Nora was photographed in widow’s weeds for Gente. The title of the article — in which Dr Dupuy’s hand was evident — was borrowed from Quevedo: ‘Love Constant Beyond Death’. Through her lawyers, Nora declared her intention to seek control and use of her husband’s lands until he should return from space. After speedy proceedings, the courts ruled in her favour declaring the case ‘Another close encounter of the third kind’.
Spielberg’s film of the same title was causing a furore in cinemas at the time. Spielberg’s aliens communicated by means of musical notes and — unlike those at Encrucijada or the Valle de la Luna — did not abduct objects or people. But whatever the form and the language of the alien visitors, in Argentina their existence was accepted as an article of faith. On the cover of the Dimensión Desconocida, the actor Fabio Zerpa formulated a question which the priest echoed in his Sunday sermon: ‘Are we so vain as to believe we are the only children of God in the universe?’
The affair between Emilia’s father and Balmaceda had been going on for about a year at the time Bonavena was murdered. The World Cup was coming up and women — with the exception of models and strippers — completely disappeared from the news. La Balmaceda was inconsolable at being suddenly eclipsed by virtue of being a widow and because of her lack of interest in the military junta. Her last novel had been published in 1974 and she was not writing another. Early in June, shortly before the start of the World Cup, she made another bid for fame, publishing an article in the Somos offering to ‘motivate’ — this was the word she used — the Argentinian players in the changing rooms and the gyms where they trained. The article, entitled ‘Country Comes First’ made her a laughing stock. Emilia’s father felt so humiliated by his lover’s blunder that he stopped taking her calls. Balmaceda wasted little time in replacing him with a tennis champion, posing with him next to his tennis trophies for the press, and later with a ship’s captain who eventually ended up with the land that had belonged to the husband now lost in space.
She firmly resisted the mortifications of age. In photographs in Gente, day by day, month by month, it was possible to watch as her laughter lines, the bags under her eyes, the folds of her double chin, gradually disappeared; watch as her eyes became bigger, her lips fuller, as her tits and her ass defied the effects of gravity. Once the cycle was complete and she had recovered her lost youth, Nora stumbled on another profitable idea, one which once again sold thousands of books. In flights of mystical rapture she described a wrestling tournament between the angels: the seraphim who had six wings, and the cherubim who had only four. She wrote pages and pages of incomprehensible drivel (which people nonetheless reverently quoted by heart) which, she said, were dictated to her by beneficent angels lately returned from visiting God. Her greatest success came when she announced that she had witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary on the plains of Esteco, 1300 kilometres north-east of Buenos Aires. A prosperous city had been established there in the late sixteenth century, but by the time Nora Balmaceda drove past with a military escort in search of angels it was a barren wilderness. She had read somewhere that Esteco had been razed by the earthquake of 1692, and the winds of God’s wrath had wiped out its heathen inhabitants. On the banks of the Río Pasaje, where a six-foot menhir marks the spot of the former settlement, Nora had met a goatherd, a little girl who was visited by the Mother of God at dawn every Wednesday. The little girl told Nora that the Virgin appeared as a form without a face, a gentle voice, enfolded in a mantle of light. These visions, wrote Nora, could only be of the Blessed Virgin. ‘Our Lady has come back to this world to put an end to the brutality of atheist extremism and to redeem those who are prepared to repent.’ In her conversations with the little shepherdess, the Virgin had asked that a maximum security basilica (a basilica, not a chapel, Nora insited) be built nearby where she would personally cleanse misguided souls and guide them to heaven. The magazine in which her article was published saw its circulation triple and before the place could be overrun with penitent pilgrims, the junta dispatched sick prisoners from jails and ordered them to dig the foundations of this new temple. Two months after first meeting the little goatherd, Nora wrote that the girl had watched, overjoyed, as the prisoners ascended into heaven on a carpet of light. On a local radio station the prophet was heard to say, ‘Angels took them up to heaven.’
Nora Balmaceda basked for a little longer in her rapturous success, dealt with the avalanche of foreign publishers begging to translate her books. In the midst of this frenzied whirl of success, she committed suicide by taking cyanide. She left no letter, no explanation and no will. Before she lay down to die, she put on a white organza blouse and made herself up as though going to a ball. On the nightstand there were two other sodium cyanide tablets. Her faded beauty was intact. No one claimed her body. There had been no sightings of her husband since his abduction by aliens and no relatives appeared. Dr Dupuy gave one of his assistants the task of having her buried with modesty and discretion. Later, he called a bishop friend of his and asked that the Church take possession of all her worldly goods.
Stories that would chill the blood continued to circulate about the disappearances that took place during those years. In old bookshops in Buenos Aires, it is still possible to find copies of magazines telling the strange stories — written in the curious mixture of hypocrisy and collusion common to the period — of people who sailed out on the Río de la Plata only to vanish, leaving their abandoned boats adrift. Many, like Nora Balmaceda’s lost husband, were landowners. Before they set out on their last journey, these people bequeathed their lands and factories to the military leaders who had been their friends and protectors. The courts were inundated by lawsuits from siblings and spouses left penniless, but none was successful since the bodies of those missing never appeared. Where there is nothing to see, no one existed, government spokesmen explained. Such doublespeak has since slipped into ordinary speech having been a staple of journalism. Where there is nothing to see, no one existed — these expressions were repeated over and over on the radio and on television. You can sometimes hear them still.