My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (2 page)

Sometimes I couldn’t sleep; when that happened, I’d get up off the sofa and walk toward my host’s bookshelves, always different but also always, without fail, located beside the sofa, as if reading were possible only in the perpetual discomfort of that piece of furniture in which one is neither properly seated nor completely stretched out. Then I would look at the books and think how I used to read them one right after the next but how at that point they left me completely cold. On those bookshelves there were almost never books by those dead writers I’d read when I was a poor teenager in a poor neighborhood of a poor city in a poor country, and I was stupidly insistent on becoming part of that imaginary republic to which they belonged, a republic with vague borders in which writers wrote in New York or in London, in Berlin or in Buenos Aires, and yet I wasn’t of that world. I had wanted to be like them, and the only proof that remained of that determination, and the resolve that came with it, was that trip to Germany, the country where the writers that most interested me had lived and had died and, above all, had written, and a fistful of books that already belonged to a literature I had tried and failed to escape; a
literature like the nightmare of a dying writer, or, better yet, of a dying, talentless Argentine writer; of a writer, let’s say, who is not the author of
The Aleph
, around whom we all inevitably revolve, but rather the author of
On Heroes and Tombs
, someone who spent his whole life believing that he was talented and important and morally unquestionable and who at the very end discovers that he’s completely without talent and behaved ridiculously and brunched with dictators, and then he feels ashamed and wants his country’s literature to be at the level of his miserable body of work so that it wasn’t written in vain and might even have one or two followers. Well, I had been part of that literature, and every time I thought about it, it was as if in my head an old man was shouting
Tornado! Tornado!
announcing the end of days, as in a Mexican film I had once seen; except that the days had kept coming and I had been able to grab onto the trunks of those trees that remained standing in the tornado only by quitting writing, completely quitting writing and reading, and by seeing books for what they were, the only thing that I’d ever been able to call my home, but complete strangers in that time of pills and vivid dreams in which I no longer remembered nor wanted to remember what a damn home was.

Once, when I was a boy, I asked my mother to buy me a box of toys that—though I didn’t know it at the time—came from Germany and were made close to a place where I would live in the future. The box contained an adult woman, a shopping cart, two boys, a girl and a dog, but it had no adult man and was, as the representation of a family—since that’s what it was—incomplete. I didn’t know it then, but I had wanted my mother to give me a family, even if it was just a toy one, and my mother had been able to give me only an incomplete family, a family without a father; once again, a family vulnerable to the elements. I had then taken a toy Roman soldier and stripped him of his armor and turned him into the father of that toy family, but I didn’t know how to play with them, I had no idea what families did, and the family that my mother had given me ended up in the back of a closet, the five characters looking at each other and perhaps shrugging their toy shoulders in the face of their ignorance of their roles, as if forced to represent an ancient civilization whose monuments and cities had not yet been unearthed by archeologists and whose language remained undeciphered.

Something had happened to my parents and to me and to my siblings that prevented me from ever knowing what a home was or what a family was, though everything seemed to indicate I had both. Many times in the past I had tried to understand what that thing had been, but then and there, in Germany, I stopped trying, like someone who accepts the mutilations from a car accident he can’t remember. My parents and I had that accident: something crossed our path and our car spun around a few times and went off the highway, and we were now wandering through the fields, our minds blank, that shared experience the only thing uniting us. Behind us there was an overturned car in a ditch on the side of a country road, bloodstains on the seats and in the grass, but none of us wanted to turn around and look back.

