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

sum up a life, and, naturally, it was incomplete. It said: I had a serious bout of hepatitis when I was five or six years old; later, or before, I had scarlet fever, chicken pox and German measles, all in the span of about a year. I was born with flat feet and they had to be corrected with enormous shoes that I was horribly ashamed of; really, I shouldn’t ever wear sneakers. I was a vegetarian for a couple of years and, even though I’ve given that up, I still almost never eat meat.I learned to read on my own at five years old; I read dozens of books, but I no longer remember anything about them except that they were written by foreign authors who were dead. That a writer could be Argentine and living is a fairly recent discovery and still shocks me. My mother says I didn’t cry during my first days of life; mainly what I did was sleep. My mother says when I was a baby, my head was so big that if they left me sitting, I would start to sway and then fall headfirst toward one side or the other. I remember crying several times as a child, but I haven’t cried since the death of my paternal grandfather in 1993 or 1994, presumably because the medication doesn’t allow me to. Perhaps the only real effect of the pills is that they hinder complete happiness or complete sadness; it’s like floating in a pool without ever seeing its bottom but not being able to reach the surface. I lost my virginity at fifteen; I don’t know how many women I’ve had sex with since then. I ran away from the day care my mother took me to when I was three years old; in the reconstruction of the time that passed between my disappearance and when I was turned in to a police station, there are one hundred minutes in which nobody knows where I was, not even me. My paternal grandfather was a painter, my maternal grandfather worked on trains; the former was an anarchist and the latter a Peronist, I think. My paternal grandfather once pissed on the flagpole of a police station, but Idon’t know why or when; I think I remember it was because they didn’t let him vote or something like that. My maternal grandfather was a guard who worked the line from Córdoba to Rosario; before that, the train passed through Jujuy and Salta and then on to Buenos Aires, where it ended; this was the trajectory that carried the explosives used by the Peronist Resistance, but even though their transportation wasn’t possible without the collaboration of train employees, I don’t know if my grandfather was an active collaborator. I don’t remember the first record I bought, but I remember I heard the first song that moved me inside a car in a place called Candonga, in the province of Córdoba; actually, they were two songs on a radio program that came through the mountains, which distorted the sound and made it seem broadcast straight from the past. My father didn’t like Spanish films, he said they gave him a headache. I voted during the entire decade of the nineties in Argentina, and always for candidates who didn’t win. I worked in a secondhand bookstore every Saturday morning from the ages of twelve to fourteen. My mother’s mother died when she was a girl, I don’t know of what, and from then until she was a teenager, my mother and her sister lived in an orphanage; I think the only things my mother remembers about those years is that once she saw a nun without her habit on and that her sister stole her food. I was a fanatical Catholic between the ages ofnine and thirteen; later, the impossibility of making Christian morality compatible with an ethical code in keeping with my experiences made me distance myself from Catholicism, which now seems to me a philosophical aberration. Islam strikes me as the religion most in keeping with our times and the most practical and therefore, perhaps, the true faith. No psychoanalytical therapy has ever worked for me. My parents are journalists, newspaper journalists. I like the ravioli, empanadas and breaded steaks my mother