Tomás Eloy Martínez - Purgatory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s your car, Ms Dupuy.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He comes back to the bed. The gentle rain of notes drips onto their bodies. Emilia lets the night slip past and all that passes is the night. From time to time, she gazes, incredulous, at her sleeping husband: the mole beneath his left eye is the colour of ripe figs, there are tiny, almost imperceptible lines at the corners of his mouth, and it amazes her to think this body belongs to her, anyone would think it obscene that a sixty-year-old woman should be hopelessly in love with this boy of thirty-three. It is an unexpected gift from fate and, now she thinks about it, perhaps it is fate’s reward for all her years of waiting. She would rather have this wild, insatiable love than the life she would have had if everything had gone according to plan: a marriage held together by convention, moved by the rhythm of family celebrations, of talk shows, of late-night films. Her phantom widowhood immersed her in the stupor of so many TV soap operas that she cannot remember what she was in the middle of watching when Simón disappeared. Rosa de lejos ? No, that came later. Maybe it was Pablo en nuestra piel , where she cried inconsolably at the scene where Mariquita Valenzuela and Arturo Puig say goodbye at the airport and, with tears in his eyes, he recites: I want everyone to know 11I love you / leave your hand, love, upon my hand. When she wakes, she considers telling him about that scene. Back then, people let themselves be numbed by sentimentality to forget the death that was all around them. The flying saucers, the soap operas, football, patriotism: she will tell him about all the straws she too clutched at, poor deluded shipwrecked fool.