My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain

by Patricio Pron

  22

  At that point, the articles my father had collected began to run together. The reader retains barely a few sentences: “The firemen searched for Burdisso in rural regions”; “[…] with negative results […]”; “ ‘It is very difficult to search like this, without any leads,’ stated the Fire Chief, Raúl Dominio, to […]”; “Last Friday the search was resumed by police staff, fireman and municipal employees, […] this time a larger amount of personnel was used and they scoured each sector inch by inch”; “the Special Dog Brigade of the Santa Fe Police and specialized detectives worked on his search, but they weren’t able to find the man,” et cetera. Of all the articles, one stood out, published in El Ciudadano & La Región of the city of *osario. One of its paragraphs began by saying: “Alberto José Burdisso lives alone in his house at 400 Calle Corrientes in the city of El Trébol”; I knew this was the newspaper where my father worked and I also knew there was a wish or a hope in that sentence, found in the verb tense, and I understood the writer was my father and, had he been able to dispense with journalistic conventions, he would have been more direct and expressed his conviction, his wish or his hope without relying on any rhetoric, laying bare without any euphemisms: “Alberto José Burdisso lives.”

  23

  In a multitudinous gathering of almost 1000 people, the city of El Trébol complained about the lack of justice in the Burdisso case and the lack of resolution in his mysterious disappearance.

  From five in the afternoon on a holiday Monday, the Plaza began to fill with people who, gathering of their own volition, signed a list of demands that will be set [sic] to the hands of Judge Eladio García of the city of San Jorge. […] First at the event was Dr. Roberto Maurino, a childhood schoolmate of Burdisso’s, who spoke to the audience. […], Maurino stated to an attentive crowd that was continually signing petitions. Shortly afterward came Gabriel Piumetti, one of the organizers of the march, along with his mother, who pointed out […] The people applauded every word and shouts of “Justice, justice!!!” were heard in the amphitheater for a long time.

  After the first speeches, someone in the public shout [sic], “Let the police commissioner speak!,” as he was among the people. It was then that the chief of the city’s Fourth Precinct, Oriel Bauducco, expressed […]. At that moment irate demands from the public arose and various questions were heard: “Why did they search for Burdisso with dogs ten days after his disappearance?” fired off one woman, and another question immediately followed: “Wide [sic] you clear out Burdisso’s house two days after his disappearance when it should have been taped off?” That was the moment of highest tension in the Plaza, the crowd staring insistently at the superior officer, waiting for a reply that never came. […] struggled to say Bauducco, who after listening how various residents complained [sic] the lack of road blocks in the streets and the absence of patrolling in the city.

  Minutes later Mayor Fernando Almada addressed the crowd saying […]. In addition to Almada, among those gathered were the city councilmen, the former mayor, now secretary of […], and the employees and Executive Board of the Club Trebolense, where Alberto Burdisso worked.

  El Trébol Digital, June 17, 2008

  24

  In the lower corner of the article was a photograph. It showed a group of people—perhaps there really were a thousand, as the anonymous writer of the article claims, though it doesn’t look like it—listening to a bald speaker. In the background of the photograph was a church I recognized, with a disproportionately tall tower, which looked like a swan curled up on the shore, stretching out its neck in an attempt to find nourishment. Seeing it, I remembered my father once told me that my paternal great-grandfather had climbed up the old tower, which had been damaged in an earthquake or some other natural disaster, in order to clear out the rubble so it could be rebuilt, but because the tower’s wooden beams were rotted from exposure to the elements, my great-grandfather was risking his life, not to mention the inevitable thread of paternities that led to us; but in that moment I couldn’t remember if my father had told me the story or if it was made up, a flight of fancy based on the similarity between the thinness of the tower and that of my paternal grandfather as I remembered him, and still today I don’t know if it was my paternal great-grandfather or my maternal great-grandfather who climbed the tower, nor do I know if at any point the church tower suffered damage, since there aren’t many earthquakes or natural disasters in El Trébol.

  25

  “Three cases of homicide, disappearance and kidnapping in one year in the city,” affirmed another article, pointing out: “Three unresolved cases.”

  26

  Once more, the key word here was disappearance, repeated in one way or another in all the articles, like a black armband worn by every cripple and have-not in Argentina.

  26

  An article in the morning paper La Capital of the city of *osario on June 18 expanded, corrected and contextualized the previous article: the demonstration had brought together eight hundred people, not a thousand, and the list of demands requested “that justice be done,” which, in addition to the way most of the speeches alternated between the present and past tenses, made it seem as if the demonstrators suspected Burdisso had been murdered and they wanted the authorities to consider this possibility. At the same time, the growing demands, with their explicit warning that what had happened to Burdisso could also happen to others, seemed to shift the focus from an isolated police event to a generalized, omnipresent threat. It could be said that the eight hundred people who took part in the demonstration—an insignificant segment of the population, if, as another article maintains, the city has thirteen thousand inhabitants—were already beginning to switch from demanding “justice” for Burdisso to demanding it for themselves and their families. No one wanted to suffer Burdisso’s fate, but no one at that point knew what had happened to him and no one wondered why he had been chosen instead of someone else, someone else among those who exorcized their fears with a demonstration and a list of demands.

