Purgatory

2. In dream I seemed to see a lady, singing

‘Purgatorio’, XXVIII, 40

Like Emilia, I’ve lived in Highland Park since 1991, on the deserted slope of the hill overlooking the Raritan River. In the mid eighteenth century, the Raritan was a bustling thoroughfare. These days, it’s a trickle of water, a nesting place for thousands of Canadian geese whose honking disrupts the peace of the little town. Although, in September 1999, the geese vanished for no apparent reason. The sky grew dark, all nature fell silent. Nobody was prepared for what happened next. That night, Hurricane Floyd swelled the waters of the Raritan, which rose so much in a few hours that the river burst its banks, flooding the whole of Johnson Park a hundred yards from where I live. The nests of the geese — heavy, rugged straw things — were swept away by the current. The basements of all the houses overlooking the park were flooded. Whole libraries and photographic studios were wiped out and the maps marking out the eruv so crucial to the Orthodox people in town were destroyed. The following morning, everyone turned out to see the damage. The sun was so glorious that morning that even those who had lost things in the storm treated it like a pleasant autumn stroll. After all, it was impossible to estimate the extent of the damage, most of which was irreparable. A week later, life in Highland Park was the same as it had ever been. The waters of the Raritan had retreated and once more skirted the periphery of the town. The geography department at the university drew up a new map for the mayor’s office that included two small islands which had appeared in the oxbow when the water subsided. Space calmly resisted the onslaught of time. Little had changed. The boundaries of Highland Park still comprised the sixty blocks it had before the storm, including the park, eighteen places of worship and some fifteen thousand souls.

My best friend back then was Ziva Galili, head of Rutgers’ history department and one of the foremost authorities I’ve ever met on the 1917 Russian Revolution — a field in which there’s no shortage of authorities. Every year, Ziva spends at least three months unearthing new surprises from the files of the now defunct KGB. Whenever I go round to her house, I overhear her speaking half a dozen languages fluently, including Hebrew, the language of her parents and of the kibbutz where she grew up. She’s still my best friend, though we don’t see as much of each other these days because she was appointed acting dean of the School of Arts and Sciences in 2006, and so now she’s rarely ever home. About a quarter of the residents of Highland Park are African immigrants, refugees lucky enough to have escaped the massacres in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Another quarter is made up of the tenured professors — of whom I am one — who hail from various countries predictable and unpredictable: Czechs, Chinese, Indians, Burmese, Russians, Bulgarians, Belgians, Israelis, Mexicans, Brazilians, Argentinians. I don’t need to go on. The rest, and by far the majority, is made up of observant Jews, many of whom are ultra-Orthodox. This is why anywhere you go in town there’s always a synagogue nearby, and why one of the most respected rabbinical schools in New Jersey is just outside town on Woodbridge Avenue about two hundred yards from the flyover on Route 1. At dusk on Fridays and on Saturday mornings, streams of students can be seen walking down Woodbridge Avenue wearing their long black coats, winter and summer, with the white wool tallit underneath. In town, hundreds of young mothers bustle around the synagogues in formal dress, wearing hats copied from the British court and conspicuous wigs. They energetically push buggies carrying two or three children of various ages (they’re often already pregnant with their next child), chatting happily and enthusiastically about the food they’ve prepared for Shabbat. Their husbands rarely accompany them, spending the holy day in prayer and the study of God’s laws. They are a devout and gentle people who have found happiness in this town where nothing ever happens. The police in Highland Park are bored to death. Their sole occupation is chasing down those rare drivers who dare exceed the 25 mph speed limit (15 mph near schools), or those who forget to wear a seat belt. Friendships are made on the steps of churches and temples and cemented over lunches where everyone prays together. Catholics, evangelicals, Jews: the inhabitants of Highland Park are believers and faith is at the heart of their lives. Since I choose to live without God, I know no one and no one calls on me. It’s hardly surprising then that it was some time before I heard about Emilia Dupuy — known to the regulars at Chris Nolan’s beauty salon and Vijay Maktal’s pharmacy as Millie since it is easier to pronounce than Emilia, whose Spanish vowels are a death trap for Anglo-Saxons.

I first encountered her at Stop & Shop back when it was called Food Town. Before we realised we were both from Argentina and began to greet each other with polite mistrust, my only thought was to avoid being in the same checkout line as her. Not only did Emilia, like most of the older women in town, take her own sweet time squeezing the tomatoes and smelling the peaches, she also drove the checkout girls to distraction with avalanches of vouchers and coupons. The cashier would be bagging up the broccoli and the low-fat ice cream and suddenly Emilia would produce a coupon offering a $2 discount. Usually, she’d try to get a 100 oz tub of ice cream with just one coupon, and when the cashier refused, she’d start to bicker and the war of words would usually end with a supervisor rushing over to sort things out. By which time, of course, everyone else in the line had scuttled off in search of calmer checkouts. Whenever I ran into Emilia at the supermarket, I always made sure to leave before her, even if I arrived after her. She didn’t look like a woman in her mid-fifties. Anyone would have thought she was ten years younger. She was tall, thin, willowy, with that air common to so many Argentinian women of a teenage girl who refuses to grow up. She had a deep tan — the result of hours on a sunbed (there are seven tanning shops in town) and tried to hide her thinning hair with a brittle shell of hairspray. What I most noticed, though, were her eyes, a luminous, almost translucent blue, as with indefatigable curiosity she watched the slow pulse of the world — which in Highland Park moved as slowly as a tortoise. She had small breasts and a shapely ass which emphasised her long legs. She was an attractive woman, and she knew it.

I met her because I’m interested in cartographers, who are very much like novelists in their determination to modify reality. I got my first insight into labyrinths and old naval maps in the geography department at Rutgers, but since no one there produces historical or comparative maps — which were what most interested me — I was directed to the offices of Hammond on Progress Street in Union, before they moved to Springfield. That afternoon, I spotted Emilia Dupuy in one of the programmers’ cubicles and I realised that she lived in the same town as I did, about half a mile from my house.

At work, she was a different person. The woman I was introduced to at Hammond Atlas was nothing like the exasperating fifty-something-year-old at Stop & Shop. She was almost the antithesis: calm, obliging, sweet. She wore a pleated skirt that showed off her magnificent legs, her hair was piled into a simple bun that emphasised the graceful curve of her neck. Later, when I knew her better, I dared to tell her that I had never seen her as beautiful as she was that day. I told her I thought she should dress like that all the time, simple clothes, but she was shocked. ‘The woman you met in Union wasn’t me,’ she said. ‘My God, I hadn’t set foot in a beauty salon in nearly a week.’ I didn’t say so, but I’ve always thought that in the beauty salons that line Raritan Avenue — three to a block — women like Emilia allow their natural grace to be stripped away. I’ve seen women come out of these places with hairdos like towers, eyelashes drooping from the weight of mascara, false nails painted with garish designs, all of which — together with their brashly coloured shapeless dresses — would have earned them a role in a Fellini movie if Federico had ever met them.

Emilia invited me to tea at her apartment on North 4th on Saturday afternoon. I accepted without a second’s thought for the simple reason that I wanted to see the plastic Stabilene sheets on which mapmakers marked out planimetric elements in the 1970s, and to talk to her about ‘scribing’, the process used in making large-scale maps back then.

The two-family houses I’d seen in Highland Park, rented by students or visiting professors, were invariably sparsely furnished: makeshift bookshelves made of planks and cement bricks, a kitchen table where the computer sat alongside yesterday’s lunch plates, a few chairs, a television and a bed that would not have looked out of place in a monk’s cell. Emilia’s apartment, on the other hand, took up the whole top floor. Maps and plans were strewn everywhere, covering up the rugs and the ruched curtains. She had invited Nancy Frears too to avoid any malicious gossip among the neighbours. While Nancy was setting the table, Emilia excitedly gave me a tour of the apartment’s three small rooms: a bedroom hung with calendars, thermometers and photos of her nieces and nephews sending their love from San Antonio, Texas; a dining room with a small bookcase, a pair of overstuffed armchairs and a drawing table; and a tiny room about six foot by six foot whose focal point was an exercise bike. Opposite the bike was a hi-fi system and a pair of Bose speakers. I spotted albums by León Gieco, Almendra and Charly García between Bach suites and the chamber music of Charles-Valentin Alkan. I could easily imagine Emilia spending hours here, sculpting her legs and toning her abs.

