That same evening my mother and I looked through the trash for all the information we could find about his pet. We discovered that he had bought it in a store a few blocks from the Les Gobelins metro station in Paris, its address written on the plastic bags. When Dad set up his snake in the pagoda I was afraid that he was going to move up there to live with it. He’d spend hours sitting in front of its terrarium doing nothing but looking at it, so absorbed in his thoughts that he sometimes forgot to close the door. What was happening to him? Why, after having shared everything with Mom, was he excluding her from his search for his origins? Had he gotten tired of living in that Dutch womb? It was truly a mystery. Rather than hurt me, his incipient madness intrigued me. I started watching him through my binoculars every evening, looking from the kitchen into his den’s only window. I wanted to know what he spent so much time on in that place he had built for no apparent reason and without respect for the house’s original design. At first I held on to the hope that from his isolation a great creativity would emerge and flow into a marvelous play. But not once in all the times that I spied on him did I see him write a single line. Reading, that he did do, and when he wasn’t doing that he was sitting in a chair watching the snake. He was a sorry sight.