For a long time along Route 13 there were prostitution rings and other dubious activity. Close to 40 brothels were opened in towns like El Trébol, San Jorge, Sastre and others in the district of General San Martín. “It’s all connected, this is the tail end of a story of shady characters,” suggested investigators. […] Burdi had ended things with Carizo and met Gisela Córdoba, a woman battered by life, hardened by its absolute lack of charity. Córdoba has three children and lives with her legal husband, Marcos Brochero, but had, apparently, a relationship with two “boyfriends,” Burdi and a 64-year-old man, Juan Huck, who she met in one of these establishments of easy virtue. Doubts about her motive turned to certainty over the course of the investigation. “Statements were taken from the eight charged suspects, including Gisela Córdoba, Juan Huck, Marcos Brochero and Gabriel Córdoba, who remained under arrest for suspicion of homicide,” they said. The issue turned out to be the house co-owned by Burdisso and Miriam Carizo. Carizo, about 40 years old, married another man, but Burdi stayed in the house. Gisela Córdoba knew about the property and got Burdisso to put half in her name, though he retained the legal right to live there. He had to die or disappear in order for Córdoba to occupy the house or sell it.
They took him to a deserted area and tried to force him to sign a document to free up the property. Days earlier, Córdoba had consulted lawyers on how to deal with Burdisso’s rights to the house in the case of his disappearance. Furthermore, it seems that she already had put the house up for rent. […] After his death, Burdi received a fond farewell at the doors of the club where he worked. At the reception desk there is a letter: “I wanted to tell you that Ñafa put your bike away, that you are missed and that Ana is inconsolable. Your dog keeps looking for you and crying.” It is signed by Laura Maurino.
Claudio Berón in La Capital de *osario, June 29, 2008
50
In one of the photographs that accompanied the article you can see a one-story house behind a tiny parcel of lawn on an unpaved, sewerless street. The house has a large two-paned window and another smaller one at the entrance, which has its own small roof held up by a fragile-looking column. In front of the house there is a hedge, but it seems to have dried up. The house is shuttered and, strangely, it looks like there is a high-backed chair lying facedown on a stretch of open ground, a plot of land where no one is ever going to live. That’s the house they killed Alberto Burdisso for.
51
Looking up from my father’s file, I gazed out at the courtyard of the house he’d built and wondered what he had said at Burdisso’s funeral, if he was there when the body was found in that well and if there was something my father knew or could know and I would never know, something having to do with the sordid, sad backdrop of a town that I had believed idyllic. In that courtyard before my eyes, I’d played games I no longer remember, games that came from the books I read and the films I saw and, particularly, from a period of sadness and terror that now, slowly, was coming back in spite of all the pills, my memory loss and the distance I’d tried to put between myself and that time. Burdisso’s corpse was pulled from the well using a tripod and pulleys, said the article, and I wondered if my father had been there at that moment, if my father had seen the body of the brother of someone who had been his friend hanging from a hook like an animal, floating above the town, already definitively sullied by vice. I also wondered if the story had ended, if I would find out what had happened to Burdisso’s murderers and if the symmetry in this story had already run out, the lines moving away from each other, vanishing into space, which is infinite, and, therefore, meeting up again somewhere. I wondered if my father could think about these things in a hospital bed, unreachable to me but not to the past; soon to be part of the past himself.
52
Some two hundred residents gathered in El Trébol’s Plaza San Martín on Sunday afternoon to demand the sentencing of the killers in the Burdisso case. There, Dr. Roberto Maurino […] explained the situation of the four in custody and the latest news of the trial: “The case is not closed. There are four suspects charged with obligatory jail time. There is no bail set for them and they will have to endure the process from the inside. Later will come the trial in Santa Fe, where they will be condemned or absolved. Of the four detainees, three are accused of premeditated homicide acting as a group or a gang, and the fourth as a secondary participant with a sentence of fifteen to twenty years. The maximum penalty for the first three is life imprisonment. […] Of the suspects who have been released, three are charged with aggravated concealment, which is to say, they knew but said nothing. I do not know whom [sic] they are. Their charge does not carry a minimum jail sentence and they can go free at the discretion of the court. […] The four detainees confessed their guilt. We will now search, as a town, as a civil association or as a club, for a plaintiff to participate in the trial. To date the law has only allowed this in one case: the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo against a torturer. The idea is to keep tabs on the case in the Sentencing Court of Santa Fe.”
El Trébol Digital, June 30, 2008
53
At the bottom of the article there was a photograph showing a group of people around an old man holding up a megaphone with his back to the photographer; in the background, to the left, I thought I recognized my father.
54
Next in the file were two letters to the editor addressed to El Trébol Digital, one signed by a woman whose last name was Bianchini and another by a ten-year-old girl. A week later, on July 7, the news was published of a demonstration in which some forty-two people had called for the killers’ sentencing; in the photos that followed I didn’t see my father. Then there was a photocopy of the front page of a newspaper I’d never seen before, El Informativo, showing a photograph of two policemen escorting a man, with a jacket covering his face, from a car. “The Murderers Could Get Life in Prison” was the headline, accompanied by the following teasers at the bottom of the page: “The untold side of the story. Who was Alberto Burdisso? Why did they kill him? Chronicle of a tragic end. The story of his sister. The clairvoyant that foresaw his reappearance.”