Before I could persuade Emilia to talk to me about the Stabilene film used in map-making thirty years ago, or allow me to run my fingers over samples of coloured Mylar sheets — orange, yellow, green, midnight blue — I first had to brave the thick tangle of gossip and family tragedy Nancy had amassed on the residents of Highland Park: the screaming matches between the Flemms — professors of electrical engineering — that spilled out onto the street, a juicy tale of adultery and ruinous stock market investments; the scandal provoked by the sermon in which Father Landowski denounced the secret abortions of two Catholic teenagers; the shock imprisonment — for only nine hours — of local policeman Tom Nizmar’s eldest boy for stealing a CD from Barnes & Noble. There was nothing that Nancy did not know, including the exact time I came out onto the porch to pick up the Times and the fact that I was disappointed when it was delivered late on Sundays. I asked how she managed to know so much about people who lived miles away and she informed me that you had only to keep your ears open in any beauty salon to be able to predict — with a tiny margin of error — who was getting married, who having a baby and which businesses in Highland Park were about to go belly up.

It was Nancy who asked me if I’d ever seen Large Lenny on Main Street. I didn’t know who she meant until she described him. ‘Sure, I know him,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen him walking up and down at all hours like a madman.’ Lenny, she told me, really was mad. He was six foot ten tall and weighed about 370 pounds. He’d burst into elementary-school classes and rail against abortion and euthanasia. ‘I am the way, the truth and the life,’ he’d say. ‘The life that I give in heaven no one can take away on earth.’ Now and again, the police would take him into custody for disorderly conduct, but he was always released within a couple of hours because his constant bellowing of verses from the Gospels terrified the local cops.

Large Lenny would follow the kids when they got out of school, proclaiming: ‘Be not deceived, children, be not deceived. Many will come claiming to speak in the name of the Father, saying that the end of the world is nigh, but they are liars. Do not listen to them. Listen only to me.’ After school, the kids would always have stale cookies and bits of chalk in their bags and would throw them at Lenny to try to get him to shut up, but Large Lenny would not leave the Scriptures in peace. Nothing could stop him. When night fell and people took refuge in their houses, they could still hear the giant’s supplications over the noise of Passover celebrations, bar mitzvahs, over the din of the television. ‘Come from your lairs, your burrows, and touch me,’ he’d roar. ‘I am not a spirit, because a spirit has no flesh, no bones, and I do, as you can see!’ ‘You’d have to be blind not to see you, lardass!’ they would call from their houses. ‘That’s enough now. Go home to bed!’

Three or four times a month the mayor’s office would get a petition asking that Large Lenny be committed to an asylum. Nothing ever happened, however, because it would be a drain on public funds and also because his meanderings along Main Street brought in tourists from Princeton and Metuchen. ‘Large Lenny might not be in his right mind,’ Nancy said to me, ‘but he’s gentle as a butterfly.’

I left before it got dark, just as Nancy was trying to convince me that, with a bit of patience, it was possible to win a fortune playing bingo and the lottery. By then, I had managed to persuade Emilia to lend me some Stabilene sheets and partially completed maps her husband had drawn.

As she showed me out, she asked if I would mind meeting up now and then for a chat. ‘I can’t remember the last time I heard an Argentinian voice,’ she said. I promised to call her, almost out of a sense of guilt. A week later, I bumped into her outside the Bagel Dish Café opposite the pharmacy and, having nothing better to do, agreed to join her for coffee. Without Nancy Frears around, Emilia turned out to be exactly as I expected: an intelligent woman preoccupied by the misfortunes of the world. She had just read Philip Roth’s novel about Charles Lindberg and offered to show me the house where the hero’s son had been kidnapped in 1932. ‘If you like,’ she said, slipping into the familiar Spanish tuteo, ‘I can introduce you to the nice old man who lives there now. He’s convinced he’s Lindberg’s lost child — he certainly acts like a child.’ ‘What do you mean, a child?’ I asked. ‘Twenty months old,’ she said, ‘the age Lindberg’s son was when he was taken.’

When Emilia began to tell me her life story, I was writing a novel set in Buenos Aires and the last thing I wanted was to hear anything that would put me off: other people’s memories can stir up private memories which I find distracting. But it was impossible not to be captivated by the skill with which she wove the tangled web of her story; by the measured, confiding tone that implied this was something she would not tell anyone else in the world. Sometimes, if I closed my eyes and followed the story, like a sailboat going where the wind takes it, it was like being alone with a good book because, like Maugham (Emilia had at least ten volumes of Maugham in Penguin Classics), she was a master of concealing the essential in order to reveal it gradually.

She was an avid reader with a keen intelligence. She could appreciate the similarities between Kafka’s early work and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and gave a detailed account of Guillermo Sánchez Trujillo’s study on the influence of Crime and Punishment on The Trial, which theorised that Dostoevsky’s novel provided Kafka with a template that allowed him to recount the break-up of his engagement to Felice Bauer. Our conversation was a series of endless, aimless stories, but we didn’t care because this was why we were here, to talk about things that would be meaningless to anyone else in the town. I contributed my own share of trivia, mentioning — though it had nothing to do with the conversation — Dante’s influence on Borges’ mature poetry, something that seemed self-evident to me. I was about to explain why when Emilia interrupted me and recited long passages from Infierno and Purgatorio, interweaving them seamlessly with verses from El otro, el mismo and Elogio de la sombra, collections which Borges published just before he turned seventy. I don’t know which Spanish translation of Dante she was quoting, but I know that what she did was a revelation, it made them seem like the work of a single poet. ‘In both of them,’ she said to me, ‘and contrary to what the romantics and the symbolists believe, the state of blessedness and joy can attain an intensity that is more moving than that of suffering.’

I felt so comfortable in the hour and a half I spent with her, so surprised by her erudition, by the enthusiasm with which she bounded from one subject to another, that I invited her to join me for coffee at Starbucks in New Brunswick the following Saturday. When I called her at the Hammond offices on Friday to confirm, she asked me to swing by and pick her up half an hour earlier. She had something she wanted to show me, she said, and a story she wanted to tell me.

When I arrived, she was standing waiting for me on the stoop wearing jeans and sneakers with her hair pinned up. Only in that morning light did I notice that her eyes looked tired, her eyelids heavy, as though one half of her was hidden beneath the waning moon of her face.

‘You know Loews cinema on Route 1?’ she asked me.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Everyone does.’

‘Then you’ll know that there’s a grave in the middle of the parking lot.’

I was surprised, because I didn’t know, though I park there every time I go to the movies. Sometimes, on summer nights, I drive up to the hill overlooking Raritan and gaze down at the gently flowing river and the lights on the far shore where my house is.

‘What grave?’ I asked.

‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

The vast wasteland of concrete behind the cinema stretched out in front of us. I parked next to a squat brick wall with an iron railing running around the top, as unremarkable as the oblique, lukewarm mid-morning sunshine. I had driven past dozens of times assuming it was an electrical substation, or a vent for the cinema’s air-conditioning system.

‘This is where they buried Mary Ellis,’ Emilia said. ‘According to legend, beneath her ashes are the ashes of her horse. If you come closer you can see her gravestone.’

I’d vaguely heard of Mary Ellis at some teachers’ meeting, but always assumed she was a fictional character, someone from some unfinished novel by one of the Brontë sisters. But the delicate marble bust depicted a real woman with a long nose and ringlets in her hair, and underneath, her dates, cut into the stone: 1773–1794.

‘Mary Ellis’s diary is in the Princeton manuscript library,’ Emilia told me as we sat down in Starbucks on George Street with our cappuccinos. ‘According to their records, nobody ever bothers to read it. The information about her childhood I’ve managed to find in encyclopedias on New Jersey is not very reliable, but what Mary herself wrote — her story — is as moving as Cathy Earnshaw’s confession in Wuthering Heights. Mary, as she herself says many times, was the man she loved. At eighteen, she became engaged to a young lieutenant called William Clay. Mary was an orphan, she had no dowry and lived with a paternal aunt in a house in New Brunswick. Once or twice a week she would ride down to the riverbank to meet with Clay alone. The townsfolk talked. When the pastor of the local Presbyterian church gave a sermon about couples who outraged decency and courted the wrath of God, a number of accusing faces turned to stare at her. But Mary didn’t think the sermon referred to her. She was about to get married; she was happy. Two weeks before the wedding, Lieutenant Clay asked her to meet him urgently at their usual place by the river. There, he told her that he had been called up to quell a farmers’ uprising in Pennsylvania and was due to ship out that night. “Within the month,” he told her, “I will come back for you; I’ll hoist a yellow shawl on the mainmast and announce my arrival with two shots from a harquebus. Then we shall be able to marry.” As proof of his love, Clay gave her the magnificent black horse he had inherited from his father. A month passed, and then another. News eventually reached New Brunswick that the uprising had been quelled in a matter of hours without a shot being fired and the troops had been given leave. After she heard this Mary would saddle the black horse every afternoon and ride to the clifftop overlooking the Raritan. Her diary begins here, in the first week of her wait. She gives a detailed account of her daily two-mile ride, describes the countryside in rain or fog and her trepidation whenever a ship hove into view.’

