Purgatory: A Novel
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About this ebook
Tomás Eloy Martínez
Tomás Eloy Martínez was born in Argentina in 1934. During the military dictatorship, he lived in exile in Venezuela where he wrote his first three books, all of which were republished in Argentina in 1983, in the first months of democracy. He was until his death in January 2010 a professor and director of the Latin American Program at Rutgers University. He was shortlisted for the 2005 International Man Booker Prize.
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Reviews for Purgatory
732 ratings32 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Minder dramatisch en meeslepend dan eerste deel, maar eigenlijk "mooier" door het perfect evenwicht tussen literair en leerdicht. Bijzonder verfijnd van toon.Het laatste deel vanaf zang 28 heeft een heel ander timbre dat al volledig in de lijn ligt van Paradiso en minder volgbaar en genietbaar is.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I see that people have reviewed versions of Dante translated into English by several people, but nobody has done John Ciardi's translations, so here goes. I read Ciardi's Inferno many years ago (like, 1976, and followed it up with Niven and Pournelle's takeoff). I find Ciardi's translation of Il Purgatorio more interesting (though perhaps less 'salacious'). Ciardi certainly has a way of keeping the reader's attention, and the Dante's narrative is well worth the effort. Ciardi provides extensive notes on subjects in the narrative (characters that Dante and Virgil meet in their journey, uh, Pilgrimage). He also provides a pretty much 'play by play' narrative of his own philosophy and choices for the language, rhymes and scansion of the text itself (Italian isn't so easy to translate into English, it seems). All in all a very nicely done translation. I will be searching for Ciardi's translation of 'The Paradiso.'
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sinclair translation, as ever, is superb, and the notes and introductions continue to be very useful. Dante emerges after the trials of Inferno and climbs the mount of Purgatory with Virgil, participating in the penance necessary to cleanse him of his sins. As in Inferno, the souls are put through various trials which testify to Dante's ever-erudite imagination. The cantica concludes with Dante being reunited with his beloved Beatrice; but there is a bittersweet note as Virgil, a pagan despite his fine qualities, is denied entrance to Paradise.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Perhaps after reading Inferno I picked up Dante's voice and rhythm, but Purgatorio seemed much less dense and not as confusing. Each circle was quite straight forward and the fewer incidents of name dropping was helpful in realizing the essence of each layer of repentance.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Minder dramatisch en meeslepend dan eerste deel, maar eigenlijk "mooier" door het perfect evenwicht tussen literair en leerdicht. Bijzonder verfijnd van toon.Het laatste deel vanaf zang 28 heeft een heel ander timbre dat al volledig in de lijn ligt van Paradiso en minder volgbaar en genietbaar is.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy epitomized medieval attitudes. From historical perspectives, this work serves as a window into the mentality of late middle ages in Italy, on the brink of the Renaissance. Scholastic thinking informs Dante's approach.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Eh, this definitely wasn't as fun to read as [book: Inferno]. There was a lot less exciting stuff going on. But some of the imagery was still very beautiful.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I listened to this book on CD instead of actually reading it. The version that I had had an explanation at the beginning of each verse to help you understand and then read the verse.
In this book, you travel with Dante through Purgatory and he cleanses himself of the seven deadly sins.
I really liked this book. I forgot how much I liked Greek Mythology (which I expected only because of the Inferno). It has pushed me to look into more mythology again. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What is there to say about this that others haven't said better? The language is beautiful, and the ideas -- well, reading it, I realised I knew all about Dante's work without ever having read it before. That tells you how pervasive they are.
It's an amazing work. I don't know what translation I read: it was a free download. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I found this just as interesting as Inferno. The concepts, people and theology that Dante described for us is fascinating, if you are interested in that sort of thing at all. Luckily this is a fairly easy to read translation.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Hollanders once again do a fine job of pulling the reader along, with a clear translation and very helpful notes that help to clarify Dante's context. I just dipped into them when I had a particular question. (Can't imagine how long it would take to read them all). Things I learned about Purgatory:
Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, borrows it's title from Dante's vision of Mt. Purgatory.
The Garden of Eden is preserved at the peak of the mountain.
Next stop: Paradise! - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5In which the boringly repentant people get punished horribly, because otherwise they wouldn't REALLY be repenting.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5There are two kinds of people who read Dante. The first kind gets all excited about people stuck head down in piles of shit, and wishes that the adulterers and libertines could just keep on doing what they did in the real world, because it's so romantic. The second kind gets all excited about griffins pulling chariots, the relationship between the political and the religious, and the neoplatonic ascent from beautiful woman to Beauty and God. I am the second kind; I can see the pull of the first kind, and I understand it, but really. The whole thing just gets better the further on it goes. Hell is like a decent TV drama with an episode each week, say, House. Purgatorio (and, from memory, Paradiso) are to Inferno what The Wire is to House. Sometimes you just want to watch 45 minutes of cool stuff; sometimes you want something a bit less immediately gratifying, but a more substantial. And this is the substance.
Luckily, the Hollanders are here to translate this thing for you and to give you the insider knowledge you'll need to get a hold of that substance. It isn't easy, unless you're a medievalist who knows the psalms by heart in latin, which I am not and, I'm guessing, neither are you. Because those people are not writing or reading goodreads reviews. They are studying ancient manuscripts and debating whether that letter there is an iota or a lambda. Good for them. Good for the head in a bucket of shit loving people. Good for all. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Hollanders once again do a fine job of pulling the reader along, with a clear translation and very helpful notes that help to clarify Dante's context. I just dipped into them when I had a particular question. (Can't imagine how long it would take to read them all). Things I learned about Purgatory: Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, borrows it's title from Dante's vision of Mt. Purgatory.The Garden of Eden is preserved at the peak of the mountain.Next stop: Paradise!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5(Review is of the Penguin Classics translation by Mark Musa, and applies to all three volumes, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradisio) I would not think to quibble with reviewing Dante himself - Dante is a master, and doesn't need my endorsement. I will say, however, that Musa's translation is an exceptionally sensitive one, and his comprehensive notes are an invaluable aid to the reader less familiar with Dante's broad spheres of reference. Musa is clearly a devoted scholar of Dante, and his concern for Dante's original meaning and tone is evident. This is one of the best translations of The Comedia available.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is the second part of Dante's Divine Comedy. The first took us through Hell, and this part takes us through Purgatory--the realm where Catholics believe those souls not saints spend time purging their sins before entering Heaven. And that's the key difference: Hope. Dante famously has the gateway into Hell read "Abandon All Hope." The punishments in Hell are purposeless and its denizens are without hope they'll ever see an end. So Purgatory is less dark, less grotesque, and alas, less memorable.There is beautiful poetry to be found here and gorgeous imagery and use of classical and biblical materials. But the fact is that without refreshing my memory with a reread there is so much of Hell I remember. The eternal scorching wind of the first part with Francesca Rimini and her lover. Gianni Schicci in the Circle of Impersonators, Dante's friend who is eternally condemned for being a homosexual, Mohamed among the schismatics, and Judas, Brutus and Cassius in the lake of ice in the lowest circle being chewed on by Satan.With Purgatory I did remember Dante's architecture--the seven ledges in the Mountain each dealing with punishing and purging one of the Seven Deadly Sins. But I didn't remember the people, outside of Dante's guide Virgil and the wrench I felt when he was replaced with Dante's love Beatrice. Dante's Hell admittedly has the advantage of being echoed in both popular and elite culture. Gianni Schichi and Francesca di Rimini both have operas of that name; I can remember a book--I think it was by Piers Anthony--where Mohammed complains about winding up in a Christian Hell. And haven't we all heard of the Ninth Circle? Dante's Purgatory doesn't have that advantage.Don't get me wrong. This is still amazing and worth the read. Recently I read Moby Dick and though it had powerful passages I found it self-indulgent and bloated and devoutly wished an editor had taken a hatchet to the numerous digressions. There is no such thing as digressions in Dante. I don't think I've ever read a more carefully crafted work. The number of cantos, the rhyme scheme--everything has a meaning. Nothing is incidental or left to chance here. All in all, like Dante's Hell, this is an imaginary landscape worthy of Tolkien or Pratchett, both in large ways and small details. I found it fitting how Dante tied both sins and virtues to love--a sin was love misdirected or applied. Then there are all the striking phrases, plays of ideas and gorgeous imagery that comes through despite translations. I loved The Divine Comedy so much upon my first read (I read the Dorothy Sayers translation) I went out and bought two other versions. One by Allen Mandelbaum (primarily because it was a dual language book with the Italian on one page facing the English translation) and a hardcover version translated by Charles Eliot Norton. Finally, before writing up my review and inspired by Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, I got reacquainted by finding Longfellow's translation online. Of all of them, I greatly prefer Mandelbaum's translation. The others try to keep the rhyming and rhythm of the original and this means a sometimes tortured syntax and use of archaic words and the result is forced and often obscure, making the work much harder to read than it should be.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I have not read a huge number of translations of Dante, but of the one's that I've read Musa's is by far the best. Extremely readable but also quite complex. I would recommend this translation to anyone.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When I hear discussion about the Divine Comedy, mostly I hear references to Inferno. It’s all Grr Argh suffering. Look the angst. The pathos. The humanity of it all. Hello, everyone is damned. Great story, but everyone is in hell. Now Purgatorio is something I can sink my teeth into. Sure people are suffering. However, instead of reenacting the results of their errors over and over, they are purging away the sin itself.Purgatory is about hope. The suffering isn’t about making people, well, suffer. Purgatory isn’t about punishment. The suffering is God’s way of helping sinners wrap their brain around why and how that sin hurts them. Hurts others. Basically, it’s God showing a little tough love. Purgatory is hopeful because eventually, Purgatory will be empty. There is the promise that one day, each sinner will have a place in paradise.Purgatory is also about people. They aren’t damned and they aren’t saved. They weren’t saints. Most of them screwed up at some point or another. That’s why they are there. Casella, who sings in the sweet new style. Okay, so he waited a bit to long to reform, but at least he reformed. Save me, but not yet. La Pia, who was filled with envy, the mean old woman on her porch making fun of people. Now she sits with her eyes sewn shut, talking with others. Learning to listen. Learning to lean on others for support.Statius, who hid his Christianity out of fear. And okay, you gotta love a guy who starts out by saying that Virgil is his hero and you, the reader, know Virgil is standing right there. And Dante the character starts to lose it. Okay, it’s couched in poetic language. But come on, his eyes are filled with mirth and he’s dying to tell Statius, hey your hero, he’s standing right next to you. Lovely moment.Although, there is a thread of sadness that runs through the narrative. Virgil. He’s damned through no fault of his own. Over and over Dante returns to a question that clearly bothers him. How can Virgil, brave, noble, Dante’s literary father, be damned. Which as I think of it is an another example of Dante’s damned fathers, saved sons theme. There is something so fresh and poignant about that moment, when upon seeing Beatrice, Dante is struck by confusion. Turns to ask Virgil what he should do, but Virgil has slipped away all unnoticed to return to his blameless place in hell.I first read Purgatory for my favorite class in college, "Dante", and lo these years later, I still like to return on occasion to climb up the mountain.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Merwin brings the centerpiece of Dante's masterpiece to English in a translation that is accurate, artful, and enjoyable. I recommend reading the whole thing aloud—easily done over a day or so—to get the full effect of the compounding sentence structures, elaborate analogies, and overall music of this rendering. Some of the allusions were lost on me (and I was too lazy to check the endnotes), yet I found it easy to feel the awesome highs and lows, the tension and relief, along with Dante on his journey through the middle realm. I'll grant that this is the only translation of Purgatorio that I've read and I can't read the original, so I can't say much to compare Merwin's version to others, but I can safely say that this work is an important and exciting renewal of the literary canon by one of our day's foremost men of letters.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Purgatory is the first novel of Tomás Eloy Martínez to be translated into English since his death in 2010. He is best know for his acclaimed books The Peron Novel, Santa Evita, and The Tango Singer. It is translated from the Spanish by award winning translator Frank Wynne.This was my first novel by Eloy Martínez, so I had nothing but his reputation to go on but I am always willing to try new authors from Latin America. This one did not let me down. It’s a hauntingly melancholy novel about a woman whose husband disappeared thirty years ago along with thousands of others during Argentina’s military dictatorship. She spends the intervening time searching for him as she hears rumors that he has been seen in various places. What makes the book so poignant is that her own father is a high ranking official in the dictatorship and is almost certainly complicit in his son-in-law’s fate and certainly in that of many of his compatriots. Eloy Martínez really does a great job of portraying how a people can put their blinders on and ignore that what they are doing really does not (and cannot) justify the end. As the novel jumps back and forth between the past and the present, you see the toll that this takes on the family and the country.When Emilia finally sees her husband Símon in a restaurant, he has not aged a bit from the day he disappeared while she, of course, is 30 years older. As the novel winds on, Emilia withdraws into her “life” with Símon. Is it reality or is it all in her mind? You decide…but you should read this book.I’ll leave you with my favorite passage from the book: “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.”This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviews (sorry it wasn't really "early")
