Purgatory

Purgatory, the English translation of Argentinian author Tomás Eloy Martínez's Purgatorio, published in 2008, was the last novel written by Martínez before his death in 2010. It follows Emilia Dupuy, an elderly woman whose life changes after she appears to stumble across her deceased husband thirty years after his death. It has been noted for its spare, journalistic style, and unflinching portrait of the emotional effects of Argentina's “Dirty War,” which began in 1976 when a military junta headed by Jorge Videla seized power. His tenure was marked by various horrific human rights abuses, including, notably, the forced disappearances of thousands of political dissidents (known in Spanish as Desaparecidos).

Purgatory opens with a mystery: sixty-year-old Emilia Dupuy is sitting in a local restaurant in New Jersey when she spies her husband, Simón Cardoso, who disappeared three decades ago – in Argentina.
Both cartographers, Simón had disappeared while they were on a trip to map a little known area of the Argentinian countryside. At a military checkpoint, they were stopped and seized. Emilia, daughter of the Machiavellian Orestes Dupuy, a dangerous man and important agent of the ruling regime, was summarily dispatched back home against her will. She never saw her husband again.

The fact of his sudden reappearance is shocking enough, but there is something else: he looks exactly as he did at the time of his disappearance – he is young, healthy, and handsome, in the prime of his life. Emilia, understandably shocked, cannot believe her eyes. She has been searching for Simón for years.



In the second chapter, the third person narrative switches to the first person. The unnamed narrator identifies himself as the author of the story and other stories written, in the real world, by Martínez; like Martínez, he also teaches at Rutgers. The narrator is a regular presence in the novel. He identifies himself as Emilia's neighbor, who is watching her from afar. One day, after seeing her in a local grocery store, he strikes up a conversation with her, initiating a friendship.

Over time, the narrator has several interviews with Emilia, which form much of her story in the novel (although not all as he does not narrate the entire book). He learns that her father was a propagandist for the ruling regime in Argentina, and subsequently a very powerful man. He was also ruthless, casually committing his wife to a care facility and helping his son-in-law to set up a Ponzi scheme that later failed – a situation he remedied by casually shipping the son-in-law, his daughter, and their child off to the U.S. to live in hiding. They had no say in this, but their situation was preferable to that of his second son-in-law, Simón, who Emilia believes her father was responsible for “disappearing.” In many ways, Orestes can be seen as symbolic of the ruling officers of Argentina's military junta during the Dirty War.

The narrator's interviews, besides revealing small bits about him, begin over time to affect his mind. His engagement with Emilia – who may only be a figment of his imagination – forces him to face the fact that he lives in a world where people can be made to simply disappear. This causes the narrator to question his own reality. Moreover, this brings up an important point about Purgatory.



Purgatory is not an easy book to summarize as it avoids simple linearity, and even common sense, at every turn. The narrator's view of Emilia is one of the many layers through which Simón's return is filtered, a technique that allows Martínez to cushion the events of the novel in a rich ambiguity. Although inevitably many readers will find this ambiguity frustrating, it is in a way the true subject of the novel: what constitutes truth in a world where governments routinely deceive their constituents, and, to live in hope, civilians must deceive themselves?

At the end of the novel, several questions remain: how much of the narrator's story is true, and how much simply an allegorical description of that vast number of displaced Argentinians who survived the Dirty War? Martínez's refusal to tie up the loose ends in a story replete with loose ends can only be read as a statement on the power of propaganda and delusion in Dirty War-era Argentina – one that continues to ring with relevance in a modern age where the lines between fact and fiction are often difficult to discern. Purgatory is also one of a relatively small number of novels about Argentina's Dirty War available in English.