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

A line of light came in through the lowered blind of my father’s study; when the blind was lifted, however, the light seemed weaker to me than the line had indicated. I opened the curtains and turned on a table lamp, but even then the light was insufficient. My father used to tell my brother as a boy that he should go out and play and come back when he could no longer see his hands, but my brother could still see his hands at night. In that moment, though it wasn’t yet night, I was the one who couldn’t see mine. I felt a presence behind me and for a second I thought it was my father, coming to scold me for sneaking into his study, but then I saw that it was my brother. I think I’m going crazy, I said to him, I can’t see my hands. My brother stared at me and said, It looks that way to me too. I didn’t know if he was talking about my having gone crazy or that he couldn’t see his hands; either way, a moment later he came back with a desk lamp that he put on the table and turned on along with the others. The light was still dim, but now I could make out some objects in the penumbra: a blade for cutting paper; a ruler; a jar of pencils, pens and highlighters; and a typewriter standing on end to save space. On the desk there was a pile of folders, but I didn’t touch them. I sat in my father’s chair and looked at the garden, wondering how many hours he’d spent there and if he’d ever thought of me during that time. The study was freezing. I leaned forward and grabbed a folder from the pile. The folder was filled with information for a trip my father hadn’t taken and perhaps now never would. I put it to one side and grabbed another that contained recent press clippings with his byline; I read the clippings for a while and then left them to one side. On a loose sheet of paper I found a list of books my father had recently bought: there was a title by Alexis de Tocqueville, another by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an atlas of Argentina’s highways, a book about that music from the northeastern part of the country called chamamé and a book I’d written some time ago. In the next folder was a reproduction of an old photograph, enlarged to the point that it dissolved into dots. In it appeared my father, although, of course, he wasn’t exactly my father, but rather whoever he had been before I met him: his hair was moderately long and he had sideburns and was holding a guitar; beside him there was a young woman with long, straight hair and an expression of surprising seriousness, a gaze that seemed to say she wasn’t going to waste time because she had more important things to do than stay still for a photograph, she had to fight and die young. And I thought: I know that face, but later, reading the materials my father had gathered in that folder, I thought that I hadn’t ever known it, that I’d never seen it and that I would have preferred to continue that way, without knowing anything about the person behind that face, and also without knowing anything about my father’s last weeks. You don’t ever want to know certain things, because what you know belongs to you, and there are certain things you never want to own.

The folder was thirty by twenty-two centimeters, made of a very lightweight cardboard in a pale yellow color. It was two centimeters thick and enclosed by two elastic bands that could have once been white but at this point had a slightly brown tone; one of the bands held the folder from top to bottom and the other along its width, which made them form a cross; more specifically, a Latin cross. Near the lower edge of the folder there was a sticker carefully positioned on the yellow cardboard. The letters were black, printed on a gray background; just one word and that word was a name: Burdisso .

Inside the folder was another sticker, which included the full name of a person, Alberto José Burdisso.

On the next page was a photograph of a man who looked withdrawn, who had barely distinguishable features. It accompanied an article titled “The Mysterious Case of a Missing Resident.” The text of the article is as follows:

Alberto Burdisso is a citizen of El Trébol and has been an employee at the Club Trebolense for many years. The mystery as regarding his person began to grow when on Monday he did not present his person [ sic ] at work and neither did he do so on Tuesday. From that moment began an elaborate investigation. His coworkers at the institution first investigated by their own means, going to his home on Calle Corrientes and seeing that there was no movement inside, ongly [ sic ] his bicycle left in the courtyard, watched over by his dog, who was outside.

No one has seen “Burdi” since Sunday, and he would have mentioned to one of his coworkers if he was going to the city of *osario for the weekend. He would have received his salary between Friday and Saturday, since the Club Trebolense pays its employees on the last workday of the month.

“They called us on Monday at 10 p.m. on the 101 emergency line,” declared Captain Hugo Iussa to El Trébol Digital . “A coworker told us that he hadn’t shown up for work at the Club Trebolense. We interviewed neighbors, and we notified the Court of First Instance in San Jorge, which authorized us to make a ‘file of inquiry of whereabouts,’ but for now, at this point, that doesn’t mean that we’ve ruled out another possibility”[?]. He also added: “We reviewed his domicile and we did not perceive any signs of violence. We have several hypotheses and we are hoping to find him.”

Coworkers last saw Burdisso on Saturday as he left work at lunchtime lunchtime [ sic ]. There, to a doorman of the Institution he mentioned the possibility of going to *osario for a stroll.

According to neighbors, Alberto José Burdisso, 60 years old, was last seen in the vicinity of his own neighborhood, on Calle Corrientes at number 438 on Sunday afternoon.

Another peculiarity of the resident is that he has no relatives in the city, he only had a disappeared sister during the period of the Military Dictatorship and some cousins in the rural area of El Trébol but with whom he barely had any contact.

Source: El Trébol Digital , June 4, 2008

This article, with its absurd syntax, was followed by an enlargement of the image that accompanied it in the digital edition. The photograph showed a man with a round face, small eyes and a mouth with thick lips locked in a strange smile. The man wore his hair very short — it was either light or gray — and in the photograph he was being given a commemorative plate of some kind by someone only partially in the frame. The man — all signs point to the fact that it was Alberto Burdisso himself — wore a pale V-necked cotton sports shirt from which hung some rimless eyeglasses the man, perhaps out of vanity, had taken off before being photographed. The text of the commemorative plate was illegible in the photograph.

Then it must be because he lived in the same small town where my father grew up, the town to which he periodically returned and where my sister lives, I thought the first time I read the news article. Now I also think that behind the abstruse syntax and the ridiculous police jargon — how else to describe sentences such as “but for now, at this point, that doesn’t mean that we’ve ruled out another possibility”?—there was a symmetry, according to which I was searching for my father and my father was giving his account of a search for someone else, someone he may have known and who had disappeared.