I was four years old. I woke up and my mother wasn’t there. I opened the window and screamed as much as my throat could bear it: “My mother left me!”
The truth was that she’d gone to buy bread. And she returned in five minutes.
How terrible to see me half-naked, miserable with tears as I yelled, leaning out the window on the third floor.
It was mortifying for my mother as she ran up the stairs, hoping I wouldn’t fall.
I was five years old and went to the park for the first time, on my own. The park was sprinkled with fine sand. I knew that my mother was watching from the window. So I felt safe.
I looked at the fine sand, glittering in rainbow colors. The sand was mixed with tiny bits of glass in various tints. I said, “What pretty sand.” Maja said it wasn’t sand but pieces of glass from a chandelier and a vase, and all the other things Amar’s father had thrown from the window of his apartment the day before.
Maja knew. She was older and knew. I didn’t know. It was my first time alone in the park.
Amar and his mother left. Amar’s father sat alone in the apartment with half-boarded windows and cried. So said Maja. I watched how the setting sun made a million radiant sparkles in the sand of the park.
I was seven years old. I got into a fight with Asja at school. She said I had no father. And that’s why I was a bastard child. Asja was bigger and she broke my nose.
I walked home from school with my sidekick Dario. Dario didn’t like Asja. Asja said he was a girl because he played Barbies with me. Dario promised to make an evening gown for my Barbie if I promised to stop crying.
I was fourteen. And it bothered me utterly that, when they wanted to hurt me, they said I was a bastard. I had a T-shirt that read Bastard. To make their job easier.
I went to visit Dario. They’d beaten him up three days earlier because he’d worn a pink T-shirt that read BOYTOY.
At twenty-two, the world looked a little different. Dario and I ambled along the path of the cemetery in Paris. Next to Morrison’s grave we stepped in a bog. Dario cursed the moment when he decided to wear his Prada shoes and set off into the wilds. With me. I am about to visit the grave of my father. He and my mother were together a little longer than was necessary to produce me, and a little shorter than the time that separates one new moon from the next.
Everyone has a father. No one is a bastard.
Bastard is a word invented to hurt those who aren’t like everyone else. I never saw my father. But I have his eyes. And temperament. I know that he was extraordinary. Because if he hadn’t been, my mother never would have chosen him.
At seventy, nothing is as it seems. Dario and I can sit on the balcony of some nursing home. Trade goldfish with the other old people. Cough and become children again. At seventy nothing is as harsh as it used to be, because at seventy you’re not a bastard or a faggot…at seventy you’re just old.
Translated by Jennifer Zoble