Free My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron

one you could see three firemen with their gear; inthe background, a coffin or box wrapped in black plastic. In the two photographs that followed, you could see five people carrying the coffin; one of them covered his face with a handkerchief, maybe to avoid the smell of the cadaver. In the next photograph you could see the firemen putting the coffin into a van that perhaps served as an ambulance and perhaps not; there was a man filming, with one hand in his pocket; two other men smiling. In the final photograph, which broke the apparent chronological continuity, you could see the coffin before it got taken to the van; it was on the ground, which was broken into big dark mounds of clumpy earth, and you couldn’t see anyone near it; the coffin was completely alone.

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    Question: “Is it true that the body has a scar on the torso like the one Burdisso had?”
    Answer: “It is true that the body has a scar like this.”
    Question: “What information will the autopsy reveal?”
    Answer: “The autopsy will determine the causal [
sic
] of death and the reasons for the state of putrefaction.”
    Question: “In what state was the body?”
    Answer: “The body has a series of circumstancesthat the doctors will mention in their report.”
    Question: “What does that mean? Injuries?”
    Answer: “Exactly. The doctors confirmed that.”
    Question: “On the face or on the body?”
    Answer: “On the body.”
    Question: “Bullet wounds?”
    Answer: “At this point it does not appear so.”
    Question: “Blunt force trauma?”
    Answer: “There are no details of that kind […].”
    Question: “Has anyone been arrested?”
    Answer: “There are people of interest in El Trébol and in other areas.”
    Question: “Could this change the determination of the cause of death?”
    Answer: “That will be decided by a judge […].”
    Question: “Are there fugitives from justice?”
    Answer: “The people summoned have appeared.”
    Question: “Who notified the authorities about the body? Is it true that it was a hunter?”
    Answer: “The person who revealed knowledge could be someone who hunts, who smelled the odors.”
    Conversation between the writer and Jorge Gómez, of the Eighteenth Regional Unit,
El Trébol Digital
, June 20, 2008. Title of the article: “We Have Information That the Body Found Could Be Alberto Burdisso’s”

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    We came on Thursday night with police personnel. All indications were that we would find something. It’s an unpleasant place still during the day, very dangerous, and it was impossible to continue after dark. So we returned with eighteen men and we worked at a depth of ten meters with tripod and rigs making it easier to extract the body. […] It’s not the first time we’ve done this. […] They [volunteer firemen Javier Bergamasco and “Melli” Maciel] had to do the hardest part, but it was a team effort.
    Declarations of the head of the Volunteer Firemen Corps of El Trébol, Raúl Dominio, to
El Trébol Digital
, June 20, 2008

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    Even before the results of the autopsy on the cadaver were made public, the accumulated facts—particularly the scar mentioned in the conversation between the chief of the Eighteenth Regional Police Unit and an anonymous journalist—and an explicit desire for the missing man to be found(dead or alive, really) seemed to have led to the immediate unspoken conclusion that the cadaver was Burdisso; in fact, the following article collected by my father, an article from the twenty-first, stated outright that “the body of Alberto Burdisso will arrive in the city at approximately one thirty” and gave the name of the funeral home where the body would be laid out, the prayers said at the parish of Saint Lawrence the Martyr—the church in the background of the photograph of the demonstration four days earlier—and a funeral procession through streets with names like San Lorenzo, Entre Ríos, Candiotti and Córdoba. However, the identity of the body found in the