My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain Read Online Free PDF

discovered, was the kitchen; when he retraced his steps back toward the living room, he felt a blow from above and fell to the floor facedown. As he turned over, he received another blow, this time on the shoulder, and fell again, but just then he discovered a floor lamp in reach and switched it on: light bathed the room for an instant and his attacker, blinded, stepped back. Then the protagonist grabbed the lamp and dealt him a blow to the head. In the path traced through the air by the lamp on its way to the attacker’s head, and before the cord was pulled out of the outlet, the protagonist was able to seethat his attacker was tall and sickly-looking. The attacker’s face was familiar, even on the floor, with his head bleeding; the protagonist turned on a small lamp that was on a table and, as he brought it closer to the face of his opponent, who looked dead and maybe really was, the protagonist discovered that he was that doctor from whom the nurse often protected him. As in most bad films—and this one really was bad, which I think had been clear to me from the beginning—the protagonist’s sequence of thoughts was visually represented by the repetition of previous scenes: the face of the nurse who looked like a butcher; her antagonism toward the head doctor, which she covered up with deference; the handing over of the list and the money; the meetings with some of the people on the list, almost all of them doctors and almost all employees of the hospital where he had been treated after his accident. And there was one more scene, which had not been shown previously and which, given that the protagonist could not have been present—or, having been present during his convalescence, he must not have understood or couldn’t remember—was only speculation: the nurse writing the list with a smile on her contorted face. At that moment, the viewer understood that the protagonist had been used by the nurse who looked like a butcher to get rid of those people she didn’t want around or who had at some point humiliated or hurt her, and he understood thatfrom that moment on he was going to be a pariah, someone without an identity, forced to hide, to live bound by a paradoxical secrecy, concealing a name that he himself didn’t know. How can you hide something you don’t know, I wondered, but just then, on-screen, a scream was heard: a woman stood screaming beside a staircase, and she leaped on the dead doctor and then lifted her face to the protagonist and insulted him. The protagonist walked toward the door and closed it behind him and then started running, and the camera watched him run, from a crime and from a betrayal, fleeing to nowhere, to an anonymous, clandestine life or to his revenge against the nurse—though it was unlikely that the protagonist would want to stain his hands with blood again; after all, he didn’t seem like a violent person—or to wherever it is that the protagonists of movies go when the credits start to roll and then after them come the commercials.

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    I’ve seen that movie before, said my mother. One day in El Trébol, when your father left me hidden there. Why were you hiding, I asked, but my mother started clearing plates and said she didn’t remember but maybe my father had written itdown somewhere, on some of the papers he had in his study. I nodded but immediately didn’t know why because really I had no idea what my mother meant.

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    Some time before all of this happened I had tried to make a list of the things I remembered about myself and about my parents so that my memory, which I had already started to lose, wouldn’t prevent me from holding on to a couple of things I wanted to keep and so that, I thought in that moment, I wouldn’t end up like the protagonist in that film, both fleeing from himself and still a stranger to himself. My list was in my backpack, and I left my mother in the dining room and went to read it. It was an exceptionally short list considering it had to