Jarrett’s music circles around the same clusters of notes, sometimes lingering on a single note, and outside, the night itself has stopped moving; only inside Emilia, as in a dark heart of a volcano, life still ebbs and flows.
She can’t remember Simón ever fucking her the way he is fucking her now. Her body is ablaze, she arches herself, raises her body so he can penetrate all the way to her throat, she licks him, devours him, and what she feels is so intense, so overpowering, that she feels coursing from her tongue the foam from the tongue with which he kisses her. Emilia soars so high that Simón’s fires reach deeper than her body, they are fires of pure sex, flames that come and go leaving no ashes. By now she has lost count of how many times she’s come, they’ve climaxed, she’s orgasmed, how do they say it in other languages, ancora, more, encore, ainda mas, don’t go, querido mío, don’t leave. On and on until the first breath of morning seeps through the window, on and on until she can’t go on any more and clutches the pillow wet with tears.
The Jarrett concert stays with her all night. The CD ends but she does not notice. She knows the slow final cadences by heart and so the melody slips unnoticed towards silence. She hugs Simón to her, fearful that reality will fade out like the music. The room is still dark, the faint brightness she saw when she woke disappears. Perhaps we can’t see the sun, she thinks. A dirty grey day like most of the days this autumn. She doesn’t know whether or not to get up. She allows herself to be carried along by the joy of knowing that he is sleeping here, in the room, and that he will not leave her again to waste her life in the maps at Hammond. Why wake him? This body lying next to her is the only map she needs to get her bearings in time. And thinking about it, what need has she of time when time has folded in on itself and now fits inside the body of her beloved. When she first set out to look for him she could not have imagined that there could have been so many circles in her purgatory, nor that when she reached one another would appear above it, and then another. Her eternal noon was an everlasting purgatory.
Now, I am the one wondering where Emilia has gone. Nancy Frears phoned the police, who are thrilled to be presented with a mystery in this town without mysteries. Two officers accompanied by the chief of police in person broke down the door of her North 4th Avenue apartment and found not a living soul. The bed was made, the books and CDs neatly organised, the hi-fi and the computer had not even been unplugged. There were no signs of a break-in or a robbery. The only conspicuous detail was that Emilia had not taken out the garbage bag in the kitchen and by now it was beginning to smell. On the table were the remains of some sushi, a seaweed salad and some Chinese fortune cookies. Nancy phoned Chela, but, according to her answering machine, the Echarri family were out of the country. I’m the last person to have seen Emilia and the police asked me to come in and make a statement. As I explained, a fat cop took notes, stopping from time to time to eat the half-finished pizza oozing grease all over the cardboard delivery box. The officer wanted to know if Emilia had been suicidal, suffered from some terminal illness or mentioned that she might be going on holiday. The interview lasted half an hour, and before he handed me the statement to sign, he asked if there was anything else I could think of that might be helpful. I was surprised to hear myself telling him that thirty years ago in my country many people disappeared without leaving a trace and that Emilia’s husband had been one of the disappeared. ‘She never gave up hope of finding him again,’ I said. ‘She could never bring herself to accept that he might be dead.’ ‘What about you, what do you think?’ asked the officer. ‘I believe he’s dead. Emilia’s not the only person to hope that someone she loves will come back from the dead; there are thousands like her, clinging to an illusion. Imagine the pain of not knowing where your daughter is, not knowing who took her. And if she were dead, imagine the desolation of not knowing in what dark corner of the world her body is.’ ‘In this country, it is the job of the police to find out what happened,’ said the officer. ‘We are paid by the state to do just that. This woman’s disappearance might be a crime, a kidnapping, she might have committed suicide, she could have gone away to join a sect. We can rule out kidnapping, since it’s been several days and there’s been no ransom demand. We can rule out the idea that she’s been taken by gangsters running a prostitution ring, since, quite frankly, the woman is too old. Also she has no priors and there’s no reason to suspect she was a drug mule or involved in trafficking. She has a perfect résumé, no offences, no problems at work, she got on well with her neighbours. It makes no sense,’ the officer went on. ‘Here, people don’t just disappear into thin air. Give it a week or two and we’ll find out what happened.’ ‘It doesn’t always work out that way,’ I said. ‘You see photos of missing people on milk cartons all the time, kids, old people.’ ‘Most of them have mental health problems,’ insisted the policeman. I said goodbye, left a card with my details on his desk and asked him to get in touch if they found out anything.
The following day, Nancy Frears insisted on seeing me; she asked me to come by her apartment on Montgomery Street. The minute I walked through the door, she threw herself into my arms and started sobbing. ‘Where can poor Millie have gone? Have you heard anything?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘I don’t know anything either. I drop by the chief of police’s office as often as I can. No one there wants to say anything, but you get to hear things around town. If you were a woman, you’d understand. You hear people gossiping at the salon, in the drugstore, over at Jerusalem Pizza. They say someone saw her on the street talking to herself, dressed up like she was going to a party. Someone saw her on Saturday morning at dawn taking the train to Newark. What would she be doing up at that hour? Her car still hasn’t turned up. They’ve issued a description of the car and the licence plate to all the toll routes and hotels for two hundred miles. All the patrol cars have the details too, of course. We should get some news soon. She has to eat, to sleep, to take a bath. Can you wait a minute? I need to go to the bathroom. It’s my stomach, I get gas, you know. Never gives me a minute’s peace.’
She reappears with a file of clippings. Emilia gave them to her to look after a while ago and she shows them to me to see if I recognise anything. I see the pamphlet again, the samples of Stabilene film which cartographers carried with them everywhere thirty years ago. Inside the pamphlet I see a copy of the ‘Rules concerning the making of cartographic documents for the Automobile Club’ typed on an old-fashioned typewriter. I don’t stop to read it since the predictable articles in it have long since expired. What surprises me is the carefully hand-drawn page at the end. On it there are three squares splitting off like tree branches from a central square. Each space is filled with elegantly calligraphed text. One of them reads: ‘Choice and selection of the nomenclature for the colour blue’, and the uppermost square reads: ‘Rough sketch to scale of Ruta 77 as far as the Abra River’. I assume that it is Simón’s handwriting, large, meticulous well-spaced letters. If Simón did write it, it would explain why Emilia has treasured this useless, yellowing scrap of paper all these years. Or perhaps she keeps it because it is the last vestige of his contact with the world: this sheet of paper, his fingerprints on the steering wheel of the jeep, the sketch of the Río El Abra that was taken from them in Huacra, the tremulous signature on the prison register. As I touch the sheet, I barely feel it, it is as though the paper is air; of course I know that my senses are gradually disappearing, I know that my eyesight is failing, that my ears hear only what they want to hear: Kiri Te Kanawa singing Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, the voices of my sons, Keith Jarrett playing the piano, the murmur of snow as it falls.