Purgatory

4. As one who believes and does not, saying: ‘It is, it is not’

‘Purgatorio’, VII, 12

Every morning I glance through the online editions of the Argentinian papers. One day in autumn, before planning one of my classes, I was surprised to find myself reading that Dr Orestes Dupuy had died from a lung infection. He was eighty-six years old and had been in an intensive care unit for some time. I was convalescing from a serious illness myself but I wanted to go and see Emilia and offer her my insincere condolences. Neither she nor I would mourn Dupuy’s passing.

I hadn’t seen her since our conversation over lunch at Toscana. I still hadn’t talked about the illness which had forced me to move away from Highland Park for a period and which I prefer not to dwell on. I had been seriously ill, I still don’t know how the doctors managed to keep me alive. My body was completely ravaged and the list of doctors who helped me is long: Jerome Richie, a urologist; Anthony D’Amico and Jan Drappatz, both oncologists; Peter Black, a neurosurgeon; and, most importantly for me, José Halperín, an old friend, someone with whom I shared my exile and through whom I met the others. I’m sure they remember me, if only because I constantly pestered them, sending them my books.

Emilia sent a get-well card to the hospital and a Keith Jarrett CD, The Melody at Night, With You, which I loved. It’s been months since then and I still haven’t even called to thank her. I know she’s still living in the same apartment on North 4th Avenue, that she’s still working at Hammond. When I figured she would be home from work, at about 7 p.m., I called round. She opened the door, looking pale and wizened as though suddenly older than her years. I felt that she was genuinely pleased to see me, that, apart from Nancy Frears, she had no one she could talk to. I didn’t want to stay long, and was about to refuse the tea and cookies she brought out almost as soon as we had sat down, but I accepted so as not to offend her. One of the Jewish communities in town had asked her to redraw the map demarcating the eruv which had been destroyed in the flood of 1999. She was about to show me the drafts she had been working on when suddenly she broke down and cried. The situation was awkward, I didn’t know what to do. Had we been in Buenos Aires, I would have hugged her, but here in New Jersey, alone in her apartment, I had no idea how she would take it. She dried her eyes with a tissue, went to her bedroom for a minute, and when she reappeared she was calm once more. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m being silly. It’s just that I miss him so much. I miss him more with every day.’ She took it for granted I knew who she was talking about, but she explained anyway. ‘I miss Simón,’ she said. ‘Now that I’m really an orphan, I find it reassuring to think I haven’t lost Simón.’

From our conversation at Toscana, I’d assumed that her search for her husband was ancient history. Emilia had arrived in Highland Park, weary of following one false lead after another, of believing that he was waiting for her somewhere, hidden inside a map. She had laughed at that, it was nonsense, she said, a sort of private game she played, one of those comforts, like a pair of winter gloves, you keep and then forget, but now I realised that she was being serious, that she was still waiting for Simón. ‘I hardly sleep,’ she said. ‘I wake up several times in the middle of the night. Sometimes, I see him leaning in the doorway, and when I turn the light on and he’s not there, I go over and sniff the door frame, sniff the floor like a dog for some trace of a scent he’s left behind. A car will park outside, someone will get out and I’ll rush to the window to see if it’s him. It’s never him. The night Papá died, Chela called me from San Antonio. She asked if I wanted to go back to Buenos Aires with her, the funeral was going to be postponed for a couple of days. I told her I couldn’t leave, that Simón was coming back at any moment. Chela asked me if I was feeling OK; she didn’t insist. I called Hammond, left a message saying there had been a death in the family and that I wouldn’t be in to work the next day. I really believed that, when he heard that my father was dead, Simón would come back. I stayed awake until dawn, watching two old Argentinian movies, Tiempo de revancha¹⁴ and La fiesta de todos. In the first, Buenos Aires is a sordid, crumbling city filled with the concrete pillars of half-constructed avenues. Watching it reminded me of the morning I saw those same ruins, saw the families left homeless in the wake of the demolitions. In La fiesta de todos, there’s a brief shot of Papá on the VIP stand at River Plate Stadium on the day Argentina won the World Cup. Later there’s a shot of me in profile, scanning the crowds. Hoping I might spot Simón in the stands somewhere, I watched the video over and over. It was a waste of time.’

I felt sorry that I couldn’t talk frankly to Emilia, because, like the witnesses at the trial of the comandantes, I believed her husband had been murdered in Tucumán the same night he was arrested. A warrant officer had testified that he had witnessed the commanding officer personally kill Simón Cardoso, put a bullet in his forehead. Two others testified that they had seen him before he was taken out to the courtyard to be executed, shuffling along, his body broken from the torture. The human rights organisations investigating the case were convinced that Dupuy was behind the killing but could find no conclusive evidence. The body was never found. Details of the case were published in Diario del Juicio¹⁵, Emilia had probably read them but did not believe. Even the flicker of a doubt would have destroyed her because, if her husband was dead, it meant her father was guilty, her mother was complicit; it meant that she was the daughter of two murderers. If that were true, she would rather she had never been born, rather she had been a foundling, a baby in a children’s home, a piece of trash without a name. What I knew but could not bring myself to say created a yawning gap between us, a wordless, desolate no-man’s-land like the borderland by the Mandelbaum Gate. It was something I regretted, because I had begun to think that she was very like me. We had both fought against death in our own ways, and neither of us was prepared to surrender. For me, the only way to go on living was to pretend that death would never happen, to embrace each happy new morning. Emilia, braver than me, refused to allow the tragedy of her past to destroy the present and so she carried on with her routine, hoping and believing that doing so brought her closer to the fateful day when he would finally come and find her. When she said ‘I miss him so much’, her voice sounded like a branch breaking. She was not the same person who had lunched with me at Toscana.

She was in complete denial. She had to know about the atrocities her father was alleged to have committed when the dictatorship began to fall apart after the Malvinas War. It was then that the dam burst and the horrors of the past were brought to light: the prisoners who had been tortured, blinded, tossed into rivers or into mass graves; the newborn babies kidnapped, the rapes, the struggle to the death against enemies that did not exist. Dupuy was in each and every circle of that hell: he helped make them possible, gave them his blessing, told Jimmy Carter’s envoys that they were fictions dreamed up by subversives. In the final editorial he wrote for La República, he announced that the magazine was to cease publication because these days people would rather listen to the radio or watch television than read anything. He was a man of words, he said, and he did not care whether his speeches were printed or spoken so long as he had free speech. He admitted that, in the past, he had been guilty of serious sins of omission (he still talked in terms of sins), a fault, he said, he shared with millions of Argentinians. He apologised for paying more attention to the peso’s flotation against the dollar than to the bodies floating in the Río de la Plata. ‘I am responsible for those mistakes, as are thousands of my compatriots.’ The editorial concluded with a sentence that was a model of abject cynicism: ‘The dictatorship that we, the Argentinian people, endured was more criminal, more corrupt than any that has come before. It kept us in ignorance of the atrocities committed even as it allowed itself free rein to commit them. Thanks to God’s great wisdom, the nightmare is finally coming to an end.’

He agreed to television interviews in which he sidestepped difficult questions and, now, stripped of his fascist conviction, extolled the virtues of democracy and tolerance, pronounced himself a Christian who was prepared to discuss even those ideas and beliefs he found distasteful, without explaining what these might be. Though he took great pains to upset no one, some of his actions were brought up during the trials. He was spared punishment, but not rejection. The director of an orphanage for girls declared that the doctor used to visit the inmates from time to time, choose one of the prettiest and take her for a drive in his car. None of them ever returned. They were young girls, little more than teenagers, learning to sew, to cook, to do accounts. They had no families to claim them, they lived in the orphanage isolated from all contact with the outside world. I read the woman’s statement in the Diario del Juicio, and for days afterwards the horror of it made me feel physically sick, it made me feel ashamed to think what we had silently allowed to happen, to think of the depths to which the human race could sink. When I told my neighbour Ziva Galili about it, she said that Lavrentiy Beria, one of Stalin’s butchers, had been accused of similar atrocities. Just before the Second World War, he had been the head of NKVD, the Soviet Union’s internal security police. At the end of the day, he and his henchmen would go hunting for girls on the streets of Moscow, of Kokoschkino, of Noginsk, or whatever far-flung suburb his duties as a spy took him to. When he found a girl he liked, he ordered the car to follow her discreetly without attracting attention. Suddenly, he would attack. One of his henchmen would block the girl’s path, throwing open the car door, while another bundled her inside where Beria would examine her more closely. If the examination proved satisfactory, he would take the girl to a secret house, gag her and tie her up. After the rape, the least submissive girls were thrown into the Moskva River, the others were sent to the army brothels in Siberia. I had read fragments of this chilling story in a book by Donald Rayfield¹⁶ about Stalin’s ‘hangmen’ and their abuses. In the book, I had seen a disturbing photo of Beria when he was about forty in which he looked very like Dr Dupuy: the same broad forehead, the same lascivious mouth, a nose like the beak of a bird of prey. Democratic openness made it possible for a number of newspapers to mention other sordid stories about Dupuy, but they were quickly snuffed out by the avalanche of civil and criminal suits he filed to defend himself. Many of those who could have denounced him had been his accomplices and even the teachers at the orphanage were not prepared to identify him as the man who took away the girls.

In late 1977, Dupuy had been the adviser to whom the comandantes most often turned, the only one they were prepared to accept as a moderator in their power struggles. One November night he was summoned to the presidential palace. It was seven months before the start of the World Cup and everything had already been completed: the stadiums, the hotels for visiting journalists, the motorways, the TV station which would broadcast the games in colour. Dupuy assumed he had been summoned to mediate in another of the endless wranglings for power. He would be blunt, tell them to sort it out themselves. Or perhaps they would ask him to discreetly get rid of the annoying gaggle of women¹⁷ who gathered at the Pirámide de Mayo every Thursday afternoon right under the their noses, demanding the return of sons who were lost or dead. Whatever the mission entrusted to him by the comandantes, he would know how best to deal with it, which would make all three of them happy.