55
The next article, which summed up the story in a profusion of yellow journalism, littered with superfluous commas that brought to mind a fetid flower, was signed by Francisco Díaz de Azevedo. An excerpt:
[…] in the house on Corrientes, number 438, which he had bought and put under his name and that of his ex common-law wife, a few years earlier, and from which he had been evicted and left to live practically abandoned in a garage.
[…] For some time now, another woman kept his entire monthly salary, in exchange for temporary companionship, and, recently, she had even gotten him into several fights. In fact, Alberto hadn’t frequented the house of this new “companion” in three months, because he had had an altercation that came to blows with this woman’s common-law husband, a fact that is confirmed by the police; which is why she was the one that went to Burdisso’s house, “to visit.”
As regards Alberto’s economic situation, the money that he received in 2006, for the death of his sister during the Process (220,000 pesos), absolutely nothing remained of it.
On the afternoon of Saturday the 31st, and contrary to what was said and assumed, Alberto Burdisso withdrew all the money of his salary, via the cash machine of Banco Nación, since on the last business day of the month, Trebolense had deposited his salary. Afterward, his card was held in the bank itself, although nobody knows what later happened to that money, since it never appeared again. The next day, at approximately seven thirty in the morning, Burdisso was picked up at his domicile on Calle Corrientes, by a male and a woman, to go look for wood in a field bordering the city. When they arrived at the abandoned house, Burdi’s escorts sought to pressure him into signing a series of papers and documents regarding his home, which he resisted, and it was then that he was thrown into a dry well, of some ten meters deep.
In the fall, the victim suffered six broken ribs, a broke
n arm and shoulder, but he remained alive, in that place. That same evening, Burdi’s cell phone received, in the depths of the well, calls from relatives of the woman who went there with him and with whom he had occasional relations. The calls were to check if he was still alive.
The following day, Monday July 1st, the common-law husband of the woman who threw the resident into the well, arrived at the field, tore down the stonework from around the well and threw metal sheets and tree trunks onto the humanity [sic] of Alberto. Shortly after this fact, his death is produced by suffocation and confinement. Which is to say, Burdi was alive for at least twenty-four hours in the well and only died after being covered by the refuse.
For twenty days, the searches were unfruitful and almost useless. Until one afternoon, the city police station, received the information that Burdisso could have been thrown into a well, in the rural area. […] This person, indicated three possible locations and accompanied police personnel to visit them, detecting, that one of the wells (in which he was finally found), wasn’t in the same shape, as the last time this “woodsman” had seen it, detecting with his bare eyes, that some stonework around the top of the well was missing. […] It was fireman Javier Bergamasco, who from inside the hole, noticed that there was a body, in an advanced state of decomposition. He proceeded with a ‘prima facie’ examination with Dr. Pablo Candiz, at the site of the finding and later in the El Trébol morgue, where coworkers and friends, identified him by the particular scar he had on his abdomen. […] The autopsy revealed that Alberto had been beaten about the eyes and behind the ears, with, surely, fists, before being thrown into the well.
Automatically, after the finding of the body, they carried out a string of simultaneous arrests, after a week of witness statements, they will go to trial: a woman, Gisela C., twenty-seven years old, who already had priors for fraud, Juan H., sixty-three years old, with no prior convictions, Marcos B., thirty-one years old, with priors for drug consumption and the common-law husband of Gisela C. and Gabriel C., thirty-four years old, brother of Gisela C. with priors for misdemeanor theft […].
56
When I reached this point, I went back a few pages and again unfolded the map my father had used, but I didn’t know how to find out if any of the rural homes he’d visited and marked on the map was the house where the murder had taken place, and, in that case, if it had been my father who had alerted the police. On a small blank page I found on my father’s desk I jotted down: “Was my father the firewood collector—the hunter, in other versions—who filed the report with the police?” and I remained contemplating what I’d written for a long while. Finally I turned the page over and discovered that it was an invoice for some photographic enlargements that weren’t in the file but—though I didn’t know yet, so I should pretend here that I don’t know—were inside another of the files piled up on the desk, to which I would return time and time again in the days following these discoveries.
57
“How long have you lived in El Trébol?”
“About twenty years.”
“What are you?”
“I belong to a charismatic center. I’ve been strengthening the mental part.”
“Are you clairvoyant?”
“I haven’t gotten that far.”
“Are you a witch?”
“No.”
“Do they call you a witch?”
“Affectionately. Witch, witchy and crone.”
“Do you make your living this way?”
“I have up until now.”
“Describe to me what your powers are.”
“I channel myself to help those who need it for good. I channel for health, work and affection.”
“How does that include the Burdisso case?”
“I measured myself. I wanted to see my ability and my reach.”
“What did you see?”
