My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (16 page)

A conversation one night with my sister, in the hospital: I asked her about the names I’d found on a list among my father’s papers, the names of those who had participated in that first newspaper he’d started, and what Alicia Burdisso was doing
there. Those are names of people from the town, answered my sister; many of them were politically active and one of them was Alicia. Then I said: That’s why he was searching for her, after so long; because he’d gotten her into politics and he was still alive and she was dead. My sister laid her hand on my shoulder, and then she went to the end of the hallway, where I could no longer see her.

In one of my parents’ books I found some passages about the last place Alicia Burdisso had been seen alive. My father had underlined, in pencil and in a trembling hand:

In one of those centers, at the Central Police Headquarters, Alicia Burdisso had last been seen, and my father had underlined her name with red ink that made a mark like a scar or a wound.

When I read this, I understood that my dream had been a warning or a reminder for my father and for me, and that in it the transformation of the word
verschwunden
(disappeared) into
Wunden
(wounds) was related to what had happened to my father, and the transformation of the word
verschweigen
(to keep quiet) into
verschreiben
(to prescribe) had to do with what had happened to me, and I thought the moment had come to put an end to it all. As the pills dissolved slowly in the toilet bowl and began to transport their message of unwarranted happiness to fish who would receive it with their little open mouths at the end of the network of sewers that led to the river, I thought
I would have to talk to my father, if that was possible someday, and resolve all my questions, and that task, the task of finding out who my father had been, would keep me busy for a long time, maybe until I was a father myself someday, and no pill could do it for me. I also understood that I had to write about him and that writing about him was going to mean not only finding out who he had been, but also, and above all, finding out how to write about one’s father, how to be a detective and gather the information available but not judge him, and give all that information to an impartial judge whom I didn’t know and perhaps never would know. I thought of the unfortunately apt parable of the fate of the disappeared, of their family members and of their attempts to repair something that couldn’t be repaired, which brought yet another symmetry to this story of a missing brother and a missing sister: my father and I were searching for a person, I for my father and he for Alberto Burdisso but also, and above all, for Alicia Burdisso, who had been his friend as a teenager and who, like him, became politically active in that period and was a journalist, but died. My father had started to search for his lost friend and I, without meaning to, had also started shortly afterward to search for my father. This was our lot as Argentines. And I wondered whether this could also be a political task, one of the few with relevance for my own generation, which had believed in the liberal project
that led a large portion of the Argentine people into poverty in the 1990s and made them speak an incomprehensible language that had to be subtitled; a generation, as I was saying, that had gotten burned, but some of us still couldn’t forget. Someone once said that my generation would be the rear guard of the young people in the 1970s who’d fought a war and lost it, and I also thought about that mandate and how to carry it out, and I thought a good way would be to one day write about everything that had happened to my parents and me and hope that others would feel compelled to start their own inquiries into a time that still hasn’t ended for some of us.

One day I got a call from the university where I worked back in Germany. A female voice, which I imagined emerging from a straight neck extending down from a small chin to a slightly open shirt collar, in a small office filled with plants and smelling of coffee and old paper, since all German offices are like that, told me that I had to come back to work or they would be forced to terminate my contract. I asked her for a few days to think it over, and I heard the echo of my voice down the telephone line, speaking in a foreign language. The woman
agreed and hung up. I had two days to decide what to do, but I also realized there was no need to think it over: I was there and I had a story to write and it would make a good book because it had a mystery and a hero, pursuer and pursued, and I had already written stories like that and knew I could do it again; however, I also knew this story had to be told in a different way, in fragments, in whispers and with laughter and with tears, and I knew I would be able to write it only once it became part of the memories I’d decided to recover, for me and for them and for those who would follow. As I thought all this, standing beside the telephone, I noticed it had started to rain again, and I told myself I would write that story because what my parents and their comrades had done didn’t deserve to be forgotten, and because I was the product of what they had done, and because what they’d done was worthy of being told because their ghost—not the right or wrong decisions my parents and their comrades had made but their spirit itself—was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm.

Someone once said there’s a minute that escapes the clock so it never has to happen and that minute
is the minute in which someone dies; no minute wants to be that moment, and it flees and leaves the clock gesticulating with its hands and an idiot’s face.

Perhaps it was that, perhaps it was the unwillingness of a minute to be the minute in which someone stops breathing, but the fact is my father didn’t die: in the end, something made him cling to life and he opened his eyes and I was there when he did it. I think he wanted to say something, but I warned him: You have a tube in your throat, you can’t speak, and he looked at me and then he closed his eyes and he seemed, finally, to rest.

The last time I was in the hospital, my father still wasn’t able to speak, but he was conscious and his pulse had stabilized and it looked like he would soon be breathing again without the help of a machine. My mother left us alone and I thought I needed to tell him something, I needed to tell him what I’d discovered about his search for the
disappeared siblings and what that had led me to remember and how I’d decided to start to remember there and then, willing to recover a history that belonged to him and to his comrades and also to me, but I didn’t know how to do it. Then I remembered I was carrying a book with me and I began to read to him; it was a book of poems by Dylan Thomas, and I read until the light coming through the window of that hospital room had faded completely. When that happened, I thought I’d be able to cry in the darkness without my father seeing, so I did, for a long while. I don’t know if my father did as well. In the darkness, I could make out only his motionless body in the bed and his hand, to which I was clinging. When I could speak again, I told him: Hold on, you and I have to talk, but now you can’t and I can’t; someday, though, maybe we can, like this or some other way, and you have to hold on until that day comes. Then I let go of his hand and I left the room and I continued crying for a while in the hallway.

