In Spanish, this 2011 work by Patricio Pron, is called El espiritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia; the title of the English edition is My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain, and I'll talk more on the translation of the title later.

It was a slightly tough read, not because the Spanish is particularly difficult, but because Pron has a predilection for long sentences and immensely long paragraphs. I always felt as though I needed to take a deep breath before launching myself into one of those, so that I had enough oxygen to power my way through to the end without losing momentum. By way of compensation, many of the sections are quite short.

It's a book that absolutely repays the effort, though. It powerfully links the personal and the political, while sustaining a haunting quality that somehow gets into your brain.

I came to it via Benjamin Naishtat's Rojo, which prefaces the era of "disappearances" in Argentina. Accordingly, Pron's central motif is disappearance. I didn't realize at first that it is largely autobiographical, and once I had understood that, it became even more moving.


All the photos in this post come from Timor Leste in 2014. As this UN report from 2011 documents, this was another country still coming to terms with the legacy of enforced "disappearance"

We learn right at the beginning of Pron's book that the young Argentine narrator has suffered significant memory loss because of the prescribed drugs he has taken over an eight-year period beginning in 2000. He has spent those years living away from home, in Germany. But in August 2008, his father, a journalist, falls ill, and he decides to return home. That's the content of the first two subsections. The third subsection is missing, and we move on to the fourth. This pattern will recur, with subsections missing, or numbering repeated or out of order. It's as though Pron is saying to us: nothing is reliable; nothing is complete; any story about humans is going to be full of missing pieces and dislocations; live with it.

Aside from his history of medication, we immediately sense the alienation seeping out of this young man. A few months before his return to Argentina, he gave up his rented room, and started sleeping on friends' sofas. Once fascinated by German authors, he had now quit both reading and writing, and had started "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".

Something had happened to him, his parents, and his siblings that prevented him from ever really knowing what a home was or what a family was -- although to all intents and purposes, he had both a home and a family. But he doesn't know what that decisive "something" was. There's a poignant anecdote from his childhood, when he is given a box of toys containing an adult woman, a shopping cart, two boys, a girl, and a dog. Because it contains no adult man, he feels that as a representation of a family it's not complete. So he takes one of his toy Roman soldiers, removes its armour, and makes it the father of the toy family. But he doesn't know how to play with them, because he has no idea what families do.

On the journey back to Argentina he tries to remember his life with his father. But not much comes back to him. He knows him very little. But he does remember that his father, too, suffers from memory lapses.

In the midst of all this fog, we are given little pointers as to where the story is going: "As I travelled in that plane back to a country that my father loved and that was also mine, a country that for me was equivalent to that abyss in front of which he and I had posed for a photo, without understanding each other, I still didn't know, however, 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 whole generation's."



Back in Argentina, and caught up in the dispiriting limbo of hospital visits and time at home, he looks through some of his father's books. The phrase "fighting the good fight" is underlined, and the narrator thinks that he personally hasn't really fought, and neither has any of his contemporaries. Instead, they have confronted defeats with pills or pastimes. "My father's generation had been different, but once again there was something in that difference that was also a meeting point, a thread that crossed the ages, and united us despite everything, and was frighteningly Argentinean: the feeling of being united in defeat, parents and children."

Another little clue, another breadcrumb in the forest.

More pointers emerge, tantalizingly. After watching a movie on TV, his mother comments that she'd seen it before "in El Trebol, when your father hid me there". Asked why she was hiding, she says she can't remember, but maybe his father has written it down somewhere.

There are so many metaphors throughout this first section -- fears that a family recipe will be forgotten; a memory of escaping from kindergarten, and the 100 minutes that were missing in the subsequent reconstruction of his actions and path; a film where someone get left behind... It is these details that build up a dense and terrifying picture of not knowing. Yet at the same time, "you don't always want to know certain things, because what you know becomes your property, and there are certain things that you would never want to possess".

What do you know, and what do you want to know, and what can you actually cope with knowing?