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5At times reminiscent of the great magical realist novels so endemic to South America, Tomas Eloy Martinez's last novel, Purgatory, transcends the style with brilliant technical flourishes, offering a metafiction on personal and national identity. When an Orwellian nightmare state is imposed upon a people, escape, both physical and psychological, becomes paramount. Such is the Argentina of the 1976-1982 military dictatorship, the period when approximately 30,000 "undesirables" simply disappeared.Emelia is a 60 year old Argentine immigrant cartographer living and working in New Jersey. She last saw her husband Simon 30 years previously, when they were on a journey to map an obscure road in a desolate area of the country. Stopped by military checkpoints, they are arrested and Simon is never seen again. Emelia, being the daughter of the regime's chief propagandist, is wisked back home to safety by her parents. Moving back and forth in time and place, Emelia never fully accepts Simon's disappearence or possible death at the hands of the military government for which her father works and of which he extols the virtues. Then he shows up in New Jersey, not having aged a day in the 30 years he's been missing.Emelia's story is revealed through interviews with the unnamed narrator, clearly a fictional representation of the author himself. Martinez was also affected by the dictatorship, escaping to exile in New Jersey. As he gets closer to the heart of Emelia's story, he begins to question is own identity and place in the world. Where Emelia has her maps in which she can escape and possibly find Simon, the narrator attempts to remain grounded in reality. But when reality includes the disappearance of such swaths of a populace, is that reality enough?Technically challenging in its shifting voice, setting and timeframe, Purgatory rewards readers who surrender to its lyrical pull, interspersing moments of suppressed eroticism sprung open with the sheer terror of personal and political patriarchy run amok. Argentina will never be the same, nor will the reader who journeys there with Emelia.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A beautifully written novel focusing on the personal, cultural, psychological, social (etc.) destruction of Argentina's brutal dictatorship of the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Purgatory is a reference to the state of suspended animation that everyone who lost anyone during the period suffered, and it also descended upon the families of the men in charge as well as the obvious victims. The symbolism and metaphors were rampant- for instance the main character Emilia who wanders through her life looking for her disappeared husband is a cartographer, unable to find her way regardless of how much she knows about geography. Well-written and tight, with a great deal of detail and information about the years of the dictatorship. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tomas Eloy Martinez's last novel, Purgatory, is a wildly evocative, dreamlike novel. The story of Emilia Dupuy, an Argentinian exile living in New Jersey, working as a cartographer for Hammond, is told in narrative viewpoints shifting from 3rd person omniscient to the voice of a 1st person observer -- the narrative "author," also an Argentinian exile. The book opens when Emilia sees her husband Simon, one of the "disappeared," missing for 30 years, in a local restaurant having an animated conversation with two Scandinavians. Finally she propels herself to his booth and asks, "Querido, querido mio, where have you been?" He smiles and replies, "We need to talk, don't we? Let's get out of here." And they leave the restaurant together, or do they?In an interview with Guardian reviewer, Alberto Manguel, Martinez had said that he was trying to write a novel about the 1976-82 Argentinian dictatorship, but without descriptions of atrocities and torture -- rather an evocation of the stifling atmosphere of the time -- what it was like "to breathe in the contaminated air." Emilia lives in that purgatory, not only during the dictatorship, but for the next 30 years as she searches for her husband, not truly knowing whether he is alive or dead, what is true or false, what is real or unreal.'But at least I could make sure that Simon could see me, draw him to me, position myself with the same orbit. Maps,' she said. 'If I can put myself on the same map as him, sooner or later we're bound to meet. When I say it out loud, it sounds silly, but to me it seems self-evident. If time is the fourth dimension, who knows how many things exist that we cannot see in space-time, how many invisible realities. Maps are almost infinite, and at the same time, they're unfinished.... In order to see Simon, I needed to drop -- or rise above -- a map, if possible every map.'
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Purgatory a Novel, by Tomas Eloy MartinezWhile Jorge Luis Borges will always be considered the godhead of Argentine literature it is to Tomas Eloy Martinez that accolades should be showered for documenting the arc of mid-twentieth century Argentine history. Borges métier was short fiction, erudite and mystical, steeped in the earlier 1900’s documenting the push and pull of gaucho life with the European influence of Buenos Aires. Borges’ strong points were essays about books and his unique metaphysical visions despite (or perhaps heightened by) his own visual impairment. In his later novel, The Tango Singer, Tomas Eloy Martinez pays special homage to Borges; in this tale the main character is a graduate student searching for the exact location of Borges’ El Aleph.Both Borges and Martinez died before they could be bestowed the awards they justly deserved: for Borges the Nobel Prize for Literature, for Martinez the International Man Booker Prize for which he was nominated in 2005. With Purgatory a Novel, Martinez demonstrates clearly that via the novel he is the master illuminating recent Argentine history. Starting with The Peron Novel which portrays how the quite ordinary and obsequious Colonel transforms his position into a pervasive politics, and then with Santa Evita his choice of spouse catapulted both of them into the realm of religious adoration capturing the imagination and dedication of the common folk. Now with Purgatory a Novel Tomas Eloy Martinez takes on the dictatorship of the late 1970’s who brought a reign of terror to this country that still permeates its soul and fires up the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo frequent protests.Purgatory is the story of Emilia, daughter of Dr. Dupuy, the chief propagandist of the dictatorship. In the wake of the dictatorship which is determined to squelch all dissidents through disappearances, she marries a fellow cartographer she has met at the Argentine Automobile Association. At a small dinner party hosted by her father and attended by the President (often referred to as the eel) to celebrate the betrothal to her soon to be husband, Simon, Emilia’s fiancé begs to differ with the current policies, questioning the morality of torture. Shortly thereafter while on assignment to chart unknown backloads of the pampas, Emilia and Simon are detained by a ragged detail of soldiers who determine that Simon should be held for further interrogation. He is never seen again and Emilia sets forth on decades of longing and searching from Argentina to Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and finally ending up in New Jersey where she meets a fellow Argentine-a mildly disguised version of Tomas Eloy Martinez himself: a college professor of literature at a New Jersey University. It is through this meeting of the 2 exiles that her story is told through both flashbacks and real time.The absurd cruelty of the regime is aptly depicted in a brief interview The Eel has with a Japanese journalist stating that “ ‘firstly we would have to verify that what you say existed was where you say it was. Reality can be very treacherous. Lots of people are desperate for attention and they disappear just so people won’t forget them…A desaparecido is a mystery, he has no substance, he is neither alive nor dead, he does not exist. He is a ‘disappeared’. And as he said he does not exist, he rolled his eyes to heaven. ‘Don’t use that word again,’ he went on, ‘you have no basis for it. It is forbidden to publish it. Let it be disappeared and be forgotten.’ ”Of course that is what any regime of terror hopes for; that the powers will control the message and dictate what is considered to be the truth, what is real and what is to be acknowledged and remembered. But this dirty war ultimately failed, on the shores of the Malvinas it took its last gasp and it was the Mothers of the Plaza Major and the other victims - like Emilia and Tomas Eloy Martinez- that would not allow the disappeared to be forgotten. As in a prior novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, by Nathan Englander, the absurd terror that permeated Argentina in the late 70’s is exposed for all to remember. Like Martinez, Englander describes and captures the bureaucratic maze of obstacles, an artifice constructed by the late dictatorship of Jorge Videla (the eel in Purgatory) to obstruct from the view of its citizenry the true evil of his evil regime, manifested by the abduction of the infants of dissidents who are then adopted by childless Colonels and Captains of the Army’s elite corp.Like the unchartered roads Emilia and Simon set out to find in Patagonia, the search for our lost loves, Eloy Martinez writes, is also uncharted. Once gone they only exist in memories and imaginations. The parallel and reference to “the politics of memory” that existed behind the Iron Curtain as portrayed by Milan Kundera in his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and also administered by the perpetrators of Jorge Videla’s Dirty Wars is undeniable. Imagining what was and never was is uniquely described by Eloy Martinez in one powerful passage in which the imagined Simon describes an event that occurred while he was working as an attendant in an old age home:“The writer with the slate who used to pace the corridors of the old folks’ home also told me a dream. It wasn’t a dream exactly; it was the memory of a recurring dream. A huge black dog was jumping on him and licking him. Inside the dog were all the things that had never existed and even those that no one even imagined could exist. ‘What does not exist is constantly seeking a father’, said the dog, ‘someone to give it consciousness.’ ‘A god?’ asked the writer. ‘No, it is searching for any father,’ answered the dog. ‘The things that do not exist are much more numerous than those that manage to exist. That which will never exist is infinite. The seeds that do not find soil and water and do not become plants, the lives that go unborn, the characters that remain unwritten.’ ‘The rocks that have crumbled to dust?’ ‘No those rocks once were. I am speaking only of what might have been but never was,’ said the dog. ‘The brother that never was because you existed in his place. If you had been conceived seconds before or seconds after, you would not be who you are, you would not know that your existence vanished into nowhere without you even realizing. That which will never be known that it might have been. This is why novels are written: to make amends in this world for the perpetual absence of what never existed.’ The dog vanished into the air and the writer woke up.’ “Near the end of Pergatory a Novel, the narrator, the Argentine professor states:“the more I delve into Emilia’s life, the more I realize that from beginning to end it is an unbroken chain of losses, disappearances and senseless searches. She spent years chasing after nothing, after people who no longer existed, remembering things that had never happened. But aren’t we all like that? Don’t we all abuse history to leave some trace there of what we once were, a miserable smudge, a tiny flame when we know that even the darkest mark is a bird that will leave on a breath of wind? One human being is more or less the same as another; perhaps we are all already dead without realizing it, or not yet born and do not know it…we come into the world without knowing it, the result of a series of accidents, and we leave it to go who knows where, nowhere probably.”We can only hope that prior to his recent death Eloy had time to expand his trilogy of novels (spanning the 1940’s to 1970’s) and that someday soon we will have a quartet; the fourth installment detailing the more recent economic and political crisis of 2001 when the bank doors shut, the vaults were sealed tight, the currency, the peso devalued overnight, forcing hundreds of thousands portenos onto the avenidas of Buenos Aires, banging on their pots and pans for justice and transparency. The Kirchners, Nestor and Cristina, came to power with a neo-Peronism, a nationalistic approach blaming outsiders, the IMF, the World Bank, the Brits and the elites of Buenos Aires. Today the Kirchenrites are still at it, attacking their critics: academics, capitalists and the media; they have become minor shadows of their historic precedents, Juan Peron and all other governments that have tried to “control the message”. Tomas Elroy Martinez has documented through his novels the mid-twentieth century history of Argentina. From The Peron Novel which starts in the 1930’s to Santa Evita and now Purgatory a Novel which roots itself in the dictatorship of the late 1970’s. Martinez, through story and characterization lets the reader in on what the Argentine peoples have lived through. We can only hope that that there is another book he left in his desk drawer that will explicate for us the economic crisis of the late 90’s and the resurgent Kirchnerites who perpetrate a quasi Peronism and political split between the rural nativist and the more universal European outlook of Buenos Aires. Ironically we find ourselves back at the beginning with the same themes that Borges, himself, mined over and over.The Argentine drama evolves and it has lost one of its best literary chroniclers. Without Tomas Eloy Martinez, who will portray this most recent chapter?
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5First let me say thanks to the LT Early Reviewers program for selecting me to read this book. And thanks also to Bloomsbury, whose published works of translated fiction have been absolutely topnotch. If there is anyone qualified to write about Argentina's Dirty War (1976-83) , it is Martinez. He himself went into exile after a series of reports he did for a newspaper in Buenos Aires led to blacklisting, death threats, and according to an interview in The Guardian from 2007, armed gunmen surrounding the restaurant in which he was eating. In Purgatory, Martinez explores not only the desaparecidos, but also examines the question of those left behind when their families, friends, loved ones and neighbors just vanished. It is a sad but compelling novel, one that you won't forget long after the book is put back on its shelf. Hopefully, it may also inspire you to read other books about this dark time in Argentina's history. The last time Emilia Cardoso saw her husband Simón was thirty years ago during a map-making assignment in a patch of desert in Argentina. She and Simon were employed as cartographers while on assignment from the Automobile Club, and they were tasked to map a desolate stretch of road outside of Tucuman. Their journey took them as far as Huacra, and it was there where Emilia's life-long purgatory began. After coming upon a group of people hiding from the military police out in the desert, some dying of thirst, they make it their own mission to offer help, and in doing so, Simón and Emilia were taken into custody themselves. Their captors separated the two and then took them away; Emilia was rescued by her father, Dr. Dupuy, who helps the military government as publisher of a magazine for influential people called La Republica. Although she searched and waited, waited and searched, she never found Simón again. He had become one of the thousands of desaparecidos, victims of Argentina's dirty war: "... a mystery, he has no substance, he is neither alive nor dead, he does not exist. He is a 'disappeared.' "Oddly enough, Simón has now turned up in a New Jersey diner, where Emilia is living and working, continuing her career in maps. He hasn't aged a bit since Emilia last saw him, while she has gone on with her life, aging normally, although her life has been anything but typical. The novel continues in alternating narratives, those of Emilia and a writer in exile who befriends her after recovering from a serious illness. He is determined to tell her story, which is related here largely through flashbacks leading back to the very beginning where her story begins, during the time of Argentina's dirty war. It was a time when reality was covered up by government propagandists, when "propaganda manufactured illusions of happiness in the wasteland of misery," and Emilia's father, Dr. Dupuy, helped make this possible, often through a smoke-and-mirrors approach to the truth. Any real truth was considered lies, the weapon of subversives who wanted to tarnish Argentina's national image and crush the national spirit. Even when information is passed on to Emilia that Simon had been killed by the military, her father told her it was the work of subversives trying to get to him and his family. But Emilia never gives up looking for Simon; she takes mapmaking jobs to support herself during her search, moves from place to place where sightings have been reported, and eventually she comes to realize that she can no longer go on this way, ultimately taking a job in New Jersey. But all of this time Emilia has been living in her own Purgatory, " a wait whose end we cannot know." She has only one remotely close friend, she never remarries, she has trouble fitting in, she never stops hoping, never accepts that Simon might possibly be dead and lives in a constant state of denial. In this sense, Emilia has become a living ghost in a way -- as she notes after her chance meeting with Simon, "Without him, I