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

Once again: my parents haven’t read Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo or Ernesto Sábato. They’ve read Jorge Luis Borges, Rodolfo Walsh and Leopoldo Marechal but not Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo and Ernesto Sábato. They’ve read Ernesto Guevara, Eva and Juan Domingo Perón and Arturo Jauretche but not Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo and Ernesto Sábato. What’s more: they’ve read Juan José Hernández Arregui, Jorge Abelardo Ramos and Enrique Pavón Pereyra but not Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo and Ernesto Sábato. One could spend hours thinking about this.

At first I took paroxetine and benzodiazepines, no more than fifteen milligrams; but fifteen milligrams was like a sneeze in a hurricane for me, something insignificant and without any effect, like trying to cover the sun with one hand or teach justice in the land of the reprobates, and so the dosage had gotten incrementally upped until it reached sixty milligrams, when there was nothing stronger on the market and the doctors looked the way the caravan leaders in Westerns look when they say they will go only that far because beyond is Comanche territory, and then they turn around and spur on their horses, but first they look at the members of the caravan and they know they’ll never see them again and they feel shame and pity. Then I started to take sleeping pills too; when I took them, I fell into a state that must be like death, and through my mind passed words like stomach, lamp and albino , without any apparent connection. Sometimes I jotted them down the next morning, if I remembered them, but when I read them it was like flipping through the newspaper of a country sadder than the Sudan or Ethiopia, a country for which I had no visa nor did I want one, and I thought I heard a fire truck come barreling to put out the fucking flames of hell with a tank filled with gasoline.

A doctor started to walk toward us from the opposite end of the hallway, and when we saw him we stood up without thinking. I’m going to examine him, he warned us, and then he went into my father’s room and he was there for a little while. We were waiting outside, not knowing what to say. My mother was looking out the large window behind us as a small tugboat dragged a much larger vessel upriver, toward the port. I held in my hands a magazine about cars, even though I don’t know how to drive; someone had left it on one of the seats and I merely let my eyes slide over its pages in an exercise as restful as contemplating a landscape, although in this case it was a landscape of incomprehensible technological innovations. The doctor finally came out and said that everything was the same, that there was no news at all. I thought one of us should ask him something so that the doctor would see we were really worried about my father’s situation, so I asked him how his temperature was. The doctor squinted for a second, and then he looked at me incredulously and stammered: His temperature is perfectly normal, there’s no problem with his temperature; and I thanked him and he nodded and started to head down the hallway.

That morning my sister told me she’d once found a sentence underlined in a book that my father had left at her house. My sister showed me the book. The sentence was: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race: I have kept the faith.” It was verse seven of chapter four of Paul’s second letter to Timothy. Reading it, I thought that my father had underlined that sentence so it would inspire and console him, and perhaps also as an epitaph, and I thought that if I knew who I was, if the fog that was the pills dissipated for a moment so that I could know who I was, I would have wanted that epitaph for myself too, but then I thought that I hadn’t really fought, and that no one in my generation had fought; something or someone had already inflicted a defeat on us and we drank or took pills or wasted time in a thousand and one ways as a mode of hastening an end, possibly an undignified one but liberating nonetheless. Nobody had fought, we had all lost and barely anyone had stayed true to what they believed, whatever that was, I thought; my father’s generation had been different, but, once again, there was something in that difference that was also a meeting point, a thread that went through the years and brought us together in spite of everything and was horrifically Argentine: the feeling of parents and children being united in defeat.

My mother started to prepare a meal and I went to help her, getting up from watching the television my brother had muted. While I peeled the onions, I thought that the recipe, in its glorious simplicity of bygone eras, would soon be lost in a period of confusion and stupidity, and I told myself that I should at least save it — since perpetuating that moment of shared happiness, perhaps one of the last with my mother before I returned to Germany, was impossible. I thought I had to perpetuate that recipe before it was too late. I grabbed a pen and started to take notes so I wouldn’t forget that moment, but all I could do was write down the recipe; a simple, short recipe, yet relevant to me as a relic of a time of procedures, of a time of precise and punctuated steps, so different from those days of pain that blunted us all.

So this is the recipe: Take a good amount of ground beef, spread it over a cotton dish towel, distribute diced onions and chopped olives over the meat, along with hard-boiled eggs and anything else you want to add — here the options seem limitless: pieces of pepper, raisins, dried apricots or prunes, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, canned vegetables, et cetera — and then knead the meat so that the ingredients you’ve added are well distributed throughout. Then season with salt, paprika, cumin and chili powder and use the dish towel to shape the meat into a compact block that doesn’t break apart as you handle it; if the meat doesn’t stick together well, you can add bread crumbs. When the mixture is ready, place it into a lightly oiled mold and put it in the oven. Bake it until the meat loaf — since that’s what you’re making — is golden brown. It can be eaten hot or cold and accompanied by a salad.