By the time he arrived for the meeting, it was almost midnight. The corridors of the presidential palace were deserted: Dupuy had negotiated these hallways many times and knew he had to move carefully. Every twenty or thirty metres, someone would step out of the shadows and demand that he produce his papers. As he walked, the air became hotter and hotter. He leaned for a moment on the balustrade of the gallery and looked down at the palm trees in the courtyard. The night swelled, the darkness swelled (there is no other way to explain the slow inflammation of reality), and pollen stained the floor tiles a cloying yellow. An aide-de-camp came to meet him and walked with him to the dining room where the comandantes were finishing their meal. They seemed nervous, upset. The table was littered with press clippings from foreign papers, cartoons, stark headlines about the secret concentration camps, the torture, the numbers of the disappeared. One of the cartoons depicted the Eel with a little moustache like Hitler’s and the same lock of hair falling across his forehead. The artist had taken pains to make sure the hair looked shiny and stiff with hair cream. Dupuy had the impression that the commander-in-chief of the navy was amused by this display of rubbish. He was a strapping, muscular, arrogant man, the opposite of the Eel. He apologised to Dupuy for summoning him at such a late hour and asked him to take a seat.

‘We don’t want to take up too much of your time. I’m sure you’ve realised why we asked you to come. We need your help, your imagination.’

‘A vicious campaign has been unleashed against us,’ the Eel interjected. ‘It needs to be stopped as soon as possible. In a few months, the whole country will be on display for all the world to see. Our every move is going to be examined under a microscope.’

‘I assume you’ve read my latest editorial in La República refuting this sleazy campaign.’

‘ “Rights and Humans”? It was a model of intelligence, Doctor, as your writing always is,’ said the admiral. ‘However, what you write unfortunately only influences opinion in this country. And the country needs no convincing. They realise that when they attack the government, they attack the nation. What we cannot control are the lies spread abroad—’

‘The vicious campaign against Argentina,’ interrupted the Eel. ‘You’ve seen the cartoons attempting to ridicule me.’

‘Your editorial has been translated and sent via our embassies to foreign newspapers,’ said the admiral. ‘We have offered a lot of money to have them published. Most of them replied saying they won’t publish, not even as a paid advertisement.’

Dupuy felt embarrassed by the comment.

‘It’s not your fault, Doctor,’ the Eel intervened. ‘A number of extremists have escaped and have been making harmful statements about us. They’ve been travelling all over the world smearing our good name. They’re tireless. Even the BBC in London has broadcast a documentary full of lies. We plan to sue them, but who knows whether it’s wise to aggravate them, whether it will only give them more rope to hang us with.’

‘To do nothing would be much worse. But how can I be of help, señores?’ Dupuy asked. ‘You know more about counter-intelligence strategy than I do.’

‘We can’t destabilise subversives by the book,’ said the admiral. ‘What we need is a little imagination. That’s why we’ve called you in. What are your thoughts?’

‘Nothing, just at the moment. I’ll give the situation careful consideration and come up with a quick, effective solution. Something that will silence the liars once and for all.’

‘A lightning flash that will win over the sceptics. Another Star of Bethlehem,’ said the Eel.

‘A blinding flash, certainly, but something lasting,’ Dupuy amended, ‘something that will leave its mark on history. A century from now, any memories of us will be vague. To some in Argentina we will be heroes, not to others. But when they look on what we achieved, we will be remembered with respect, as the Borgias are in Florence, as Napoleon is in France. Of this sleazy campaign of lies against Argentina, on the other hand, no one will remember a thing. We will refute them now with something that will last forever. With a monument, but not one carved in marble. A monument that is imperishable. If you will excuse me, señores, I need to think.’

He did not sleep that night. The image of the Eel with the fringe and the Hitler moustache lay in wait like a starving cat. He reviewed the speeches Hitler had made when he carried all the world before him and wondered what his legacy to posterity would have been if history had not ruined it. He thought of the scale models of the Berlin Olympiad which the architect Speer had given Hitler for his birthday. He recalled the arresting opening scenes of Leni Riefenstahl’s two classic documentaries and sensed that this was the key. The finished motorways and the stadiums for the World Cup were equal to the ambition of Speer’s scale models. What was needed to complete the picture was a film like Riefenstahl’s, an enduring work of art which would tour the world, singing the glories of Argentina, which would carry off the prizes at Cannes, at Venice, at the Oscars. It needed a great opening and a great director. He thought of the unforgettable opening images of Olympia depicting the ruins of the greatness of Greek civilisation; he imagined thousands of balloons and doves rising in the late-afternoon air as a providential plane crossed the sky, a reference to Triumph of the Will where the Führer’s plane comes in to land at Nuremberg. The problem was the Eel did not have the gravitas of Hitler; he was scrawny, surly and the moment he opened his mouth he sounded like a barracks sergeant. This was something that could be dealt with later: using body doubles and long-distance shots. Right now he needed to think of a director capable of the same epic feat as Riefenstahl, someone who was already famous and respected.

He had met Orson Welles in the bullring in Toledo. He had only the vaguest idea of what Welles had done, but he knew that his first film, Citizen Kane, was considered by critics to be the finest in the history of cinema. That was enough for him. He didn’t need to see Citizen, all he needed was to find out a little more about the man himself. He had been a prodigy and at the age of thirty had married Rita Hayworth. He was not egotistical — his failures had cured him of his pride. If Welles was prepared to follow his orders, this documentary about Argentina would go down in history as the bible of cinema. The more he thought about the project, the more convinced he was that it could not fail. The characters would be heroes like those in Greek mythology. And the plot, ah, the plot — he would have to fashion it carefully. It would depict battles of the stature of War and Peace, Moby-Dick, the Iliad but played out on the football field. He would have liked to call the film Gods of the Stadium, but this was the Spanish title of Riefenstahl’s Olympiad.

The Welles he had met in Toledo was an educated man, more a jaded ox than a fighting bull. And, according to his informants, after Toledo, things had not gone well for him. He was constantly in need of money, constantly fighting with producers who mutilated his works of art.

That won’t happen with me, thought Dupuy, I speak the same language as he does. He had first seen him before the bullfight which was Antonio Bienvenida’s farewell to the bullring. He had been lying on a red velvet sofa, in a waiting room outside the matador’s dressing room, wreathed in the smoke from his huge cigar. Dupuy had had no idea who he was. He had never seen him act, did not know the man was famous. These were things he realised only later. Taking him to be a bullfighting critic, he greeted him respectfully: ‘Hail Mary, most pure.’¹⁸ Welles looked him up and down without answering. ‘You’re not Catholic?’ the doctor said, surprised. A good Catholic would respond ‘Conceived without sin’. Welles smiled haughtily. ‘Please, don’t talk about my private life, señor,’ he said in impeccable Spanish. ‘Are you or aren’t you?’ Dupuy insisted. ‘I don’t know. Let me put it another way: once a Catholic, always a Catholic.’ ‘I certainly believe so,’ the doctor agreed. ‘That is the catechism.’

Bienvenida emerged from the dressing room wearing the bullfighter’s traditional ‘suit of lights’. He was a gentleman of melancholy disposition and he was nervous. The bulls that afternoon were the last he would face in his life. ‘I hope you get to see a good fight,’ he said. ‘By the grace of God,’ Dupuy corrected him. Then he turned back to Welles who had looked up. ‘Come now, hombre, say something. What are you waiting for? Wish the man luck.’ Welles did not say a word, but held out his hand to Bienvenida and stubbed out his cigar.

Dupuy smiled as he remembered the encounter. He had no doubts now. He would provide Welles with whatever he wanted, vast multitudes, fake cities like those in Hollywood; he would allow him to bring his own crew and would ensure that they lacked for nothing. He, Dupuy, would choose the music for the soundtrack. He would persuade Welles that they needed military marches, exuberant music and, especially, tangos. He would take him to meet Piazzolla, who had spent the past months writing a suite about the World Cup. He would tell Piazzola he had written the music for Last Tango in Paris, that he was a Richard Strauss, a Nino Rota. Orson would get down on his knees and thank him.

The following day he presented his idea to the comandantes. He spoke to each of them individually, because when they were together they constantly competed for control. The solution, he could convince them, was magnificent, but immortal? It would be difficult for a film — any film — to rival the Great Wall of China, nor was it as symbolic as the Obelisk of Buenos Aires. Wouldn’t it be possible to build another obelisk, they suggested to him, one twice as high with a football at the top? Dupuy wasted hours talking to them while they interrupted him, taking phone calls, signing decrees, consulting with the high command. The commander-in-chief of the navy said that he would agree to the idea if he could be filmed entering the stadium with Perón’s widow. The widow was in jail and the scene would have to be shot in secret. The commander-in-chief of the air force wanted the film to open with a fly-past of fighter planes. The Eel demanded that, instead of balloons and doves, Welles could make a speech asking for God’s blessing on Argentina. Dupuy said yes to all of them and suggested they let the director work in peace until it was finished. They were about to spend millions, he did not want to get embroiled in arguments before he had to. He phoned Welles’s agents and, shortly afterwards, flew to Los Angeles to firm up the details of what he was already calling the film of the century.

Orson, he was told, travelled a lot and it was extremely rare to find him at his home in Beverly Hills. Sometimes he would take the overnight flight to Boston and, the next day, fly to some godforsaken town in Arizona. He was working tirelessly on the filming of Othello, adapting a short story by Isak Dinesen and writing a screenplay based on a novel by Graham Greene. One of the agents repeated to Dupuy Welles’s comments when he was informed about the project. A film about Argentina? Flamenco and bullfights? I’m intrigued. Tell this man to come and see me. I’ve had Capone and Lucky Luciano and Costello hounding me to make films for them — I dealt with them and I’m still alive.