As I flew toward my father, toward something I didn’t know but that was disgusting and frightening and sad, I wanted to remember what I could about
my life with him. There wasn’t much: I remembered my father building our house; I remembered him coming home from one of the newspapers where he worked with a noise of papers and keys and a scent of tobacco; I remembered him once hugging my mother and many times sleeping with a book in his hands, which always, as my father nodded off, dropped to cover his face as if he were a dead man found on the street during some war; and I could also remember him often driving, looking forward with a frown at a road that was either straight or sinuous and located in the provinces of Santa Fe, Córdoba, La Rioja, Catamarca, Entre Ríos, Buenos Aires, all those provinces through which my father took us in an attempt to show us their beauty—a beauty I found hard to grasp—always trying to give meaning to those symbols we learned in a school that had yet to cast off a dictatorship whose values it continued to perpetuate. Symbols that children like me would draw using a plastic stencil our mothers bought for us, with which, if you ran a pencil over the lines cut into the plastic, you could draw a house that we were told was in Tucumán, another building that was in Buenos Aires, a round cockade and a flag that was sky blue and white, which we knew well because it was supposedly our flag, although we had seen it so many times in circumstances that weren’t really ours, completely beyond our control, circumstances that we didn’t have anything to do with and didn’t want to have
anything to do with: a dictatorship, a soccer World Cup, a war, a fistful of failed democratic governments that had served only to allocate injustice in all of our names and in the name of a country that my father and others thought was, had to be, mine and my brother’s and my sister’s.

There were more memories but they stuck together to create a certainty that was in turn a coincidence, and many will consider this coincidence mere invention, and perhaps indeed it was: my father had always had a bad memory. He used to say that it was like a sieve, and he predicted that mine would be like that too, because, he said, memory is something you carry in your veins. My father could remember things that had happened decades earlier but, at the same time, was capable of forgetting everything he’d done the day before. His life was probably an obstacle course because of that and because of dozens of other things that happened to him, some that made us laugh and some that didn’t. One day he called home to ask us his address; I don’t remember who picked up the phone, but there was my father’s voice. Where do I live, he asked. What, responded whoever was on the other end of the phone, my mother or one of my siblings or
maybe even me. Where do I live, said my father again, and the other person—my mother, or one of my siblings, or maybe even me—recited the address; a little while later he was home, sitting at the table reading a newspaper as if nothing had happened or as if he’d forgotten what had happened. Another time, someone rang the bell; my father, who was closest, grabbed the intercom near the kitchen and asked who it was. We are Jehovah’s Witnesses, they said. Whose witnesses, asked my father. Jehovah’s, they answered. And what do you want, my father asked again. We come to bring you the word of God, they said. Of who, asked my father. The word of God, they said. My father asked again: Who. We are Jehovah’s Witnesses, they said. Whose witnesses, asked my father. Jehovah’s, they answered. And what do you want, my father asked again. We come to bring you the word of God, they said. Of who, asked my father. The word of God, they answered. No, they brought me that last week, said my father, and he hung up without even glancing at me, beside him and looking perplexed. Then he walked over to my mother and asked her where the newspaper was. On the stove, replied my mother, and neither she nor I told him that he was the one who’d left it there a few minutes earlier.

I used to think my father’s bad memory was just an excuse to get him out of the few inconveniences caused by a daily life that he’d long ago left in my mother’s hands: birthdays, anniversaries, groceries. If my father had carried a date book, I’d thought, it would have been one in which the pages of the following day fell out, an object always in flames like a pyromaniac’s diary. I’d thought it was all a trick my father had come up with, his way of avoiding things that for some reason were too much for him, among which were me and my brother and sister but also a past that I’d barely glimpsed—childhood in a small town, an interrupted political career, years of working at newspapers that were like those boxers who spend more time on the mat than standing and fighting, a political past that I thought I knew nothing about and that maybe I didn’t want to know about—which didn’t lead me to suspect who my father really was, the abyss he had faced and how he’d barely gotten out of it alive. When I spoke with my sister at the hospital, though, I realized that something had always been wrong with my father and that maybe his lack of memory wasn’t faked, and I also realized that I had come to this discovery too late, too late for me and too
late for him, and that’s how it always happens, even though it’s sad to say so.

