My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain

by Patricio Pron

  3

  I dreamed that I was visiting Álvaro C. V. in a museum where he worked. The museum was located in a building reminiscent of the design school in Barcelona. I began to wander through its rooms, looking for Álvaro, and each room was different, all of them filled with objects that my attention seemed to want to settle on indefinitely. In one of them was a glass case displaying piston-like objects made of gourds that, according to the explanatory sign, produced sounds beyond all description. As I turned down a hallway, I finally found Álvaro and he and I went out, but my attention remained in the rooms and I understood that it wouldn’t return to me until I had figured out what those devices were and could describe the sounds they produced. A moment later I was back in the museum, watching two experiments being carried out. In the first, a cat was submerged in a rubber solution and then mounted inside a cardboard tube. A woman explained that the result was an antenna that could be set up at home when the television or radio signal was too weak to be captured by a conventional antenna. Beside her, the cat still shook and meowed, but gradually stopped, since it couldn’t breathe due to its cardboard corset, and finally its head fell slack while the antenna remained standing. Next, the experimenters grabbed a little monkey and put a cardboard collar on him similar to the ruffs worn in the seventeenth century. Then they started to cut the muscles below his neck, one by one, and studied how long they took to stop moving, analyzing how quickly the monkey understood what was happening to him, and conjecturing which muscles and veins to cut last to keep the animal alive as long as possible. I knew the cardboard collar had been placed on the monkey so that he wouldn’t be terrified by the sight of what they were doing to him, but his timid moans, which devolved into mere gurgling, and the expressions on his face made me realize that he felt and knew perfectly what was happening. One by one his legs stopping moving, then his arms became stiff, his lungs stopped and, finally, when the animal’s face was little more than a mask of horror, they cut a thick vein like a red thread that held together his head and the rest of his body beneath the cardboard collar and the monkey died.

  22

  I dreamed that I was watching television in a small hotel in Rome and that on the air they were talking about the wife of the Serbian prime minister Goran D. The woman’s last name was “Cunt” and she was said to be in contact with the “vagina,” or Russian mafia.

  30

  I dreamed that there was a crazy writer named Clara. A psychiatrist at her side supported her refusal to authorize an interview with a team of documentary filmmakers, and he said the word humiliation over and over again until she got up and put a white metal plate on her chair, saying that she was the plate. Then, using her fingernails, she wrote a physics formula on the cement floor and she left. In the following days she stopped eating. My theory was that the writer had wanted to express a desire, to ask for food, and she had done it the only way she knew how: as if we, wanting to eat watermelon, had asked for sugar and water. But the rest of the spectators thought that the physics formula—contrasting the sizes of the earth and the sun—could never be a request but was instead a revelation the writer was making to us before she died from starvation and firm resolve.

  31

  I dreamed that I was watching a film with my father. Some shoes, I think they were mine, lay on the floor between us and the television, which was showing a commercial made up of children’s drawings of flying machines. A screen of handwritten text followed the commercial: We are all part of our language; when one of us dies, so does our name and a small but significant part of our native tongue. For this reason, because I don’t want to impoverish the language, I have decided to live until the new words arrive. The signature at the end was illegible and only the three dates that followed it could be made out: 1977, 2008 and 2010. My father turned to me and said: 2010 is 2008 minus 1977, and 1977 is 2010 backward. You have nothing to fear. I replied: I’m not afraid, and my father turned his gaze back to the television screen and said: But I am.

  IV

  We are survivors, we outlive the deaths of others. There is nothing else to do. And there is nothing else to do but to inherit, whatever it may be. A house, a character, a society, a country, a language. Later others will arrive; we are also the people yet to come. What do we do with that inheritance?

  —Marcelo Cohen

  1

  My mother’s face was drawn together in a serious expression when I woke up, and she came over to me as if through the vibrant air of a summer day. Outside it was raining—it had started as I was returning from the museum the day before—and my mother’s face seemed to sum up the absurd situation we were in: her husband and her son were sick and nobody knew what to do. As I always did when I was sick, I asked for my sister. She’s at the hospital now, answered my mother, but she spent all day yesterday by your side. My mother put a damp cloth on my forehead. You went to the museum to see your father, she asked; she didn’t wait for my reply. I figured, she said, and she turned her face away, which had already started to dampen with tears.

  2

  Outside the rain kept falling, and as it fell it seemed to swallow up the air, pushing it behind the solid curtain of water the rain formed between the sky and the earth, to a place where my lungs couldn’t reach and neither could my parents’ or my sister’s. Although the air was filled with water, it also seemed empty, as if it hadn’t really been replaced by water but rather by some intermediary substance, a substance of sadness and desperation and all the things you hope to never have to face, like the death of your parents, and yet are there the whole time, in a childish landscape of constant rain that you can’t take your eyes off.

  4

  Is it morning or afternoon, I asked my brother when he appeared with a cup of tea. Afternoon, said my brother. Do you mean that it’s after noon or truly the afternoon, I asked, but my brother had already left by the time I was able to articulate the question.

