Purgatory (28 page)

The success of the twenty-four-hour solidarity appeal is beyond his wildest expectations. At precisely 6 p.m. every television in the country is turned on; even those in hospital join in singing the national anthem. The great Libertad Lamarque cries as she recites the poem ‘La hermanita perdida’
²³
. Famous actors and comedians come down from their pedestals and sell flowers in the streets. The television studios are besieged by old women who have spent sleepless nights knitting scarves and socks for the poor soldiers who are freezing. In a few short hours, there is a staggering pile of jewels, heirlooms, first communion medals, wedding rings. In the grocery shops there is not a tin of meatballs, sardines or beans left on sale – anything that can be eaten has been handed over. ‘
So that our brave boys can go on fighting
,’ sings Lolita Torres to the cameras through the night.

Emilia marches on the television studio with the mothers and wives of the disappeared. Like them, she has covered her head with a white scarf. She hopes her father will see her, will have her thrown out. Nothing would ease her contempt better than a good scandal. But this is something that will not happen, because Dupuy wants only to forget his daughter, to force her, he doesn’t yet know how, to go far away. In the streets, the crowds wave flags. In another photo taken in the studio, I can make out Nora Balmaceda. I barely recognise her. I’ve seen her picture in magazines and in a couple of documentaries, always with her rosebud mouth larded with lipstick and her eyelashes thick with mascara. But what appeared that night on television was her corpse. She is standing, barely able to hold herself up. I don’t believe, like so many of the others I recognise in the photograph, she would go so far to hide her story. On the contrary, she would be only too happy to tell it as long as there were cameras pointed at her. She would tell all: the novels she didn’t write, her travels, her affairs with famous sportsmen, her affair with the admiral. On her right, an elderly woman, still clinging to her flag, is picking up her false teeth which have fallen on the floor. What patriotic fervour, what religious devotion there is in that photograph. In the last photo, a messenger with slicked-back hair and patent-leather shoes is standing next to Dupuy and whispering something in his ear. He is in civilian clothes, wearing a suit that looks as though he borrowed it, and just this detail is enough to recognise that he is a military orderly. The photo is marked May 21, 1982, at 12.03 a.m. The messenger must be telling Dupuy that the British Army has surrounded the Argentinian troops defending Port Stanley and that the government has ordered them to defend it to the last man.

The war carries on for a few more days, and then it is over. The president shuts himself away in his office, drinking bottle after bottle of Old Parr, and then resigns. On the heels of the invented triumphs comes despair. ‘We have lost a battle, let us not lose the country,’ Dupuy says in a radio interview. He is the only major figure who dares to show his face. That same afternoon, he meets with the
comandantes
who have survived the disaster and asks them what they want him to do with the donations from the solidarity appeal. ‘Is there much?’ they ask. ‘Oh yes,’ he tells them, ‘almost sixty million dollars, and 140 kilos of gold which I’d suggest melting down into ingots. There are tons of tinned foods, chocolates, sacred pictures, letters for the soldiers and two whole hangars bursting with winter clothes.’ The
comandantes
look at each other, confused. Dupuy sets them straight. ‘Almost all of it is rubbish. The scarves and woollen vests are in bright colours and might easily draw attention to the soldiers. The best thing to do is dump it all. Not the gold and the money, obviously. As for everything else, we should ship it out on two Hercules planes, though we’d be running the risk of the British getting their hands on everything, including the planes.’ ‘What do you suggest, Doctor?’ asks one of the
comandantes
. ‘I suggest we cover our backs, save face. If anyone asks about the contributions, we tell them we sent everything we could and that, since the islands were in British hands, we don’t know what they did with them. We can also say that everything else was put into accounts reserved for the armed forces and the missions. We won’t exactly be lying. We have to give up a percentage to dispel any doubts. I would also suggest that this operation be classified a state secret. If it were up to me, I’d order that history books be immediately rewritten to include these heroic deeds before people start publishing all sorts of bullshit. I’d say that London had plans to invade Tierra del Fuego and that we were merely defending ourselves against the first and third largest powers in the world.’ ‘Professor Addolorato has already said that,’ one of the
comandantes
pointed out. ‘In that case, get Addolorato to write the books.’ Dupuy was offended. ‘All I know, señores, is that when the truth is unfavourable, it must be made to disappear as quickly as possible.’ He withdraws, leaving a copy of
La República
on the new president’s desk. On page one it reads: ‘The time has come for humility. Let us give politicians the opportunity to govern. Let us offer them the wisdom of our military leaders. This country must go on being a country of freedom, of the cross and the sword.’

