My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (10 page)
Read My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain Online
Authors: Patricio Pron
Looking up from my father’s file, I gazed out at the courtyard of the house he’d built and wondered what he had said at Burdisso’s funeral, if he was there when the body was found in that well and if there was something my father knew or could know and I would never know, something having to do with the sordid, sad backdrop of a town that I had believed idyllic. In that courtyard before
my eyes, I’d played games I no longer remember, games that came from the books I read and the films I saw and, particularly, from a period of sadness and terror that now, slowly, was coming back in spite of all the pills, my memory loss and the distance I’d tried to put between myself and that time. Burdisso’s corpse was pulled from the well using a tripod and pulleys, said the article, and I wondered if my father had been there at that moment, if my father had seen the body of the brother of someone who had been his friend hanging from a hook like an animal, floating above the town, already definitively sullied by vice. I also wondered if the story had ended, if I would find out what had happened to Burdisso’s murderers and if the symmetry in this story had already run out, the lines moving away from each other, vanishing into space, which is infinite, and, therefore, meeting up again somewhere. I wondered if my father could think about these things in a hospital bed, unreachable to me but not to the past; soon to be part of the past himself.
Some two hundred residents gathered in El Trébol’s Plaza San Martín on Sunday afternoon to demand the sentencing of the killers
in the Burdisso case. There, Dr. Roberto Maurino […] explained the situation of the four in custody and the latest news of the trial: “The case is not closed. There are four suspects charged with obligatory jail time. There is no bail set for them and they will have to endure the process from the inside. Later will come the trial in Santa Fe, where they will be condemned or absolved. Of the four detainees, three are accused of premeditated homicide acting as a group or a gang, and the fourth as a secondary participant with a sentence of fifteen to twenty years. The maximum penalty for the first three is life imprisonment. […] Of the suspects who have been released, three are charged with aggravated concealment, which is to say, they knew but said nothing. I do not know whom [
sic
] they are. Their charge does not carry a minimum jail sentence and they can go free at the discretion of the court. […] The four detainees confessed their guilt. We will now search, as a town, as a civil association or as a club, for a plaintiff to participate in the trial. To date the law has only allowed this in one case: the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo against a torturer. The idea is to keep tabs on the case in the Sentencing Court of Santa Fe.”
El Trébol Digital
, June 30, 2008
At the bottom of the article there was a photograph showing a group of people around an old man holding up a megaphone with his back to the photographer; in the background, to the left, I thought I recognized my father.
Next in the file were two letters to the editor addressed to
El Trébol Digital
, one signed by a woman whose last name was Bianchini and another by a ten-year-old girl. A week later, on July 7, the news was published of a demonstration in which some forty-two people had called for the killers’ sentencing; in the photos that followed I didn’t see my father. Then there was a photocopy of the front page of a newspaper I’d never seen before,
El Informativo
, showing a photograph of two policemen escorting a man, with a jacket covering his face, from a car. “The Murderers Could Get Life in Prison” was the headline, accompanied by the following teasers at the bottom of the page: “The untold side of the story. Who was Alberto Burdisso?
Why did they kill him? Chronicle of a tragic end. The story of his sister. The clairvoyant that foresaw his reappearance.”
The next article, which summed up the story in a profusion of yellow journalism, littered with superfluous commas that brought to mind a fetid flower, was signed by Francisco Díaz de Azevedo. An excerpt:
[…] in the house on Corrientes, number 438, which he had bought and put under his name and that of his ex common-law wife, a few years earlier, and from which he had been evicted and left to live practically abandoned in a garage.
[…] For some time now, another woman kept his entire monthly salary, in exchange for temporary companionship, and, recently, she had even gotten him into several fights. In fact, Alberto hadn’t frequented the house of this new “companion” in three months, because he had had an altercation that came to blows with this woman’s common-law husband, a fact that is confirmed by the police; which is why she was the one that went to Burdisso’s house, “to visit.”