  5

  Is it morning or afternoon, I asked again. This time my brother was bringing me a bowl of soup that he’d made. It’s night, he said, pointing outside. He told me that our mother and sister were at the hospital with our father and that they were going to spend the night there. So you’re babysitting me, I said to him, trying to sound sarcastic. My brother answered: Let’s watch TV, and he dragged over a small wheeled table with the television set on it.

  6

  I liked being there, with my brother. The fever had started to lift, but I still had problems focusing my vision for long periods and I had to look away when my brother started flipping through the local channels in search of a movie for us to watch. At one point he stopped on a show about policemen chasing criminals in a shantytown on the outskirts of the capital; the sound wasn’t particularly good—it was recorded in the worst circumstances, in the midst of shoot-outs and wind and weather—and the local dialect seemed to have changed a lot since I’d left, so I didn’t understand anything they were saying. The program had subtitles only when poor people were speaking, even though what the police said was incomprehensible too, and I thought for a moment about what kind of country this was in which the poor had to be subtitled, as if they were speaking a foreign language.

  7

  Finally my brother stopped on a channel where a movie was just starting. The premise was that a young man had suffered a minor accident and spent a few days in the hospital; on returning home, for some reason, he believed that his father was to blame for the accident and started to follow him, always keeping his distance. His father’s behavior showed no signs of being dangerous, but, in the son’s imagination, everything the father did was linked to a specific murder the son believed he was going to commit. If the father went into a store and tried on a jacket, the son thought he was planning to wear it as a disguise, since he never wore jackets like that. If his father flipped through a travel magazine in the barbershop, the son thought he was looking for a place to run off to after the murder. Because the son loved his father and didn’t want him to
end up in jail—and because he believed that he was the intended victim—he started to set traps to try to sabotage his father. He hid the jacket, burned his father’s passport in the sink and destroyed his suitcases with a knife. For the father, these baffling domestic mishaps—his new jacket had disappeared, as had his passport; the suitcases he had in the house were torn—were surprising but also irritating. His usually jovial nature grew more and more bitter each day, and something inexplicable, something hard to justify but at the same time as real as an unexpected cloudburst, made him suspect that he was being followed. On his way to work, he obsessively searched the faces of his fellow passengers on the metro, and when he was out walking, he looked over his shoulder at every corner. He never saw his son, but his son saw him and attributed his nervousness and irritability to anxiety provoked by his imminent crime. One day the father told the son about his suspicion and the son tried to mollify him. Don’t worry, it’s just your imagination, he said, but the father was still jumpy. That same afternoon, tailing his father as he did every day, the son saw him buying a gun. When he got home that night, the father showed the weapon to his wife and son and they argued. The wife, who had doubted her husband’s stability for some time, tried to snatch the gun away from him; there was a struggle that the son watched, speechless, until he let out a scream and forced himself between them. The gun went off and the mother fell down dead. Looking at her, the son realized that his intuition was both right and wrong: he had foreseen the crime but failed to see that he wouldn’t be the victim, that he and not his father would commit the crime, that his father was nothing more than the instrument of someone else’s runaway imagination. This all resulted from an accumulation of real events, profoundly real but misinterpreted. As the movie ended, I discovered that my brother had fallen asleep next to me and I didn’t want to wake him. The flickering light from the yogurt and car commercials continued projecting onto my face for quite some time.

  8

  The night before last you were delirious, said my sister as she brought me a cup of tea the next morning. She asked me if I remembered what I’d been dreaming. I remembered two or three dreams and told them to her. She said she didn’t like them because animals died in every one, but that the one about my father was good. I didn’t dream them for you to like, I answered, and she smiled. You always told us your dreams when he took us to school, remember? I shook my head. He would go out first and start the car and then we would go out and get into the backseat and you would tell us what you’d dreamed about the night before; you always dreamed about tortured, dead animals. I never understood why he always went out first to start the car, I said; it didn’t make sense, because he had to wait for us anyway. My sister looked at me blankly, as if I were one of those people on television speaking their poor subtitled language, lost in a land that didn’t belong to them. How can you not remember, she said. Back then journalists were getting killed by car bombs; he went out alone every day to start the car to protect us, to take on all the risk himself. I can’t believe you don’t remember, she said.

  9

  Then what I’d tried not to remember came back to me with unusual intensity, and it was no longer oblique, like the fuzzy images of photographs I’d been gathering just to have but not to look at. It came back head-on and with the overwhelming force of the fire truck I saw occasionally when I’d taken too many pills. It explained everything for me, explained the terror that I instinctively linked to the past, as if in the past we had lived in a country called fear with a flag that was a face filled with dread, explained my hatred toward the country of my childhood and my leaving that country, an exile that had begun long before I left for Germany and finally managed to forget everything. At one point I had wanted to believe that this voyage was a one-way trip, because I had no home to return to, given the conditions under which my family and I lived for a long time. But in that moment I realized I did have a home and that this home was a bunch of memories and those memories had always been with me, as if I were one of those stupid snails my grandfather and I used to torture when I was a boy.

