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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 happened 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.

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.

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?