PATRIZIO PRON
The spirit of my parents still rises in the rain
translated Maria Paleologou
ed. Icarus, P. 310

Gratitude and criticism until he accepts what Perón said, “parents are the bones that children grind their teeth on.”

He returns to a country that he could call, feel, be his home. But it is not. He returns unwittingly, he has been gone for many years, and he stubbornly and cruelly, self-destructively tried to forget. He changed countries, homes, jobs. He remained dishonest by choice. He works and can support his home and a normal life, and yet he prefers to stay with friends, carrying his few belongings, ready to leave, hide, escape at any moment. The memory haunts him. He is haunted by the fact that he lived in Argentina during the dictatorship, he is trying to escape, forget himself, become a person without memory, without a past, without roots, or landmarks. And he succeeds. He takes medicine and forgets. He forgets the lack of freedom, the secret life of his parents, the tricks he was taught to escape, he seems to forget the fear, the horror of surviving in a society under constant supervision.

But his father falls seriously ill and ends up in the hospital, he is called back by love for the man who gave birth to him, the need that he feels to be with him, to endure as long as possible in this situation, to his mother. and a sister not to miss him if his father dies. All he has to do now is stay and take care of his father in the hospital for as long as he can.

However, upon returning to his homeland, digging through the writings of his journalist father, looking for his own past lost life, he discovers evidence, articles, maps, photographs about the disappearance, which turns out to be a murder. A person is killed with a low motive for his money and property, the spiral is found, he confesses, he is punished, the cycle of this crime closes. But there is another crime, this murdered man also had a sister. A sister who suddenly disappeared, who was last seen in a concentration camp, who was never seen again, whose story interested his father as he collected facts, reports, information, disappeared for political reasons, lost in a story that was on the same ideological hand, as his parents lost.

Reading the story of the disappearance, the hero of Pron, who is so close to the author, in many moments the author himself, recalls what he experienced. His dormant memory, the memory he tried so hard to destroy in order to continue to live, has been resurrected and demands its integral share in his life. Childhood memories surface, Argentina’s dark political past is illuminated, deep well-hidden memories of the family’s fringe resistance to the military junta come to life. All the efforts of the author come down to telling a story shrouded in silence, recognizing, however, that this secret knowledge that he discovers does not have the power of liberation from the past, which he so intensely seeks, but is the truth. which carries with it danger and pain, “you never want to know certain things, because everything you know is yours, and there are certain things you never want to be yours.” The need for transparent, absolute truth, the desire to break the silence, the will to know who his father really was and who he is haunt him. Was his family created to be an alibi for legitimacy? Was he, his whole being, just an image that his parents wanted him to exist in order to deceive and support the resistance? Did the family photo, parents and children, dispel suspicions that they were dissidents? Was it all one big, huge, inhuman lie?

The heavy legacy that the writer has to manage concerns not only what was lost, what was missing, what was not said, but also what was lost and is now being revealed, what consequences they have, what shadow they cast again. The search for his father in the past, his murdered neighbor and missing sister, leads Pron to search for his own father, the same one who always, always before they left, got out before the children and started the engine alone, and this lonely movement suddenly makes sense, it was a protection movement , security, fear, love.

Short short chapters, some in just a few lines convey the anxiety, turmoil, torment of the letter. Nightmares born of memories, searching for the truth in solitude, guilt, small lies out of compassion and the need for Pron to give his parents forgiveness and gratitude for the struggle they led, the life they chose, the powers they drained. Gratitude and criticism, sensitivity and coldness, understanding and sadness, until he accepts what Perón said: “Parents are the bones that children grind their teeth on.”