Welles was waiting for him on the terrace at the back of the house, next to a vast swimming pool shaped like a kidney. It was December, a strong breeze was blowing, whipping up eddies of yellow leaves. As in Toledo, the director was chewing on a fat cigar. There was no smoke this time. He chewed it and spat the dark tobacco fibres onto the ground. He was still physically imposing, but more bloated now and the fat around his belly fell in folds over his trousers. A liveried servant brought two whisky glasses and poured generous measures, though Welles did not seem to notice. He was engrossed in reading Dupuy’s business card (his name, phone numbers and the logo of the newspaper), and every now and then he would glance through the papers and photographs piled on the table. Scripts, Dupuy supposed, and photographs of actors. He doesn’t need to prove he’s a busy man. I know he is. He realised Welles did not remember him. It is hardly surprising, we only met briefly one afternoon, he thought. It will come back to him when he hears my offer, an offer bigger than Hollywood, than Spain, an offer (Dupuy repeated to himself, excited now) as big as the world. He spoke to Welles in Spanish. The director replied in English.

‘May I call you Orson?’ Dupuy said. ‘We met about ten years ago, in Antonio Bienvenida’s dressing room.’

‘Call me Orsten,’ said Welles, giving no sign that he remembered Bienvenida. ‘That’s what Lucky Luciano called me, Orsten. I called him Charlie. Mind if I call you Charlie?’

‘If you like. Let me explain my project to you.’

Dupuy had to make several attempts. Welles knew nothing about football, had never heard of the World Cup, and his impression of Argentina was a vast horizon of pampas. He vaguely remembered Buenos Aires — he had been awarded a prize there for Citizen Kane in 1942. ‘I remember there was a fascist march protesting against my visit. Your country was sympathetic to fascism back then, wasn’t it, Charlie?’ The doctor said nothing, he did not want to get entangled in ideological explications. It was a potential quagmire. He, Dupuy, was a master of politics; Welles was barely a novice. On the other hand, it had been years since Dupuy had set foot in a cinema. ‘I won’t take up much of your time, Orsten. I’ve come to pitch a documentary with an unlimited budget, can you imagine? Obviously, the footage will be served to you on a plate, at least half the film would be taken up with the matches.’ This, he knew, was not true; Riefenstahl had had to painstakingly craft her film, but he did not want to discourage Welles. ‘It’s just a documentary, child’s play. We wouldn’t need much from you at all, Orsten, just your voice and your vision. And your name, Orson. When you’re done, you’ll have more than enough money to complete all the projects you left half finished. You’ll be able to go back to filming Don Quixote, King Lear, The Magic Mountain.’ ‘I’ve never been interested in The Magic Mountain,’ Welles corrected him, ‘and the things in my past will stay in my past.’ ‘Allow me to explain our documentary to you a little better,’ Dupuy insisted, ‘it will only take two minutes. What my government wants is for you to make a great film, something that will go down in history, a Citizen Kane of documentary film-making. Just imagine the opening for a moment, Orson. The blue sky, dappled clouds, thousands of birds, the excited voices of the crowds we cannot see yet. And a microphone descending from above, just like in The Magnificent Ambersons’ — his advisers had recommended that he not forget this point: the microphone, the stentorian voice, the commanding ego — ‘and then. and then, your voice as the screen opens up: “This is Orson Welles in Argentina. I wrote and directed this film.” What do you think?’

Welles stared at him, incredulous. ‘In the papers I have here it says that there are magicians in your country, Charlie, illusionists. is that true? As you know I am more of an illusionist than a director.’ Dupuy had been advised that Welles had recently released a film about forgery and magic, F for Fake. He had a copy in the screening room at La República, but had not had time to watch it. ‘You want to film magicians?’ Dupuy was surprised. ‘No problem,’ he said, ‘there are lots of them in Argentina. I’ll make sure you have everything you need.’ ‘Listen to me, Charlie, I read in here’ — Welles once again placed his huge hand on the files piled on the table — ‘the magicians in your government make people in the streets disappear.’ Dupuy began to panic. ‘Who told you that? They’re lies. Argentina has been the victim of a vicious smear campaign, a tissue of lies put about by subversive terrorists. Nobody is disappearing. There would be no need for you to address the matter in your film. We would prefer to show that ours is a peace-loving country and that our people are happy. We need to think positively, Orsten.’ He did not like this turn of the conversation, it was going off-track, and the longer it went on, the more difficult it would be to rectify. He needed to stop it before he or Welles lost their patience. He had been about to ask Welles to name his price. He restrained himself. The director was more astute and more refined than the intelligence services.

‘Maybe we can come to a deal, Charlie,’ said Welles. ‘As you probably know, many years ago I caused a panic in this country with a radio programme. I convinced two million people that Martians were invading New Jersey. People rushed out into the streets, crazed with terror. Art is illusion, Charlie, reality is illusion. Things exist only when we see them; in fact, you might say they are created by your senses. But what happens when this thing that doesn’t exist looks up and stares back at you? It ceases to be a something, it reveals its existence, rebels, it is a someone with density, with intensity. You cannot make that someone disappear because you might disappear too. Human beings are not illusions, Charlie. They are stories, memories, we are God’s imaginings just as God is our imagining. Erase a single point on that infinite line and you erase the whole line and we might all tumble into that black hole. Be careful, Charlie.’ Dupuy was confused, he couldn’t see what Welles was driving at. If he didn’t like the project, why didn’t he just say? There was no need to beat about the bush.

An icy wind whipped across the terrace. The director had a large black cloak and a scarf next to him, but he did not even look at them. He seemed impervious to the wind, to the gathering darkness, to the rusty December leaves that went on falling. He called for another whisky. ‘More than twenty years ago, I was asked to direct a documentary about Babe Ruth,’ he said. ‘You know who Babe Ruth was? A baseball legend the like of which has never been seen since. I didn’t like baseball, I’d never seen Babe in his glory days, but people worshipped him and I was interested in recording that idolisation on film. I took on the project and went to work. We shot a few scenes with him. He was a very sick man by then, throat cancer, so obviously he couldn’t talk much. I convinced the producers that we would invent Babe, that we would create a life for him. I wanted to show him shaking Roosevelt’s hand, touching Marlene Dietrich’s legs, playing dice with Gary Cooper. In cinema, you can create any reality you want, imagine things that don’t yet exist, freeze some moment in the past and move to a point in the future; the football matches can be reflected in anything, Charlie, they’re just smoke and air, the stadiums can be filled with crowds using special effects. Maybe we can come to some arrangement. Let’s make this documentary of yours, but there is no World Cup, there are no players, no football matches. There’s only magic. You stop seeing, you stop talking and everything disappears. It would be a great metaphor for your country.

‘Charlie, take off your watch and give it to me for a minute,’ said Welles. It was a $20,000 Patek Philippe. Welles held it in front of his eyes and told Dupuy to pay careful attention. Then he threw it on the ground and stamped on it. The inner workings of the watch went flying everywhere. The doctor was speechless. ‘Don’t worry, Charlie,’ said Welles, ‘you’ll get it back. It will be identical to the watch you had before, but it won’t be the same because we have to pluck it from the unreality where it is now. Stamping on the watch did it no damage, but in the seconds that have passed since you gave it to me, the watch has been transformed. Here you are, Charlie.’ The director opened his fist and the Patek Philippe reappeared exactly as it had been before he threw it on the ground, or at least it seemed to be. Welles had recovered his good humour and Dupuy his hopes. He was not going to go back to Buenos Aires empty-handed, but now he was not sure that entrusting the documentary to Welles was a good idea. He felt that he was dealing with a madman.

‘Orsten, could you explain a little more?’ he said. ‘Talk to me about the documentary. What do you think of the opening shots, the sky, the birds, the microphone?’

‘Maybe,’ said Welles. ‘What’s next?’

Dupuy unfolded the speech he had written during the long flight and began to read. ‘In the film, it will be your voice, Orsten. It’s in Spanish, but I’ll have it translated for you. “My name is Orson Welles, I’m speaking from the River Plate Monumental Stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We share the excitement of this righteous, humane country, one of whose greatest feats had been to organise and host the 1978 World Cup, defying the sceptics who said, ‘They’ll never succeed.’ Here, stadiums, motorways and airports have been built in record time. Here, the people love life and live in peace.” What do you think, Orsten?’

‘It’s not my style, Charlie, it’s too eloquent. Get Robert Mitchum to read it. He has a more compelling voice.’

‘Whatever you say, Orsten,’ said Dupuy. ‘We’ll hire Mitchum, whatever it costs.’

‘How much were you thinking of spending, Charlie?’

‘Whatever we need to. The budget for the World Cup is four hundred million dollars. We could put fifty or sixty million towards the film, whatever you need.’

‘Don’t be so extravagant, Charlie. The documentary I have in mind is going to cost you two million tops. Most of the budget will be spent on tricks, special effects, editing. There’s no need for stadiums, players, crowds. What we are going to create is illusion. Like in the radio play with the Martians. No political speeches, no patriotic eulogies, I don’t do that kind of thing.’

Dupuy was more confused than ever by Welles. How was he planning to make a World Cup documentary without the World Cup taking place? The trick with the Patek Philippe proved that the director was a master of illusion, that he could confound millions as he had confounded Dupuy. But I’m a rational man, thought Dupuy, I’m not about to sell the comandantes hot air. I need something solid, I need to know what this necromancer is getting at. Maybe what he’s thinking of is even more majestic than Albert Speer’s imperial Berlin in Olympia, maybe he wants to make a film as ineffable as the Great Mass in C minor by Mozart, an intangible glory, pure sound, maybe we need to think in terms like that. ‘Orsten,’ he said, ‘as you know, there can’t be a World Cup without an audience. Millions of people in hundreds of countries watch the matches on television. We have to show the pitch, the stands, the fans cheering the goals. We can’t have people screaming gooooooal if there are no goals. These are serious people. They’re not actors.’

Welles’s demeanour did not change. ‘The more we talk the less you seem to understand, Charlie,’ he said. ‘The matches will be broadcast on television, but that doesn’t mean there have to be any matches. People believe something happens when they are told that it’s happening. Did you believe I broke your watch?’

