Challenging grim reality

“SIMÓN CARDOSO had been dead for 30 years when Emilia Dupuy, his wife, found him at lunchtime in the dining room of Trudy Tuesday.”

With this beguiling opening sentence, the late Argentinian novelist, Tomás Eloy Martinez, sets in motion a story that challenges the very foundations of reality. The result is a ghost story of sorts, but leagues advanced from the traditional type. It is also a social commentary, a soul-history, an allegory of a nation’s worst excess and most terrible secret. Perhaps more than anything else, though, it is a love story, a deep consideration of the heart’s most empowering emotion and just how long it can be expected to nourish.

In July 1976, the couple, both employed as cartographers and just recently married, are sent to Tucumán, a backwater, to chart an insignificant 10-mile stretch of road. It is a honeymoon trip, soft work in the countryside, until things turn nasty. Cardoso is arrested, and joins the ranks of Argentina’s ‘Disappeared’ as the country wages dirty war with itself.

Emelia is arrested too, but as the daughter of a senior political advisor adept at manipulating the ever-shifting military juntas, is soon released. These are still the early months of what will become one of the world’s great post-war atrocities, as so-called enemies of the state, in numbers estimated at 30,000, are snatched from the streets and made to vanish. Emelia suspects that her father is behind Simón’s disappearance but also believes completely that her husband is still alive, despite various eye-witness testimonies to the contrary. What follows is a search that spans a lifetime and a continent, led in wrong directions by whispers and promises, but always hoping, keeping faith.

Yet this is only the surface. Post-modern in its scrambled narrative and metafictional techniques, the aptly titled ‘Purgatory’ is a novel which leans heavily on the surreal.

The author has woven his web of absurdity in reflection of a world gone truly and thoroughly mad. The notion that Simón, or some chimerical rendition thereof, appears out of the great blue open in a New Jersey restaurant, not having aged a single day in the three decades since his disappearance, quickly loses its rattle of implausibility when stacked against the realisation that multitudes could and did vanish without trace before a watching world. And shadowing every page with relentless finesse is the suggestion that reality is never less or more than a matter of perception.

Long considered one of Latin America’s most imaginative writers, Eloy Martinez has, with Purgatory, produced a goodbye that is startling, tragic and never less than elegant.