My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Mara Faye Lethem

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Spain as El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia by Random House Mondadori, S. A., Barcelona, in 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Patricio Pron. This translation originally published in the United Kingdom by Faber & Faber Limited, London.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Bob Dylan Music Company: Excerpt from “I Want You” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music, renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music. Reprinted by permission of Bob Dylan Music Company.

  New Directions Publishing Corporation: Excerpt from “Thou Shalt Not Kill” by Kenneth Rexroth, from Selected Poems, copyright © 1956 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of

  New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pron, Patricio, [date]

  [Espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia, English]

  My fathers’ ghost is climbing in the rain / by Patricio Pron;

  translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem. —

  First American edition.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96227-0

  I. Lethem, Mara, translator. II. Title.

  PQ7798.26.R58E8713 2013

  863’.64—dc22 2012049209

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Front-of-jacket image: Photos.com / Jupiterimages

  Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

  v3.1

  They are murdering all the young men.

  For half a century now, every day,

  They have hunted them down and killed them.

  They are killing them now.

  At this minute, all over the world,

  They are killing the young men.

  They know ten thousand ways to kill them.

  Every year they invent new ones.

  Kenneth Rexroth, “Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Memorial for Dylan Thomas”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 52

  Part II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Part III

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part IV

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  A Note About the Author

  I

  The true story of what I saw and how I saw it […] is after all the only thing I’ve got to offer.

  —Jack Kerouac

  1

  Between March or April 2000 and August 2008, while I was traveling and writing articles and living in Germany, my consumption of certain
drugs made me almost completely lose my memory, so that what I remember of those eight years—at least what I remember of some ninety-five months of those eight years—is pretty vague and sketchy: I remember the rooms of two houses I lived in, I remember snow getting in my shoes as I struggled to make my way to the street from the door of one of those houses, I remember that later I spread salt and the snow turned brown and started to dissolve, I remember the door to the office of the psychiatrist who treated me but I don’t remember his name or how I found him. He was balding and weighed me on every visit; I guess it was once a month or something like that. He asked me how things were going, and then he weighed me and gave me more pills. A few years after leaving that German city, I returned and retraced the path to that psychiatrist’s office and I read his name on the plaque alongside the other doorbells, but it was just a name, nothing that explained why I’d visited him or why he’d weighed me each time, or how I could have let my memory go down the drain like that; at the time, I told myself I could knock on his door and ask him why I’d been his patient and what had happened to me during those years, but then I thought I should have made an appointment, that the psychiatrist wouldn’t remember me anyway, and, besides, I’m not really all that curious about myself. Maybe one day a child of mine will want to know who his father was and what he did during those eight years in Germany and he’ll go to the city and walk through it, and, perhaps, with his father’s directions, he’ll show up at the psychiatrist’s office and find out everything. I suppose at some point all children need to know who their parents were and they take it upon themselves to find out. Children are detectives of their parents, who cast them out into the world so that one day the children will return and tell them their story so that they themselves can understand it. These children aren’t judging their parents—it’s impossible for them to be truly impartial, since they owe them everything, including their lives—but they can try to impose some order on their story, restore the meaning that gets stripped away by the petty events of life and their accumulation, and then they can protect that story and perpetuate it in their memory. Children are policemen of their parents, but I don’t like policemen. They’ve never gotten along well with my family.

  2

  My father got sick at the end of those years, in August 2008. One day, probably on her birthday, I called my paternal grandmother. She told me not to worry, that they’d taken my father to the hospital only for a routine checkup. I asked her what she was talking about. A routine checkup, nothing important, replied my grandmother; I don’t know why it’s taking so long, but it’s not important. I asked her how long my father had been in the hospital. Two days, three, she answered. When I hung up with her, I called my parents’ house. No one was there. Then I called my sister. A voice answered that seemed to come from the depths of time, the voice of everyone who has ever waited for news in a hospital hallway, a voice of tiredness and desperation. We didn’t want to worry you, my sister told me. What happened? I asked. Well, answered my sister, it’s too complicated to explain to you now. Can I talk to him? I asked. No, he can’t talk, she replied. I’m coming, I said, and I hung up.

  4

  My father and I hadn’t spoken in some time. It wasn’t anything personal, I just didn’t usually have a telephone on hand when I wanted to talk to him and he didn’t have anywhere to call me if he ever wanted to. A few months before he got sick, I left the room I’d been renting in that German city and started sleeping on the couches of people I knew. I didn’t do it because I was broke, but for the feeling of irresponsibility that I assumed came with not having a home or obligations, with leaving everything behind. And honestly it wasn’t bad, but the problem is, when you live like that you can’t have many possessions, so gradually I parted with my books, with the few objects I’d bought since arriving in Germany and with my clothes; all I held on to were some shirts, because I discovered that a clean shirt can open doors for you when you have nowhere to go. I usually washed them by hand in the morning while I showered and then let them dry inside one of the lockers at the library in the literature department of the university where I worked, or on the grass in a park where I used to go to kill time before searching out the hospitality and companionship of the owner of some sofa. I was just passing through.

  5

  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.

  6

  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.

  7

  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 st
opped 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.

  9

  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.