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

but that he died inside the well.
    Burdisso was buried last Sunday. His remains were accompanied by a procession of some 20 blocks and passed the headquarters of the club where he worked. It was in the late afternoon. Prior to that, there was a prayer for the dead in the parish of Saint Lawrence the Martyr.
    The imminent arrest of a series of suspects was immediately made known. On Wednesday eight arrests had already been made. But in the end four individuals were charged, who remain in custody. […] Those who knew him maintain that Burdisso was in general a withdrawn and gullible man who believed each one of the cunning arguments with which Córdoba deceived him.So much so that one of the accused, Marcos Brochero, a native of Cañada Rosquín, was Córdoba’s husband but Burdisso thought he was her brother.

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    In the photocopy of the article that appeared in his file, my father had highlighted in fluorescent yellow a paragraph I had missed in my reading and which he, a much better journalist than I—he in fact taught the journalists who in time would be my own teachers, in an almost preindustrial system of apprenticeship that in both form and content radically opposed the nonsense they tried to teach us at the university and, furthermore, bonded my father and me in a sort of involuntary tradition, an old school of rigorous and willful and defeated journalists—my father, as I was saying, had highlighted:
    Burdisso had surrounded himself with a series of individuals from the margins of society, many of them with criminal records […] he was 60 years old and lived alone in his house at 400 Calle Corrientes, four blocks from the club. He had no immediate family, since his sister had disappeared during themilitary dictatorship. For that loss […] two years ago he received an indemnity from the state of 240 thousand pesos (some 56 thousand dollars). With that money he bought a house—the one they had wanted to take from him—a car, a motorcycle and other items.

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    Ten years ago, the towns on Route 13 were, to some, the gates to a lost paradise. Brothels, gambling and sex, both cheap and expensive. Nightclubs and all kinds of crime. That was, according to the sources consulted, up until two years ago. There were some forty brothels in the area and a lot of trafficking of women from Brazil and remote regions of Paraguay. Many of these women told the court of their trips to Europe to prostitute themselves.
    Miriam Carizo was the owner of a bar of ill repute, where she met Alberto Burdisso in 2005 and struck up a relationship with him that lasted two years. Gisela Córdoba (28 years old), the woman Burdisso was involved with when his romance with Carizo ended, is believed to be part of this network and had prior convictions for check fraud in El Trébol itself. The other charged suspects were habitués of nightclubs. According toinvestigators on the case thus [
sic
] would be the “tail end” of these rings, which had already disappeared but left behind a saga of survivors of this life of vice.
    A contextualization by Claudio Berón in
La Capital de *osario
, June 29, 2008

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    A house, a lot of money that paradoxically was not the bearer of good fortune and an immense loneliness ended the life of Alberto Burdisso. […] They killed him on the first Sunday of June. It is believed that a woman of ill repute wanted to take his property and for that she convinced two men and some other people of the need to have him disappear. […] Several meters from the vast field that surrounds El Trébol, a town of no more than 13 thousand inhabitants, there is a new white house. There lived Burdisso; a man different from the rest, 60 years old and, according to some who knew him, celibate until the age of 57. In 2005 he received more than 200 thousand pesos in reparations for his disappeared younger sister. He burned through that cash.
    According to Roberto Maurino, Burdisso was a sullen and withdrawn man, but normal. “He traveled