My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (3 page)

Anyway, that encounter, which really happened and which, therefore, was true, can be read here simply as an invention, as something fake, since, first of all, I was sufficiently confused at the time and so clearly worried that I could and did distrust my senses, which could incorrectly interpret a real event, and, second, because that encounter with the aging soccer player from a country that was part of my past, and almost everything that happened later, which I’m here to explain, was true but not necessarily believable. It has been said that in literature the beautiful is true but the true in literature is only the believable, and between the believable and the true there is a vast distance. Not to mention the beautiful, which is something that should never be discussed: the beautiful should be literature’s nature preserve, the place where beauty prospers without literature’s hand ever touching it, and it should serve to entertain and console writers, since literature and beauty are completely different things or perhaps the same thing, like two gloves for the right hand. Except you can’t put a right-hand glove on your left hand; some things don’t go together. I had just arrived in Argentina, and while I waited for the bus that
would take me to the city where my parents lived, almost two hundred miles to the northeast of Buenos Aires, I was thinking that I had come from the dark German forests to the horizontal Argentine plain to see my father die and to say good-bye to him and to promise him—even though I didn’t believe it in the slightest—that he and I were going to have another chance, in some other place, for each of us to discover who the other was and that, perhaps, for the first time since he had become a father and I a son, we would finally understand something; but this, being true, wasn’t the least bit believable.

And then there was the impossible tongue twister of the ill and their doctors, who brought together words like
benzodiazepine, diazepam, neuroleptic, hypnotic, zolpidem, tranquilizer, alprazolam, narcotic, antiepileptic, antihistamine, clonazepam, barbiturate, lorazepam, triazolobenzodiazepine, escitalopram—
all words amid the jumbled words in a head that refused to function.

When I got to my parents’ house, nobody was there. The house was cold and damp, like a fish whose belly, as a boy, I had once brushed against before throwing it back into the water. It didn’t feel like my house—that old sensation that a particular place is your home had vanished forever—and I was afraid the house would consider my presence an insult. I didn’t touch even a single chair: I left my small suitcase in the entryway and I began to walk through the rooms, like a snoop. In the kitchen there was a hunk of bread that some ants had started eating. Someone had left a change of clothes and an open empty handbag on my parents’ bed. The bed was unmade and the sheets retained the shape of a body that perhaps was my mother’s. Beside it, on my father’s night table, there was a book that I didn’t look at, some eyeglasses and two or three bottles of pills. When I saw them, I told myself that my father and I had something in common after all, that he and I were still tied to life by the invisible threads of pills and prescriptions and that those threads also now somehow united us. My old room was on the other side of the hallway. As I went into it, I thought everything must have shrunk: that the table was smaller than I remembered
it, that the chair beside it could be used only by a midget, that the windows were tiny and that there weren’t as many books as I remembered, and besides they’d been written by authors who no longer interested me. It seemed as if I’d been gone more than eight years, I thought as I lay on what had been my bed. I was cold but I didn’t want to cover myself with the bedspread, and I lay there, with one arm over my face, unable to sleep but also unwilling to stand up, thinking in circles about my father and about me and about a lost opportunity for him and for me and for all of us.

My mother came into the kitchen and found me contemplating the products in the refrigerator. Like those dreams in which everything is suspiciously familiar and at the same time shockingly strange, the products were the same but their containers had changed, and now the beans were in a can that reminded me of the old tomato can, the tomatoes came in a canister that reminded me of the cocoa and the cocoa came in bags that made me think of diapers and sleepless nights. My mother didn’t seem at all affected by my presence, but I was surprised to see her so thin and so fragile; when I stood up and she came over to hug me, I saw she
had a gaze that could turn the demons out of hell, and I wondered if that gaze wasn’t enough to cure my father, to alleviate the pain and suffering of all the patients in the hospital where he lay dying, because that gaze was the gaze of a will that can stand up to anything. What happened, I asked my mother, and she started to explain, slowly. When she finished, she went to her room to cry alone and I put some water and a fistful of rice into a pot and I stared through the window at the impenetrable jungle that had grown from the garden my mother and brother had tended so carefully, in the same place but in a different time.