  27

  A couple of letters to the editor were published in El Trébol Digital on June 18 and 19 of that year: one denounced “the black humor” of an anonymous text message that proposed marching for the disappearance not of Burdisso but of a rival sports team; the other wondered if Burdisso had been “swallowed up by the earth.”

  28

  A survey, published on the same site on June 18, contained hardly any variation from the one published a week earlier.

  He’s going to show up (2.64% as opposed to the previous 2.38%); He’s never going to be seen again (11.45% as opposed to 13.10%); He’s going to be found alive (2.64% as opposed to 3.57%); He’s going to be found dead (28.63% as opposed to 25.00%); He moved without telling anyone (5.29% as opposed to 4.76%); This was a crime of passion (24.67% as opposed to 25.00%); He was kidnapped (5.29% as opposed to 8.33%); He is dead by natural causes (2.20% as opposed to 3.57%); He left town for some reason (5.73% as opposed to 2.38%); I don’t know what to think (11.45% as opposed to 11.90%).

  29

  The title of another article: “Agents from Criminalistics Arrive in the City for the Burdisso Case.” The date of its publication: June 19, 2008. The defense of the actions taken by the local police, from the chief of the Eighteenth Regional Unit:

  […] on the speed with which Burdisso’s dwelling was occupied and the delay in the arrival of the Brigade of dogs to the city, Dr. Gómez pointed out: “They are two separate issues. As in regards therein to the dwelling it must be understood that as there is no proof of any tragic events the dwelling cannot be kept unoccupied, and the issue of the dogs is because they were looking for finer elements [sic]. The dogs were sent in and will be sent in again soon. We are searching for Burdisso throughout the country, as we have been from the very first moment.” […]

  A declaration, from the same civil servant: “For the moment we are searching to find him alive.”

  30

  I want him to show up if he
went off on his own, and if he’s found dead, I want the guilty parties to be found. I’m asking everyone who was there [at the demonstration on the seventeenth], [who] also did it out of obligation, nobody is exempt, it could happen to any of us.

  Raquel P. Sopranzi in El Trébol Digital on June 20, 2008

  31

  As I continue reading my father’s file, I come across a headline from El Trébol Digital on June 20, stamped on an idyllic image of the town with the incongruence of a modern device in an old photograph: “Now They Discover a Body in an Abandoned Well.”

  32

  This morning, at approximately 10:30, the excavation unit of the Volunteer Firemen of El Trébol, following intense search, founds [sic] a body at the depths of an abandoned well in a field 8 kilometers from the city of El Trébol, where there is an old abandoned building with two old water wells. The body appeared beneath much rubble and corrugated metal sheets. The police worked at the site while the firemen operated on the outside of the cavity. At approximately twelve thirty, they managed to extract a male body of some eighty-five or ninety kilos and approximately 1.70 in height tressed [sic] in pants and blue cardigan and white T-shirt. The judge of the city of San Jorge, Dr. Eladio García, along with special units and staff from the 18th Regional Unit based in Sastre, arrived on the scene.

  Dr. Pablo Cándiz, forensic doctor, made the first inspection of the cadaver, which was later transferred to the city of Santa Fe to be autopsied.

  “We have no information on other missing person cases in the region,” stated the Deputy Chief of the 18th Regional Unit, Commissioner Agustín Hiedro, to “ElTrebolDigital” [sic] from the site[,] and added: “We found the site based on a report from someone who had been in that field and noticed a penetrating odor surrounding a well. We works [sic] intensely in the late noon on Thursday until due to low light it was decided that we would continue our work on Friday morning, and so we came out here first thing.”

  The body found in the depths of the crevice has physical similar [sic] characteristics to Alberto Burdisso, who mysteriously disappeared exactly twenty days ago.

  33

  Some photographs accompanied the article. In the first you could see some five people looking into a well; since all the figures were leaning over, you couldn’t make out their faces, though you could see that one of them, the third from the left, situated precisely in the middle, had white hair and wore glasses. In the next photograph you could see a fireman descending into the well on a rope; the fireman wore a white helmet with the number thirty on it. In another photograph you could see the fireman already inside the well, barely illuminated by the light from the mouth of the hole and a flashlight attached to his helmet. In the next one you could see three firemen with their gear; in the 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.

  34

  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 circumstances that 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”

  35

  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

  36

  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 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 it was 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.

  37

  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 and a 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—one man 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 Burdisso 8.21.1956 [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 crypt.