10
There were more memories but they stuck together to create a certainty that was in turn a coincidence, and many will consider this coincidence mere invention, and perhaps indeed it was: my father had always had a bad memory. He used to say that it was like a sieve, and he predicted that mine would be like that too, because, he said, memory is something you carry in your veins. My father could remember things that had happened decades earlier but, at the same time, was capable of forgetting everything he’d done the day before. His life was probably an obstacle course because of that and because of dozens of other things that happened to him, some that made us laugh and some that didn’t. One day he called home to ask us his address; I don’t remember who picked up the phone, but there was my father’s voice. Where do I live, he asked. What, responded whoever was on the other end of the phone, my mother or one of my siblings or maybe even me. Where do I live, said my father again, and the other person—my mother, or one of my siblings, or maybe even me—recited the address; a little while later he was home, sitting at the table reading a newspaper as if nothing had happened or as if he’d forgotten what had happened. Another time, someone rang the bell; my father, who was closest, grabbed the intercom near the kitchen and asked who it was. We are Jehovah’s Witnesses, they said. Whose witnesses, asked my father. Jehovah’s, they answered. And what do you want, my father asked again. We come to bring you the word of God, they said. Of who, asked my father. The word of God, they said. My father asked again: Who. We are Jehovah’s Witnesses, they said. Whose witnesses, asked my father. Jehovah’s, they answered. And what do you want, my father asked again. We come to bring you the word of God, they said. Of who, asked my father. The word of God, they answered. No, they brought me that last week, said my father, and he hung up without even glancing at me, beside him and looking perplexed. Then he walked over to my mother and asked her where the newspaper was. On the stove, replied my mother, and neither she nor I told him that he was the one who’d left it there a few minutes earlier.
11
I used to think my father’s bad memory was just an excuse to get him out of the few inconveniences caused by a daily life that he’d long ago left in my mother’s hands: birthdays, anniversaries, groceries. If my father had carried a date book, I’d thought, it would have been one in which the pages of the following day fell out, an object always in flames like a pyromaniac’s diary. I’d thought it was all a trick my father had come up with, his way of avoiding things that for some reason were too much for him, among which were me and my brother and sister but also a past that I’d barely glimpsed—childhood in a small town, an interrupted political career, years of working at newspapers that were like those boxers who spend more time on the mat than standing and fighting, a political past that I thought I knew nothing about and that maybe I didn’t want to know about—which didn’t lead me to suspect who my father really was, the abyss he had faced and how he’d barely gotten out of it alive. When I spoke with my sister at the hospital, though, I realized that something had always been wrong with my father and that maybe his lack of memory wasn’t faked, and I also realized that I had come to this discovery too late, too late for me and too late for him, and that’s how it always happens, even though it’s sad to say so.
12
Actually, there was another memory, although it wasn’t a direct recollection, something that had come from experience and had lodged in the mind, but rather something that I had seen in my parents’ house, a photograph. In it, my father and I are sitting on a small stone wall; behind us, an abyss and, a bit beyond, mountains and hills that—though the photograph is in black and white—one imagines green and red and brown. My father and I are sitting on the wall like this: he, in profile, with his arms crossed; I, with my back to the abyss, and my hands beneath my thighs. Looking carefully at the photograph, one will see that it has a certain dramatic intensity not attributable to the landscape—though it is dramatic in the way that some people imagine a landscape can be—but rather to the relationship between us. My father is looking at the landscape; I am looking at him, and in my gaze there is a very specific plea: that he notice me, that he take me down off that wall where my legs hang without touching the ground and which seems to me—inevitably an exaggeration, because I’m just a boy—about to collapse at any moment and drag me into the abyss along with it. In the photograph, my father doesn’t look at me; he doesn’t even notice that I am looking at him or acknowledge the entreaty I was capable of formulating only in that way, as if he and I were doomed not to understand each other, not to even see each other. My father in the photograph has the hair I’m going to have, the same torso I’ll have in the future, now, when I am older than he was when someone—my mother, probably—took that photograph of us as we climbed a mountain whose name I don’t recall. Perhaps at that moment, as I thought about him, as I sat on an airplane, he felt for me the fear I had felt then on a mountain in the province of La Rioja around 1983 or 1984. However, as I traveled in that airplane back to a country that my father loved and that was also mine, a country that for me was just like the abyss he and I had posed in front of, not understanding each other, for a photograph, I didn’t yet know that my father knew fear much better than I thought, that my father had lived with it and fought against it and, like everyone, had lost that battle in a silent war that had been his and his entire generation’s.
