Purgatory

3. Flame that follows fire as it changes

‘Purgatorio’, XXV, 124

Though Simón has changed in subtle ways, imperceptible to those who don’t know him, Emilia loves the man he was and the man he is now equally. It is both men’s lips that kiss her, both men’s breath which, having kissed her, heave a gentle sigh. Her husband moves with the wariness of a cat, as though expecting one of the two bodies to overtake the other.

Sometimes, both are one, as they were the night before when he made love to her with a new urgency, or this morning when he told her the story of the writer and his slate. But then, he lapses into silence, watching her, smiling at her with an unfamiliar face as though he had to bring the smile from some faraway place. At such times she does not know what to do with the love she feels for both men, nor which of them she should go to first. She realises that after thirty years her husband is not the same. But it worries her that the man he was before has retreated into this other creature she hasn’t been able to get to know. The Simón who disconcerts her can predict her desires, knows her thoughts before she does, understands the tensions of her body much better than the first. One is the obverse of the other, or the other way round, and she does not want to choose. Chance has bestowed on her unexpected gifts and she has no reason to scorn those that are to come. She deserves every possible gift as recompense for what she has suffered. And more than anything, she deserves the love of her former husband and the pleasures she has discovered with the present husband lately arrived. I’m lucky, she thinks. She does not dare to say the words aloud because happiness attracts envy and hard on the heels of envy comes misfortune.

She leaves Simón skipping from one piece of music to another, from Mozart’s sublime Mass in C Minor to that stupid song by Frankie Valli they heard every day during their honeymoon, ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’, and goes to take a shower. At dawn, as she drove the Altima back from the Hammond offices, she remembered that on both sides of the Delaware are little towns full of antique shops where they could lunch al fresco.

She puts on a pair of jeans, a polo-neck sweater and the jacket she wears on days out. She comes up behind her husband, wraps her arms around him and kisses the back of his neck which smells of the cheap aftershave he used to wear when they were dating. His clothes are the ones he was wearing yesterday. And, apart from his long sideburns, there’s not a trace of stubble on his face. She takes his hand and leads him downstairs.

‘Amor, I’d like to show you the little town where we’re going to live.’

The weather forecast on the radio claims the temperature is going to remain mild until nightfall. The sky is cloudless, the humidity low. On Saturday mornings, couples stream along Main Street towards the synagogues, never moving outside the limits of the eruv. The heathens of the town make the most of their day off to go shopping at the supermarket and take their laundry to the Korean dry-cleaner. ‘What will we do if we run into Nancy Frears?’ Emilia asks. She has told her husband about this suffocating friendship which she is thinking of breaking.

‘We go over and say hello, surely. I’m bound to meet her sooner or later. Life goes on.’

Raritan Avenue is deserted. The doors of Jerusalem Pizza and Moshe Food are closed — no one ever believes that Highland Park has stores with such names, but anyone can check — they’ve pulled down the shutters of Shanghai Kosher and Sushi Kosher. The place that sells Israeli gifts and the stores that sells bridal gowns (there are two, both thriving) show no signs of life either. It is Saturday morning and the devout inhabitants never cease to magnify the Lord. Emilia is surprised, however, that there are no cars, since Main Street is usually bumper-to-bumper. She does not even see anyone at their window. From time to time, a delivery truck stops at the traffic lights. It’s 10 a.m., the sun is shining, but there’s nobody to realise it. Only the squirrels coming and going among the trees, gathering up the last nuts of the fall.

‘We’re going to New Hope,’ says Emilia. ‘I parked the Altima on Denison Street a couple of blocks from here.’

Simón does not answer. Why would he say anything, if he simply wants what she wants?

They get to the Delaware Bridge just before noon. On the western bank, in Lambertville, there is a short street of antique shops. People are buying ramshackle chairs, ornate mirrors with faded paint moulding, umbrellas with wooden handles, cradles decorated with angels blowing trumpets. There is a cluster of curious onlookers in front of a shop window displaying replicas of an imaginary Mayflower and other heroic ships in bottles sealed with wax. They cross the bridge on foot. On the eastern bank of the river, New Hope, its twin, shares the same illusions as Lambertville. The brick mansions on the corners are proud to have weathered two centuries: 1805, proclaims the foundation stone on the post office; 1784 is carved on Benjamin Parry’s house. In the window of a store selling mirrors, Emilia contemplates her reflection in the bevelled-glass door.

The reflection in the glass makes her conscious of her age, the heavy, slightly hunched shoulders, the broad matronly hips that refuse to be tamed by hours in the gym. She would like to go on standing here next to Simón and freeze this moment forever. But she does not have the courage to face the image of herself as an old woman, which is why she decided at the last minute not to bring a camera.

In the Italian restaurant overlooking the river, she has reserved a table by the window. They take their seats; she orders a bottle of coarse house Chianti and a single plate of pasta. The glimpse of her reflection, slightly overweight, has convinced her to go back on the diet she gave up three weeks ago, vowing this time to be strict with herself. Simón cannot tear his eyes from the river. The sun, shining full on him, blurs its contours. Moves over his body like a huge eraser.

She too gazes at the current moving languidly towards the same blind space which waits ahead for her, folding itself into something that does not know whether it is darkness or light, leaving the bank where everything happens.

Shortly after Simón’s disappearance, Emilia’s mother, in her own way, also disappeared. Waking one morning she saw the doctor knotting his tie in the mirror and did not recognise him. She asked him who he was, told him to get out of her room.

‘Ethel, querida, I’m your husband,’ Dupuy told her. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Surely you can see I am still in my nightdress, señor? Could you please leave? I’m a married woman.’

Her father called Emilia at the Automobile Club and ordered her to come back to the house immediately. He did not know what to do with his wife and it seemed to him that, before he called the doctor, it would be prudent to wait for the symptoms to manifest themselves more clearly.

‘Emilia is going to come and take care of you, Ethel,’ he told his wife, kissing her forehead. ‘I’ve got meetings all morning.’

‘Thank you, señor. I don’t need anyone to take care of me. As soon as you’ve gone, I’ll get up.’

When Emilia arrived, her mother was still in bed. She did not recognise her daughter either, but she easily accepted Emilia’s offer to bring her a glass of milk and some biscuits from the kitchen. Seeing her return with the tray, her mother reacted oddly, greeting her again as though she had just arrived.

‘Who am I, Mamá?’ Emilia asked, giving her the answer.

‘You’re Rita my sister. Who else would you be?’

Rita had died ten years earlier. Emilia quickly realised that, for her mother, time had stopped in a happy eternity.

She was taken to the clinic opposite the house where they tested her reflexes and pointlessly asked her questions about her age, the city and the street where she lived. In the afternoon, she was still submerged in the same forgetful torpor. At times, Emilia thought she was almost her old self. At others, she was disheartened to hear her talk like a complete stranger, words that seemed to come from someone else’s throat. One of the nurses said something that made her think: I’ve known patients who wanted to drift away, people who are weary of themselves. Some of them recover by staying in that state of nothingness only to get sick again if they’re forced to come back. Emilia had read something similar in Proust: The most humiliating suffering is to feel that one no longer suffers.

The doctors asked how long she had been suffering these symptoms. No one knew; no one had been paying attention.

‘She’s been very distracted lately,’ the father said, ‘but then she was always that way.’

‘A few weeks ago, she got it into her head that there were men spying on her,’ Chela told them. ‘Since then, she’s been staying in her room with the curtains closed. She’ll walk into the kitchen or the bathroom and forget why she’s there.’

‘That’s strange,’ the father said, ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

‘And you don’t know that she drops her trousers in the middle of the kitchen and pees in front of the servants.’

‘You shouldn’t talk about such things, they’re private.’

‘Any little detail is helpful,’ the doctors said. ‘You’ll need to keep an eye on her for a while. When we have a clear diagnosis, we’ll know how best to help her.’

‘She’ll be better cared for here in the clinic than she will anywhere else. Make sure she has a nurse with her day and night,’ the father decided.

‘That would be a mistake,’ one of the doctors said. ‘She has a better chance of improving in her own home. Nothing can take the place of the care and affection of her loved ones.’

‘It’s not that simple,’ Dupuy countered. ‘I’m out at work all day. I have important responsibilities I cannot simply give up. How are we supposed to deal with her if she’s getting worse?’

‘She is a very tranquil person,’ said the same doctor. ‘The best thing is to be gentle and patient with her.’

‘Do you have any idea how long this might last?’ the father asked. ‘I need to be able to relax too.’

‘If it bothers you, put her in another room,’ the doctor said impatiently. ‘Keep her company when you have the time. And leave the television on. That might help her.’

