My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (13 page)

Besides, I’d seen enough mystery novels already and would see many more in the future. Telling this story from the perspective of genre would be illegitimate. To begin with, the individual crime was less important than the social crime, but social crime couldn’t be told through the artifice of a detective novel; it needed a narrative in the shape of an enormous frieze or with the appearance of an intimate personal story that held something back, a piece of an unfinished puzzle that would force the reader to look for adjacent pieces and then keep looking until the image became clear. Furthermore, the resolution of most detective stories is condescending, no matter how ruthless the plotting, so that the reader, once the loose ends are tied up and the guilty finally punished, can return to the real world with the conviction that crimes get solved and remain locked between the covers of a book, that the world outside the book is guided by the same principles of justice as the tale told inside and should not be questioned.

Thinking about all that and going back to it during the following days and nights, lying in bed in a room that had been mine or sitting in a chair in the hallway of a hospital that was starting to feel familiar, in front of a round window into the room where my father was dying, I told myself that I had the material for a book and that this material had been given to me by my father, who had created a narrative in which I would have to be both the author and the reader, discovering as I narrated, and I wondered if my father had done it deliberately, if he had foreseen that one day he wouldn’t be there to carry out the task himself and that this day was approaching, and he had wanted to leave a mystery as my inheritance; and I also wondered if he’d approve, as a journalist and therefore as someone who paid much more attention to the truth than I ever did. I’ve never felt comfortable with the truth. I had tried to stonewall it and give it the slip; I’d gone off to another country that hadn’t been a reality for me from the very start, a place where the oppressive situation that was real to me for many years did not exist. I wondered, still and again, what my father would have thought of my writing a story I barely knew; I knew how it ended—it
was obvious it ended in a hospital, as almost all stories do—but I didn’t know how it began or what happened in the middle. What would my father think of my telling his story without understanding it completely, chasing after it in the stories of others as if I were the coyote and he the roadrunner and I had to resign myself to watching him fade into the horizon, leaving behind a cloud of dust, the wind taken out of my sails; what would my father think of my telling his story—the story of all of us—without really knowing the facts, with dozens of loose ends that I would knot up slowly to construct a narrative that stumbled along contrary to everything I’d set out to do, in spite of my being, inevitably, its author. What had my father been? What had he wanted? What was this backdrop of terror that I’d wanted to forget all about but that had come back to me when the pills ran out and I discovered the story of those disappearances, which my father had made his, which he’d explored as much as he could so he wouldn’t have to venture into his own story?

The day after visiting the museum, I got sick. The first day, of course, was the worst; I remember the fever and the torpor and a series of dreams that
repeated over and over again like a carousel whose operator had gone mad or was a sadist. Not all the dreams made sense, but their connecting thread did, and I remember what they said, even though it was fragmentary. In spite of my bad memory, in spite of the unfortunate series of circumstances that had made that memory worthless for a long period only just starting to come to an end, I can still to this day remember those dreams.

I dreamed that I went into a pet shop and stopped to look at the tropical fish; one of them in particular caught my eye: it was transparent, you could barely distinguish its silhouette from its transparent eyes and its organs; but, unlike the other fish, also somewhat clear, this one was completely crystalline and had its organs separated like colored rocks stuck inside it with no connection between them, a fistful of autonomous organs with no center of command.

I dreamed that I was writing in my old room in Göttingen and discovered insects in my pockets; I didn’t know how they’d gotten there, and, although that would have been useful information, the only thing I was thinking about was making sure no one noticed that the insects were there, trying to get out.

I dreamed that I was riding a horse and its two front legs just came off while it drank water; the horse ate them, and then its head came off its neck and rolled around trying to reattach itself. I imagined that the horse would grow another head, first a stump like a fetus and then a head with a proper horse shape.

I dreamed that I was going up some stairs and three rings fell off my hands: the first was a silver ring in the shape of a zigzag that I wore on my index finger; the second was a ring in the shape of a chain, on my middle finger; the third was Ángela F.’s ring and it had a blue stone.

I dreamed that I was a boy and I was observing the preparations for what I understood to be a woman’s suicide; the woman wore a housedress and lay in bed in what I recognized as a modest hotel room someplace in the Near East, with a rosary in her hands; on her bed was a white and red flag. The woman had a shotgun in her arms. She stared at me and I understood that she blamed me for what she was going to do. I’d thought the suicide would be fake, but in that moment I understood that it would be real. Before lifting the barrel of the shotgun to her mouth, she handed me a photograph that showed Juan Domingo Perón beside important members of the Peronist Resistance
and she told me the photograph had been taken before they all started shooting each other. In the photograph I saw the woman.

I dreamed that I was dreaming about the relationship between the words
verschwunden
(disappeared) and
Wunden
(which doesn’t exist independently in German but in certain cases is the plural of
Wund
, wound) and the words
verschweigen
(to keep quiet) and
verschreiben
(to prescribe).

I dreamed that I was back on the Argentine plain, watching a form of popular entertainment there called “off leash”; it involved tricking a monkey into getting into a well that was then filled with dirt, so that only the monkey’s head could be seen. Then an animal, usually a lion, was released into the ring, and people bet on whether or not the monkey could escape from his trap and, if so, whether he could manage to kill the lion. The monkey pulled it off on very few occasions, but he always—whether
or not he defeated his opponent—ended up killing himself after seeing his similarity to the humans around him who took pleasure in such entertainment.

I dreamed that, on a train operated by the German company Metronom, I met a woman who was forced to carry a baby developing in a uterus located outside her body, tied to her only by the umbilical cord. If asked, the woman pulled the uterus out of a bag that she always had with her. The uterus was the size of a shoe; inside, the gestating baby displayed emotions and reactions that only the mother knew how to interpret. As the conductor approached, I asked her how to get to a town called Lemdorf or Levdorf, but she didn’t answer. In the train station of an industrial city called Neustadt, whose smokestacks and factories could be seen from the station hall, the unresponsive conductor came over and told me I had two options for getting to Lemdorf or Levdorf: taking a bus that went halfway there and then taking another; or giving poisoned food to a beggar at the station door. Then I understood that Lemdorf or Levdorf, the place in northern Germany I was headed to, was hell.

I dreamed that I knew a method of divination: two people spit into each other’s mouths; the transfer of liquid also transfers their plans and desires.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.