I remembered my parents. They had passed away when they were still young, not quite sixty, a few months apart. Almost like Philemon and Baucis, a myth my mother loved. I hadn’t had time to have a proper talk with them. I knew very little about my father and mother. For example, I’d never known if before they met and got engaged, then married, either of them had had someone else. A desperate relationship that had ended tragically, lots of brief affairs, whatever. When I was small I found it completely unimaginable that my father could have touched a woman other than my mother, and more than unimaginable that my mother had touched a man other than my father. On some subjects they were both very bashful. When I was eight and had no idea about matters of sex and reproduction, my father gave me a lecture. It so happened that I’d asked something about eggs. Why in some cases they were normal eggs, the kind we ate – which I liked a lot – whereas in other cases they 10had chicks in them which emerged after a while, as clearly shown in schoolbooks and in comic strips and cartoons. My father explained to me that the presence of the chick depended on whether or not the hen had gone and taken a walk with the rooster. “If the hen takes a walk with the rooster,” he said, “chicks are born. Otherwise, we can eat the eggs.”

The explanation raised many more problems than it solved. While my father went back to whatever he’d been doing, clearly considering his educational duty fulfilled, I was asking myself – and would continue to ask myself for years – nagging questions, like: When exactly did the chick appear inside the egg? Was there a specific itinerary for the walk that would produce this mind-blowing outcome? What happened if the rooster and the hen were shut up in a chicken coop and not allowed to take walks?

With time, I started to have less confused ideas about certain matters, and sometimes I thought of asking my father what had induced him to tell me such a surreal story.

But I didn’t.

I sometimes make an inventory of what my parents left me. Mostly good, even crucial things. For example, a deliberately simple notion of honesty, a concept about which there shouldn’t be subtle distinctions. Respect for others. A love of ideas.

Other things they passed down to me are more ambiguous, and may be positive or negative depending on how they insert themselves in the structure of a personality. Among these is the conviction, as radical as a moral imperative, that you should always get by on your own. I think the precept has a long history, that it comes from an old, almost ancestral, fear of being in debt.11