Reading Notes: Desaparecido
This week’s story in The New Yorker, Guillermo MartÃnez’s unassuming but extraordinary “Vast Hell” (translated by Albert Manguel), takes its title from an Argentine proverb, printed as an epigram: “A small town is a vast hell.” It doesn’t take much imagination to comprehend the proverb; for most people in history, small towns have been inescapable reservoirs of unforgotten crimes and misdemeanors. Judgment is eternally ongoing, salvation not to be had on this earth.
Mr MartÃnez has set his story in a small, presumably fictional, Argentinian town, situated beside the sea, but the locals’ attention is focused on outsiders, as it will be when outsiders intrude. And Mr MartÃnez focuses on the attention, not on its object. We never really know what the barber’s wife, known as “the French Woman,” and the scruffy young hitchhiker got up to in the boy’s tent not far from the widow Espinosa’s house. We hear plenty of the widow’s outrage at the lovers’ trysts, and even more about her conviction that only foul play can explain their disappearance.
The disappearances register in what will turn out to be a telling way.
One day, we realized that the boy and the French Woman had disappeared. I mean, the boy didn’t seem to be around anymore, and no one had seen the French Woman, either in the barbershop or on the pathway down to the beach, where she liked to go for walks. The first thing we all thought was that they’d run away together, and, maybe because running away always has a romantic ring to it, or because the dangerous temptress was now out of reach, the women seemed willing to forgive the French Woman for this. It was obvious that there was someting wrong in that marriage, they’d say. Cerviño was too old for her, and also the boy was very handsome. … And with secretive giggles they’d confess that maybe they would have done the same.
But the widow won’t have it: she’s convinced that Cerviño murdered the lovers.
In the meantime, Espinosa’s widow seemed to have gone out of her mind. She went about digging holes everywhere, armed with a ridiculous child’s shovel, hollering at the top of her voice that she wouldn’t rest until she found the bodies.
And one day she found them.
She found bodies, that is. When we have finished the story — when, perhaps, we have read it a second time (“Vast Hell” is not long), we savor Mr MartÃnez’s meditation on curiosity. Another widow might have attacked the dunes in search of very different bodies, but far from enlisting the local inspector’s help in finding them, she would have joined them instead — as indeed does a little dog, who, like Espinosa’s widow, can’t let go. Crime passionel is one thing; political atrocity quite another.
Before heading back to town, he ordered us not to speak to anyone about what we had seen, and jotted down, one by one, the names of all who had been there.
Perhaps when we re-read the opening sentence —
Often, when the grocery story is empty and all you can hear is the buzzing of flies, I think of that young man whose name we never knew and whom no one in town ever mentioned again.
— what we hear is the silence of unmarked graves.