Read Online My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron - Free Book Online

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.

22
    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 resumedby 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.”

23
    In a multitudinous gathering of almost 1000 people, the city of El Trébol complained about the lack of justice in the Burdisso case and the lack of resolution in his mysterious disappearance.
    From five in the afternoon on a holidayMonday, the Plaza began to fill with people who, gathering of their own volition, signed a list of demands that will be set [
sic
] to the hands of Judge Eladio García of the city of San Jorge. […] First at the event was Dr. Roberto Maurino, a childhood schoolmate of Burdisso’s, who spoke to the audience. […], Maurino stated to an attentive crowd that was continually signing petitions. Shortly afterward came Gabriel Piumetti, one of the organizers of the march, along with his mother, who pointed out […] The people applauded every word and shouts of “Justice, justice!!!” were heard in the amphitheater for a long time.
    After the first speeches, someone in the public shout [
sic
], “Let the police commissioner speak!,” as he was among the people. It was then that the chief of the city’s Fourth Precinct, Oriel Bauducco, expressed […]. At that moment irate demands from the public arose and various questions were heard: “Why did they search for Burdisso with dogs ten days after his disappearance?” fired off one woman, and another question immediately followed: “Wide [
sic
] you clear out Burdisso’s house two days after his disappearance when it should have been taped off?” That was the moment of highest tension in the Plaza, the crowd staring insistently at the superior officer, waiting for a reply that never came. […] struggled to say Bauducco, who after listening how various residents complained [
sic
] the lack ofroad blocks in the streets and the absence of patrolling in the city.
    Minutes later Mayor Fernando Almada addressed the crowd saying […]. In addition to Almada, among those gathered were the city councilmen, the former mayor, now secretary of […], and the employees and Executive Board of the Club Trebolense, where Alberto Burdisso