Soon’s compassion as she listens gives way to fascination: Old Man’s life is ever more enigmatic and intriguing. Old Man has a father-grandfather and he was in an insane asylum—now she’s using that phrase: insane asylum—he has a strange, dark past, he’s been repudiated through a conspiracy of the mind police who locked him up by force. It’s possible that later that day, when she pretends to do her homework sitting serenely at her desk with her bedroom door closed, she will write about all of this, embellishing it here and there with a fitting tone: Little by little he reveals his secrets; he whispers them quietly into my ear; I tremble as I listen; his voice is hoarse and slow, like the bad guys in scary movies, but he isn’t bad, I don’t think he’s bad, though maybe he’s done evil things.

So your father was a monster, then. A monster? No, why? No more monstrous than the people who tortured Old Man at the clinic! His father loved them. Both of them, his mother and him. Old Man doesn’t have bad memories of him, not at all! He does remember him, it’s true, as awkward, curt, a man of few words. Big. Very big! Almost two meters tall, he says, and luckily Old Man didn’t inherit that height, because being so tall only gives you back problems. Shy. He was also shy! His teeth were in very bad shape because he was ashamed to open his mouth in front of a dentist. He never, ever went to the doctor. He barely had any friends. Because he was shy, not evil!, insists Old Man. He went to work at the factory—he was a pipe fitter—came home, helped his daughter with the housework—like that, day after day, all his life! On weekends they went to church together: he was a very devout man, but he never took communion. Sometimes he drank a lot, he drank until he passed out, but that didn’t happen every day, and he never got violent. He loved her a lot, his daughter, his Adriana. So much that he wouldn’t let her go out; he was afraid something would happen to her. He shooed away any man who approached her, and also, later on, any woman! Back then girls didn’t go out as much as they do now. It was the normal way of things for his mother to spend all her time inside. No one thought it was odd, although it was precisely her being shut away that must have caused what happened to happen. Old Man sincerely believes that his father didn’t do it with evil intentions. He must have gotten things confused! The neighbors presumed that his mother had slipped up and gotten pregnant, by who knew whom. That’s what they thought, or wanted to think, in spite of the fact that he, Old Man, had no problem calling his father dad. He called him dad and not grandpa, in public places, in the plaza, in the small corner store where they bought provisions. As a child he spent more time with his father-grandfather than with his mother, who always avoided him, tending hurriedly to his needs without ever speaking or playing. Later, when he grew up, it took him a long time to understand—he was at least sixteen years old when he fit the puzzle together! He forced himself to hate his father-grandfather, unsuccessfully. When he found out the truth, from exactly that day onward, his life twisted up and turned unhappy. That’s why he started to look for consolation in birds. Only when he was observing or reading about birds did he feel secure. He discovered, for example, that incest is normal among certain species. There are tons of birds that copulate happily with each other and never stop to think whether it’s correct or not. Who has the right to tell them it’s wrong, that they should stop it immediately? Certainly not him! Luckily, birds have saved him from resentment, among other things.