‘I don’t know much about you,’ I said, ‘but I can’t imagine why you find Mary Ellis so fascinating.’

‘There’s no need to imagine. We have one thing in common: neither of us ever saw the man we loved again. Two years later, Mary found out that Lieutenant Clay had married the heiress to a South Carolina plantation. Yet still she went every afternoon to the same place by the river for a meeting with no one. Her diary after this is confused. She was losing her mind. In the autumn of 1794, when the waters of the Raritan rose to record heights, Mary rode out to the clifftop and, with her horse, leaped into the torrent without even leaving a note.’

‘She didn’t need to.’

‘When her body was found at Perth Amboy near the mouth of the Raritan, Mary was still clinging to her horse, her feet still in the stirrups. No cemetery was prepared to give her a Christian burial so devout hands buried her on the hilltop and her horse with her. The grave was constantly covered with flowers and became a place where young girls would go to tell their tales of lost love, so the governor of Jersey declared the plot of land sacrosanct. In the years that followed, the land around it was used as a pig farm, later a restaurant, then a flea market. Now it’s a cinema, though lovers no longer come to visit the tomb. But every time someone stops in front of the grave, they see the image of a woman, scanning the horizon, waiting for her lover to return.’

‘So this is the story you wanted to tell me,’ I said.

‘No. I wanted to show you Mary Ellis’s grave, but the story I called you about is my own. You said you don’t know very much about me. From that first time we talked in the Bagel Cafe I’ve been thinking I’d like to tell you something more about me. But I don’t know if we’ll have time right now. It’s noon. You need to get back to the university.’

‘I’m free until two o’clock.’

I invited her to split a salad at Toscana, a quiet, discreet restaurant nearby. I regretted the offer almost immediately. Words poured from Emilia in that frantic torrent of those who spend too much time alone. I was afraid I would be bored.

The wind had picked up; the only people walking along George Street were a few idle students and shop workers finishing their shift. I was overcome, as so often, by a feeling of melancholy at being so far from my own country, in this foreign suburb in which nothing ever happened.

Within ten minutes, Emilia had filled in the trivial details of her friendship with Nancy Frears, the emptiness of her weekends, her routine of bingo, Mass on Sundays, trips to the beauty salon. Books and films, she told me, had saved her life. She said sometimes she was terrified that, like Mary Ellis, she would lose her mind.

‘More than once I’ve woken up in the middle of the night with the feeling that my husband is in the room.’

‘There’s nothing strange about that. It happens to all of us. We’re dreaming and when we wake up the dream lingers for a while.’

‘No, it’s more real than that. I feel that Simón is standing by the door to my room, not daring to come in.’

‘It’s because you never saw his body. That’s why.’

‘Who knows? The courts declared him dead and I did everything I could to kill him inside me. Because he had no grave, I was his grave. Now he wants to leave it.’

‘You should buy a cemetery plot for him, even if it’s only symbolic. Bury everything you have of his somewhere.’

‘I don’t have any of his clothes or his things any more. All I’ve got is a photo and a wedding ring. I couldn’t bring myself to bury them.’

‘Maybe the time has come to let him go. ’

‘I’ve spent years doing everything I can to make him go. I came to Highland Park to escape from the past, and I almost succeeded. I didn’t go back to Buenos Aires, I stopped talking to my parents. Whole days would go by when I didn’t think of Simón once, didn’t even dream about him. The next morning I would feel guilty, but I would also feel a thrill of victory. Since then, he’s come back, little by little. If I just knew where his body was, I wouldn’t have to go through this agony.’

We had ordered pumpkin soup and tuna salad, but we barely touched the food. Much later I realised that we were so cut off from the real world that it hardly mattered whether we were in Toscana or somewhere else. Emilia seemed desperate to tell her story, though just then she had more questions than answers, more wishes than questions. But her wishes could not be fulfilled, or perhaps they had already been fulfilled without her realising. Nothing is more terrible than to wish for something you believe you can never have.

‘It’s all in the past. Don’t torment yourself.’

‘I don’t. That’s the worst thing: I don’t feel any pain any more. I’ve grown used to the absence of the only person I ever loved. What’s strange is that I know I’m not the same person since I lost him and yet I carry on as though nothing happened. I feel despicable.’

‘You’ve no reason to. Nancy told me you spent fifteen years searching for him.’

‘Fifteen? I was searching for him even before I met him. Now I’m waiting for him to come searching for me. At Mass last Sunday Father Flannagan’s sermon was about purgatory. The Catholic Church used to teach that purgatory was a necessary purification for imperfect souls before they could enter paradise, that accepting suffering as an act of love for God and all forms of penitence was purgatory. That’s how things used to be. Not any more. The Church is more tolerant these days, Father Flannagan said. Now, purgatory is seen as a wait whose end we cannot know.’

All things come to an end, I told her, even eternity. It was a cliché and as I said it aloud it sounded even more clichéd.

She shook her head.

‘Not Simón. Simón is still there at the door to my bedroom. I know it’s him. He wants me to see him, to let him in. I don’t know how to do it.’

‘It’s not Simón in the doorway. It’s your love for him that won’t leave you in peace.’

‘Simón disappeared one morning in Tucumán. That was thirty years ago,’ she said. ‘For a while I lived out what seemed like a normal life in my parents’ house.’

From time to time, Emilia got messages from people who claimed to have seen her husband dead in this place or that. She went on drawing maps as though nothing had happened. Nothing seemed strange to her. She herself could have sworn she saw Simón at the Country Show or among the visitors to the Buenos Aires Book Fair. He was her God and, like the God of the Church, he was omnipresent. Sooner or later he would return. She had only to be patient. But she could not stop herself worrying when she received these messages about the life he was living far from her. She would lie awake for days convinced that at any moment he would ring the doorbell and explain why he had disappeared without so much as a word. But he never did come, and over time the physical need she felt to hold him in her arms waned. She became resigned to solitude, to abandonment; she began to forget there had been a time when she felt neither alone nor abandoned.

I asked where she had looked for him — cities, beaches, bars, hospitals. As she told me, something inexplicable happened to me. It has no bearing on this story but if I don’t mention it I’ll feel as though nothing that happened that afternoon was real. And it was. We were a couple of blocks from the train station and every now and then we’d feel a blast of wind from a passing train. I looked out the window of the restaurant and, in place of the grey shapes of the buildings, the discount clothing store, the university bookshop, the branches of the major banks that had always been there, I saw the gently rolling pampas outside Buenos Aires, with cows lifting their heads to the sky and lowing as though they too were leaving with the train. Emilia went on talking — about the beaches of Brazil, the mountains of Venezuela, the flea markets of Mexico City — and still I saw the pampas there where it had no business being. In that moment I believed that Simón stood in the doorway of Emilia’s bedroom on North 4th Avenue. I was prepared to believe whatever she told me. If I did not believe her, why was I listening?

‘The first news of Simón that seemed genuine came from one of my father’s sisters,’ she went on.

She was no longer looking at me. I felt like one of her maps. On a map you can be whatever you want to be: the pampas, the Amazon rainforest, a ruined city, an imaginary island.

‘My aunt said she’d seen Simón at the Ipanema Theatre in Rio de Janeiro where she was working as assistant set designer. She’d gone over to say hello but Simón had run off. As soon as I heard this, I decided I had to go there. I spent six months in Rio going from one theatre to another and then from one map company to another. Nobody had heard of him, the whole story was a sick joke.’

I asked her whether she had tackled her aunt about it.

‘I sent her a letter. She never replied. My sister Chela thinks my father put her up to it, asked her to lie to me to get me out of Buenos Aires. The country was in chaos at the time and I think my father, who’d always been so sure of himself, was afraid that I might become a troublesome witness. The thousands of dead, the concentration camps, the unmarked graves left behind by the military junta were just beginning to come to light and my father had sanctioned every one of those crimes. It was more than that — he did not think of them as crimes. After what we now call the dictatorship took power, my father became a rich man, a very rich man. The junta advanced him loans he never repaid, gave him million-dollar commissions, subsidies for public works that had no useful purpose. For my father, it was constantly raining money. He bought land in some of the most fertile areas of the pampas, luxury flats in Paris, in New York, in Barcelona.’

