Read Online Purgatory by Tomás Eloy Martínez - Free Book Online

hugging the walls. The stillness was so deliberate it seemed artificial. Across the boulevard that divided the north of the city from the south hung a banner showing a photograph of three strapping, dishevelled, thuggish young men and, underneath, the words: We will not allow the extremists to destroy the country. Help us eliminate them . A block further on was a poster with an illustration of a hard-working broom bearing the legend, in blue and white: Order and Cleanliness. Death to Subversion .
    Order and Cleanliness was one of her father’s propaganda slogans for the government Emilia remembered. How many other slogans had he penned that she was not aware of? God, Country, Family she knew was his, though it belonged to everyone now.
    She was taken to the police station where they fingerprinted her and made her sign a piece of paper admitting that Simón had rented the jeep. ‘Under instructions from the Automobile Club Argentina’ Emilia explained in a note at the bottom. Flanked by two guards, she was led down into a vast basement lined on both sides with a row of cells from which there came not the slightest sound. Emilia was locked up in the furthest cell. As soon as the guards left her, she lost all track of time. It took a long while for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. She could make out a cot bed bolted to the floor; in the corner was a bucket from which came the stench of geological strata of urine. The wall opposite was dizzyingly high, at least eight metres, and converged with the wall behind her meaning the cell was shaped like a pyramid. At some point, a guard passed a jug of water through the bars and she gulped it down in one breathless swallow. Her throat was dry, filled with sand and fear.
    Just as she was about to fall asleep, a ghostly glow jolted her awake again. On the high wall opposite, some invisible machine was projecting dreamlike images. The pictures came and went, disappearing like shooting stars. She thought for a moment that she was seeing things and remembered a line from Dante she had read at school: Poi piovve dentro all’alta fantasia . It was true: it was raining in her imagination, but raining so hard that the forms and shapes blurred and melted almost as soon as they appeared. She saw Simón rushing headlong into a fire, but that too was one of Dante’s images. She saw a newborn baby being strangled with an electrical cord. The umbilical cord was still attached, and the baby’s face was crumpled in a rictus of terrible pain. The image swelled as though about to encroach on the real world; it grew larger and larger before dissolving into a poster whose typeface reminded her of old cinema newsreels: Baby butchered by subversive criminals . She saw the three persons of the Holy Trinity devouring one another: the Father devouring the Son, and the resulting two-headed monster devouring the dove that was the Holy Spirit, then the dove taking flight and, using his beak as a scythe, beheading the other two. And then she saw herself watching these things, and it was only then that she realised the images were not inside her head, that somewhere there was a hidden projector, though she could not understand why. Who would spend money creating such images? Could anyone else see them?
    Every so often the images were repeated, always in the same order, as though part of an infinite loop. At dawn – she assumed it must be dawn by now – they vanished like flotsam carried out on the tide. She tried to sleep, but a radio somewhere nearby kept repeating the lottery results over and over. ‘Two thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight. Eight hundred thousand pesos,’ the presenter announced. ‘Two thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight. Eight hundred thousand pesos,’ echoed the darkness at the end of the corridor. Reality retreated, becoming more and more remote, its place taken up by the only two senses Emilia trusted: smell and touch. But were these senses free or were they too prisoners of