The second section is a compilation of the records his father had gathered about a crime that was committed in June that year in El Trebol. It's a sordid and banal crime, in which a 60-year-old man, Alberto Burdisso, falls foul of a disreputable group of swindlers, who concoct a variety of ways to extort money from him, and eventually kill him in a particularly heartless and brutal fashion. We learn very early that Burdisso's sister, Alicia, had disappeared in the period of the military dictatorship, and we later become aware that the money out of which Alberto has been tricked was actually a state indemnity for the loss of Alicia.

Before Alberto's body is found, there is a groundswell of anxiety and activity from the citizens of El Trebol. In what was emerging -- "a collective fear, the fear of a repetition, and in a way, the fear of the loss of the almost proverbial tranquillity of El Trebol" -- we see hints of community remembrance. A thousand people take part in an action to reject "impunity"; the newspapers note there have been three cases of homicide, disappearance, and abduction in one year: "Three unpunished cases." The key word -- repeated "like a funeral rosette on the lapel of all the crippled and the wretched of Argentina" -- is always "disappearance".

As he works his way through the file -- which layers on the details in the manner of a whodunit -- the narrator increasingly wonders why his father was so interested in this disappearance. Why did he help in the search, attend the funeral, even speak at it? There is a double problematique here, he thinks: the circumstances of Burdisso's death, and the motives that prompted his father to look for him -- "as though that search were to clarify a bigger mystery more profoundly sunk in reality".



Eventually, he comes to an article that reports something of what his father, Chacho Pron, had said at the cemetery. He was recalling Alicia Burdisso, Alberto's sister, who disappeared on 21 June 1976 during the military "process" in the province of Tucuman. So that's it, thinks the narrator. That is why his father is interested -- because there's a symmetry; his father knew both these people, and was powerless to prevent the disappearance of either of them.

Something of the narrator's memory blur is starting to lift. Seeing photos of the town, he starts to remember "a time of sadness and terror that was now slowly re-drawing itself before my eyes despite all the pills, all the retrograde amnesia, and the distance that I had tried to put between that time and me".

And finally we get a detailed report of the father's speech at the funeral. He talks about the person who can't be there. The person who can't now be anywhere, and yet is everywhere, waiting for the truth, reclaiming justice, demanding remembrance. That person is Alicia, Alberto's sister, who was "disappeared" 31 years earlier, in 1977, by "the minions of the last and bloodiest civil-military dictatorship". Alicia and her generation, he reminds his listeners, fought for the freedom that the next generation enjoys; without such young people, we couldn't today be saying what we think, or choosing our destiny; people couldn't have organized the march for Alberto or taken part in the demonstrations. "Today we are saying goodbye to Alberto in a way that we couldn't say goodbye to Alicia. So when you demand justice for him, remember to demand it also for her."



So far we have been presented with a number of puzzle pieces. But neither we nor the narrator see the connection. The third section concerns the narrator's attempts to solve the conundrum that he feels his father has left for him. At an exhibition about the press at the local museum, he watches his father telling the story of his own career, and of the press in this town. He feels pride, but also the sense of disappointment he always feels when he thinks of his father, and the impossibility of imitating him or of offering him a success equivalent to his -- which could be counted in pages produced and in journalists trained, and "in a political history I had once known about, and since tried to forget".  

He continues to dig away among the papers in his father's study. He knows the elder Pron had once said he would have liked to write a book, and he wonders what it would have been like. In an interesting bit of metanarrative, he suggests it would be "short; made of fragments; with gaps where my father couldn't or didn't want to remember something; made of symmetries -- stories duplicating themselves over and over again... -- and sadder than Father's Day at an orphanage".

Just like this book, in other words...

From his father's papers we gradually learn more about Alicia, who was 25 when she was taken away by the security forces. She remains largely a phantasma, though. An idealistic, strong, inspiring, somehow incorporeal figure. Quoted are some lines that this source says is her last poem:

Come, leave behind, this very dawn,
your empty places and the loneliness
where selfishness ran aground
and was devouring you, unforgivable.
Then you will see that your blindness was only mystical
that there were shadows in your soul
and that it is possible to reach the dawn together
to make ourselves into day.



