My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (7 page)

In this article, for the first time it becomes clear that the Burdisso case has been transformed from a police matter—pathetic, yes, confused, yes, but also pretty juvenile—into some sort of vague threat that affects society at large. “Nobody knows anything. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything. In the city everybody whispers about it, as if they were afraid of something,” writes the article’s anonymous author. And yet the author never specifies what this fear is, if it’s the disappearance or whatever is behind it, an accident or a murder, perhaps related to the money, although supposedly there wasn’t any left. And why did a Faulknerian idiot receive all that money? I wondered. And what were those “teensy details” mentioned by the police officer? At this point the missing man himself ceased to be a cause for concern among the town’s inhabitants and, in his place, what emerged was a collective fear, the fear of a recurrence and the fear of losing the almost proverbial tranquillity of El Trébol. At this point, to put it another way, the inevitable shift occurred from individual victim to
collective victim, as witnessed by the following article, published on June 12 in the same local newspaper as the previous ones:

Then, in my father’s folder, there was a map folded in four; it was a map of the region of El Trébol, marked with a yellow highlighter and two pens, one with red ink and the other blue. Entire areas had been highlighted. The blue pen followed the itinerary of the policemen in charge of the investigation. The red pen marked the search itinerary of someone else, who had mainly opted for places where the police hadn’t looked, thickets on the outskirts of town and a nearby brook. There were
some illegible notes written in a cramped, hasty hand on the edges of the map. That handwriting—I can still recognize it—was my father’s. The map was crumpled and had traces of mud on the upper right corner, which made me think that my father had used it out in the field, during a search.

A headline on June 13, from
El Trébol Digital:
“Now They Search for Burdisso with Dogs.”

That same day, the regional press showed interest in the case for the first time; in my father’s file there was a photocopy of an article published in the newspaper
La Capital de *osario
with the title “El Trébol Marches for the Recovery of Local Man.” Someone, I suppose my father, had underlined the main thrust of the article, which is the following:

A naïve reader might wonder why the regional press states that the police found signs of violence in the missing man’s home when the local press maintains that this wasn’t the case, that when his friends went looking for him they found the front door locked and the bicycle—not to mention the oh-so-literary detail of the “loyal dog” who followed his master “wherever he went”—in front of the
house. The reader might wonder why the security camera at the cash machine wasn’t working at the moment the missing man’s debit card was used for the last time. Once again the naïve reader might wonder who the “loose living” people the article referred to were, but there, for someone who has lived in the city where the events took place, the answer is simple: a “loose living” person is, in El Trébol, anyone who wasn’t born in the city. A foreigner. Even if this foreignness is based only on a couple of kilometers’ distance, or the supposed misfortune of having been born on the other side of a gully or beyond a copse of eucalyptus trees or on the other side of the train tracks, anywhere on the whole planet that extends past the city and that, for the inhabitants of El Trébol, is an inhospitable, hostile world where the cold cuts your flesh and the heat burns and there is no shade or shelter.

At that point, the articles my father had collected began to run together. The reader retains barely a few sentences: “The firemen searched for Burdisso in rural regions”; “[…] with negative results […]”; “ ‘It is very difficult to search like this, without any leads,’ stated the Fire Chief, Raúl Dominio, to […]”; “Last Friday the search was resumed
by police staff, fireman and municipal employees, […] this time a larger amount of personnel was used and they scoured each sector inch by inch”; “the Special Dog Brigade of the Santa Fe Police and specialized detectives worked on his search, but they weren’t able to find the man,” et cetera. Of all the articles, one stood out, published in
El Ciudadano & La Región
of the city of *osario. One of its paragraphs began by saying: “Alberto José Burdisso lives alone in his house at 400 Calle Corrientes in the city of El Trébol”; I knew this was the newspaper where my father worked and I also knew there was a wish or a hope in that sentence, found in the verb tense, and I understood the writer was my father and, had he been able to dispense with journalistic conventions, he would have been more direct and expressed his conviction, his wish or his hope without relying on any rhetoric, laying bare without any euphemisms: “Alberto José Burdisso lives.”

In the lower corner of the article was a photograph. It showed a group of people—perhaps there really were a thousand, as the anonymous writer of the article claims, though it doesn’t look like it—listening to a bald speaker. In the background of the photograph was a church I recognized, with a disproportionately tall tower, which looked like a swan curled up on the shore, stretching out its neck in an attempt to find nourishment. Seeing it, I remembered my father once told me that my paternal great-grandfather had climbed up the old tower, which had been damaged in an earthquake or some other natural disaster, in order to clear out the rubble so it could be rebuilt, but because the tower’s wooden beams were rotted from exposure to the elements, my great-grandfather was risking
his life, not to mention the inevitable thread of paternities that led to us; but in that moment I couldn’t remember if my father had told me the story or if it was made up, a flight of fancy based on the similarity between the thinness of the tower and that of my paternal grandfather as I remembered him, and still today I don’t know if it was my paternal great-grandfather or my maternal great-grandfather who climbed the tower, nor do I know if at any point the church tower suffered damage, since there aren’t many earthquakes or natural disasters in El Trébol.

“Three cases of homicide, disappearance and kidnapping in one year in the city,” affirmed another article, pointing out: “Three unresolved cases.”

Once more, the key word here was
disappearance
, repeated in one way or another in all the articles, like a black armband worn by every cripple and have-not in Argentina.

An article in the morning paper
La Capital
of the city of *osario on June 18 expanded, corrected and contextualized the previous article: the demonstration had brought together eight hundred people, not a thousand, and the list of demands requested “that justice be done,” which, in addition to the way most of the speeches alternated between the present and past tenses, made it seem as if the demonstrators suspected Burdisso had been murdered and they wanted the authorities to consider this possibility. At the same time, the growing demands, with their explicit warning that what had happened to Burdisso could also happen to others, seemed to shift the focus from an isolated police event to a generalized, omnipresent threat. It could be said that the eight hundred people who took part in the demonstration—an insignificant segment of the population, if, as another article maintains, the city has thirteen thousand inhabitants—were already beginning to switch from demanding “justice” for Burdisso to demanding it for themselves and their families. No one wanted to suffer Burdisso’s fate, but no one at that point knew what had happened to him and
no one wondered why he had been chosen instead of someone else, someone else among those who exorcized their fears with a demonstration and a list of demands.

A couple of letters to the editor were published in
El Trébol Digital
on June 18 and 19 of that year: one denounced “the black humor” of an anonymous text message that proposed marching for the disappearance not of Burdisso but of a rival sports team; the other wondered if Burdisso had been “swallowed up by the earth.”

A survey, published on the same site on June 18, contained hardly any variation from the one published a week earlier.

The title of another article: “Agents from Criminalistics Arrive in the City for the Burdisso Case.” The date of its publication: June 19, 2008. The defense of the actions taken by the local police, from the chief of the Eighteenth Regional Unit:

A declaration, from the same civil servant: “For the moment we are searching to find him alive.”

As I continue reading my father’s file, I come across a headline from
El Trébol Digital
on June 20, stamped on an idyllic image of the town with the incongruence of a modern device in an old photograph: “Now They Discover a Body in an Abandoned Well.”