‘Of course, Orsten. I saw it with my own eyes.’

‘But I didn’t break it, Charlie. It was an illusion. It never left my hand. Cinema is that same magic raised to the highest power. In your country, Charlie, magic is possible: Martians, the apocalypse, prophets walking on water. Your people believe in all these things, even those that don’t exist.’

‘That’s not how it is, Orsten. In Argentina, people want to hear El Gordo Muñoz¹⁹ commentating on the matches, cheering the goals. What is a sports commentator supposed to do if there are no matches, no goals?’

‘Charlie, a truly great presenter can make and unmake reality as it suits him. Do you really think that this guy Muñoz has never imagined games, missed shots, fouls? He’s seen thousands of football matches in his life. All he needs to do is take the best, the most exciting moments. And if he allows his imagination free rein, he could create unforgettable matches, games that no one could ever play. I’ll make a deal with you, Charlie. I’ll bring my magic to this documentary, you pay me with your magic.’

‘I still don’t understand, Orsten.’

‘You don’t understand, Charlie? I make the film for you for free, with the best World Cup anyone’s ever seen, and you and your generals will make the disappeared appear.’

Dupuy stalked out of the house indignantly. In the distance, the lights of Los Angeles looked like fireflies. Sullenly, he contemplated the tree-lined streets, the downtown skyscrapers, the glittering bars. In some dark corner of the city, he thought, Argentinian extremists were hiding. They had injected their poison into the files Welles had piled on his table and flicked through from time to time. It had to be them, he was sure of it, there were cockroaches scuttling everywhere. The World Cup would shut them up, it would wipe them forever from every map, condemn them to perpetual disappearance.

The following night he took the flight back to Buenos Aires. He was no longer interested in Welles now. He would make the documentary with another director and personally instil the spirit of Riefenstahl into whomever he chose. He would get someone like Mitchum on board, that would be easy. The trip had been useful if only for the fact that it had confirmed that reality is a creation of the senses, something men had known for centuries but constantly forgot. There are no disappeared in this country, the Eel would say, no one is disappearing, and under the spell of his insipid voice everyone denied the obvious; and the more people were disappeared into non-existent dungeons, the less their absence was noticed. I’ll bombard the comandantes’ offices with new ideas, thought Dupuy, I’ll suggest they persuade the people to see the World Cup as something more than just football. They need to think of their team not just as eleven players against another eleven players, but to consider every match as a fight to the death between two countries, between the flag they worship and the flags of foreign countries. We’ll need to come up with images, metaphors, he thought. That was what Welles had said, and though the director would not have liked the idea, in this they were in agreement.

In less than a month, it will be New Year. That would be an ideal opportunity to test the credulity of people, to see just how effective Orson Welles’s illusions could be. He asked two like-minded journalists to meet him in his office and asked them if they could dress up as Joseph, a carpenter, and his wife, the Virgin Mary. The investigation would take them two days, writing it would take another two. No, La República would not publish the article: it would be circulated only among the elite. He would take charge of placing it with a magazine that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and ensure they were well paid. The fake Virgin Mary was to improvise the clothes they needed to wear and write dialogue for them. He would have to approve the text, it was a confidential matter. That night, the woman rang his doorbell. Her hair was covered by a blue shawl and she was wearing a loose white dress and crude sandals. She had padded herself and looked to be seven or eight months pregnant. Dupuy showed her into his study and offered her a glass of water or fruit juice. ‘I’d prefer a whisky,’ she said. She took off the shawl and draped it over an armchair. She showed him photographs of Joseph wearing coarse canvas trousers and a dark shirt and sandals. He was growing out his beard. ‘This is what we’re going to say: “I’m María, a housewife, and this is my husband José, he’s a carpenter. We’re expecting a baby on December the 24th. Joseph is unemployed. Could you help us?” ’ ‘The beard is good,’ said the doctor, ‘but I think it would be better if you didn’t wear the shawl. You need to be less obvious, to challenge reality, instil the symbolism in the minds of the readers, don’t you think? The dialogue is good. And José can carry a carpenter’s tool of some sort, a ruler, a saw so people don’t think he’s a tramp.’ ‘Don’t worry, Doctor,’ the woman said, and finished the glass of whisky before she left.

José came to see him a week later. ‘We’re exhausted,’ he said. ‘We’ve been to Victoria, to Carapachay, to the railway works in Remedios de Escalada, and having failed there, we tried our luck in Córdoba. We were turned away everywhere we went. The place where they treated us best was a filthy dive bar — they gave us food, rancid cheese and stale bread. There were two drunks in the bar who made fun of María. “So you’re going to give birth on the 24th, on Christmas Eve? Who do you think you are, the Virgin? I could easily believe you’re a virgin, you fat fuck. Get out of here.” María, who’s a devout Catholic, said, “God forgive you, how could you take me for Our Lady?” and that’s when things went sour. I couldn’t convince her to stay. I finished the article myself and have brought it to you, Doctor, just to fulfil our obligations.’ ‘Does the article explain everything exactly as it happened?’ asked Dupuy. ‘Word for word,’ said José. ‘Neither of you understands anything. Go back and write it again. Write about people being helpful, say they invited you to eat with them, offered you work, gave you clothes for the baby. I’ve already earmarked seven pages in the magazine for the piece. Just because you failed in reality doesn’t mean I have to fail.’

One of the admiral’s henchmen had infiltrated the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. It was at a meeting in the Church of Santa Cruz and as he left he kidnapped one of the mothers and two French nuns. The following day, the papers said that the Montoneros had claimed responsibility for the kidnappings and were demanding ‘the release of 21 subversive delinquents’ for the safe return of the hostages. It sounded like one of Dupuy’s ruses, but the doctor was insulted that these copycats had been so sloppy in their work. He put in a furious call to the admiral. ‘What idiot came up with the idea that the Montoneros would refer to their own comrades as delinquents?’

Did he have to do everything himself? Unless he was absolutely meticulous, even his best plans seemed foolish. In a speech he had not had the opportunity to read, the Eel rashly admitted that there were four thousand extremist prisoners. He spoke without thinking, that’s far too many, thought Dupuy. He wrote the script for a fake documentary showing military operations against subversive troops who were launching attacks on the northern border using Soviet-issue missiles and mortars. In the film, they would be repelled by the military and mown down on the battlefield. National cinema had already created battles in Savage Pampas and The Gaucho War which people still remembered. It would cost nothing to breathe new life into epics like this and use them to justify the four thousand dead. He took the plan to the admiral, who was against the idea. ‘Forget about the Montoneros, Doc. We don’t need them any more. We need to show the people that Argentina has enemies with bigger firepower, ruthless despots determined to steal parts of the country from us.’ ‘Stroessner?’ Dupuy ventured. ‘How could you think such a thing?’ said the admiral. ‘The President of Paraguay is an ally. I was thinking of someone less cunning. A brute like Pinochet, for instance. The Argentine people don’t like him, and the Chileans will be a pushover.’

Welles, thought Dupuy, had not been so wrong after all. The people of Argentina will believe what they’re told and the newspapers and the radio will say what they’re told to say. Even an illiterate like Pol Pot has almost succeeded in creating the reverse situation in Cambodia: a Communist peasant society. What’s stopping us from marching forward on our crusade (he loved the word crusade), doing the same thing, but under the banner of the one true God?

Welles had made a deeper impression on him than he had realised. His editorials in La República were no longer starchy analytical articles where military chiefs and businessmen could read between the lines. He now rarely quoted Descartes, Leibniz and St Augustine, preferring Eliphas Lévi and Madame Blavatsky. He did not mention Horangel’s²⁰ astrological predictions, though he read them. He talked about symbolism, about the influence of the stars, the relationship between numbers and letters, and, which was more astonishing, even the comandantes took his economic predictions seriously.

Alone in the house, Emilia wandered through the rooms where the things her mother had left behind were fading, the cane, the bed jacket she wore when she got up, the bedpan, the television with its still-flickering grey images. She visited her at the old people’s home twice a week and every time she left her mother sitting out on the terrace with the other old people she was racked with guilt. As a teenager she had been fascinated by the things she didn’t know and drew maps as though she were writing poems: maps of imaginary cities that existed only in books, or of countries wiped away by the dust of history. Now, none of this mattered: as an adult, she had moved from one disenchantment to the next. She spent her days between itinerant maps which disappeared even before they were fully formed.

When the nurses brought her mother out onto the terrace, Emilia would stroke her hair and tell her stories. She talked to her about the first time she had met Simón in the cellar bar where Almendra were playing songs that now sounded dated, sang the lyrics to her in a voice so soft the nurse could not hear, recounted the plots of movies they had watched together and of which Emilia remembered only fleeting images. She talked to her as she might to a doll, or to the daughter she had never had. And as she talked, she stroked her hands while her mother stared into the distance with her beatific Mona Lisa smile. Sometimes, she seemed to wake up, she would echo ‘Ah yes, Simón, your Simón’, but they were just sounds, like the first babblings of a baby. She was wasting away, if it were possible for an old woman who was already no more than a shadow of herself to waste away.

One of the doctors advised Emilia to take Ethel back to the family home from time to time. He explained that sleeping in their own bed, being in a familiar place surrounded by people who love them, could work miracles for people suffering from mental illness. ‘There’s no chance that she will ever be who she used to be,’ said the doctor, ‘the damage is irreversible, but if anything is going to help her, it’s love.’

‘Baruch atah Adonai,’ muttered Ethel.

‘Blessed is the Lord,’ translated the doctor. ‘Your mother is a very religious person. She repeats that prayer several times a day.’

‘That’s not the way she used to pray. Could she have converted?’

‘How could she have? She’s in no fit state. She calls on God the only way she knows how, the way she remembers.’

‘Taking her home would create problems. We’ve given away most of her clothes. My sister is about to get married. I’m out working all day and so is my father.’

‘Think about it, discuss it among yourselves. Three days, maybe a week every now and then would be enough. And don’t worry about the clothes, she doesn’t need much.’

