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lurch. The few times that we speak, I can’t be natural. I judge his life from afar. He doesn’t have money, he claims; he can’t help us, he insists. Whereas all I can see is that he’s removed himself from the mess, and I doubt the truth of his excuses. It’s the real estate boom of the mid-eighties and with the friend he met in Brazil he buys apartments to fix up and sell. The initial capital is hers, but the work, the search for properties, the renovation decisions, and the oversight are all his. And he never sees the fruits of his labor. He’s a worker without pay. He works for her in exchange for imagining that he has something to fall back on. His excuses aren’t good enough for me, considering that my mother and I have nothing, but more than anything it’s his desertion that hurts. Even though I sense that he isn’t untouched by it, that it’s at once the result and cause of deep suffering, I feel let down.
    This is how things will be from now on.
    Could he really have helped us in 1984? Today, March 22, 2009, as I revise what I wrote many months ago, I have my doubts. Was he really absent as often as I remember? Should I have concerned myself so much with our financial problems? Was it my place to take him to task?
    *   *   *
    This is a story of two people, though I’m the only one telling it. My father wouldn’t tell it. My father kept almost everything to himself.
    Sometimes the responsibility frightens me. I try to strip away all embellishment, set down the memories exactly as they come into my head, but obviously I can’t avoid making some decisions.
    Up until now I’d never written in my own voice. I had written fictionally about reality, as one always does, but it wasn’t my reality and I wasn’t the one narrating. It’s a new and confusing feeling. With fiction, you can say anything. In your own voice, either you’re tempted to leave things out or you miss being able to make things up. I’ve passed through both states in previous pages.
    Really, though, one of my fears is not having anything to add to what I’ve written in other books—books that were fiction, about other people who weren’t me, but into which I poured myself.
    I don’t include my first book. In my first book, a collection of short stories, I wasn’t even conscious that I was writing about reality. I had read, or been warned by someone—an older writer, maybe my own grandfather—that it isn’t a good idea to make one’s first novel a self-portrait, that it blocks the imagination and creates vices that are hard to shake, and so convinced was I of this that in the book’s stories I shunned personal experience and borrowed only some unimportant traits of mine—poor eyesight, for example, or certain habits—to distinguish the different narrators. To none of them did I give anything that was truly mine.
    It wasn’t until my first novel that I equipped myself with a spelunker’s helmet to climb down into known depths. And even when I did, it wasn’t intentional. I wanted to write about the insecurities of childhood, and as usual, my desire to write preceded the invention of a story. I remember being paralyzed, unable to come up with anything, until before I realized it, the childhood I was trying to elaborate began to take on elements of my own. The narrator, an adult narrator looking back on his childhood, was an only child, and the epicenter of his family was his mother, with whom he lived and shared the ambivalent memory of an absent father. I lent him the feelings of dread and the thoughts I had at the time, but that was all I took from my own experiences. Or at least so I thought while I was writing it.
    My father, however, saw things differently.
    Just recently I found out that he was very upset by it, and though the person who told me this isn’t especially trustworthy, in this case the