‘Maybe you could move into one of his palaces,’ I said with a sarcasm I instantly regretted.

‘I left Buenos Aires with only the clothes I stood up in and what money I’d saved from my job. Later, I found there was money in my accounts that wasn’t mine and I spent it, but only so I could go on searching for Simón. My father owed him that. My father doesn’t know where I am now or what I’m doing. The only person who knows is Chela, but if she ever tells him, I’ll lose my only sister forever.’

‘Just now, when you said “what we now call the dictatorship”, I thought you were a collaborator too. I’m sorry. Because what we went through was a dictatorship, the most vicious dictatorship Argentina ever suffered, and God knows we’ve suffered a few. But since you were a victim of it, why do you still refuse to accept they murdered Simón? More than one witness testified as much, it was established at a trial that no one disputes.’

‘Because they didn’t murder him. I didn’t believe it when I left for Rio and I don’t believe it now. Simón is alive. It’s been thirty years and he is still alive. I know. I can feel him inside me. The witnesses saw what they wanted to see. If they blew his head off, as they say, how could the witnesses have recognised him? The only person who could have was me. But I didn’t see him. Simón is alive. I know it. When he comes back, he’ll explain why he left and everything will make sense. Shall I go on?’

‘Sure, go ahead.’

‘After the Malvinas War, the dictatorship collapsed. By then, Chela was living in Texas with her husband and I didn’t want to leave my mother all alone in Buenos Aires. The air was thick with old grudges demanding retribution. My father had been one of the junta’s most visible collaborators — though he had also been one of the first to sing the praises of democracy — and he was probably afraid that I would mention Simón.’

‘Nobody could have blamed you. Your husband was one of the disappeared. You were a victim.’

‘Nobody did blame me. I blamed myself for having been stupid and gullible, for having been a collaborator, in my own way. My conscience wouldn’t leave me alone. My father wouldn’t leave me alone. He would come and stand by my bedside, stroke my shoulder, my hair. He’d never been demonstrative but now suddenly, whenever we were alone, he was overly affectionate. In the end all I felt for him was disgust, pity and disgust. There was nothing left for me in Rio and I missed my mother. I wanted to go back to Buenos Aires to take care of her. I checked the bus timetables — back then it was a twenty-hour trip — and decided to leave as soon as possible when suddenly I got a phone call from Caracas. Some woman I didn’t know asked if I was related to Simón Cardoso. I’m his wife, I told her. “I’m Nurse Coromoto at the Centro Médico La Trinidad,” she said. “Your husband was brought into the emergency department two hours ago suffering from paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. We’ve already given him IV digoxin.” “I don’t understand a word you’re saying,” I interrupted her. “You don’t understand? Simón Cardoso is suffering from serious cardiac arrhythmia. He needs intensive care but claims that he has no money. If no one is prepared to cover the cost of his treatment, we’ll have to send him to a public hospital where he’ll be lucky to be treated at all.” The nurse’s voice was clipped, harsh, urgent. I begged her to admit Simón for forty-eight hours. I would leave immediately, I told her, and I would pay for everything. I’d never even been to Caracas. And I had no money left and was not about to call my father.’

‘You must have been desperate.’

‘I was, and I couldn’t think about anything except how to get there. By the time I hung up, I was crying. It had been seven years since Huacra and the empty hours and days were finally beginning to be filled, to have a purpose, a direction. I went to Galeão airport at five in the morning and asked at every counter for the quickest flight to Caracas. I found a flight leaving Rio at eleven and connecting in Bogotá and bought a ticket with a credit card I’d never used before and didn’t know how I would pay off. As soon as the banks opened, I went to withdraw the last three hundred dollars I had in my account. I was told I had a balance of five thousand dollars. My father, again. Sooner or later I would have to pay the money back, but at that point I didn’t care how.’

‘So your father knew where you were?’

‘No. He’d been putting money in my account for months, though I never asked him for anything. He just did it, like he always did. To him, I was just something that bought and spent. Caracas unsettled me. I felt strange, as though I’d just arrived in Luanda or Nauru. The city centre was teeming with hawkers and office workers speaking some sort of onomatopoeic language in which I could only make out scraps of Spanish. In travel agencies and cafes and countless discount shops I asked for directions to the Centro Médico and every time I was sent off in a different direction, to some remote area: Antímano, Boleíta, El Silencio, Propatria. I had so much trouble finding the place I began to wonder if it really existed. I mentioned La Trinidad to an assistant in a clothes shop and she said that she thought there was a big clinic out there that dealt with infectious diseases. I decided to take a chance. I hailed a cab and the driver refused to take me, as did the next four or five taxis. They said that it was too far, that they’d have to drive out through the dark hills. When I finally did manage to persuade a driver, I realised how dangerous it was. La Trinidad is about fifteen kilometres from the Plaza Bolívar, at the end of a tangle of winding streets perched on a cliff overlooking a ravine. The taxi’s engine coughed and sputtered, but it kept going. By the time we arrived it was almost midnight. The duty nurse took pity on me; she checked the computer for patients recently admitted or discharged. No one named Simón Cardoso appeared on the list and she went back several years.’

‘It was a hoax. Like Rio.’

‘I didn’t think so at the time. At the time I didn’t even realise that Rio had been a set-up. I hadn’t had anything to eat for hours and I fainted. When I came round, I asked for Nurse Coromoto. The only person by that name who worked at the clinic was in the accounts department. I assumed I’d come to the wrong hospital. It was the logical explanation. Why would anyone go to the trouble of phoning me from Caracas in the middle of the night to tell me the one lie that could persuade me to leave Rio. What difference did it make whether I was in Brazil or Venezuela?’

‘Your father again. Do you know why he was doing it?’

‘No. Maybe to torment me, to keep me away. He didn’t trust me.’

Sitting in Toscana listening to Emilia it seemed to me she was three distinct women, first, the woman who was gravely telling me about her tragic past, dwarfed by her father’s looming shadow but determined not to be cowed, not to allow this dark force to destroy her will to survive. Next, the woman who wore white-and-purple-patterned false nails that made her slender fingers look unspeakably vulgar. And a third, who complemented the other two — the first perhaps more than the second — an intelligent woman who would recite the poems of Gonzalo Rojas and John Ashbery, who recited Marianne Moore’s zoological creatures drawing out the words until they became disconnected from reality, until they were no more than words: we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat. a tireless wolf under a tree.

‘It’s easy to get lost in Caracas,’ I said to her. ‘When I lived there, there were lots of clinics and neighbourhoods called Trinidad: Lomas de la Trinidad, Hacienda de la Trinidad, Trinidad Santísima.’

‘I found that out in the weeks that followed. I rented a cheap apartment in Chacaíto, the only part of the city with sidewalks and cafes. Every morning at seven o’clock I’d set off on my tour of hospitals and clinics looking for Simón. I didn’t always manage to get help. It was just before Christmas and people were in no mood to hear about other people’s misfortunes. I told my story to the nurses and the doctors, but they barely listened. Thousands of Argentinians had come to Caracas before me, all telling the same story. After a few weeks it occurred to me to print flyers with Simón’s photo and stick them up in the kiosks around Sabana Grande in case someone recognised him. The few people who got in touch wanted me to give them money, wanted me to come alone. They were con artists pure and simple. I was taken in by some of them and frittered away the last of my savings.’

‘You could have got a job. It was possible to get work back then.’

‘I did, I applied to be a cartographer with the Venezuelan Oil Company and they gave me the curious job of naming the intricate network of roads carved into the hills around the city like an amphitheatre. I spent my mornings walking up endless flights of steps, losing myself in the winding lanes that led to barns or sawmills, to storehouses of cardboard, carefully noting down the nicknames given them by locals, mostly names related to local characters: Iván el Cobero, Paloma Mojada, Coño Verde, La Cangrejera, things like that. What had been a series of dotted lines, an undocumented circulatory system, I drew together with a skein of words. I divided my time between this hare-brained task and my trips to the hospitals. I could feel Simón slipping through my fingers, but at night, as soon as I fell asleep, he appeared in my dreams. I was reading a lot of Swedenborg at the time, and took to heart his idea that human beings are merely “cyphers”, a vestige of the writings of God which allows us to be other, to be elsewhere, if God should decide that what He has written means something different. More than once I went to the Cinemateca de Caracas to see Hitchcock’s Vertigo, with Kim Novak as a ghost so carnal that you accept her death precisely because it is an oxymoron. But the true corpse in the movie is obviously James Stewart, a man who loses the woman he loves not once but twice. I couldn’t bear to be Stewart, I couldn’t bear to lose Simón a second time. I would have been better off forgetting, but I realised that I would never be able to forget. I had grown used to being alone, to fending for myself, to ignoring the sexual innuendos of the men of Caracas who didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word “no”. Like I said, I lived only to find him.

