El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011; My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain, 2013) shows how difficult it was for me to leave behind part of my personal history and that of my country, beginning around 2007. For four years, I was trying to understand what I could do with certain facts and circumstances: the political experience of my parents, the disappearance and murder of many of their friends and comrades, our freedoms compromised and under threat for most of the Dictatorship, the hiding, the fear, and the pretense, the country that resulted from canceling the project of political sovereignty, economic independence, and social justice envisioned by my parents’ generation, the disillusionment and cynicism of my own, the exiles, the escape, the defections, the loyalties. The novel—which some call autofiction, others a nonfiction novel, and some more recently true crime—was published in 2011, even though my impression back then was that the facts gathered there could only be of interest to me and a handful of close friends. No writer is, it seems, a good judge of their work, not even one who, like me, was educated as a literary critic and writes regularly about books.
I assumed my editor would reject the manuscript, so I submitted it along with the stories of La vida interior de las plantas de interior (2013; The Inner Life of Indoor Plants). I had written the novel because the narrated facts had been imposed on me, preventing me from writing about anything else for a long time. My interests tend to be a bit unusual, and my editor could see all this in another way; if I delivered the stories as well, I thought, at least one of the two books would be published. My editor supported the novel from the moment he read it, though, and since then it has been translated into ten languages and published in various countries; it’s the novel I have most often been asked about, the one I have had the most opportunity to read in public, the one most written about in the Academy, and the one I’ve seen most highlighted and annotated by its readers.
I wrote the first pages in Madrid, in a one-bedroom apartment in a building whose address didn't fit in delivery notifications, but I stayed there less than a year there and wrote the rest of the book on Vallehermoso street. My new lodging had a single room; from one side, you could see Parque del Oeste, from the other, the petty thieves and the homeless going in and out of a supermarket open twenty-four hours. I was writing in order to avoid thinking about what I was narrating, to banish those events—“Forget about it, deactivate it, let it go already. It’s only in your memory, suppress it. You have the power to do it. Write it,” William S. Burroughs proposed in Last Words—but there were difficulties, pitfalls; and sometimes what you wished to forget comes back and reminds you with greater intensity and more often when you point it out; for example, with a book.
Writing about what happened to oneself poses practical difficulties, but the problems confronted when you broach a story that doesn’t entirely belong to you are greater and enter the realm of ethics. The question of whether it’s appropriate to narrate a collective project to transform reality and its consequences, reducing them to the story of a few people’s lives—my parents; Alicia Burdisso, murdered in 1977 in the clandestine center of detention that operated at the Police Station in San Miguel de Tucumán during the Dictatorship; her brother Alberto, murdered decades later to rob him of the compensation paid by the State for Alicia’s disappearance; myself, in part—is also an ethical problem; in practical terms, it is also a moral problem and it was just about to make the book fall flat. A combination of shame and calculation had caused me to grant my parents the right to veto the novel’s publication in Argentina: I saw no great contradiction in throwing Molotov cocktails at the door of a conservative newspaper in one’s youth and decades later working there. Not everyone was of the same opinion—my mother was not. This was the first and last time that my parents read a book of mine before it was published. It didn’t seem as if this book would have any precedents; on the other hand, if there was a similar book about the tragic facts of the country’s recent past whose responses to the problems were posed by the writing, I could rest easy: I didn’t discover it until after the novel was published.
There was a certain consensus established around that time that those tragic facts should only be discussed by their protagonists, not those who, like me, experienced them as children and in a secondary position. Bearing witness is an economy, and Argentina is a country of monopolies, such that EEDMPSSELLLFootnote1 had several false starts and two or three versions, and its main theme—the way in which the two narrated deaths established a symmetry that framed another symmetry, in which, when I was “looking for” my father, he too was looking for someone, in his case someone whose disappearance was closely linked, in turn, with the murder of someone else and with his personal history—was only revealed to me during its crafting. To write El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia was a form of learning to write a novel called El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia, and I suspect that in this aspect as well the book ended up being determinant for me: I never wrote with a preconceived plan. Since then, all my books have been a product of the approach employed in EEDMPSSELLL, according to which those books are responses to the questions which gave rise to them, their own instruction manual, their map of a territory not previously laid out.
My father read the manuscript not too far from where the lives of Alicia and Alberto Burdisso played out, along with the murder of the latter, but it’s possible that my memory of seeing him reading it may be a false one, where two or more circumstances that could have produced it are tied together into one image. My parents did not exercise their right to veto, however questionable the reading may have seemed to them. A little later, in 2010, my father thought it important to offer me his view of the facts and to correct a few errors: the result was practically an autonomous text, which I published with his permission (https://bit.ly/3QuypoP) and years later I heard someone say it was invented, part of the novel.
My father’s was only the first of a series of private reactions to EEDMPSSELLL, not all of them in Argentina, which seemed to demonstrate that also in other societies it appeared, on the one hand, impossible for a generation, that of the sixties and seventies, to account for their experience and, on the other, clearly just as difficult for the youngest to understand. It is an interruption in the transmission of political experience—and, as such, an obstacle to the creation of alternative political projects—which, under the forms of inhibition and silence, would make clear that all those societies remain stuck in an immediately post-dictatorial situation which every one of them negotiates as best they can, and which more often sidesteps or obliterates the pretense of being a society that’s completely democratic.
