Nancy had survived a stultifying marriage. Sid Frears, her late husband, had been a travelling salesman selling synthetic adhesive who left her alone for months at a time. After fifteen years of marriage, pancreatic cancer had carried him off. Nancy had not the slightest interest in changing her life. Sid’s life insurance policy, invested at a fixed interest during the boom years, ensured her an annual income of $22,000. She decided she did not need to work. Her only work was voluntary: from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she worked at the library. ‘What would I want to go out to work for?’ she said. ‘So I don’t feel alone? I’m not that kind of person, Millie. I like my own company. I read People magazine every week, I listen to the Beach Boys, and if I want to fart, I fart. There’s no one to complain.’
More than once, Emilia caught her staring at the photo of Simón on her beside table. Comparing him to Sid and shaking her head. ‘You had a good thing going there, huh, Millie? Was he good in bed?’ Emilia would have liked to tell her that sex with Simón in her imagination was better than it had been in reality, but this was something she would tell no one, something she did not dare admit even to herself. Sometimes, when they got back from bingo, Nancy would gaze at Simón’s broad forehead, his pale, honest eyes, his firm nose.
‘He looks just like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, don’t you think, hon? If he hadn’t died, he’d look like Clint in The Bridges of Madison County now.’
On the Friday when Emilia met Simón at Trudy Tuesday, she had left home at 7 a.m. as she did every morning. It took her forty minutes to drive from her apartment on North 4th Avenue to the Hammond offices in Springfield industrial park. She worried about avoiding the inevitable accidents on Garden State Parkway, the storms that could break suddenly over a two-mile area while in the distance the sun was still shining. Like a taxi driver, she drove with the radio tuned to 1010 AM, which kept her up to date on traffic tailbacks.
The suburbs were endless, indistinguishable, and if, as she sometimes did, she allowed her mind to wander she would somehow end up driving through a strip mall with branches of Wal-Mart, Pep Boys, Pathmark and Verizon Wireless laid out in an arc, beneath louring skies of identical clouds with identical squawking birds. Only the leaves of the walnut trees showed any imagination, distinguishing themselves in autumn as they fell.
Sometimes at the office, as her screen glowed with the colours of maps, print priorities and legends, Emilia would sit daydreaming about Simón whom she had not seen die. The death of a loved one is devastating. How much more devastating, then, was the death of someone you could not be sure was dead? How can you lose something not yet found? Emilia had seen the glimmer of an answer in a poem by Idea Vilariño dedicated to the man who abandoned her: I am no more than I now / forever, and you / now / to me / no more than you. Now you are not / and some day soon / I won’t know where you live / with whom / or whether you remember / You will never hold me / as you did that night / never / I will never touch you / I will not see you die.
Some years previously, someone had told her about a group of geographers who spent their winters in Nuuk, Greenland, mapping the effects of global warming and she had imagined Simón was on that expedition. It was a foolish fantasy, but for a few months, it had been a consolation. In the notebook where she jotted down her feelings, she wrote something that still pained her today: ‘If he came back, I would be able to see him die.’
During the Trial of the Juntas against the military leaders of the dictatorship, three separate witnesses claimed to have seen Simón’s body in the courtyard of a police station in Tucumán, his body showing clear signs of having been tortured, a bullet hole between his eyes. Emilia was in Caracas during the trials and did not know whether to believe the story or not. The witnesses seemed genuine, but their testimonies differed. She had been with her husband when he was arrested, her own testimony would have been very different from theirs: they had been arrested by mistake and released two days later, Simón a couple of hours before Emilia. She had seen Simón’s signature in the prison register indicating that he had left. Her father, Dr Orestes Dupuy, had checked the fact with the military governor himself.
To Emilia, her version was an indisputable fact. It was because she believed it that she did not set foot outside their San Telmo apartment in Buenos Aires for months, waiting for her husband to come home, waiting for him to call. She felt a terrible emptiness, spent the days staring out the window as the hours passed, learning by heart the relief map of the buildings, the shapes of the people moving behind their curtains. Her father had tried to persuade her to move back to the family home, but Emilia wanted things to be exactly as they had been when Simón was there. Every morning, she went to work at the Argentina Automobile Club, every evening when she came home, she made dinner, never forgetting to set two places at the table.
From time to time, she got distressing letters from people who claimed to have seen Simón on a street in Bogotá or Mexico City and demanded money in return for more information. There were phone calls, too, from people who told her that Simón was dead. These contradictory stories left her unable to sleep. She was still hopelessly in love and, what was worse, she realised it was a love that had no purpose, no object. Almost a year after Simón’s disappearance, by which time his name was barely mentioned, Emilia decided to distract herself and after much hesitation went to the Cine Iguazú to see Ettore Scola’s A Special Day, a film about a mother of six living in a seedy tenement building and her neighbour, a homosexual radio announcer, who care for each other as best they can while all the other tenants have left to go and take part in the parade to honour Hitler’s visit to Rome in 1935. The film had been running for about an hour when the air conditioning cut out. The afternoon was so humid that now the images were shrouded in a vapour that made them seem unreal. The air in the cinema became unbreathable, there was a sound of whistling, of feet stamping. Some of the audience got up and left. A woman who seemed to have just arrived came over and sat in the seat next to Emilia so abruptly she knocked over her handbag. As Emilia leaned down to pick it up, the woman hissed: ‘They murdered your husband in Tucumán just like they did mine. My husband died under torture. Yours got five bullets in his chest and one between the eyes to finish him off. We can’t go on like this, like nothing’s happened.’ ‘I don’t believe you,’ Emilia said. ‘You’re just a subversive.’ ‘I’m doing you a favour,’ the woman insisted, ‘I’m not asking you to do anything. In this country, we’re all dead already.’ At that moment, the house lights went out again, the air conditioning came on and the film started up. Somebody in the row behind them whistled. The woman got up and was lost in the darkness, Emilia moved to another seat where she sat, her whole body rigid, until the film was over.
More than once she had heard people tell her father that political subversives — who had been all but wiped out — were prepared to tell people anything they wanted to hear if they thought they could win them over to the cause. Obviously, this woman was one of them and, although Emilia dismissed what she had said as lies, she was haunted for a long time by the image of Simón’s body lying broken in a courtyard like a dog. She couldn’t stop herself picturing him lying with a bullet hole in his head, black with flies and with soot from the chimneys of the local sugar mills. The image went with her everywhere, as though her whole being was subsumed within this dead man whom no one had mourned, no one had buried. But she remained convinced Simón was still alive. Maybe he had lost his memory, maybe he was in a hospital and unable to get in touch.