61
Whether it was Brochero, who, in some versions, had stayed in El Trébol that morning, whether it was Córdoba, or whether it was Huck, who maintains that he was a victim in all this—who threw Burdisso into the well is of little importance here; nor does it matter much that Brochero returned three days later to throw bricks, pieces of masonry and dead leaves onto the wounded man to finish him off; the fate of the accused doesn’t matter much, and neither does what happened to Córdoba in the women’s prison in Santa Fe or to Brochero and Huck in the jail in Coronda. This crime, every crime, has an individual, private aspect but also a social one; the first concerns only the victims and their close relatives, but the second concerns us all and is the reason justice is required to intervene in our name, in the name of a collective whose rules have been called into question by the crime and which, faced with the impossibility of undoing the first, tries to get the second under control, with power that, at least in theory, comes neither from an individual nor a single class but rather from society as a whole, wounded but still standing.
62
The remaining questions at that point were who Fanny was, why my father summed up the case’s legal situation and why it was my father who had to do it and not someone else, anyone else.
63
The next documents in my father’s file were fragments of a register I didn’t recognize, in which appeared people with the last name Carizo, including Miriam, Burdisso’s common-law wife to whom he’d given fifty percent of his property, which was documented here with one new detail: Burdisso’s and her tax and national identification numbers. Then there was a photocopy of the document produced by the General Property Registry of the Province of Santa Fe, detailing the purchase of the house on Calle Corrientes by Alberto Burdisso and dating the purchase to November 16, 2005. Burdisso had bought the property from Nelson Carlos Girello and Olga Rosa Capitani de Girello, two elderly people. Other information was included on the bill of sale: Burdisso’s birth date—February 1, 1948; his mother’s last name—Rolotti; marital status—single; his national identification card number—6.309.907; and his previous address—Entre Ríos and Cortada Llobet, in El Trébol. Also the size of the property—307.20 square meters; and the amount paid—twenty-five thousand pesos in cash. The notary public who had witnessed the transaction was named Ricardo López de la Torre.
64
It was as if my father had wanted to deconstruct the crime into a handful of insignificant facts, a pile of notarized documents, technical descriptions and official registries whose accumulation made him forget for a moment that they all added up to a tragic event, the disappearance and death of a man in an abandoned well, which would make him think about the symmetry between that man’s death and his sister’s, also tragic and about which my father was never going to know anything. This was my father’s attempt to collaborate in the search for Burdisso and my attempt to search for and find my father in his last thoughts before everything that had happened happened.
65
[…] that they sell to Mr. Alberto José Burdisso and Mrs. Miriam Emilia Carizo, in joint ownership of indivisible, equal parts: a plot of land including everything constructed or planted on it, located in the city of El Trébol, District San Martín, part of the block numbered Seventy-Eight on the official map. […] said map is registered in the Topographical Department under number 130,355, dated the 18th of February of 2000, attached here, and said portion is designated as lot number six (6), located on the North part of the block, divided by a public walkway, situated at twenty-five meters eight centimeters from the Northeast corner of the block toward the East, and composed of: twelve meters eighty centimeters facing North, the same facing South, by twenty-four meters on its East and West sides, equivalent to an area of three hundred seven meters twenty decimeters square, adjoining: to the North, Calle Corrientes; to the West, lot number Five; to the East, lot number Seven; and to the South, lot number Eleven, all on the same map of measurement.
66
El Trébol, June 9, 2008, 10:30 time [sic]. regarding: It being the date and time that figure on the margin, a person of the female sex appears before this Police Station wishing to file civil record, a request immediately accepted. Next is gathered her full names and other circumstances relating to her personal identity[.] LET THE RECORD STATE that she gave her name as: MIRIAM EMILIA CARIZO, Argentine, educated, single, employed, National Identification Number […], residenced in a rural region in the mid-East, who being found competent for the function STATES: “That she is the co-owner of the dwelling located on Calle Corrientes number 438 along with Mr. Alberto José Burdisso, and, in the face of his absence and under advisement by the Court of this city, asks to change the locks of the dwelling in the evening hours if possible to prevent a possible usurpation. That is all. The present record states for legal purposes that this is not to be interpreted as home abandonment, rather due to the circumstances aforementioned. The above is all I have to say on the subject, having nothing more to add, delete or amend …” As that is all, the record is considered completed, read and ratified by the declarant signing below in accordance before I [sic] who certifies. SIGNED: Miriam Emilia Carizo (declarant). Agent (S.G.) María Rosa Finos, acting police officer. I HEREBY CERTIFY: that the present record is a faithful copy of the existing original found on page 12 in the […].
67
Then my father had drawn Burdisso’s family tree, starting with his grandparents, including dates only for the births and deaths of Alberto and Alicia. For Alicia, the second date, the date of her death, appears as a question mark.
