My mother never reproached him for it. She feigned—the way so many things are feigned in a marriage to keep it on an even keel—that she hadn’t noticed. His obsession worried her almost as much as it worried me: I was beginning to fear my father was going off his rocker like Don Quixote, only the other way around: not from too much reading but from too much writing. She knew my father needed to make that voyage alone, not because he harbored any literary ambitions but because confronting the words was his way of discovering who he really was and trying to recover the memory and the spirit of the mother he had lost when he was four years old.

I remember one day when I woke up with a start shortly before dawn. My heart was beating furiously, and I could hardly breathe. I had dreamed that my father was dissolving into the mist, and I was losing him forever. It wasn’t the first time. I jumped out of bed and ran down to the bookshop. I found him in the back room, still in a solid state, a battlefield of crumpled pages strewn around his feet. His fingers were ink-stained and his eyes were bloodshot. He’d placed an old photograph of Isabella on the desk, taken when she was nineteen, the one we all knew he always carried with him because he was terrified of forgetting her face.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t give her life back to her.”

I held back my tears and looked into his eyes. “I’ll do it for you,” I said. “I promise.”

My father, who always smiled at my occasional outbursts of seriousness, embraced me. When he let go of me and saw that I was still there and I had been speaking in earnest, he offered me his fountain pen. “You’ll need this. I don’t even know what side it’s supposed to write with . . .”

I studied that dreadful-looking gadget and slowly shook my head. “I’ll use a typewriter,” I declared. “An Underwood, the professional’s choice.”

I’d seen that phrase, “the professional’s choice,” in a newspaper ad, and it had impressed me. It was quite something to think that just owning one of those contraptions of the size and tonnage of a steam engine might transform you from an amateur journalist to a professional writer.

My declaration of intentions must have caught my father by surprise. “So now you want to be a professional writer? With an Underwood and all that?”

While we’re at it, I thought dreamily, one with an office on the top floor of a Gothic skyscraper, imported cigarettes galore, a dry martini in one hand and a muse sitting on my lap, wearing blood-red lipstick and expensive black underwear. That, anyway, is how I imagined the professionals at the time, at least the ones who created those detective novels that soaked up my sleep, my soul, and some other things too. Great expectations aside, I didn’t miss the slight hue of irony beneath my father’s affectionate tone. If he was going to question my vocation, we were bound to argue.