My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain

by Patricio Pron

  8

  What must the novel my father wanted to write have been like? Brief, composed of fragments, with holes where my father couldn’t or didn’t want to remember something, filled with symmetries—stories duplicating themselves over and over again as if they were an ink stain on an assiduously folded piece of paper, a simple theme repeated as in a symphony or a fool’s monologue—and sadder than Father’s Day at an orphanage.

  9

  One thing was clear: the novel my father would have written wouldn’t have been an allegory or domestic fiction or an adventure or a romance, it wouldn’t have been a ballad or a coming-of-age novel, it wouldn’t have been a detective novel or a fable or a fairy tale or historical fiction, it wouldn’t have been a comic novel or an epic or a fantasy, not a gothic or an industrial novel; it certainly wouldn’t have been a realist novel or a novel of ideas or a postmodern novel, not a newspaper serial or a novel in the nineteenth-century style; and there’s no way it would have been a parable or science fiction, suspense or a social novel, a novel of chivalry or a bodice-ripper; while we’re at it, it probably wouldn’t have been a mystery or a horror novel either, even though those would cause the right amount of fear and grief.

  10

  Among my father’s papers I found a paid announcement from the Argentine newspaper Página/12 dated Thursday, June 27, 2002. The text of the announcement:

  Alicia Raquel Burdisso, journalist, university student in literature (25 years old). Arrested/disappeared by security forces in the city of Tucumán on 6-21-77.

  It has been 25 years since her kidnapping (as she left work), and we still do not know what happened. We cannot forget the sinister crime of her disappearance. We have never received any official explanation of this shameful crime.

  We remember you with much affection and feeling.

  Alberto, Mirta, Fani, David

  To the right of the text there was a photograph of a young woman. She had an oval face framed by thick black hair, her thin eyebrows prominent and her large eyes heavily outlined in eyeliner, not looking at the viewer but beyond, at someone or something located to the right and above wherever the anonymous photographer was when he or she took the picture of this woman, her thin lips twisted into an expression of interrogatory seriousness. There was no reason to doubt that the woman in the photograph was Alicia Raquel Burdisso; what’s more, everything seemed to point to that, but her gaze and her unusual seriousness made it seem as if she were no twenty-five-year-old but rather a woman who had seen many things and decided to press on toward them, someone who could barely stop for a second to pose for a photograph, a person who concentrated so intensely on that point above her that, if asked in the moment she was being photographed, she would hardly have been able to give her name or home address.

  11

  Then there were other photographs. The first showed a dozen young people sitting around a table with two bottles of wine, one of which was still unopened, and some glasses. Not all the young people looked at the photographer; only the one to the left of the young man who is my father, and two women standing behind him. A series of details, particularly the bars on a window, made me realize that the young people were in the living room of my paternal grandparents’ house; two of them are holding guitars: my father, whose left hand is positioned in what seems to be an E chord at the top of the instrument’s neck, and a young woman who seems to be playing a C minor chord—it also could be G-sharp minor; the lack of capo makes it hard to be sure—and looks toward the right of the photograph. My father and another young man are wearing plaid shirts; another, stripes; two women are wearing the kind of floral dresses common in the 1960s; two women have straight hair and another sports a haircut à la Jeanne Moreau. My father wears his hair long for the period, and a bushy beard that shows only his chin, which he must have shaved. Behind this group of young people is a chalkboard on which someone has written: “Semana Gráfica, a year of venom.” On the right side of the photograph is a young woman who is smiling and looking forward and seems to be singing. It’s Alicia Raquel Burdisso.

  12

  Another photograph showed the same group of young people, joined by another, probably the photographer of the previous image, in the courtyard of my grandparents’ house. One of them is smoking. My father smiles. Alicia leans on the shoulder of one of the women, who blocks her almost completely.

  13

  A third photograph showed them horsing around. My father is wearing some sort of helmet and holding up one wrist; Alicia is to his right and wears a straw hat and a flower in her hair; she is smoking and, for the first time in the series of photographs, laughing. The photograph is dated November 1969.

  14

  If you have a digital copy of the photograph, as I do, and if you enlarge it again and again, as my father did, the woman’s face breaks down into a multitude of gray squares until the woman literally disappears.

  15

  My father had even written a brief biographical summary of the people linked with arrows on the first page of the file: there were names and dates and names of political parties and groups that no longer existed and whose memory reached me like the imaginary voices of the dead in a séance. My father’s list included a dozen names, six of which were associated with names of political organizations. Then my father had included some photocopies of the first page of the publication he ran, and highlighted in yellow the names of people who appeared on the list. One of them was Alicia Raquel Burdisso, who, on my father’s list, was reduced to a single date, that of her birth; in place of the other was a question mark, but for me, there and then, that question mark didn’t introduce a question but rather an answer, an answer that explained everything.