That night, Emilia raised the subject with her father and Chela who let out a scream. ‘Who is this doctor? Is he crazy? Has everyone gone crazy? Didn’t you tell him that I’m getting married and that if she’s here it’ll be a disaster?’

Her father considered the idea. He dropped by the sanatorium only rarely, claiming that it upset him to see the ruined shell that was the woman to whom he had given his name. He asked if they bathed her every day, whether they were feeding her properly, then he left. She had never heard him say a loving word. He loathed expressions of affection, or maybe (thought Emilia), he used them only when saying things he did not truly believe.

‘I told the doctor everything,’ Emilia said. ‘Mamá won’t be coming back until after you’re married. And she won’t be coming back permanently. She just needs to come home from time to time for short periods. You won’t even know she’s here. I’ll look after her, and if I’m not here, we’ll bring in a nurse.’

She was still working as a cartographer for the Automobile Club. She earned a pittance but enough for her to live modestly without having to rely on her father. If she had known at the time that every month Dupuy deposited a sum equal to her salary into her account, she would have thrown it back in his face. When she was asked to work overtime, she gratefully accepted even though the money was pitiful. She was making plans to go out into the world to search for Simón. She would close her eyes and indicate a point on the map, telling herself that this was the place where her husband was hiding, the place from which he would return. She was hoping for a chance revelation, just as Bible readers hope to find illumination in the first line they happen on.

Contrary to what Emilia expected, Dupuy did not reject the doctor’s recommendation out of hand. He said that he would think about it and make his decision the following evening. His daughter never knew who he spoke to during those hours, nor how he came to the conclusion she least expected. Her only thought was that, at a time marked by frequent social gatherings, single men were the subject of gossip. More than once, the Eel had said that though he sympathised with Dupuy over Ethel’s illness, nobody understood why he didn’t simply take his daughter to such parties. ‘Emilita is a treasure, we’ve known her since she was a little girl, and she’s a pleasure to talk to. Don’t hide this precious jewel away from us, Doc,’ the admiral agreed. ‘Between us, we’ll teach her to enjoy life.’

Dupuy did not believe his daughter worthy of quite so much attention unless it seemed she was basking in his reflected glory. However, it was not a bad idea to be seen at Mass with her, to take her to the theatre. The comandantes were right. Unaccompanied men aroused suspicion, and the Church would not give its blessing to him remarrying while Ethel was still alive. Emilia was a jewel, why not show her off?

He summoned both his daughters and told them that he would not object to their mother coming home to stay occasionally only if Emilia would agree to move back into the family home to look after her, and give up the fantasies that had her languishing in San Telmo and agree to be his escort when he asked her.

Chela became alarmed.

‘Don’t worry about anything. Your wedding comes first — after that we can think about bringing her home. As your sister says, there’s no reason not to, it’s only for a couple of days a month. I can’t see why you would have a problem with it since you won’t be living here.’

He turned to Emilia.

‘But I don’t want any problems either. While she’s in this house, Ethel will have to stay in her room like the vegetable she is. If I see her or hear her, I’m sending her straight back to the home.’

‘What about my job?’ asked Emilia.

‘You’ll have to gradually give up working. Make up your mind: either you look after your mother, or we go back to the way things were.’

‘But a nurse—’ she managed to protest.

‘I’ve thought about this carefully,’ Dupuy interrupted her. ‘I am not prepared to tolerate strangers in my house.’

What Emilia had not expected was the trap she had set for herself. Love and good intentions had forced her to trade one cell for another; this one, her father’s, was the bitterest.

She would forget her troubles by burying herself in her work. She needed every penny she could make, needed it desperately so that one day she would be able to leave. She was a married woman, an adult. She had to throw off this yoke. She no longer even knew how to find her way around this city, a city she had once moved through heedlessly with Simón on her arm. What had been a street two years before was now fences and rubble; beneath the houses tunnels opened up, and in some places the Buenos Aires of the past seemed to have come back to life, watering troughs, horse-drawn carriages and hitching posts, things she believed had disappeared forever. Almost daily the Automobile Club redrew the maps of whole neighbourhoods, scarred by a network of motorways that was being built. She told them that she would have to take care of her mother and that soon she would only be able to work part-time. A number of areas needed to be remapped and she was lucky to be assigned Parque Chacabuco, where her mother’s nursing home was. She would take her time, visit her every now and then, and gradually tell her the good news. ‘Mamá, we’re going to be sleeping in the same room again, like we used to,’ she would tell her, ‘I’m going to take care of you again.’ She had to make the most of these conversations about the world outside, which was changing so quickly.

Buenos Aires was different now: the newspapers called it progress, but the only progress Emilia could see was the steady advance of misery. The mayor had refugees forcibly evicted from the makeshift shanty towns. If they resisted, he had the electricity and water cut off. Tanks would burst through the walls of houses, rolling implacably over mattresses, stoves, half-cooked meals. She would not tell her about that, she would tell her simply that almost nothing was where it had been.

The area assigned to Emilia was a network of short streets and narrow tree-lined alleys: a corner of the city condemned to death. In a few short months, cartographers would have to draw their maps, fill in the blank spaces currently bounded by dotted lines. It was Monday. The heavy rains of the previous week had alleviated the sweltering January heat. Emilia got off the bus and walked across the park. She walked self-consciously, knowing that she was being watched but unable to tell from where. Perhaps from the porches, the balconies, the roofs of the houses. Her father always said that the best watchmen were those who never let themselves be seen, and she saw no one but she was certain she was being watched, she could feel eyes boring into the back of her neck. She stared at the little map she took from her bag. The alleys spread out in a fan on one side of the park: their names — Science, Good Order, Progress, Commerce — the last embers of positivism. She took out her drawing pad and prepared to makes notes. A sudden noise startled her. Behind her, a huge wrecking ball smashed through the wall of a nearby house, throwing up a cloud of dust and debris that settled on a family having lunch on a piece of rubble-strewn waste ground. The table was set: a chequered tablecloth, ruined milanesas covered with gravel and brick dust. The man sitting at the head of the table got up and eyed Emilia warily. ‘Hey, señora, señorita,’ he said, still chewing, his mouth enlivened by a single yellow tooth, ‘are you here from the council about the census?’ ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said Emilia. ‘I’m making a map of the area.’ ‘Oh, you’re from the land registry, it’s the same thing. Could you find out for us when they’re going to pay for the expropriation? They said they were going to send the money today, said there would be vans to take us to a new house, but nothing’s happened, we’ve been waiting since first thing this morning. Our neighbours here left last week’ — he threw his arms wide, gesturing to the waste ground — ‘and those behind here have already been paid. You can see how we have to live. It’s hell. Some people were lucky, they were given a month to leave. They tell me it could have been worse. An old woman in the Pasaje de las Garantías dropped dead when she saw the trucks rolling in. Fifty years she’d lived in the same place, cooked her meals in the same kitchen; she was the last to leave, she stayed behind to watch the collapsing roofs, the chicken coop, the plants in the garden.’

Emilia was due to map the Pasaje de las Garantías too, and went to see it. It was desolate, empty, grey as the surface of the moon and filled with craters. Maybe the motorway had scared the neighbours away. This was one of the few areas where work had been finished. At either end rose two prefabricated houses surrounded by dying gardens. One was little more than a cave which still stood in spite of the louring concrete pillars. Behind, beneath the sweeping cement curves, in a fantasy version of an old glasshouse, a few stubborn plants continued to compete for their share of oxygen and moisture under metal panels already beginning to rust. She thought she could see the glitter of freesias struggling up through the weeds. She bought a bunch of flowers from a stall on the avenue nearby. She felt a desperate desire to see her mother smile, for some small flame of happiness to spark in her life, a desire for Simón to suddenly descend from an alien sky, for people to dance on the pavements, for anything that would make her grief go away.

After Chela’s wedding, Ethel spent a brief period in the family mansion on calle Arenales. Emilia shut herself up in the bedroom with her, soothed her with Schubert quartets and waltzes from the distant past when she had been courting; she changed her nightdress, put perfume on her, and at dusk she walked with her through the darkened corridors. She was just the same, or perhaps not, but the differences were imperceptible. She stared at her daughter with the same incomprehension, addressed her formally, called her by the names of friends now dead, muttered unintelligible words. When her daughter hugged her, the muscles beneath her fragile skin tensed as though she were a frightened tortoise. It seemed as if nothing mattered to her, as they stepped outside into the sunshine to take her back to the home.

Emilia paid the heavy price that Dupuy had demanded. She lived now in the family home as in another tomb, waiting for her mother’s next visit: these fleeting bursts of happiness were her reward, her consolation. Leaving the apartment in San Telmo vacant was a waste, so she rented it for short-term lets to tourists. She left the furniture there so that she could go back whenever she needed or simply so she could shut herself up there and cry.

There were only a few weeks remaining before the World Cup began. One Sunday, her father insisted that she accompany him to rehearsals for the opening ceremony. ‘We’ll show the world how disciplined we are,’ he said. ‘They need to see us as we really are: tempered steel, a model of piety and order. Forty years ago in Berlin, German athletes had used their bodies to form the name of the fatherland and the swastika emblazoned on the flag. Now, the world will see that the young men of Argentina are every bit a match for those Gods of the Stadium. We shall do exactly as they did, hundreds of boys will spell out the hallowed word A-R-G-E-N-T-I-N-A. It will be a feat, since some of those letters are difficult. The G and the N require at least two somersaults.’ Sometimes, Emilia thought, he talked to her like a dim-witted child, just as he had always spoken to her mother. ‘Argentina, the name spelled out on the pitch with the grenadier marching band marking time. Magnificent, don’t you think? We need to go. The comandantes and their wives will be there for the gymnastic displays, I can’t be seen to be there alone, and they’re fond of you, Emilia. They know about your mother. This is a celebration and women must be present.’

