My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (4 page)

A doctor started to walk toward us from the opposite end of the hallway, and when we saw him we stood up without thinking. I’m going to examine him, he warned us, and then he went into my father’s room and he was there for a little while. We were waiting outside, not knowing what to say. My mother was looking out the large window behind us as a small tugboat dragged a much larger vessel upriver, toward the port. I held in my hands a magazine about cars, even though I don’t know how to drive; someone had left it on one of the seats and I merely let my eyes slide over its pages in an exercise as restful as contemplating a landscape,
although in this case it was a landscape of incomprehensible technological innovations. The doctor finally came out and said that everything was the same, that there was no news at all. I thought one of us should ask him something so that the doctor would see we were really worried about my father’s situation, so I asked him how his temperature was. The doctor squinted for a second, and then he looked at me incredulously and stammered: His temperature is perfectly normal, there’s no problem with his temperature; and I thanked him and he nodded and started to head down the hallway.

That morning my sister told me she’d once found a sentence underlined in a book that my father had left at her house. My sister showed me the book. The sentence was: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race: I have kept the faith.” It was verse seven of chapter four of Paul’s second letter to Timothy. Reading it, I thought that my father had underlined that sentence so it would inspire and console him, and perhaps also as an epitaph, and I thought that if I knew who I was, if the fog that was the pills dissipated for a moment so that I could know who I was, I would have wanted that
epitaph for myself too, but then I thought that I hadn’t really fought, and that no one in my generation had fought; something or someone had already inflicted a defeat on us and we drank or took pills or wasted time in a thousand and one ways as a mode of hastening an end, possibly an undignified one but liberating nonetheless. Nobody had fought, we had all lost and barely anyone had stayed true to what they believed, whatever that was, I thought; my father’s generation had been different, but, once again, there was something in that difference that was also a meeting point, a thread that went through the years and brought us together in spite of everything and was horrifically Argentine: the feeling of parents and children being united in defeat.

My mother started to prepare a meal and I went to help her, getting up from watching the television my brother had muted. While I peeled the onions, I thought that the recipe, in its glorious simplicity of bygone eras, would soon be lost in a period of confusion and stupidity, and I told myself that I should at least save it—since perpetuating that moment of shared happiness, perhaps one of the last with my mother before I returned to Germany, was impossible.
I thought I had to perpetuate that recipe before it was too late. I grabbed a pen and started to take notes so I wouldn’t forget that moment, but all I could do was write down the recipe; a simple, short recipe, yet relevant to me as a relic of a time of procedures, of a time of precise and punctuated steps, so different from those days of pain that blunted us all.

So this is the recipe: Take a good amount of ground beef, spread it over a cotton dish towel, distribute diced onions and chopped olives over the meat, along with hard-boiled eggs and anything else you want to add—here the options seem limitless: pieces of pepper, raisins, dried apricots or prunes, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, canned vegetables, et cetera—and then knead the meat so that the ingredients you’ve added are well distributed throughout. Then season with salt, paprika, cumin and chili powder and use the dish towel to shape the meat into a compact block that doesn’t break apart as you handle it; if the meat doesn’t stick together well, you can add bread crumbs. When the mixture is ready, place it into a lightly oiled mold and put it in the oven. Bake it until the meat loaf—since that’s what you’re making—is
golden brown. It can be eaten hot or cold and accompanied by a salad.

The doctor—perhaps the one from before or maybe a different one; they all look the same to me—said: Anything can happen. And in my head those three words kept turning around until they had no meaning: Anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen …

My brother was nervously flipping channels until he stopped on one. It was showing a war film. Even though the plot was confusing and the acting was horrible and constantly thwarted by a camera that seemed to have been deliberately placed where the characters’ faces couldn’t be seen or where they should be walking, which brought about inevitable cuts where presumably the actors tripped over the camera and they had to redo the take, I slowly understood that the film was about a man who, after an accident, which wasn’t shown
in the film and which presumably had been a car accident or even an airplane crash, woke up in a hospital not knowing who he was. Naturally, the doctors didn’t know either, nor did the numerous police officers who questioned him. A nurse who looked like a butcher, who at the beginning of the film seemed particularly impatient with the man and with his persistent questions about who he was, or had been, and what he was doing there, ended up taking pity on him, and she told him that she’d found among his clothes, or among the shreds of his clothes, a piece of paper with half a dozen names on it, and she handed it to him. The nurse and the patient agreed that he wouldn’t talk to anyone about it, especially not to the head doctor, a tall sickly-looking man who seemed to hate the nurse and from whom she protected the patient when this doctor doubted his version of the facts or pestered him with questions. That night, the patient ran away from the hospital: he had decided to go in search of the people on the list and make them say who or what he was. With the money that was on him when the accident happened—a huge amount, which he didn’t know how he’d gotten, and which the nurse had secretly given him that night, along with some clothes—he checked into a hotel on the outskirts of town and from there began his search with the help of the phone book. But the search wasn’t as simple as anticipated. Three of the six people were already
dead or had moved, and another two agreed to talk to him only to admit they didn’t know who he was or why their names appeared on that list; on both occasions the conversation was tense and ended badly, with the protagonist getting thrown out. He wasn’t surprised that all of the people on his list were somehow related to the hospital. The one remaining person refused to talk to him, so the protagonist started to hang around his house. He discovered with some surprise that he had a huge talent for spying, a talent that allowed him to observe people without being seen and to blend into the crowd when he was being followed. An incidental talent, which he discovered one night, was picking locks; after opening one, he entered a dark room, some sort of poorly lit living room; he advanced silently a few steps and headed toward an adjacent room that, he discovered, was the kitchen; when he retraced his steps back toward the living room, he felt a blow from above and fell to the floor facedown. As he turned over, he received another blow, this time on the shoulder, and fell again, but just then he discovered a floor lamp in reach and switched it on: light bathed the room for an instant and his attacker, blinded, stepped back. Then the protagonist grabbed the lamp and dealt him a blow to the head. In the path traced through the air by the lamp on its way to the attacker’s head, and before the cord was pulled out of the outlet, the protagonist was able to see
that his attacker was tall and sickly-looking. The attacker’s face was familiar, even on the floor, with his head bleeding; the protagonist turned on a small lamp that was on a table and, as he brought it closer to the face of his opponent, who looked dead and maybe really was, the protagonist discovered that he was that doctor from whom the nurse often protected him. As in most bad films—and this one really was bad, which I think had been clear to me from the beginning—the protagonist’s sequence of thoughts was visually represented by the repetition of previous scenes: the face of the nurse who looked like a butcher; her antagonism toward the head doctor, which she covered up with deference; the handing over of the list and the money; the meetings with some of the people on the list, almost all of them doctors and almost all employees of the hospital where he had been treated after his accident. And there was one more scene, which had not been shown previously and which, given that the protagonist could not have been present—or, having been present during his convalescence, he must not have understood or couldn’t remember—was only speculation: the nurse writing the list with a smile on her contorted face. At that moment, the viewer understood that the protagonist had been used by the nurse who looked like a butcher to get rid of those people she didn’t want around or who had at some point humiliated or hurt her, and he understood that
from that moment on he was going to be a pariah, someone without an identity, forced to hide, to live bound by a paradoxical secrecy, concealing a name that he himself didn’t know. How can you hide something you don’t know, I wondered, but just then, on-screen, a scream was heard: a woman stood screaming beside a staircase, and she leaped on the dead doctor and then lifted her face to the protagonist and insulted him. The protagonist walked toward the door and closed it behind him and then started running, and the camera watched him run, from a crime and from a betrayal, fleeing to nowhere, to an anonymous, clandestine life or to his revenge against the nurse—though it was unlikely that the protagonist would want to stain his hands with blood again; after all, he didn’t seem like a violent person—or to wherever it is that the protagonists of movies go when the credits start to roll and then after them come the commercials.

I’ve seen that movie before, said my mother. One day in El Trébol, when your father left me hidden there. Why were you hiding, I asked, but my mother started clearing plates and said she didn’t remember but maybe my father had written it
down somewhere, on some of the papers he had in his study. I nodded but immediately didn’t know why because really I had no idea what my mother meant.