They brought Señora Ethel home. Emilia made up a room with two beds far from her father’s bedroom and suggested she stay for a while to look after her. At dinner time, she turned on the television. There was a variety show on called La noche de Andrés. The host sang (very badly), danced, told inane stories, introduced other singers (who were even worse) and promised each new act would reveal the secret of happiness. Every fifteen or twenty seconds there was a roar of applause, a burst of canned laughter. Emilia noticed that her mother was weeping, her face expressionless. Tears trickled down her face, soaking her nightgown.

‘Are you in pain?’ Emilia asked. ‘Do you want me to call the doctor?’

‘This programme is really sad,’ her mother replied. ‘Just look at what these people have to do to get attention.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘Can’t you see they’re prisoners. They’re in jail and in order to get out they have to draw a car on the wall.’

‘What car?’

‘Any car. Can’t you see them? They draw it with chalk, open the car door and disappear.’

The Eel found out about Ethel’s illness that afternoon and on Sunday after Mass came to visit the Dupuy family.

‘Ethel will recognise me,’ he said to his wife with the swollen legs. They arrived at the mansion on the calle Arenales with a military escort. The priest’s sermon at Mass had proposed a riddle with no solution. It had something to do with the Gospel passage about salt losing its saltiness. The priest had glared down from the pulpit: Christ would know what to do with such salt. But what of us? Wherewith will we season it?

‘Why would anyone want to season something that doesn’t exist?’ he asked his wife.

‘What do I know?’ she replied. ‘It seems obvious to me — you just buy some more salt.’

She said the sermon had depressed her and she no longer had the energy to visit sick people. The president did not feel like it either, but duty had to come before everything. He did his best to seem touched when Dupuy came out to meet him. And yet he could not suppress the tics that had been annoying him for months now: sudden, violent electrical discharges flashing through his face. He was wearing a twill suit and the same heavily Brylcreemed hairstyle he wore when he gave speeches. Dupuy went with him to the bedroom.

‘Señor Presidente.’

To refresh the sick woman’s memory, one of the daughters announced his name as he went in while she stared into space with an expression of bliss.

‘Come on now, Ethel, who am I?’ asked the Eel, bringing his perfumed face close to hers.

‘Good day to you, señor. Thank you for coming.’

There was one of the silences which carried her off to another place, then she went on in the same tone, though her voice was different.

‘Come on then, out with it, you little coward. You went to Conti and told him everything. Get out, go on, fuck off.’

The president’s aide-de-camp had the military escort leave the room.

‘She’s got you confused with Tito, señor,’ Dupuy explained. ‘Her twin brother, he used to play with her. Don’t pay any attention. You’ll have to forgive her, she’s not herself.’

‘Tito puto, go get yourself fucked by some germs. I hope they germinate you good and fuck you till you’re fucked.’

The voice became more and more shrill as though sharpened with a sabre. Emilia rushed into the room and hugged her mother.

‘Papá, leave her alone, please. All these people just confuse her. Poor Mamá, poor thing.’

Disappointed, the president shook his head, took Dr Dupuy’s arm and went out into the corridor.

‘I’m sorry, Dupuy. I had no idea she was so bad. Her expression is completely blank.’

‘I’m the one who’s sorry, señor. I don’t know where she came up with language like that. I look after her as best I can. I don’t let anyone see her. I’m not about to admit defeat over some minor setback.’

‘You get more clear-sighted every day, Dupuy. I can tell as much from your editorials. Congratulations. I admire the pieces you’ve written about the Jews who are trying to stay in Patagonia. You brilliantly unmasked them and put an end to their little game. We have to show them that they don’t rule the world.’

The mother sat up in bed. Emilia had the impression that she had heard what was being said. Every word seemed to trigger a memory in her, and each memory triggered another word. A thin wail like the bleating of a lamb came from her mother. Then, with no transition, she began to sing in a tuneless voice: L’shana haba’a b’Yerushalayim.

‘What’s that?’ asked the president, alarmed. ‘Is she speaking Jewish?’

‘No, señor,’ said Dupuy. ‘I think she’s singing “Next Year in Jerusalem”. It’s Hebrew. She must have heard it when she was a little girl: a Jewish family lived next door. Her childhood is about the only thing she does remember now. My daughters and I have to treat her like she’s five years old again.’

Emilia stayed in the house for several months looking after her mother. Even when she slept, she was alert to any changes in her mother’s breathing, to her timid catlike mewling. She would get up in the night several times to take her temperature or take her to the bathroom. Every time, her mother would treat her as though she were someone new, a character from the stories she read in Maribel and Vosotras, or a playmate.

Several times in the night Emilia would get up to take her mother’s temperature or take her to the bathroom and each time, her mother reacted as though she were someone different, some character from a story she had read in Maribel and Vosotros.

‘Oh, how lovely, I haven’t seen you for ages,’ her mother said when Emilia came into the room even if she had only been gone a moment. It clearly kept her entertained since none of the characters ever reappeared.

The following Sunday, the Eel’s wife brought her a gift, a medal of St Dymphna, the patron saint of mental illness. The priest had brought it back from the Vatican together with a collection of colourful prints. The Supreme Pontiff particularly recommended the saint, whose miracles in Belgium and Africa had been well documented. ‘Dymphna can be of great succour to those who have hallucinations,’ the priest had said, choking on the consonants. ‘Very few of the faithful are familiar with her because the illnesses she cured were little known before the advent of psychoanalysis. The Pope himself suggested that a candle be lit every night and ten Hail Marys offered up to St Dymphna so that she might smile on the sick person and bless her from her place in paradise.’

Summer passed, then autumn and still her mother did not come back to reality. Emilia did not move from the bed next to her. She could not bear the television being on constantly, but the doctors were convinced that it helped bring the outside world to her mother, helped stimulate her. Together they put up with seven to ten toxic hours of programming a day: lunches with Mirtha Legrand, the bucolic idyll of Little House on the Prairie, the exploits of Wonder Woman and the Bionic Woman. The evening news regurgitating speeches by the Eel surrounded by his uniformed acolytes. In chorus they explained that Argentina was waging a pitiless war against the enemies of the Christian West and that God would defend the blue-and-white flag of Argentina against the blood-red rag of Communism. After that came a warning, or rather an order: ‘People of Argentina, we shall conquer!’

‘Having to watch television day and night is frying my brain,’ Emilia told the doctors. ‘I’m not sleeping properly. I’m having hallucinations.’ They prescribed a sedative for her. Emilia began to think that all these prayers to St Dymphna could have side effects, the way some medicines did. Every morning, she found it harder to get up, she felt her body opening up like a plant with spiders crossing from branch to branch on greasy strands of web. When her mother slept, memories of Simón would come to her, but Emilia never went beyond the boundaries of her body; as though her body were a house condemned, she would go to the door only to retreat. She tried to capture the memories, jotting them down in the little notebook she always had to hand: ‘Thinking about S, my throat hurts, my chest hurts, my womb hurts. If I saw him dead, I would kill myself.’ It seemed to her that she would never escape this plane in which few things happened and those that did were all the same.

Early one morning, after taking her mother to the bathroom, she saw the toilet was full of blood and there was a trail of drops leading away from it. The cook said that her mother had eaten a salad of beetroot and hard-boiled eggs and that beetroot always turned urine red. But the bleeding continued and Emilia, terrified, asked the family doctor for help. Shortly afterwards an ambulance arrived and took Ethel to a clinic in Belgrano. Dr Dupuy was on an official visit to Los Angeles and his daughter had no idea how to get in touch with him. It was 6 a.m. in Buenos Aires and everyone in Los Angeles would be in bed. Against her better judgement, she asked the Eel for help. He called her father at 6.30 a.m. and Emilia falteringly told him what had happened. ‘And you thought it was worth bothering me for something as trivial as that?’ Dupuy was indignant. ‘I travel ten thousand miles and even here I can’t be left in peace to get on with my work. Your mother has everything she needs, I don’t see there’s any reason to worry.’ He was furious, however, to hear that two strangers had been in the house without anyone keeping an eye on them. ‘What if they were subversives in disguise who intended to plant a bomb under my bed? What if they demanded a ransom for the nurse? I go away for a couple of days and the whole world falls apart.’ This carelessness, this negligence infuriated him. Emilia decided to remain calm while her father fulminated down the phone; she could almost see the veins bulging in his temples.

‘Can you find out what’s happening with Mamá and call me back in half an hour, please?’

‘You think it’s as easy as that to call?’ Dupuy retorted, even more furious. ‘The phone system in the country is a disaster. The language in this country is a disaster.’

Señora Ethel was resting in the clinic, well looked after. Emilia spent hours in the emergency room waiting for a diagnosis. Eventually, a young man, his white coat unbuttoned, came out into the hallway, quickly taking off his surgical mask and his latex gloves. He told her that, for the moment, all he could find was a severe case of haemorrhoids. He asked whether the patient often complained.

‘You may have noticed that my mother is not herself,’ Emilia answered. ‘She never complains about anything.’

‘We’re going to have to do a sigmoidoscopy and a complete blood analysis. It might be nothing more than anaemia. Right now, there’s no need for you to worry.’

