My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain

by Patricio Pron

  38

  Then there was one last photograph of the event, and when I saw it I was surprised and confused, as if I had just seen a dead man approaching along a path with the infernal red setting sun silhouetted behind his back. It was my father just as I would see him in the hospital, in his final years: bald with a white beard on his thin face, very similar to his own father as I remembered him, with large rimless glasses, the glasses of a policeman or a mafioso, with his hands in the pockets of a white coat, talking, his throat wrapped with a plaid scarf that I thought I had given him at some point as a gift. Beside him were other men, who contemplated him with sad faces, as if they knew my father was talking about a dead man without knowing that he would soon be one of them, that he was going to enter a dark, bottomless well that everyone who dies falls into, but my father didn’t know it yet and they didn’t want to tell him. There were eleven men standing behind my father, as if my father were the sacked coach of a soccer team that had just lost the championship; one wore a jacket and tie, but the rest wore leather coats and one, a long scarf that seemed about to strangle him. Some of them looked at the ground. I looked at my father and couldn’t quite understand what he was doing there, talking in that cemetery on a cold afternoon, an afternoon in which the living and the dead should have taken refuge in the shelter of their homes or their tombs and in the resigned consolation of memory.

  39

  From the June 21, 2008, edition of El Trébol Digital:

  Alberto José Burdisso lived aloan [sic] but left this world with a crowd. Because a multitude, crying out for justice, accompanied him en masse to his final resting place. Following the prayers for the dead in the parish of Saint Lawrence the Martyr, completely packed, a funeral procession several blocks long changed its route to pass by the Club Trebolense, where many, many people greeted it with applaude [sic]. The scene […]. After the first waves of applause, Dr. Roberto Maurino stated: “He got by the best he could, almost always suffering, and he left the same way because he got the worst of it in his last moments. Now, for eternity, into the unknown, Alberto will rest in peace. It was a great honor to be his friend.” […] The procession then finally continued with hundreds of cars. […] When the procession arrived at the local cemetery, several hundred residents walked with Burdisso’s coffin to its final resting place. There “Chacho” Pron, with warm and heartfelt words, also remembered Alicia Burdisso, Alberto’s sister, disappeared on the twenty-first of June of 1976 during the military Process [sic], in the province of Tucumán.

  40

  That’s it, I said to myself, interrupting my reading, that’s the reason my father decided to gather all this information: symmetry. First a woman disappears, then a man, and they are siblings and my father perhaps knew them both and hadn’t been able to stop the disappearance of either one. But how could he? With what power did my father think he could prevent those disappearances—he who was dying in a hospital bed while I read all this?

  41

  “A mail [sic] has been released from custody, which doesn’t mean that he won’t be brought to trial. The case is being worked on throughout the whole region and the suspects are being held in the city of El Trébol and the Sastre jail. Important details were added in recent hours.”

  […]

  “Could Burdisso have been strangled?”

  “We will know in the coming hours but we cannot corroborate it.”

  “Did he die in the well or before?”

  “We are waiting for the results of the autopsy and the forensic report to determine this.”

  “In what state was the body? Did it have wounds or bruises?”

  “The body was beaten. They did not find bullet entry wounds.”

  “Is there any relation among those arrested?”

  “The suspects are related. Some closely and others allegedly.”

  […]

  “Who are the suspects in custody?”

  “Five men and two women.”

  Conversation between Commissioner Jorge Gómez of the Eighteenth Regional Unit of the Provincial Police and a journalist (El Trébol Digital, June 23, 2008)

  42

  The next day, a headline on the same website announced: “Alberto Burdisso Died by Suffocation and Was Savagely Beaten.”

  The case was changed to Homicide by Criminal Trial Judge Dr. Eladio García[,] of the city of San Jorge. The forensic examination present that Burdisso presented [sic] a very hard blow to the head, perhaps caused by a blunt object, and numerous punches. He would have been thrown into the well while still alive.

  43

  More headlines: “El Trébol, Seven Arrests for the Burdisso Case” (La Capital de *osario, June 25); “A New Arrest in the Burdisso Case” (El Trébol Digital, June 25); “Readers Applaud Treatment of the Burdisso Case” (El Trébol Digital, June 25); “Police Are Seeing Results in the Burdisso Case” (El Trébol Digital, June 26); “They Will Demand Justice in the Plaza” (El Trébol Digital, June 26). And one more headline, from the article that tells the whole story, published by El Trébol Digital the following day: “Burdisso Suffered Up Until His Final Moments.”