don't exist." And this is the same fate as many of those thousands of people who had "disappeared with no apparent reason," -- indeed, as the fictional author notes, "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." And at the heart of this story are all of those thousands of people whose lives are on perpetual hold waiting for some word even now, decades later.You don't need to have a background in Argentina's history to understand and appreciate this novel; it can't hurt, but Martinez manages to get the critical points of the period across to his readers without going into a lot of historical detail. I don't suppose this book will be to everyone's taste, but if you are at all familiar with or interested in the desaparecidos or Argentina's Dirty War, you will probably really like this novel. While the blurb says "ghost story," you have to look at that phrase in terms of metaphor rather than hoping that there's something paranormal to come out of this book, so if that's what caught your eye, well, you're reading the wrong story. Purgatory is a wonderful, moving story of a woman who has been through a great deal of loss; it is also the story of the spirit of love that never dies, while at the same time , since it cannot really speak to what actually happened to the thousands of disappeared, it is the story of the ones left behind. And clever Martinez also manages to put his readers in a state of uncertainty as they wonder about Simón's return and as they wait to discover what will ultimately become of Emilia. It is a lovely book and I definitely recommend it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A smart captivating read by Argentinian author Tomás Eloy Martínez who lived in exile during the dictatorship that almost destroyed his country. Purgatory is the story of Emilia Dupuy, whose husband is one of the "disappeared" and whose father, as a high-ranking military official, orchestrated that disappearance. Despite eye-witness accounts of her husband's torture and murder, Emilia refuses to believe and spends her life searching for him. The story flows seamlessly between realism and fantasy, love story and ghost story. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Upon reading the back cover, I expected a novel of magical realism about a sixty-year-old woman, and her long-missing husband, who hadn't aged a day since he disappeared. What I got was something else entirely. Purgatory is a lyrical novel, at the center of which are Argentina's "disappeared." While I've come away with the sense that this is an important novel (or, at least, an important subject to be immortalized), I did not find it to be an engaging one. For me, it felt like a fairly disjointed bait-and-switch, roping me in with the promise of magical realism, only to have that aspect of the novel evaporate as the narrative delves into the world of the regime's propagandist, and then as it incorporates the author as a character in his own work. I really wanted to love this book, unfortunately, it just didn't work for me.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I had not previously read anything by Tomás Eloy Martínez, the late Argentinian novelist, but my interest was immediately aroused by the press materials on the back jacket, including praise from such authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. This novel, the last written before Martínez's death in 2010, depicts the aftermath of the so-called "Dirty War" in Argentina - a period of state-sponsored terrorism in which suspected insurgents or political dissidents would disappear, never to be heard from or spoken of again. The "disappeared" may be alive or dead, for all that their loved ones know, and their strange twilight existence is evoked by quotations from Dante's Purgatorio.The story centers around Emilia, the wife of one of the "disappeared" and the daughter of a high-ranking official in the military government. A cartographer, she spends her life drawing maps in expectation of her husband's imminent return. This is the background to the novel's startling opening gambit, in which Simón reappears after thirty years' absence, looking exactly the age at which Emilia last saw him. As the novel proceeds, the action alternates between the present and the distant past, gradually revealing the circumstances under which Simón disappeared and the course of Emilia's subsequent life. Martínez himself, or someone very much like him, is the narrator of the book, appearing as a minor character in Emilia's life and combining aspects of his real-life biography with the fictional events of the storyline. The resulting novel is a potent mixture of fact and fiction, reality and illusion; the reader is meant to be slightly perplexed, casting about for reality as Emilia does by creating her elaborate and lifelike maps.There are some wonderful moments in this book, including one of the more memorable opening sentences I've encountered in a novel in some time; there is also a delightful vignette about Orson Welles. For this reader, however, the book as a whole was not completely successful; the symbolism always seemed in danger of becoming aimlessly portentous, rather than helping to tie together the novel's various narrative threads. Still, Purgatory has piqued my interest in this author, and I would be interested to read his previous works.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Perhaps the only sane approach to the insanity and cruelty of Argentina's Dirty War is to fade into a magical-realistic vision. Tomás Eloy Martínez does just that in Purgatory. In the story of a woman who searches for thirty years for her husband who was disappeared, he invites the reader to share the fear, despair, and helplessness of the survivor. I know nothing about the Dirty War other than what I have read in this book. Even with my faulty understanding of what Eloy Martínez was doing, I think that I know enough.Purgatory wanders through time with both a third person narration that seemed clumsily translated and a first person narration that is immediate and deft. Emilia, the main character, is sixty when she sees her husband, still looking the thirty years that he was when he disappeared, in a restaurant in New Jersey, far from their Argentinian homeland. The couple had been cartographers sent on assignment into the wilds to make a valid map for their company. They stumble onto a crowd of homeless people, rounded up by the milita and dumped in the wilderness (in one of the most distressing scenes in the book) with no means of sustenance. When they try to report them, they are arrested. Because Emilia's father is a central power behind the government, she is saved. Simón, however, disappears. Emilia spends her life looking for him and drawing maps by which they may find their way to one another.Maps and disappearances are the controlling motifs of the book. For Emilia a map has a separate reality which one may enter. In some sense everybody in the book disappears. Emilia and her professor friend, the first person narrator who is or is not TEM, have disappeared in exile. Emilia's mother disappears in dementia. Her cruel, callous father finally disappears in death. The Argentina that Emilia and her friends love disappears in illusion. This being present and not present is the essence of Purgatory.Hear a conversation between Emilia and Simón:"'I've been looking for this island for a long time,' he says. 'I find it, and when I try to pin down in space where it is, it slips through my fingers. Maybe that's my mistake, maybe there is no place in space for it. I try to draw it differently. I put it down on paper and turn away for a minute, and when I look at it again, the island is gone. It has vanished.''It must be situated in time, then,' Emilia says, 'and if it is, then sooner or later it will come back. Sooner and later are refuges in time.'"This is not a book for the faint of heart. It will bear rereading, especially for somebody like me who understood only a small portion of what she read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An exploration of the legacy of Argentina's Dirty War, this is a tremendous book.It opens with an incredible first sentence and it contains a brilliant set piece involving Orsen Welles, but it does slow down from time to time. It is well worth pushing through, because this is a special work. For me, the difficulty was with the main character, Emilia, who is confusing and hard to understand. She frequently seems passive or obtuse despite her obvious intelligence and drive. But as the novel unfolds, the source of her character becomes clear. She is revealed in the end as the victim not just of her husband's disappearance but also of her powerful father's domination and control. She is an obvious stand-in for Argentina itself, deceived and brutalized, and part of the book's brilliance is that by the end the cause of her suffering and mental unravelling is so understandable.It is a novel about dreams and illusions, good and bad. The disappearances and loss that lie at the center of the novel are not just the loss of things that existed, but also the absence of the things that never were. Dreams, maps, boundaries and writing are all metaphors for ways we both lose our way and try to find ourselves.In our rather feckless time, where first novels about college baseball players are elevated to "best of the year" status, this book stands out. It is difficult, serious and important. The author died before this was translated into English, but it proudly speaks for him. I hope people read this book.
