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them, but I refuse: even with someone else in the room, it seems more natural to me to sleep with them than with two strangers. My father gets angry, grumbles, but accepts it in the end. Two clashing forms of logic: a child’s and an adult’s.
    The next year, 1982, is hectic. Hectic because lots of things—contradictory things—happen. Hectic because their effect on me is mixed. Hectic because 1982 stretches on, turning into 1983. In ’82 we visit Paris and Amsterdam; in ’82 I go out at night, march in protests, and wear a little black circle-A anarchist pin; in ’82 I spend the summer in England and buy myself a pair of plaid pants, boots, and a leather jacket; in ’82 I make short-lived plans with some friends to form a band. I tell my father about it one Sunday when we’re at lunch with my mother in a Chinese restaurant, and though at first he can’t help making a joke of it, he ends up becoming our biggest champion, as is always the case when behind some plan of mine he senses an itch to escape my mother’s influence. In ’82 my father adopts the habit of picking me up at school some days and returning me the next morning after the two of us spend the night at the studio where he lives and works. In the evening, after dinner at a restaurant, he takes me to shows or to the movies or—during the season—to a bullfight. I remember seeing Picasso and Mondrian and El Greco and Dalí, and especially a Kurt Schwitters show that for a few evenings inspires me to forget the black Olivetti typewriter on which I’ve begun to write and throw myself into making collages à la Kurt Schwitters: I remember Quest for Fire ; I remember City of Women ; I remember Fitzcarraldo ; I remember a Monty Python movie and a revival of Eraserhead . All in all, in ’82 we see quite a bit of each other; I bask in the novel male camaraderie and imprint on my brain attitudes that I will make my own, but it’s also an era in which the silences between us grow thicker. One day, on what pretext I can’t remember, he brings me to an apartment to which he has a key, and on the doorstep, just before we go in, he warns me that I’ll see paintings and pieces of furniture that belong to him, which he’s loaned to the owner for a story in a design magazine. Weeks later, after he picks me up from school, instead of sleeping at his studio, we sleep at that same apartment, this time with the owner present. It’s the friend he met in Brazil, whom just over a year ago he’d brought to my mother’s apartment.
    I spend two or three nights there, sleeping in one bedroom or another, depending on shifting criteria, until for reasons I can’t explain, the evenings with him become less and less frequent. He no longer invites me to spend the night. He no longer comes to pick me up from school.
    And yet he doesn’t break ties completely. There are silences, mutual misunderstandings, but in hindsight they look more like a foretaste of what’s to come than a permanent reality. He comes over when he chooses, spends the evening, and leaves in a hurry, briskly, as if escaping from invisible snares.
    But there’s more.
    A parenthesis.
    At some point between ’82 and ’83, my mother, who has a crowded calendar and goes out a lot at night, becomes involved in a romantic relationship with one of her suitors, a writer by trade. At some point between ’82 and ’83, my father asks my mother to be his guarantor in the purchase of a ground-floor apartment for sale in the two-story building where the friend he met in Brazil has her apartment. My mother is prepared to give him the money, but suddenly it’s the friend he met in Brazil who doesn’t want him to have the place. My father is incensed. One Saturday he asks me to come with him to her house, and we take his things. The break deepens the depression from which he’s been suffering for years. He