No other project had gotten him as excited as the one with the Koreans. Convinced he was finally going to make it big and become independently wealthy, he took out loans from several banks. An act that my mother was unaware of or hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. After everything went under, he would never be the same. He lost his energy, and for a long time he always had an expression of sad surprise on his face. Like a gambler who, almost without realizing it, has lost every last one of his chips.

These are the only things I remember about my father, the things I knew about him and those I was told. Contrary to what one would expect, after he lost his job he spent less time in the house, even less than when he used to travel to Korea. I never knew where he went and it seemed my mom didn’t either, because soon enough, the fights started.

My mother was an intelligent and ambitious woman. She was always looking ahead, unconcerned about what she might have been leaving behind. I know because she always told me stories about her poor childhood and how she had overcome it. My mother thought that she could break with her roots quickly and easily, automatically, the way you might shake the dust from your clothes after falling. She was diligent and, for a while, optimistic. She thought it was enough just to be very sure of what you wanted. I suppose that when she met my father, he must have seemed like an entrepreneur. But her plans were always met with an uphill battle. First she got pregnant and had to get married. Then she supported her husband in all of his projects and her husband ended up unemployed, and soon she realized that it, too—her marriage—had failed. Of course, my mother never thought about separating, at least not back then. For one thing, she was too conservative, and for another, accepting failure was to her even worse than the fact of failing itself.

At that time, my parents’ story was being woven almost without my realizing it. I was seven years old and the only thing I understood with any clarity was that Sonia was gone, and I had to spend some time alone in the house. Then Aunt Nana came to live with us.

She was my mother’s aunt and her name was Monica, but everyone in the family called her Aunt Nana. Though they were guarded by an enormous pair of glasses, her eyes are what I remember most. Black, with no distinction between the pupil and iris, surrounded by some sparse eyelashes that brought to mind a plucked bird. That was her aspect in general, a small animal, shorn and defenseless.