By now the narrator has understood that his father's interest in Alberto stemmed from his interest in Alicia, and that interest was in turn the product of a bundle of circumstances of which perhaps his father was not yet fully conscious, but which could be resumed like this: it was he who had initiated Alicia into politics, without knowing that this move was going to not only cost her life itself, but also expose him to decades of fear and regret, and continue sending out ripples that would affect his son many years later.

We're deep into metanarrative now, as Pron ponders the type of book he could write on the basis of the material his father has made him aware of -- a book where he would be both reader and writer, discoverer and narrator. He has finally come to the point of wondering: "What had my father been? What had he wanted? What was that background of terror that I had wanted to forget completely, and that had returned to me when the pills had started to wear off, and when I had discovered among his papers the story of the disappeared people, that my father had made his -- that he had explored as much as he could to avoid having to venture into his own story?"

The next bit is the only part of the book that I don't like. Maybe it actually happened like this. But even if it did, the editor should have axed it. After his museum visit, the narrator falls sick, and has a series of dreams. I'm sure all the dreams were meaningful, but personally I find strangers' dreams tedious.

Finally we're done with the dreams, and into the fourth section, which I guess is the great reveal, if such an expression is appropriate for such a veiled, allusive, enigmatic form of writing.



He wakes from his dream-fever. It's raining -- remember the title? -- and it is as though the rain has displaced the air, and replaced it not with water but with "an intermediary substance made up of sadness and desperation and all the things which you hope not to ever have to confront, like the death of your parents, and which are nevertheless there all the time, in a childlike landscape in which it's always raining, and which you can't in reality take your eyes off".

Then, as he tells his sister about his fever-dreams, she reminds him that he always used to recount his dreams when their father took them to school in the morning. He casually remarks that he never understood why their father used to go out first, and start the car, when he would only have to wait for them. His sister looks at him blankly: "I don't understand how you don't remember, she answered. At that time they were killing journalists, putting bombs in their cars; he used to go out alone each time to start the car in order to assume all the risk himself and protect us. I can't believe you don't remember."

This is like a lightbulb turning on his head, illuminating the terror with which he has involuntarily linked the past, and explaining both the hatred he feels towards the country of his childhood, and his abandonment of that country in an exile that had begun even before he went to Germany: "I had once wanted to believe that my journey had no return because I did not have a home to return to, on account of the particular conditions in which my family and I lived for a long period, but at that moment I realized that I did have a home, and that home was a whole lot of memories and those memories had always accompanied me."



Now he remembers the restrictions he lived under as a child: don't bring other children to the house; when walking alone, face oncoming traffic; throw your name-tag onto the ground and shout your name if anyone tries to force you into a car; don't repeat anything you hear at home; don't talk about the Peronist emblem you see at home, and forget its significance. These rules, that he was recollecting at that moment for the first time in ages, were supposed to protect him and protect the family in a period of terror. Whereas his parents seemed to have simply forgotten them, he had pushed them underground, but had internalized them to the point where even in Germany he was subconsciously looking for routes that went against the traffic. He now realizes it wasn't the drugs that had caused his memory loss; rather it was the facts themselves that had provoked his desire to forget everything.

So he decides to remember.

His parents, it turns out, were members of Guardia de Hierro, a Peronist resistance group. After the death of Juan Peron in 1974, some of Pron's parents' comrades were killed or "disappeared"; some left the country. The rest experienced a painful process of adaptation, and a kind of internal exile. His parents went on in their own way. They carried on being journalists. They gave their children a legacy and a mandate. But "that legacy and that mandate, which are those of social transformation and determination, were inappropriate in the times we had to grow up in, which were times of pride and frivolity and defeat".

There's that note of generational self-disparagement again.

