They got to the airport just in time for the four o’clock flight. Simón was probably waiting for her in Buenos Aires, Emilia’s mother told her, where else could he be? ‘But then why doesn’t he answer the phone?’ asked Emilia, who had been calling the San Telmo apartment every fifteen minutes. ‘He probably took the bus back,’ her mother replied, ‘it’s a twenty-hour journey, he won’t get there until tomorrow morning.’ ‘But without leaving a message, without asking after me? That’s not like him,’ said Emilia. ‘Fear changes people, hija,’ her father observed. ‘If he’s afraid, then by now he’s running away from everything, even himself.’ It was only as they boarded the plane that Emilia realised her father had not bought a fourth ticket. She thought it best to say nothing and spent the next two hours staring at the clouds through the window.
Years later, when Simón still had not reappeared, she read an article in Gente that said Argentinian husbands often disappeared suddenly, without giving any explanation. They suffer from Wakefield’s syndrome, a psychoanalyst explained, an allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story in which an upstanding London gentleman leaves his wife one day for no reason, moving to a house one street away from where he watches her go about her day-to-day routine until he grows old. Emilia knew in her heart that Simón was not like that; he would come back to her as soon as he could.
At the time, thousands of people disappeared for no apparent reason. Ambassadors disappeared, the lovers of captains and admirals, the owners of businesses coveted by the comandantes. Workers disappeared from their factory gates; farmers from their fields, leaving tractors running; dead men from the graves in which they had been buried only the day before. Children disappeared from their mothers’ wombs and mothers from the children’s memories. The sick who arrived in hospital at midnight had disappeared by morning. Frantic mothers rushed out of supermarkets searching for children who had slipped through black holes between the shelves. Some turned up years later, but they were not the same. They had other names, other parents, a history that was no longer theirs. And it was not only people who disappeared; rivers, lakes, train stations, half-built cities vanished into the air as though they had never existed. The list of things that were no more and those that might have been was infinite.
In an interview with a Japanese journalist, the Eel was forced to address the question of this rash of disappearances. ‘Firstly we would have to verify that what you say existed was where you say it was. Reality can be very treacherous. Lots of people are desperate for attention and they disappear just so people won’t forget them.’ Emilia watched the interview on television, listened as he articulated every syllable, slowly nodding his bald head.
‘A desaparecido is a mystery, he has no substance, he is neither alive nor dead, he does not exist. He is a “disappeared”.’
And as he said he does not exist, he rolled his eyes to heaven.
‘Don’t use that word again,’ he went on, ‘you have no basis for it. It is forbidden to publish it. Let it disappear and be forgotten.’
Emilia left Simón standing in the doorway of Trudy Tuesday and — not letting him out of her sight — crossed the road to pick up her silver Altima from the parking lot at Hammond Atlas. She was not afraid that he would leave again — after all these years it made no sense. ‘I’ll go pick up the car.’ Emilia whispered to him. ‘We’ll go home.’ She did not even need to wait for an answer. On the far side of Route 22 she turned to make sure he was still standing where her senses had left him. He wasn’t there. She saw him walking north, a smudge of light, a haze raised by the afternoon sunshine.
‘Simón!’ she called, but he did not hear her. Perhaps he could not hear her over the constant stream of trucks from Newark. A taxi stopped on the corner and, without hesitating, Emilia jumped in and told the cab driver to follow her husband. Simón was crossing a bridge less than two hundred metres away and she quickly caught up with him. When she opened the taxi door he climbed in, smiling, as though nothing had happened. Still panicked, her heart in her mouth, Emilia stammered her Highland Park address and explained to the driver the quickest way to get there. The enthusiasm her husband had shown some minutes before as he chatted to the Scandinavians seemed to have completely drained away. Now he huddled in the back seat like a timid boy, stealing glances at Emilia. He was carrying the case she had given him thirty-one years before: a wide, soft brown leather bag, perfect for overnight trips: the same case that, according to the prison register, had been returned to him at the police station in Tucumán. Back then, Simón had three original maps on fine card in the case, the names already printed, and plastic Stabilene overlays on which to apply the geographical symbols. Emilia would have liked to ask him whether he kept the past, too, in the case, frozen, the prisoner of a time that would not go away. It had been years now since cartographers had used Stabilene overlays. Nowadays, maps were the creations of computer programs, metaphors that had no place in reality.
‘I’m not going to leave your side,’ she told him. ‘I don’t need to be back at work until Monday.’ It was Friday.
Simón stared out at the soulless monotony of suburbia, the Taco Bells and the Dunkin’ Donuts spilling fat, satisfied families onto the street, the Kinkos, the Pathmarks, the Toys R Us and the other endless, sprawling temples to consumerism. Emilia talked incessantly. ‘Ever since I moved to this country, I’ve been amazed by the food, the huge perfect-looking tomatoes, the lettuces that never wilt, the shelves of fruit that call to you like sirens as soon as you step into a grocery store. Now I understand why Disney’s Snow White was bewitched by her stepmother’s apple. A tasteless apple that brings eternal sleep. Don’t you feel that, Simón? None of the food here has any flavour to it. The stuff they sell here is a genetic fantasy, a breeding ground for every future disease.’ Every now and then, the cab driver would turn and ask, ‘Everything OK, lady? Did you say something?’ ‘No, everything’s fine.’
For a long time her husband sat, saying nothing, staring out at the bleak expressway. I have to be careful, Emilia thought. I’m desperate to make up for lost time, but maybe he’s not. I don’t want to crowd him, to pressure him. Sooner or later we’ll go back to being the people we used to be. And even if we don’t, it doesn’t matter. At least we’ll be together. A day, two days, the rest of our lives. Once that fact sank in, they would talk, tell each other all the things they had not been able to share. There was so much to tell! I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, she thought, I never gave him up for dead, not even when those three witnesses stood up in court and swore they had seen his body, tossed like garbage in some courtyard somewhere. I never stopped loving him, I was never unfaithful. All through the terrible years I knew he would come back, I searched for him, I waited, I knew. I’d almost say I won him back, but to talk about the man I love like that would be to diminish him; my Simón is not a trophy.
The sun is setting quickly; soon now the darkness will envelop them. Usually by the time Emilia leaves work at Hammond it is already dark; she has rarely had an opportunity to see the twilight, the crimson and yellow death throes of the autumn trees, the blurred shapes of the identical buildings along the expressway as they flash past. In a few moments, everything will disappear, the afternoon light, the falling leaves; everything but Simón, sitting here beside her.