Simon Cardoso had been dead for thirty years when Emilia Dupuy, his wife, found him at lunchtime in the dining room of Trudy Tuesday." So begins "Purgatory, " the final and perhaps most personal work of the great Latin American novelist Tomas Eloy Martinez. Emilia Dupuy's husband vanished in '70s, while the two were mapping an Argentine country road. All evidence seemed to confirm that he was among the thousands disappeared by the military regime. Yet Emilia never stopped believing that the disappeared man would reappear. And then he does, in New Jersey. And for Simon, no time at all has passed. In Martinez's hands, this love story and ghost story becomes a masterful allegory for history political and personal, and for a country's inability to integrate its past with its present.