My siblings were standing in the hallway when I arrived at the hospital. From a distance they seemed silent, although later I saw that they were talking or pretending to, as if they felt obligated to simulate keeping up a conversation that not even they were really listening to. My sister started to cry when she saw me, as if I were bringing terrible and unexpected news, or as if I myself were that news, returning horribly mutilated from a never-ending war. I handed them some chocolates and a bottle of schnapps that I’d bought in Germany,
in the airport, and my sister started laughing and crying at the same time.

My father was lying beneath a tangle of cords like a fly in a spiderweb. His hand was cold and my face was hot, but I noticed that only when I brought my hand to my face to wipe it.

I stayed with him that evening, without really knowing what to do except look at him and ask myself what would happen if he opened his eyes or spoke, and for a moment I hoped that he wouldn’t open them while I was there. Then I said to myself: I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten and when I open them none of this will be real, it will never have happened, like when films end or you close a book; but when I opened my eyes, after having counted to ten, my father was still there and I was still there and the spiderweb was still there, and we were all surrounded by the noises of the hospital and that heavy air that smells of disinfectant
and false hopes and is sometimes worse than sickness or death. Have you ever been in a hospital? Well, then you’ve seen them all. Have you watched someone die? It’s different every time. Sometimes the illness is blinding and you close your eyes and what you most fear is like a car coming toward you at top speed along a country road some ordinary night. When I opened my eyes again, my sister was beside me and it was nighttime and my father was still alive, fighting and losing but still alive.

My sister insisted on spending the night at the hospital. I went back to the house with my brother and my mother and we watched a movie on television for a while. In the movie, a man ran through an intense snowstorm along a frozen track that seemed endless; the snow fell on his face and on his coat and sometimes it seemed to obstruct the man’s vision of what he was chasing, but the man kept running as if his life depended on catching the airplane that taxied in front of him.
Johnny! Johnny!
shouted a woman who emerged from the open hatch of the airplane, which seemed about to take off at any minute. When the man was just about to reach her outstretched hand, however, the plane took off and another man violently snatched
the woman away and even shot one or two times at the man called Johnny before the plane completely disappeared into the snowstorm. It’s the courier of the czar, said my brother just as the man named Johnny fell to the snow-covered ground and his panting image faded slowly to black and on the screen appeared the words
THE END
. There were no airplanes in the time of the czar, I replied, but my brother looked at me as if I hadn’t understood a thing.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I poured myself a glass of water in the dark of the kitchen and stood there for a while, drinking and trying not to think about anything. When I finished the water, I went back to my room and grabbed a sleeping pill and swallowed it hurriedly. While I waited for it to take effect, I started wandering around the house, trying to figure out if the house had changed or was the same as when I lived there, but I couldn’t tell. Maybe, simply, it wasn’t the house but my perception that had changed, and that change in perception—whether it was brought on by the travel or my father’s situation or my pill consumption—carried with it a change in the object of that perception, as if, in order to know whether or not the
house had changed, I had to be capable of comparing my way of seeing things in that moment and my way of seeing them before leaving and living in Germany and starting to take pills and before my father got sick and I came back, which was impossible. I distracted myself by looking at the books on the shelves in the living room, which were my parents’ books from when they were young, in the light that entered from the street through a window. Although I knew those books well, perhaps it was also my perception that made them seem new to my eyes, and once again I wondered what had really changed from the time I’d flipped through them to now, when I looked at them without curiosity and with some apprehension in the light that filtered in from outside, and again I arrived at no conclusion. I was there for a while longer, standing on the cold floor of the living room, looking at those books. I heard a bus pass and then the cars of the first people headed to work, and I thought the city was soon going to set into motion again and I didn’t want to be there to see it. I went to my room and took two more pills, and then I lay down in bed and waited for them to take effect; but, as always, I didn’t really notice when they did, because first my legs went numb and then I could no longer move my arms and I merely managed to think about that slow falling to pieces that was the only way sleep came and to tell myself, a moment before finally drifting off, that I had to make lists
of everything I saw, that I had to make an inventory of everything I was seeing in my parents’ house so that I wouldn’t forget it again. Then I fell asleep.