“The first Monday he disappeared, I saw that he was still alive. It was that Monday. The following days it was already looking more doubtful. It could be or not. I saw all the ups and downs. Then, it gave me [sic] that he was deceased. That he could be in a place with stagnant water, depth, a sewer, a well, et cetera. It wasn’t clear. But they were looking in the cemetery and I felt that wasn’t right.”
“What did you feel when the case was solved?”
“Very powerless because this is a small town. Very annoyed. […] I couldn’t help him in the moments that he manifested himself to me that he was alive. I don’t knew [sic] whether to call it strength or cowardice, because I didn’t come forward in those moments and I didn’t reveal myself, I didn’t reveal my ability to help.”
“How do you see these things?”
“Through writings. I call it ‘mermerism’ [sic] and it is through the fingertips. I carve around and I look at the contents of the person, but I never let the person tell me about their situation directly. I try to decipher it myself […].”
58
Alberto’s mother died when he was very young and he never talked about her, I guess he didn’t remember her. […] His father went missing when he was only fifteen years old, and at that point Burdi was already doing jobs as a laborer and bricklayer’s assistant. He lived a life of loneliness, humility and simplicity, and we should acknowledge him as one of those people behind the scenes in this country. Who live silently, scraping by, in a highly complicated society. […] [In the late 1970s] he told me about the problem with his sister, […] and I went with him to Tucumán, but, unfortunately, we returned empty-handed. […] That money [the reparations given by the state as compensation for being a relative of a disappeared person] doomed him, in every sense. His life was, without a doubt, torturous. His childhood was marked by the absence of his mom. As a teenager his father dies. Then, the only loved one he has left, his sister, is murdered by the military dictatorship and, when he gets some financial stability, which could have allowed him to enjoy life, he ends up losing everything, even life itself. Burdi could have left the money in the Club’s mutual fund and lived off the interest. But we advised him to buy property, it seemed to us the best way to invest some of the money and, besides, he would have a place of his own to live. Maybe if we’d made a different suggestion, this wouldn’t have happened.
Roberto Maurino, childhood friend of Alberto Burdisso, in statements to El Informativo, El Trébol, July 2008
59
Next in my father’s file was a page titled simply “Fanny,” and undated:
A civilian plaintiff is needed as a driving force in the criminal proceedings. This is the task assigned to the district attorney, but the civilian plaintiff intervenes to guarantee that he won’t let the proceedings stagnate. There was an attempt to convince some cousins from El Trébol, but they are avoiding committing to it. The civil plaintiff will be assisted by a lawyer from Santa Fe (where the sentence will be handed down) who is the grandson of Luciano Molinas and an activist in the association HIJOS [acronym for Children United for Identification and Justice and Against Forgetting and Silence, an organization of the children of Argentine disappeared]. This lawyer has experience in the matter and has agreed to charge minimal fees, to which will be added the expenses required for the court filing (where this money will come from is something that has to be discussed). The inheritance of the property on Calle Corrientes, whose undivided half share is registered in Alberto’s name, should also be dealt with at this time.
60
Following that was an article from the August 1 edition of the newspaper El Ciudadano & La Región, from *osario, titled “Criminal Conspiracy.” I didn’t need to read past the first line to know that my father had written it. A paragraph:
The couple planned and executed the sinister plot over a year and a half, according to the judicial investigation. The fatal victim was Alberto Burdisso, a sixty-year-old man who lived in the town of El Trébol and had received reparations of two hundred thousand pesos. The man entered into a romantic relationship with Gisela Córdoba, thirty-three years his junior, and
gradually handed over to her: half of his house (since the other half belonged to his ex-wife), furniture, a car and a large part of his monthly earnings. He even moved into the garage, leaving the house in the hands of the young woman (who rented it out the same day Burdisso was pushed into the well where he lay dying for three days), just as he found out that the young woman’s supposed brother was actually her husband. Meanwhile, the girl picked up a new lover, sixty-three years old, who ended up involved in the crime. The motive was a supposed life insurance policy that she believed was in her name.
An article in La Capital de *osario dated that same day with the byline Luis Emilio Blanco below the title “El Trébol: They Prosecute Burdisso’s Killers and Reveal Details of the Case” did not contribute any additional information but did offer slightly different facts: Here Burdisso is sixty-one and not sixty, Marcos Brochero is thirty-two and not thirty-one, Juan Huck is sixty-one and not sixty-three, the abandoned rural house where the body was found is eight and not nine kilometers from town (in a piece published the next day in the newspaper El Litoral of Santa Fe, the distance was reduced to six kilometers). Here it is Gisela Córdoba and not Juan Huck who threw the man into a well that’s twelve and not ten meters deep, Burdisso broke five ribs and not six and both shoulders instead of a shoulder and an arm, as in the previous version, but those are all minor details. More interesting is the supposed request from Córdoba to Huck to “get him out of the well and throw him somewhere so they’ll find him and confirm his death” to enable her to gain access to the life insurance she believed was in her name; Huck refused. The article also included some secondary information revealed in the autopsy: “[…] the results show that the man had dirt in his mouth and respiratory tract, which indicates that he tried to breathe beneath the material thrown onto him,” specified the source.
My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain Page 8