The doctor — perhaps the one from before or maybe a different one; they all look the same to me — said: Anything can happen. And in my head those three words kept turning around until they had no meaning: Anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen …

My brother was nervously flipping channels until he stopped on one. It was showing a war film. Even though the plot was confusing and the acting was horrible and constantly thwarted by a camera that seemed to have been deliberately placed where the characters’ faces couldn’t be seen or where they should be walking, which brought about inevitable cuts where presumably the actors tripped over the camera and they had to redo the take, I slowly understood that the film was about a man who, after an accident, which wasn’t shown in the film and which presumably had been a car accident or even an airplane crash, woke up in a hospital not knowing who he was. Naturally, the doctors didn’t know either, nor did the numerous police officers who questioned him. A nurse who looked like a butcher, who at the beginning of the film seemed particularly impatient with the man and with his persistent questions about who he was, or had been, and what he was doing there, ended up taking pity on him, and she told him that she’d found among his clothes, or among the shreds of his clothes, a piece of paper with half a dozen names on it, and she handed it to him. The nurse and the patient agreed that he wouldn’t talk to anyone about it, especially not to the head doctor, a tall sickly-looking man who seemed to hate the nurse and from whom she protected the patient when this doctor doubted his version of the facts or pestered him with questions. That night, the patient ran away from the hospital: he had decided to go in search of the people on the list and make them say who or what he was. With the money that was on him when the accident happened — a huge amount, which he didn’t know how he’d gotten, and which the nurse had secretly given him that night, along with some clothes — he checked into a hotel on the outskirts of town and from there began his search with the help of the phone book. But the search wasn’t as simple as anticipated. Three of the six people were already dead or had moved, and another two agreed to talk to him only to admit they didn’t know who he was or why their names appeared on that list; on both occasions the conversation was tense and ended badly, with the protagonist getting thrown out. He wasn’t surprised that all of the people on his list were somehow related to the hospital. The one remaining person refused to talk to him, so the protagonist started to hang around his house. He discovered with some surprise that he had a huge talent for spying, a talent that allowed him to observe people without being seen and to blend into the crowd when he was being followed. An incidental talent, which he discovered one night, was picking locks; after opening one, he entered a dark room, some sort of poorly lit living room; he advanced silently a few steps and headed toward an adjacent room that, he discovered, was the kitchen; when he retraced his steps back toward the living room, he felt a blow from above and fell to the floor facedown. As he turned over, he received another blow, this time on the shoulder, and fell again, but just then he discovered a floor lamp in reach and switched it on: light bathed the room for an instant and his attacker, blinded, stepped back. Then the protagonist grabbed the lamp and dealt him a blow to the head. In the path traced through the air by the lamp on its way to the attacker’s head, and before the cord was pulled out of the outlet, the protagonist was able to see that his attacker was tall and sickly-looking. The attacker’s face was familiar, even on the floor, with his head bleeding; the protagonist turned on a small lamp that was on a table and, as he brought it closer to the face of his opponent, who looked dead and maybe really was, the protagonist discovered that he was that doctor from whom the nurse often protected him. As in most bad films — and this one really was bad, which I think had been clear to me from the beginning — the protagonist’s sequence of thoughts was visually represented by the repetition of previous scenes: the face of the nurse who looked like a butcher; her antagonism toward the head doctor, which she covered up with deference; the handing over of the list and the money; the meetings with some of the people on the list, almost all of them doctors and almost all employees of the hospital where he had been treated after his accident. And there was one more scene, which had not been shown previously and which, given that the protagonist could not have been present — or, having been present during his convalescence, he must not have understood or couldn’t remember — was only speculation: the nurse writing the list with a smile on her contorted face. At that moment, the viewer understood that the protagonist had been used by the nurse who looked like a butcher to get rid of those people she didn’t want around or who had at some point humiliated or hurt her, and he understood that from that moment on he was going to be a pariah, someone without an identity, forced to hide, to live bound by a paradoxical secrecy, concealing a name that he himself didn’t know. How can you hide something you don’t know, I wondered, but just then, on-screen, a scream was heard: a woman stood screaming beside a staircase, and she leaped on the dead doctor and then lifted her face to the protagonist and insulted him. The protagonist walked toward the door and closed it behind him and then started running, and the camera watched him run, from a crime and from a betrayal, fleeing to nowhere, to an anonymous, clandestine life or to his revenge against the nurse — though it was unlikely that the protagonist would want to stain his hands with blood again; after all, he didn’t seem like a violent person — or to wherever it is that the protagonists of movies go when the credits start to roll and then after them come the commercials.