Tomás Eloy Martínez - Purgatory

The sketch left them feeling even more depressed. They decided to sleep in separate rooms and kissed each other goodnight without passion. In the morning they were due to take the 10 a.m. flight to Recife for a two-week cruise down the Brazilian coast — a wedding present from Emilia’s father.

They had been on the cruise for several days when, over breakfast, they heard that the actor in the sketch had issued an unqualified apology to the viewers and the authorities. ‘Sometimes my jokes are in bad taste,’ he said, ‘and this time I have stupidly contributed to the campaign of vilification against our country. I am unworthy to live among you. The people of Argentina are a peaceful people, and I failed to respect that peace. To joke about the disappeared is to play into the hands of the subversives.’ One of the ship’s officers, who had seen the apology on television, mentioned it over breakfast. ‘The poor bastard had circles under his eyes so black that they looked like they were painted on,’ he said. ‘ Hijo de puta ,’ commented a deeply tanned older woman sitting next to Emilia. ‘People like that don’t deserve to live. If I were a man, I’d kill every last one of them.’ Everyone went on eating breakfast in silence.

The inchoate love Emilia had felt on her wedding night cured itself the following day in the narrow uncomfortable berth of the cruise ship put out of Recife. When Simón’s hand brushed her belly as he stowed the luggage, she felt a smouldering desire she had kept buried deep inside her ever since she had her first period. Now, finally, she could satisfy it without virginal coyness or Catholic guilt. She fell back on the berth and begged Simón to rid her once and for all of her cursed hymen. But Simón did not feel the same urgency. He wanted to prolong the moment, to separate it into languid fragments of desire, to enter Emilia’s body with his every sense. ‘Let’s take it gently, amor ,’ he said. ‘It’s your first time.’ She was impatient and couldn’t understand why her husband wanted to delay the moment of penetration. ‘No, not gently, do it now,’ she urged him. Was this Christian? She wanted nothing in that moment as much as she wanted to be hurt, defiled, broken. When she had been a little girl of seven or eight, the family cook had explained to her that losing her virginity would be like dying. That the pain she felt would be the same pain she would feel when she died, but that with it would come all of God’s pleasures.

She allowed Simón to undress her; to discover for the first time the pinkish birthmark, round as a ten centavo coin, on her right buttock; to linger over the small folds of cellulite that had appeared on one of her thighs — while still she was a virgin, she had thought to herself, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin with cellulite — to trace with his tongue the almost invisible line of hair that ran from her navel to the centre of her being. Her eyes were closed when he, now naked, parted her lips with his tongue and mingled his saliva with hers. Feeling his gentleness, smelling his scent, Emilia’s heart began to race, she had never felt it pound so hard, she didn’t think it could take much more, but it was beating harder still when Simón slipped his tongue between her thighs.

‘Don’t. ’ she said. ‘It’s salty.’ He looked up from between her legs and smiled. ‘How do you know it’s salty?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, he buried himself in her depths until her inner labia gripped him. ‘Now, please. ’ Emilia whimpered. ‘Give it to me now, please.’ Simón penetrated her gently, moving towards her hymen, more gently than she had imagined. She heard a brief moan and then the surge of his ejaculation overcame him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wanted it to last a lifetime.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she reassured him. ‘We can do it again in a little while.’

‘I’ve hurt you. You’re bleeding.’

‘Good. I’m supposed to bleed. I won’t even feel it tomorrow. And besides, like you said, we’ve got our whole lives together.’

After a while, Emilia shifted towards him, kissed his throat, behind his ear. Without saying a word, she took his penis and stroked it delicately.

‘I can’t,’ Simón said. ‘It’s got a life of its own, this thing. Sometimes it stays limp like that for hours.’

‘It’s OK, it’s OK, don’t think about it. You can do it.’

Simón rummaged in a suitcase, took out a cassette deck and pressed Play. From the machine, in spite of the poor quality of the recording, came a sequence of simple piano chords of extraordinary purity, music that sounded like nothing else in the world.

‘When I’m alone, Keith Jarrett’s improvisations get me excited. With you, they’ll get me even more excited.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Emilia smiled. ‘You’re saying he’s improvising this?’

‘From beginning to end.’

‘It’s so perfect. He must have the whole melody memorised.’

‘No. This is Jarrett’s great discovery. He turned up at the Köln Opera House without the faintest idea of what he was going to play. He was tired, he’d spent a whole week playing concerts and he was surprised to find that the music came to him in waves. Before that night, he was a great jazz pianist, but that night he created a genre all his own. His music is a constant, an absolute. The coughing from the audience, the creak of the piano, nothing is prepared. Maybe Bach or Mozart created galaxies like this, improvised harmonies that drift now through the darkness of time, but none of them have survived. That night at the Köln Opera House can never be repeated. Jarrett himself couldn’t do it. It’s an evanescent concerto, born to live and die in that very moment. It will become a commonplace, a cliché, to be listened to by lovers like us, but the human race will go on needing it.’

They lay back on the berth. After seven minutes, Jarrett began to moan as though fucking his instrument. Simón’s penis remained inert.

‘Let me hold you,’ Emilia said.

She went on stroking him with one hand while slowly caressing herself with the other. After a moment, his moan joined Jarrett’s.

After the phone call from the woman from the cinema, Emilia spent the morning wondering what to do. She could barely bring herself to concentrate on the maps which she was supposed to be working on, converting them from 1:450,000,000 scale to 1:450,000. She longed to talk to her father, but she was afraid of how he might react. He had become increasingly volatile and unpredictable. That afternoon, in the family home on calle Arenales, she finally confided in Chela. As always, her sister told her mother, who told Dupuy, who came to see her some two hours later trembling and angrier than she had ever seen him. He stood, glaring at Emilia.

‘How can you be so naive? Don’t you understand that we are at war? That your family could be attacked by subversives at any moment? You should have told me what happened in the cinema the moment it happened. You have no right to make a fool of me in front of my friends. I won’t tolerate such behaviour.’

‘What did I do? So, I didn’t mention it for a couple of days. I’m not psychic. I don’t know what’s going on.’

‘No, and you don’t know how to look after yourself either. It was a trap. They were trying to get information out of you, trying to inveigle their way into this house. They want to blow our brains out, all of us.’

‘So what am I supposed to do if this woman calls again?’

‘She won’t. She was picked up in a cafe near your place. She’d been spying on you, she was armed. A patrol surrounded her and when they told her to surrender her weapon, she tried to resist. They tried to stop her, but she shot herself.’