That night, before I caught my plane, my mother and I looked at some photographs my father had taken of me with his Polaroid camera when I was a boy. In them I was faded; soon my past would be
completely erased and my father and my mother and my brother and my sister and I were going to be united in that, too, in absolute disappearance.

As we looked at those photographs, which had literally started to fade between our fingers, I asked my mother why my father had searched for Alicia Burdisso and what he’d really wanted to find. My mother said that she and my father wished that their comrades and those who had shared the struggle with them, those they’d known and those they’d never met, those they’d known only—following the most basic rules of safety—by their absurd noms de guerre, like the ones they themselves had gone by, hadn’t died the way they did. Your father isn’t sad that he fought the war: he’s only sad that we didn’t win, said my mother. Your father would have liked for the bullets that killed our comrades to have traveled a long distance, not just a few meters, a trajectory that could be counted in thousands of kilometers and in years of journeying, so that we all could have had more time, and your father would have liked for his comrades to have been able to take advantage of that time to live and write and travel and have children who wouldn’t understand them, and to die only after
having done all that. Your father wouldn’t have minded that his comrades had lived only to betray the revolution and its ideals, which is what we all do by living, because living is very much like having a plan and doing your best to keep it from succeeding, but his comrades, our comrades, didn’t have time. Your father would have liked for the bullets that killed them to have given them time to live and to leave behind children who wanted to understand and would try to understand who their parents had been and what they’d done and what had been done to them and why they were still alive. Your father would have liked for our comrades to have died that way instead of being tortured, raped, murdered, thrown from airplanes, drowned in the sea, shot in the neck, in the back, in the head, with their eyes open, looking toward the future. Your father would have liked not to be one of the few who survived, because a survivor is the loneliest person in the world. Your father wouldn’t have minded dying if in exchange there was a possibility that someone would remember him and later decide to tell his story and the story of his comrades who marched with him to the goddamn end of the story. Perhaps he thought, as he sometimes did: “At least it’s in writing,” and that whatever was in writing would be a mystery and would make my son search for his father and find him, and also find those who shared with his father an idea that could only end badly. That in searching
for his father he would understand what happened to him and to those he loved and why all that makes him who he is. That my son knows, in spite of all the misunderstandings and the defeats, there is a struggle and it goes on, and that struggle is for truth and justice and light for those who are in darkness. That’s what my mother said just before closing the photo album.

Sometimes I still dream of my father and my siblings: the fire truck passes by on its way to hell, and I think about those dreams and write them down in a notebook and they remain there, like photographs from the birthday when I turned seven and laughed with a laugh missing two or three teeth and that absence was the promise of a better future for us all. Sometimes I also think that perhaps I can never tell this story but I should try anyway, and I also think that even though the story as I know it may be inaccurate or false, its right to exist is guaranteed by the fact that it is also my story and by the fact that my parents and some of their comrades are still alive: if that’s true, if I don’t know how to tell the story, I should do it anyway so that they feel compelled to correct me in their own words, so that they say the words that as their
children we have never heard but that we need to unravel to complete their legacy.

Once, my father and I went deep into the woods and my father began to teach me how to find my way by observing the location of moss on tree trunks and the position of certain stars; we were carrying ropes and he tried to show me how to knot them to the trunks and use them to climb or descend a slope; he also explained how to camouflage myself, how to quickly find a hiding spot and how to move through the woods without being seen. At the time, these lessons didn’t interest me much, but they came back to me when I closed my father’s file. In that moment, it seemed like what my father had wanted to teach me that day, in that absurd game of guerrillas I unwittingly found myself involved in, was how to survive, and I wondered if that wasn’t the only thing he’d ever tried to teach me over the years. My father had seen in me a sickly and possibly defenseless boy, maybe just as he himself was in his childhood, and he tried to toughen me up by showing me the most brutal side of nature, which is fundamentally tragic; so, during our visits to the countryside, I witnessed the slaughter of cows, hens and horses
whose deaths were part of life in the country but in me left an indelible footprint of fear. This display of the world’s brutality and of the infinitesimal distance separating life and death didn’t make me stronger; rather, it crippled me with an indefinable terror that has accompanied me ever since. However, perhaps confronting me with terror was my father’s chosen method of saving me from experiencing it, perhaps the display was meant to make me indifferent to it or, alternatively, aware enough of it to learn to watch out for myself. Sometimes I also think about my father beside the well where Alberto José Burdisso was found, and I imagine myself standing next to him. My father and I amid the ruins of a house some three hundred meters from an isolated country road, barely some walls and some mounds of brick and rubble among the chinaberry trees and wild privet and weeds, both of us contemplating the black mouth of the well in which lie all the dead of Argentine history: all the defenseless and underprivileged; those who died trying to oppose a deeply unjust violence with a possibly just violence; and all those killed by the Argentine state, the government that rules over a land where only the dead bury the dead. Sometimes I remember wandering with my father through a forest of low trees, and I think that forest is the forest of fear, and he and I are still in there, and he keeps guiding me, and perhaps we’ll get out of the woods someday.