13
I hadn’t been back to that country for eight years, but when the airplane dropped into the airport and spat us out, I felt as if it had been even longer. I’d once heard that the minutes spent on a roller coaster were, as perceived by the people in the car, longer than the ones spent at the foot of the ride watching others scream and grip the metal bar, and in that moment I had the impression that the country itself had gotten on a roller coaster and continued twisting upside down as if the operator had gone crazy or was on his lunch break. I saw old young people who wore clothes that were both old and new at the same time, I saw a blue carpet that looked new but was already dirty and worn where it had been stepped on, I saw some booths with yellow glass panes and some young but old policemen who looked distrustingly at passports and sometimes stamped them and sometimes didn’t; even my passport already looked old and, when they gave it back to me, I felt as if they were handing me a dead plant beyond any hope of being brought back to life; I saw a young woman in a miniskirt giving passersby cookies made with dulce de leche, and I could almost see the dust of the years settled on those cookies and in the caramel. She said to me: Would you like to try a cookie? And I shook my head and practically ran toward the exit. As I left, I thought I saw the old, obese caricature of a soccer player, and I thought I saw him being chased by dozens of photographers and journalists and that the soccer player wore a T-shirt printed with an old photograph of himself, a photograph monstrously disfigured by his belly that showed an exaggeratedly large leg, a curved, elongated torso and an enormous hand hitting a ball to score a goal in some World Cup on any old day of some springtime past.
14
But maybe that didn’t really happen and it was all a hallucination induced by the pills that doctor gave me and I silently swallowed on the sofas of people I knew in that German city. Once, long after all that happened, I reread the instructions on one of those medications, which I’d read so many times before but nevertheless had forgotten every time. I read that those pills had a sedative, antidepressive and tranquilizing effect. I read that they took effect between one and six hours after being taken orally but that eliminating them required some one hundred and twenty hours—which makes five days, according to my calculations—and eighty-eight percent passes through urine and seven percent through sweat, and five percent of the substance is never eliminated. I read that it produces physical and psychological dependence and that it induces amnesia as well as a decrease in or a complete lack of ability to remember events that take place during the periods of the drug’s effectiveness. I read that it can cause suicidal tendenci
es in the patient—which is, undoubtedly, serious; drowsiness—which is, of course, not; weakness; fatigue; disorientation; ataxia; nausea; emotional blunting; reduced alertness; loss of appetite or of weight; sleepiness; breathlessness; double vision; sleep disturbances; dizziness; vomiting; headaches; sexual disturbances; depersonalization; hyperacusia; numbness or tingling in extremities; hypersensitivity to light or physical contact; hallucinations or epileptic convulsions; respiratory, gastrointestinal or muscular problems; increase in hostility or irritability; anterograde amnesia; alteration of the perception of reality and mental confusion; slurred speech; abnormalities in liver and kidney function; and withdrawal symptoms following abrupt discontinuation of the medication. So I guess seeing a soccer player wearing a T-shirt with a deformed image of his own past over his gut is among the least serious things that can happen to you when you take stuff like that.