Dupuy had no interest in football but the World Cup, as he tirelessly repeated, was a patriotic crusade. He was already seated on the cloud of this imminent achievement and he had no intention of coming down. He would come home late with foreign magazines and newspapers he had furiously red-pencilled. He did not stay for dinner; his daughter barely saw him. ‘Everywhere, there is an unjustified hatred of us,’ he complained, ‘a vicious campaign against Argentina. What the subversives failed to do with bombs they’re trying to do with poisonous words.’

European magazines published cartoons showing a football surrounded by electrified fences like those in Auschwitz; ridiculed the Eel, dressing him up as Death carrying a scythe. ‘Such disrespect is simply intolerable.’ The doctor was indignant. He dreamed of having the authors of these abuses arrested and watching them being tortured to death. He resented the fact that they were out of reach of his justice. He paid ‘the finest penmen in the country’ to write eulogies for the papers about the peace and happiness that flourished in the country hosting the World Cup, articles intended to bury the calumnies of Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig and the other Marxists who wrote for rags like Le Monde, La Repubblica, Paris Match, L’Express and Il Manifesto. He phoned the journalist who had unsuccessfully portrayed the Virgin Mary for him the previous Christmas and ordered her to visit the offices of the antagonistic magazines and discover what was at the root of this vicious hostility towards Argentina, who had paid these pen-pushers their thirty pieces of silver. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘ask them if they’re basing this on confessions from subversives, tell them it’s all lies, that before they print such garbage they should come and see for themselves that we live in peace and happiness; our doors are always open.’

He had thousands of postcards printed, the postage pre-paid so that children in the schools could write a message he had devised to the footballers who would be visiting. The teachers would dictate the poignant reproachful words: ‘Though you are far away, you dare to judge us. You are prepared to believe the words of criminal subversives who are destroying our country and not the patriotic soldiers risking their lives to preserve something this country is proud of: peace.’ It was the responsibility of the teachers to ensure that the cards were sent and to inform on any pupils who refused to comply. ‘In the new Argentina there is no place for those who stain our history,’ wrote Dupuy in his editorial for La República. The more the World Cup approached, the more passionate his patriotism, his faith in the system, his conviction that the three hallowed words he dreamed of inscribing on the flag — God, Country, Family — were already engraved on what he called the spirit of the nation, or the soul of Argentina, it didn’t matter.

Emilia was bored by the World Cup and it showed. A couple of years later, when Chela and Marcelito Echarri saw her in a brief shot from the film La fiesta de todos, they laughed at the fact that the camera had caught her in the middle of a yawn. She had flu and was coming down with a fever; she would have preferred to take her mother home and lie down next to her, but Dupuy wanted her to accompany him to the final at the River Plate Stadium and she could not refuse.

The match was due to start at 3 p.m.; the whole city was moving in slow motion and the driver from La República came to pick them up at 1.30 p.m. Crowds thronged the streets, blocking access to the stadium; vast human anthills swarmed, swathed in the Argentinian flag, wearing headbands, woolly hats emblazoned with the national coat of arms, wrapped up in blue-and-white scarves, all the trappings of patriotic fervour. Buenos Aires was affected by a madness of euphoria. Two policemen on motorcycles opened the way for them. Hundreds more were stationed around the grounds to look after VIPs. A number of fans jumped security barriers and applauded Dupuy when they recognised him. ‘What a pleasure, what a privilege to have you here for the celebration, Doctor,’ they shouted. Emilia’s father succumbed to temptation, popping his head out the car window to shake hands with the fans. It was difficult to know who was who, they seemed fused like Siamese twins by their frenzy and fanaticism. A woman struggled through the wall and rushed over to him. ‘Doctor, Doctor, you’re my last hope,’ she said, or rather shouted. ‘My daughter was taken away from our house when she was six months pregnant. My grandson has probably been born by now who knows where. Make them give them back to me, Doctor, I can’t go to my grave without seeing her again. Her name is Irene. Irene Cruz. You can do it, Doctor, you can.’ She tried to stroke his hands, the words swallowed up by her sobs. Dupuy did not even look at her. His attention was fixed on the crowds clapping and cheering. The woman held out a card to him as the police lifted her bodily and dragged her off through the milling crowd. Emilia took the card and looked at it — a phone number, two names, an address in Villa Adelina. ‘What are you going to do, Papá?’ she asked. ‘What do you want me to do?’ said Dupuy and ordered the driver not to stop again. Inside the stadium, he took a seat behind the comandantes; Emilia sat with their wives on one of the stands nearby. She saw her father whisper something to the Eel. The woman’s card trembled in her hand like a living thing and Emilia quickly tucked it into the waistband of her skirt.

Flares erupted around her; the whole stadium was jumping up and down, chanting Argentina! Argentina! She felt herself infected by this fervour, she felt it would be despicable to rush from the stadium to find Irene Cruz’s mother and hug her. Who knew in what pit of hell her daughter and her unborn grandson lay buried while the crowds on the stand chanted Argentina! Argentina! Who knew whether simply approaching this woman might not condemn her to death. A few metres away, Dupuy was smiling, regaling the Eel with stories of intrigue in the high command even as he told the comandantes what they should do and even what they should say on the radio on the day of victory. Around Emilia, everyone in the crowd, even the most anaesthetised, were on their feet, shouting insults at the Dutch team, wrapping themselves in flags and painted bed sheets. ‘Argentina, champions of the world!’ roared El Gordo Muñoz through transistor radios. ‘Great and glorious, Argentina, Hear, mortals, the sacred cry!²¹’ Emilia struggled from the arms embracing her, took Señora Cruz’s card, tore it to shreds and tossed it into the air to join the rain of streamers and confetti darkening the five o’clock sky.

I was still trying to work out what exactly the eruv was when Emilia asked me to go and see her. Autumn lingered on, it was late November but it was not yet cold. Water was freezing in the lakes of Vietnam, the oases of Libya, but in Highland Park, where the first snows usually fall about this time of year, the defiant warmth of summer refused to leave and the neighbours went jogging in the park in T-shirts. The map of the eruv Emilia had drawn had now been posted on the Internet: Donaldson Park and the Raritan River were outside its boundaries. My friend Ziva pronounced it eiruv, or ieruv, as the Russians do. One of the rabbis in town took the trouble to explain to me that it was a symbolic wall separating public space from private. On the Sabbath, it is forbidden to move things from one to another. Some communities forbid women from wearing jewellery and even sunglasses unless they need to. He gave me an example: on Saturday — Shabbat — it is forbidden to build. To open an umbrella, he explained, is similar to erecting a tent. Consequently, on Saturdays, it is forbidden to move beyond the bounds of the eruv with an umbrella. Highland Park is less than five square kilometres and a large section of the black neighbourhood is inside the eruv because the Almighty belongs to everyone, even those unfortunate enough not to believe in Him.

When I rang her doorbell, Emilia had just recovered from a panic attack and seemed about to have another. I don’t know how she made it down the stairs to open the door. I took her arm and helped her back into the hall. I find anything to do with mental illness distressing, I never know what to do to help. I’m terrified of saying the wrong thing and bringing down the whole fragile thing that is the mind. Emilia had turned on every light in the house. Her body was shaking as though her whole world had come crashing down. She wanted to tell me something but she was stammering so much I couldn’t understand her. I suppose that, if anyone had seen it, my clumsy, frantic attempts to help her would have seemed ridiculous. I brought her a glass of water, asked her if she wanted me to call an ambulance. She drank the water and hysterically told me not to call an ambulance. She sat for a moment saying nothing, hugging her knees to her chest. I had always felt that she was three distinct women: the old woman who showered the cashiers at Stop & Shop with coupons, the woman who was in love with Simón, and the little girl Dr Dupuy had destroyed. All three were there in front of me and I didn’t know which one to talk to. I waited until her breathing was calmer and asked her if she had any medication in the house that would help her sleep. I was going to give her some, stay with her until she fell asleep and see how she was the following day. She told me she had some pills in the bathroom cabinet she kept for emergencies and I went to look for them. There were about ten or twelve pill bottles containing the full panoply of pharmaceutical flora and fauna: Estradiol, a hormone replacement for women post menopause, Benadryl, Lexotanil, a sleeping pill from Argentina, Clonazepam and Vicodin, drugs used to calm anxiety and knock you out. Most of the drugs were dangerous, and there was more than enough for Emilia to commit suicide if she had a mind to. But she was not going to kill herself while she was still waiting for Simón.

Simón, once again, had been the reason for her call. ‘Please, I’m begging you, go into my bedroom,’ she said, ‘see if he’s hiding in there somewhere. I looked in the mirror and I didn’t see myself, I saw him standing there instead. For days now I’ve been working on a map and I get up to go to the bathroom or make a cup of coffee and when I come back the map is full of mistakes, or it’s been completely erased and I can’t start over again.’

‘Maybe you were distracted and you erased it yourself,’ I said. ‘Happens to the best of us. Maybe you made the mistakes yourself and didn’t realise. You’re not taking cocaine or LSD or something like that? You’ve got enough drugs in that bathroom cabinet to stun an elephant.’

‘No, I’ve never been tempted by things like that,’ she said. ‘Maybe later, when I’m too old for anything else. Besides, I almost never make mistakes when I’m drawing maps. It never happens to me at work, why would it happen when I’m here? As soon as I come through the door, I feel like there’s someone else here. Everything is exactly where I left it but nothing is the same. I don’t know if my senses are playing tricks on me and I need to know what you see, what you hear, since your senses are fine.’

‘I’ll go and look at myself in the mirror,’ I said. ‘But don’t put too much faith in me. My senses are shot, too. I think I’m losing my sense of touch, my hearing is going and so is my sight. I wrote a novel twenty years ago in which cats were stealing my character’s senses; by the time he died, he had none left. Now it feels like he’s come back for revenge.’

‘I read that one,’ she said. ‘The character’s name is Carmona²².’

I was pleased she still remembered a book that few people had ever heard of. Besides, I was the least suitable person to bring her back to reality. I asked her whether she saw Simón or whether she thought she saw him.

