Purgatory Read Free Page B

the order of the words, they managed to shed some light on it. ‘What is it about this line you find so moving?’ Emilia wanted to know. ‘What is unsaid, but hinted at in the folds between the words.’ Sometimes her friend was not so stupid.
    Nancy had survived a stultifying marriage. Sid Frears, her late husband, had been a travelling salesman selling synthetic adhesive who left her alone for months at a time. After fifteen years of marriage, pancreatic cancer had carried him off. Nancy had not the slightest interest in changing her life. Sid’s life insurance policy, invested at a fixed interest during the boom years, ensured her an annual income of $22,000. She decided she did not need to work. Her only work was voluntary: from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she worked at the library. ‘What would I want to go out to work for?’ she said. ‘So I don’t feel alone? I’m not that kind of person, Millie. I like my own company. I read People magazine every week, I listen to the Beach Boys, and if I want to fart, I fart. There’s no one to complain.’
    More than once, Emilia caught her staring at the photo of Simón on her beside table. Comparing him to Sid and shaking her head. ‘You had a good thing going there, huh, Millie? Was he good in bed?’ Emilia would have liked to tell her that sex with Simón in her imagination was better than it had been in reality, but this was something she would tell no one, something she did not dare admit even to herself. Sometimes, when they got back from bingo, Nancy would gaze at Simón’s broad forehead, his pale, honest eyes, his firm nose.
    ‘He looks just like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry , don’t you think, hon? If he hadn’t died, he’d look like Clint in The Bridges of Madison County now.’
    On the Friday when Emilia met Simón at Trudy Tuesday, she had left home at 7 a.m. as she did every morning. It took her forty minutes to drive from her apartment on North 4th Avenue to the Hammond offices in Springfield industrial park. She worried about avoiding the inevitable accidents on Garden State Parkway, the storms that could break suddenly over a two-mile area while in the distance the sun was still shining. Like a taxi driver, she drove with the radio tuned to 1010 AM, which kept her up to date on traffic tailbacks.
    The suburbs were endless, indistinguishable, and if, as she sometimes did, she allowed her mind to wander she would somehow end up driving through a strip mall with branches of Wal-Mart, Pep Boys, Pathmark and Verizon Wireless laid out in an arc, beneath louring skies of identical clouds with identical squawking birds. Only the leaves of the walnut trees showed any imagination, distinguishing themselves in autumn as they fell.
    Sometimes at the office, as her screen glowed with the colours of maps, print priorities and legends, Emilia would sit daydreaming about Simón whom she had not seen die. The death of a loved one is devastating. How much more devastating, then, was the death of someone you could not be sure was dead? How can you lose something not yet found? Emilia had seen the glimmer of an answer in a poem by Idea Vilariño dedicated to the man who abandoned her: I am no more than I now / forever, and you / now / to me / no more than you. Now you are not / and some day soon / I won’t know where you live / with whom / or whether you remember / You will never hold me / as you did that night / never / I will never touch you / I will not see you die.
    Some years previously, someone had told her about a group of geographers who spent their winters in Nuuk, Greenland, mapping the effects of global warming and she had imagined Simón was on that expedition. It was a foolish fantasy, but for a few months, it had been a consolation. In the notebook where she jotted down her feelings, she wrote something that still pained her today: ‘If he came back, I would be able to see him die.’
    During the