  10

  When I was a boy, I had instructions not to bring other children home; if I had to walk down the street alone, I was supposed to walk against traffic and stay alert if a car stopped alongside me. I wore a card around my neck with my name, my age, my blood type and a contact telephone number: if someone tried to pull me into a car, I was supposed to throw that card to the ground and shout my name as loudly and as many times as I could. I wasn’t allowed to stomp on the cardboard boxes I found on the street. I couldn’t say a word about anything I ever heard at my house. In the house was an emblem painted by my father, two outstretched hands holding up something that looked like a hammer crowned by a Phrygian cap, with a background of sky blue and white, framed by a rising sun and some laurels; I knew it was the Peronist coat of arms but I couldn’t mention it to anyone, and I was also supposed to forget what it meant. These rules, which I remembered for the first time in a long time, were designed to protect me, to protect my parents and my brother and sister and me in a time of terror, and though my parents may have already forgotten about them, I hadn’t, because suddenly I thought of something that I still continued to do, even in Germany, when I was distracted: draw up imaginary routes to take me where I wanted to go, always walking against traffic.

  11

  About those snails: my grandfather and I would paint their shells different colors, and sometimes we’d write messages on them. Once, my grandfather left a greeting with his name and put the snail down on the ground. The snail left and a long time later some people brought it back to us: it had been found a few kilometers away, which was a significant distance for me but perhaps impossible for a snail; its feat made a real impression on me, and also left me thinking for a while that everything came back, that everything returned even if you were carrying all your possessions with you and had no reason to come back. Then I decided that I was never going to come back, and I kept that childhood promise to myself for a long time of German fog and medicated haze, and, even though certain circumstances forced me to return, I hadn’t returned to the country that my parents had wanted me to love, the one called Argentina, but rather to an imagined country, the one they had fought for and that had never existed. When I understood that, I also realized it hadn’t been the pills that caused my inability to remember the events of my childhood, but rather those very events themselves that had provoked my desire to self-medicate and forget everything. And then I decided to remember, to do it for me and for my father and for what we’d both gone searching for, which had unintentionally reunited us.

  12

  My parents belonged to an organization called the Iron Guard. Unlike its unfortunate name, which links it to a Romanian organization from the period between the wars with which it has nothing else in common [1], my parents’ organization was Peronist, though the philosophy of its members—moreover, of my parents [2]—seems to have been historical materialist [3] [4]. Given that most of its members did not come from Peronist homes, their efforts were geared toward finding out what it meant to be a Peronist, and they turned to the neighborhoods in which the grand Peronist narrative of the distribution of wealth and the times of prosperity and paternalism were still vivid in residents’ memories, as was the presence of the Resistance [5], to which my parents’ organization contributed in its last phase. This sets my parents’ organization apart from the Montoneros, the organization it was, at one point, poised to merge with [6]: Iron Guard members didn’t believe they possessed the truth of the revolutionary process but rather they went out to search for it in the lower classes’ experience of resistance [7]; they didn’t attempt to impose their practices but rather to acquire them. The other substantial difference was their rejection of violent methods; after a period of debate [8], the organization decided not to resort to weapons except for defensive means, and I suppose that’s what saved the lives of my parents and a large number of their comrades and, indir
ectly, my own life [9]. From that moment on, the organization’s main tools for building power were rhetoric and debate, whose potential for transformation is, as we all know, negligible; but something happened: for a long time they were the most powerful organization within Peronism and the only one with any real reach beyond the middle class, whose desire for transformation ended up proving nonexistent. Their objective was to create a “strategic rear-guard” [10], a state actually rooted in society, with the goals of replacing the militarized state, installed in 1955 and devoid of political legitimacy, and building power from the bottom up, dealing with real problems and avoiding violence except on the fringes in order to establish a legitimate alternative and as an element of agitation [11]. However, being a Peronist who was absolutely loyal to Perón had its pitfalls: unconditional adherence to the movement’s leader led my parents’ organization to accept an impotent government made up of an ignorant woman and a sadistic murderer nicknamed the Warlock because of his grotesque enthusiasm for the occult, and, furthermore, it led them down a dead end after Perón’s death [12]. Where does an army go once its general is dead? Nowhere, obviously. Although Perón stated that his “only heir” was the people, who were in turn permeated by the Iron Guard, which swam among the people like a fish in water but at the same time gave them a channel and banks—as if the water had no meaning without the fish nor the fish without the water and one would disappear without the other—the Iron Guard dissolved after Perón’s death [13], unable to take charge of a legacy that it would have to defend with weapons and bloodshed in the months to come. This also saved my parents’ lives, and my life [14]. Those comrades who decided to join other organizations and continue their militancy were murdered and disappeared, others left the country, and the rest underwent a painful readjustment process, a sort of inner exile in which they had to witness the failure of a revolution definitively put down by the dictatorship. Those who continued or were ordered to continue were killed; my parents continued in their own way: my father stayed a journalist, as did my mother, and they had children to whom they passed on a legacy that is also a mandate, and that legacy and mandate—of social transformation and struggle—turned out to be unsuited to the times we grew up in, times of pride and frivolousness and defeat.