Purgatory (14 page)

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
¹¹
I 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.

She gets up at five o’clock so she can catch the 5.35 express from New Brunswick. She doesn’t turn the light on but slips away silently, hurriedly scribbling a note that she leaves on the pillow next to Simón. ‘I’ll be back in time for breakfast. Get some sleep. I love you.’ As she crosses the bridge over the Raritan and stares out at the ocean, she can just make out a purple glow appearing over the horizon and she imagines herself, like Mary Ellis, staring out through the window at nothing. She feels a slight twinge in a tooth she had filled a few weeks ago and remembers she needs to make another appointment to see her dentist. She’ll do it on Monday. Monday without fail.

Monday, she thinks again. Suddenly, the week is hurtling towards her with the terrible weight of reality. Every time she moves away from the present, time fills up with half-finished images that need to be completed and the responsibility fills her with dread. There are no cars, no trucks on the road, all the lights are out in the buildings and dawn creeping over the horizon is enough for the weight of time to torment her. Monday, she says once more. Monday. When she met Simón in Trudy Tuesday, the weekend seemed to stretch out endlessly, but now in the early hours of Saturday morning, every second seems fleeting. She wishes she could stop time, chain it to the wall in shackles. She has not even thought about whether her husband needs to be at work too. She doesn’t know what mapping company he works for, didn’t think to ask him for an address, a phone number. Only now does she realise how fragile her happiness is, how slender the thread by which her life hangs.

The station is deserted and the train, as always, arrives on time. A fine mist hangs over the trees. Although the leaves are turning yellow and orange as they do every autumn, squalls, sudden thaws, and brusque heatwaves presage further storms and hurricanes. Natural disasters hold a mirror up to this country which has sown so much hatred, so many wars, thinks Emilia. In the past six years, the culture of the United States has rolled back half a century to the shadows of Senator Joe McCarthy and Tricky Dicky Nixon. It’s not worth living here any more.

There are two elderly women and a young black man in her carriage. Barely have they leaned their heads against the window than they fall asleep. Emilia, however, is determined to face every second of the day with her eyes wide open, gazing at the sweetness of her life. As the trains rolls through Elizabeth, she watches the church steeples carving out a space in the greyish light of morning and although she has never taken the train at such an early hour she feels as if she has lived this scene before. It is as if the sleeping boy, the sleeping women have been here in this shadowy nook forever, as though everything that has happened in the sixty years she has lived has been a preparation for this inconsequential moment. Perhaps I am already dead, Emilia thinks, and what I am seeing is my hell or my purgatory. Every human being, she thinks, is condemned to linger forever in a sliver of time from which he can never escape. Her fragment of eternity, then, is here with three sleeping strangers on this suburban commuter train at 5.50 a.m.

The feeling fades as they draw into Newark station. She needs to hurry if she is to catch the number 70 bus out to Livingston Mall in Springfield. She has not made this fifteen-minute journey often. The sordid suburban scene depresses her, the sadness of people at dawn, the loneliness of the trees, the certainty that nothing will ever happen here because – she thinks – there are places so devoid of meaning that even the most insignificant events cannot blossom there. The last straw is that, when she finally arrives at the office, there is a hearse blocking the Altima. She rings the bell for Hammond but no one answers. It is a quarter to seven and the security guard is not answering. How inconsiderate. It’s Saturday and she could be lying in bed with her husband but for the unexpected call the night before. She arrives punctually as requested, rings the bell insistently. When she turns, she sees a giant of a man in a heavy coat appear from nowhere and come slowly across the parking lot to the limousine.

‘Morning,’ he says.

‘Good morning,’ she replies. ‘It’s about time.’

The giant starts up the hearse and drives off without a word. Emilia would have liked to ask him what he was doing here but didn’t dare. As a child, she shrank from undertakers and they still terrify her. All that matters is that her car is now free and she can take Route 22 back. The autumn sun rises quickly. She remembers leaving the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the freezer last night, the endives and the smoked salmon on the table. Dinner was ruined, but she doesn’t care. The happiness she feels is venal, simoniacal, yet it compensates for all her losses. In buying heaven she has sold hell. But she needs to come back to earth if she is not to go on losing. So delirious with love is she that she even forgot to ask her husband what he wanted for breakfast. She is sure that, like her, he will want black coffee and toast.

In her North 4th Avenue apartment, the silence is abysmal, unbroken even by the startling hiss of the lights as she turns them on.

‘Are you awake,
amor
?’

Simón is not in the bedroom or in the kitchen. Perhaps when he woke he didn’t realise where he was and left. What if he’s forgotten her? She sometimes forgets things she did only yesterday while still remembering her childhood. She knows this happens to people as they grow older and Emilia is now on the slippery slope – very soon she’ll be eligible for a senior’s discount on the train and at the cinema – but Simón is barely thirty-three and his memory is unscathed.

A streak of light appears under the bathroom door. It comes from the window that overlooks the house next door. Timidly she calls out: ‘Are you in there, Simón?’ Her husband immediately replies: ‘Yeah, I’m here. I was wondering where you’d got to.’

He is wearing the pyjamas he wore on their trip to Tucumán. He must have kept them in his case all these years. Maybe he’d like to go with her to Menlo Park and buy some new clothes. She hums the opening bars of
The Köln Concert
as she makes coffee. She feels a rapturous joy flow through her body, the same electrical trill she felt the day they were married. When Simón opens the bathroom door, she rushes over to kiss him.

‘I left my car over at Hammond,’ she tells him, ‘the security guard was right. It’s a beautiful morning. Let’s go somewhere,
amor
, somewhere far from this world.’

Simón concentrates on his rye-bread toast and his coffee. He reaches over and strokes Emilia’s hand as it hovers in the air.

‘Have you heard of the eternal noon?’ he asks.

‘Once, a long time ago,’ says Emilia. ‘I’ve forgotten what it means.’

‘I learned about it in the old folks’ home.’

‘You were in an old folks’ home?’

‘Seven years. I worked there. I’ll tell you about it some other time.’

For Simón to talk about some other day, about a future with her, assuages her anxiety at the mention of the retirement home. Ever since they put her mother in one, the most expensive they could find, she has never been able to forget the experience of that spectral kingdom where no one spoke or dreamed or existed.