  44

  The brutally murdered resident of El Trébol died, as detailed by the autopsy, of suffocation. His body was found with six broken ribs, the arm and shoulder fractured by the fall into the well. Alberto, according to declarations, was taken to the field on Sunday June 1rd [sic] at seven in the morning to look for firewood and there they beat him and threw him into the old well where he was found. Before throwing him into the well, they tried to make him sign a sales contract and he refused. According to the work by the forensic doctors and the autopsy, Alberto Burdisso recovered consciousness in the well but later died from asphyxia, though it remains unknown whether this was caused by his position in the well or from lack of air. The cellular telephone will play an important role in the trial, since it was found along with Burdisso’s body and there are compromising called persons.

  El Trébol Digital, June 27, 2008

  45

  If one reads the articles carefully and ignores their typographical errors and erratic syntax, and if afterward one thinks about what they say and accepts that what they describe is what really must have happened, one can sum up the entire story in a more or less coherent narrative: A man was taken to an isolated place through some kind of deception and there he was ordered to sign over an unknown property, which he refused to do; his attackers threw him into a well and he died there. In its simplicity, in its almost brutal pettiness, the story could fit perfectly into one of those books of the Old Testament in which the characters live and, above all, die beholden to simple passions, by the hand of an incomprehensible god who is nonetheless still worthy of praise and worship. However, since we can assume that this is not a biblical story and that the motivations of the characters are not subject to the whims of a capricious god, when reading all this, we must also ask ourselves what were the reasons behind these acts: Why was this crime committed? How is it possible that so many people are implicated in a murder that could have been carried out by one, two or, at the most, three people, all of whom could have fit in Burdisso’s little car? And why was he murdered? For his house, which the anonymous writer at El Trébol Digital presented in his or her articles as a place with no particularly special features? It certainly wasn’t some luxurious mansion that stood out in the puritanical, austere atmosphere of the town. For money? Where was this money going to come from, a sum large enough to outweigh the risk for his killers of winding up in prison for the rest of their lives? Where was a maintenance employee of an athletic club in a provincial town going to get all that money? How could Burdisso’s suffocation be explained if the well, as first reported, was dry? Why didn’t Burdisso call for help with his cell phone if it was found beside his body in the well? And who is compromised by the calls recorded by the cell phone, Burdisso or his murderers? Were the calls made before or after his fall into the well? Once again, who would want to kill some sort of Faul
knerian fool, poorer than a church mouse, in a town where his disappearance would be noticed immediately, a town where, moreover, many people would know who Burdisso was, what he had done and who was with him in his final hours?

  46

  An article on June 27 by Claudio Berón, a journalist for La Capital de *osario, answered—to the extent that these things can be answered—some of these questions. I read it hastily:

  Finally, after three weeks of intense investigations, the crime of Alberto Burdisso of El Treból was resolved. Burdisso, the 60-year-old man who […] and whose cadaver was […]. Gisela Córdoba, Gabriel Córdoba—her brother, Juan Huck and Marcos Brochero remained in custody charged with homicide. The motive, according to court sources, could be that they wanted Burdisso to sign a document leaving his house in Córdoba’s name, and when he refused they decided to kill him. After weighing various hypotheses, Criminal Judge Eladio García, who headed the investigation, decided to charge the four suspects and […]. The Commissioner of the 18th Regional Unit, Jorge Gómez, also worked on the investigation, mobilizing the Forensics Department of Rosario and Santa Fe, the canine division, which participated in the search for the body, and finally the Special Operations Troop (TOE). […] It seems that Córdoba maintained a relationship with Huck while at the same time saying that she was Burdisso’s girlfriend. Huck and Córdoba seem to have taken the victim under false pretenses to the well where he was found. Brochero, Córdoba’s legal spouse, would have later hidden the cadaver.

  […] The disappearance of Alberto José Burdisso shocked the city from the first moment […] he missed work on June 2, a fact […] also his debit card was found in the cash machine of Banco Nación, which had “swallowed” it the previous Saturday. […] In addition, and as was repeatedly mentioned during the days he remained missing, he spent his money on women of easy virtue. […] The worry and the conjectures about his […] These demands grew so insistent that on Monday, June 16, fifteen days after his disappearance, a demonstration was organized to ask for an escalation of police efforts to find Burdisso. On that occasion, close to a thousand […] and they signed a list of demands to request that Judge García consider the case a murder investigation.

  Finally, the body was found on the 20th of this month. It was in a well on the property of a derelict home, some seven kilometers northeast of the city center. Around ten, after three hours of searching, a squadron of Volunteer Firemen discovered the body in an advanced state of decomposition at the bottom of the well, currently dry. As was published in La Capital in their edition of the 21st, the body was covered with rubble, corrugated metal sheets and branches, so the police ruled out a suicide or an accident.