69
A photograph showing an oval portrait of a man with a Nietzschean mustache and a bow tie beside a plaque: “Jorge Burdisso 2.19.1928 aged 72. In remembrance by his family.” Another photograph: “Margarita G. de Burdisso 3.31.1933 aged 68. In remembrance by her family.” A photograph of a vault, with the inscription “Burdisso Family.” When I saw that photograph, I jumped, because I knew that vault: I had hidden behind it and other similar tombs, playing hide-and-seek in the cemetery with my friends when there were no adults around.
70
A photocopy of a list of telephone numbers and contact information for people with the last name Páez and for the perfume shop Fanny.
71
The last page in the file was titled “A Eulogy for Alberto José Burdisso” and was dated “El Trébol Cemetery, June 21, 2008.” It was a transcription of the words my father spoke at the funeral of Alberto José Burdisso:
Friends and neighbors, there is not much I can add to what has already been said. You surely knew Alberto better than I did, as we were friends for only a few months during primary school.
But I felt obliged to come here with him and with you in order to give voice to someone who could not be here today. The entire town should be here, because I don’t believe Alberto brought anything but good into anyone’s life. And many have come. Those taken first from this world, like his parents and his aunt, who raised him, aren’t here. The indifferent aren’t here, those who live gazing at their own navels, oblivious to everything beyond their own interests. And someone in particular isn’t here. Someone who is nowhere yet everywhere, waiting for the truth, calling for justice, demanding remembrance.
That person is Alicia, Alberto’s sister, who in spite of being younger looked after him like an older sister when they were left alone.
But Alicia isn’t here, hasn’t been here for thirty-one years. It is exactly thirty-one years to the day that she was disappeared in Tucumán, on June 21, 1977, by the thugs of the most recent and the bloodiest civil-military dictatorship.
Alicia was kidnapped and disappeared because she was part of a generation that had to fight to restore freedom to our country. So people like Alberto and like all of us could live in a world without fear and without gags in our mouths. Without those young people like Alicia, today we wouldn’t be able to say what we think, act as we feel we should, choose our destiny. For example
, our march to the plaza to demand Alberto be found would not be possible. Nor would the demonstrations of the last few days during which people have been able to speak out about the kind of country they want without fear of being kidnapped and disappeared.
Today we say good-bye to Alberto in a way we were unable to with Alicia. Which is why I ask that when you demand justice for him, remember to demand it for her as well. And may the Lord receive the spirits of them both among his chosen ones.
72
Next there was a blank page, and then nothing except for the porous surface of the file’s yellow cardboard, which remained open for a moment and then was closed by a hand that, although at that moment I wasn’t thinking about it at all, belonged to me and was covered in folds and grooves like country roads traveled by devastation and death.
III
Parents are the bones children sharpen their teeth on.
—Juan Domingo Perón
1
Once, a long time before any of this happened, my mother gave me a jigsaw puzzle that I rushed to put together while she watched. It probably didn’t take me very long, since it was a puzzle for kids and had few pieces, no more than fifty. When I finished, I brought it to my father and showed it to him with childish pride, but my father shook his head and said, It’s very easy, and asked me to give it to him. I handed over the puzzle and he started to cut the pieces into tiny bits devoid of any meaning. He didn’t stop until he had cut up every one of the pieces, and when he was done he said to me: Put it together now. But I was never able to do it again. Several years earlier, my father, instead of destroying a puzzle, had made one for me, with wooden pieces that were rectangular, square, triangular and round, which he painted different colors to make them easier to identify; of all the pieces, I vaguely remember that the round ones were yellow and the square ones were maybe red or blue, but what’s important here is that, as I closed my father’s file, I began to think he’d created yet another puzzle for me. This time, however, the pieces were movable and had to be assembled on a larger tabletop that was memory and in fact the world. Once again, I wondered why my father had participated in the search for that murdered man, why he’d wanted to document his efforts and the results that they’d failed to produce, as well as the final words he’d said on the subject, linking the murdered man with his disappeared sister. I had the impression that my father hadn’t really been looking for the dead man, who meant little or nothing to him; that what he’d been doing was searching for the sister, picking up a search that certain tragic circumstances—which I myself, and perhaps he and my mother, had tried to forget—had kept him from carrying out in June 1977, when he and my mother and I—my siblings had not yet been born—lived in a state of terror that delayed sounds and movements from reaching us, as if we were underwater. I told myself that my father had wanted to find his friend through her brother, but I also wondered why he hadn’t begun that search sooner, when the murdered brother was still alive and it wouldn’t have been difficult for my father to talk to him; when the brother went missing, I thought, one of the last bonds linking my father to the disappeared woman was broken, and precisely because of that it made no sense to search for him, given that the dead don’t talk, they say nothing from the depths of the wells they’ve been thrown into out on the Argentine plain. I wondered if my father knew his search wouldn’t turn up any results, if he was simply captivated by the symmetry of two missing siblings with more than thirty years between them, willing to throw himself again and again at a light that dazzled him until he collapsed from exhaustion, like an insect in the dark, hot air of a summer night.