  16

  Next there was a printout, presumably from the Internet, with the photograph from the commemorative paid announcement in Página/12, and the following text:

  Alicia Raquel Burdisso Rolotti: Arrested/Disappeared on 6/21/77. Alicia was 25 years old. She was born on March 8, 1952. Student of journalism and literature. She wrote poems and articles for the magazine Aquí Nosotras of the UMA [Argentine Women’s Union, the female section of the Communist Party]. And the newspaper Nuestra Palabra [historical and official organ of this Party]. She was kidnapped from her workplace in San Miguel de Tucumán. She was seen at the Clandestine Detention Center of the Tucumán Police Headquarters.

  On the same page was a statement in the form of a letter to Alicia, signed by René Nuñez:

  Soul sister, I still remember when in the midst of the cold and the terrifying silence I moved aside my blindfold and there you were, so little, so skinny that I thought you were a twelve-year-old girl, we greeted each other with a smile and I sensed an exceptional strength in you that filled me with hope, especially when you encouraged me and told me (with signs and silent writing on the wall) “from here they’re taking us to the PEN [National Executive Branch], we’re saved.” I was sure it was all over because they were taking me to be executed, but they didn’t kill me, I don’t know why, they threw me into a wasteland filled with garbage. That’s why my hopes were so high, I never imagined I wouldn’t ever see you again. Sister, ally, comrade! I could do nothing more for you except remember you and keep spreading, in your name and in the name of all those who are no longer with us, the word of our struggle.

  Then, finally, there was a poem:

  Come, leave behind this daybreak

  your gaping holes and loneliness

  where egotism ran aground

  and devoured you, unforgivable.

  Then you’ll see that your blindness was only mystical

  that there were shadows in your soul

  and that it is possible to reach the dawn together

  to see our new day.

  Maybe the poem was by Alicia Burdisso.

  17

  When I left the photographs on my father’s desk, I understood that his interest in what had happened to Alberto Burdisso was the result of his interest in what had ha
ppened to Alberto’s sister, Alicia, and that interest was in turn the product of a fact that perhaps my father couldn’t even explain to himself but, in trying to, he had gathered all those materials. This fact was, my father had gotten Alicia involved in politics without knowing that what he was doing would cost that young woman her life, would cost him decades of fear and regret and would have its effects on me, many years later. As I tried to shift my attention from the photographs I’d just seen, I understood for the first time that all the children of young Argentines in the 1970s were going to have to solve our parents’ pasts, like detectives, and what we would find out was going to seem like a mystery novel we wished we’d never bought. But I also realized that there was no way of telling my father’s story as a mystery or, more precisely, that telling it in such a way would betray his intentions and his struggles, since telling his story as a detective tale would merely confirm the existence of a genre, which is to say, a convention, and all of his efforts were meant to call into question those very social conventions and their pale reflection in literature.

  18

  Besides, I’d seen enough mystery novels already and would see many more in the future. Telling this story from the perspective of genre would be illegitimate. To begin with, the individual crime was less important than the social crime, but social crime couldn’t be told through the artifice of a detective novel; it needed a narrative in the shape of an enormous frieze or with the appearance of an intimate personal story that held something back, a piece of an unfinished puzzle that would force the reader to look for adjacent pieces and then keep looking until the image became clear. Furthermore, the resolution of most detective stories is condescending, no matter how ruthless the plotting, so that the reader, once the loose ends are tied up and the guilty finally punished, can return to the real world with the conviction that crimes get solved and remain locked between the covers of a book, that the world outside the book is guided by the same principles of justice as the tale told inside and should not be questioned.

  19

  Thinking about all that and going back to it during the following days and nights, lying in bed in a room that had been mine or sitting in a chair in the hallway of a hospital that was starting to feel familiar, in front of a round window into the room where my father was dying, I told myself that I had the material for a book and that this material had been given to me by my father, who had created a narrative in which I would have to be both the author and the reader, discovering as I narrated, and I wondered if my father had done it deliberately, if he had foreseen that one day he wouldn’t be there to carry out the task himself and that this day was approaching, and he had wanted to leave a mystery as my inheritance; and I also wondered if he’d approve, as a journalist and therefore as someone who paid much more attention to the truth than I ever did. I’ve never felt comfortable with the truth. I had tried to stonewall it and give it the slip; I’d gone off to another country that hadn’t been a reality for me from the very start, a place where the oppressive situation that was real to me for many years did not exist. I wondered, still and again, what my father would have thought of my writing a story I barely knew; I knew how it ended—it was obvious it ended in a hospital, as almost all stories do—but I didn’t know how it began or what happened in the middle. What would my father think of my telling his story without understanding it completely, chasing after it in the stories of others as if I were the coyote and he the roadrunner and I had to resign myself to watching him fade into the horizon, leaving behind a cloud of dust, the wind taken out of my sails; what would my father think of my telling his story—the story of all of us—without really knowing the facts, with dozens of loose ends that I would knot up slowly to construct a narrative that stumbled along contrary to everything I’d set out to do, in spite of my being, inevitably, its author. What had my father been? What had he wanted? What was this backdrop of terror that I’d wanted to forget all about but that had come back to me when the pills ran out and I discovered the story of those disappearances, which my father had made his, which he’d explored as much as he could so he wouldn’t have to venture into his own story?

