He’s a man who doesn’t spend his money; he treats it like it doesn’t belong to him (maybe that’s why he treats it like it doesn’t belong to us either, and, for that matter, never will): he buys houses and rents them to ensure a monthly income, a psychological anchor, but he doesn’t have significant expenses, and after the financial crisis he stopped leasing big sedans and trading them in every three years—he didn’t like the idea that the kids with their startups might think he wasn’t being frugal while their own efforts often went unpaid. He doesn’t live extravagantly; he has a beach house that requires significant upkeep, but he doesn’t collect wine or own a sailboat. Any thieves breaking into one of his houses would find only computers to steal, and some rococo knickknacks, and my mother’s jewelry.

None of his three children decided to follow him into his career, but we’re all good at “advancement”; we know how to “feel out a situation,” set goals for ourselves, and keep our head down. And we respect his austerity, have always accepted the fact that it was his professional habit to record our every “loan,” since we first started asking for support in college. I owed him over one hundred and thirty thousand euros; I would never be able to repay that, and I doubt he expects me to. The only one who did manage to wipe out her debt was my sister, Irene, whom we hardly ever saw, since she lived in Milan and had lost touch with us. He’d bought her place for her, but homes, my father said, weren’t part of the bill.

This agreement, which made money even more abstract than it already was, grew surreal due to the fact that we had no idea how much he’d accumulated. Someday Luca, Irene, and I would become well-off; for now, we were entitled to enough money to support our professional dreams, but not to live like the rich. Or, we were rich but couldn’t live like we were.

Being rich meant not being afraid of ending up under a bridge. Ending up under a bridge has been an absurd fear of mine ever since I was little. We “knew” that anyone could lose everything in an instant, because “the economy isn’t something that’s fair” and “when you play with investments you’re engaging in the riskiest parts of the economy.” But this isn’t the story of a son who discovers that his father has debts: it’s just the plain, ordinary story of how three kids and their mother lived peacefully thinking they had nothing and everything at the same time.

And it was only through this, I knew, that I could become an editor at an important publishing house. And here’s what’s really warped: I never even wanted to be an editor—I just couldn’t help trying my hardest to succeed. Plus, what’s the point of accruing debt if not to succeed? You go into debt to work to pay off your debt—I still find this idea bewildering. My father gave away his money, earned in a different world, in the seventies and eighties, to help me in this new century to realize a dream that wasn’t exactly mine, or his.