‘In the Cinemateca, a film critic came up to me on the pretext of talking about Hitchcock. He was the first man I’d found attractive since Simón, the only one I might have fallen in love with. When he looked at me, it was as though I was the only woman on the planet; he devoured me with his eyes, not sexually but with a genuine desire to discover who I was. He had that cinnamon-coloured skin so many Venezuelans have, and pale, piercing eyes. After the screening of Vertigo we went to the Ateneo de Caracas for coffee. He was careful and precise in his words. He pointed out to me the wealth of clues Hitchcock gives in the first scene that Scottie — James Stewart’s character — is impotent: the way he uses his cane, the detail that he hasn’t had a girlfriend for two years. We talked for over an hour. When we left, he invited me to go to the beach with him the following Sunday — something that in Caracas is part of a game that inevitably leads to sex — and I was on the point of accepting. In the end I told him I’d think about it and call him. When I got back to my apartment in Chacaíto, I realised I was about to make a mistake. I would have liked to be able to spend time with him, to feel less alone, but his advances would have become more persistent, in the end we would have quarrelled. There was nothing natural about my ascetic life, yet I felt completely at peace. I thought I was avoiding men for fear that Simón would reappear just as I was about to start a new relationship, but it wasn’t that. The truth was that I wasn’t available to anyone but him. Losing him had not only quenched my sexual desire, it had snuffed out all my desires. I would not be myself again until I found him. I didn’t go back to the Cinemateca and for weeks I didn’t answer my phone or go back to the beach. I don’t know how this guy found out I worked for the state oil company, but he ended up leaving me a slew of messages. Over time, the fear I might run into him subsided and I took to going back to the beach though only to more remote beaches where I thought it was less likely that I would run into him. In Oricao or Osma, I roamed wild untamed paths with the singer Soledad Bravo, who would sing as the sun was sinking into the sea, in a voice as huge and golden as the papayas.’

‘How long was it before you realised Simón wasn’t in Caracas? In your shoes, I would have given up within a year.’

‘Five years, two months and twenty-one days. From December 15, 1983, until March 8, 1989. And if I left Venezuela, it wasn’t because I chose to. It was chance.’

The waiter at Toscana reappeared and asked if we wanted anything else. We were the only people left in the restaurant. Outside on the street, usually busy in the afternoons, there was only the hum of traffic. It was after two o’clock but Emilia seemed unaware of the time and indeed the world. In the grey flashes of light from the street I saw her as, two centuries earlier, the villagers of New Brunswick must have seen Mary Ellis: standing alone on the banks of the Raritan waiting for a man who would never come.

‘We should go,’ I said.

‘Please, can we just stay a few more minutes? Don’t leave me in the middle of the chance event that forced me to leave Caracas. The story isn’t very long. It begins with an anonymous letter. I’ve no idea how the postal system in Venezuela works these days, but back then mail was sporadic — all the more so after the Caracazo⁹ uprising. On the Saturday after the riots, the mood of the city was solemn. No one dared to go out for fear of another wave of violence. The post offices were all closed and yet, bizarrely, that Saturday, I received a registered letter from Buenos Aires with no return address. I opened the envelope warily. Inside, there was a cutting from a Mexican newspaper, Uno más Uno, an article by someone called Simón Cardoso. It could have been by anyone of that name, but the article — which was about the hunt for and the arrest of the head of the Mexican Petroleum Workers’ Union, a man known as “la Quina” — was illustrated with a map of Ciudad Madero on the Gulf Coast, and in the map I recognised the mistakes my husband always made with place names. I never did find out who sent me the cutting, or how they found out my address — Chela was the only person who knew it. By the time I got the letter, the article was two or three weeks old. I couldn’t wait. By then, I was deputy head of the cartography department, I was taking home twelve hundred dollars a month and managing to save five hundred. What with the chaos that followed the riots, flights took off as and when they could. I spent days sleeping on the floor at the airport. At 6 a.m. on March 8, a voice on the tannoy announced a flight departing for Mexico City, via Panama. I wept, I screamed, I invented illnesses, deaths in the family, anything so they would give me a seat. That’s how I arrived in Mexico City, as penniless as when I left Rio. With my savings suddenly worthless, I holed up in a hawkers’ guest house near Zócalo and started looking for my love all over again, though I didn’t hold out much hope. I spent more than two years chasing mirages — newspapers that had been shut down, scandal sheets that had never started up, prying into illegal agencies that created maps of Utopia for the dreamers who wanted to cross the border into the United States. I risked my life in brightly lit rooms where, with state-of-the-art computers, the finest cartographers in the world helped drug traffickers find little-travelled routes between their laboratories and their secret airstrips. I helped them out as much to boost my earnings as to gain the protection of the drug bosses who, through their contacts at immigration, could find out who entered and left Mexico.’

‘You could have stayed there.’

‘I could. But then, one morning, I woke up convinced that I would never find Simón. He was alive but he couldn’t see me. I had to stop looking for him so that he could look for me. It was a revelation. He had to come back the way he had left. I felt that that was how things were, how they had always been, and they could never be otherwise. I’d spent years and years chasing a chimera. I’d allowed myself to be led by signs dangled before me by other people rather than being led by what I felt inside. It was too late to get back the time I’d lost. But at least I could help make sure Simón could see me, draw him to me, position myself within the same orbit. Maps,’ she said. ‘If I can put myself on the same map as him, sooner or later we’re bound to meet. When I say it out loud, it sounds silly, but to me it seems self-evident. If time is the fourth dimension, who knows how many things exist that we cannot see in space — time, how many invisible realities. Maps are almost infinite, and at the same time they’re unfinished. The maps of Highland Park, for example, don’t include the eruv, they don’t include those residents who will be born tomorrow. In order to be able to see Simón, I needed to drop off — or rise above — a map, if possible every map. I was still based in Mexico City at the time. I got up, I went to Sanborns restaurant in the Casa de los Azulejos, and I started sending letters to every mapping company in the US and Canada. I wanted to get as far away as I could. If I’d been offered a job in Hawaii or Alaska, I would have taken it. Two weeks later, I got a reply from Hammond. They had a vacancy for an assistant in Maplewood, New Jersey.’

‘It’s getting late,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I was exhausted by the conversation and I still had no idea what she was trying to tell me.

‘Let’s go,’ she agreed. ‘I’m sorry for keeping you.’

I drove her back in silence. The streets of Highland Park were hung with banners advertising hot-air balloon flights, fireworks and free ice cream in Donaldson Park. The town was about to celebrate its 102nd birthday.

As we pulled into North 4th Avenue, we saw Large Lenny weaving from one sidewalk to the other carrying thick red candles that were burning his hands as they melted. He seemed insensible to the pain, staring at some fixed point in the middle distance. But however disconnected he was from the world, something had made him cry. Tears spilled silently from his eyes and followed a roundabout course to drip from his jaw. A gang of kids was following him, firing pebbles at him with elastic bands. Emilia couldn’t bear it.

‘Leave him alone,’ she shouted. ‘Can’t you see he’s crying?’

‘I’m not crying,’ the giant corrected her. ‘I forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

‘Are you OK, Lenny?’ Emilia comforted him. ‘You want me to take you home?’

The question was ridiculous, no one knew where Large Lenny lived. Everyone assumed one of the local synagogues gave him shelter, but it was impossible to know which since he visited all of them.

‘I thirst,’ he answered.

We had arrived at the door to Emilia’s house and she went upstairs to her apartment to get him a bottle of cold water. A couple of neighbours were peering out of their windows. In the distance, I heard the announcer’s voice from the sports field. Some high-school students were playing a match.

‘Blow out those candles, Lenny,’ I said. ‘You’re burning your hands.’

‘They have to be lit. For the res’rection.’

When Emilia brought the water, the giant set the candles down on the porch and drank straight from the bottle, the water coursing noisily down his cavernous throat.

‘Large Lenny thinks someone’s come back to life,’ the downstairs neighbour informed Emilia. The guy gave a little laugh, and from some nearby balconies came a chorus of jeers.

‘Who’s the dead guy? Him?’

‘I am no longer of this world,’ said the giant. ‘Someone who was lost is coming back to the world and if these candles don’t show him the light he won’t find his way.’

‘Where is this person?’ Emilia asked, going along with his train of thought. ‘So we can help them. ’

‘You don’t need to, that’s what I’m saying. You should know that better than me.’

