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

My mother came into the kitchen and found me contemplating the products in the refrigerator. Like those dreams in which everything is suspiciously familiar and at the same time shockingly strange, the products were the same but their containers had changed, and now the beans were in a can that reminded me of the old tomato can, the tomatoes came in a canister that reminded me of the cocoa and the cocoa came in bags that made me think of diapers and sleepless nights. My mother didn’t seem at all affected by my presence, but I was surprised to see her so thin and so fragile; when I stood up and she came over to hug me, I saw she had a gaze that could turn the demons out of hell, and I wondered if that gaze wasn’t enough to cure my father, to alleviate the pain and suffering of all the patients in the hospital where he lay dying, because that gaze was the gaze of a will that can stand up to anything. What happened, I asked my mother, and she started to explain, slowly. When she finished, she went to her room to cry alone and I put some water and a fistful of rice into a pot and I stared through the window at the impenetrable jungle that had grown from the garden my mother and brother had tended so carefully, in the same place but in a different time.

My siblings were standing in the hallway when I arrived at the hospital. From a distance they seemed silent, although later I saw that they were talking or pretending to, as if they felt obligated to simulate keeping up a conversation that not even they were really listening to. My sister started to cry when she saw me, as if I were bringing terrible and unexpected news, or as if I myself were that news, returning horribly mutilated from a never-ending war. I handed them some chocolates and a bottle of schnapps that I’d bought in Germany, in the airport, and my sister started laughing and crying at the same time.

My father was lying beneath a tangle of cords like a fly in a spiderweb. His hand was cold and my face was hot, but I noticed that only when I brought my hand to my face to wipe it.

I stayed with him that evening, without really knowing what to do except look at him and ask myself what would happen if he opened his eyes or spoke, and for a moment I hoped that he wouldn’t open them while I was there. Then I said to myself: I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten and when I open them none of this will be real, it will never have happened, like when films end or you close a book; but when I opened my eyes, after having counted to ten, my father was still there and I was still there and the spiderweb was still there, and we were all surrounded by the noises of the hospital and that heavy air that smells of disinfectant and false hopes and is sometimes worse than sickness or death. Have you ever been in a hospital? Well, then you’ve seen them all. Have you watched someone die? It’s different every time. Sometimes the illness is blinding and you close your eyes and what you most fear is like a car coming toward you at top speed along a country road some ordinary night. When I opened my eyes again, my sister was beside me and it was nighttime and my father was still alive, fighting and losing but still alive.

My sister insisted on spending the night at the hospital. I went back to the house with my brother and my mother and we watched a movie on television for a while. In the movie, a man ran through an intense snowstorm along a frozen track that seemed endless; the snow fell on his face and on his coat and sometimes it seemed to obstruct the man’s vision of what he was chasing, but the man kept running as if his life depended on catching the airplane that taxied in front of him. Johnny! Johnny! shouted a woman who emerged from the open hatch of the airplane, which seemed about to take off at any minute. When the man was just about to reach her outstretched hand, however, the plane took off and another man violently snatched the woman away and even shot one or two times at the man called Johnny before the plane completely disappeared into the snowstorm. It’s the courier of the czar, said my brother just as the man named Johnny fell to the snow-covered ground and his panting image faded slowly to black and on the screen appeared the words THE END . There were no airplanes in the time of the czar, I replied, but my brother looked at me as if I hadn’t understood a thing.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I poured myself a glass of water in the dark of the kitchen and stood there for a while, drinking and trying not to think about anything. When I finished the water, I went back to my room and grabbed a sleeping pill and swallowed it hurriedly. While I waited for it to take effect, I started wandering around the house, trying to figure out if the house had changed or was the same as when I lived there, but I couldn’t tell. Maybe, simply, it wasn’t the house but my perception that had changed, and that change in perception — whether it was brought on by the travel or my father’s situation or my pill consumption — carried with it a change in the object of that perception, as if, in order to know whether or not the house had changed, I had to be capable of comparing my way of seeing things in that moment and my way of seeing them before leaving and living in Germany and starting to take pills and before my father got sick and I came back, which was impossible. I distracted myself by looking at the books on the shelves in the living room, which were my parents’ books from when they were young, in the light that entered from the street through a window. Although I knew those books well, perhaps it was also my perception that made them seem new to my eyes, and once again I wondered what had really changed from the time I’d flipped through them to now, when I looked at them without curiosity and with some apprehension in the light that filtered in from outside, and again I arrived at no conclusion. I was there for a while longer, standing on the cold floor of the living room, looking at those books. I heard a bus pass and then the cars of the first people headed to work, and I thought the city was soon going to set into motion again and I didn’t want to be there to see it. I went to my room and took two more pills, and then I lay down in bed and waited for them to take effect; but, as always, I didn’t really notice when they did, because first my legs went numb and then I could no longer move my arms and I merely managed to think about that slow falling to pieces that was the only way sleep came and to tell myself, a moment before finally drifting off, that I had to make lists of everything I saw, that I had to make an inventory of everything I was seeing in my parents’ house so that I wouldn’t forget it again. Then I fell asleep.

Titles found in my parents’ library: Another Episode in the Class War; Argentine Literature and Political Reality from Sarmiento to Cortázar; Around the Day in Eighty Worlds; Blade, Dull Edge and Point; British Policy in the River Plate Region; Collected Fictions; Diary of Che Guevara, The; Evita: In My Own Words; Folk Songbook; Foundation for National Reconstruction; Industry, Industrial Bourgeoisie and National Liberation; It Is the People’s Time; Latin America, Now or Never; Life and Death of López Jordán; Little Red Book, The; Martín Fierro; Might Is the Right of Beasts; Mordisquito; My Life for Perón!; Nationalism and Liberation; Navigation Notebook; Operation Massacre; Organized Community, The; Perón, Man of Destiny; Peronism and Socialism; Peronist Doctrine; Peronist Philosophy; Perón Speaks: Speeches and Addresses of Juan Perón; Political Leadership; Prophets of Hate, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Argentina; Rosas, Our Contemporary; Satanovsky Case, The; Tactical Manual; What Is to Be Done?; Who Killed Rosendo? . Authors found in my parents’ library: Borges, Jorge Luis; Chávez, Fermín; Cortázar, Julio; Duarte de Perón, Eva; Guevara, Ernesto; Hernández Arregui, Juan José; Jauretche, Arturo; Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich; Marechal, Leopoldo; Pavón Pereyra, Enrique; Peña, Milcíades; Perón, Juan Domingo; Ramos, Jorge Abelardo; Rosa, José María; Sandino, Augusto César; Santos Discépolo, Enrique; Scalabrini Ortiz, Raúl; Vigo, Juan M.; Viñas, David; Walsh, Rodolfo; Zedong, Mao. Authors absent from my parents’ library: Bullrich, Silvina; Guido, Beatriz; Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel; Ocampo, Victoria; Sábato, Ernesto. Predominant colors of the covers of the books in my parents’ library: sky blue, white and red. Most common publishing houses in their library: Plus Ultra, A. Peña Lillo, Freeland and Eudeba. Words that presumably most frequently appear in the books in my parents’ library: tactic, strategy, struggle, Argentina, Perón, revolution . General condition of the books in my parents’ library: poor, and in some cases terrible, dreadful or critical.