My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron

others allegedly.”
    […]
    “Who are the suspects in custody?”
    “Five men and two women.”
    Conversation between Commissioner Jorge Gómez of the Eighteenth Regional Unit of the Provincial Police and a journalist (
El Trébol Digital
, June 23, 2008)

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    The next day, a headline on the same website announced: “Alberto Burdisso Died by Suffocation and Was Savagely Beaten.”
    The case was changed to Homicide by Criminal Trial Judge Dr. Eladio García[,] of the city of San Jorge. The forensic examination present that Burdisso presented [
sic
] a very hard blow to the head, perhaps caused by a blunt object, and numerous punches. He would have been thrown into the well while still alive.

43
    More headlines: “El Trébol, Seven Arrests for the Burdisso Case” (
La Capital de *osario
, June 25); “A New Arrest in the Burdisso Case” (
El TrébolDigital
, June 25); “Readers Applaud Treatment of the Burdisso Case” (
El Trébol Digital
, June 25); “Police Are Seeing Results in the Burdisso Case” (
El Trébol Digital
, June 26); “They Will Demand Justice in the Plaza” (
El Trébol Digital
, June 26). And one more headline, from the article that tells the whole story, published by
El Trébol Digital
the following day: “Burdisso Suffered Up Until His Final Moments.”

44
    The brutally murdered resident of El Trébol died, as detailed by the autopsy, of suffocation. His body was found with six broken ribs, the arm and shoulder fractured by the fall into the well. Alberto, according to declarations, was taken to the field on Sunday June 1rd [
sic
] at seven in the morning to look for firewood and there they beat him and threw him into the old well where he was found. Before throwing him into the well, they tried to make him sign a sales contract and he refused. According to the work by the forensic doctors and the autopsy, Alberto Burdisso recovered consciousness in the well but later died from asphyxia, though it remains unknown whether this was caused by his position in the well or from lack of air. The cellular telephone will play an important role in the trial,since it was found along with Burdisso’s body and there are compromising called persons.
    El Trébol Digital
, June 27, 2008

45
    If one reads the articles carefully and ignores their typographical errors and erratic syntax, and if afterward one thinks about what they say and accepts that what they describe is what really must have happened, one can sum up the entire story in a more or less coherent narrative: A man was taken to an isolated place through some kind of deception and there he was ordered to sign over an unknown property, which he refused to do; his attackers threw him into a well and he died there. In its simplicity, in its almost brutal pettiness, the story could fit perfectly into one of those books of the Old Testament in which the characters live and, above all, die beholden to simple passions, by the hand of an incomprehensible god who is nonetheless still worthy of praise and worship. However, since we can assume that this is not a biblical story and that the motivations of the characters are not subject to the whims of a capricious god, when reading all this, we must also ask ourselves what were the reasons behind these acts: Why was this crime committed? How is it possible that somany people are implicated in a murder that could have been carried out by one, two or, at the most, three people, all of whom could have fit in Burdisso’s little car? And why was he murdered? For his house, which the anonymous writer at
El Trébol Digital
presented in his or her articles as a place with no particularly special features? It certainly wasn’t some luxurious mansion that stood out in the puritanical, austere atmosphere of the town. For money? Where was this money going to come from, a sum large enough to outweigh the risk for his killers of winding up in prison for the rest of their lives? Where was a maintenance employee of an