My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (17 page)
Read My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain Online
Authors: Patricio Pron
In the time since the events narrated in this book took place, there have been several new pieces of information regarding the fates of Alicia Raquel Burdisso and her brother, Alberto José Burdisso. On June 19, 2010,
La Capital de *osario
published the news that the Sixth Sentencing Court of the province of Santa Fe condemned Gisela Córdoba and Marcos Brochero to twenty years in prison for willful and premeditated homicide, and Juan Huck to seven years in prison for voluntary manslaughter. According to Marcelo Castaños and Luis Emilio Blanco, the authors of the article, the courts determined the facts as follows:
Shortly after dawn on the first Sunday of June, Gisela Córdoba, 27 years old at the time, set out for the countryside along with Brochero, 32 (her husband), Burdisso and Huck, 61 years old. They traveled in a blue Peugeot 504 to a house in ruins located roughly eight kilometers from the city center. The pretext was collecting firewood for a barbecue, something they did with some frequency.
[…] The courts later determined that
on that morning, when passing by the well, Burdisso was pushed in, fell 12 meters and hit the bottom, breaking five ribs and one shoulder, dislocating the other. According to the autopsy, the victim remained there wounded for three days until Brochero returned to the scene, and after seeing that Burdisso was still alive, he broke stones from the well and threw the rubble in, along with dirt, construction materials, corrugated metal sheets and branches.
“He buried him alive. It was gruesome because the man had dirt in his mouth and respiratory tract, which is to say that he tried to breathe under the material thrown onto him,” a court source recently commented. The autopsy indicated “death by suffocation due to confinement.”
[…] The couple now sentenced had been taking advantage of the man from El Trébol for some time. Córdoba pretended to be in a relationship with him and had gotten most of a reparation of more than 200 thousand pesos that the victim had received.
Under false pretenses she gradually took possession of the proceeds from the sale of Burdisso’s house and car. She also took the furniture, electrical appliances and a large part of the salary he received as an employee at the Club Trebolense. […] A week prior to his disappearance, Córdoba offered to rent the house to a man with the nickname of The Uruguayan. […] The same day of the disappearance, Córdoba showed the
house to The Uruguayan and afterward they signed a lease.
She also believed herself to be the beneficiary of a life insurance policy Burdisso had, and therefore, after having murdered him, she asked Huck to take him out of the well and throw him somewhere where they could find him and confirm his death so that she could demand compensation. Huck did not comply with her request.
The homicide hearing [heard by Eladio García, Judge of the Court of First Instance for the Investigation of Criminal and Correctional Affairs in San Jorge] lasted until September 2008. In the meantime, 17 people were arrested, the rest of whom were released, leaving the three accused. […]
The fate of Alicia Raquel Burdisso is, like that of thousands of disappeared people during the most recent Argentine dictatorship, much more difficult to establish, but her name was mentioned again, this time by one of the witnesses at the trial of dictator Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, held at the Federal Oral Tribunal (TOF) in Tucumán, who stated that he saw her in the Clandestine Detention Center run out of the Police Headquarters in San Miguel de Tucumán; his testimony was based on lists of detainees made in 1977 by the Tucumán Police Intelligence—headed by
Menéndez—which showed the fate of each victim. Alicia Burdisso was murdered at that Police Headquarters that year. In the trial, sentences were handed down for the former chief of police in Tucumán, Roberto Heriberto “One-Eye” Albornoz, life without parole; former policeman Luis de Cándido, held accountable for aggravated illicit association, home invasion, illegitimate deprivation of liberty and usurpation of real property and sentenced to eighteen years of prison; his brother Carlos, who received a suspended sentence of three years for having seized a house belonging to one of the victims; and Menéndez himself, who received a life sentence—the fourth such sentence he had gotten by that point—for “crimes of home invasion, aggravated illegitimate deprivation of liberty, aggravated torture, torture leading to death and premediated homicide.” The trial had also begun for the former governor Antonio Domingo Bussi (eighty-four), who was declared unfit for trial due to health reasons, while two of the accused military men, Albino Mario Zimmerman (seventy-six) and Alberto Cattáneo (eighty-one), died in March and May 2010, which speaks to the urgency with which these trials—and the private trials, the task of finding out who those who came before us were, which is the subject of this book—must be carried out.
While the events told in this book are mostly true, some are the result of the demands of fiction, whose rules are different from the rules of such genres as testimony or autobiography; for that reason I would like to mention here what the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina once said, as a reminder and a warning: “A drop of fiction taints everything as fictional.” When my father read the manuscript of this book, he thought it was important to make some observations that reflect his perspective on the narrated events and correct certain errors; the text that gathers these observations, and which is the first example of the type of reactions this book is intended to provoke, can be found at
http://patriciopron.blogspot.com/p/elespiritu-de-mis-padres-sigue.html
under the title “The Record Straight.”
I would like to thank here those people who have supported and encouraged the writing of this book and the authors whose works have been points of reference and inspiration for me, particularly Eduardo De Grazia. I would also like to thank Mónica Carmona and Claudio López Lamadrid, my editors at Random House Mondadori, and Rodrigo Fresán, Alan Pauls, Miguel Aguilar, Virginia Fernández, Eva Cuenca, Carlota del Amo and Alfonso Monteserín; also Andrés “Polaco”
Abramowski for the part about the minute that runs away from the clock so it won’t ever have to happen. This book is for my parents, Graciela “Yaya” Hinny and Ruben Adalberto “Chacho” Pron, and for my sister and brother, Victoria and Horacio, but also for Sara and for Alicia Kozameh, for “Any” Gurdulich and Raúl Kantor and for their comrades and their children. This book is also for Giselle Etcheverry Walker:
She is good to me
And there’s nothing she doesn’t see
She knows where I’d like to be
But it doesn’t matter
.
Patricio Pron, born in 1975, is the author of three story collections and four previous novels, and he also works as a translator and critic. His fiction has appeared in
Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story
and
The Paris Review
, and has received numerous prizes, including the Juan Rulfo Short Story Prize and the Jaén Novel Prize. He lives in Madrid.
For more information, please visit
www.aaknopf.com