As regards Alberto’s economic situation, the money that he received in 2006, for the death of his sister during the Process (220,000 pesos), absolutely nothing remained of it.
On the afternoon of Saturday the 31st, and contrary to what was said and assumed, Alberto Burdisso withdrew all the money of his salary, via the cash machine of Banco Nación, since on the last business day of the month, Trebolense had deposited his salary. Afterward, his card was held in the bank itself, although nobody knows what later happened to that money, since it never appeared again. The next day, at approximately seven thirty in the morning, Burdisso was picked up at his domicile on Calle Corrientes, by a male and a woman, to go look for wood in a field bordering the city. When they arrived at the abandoned house, Burdi’s escorts sought to pressure him into signing a series of papers and documents regarding his home, which he resisted, and it was then that he was thrown into a dry well, of some ten meters deep.
In the fall, the victim suffered six broken ribs, a broken arm and shoulder, but he remained alive, in that place. That same evening, Burdi’s cell phone received, in the depths of the well, calls from relatives of the woman who went there with him and with whom he had occasional relations. The calls were to check if he was still alive.
The following day, Monday July 1st, the common-law husband of the woman who threw the resident into the well, arrived at the field, tore down the stonework from around the well and threw metal sheets and tree trunks onto the humanity [
sic
] of Alberto. Shortly after this fact, his death is produced by suffocation and confinement. Which is to say, Burdi was alive for at least twenty-four hours in the well and only died after being covered by the refuse.
For twenty days, the searches were unfruitful and almost useless. Until one afternoon, the city police station, received the information that Burdisso could have been thrown into a well, in the rural area. […] This person, indicated three possible locations and accompanied police personnel to visit them, detecting, that one of the wells (in which he was finally found), wasn’t in the same shape, as the last time this “woodsman” had seen it, detecting with his bare eyes, that some stonework around the top of the well was missing. […] It was fireman Javier Bergamasco, who from inside the hole, noticed that there was a body, in an advanced state of decomposition. He proceeded with a
‘prima facie’
examination with Dr. Pablo Candiz, at the site of the finding and later in the El Trébol morgue, where coworkers and friends, identified him by the particular scar he had on his abdomen. […] The autopsy revealed that Alberto had been beaten about the eyes
and behind the ears, with, surely, fists, before being thrown into the well.
Automatically, after the finding of the body, they carried out a string of simultaneous arrests, after a week of witness statements, they will go to trial: a woman, Gisela C., twenty-seven years old, who already had priors for fraud, Juan H., sixty-three years old, with no prior convictions, Marcos B., thirty-one years old, with priors for drug consumption and the common-law husband of Gisela C. and Gabriel C., thirty-four years old, brother of Gisela C. with priors for misdemeanor theft […].
When I reached this point, I went back a few pages and again unfolded the map my father had used, but I didn’t know how to find out if any of the rural homes he’d visited and marked on the map was the house where the murder had taken place, and, in that case, if it had been my father who had alerted the police. On a small blank page I found on my father’s desk I jotted down: “Was my father the firewood collector—the hunter, in other versions—who filed the report with the police?” and I remained contemplating what I’d written for a long while. Finally I turned the page
over and discovered that it was an invoice for some photographic enlargements that weren’t in the file but—though I didn’t know yet, so I should pretend here that I don’t know—were inside another of the files piled up on the desk, to which I would return time and time again in the days following these discoveries.
“How long have you lived in El Trébol?”
“About twenty years.”
“What are you?”
“I belong to a charismatic center. I’ve been strengthening the mental part.”
“Are you clairvoyant?”
“I haven’t gotten that far.”
“Are you a witch?”
“No.”
“Do they call you a witch?”
“Affectionately. Witch, witchy and crone.”
“Do you make your living this way?”
“I have up until now.”
“Describe to me what your powers are.”
“I channel myself to help those who need it for good. I channel for health, work and affection.”
“How does that include the Burdisso case?”
“I measured myself. I wanted to see my ability and my reach.”
“What did you see?”