15
Anyway, that encounter, which really happened and which, therefore, was true, can be read here simply as an invention, as something fake, since, first of all, I was sufficiently confused at the time and so clearly worried that I could and did distrust my senses, which could incorrectly interpret a real event, and, second, because that encounter with the aging soccer player from a country that was part of my past, and almost everything that happened later, which I’m here to explain, was true but not necessarily believable. It has been said that in literature the beautiful is true but the true in literature is only the believable, and between the believable and the true there is a vast distance. Not to mention the beautiful, which is something that should never be discussed: the beautiful should be literature’s nature preserve, the place where beauty prospers without literature’s hand ever touching it, and it should serve to entertain and console writers, since literature and beauty are completely different things or perhaps the same thing, like two gloves for the right hand. Except you can’t put a right-hand glove on your left hand; some things don’t go together. I had just arrived in Argentina, and while I waited for the bus that would take me to the city where my parents lived, almost two hundred miles to the northeast of Buenos Aires, I was thinking that I had come from the dark German forests to the horizontal Argentine plain to see my father die and to say good-bye to him and to promise him—even though I didn’t believe it in the slightest—that he and I were going to have another chance, in some other place, for each of us to discover who the other was and that, perhaps, for the first time since he had become a father and I a son, we would finally understand something; but this, being true, wasn’t the least bit believable.
18
And then there was the impossible tongue twister of the ill and their doctors, who brought together words like benzodiazepine, diazepam, neuroleptic, hypnotic, zolpidem, tranquilizer, alprazolam, narcotic, antiepileptic, antihistamine, clonazepam, barbiturate, lorazepam, triazolobenzodiazepine, escitalopram—all words amid the jumbled words in a head that refused to function.
20
When I got to my parents’ house, nobody was there. The house was cold and damp, like a fish whose belly, as a boy, I had once brushed against before throwing it back into the water. It didn’t feel like my house—that old sensation that a particular place is your home had vanished forever—and I was afraid the house would consider my presence an insult. I didn’t touch even a single chair: I left my small suitcase in the entryway and I began to walk through the rooms, like a snoop. In the kitchen there was a hunk of bread that some ants had started eating. Someone had left a change of clothes and an open empty handbag on my parents’ bed. The bed was unmade and the sheets retained the shape of a body that perhaps was my mother’s. Beside it, on my father’s night table, there was a book that I didn’t look at, some eyeglasses and two or three bottles of pills. When I saw them, I told myself that my father and I had something in common after all, that he and I were still tied to life by the invisible threads of pills and prescriptions and that those threads also now somehow united us. My old room was on the other side of the hallway. As I went into it, I thought everything must have shrunk: that the table was smaller than I remembered it, that the chair beside it could be used only by a midget, that the windows were tiny and that there weren’t as many books as I remembered, and besides they’d been written by authors who no longer interested me. It seemed as if I’d been gone more than eight years, I thought as I lay on what had been my bed. I was cold but I didn’t want to cover myself with the bedspread, and I lay there, with one arm over my face, unable to sleep but also unwilling to stand up, thinking in circles about my father and about me and about a lost opportunity for him and for me and for all of us.
21
My mother came into the kitchen and found me contemplating the products in the refrigerator. Like those dreams in which everything is suspiciously familiar and at the same time shockingly strange, the products were the same but their containers had changed, and now the beans were in a can that reminded me of the old tomato can, the tomatoes came in a canister that reminded me of the cocoa and the cocoa came in bags that made me think of diapers and sleepless nights. My mother didn’t seem at all affected by my presence, but I was surprised to see her so thin and so fragile; when I stood up and she came over to hug me, I saw she had a gaze that could turn the demons out of hell, and I wondered if that gaze wasn’t enough to cure my father, to alleviate the pain and suffering of all the patients in the hospital where he lay dying, because that gaze was the gaze of a will that can stand up to anything. What happened, I asked my mother, and she started to explain, slowly. When she finished, she went to her room to cry alone and I put some water and a fistful of rice into a pot and I stared through the window at the impenetrable jungle that had grown from the garden my mother and brother had tended so carefully, in the same place but in a different time.