Large Lenny handed back the empty bottle and headed off towards Main Street still shouting verses from the Gospel according to Luke, but I was no longer listening. I went home.

When they got back from their honeymoon, Simón and Emilia thought they were Parmenides’ ‘One Being, eternal’, a being that would never move from itself into the past or towards anything else; things are never as we expect them to be, things are not even as they appear.

The taxi driver who picked them up at the airport told them that Ringo Bonavena had been murdered outside a brothel in Reno, Nevada, the week before. The flat-footed boxer with the rippling muscles and a voice like a little girl’s had been killed by a single shot to the chest. Ringo would never again sing ‘Pajarito pío pío’. ‘He was killed by a gangster,’ the driver told them. ‘Imagine it: the eighteen-stone brick shithouse who KO’d Ron Hicks in the first minute, the guy who held out fifteen rounds against Cassius Clay, died because of some dumb argument with a bodyguard in some two-bit whorehouse, excuse my language, señora. They flew his body back last Friday. You wouldn’t believe the number of people lined up to see him. Yesterday there was thousands of guys standing in the rain.’

At 9.30 a.m. the air seemed dirty, thick with fog and smelling of disinfectant. The car inched down the avenida del Libertador towards the San Telmo apartment which was as unfamiliar, as impersonal to Emilia and Simón as a hotel room. They had been so taken with the apartment when they had viewed it, with the balconies overlooking the Parque Lezama, that Dr Dupuy had bought it for them as a wedding present, and insisted they should not move in until it had been completely redecorated and furnished. Emilia’s mother picked the paint colours for the walls, the dining set, the bedroom curtains, the carpets, the crockery and the cutlery. Simón had insisted that they at least be allowed to bring the drawing tables, the encyclopedias and the cartography manuals they had had when they were still single, so some part of their identity would be preserved.

The redecoration had taken longer than expected, forcing them to spend a month in Punta del Este after their long cruise back from Recife. They arrived exhausted but excited. It was Sunday and there was something melancholy about the light in Buenos Aires. Ringo Bonavena’s body had been flown home so that he might be added to the list of national saints, a pantheon which already included Gardel, Perón and Evita. The streets around the Plaza Roma were crowded with parked cars from the funeral cortège, all decked out in black crape and floral wreaths. As they passed Luna Park, they were overtaken at top speed by a Mercedes-Benz with tinted windows which jumped the traffic lights. Emilia recognised it as her father’s car and told the driver to park wherever he could find a space in the fleet of funeral cars. She wanted to surprise her father; what she could not know was that it was she who would be surprised, because Dr Dupuy stepped into Luna Park Stadium with his arm around the waist of a woman who — from behind at least — looked young and glitzy. Simón reluctantly got out of the car; he did not want their return in Buenos Aires ruined by an ugly scene between father and daughter, but, as she told the story thirty years later, Emilia had known exactly what she was doing. Nothing, she believed, not even shame, could perturb her father.

When the stadium doors were opened, all eyes turned to the catafalque which now occupied the area at the foot of the empty bleachers where the boxing ring had been. The coffin was lit by four church candles, the kind that stream wax, and by the red and green glow of garish spotlights. Bonavena’s mater dolorosa gently stroked the face of the son who looked so much like her, as though touching her own death. In a timeless mirror, events continued to repeat themselves. A television presenter knelt before the mother, took her hands and kissed them. Hadn’t they seen this scene before on Telenoche or Videoshow? Everything was the same and yet everything was different, as though events had been rewound to be played out again. So the crowds of onlookers lining the streets to watch Bonavena’s cortège pass waited with the same impatience they had twenty-five years earlier when they had waited for Evita’s coffin, but this time there could be no miracle: though the events were the same, in shifting from one era to another they were recreated in a new form.

Dr Dupuy stood before the coffin for a moment and, turning, found himself face to face with his daughter. Emilia didn’t recognise the woman on his arm, but Simón recognised her immediately. He had read an article in a doctor’s waiting room describing her as a woman who collected powerful lovers, a writer of romantic novels that sold in their thousands though no one knew anyone who actually bought them.

‘This is Nora Balmaceda,’ Dr Dupuy introduced her. This, they knew, was the end of their honeymoon.

They didn’t have time to say anything because just at that moment the undertakers set about sealing the zinc coffin with blowtorches and Ringo’s mother fainted. ‘That’s the sixth time,’ Emilia informed Señora Balmaceda; she had heard about the previous five fainting spells on the morning news. ‘But I didn’t tell her that until afterwards,’ Emilia recalled in Highland Park, ‘because the minute she saw that grieving lump of lard collapse, Nora Balmaceda rushed over to help her.’ She managed to put her arms around her just as the paparazzi — at Dr Dupuy’s signal — froze the scene with their cameras. The picture made the front page of the late editions, printed as big as the photo of the cortège at the intersection of the avenida de Mayo and the Nueve de Julio. Even the caption — ‘A mother and a writer united in grief’ — had been dictated by Dupuy.

Back then, anything was possible. Propaganda manufactured illusions of happiness in the wasteland of misery. Every week, magazines published eyewitness accounts of astonished gauchos who had seen fleets of flying saucers in the night sky. Schoolchildren were taught the topography of Mars, Ananke, Titan, Enceladus and Ganymede with as much dedication as they had been forced to learn by heart the names of the rivers of Europe and Siberia during the Second World War. The emissaries from alien planets, they were told, came in peace, took a number of human specimens to study their emotions and after some years — twenty, a hundred, no one knew how many — returned them to earth or kept them permanently in specialised zoos. A government minister had personally seen two large saucers collecting human specimens in the barren wilderness of the Valle de la Luna¹⁰. The alien crew, he said, were small creatures with large heads ringed with a halo of light that seemed to protect them from our oxygenated atmosphere. With benign expressions, they were herding some twenty people they had undoubtedly collected in the cities into their spaceships. They invited the minister to join the expedition but he explained that his governmental responsibilities made it impossible. This account, from such a solemn governmental source, dispelled the doubts of even the most sceptical. News items about flying saucers were everywhere. Voluntad, a monthly magazine, interviewed six pilots who had encountered alien fleets while at the controls. One pilot, who flew the route between Río Gallegos and Ushuaia — virtually the end of the world — had even managed to photograph two spherical objects with their spindly landing gear.

Over Christmas, Nora Balmaceda became one of the chosen. Even the hardest of hearts in the country were moved by her tale — a tale that proved infinitely more successful than her romantic novels. She had persuaded her husband, a pallid heir to ten thousand hectares in the Humid Pampa, to spend Christmas of 1976 in San Antonio de los Cobres, some four thousand metres above sea level, and then drive down to Salta to see in the new year. On 26 December, they set off in their jeep towards Las Cuevas, forty kilometres south-east, taking the steep, rocky course of Ruta 51 at a moderate speed. It took more than two hours to cover the first two-thirds of the journey. Arriving in the tiny village of Encrucijada they stopped to urinate. A milky glow of stars was stealing across the nine o’clock dusk. Not a thing was moving, not even an insect, and the silence — as Nora told the newspapers — was thick as syrup. Her husband went around the hood of the jeep while she went to pee in the shelter of the escarpment. They were heading back to their vehicle when, from nowhere, they were blinded by a dazzling light that spilled its sulphurous breath over them. Nora managed, with some difficulty, to climb back into the jeep. Through the windshield she saw tiny hairless humanoid creatures floating in a firestorm of yellow flame. Suddenly, the light was snuffed out and she was left in an inexplicable state of torpor. Perhaps she fell asleep, though only for a minute or two. When she came to, she found herself several hours’ drive away in Rosario de Lerma at the wheel of the jeep. Her husband had disappeared. The only possible explanation was that this light, by some preternatural magnetic force, had drawn him up into the heavens. Every TV channel showed the same footage: Nora, tearful, inconsolable, transfigured as she described her visions of another world. ‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t give to take my husband’s place,’ she said. ‘He has found his Shangri-La, has entered the seventh circle of paradise, he has discovered the supreme wisdom of God.’

Nora was photographed in widow’s weeds for Gente. The title of the article — in which Dr Dupuy’s hand was evident — was borrowed from Quevedo: ‘Love Constant Beyond Death’. Through her lawyers, Nora declared her intention to seek control and use of her husband’s lands until he should return from space. After speedy proceedings, the courts ruled in her favour declaring the case ‘Another close encounter of the third kind’.

Spielberg’s film of the same title was causing a furore in cinemas at the time. Spielberg’s aliens communicated by means of musical notes and — unlike those at Encrucijada or the Valle de la Luna — did not abduct objects or people. But whatever the form and the language of the alien visitors, in Argentina their existence was accepted as an article of faith. On the cover of the Dimensión Desconocida, the actor Fabio Zerpa formulated a question which the priest echoed in his Sunday sermon: ‘Are we so vain as to believe we are the only children of God in the universe?’

