‘How long was it before you realised Simón wasn’t in Caracas? In your shoes, I would have given up within a year.’
‘Five years, two months and twenty-one days. From December 15, 1983, until March 8, 1989. And if I left Venezuela, it wasn’t because I chose to. It was chance.’
The waiter at Toscana reappeared and asked if we wanted anything else. We were the only people left in the restaurant. Outside on the street, usually busy in the afternoons, there was only the hum of traffic. It was after two o’clock but Emilia seemed unaware of the time and indeed the world. In the grey flashes of light from the street I saw her as, two centuries earlier, the villagers of New Brunswick must have seen Mary Ellis: standing alone on the banks of the Raritan waiting for a man who would never come.
‘We should go,’ I said.
‘Please, can we just stay a few more minutes? Don’t leave me in the middle of the chance event that forced me to leave Caracas. The story isn’t very long. It begins with an anonymous letter. I’ve no idea how the postal system in Venezuela works these days, but back then mail was sporadic — all the more so after the Caracazo9 uprising. On the Saturday after the riots, the mood of the city was solemn. No one dared to go out for fear of another wave of violence. The post offices were all closed and yet, bizarrely, that Saturday, I received a registered letter from Buenos Aires with no return address. I opened the envelope warily. Inside, there was a cutting from a Mexican newspaper, Uno más Uno, an article by someone called Simón Cardoso. It could have been by anyone of that name, but the article — which was about the hunt for and the arrest of the head of the Mexican Petroleum Workers’ Union, a man known as “la Quina” — was illustrated with a map of Ciudad Madero on the Gulf Coast, and in the map I recognised the mistakes my husband always made with place names. I never did find out who sent me the cutting, or how they found out my address — Chela was the only person who knew it. By the time I got the letter, the article was two or three weeks old. I couldn’t wait. By then, I was deputy head of the cartography department, I was taking home twelve hundred dollars a month and managing to save five hundred. What with the chaos that followed the riots, flights took off as and when they could. I spent days sleeping on the floor at the airport. At 6 a.m. on March 8, a voice on the tannoy announced a flight departing for Mexico City, via Panama. I wept, I screamed, I invented illnesses, deaths in the family, anything so they would give me a seat. That’s how I arrived in Mexico City, as penniless as when I left Rio. With my savings suddenly worthless, I holed up in a hawkers’ guest house near Zócalo and started looking for my love all over again, though I didn’t hold out much hope. I spent more than two years chasing mirages — newspapers that had been shut down, scandal sheets that had never started up, prying into illegal agencies that created maps of Utopia for the dreamers who wanted to cross the border into the United States. I risked my life in brightly lit rooms where, with state-of-the-art computers, the finest cartographers in the world helped drug traffickers find little-travelled routes between their laboratories and their secret airstrips. I helped them out as much to boost my earnings as to gain the protection of the drug bosses who, through their contacts at immigration, could find out who entered and left Mexico.’
‘You could have stayed there.’
‘I could. But then, one morning, I woke up convinced that I would never find Simón. He was alive but he couldn’t see me. I had to stop looking for him so that he could look for me. It was a revelation. He had to come back the way he had left. I felt that that was how things were, how they had always been, and they could never be otherwise. I’d spent years and years chasing a chimera. I’d allowed myself to be led by signs dangled before me by other people rather than being led by what I felt inside. It was too late to get back the time I’d lost. But at least I could help make sure Simón could see me, draw him to me, position myself within the same orbit. Maps,’ she said. ‘If I can put myself on the same map as him, sooner or later we’re bound to meet. When I say it out loud, it sounds silly, but to me it seems self-evident. If time is the fourth dimension, who knows how many things exist that we cannot see in space — time, how many invisible realities. Maps are almost infinite, and at the same time they’re unfinished. The maps of Highland Park, for example, don’t include the eruv, they don’t include those residents who will be born tomorrow. In order to be able to see Simón, I needed to drop off — or rise above — a map, if possible every map. I was still based in Mexico City at the time. I got up, I went to Sanborns restaurant in the Casa de los Azulejos, and I started sending letters to every mapping company in the US and Canada. I wanted to get as far away as I could. If I’d been offered a job in Hawaii or Alaska, I would have taken it. Two weeks later, I got a reply from Hammond. They had a vacancy for an assistant in Maplewood, New Jersey.’
‘It’s getting late,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I was exhausted by the conversation and I still had no idea what she was trying to tell me.
‘Let’s go,’ she agreed. ‘I’m sorry for keeping you.’
I drove her back in silence. The streets of Highland Park were hung with banners advertising hot-air balloon flights, fireworks and free ice cream in Donaldson Park. The town was about to celebrate its 102nd birthday.
As we pulled into North 4th Avenue, we saw Large Lenny weaving from one sidewalk to the other carrying thick red candles that were burning his hands as they melted. He seemed insensible to the pain, staring at some fixed point in the middle distance. But however disconnected he was from the world, something had made him cry. Tears spilled silently from his eyes and followed a roundabout course to drip from his jaw. A gang of kids was following him, firing pebbles at him with elastic bands. Emilia couldn’t bear it.
‘Leave him alone,’ she shouted. ‘Can’t you see he’s crying?’
‘I’m not crying,’ the giant corrected her. ‘I forgive them, for they know not what they do.’
‘Are you OK, Lenny?’ Emilia comforted him. ‘You want me to take you home?’
The question was ridiculous, no one knew where Large Lenny lived. Everyone assumed one of the local synagogues gave him shelter, but it was impossible to know which since he visited all of them.
‘I thirst,’ he answered.
We had arrived at the door to Emilia’s house and she went upstairs to her apartment to get him a bottle of cold water. A couple of neighbours were peering out of their windows. In the distance, I heard the announcer’s voice from the sports field. Some high-school students were playing a match.
‘Blow out those candles, Lenny,’ I said. ‘You’re burning your hands.’
‘They have to be lit. For the res’rection.’
When Emilia brought the water, the giant set the candles down on the porch and drank straight from the bottle, the water coursing noisily down his cavernous throat.
‘Large Lenny thinks someone’s come back to life,’ the downstairs neighbour informed Emilia. The guy gave a little laugh, and from some nearby balconies came a chorus of jeers.