Titles found in my parents’ library:
Another Episode in the Class War; Argentine Literature and Political Reality from Sarmiento to Cortázar; Around the Day in Eighty Worlds; Blade, Dull Edge and Point; British Policy in the River Plate Region; Collected Fictions; Diary of Che Guevara, The; Evita: In My Own Words; Folk Songbook; Foundation for National Reconstruction; Industry, Industrial Bourgeoisie and National Liberation; It Is the People’s Time; Latin America, Now or Never; Life and Death of López Jordán; Little Red Book, The; Martín Fierro; Might Is the Right of Beasts; Mordisquito; My Life for Perón!; Nationalism and Liberation; Navigation Notebook; Operation Massacre; Organized Community, The; Perón, Man of Destiny; Peronism and Socialism; Peronist Doctrine; Peronist Philosophy; Perón Speaks: Speeches and Addresses of Juan Perón; Political Leadership; Prophets of Hate, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Argentina; Rosas, Our Contemporary; Satanovsky Case, The; Tactical Manual; What Is to Be Done?; Who Killed Rosendo?
. Authors found in my parents’ library: Borges, Jorge Luis; Chávez,
Fermín; Cortázar, Julio; Duarte de Perón, Eva; Guevara, Ernesto; Hernández Arregui, Juan José; Jauretche, Arturo; Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich; Marechal, Leopoldo; Pavón Pereyra, Enrique; Peña, Milcíades; Perón, Juan Domingo; Ramos, Jorge Abelardo; Rosa, José María; Sandino, Augusto César; Santos Discépolo, Enrique; Scalabrini Ortiz, Raúl; Vigo, Juan M.; Viñas, David; Walsh, Rodolfo; Zedong, Mao. Authors absent from my parents’ library: Bullrich, Silvina; Guido, Beatriz; Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel; Ocampo, Victoria; Sábato, Ernesto. Predominant colors of the covers of the books in my parents’ library: sky blue, white and red. Most common publishing houses in their library: Plus Ultra, A. Peña Lillo, Freeland and Eudeba. Words that presumably most frequently appear in the books in my parents’ library:
tactic, strategy, struggle, Argentina, Perón, revolution
. General condition of the books in my parents’ library: poor, and in some cases terrible, dreadful or critical.

Once again: my parents haven’t read Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo or Ernesto Sábato. They’ve read Jorge Luis Borges, Rodolfo Walsh and Leopoldo Marechal but not Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido,
Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo and Ernesto Sábato. They’ve read Ernesto Guevara, Eva and Juan Domingo Perón and Arturo Jauretche but not Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo and Ernesto Sábato. What’s more: they’ve read Juan José Hernández Arregui, Jorge Abelardo Ramos and Enrique Pavón Pereyra but not Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo and Ernesto Sábato. One could spend hours thinking about this.

At first I took paroxetine and benzodiazepines, no more than fifteen milligrams; but fifteen milligrams was like a sneeze in a hurricane for me, something insignificant and without any effect, like trying to cover the sun with one hand or teach justice in the land of the reprobates, and so the dosage had gotten incrementally upped until it reached sixty milligrams, when there was nothing stronger on the market and the doctors looked the way the caravan leaders in Westerns look when they say they will go only that far because beyond is Comanche territory, and then they turn around and spur on their horses, but first they look at the members of the caravan and they know they’ll never see them
again and they feel shame and pity. Then I started to take sleeping pills too; when I took them, I fell into a state that must be like death, and through my mind passed words like
stomach, lamp
and
albino
, without any apparent connection. Sometimes I jotted them down the next morning, if I remembered them, but when I read them it was like flipping through the newspaper of a country sadder than the Sudan or Ethiopia, a country for which I had no visa nor did I want one, and I thought I heard a fire truck come barreling to put out the fucking flames of hell with a tank filled with gasoline.