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

I’ve seen that movie before, said my mother. One day in El Trébol, when your father left me hidden there. Why were you hiding, I asked, but my mother started clearing plates and said she didn’t remember but maybe my father had written it down somewhere, on some of the papers he had in his study. I nodded but immediately didn’t know why because really I had no idea what my mother meant.

Some time before all of this happened I had tried to make a list of the things I remembered about myself and about my parents so that my memory, which I had already started to lose, wouldn’t prevent me from holding on to a couple of things I wanted to keep and so that, I thought in that moment, I wouldn’t end up like the protagonist in that film, both fleeing from himself and still a stranger to himself. My list was in my backpack, and I left my mother in the dining room and went to read it. It was an exceptionally short list considering it had to sum up a life, and, naturally, it was incomplete. It said: I had a serious bout of hepatitis when I was five or six years old; later, or before, I had scarlet fever, chicken pox and German measles, all in the span of about a year. I was born with flat feet and they had to be corrected with enormous shoes that I was horribly ashamed of; really, I shouldn’t ever wear sneakers. I was a vegetarian for a couple of years and, even though I’ve given that up, I still almost never eat meat. I learned to read on my own at five years old; I read dozens of books, but I no longer remember anything about them except that they were written by foreign authors who were dead. That a writer could be Argentine and living is a fairly recent discovery and still shocks me. My mother says I didn’t cry during my first days of life; mainly what I did was sleep. My mother says when I was a baby, my head was so big that if they left me sitting, I would start to sway and then fall headfirst toward one side or the other. I remember crying several times as a child, but I haven’t cried since the death of my paternal grandfather in 1993 or 1994, presumably because the medication doesn’t allow me to. Perhaps the only real effect of the pills is that they hinder complete happiness or complete sadness; it’s like floating in a pool without ever seeing its bottom but not being able to reach the surface. I lost my virginity at fifteen; I don’t know how many women I’ve had sex with since then. I ran away from the day care my mother took me to when I was three years old; in the reconstruction of the time that passed between my disappearance and when I was turned in to a police station, there are one hundred minutes in which nobody knows where I was, not even me. My paternal grandfather was a painter, my maternal grandfather worked on trains; the former was an anarchist and the latter a Peronist, I think. My paternal grandfather once pissed on the flagpole of a police station, but I don’t know why or when; I think I remember it was because they didn’t let him vote or something like that. My maternal grandfather was a guard who worked the line from Córdoba to Rosario; before that, the train passed through Jujuy and Salta and then on to Buenos Aires, where it ended; this was the trajectory that carried the explosives used by the Peronist Resistance, but even though their transportation wasn’t possible without the collaboration of train employees, I don’t know if my grandfather was an active collaborator. I don’t remember the first record I bought, but I remember I heard the first song that moved me inside a car in a place called Candonga, in the province of Córdoba; actually, they were two songs on a radio program that came through the mountains, which distorted the sound and made it seem broadcast straight from the past. My father didn’t like Spanish films, he said they gave him a headache. I voted during the entire decade of the nineties in Argentina, and always for candidates who didn’t win. I worked in a secondhand bookstore every Saturday morning from the ages of twelve to fourteen. My mother’s mother died when she was a girl, I don’t know of what, and from then until she was a teenager, my mother and her sister lived in an orphanage; I think the only things my mother remembers about those years is that once she saw a nun without her habit on and that her sister stole her food. I was a fanatical Catholic between the ages of nine and thirteen; later, the impossibility of making Christian morality compatible with an ethical code in keeping with my experiences made me distance myself from Catholicism, which now seems to me a philosophical aberration. Islam strikes me as the religion most in keeping with our times and the most practical and therefore, perhaps, the true faith. No psychoanalytical therapy has ever worked for me. My parents are journalists, newspaper journalists. I like the ravioli, empanadas and breaded steaks my mother makes; I like the salads they make in Turkey, Hungarian stews and fish. My father cut a toe with a shovel, he fell from a horse onto a barbed-wire fence, he accidentally sprayed himself with gasoline while he was grilling some meat, he stuck his fingers in a fan, he went through a glass door with his forehead and he crashed his car twice, though all this happened over many years and not consecutively. My grandmothers were named Felisa and Clara; good names. Among the languages I’ve learned are English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, French and Catalan; I speak a little Serbo-Croatian and Turkish, but only for traveling. I don’t like children; I like people who stumble on the street or get bitten by a dog or have some sort of similar accident. I don’t like to have my own place; I prefer sleeping at other people’s houses. I don’t mind dying, but I fear the deaths of those I care about, and especially the deaths of my parents.

When I left the hospital, I told my mother I preferred to walk, but I stood there until she got into a taxi and the taxi took off and vanished around a corner. Afterward, I started to walk toward the house, and as I went, I entertained myself watching people pass me by, drivers on their routes, bellowing words I didn’t understand, and women and men who stopped in front of store windows. The city’s daily life, which I’d once been part of, had continued after I’d left, and there, in that very same moment, I had the opportunity to observe it without being observed, as if I were my own ghost, since being a ghost is nothing more than being oneself turned into someone else. As I looked into a store, I thought I was the one trying on a sweater; seeing the lights of the city library still on for the last readers, I thought that I was among them; seeing a person reading or writing by a window or preparing an early dinner completely alone in a kitchen, I remembered that I had done those things and that sometimes, as I read or wrote or cooked, I thought I heard a voice in my head telling me that everything was going to be okay, that I was going to write the books I’d always wanted to write, or at least I was going to come as close as I could and later I’d be empty and have nothing more to say, and that I was going to publish with the houses where I wanted to publish, and that I was going to meet loyal friends who would know how to drink and laugh, and that I was going to have the time to read everything I wanted to read, but also the resignation to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to read it all, as always happens, and, in general, that things weren’t going to go wrong. And in that moment, as I walked though the city without being observed by anyone except myself, I understood for the first time that the voice that had so often sounded in my head, especially in the worst of times, in the moments of greatest doubt, was an unknown voice while at the same time familiar because it was my own voice, or the voice of someone I was going to be, and that one day, after having seen it all and after having done everything and having returned, it would whisper to me, while I tried on a sweater in a store or read in a library or prepared an early dinner, that everything was going to be fine, and would promise me more books and more friends and more trips. Except then I wondered what would happen when I went back to the German city where I’d been living, if I would hear that voice again promising that there were going to be other days and I was going to see them all, and perhaps my father too, and that I was going to leave evidence of them, and I wondered if that voice would tell the truth this time or if it would tell a compassionate lie, as it had done so many times in the past.