Part of the dark legacy Pron has to contend with is his birth date. He was born in December 1975, therefore conceived around March of that year, about eight months after Peron's death, and a few months after the disbandment of Guardia de Hierro. He feels such children are a sort of consolation prize. If that generation's parents couldn't make a revolution, at least they could make children, and those children in turn -- with the testimony they bore to "normal" life -- could become, at a roadblock or in a raid, the difference between life and death. If the parents were detained, they needed convincing short stories -- that could be told in a minute -- so that they wouldn't be killed immediately. The stories shouldn't be too polished. In those years, a child was that "minute".

(I should note at this point that Pron later invites his father to comment on the book he is writing, and Pron senior's comments, along with numerous other addenda, are recorded here. His father vigorously repudiates the idea of children as consolation prizes and cover stories. Maybe he's right. But for the child, perception is reality. That's one of the many injustices of parenthood.)



Anyway, with all this as baggage, Pron starts to tell his parents' story -- and his own. He knows there is interpretation and invention in what he remembers, "but someone once told me that it didn't matter how imaginary the cause was, because its consequences were always real". For him those very real consequences are fear, and a series of memories that he had gathered over the course of the years, and which had stayed with him, despite every intention on his part to eliminate them.

What can his generation do, he wonders -- "lost in a world of dispossession and frivolity, all members of a long-defeated army whose battles we can't even remember and our parents still don't even dare to look in the face?... I wondered what my generation could offer that could rise to the joyous despair and desire for justice of the generation that preceded it, that of our parents. Wasn't the ethical imperative that that generation inadvertently placed on us terrible?"

Peeling back the layers of their parents' generation -- rather than averting their gaze -- could, he suggests, be the political task of his own cohort, a generation whose support in the 1990s of the liberal project had condemned many to poverty and marginalization (earlier in the book he talks about watching a film in which everyone is incomprehensible, but only the poor have subtitles...)



Pressed by his university in Germany to return to work, he agonizes about how to tell the story that is burdening him.  In one of his father's books he finds some extracts about the last site at which Alicia had been seen alive: the Central Police Headquarters, San Miguel de Tucuman, which functioned as a torture site and clandestine detention centre. But the story is still only fragments.

It's raining again by now. Pron writes: "I told myself that I was going to write this story, because what my parents and their comrades had done didn't deserve to be forgotten, and because I was the product of what they had done, and because what they had done was worthy of being told, because it was their spirit -- not the right and wrong decisions that my parents and their comrades had made, but their spirit itself -- that was going to keep on climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm." (Remember this -- we'll return to it.)

Miraculously, his father does not die. Pron can't talk to him immediately, but his newfound realization enables him to talk to his mother, who tells him his father didn't regret having fought the war, he just regretted not having won it. He would have liked his comrades to have had the chance to live, to have had the chance to die natural deaths, not be tortured, violated, destroyed, thrown from airplanes and left to drown in the sea. "Your father would have liked not to be among the few who survived, because a survivor is the loneliest person in the world... Perhaps he thought... 'Let something at least be written down.'"

The narrator remembers being taken to the mountains by his father, and subjected to experiences that were intended to make him stronger, but instead imbued him with an indefinable terror. He imagines standing next to his father by the well where the body of Alberto was found, the two of them looking at the black mouth of the place where lie all the dead in the history of Argentina. "Sometimes I remember my father and me wandering through a forest of low trees, and I think that this forest is the forest of fear, and that he and I are still there and he continues to guide me, and that maybe we will get out of that forest one day."

One day.



It's a bold move to blend crime story, psychological Bildungsroman, and political history, but Pron pulls it off.

What we remember, and why we forget. How corporate memory and individual memory intersect. What we know, and the extent to which we don't know, and can never know. What we fight for, and what we just let happen. Who we are, and what made us who we are.

And how we recount all that.

All these themes constantly echo throughout the seemingly chaotic but cleverly scripted narrative, strewn from the outset with teasing snippets you need to come back to.

Fascinating.



There are just a couple of codas to tack on before I conclude this very lengthy post.