‘A sigmoidoscopy. I’ve never heard of that.’

‘We need to make sure she doesn’t have cancer in her sigmoid colon.’

‘I’d like to see her.’

‘Not just yet. We’ll let her rest for a while.’

It made Emilia nervous, the doctor’s habit of speaking in the first-person plural, as though all of humanity were ill or convalescing.

She took a cigarette out of her handbag. An assistant rushing past with an IV drip dodged round her, irritated. She gestured to the large wooden crucifix next to the exit, and the sign above the cross that read: Christ is always watching you.

Shortly before noon, Chela came to relieve her. Emilia realised that her sister’s mind was on other things. She had got engaged to a business consultant with the looks of a tennis pro and they were planning to get married in April or May the following year. Their mother’s lunatic state made it impossible to hold the wedding reception at the bride’s home and the major dilemma in her sister’s life was where to host the four hundred people on the guest list which Chela made and unmade every day.

She arrived at the clinic complaining that the rain was getting worse. She fetched a chair so she could sit down for a minute, and when another nurse came and told them that the results of the pathologist’s tests would be ready in an hour asked whether she could leave yet.

‘What are the tests for?’ she asked anxiously.

‘To see whether Mamá has cancer,’ Emilia told her. ‘She probably doesn’t.’

‘What kind of cancer? What happens if she’s got it?’

‘There’s no point getting worried ahead of time. I told you, just take it easy.’

‘How am I supposed to take it easy? Can’t you see she’s trying to ruin my wedding? She’s been like this for months, playing at being ill and swearing like a trooper.’

‘Well then, you just do what you have to do. I’ll look after her, I don’t mind.’

Two days later, when Dr Dupuy came back from his trip, the tests had revealed a tumour in the sigmoid colon. There was a silver lining, according to the doctors, because there were no signs of metastases. The mother’s bony, emaciated body barely swelled the sheets. She had cannulas in her nose, and the usual intravenous feeding tube in her arm. After midnight, the rain stopped and the air began to move sluggishly between the buzzing of the blowflies and the death throes of the foul-smelling flowers. The corridor was covered by a slick, humid film and Emilia could clearly see the prints left by the nurses. Her father talked with the doctors for about half an hour and then shut himself up in a phone booth. He emerged having already made a decision.

He did not inform his daughters of his decision until the following day. He called them into his study, a place they were only admitted to on special occasions. He closed the curtains and made sure the door was locked. Chela, as unsettled as Emilia, perched on the edge of her seat as though she wanted to escape. The study had always been gloomy, but now it was worse. The walls which were free of books were hung with the diplomas and citations from his years of service to his country. The doctor addressed his daughters in a voice so subdued, so secretive, it seemed to dissolve into the air. Ever since they were little, the daughters had known that everything their father did and said was a secret and did not even discuss it with each other. It made no sense to ask them to be discreet, but this is what Dupuy did. He went further: he forced them to swear that they would never repeat what he might say that day or in the difficult days ahead to anyone, anyone, he repeated, not even to your fiancé, Chela, or your husband when he’s your husband, not even to the priest in the confessional. Emilia feared the worst. She feared — though she did not dare to formulate the thought — that her father had decided to kill their mother, out of compassion or for some other reason, and was going to ask them to be complicit in his crime. In the thin small voice that was all she could manage, she asked: ‘You’re not going to confess a sin, are you, Papá? Because if it’s a sin, we have to confess it.’ ‘How could you think such a thing?’ her father answered. ‘I’m a Catholic, I abide by God’s commandments, I would never do anything to make you lose His sanctifying grace.’

He moved his chair over to the desk and went on talking, his face turned towards the window as though even there, even out there in the garden, his enemies might be listening. Emilia never really knew who these enemies were her father talked about, because one day it would be the Montoneros¹², then it was the People’s Revolutionary Army¹³ and later, when they had all been exterminated, it was a brigade led by some admiral who was plotting against the Eel, or an envoy of the American government, or Pinochet threatening to invade the islands on the Beagle channel, or corrupt intermediaries paralysing the nuclear power plants. When one group retreated, another advanced, and sometimes none of them retreated.

‘Last night I stopped them operating on Ethel,’ he told them. ‘It would have been butchery. I called Dr Erich Schroeder and he proposed an excellent solution. I’m going to take Ethel out of the clinic and have Schroeder take over her treatment.’

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t see how that will be better for Mamá. Who is this Schroeder?’ asked Emilia. ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

‘He’s a world-renowned specialist. You’ve never heard of him because he treats only a very few select patients and he has a 100 per cent success rate. He’s been living in Argentina for twenty years in absolute secrecy. He has built a machine that captures gamma rays from space and focuses them on the patient’s body. In one or two treatments, they’re cured.’

‘At the clinic, they recommended she have surgery, and I thought that was the best option. It’s more reliable. Mamá’s heart is strong, she’ll have no problem with the anaesthesia. If you have such confidence in Schroeder, why don’t you ask him to operate?’

‘If he’d offered to operate, I would have accepted without question. But he’s against the idea. Schroeder’s rays can only work if the patient has not had an operation. He explained to me in a cancer as aggressive as your mother’s, when the scalpel touches the tumour, there’s a danger that abnormal cells will quickly move through the circulatory system.’

‘I’d like to find out a bit more,’ said Emilia.

‘I don’t understand what the two of you are talking about,’ said Chela. ‘Whatever Papá decides will be for the best. Do I have to listen to any more? Can I go now? Marcelo is going to come by and pick me up soon.’ Marcelo Echarri, the fiancé. Dr Dupuy had not told them everything, and what was left unsaid was the heart of the secret that the sisters had sworn to keep. Chela would never know it because she left as soon as her father opened the door and Emilia would have preferred not to find out what it was. Years later, when she thought about the episode, she was not sure that it was not a wild dream in which they had all become entangled, or whether St Dymphna’s influence had also harmed their father. The name Erich Schroeder would one day be famous, but not for his gamma ray machine. In 1984, it was discovered that in Auschwitz and Dwory he had developed a system for using energy from space to kill prisoners and he was convicted as a war criminal. When Dr Dupuy knew him, he had been living under his real name on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and no one had bothered him for years. His gamma ray machine attracted the attention of the intelligence agencies and quickly became the focus of a cold war between the three governmental forces. Each of them wanted control of the machine, but Schroeder had no respect for any of them. He respected only Dupuy.

‘Schroeder,’ Emilia’s father told her, ‘is the only person in the world who knows how this machine works. He has not shared that knowledge with anyone, has not written down his formulae for posterity, and when he dies all that we will be left with will be a pile of useless metal which can say nothing, which will mean nothing. I’ve seen what this machine can do, but its inner workings, the way in which the treatments take place, is a mystery that may rely on creatures that are nothing like us, creatures that are pure energy, who move effortlessly between realities, between the future and the present.’

Emilia listened, astonished and incredulous, and wondered if this lunatic who talked like a character out of Lovecraft or Poe was the same father who believed that even God (especially God) was governed by the laws of reason.

The remainder of the tale was even more unexpected.

‘The machine draws its power from Ganymede,’ said her father, imperturbable.

Emilia did not understand, or did not want to understand. She knew that Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s inner moons, was the largest satellite in the solar system; chains of craters had been seen on its surface and it had its own magnetosphere, but it gave off no gasses and was not protected by saints like Dymphna. Her father seemed to believe, moreover, that there were intelligent beings living beneath the crust of ice and silica, something for which there was not the least evidence. Words continued to pour out of him, there was no other way to describe it. ‘Gamma rays cure illnesses that cannot be detected; they are also capable of causing them. If we can absorb them, we must be able to emit them. I’ve watched Schroeder use them. He places the head of the patient in a device that looks like the hairdryers they use in salons and connects an antenna which picks up the body’s signals. The antenna draws a graph which the gamma rays read. This information makes it possible for them to surround the cancerous cells and send them to Ganymede where they are examined and archived. The rays are like a flock and an untrained shepherd would madden them. The only person who knows how to guide them is Dr Schroeder.’

Her father’s story went on flowing, in tributaries, estuaries, streams, deltas. One story ran into another and this into a third, sometimes moving away, sometimes circling back to the beginning. When he finished a sentence he fell silent and reminded Emilia of her solemn promise to say nothing.

‘Are you sure about this, Papá?’ The daughter did not know what to think. Creatures from another world had always seemed to her to be the sort of madness designed to entertain the gullible. She took it for granted that if God had created Man in His image and likeness, there could be no beings in other worlds. Nor, obviously, other gods. Dupuy was prepared to counter this. A Polish theologian he had admired for some time, the Bishop of Krakow, had written that life as described in the Scriptures ‘is universal’. At the Second Vatican Council, his mentor, Pope John XXIII, had preached: ‘How small would God be if, having created this vast universe, He allowed only us to populate it.’

