My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron Read Free Book Online Page A

visit to church and respect for the national holidays and, in general, the consistent cultivation of hypocrisy that seemed to be part of a local tradition the inhabitants of El Trébol were particularly proud of and had tacitly decided to defend against the onslaught of truth and progress, which were considered foreign in that town.

8
    The next article was from the same digital newspaper, published a day after the first. It read:
    Alberto Burdisso has not turned up. 72 hours have passed since his disappearance, there are not many clues to guide those searching for him in the city and in the region. After an intense day on Wednesday in which the local police relentlessly took declarations from coworkers, family members, neighbors, and friends, the Volunteer Firemen, along with the police themselves, scoured the region, rural roads, farmhouses, ruined and abandoned houses that border and are next to the neighborhood where Burdisso has his abode, with a totally negative result. “We carried out patrols and searches in suburban and urban areas in spiral but to date we’ve found nothing. We’ll continue all day today with more searching. We worked the canals, sewers and even wastelands, but, for the moment, nothing,” explained Hugo Yussa to “ElTrebolDigital” [
sic
]. Alberto Burdisso was last seen on Sunday night near his domicile, on Calle Corrientes number 400.
    On Wednesday evening during the evening hours, another important detail emerged:Burdisso’s debit card was swallowed by the ATM of Banco Nación. “The card thing happened on Saturday,” explained Iussa, of the 9th Precinct. The search operation asked the banks Credicoop (from thence the card was issued) and Banco Nación (in who’s [
sic
] machine it was found) to offer information on the financial movements in the accounts of the missing resident.

9
    The following pages were stapled together in the upper left corner; they were printouts, shoddy ones, of a short history of El Trébol that my father had corrected and annotated by hand:
    The birth of El Trébol [illegible]. There was no single act or explicit desire [crossed out]. The situation is even further complicated by the almost simultaneous design of three towns: […] Pueblo Passo in 1889, El Trébol in 1890 and Tais in 1892. The conjunction of these three towns came about in 1894 when, by provincial decree, the Municipality was established, all under the single denomination of El Trébol, whose [illegible].
    On the 15th of January 1890 the first train left Cañada de Gómez [illegible] immigrant familymembers and friends with the intention of establishing themselves in those lands [illegible] of the Central Argentine Railway like the founding date of El Trébol, [crossed out] their complex interrelation [illegible] rural [illegible].
    The name emerged during the construction of the branch line of the Central Argentine Railway [illegible] financed with capital from Britain, since this subsidiary company was responsible for naming the stations that [illegible] three stations in a row were named with symbols of Great Britain. “Las Rosas” for the red and white roses in the English coat of arms; “Los Cardos”—Thistles—in honor of Scotland; and “El Trébol”—Clover—for the flower typical of Ireland [illegible] first colonists that came to settle around 1889 were [illegible] in 1895 the national census of that year calculated 3,333 rural settlers and 333 in the urban area, which is [illegible] mostly Italians, although there were also Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans, Swiss, Yugoslavians, Russians, “Turks” who arrived crowded into boats with third-class tickets and for the most part [illegible].
    In 1914 Mr. Victorio De Lorenzi and Mr. Marcos de la Torre bought the land where [illegible] and in 1918 some expansions were undertaken, the police station and an [illegible] assembly hall was built. In 1941 whenthe fiftieth anniversary of El Trébol was celebrated they [illegible] the