My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (8 page)

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.

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.

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.

Then there was one last photograph of the event, and when I saw it I was surprised and confused, as if I had just seen a dead man approaching along a path with the infernal red setting sun silhouetted behind his back. It was my father just as I would see him in the hospital, in his final years: bald with a white beard on his thin face, very similar to his own father as I remembered him, with large rimless glasses, the glasses of a policeman or a mafioso, with his hands in the pockets of a white coat, talking, his throat wrapped with a plaid scarf that I thought I had given him at some point as a gift. Beside him were other men, who contemplated
him with sad faces, as if they knew my father was talking about a dead man without knowing that he would soon be one of them, that he was going to enter a dark, bottomless well that everyone who dies falls into, but my father didn’t know it yet and they didn’t want to tell him. There were eleven men standing behind my father, as if my father were the sacked coach of a soccer team that had just lost the championship; one wore a jacket and tie, but the rest wore leather coats and one, a long scarf that seemed about to strangle him. Some of them looked at the ground. I looked at my father and couldn’t quite understand what he was doing there, talking in that cemetery on a cold afternoon, an afternoon in which the living and the dead should have taken refuge in the shelter of their homes or their tombs and in the resigned consolation of memory.

From the June 21, 2008, edition of
El Trébol Digital:

That’s it, I said to myself, interrupting my reading, that’s the reason my father decided to gather all this information: symmetry. First a woman disappears, then a man, and they are siblings and my father perhaps knew them both and hadn’t been able to
stop the disappearance of either one. But how could he? With what power did my father think he could prevent those disappearances—he who was dying in a hospital bed while I read all this?

The next day, a headline on the same website announced: “Alberto Burdisso Died by Suffocation and Was Savagely Beaten.”