Some time before all of this happened I had tried to make a list of the things I remembered about myself and about my parents so that my memory, which I had already started to lose, wouldn’t prevent me from holding on to a couple of things I wanted to keep and so that, I thought in that moment, I wouldn’t end up like the protagonist in that film, both fleeing from himself and still a stranger to himself. My list was in my backpack, and I left my mother in the dining room and went to read it. It was an exceptionally short list considering it had to sum up a life, and, naturally, it was incomplete. It said: I had a serious bout of hepatitis when I was five or six years old; later, or before, I had scarlet fever, chicken pox and German measles, all in the span of about a year. I was born with flat feet and they had to be corrected with enormous shoes that I was horribly ashamed of; really, I shouldn’t ever wear sneakers. I was a vegetarian for a couple of years and, even though I’ve given that up, I still almost never eat meat.
I learned to read on my own at five years old; I read dozens of books, but I no longer remember anything about them except that they were written by foreign authors who were dead. That a writer could be Argentine and living is a fairly recent discovery and still shocks me. My mother says I didn’t cry during my first days of life; mainly what I did was sleep. My mother says when I was a baby, my head was so big that if they left me sitting, I would start to sway and then fall headfirst toward one side or the other. I remember crying several times as a child, but I haven’t cried since the death of my paternal grandfather in 1993 or 1994, presumably because the medication doesn’t allow me to. Perhaps the only real effect of the pills is that they hinder complete happiness or complete sadness; it’s like floating in a pool without ever seeing its bottom but not being able to reach the surface. I lost my virginity at fifteen; I don’t know how many women I’ve had sex with since then. I ran away from the day care my mother took me to when I was three years old; in the reconstruction of the time that passed between my disappearance and when I was turned in to a police station, there are one hundred minutes in which nobody knows where I was, not even me. My paternal grandfather was a painter, my maternal grandfather worked on trains; the former was an anarchist and the latter a Peronist, I think. My paternal grandfather once pissed on the flagpole of a police station, but I
don’t know why or when; I think I remember it was because they didn’t let him vote or something like that. My maternal grandfather was a guard who worked the line from Córdoba to Rosario; before that, the train passed through Jujuy and Salta and then on to Buenos Aires, where it ended; this was the trajectory that carried the explosives used by the Peronist Resistance, but even though their transportation wasn’t possible without the collaboration of train employees, I don’t know if my grandfather was an active collaborator. I don’t remember the first record I bought, but I remember I heard the first song that moved me inside a car in a place called Candonga, in the province of Córdoba; actually, they were two songs on a radio program that came through the mountains, which distorted the sound and made it seem broadcast straight from the past. My father didn’t like Spanish films, he said they gave him a headache. I voted during the entire decade of the nineties in Argentina, and always for candidates who didn’t win. I worked in a secondhand bookstore every Saturday morning from the ages of twelve to fourteen. My mother’s mother died when she was a girl, I don’t know of what, and from then until she was a teenager, my mother and her sister lived in an orphanage; I think the only things my mother remembers about those years is that once she saw a nun without her habit on and that her sister stole her food. I was a fanatical Catholic between the ages of
nine and thirteen; later, the impossibility of making Christian morality compatible with an ethical code in keeping with my experiences made me distance myself from Catholicism, which now seems to me a philosophical aberration. Islam strikes me as the religion most in keeping with our times and the most practical and therefore, perhaps, the true faith. No psychoanalytical therapy has ever worked for me. My parents are journalists, newspaper journalists. I like the ravioli, empanadas and breaded steaks my mother makes; I like the salads they make in Turkey, Hungarian stews and fish. My father cut a toe with a shovel, he fell from a horse onto a barbed-wire fence, he accidentally sprayed himself with gasoline while he was grilling some meat, he stuck his fingers in a fan, he went through a glass door with his forehead and he crashed his car twice, though all this happened over many years and not consecutively. My grandmothers were named Felisa and Clara; good names. Among the languages I’ve learned are English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, French and Catalan; I speak a little Serbo-Croatian and Turkish, but only for traveling. I don’t like children; I like people who stumble on the street or get bitten by a dog or have some sort of similar accident. I don’t like to have my own place; I prefer sleeping at other people’s houses. I don’t mind dying, but I fear the deaths of those I care about, and especially the deaths of my parents.