Book preview
Purgatory - Tomás Eloy Martínez
Translator
1
Treating shadows like solid things
‘Purgatorio’, XXI, 136
Simón Cardoso had been dead thirty years when his wife, Emilia Dupuy, spotted him at lunchtime in the lounge bar in Trudy Tuesday. He was in one of the booths at the back chatting to two people she didn’t recognise. Emilia thought she had stepped into the wrong place and her first impulse was to turn round, get out of there, go back to the reality she had come from. Fighting for breath, throat dry, she had to grip the bar rail for support. She had spent her whole life looking for him, had imagined this scene a thousand times, and yet now that it was happening she realised she wasn’t ready. Her eyes filled with tears; she wanted to call his name, run over to his table and take him in her arms. But it took all her strength simply to hold herself up, to stop herself from crumpling in a heap in the middle of the restaurant, from making a fool of herself. She could barely summon the energy to walk over to the booth in front of Simón’s and sit in silence waiting for him to recognise her. As she waited, she would have to feign indifference though her blood pounded in her temples and her heart lurched into her mouth. She gestured for a waiter and ordered a double brandy. She needed something to calm her, to still the fear that, like her mother, she was losing her faculties. There were times when her senses betrayed her; she would lose her sense of smell, become disoriented in streets she knew like the back of her hand, drift off to sleep listening to silly songs that, she didn’t know how, seemed to be coming from her stereo.
She glanced over at Simón’s booth again. She needed to be sure it was really him. She could just see him between the two strangers, he was sitting facing her, talking animatedly to his companions. There could be no doubt: she recognised his gestures, the curve of his neck, the mole under his right eye. It was astonishing to discover that her husband was still alive but what was inexplicable was that he had not aged a day. He seemed stuck at thirty-three, even his clothes were from a different era. He was wearing bell-bottoms – something no one would be seen dead in these days – a wide-collared, open-necked shirt like the one John Travolta wears in Saturday Night Fever, even his long hair and his sideburns were relics of a different age. For Emilia, on the other hand, time had passed as expected and now she was ashamed of her body. The dark circles under her eyes, the sagging muscles of her face were clearly those of a woman of sixty, whereas on Simón’s face she couldn’t see a single line or wrinkle. In the countless times she imagined finding him again, it had never occurred to her that age would be an issue. But the disparity between their ages now forced her to reconsider everything. What if Simón had remarried? It pained her even to think that he might be living with another woman. In all the years of waiting, she never doubted for an instant that her husband still loved her. He had probably had affairs – she could understand that – but after the hell they had endured together, never for a moment had she imagined that he might have replaced her. But things were different now. Now, he looked as though he could be her son.
She studied him more carefully. It frightened her how inconsistent this appearance was with reality. He looked half as old as the age – sixty-three – that surely appeared on his passport. She remembered a photograph of Julio Cortázar taken in Paris late in 1964, in which the writer – born at the beginning of the First World War – looked as though he might be his own son. Perhaps, like Cortázar, Simón had fine wrinkles visible only close up, but his comments, which she could hear, were defiantly youthful, even his voice sounded like that of a young man, as though time for him were an endless loop, a treadmill on which he could run and run without ageing a single day.
Emilia resigned herself to waiting. She opened the Somerset Maugham novel she had brought with her. As she tried to read, something curious happened. Coming to the end of a line, she would run into an invisible barrier which stopped her going on. Not because she found Maugham boring; on the contrary, she loved his writing. It was similar to an experience she had had watching Death in Venice on DVD. In an early scene, as Dirk Bogarde sits, troubled, on the Lido watching Tadzio emerge from the sea, the scene had cut back to the conversation in Russian – or was it German? – between the bathers and the strawberry sellers. At first, assuming the director was giving an object lesson in critical realism, deliberately repeating the holidaymakers’ vulgarities, Emilia waited for the next scene only for the sequence of Tadzio emerging from the sea, shaking himself dry, to stubbornly reappear once more to the delicate strains of Mahler’s Fifth. Two nights later, when she should already have returned the film, Emilia played the DVD again and this time was able to watch it through to its poignant conclusion. She was aware that age had made her more dull-witted, but it was something she felt sure she could rectify with a little more attention.
The voices of the strangers in the booth behind her were irritating. She wanted to concentrate on Simón’s voice, anything that distracted from it seemed unbearable. In a restaurant where it was rare to hear anything other than a nasal New Jersey drawl, the strangers’ approximate English was peppered with interjections and technical words in some Scandinavian language. They were talking about Microstation map-making software, a program also used at Hammond, where she worked. Unwittingly, one of the two began to recite the clichés every cartography student learned in their first lecture. ‘Maps,’ he said, ‘are imperfect reproductions of reality, two-dimensional representations of what are in fact volumes, moving water, mountains shaped by erosion and rock falls. Maps are poorly written fictions,’ he went on. ‘Too much detail and no history whatever. Now, ancient maps were real maps: they created worlds out of nothing. What they didn’t know, they imagined. Remember Bonsignori’s map of Africa? The kingdoms of Canze, of Melina, of Zaflan – pure inventions. On Bonsignori’s map, the Nile rose in Lake Zaflan, and so on. Rather than orienting explorers, it disoriented them.’
