Purgatory by Tomás Eloy Martínez Page A

of her maps. On a map you can be whatever you want to be: the pampas, the Amazon rainforest, a ruined city, an imaginary island.
    ‘My aunt said she’d seen Simón at the Ipanema Theatre in Rio de Janeiro where she was working as assistant set designer. She’d gone over to say hello but Simón had run off. As soon as I heard this, I decided I had to go there. I spent six months in Rio going from one theatre to another and then from one map company to another. Nobody had heard of him, the whole story was a sick joke.’
    I asked her whether she had tackled her aunt about it.
    ‘I sent her a letter. She never replied. My sister Chela thinks my father put her up to it, asked her to lie to me to get me out of Buenos Aires. The country was in chaos at the time and I think my father, who’d always been so sure of himself, was afraid that I might become a troublesome witness. The thousands of dead, the concentration camps, the unmarked graves left behind by the military junta were just beginning to come to light and my father had sanctioned every one of those crimes. It was more than that – he did not think of them as crimes. After what we now call the dictatorship took power, my father became a rich man, a very rich man. The junta advanced him loans he never repaid, gave him million-dollar commissions, subsidies for public works that had no useful purpose. For my father, it was constantly raining money. He bought land in some of the most fertile areas of the pampas, luxury flats in Paris, in New York, in Barcelona.’
    ‘Maybe you could move into one of his palaces,’ I said with a sarcasm I instantly regretted.
    ‘I left Buenos Aires with only the clothes I stood up in and what money I’d saved from my job. Later, I found there was money in my accounts that wasn’t mine and I spent it, but only so I could go on searching for Simón. My father owed him that. My father doesn’t know where I am now or what I’m doing. The only person who knows is Chela, but if she ever tells him, I’ll lose my only sister forever.’
    ‘Just now, when you said “what we now call the dictatorship ”, I thought you were a collaborator too. I’m sorry. Because what we went through was a dictatorship, the most vicious dictatorship Argentina ever suffered, and God knows we’ve suffered a few. But since you were a victim of it, why do you still refuse to accept they murdered Simón? More than one witness testified as much, it was established at a trial that no one disputes.’
    ‘Because they didn’t murder him. I didn’t believe it when I left for Rio and I don’t believe it now. Simón is alive. It’s been thirty years and he is still alive. I know. I can feel him inside me. The witnesses saw what they wanted to see. If they blew his head off, as they say, how could the witnesses have recognised him? The only person who could have was me. But I didn’t see him. Simón is alive. I know it. When he comes back, he’ll explain why he left and everything will make sense. Shall I go on?’
    ‘Sure, go ahead.’
    ‘After the Malvinas War, the dictatorship collapsed. By then, Chela was living in Texas with her husband and I didn’t want to leave my mother all alone in Buenos Aires. The air was thick with old grudges demanding retribution. My father had been one of the junta’s most visible collaborators – though he had also been one of the first to sing the praises of democracy – and he was probably afraid that I would mention Simón.’
    ‘Nobody could have blamed you. Your husband was one of the disappeared. You were a victim.’
    ‘Nobody did blame me. I blamed myself for having been stupid and gullible, for having been a collaborator, in my own way. My conscience wouldn’t leave me alone. My father wouldn’t leave me alone. He would come and stand by my bedside, stroke my shoulder, my hair. He’d never been demonstrative but now suddenly, whenever we were alone, he was overly affectionate. In the end all I felt for him