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

There is also the mystery of who was giving his account and who had taken an interest in the search, but that mystery is almost impossible for me to solve.

What did I remember about El Trébol? An expanse of field, sometimes yellow and sometimes green but always right next to the houses and the streets, as if in my memories the town is much smaller than the statistics indicate. A little forest of trees beside some abandoned, overgrown train tracks: in the forest there were frogs and iguanas, which rested on the tracks during the hottest hours of the day and fled if they noticed you were stalking them. The neighborhood kids used to say that if you found yourself confronted by an iguana, you should always be sure to keep in front of it, since if the iguana lashed at you with its tail it could cut off your leg. This game was also popular: We used to capture frogs in an irrigation ditch and stick them, still alive, in a plastic bag, which we then placed in the street as a car was passing. The game was, after the car had destroyed the bag, each of us would try to put together an entire frog with the pieces scattered on the sidewalk; whoever finished a frog first won. On the street where we used to play this frog puzzle game, there was an old bar and warehouse that had been swallowed up by the city, and my paternal grandfather used to go there at dusk to drink a glass of wine and sometimes play cards. In the summer you could get ice cream at a store called Blanrec, whose owner, I think, was actually called Lino; I used to read a lot when we spent summers in El Trébol, and take long naps and, in general, spend a lot of time walking the streets, which were like the streets in the small American Midwestern towns from 1950s movies; most of the buildings were homes, and they were all always closed up, with the blinds slightly open to enable people to spy on what was happening outside. At dusk the spying came out into the open, as if a ban prohibiting it only at certain hours had been lifted, and people used to bring chairs out onto the sidewalk and sit and chat with the neighbors. Sometimes you also saw people on horseback. Naturally, everyone knew each other and they said good morning or good afternoon or whatever it was, greeting each other with first names or nicknames because each one of those names came with a story that was the story of the individual who bore it and of his entire family, past and present. Some of my father’s uncles were deaf-mutes and, therefore, I was the kid from the deaf family or the grandson of the painter; the deaf-mutes made floor mosaics, a profession I think they learned in jail, and they had dogs that responded to names they could say in spite of not being able to really speak: Cof and Pop. There were never thefts of any importance in town and people usually left their doors open in the summer and their cars unlocked and their bicycles tossed on their front lawns. Around the back of my grandparents’ house, a man had some land where he raised rabbits. Another had a grocery store with shelves that reached the ceiling; he was very tall. I liked the bread that man sold. I also liked the iced tea my grandmother made and the songs my grandfather whistled. He was always whistling or humming; his hands were destroyed by the turpentine he used to remove paint stains but, from what I understood, he’d been through worse. There wasn’t a real bookstore or a library in town; just one store run by two old ladies that sold newspapers and some comic books, which I bought if the old ladies considered them appropriate for me. There was absolutely nothing else to do in that place except go to the movie theater on the main street, which offered a double feature for kids; inevitably, since the theater had limited funds, the same movies were shown over and over, so we’d had to find some other source of entertainment: putting candies in our mouths and, when we had salivated enough and they were damp and sticky, throwing them into the long hair of the girls in the front rows. Some of us, the cruel ones, used gum instead of candy, and any attempts to try to remove the gum made it even more entrenched, and there was crying and laughing and threats. I also liked the honey produced by a beekeeper in town, but otherwise there was nothing to do except spy and be spied on, all the while maintaining an air of seriousness that even we kids were forced to put on, with the obligatory weekly visit to church and respect for the national holidays and, in general, the consistent cultivation of hypocrisy that seemed to be part of a local tradition the inhabitants of El Trébol were particularly proud of and had tacitly decided to defend against the onslaught of truth and progress, which were considered foreign in that town.

The next article was from the same digital newspaper, published a day after the first. It read:

Alberto Burdisso has not turned up. 72 hours have passed since his disappearance, there are not many clues to guide those searching for him in the city and in the region. After an intense day on Wednesday in which the local police relentlessly took declarations from coworkers, family members, neighbors, and friends, the Volunteer Firemen, along with the police themselves, scoured the region, rural roads, farmhouses, ruined and abandoned houses that border and are next to the neighborhood where Burdisso has his abode, with a totally negative result. “We carried out patrols and searches in suburban and urban areas in spiral but to date we’ve found nothing. We’ll continue all day today with more searching. We worked the canals, sewers and even wastelands, but, for the moment, nothing,” explained Hugo Yussa to “ElTrebolDigital” [ sic ]. Alberto Burdisso was last seen on Sunday night near his domicile, on Calle Corrientes number 400.

On Wednesday evening during the evening hours, another important detail emerged: Burdisso’s debit card was swallowed by the ATM of Banco Nación. “The card thing happened on Saturday,” explained Iussa, of the 9th Precinct. The search operation asked the banks Credicoop (from thence the card was issued) and Banco Nación (in who’s [ sic ] machine it was found) to offer information on the financial movements in the accounts of the missing resident.

The following pages were stapled together in the upper left corner; they were printouts, shoddy ones, of a short history of El Trébol that my father had corrected and annotated by hand:

The birth of El Trébol [illegible]. There was no single act or explicit desire [crossed out]. The situation is even further complicated by the almost simultaneous design of three towns: […] Pueblo Passo in 1889, El Trébol in 1890 and Tais in 1892. The conjunction of these three towns came about in 1894 when, by provincial decree, the Municipality was established, all under the single denomination of El Trébol, whose [illegible].

On the 15th of January 1890 the first train left Cañada de Gómez [illegible] immigrant family members and friends with the intention of establishing themselves in those lands [illegible] of the Central Argentine Railway like the founding date of El Trébol, [crossed out] their complex interrelation [illegible] rural [illegible].

The name emerged during the construction of the branch line of the Central Argentine Railway [illegible] financed with capital from Britain, since this subsidiary company was responsible for naming the stations that [illegible] three stations in a row were named with symbols of Great Britain. “Las Rosas” for the red and white roses in the English coat of arms; “Los Cardos”—Thistles — in honor of Scotland; and “El Trébol”—Clover — for the flower typical of Ireland [illegible] first colonists that came to settle around 1889 were [illegible] in 1895 the national census of that year calculated 3,333 rural settlers and 333 in the urban area, which is [illegible] mostly Italians, although there were also Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans, Swiss, Yugoslavians, Russians, “Turks” who arrived crowded into boats with third-class tickets and for the most part [illegible].