23
My siblings were standing in the hallway when I arrived at the hospital. From a distance they seemed silent, although later I saw that they were talking or pretending to, as if they felt obligated to simulate keeping up a conversation that not even they were really listening to. My sister started to cry when she saw me, as if I were bringing terrible and unexpected news, or as if I myself were that news, returning horribly mutilated from a never-ending war. I handed them some chocolates and a bottle of schnapps that I’d bought in Germany, in the airport, and my sister started laughing and crying at the same time.
24
My father was lying beneath a tangle of cords like a fly in a spiderweb. His hand was cold and my face was hot, but I noticed that only when I brought my hand to my face to wipe it.
25
I stayed with him that evening, without really knowing what to do except look at him and ask myself what would happen if he opened his eyes or spoke, and for a moment I hoped that he wouldn’t open them while I was there. Then I said to myself: I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten and when I open them none of this will be real, it will never have happened, like when films end or you close a book; but when I opened my eyes, after having counted to ten, my father was still there and I was still there and the spiderweb was still there, and we were all surrounded by the noises of the hospital and that heavy air that smells of disinfectant and false hopes and is sometimes worse than sickness or death. Have you ever been in a hospital? Well, then you’ve seen them all. Have you watched someone die? It’s different every time. Sometimes the illness is blinding and you close your eyes and what you most fear is like a car coming toward you at top speed along a country road some ordinary night. When I opened my eyes again, my sister was beside me and it was nighttime and my father was still alive, fighting and losing but still alive.
26
My sister insisted on spending the night at the hospital. I went back to the house with my brother and my mother and we watched a movie on television for a while. In the movie, a man ran through an intense snowstorm along a frozen track that seemed endless; the snow fell on his face and on his coat and sometimes it seemed to obstruct the man
’s vision of what he was chasing, but the man kept running as if his life depended on catching the airplane that taxied in front of him. Johnny! Johnny! shouted a woman who emerged from the open hatch of the airplane, which seemed about to take off at any minute. When the man was just about to reach her outstretched hand, however, the plane took off and another man violently snatched the woman away and even shot one or two times at the man called Johnny before the plane completely disappeared into the snowstorm. It’s the courier of the czar, said my brother just as the man named Johnny fell to the snow-covered ground and his panting image faded slowly to black and on the screen appeared the words THE END. There were no airplanes in the time of the czar, I replied, but my brother looked at me as if I hadn’t understood a thing.
27
That night I couldn’t sleep. I poured myself a glass of water in the dark of the kitchen and stood there for a while, drinking and trying not to think about anything. When I finished the water, I went back to my room and grabbed a sleeping pill and swallowed it hurriedly. While I waited for it to take effect, I started wandering around the house, trying to figure out if the house had changed or was the same as when I lived there, but I couldn’t tell. Maybe, simply, it wasn’t the house but my perception that had changed, and that change in perception—whether it was brought on by the travel or my father’s situation or my pill consumption—carried with it a change in the object of that perception, as if, in order to know whether or not the house had changed, I had to be capable of comparing my way of seeing things in that moment and my way of seeing them before leaving and living in Germany and starting to take pills and before my father got sick and I came back, which was impossible. I distracted myself by looking at the books on the shelves in the living room, which were my parents’ books from when they were young, in the light that entered from the street through a window. Although I knew those books well, perhaps it was also my perception that made them seem new to my eyes, and once again I wondered what had really changed from the time I’d flipped through them to now, when I looked at them without curiosity and with some apprehension in the light that filtered in from outside, and again I arrived at no conclusion. I was there for a while longer, standing on the cold floor of the living room, looking at those books. I heard a bus pass and then the cars of the first people headed to work, and I thought the city was soon going to set into motion again and I didn’t want to be there to see it. I went to my room and took two more pills, and then I lay down in bed and waited for them to take effect; but, as always, I didn’t really notice when they did, because first my legs went numb and then I could no longer move my arms and I merely managed to think about that slow falling to pieces that was the only way sleep came and to tell myself, a moment before finally drifting off, that I had to make lists of everything I saw, that I had to make an inventory of everything I was seeing in my parents’ house so that I wouldn’t forget it again. Then I fell asleep.
My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain Page 2