Patricio Pron - My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain

A naïve reader might wonder why the regional press states that the police found signs of violence in the missing man’s home when the local press maintains that this wasn’t the case, that when his friends went looking for him they found the front door locked and the bicycle — not to mention the oh-so-literary detail of the “loyal dog” who followed his master “wherever he went”—in front of the house. The reader might wonder why the security camera at the cash machine wasn’t working at the moment the missing man’s debit card was used for the last time. Once again the naïve reader might wonder who the “loose living” people the article referred to were, but there, for someone who has lived in the city where the events took place, the answer is simple: a “loose living” person is, in El Trébol, anyone who wasn’t born in the city. A foreigner. Even if this foreignness is based only on a couple of kilometers’ distance, or the supposed misfortune of having been born on the other side of a gully or beyond a copse of eucalyptus trees or on the other side of the train tracks, anywhere on the whole planet that extends past the city and that, for the inhabitants of El Trébol, is an inhospitable, hostile world where the cold cuts your flesh and the heat burns and there is no shade or shelter.

At that point, the articles my father had collected began to run together. The reader retains barely a few sentences: “The firemen searched for Burdisso in rural regions”; “[…] with negative results […]”; “ ‘It is very difficult to search like this, without any leads,’ stated the Fire Chief, Raúl Dominio, to […]”; “Last Friday the search was resumed by police staff, fireman and municipal employees, […] this time a larger amount of personnel was used and they scoured each sector inch by inch”; “the Special Dog Brigade of the Santa Fe Police and specialized detectives worked on his search, but they weren’t able to find the man,” et cetera. Of all the articles, one stood out, published in El Ciudadano & La Región of the city of *osario. One of its paragraphs began by saying: “Alberto José Burdisso lives alone in his house at 40 °Calle Corrientes in the city of El Trébol”; I knew this was the newspaper where my father worked and I also knew there was a wish or a hope in that sentence, found in the verb tense, and I understood the writer was my father and, had he been able to dispense with journalistic conventions, he would have been more direct and expressed his conviction, his wish or his hope without relying on any rhetoric, laying bare without any euphemisms: “Alberto José Burdisso lives.”

In a multitudinous gathering of almost 1000 people, the city of El Trébol complained about the lack of justice in the Burdisso case and the lack of resolution in his mysterious disappearance.

From five in the afternoon on a holiday Monday, the Plaza began to fill with people who, gathering of their own volition, signed a list of demands that will be set [ sic ] to the hands of Judge Eladio García of the city of San Jorge. […] First at the event was Dr. Roberto Maurino, a childhood schoolmate of Burdisso’s, who spoke to the audience. […], Maurino stated to an attentive crowd that was continually signing petitions. Shortly afterward came Gabriel Piumetti, one of the organizers of the march, along with his mother, who pointed out […] The people applauded every word and shouts of “Justice, justice!!!” were heard in the amphitheater for a long time.

After the first speeches, someone in the public shout [ sic ], “Let the police commissioner speak!” as he was among the people. It was then that the chief of the city’s Fourth Precinct, Oriel Bauducco, expressed […]. At that moment irate demands from the public arose and various questions were heard: “Why did they search for Burdisso with dogs ten days after his disappearance?” fired off one woman, and another question immediately followed: “Wide [ sic ] you clear out Burdisso’s house two days after his disappearance when it should have been taped off?” That was the moment of highest tension in the Plaza, the crowd staring insistently at the superior officer, waiting for a reply that never came. […] struggled to say Bauducco, who after listening how various residents complained [ sic ] the lack of road blocks in the streets and the absence of patrolling in the city.

Minutes later Mayor Fernando Almada addressed the crowd saying […]. In addition to Almada, among those gathered were the city councilmen, the former mayor, now secretary of […], and the employees and Executive Board of the Club Trebolense, where Alberto Burdisso worked.

El Trébol Digital , June 17, 2008

In the lower corner of the article was a photograph. It showed a group of people — perhaps there really were a thousand, as the anonymous writer of the article claims, though it doesn’t look like it — listening to a bald speaker. In the background of the photograph was a church I recognized, with a disproportionately tall tower, which looked like a swan curled up on the shore, stretching out its neck in an attempt to find nourishment. Seeing it, I remembered my father once told me that my paternal great-grandfather had climbed up the old tower, which had been damaged in an earthquake or some other natural disaster, in order to clear out the rubble so it could be rebuilt, but because the tower’s wooden beams were rotted from exposure to the elements, my great-grandfather was risking his life, not to mention the inevitable thread of paternities that led to us; but in that moment I couldn’t remember if my father had told me the story or if it was made up, a flight of fancy based on the similarity between the thinness of the tower and that of my paternal grandfather as I remembered him, and still today I don’t know if it was my paternal great-grandfather or my maternal great-grandfather who climbed the tower, nor do I know if at any point the church tower suffered damage, since there aren’t many earthquakes or natural disasters in El Trébol.

“Three cases of homicide, disappearance and kidnapping in one year in the city,” affirmed another article, pointing out: “Three unresolved cases.”

Once more, the key word here was disappearance , repeated in one way or another in all the articles, like a black armband worn by every cripple and have-not in Argentina.

An article in the morning paper La Capital of the city of *osario on June 18 expanded, corrected and contextualized the previous article: the demonstration had brought together eight hundred people, not a thousand, and the list of demands requested “that justice be done,” which, in addition to the way most of the speeches alternated between the present and past tenses, made it seem as if the demonstrators suspected Burdisso had been murdered and they wanted the authorities to consider this possibility. At the same time, the growing demands, with their explicit warning that what had happened to Burdisso could also happen to others, seemed to shift the focus from an isolated police event to a generalized, omnipresent threat. It could be said that the eight hundred people who took part in the demonstration — an insignificant segment of the population, if, as another article maintains, the city has thirteen thousand inhabitants — were already beginning to switch from demanding “justice” for Burdisso to demanding it for themselves and their families. No one wanted to suffer Burdisso’s fate, but no one at that point knew what had happened to him and no one wondered why he had been chosen instead of someone else, someone else among those who exorcized their fears with a demonstration and a list of demands.