Book//mark – My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain | Patricio Pron, 2011

 “Nobody had fought, we all had lost and barely anyone had stayed true to what they believed,
whatever that was, I thought; my father’s generation had been different, but once again, there
was something in the difference that was also a meeting point, a thread that went through the
years and brought us together in spite of everything and was horrifically Argentine: the
feeling of parents and children being united in defeat.”

“I understood for the first time that all the children of young Argentines in the 1970s were going
to have to solve our parents’ pasts, like detectives, and what we would find out was going to seem
like a mystery novel we wished we’d never bought. But I also realized that there was no way
of telling my father’s story as a mystery or, more precisely, that telling it in such a way would
betray his intentions and his struggles, since telling his story as a detective tale would merely
confirm the existence of a genre, which is to say, a convention, and all of his efforts were meant
to call into question those very social conventions and their pale reflection in literature.”

“You don’t ever want to know certain things, because what you know belongs to you,
and there are certain things you never want to own.”

“I wondered what my generation could offer that could match the exuberant desperation and thirst
for justice of the preceding generation, our parents’. wasn’t it a terrible ethical imperative that
generation unintentionally imposed on us? how do you kill your father if he’s already dead and,
in many cases, died defending an idea that seems noble even if its execution was remiss or
clumsy or wrong-headed? how else could we measure up if not by doing as they did, fighting a
senseless war that was lost before it began and marching into slaughter to the sacrificial chants
of disaffected youth, arrogant and impotent and stupid, marching to the brink of civil war against
the forces of the repressive machinery of a country that, in essence, is and always has been
conservative?

“What must the novel my father wanted to write have been like? Brief, composed of fragments,
with holes where my father couldn’t or didn’t want to remember something, filled with symmetries—
stories duplicating themselves over and over again as if they were an ink stain on an assiduously
folded piece of paper, a simple theme repeated as in a symphony or a fool’s monologue—and
sadder than Fathers’ Day at an orphanage.”

“I’d seen enough mystery novels already and would see many more in the future. Telling this
story from the perspective of genre would be illegitimate. To begin with, the individual crime was
less important than the social crime, but social crime couldn’t be told through the artifice of a
detective novel; it needed a narrative in the shape of an enormous frieze or with the appearance
of an intimate personal story that held something back, a piece of an unfinished puzzle that would
force the reader to look for adjacent pieces and then keep looking until the image became clear.
Furthermore, the resolution of most detective stories is condescending, no matter how ruthless the
plotting, so that the reader, once the loose ends are tied up and the guilty finally punished, can
return to the real world with the conviction that crimes get solved and remain locked between
the covers of a book, that the world outside the book is guided by the same principles of justice
as the tale told inside and should not be questioned.”

“As I thought all this standing beside the telephone, I noticed it had started to rain again, and I
told myself I would write that 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’d done was worthy of being told because their ghost—not the right or wrong decisions
my parents and their comrades had made but their spirit itself—was going to keep climbing in
the rain until it took the heavens by storm.”

Patricio Pron, My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain, 2011