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

Once, when I was a boy, I asked my mother to buy me a box of toys that — though I didn’t know it at the time — came from Germany and were made close to a place where I would live in the future. The box contained an adult woman, a shopping cart, two boys, a girl and a dog, but it had no adult man and was, as the representation of a family — since that’s what it was — incomplete. I didn’t know it then, but I had wanted my mother to give me a family, even if it was just a toy one, and my mother had been able to give me only an incomplete family, a family without a father; once again, a family vulnerable to the elements. I had then taken a toy Roman soldier and stripped him of his armor and turned him into the father of that toy family, but I didn’t know how to play with them, I had no idea what families did, and the family that my mother had given me ended up in the back of a closet, the five characters looking at each other and perhaps shrugging their toy shoulders in the face of their ignorance of their roles, as if forced to represent an ancient civilization whose monuments and cities had not yet been unearthed by archeologists and whose language remained undeciphered.

Something had happened to my parents and to me and to my siblings that prevented me from ever knowing what a home was or what a family was, though everything seemed to indicate I had both. Many times in the past I had tried to understand what that thing had been, but then and there, in Germany, I stopped trying, like someone who accepts the mutilations from a car accident he can’t remember. My parents and I had that accident: something crossed our path and our car spun around a few times and went off the highway, and we were now wandering through the fields, our minds blank, that shared experience the only thing uniting us. Behind us there was an overturned car in a ditch on the side of a country road, bloodstains on the seats and in the grass, but none of us wanted to turn around and look back.

As I flew toward my father, toward something I didn’t know but that was disgusting and frightening and sad, I wanted to remember what I could about my life with him. There wasn’t much: I remembered my father building our house; I remembered him coming home from one of the newspapers where he worked with a noise of papers and keys and a scent of tobacco; I remembered him once hugging my mother and many times sleeping with a book in his hands, which always, as my father nodded off, dropped to cover his face as if he were a dead man found on the street during some war; and I could also remember him often driving, looking forward with a frown at a road that was either straight or sinuous and located in the provinces of Santa Fe, Córdoba, La Rioja, Catamarca, Entre Ríos, Buenos Aires, all those provinces through which my father took us in an attempt to show us their beauty — a beauty I found hard to grasp — always trying to give meaning to those symbols we learned in a school that had yet to cast off a dictatorship whose values it continued to perpetuate. Symbols that children like me would draw using a plastic stencil our mothers bought for us, with which, if you ran a pencil over the lines cut into the plastic, you could draw a house that we were told was in Tucumán, another building that was in Buenos Aires, a round cockade and a flag that was sky blue and white, which we knew well because it was supposedly our flag, although we had seen it so many times in circumstances that weren’t really ours, completely beyond our control, circumstances that we didn’t have anything to do with and didn’t want to have anything to do with: a dictatorship, a soccer World Cup, a war, a fistful of failed democratic governments that had served only to allocate injustice in all of our names and in the name of a country that my father and others thought was, had to be, mine and my brother’s and my sister’s.

There were more memories but they stuck together to create a certainty that was in turn a coincidence, and many will consider this coincidence mere invention, and perhaps indeed it was: my father had always had a bad memory. He used to say that it was like a sieve, and he predicted that mine would be like that too, because, he said, memory is something you carry in your veins. My father could remember things that had happened decades earlier but, at the same time, was capable of forgetting everything he’d done the day before. His life was probably an obstacle course because of that and because of dozens of other things that happened to him, some that made us laugh and some that didn’t. One day he called home to ask us his address; I don’t remember who picked up the phone, but there was my father’s voice. Where do I live, he asked. What, responded whoever was on the other end of the phone, my mother or one of my siblings or maybe even me. Where do I live, said my father again, and the other person — my mother, or one of my siblings, or maybe even me — recited the address; a little while later he was home, sitting at the table reading a newspaper as if nothing had happened or as if he’d forgotten what had happened. Another time, someone rang the bell; my father, who was closest, grabbed the intercom near the kitchen and asked who it was. We are Jehovah’s Witnesses, they said. Whose witnesses, asked my father. Jehovah’s, they answered. And what do you want, my father asked again. We come to bring you the word of God, they said. Of who, asked my father. The word of God, they said. My father asked again: Who. We are Jehovah’s Witnesses, they said. Whose witnesses, asked my father. Jehovah’s, they answered. And what do you want, my father asked again. We come to bring you the word of God, they said. Of who, asked my father. The word of God, they answered. No, they brought me that last week, said my father, and he hung up without even glancing at me, beside him and looking perplexed. Then he walked over to my mother and asked her where the newspaper was. On the stove, replied my mother, and neither she nor I told him that he was the one who’d left it there a few minutes earlier.

I used to think my father’s bad memory was just an excuse to get him out of the few inconveniences caused by a daily life that he’d long ago left in my mother’s hands: birthdays, anniversaries, groceries. If my father had carried a date book, I’d thought, it would have been one in which the pages of the following day fell out, an object always in flames like a pyromaniac’s diary. I’d thought it was all a trick my father had come up with, his way of avoiding things that for some reason were too much for him, among which were me and my brother and sister but also a past that I’d barely glimpsed — childhood in a small town, an interrupted political career, years of working at newspapers that were like those boxers who spend more time on the mat than standing and fighting, a political past that I thought I knew nothing about and that maybe I didn’t want to know about — which didn’t lead me to suspect who my father really was, the abyss he had faced and how he’d barely gotten out of it alive. When I spoke with my sister at the hospital, though, I realized that something had always been wrong with my father and that maybe his lack of memory wasn’t faked, and I also realized that I had come to this discovery too late, too late for me and too late for him, and that’s how it always happens, even though it’s sad to say so.

Actually, there was another memory, although it wasn’t a direct recollection, something that had come from experience and had lodged in the mind, but rather something that I had seen in my parents’ house, a photograph. In it, my father and I are sitting on a small stone wall; behind us, an abyss and, a bit beyond, mountains and hills that — though the photograph is in black and white — one imagines green and red and brown. My father and I are sitting on the wall like this: he, in profile, with his arms crossed; I, with my back to the abyss, and my hands beneath my thighs. Looking carefully at the photograph, one will see that it has a certain dramatic intensity not attributable to the landscape — though it is dramatic in the way that some people imagine a landscape can be — but rather to the relationship between us. My father is looking at the landscape; I am looking at him, and in my gaze there is a very specific plea: that he notice me, that he take me down off that wall where my legs hang without touching the ground and which seems to me — inevitably an exaggeration, because I’m just a boy — about to collapse at any moment and drag me into the abyss along with it. In the photograph, my father doesn’t look at me; he doesn’t even notice that I am looking at him or acknowledge the entreaty I was capable of formulating only in that way, as if he and I were doomed not to understand each other, not to even see each other. My father in the photograph has the hair I’m going to have, the same torso I’ll have in the future, now, when I am older than he was when someone — my mother, probably — took that photograph of us as we climbed a mountain whose name I don’t recall. Perhaps at that moment, as I thought about him, as I sat on an airplane, he felt for me the fear I had felt then on a mountain in the province of La Rioja around 1983 or 1984. However, as I traveled in that airplane back to a country that my father loved and that was also mine, a country that for me was just like the abyss he and I had posed in front of, not understanding each other, for a photograph, I didn’t yet know that my father knew fear much better than I thought, that my father had lived with it and fought against it and, like everyone, had lost that battle in a silent war that had been his and his entire generation’s.