Actually, there was another memory, although it wasn’t a direct recollection, something that had come from experience and had lodged in the mind, but rather something that I had seen in my parents’ house, a photograph. In it, my father and I are sitting on a small stone wall; behind us, an abyss and, a bit beyond, mountains and hills that—though the photograph is in black and white—one imagines green and red and brown. My father and I are sitting on the wall like this: he, in profile, with his arms crossed; I, with my back to the abyss, and my hands beneath my thighs. Looking carefully at the photograph, one will see that it has a certain dramatic intensity not attributable to the landscape—though it is dramatic in the way that some people imagine a landscape can be—but rather to the relationship between us. My father is looking at the landscape; I am looking at him, and in my gaze there is a very specific plea: that he notice me, that he take me down off that wall where my legs hang without touching the ground and which seems to me—inevitably an exaggeration, because I’m just a boy—about to collapse
at any moment and drag me into the abyss along with it. In the photograph, my father doesn’t look at me; he doesn’t even notice that I am looking at him or acknowledge the entreaty I was capable of formulating only in that way, as if he and I were doomed not to understand each other, not to even see each other. My father in the photograph has the hair I’m going to have, the same torso I’ll have in the future, now, when I am older than he was when someone—my mother, probably—took that photograph of us as we climbed a mountain whose name I don’t recall. Perhaps at that moment, as I thought about him, as I sat on an airplane, he felt for me the fear I had felt then on a mountain in the province of La Rioja around 1983 or 1984. However, as I traveled in that airplane back to a country that my father loved and that was also mine, a country that for me was just like the abyss he and I had posed in front of, not understanding each other, for a photograph, I didn’t yet know that my father knew fear much better than I thought, that my father had lived with it and fought against it and, like everyone, had lost that battle in a silent war that had been his and his entire generation’s.

I hadn’t been back to that country for eight years, but when the airplane dropped into the airport and spat us out, I felt as if it had been even longer. I’d once heard that the minutes spent on a roller coaster were, as perceived by the people in the car, longer than the ones spent at the foot of the ride watching others scream and grip the metal bar, and in that moment I had the impression that the country itself had gotten on a roller coaster and continued twisting upside down as if the operator had gone crazy or was on his lunch break. I saw old young people who wore clothes that were both old and new at the same time, I saw a blue carpet that looked new but was already dirty and worn where it had been stepped on, I saw some booths with yellow glass panes and some young but old policemen who looked distrustingly at passports and sometimes stamped them and sometimes didn’t; even my passport already looked old and, when they gave it back to me, I felt as if they were handing me a dead plant beyond any hope of being brought back to life; I saw a young woman in a miniskirt giving passersby cookies made with dulce de leche, and I could almost see the dust of the years settled on those cookies and in
the caramel. She said to me: Would you like to try a cookie? And I shook my head and practically ran toward the exit. As I left, I thought I saw the old, obese caricature of a soccer player, and I thought I saw him being chased by dozens of photographers and journalists and that the soccer player wore a T-shirt printed with an old photograph of himself, a photograph monstrously disfigured by his belly that showed an exaggeratedly large leg, a curved, elongated torso and an enormous hand hitting a ball to score a goal in some World Cup on any old day of some springtime past.

But maybe that didn’t really happen and it was all a hallucination induced by the pills that doctor gave me and I silently swallowed on the sofas of people I knew in that German city. Once, long after all that happened, I reread the instructions on one of those medications, which I’d read so many times before but nevertheless had forgotten every time. I read that those pills had a sedative, antidepressive and tranquilizing effect. I read that they took effect between one and six hours after being taken orally but that eliminating them required some one hundred and twenty hours—which makes five days, according to my calculations—and eighty-eight
percent passes through urine and seven percent through sweat, and five percent of the substance is never eliminated. I read that it produces physical and psychological dependence and that it induces amnesia as well as a decrease in or a complete lack of ability to remember events that take place during the periods of the drug’s effectiveness. I read that it can cause suicidal tendencies in the patient—which is, undoubtedly, serious; drowsiness—which is, of course, not; weakness; fatigue; disorientation; ataxia; nausea; emotional blunting; reduced alertness; loss of appetite or of weight; sleepiness; breathlessness; double vision; sleep disturbances; dizziness; vomiting; headaches; sexual disturbances; depersonalization; hyperacusia; numbness or tingling in extremities; hypersensitivity to light or physical contact; hallucinations or epileptic convulsions; respiratory, gastrointestinal or muscular problems; increase in hostility or irritability; anterograde amnesia; alteration of the perception of reality and mental confusion; slurred speech; abnormalities in liver and kidney function; and withdrawal symptoms following abrupt discontinuation of the medication. So I guess seeing a soccer player wearing a T-shirt with a deformed image of his own past over his gut is among the least serious things that can happen to you when you take stuff like that.