  The investigators arrived on the scene after a call from a hunter, who reported the day before that he had detected a strong odor in the area around the well. When they removed the cadaver—work that had to be done with pulleys and a tripod—they verified that it was wearing a shirt from the club. Other characteristics of the body, such as the large scar on the torso, led them to presume that it was the missing man. Nevertheless, this was confirmed a day later, when the body was subjected to an autopsy. […] determined that the man had been in the early stages of asphyxia and had suffered hard blows to the head, but that he died inside the well.

  Burdisso was buried last Sunday. His remains were accompanied by a procession of some 20 blocks and passed the headquarters of the club where he worked. It was in the late afternoon. Prior to that, there was a prayer for the dead in the parish of Saint Lawrence the Martyr.

  The imminent arrest of a series of suspects was immediately made known. On Wednesday eight arrests had already been made. But in the end four individuals were charged, who remain in custody. […] Those who knew him maintain that Burdisso was in general a withdrawn and gullible man who believed each one of the cunning arguments with which Córdoba deceived him. So much so that one of the accused, Marcos Brochero, a native of Cañada Rosquín, was Córdoba’s husband but Burdisso thought he was her brother.

  47

  In the photocopy of the article that appeared in his file, my father had highlighted in fluorescent yellow a paragraph I had missed in my reading and which he, a much better journalist than I—he in fact taught the journalists who in time would be my own teachers, in an almost preindustrial system of apprenticeship that in both form and content radically opposed the nonsense they tried to teach us at the university and, furthermore, bonded my father and me in a sort of involuntary tradition, an old school of rigorous and willful and defeated journalists—my father, as I was saying, had highlighted:

  Burdisso had surrounded himself with a series of individuals from the margins of society, many of them with criminal records […] he was 60 years old and lived alone in his house at 400 Calle Corrientes, four blocks from the club. He had no immediate family, since his sister had disappeared during the military dictatorship. For that loss […] two years ago he received an indemnity from the state of 240 thousand pesos (some 56 thousand dollars). With that money he bought a house—the one they had wanted to take from him—a car, a motorcycle and other items.

  48

  Ten years ago, the towns on Route 13 were, to some, the gates to a lost paradise. Brothels, gambling and sex, both cheap and expensive. Nightclubs and all kinds of crime. That was, according to the sources consulted, up until two years ago. There were some forty brothels in the area and a lot of trafficking of women from Brazil and remote regions of Paraguay. Many of these women told the court of their trips to Europe to prostitute themselves.

  Miriam Carizo was the owner of a bar of ill repute, where she met Alberto Burdisso in 2005 and struck up a relationship with him that lasted two years. Gisela Córdoba (28 years old), the woman Burdisso was involved with when his romance with Carizo ended, is believed to be part of this network and had prior convictions for check fraud in El Trébol itself. The other charged suspects were habitués of nightclubs. According to investigators on the case thus [sic] would be the “tail end” of these rings, which had already disappeared but left behind a saga of survivors of this life of vice.

  A contextualization by Claudio Berón in La Capital de *osario, June 29, 2008

  49

  A house, a lot of money that paradoxically was not the bearer of good fortune and an immense loneliness ended the life of Alberto Burdisso. […] They killed him on the first Sunday of June. It is believed that a woman of ill repute wanted to take his property and for that she convinced two men and some other people of the need to have him disappear. […] Several meters from the vast field that surrounds El Trébol, a town of no more than 13 thousand inhabitants, there is a new white house. There lived Burdisso; a man different from the rest, 60 years old and, according to some who knew him, celibate until the age of 57. In 2005 he received more than 200 thousand pesos in reparations for his disappeared younger sister. He burned through that cash.

  According to Roberto Maurino, Burdisso was a sullen and withdrawn man, but normal. “He traveled alone and only to the south. We had a lot of chats. He finished school and then worked at the Club Trebolense. With the cash he got, he bought a house in Rosario, a house here and an old car. He was too trusting,” he declared. Around the time of the compensation he met a woman, Miriam Carizo. He bought a house and put it in both of their names, he gave her a car and, his coworkers say, he paid for a birthday party for her daughter, with whom he had an almost paternal relationship. “Burdi was like that, just crazy. He said everybody does what they want with their lives. He talked a lot to people he wanted to talk to. He didn’t bother nobody. He had his paycheck held to cover the loans they made him take out. We’re grieving for him. He surrounded himself with bad people. And who knows why they killed him, they even had control of his paychecks,” they say at the club.