Two Saturdays after that Dad again went out without telling us where. My mother searched his clothing for the pagoda key and found it. We took advantage of his absence to enter the place he’d never invited us. I remember Mom judging everything with disapproval and disgust, as if it were an assassin’s lair rather than her husband’s sanctuary. I can’t say which was more noticeable in her expression, the disgust she felt or the sadness. I on the other hand gazed in curiosity at the objects Dad had accumulated in so little time: some blue metal balls, an etching of a yin-yang, Chinese coins, fabrics with dragon prints, a small carpet that looked antique. On his desk, the Tao Te Ching and The Chinese Oracle of Changes. It was all there, available and exposed, as if on display. I wondered if with all those symbols and esoteric texts he wasn’t trying to summon his ancestors. The snake was, for me anyway, the most interesting thing there. It must have been about a meter long. Its brown skin had round, dark marks laid out in perfect symmetry. Mom and I stopped in front of the glass. It seemed to be in a deep sleep, coiled up in a corner of the terrarium. Though we tried, we couldn’t find either its head or its face. I said to her, brightly so has to reassure her, that an animal so tame couldn’t be dangerous. But she didn’t agree with me at all and wanted to leave right away. After locking the door we put the key back and went downstairs. Mom poured herself a tall glass of whiskey on the kitchen table and summed up in a single phrase what she was thinking:

“The devil has entered our home.”

She went on for a few minutes about vipers and their characteristics, as she understood them. Temptation, selfishness, evil . . . those things were my father, according to her. He carried all that inside him ever since he returned from China.

“Look at how skinny he is! I wonder if he started smoking opium. It would be terrible but at least we’d know what was going on with him,” she concluded, leaving me stunned.