The affair between Emilia’s father and Balmaceda had been going on for about a year at the time Bonavena was murdered. The World Cup was coming up and women — with the exception of models and strippers — completely disappeared from the news. La Balmaceda was inconsolable at being suddenly eclipsed by virtue of being a widow and because of her lack of interest in the military junta. Her last novel had been published in 1974 and she was not writing another. Early in June, shortly before the start of the World Cup, she made another bid for fame, publishing an article in the Somos offering to ‘motivate’ — this was the word she used — the Argentinian players in the changing rooms and the gyms where they trained. The article, entitled ‘Country Comes First’ made her a laughing stock. Emilia’s father felt so humiliated by his lover’s blunder that he stopped taking her calls. Balmaceda wasted little time in replacing him with a tennis champion, posing with him next to his tennis trophies for the press, and later with a ship’s captain who eventually ended up with the land that had belonged to the husband now lost in space.

She firmly resisted the mortifications of age. In photographs in Gente, day by day, month by month, it was possible to watch as her laughter lines, the bags under her eyes, the folds of her double chin, gradually disappeared; watch as her eyes became bigger, her lips fuller, as her tits and her ass defied the effects of gravity. Once the cycle was complete and she had recovered her lost youth, Nora stumbled on another profitable idea, one which once again sold thousands of books. In flights of mystical rapture she described a wrestling tournament between the angels: the seraphim who had six wings, and the cherubim who had only four. She wrote pages and pages of incomprehensible drivel (which people nonetheless reverently quoted by heart) which, she said, were dictated to her by beneficent angels lately returned from visiting God. Her greatest success came when she announced that she had witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary on the plains of Esteco, 1300 kilometres north-east of Buenos Aires. A prosperous city had been established there in the late sixteenth century, but by the time Nora Balmaceda drove past with a military escort in search of angels it was a barren wilderness. She had read somewhere that Esteco had been razed by the earthquake of 1692, and the winds of God’s wrath had wiped out its heathen inhabitants. On the banks of the Río Pasaje, where a six-foot menhir marks the spot of the former settlement, Nora had met a goatherd, a little girl who was visited by the Mother of God at dawn every Wednesday. The little girl told Nora that the Virgin appeared as a form without a face, a gentle voice, enfolded in a mantle of light. These visions, wrote Nora, could only be of the Blessed Virgin. ‘Our Lady has come back to this world to put an end to the brutality of atheist extremism and to redeem those who are prepared to repent.’ In her conversations with the little shepherdess, the Virgin had asked that a maximum security basilica (a basilica, not a chapel, Nora insited) be built nearby where she would personally cleanse misguided souls and guide them to heaven. The magazine in which her article was published saw its circulation triple and before the place could be overrun with penitent pilgrims, the junta dispatched sick prisoners from jails and ordered them to dig the foundations of this new temple. Two months after first meeting the little goatherd, Nora wrote that the girl had watched, overjoyed, as the prisoners ascended into heaven on a carpet of light. On a local radio station the prophet was heard to say, ‘Angels took them up to heaven.’

Nora Balmaceda basked for a little longer in her rapturous success, dealt with the avalanche of foreign publishers begging to translate her books. In the midst of this frenzied whirl of success, she committed suicide by taking cyanide. She left no letter, no explanation and no will. Before she lay down to die, she put on a white organza blouse and made herself up as though going to a ball. On the nightstand there were two other sodium cyanide tablets. Her faded beauty was intact. No one claimed her body. There had been no sightings of her husband since his abduction by aliens and no relatives appeared. Dr Dupuy gave one of his assistants the task of having her buried with modesty and discretion. Later, he called a bishop friend of his and asked that the Church take possession of all her worldly goods.

Stories that would chill the blood continued to circulate about the disappearances that took place during those years. In old bookshops in Buenos Aires, it is still possible to find copies of magazines telling the strange stories — written in the curious mixture of hypocrisy and collusion common to the period — of people who sailed out on the Río de la Plata only to vanish, leaving their abandoned boats adrift. Many, like Nora Balmaceda’s lost husband, were landowners. Before they set out on their last journey, these people bequeathed their lands and factories to the military leaders who had been their friends and protectors. The courts were inundated by lawsuits from siblings and spouses left penniless, but none was successful since the bodies of those missing never appeared. Where there is nothing to see, no one existed, government spokesmen explained. Such doublespeak has since slipped into ordinary speech having been a staple of journalism. Where there is nothing to see, no one existed — these expressions were repeated over and over on the radio and on television. You can sometimes hear them still.

Other, less durable symbols of those times have vanished. The alien spaceships that once lit up the four corners of the heavens never returned. Of the Basilica to Our Lady of Esteco, not even the ruins have survived. All around lie the skeletons of disused trains. There are no villages, no warehouses on the old gravel road which connected the plains of Esteco with distant Buenos Aires. The trucks don’t run any more, the villages have died out and the houses where no one lives are left to ghosts and rats. The one-horse town which, back in the 1970s, was the major market town in the area, was flooded when a dam was built. A number of elderly people refused to leave and took refuge in the church tower where they waited patiently for the waters to rise. A woman managed to climb onto the cross atop the steeple and huddle there. The fishermen who ply the reservoir can still see the rusted cross rising above the glassy waters; there is nothing else.

While I was writing this page, I read an article about a Patagonian lake that disappeared overnight. The lake was situated near the Témpano glacier at 50º south, it was three kilometres wide and five metres deep. Forest rangers last saw it two weeks ago. When they came back, they found only a dry bed with an enormous crack running up to twenty-five metres deep. Some believe the lake evaporated. It’s the first lake ever to disappear into thin air, they said, forgetting that between 1977 and 1978 whole groups of lakes disappeared. This was how the lago de Sabón, the lago Pulgarcito and the lago Sin Regreso were lost, together, with other smaller lakes. At the time, military patrols witnessed them rise like hot-air balloons, shifted by the movement of geological plates, and spill into volcanoes in the Andes. They were erased from the maps and these lost zones were covered with the wavy blue lines that denote impenetrable snows. Foreign map-makers asked if they might have more information about these blank spaces and the Argentinian authorities invariably responded with Bishop Berkeley’s observation: ‘If it be not perceived, it exists not.’

Their first meeting after thirty years goes just as Emilia imagined so many times. Simón says the very words Emilia dreamed he would say; he moves as though his body has limits that he cannot go beyond. Aside from that, everything is calm, unsurprising. ‘Is it you, Simón?’ she asked him. ‘Is it really you?’ and as she climbed the stairs she reached back and took his hand. The hand seems frail, lighter than she remembers it, smoother too. She hears him say: ‘I never stopped loving you, Emilia, not for a single day.’ She replies, ‘Me neither, amor. Not for a single day.’ At that moment she decides she will ask him to stay. She desperately wants him to linger in the eternity of love she has prepared for him, wants him to undress her now, to satisfy this desire she has concealed from everyone so that he might be the first to know it. When he penetrates her, she wants the world to stop turning, the daylight to pale like the waning moon now rising, for the suffering to cease to suffer, the dead to put an end to death. This is what she wants, but will he want it too? She tells herself again that she should not want him so, with this selfish desire of those who have nothing, who can give nothing. She has searched for him until she was left without breath, without being, but who knows whether he searched for her with the same fervour, who knows what her husband expected to find? Thirty years have passed and they have many stories to tell each other. She wants to begin with the thing that worries her most.

‘Sit down, Simón. Could you do me a favour and sit down for a minute, my love? I’m not the person I was when you left and it’s important that you understand.’

‘I didn’t leave you,’ he says, ‘I’m here.’

He speaks as though age, which has spared his body, has taken refuge in his vocal cords, his voice is stripped of the authority it had when he was chatting with his European friends in Trudy Tuesday. It doesn’t surprise her. Time is like water: when it ebbs in one place it flows somewhere else. This is precisely what she wants to talk to him about. Until a moment ago, all she wanted was to say nothing, to hold him. To lie down beside him and hold him. But the lost years fill her with doubts. She is afraid that if she tells him they are not the people they once where, she might sever the slender thread by which they are now connected. She doesn’t want to hurt him, doesn’t want to hurt herself, and this is precisely why she cannot control what she says.

‘You’re here because you pitied me because I searched for you so long. I combed every city where you were seen. I spent months in Rio de Janeiro, years in Caracas and in Mexico. I came here to this suburb because I couldn’t keep searching any more.’

