Free Purgatory by Tomás Eloy Martínez Page A

rest of our lives. Once that fact sank in, they would talk, tell each other all the things they had not been able to share. There was so much to tell! I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, she thought, I never gave him up for dead, not even when those three witnesses stood up in court and swore they had seen his body, tossed like garbage in some courtyard somewhere. I never stopped loving him, I was never unfaithful. All through the terrible years I knew he would come back, I searched for him, I waited, I knew . . . I’d almost say I won him back, but to talk about the man I love like that would be to diminish him; my Simón is not a trophy.
    The sun is setting quickly; soon now the darkness will envelop them. Usually by the time Emilia leaves work at Hammond it is already dark; she has rarely had an opportunity to see the twilight, the crimson and yellow death throes of the autumn trees, the blurred shapes of the identical buildings along the expressway as they flash past. In a few moments, everything will disappear, the afternoon light, the falling leaves; everything but Simón, sitting here beside her.
    Always as she leaves the offices at Hammond, even on the worst nights – when it rains and snows and when the ambulances wail incessantly – she is met by evangelical preachers chanting their litanies – O Lord, O Lord – as they wave collection boxes at passers-by. Their ominous chanting still plagues her as she lays her head on her pillow because the sounds of the day always return to her at night as though they had retreated and were waiting for this moment to spread through the smooth surfaces of her head: the sounds of this day and other distant days. She would like to rid herself of these futile memories, but she has had no choice but to carry them with her wherever she goes. Once she was unaware of them. Time has brought them back. As the years passed, the memories receded. Now, with Simón sitting next to her, she has nothing to fear.
    ‘What a perfect day,’ she says, not expecting him to reply.
    And indeed he does not reply. Barely fifteen hours ago, she was sitting with Nancy Frears in her apartment on North 4th Avenue watching The Ghost and Mrs Muir on television – an old romantic comedy in which Gene Tierney, who is recently widowed, moves with her daughter into a haunted house by the sea and falls in love with the ghost. Nancy had left at about eleven o’clock and Emilia had read for a while, some poems by Gonzalo Rojas which moved her with their fierce eroticism: Lowing, bellowing female my beautiful / love entering God, made animal / anointing the brain of her old man/ torrents running over him . The words had inflamed her; she still has life enough in her to be aroused, to masturbate, to belong to herself as she has never wanted to belong to anyone else.
     
    ‘I never stopped loving you, Emilia, not for a single day,’ says Simón. The roar of the expressway drowns out his barely audible voice. ‘I never stopped loving you either, amor . Not for a single day.’ Her mind is racing, there is so much to think about before they get home. But perhaps it is better to stay calm, to wait, to see how they feel being together. They have said that they still love each other. It is not much, and yet it is everything. She is afraid that Simón will be disappointed when he sees her as she is, the crumpled scrap of paper adversity has made of her.
    As they turn off Route 22 to the even more arid plain of the 287, lined on either side by hotels vast as cemeteries (who but a ghost would think to stay out here in the middle of nowhere?) some ten or twelve miles from her house, she realises that she smells, that she is dirty, that her hair is thick with sweat. She showered before leaving home that morning, shaved her armpits the night before, and yet she exudes smells that only a second shower can staunch. If all goes well, maybe she could ask her husband to take a bath with her? No. She glances at him, so