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

well should not be accepted by the reader before asking why someone would want to murder a Faulknerian idiot, an adult with the mind of a child, someone who didn’t drink, didn’t gamble and had no money, someone who had to work every day to survive, doing the most menial of tasks like cleaning a swimming pool or repairing a roof. That question, which ran through the next few articles in my father’s file, is perhaps a public one. A private question—so intimate that I could ask it only of myself, and at that point I didn’t know the answer—was why my father had taken such an interest in the disappearance of someone he may not have even known, one of those faces seen in passing, associated with a name or two but of no great significance, part of the landscape, like a mountain or a river. So itwas actually a double mystery: not only the particular circumstances of Burdisso’s death but also the motives that led my father to search for him, as if that search would solve a greater mystery more deeply obscured by reality.

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    More photographs: a white car stopped in front of a crowd, mostly of children, who were applauding at the doors of a building with a sign that read “Club Atlético Trebolense M. S. y B.”; I didn’t know what the initials meant, but the figure on the sign—a disproportionately muscular man, kneeling, holding up a C.A.T. emblem—was familiar; bunches of flowers emerged from the car’s windows and seemed about to fall onto the asphalt. The next photograph showed the same scene from another angle, the photographer situated amid the mourners; his location allowed the viewer to see spectators gathered on the facing sidewalk. There were more photographs, taken in the same moment but from different angles; what most caught my eye was the contrast between the naked colossus who presided over the sign with the initials and the coats worn by the spectators. Then there were two images of an old man who stood speaking beside the car; the old man was bald, he wore glasses anda dark coat; one of the bunches of flowers coming out of the car’s window had some sort of sash with a phrase, of which only the word
executive
could be read. The old man’s face was familiar to me, and I wondered if he might be that dentist who had taken a fish bone out of my throat when I was a boy, a dentist whose hands shook and consequently instilled more fear in me as they handled the forceps than the fish bone itself had. Then there was a photograph that was easier for me to identify, even though the identification came quite fast and seemed to gush out, as if my memory, instead of evoking the recollection, regurgitated it. It was the entrance to the local cemetery and there were several dozen people forming a corridor in front of the car with the flowers; in the background of the image was a palm tree that seemed to shiver from the cold. In the next photograph, the crowd is seen from another angle showing a row of trees and a stretch of flat, empty land. Then there are two trite funeral photographs: one of some people walking with floral wreaths through the main entrance to the cemetery and toward the spot where the photographer must have stood, the figures breaking up into fragments if you look quickly—a mustached face, a hedge, two ties, a jacket, the surprised face of a child, a sweater over sweatpants, someone looking back; and one of four people holding up the coffin beside a niche dug into the wall—oneman facing away and another man looking directly at the photographer with a slight expression of reproach. Then there was an image of a plaque that read: “R.I.P. Dora R. de Burdisso8.21.1956 [or it could be 1958, the photograph wasn’t in sharp focus] / Your husband and children with love”; it was probably the plaque that covered the niche before the coffin was deposited, probably referring to the dead man’s grandmother or mother—but then, where is his father buried?—so perhaps it was a family