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

I hadn’t been back to that country for eight years, but when the airplane dropped into the airport and spat us out, I felt as if it had been even longer. I’d once heard that the minutes spent on a roller coaster were, as perceived by the people in the car, longer than the ones spent at the foot of the ride watching others scream and grip the metal bar, and in that moment I had the impression that the country itself had gotten on a roller coaster and continued twisting upside down as if the operator had gone crazy or was on his lunch break. I saw old young people who wore clothes that were both old and new at the same time, I saw a blue carpet that looked new but was already dirty and worn where it had been stepped on, I saw some booths with yellow glass panes and some young but old policemen who looked distrustingly at passports and sometimes stamped them and sometimes didn’t; even my passport already looked old and, when they gave it back to me, I felt as if they were handing me a dead plant beyond any hope of being brought back to life; I saw a young woman in a miniskirt giving passersby cookies made with dulce de leche, and I could almost see the dust of the years settled on those cookies and in the caramel. She said to me: Would you like to try a cookie? And I shook my head and practically ran toward the exit. As I left, I thought I saw the old, obese caricature of a soccer player, and I thought I saw him being chased by dozens of photographers and journalists and that the soccer player wore a T-shirt printed with an old photograph of himself, a photograph monstrously disfigured by his belly that showed an exaggeratedly large leg, a curved, elongated torso and an enormous hand hitting a ball to score a goal in some World Cup on any old day of some springtime past.

But maybe that didn’t really happen and it was all a hallucination induced by the pills that doctor gave me and I silently swallowed on the sofas of people I knew in that German city. Once, long after all that happened, I reread the instructions on one of those medications, which I’d read so many times before but nevertheless had forgotten every time. I read that those pills had a sedative, antidepressive and tranquilizing effect. I read that they took effect between one and six hours after being taken orally but that eliminating them required some one hundred and twenty hours — which makes five days, according to my calculations — and eighty-eight percent passes through urine and seven percent through sweat, and five percent of the substance is never eliminated. I read that it produces physical and psychological dependence and that it induces amnesia as well as a decrease in or a complete lack of ability to remember events that take place during the periods of the drug’s effectiveness. I read that it can cause suicidal tendencies in the patient — which is, undoubtedly, serious; drowsiness — which is, of course, not; weakness; fatigue; disorientation; ataxia; nausea; emotional blunting; reduced alertness; loss of appetite or of weight; sleepiness; breathlessness; double vision; sleep disturbances; dizziness; vomiting; headaches; sexual disturbances; depersonalization; hyperacusia; numbness or tingling in extremities; hypersensitivity to light or physical contact; hallucinations or epileptic convulsions; respiratory, gastrointestinal or muscular problems; increase in hostility or irritability; anterograde amnesia; alteration of the perception of reality and mental confusion; slurred speech; abnormalities in liver and kidney function; and withdrawal symptoms following abrupt discontinuation of the medication. So I guess seeing a soccer player wearing a T-shirt with a deformed image of his own past over his gut is among the least serious things that can happen to you when you take stuff like that.

Anyway, that encounter, which really happened and which, therefore, was true, can be read here simply as an invention, as something fake, since, first of all, I was sufficiently confused at the time and so clearly worried that I could and did distrust my senses, which could incorrectly interpret a real event, and, second, because that encounter with the aging soccer player from a country that was part of my past, and almost everything that happened later, which I’m here to explain, was true but not necessarily believable. It has been said that in literature the beautiful is true but the true in literature is only the believable, and between the believable and the true there is a vast distance. Not to mention the beautiful, which is something that should never be discussed: the beautiful should be literature’s nature preserve, the place where beauty prospers without literature’s hand ever touching it, and it should serve to entertain and console writers, since literature and beauty are completely different things or perhaps the same thing, like two gloves for the right hand. Except you can’t put a right-hand glove on your left hand; some things don’t go together. I had just arrived in Argentina, and while I waited for the bus that would take me to the city where my parents lived, almost two hundred miles to the northeast of Buenos Aires, I was thinking that I had come from the dark German forests to the horizontal Argentine plain to see my father die and to say good-bye to him and to promise him — even though I didn’t believe it in the slightest — that he and I were going to have another chance, in some other place, for each of us to discover who the other was and that, perhaps, for the first time since he had become a father and I a son, we would finally understand something; but this, being true, wasn’t the least bit believable.

And then there was the impossible tongue twister of the ill and their doctors, who brought together words like benzodiazepine, diazepam, neuroleptic, hypnotic, zolpidem, tranquilizer, alprazolam, narcotic, antiepileptic, antihistamine, clonazepam, barbiturate, lorazepam, triazolobenzodiazepine, escitalopram— all words amid the jumbled words in a head that refused to function.

When I got to my parents’ house, nobody was there. The house was cold and damp, like a fish whose belly, as a boy, I had once brushed against before throwing it back into the water. It didn’t feel like my house — that old sensation that a particular place is your home had vanished forever — and I was afraid the house would consider my presence an insult. I didn’t touch even a single chair: I left my small suitcase in the entryway and I began to walk through the rooms, like a snoop. In the kitchen there was a hunk of bread that some ants had started eating. Someone had left a change of clothes and an open empty handbag on my parents’ bed. The bed was unmade and the sheets retained the shape of a body that perhaps was my mother’s. Beside it, on my father’s night table, there was a book that I didn’t look at, some eyeglasses and two or three bottles of pills. When I saw them, I told myself that my father and I had something in common after all, that he and I were still tied to life by the invisible threads of pills and prescriptions and that those threads also now somehow united us. My old room was on the other side of the hallway. As I went into it, I thought everything must have shrunk: that the table was smaller than I remembered it, that the chair beside it could be used only by a midget, that the windows were tiny and that there weren’t as many books as I remembered, and besides they’d been written by authors who no longer interested me. It seemed as if I’d been gone more than eight years, I thought as I lay on what had been my bed. I was cold but I didn’t want to cover myself with the bedspread, and I lay there, with one arm over my face, unable to sleep but also unwilling to stand up, thinking in circles about my father and about me and about a lost opportunity for him and for me and for all of us.