not the same. It felt as though the past was retreating, leaving no trace, as though life was suspended in a continuous present where things happened without cause and effect.

They got to the airport just in time for the four o’clock flight. Simón was probably waiting for her in Buenos Aires, Emilia’s mother told her, where else could he be? ‘But then why doesn’t he answer the phone?’ asked Emilia, who had been calling the San Telmo apartment every fifteen minutes. ‘He probably took the bus back,’ her mother replied, ‘it’s a twenty-hour journey, he won’t get there until tomorrow morning.’ ‘But without leaving a message, without asking after me? That’s not like him,’ said Emilia. ‘Fear changes people, hija,’ her father observed. ‘If he’s afraid, then by now he’s running away from everything, even himself.’ It was only as they boarded the plane that Emilia realised her father had not bought a fourth ticket. She thought it best to say nothing and spent the next two hours staring at the clouds through the window.

Years later, when Simón still had not reappeared, she read an article in Gente that said Argentinian husbands often disappeared suddenly, without giving any explanation. They suffer from Wakefield’s syndrome, a psychoanalyst explained, an allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story in which an upstanding London gentleman leaves his wife one day for no reason, moving to a house one street away from where he watches her go about her day-to-day routine until he grows old. Emilia knew in her heart that Simón was not like that; he would come back to her as soon as he could.

At the time, thousands of people disappeared for no apparent reason. Ambassadors disappeared, the lovers of captains and admirals, the owners of businesses coveted by the comandantes. Workers disappeared from their factory gates; farmers from their fields, leaving tractors running; dead men from the graves in which they had been buried only the day before. Children disappeared from their mothers’ wombs and mothers from the children’s memories. The sick who arrived in hospital at midnight had disappeared by morning. Frantic mothers rushed out of supermarkets searching for children who had slipped through black holes between the shelves. Some turned up years later, but they were not the same. They had other names, other parents, a history that was no longer theirs. And it was not only people who disappeared; rivers, lakes, train stations, half-built cities vanished into the air as though they had never existed. The list of things that were no more and those that might have been was infinite.

In an interview with a Japanese journalist, the Eel was forced to address the question of this rash of disappearances. ‘Firstly we would have to verify that what you say existed was where you say it was. Reality can be very treacherous. Lots of people are desperate for attention and they disappear just so people won’t forget them.’ Emilia watched the interview on television, listened as he articulated every syllable, slowly nodding his bald head.

‘A desaparecido is a mystery, he has no substance, he is neither alive nor dead, he does not exist. He is a “disappeared”.’

And as he said he does not exist, he rolled his eyes to heaven.

‘Don’t use that word again,’ he went on, ‘you have no basis for it. It is forbidden to publish it. Let it disappear and be forgotten.’

Emilia left Simón standing in the doorway of Trudy Tuesday and — not letting him out of her sight — crossed the road to pick up her silver Altima from the parking lot at Hammond Atlas. She was not afraid that he would leave again — after all these years it made no sense. ‘I’ll go pick up the car.’ Emilia whispered to him. ‘We’ll go home.’ She did not even need to wait for an answer. On the far side of Route 22 she turned to make sure he was still standing where her senses had left him. He wasn’t there. She saw him walking north, a smudge of light, a haze raised by the afternoon sunshine.

‘Simón!’ she called, but he did not hear her. Perhaps he could not hear her over the constant stream of trucks from Newark. A taxi stopped on the corner and, without hesitating, Emilia jumped in and told the cab driver to follow her husband. Simón was crossing a bridge less than two hundred metres away and she quickly caught up with him. When she opened the taxi door he climbed in, smiling, as though nothing had happened. Still panicked, her heart in her mouth, Emilia stammered her Highland Park address and explained to the driver the quickest way to get there. The enthusiasm her husband had shown some minutes before as he chatted to the Scandinavians seemed to have completely drained away. Now he huddled in the back seat like a timid boy, stealing glances at Emilia. He was carrying the case she had given him thirty-one years before: a wide, soft brown leather bag, perfect for overnight trips: the same case that, according to the prison register, had been returned to him at the police station in Tucumán. Back then, Simón had three original maps on fine card in the case, the names already printed, and plastic Stabilene overlays on which to apply the geographical symbols. Emilia would have liked to ask him whether he kept the past, too, in the case, frozen, the prisoner of a time that would not go away. It had been years now since cartographers had used Stabilene overlays. Nowadays, maps were the creations of computer programs, metaphors that had no place in reality.

‘I’m not going to leave your side,’ she told him. ‘I don’t need to be back at work until Monday.’ It was Friday.

Simón stared out at the soulless monotony of suburbia, the Taco Bells and the Dunkin’ Donuts spilling fat, satisfied families onto the street, the Kinkos, the Pathmarks, the Toys R Us and the other endless, sprawling temples to consumerism. Emilia talked incessantly. ‘Ever since I moved to this country, I’ve been amazed by the food, the huge perfect-looking tomatoes, the lettuces that never wilt, the shelves of fruit that call to you like sirens as soon as you step into a grocery store. Now I understand why Disney’s Snow White was bewitched by her stepmother’s apple. A tasteless apple that brings eternal sleep. Don’t you feel that, Simón? None of the food here has any flavour to it. The stuff they sell here is a genetic fantasy, a breeding ground for every future disease.’ Every now and then, the cab driver would turn and ask, ‘Everything OK, lady? Did you say something?’ ‘No, everything’s fine.’

For a long time her husband sat, saying nothing, staring out at the bleak expressway. I have to be careful, Emilia thought. I’m desperate to make up for lost time, but maybe he’s not. I don’t want to crowd him, to pressure him. Sooner or later we’ll go back to being the people we used to be. And even if we don’t, it doesn’t matter. At least we’ll be together. A day, two days, the rest of our lives. Once that fact sank in, they would talk, tell each other all the things they had not been able to share. There was so much to tell! I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, she thought, I never gave him up for dead, not even when those three witnesses stood up in court and swore they had seen his body, tossed like garbage in some courtyard somewhere. I never stopped loving him, I was never unfaithful. All through the terrible years I knew he would come back, I searched for him, I waited, I knew. I’d almost say I won him back, but to talk about the man I love like that would be to diminish him; my Simón is not a trophy.

The sun is setting quickly; soon now the darkness will envelop them. Usually by the time Emilia leaves work at Hammond it is already dark; she has rarely had an opportunity to see the twilight, the crimson and yellow death throes of the autumn trees, the blurred shapes of the identical buildings along the expressway as they flash past. In a few moments, everything will disappear, the afternoon light, the falling leaves; everything but Simón, sitting here beside her.

Always as she leaves the offices at Hammond, even on the worst nights — when it rains and snows and when the ambulances wail incessantly — she is met by evangelical preachers chanting their litanies — O Lord, O Lord — as they wave collection boxes at passers-by. Their ominous chanting still plagues her as she lays her head on her pillow because the sounds of the day always return to her at night as though they had retreated and were waiting for this moment to spread through the smooth surfaces of her head: the sounds of this day and other distant days. She would like to rid herself of these futile memories, but she has had no choice but to carry them with her wherever she goes. Once she was unaware of them. Time has brought them back. As the years passed, the memories receded. Now, with Simón sitting next to her, she has nothing to fear.

‘What a perfect day,’ she says, not expecting him to reply.

And indeed he does not reply. Barely fifteen hours ago, she was sitting with Nancy Frears in her apartment on North 4th Avenue watching The Ghost and Mrs Muir on television — an old romantic comedy in which Gene Tierney, who is recently widowed, moves with her daughter into a haunted house by the sea and falls in love with the ghost. Nancy had left at about eleven o’clock and Emilia had read for a while, some poems by Gonzalo Rojas which moved her with their fierce eroticism: Lowing, bellowing female my beautiful / love entering God, made animal / anointing the brain of her old man/ torrents running over him. The words had inflamed her; she still has life enough in her to be aroused, to masturbate, to belong to herself as she has never wanted to belong to anyone else.

‘I never stopped loving you, Emilia, not for a single day,’ says Simón. The roar of the expressway drowns out his barely audible voice. ‘I never stopped loving you either, amor. Not for a single day.’ Her mind is racing, there is so much to think about before they get home. But perhaps it is better to stay calm, to wait, to see how they feel being together. They have said that they still love each other. It is not much, and yet it is everything. She is afraid that Simón will be disappointed when he sees her as she is, the crumpled scrap of paper adversity has made of her.

As they turn off Route 22 to the even more arid plain of the 287, lined on either side by hotels vast as cemeteries (who but a ghost would think to stay out here in the middle of nowhere?) some ten or twelve miles from her house, she realises that she smells, that she is dirty, that her hair is thick with sweat. She showered before leaving home that morning, shaved her armpits the night before, and yet she exudes smells that only a second shower can staunch. If all goes well, maybe she could ask her husband to take a bath with her? No. She glances at him, so placid, so quiet, and her embarrassment immediately disappears. She will ask him what he wants to do, hope that he will ask her to come to bed with him tonight. She will give herself to him, follow him wherever he wants to go just as he has followed her to this corner of New Jersey without her even asking. He seems familiar with his surroundings, he doesn’t even seem surprised when she points out the shadows of Johnson Park where she jogs on Saturdays and Sundays. Two blocks from her place, Simón finally speaks: ‘All yet seems well; and if it end so meet / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.’ ‘Shakespeare, isn’t it? Your English is very good. How did you learn?’ ‘Television,’ he answers. ‘Six hours a day.’ And she says, ‘I worked on mine listening to audio books. Solitude leaves you time for everything.’

Emilia’s apartment is dark: a small balcony overlooking the street, a living room, bathroom, kitchen, bedroom. The dining table is strewn with maps. In the kitchen there are dirty dishes and smells that have been lingering, festering since morning. She has let things go, she didn’t call the landlord to get him to fix the damp patches where the wallpaper is peeling. She watches her husband climbing the stairs behind her, reaches out her hand. ‘Is it you, Simón? Is it really you?’ She grips his hand, slender, weightless, soft as she remembers it. As she climbs the last stair, she is overcome by desire, the torrential desire that has been building in her belly ever since she first began to miss him; she wants to feel his body, to hold him, she cannot bear this passion inside her any longer. As though reading her thoughts, Simón’s voice comes to her aid: ‘Not for a single day did I stop loving you,’ he says. ‘Me neither,’ Emilia replies, ‘not for a single day.’ And with her whole being she says the words again so even the threadbare walls can hear. ‘Not for a single day, amor.’