My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (11 page)

An article in
La Capital de *osario
dated that same day with the byline Luis Emilio Blanco below the title “El Trébol: They Prosecute Burdisso’s Killers and Reveal Details of the Case” did not contribute any additional information but did offer slightly different facts: Here Burdisso is sixty-one and not sixty, Marcos Brochero is thirty-two and not thirty-one, Juan Huck is sixty-one and not sixty-three, the abandoned rural house where the body was found is eight and not nine kilometers from town (in a piece published the next day in the newspaper
El Litoral
of Santa Fe, the distance was reduced to six kilometers). Here it is Gisela Córdoba and not Juan Huck who threw the man into a well that’s twelve and not ten meters deep, Burdisso broke five ribs and not six and both shoulders instead of a shoulder and an arm, as in the previous version, but those are all minor details. More interesting is the supposed request from Córdoba to Huck to “get him out of the well and throw him somewhere so they’ll find him and confirm
his death” to enable her to gain access to the life insurance she believed was in her name; Huck refused. The article also included some secondary information revealed in the autopsy: “[…] the results show that the man had dirt in his mouth and respiratory tract, which indicates that he tried to breathe beneath the material thrown onto him,” specified the source.

Whether it was Brochero, who, in some versions, had stayed in El Trébol that morning, whether it was Córdoba, or whether it was Huck, who maintains that he was a victim in all this—who threw Burdisso into the well is of little importance here; nor does it matter much that Brochero returned three days later to throw bricks, pieces of masonry and dead leaves onto the wounded man to finish him off; the fate of the accused doesn’t matter much, and neither does what happened to Córdoba in the women’s prison in Santa Fe or to Brochero and Huck in the jail in Coronda. This crime, every crime, has an individual, private aspect but also a social one; the first concerns only the victims and their close relatives, but the second concerns us all and is the reason justice is required to intervene in our name, in the name of a collective
whose rules have been called into question by the crime and which, faced with the impossibility of undoing the first, tries to get the second under control, with power that, at least in theory, comes neither from an individual nor a single class but rather from society as a whole, wounded but still standing.

The remaining questions at that point were who Fanny was, why my father summed up the case’s legal situation and why it was my father who had to do it and not someone else, anyone else.

The next documents in my father’s file were fragments of a register I didn’t recognize, in which appeared people with the last name Carizo, including Miriam, Burdisso’s common-law wife to whom he’d given fifty percent of his property, which was documented here with one new detail: Burdisso’s and her tax and national identification numbers. Then there was a photocopy of the document produced by the General Property Registry of the
Province of Santa Fe, detailing the purchase of the house on Calle Corrientes by Alberto Burdisso and dating the purchase to November 16, 2005. Burdisso had bought the property from Nelson Carlos Girello and Olga Rosa Capitani de Girello, two elderly people. Other information was included on the bill of sale: Burdisso’s birth date—February 1, 1948; his mother’s last name—Rolotti; marital status—single; his national identification card number—6.309.907; and his previous address—Entre Ríos and Cortada Llobet, in El Trébol. Also the size of the property—307.20 square meters; and the amount paid—twenty-five thousand pesos in cash. The notary public who had witnessed the transaction was named Ricardo López de la Torre.

It was as if my father had wanted to deconstruct the crime into a handful of insignificant facts, a pile of notarized documents, technical descriptions and official registries whose accumulation made him forget for a moment that they all added up to a tragic event, the disappearance and death of a man in an abandoned well, which would make him think about the symmetry between that man’s death and his sister’s, also tragic and about which my father was never going to know anything. This
was my father’s attempt to collaborate in the search for Burdisso and my attempt to search for and find my father in his last thoughts before everything that had happened happened.

Then my father had drawn Burdisso’s family tree, starting with his grandparents, including dates only for the births and deaths of Alberto and Alicia. For Alicia, the second date, the date of her death, appears as a question mark.

A photograph showing an oval portrait of a man with a Nietzschean mustache and a bow tie beside a plaque: “Jorge Burdisso
2.19.1928 aged 72. In remembrance by his family.” Another photograph: “Margarita G. de Burdisso
3.31.1933 aged 68. In remembrance by her family.” A photograph of
a vault, with the inscription “Burdisso Family.” When I saw that photograph, I jumped, because I knew that vault: I had hidden behind it and other similar tombs, playing hide-and-seek in the cemetery with my friends when there were no adults around.

A photocopy of a list of telephone numbers and contact information for people with the last name Páez and for the perfume shop Fanny.

The last page in the file was titled “A Eulogy for Alberto José Burdisso” and was dated “El Trébol Cemetery, June 21, 2008.” It was a transcription of the words my father spoke at the funeral of Alberto José Burdisso:

Next there was a blank page, and then nothing except for the porous surface of the file’s yellow cardboard, which remained open for a moment and then was closed by a hand that, although at that moment I wasn’t thinking about it at all, belonged to me and was covered in folds and grooves like country roads traveled by devastation and death.

Once, a long time before any of this happened, my mother gave me a jigsaw puzzle that I rushed to put together while she watched. It probably didn’t take me very long, since it was a puzzle for kids and had few pieces, no more than fifty. When I finished, I brought it to my father and showed it to him with childish pride, but my father shook his head and said, It’s very easy, and asked me to give it to him. I handed over the puzzle and he started to cut the pieces into tiny bits devoid of any meaning. He didn’t stop until he had cut up every one of the pieces, and when he was done he said to me: Put it together now. But I was never able to do it again. Several years earlier, my father, instead of destroying a puzzle, had made one for me, with wooden pieces that were rectangular, square, triangular and round, which he painted different colors to make them easier to identify; of all the pieces, I vaguely remember that the round ones were yellow and the square ones were maybe red or blue, but what’s important here is that, as I closed my father’s file, I began to think he’d created yet another puzzle for me. This time, however, the pieces were movable and had to be assembled on a larger tabletop that was memory and in fact
the world. Once again, I wondered why my father had participated in the search for that murdered man, why he’d wanted to document his efforts and the results that they’d failed to produce, as well as the final words he’d said on the subject, linking the murdered man with his disappeared sister. I had the impression that my father hadn’t really been looking for the dead man, who meant little or nothing to him; that what he’d been doing was searching for the sister, picking up a search that certain tragic circumstances—which I myself, and perhaps he and my mother, had tried to forget—had kept him from carrying out in June 1977, when he and my mother and I—my siblings had not yet been born—lived in a state of terror that delayed sounds and movements from reaching us, as if we were underwater. I told myself that my father had wanted to find his friend through her brother, but I also wondered why he hadn’t begun that search sooner, when the murdered brother was still alive and it wouldn’t have been difficult for my father to talk to him; when the brother went missing, I thought, one of the last bonds linking my father to the disappeared woman was broken, and precisely because of that it made no sense to search for him, given that the dead don’t talk, they say nothing from the depths of the wells they’ve been thrown into out on the Argentine plain. I wondered if my father knew his search wouldn’t turn up any
results, if he was simply captivated by the symmetry of two missing siblings with more than thirty years between them, willing to throw himself again and again at a light that dazzled him until he collapsed from exhaustion, like an insect in the dark, hot air of a summer night.