My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (9 page)
Read My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain Online
Authors: Patricio Pron
More headlines: “El Trébol, Seven Arrests for the Burdisso Case” (
La Capital de *osario
, June 25); “A New Arrest in the Burdisso Case” (
El Trébol
Digital
, June 25); “Readers Applaud Treatment of the Burdisso Case” (
El Trébol Digital
, June 25); “Police Are Seeing Results in the Burdisso Case” (
El Trébol Digital
, June 26); “They Will Demand Justice in the Plaza” (
El Trébol Digital
, June 26). And one more headline, from the article that tells the whole story, published by
El Trébol Digital
the following day: “Burdisso Suffered Up Until His Final Moments.”
The brutally murdered resident of El Trébol died, as detailed by the autopsy, of suffocation. His body was found with six broken ribs, the arm and shoulder fractured by the fall into the well. Alberto, according to declarations, was taken to the field on Sunday June 1rd [
sic
] at seven in the morning to look for firewood and there they beat him and threw him into the old well where he was found. Before throwing him into the well, they tried to make him sign a sales contract and he refused. According to the work by the forensic doctors and the autopsy, Alberto Burdisso recovered consciousness in the well but later died from asphyxia, though it remains unknown whether this was caused by his position in the well or from lack of air. The cellular telephone will play an important role in the trial,
since it was found along with Burdisso’s body and there are compromising called persons.
El Trébol Digital
, June 27, 2008
If one reads the articles carefully and ignores their typographical errors and erratic syntax, and if afterward one thinks about what they say and accepts that what they describe is what really must have happened, one can sum up the entire story in a more or less coherent narrative: A man was taken to an isolated place through some kind of deception and there he was ordered to sign over an unknown property, which he refused to do; his attackers threw him into a well and he died there. In its simplicity, in its almost brutal pettiness, the story could fit perfectly into one of those books of the Old Testament in which the characters live and, above all, die beholden to simple passions, by the hand of an incomprehensible god who is nonetheless still worthy of praise and worship. However, since we can assume that this is not a biblical story and that the motivations of the characters are not subject to the whims of a capricious god, when reading all this, we must also ask ourselves what were the reasons behind these acts: Why was this crime committed? How is it possible that so
many people are implicated in a murder that could have been carried out by one, two or, at the most, three people, all of whom could have fit in Burdisso’s little car? And why was he murdered? For his house, which the anonymous writer at
El Trébol Digital
presented in his or her articles as a place with no particularly special features? It certainly wasn’t some luxurious mansion that stood out in the puritanical, austere atmosphere of the town. For money? Where was this money going to come from, a sum large enough to outweigh the risk for his killers of winding up in prison for the rest of their lives? Where was a maintenance employee of an athletic club in a provincial town going to get all that money? How could Burdisso’s suffocation be explained if the well, as first reported, was dry? Why didn’t Burdisso call for help with his cell phone if it was found beside his body in the well? And who is compromised by the calls recorded by the cell phone, Burdisso or his murderers? Were the calls made before or after his fall into the well? Once again, who would want to kill some sort of Faulknerian fool, poorer than a church mouse, in a town where his disappearance would be noticed immediately, a town where, moreover, many people would know who Burdisso was, what he had done and who was with him in his final hours?
An article on June 27 by Claudio Berón, a journalist for
La Capital de *osario
, answered—to the extent that these things can be answered—some of these questions. I read it hastily:
Finally, after three weeks of intense investigations, the crime of Alberto Burdisso of El Treból was resolved. Burdisso, the 60-year-old man who […] and whose cadaver was […]. Gisela Córdoba, Gabriel Córdoba—her brother, Juan Huck and Marcos Brochero remained in custody charged with homicide. The motive, according to court sources, could be that they wanted Burdisso to sign a document leaving his house in Córdoba’s name, and when he refused they decided to kill him. After weighing various hypotheses, Criminal Judge Eladio García, who headed the investigation, decided to charge the four suspects and […]. The Commissioner of the 18th Regional Unit, Jorge Gómez, also worked on the investigation, mobilizing the Forensics Department of Rosario and Santa Fe, the canine division, which participated in the search for the body, and finally the Special Operations Troop (TOE). […] It seems that Córdoba maintained a relationship with Huck while
at the same time saying that she was Burdisso’s girlfriend. Huck and Córdoba seem to have taken the victim under false pretenses to the well where he was found. Brochero, Córdoba’s legal spouse, would have later hidden the cadaver.