It was almost noon. When her father opened his study door, Chela was talking excitedly on the phone.

‘Go to the clinic, Emilia, and pack up everything in your mother’s room. We’ll move her in about half an hour.’

An ambulance sent by Schroeder transported her mother. Dupuy and Emilia drove behind. The caravan made slow progress. As it crossed the avenida General Paz and ventured into the pallid suburbs of greater Buenos Aires, the ambulance took cross streets and began to head out into the countryside. The mood of the heavens, forgetting the violent storm of the night before, was tranquil, indifferent. A few fat clouds glided roundly over the cattle and the wind lay becalmed over the vast greenness waiting for nothing. After an hour, the plain began to sink and the road to climb above it, twisting like a vein. A few petrol stations dotted the barren landscape. In the distance, a long, flat building appeared, stretching out across the ravine. On the flagpoles flanking the gates fluttered a pair of flags: one was the flag of Argentina, its horizontal stripes emphasised with pale blue stitching; the other bore two black crescent moons connected by a cord against a white field. Behind them, set on a concrete pedestal, was a hemispheric dish cast in steel. It was huge and concave with a tall, transparent pistil.

‘Schroeder’s laboratory,’ her father announced. ‘The national flag. The labarum of Ganymede.’

The building was protected by a wire fence. She could clearly see the walnut trees, white cedars, the crouching dogs, the partridges, but what most caught Emilia’s attention was the pistil in the steel hemisphere which intermittently showered sparks over the grounds.

‘Those are the rays,’ her father told her. ‘On auspicious days, multitudes of rays stream down from Ganymede. Sometimes they hang, suspended in the sky, for weeks waiting for the moment to fall. Schroeder is forcing them to drop so we can see them. It’s a privilege.’

‘They’re falling now,’ Emilia observed.

‘They fall into the antenna which filters them. A lot of the rays are of no use in the healing process. Those that collide with the asteroid belt are contaminated by the time they arrive, can you see? They bring a film of dust with them. Schroeder tested them on rats and on goats. He bathed the animals in the contaminated rays and left them to bloat and swell until they exploded.’

‘My God, that’s cruel.’

‘That is how we save the human race. Cruelty is what saves us.’

The ambulance moved forward. From the gate, Emilia saw Schroeder (she was certain that it was Schroeder) walking towards them, arms spread wide. It was difficult to look him in the eye because his pupils constantly flicked like a pinball from side to side.

‘Welcome. We’ve been lucky,’ he said to them. ‘The limpid air is favourable to the arriving rays. We will be able to see them.’

He had a harsh accent, pronouncing his Rs in such a way that they spilt his words, but his Spanish syntax was irreproachable. Every item in his laboratory occupied the one space it could occupy in the universe, the same methodical, ineluctable order that objects possessed in a painting by Vermeer. On which subject, if the painting hanging above Schroeder’s desk to the right in the room as one entered was not a genuine Vermeer, it looked very much like one: it depicted a young woman in Delft sitting before a window reading a piece of sheet music, her face bathed in the unmistakable light of the master.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ Emilia asked.

‘A Vermeer? Yes, but it’s not mine,’ Schroeder explained. ‘I risked my life for it when I left Germany. Some day its owner will come and collect it.’

Next to the office was a vast room completely filled with devices with flickering needles and coiled serpentine condensers that looked like something out of a Hollywood movie. ‘Come and see the scanner,’ said Schroeder, ‘we’ve just started it up.’ They had seated the mother in a high chair. One of the doctor’s assistants took her temperature and her blood pressure. Another moved the hood and placed it ten centimetres from her head. The machine gave off blue flashes which lit up the whole room for seconds at a time. The mother’s face registered neither surprise nor pain. It was frozen in a beatific smile.

‘We will now begin the procedure, which is as much spiritual as it is physical,’ said Schroeder. ‘If you will allow me to focus.’

He stepped behind a screen next to the bathroom mumbling something that might have been a prayer in an incomprehensible language which seemed to borrow from Sanskrit, High Gothic, Armenian and some dialects of Anatolia, sounds that had been lodged in the human throat since the dawn of Indo-European language. Schroeder emerged euphoric. His pupils fluttered like moths around a flickering flame. ‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘Place the hood on her head.’

The assistant pressed the pedal and the hood was lowered to cover the mother’s head down to the bridge of her nose. The needles flickered and the valves glowed with all the colours of the rainbow.

‘Now, lean out the window and see the effect of the rays in the pool,’ said Schroeder.

Outside, next to the house, was a rectangular pool of water with trampolines at either end. From the surface, liquid spikes rose fifteen to twenty metres into the air, never for a moment losing their narrow, needle-like shape. It was as though the water was rising and falling across a transparent surface. As it reached its upper limit, it became tinted with colour. Sometimes blue or purple, sometimes an intense green. Everything suddenly became calm and a silence descended on the room that seemed older than time itself. Schroeder triumphantly lifted up a tube containing a dark, viscous substance.

‘The cancerous cells have surrendered,’ he declared, standing on tiptoe. ‘Here they are, encapsulated, the demons of her disease.’

‘You mean the cancer’s gone? Just like that, with no pain?’ asked Emilia. ‘Is that possible?’

Schoeder did not answer her. He took Dupuy’s arm and led him out to the gallery which ran around the house.

‘More than possible. It’s real. On Ganymede, all reality has its obverse. Your wife is there and she is also here.’

‘How will we know when Ethel is Ethel?’

‘You’ll never know,’ Schroeder responded, imperturbable. ‘Someone, on Ganymede, has divined in her a wisdom that warrants scientific study. I have no idea what Señora Dupuy will be like there. The Señora Dupuy who remains here will be just like the person who arrived with you: sweet, gentle, lost, with no memory. But healthy.’

‘What wisdom could they possible have seen?’ Dupuy asked sarcastically. ‘There must be some mistake. Poor Ethel always was terribly ignorant. She could just about read and pray.’

‘Make no mistake. Your wife is very precious, Dupuy, make no mistake. Look after her. She can go home with you now, all trace of her illness has been eliminated.’

‘You take care too, Schroeder. Your connection to Ganymede is also very precious, more perhaps than you imagine.’

‘I know. But I need take no precautions. I am protected by powers much greater than anything in this world.’

The afternoon is placid, even the Delaware does not seem to flow. The round, grey cloud that looks like a sheep still hovers. Everything persists in its essence, except Emilia. The memory of her mother has passed over her like a shadow and changed her. She has barely sipped the Chianti, barely touched the plate of pasta. All she wants is for Simón to talk to her. But Simón is still staring at the unmoving river, he does not speak. He seemed excited that morning when he told her the story of the writer with his slate, but then this expression returned, the indifferent expression that so reminds her of her sick mother. It’s unfair, Emilia thinks again, she does not even know the storms he has weathered. Seven years in an old people’s home. It is the sort of place she has only ever briefly visited, and even then, every time she left she found it difficult to shake off the feeling of anxiety. ‘So where was the retirement home, Simón?’ she asks. When he does not answer, she decides to tell him about the terrible dream she had two nights before she encountered him in Trudy Tuesday. She says:

‘I saw myself turning the corner onto an empty street. You were striding along on the opposite pavement, head down. “Simón!” I shouted. You crossed the street, came up to me, I gave you my hand. “What a pleasure to see you again, Señor Cardoso,” I said with a formality that seemed natural in the dream. “I don’t know whether you remember, but I was married to you.” “Oh, really?” you said. “That’s nice.” “I was married to you.” “I don’t know what else to say on the subject, señora. The dead have no memory. Now, I’m afraid I have to go, I’m in rather a hurry.” “Please remember,” I begged you. “Remember me, Señor Cardoso.” I made a gesture you didn’t understand. The deserted street filled with voices, with people jostling for space. My parents, Chela, the cartographers at Hammond, Nancy, the people from the hills above Caracas, James Stewart’s character from Vertigo and behind them a numberless, infinite multitude. All clamouring for my attention while I tried to stop you from leaving, but you had already left without saying goodbye. I’ve never been as surrounded by people as I was in that dream, and I didn’t like it. When I woke up, it occurred to me that the most unbearable loneliness is not being able to be alone.’

Before the night draws in, they head back to Highland Park in the Altima. Emilia drives in silence. She does not know what to say to her mute husband. She has already told him that first thing on Monday she will go with him to pick up his papers, his social security card, his driver’s licence if he has one. She should ask him where he left them, but not now. Now, as they cross the bridge over the Raritan, they see brightly lit stalls on the bank: tombolas, bingo, stalls selling crafts, a string of coloured Japanese lanterns swaying in the wind. ‘What do you say we go down and look at the stalls later?’ she asks. The only fair she is familiar with is the one they hold on Raritan Avenue on the Fourth of July. She never heard of one on the banks of the river, still less in November when the rains come unannounced. This has to be the first. If it fails, there won’t be another one. ‘Shall we go down and take a look?’ ‘Later,’ Simón says, ‘later.’