“The first Monday he disappeared, I saw that he was still alive. It was that Monday. The following days it was already looking more doubtful. It could be or not. I saw all the ups and downs. Then, it gave me [
sic
] that he was deceased. That he could be in a place with stagnant water, depth, a sewer, a well, et cetera. It wasn’t clear. But they were looking in the cemetery and I felt that wasn’t right.”
“What did you feel when the case was solved?”
“Very powerless because this is a small town. Very annoyed. […] I couldn’t help him in the moments that he manifested himself to me that he was alive. I don’t knew [
sic
] whether to call it strength or cowardice, because I didn’t come forward in those moments and I didn’t reveal myself, I didn’t reveal my ability to help.”
“How do you see these things?”
“Through writings. I call it ‘mermerism’ [
sic
] and it is through the fingertips. I carve around and I look at the contents of the person, but I never let the person tell me about their situation directly. I try to decipher it myself […].”
Alberto’s mother died when he was very young and he never talked about her, I guess he didn’t remember her. […] His father went missing when he was only fifteen years old, and at that point Burdi was already doing jobs as a laborer and bricklayer’s assistant. He lived a life of loneliness, humility and simplicity, and we should acknowledge him as one of those people behind the scenes in this country. Who live silently, scraping by, in a highly complicated society. […] [In the late 1970s] he told me about the problem with his sister, […] and I went with him to Tucumán, but, unfortunately, we returned empty-handed. […] That money [the reparations given by the state as compensation for being a relative of a disappeared person] doomed him, in every sense. His life was, without a doubt, torturous. His childhood was marked by the absence of his mom. As a teenager his father dies. Then, the only loved one he has left, his sister, is murdered by the military dictatorship and, when he gets some financial stability, which could have allowed him to enjoy life, he ends up losing everything, even life itself. Burdi could have left the money in the Club’s mutual fund and lived off the interest. But we advised him to buy property,
it seemed to us the best way to invest some of the money and, besides, he would have a place of his own to live. Maybe if we’d made a different suggestion, this wouldn’t have happened.
Roberto Maurino, childhood friend of Alberto Burdisso, in statements to
El Informativo
, El Trébol, July 2008
Next in my father’s file was a page titled simply “Fanny,” and undated:
A civilian plaintiff is needed as a driving force in the criminal proceedings. This is the task assigned to the district attorney, but the civilian plaintiff intervenes to guarantee that he won’t let the proceedings stagnate. There was an attempt to convince some cousins from El Trébol, but they are avoiding committing to it. The civil plaintiff will be assisted by a lawyer from Santa Fe (where the sentence will be handed down) who is the grandson of Luciano Molinas and an activist in the association HIJOS [acronym for Children United for Identification and Justice and Against Forgetting and Silence, an organization of the children of Argentine disappeared]. This lawyer has experience in the matter and has agreed to charge
minimal fees, to which will be added the expenses required for the court filing (where this money will come from is something that has to be discussed). The inheritance of the property on Calle Corrientes, whose undivided half share is registered in Alberto’s name, should also be dealt with at this time.
Following that was an article from the August 1 edition of the newspaper
El Ciudadano & La Región
, from *osario, titled “Criminal Conspiracy.” I didn’t need to read past the first line to know that my father had written it. A paragraph:
The couple planned and executed the sinister plot over a year and a half, according to the judicial investigation. The fatal victim was Alberto Burdisso, a sixty-year-old man who lived in the town of El Trébol and had received reparations of two hundred thousand pesos. The man entered into a romantic relationship with Gisela Córdoba, thirty-three years his junior, and gradually handed over to her: half of his house (since the other half belonged to his ex-wife), furniture, a car and a large part of his monthly earnings. He even moved into the garage, leaving the house in the hands of the young woman
(who rented it out the same day Burdisso was pushed into the well where he lay dying for three days), just as he found out that the young woman’s supposed brother was actually her husband. Meanwhile, the girl picked up a new lover, sixty-three years old, who ended up involved in the crime. The motive was a supposed life insurance policy that she believed was in her name.