Firstly, I am appalled by how little I know of what happened in Argentina during my lifetime... Luciano Benjamin Menendez -- described in this Guardian account as "one of Argentina's most feared army officers during military rule between 1976 and 1983" -- was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2008.

What -- not until 2008? Correct...

The report continues: "Amnesties and pardons introduced after the return to civilian rule meant most of those held responsible for the kidnap, torture and killing of tens of thousands of Argentines during the Dirty War escaped prosecution. Three years ago, these laws were ruled unconstitutional and the trials began again." So this was the period of renewed raking over the ashes that forms the backdrop to the book.

Menendez remained uncontrite, saying in a statement before his sentencing: "Argentine society was involved in a war provoked by international Marxists, the same people that still persist in their obscure aim. The difference is a sad one for our homeland as before the terrorists were living illegally and now they do so within the law, pretending to be peaceful citizens, respecting the law and the constitution." He died in 2018, aged 90. So very much greater an age than his victims had been permitted to reach.

It is at his trial, though, that Alicia's name is mentioned by a witness, who affirms he saw her at the clandestine detention centre that operated out of the Police Headquarters in San Miguel de Tucuman. The testimony was corroborated by lists of detainees drawn up in 1977 by Tucuman police intelligence (then under Menendez's responsibility), which included the fate of each of the victims. Alicia Burdisso was assassinated in that headquarters that year.

In 2014, Ruben Adalberto (Chacho) Pron, Patricio's father, wrote his own book about Alicia, the second in a proposed series of three about various disappeared persons. He records the testimony of Liliana Valente, a fellow-student of Alicia's in Tucuman, who "has trouble finding the words to define the climate of oppression and fear that had settled in the province... 'The dictatorship was difficult everywhere, but Tucuman... was like another world..,' she evokes, powerless to explain the dimensions of the indescribable. 'There was no limit there. It was terrible,' she finally blurts out, forcing herself to conjure up the horror of what was happening around her thirty-five years ago, which still arouses chills in those who lived through those days in that place."



One last thing, and that's the book's title, and how it has been translated. It's tough to render in English, because "padres" can both mean "fathers" and "parents", and "espiritu" can mean both "ghost" and "spirit". Given the context I noted above, though -- the idea that the rain has replaced the air with a substance made up of sadness and desperation, and the author's conviction that the story of his parents and their generation and their descendants deserves to be told because it was "their spirit itself [that] was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm" -- it seems logical to opt for The Spirit of my Fathers Keeps Climbing in the Rain rather than My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain.

Except that the English version is the actual last line of a Dylan Thomas poem, which Pron must be intentionally referencing... (In the book, when his father has regained consciousness, but still cannot speak, and still needs help to breathe, Pron feels he wants to talk to him about everything he has found out in the previous days, and what he wants to do with that material. But he doesn't know how to do it. So he sits with his father, and reads the book of Dylan Thomas poems he has brought with him, and cries for a while, and tells his father to hang on, because one day they really do need to talk.)

The last line of the evocative but frankly obscure I Fellowed Sleep is, precisely: "My fathers' ghost is climbing in the rain".

The only Spanish translation of this poem that I have been able to find ends not with "el espiritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia" (Pron's title), but rather with "es el fantasma de mis padres que trepa por la lluvia" (definitely ghost, not spirit, no word for continue, and a different word for rising).

The Portuguese title (O espírito dos meus pais continua a subir na chuva) sticks very close to Pron's original Spanish. The German and Italian titles (respectively, Der Geist meiner Vaeter steigt im Regen auf, and Lo spirito dei miei padri si innalza nella pioggia) lose the idea of continuing, but keep the ghost/spirit and parents/fathers ambiguity. The French version bottles out with a quite bland rendering -- L'esprit de mes peres -- but at least leans very definitely towards spirit rather than ghost.

Does any of that matter? Not really... But it's maybe just a tad symbolic of the puzzle -- the way meanings shift, the way we remember words and interiorize ideas, the way translations create slippage, the way language can only ever be allusive -- that Pron has presented us with throughout.