‘I don’t understand the difference,’ she said. ‘I don’t talk to him, I can’t touch him, but I know he’s there. Ever since I saw him standing in the doorway — that doorway’ — she pointed to the door leading to the bedroom — ‘he hasn’t left, he doesn’t want to leave. He’s saying something to me, but I can’t understand him.’

‘I don’t understand you either, Emilia,’ I said. ‘You need to be clearer in explaining what you remember. When you tell me things, there are blind spots, contradictions, things that couldn’t have happened when you think they happened. I’m completely confused when you talk to me about your mother’s visits to the house on the calle Arenales, about when you moved back from the San Telmo apartment, how many times Chela’s wedding was postponed, about your father’s machinations. Maybe my senses are as damaged as yours. You need to go and see a doctor. I can’t help you. Just like you, I see things that aren’t there, but it doesn’t make me worry for my sanity. There are figures and feelings that are far removed from reality, or they’re part of a reality different from ours. Have you ever been to the Jewish museum in Berlin?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve never been to Germany.’

‘I visited the museum in 2005, and I have no wish ever to go again.’

‘Was it a painful experience?’

‘It was painful in a sense, but that’s not why. I experienced the same unreal sensations you’re talking about. I heard voices, I sat down on a terrace next to my dead father, there were past lives inside me struggling to come out. I’d read somewhere that the museum is an architectural masterpiece, and it is. I can’t explain why, there are lots of books about it. I don’t want to overwhelm you talking about the angles, the weird vertical planes, the ceilings that seem to be falling in on you, the silences that open and close up as you walk through, but you quickly find yourself in a different reality, one that you feel you could be lost in forever. For years, you’ve lived in exile, moving from place to place, Emilia; you think you know what it is, but you couldn’t begin to explain it, there are no stories, no words in this desolate terrain because everything within you remained outside the moment you crossed the threshold. You might say that at that moment you entered purgatory, if what came before was hell (and it wasn’t, at least for me it wasn’t), if after was paradise, which never came. And when the wandering is over, when you go back to the home you left behind, you think you’re closing the circle, but visiting the museum you realise that the whole journey has been a one-way trip, always leaving. No one returns from exile. What you forsake, forsakes you. To the south of the museum is what’s called the Garden of Exile, forty-nine columns that rise (no, they don’t rise — every verb seems inadequate: rise, extend, stretch away?), forty-nine hollow columns of decreasing height; an oblique vision of life. Out of each column emerges a tree: you can’t tell where the tree comes from, all you can see is the desperate struggle of the branches to reach the light, to meet the sky they once lost. Pity moves you to walk between the columns so the trees will not feel so alone. You walk. The ground is cobbled and sloping, an edge of the world towards which things slide until finally they fall. By the time you’ve taken two steps, you are nowhere, there are no columns, there are no trees, there is no sky, the compass that guided you has disappeared, your reason for existing has been wiped out, you are nothing and you have stopped in a place from which no one ever returns. Exile.’

I went over to the mirror and looked at myself. The photo of a young Simón smiled at the mirror from the nightstand. The room was a mess; it was strange that Emilia, usually so fastidious, allowed me to go in. Magazines lay open on the bed, the sort people read while they’re queuing at the supermarket, featuring huge photos of Jennifer Lopez pregnant with twins, Britney Spears in her rehab clinic. I would never have imagined Emilia had such a morbid curiosity about the lives of others, though it made sense: the Emilia who collected coupons and played bingo belonged to that niche. It is impossible really to know another human being completely, and I had only ever seen Emilia on one side of the eruv, I never knew what became of her when she crossed over. I talked to her from where I stood, trying to reassure her. ‘I’m standing in front of the mirror, Emilia. There’s no one here. All I can see is the idiot standing here talking to you, I can see a shadow beside me, but it’s the idiot’s shadow. Try as I might, I’ll never see Simón because the only reason for your Simón to exist is for you alone to see him.’

When did that happen? When was it that Emilia phoned me asking for help? When did I go round to her house and stand staring at myself in the mirror, and leave without recognising my own body, feeling that memories that were not mine had entered into my body and I could not shake them off, memories that insisted on staying inside me even though I ran out? I didn’t make a note of it in my diary and recently the days have become confused. I haven’t seen her since then. I tried calling her at Hammond to talk to her about the novel I’m writing but they told me that she’d stopped coming in. I went by her house a couple of times and was surprised not to see her beat-up silver Altima parked on North 4th Avenue or in the parking lot at Rite Aid where she sometimes left it.

More than once I was on the point of telling her something about my novel. But I held back, out of shyness, out of shame, for the nameless reason that drives all writers to hide what they are doing until it’s finished. I said nothing because I was foundering in a swamp of first drafts I still haven’t climbed out of. She is the character on which the story turns, she was even before I knew her, and now I’d rather not carry on with it until we have had a serious conversation. I’m not waiting for her to give me permission to continue — characters aren’t censors, they don’t interfere in what happens to them. But Emilia is not simply one of my characters, she is also a human being, someone I know, someone I run into at Stop & Shop, a friend who has confided in me. Or is she simply someone inside me the way Simón is inside her? Before going out to look for her I remembered the lines of Felisberto Hernández: One can betray only when one lives with others. But with the body in which I live, no betrayal is possible. This, Felisberto used to say, is a hopeless situation. I have to clarify things with Emilia, work out where she begins and I end. Not knowing makes me uneasy.

Writing has always been a liberating act for me, the only place myself could roam without having to explain itself. While I write, I let myself go. Only after I have taken a few steps do I think about the boundaries of what I am doing: whether I am headed towards a novel or an essay, whether this is a story or a film script or a profile of the dead. I most often get lost when I try to go beyond the boundaries. Though the boundaries may resist, still I cross them. I want to see what’s on the other side of the words, in the landscapes that are never seen, in the stories that disappear even as they are being told. Perhaps if I devoted myself to poetry I might catch a glimpse of this horizon I can never reach. But I am not a poet, something I regret. If I were I would be able to name the true nature of things, unerringly find the centre rather than becoming lost on the margins. What am I going to say to Emilia when I see her?

That human beings are responsible for everything except our dreams. Many years ago now, before I met her, I dreamed of her and I transformed that dream into the first lines of a story that I have carried with me from country to country, believing that some day I would have the dream again and I would feel the need to complete it. I dreamed that I went into a seedy restaurant where an elderly woman was sitting at one end of a long table staring at one of the people eating with her. At that moment, I knew, with the blinding clarity we have in dreams, that the woman was a widow and the man was her husband who had been dead for thirty years. I also knew that the husband was the man he had been, his voice, his age those of the time he died.

When I woke up, I was excited, imagining the pleasure that elderly woman would feel to be loved, to be made love to by a much younger man. I didn’t care whether he was her husband or not. It seemed to me to be an act of poetic justice, since in most stories, the situation is reversed. I started writing, not knowing where my search would take me. I didn’t know what the husband was doing in that seedy restaurant, nor why time, for him, seemed to have been suspended. Those thirty years of separation — I thought — somehow echoed the emptiness of the thirty years I had spent exiled from my country and which I hoped to find, when I went back, exactly as I had left it. I know that it is an illusion, naive in the way all illusions are, and perhaps that was what attracted me, because those lost years will always haunt me and if I narrate them, if I imagine every day I did not live, perhaps — I thought — I could exorcise them. I wanted to remember what I didn’t see, recount the life I would have had, looking after my children, loving them, wandering through the cities of Argentina, reading. I wanted the impossible, because I could not have lived oblivious to the torture victims, to the prisoners held without trial, to the slaves in the death camps working for the greater glory of the admiral and the Eel. I wanted to be Wakefield, to disappear completely from the world and come back home one day, open the door and find nothing has changed. I wanted to know what it would have been like, the life of a writer forbidden to write. The questions tormented me, gave me no peace, and in desperation, I set about answering them. The phrase sounds melodramatic, but it is true nonetheless. I wrote quickly, page after page, eager to find out what happened next. I worked at a frantic pace unfamiliar to me. In general I can spend hours agonising over a single sentence, sometimes a single word, but in this book, almost without realising it, the writing consumed me, gambling in a race against death. True to form, death came looking for me. I had written about eighty pages when illness laid me low. In hospital, I began to see things differently. I thought about all the things that disappear without our even noticing, because we know only what exists, we know nothing of those things that never come into existence; I thought about the non-being I would have been had my parents conceived me seconds earlier or later, I thought of the libraries of books never written (Borges tried to make up for this absence in ‘The Library of Babel’), but all that remained was the idea, there was no flesh, no bones, a magnificent, lifeless idea. I thought about the Mozart symphonies silenced by his untimely death, about the song running through John Lennon’s mind that December night when he was murdered. If we could recover the unwritten books, the lost music, if we could set out in search of what never existed and find it, then we should have conquered death. While I was lying there waiting for death I thought that perhaps this was the way to get my life back. So I abandoned the novel I had been writing, and started this novel, which is filled with what does not exist and at its heart, still, is Emilia, who had taken my hand at Toscana and guided me through her labyrinth. You might say I found her before setting out to look. For her, it breathed new life into her hopes of seeing Simón again; for me, it breathed new life into this book.

I was describing her, bent over her drawing table, over the half-finished map of the eruv, when she called to ask me if it was Simón reflected in her mirror. I already said, I think, that I saw only myself and the photo of Simón as a young man on the nightstand behind me. For more than a week now, I have made no attempt to find Emilia. Sooner or later, I feel sure, she will call because the memories I carry within me are her memories too, and she will ask me to leave them where they are. Before I lost her, I thought I saw a light on in her apartment and I rang the doorbell. I must have been mistaken, because no one answered. I looked again and the lights were off.

