Purgatory Read Online Free PDF

authorities. ‘Sometimes my jokes are in bad taste,’ he said, ‘and this time I have stupidly contributed to the campaign of vilification against our country. I am unworthy to live among you. The people of Argentina are a peaceful people, and I failed to respect that peace. To joke about the disappeared is to play into the hands of the subversives.’ One of the ship’s officers, who had seen the apology on television, mentioned it over breakfast. ‘The poor bastard had circles under his eyes so black that they looked like they were painted on,’ he said. ‘ Hijo de puta ,’ commented a deeply tanned older woman sitting next to Emilia. ‘People like that don’t deserve to live. If I were a man, I’d kill every last one of them.’ Everyone went on eating breakfast in silence.
    The inchoate love Emilia had felt on her wedding night cured itself the following day in the narrow uncomfortable berth of the cruise ship put out of Recife. When Simón’s hand brushed her belly as he stowed the luggage, she felt a smouldering desire she had kept buried deep inside her ever since she had her first period. Now, finally, she could satisfy it without virginal coyness or Catholic guilt. She fell back on the berth and begged Simón to rid her once and for all of her cursed hymen. But Simón did not feel the same urgency. He wanted to prolong the moment, to separate it into languid fragments of desire, to enter Emilia’s body with his every sense. ‘Let’s take it gently, amor ,’ he said. ‘It’s your first time.’ She was impatient and couldn’t understand why her husband wanted to delay the moment of penetration. ‘No, not gently, do it now,’ she urged him. Was this Christian? She wanted nothing in that moment as much as she wanted to be hurt, defiled, broken. When she had been a little girl of seven or eight, the family cook had explained to her that losing her virginity would be like dying. That the pain she felt would be the same pain she would feel when she died, but that with it would come all of God’s pleasures.
    She allowed Simón to undress her; to discover for the first time the pinkish birthmark, round as a ten centavo coin, on her right buttock; to linger over the small folds of cellulite that had appeared on one of her thighs – while still she was a virgin, she had thought to herself, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin with cellulite – to trace with his tongue the almost invisible line of hair that ran from her navel to the centre of her being. Her eyes were closed when he, now naked, parted her lips with his tongue and mingled his saliva with hers. Feeling his gentleness, smelling his scent, Emilia’s heart began to race, she had never felt it pound so hard, she didn’t think it could take much more, but it was beating harder still when Simón slipped his tongue between her thighs.
    ‘Don’t . . .’ she said. ‘It’s salty.’ He looked up from between her legs and smiled. ‘How do you know it’s salty?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, he buried himself in her depths until her inner labia gripped him. ‘Now, please . . .’ Emilia whimpered. ‘Give it to me now, please.’ Simón penetrated her gently, moving towards her hymen, more gently than she had imagined. She heard a brief moan and then the surge of his ejaculation overcame him.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wanted it to last a lifetime.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she reassured him. ‘We can do it again in a little while.’
    ‘I’ve hurt you. You’re bleeding.’
    ‘Good . . . I’m supposed to bleed. I won’t even feel it tomorrow. And besides, like you said, we’ve got our whole lives together.’
    After a while, Emilia shifted towards him, kissed his throat, behind his ear. Without saying a word, she took his penis and stroked it delicately.
    ‘I can’t,’ Simón said. ‘It’s got a life of its own, this thing. Sometimes it stays limp like that for hours.’
    ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, don’t think about