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

A conversation one night with my sister, in the hospital: I asked her about the names I’d found on a list among my father’s papers, the names of those who had participated in that first newspaper he’d started, and what Alicia Burdisso was doing there. Those are names of people from the town, answered my sister; many of them were politically active and one of them was Alicia. Then I said: That’s why he was searching for her, after so long; because he’d gotten her into politics and he was still alive and she was dead. My sister laid her hand on my shoulder, and then she went to the end of the hallway, where I could no longer see her.

In one of my parents’ books I found some passages about the last place Alicia Burdisso had been seen alive. My father had underlined, in pencil and in a trembling hand:

Central Police Headquarters, Radio Patrol Command, Firemen’s Barracks and the School of Physical Education, all located in the capital of the province [of Tucumán]. La Compañía de Arsenales “Miguel de Azcuénaga,” El Reformatorio and El Motel on the outskirts. Nueva Baviera, Lules and Fronterita in various locations in the interior. […] double barbed-wire fence, guards with dogs, heliports, surveillance towers, et cetera. […] The detainees who passed through those places mostly did so for short periods, and were later transferred. There is a serious possibility that, in many cases, the transfer culminated with the prisoners’ murder. “The prisoners were taken to the ‘Escuelita’ in private cars either in the trunk, in the backseat or lying on the floor. Then the prisoners were taken out, and from the little we knew, when that happened, most of them were executed. If a detainee died, they waited for nightfall, and after wrapping the body in an army blanket, they stuck it into one of the private cars that were headed who knows where” (from the testimony of Officer Antonio Cruz, Dossier 4636). “They put a red ribbon around the necks of those sentenced to death. Every night a truck picked them up to take them to the extermination camp” (from the testimony of Fermín Núñez, Dossier 3185). […] Right in the center of the city of San Miguel, the Central Police Headquarters, which was already functioning as a torture center, became […] a Clandestine Detention Center. In that period Lieutenant Colonel Mario Albino Zimermann was the Chief of Police in Tucumán […]. He was joined by Commissioner-Inspector Roberto Heriberto Albornoz […] and Captains José Bulacio […] and David Ferro […]. The army maintained control of this place through a military supervisor. The person in charge of Security Area 321, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Arrechea, of the 5th Brigade, would visit the center and attend torture sessions […]. The neighbors heard the moans and screams of the victims and, often, shots fired in bursts that were either simulated executions by firing squad or, simply, executions.

In one of those centers, at the Central Police Headquarters, Alicia Burdisso had last been seen, and my father had underlined her name with red ink that made a mark like a scar or a wound.

When I read this, I understood that my dream had been a warning or a reminder for my father and for me, and that in it the transformation of the word verschwunden (disappeared) into Wunden (wounds) was related to what had happened to my father, and the transformation of the word verschweigen (to keep quiet) into verschreiben (to prescribe) had to do with what had happened to me, and I thought the moment had come to put an end to it all. As the pills dissolved slowly in the toilet bowl and began to transport their message of unwarranted happiness to fish who would receive it with their little open mouths at the end of the network of sewers that led to the river, I thought I would have to talk to my father, if that was possible someday, and resolve all my questions, and that task, the task of finding out who my father had been, would keep me busy for a long time, maybe until I was a father myself someday, and no pill could do it for me. I also understood that I had to write about him and that writing about him was going to mean not only finding out who he had been, but also, and above all, finding out how to write about one’s father, how to be a detective and gather the information available but not judge him, and give all that information to an impartial judge whom I didn’t know and perhaps never would know. I thought of the unfortunately apt parable of the fate of the disappeared, of their family members and of their attempts to repair something that couldn’t be repaired, which brought yet another symmetry to this story of a missing brother and a missing sister: my father and I were searching for a person, I for my father and he for Alberto Burdisso but also, and above all, for Alicia Burdisso, who had been his friend as a teenager and who, like him, became politically active in that period and was a journalist, but died. My father had started to search for his lost friend and I, without meaning to, had also started shortly afterward to search for my father. This was our lot as Argentines. And I wondered whether this could also be a political task, one of the few with relevance for my own generation, which had believed in the liberal project that led a large portion of the Argentine people into poverty in the 1990s and made them speak an incomprehensible language that had to be subtitled; a generation, as I was saying, that had gotten burned, but some of us still couldn’t forget. Someone once said that my generation would be the rear guard of the young people in the 1970s who’d fought a war and lost it, and I also thought about that mandate and how to carry it out, and I thought a good way would be to one day write about everything that had happened to my parents and me and hope that others would feel compelled to start their own inquiries into a time that still hasn’t ended for some of us.

One day I got a call from the university where I worked back in Germany. A female voice, which I imagined emerging from a straight neck extending down from a small chin to a slightly open shirt collar, in a small office filled with plants and smelling of coffee and old paper, since all German offices are like that, told me that I had to come back to work or they would be forced to terminate my contract. I asked her for a few days to think it over, and I heard the echo of my voice down the telephone line, speaking in a foreign language. The woman agreed and hung up. I had two days to decide what to do, but I also realized there was no need to think it over: I was there and I had a story to write and it would make a good book because it had a mystery and a hero, pursuer and pursued, and I had already written stories like that and knew I could do it again; however, I also knew this story had to be told in a different way, in fragments, in whispers and with laughter and with tears, and I knew I would be able to write it only once it became part of the memories I’d decided to recover, for me and for them and for those who would follow. As I thought all this, standing beside the telephone, I noticed it had started to rain again, and I told myself I would write that story because what my parents and their comrades had done didn’t deserve to be forgotten, and because I was the product of what they had done, and because what they’d done was worthy of being told because their ghost — not the right or wrong decisions my parents and their comrades had made but their spirit itself — was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm.