Purgatory Read Free Page A

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 had no desire to be on such intimate terms with the geographers from Rutgers. With Nancy, on the other hand, she didn’t mind. Nancy’s friendship was like a cat or a comfortable eiderdown. Besides, for Nancy, Emilia represented a pinnacle of refinement she could never attain; when they were together she constantly felt she was learning something new, even when Emilia read her poems she did not understand or took her to little art-house cinemas to see classic Mizoguchi films.
    Nancy’s favourite quotation was a line from Ezra Pound she had chanced upon in the library. She was drawn to the hidden meaning she sensed in the cadence of the line: How ‘came I in’? 5 Was I not thee and Thee? It had a mysterious lilt; she asked Emilia to help her decipher it, and without even changing