My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (5 page)

When I left the hospital, I told my mother I preferred to walk, but I stood there until she got into a taxi and the taxi took off and vanished around a corner. Afterward, I started to walk toward the house, and as I went, I entertained myself watching people pass me by, drivers on their routes, bellowing words I didn’t understand, and women and men who stopped in front of store windows. The city’s daily life, which I’d once been part of, had continued after I’d left, and there, in that very same moment, I had the opportunity to observe it without being observed, as if I were my own ghost, since being a ghost is nothing more than being oneself turned into someone else. As I looked into a store, I thought I was the one trying on a sweater; seeing the lights of the city library still on for the last readers, I thought that I was among them; seeing a person reading or writing by a window or preparing an early dinner completely alone in a kitchen, I remembered that I had done those things and that sometimes, as I read or wrote or cooked, I thought I heard a voice in my head telling me that everything was going to be okay, that I was going to write the books I’d always wanted to write, or at least I was going to come as close as I
could and later I’d be empty and have nothing more to say, and that I was going to publish with the houses where I wanted to publish, and that I was going to meet loyal friends who would know how to drink and laugh, and that I was going to have the time to read everything I wanted to read, but also the resignation to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to read it all, as always happens, and, in general, that things weren’t going to go wrong. And in that moment, as I walked though the city without being observed by anyone except myself, I understood for the first time that the voice that had so often sounded in my head, especially in the worst of times, in the moments of greatest doubt, was an unknown voice while at the same time familiar because it was my own voice, or the voice of someone I was going to be, and that one day, after having seen it all and after having done everything and having returned, it would whisper to me, while I tried on a sweater in a store or read in a library or prepared an early dinner, that everything was going to be fine, and would promise me more books and more friends and more trips. Except then I wondered what would happen when I went back to the German city where I’d been living, if I would hear that voice again promising that there were going to be other days and I was going to see them all, and perhaps my father too, and that I was going to leave evidence of them, and I wondered if that voice would tell the truth this time or if it would
tell a compassionate lie, as it had done so many times in the past.

A line of light came in through the lowered blind of my father’s study; when the blind was lifted, however, the light seemed weaker to me than the line had indicated. I opened the curtains and turned on a table lamp, but even then the light was insufficient. My father used to tell my brother as a boy that he should go out and play and come back when he could no longer see his hands, but my brother could still see his hands at night. In that moment, though it wasn’t yet night, I was the one who couldn’t see mine. I felt a presence behind me and for a second I thought it was my father, coming to scold me for sneaking into his study, but then I saw that it was my brother. I think I’m going crazy, I said to him, I can’t see my hands. My brother stared at me and said, It looks that way to me too. I didn’t know if he was talking about my having gone crazy or that he couldn’t see his hands; either way, a moment later he came back with a desk lamp that he put on the table and turned on along with the others. The light was still dim, but now I could make out some objects in the penumbra: a blade for cutting paper; a ruler; a jar of pencils, pens and
highlighters; and a typewriter standing on end to save space. On the desk there was a pile of folders, but I didn’t touch them. I sat in my father’s chair and looked at the garden, wondering how many hours he’d spent there and if he’d ever thought of me during that time. The study was freezing. I leaned forward and grabbed a folder from the pile. The folder was filled with information for a trip my father hadn’t taken and perhaps now never would. I put it to one side and grabbed another that contained recent press clippings with his byline; I read the clippings for a while and then left them to one side. On a loose sheet of paper I found a list of books my father had recently bought: there was a title by Alexis de Tocqueville, another by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an atlas of Argentina’s highways, a book about that music from the northeastern part of the country called chamamé and a book I’d written some time ago. In the next folder was a reproduction of an old photograph, enlarged to the point that it dissolved into dots. In it appeared my father, although, of course, he wasn’t exactly my father, but rather whoever he had been before I met him: his hair was moderately long and he had sideburns and was holding a guitar; beside him there was a young woman with long, straight hair and an expression of surprising seriousness, a gaze that seemed to say she wasn’t going to waste time because she had more important things to do than stay still for a photograph, she had to fight and die
young. And I thought: I know that face, but later, reading the materials my father had gathered in that folder, I thought that I hadn’t ever known it, that I’d never seen it and that I would have preferred to continue that way, without knowing anything about the person behind that face, and also without knowing anything about my father’s last weeks. You don’t ever want to know certain things, because what you know belongs to you, and there are certain things you never want to own.

The folder was thirty by twenty-two centimeters, made of a very lightweight cardboard in a pale yellow color. It was two centimeters thick and enclosed by two elastic bands that could have once been white but at this point had a slightly brown tone; one of the bands held the folder from top to bottom and the other along its width, which made them form a cross; more specifically, a Latin cross. Near the lower edge of the folder there was a sticker carefully positioned on the yellow cardboard. The letters were black, printed on a gray background; just one word and that word was a name:
Burdisso
.

Inside the folder was another sticker, which included the full name of a person, Alberto José Burdisso.

On the next page was a photograph of a man who looked withdrawn, who had barely distinguishable features. It accompanied an article titled “The Mysterious Case of a Missing Resident.” The text of the article is as follows:

This article, with its absurd syntax, was followed by an enlargement of the image that accompanied it in the digital edition. The photograph showed a man with a round face, small eyes and a mouth with thick lips locked in a strange smile. The man wore his hair very short—it was either light or gray—and in the photograph he was being given a commemorative plate of some kind by someone only partially in the frame. The man—all signs point to the fact that it was Alberto Burdisso himself—wore a pale V-necked cotton sports shirt from which hung some rimless eyeglasses the man, perhaps out of vanity, had taken off before being photographed. The text of the commemorative plate was illegible in the photograph.

Then it must be because he lived in the same small town where my father grew up, the town to which he periodically returned and where my sister lives, I thought the first time I read the news article. Now I also think that behind the abstruse
syntax and the ridiculous police jargon—how else to describe sentences such as “but for now, at this point, that doesn’t mean that we’ve ruled out another possibility”?—there was a symmetry, according to which I was searching for my father and my father was giving his account of a search for someone else, someone he may have known and who had disappeared.

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.