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

crypt.

38
    Then there was one last photograph of the event, and when I saw it I was surprised and confused, as if I had just seen a dead man approaching along a path with the infernal red setting sun silhouetted behind his back. It was my father just as I would see him in the hospital, in his final years: bald with a white beard on his thin face, very similar to his own father as I remembered him, with large rimless glasses, the glasses of a policeman or a mafioso, with his hands in the pockets of a white coat, talking, his throat wrapped with a plaid scarf that I thought I had given him at some point as a gift. Beside him were other men, who contemplatedhim with sad faces, as if they knew my father was talking about a dead man without knowing that he would soon be one of them, that he was going to enter a dark, bottomless well that everyone who dies falls into, but my father didn’t know it yet and they didn’t want to tell him. There were eleven men standing behind my father, as if my father were the sacked coach of a soccer team that had just lost the championship; one wore a jacket and tie, but the rest wore leather coats and one, a long scarf that seemed about to strangle him. Some of them looked at the ground. I looked at my father and couldn’t quite understand what he was doing there, talking in that cemetery on a cold afternoon, an afternoon in which the living and the dead should have taken refuge in the shelter of their homes or their tombs and in the resigned consolation of memory.

39
    From the June 21, 2008, edition of
El Trébol Digital:
    Alberto José Burdisso lived aloan [
sic
] but left this world with a crowd. Because a multitude, crying out for justice, accompanied him en masse to his final resting place. Following the prayers for the dead in the parish of Saint Lawrence the Martyr,completely packed, a funeral procession several blocks long changed its route to pass by the Club Trebolense, where many, many people greeted it with applaude [
sic
]. The scene […]. After the first waves of applause, Dr. Roberto Maurino stated: “He got by the best he could, almost always suffering, and he left the same way because he got the worst of it in his last moments. Now, for eternity, into the unknown, Alberto will rest in peace. It was a great honor to be his friend.” […] The procession then finally continued with hundreds of cars. […] When the procession arrived at the local cemetery, several hundred residents walked with Burdisso’s coffin to its final resting place. There “Chacho” Pron, with warm and heartfelt words, also remembered Alicia Burdisso, Alberto’s sister, disappeared on the twenty-first of June of 1976 during the military Process [
sic
], in the province of Tucumán.

40
    That’s it, I said to myself, interrupting my reading, that’s the reason my father decided to gather all this information: symmetry. First a woman disappears, then a man, and they are siblings and my father perhaps knew them both and hadn’t been able tostop the disappearance of either one. But how could he? With what power did my father think he could prevent those disappearances—he who was dying in a hospital bed while I read all this?

41
    “A mail [
sic
] has been released from custody, which doesn’t mean that he won’t be brought to trial. The case is being worked on throughout the whole region and the suspects are being held in the city of El Trébol and the Sastre jail. Important details were added in recent hours.”
    […]
    “Could Burdisso have been strangled?”
    “We will know in the coming hours but we cannot corroborate it.”
    “Did he die in the well or before?”
    “We are waiting for the results of the autopsy and the forensic report to determine this.”
    “In what state was the body? Did it have wounds or bruises?”
    “The body was beaten. They did not find bullet entry wounds.”
    “Is there any relation among those arrested?”
    “The suspects are related. Some closely and