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

The night before last you were delirious, said my sister as she brought me a cup of tea the next morning. She asked me if I remembered what I’d been dreaming. I remembered two or three dreams and told them to her. She said she didn’t like them because animals died in every one, but that the one about my father was good. I didn’t dream them for you to like, I answered, and she smiled. You always told us your dreams when he took us to school, remember? I shook my head. He would go out first and start the car and then we would go out and get into the backseat and you would tell us what you’d dreamed about the night before; you always dreamed about tortured, dead animals. I never understood why he always went out first to start the car, I said; it didn’t make sense, because he had to wait for us anyway. My sister looked at me blankly, as if I were one of those people on television speaking their poor subtitled language, lost in a land that didn’t belong to them. How can you not remember, she said. Back then journalists were getting killed by car bombs; he went out alone every day to start the car to protect us, to take on all the risk himself. I can’t believe you don’t remember, she said.

Then what I’d tried not to remember came back to me with unusual intensity, and it was no longer oblique, like the fuzzy images of photographs I’d been gathering just to have but not to look at. It came back head-on and with the overwhelming force of the fire truck I saw occasionally when I’d taken too many pills. It explained everything for me, explained the terror that I instinctively linked to the past, as if in the past we had lived in a country called fear with a flag that was a face filled with dread, explained my hatred toward the country of my childhood and my leaving that country, an exile that had begun long before I left for Germany and finally managed to forget everything. At one point I had wanted to believe that this voyage was a one-way trip, because I had no home to return to, given the conditions under which my family and I lived for a long time. But in that moment I realized I did have a home and that this home was a bunch of memories and those memories had always been with me, as if I were one of those stupid snails my grandfather and I used to torture when I was a boy.

When I was a boy, I had instructions not to bring other children home; if I had to walk down the street alone, I was supposed to walk against traffic and stay alert if a car stopped alongside me. I wore a card around my neck with my name, my age, my blood type and a contact telephone number: if someone tried to pull me into a car, I was supposed to throw that card to the ground and shout my name as loudly and as many times as I could. I wasn’t allowed to stomp on the cardboard boxes I found on the street. I couldn’t say a word about anything I ever heard at my house. In the house was an emblem painted by my father, two outstretched hands holding up something that looked like a hammer crowned by a Phrygian cap, with a background of sky blue and white, framed by a rising sun and some laurels; I knew it was the Peronist coat of arms but I couldn’t mention it to anyone, and I was also supposed to forget what it meant. These rules, which I remembered for the first time in a long time, were designed to protect me, to protect my parents and my brother and sister and me in a time of terror, and though my parents may have already forgotten about them, I hadn’t, because suddenly I thought of something that I still continued to do, even in Germany, when I was distracted: draw up imaginary routes to take me where I wanted to go, always walking against traffic.

About those snails: my grandfather and I would paint their shells different colors, and sometimes we’d write messages on them. Once, my grandfather left a greeting with his name and put the snail down on the ground. The snail left and a long time later some people brought it back to us: it had been found a few kilometers away, which was a significant distance for me but perhaps impossible for a snail; its feat made a real impression on me, and also left me thinking for a while that everything came back, that everything returned even if you were carrying all your possessions with you and had no reason to come back. Then I decided that I was never going to come back, and I kept that childhood promise to myself for a long time of German fog and medicated haze, and, even though certain circumstances forced me to return, I hadn’t returned to the country that my parents had wanted me to love, the one called Argentina, but rather to an imagined country, the one they had fought for and that had never existed. When I understood that, I also realized it hadn’t been the pills that caused my inability to remember the events of my childhood, but rather those very events themselves that had provoked my desire to self-medicate and forget everything. And then I decided to remember, to do it for me and for my father and for what we’d both gone searching for, which had unintentionally reunited us.

My parents belonged to an organization called the Iron Guard. Unlike its unfortunate name, which links it to a Romanian organization from the period between the wars with which it has nothing else in common [1], my parents’ organization was Peronist, though the philosophy of its members — moreover, of my parents [2] — seems to have been historical materialist [3] [4]. Given that most of its members did not come from Peronist homes, their efforts were geared toward finding out what it meant to be a Peronist, and they turned to the neighborhoods in which the grand Peronist narrative of the distribution of wealth and the times of prosperity and paternalism were still vivid in residents’ memories, as was the presence of the Resistance [5], to which my parents’ organization contributed in its last phase. This sets my parents’ organization apart from the Montoneros, the organization it was, at one point, poised to merge with [6]: Iron Guard members didn’t believe they possessed the truth of the revolutionary process but rather they went out to search for it in the lower classes’ experience of resistance [7]; they didn’t attempt to impose their practices but rather to acquire them. The other substantial difference was their rejection of violent methods; after a period of debate [8], the organization decided not to resort to weapons except for defensive means, and I suppose that’s what saved the lives of my parents and a large number of their comrades and, indirectly, my own life [9]. From that moment on, the organization’s main tools for building power were rhetoric and debate, whose potential for transformation is, as we all know, negligible; but something happened: for a long time they were the most powerful organization within Peronism and the only one with any real reach beyond the middle class, whose desire for transformation ended up proving nonexistent. Their objective was to create a “strategic rear-guard” [10], a state actually rooted in society, with the goals of replacing the militarized state, installed in 1955 and devoid of political legitimacy, and building power from the bottom up, dealing with real problems and avoiding violence except on the fringes in order to establish a legitimate alternative and as an element of agitation [11]. However, being a Peronist who was absolutely loyal to Perón had its pitfalls: unconditional adherence to the movement’s leader led my parents’ organization to accept an impotent government made up of an ignorant woman and a sadistic murderer nicknamed the Warlock because of his grotesque enthusiasm for the occult, and, furthermore, it led them down a dead end after Perón’s death [12]. Where does an army go once its general is dead? Nowhere, obviously. Although Perón stated that his “only heir” was the people, who were in turn permeated by the Iron Guard, which swam among the people like a fish in water but at the same time gave them a channel and banks — as if the water had no meaning without the fish nor the fish without the water and one would disappear without the other — the Iron Guard dissolved after Perón’s death [13], unable to take charge of a legacy that it would have to defend with weapons and bloodshed in the months to come. This also saved my parents’ lives, and my life [14]. Those comrades who decided to join other organizations and continue their militancy were murdered and disappeared, others left the country, and the rest underwent a painful readjustment process, a sort of inner exile in which they had to witness the failure of a revolution definitively put down by the dictatorship. Those who continued or were ordered to continue were killed; my parents continued in their own way: my father stayed a journalist, as did my mother, and they had children to whom they passed on a legacy that is also a mandate, and that legacy and mandate — of social transformation and struggle — turned out to be unsuited to the times we grew up in, times of pride and frivolousness and defeat.