‘I wasn’t in any of those cities. You looked for me in places where I never was.’

‘Then tell me where you were, tell me where I should have looked. What I want to say to you is that, all the while I was searching, I was growing old. I don’t know how to make you see what I can’t see myself. I’m the same person I was when we fell in love, I feel the same passion, I’m still the same romantic, I still love flowers though no one gives me flowers any more, I love the same music I loved then, and when I go to the cinema, it feels as though you’re sitting next to me, holding me, feeling what I feel.’

‘But we’re not the same people.’

‘That’s what I was coming to. I’m the same person I was, but my body is not the same. Life has made me younger, but my body has gone the way of every woman’s body.’

She asks him if he would like tea. She puts water on to boil and takes down two cups and a tray. ‘Lemon? Sugar?’ This is how she likes her tea. As does he, she knows that already. The sky is heavy with clouds swollen with rain. Night is about to fall, as all things which belong to the natural order falls. Emilia will not see it fall because some days ago, tired of having the students next door peering in at her, she covered the windows with adhesive paper. She finds it unbearable to have to expose her failing, fading body to the eyes of heartless strangers.

‘If we’d lived together, you’d be used to the way I look and I wouldn’t feel the embarrassment I feel right now. You look the same as you always did. Me. well, you can see for yourself. I would have liked to be the woman I used to be, amor, but I grew old. You’ll be disappointed. It’s been seven years since I had my last period. When I get up in the morning I have bad breath. I stink in places where once I didn’t smell at all: my armpits, though I shave them and wash them carefully. Sometimes I smell of pee. The lips of my vagina have withered and even when I masturbate they’re dry. Are you surprised I still masturbate at my age?’

‘Nothing surprises me. You’re wet now.’

‘Aren’t you? It’s desire. Can you tell? It’s something I thought I’d never feel again. Every time I missed you, I felt a physical ache. I felt it many times down the long years. Loneliness fell on me like a penance. I felt it coming and I consoled myself with the illusion of sex, with the illusion that I still could.’

The telephone rings: three, four times. Whoever is calling is impatient. The phone cuts off then rings again.

‘Don’t answer it,’ says Simón. ‘Don’t go.’

On the caller ID screen Emilia reads the number of the Hammond offices. It is 7.30 p.m. If they are calling her, it has to be an emergency that only she can deal with. She lifts the receiver. It’s Sucker, the security guard, a gaunt old man who shuffles when he walks.

‘Are you sure it’s mine?’ Emilia groans. ‘It can’t be mine.’

The voice on the other end of the line is shrill and irritated. In the fifteen years since she was hired to work at the Maplewood office, the security guard’s routine has never been broken. Inertia keeps him at his post.

‘It’s your car, Ms Dupuy.’

Dipthongs confound him. He pronounces it Dew-pew-y like a kid in nursery school.

‘That’s strange. When I left the office, I drove home in my car. Hang on a minute. I’ll just go and check that it’s parked where it usually is. I’ll call you right back.’

‘It’s your car, Ms Dupuy. A 1999 silver Altima. I checked the licence plate. If I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t have bothered you.’

‘Maybe it was stolen. I’ve got no idea. But if it is my car, I can’t come and pick it up. It’s Friday night. I’ve got people coming round. Can’t it wait?’

‘No, I’m sorry, but it can’t. You need to pick it up tonight or first thing tomorrow morning. There are trucks coming to pick up the school atlases from the warehouse at seven o’clock on the dot and your Altima is blocking the doors.’

That morning, when she arrived just before 9 a.m., all the parking spots at Hammond had been full. There was nowhere on the street to park, and she had had to park the car in front of the warehouse. When she clocked in she left a message with the security guard to let her know if she needed to move it. She had been nervous; Simón was waiting for her on the other side of Route 22. She hasn’t forgotten the ride back to Highland Park. Nor what happened since. She is not dreaming, she can’t be, Simón is still sitting in front of her, raising the cup of tea to his lips. This is her reality, the only reality. She has not strayed into a map drawn by lunatics. Nothing now can stop her from being happy.

There is smoked salmon in the freezer, and it’s time to make dinner for her husband. There are some endives and the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc she bought two weeks ago at Pino’s. She can put it in the freezer while she sets the table.

‘I’ll put some music on,’ she says. ‘Mozart? Jarrett? I haven’t listened to Jarrett for ages.’

‘Whatever you like. I’m going to touch you.’

‘Touch me,’ Emilia encourages him. And he comes towards her.

Her husband unbuttons her blouse; his fingertips gently brush her nipples. Her breasts sag and her once erect nipples are flaccid and wrinkled. They blossom again under Simón’s touch. Slowly, he slips his hand under her skirt, strokes her thighs, slips down her panties. Without knowing how she got there, Emilia finds herself naked, lying on the bed with him — he too is naked, hovering above her tremulous body. Everything happens exactly as she would have wanted. The lips of her vagina part, suddenly engorged and proud. Simón is erect. And it looks as though he has grown in the years he was away; he looks thinner too. He mounts her with a skill Emilia has only ever seen in her father’s pure-bred stallions as they desperately straddle the mare’s back. She feels him deep within her, feels the constant pressure on her clitoris from his careful, measured rhythm. She is so happy to have him inside her, she wants him to go even deeper, but she shudders, lets out a triumphant howl and lies there breathless and quivering. ‘Don’t stop,’ he begs her, ‘let’s keep going.’ ‘If it were up to me, we’d go on forever,’ she says. She feels moved. She had expected their lovemaking to be the way it used to be, but it is better now, it is the wild, tender lovemaking of two teenagers. In the first months of their marriage, they struggled desperately to come at the same time as though each time were the last, but when their embrace was over they felt they needed to start again, to make it better. They both constantly felt it was possible to go a little further only to stop, awkwardly, at some barrier which the other would not allow them to cross. Now she knows that she was the one afraid of falling over the edge: he would have done anything. How much can a body take? Emilia wonders. How much can my body take?

She realised that love could be different the afternoon they arrived in Tucumán, before the absurd incident in Huacra. They feverishly undressed the moment they got to their hotel room, the sort of shabby, ill-kept room their bosses invariably reserved for them. The bed was uncomfortable, with a hollow in the middle of the mattress where the springs had worn out, but they threw themselves onto it, one on top of the other, heedless of everything, licking each other, devouring each other, urged on by the animal scent of their sex. It had happened only once and yet the memory has stayed with her, vivid and intense, everywhere, tormenting her. Now she does not need it any more. She half sits up on the bed and extinguishes the memory like a bedside lamp.

Simón gets up, goes over to the stereo. In the tower of CDs he finds Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, a record which they used to listen to in the apartment in San Telmo.

‘Are we going to listen to that?’ she says. ‘They play Part Two all the time in the office. They’ve played it to death, it’s become like background music. Right there — next to your hand — is the Carnegie Hall Concert. It came out last year — I think you’ll like it.’

‘I know it. It’s magnificent, but it’s not the same thing. The Jarrett of The Köln Concert is still who we used to be.’

He comes back to the bed. The gentle rain of notes drips onto their bodies. Emilia lets the night slip past and all that passes is the night. From time to time, she gazes, incredulous, at her sleeping husband: the mole beneath his left eye is the colour of ripe figs, there are tiny, almost imperceptible lines at the corners of his mouth, and it amazes her to think this body belongs to her, anyone would think it obscene that a sixty-year-old woman should be hopelessly in love with this boy of thirty-three. It is an unexpected gift from fate and, now she thinks about it, perhaps it is fate’s reward for all her years of waiting. She would rather have this wild, insatiable love than the life she would have had if everything had gone according to plan: a marriage held together by convention, moved by the rhythm of family celebrations, of talk shows, of late-night films. Her phantom widowhood immersed her in the stupor of so many TV soap operas that she cannot remember what she was in the middle of watching when Simón disappeared. Rosa de lejos? No, that came later. Maybe it was Pablo en nuestra piel, where she cried inconsolably at the scene where Mariquita Valenzuela and Arturo Puig say goodbye at the airport and, with tears in his eyes, he recites: I want everyone to know¹¹ I love you / leave your hand, love, upon my hand. When she wakes, she considers telling him about that scene. Back then, people let themselves be numbed by sentimentality to forget the death that was all around them. The flying saucers, the soap operas, football, patriotism: she will tell him about all the straws she too clutched at, poor deluded shipwrecked fool.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Morning,’ he says.

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

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

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

‘Are you awake, amor?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You were in an old folks’ home?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You didn’t move?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where?’

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

‘Why? I don’t want to die any more.’