The conversation shifted from one subject to another, a ceaseless torrent of words. Emilia remembered Bonsignori’s map. Was she imagining it, or had she seen it in Florence or in the Vatican? The voices of the two men grated on her nerves. She could not quite make out their words, they seemed to reach her ears tattered and ravelled. A sentence that seemed about to make sense was suddenly interrupted by the roar of a fire truck or the animal wail of a passing ambulance.
One of the strangers, a man with a hoarse, weary voice, suggested they stop beating about the bush and talk about the Kaffeklubben¹ expedition. Kaffeklubben? thought Emilia. Are they crazy? That tiny godforsaken island to the north-east of Greenland, that Ultima Thule where all the winds of the world veer towards perdition? ‘Let’s try and organise the expedition as soon as possible,’ the gravelly voice insisted. ‘In Copenhagen people think there’s another island even further north. And if it doesn’t exist, there’s nothing to stop us imagining it—’
‘Let’s think more about that, let’s think more,’ Simón interrupted them. Emilia started. Though she recognised his voice, there was little trace of the Simón she had known in these words. Here was a man who spoke English fluently, who articulated final consonants – think, let’s – with an English diction beyond the scope of her husband, who could never even manage to read an instruction booklet in a foreign language.
What makes a person who he is? Not the music of his words nor his eloquence, not the lines of his body, nothing that is visible. This was a mistake she had made more than once, rushing down the street after some man who walked like Simón, who trailed a scent that reminded her of the nape of his neck, only to catch up with the man, to see his face and feel she had lost Simón all over again. Why can’t two people be identical? Why do the dead not even realise they’re dead? The Simón deep in conversation barely three feet from where she sat was exactly the same man as he had been thirty years ago, but not the man he had been ten minutes earlier. Something in him was changing so quickly she did not have time to catch up. Dear God, could he be slipping away from her again, or was it her? Was she losing him? Don’t leave me again, Simón, querido. I won’t leave your side. A person’s true identity is his memories, she reassured herself. I remember all his yesterdays as though they were today, she said to herself, and everything he remembers about who I was is still a part of who he is. Remind him, draw him out, don’t lose him.
Emilia got to her feet, walked over, stopped in front of him and looked into his eyes.
‘Querido, querido mío, where have you been?’
Simón looked up; held her gaze, smiled, untroubled, unsurprised, said goodbye to the Scandinavians then turned again and looked at Emilia as though he had seen her only yesterday.
‘We need to talk, don’t we? Let’s get out of here.’
He offered not a word of explanation, did not ask how she was, what she had been doing all these years. He was nothing like the polite, attentive Simón she had shared her life with long ago. Emilia paid for her brandy, slipped her arm through her husband’s arm and they walked outside.
For years, everything Emilia did had been in preparation for the moment when she would see Simón again. She forced herself to keep fit, to be beautiful as she had never been. She went to the gym three times a week and her body was still limber, firm except around her waist and in her face where she had found it hard not to put on weight. Since moving to Highland Park, New Jersey, she had slipped into a regular routine, one that seemed sensible to her: the meals and showers taken at the same time every day, the patience with which the minutes came and went, just as love had come only to go again. Sometimes, at night, she dreamed of lost love. She would have liked to stop such dreams, but there was nothing she could do about things that were not real. Before she went to sleep, she would say to herself: the only thing that matters is what is real.
At Hammond, she had forty minutes for lunch, though half an hour was usually more than enough. The other cartographers brought sandwiches and ate in the empty offices, amusing themselves toying with vectors, creating imaginary rivers that flowed down Central Park West, railway lines that ran along the New Jersey Turnpike between exits 13A and 15W. She watched them move their homes to distant locations, to the shores of temperate seas, because, if he chooses, a cartographer can distort the way of the world.
When she was twelve, she too had drawn relief maps of cities, adopting a bird’s-eye view. Maps in which houses were flattened, the ground was level. She dreamed up Gothic cathedrals, cylindrical mountains with slopes sculpted by the wind into curves and arabesques. She transformed broad shopping streets into Venetian canals, with tiny bridges arching across the roofs; created unexpected deserts dotted with cacti in church gardens, deserts with no birds, no insects, only a deathly dust that desiccated the air. Maps had taught her to confound nature’s logic, to create illusions here where reality seemed most unshakeable. Perhaps this was why, having hesitated between literature and architecture, when she finally got to university she had felt drawn to cartography, in spite of her difficulty understanding Rand McNally cylindrical projections² and remote sensing using microwaves. As a student, she proved a skilled draughtswoman but a poor mathematician. It took her nine years to complete the course which Simón, whom she was to marry, finished in six.
She met Simón in a basement on the avenida Pueyrredón where Almendra³, a local rock band, played their hits – ‘Muchacha ojos de papel’, ‘Ana no duerme’, ‘Plegaria para un niño dormido’ – to their adoring fans. The moment Emilia’s fingers brushed Simón’s by chance, she sensed that she would never need any other man in her life since all men were contained within him, though she did not even know his name, did not know if she would ever see him again. This chance brush of fingers signified warmth, completeness, contentment, the sense of having felt a thousand times what she was actually feeling for the first time. On this stranger’s body was written the map of her life, a representation of the universe just as it was set down in a Taoist encyclopedia⁴ two centuries before Christ. ‘The curve of his head is the vault of heaven, his delicate feet are the lowest earth; his hair, the stars; his eyes, the sun and moon; his eyebrows Ursa Major; his nose is like unto a mountain; his four limbs are the seasons; his five organs, the five elements.’
After they left the gig, they wandered the streets of Buenos Aires aimlessly. Simón took her hand so naturally that it was as though he had always known her. They arrived, exhausted, at a bar only to find it was closing up and it took them a long time to find another one. Emilia phoned her mother a couple of times to tell her not to worry. They were unsurprised to find they were both studying cartography and that both thought of maps not as a means of making a living but as codes which allowed them to recognise objects by means of symbols. It was a rare thing in young people, and they were barely twenty-five, but they were at an age when they did not want to be like others and were astonished to discover they were like each other. They were also surprised to discover that even when they said nothing, each could guess the other’s thoughts. Though Emilia had nothing to hide, she felt embarrassed at the idea of talking about herself. How could she explain she was still a virgin? Most of her friends were already married with children. There had been boys at school who had fallen for her, two or three had kissed her, fondled her breasts, but as soon as they had wanted to take things further, she had always immediately found something that repelled her: bad breath, acne, greasy hair. Simón, on the other hand, felt like an extension of her own body. Already, on that first night, she would have felt comfortable undressing in front of him, sleeping with him if he had asked. The thought did not even seem to have occurred to him. He was interested in her for what she said, for who she was, though she had barely told him anything about herself. He seemed eager to talk. He had dated a couple of girls in his teens, mostly because he felt that he should. He had not made them happy, nor had he been happy until, three years earlier, he had found a love he had thought would last forever.