No less important for me than that first reaction from my father was that, in February 2011, he drew up a project for a city ordinance to create a Memorial Space in El Trébol, where much of the book takes place. On 24 March 2012—the thirty-sixth anniversary of the last coup d’état—at the inauguration of that space, where trees were planted and a group of sculptures was installed representing the three people disappeared from the city (Carlos Alberto Bosso, detained and sequestered in *osarioFootnote2 in 1977 along with his wife and his fifteen-month-old daughter; Luis Alberto Tealdi, a union activist kidnapped on 28 September 1977; and Alicia Burdisso: my father ended up dedicating three books of journalism to them), he read an excerpt from EEDMPSSELLL. That he as well as my mother returned to political activism after reading it is for me the best and most important consequence of having written that novel.
Nothing is ever a cure, not even writing it; of all the naïveté and mistaken beliefs incurred by those who read and write books, the only one I don’t remember ever having had is the idea that literature would help to “heal” from a traumatic event, much less from a trauma whose nature is political and makes the persecution and murder of at least thirty thousand people and the indefinite cancelation of a project for transforming reality, a project that’s still perfectly reasonable and necessary. Even though something in the practice of writing allows us to forget what has been written, to make it the property of others and leave it behind—and my project was that EEDMPSSELLL would do this for me—years later I keep thinking about the narrated events and trying to explain them. I didn’t write El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia to be part of any subgenre, but this ended up happening and it’s called now, by some, “literature of the children.”
My opinions about that literature usually vary from day to day; but the subgenre, or series, is made up of some excellent texts, and it’s good that my work is read along with them, written by dear friends. The best books in the series recognize that not even those of us who are children of political activists who were not disappeared and stayed loyal to their youthful ideas are confident about really understanding the type of personal sacrifice they were ready to make in the past; we don’t understand their experience, but we know it was decisive for them and us, just as we grew up in countries that, like Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, are the direct product of the failure of their political project and of the murder and exile of thousands of people. I believe that there are not many other books by Spanish-speaking authors that convey these events with such clarity.
In post-dictatorial societies there is a specific and persistent demand to “turn the page,” and EEDMPSSELLL now seems to me a desire to resist that demand from a place that’s different than most novels on the subject; not so much an effort to adhere uncritically to the exigency of “memory, truth, and justice,” but rather an attempt to extract from the past examples of a utopian sort of political practice that might be valid for the present moment. Clearly we cannot reclaim all political ideas and actions of the previous generation, but we can reclaim their drive and dedication, and honor them as much as possible with political action that’s positive and consistently faces up to the extraordinary rise in economic and political inequality, environmental disaster, and the increase in sexist and racist social attitudes, and of those who are deniers. Maybe my novel has become more necessary than in the past, given these circumstances, while perhaps certain examples of the “literature of the children” might be seen as instigators as well as the product of a changed mentality in societies like that of Chile. For my part, in any case, I would prefer not to have ever written that game of mirrors in which some stories complete and explain others and make evident the depth of violence and squalor in Argentine life, as well as our interminable desire for justice.
Perhaps not being able to leave certain facts and circumstances behind, which, as I was saying, were impossible for me to ignore between 2007 and 2010, is a form as valid as any other of attempting to answer the questions we all ask ourselves about words, the past, the present, memory, things, what exists after memory, and the ties among all of them. It’s a “not being able to not narrate” which might be what Maurice Blanchot called “a writing from the outside” and, I’m thinking now, constitutes a negation of the desire for the past to stop belonging to us. I don’t believe anyone should go through so much pain and bare themselves in that way to write a book, but that’s what I had to do, and the story continues to be, for me as for others, a nightmare from which we cannot stop “trying to awake.” It is not salvific, it does not progress linearly, it does not deliver any Second Coming, but it still allows for unique events, very brief and highly experimental moments in which we glimpse the possibility of living in a different way. The task of constructing situations that can be inhabited by others, that expand the repertory of possibilities for the lives we live, that allow people to recover the sovereignty over themselves that the State and the Market rob from them and, as Guy Debord wrote, makes possible “the invention of games made from a new essence” that restore in an innovative way the old tie between words and things is not especially popular at this moment. Yet perhaps it’s more necessary than in the past. El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia aspires to be one of those situations, a negation of the negation that makes possible, at last, positive action.
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Patricio Pron
Patricio Pron (Argentina, 1975) is the author of six books of short stories, two books of essays, and seven novels, including El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011; My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain, 2013) and No derrames tus lágrimas por nadie que viva en estas calles (2016; Don’t Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets, 2021). His work has been awarded numerous prizes (among others, the Juan Rulfo and the Alfaguara prizes). Most recently he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of Cologne. He lives in Madrid with his wife and two cats.
Notes
1 In the original text of this essay, following the first mention of the book title in Spanish, Pron often uses this format, i.e., the combined first initials of each word in the title. I have maintained this format in the translated text.—Translator’s note.
2 Throughout his novel, Pron refers to Rosario (literally rosary) his birthplace as “*osario,” ossuary or charnel house. Translator’s note.