When they arrive at the apartment on North 4th Avenue, however, he shows no sign of wanting to go out again. He takes off his shoes, reheats the coffee from breakfast and toasts himself a slice of rye bread. As he sits down at the table, he looks as though he is about to speak. He reaches a hand out towards Emilia and strokes her. He says:

‘The writer with the slate who used to pace the corridors of the old folks’ home also told me a dream. It wasn’t a dream exactly, it was the memory of a recurring dream. A huge black dog was jumping on him and licking him. Inside the dog were all the things that had never existed and even those that no one even imagined could exist. “What does not exist is constantly seeking a father,” said the dog, “someone to give it consciousness.” “A god?” asked the writer. “No, it is searching for any father,” answered the dog. “The things that do not exist are much more numerous than those that manage to exist. That which will never exist is infinite. The seeds that do not find soil and water and do not become plants, the lives that go unborn, the characters that remain unwritten.” “The rocks that have crumbled to dust?” “No, those rocks once were. I am speaking only of what might have been but never was,” said the dog. “The brother that never was because you existed in his place. If you had been conceived seconds before or seconds after, you would not be who you are, you would not know that your existence vanished into nowhere without you even realising. That which will never be knows that it might have been. This is why novels are written: to make amends in this world for the perpetual absence of what never existed.” The dog vanished into the air and the writer woke up.’

Without Emilia asking him, he tells her where he has been all these years. She listens to the sentences fall as though she knows them, sentences that form stories that seem to be projected on a screen. It is the same deceptive impression she had as images rained upon her in her cell in Tucumán.

‘I don’t know how I ended up in the retirement home, and I don’t think it matters. The manager was expecting me. The building was surrounded by iron railings. Above the wooden door I saw an opaque glass canopy. All the rooms had high ceilings, beds without headboards and various crucifixes. All the rooms looked out onto courtyards with palms and ipe trees where the patients took the air and the sun. The courtyard I was to look after had large mosaics with ornate patterns and edging tiles. The men were separated from the women, and in the seven years I spent there, there was never any communication between the sexes. The men did not talk much, we played checkers, watched television. I saw you on the news once, you and your father.’

Emilia is surprised. ‘On the news? It can’t have been me.’

‘It was you,’ Simón insists. ‘It was during one of the World Cup matches, the first or the last. Your father was seated on the main stand behind the comandantes, who kept turning round to talk to him. You were on the grandstand opposite yawning. You were wearing a blue-and-white scarf and a white wool cap. You were yawning and laughing.’

‘It was me? How embarrassing.’

‘It was you.’

‘No, during those months I had stopped being me. I started to lose myself when you left. Or, what is worse, I became someone I didn’t want to be. It’s too late, Simón. I’m sixty years old. You’ve already given me more than I deserve, you have made me happy. You can go now, you can save yourself. I’m not worth anything. I don’t even matter to me.’

‘That’s not true. If it were true, I wouldn’t have come back. You started to lose yourself, as you rightly say: that’s a different matter. You lost a part of yourself. With what remains, you can start again. Don’t undervalue yourself. I love you.’

‘I love you too, I love you so much, so much. I don’t know what to do with myself.’

‘What to do? The life you’re living has diminished you. I’ve seen the pile of useless coupons you collect to buy things you’ll never eat: money-off vouchers for pickles, Campbell’s soup, chocolate puddings. And the bingo cards. And the false nails. And the friends you’ve chosen. Instead of being your mirror, they are your humiliation. What have you done with your life, Emilia?’

‘Nothing, that’s the worst of it. I’ve done nothing with it. It is my life that has done everything to me.’

Some weeks after the visit to Dr Schroeder, no trace of the mother’s tumour remained. The doctors who had recommended surgery performed two further sigmoidoscopies and incredulously admitted that the tissue now appeared to be healthy. In all other ways, she had got worse. She still did not recognise anyone, she confused the past and the present, her memories were muddled and she was doubly incontinent. Emilia had to go back to her job at the Automobile Club and could not continue caring for her. At the nursing home, she had met two excellent nurses, who were fond of her mother and agreed to care for her in alternating shifts. But Dr Dupuy had had enough. He considered that he had done more than was necessary to respect his wife’s unshakeable will to live and that it was now time to shut her away in a home to be cared for by professionals. Had Ethel decided to be immortal, there she would be able to enjoy a perfect eternity, with no memory, no world. She greeted all displays of affection with the same indifference. When Chela kissed her forehead her expression was exactly the same as when the Eel’s wife stroked her hands. She greeted everything with a beatific, meaningless smile. What difference did it make, then, whether she was cared for by her daughters or by nurses who were strangers to her? The nurses, at least, would clean her up more promptly. Chela insisted that a nursing home was the best place for her. Her friends knew nursing homes where patients were like guests in five-star hotels. Emilia, on the other hand, had heard horror stories about such places: old people left to God’s tender mercies, ill-fed, their sheets and mattresses never washed or aired, human beings tossed onto the scrapheap and left to die. ‘You’re both exaggerating,’ Dr Dupuy insisted. ‘I will make sure that Ethel is in the best facility in Buenos Aires. Chelita is getting married soon and what are we supposed to do with her on the wedding day, how do we protect her from the commotion, the telephone, the guests? I always know what’s for the best,’ said Dupuy. It was a phrase Chela loved to repeat: ‘You know me — whatever Papá decides is for the best.’

In a country that had been many years divided, Dupuy had long since learned to predict the winning side and distance himself in time from those about to lose. When he confined his wife in the institution in Parque Chacabuco he was proud that he had never yet been mistaken. He had succeeded in persuading Marcelito Echarri to propose to his daughter Chela (he could hardly claim the boy was in love) and agree to marry her. Even her father could not deceive Chela. She was impulsive, thoughtless and at the least effort declared herself exhausted. Marcelito, on the other hand, had graduated from Wharton with honours and had the makings of a first-class son-in-law. He had worked as a financial adviser in Miami but wanted to move back to Buenos Aires. When Dupuy discovered this, he immediately hired him to write a financial column for La República. In his first article, Echarri advised state-run companies to take advantage of easy foreign lines of credit which offered advantageous rates of interest. Now was the time to take a gamble, was his advice. And he was right. The companies secured loans at no risk to themselves since the Central Bank acted as guarantor. They made fortunes and gave Dupuy unlimited access to the private jets and the villas in Europe. ‘The respect I enjoy now is fully deserved,’ Dupuy told Echarri. ‘After so many years without one false step, people finally respect and fear me.’

There was only one mistake for which he reproached himself, but he never spoke of it to anyone. It had happened when, against his better judgement, he had allowed his eldest daughter to marry an insignificant cartographer whose background seemed so disreputable that he did not even bother to have it checked out. This was a serious mistake. The young man had been a student leader in the geography department, a member of the youth wing of the Montoneros and a left-wing idealist so arrogant he had dared to expound on his ideas at family gatherings. Out of force of habit, he initiated an investigation, but the files with the relevant information arrived too late, after the wedding Mass, when it was no longer possible for man to put asunder what God had joined together.

All his life, Dupuy had remained true to his Christian principles and he was convinced that this was why God was showering him with blessings. He expected surprises from Emilia, from his lunatic wife, but not from Chela. And yet it was she who put his faith to the test.

A few months before the date set for the wedding, she began waking up with dark circles under her eyes, she would wander around the house not bothering to get dressed until late in the afternoon, lock herself in the bathroom for hours at a time, she did not even bother to answer the telephone, which rang at all hours of the day and night. The telephone had been her passion, there was nothing she enjoyed more than talking to her girlfriends about the details of her trousseau, about what to wear on the beach, how many pairs of sandals to take, whether Bahía or Ipanema was the more romantic place for a honeymoon. The wedding day was drawing near and still Chela sat staring at the television, watching soap operas all afternoon, as though she had decided to retreat from the world. There was little difference between her and a nun. She only got to her feet when Marcelo Echarri arrived, as he did punctually every day after work at La República. She would shut herself away with him in her room, which smelled of damp and dirty laundry, and they would talk and talk for hours. Emilia was intrigued to know what kept them so occupied and finally resolved to ask her sister with whom she had not exchanged a word for several months.