  20

  The day after visiting the museum, I got sick. The first day, of course, was the worst; I remember the fever and the torpor and a series of dreams that repeated over and over again like a carousel whose operator had gone mad or was a sadist. Not all the dreams made sense, but their connecting thread did, and I remember what they said, even though it was fragmentary. In spite of my bad memory, in spite of the unfortunate series of circumstances that had made that memory worthless for a long period only just starting to come to an end, I can still to this day remember those dreams.

  21

  I dreamed that I went into a pet shop and stopped to look at the tropical fish; one of them in particular caught my eye: it was transparent, you could barely distinguish its silhouette from its transparent eyes and its organs; but, unlike the other fish, also somewhat clear, this one was completely crystalline and had its organs separated like colored rocks stuck inside it with no connection between them, a fistful of autonomous organs with no center of command.

  22

  I dreamed that I was writing in my old room in Göttingen and discovered insects in my pockets; I didn’t know how they’d gotten there, and, although that would have been useful information, the only thing I was thinking about was making sure no one noticed that the insects were there, trying to get out.

  22

  I dreamed that I was riding a horse and its two front legs just came off while it drank water; the horse ate them, and then its head came off its neck and rolled around trying to reattach itself. I imagined that the horse would grow another head, first a stump like a fetus and then a head with a proper horse shape.

  23

  I dreamed that I was going up some stairs and three rings fell off my hands: the first was a silver ring in the shape of a zigzag that I wore on my index finger; the second was a ring in the shape of a chain, on my middle finger; the third was Ángela F.’s ring and it had a blue stone.

  24

  I dreamed that I was a boy and I was observing the preparations for what I understood to be a woman’s suicide; the woman wore a housedress and lay in bed in what I recognized as a modest hotel room someplace in the Near East, with a rosary in her hands; on her bed was a white and red flag. The woman had a shotgun in her arms. She stared at me and I understood that she blamed me for what she was going to do. I’d thought the suicide would be fake, but in that moment I understood that it would be real. Before lifting the barrel of the shotgun to her mouth, she handed me a photograph that showed Juan Domingo Perón beside important members of the Peronist Resistance and she told me the photograph had been taken before they all started shooting each other. In the photograph I saw the woman.

  22

  I dreamed that I was dreaming about the relationship between the words verschwunden (disappeared) and Wunden (which doesn’t exist independently in German but in certain cases is the plural of Wund, wound) and the words verschweigen (to keep quiet) and verschreiben (to prescribe).

  11

  I dreamed that I was back on the Argentine plain, watching a form of popular entertainment there called “off leash”; it involved tricking a monkey into getting into a well that was then filled with dirt, so that only the monkey’s head could be seen. Then an animal, usually a lion, was released into the ring, and people bet on whether or not the monkey could escape from his trap and, if so, whether he could manage to kill the lion. The monkey pulled it off on very few occasions, but he always—whether or not he defeated his opponent—ended up killing himself after seeing his similarity to the humans around him who took pleasure in such entertainment.

  9

  I dreamed that, on a train operated by the German company Metronom, I met a woman who was forced to carry a baby developing in a uterus located outside her body, tied to her only by the umbilical cord. If asked, the woman pulled the uterus out of a
bag that she always had with her. The uterus was the size of a shoe; inside, the gestating baby displayed emotions and reactions that only the mother knew how to interpret. As the conductor approached, I asked her how to get to a town called Lemdorf or Levdorf, but she didn’t answer. In the train station of an industrial city called Neustadt, whose smokestacks and factories could be seen from the station hall, the unresponsive conductor came over and told me I had two options for getting to Lemdorf or Levdorf: taking a bus that went halfway there and then taking another; or giving poisoned food to a beggar at the station door. Then I understood that Lemdorf or Levdorf, the place in northern Germany I was headed to, was hell.

  26

  I dreamed that I knew a method of divination: two people spit into each other’s mouths; the transfer of liquid also transfers their plans and desires.