Some of the other photos in the file sadden me. I see Emilia and Dr Dupuy standing next to the coffin of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson. I read the date: September 8, 1978. The celebrities gathered in the funeral chapel are almost the same as those who, four years later, will be caught up in the fever of the solidarity appeal for Las Malvinas. The same as those who cheered at the World Cup until they were hoarse. The darkest year of that murky dictatorship was 1978. In December, the
comandantes
celebrate their three world triumphs: in football, in hockey and in beauty, when a twenty-one-year-old girl from Córdoba is voted Miss World. I don’t think Torre Nilsson would have approved of how his funeral chapel is staged in the photographs: the dark cedar coffin with eight ornately carved handles to carry it, the crucifix that looks as though it might drop onto his head, the wreaths and flowers that shroud him in their heavy perfume, the poster for
Martín Fierro
hanging next to the crucifix (he must have requested the poster: he considered
Martín Fierro
his finest film, I still think it was one of his worst). He would have been ashamed that in death, this most private moment, his wasted, shrunken body should be exposed for all to see.

I met him one night in October 1958 in a restaurant near that very funeral chapel. I was surprised to discover he was even more shy than me – in itself something of a feat – giving up each word with infinite care as though they were joys that he was losing forever. I chattered away, telling him about the deaths I had seen at the cinema and those I had been dreaming about for weeks. ‘Some deaths are ridiculous,’ I told him, ‘and I forget them as soon as the film is over: the living dead, zombies, ghosts. I’m more moved by the personification of Death in Ingmar Bergman’s
Seventh Seal
, and the funeral of a village girl I saw recently in Carl Dreyer’s
Ordet
.’ I told him the scene had made me cry and that later I was disappointed because the girl came back to life. Torre Nilsson smiled magnanimously. ‘Ah,
Ordet
,’ he said. ‘I think in the film Dreyer is denying the idea of death, portraying it as a sort of divergence from life, like an eclipse, after which it is possible to reappear.’ ‘What is irreparable,’ I said, ‘is the obscene way in which the dead are put on display. From that there can be no return.’ I am remembering that phrase as I look at the photos of Dupuy, the admiral and Addolorato standing before his defenceless body feigning grief.