‘I don’t know what sort of reaction you’re waiting for,’ she said. ‘Whatever is going on can’t be so serious that you have to lie around in bed all day as though you were dying. If you’re not in love with Marcelo any more, that’s easily fixed. Postpone the wedding, or cancel it. A mistake like this is something you’ll end up paying for your whole life. He’s strong, he’s intelligent, he’ll get over it—’

‘You don’t understand,’ Chela interrupted her. ‘It’s serious, it’s really serious. I can’t get married. I’d be a laughing stock. I’m pregnant. If you look hard, I’m already showing. I’ve been wearing loose dresses — luckily, the peasant style is in fashion right now, ruffles and flounces and overskirts, but this fucking bump just keeps growing.’ She sobbed inconsolably. ‘Who’s the father?’ Emilia asked, alarmed. ‘Who do you think it is?’ Chela shouted. ‘It’s Marcelo. What do you take me for, a whore?’ ‘So, what’s the problem then? He doesn’t want to marry you any more? He doesn’t want the baby, doesn’t want you?’ ‘No, no, God, it’s so difficult trying to explain things to you. It’s hard to believe we’re sisters. I’m the one who doesn’t want the baby. I want to have an abortion before it’s too late. My last period was three months ago. I can’t get married like this, I don’t want four hundred people watching me walk down the aisle with a big belly. Can you imagine the gossip, the whispering? Just like you a minute ago, people will wonder whether Marcelo is the father, whether Papá is forcing him to marry me. Can you see me walking down the aisle in a white dress seven months pregnant? It would be in all the magazines, I’d look like a fool.’ ‘No one will dare publish a thing,’ said Emilia. ‘Papá will quash any rumours. You need to get a grip. Children are not something to be hidden or aborted. You need to tell Papá before your gynaecologist does.’

That night, Emilia talked to her father. She began by minimising the problem. She told him it was their duty as a family to support Chela. ‘Marcelo?’ Dupuy sounded surprised. ‘I can’t believe he betrayed me.’ ‘What he did is only natural, Papá, it’s not a betrayal. Mamá was ill and we left Chelita on her own all the time. One thing led to another.’ ‘What are they going to do now?’ ‘Chela wants to have an abortion to avoid the shame, but I’ve already managed to get that idea out of her head.’ ‘How could she even think of such a thing? Abortion is a mortal sin, it’s worse than murder, and I won’t have hell coming into this house.’ ‘What if we brought the wedding forward?’ Emilia suggested. ‘I don’t know,’ her father replied. ‘The monsignor wants to perform the ceremony himself. The date has already been set, and who knows what other commitments he has. How far along is the little fool?’ ‘Not far, but the wedding needs to take place as soon as possible.’

‘I’ll ask for an audience with the monsignor, though as you know he’s terribly busy with good works — things no one but a saint would do. Every day, he visits the prisons, takes confession, comforts the prisoners, gives them the last rites. But I’m sure he’ll make time for me. You will both come with me. Chela needs to take responsibility for her actions, and I don’t want you leaving her on her own.’

The monsignor received them in the palace which the government had recently put at his disposal. The armchairs in the great hall where they were asked to wait were large and upholstered in maroon velvet. Young priests and seminarians in soutanes came and went carrying heavy files. The monsignor was wearing a business suit. When they entered, he extended his hand bearing the Episcopal ring. Emilia and Chela bowed and kissed it.

‘What a pleasure to have you all here, what a privilege,’ the monsignor sighed. Emilia, who had not seen him since the dinner with the Eel, noticed he had grown fatter and balder. His bald head glittered.

A seminarian came over and whispered something in his ear.

‘Tell them I’m busy. They may wait for me if they wish. They must wait their turn like everyone else. Put the files on my desk under the others.’

‘May we speak in private, Monsignor?’ Dupuy asked. ‘We have come on a rather confidential matter.’

‘Very well, come with me into the library. If it is confidential, then I shall treat the matter as though administering the Sacrament.’

He led them into a room filled with scrolls and handsomely bound books. A spiral staircase carved from a single block of wood rose to the gallery above. He put his embroidered stole about his shoulders, kissed it. ‘Reconciliatio et Paenitentia,’ he intoned. ‘I trust you have truly searched you consciences.’ Dr Dupuy interrupted him: ‘We won’t take up much of your time, Monsignor. We need to bring forward the date of Chela’s wedding. You offered to perform the ceremony. We were hoping you might give us a date that suited you.’

‘What has happened, my child?’

Chela started to cry. ‘Why is this happening to me, Monsignor? You can’t imagine how much I was looking forward to getting married.’ After her fashion, she told him what had happened. Her tale was interrupted with sobbing, and it was difficult to understand what she was saying. Emilia took her sister’s hands in her own and finished explaining.

‘What does Marcelo think?’ asked the monsignor.

‘He wants to get married as soon as possible,’ said Dupuy.

‘In that case, I can’t see the problem.’

Chela again started to talk about the shame she would feel appearing before her guests, the rumours that would hound her and her unborn child for the rest of their lives.

‘Have you repented of your sins?’ the monsignor wanted to know.

‘Of course I have. I confessed and I said ten rosaries as a penance.’

‘Well, my child, there’s no need to make so much out of such a little thing. I know some nuns who will make you a wedding dress finer than anything in Paris. I’ve seen them. They can hide a pregnancy, however advanced it is, and what’s more they use the latest fashions. Dry your tears, now, and don’t worry your head about it. Your papá and I will set a date.’

He commanded Chela to kneel and gave her his benediction. Ego te absolvo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

‘Amen,’ father and daughters replied as one. Dupuy made to get to his feet, but the monsignor stopped him. He wanted to ask him what the comandantes thought of his work in the military prisons.

‘They think it is invaluable, Monsignor.’

‘Perhaps, but this is merely the tip of the iceberg,’ said the monsignor. ‘I need reinforcements. From morning to night, I listen to extremists and to their families, I tell them to make a clean breast of things, to confess everything they know. In doing so, I do no harm to anyone, quite the reverse.’

There was a knock at the door and a seminarian popped his head round. The monsignor, clearly irritated, waved his hand. It was enough. The terrified messenger fled. ‘Don’t they understand orders? Can’t they leave me in peace?’ He gestured to a pile of abandoned files next to the spiral staircase. ‘The priests here are mere novices, they do not know how to offer succour to so much human misery. Now, if you’ll forgive me, Doctor. You can rely on me to marry that silly girl Chelita as soon as you wish, in the Basílica de Santísimo, the Iglesia del Pilar, El Socorro, in the cathedral, wherever you choose. It can wait another two or three weeks, don’t you think? Might I suggest the newly-weds spend as little time as possible at the reception to avoid any prying eyes. They can simply greet the comandantes and leave. The comandantes will be attending, will they not?’

‘I shall be inviting them, obviously.’

‘Ah. well, when you do speak to them, don’t forget to tell them that you’ve seen how overworked I am.’

Chela and Marcelo Echarri were married with all pageant that the bride had ever dreamed of. The security cordons operated without a hitch, Emilia did not leave her sister’s side for a moment; stood in front of her whenever she noticed someone staring a little too insistently. Dupuy, for his part, banned magazines — even those loyal to him — from taking photographs. No one gave a thought to Señora Ethel’s absence; there was a rumour that she was suffering from terminal cancer and had been sent to a clinic in Switzerland where the family visited her every month.

The honeymoon lasted three months. Chela had an uncomplicated labour in a clinic in Uruguay (a boy, eight pounds, eleven ounces). When she got back, she was bored to tears changing nappies and watching soap operas while Marcelo went to La República first thing and came back shattered when it was dark. Marriage was exactly what she had expected it to be: a routine from which there were no distractions and no reprieve, which snuffed out any spark of love before it appeared. As the months passed, her husband wrote less and less for the paper, allowing himself to be caught up in the new businesses now thriving in Argentina fuelled by cheap credit and a weak dollar. He began importing things as useless as they were baffling, selling them on calle Lavalle where people mindlessly lined up to buy them. His father-in-law was his guide. It was Dupuy who advised him, long before the announcement, that the government was going to abolish import duties to force Argentinian companies to learn to compete. Excitedly Marcelo started buying up watches from Hong Kong, screwdrivers from Malaysia, shirts from Taiwan, coats in fake fur and astrakhan from France. However outrageous the merchandise he imported, shopkeepers ripped them out of his hands, paying him in hard cash, determined to satisfy the greed of their insatiable customers. Though the son-in-law barely slept, he made sure not to forsake Dupuy. Every day he spent an hour in the offices of La República, dictating to various copyists optimistic predictions about the state of the economy which he insisted was now safe from speculators and prophets of doom. Industries were collapsing but nobody cared about their downfall. The secret of wealth consisted of leaving money with companies in the financial sector and waiting for it to multiply by itself, which is what Marcelito did, though this was something he did not mention in his articles, which recommended restraint and prudence and endlessly repeated the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, while he took the fortunes he was earning and invested them with the banks recommended by his father-in-law: those which paid 12 or 13 per cent interest monthly, sailing full steam ahead, secure in the knowledge they were protected by the state.

Chela found it difficult to accept this transformation in her husband. She too had changed. She was fat, she permanently carried around a box of chocolates and she would go for days without taking a bath, putting on make-up or even looking at herself in the mirror. She was still breastfeeding and her huge breasts spilled out of her nightdress. She was three years younger than Emilia but now she looked older; she even began to get grey hairs which she forgot to dye. At the height of her bitterness, she told Emilia that she spent nights lying awake, waiting for her husband, the baby in her arms, while he sat up, yoked to the calculator, the telephone and the teletype machines.

