Córdoba, or whether it was Huck, who maintains that he was a victim in all this—who threw Burdisso into the well is of little importance here; nor does it matter much that Brochero returned three days later to throw bricks, pieces of masonry and dead leaves onto the wounded man to finish him off; the fate of the accused doesn’t matter much, and neither does what happened to Córdoba in the women’s prison in Santa Fe or to Brochero and Huck in the jail in Coronda. This crime, every crime, has an individual, private aspect but also a social one; the first concerns only the victims and their close relatives, but the second concerns us all and is the reason justice is required to intervene in our name, in the name of a collectivewhose rules have been called into question by the crime and which, faced with the impossibility of undoing the first, tries to get the second under control, with power that, at least in theory, comes neither from an individual nor a single class but rather from society as a whole, wounded but still standing.
62
The remaining questions at that point were who Fanny was, why my father summed up the case’s legal situation and why it was my father who had to do it and not someone else, anyone else.
63
The next documents in my father’s file were fragments of a register I didn’t recognize, in which appeared people with the last name Carizo, including Miriam, Burdisso’s common-law wife to whom he’d given fifty percent of his property, which was documented here with one new detail: Burdisso’s and her tax and national identification numbers. Then there was a photocopy of the document produced by the General Property Registry of theProvince of Santa Fe, detailing the purchase of the house on Calle Corrientes by Alberto Burdisso and dating the purchase to November 16, 2005. Burdisso had bought the property from Nelson Carlos Girello and Olga Rosa Capitani de Girello, two elderly people. Other information was included on the bill of sale: Burdisso’s birth date—February 1, 1948; his mother’s last name—Rolotti; marital status—single; his national identification card number—6.309.907; and his previous address—Entre Ríos and Cortada Llobet, in El Trébol. Also the size of the property—307.20 square meters; and the amount paid—twenty-five thousand pesos in cash. The notary public who had witnessed the transaction was named Ricardo López de la Torre.
64
It was as if my father had wanted to deconstruct the crime into a handful of insignificant facts, a pile of notarized documents, technical descriptions and official registries whose accumulation made him forget for a moment that they all added up to a tragic event, the disappearance and death of a man in an abandoned well, which would make him think about the symmetry between that man’s death and his sister’s, also tragic and about which my father was never going to know anything. Thiswas my father’s attempt to collaborate in the search for Burdisso and my attempt to search for and find my father in his last thoughts before everything that had happened happened.
65
[…] that they sell to Mr. Alberto José Burdisso and Mrs. Miriam Emilia Carizo, in joint ownership of indivisible, equal parts: a plot of land including everything constructed or planted on it, located in the city of El Trébol, District San Martín, part of the block numbered Seventy-Eight on the official map. […] said map is registered in the Topographical Department under number 130,355, dated the 18th of February of 2000, attached here, and said portion is designated as lot number six (6), located on the North part of the block, divided by a public walkway, situated at twenty-five meters eight centimeters from the Northeast corner of the block toward the East, and composed of: twelve meters eighty centimeters facing North, the same facing South, by twenty-four meters on its East and West sides, equivalent to an area of three hundred seven meters twenty
62
The remaining questions at that point were who Fanny was, why my father summed up the case’s legal situation and why it was my father who had to do it and not someone else, anyone else.
63
The next documents in my father’s file were fragments of a register I didn’t recognize, in which appeared people with the last name Carizo, including Miriam, Burdisso’s common-law wife to whom he’d given fifty percent of his property, which was documented here with one new detail: Burdisso’s and her tax and national identification numbers. Then there was a photocopy of the document produced by the General Property Registry of theProvince of Santa Fe, detailing the purchase of the house on Calle Corrientes by Alberto Burdisso and dating the purchase to November 16, 2005. Burdisso had bought the property from Nelson Carlos Girello and Olga Rosa Capitani de Girello, two elderly people. Other information was included on the bill of sale: Burdisso’s birth date—February 1, 1948; his mother’s last name—Rolotti; marital status—single; his national identification card number—6.309.907; and his previous address—Entre Ríos and Cortada Llobet, in El Trébol. Also the size of the property—307.20 square meters; and the amount paid—twenty-five thousand pesos in cash. The notary public who had witnessed the transaction was named Ricardo López de la Torre.
64
It was as if my father had wanted to deconstruct the crime into a handful of insignificant facts, a pile of notarized documents, technical descriptions and official registries whose accumulation made him forget for a moment that they all added up to a tragic event, the disappearance and death of a man in an abandoned well, which would make him think about the symmetry between that man’s death and his sister’s, also tragic and about which my father was never going to know anything. Thiswas my father’s attempt to collaborate in the search for Burdisso and my attempt to search for and find my father in his last thoughts before everything that had happened happened.
65
[…] that they sell to Mr. Alberto José Burdisso and Mrs. Miriam Emilia Carizo, in joint ownership of indivisible, equal parts: a plot of land including everything constructed or planted on it, located in the city of El Trébol, District San Martín, part of the block numbered Seventy-Eight on the official map. […] said map is registered in the Topographical Department under number 130,355, dated the 18th of February of 2000, attached here, and said portion is designated as lot number six (6), located on the North part of the block, divided by a public walkway, situated at twenty-five meters eight centimeters from the Northeast corner of the block toward the East, and composed of: twelve meters eighty centimeters facing North, the same facing South, by twenty-four meters on its East and West sides, equivalent to an area of three hundred seven meters twenty
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