[…] The disappearance of Alberto José Burdisso shocked the city from the first moment […] he missed work on June 2, a fact […] also his debit card was found in the cash machine of Banco Nación, which had “swallowed” it the previous Saturday. […] In addition, and as was repeatedly mentioned during the days he remained missing, he spent his money on women of easy virtue. […] The worry and the conjectures about his […] These demands grew so insistent that on Monday, June 16, fifteen days after his disappearance, a demonstration was organized to ask for an escalation of police efforts to find Burdisso. On that occasion, close to a thousand […] and they signed a list of demands to request that Judge García consider the case a murder investigation.
Finally, the body was found on the 20th of this month. It was in a well on the property of a derelict home, some seven kilometers northeast of the city center. Around ten, after three hours of searching, a squadron of Volunteer Firemen discovered the body in an advanced state of decomposition at the bottom of the well, currently dry. As was published in
La Capital
in their edition of the 21st, the body was covered with rubble, corrugated
metal sheets and branches, so the police ruled out a suicide or an accident.
The investigators arrived on the scene after a call from a hunter, who reported the day before that he had detected a strong odor in the area around the well. When they removed the cadaver—work that had to be done with pulleys and a tripod—they verified that it was wearing a shirt from the club. Other characteristics of the body, such as the large scar on the torso, led them to presume that it was the missing man. Nevertheless, this was confirmed a day later, when the body was subjected to an autopsy. […] determined that the man had been in the early stages of asphyxia and had suffered hard blows to the head, but that he died inside the well.
Burdisso was buried last Sunday. His remains were accompanied by a procession of some 20 blocks and passed the headquarters of the club where he worked. It was in the late afternoon. Prior to that, there was a prayer for the dead in the parish of Saint Lawrence the Martyr.
The imminent arrest of a series of suspects was immediately made known. On Wednesday eight arrests had already been made. But in the end four individuals were charged, who remain in custody. […] Those who knew him maintain that Burdisso was in general a withdrawn and gullible man who believed each one of the cunning arguments with which Córdoba deceived him.
So much so that one of the accused, Marcos Brochero, a native of Cañada Rosquín, was Córdoba’s husband but Burdisso thought he was her brother.
In the photocopy of the article that appeared in his file, my father had highlighted in fluorescent yellow a paragraph I had missed in my reading and which he, a much better journalist than I—he in fact taught the journalists who in time would be my own teachers, in an almost preindustrial system of apprenticeship that in both form and content radically opposed the nonsense they tried to teach us at the university and, furthermore, bonded my father and me in a sort of involuntary tradition, an old school of rigorous and willful and defeated journalists—my father, as I was saying, had highlighted:
Burdisso had surrounded himself with a series of individuals from the margins of society, many of them with criminal records […] he was 60 years old and lived alone in his house at 400 Calle Corrientes, four blocks from the club. He had no immediate family, since his sister had disappeared during the
military dictatorship. For that loss […] two years ago he received an indemnity from the state of 240 thousand pesos (some 56 thousand dollars). With that money he bought a house—the one they had wanted to take from him—a car, a motorcycle and other items.
Ten years ago, the towns on Route 13 were, to some, the gates to a lost paradise. Brothels, gambling and sex, both cheap and expensive. Nightclubs and all kinds of crime. That was, according to the sources consulted, up until two years ago. There were some forty brothels in the area and a lot of trafficking of women from Brazil and remote regions of Paraguay. Many of these women told the court of their trips to Europe to prostitute themselves.
