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

That person is Alicia, Alberto’s sister, who in spite of being younger looked after him like an older sister when they were left alone.

But Alicia isn’t here, hasn’t been here for thirty-one years. It is exactly thirty-one years to the day that she was disappeared in Tucumán, on June 21, 1977, by the thugs of the most recent and the bloodiest civil-military dictatorship.

Alicia was kidnapped and disappeared because she was part of a generation that had to fight to restore freedom to our country. So people like Alberto and like all of us could live in a world without fear and without gags in our mouths. Without those young people like Alicia, today we wouldn’t be able to say what we think, act as we feel we should, choose our destiny. For example, our march to the plaza to demand Alberto be found would not be possible. Nor would the demonstrations of the last few days during which people have been able to speak out about the kind of country they want without fear of being kidnapped and disappeared.

Today we say good-bye to Alberto in a way we were unable to with Alicia. Which is why I ask that when you demand justice for him, remember to demand it for her as well. And may the Lord receive the spirits of them both among his chosen ones.

Next there was a blank page, and then nothing except for the porous surface of the file’s yellow cardboard, which remained open for a moment and then was closed by a hand that, although at that moment I wasn’t thinking about it at all, belonged to me and was covered in folds and grooves like country roads traveled by devastation and death.

Once, a long time before any of this happened, my mother gave me a jigsaw puzzle that I rushed to put together while she watched. It probably didn’t take me very long, since it was a puzzle for kids and had few pieces, no more than fifty. When I finished, I brought it to my father and showed it to him with childish pride, but my father shook his head and said, It’s very easy, and asked me to give it to him. I handed over the puzzle and he started to cut the pieces into tiny bits devoid of any meaning. He didn’t stop until he had cut up every one of the pieces, and when he was done he said to me: Put it together now. But I was never able to do it again. Several years earlier, my father, instead of destroying a puzzle, had made one for me, with wooden pieces that were rectangular, square, triangular and round, which he painted different colors to make them easier to identify; of all the pieces, I vaguely remember that the round ones were yellow and the square ones were maybe red or blue, but what’s important here is that, as I closed my father’s file, I began to think he’d created yet another puzzle for me. This time, however, the pieces were movable and had to be assembled on a larger tabletop that was memory and in fact the world. Once again, I wondered why my father had participated in the search for that murdered man, why he’d wanted to document his efforts and the results that they’d failed to produce, as well as the final words he’d said on the subject, linking the murdered man with his disappeared sister. I had the impression that my father hadn’t really been looking for the dead man, who meant little or nothing to him; that what he’d been doing was searching for the sister, picking up a search that certain tragic circumstances — which I myself, and perhaps he and my mother, had tried to forget — had kept him from carrying out in June 1977, when he and my mother and I — my siblings had not yet been born — lived in a state of terror that delayed sounds and movements from reaching us, as if we were underwater. I told myself that my father had wanted to find his friend through her brother, but I also wondered why he hadn’t begun that search sooner, when the murdered brother was still alive and it wouldn’t have been difficult for my father to talk to him; when the brother went missing, I thought, one of the last bonds linking my father to the disappeared woman was broken, and precisely because of that it made no sense to search for him, given that the dead don’t talk, they say nothing from the depths of the wells they’ve been thrown into out on the Argentine plain. I wondered if my father knew his search wouldn’t turn up any results, if he was simply captivated by the symmetry of two missing siblings with more than thirty years between them, willing to throw himself again and again at a light that dazzled him until he collapsed from exhaustion, like an insect in the dark, hot air of a summer night.

My sister was standing beside the coffee machine at one end of the hallway in the intensive care unit and spoke only when I finished telling her about my father’s file. He participated in the search for Burdisso but he did it on his own, not getting involved in the other efforts, she told me. He looked in places that didn’t interest the police, like gullies and streams, and beneath collapsed bridges; also in abandoned houses at the crossroads of country roads. Maybe he was already sick then, or maybe he got sick because of what happened. He talked of nothing else during all the weeks the search went on. I asked my sister why my father had gotten involved in a search for someone he barely knew, but my sister interrupted me with a gesture and said: He knew him; they went to school together at some point. For how long, I asked. My sister shrugged: I don’t know, but once he told me that he regretted not having spoken to Burdisso about his sister while he was still alive, that he occasionally saw him on the street and always thought about approaching him to ask if he knew anything about her, but he couldn’t think of a good way to start the conversation and ended up just letting it go. Who is Fanny, I asked. My sister thought for a minute: She’s a distant relative of Burdisso. He tried to convince her to intervene in the trial as a civilian plaintiff to speed it along. What made him want to look for the missing girl, I asked, but my sister brought the cup of coffee to her lips, took a sip and tossed it in the wastepaper basket. It’s cold, she murmured and took another coin out of her pocket and put it into the machine and said, as if continuing a previous conversation: You saw him in the museum. Who, I asked. My sister said my father’s name. They interviewed him for an exhibition in the municipal museum; you should go see it, she added, and I nodded in silence.

When I entered the museum, I paid my admission and looked around for the exhibition on the local daily press. The museum brought together various insignificant miscellanea, the odds and ends of a mercantile city that lacked any history beyond the fluctuating prices of the grains unloaded over the years in its port, the only justification for its existence in that spot beside a river, not two kilometers farther south or north or any other place at all. As I walked through the museum, I thought about how I’d lived in that city and how at some point it had been the place where I was supposedly going to remain, permanently tied down by an atavistic force that no one seemed able to explain but that affected many people who lived there, who hated it vehemently and yet never left, a city that wouldn’t release its hold on those born there, who traveled and came back or who never went anywhere and tanned in the summer and coughed in the winter and bought houses with their wives and had kids who were never able to leave the city either.