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

In the room that held the exhibition on the daily press there was a television on a constant loop, and a chair. I sat in it trembling, listening to data and figures and watching the front pages of newspapers until my father appeared on the screen. He was as I remembered him in his last years. He had a long white beard, which he occasionally ran his fingers through with a flirtatious air, and he talked about newspapers where he’d worked, newspapers he’d seen go under and reappear with other names and other staffs in other places that, invariably, were finished off by the courts soon afterward, so the newspapers went under again and the cycle repeated itself from the beginning, if there ever was one; a whole series of pretty terrible cycles of exploitation and unemployment following one after another without leaving any room for a career or for hope. My father told his story, which was also the story of the press in this city where he’d decided to live, and I, watching him on the screen at that museum exhibition, felt both pride and very strong disappointment, the same disappointment I usually felt when I thought about everything my father had done and the impossibility of following in his footsteps or of offering him achievements that could match his own, which were many and were counted in newspaper pages, in journalists trained by him who in turn had trained me and in a political history that I had once known and then tried to almost completely forget.

I watched the documentary that included the interview with my father three or four times that afternoon, listening to him attentively until I’d familiarized myself with all the dates and names but, more crucially, until looking at him started to be too terrible. I’m going to start crying, I thought, but thinking about it was enough to keep me from doing it. At some point an employee came in and announced that the exhibition would be closing in five minutes, and then he approached the television and turned it off. My father was cut off in the middle of a sentence, and I tried to finish it but couldn’t: where my father’s face had been I began to see mine, reflected in the black screen with all my features gathered in an expression of pain and sadness that I’d never seen before.

Once my father told me that he would have liked to write a novel. That night, at his desk, in a room that had once been mine and that never seemed to have enough light, I wondered if he hadn’t actually done it. Among his papers was a list of names laid out in two columns, colored lines linking them in which red predominated. There was also a page from a newspaper, the front page of a local newspaper called Semana Gráfica that I knew — because I’d once heard my father say it, and what he’d said, particularly the pride with which he’d said it, had survived the almost total collapse of my memory — was a newspaper he’d created as a teenager and that had been his first job in journalism, long before he went to a city in the heart of the country to study that discipline. There were also photographs, and perhaps these were the materials for the novel my father had wanted to write and never did.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.