Sunday night, Emilia orders in Japanese food again and she and Simón eat in silence. On the table is a bottle of sake she bought at Pino’s and, without realising, the two of them drink half the bottle. The delicate rice wine enfolds them in a giddiness like marijuana, it is a pleasure Emilia adopted from two late films by Ozu that she watched on DVD. Just as Ozu’s women anaesthetise their troubles with sake, Emilia has spent the day letting go her remaining troubles, dealing with the last one on her computer. Before dinner, she sent a brief note to her head of Human Resources at Hammond. ‘I need to be out of the office for a few days,’ it said, and at the bottom, ‘Personal reasons.’ She is no longer able to bear the routine of work. She does not want to go back to grid squares of maps, she cannot bear ever to leave this person who has come back to take her away. She has suffered more than she can bear. The world is cruel to those who love, they say. It distracts them, deflects them from the love that is the true centre of life. Why miss out on love and turn towards something else? What to do with all the wasted love that has gone unlived? Now, it does not matter to her to know what happens next. All that matters is that she does not move from the point she has reached. I’m happy, she says to herself over and over, I could go to the depths, the heights of this happiness, but not beyond it.

Simón is very pale. She sees a languid smile play on his lips. It worries Emilia that the smile came to his face just as dusk is blotting out the shape of things and she will lose the image, perhaps forever. This is the trouble with love, she thinks: that cherished expressions disappear, looks which, in memories, could be those of anyone. She gets up and puts on one of Jarrett’s concerts. The volume is turned down very low and she would like Simón to touch her. He has been affectionate to her, though she has noticed a certain reserve in his tenderness. Their lovemaking has been better than it ever was; love between them has always been easy, what has been difficult is tenderness. Thinking about it, perhaps this is the price to be paid for the remoteness she too felt in their first months of marriage. Only in Tucumán was she able to surrender herself, to realise that when his body entered into hers, she also entered into his. That one night was also the last: until yesterday. The solitary ecstasy of the past has been repeated and she never wants it to end, she wants to exhaust herself with love as though life were this and only this, the endless orgasm she has dreamed about for thirty years. Let him touch her, then. Simón is now sitting on the bed and she lays her head on his shoulder. ‘Touch me, amor, touch me,’ she says.

But Simón talks about other things. ‘When I was far from you I thought I would find you inside a map.’ Emilia interrupts him: ‘This might sound strange, but I thought the same thing.’ Simón: ‘I saw you standing in the map. I didn’t know where you were because the vectors had been erased. It was a desert with no lines.’ And Emilia: ‘In that case it wasn’t a map.’ Simón: ‘Maybe it wasn’t, but that’s where you were.’ And Emilia: ‘If it was a map with no landmarks, you could have left a trail of names, drawn trees for reference, I would have found you. Once, in Mexico, I followed a trail of white pebbles convinced that, like in Hansel and Gretel, when I came to the last one, I would find you. In Caracas, I named all the streets in a neighbourhood so you could find me: Iván el Cobero, Coño Verde. At the top of the hill was a small square. I called it Simón Yemilia. The neighbours thought I named it Simón after Simón Bolivar; I added Yemilia because a lot of girls around there are called Yemila, Yajaira, Yamila, but I knew you would know I meant Simón y Emilia, I knew that if you were ever there, ever looked at a new map of Caracas, you would be able to find me. Why don’t you touch me?’

Jarrett’s music circles around the same clusters of notes, sometimes lingering on a single note, and outside, the night itself has stopped moving; only inside Emilia, as in a dark heart of a volcano, life still ebbs and flows.

She can’t remember Simón ever fucking her the way he is fucking her now. Her body is ablaze, she arches herself, raises her body so he can penetrate all the way to her throat, she licks him, devours him, and what she feels is so intense, so overpowering, that she feels coursing from her tongue the foam from the tongue with which he kisses her. Emilia soars so high that Simón’s fires reach deeper than her body, they are fires of pure sex, flames that come and go leaving no ashes. By now she has lost count of how many times she’s come, they’ve climaxed, she’s orgasmed, how do they say it in other languages, ancora, more, encore, ainda mas, don’t go, querido mío, don’t leave. On and on until the first breath of morning seeps through the window, on and on until she can’t go on any more and clutches the pillow wet with tears.

The Jarrett concert stays with her all night. The CD ends but she does not notice. She knows the slow final cadences by heart and so the melody slips unnoticed towards silence. She hugs Simón to her, fearful that reality will fade out like the music. The room is still dark, the faint brightness she saw when she woke disappears. Perhaps we can’t see the sun, she thinks. A dirty grey day like most of the days this autumn. She doesn’t know whether or not to get up. She allows herself to be carried along by the joy of knowing that he is sleeping here, in the room, and that he will not leave her again to waste her life in the maps at Hammond. Why wake him? This body lying next to her is the only map she needs to get her bearings in time. And thinking about it, what need has she of time when time has folded in on itself and now fits inside the body of her beloved. When she first set out to look for him she could not have imagined that there could have been so many circles in her purgatory, nor that when she reached one another would appear above it, and then another. Her eternal noon was an everlasting purgatory.

Now, I am the one wondering where Emilia has gone. Nancy Frears phoned the police, who are thrilled to be presented with a mystery in this town without mysteries. Two officers accompanied by the chief of police in person broke down the door of her North 4th Avenue apartment and found not a living soul. The bed was made, the books and CDs neatly organised, the hi-fi and the computer had not even been unplugged. There were no signs of a break-in or a robbery. The only conspicuous detail was that Emilia had not taken out the garbage bag in the kitchen and by now it was beginning to smell. On the table were the remains of some sushi, a seaweed salad and some Chinese fortune cookies. Nancy phoned Chela, but, according to her answering machine, the Echarri family were out of the country. I’m the last person to have seen Emilia and the police asked me to come in and make a statement. As I explained, a fat cop took notes, stopping from time to time to eat the half-finished pizza oozing grease all over the cardboard delivery box. The officer wanted to know if Emilia had been suicidal, suffered from some terminal illness or mentioned that she might be going on holiday. The interview lasted half an hour, and before he handed me the statement to sign, he asked if there was anything else I could think of that might be helpful. I was surprised to hear myself telling him that thirty years ago in my country many people disappeared without leaving a trace and that Emilia’s husband had been one of the disappeared. ‘She never gave up hope of finding him again,’ I said. ‘She could never bring herself to accept that he might be dead.’ ‘What about you, what do you think?’ asked the officer. ‘I believe he’s dead. Emilia’s not the only person to hope that someone she loves will come back from the dead; there are thousands like her, clinging to an illusion. Imagine the pain of not knowing where your daughter is, not knowing who took her. And if she were dead, imagine the desolation of not knowing in what dark corner of the world her body is.’ ‘In this country, it is the job of the police to find out what happened,’ said the officer. ‘We are paid by the state to do just that. This woman’s disappearance might be a crime, a kidnapping, she might have committed suicide, she could have gone away to join a sect. We can rule out kidnapping, since it’s been several days and there’s been no ransom demand. We can rule out the idea that she’s been taken by gangsters running a prostitution ring, since, quite frankly, the woman is too old. Also she has no priors and there’s no reason to suspect she was a drug mule or involved in trafficking. She has a perfect résumé, no offences, no problems at work, she got on well with her neighbours. It makes no sense,’ the officer went on. ‘Here, people don’t just disappear into thin air. Give it a week or two and we’ll find out what happened.’ ‘It doesn’t always work out that way,’ I said. ‘You see photos of missing people on milk cartons all the time, kids, old people.’ ‘Most of them have mental health problems,’ insisted the policeman. I said goodbye, left a card with my details on his desk and asked him to get in touch if they found out anything.

The following day, Nancy Frears insisted on seeing me; she asked me to come by her apartment on Montgomery Street. The minute I walked through the door, she threw herself into my arms and started sobbing. ‘Where can poor Millie have gone? Have you heard anything?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘I don’t know anything either. I drop by the chief of police’s office as often as I can. No one there wants to say anything, but you get to hear things around town. If you were a woman, you’d understand. You hear people gossiping at the salon, in the drugstore, over at Jerusalem Pizza. They say someone saw her on the street talking to herself, dressed up like she was going to a party. Someone saw her on Saturday morning at dawn taking the train to Newark. What would she be doing up at that hour? Her car still hasn’t turned up. They’ve issued a description of the car and the licence plate to all the toll routes and hotels for two hundred miles. All the patrol cars have the details too, of course. We should get some news soon. She has to eat, to sleep, to take a bath. Can you wait a minute? I need to go to the bathroom. It’s my stomach, I get gas, you know. Never gives me a minute’s peace.’

She reappears with a file of clippings. Emilia gave them to her to look after a while ago and she shows them to me to see if I recognise anything. I see the pamphlet again, the samples of Stabilene film which cartographers carried with them everywhere thirty years ago. Inside the pamphlet I see a copy of the ‘Rules concerning the making of cartographic documents for the Automobile Club’ typed on an old-fashioned typewriter. I don’t stop to read it since the predictable articles in it have long since expired. What surprises me is the carefully hand-drawn page at the end. On it there are three squares splitting off like tree branches from a central square. Each space is filled with elegantly calligraphed text. One of them reads: ‘Choice and selection of the nomenclature for the colour blue’, and the uppermost square reads: ‘Rough sketch to scale of Ruta 77 as far as the Abra River’. I assume that it is Simón’s handwriting, large, meticulous well-spaced letters. If Simón did write it, it would explain why Emilia has treasured this useless, yellowing scrap of paper all these years. Or perhaps she keeps it because it is the last vestige of his contact with the world: this sheet of paper, his fingerprints on the steering wheel of the jeep, the sketch of the Río El Abra that was taken from them in Huacra, the tremulous signature on the prison register. As I touch the sheet, I barely feel it, it is as though the paper is air; of course I know that my senses are gradually disappearing, I know that my eyesight is failing, that my ears hear only what they want to hear: Kiri Te Kanawa singing Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, the voices of my sons, Keith Jarrett playing the piano, the murmur of snow as it falls.

I don’t say this to Nancy, but sometimes I think Emilia’s senses also disappeared and that is why she is not here. Our senses constantly feed our memory, and beyond that memory there is nothing. The body enters into a continuous present in which pass, one by one, all the seasons of the joys that went unlived.