Purgatory Read Online Free PDF Page B

it. You can do it.’
    Simón rummaged in a suitcase, took out a cassette deck and pressed Play. From the machine, in spite of the poor quality of the recording, came a sequence of simple piano chords of extraordinary purity, music that sounded like nothing else in the world.
    ‘When I’m alone, Keith Jarrett’s improvisations get me excited. With you, they’ll get me even more excited.’
    ‘It’s beautiful,’ Emilia smiled. ‘You’re saying he’s improvising this?’
    ‘From beginning to end.’
    ‘It’s so perfect. He must have the whole melody memorised.’
    ‘No. This is Jarrett’s great discovery. He turned up at the Köln Opera House without the faintest idea of what he was going to play. He was tired, he’d spent a whole week playing concerts and he was surprised to find that the music came to him in waves. Before that night, he was a great jazz pianist, but that night he created a genre all his own. His music is a constant, an absolute. The coughing from the audience, the creak of the piano, nothing is prepared. Maybe Bach or Mozart created galaxies like this, improvised harmonies that drift now through the darkness of time, but none of them have survived. That night at the Köln Opera House can never be repeated. Jarrett himself couldn’t do it. It’s an evanescent concerto, born to live and die in that very moment. It will become a commonplace, a cliché, to be listened to by lovers like us, but the human race will go on needing it.’
    They lay back on the berth. After seven minutes, Jarrett began to moan as though fucking his instrument. Simón’s penis remained inert.
    ‘Let me hold you,’ Emilia said.
    She went on stroking him with one hand while slowly caressing herself with the other. After a moment, his moan joined Jarrett’s.
     
    After the phone call from the woman from the cinema, Emilia spent the morning wondering what to do. She could barely bring herself to concentrate on the maps which she was supposed to be working on, converting them from 1:450,000,000 scale to 1:450,000. She longed to talk to her father, but she was afraid of how he might react. He had become increasingly volatile and unpredictable. That afternoon, in the family home on calle Arenales, she finally confided in Chela. As always, her sister told her mother, who told Dupuy, who came to see her some two hours later trembling and angrier than she had ever seen him. He stood, glaring at Emilia.
    ‘How can you be so naive? Don’t you understand that we are at war? That your family could be attacked by subversives at any moment? You should have told me what happened in the cinema the moment it happened. You have no right to make a fool of me in front of my friends. I won’t tolerate such behaviour.’
    ‘What did I do? So, I didn’t mention it for a couple of days. I’m not psychic. I don’t know what’s going on.’
    ‘No, and you don’t know how to look after yourself either. It was a trap. They were trying to get information out of you, trying to inveigle their way into this house. They want to blow our brains out, all of us.’
    ‘So what am I supposed to do if this woman calls again?’
    ‘She won’t. She was picked up in a cafe near your place. She’d been spying on you, she was armed. A patrol surrounded her and when they told her to surrender her weapon, she tried to resist. They tried to stop her, but she shot herself.’
    Two months after seizing power, the president came to her parents’ house for dinner. He was accompanied by his wife, her stiff, swollen legs covered by a long skirt, and by the chaplain of the Military Vicariate. Since Emilia was his eldest daughter and had just come back from her honeymoon, Dr Dupuy condescended to invite her on the condition that she and her husband refrain from making any political comments. This peremptory command unsettled Simón who did not want to go. Outside the family house was a confusion of cars and soldiers in service uniforms.
    It was a warm night