‘So your father knew where you were?’
‘No. He’d been putting money in my account for months, though I never asked him for anything. He just did it, like he always did. To him, I was just something that bought and spent. Caracas unsettled me. I felt strange, as though I’d just arrived in Luanda or Nauru. The city centre was teeming with hawkers and office workers speaking some sort of onomatopoeic language in which I could only make out scraps of Spanish. In travel agencies and cafes and countless discount shops I asked for directions to the Centro Médico and every time I was sent off in a different direction, to some remote area: Antímano, Boleíta, El Silencio, Propatria. I had so much trouble finding the place I began to wonder if it really existed. I mentioned La Trinidad to an assistant in a clothes shop and she said that she thought there was a big clinic out there that dealt with infectious diseases. I decided to take a chance. I hailed a cab and the driver refused to take me, as did the next four or five taxis. They said that it was too far, that they’d have to drive out through the dark hills. When I finally did manage to persuade a driver, I realised how dangerous it was. La Trinidad is about fifteen kilometres from the Plaza Bolívar, at the end of a tangle of winding streets perched on a cliff overlooking a ravine. The taxi’s engine coughed and sputtered, but it kept going. By the time we arrived it was almost midnight. The duty nurse took pity on me; she checked the computer for patients recently admitted or discharged. No one named Simón Cardoso appeared on the list and she went back several years.’
‘It was a hoax. Like Rio.’
‘I didn’t think so at the time. At the time I didn’t even realise that Rio had been a set-up. I hadn’t had anything to eat for hours and I fainted. When I came round, I asked for Nurse Coromoto. The only person by that name who worked at the clinic was in the accounts department. I assumed I’d come to the wrong hospital. It was the logical explanation. Why would anyone go to the trouble of phoning me from Caracas in the middle of the night to tell me the one lie that could persuade me to leave Rio. What difference did it make whether I was in Brazil or Venezuela?’
‘Your father again. Do you know why he was doing it?’
‘No. Maybe to torment me, to keep me away. He didn’t trust me.’
Sitting in Toscana listening to Emilia it seemed to me she was three distinct women, first, the woman who was gravely telling me about her tragic past, dwarfed by her father’s looming shadow but determined not to be cowed, not to allow this dark force to destroy her will to survive. Next, the woman who wore white-and-purple-patterned false nails that made her slender fingers look unspeakably vulgar. And a third, who complemented the other two — the first perhaps more than the second — an intelligent woman who would recite the poems of Gonzalo Rojas and John Ashbery, who recited Marianne Moore’s zoological creatures drawing out the words until they became disconnected from reality, until they were no more than words: we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat. a tireless wolf under a tree.
‘It’s easy to get lost in Caracas,’ I said to her. ‘When I lived there, there were lots of clinics and neighbourhoods called Trinidad: Lomas de la Trinidad, Hacienda de la Trinidad, Trinidad Santísima.’
‘I found that out in the weeks that followed. I rented a cheap apartment in Chacaíto, the only part of the city with sidewalks and cafes. Every morning at seven o’clock I’d set off on my tour of hospitals and clinics looking for Simón. I didn’t always manage to get help. It was just before Christmas and people were in no mood to hear about other people’s misfortunes. I told my story to the nurses and the doctors, but they barely listened. Thousands of Argentinians had come to Caracas before me, all telling the same story. After a few weeks it occurred to me to print flyers with Simón’s photo and stick them up in the kiosks around Sabana Grande in case someone recognised him. The few people who got in touch wanted me to give them money, wanted me to come alone. They were con artists pure and simple. I was taken in by some of them and frittered away the last of my savings.’
‘You could have got a job. It was possible to get work back then.’
‘I did, I applied to be a cartographer with the Venezuelan Oil Company and they gave me the curious job of naming the intricate network of roads carved into the hills around the city like an amphitheatre. I spent my mornings walking up endless flights of steps, losing myself in the winding lanes that led to barns or sawmills, to storehouses of cardboard, carefully noting down the nicknames given them by locals, mostly names related to local characters: Iván el Cobero, Paloma Mojada, Coño Verde, La Cangrejera, things like that. What had been a series of dotted lines, an undocumented circulatory system, I drew together with a skein of words. I divided my time between this hare-brained task and my trips to the hospitals. I could feel Simón slipping through my fingers, but at night, as soon as I fell asleep, he appeared in my dreams. I was reading a lot of Swedenborg at the time, and took to heart his idea that human beings are merely “cyphers”, a vestige of the writings of God which allows us to be other, to be elsewhere, if God should decide that what He has written means something different. More than once I went to the Cinemateca de Caracas to see Hitchcock’s Vertigo, with Kim Novak as a ghost so carnal that you accept her death precisely because it is an oxymoron. But the true corpse in the movie is obviously James Stewart, a man who loses the woman he loves not once but twice. I couldn’t bear to be Stewart, I couldn’t bear to lose Simón a second time. I would have been better off forgetting, but I realised that I would never be able to forget. I had grown used to being alone, to fending for myself, to ignoring the sexual innuendos of the men of Caracas who didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word “no”. Like I said, I lived only to find him.
‘In the Cinemateca, a film critic came up to me on the pretext of talking about Hitchcock. He was the first man I’d found attractive since Simón, the only one I might have fallen in love with. When he looked at me, it was as though I was the only woman on the planet; he devoured me with his eyes, not sexually but with a genuine desire to discover who I was. He had that cinnamon-coloured skin so many Venezuelans have, and pale, piercing eyes. After the screening of Vertigo we went to the Ateneo de Caracas for coffee. He was careful and precise in his words. He pointed out to me the wealth of clues Hitchcock gives in the first scene that Scottie — James Stewart’s character — is impotent: the way he uses his cane, the detail that he hasn’t had a girlfriend for two years. We talked for over an hour. When we left, he invited me to go to the beach with him the following Sunday — something that in Caracas is part of a game that inevitably leads to sex — and I was on the point of accepting. In the end I told him I’d think about it and call him. When I got back to my apartment in Chacaíto, I realised I was about to make a mistake. I would have liked to be able to spend time with him, to feel less alone, but his advances would have become more persistent, in the end we would have quarrelled. There was nothing natural about my ascetic life, yet I felt completely at peace. I thought I was avoiding men for fear that Simón would reappear just as I was about to start a new relationship, but it wasn’t that. The truth was that I wasn’t available to anyone but him. Losing him had not only quenched my sexual desire, it had snuffed out all my desires. I would not be myself again until I found him. I didn’t go back to the Cinemateca and for weeks I didn’t answer my phone or go back to the beach. I don’t know how this guy found out I worked for the state oil company, but he ended up leaving me a slew of messages. Over time, the fear I might run into him subsided and I took to going back to the beach though only to more remote beaches where I thought it was less likely that I would run into him. In Oricao or Osma, I roamed wild untamed paths with the singer Soledad Bravo, who would sing as the sun was sinking into the sea, in a voice as huge and golden as the papayas.’