3
My sister was standing beside the coffee machine at one end of the hallway in the intensive care unit and spoke only when I finished telling her about my father’s file. He participated in the search for Burdisso but he did it on his own, not getting involved in the other efforts, she told me. He looked in places that didn’t interest the police, like gullies and streams, and beneath collapsed bridges; also in abandoned houses at the crossroads of country roads. Maybe he was already sick then, or maybe he got sick because of what happened. He talked of nothing else during all the weeks the search went on. I asked my sister why my father had gotten involved in a search for someone he barely knew, but my sister interrupted me with a gesture and said: He knew him; they went to school together at some point. For how long, I asked. My sister shrugged: I don’t know, but once he told me that he regretted not having spoken to Burdisso about his sister while he was still alive, that he occasionally saw him on the street and always thought about approaching him to ask if he knew anything about her, but he couldn’t think of a good way to start the conversation and ended up just letting it go. Who is Fanny, I asked. My sister thought for a minute: She’s a distant relative of Burdisso. He tried to convince her to intervene in the trial as a civilian plaintiff to speed it along. What made him want to look for the missing girl, I asked, but my sister brought the cup of coffee to her lips, took a sip and tossed it in the wastepaper basket. It’s cold, she murmured and took another coin out of her pocket and put it into the machine and said, as if continuing a previous conversation: You saw him in the museum. Who, I asked. My sister said my father’s name. They interviewed him for an exhibition in the municipal museum; you should go see it, she added, and I nodded in silence.
3
When I entered the museum, I paid my admission and looked around for the exhibition on the local daily press. The museum brought together various insignificant miscellanea, the odds and ends of a mercantile city that lacked any history beyond the fluctuating prices of the grains unloaded over the years in its port, the only justification for its existence in that spot beside a river, not two kilometers farther south or north or any other place at all. As I walked through the museum, I thought about how I’d lived in that city and how at some point it had been the place where I was supposedly going to remain, permanently tied down by an atavistic force that no one seemed able to explain but that affected many people who lived there, who hated it vehemently and yet never left, a city that wouldn’t release its hold on those born there, who traveled and came back or who never went anywhere and tanned in the summer and coughed in the winter and bought houses with their wives and had kids who were never able to leave the city either.
4
In the room that held the exhibition on the daily press there was a television on a constant loop, and a chair. I sat in it trembling, listening to data and figures and watching the front pages of newspapers until my father appeared on the screen. He was as I remembered him in his last years. He had a long white beard, which he occasionally ran his fingers through with a flirtatious air, and he talked about newspapers where he’d worked, newspapers he’d seen go under and reappear with other names and other staffs in other places that, invariably, were finished off by the courts soon afterward, so the newspapers went under again and the cycle repeated itself from the beginning, if there ever was one; a whole series of pretty terrible cycles of exploitation and unemployment following one after another without leaving any room for a career or for hope. My father told his story, which was also the story of the press in this city where he’d decided to live, and I, watching him on the screen at that museum exhibition, felt both pride and very strong disappointment, the same disappointment I usually felt when I thought about everything my father had done and the impossibility of following in his footsteps or of offering him achievements that could match his own, which were many and were counted in newspaper pages, in journalists trained by him who in turn had trained me and in a political history that I had once known and then tried to almost completely forget.
5
I watched the documentary that included the interview with my father three or four times that afternoon, listening to him attentively until I’d familiarized myself with all the dates and names but, more crucially, until looking at him started to be too terrible. I’m going to start crying, I thought, but thinking about it was enough
to keep me from doing it. At some point an employee came in and announced that the exhibition would be closing in five minutes, and then he approached the television and turned it off. My father was cut off in the middle of a sentence, and I tried to finish it but couldn’t: where my father’s face had been I began to see mine, reflected in the black screen with all my features gathered in an expression of pain and sadness that I’d never seen before.
7
Once my father told me that he would have liked to write a novel. That night, at his desk, in a room that had once been mine and that never seemed to have enough light, I wondered if he hadn’t actually done it. Among his papers was a list of names laid out in two columns, colored lines linking them in which red predominated. There was also a page from a newspaper, the front page of a local newspaper called Semana Gráfica that I knew—because I’d once heard my father say it, and what he’d said, particularly the pride with which he’d said it, had survived the almost total collapse of my memory—was a newspaper he’d created as a teenager and that had been his first job in journalism, long before he went to a city in the heart of the country to study that discipline. There were also photographs, and perhaps these were the materials for the novel my father had wanted to write and never did.
My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain Page 9