In another of the photos, Emilia is greeting an actress who appeared in a number of Torre Nilsson’s early films and who, for years, had vanished off the face of the earth. The woman looks frightened, as though she has just been caught doing something terrible and wants to hide away. Until twenty years ago, the newspapers carried on publishing stories about what had happened to her, all of them false. Once she was dead, they lost interest and she fell into oblivion. Sometimes I see the startled expression of that former actress staring back at me from a poster in the film club, always the same face, eyes gazing into the middle distance, lips twisted in a foolish smile. Emilia mentioned her in passing that morning we went to see Mary Ellis’s grave. She told me that Torre Nilsson had taken her and turned her into a unique character, terrified of sex, constantly afraid of being raped. Later, other directors took advantage of her naive defenceless image to transform her into the perfect victim: a teenage girl who has her virginity taken in a brothel, a country girl who swears eternal love to a rogue in an empty church convinced that, though there are no witnesses, this oath is enough for them to be legally married. Going from one melodrama to the next confused her. One day she woke up not knowing who she really was and ran off the set of her last film. She got on the first bus she saw and disappeared without a trace. She never told anyone what happened in the months that followed. She had no family, only a neighbour she occasionally went out with for pizza. Maybe she was living in a hotel in a small town, maybe she ran away to the beach because when she came back she was very tanned. No producer every called her again. She went back to her old house, to her old routine of going out for pizza with her neighbour and became a dressmaker. Ever since she was a girl she had liked drawing dresses, cutting out patterns, embroidering, making costumes for her dolls. She opened a small shop, took in two stray cats and never spoke about the past again. She emerged from her obscurity only to say goodbye to the director who had discovered her and changed her life. She had intended only to spend a few minutes in the funeral chapel, to leave a flower, say a prayer. The dead man mattered less to her than that part of her life which had already died. On the huge poster hanging beside the door of the chapel she saw herself, cowering in the shadows of two men. Seeing herself like this, on display, it seemed as though this funeral was hers too and she almost fled. Emilia saw the woman leaving, looking as though she was about to faint, and went to help her. It took a moment before she recognised her. She was no longer the teenage girl in the poster. She was overweight, dishevelled and looked like a middle-class housewife. She had met her long ago in the house on calle Arenales when the actress had come with Torre Nilsson to ask Dupuy to intercede with a reactionary censor who was busy cutting swathes out of the finest films of the day, from Buñuel and Stanley Kubrick to Dreyer and Fellini. Childbirth and kissing, however reverently done, could not be seen anywhere near a church. He had banned two of Torre Nilsson’s films and was threatening to bowdlerise a third. ‘I don’t know what my father said to him,’ Emilia told me. ‘All I remember is that the girl was crying when she left. At the time, she looked like a schoolgirl – she wore a blouse with a big lace collar and ribbons in her hair. She had the same astonished expression she had in her films, as though her body shifted untouched from fantasy to reality. The trembling woman in the funeral chapel was a different person, she was short and fat with a double chin.’ Emilia took pity on her and took her outside for some fresh air. Then she invited her to go for coffee at a cafe on the corner and sat with her until she had calmed down. That was all. Emilia didn’t tell me that it was at that moment the photograph I’m looking at now was taken. The rest of the story I know from the notes and cuttings she left in North 4th Avenue.

The more I delve into Emilia’s life, the more I realise 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 deepest 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 realising it, or not yet born and do not know it,’ I said to Emilia one of the last times I saw her. ‘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. If you hadn’t loved Simón you would have loved someone else. You would have done so joyfully, with no guilt, because you cannot love what you do not know.’ She didn’t like this idea because she could not conceive of a world without Simón and loving made sense only if it meant loving him. I don’t think I understood at all that afternoon. Now, I would say I was an optimist, that the mere fact of existing or loving is enough to give meaning to everything. This is not how Emilia feels, and she is right. I realise this when I find a map among the papers that she left: the map of a city that stretches out in time not in space, and maybe because of that, an impossible city. There are transparent edges with dates beneath which the city is always different. In the centre is a vast palace next to a lake or reservoir. Above the palace, in capital letters, is written the code word to her life, Simón. The map is torn, wet with drool and with tears. It has no edges, sectors, bearing, no scale, and I don’t think it is necessary to ask where they are.

I have already spent hours unearthing what is hidden in the folds and on the backs of the photographs and clippings given to me by Nancy Frears. Perhaps there is nothing worthwhile here, perhaps that part of Emilia’s life I do not know is a lunar desert or an insignificant outcrop like Kaffeklubben. I begin reading one of her notebooks. ‘I know D is a dressmaker and I’ve asked her to make me some dresses . . .’ The cellphone I always carry with me rings and I set down the notebook. It is noon. Not many people know I have a cellphone and I don’t recognise the number calling. I answer, convinced someone has misdialled and prepared to listen to an apology.