This happened at the end of the ’90s, when everything seemed to flow or float. We’d rented a house in Recoleta because it was close to my father’s job. Of course, calling it “close” was kind of ironic. Before he went to work for the first time, my father tried to tell me about his job: he drew a stick man with an enormous head and a triangle as a hat. He drew a half moon as a mouth and two angled lines as eyes. “Like this, see?” he said, pulling at the corners of his own eyes with his index fingers, making them squint. “Chinitos. Your dad works with the Chinese,” he said, although in reality they were Koreans. He used to repeat it to impress me. But I wasn’t surprised so much that people with squinty eyes existed as that there was a whole country full of them. I was struck by the thought that if I went with him on one of his trips, I would be the one with strange eyes. Of course I never did, I never even went to Patronato, where the Koreans he worked with had their stores. Either I didn’t understand this, or they didn’t tell me, but the trouble had a name—“The Asian Crisis”—and it would have implications for my family a year and a half later.

It wasn’t the first time my father was unemployed, but it was the most dramatic. He was always inventing businesses that didn’t work out, or that he left half finished. I remember that for a time he drove a taxi, and before that he’d rented a storefront on San Diego to sell plastic bowls, cups, peelers, and plates. He said he couldn’t have a normal job because he couldn’t stand to have the bosses telling him what to do. I guess he was a bit traumatized by his father, my grandfather, who was very strict. He’d been a policeman, and he encouraged my father from the time he was little to follow in his footsteps. The handcuffs had been his. He gave them to us along with a set of batons. They were to protect the family, although the only time they were ever used was when I took Sonia prisoner. Maybe my grandfather gave them to my father to throw it in his face, to show him how unprotected he was, how vulnerable. To remind him what he could have been and was not.