Miriam Carizo was the owner of a bar of ill repute, where she met Alberto Burdisso in 2005 and struck up a relationship with him that lasted two years. Gisela Córdoba (28 years old), the woman Burdisso was involved with when his romance with Carizo ended, is believed to be part of this network and had prior convictions for check fraud in El Trébol itself. The other charged suspects were habitués of nightclubs. According to
investigators on the case thus [
sic
] would be the “tail end” of these rings, which had already disappeared but left behind a saga of survivors of this life of vice.
A contextualization by Claudio Berón in
La Capital de *osario
, June 29, 2008
A house, a lot of money that paradoxically was not the bearer of good fortune and an immense loneliness ended the life of Alberto Burdisso. […] They killed him on the first Sunday of June. It is believed that a woman of ill repute wanted to take his property and for that she convinced two men and some other people of the need to have him disappear. […] Several meters from the vast field that surrounds El Trébol, a town of no more than 13 thousand inhabitants, there is a new white house. There lived Burdisso; a man different from the rest, 60 years old and, according to some who knew him, celibate until the age of 57. In 2005 he received more than 200 thousand pesos in reparations for his disappeared younger sister. He burned through that cash.
According to Roberto Maurino, Burdisso was a sullen and withdrawn man, but normal. “He traveled alone and only to the south. We had a lot of chats. He finished school
and then worked at the Club Trebolense. With the cash he got, he bought a house in Rosario, a house here and an old car. He was too trusting,” he declared. Around the time of the compensation he met a woman, Miriam Carizo. He bought a house and put it in both of their names, he gave her a car and, his coworkers say, he paid for a birthday party for her daughter, with whom he had an almost paternal relationship. “Burdi was like that, just crazy. He said everybody does what they want with their lives. He talked a lot to people he wanted to talk to. He didn’t bother nobody. He had his paycheck held to cover the loans they made him take out. We’re grieving for him. He surrounded himself with bad people. And who knows why they killed him, they even had control of his paychecks,” they say at the club.
For a long time along Route 13 there were prostitution rings and other dubious activity. Close to 40 brothels were opened in towns like El Trébol, San Jorge, Sastre and others in the district of General San Martín. “It’s all connected, this is the tail end of a story of shady characters,” suggested investigators. […] Burdi had ended things with Carizo and met Gisela Córdoba, a woman battered by life, hardened by its absolute lack of charity. Córdoba has three children and lives with her legal husband, Marcos Brochero, but had, apparently, a relationship with two “boyfriends,” Burdi and a 64-year-old man, Juan Huck, who she met
in one of these establishments of easy virtue. Doubts about her motive turned to certainty over the course of the investigation. “Statements were taken from the eight charged suspects, including Gisela Córdoba, Juan Huck, Marcos Brochero and Gabriel Córdoba, who remained under arrest for suspicion of homicide,” they said. The issue turned out to be the house co-owned by Burdisso and Miriam Carizo. Carizo, about 40 years old, married another man, but Burdi stayed in the house. Gisela Córdoba knew about the property and got Burdisso to put half in her name, though he retained the legal right to live there. He had to die or disappear in order for Córdoba to occupy the house or sell it.
They took him to a deserted area and tried to force him to sign a document to free up the property. Days earlier, Córdoba had consulted lawyers on how to deal with Burdisso’s rights to the house in the case of his disappearance. Furthermore, it seems that she already had put the house up for rent. […] After his death, Burdi received a fond farewell at the doors of the club where he worked. At the reception desk there is a letter: “I wanted to tell you that Ñafa put your bike away, that you are missed and that Ana is inconsolable. Your dog keeps looking for you and crying.” It is signed by Laura Maurino.
Claudio Berón in
La Capital de *osario
, June 29, 2008
In one of the photographs that accompanied the article you can see a one-story house behind a tiny parcel of lawn on an unpaved, sewerless street. The house has a large two-paned window and another smaller one at the entrance, which has its own small roof held up by a fragile-looking column. In front of the house there is a hedge, but it seems to have dried up. The house is shuttered and, strangely, it looks like there is a high-backed chair lying facedown on a stretch of open ground, a plot of land where no one is ever going to live. That’s the house they killed Alberto Burdisso for.