Purgatory by Tomás Eloy Martínez

wishes could not be fulfilled, or perhaps they had already been fulfilled without her realising. Nothing is more terrible than to wish for something you believe you can never have.
    ‘It’s all in the past. Don’t torment yourself.’
    ‘I don’t. That’s the worst thing: I don’t feel any pain any more. I’ve grown used to the absence of the only person I ever loved. What’s strange is that I know I’m not the same person since I lost him and yet I carry on as though nothing happened. I feel despicable.’
    ‘You’ve no reason to. Nancy told me you spent fifteen years searching for him.’
    ‘Fifteen? I was searching for him even before I met him. Now I’m waiting for him to come searching for me. At Mass last Sunday Father Flannagan’s sermon was about purgatory. The Catholic Church used to teach that purgatory was a necessary purification for imperfect souls before they could enter paradise, that accepting suffering as an act of love for God and all forms of penitence was purgatory. That’s how things used to be. Not any more. The Church is more tolerant these days, Father Flannagan said. Now, purgatory is seen as a wait whose end we cannot know.’
    All things come to an end, I told her, even eternity. It was a cliché and as I said it aloud it sounded even more clichéd.
    She shook her head.
    ‘Not Simón. Simón is still there at the door to my bedroom. I know it’s him. He wants me to see him, to let him in. I don’t know how to do it.’
    ‘It’s not Simón in the doorway. It’s your love for him that won’t leave you in peace.’
    ‘Simón disappeared one morning in Tucumán. That was thirty years ago,’ she said. ‘For a while I lived out what seemed like a normal life in my parents’ house.’
    From time to time, Emilia got messages from people who claimed to have seen her husband dead in this place or that. She went on drawing maps as though nothing had happened. Nothing seemed strange to her. She herself could have sworn she saw Simón at the Country Show or among the visitors to the Buenos Aires Book Fair. He was her God and, like the God of the Church, he was omnipresent. Sooner or later he would return. She had only to be patient. But she could not stop herself worrying when she received these messages about the life he was living far from her. She would lie awake for days convinced that at any moment he would ring the doorbell and explain why he had disappeared without so much as a word. But he never did come, and over time the physical need she felt to hold him in her arms waned. She became resigned to solitude, to abandonment; she began to forget there had been a time when she felt neither alone nor abandoned.
     
    I asked where she had looked for him – cities, beaches, bars, hospitals. As she told me, something inexplicable happened to me. It has no bearing on this story but if I don’t mention it I’ll feel as though nothing that happened that afternoon was real. And it was. We were a couple of blocks from the train station and every now and then we’d feel a blast of wind from a passing train. I looked out the window of the restaurant and, in place of the grey shapes of the buildings, the discount clothing store, the university bookshop, the branches of the major banks that had always been there, I saw the gently rolling pampas outside Buenos Aires, with cows lifting their heads to the sky and lowing as though they too were leaving with the train. Emilia went on talking – about the beaches of Brazil, the mountains of Venezuela, the flea markets of Mexico City – and still I saw the pampas there where it had no business being. In that moment I believed that Simón stood in the doorway of Emilia’s bedroom on North 4th Avenue. I was prepared to believe whatever she told me. If I did not believe her, why was I listening?
    ‘The first news of Simón that seemed genuine came from one of my father’s sisters,’ she went on.
    She was no longer looking at me. I felt like one