‘I take him to Mass with me on Sundays,’ she told Emilia, ‘and he rushes out of the church afterwards to find out the exchange rate of the dollar against the yen. I wear the baby-doll nightdress I couldn’t wear while I was pregnant and he just goes to sleep, can you believe it? He doesn’t even wake when the baby is squalling, never picks him up, and I don’t think he’s having an affair, because he doesn’t even have time for that.’

In a few short months, the little bank which Marcelo Echarri bought blossomed, buying up agricultural cooperatives, empty factories and shares in businesses that existed only as a letterhead: it was a lavish graveyard peopled with the dead that no one wanted. The Echarri empire — as the magazines called it — rose like the villages Potemkin built for the tsarina as she travelled through the Crimea only to vanish as soon as her carriage had passed.

Everything was happening too quickly. His wealth was colossal, but existed only on paper. To escape the firestorm would require an act of daring. He looked for short-term investors prepared to entrust their modest fortunes to banks that promised the best interest rates, and his were the highest. Inevitably, the moment came when he could not pay them. The more people deposited the deeper he sank into this dirty business. Bankruptcy loomed, but still he was not prepared to give up. He had never failed and did not see why he should fail now. After a sleepless night plotting and scheming, he happened on what he thought was a providential solution. Rather than paying the monstrous interest rates demanded of them, his frontmen invested the reserves in banks which offered more realistic interest rates. He had two or three million pesos invested for a fixed term in Philadelphia, where he had lived during his carefree student days, but he had no intention of touching it. This money was his shield, his safeguard for the future. But the future was now moving away and rather than coming towards the present, as Bradley’s Metaphysics proposed, it was disappearing. Whichever way he turned, Marcelo could see no future. The future, like the money, had run dry.

He could not sleep for worrying. ‘If you carry on like this, you’ll give yourself a heart attack,’ Chela said to him. ‘Why don’t you talk to Papá?’

‘No, your father gave me some advice. He said: “You’ve got to play this like a game of chess, Marcelo. Before you attack, think about how you’re going to defend yourself. Nobody’s going to sit in your seat and play the game for you.” ’ He had followed this advice and sunk ever deeper. He bought a second foundering bank and opened up branches in the provinces to attract new deposits. In every branch, he had a motto engraved in Latin which cashiers translated for customers: Fac recte nil time: Do right, fear nothing. For the first few weeks everything went well. Customers entrusted their savings to him because the word bank inspired confidence. But when they returned to withdraw their funds, they found the doors closed, or they were sent away by the security guards with implausible excuses: we’re waiting for funds from another branch, it will all be sorted by 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, go home, don’t worry, don’t believe the rumours, your money is safer here than with the Pope in Rome. It sounded like mockery, because at the time, the Pope in Rome was on his deathbed and the Vatican Bank itself was foundering.

Marcelo had no lack of imagination, but now he lacked the funds to use it. He considered laundering money through the drug dealers who were beginning to flood in from Colombia and Mexico, but he knew that if he got into debt with them and did not pay up promptly he would be signing his own death warrant. ‘I can’t take the risk,’ he said to Chela. ‘I haven’t got the guts to leave you a widow, all alone with the baby.’ ‘You need to talk to Papá,’ his wife insisted. ‘How many time do I have to tell you?’ For several days, Marcelo hesitated, but finally decided to do so when thousands of furious investors staged a demonstration outside his bank, smashing windows and furniture, stealing telephones, forged paintings and typewriters. His debts amounted to more than two hundred million pesos.

He invited Dr Dupuy to the Jockey Club, where they were able to lunch away from indiscreet witnesses. In plain language he explained the hopeless situation he found himself in, employing all the rhetorical devices for compassion he knew while his father-in-law did not move a muscle.

Dupuy listened, impassive. He shot Marcelo a bleak look and sat for a moment in silence, devoting his attention to the shrimp cocktail the waiter had just brought.

Marcelo was about to take out a photograph of his son, Dupuy’s only grandson, prepared himself to shed tears if necessary, but in the end he did not have to lower himself to such stratagems.

‘How are we going to write up the story for La República, Marcelo? What possible explanation can we give, when there is none? How are my readers, the good men who have trusted me their whole lives, going to go on trusting me?’ At no point did Dupuy raise his voice, yet his voice boomed as though it filled the heavens. ‘They won’t understand why I gave you a position of such responsibility at the paper when you’re a piece of shit who couldn’t even see what was coming. They’ll ask why I didn’t warn you. How can I tell them that I did warn you, that I gave you more time than anyone else had, and that you were stupid enough not to listen to me?’

Marcelo was trembling. This was no time to apologise; all the while he had felt he had not put a foot wrong, and now he discovered that his one mistake, the one which a whole lifetime would not suffice to excuse, was not to have heeded the infallible voice of his father-in-law.

‘It’s not just a few banks that are failing,’ Dupuy said, ‘the whole system is falling apart, foreign credit has dried up and now the country is being asked to pay its debts. Even if I wanted to — and I don’t want to, I can’t — how would it look if I asked for you to be thrown a lifeline when the Titanic is going down?’

Marcelo’s voice faltered; he felt on the brink of tears. ‘So what do you advise me to do?’

‘Leave the country. And before you go, think about how to preserve your good name. Though it pains me to say so, it is my grandson’s name too.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that. I was going to ask for an audit, a financial inspection, but I don’t have time to doctor the figures and delete the fraudulent transactions. As soon as the auditors look at it, they’ll know my only way out is to get the state to cover my debts. I could speak to the comandantes, but if, as you say, the whole ship is going down, my hands are tied.’

‘Tied? You’ll be lucky not to have your hands cut off. The comandantes aren’t going to put themselves on the line for anyone. They’re gouging each other’s eyes out as it is. Will the books stand up to a slightly underhand audit?’

‘No. Anywhere they look there are papers implicating me.’

‘Papers,’ echoed Dupuy. He sat for a moment in silence. Marcelo feared his silences more than his poisonous tongue. ‘Paper is a perishable material. Are these papers scattered around the place?’

‘More so than I would like.’

‘How long would it take you to get them all in one place? You need to gather them together as if they were the bones you’re going to be confronted with at trial. There can’t be a single scrap, a stamp, a file missing.’

‘Twenty-four hours, thirty-six, I’m not sure. Maybe a little longer if the branches don’t move quickly.’

‘That’s a long time. You need to get your press office to issue a statement today saying that you are going to get your files in order so that the government can see that you have acted with complete rectitude. You need to denounce the damage being done to your business by these unfounded rumours. And you need to promise that, as soon as the audit is complete, you’ll pay back every last centavo. The statement needs to sound utterly sincere. Repeat that hypocritical Latin motto your bank uses: Fac recte. what’s the rest of it?’

‘I don’t understand, Dr Dupuy.’

Marcelito Echarri, who, as a student in Wharton, had solved the most complex theoretical equations, was completely at a loss. ‘If I ask for an audit, they’ll find enough evidence in half an hour to arrest me. I’d be better off leaving the country like you suggested. Chela and the baby will be fine, don’t worry.’

‘I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about me. You have dragged me and La República into this mess and you have to get us out. You can’t do it on your own, because in the state you’re in, you’re worthless. I’ll advise you. You and Chela and my grandson are going to disappear, but not yet.’

‘What should I do, Doctor? I’ll do whatever you say.’

‘Get your managers to gather all the paperwork together by tomorrow after you’ve issued your statement to the newspapers. Then announce that, while the audit is taking place, you are going to take a holiday with your wife and son. Choose your destination wisely. You might not be coming back.’

‘The papers will need to be handled by people we can trust. Don’t worry, I won’t forget anything.’

‘The way you’ve been recently, it’s impossible not to worry. Keep a close eye on the papers. I’ll send official vans to pick them up and drop them off at your bank’s head office. Nothing else is to be moved, not the furniture, not the paintings. When you lock up for the night, there will be an unforgettable fire.’

‘An accident? No one will believe it.’

‘It won’t be an accident, it will be an deliberate act of sabotage. An attack against you, against me, against the comandantes. Another terrorist attack by subversives. There won’t be anything left in the rubble.’

Two days later, on the radio from Miami, Marcelo Echarri declared that this atrocity (he used the word atrocity, everyone remembers that) had ruined him. All the money in the banks’ safes had been burned, he said, millions in bearer bonds, a Picasso harlequin, one of Francis Bacon’s cardinals, priceless, irreplaceable treasures. He had no doubt that subversive elements were responsible for the conflagration. ‘They have committed yet another crime against the country,’ he said, ‘against peaceful citizens and their savings.’