‘We met the same way you and I met,’ he said. ‘We were at an Almendra concert in the Parque Centenario, and when Spinetta sang Muchacha ojos de papel
, I gazed into her eyes and sang the chorus to her: "Don’t run any more, stay here until dawn." ’
‘You should always use that as a chat-up line.’
‘Over time the song lost its charm; these days I think it sounds corny. But it worked with her. Everything between us was perfect until we decided to move in together. We’d been thinking about it for months. It would have saved us both a lot of money.’
‘You didn’t want to do it just to save money.’
‘Of course not. We were soulmates, at least that’s what I thought. We were working in the same office, drawing maps and illustrations for newspapers. Graphic artists were pretty well paid at the time. My family lived in Gálvez, a little town between Santa Fe and Rosario, and hers were from Rawson in Patagonia, so we were both alone here in Buenos Aires. Neither of us had many friends. Then one day her father called and asked her to come home. Her older sister had cancer – Hodgkin’s lymphoma – and she’d had a relapse. She was weak from the chemotherapy and needed someone to look after her. I went to the bus station with her; she cried on my shoulder right up to the minute she had to get on the bus. I cried too. She promised she’d call as soon as she arrived, said she’d be back in two or three weeks, as soon as her sister’s course of chemotherapy was finished. I felt devastated, it was like my whole world had crumbled. She didn’t call the next day, I waited a whole month and she didn’t call. I was desperate to see her, but I didn’t know what to do. Back then, Rawson seemed so remote it might as well have been on another planet. I couldn’t bear to be alone in my tiny apartment. I spent most of the time wandering the streets, reading in cafes, walking until I was exhausted. All this was during the first weeks after Péron came back from his long exile; there were marches and demonstrations all the time. I got so depressed that, when the cafes closed, I didn’t know what to do. I was so preoccupied I started making mistakes at work. They would probably have fired me, but there was nobody else in the graphics department. In the end, I couldn’t bear the silence any longer so I went to the telephone exchange on the corner of Corrientes and Maipu intending to call every single family in Rawson with her surname. As it turned out there were only six, but none of them had ever heard of her. This seemed weird, because Rawson is a small town, and everyone pretty much knows everyone else. I waited another month, but still there was nothing: no letters, no messages, nothing. In the end, I decided to ask for time off work to go to Patagonia. I figured that once I got to Rawson I’d have no trouble finding her. I took the bus – a twenty-hour journey along a flat deserted road that somehow seemed to symbolise my fate. The minute I arrived, I started searching for her. I went to the hospitals, talked to oncologists, checked the lists of patients who had died recently. No one knew anything.’
‘It breaks my heart just listening to you,’ Emilia said.
‘That’s not the worst. Every night I’d tour the bars, I’d go in, sit down, order a beer and play Muchacha ojos de papel
endlessly on the jukebox in the hope that the song would make her appear. One night, I told the whole story to the guy behind the bar, I showed him the photo of her I kept in my wallet. I think I saw her in Trelew, he said. Why don’t you try there? Trelew was a slightly bigger town about fourteen kilometres west and the people there seemed more wary. I visited all the places I had in Rawson, but this time I also asked in the prisons. I don’t know how many times I made that tour in every town in the surrounding area, in Gaiman, Dolavon, Puerto Madryn. When I got back to Buenos Aires, I was sure that she’d be there, waiting for me. I never saw her again.’
‘You’re still waiting for her.’
‘Not any more. There comes a moment when you finally resign yourself to losing what you’ve already lost. You feel as though it’s slipping through your fingers, falling out of your life, you feel nothing will ever be the same again. I still think of her, obviously, but I don’t wake up in the middle of the night any more, worrying that she’s lying somewhere ill, or dead. Sometimes I wonder if she really existed. I know I didn’t dream her. I still have a blouse of hers, a pair of shoes, a make-up bag, two of her books. Her name was Emilia too.’
Emilia and Simón were married two years later. Simón gave up working for the newspapers and joined the map-making department at the Argentina Automobile Club where Emilia had been working for some months. They were happy, and happiness was exactly as she had imagined it would be. They talked easily about things that would have made other couples uncomfortable, and upon this mutual trust they built their home life. If she did not discover the same intense pleasure in sex she had heard her friends talk about, she said nothing, assuming that this too would come in time.
Only after Simón disappeared on a trip to Tucumán did she begin to feel racked with guilt that she had not made him happy. She felt painfully jealous of the other Emilia, for whom Simón was perhaps still searching. There were nights when she woke up with the feeling that her husband’s whole body was inside her, sounding her deepest depths, until it reached her throat. It was a pleasure so physical it made her weep. She would get up, take a shower, but when she went back to bed the spectre of the beloved body was still there, emblazoned within her.
Finding him again thirty years later unsettled her. In the past, when she had still been searching for him, she imagined that when she found him, they would quickly slip back into their old routine and carry on with their lives as though nothing had happened. But now, a sort of abyss separated them, a chasm made deeper by the fact that Simón had not aged a single day while she bore the full weight of her sixty years.
Emilia had felt no sense of foreboding when she got up that morning. She liked to lie in bed, to stretch languidly, to linger for a while before heading out to work. It was the best part of the day. After she showered, she would carefully apply her make-up, despite knowing that she was doing it for no one. As the day wore on, the lipstick would fade, the mascara fall from her lashes in tiny flecks. At least once a week she went to a beauty salon to have a new set of sculptured nails applied. She had replaced the previous nails – an orange and violet mosaic pattern – two days earlier and the new ones had a delicate pattern of blue wavy lines. She always breakfasted on toast and coffee, glanced at the headlines in the Home News. Her only friend was Nancy Frears, a librarian at Highland Park. Chela, her younger sister, lived in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and their three children, and though they called each other on birthdays and at Thanksgiving, they hadn’t seen each other for years. A couple of summers earlier, when Emilia had had her hernia operation, it had been Nancy, not Chela, who stayed with her, helped her shower, tidied the apartment. She could, of course, have found friends who shared similar interests, but she was loath to change the life she lived. A couple of geographers from Rutgers University she sometimes ran into on the train she took to Manhattan had invited her to go to the movies or to dinner. She enjoyed chatting with them on the train, but did not want to take the friendship further. To Emilia, sharing a movie with someone was like sharing a bed. In cinemas, people cry, they sigh, they reveal the flayed flesh of their emotions. She