After this fleeting appearance, he vanished. The comandantes promised to mount an exhaustive investigation and track down the perpetrators wherever they were hiding. A few hours later, six suspects who had holed up in a warehouse on the docks were surprised by a naval patrol and died during the altercation. Marcelo moved with his family to the Bahamas, and when the last spark had died down, he moved to San Antonio, Texas, where he bought a luxury-car dealership and a house in the Dominion, the most expensive neighbourhood in the city. Chela phoned Emilia from Nassau to tell her she was pregnant again.

As usual on Saturday nights, Emilia does not feel like cooking and is preparing to order Japanese food from Sultan Wok or Megumi. Japanese food was an exotic concept back when she and Simón lived in Buenos Aires and she does not know whether he has tried it since, whether he likes it.

‘Why do you ask?’ her husband said. ‘I like what you like.’

Just as Emilia goes over to make the call, the phone rings. It is Nancy, worried because she has not heard from her for several days. She has decided to give back the file of newspaper clippings her friend gave her to organise. ‘I’ll bring it over,’ Nancy insists, ‘it’s all sorted.’

‘No. you can’t,’ Emilia says, ‘I’m going to be away for a couple of days.’

‘What about the file?’ Nancy is not about to give up.

‘Hang on to it. And stop bugging me.’ She doesn’t care when Nancy says she is offended. She’ll be back, she always comes back, she is a loyal, meek little puppy.

Simón is sitting at the drawing table and is sketching the outline of a map, an island. ‘I’ve been looking for this island for a long time,’ he says. ‘I find it, and when I try to pin down in space where it is, it slips through my fingers. Maybe that’s my mistake, maybe there is no place in space for it. I try to draw it differently. I put it down on paper and turn away for a minute, and when I look at it again, the island is gone. It has vanished.’

‘It must be situated in time, then,’ Emilia says, ‘and if it is, then sooner or later it will come back. Sooner and later are refuges in time.’

‘We’ve spent our lives making maps,’ says Simón, ‘and I still don’t know what they’re for. Sometimes I wonder if they’re not simply metaphors of the world. What do you think?’

‘Not metaphors, but maybe metamorphoses, like words or like the shadows we project. By the time a map has circumscribed reality, reality is already different. In the first geography lesson I ever took, the teacher told us that the principal purpose of maps is to stop people getting lost.’

‘The opposite of what your father wanted,’ says Simón. ‘Maps to make people lose their way, so they don’t know what day it is, what time it is, where those who still are, are. He would have liked you and me to draw maps in which people disappeared and became dust from nowhere.’

‘Maybe that’s what we did,’ Emilia says. ‘Maybe we were just figures on a map that he and the comandantes were drawing, and everyone on that map got lost. There’s nothing more disorienting than falling into a map and not knowing where you are.’

‘The writer with the slate who paced the corridors told us that twice he had disappeared inside a map. The first time was in Japan, he said, just after the war. He was supposed to be coming back from Nagasaki to Buenos Aires, he’d got his ticket, but he had barely any money. He was desperate. He spent his last yen on the taxi that took him to the airport. Bad luck always comes at the worst possible time, and that was what happened to him. There was torrential rain and all the flights were cancelled. If the writer didn’t make it to Tokyo that night, he would miss the weekly connecting flight to Buenos Aires. He didn’t speak a word of Japanese, didn’t have a penny to his name, as I said, he had no idea how to ask for food or shelter. He was worse than a beggar, he was a man without a language. Someone working for the airline took pity on him and gave him a ticket to Hakata train station. In nearby Fukuoka he would be able to take a flight to Tokyo and all his problems would be over. Miming, he asked how many stops it was to Hakata. Six stops, the attendant told him. To confirm it, he held up six fingers. The writer got on the train, saw an empty seat and rushed over to take it. All around him were other passengers relaxing in comfortable berths. The conductor offered him a white dressing gown, but he refused, he was afraid he might have to pay for it. Everyone else had a dressing gown, and he felt ashamed to be the only one not wearing one. Before the first stop, he saw some of his fellow passengers eating balls of rice they dipped into a dark sauce. The writer was famished but to calm himself he tried to think about something else. As he fell asleep, he began to repeat the only word that mattered to him: Hakata. Hakata-ga? Hakata-wa? One of the other passengers scornfully held up five fingers. He felt reassured, since this confirmed that after the first stop, he had to wait five more stops. He leaned his head against the window and fell fast asleep. He woke up in the middle of the night. Rain was lashing at the windows, as though the skies had been ripped open. The mountains in the distance were framed by moonlight, and next to the trackers, peasants were harvesting rice. He could not imagine where he had strayed on the map. He didn’t dare to think what would happen when the conductor forced him to get off the train. He resigned himself to spending the rest of his life in the paddy fields with people he would never understand. Eventually, the train stopped. He could not work out the name of the station, because the signs were all in Japanese ideograms. “Hakata?” he asked the neighbour who had previously held up five fingers. “Hakata-ga, Hakata-ka,” the man replied. He unfolded a map and pointed to a huge icon which meant nothing to the writer. It looked like a box raised on a pair of legs. “Hakata,” the passenger said again. He opened a secret door in the icon, winked at the writer and gestured for him to go in. The writer thanked him and entered. On the other side, it was daytime. A brilliant sun blazed in the sky. In front of him he saw a little station which looked just like the icon he had just come through. Two soldiers stopped him. They were talking to each other in a language that was not Japanese. It sounded more like Hebrew or Arabic. The writer spoke to them in English and, to his surprise, they understood. “Where am I?” he asked. “You are at the Mandelbaum Gate, on the border,” they said. “If you want to cross, you have to show your passport.” The writer had his passport with him, he also seemed to have his suitcase, his umbrella and the books he had brought with him. “Hakata?” he asked fearfully, showing them the passport. The soldiers stamped it and pointed to a long track. “No-man’s-land,” said one of them. “Hakata no-man’s-land,” the writer repeated, satisfied. He walked along the track between pebbles, twisted metal, rusted fences and the skeletal remains of useless tanks. In the distance, he could make out the minarets of a mosque, could hear the chanting of the muezzin. He didn’t know which side of the border he was on, and he didn’t care. “Hakata?” he said aloud to cheer himself. To the right of the path, unseen by anyone, on a ruined wall, was a huge map of the city of Jerusalem: the Jerusalem of Ptolemy, the centre of the world. Above the map was the Japanese ideogram he had never been able to understand. He was amazed and heard himself exclaim: “Hakata!” A door opened in the map and, unable to resist, he popped his head through to see whether it was night-time on the other side. He hoped that by going through the door he might find himself back on the train, get to Hakata and catch the plane to Buenos Aires. “In a sense, I was right,” the writer said, “because I wound up in the old folks’ home and now I can’t leave here. Sometimes I try to draw the Japanese map on the slate. It never works, I end up drawing islands, countries even, I don’t recognise.” I asked him to show me the drawings,’ says Simón, ‘and he set me in front of the blank slate. I told him there wasn’t a single mark on the slate and he told me that it was his finest drawing: an island that disappeared as soon as it found a place in space. That’s what I’m trying to do too,’ Simón goes on. ‘I copy the island, carefully reproduce every line, every curve, but nothing happens. Sometimes I draw the sea around it, put a compass in the corner so it can find its place in space, and when I look again, the island is where it always was.’

‘Your island is just a metaphor,’ says Emilia. ‘But the man with the slate, on the other hand, managed to make his maps a metamorphosis. In fact, now that I think of it, the man himself must have been a moving metamorphosis. He escaped along the tangent, allowed himself to be enveloped by his eternal noon. The man who left Nagasaki was not the same man who boarded the train to Hakata or the one who crossed the Mandelbaum Gate — which, as you know, doesn’t exist any more, and hasn’t since the Six Day War in 1967 — or the man you met in the old people’s home. You were lucky to run into him there. It could have been anywhere, or nowhere. At least you met one person you could talk to about maps. I’m surrounded by cartographers and I’ve never had a conversation like the one you had that night.’

The doorbell rings insistently. Unhurriedly, Emilia goes downstairs and pays for the food. She sets the table and warms the sake. She reminds herself that she should barely pick at the food — the steam from the rice has already made her aroused and she does not want Simón to see her as an oversexed animal. ‘What happened to you in the old people’s home is like what happened to me in my dreams,’ she says. ‘I saw places that no longer exist, people who disappeared the moment I tried to slip inside them. I saw cities shift onto maps that had not yet been drawn. The seasons passed quickly in my dreams; winter at night was spring by morning, summer became autumn or west became south. Why don’t we eat, amor?’

‘Let’s eat later, let’s eat tomorrow,’ says Simón. ‘Right now, let’s just go to bed.’

Emilia once more feels like the smitten girl who listened to ‘Muchacha ojos de papel’, who walked the streets of Buenos Aires with Simón’s hand in hers; she feels a great tenderness burst inside her, a door opening in a Japanese ideogram; she says something that she did not believe herself capable of, in a voice that comes from some other body, some other memory: ‘Fuck me, Simón. What are you waiting for? Fuck me.’