Secret labs

By the end of my second year in elementary school, my Scottish friend and I had become an ebullient, mischief inclined pair. As a result, my English improved from the primitive pidgin state to a recognizable, if still tentative, language. We got into the habit of waiting for the morning break at school and then take advantage of the short lapse of freedom to set off together and explore those rooms in the upper floors of the school building to which access to pupils was strictly prohibited. Not that we ever found any hidden treasure in any of them, but the very sound of the words "strictly prohibited" would make it an irresistible call to adventure. We were often caught and punished, but being among the school best pupils, the punishment handed out to us was usually much more lenient than what others received for lesser misdemeanors.



I tried repeatedly to convince her of the beauty of molecules and chemistry. When I once mentioned that with knowledge of chemistry one can produce things that explode, she finally started to pay attention. I invited her over to my place and showed her the thing I was most proud of: my chemistry lab.

My mother, who saw that my interest in chemistry had taken a very theoretical side, with molecular models, atomic orbitals and all that, had in fact decided that I needed a wet lab to make it all more concrete. In those days, there was a toy that was sold for children age 11 and older, which went under the name "The little chemical scientist" and consisted of a collection of glass tubes and various chemical substances with which to make experiments. There were solutions that changed color, things that produced big colorful flames, and my all time favorite: crystals that grew to considerable size. Despite the fact that I was a mere 7 years old, well below the age limit for this toy, my mother bought it for me and I set up my nicely equipped lab.



I doubt it that, nowadays, it would still be possible to buy such toys for children, with a supply of inflammable, toxic substances, and reactions that generate stinking fumes and bursts of flames. People don't trust their children anymore these days it seems.

My lab grew considerably in size the following year, when my mother took on a new job. She began teaching in a school that trained the specialist of the fashion design industry, which already back then constituted that part of the nation's main export.
When one says fashion design, people instinctively think of anorexic models on the catwalk and queer fashion designers dressed in black silk. Well, that's right, but there's a lot more going on behind the scene. There is the large industry of textile, especially silk, production, with the chemical labs that produce the dyes and pigments, the art historians that provide the themes and sources of inspiration for the "collections" that are produced every year, the highly specialized training of the people who learn how to make those drawings. Most of the people working in the field had passed through a specific school, where they were taught the secrets of the trade. I suspect my mother's decision to take on that job was as much motivated by her interest in art history and creative drawing as by the fact that the school had a large and lavishly equipped chemistry lab, with which it made consulting for all the firms in the trade on the production of textile dyes.

The school was closer to the place where we lived, so my mother no longer had a long train commute to get back home in the evening, but she quickly befriended the head of the chemistry labs at her new workplace and given free access to them. So she often stayed extra hours after her classes were over, to enjoy herself with chemistry research. Mostly the lab over there was equipped to investigate the bonds of various new brands of synthetic dye to fabric, especially silk and cotton. A very applied kind of research, driven by the immediate needs of the local industry, but I suppose still interesting enough on the theoretical side to give satisfaction to my mother's scientific curiosity.



So she was still coming home very late, but she sometime brought me spare glasses from their lab for me to use in my small scale home made experiments. Having real glasses from a real chemistry lab made me feel like I was doing real science. It felt great. I even got a lab coat and some extra substances for my experiments when I ran out of the ones contained in the original package.

I managed to impress my Scottish friend with my enhanced lab, but when she tried asking her parents for a box of the same "little chemical scientist" package, they adamantly refused on the ground that the toy box specifically said it was meant only for children at least eleven years of age and to be used only with adult supervision, while we were only seven years old and clearly intended to play with it on our own. That wasn't the end of the story though. She saved pocket money for quite a while until there was enough to get the box. We went to the toy store and with a cleverly improvised story about a present for a non-existent older brother she convinced the clerk to sell us the chemistry box. Out on the sidewalk we carefully inspected our catch. The next question was a more difficult one to solve: how do you hide a fully equipped chemistry lab with burners, flasks, stinking and colorful fumes, from the eyes and nose of inquisitive parents. After debating for a while we came out with a perfect solution: the storage room down in the basement of her apartment building. That lasted for a while, until neighbors became suspicious and alerted her parents. I was banned from their house and forbidden to see her outside of school. At the end of elementary school we went off to different school and lost track of each other. Out of curiosity, now that I am writing up this story in this blog, I looked up her name on Google and found her PhD thesis, in Chemistry, at a respectable American university. It is such a pleasure to see that parents sometime are unable to screw up their children's future, hard as they may try!

Objects trouvés

There were a number of objects around the house that caught my attention since early childhood, objects that belonged to the world of adults, shrouded in mystery, exerting
an aura of necessity about them - objects whose presence was needed, essential, whose services were sought for aims I was eagerly trying to envision.



There was the Olivetti typewriter. That was one thing in the house whose noisy presence was almost incessantly felt. My father was an early bird: he would wake up naturally at four in the morning, promptly get up, raise all the curtains, open all the windows and turn on all the lights in the house, presumably with the intention to show widely to the neighborhood the virtuous hard worker that he was, and prevent anybody else from having a good sleep until a more humane hour of the day. He would fix himself coffee and then sit at the typewriter and work away until it was time for me to get up and get ready for school. My mother, on the contrary, was not a morning person, to say the least. She would begin working in the evening, after my father had already gone to sleep and I was also put to bed. The typewriter was back in use then and she would keep on working through the night. Ordinarily, she would go to sleep shortly before the time when my father woke up in the morning, but unfortunately their schedule was not always to carefully timed. The worst times of the day, besides the meal times, were the brief periods in the evenings or in the mornings when their waking time accidentally overlapped.

There finally came the day when I was allowed my share of the use of the typewriter, in the hours of the afternoon, when I was back from school. I perceived that as an important step into the slow and painful rite of passage that gradually gives access to the world of grownups. Being able to type my own writings acquired an enormous importance to me, be it uncertain poems, musings over plants and minerals, or summaries of my readings about the distant civilization of the Pacific islands. I felt that by typing them up I was giving my own thoughts more weight, more credibility in the currency of the adult world, where thoughts of children are so easily dismissed as irrelevant. I typed anything I happened to think about: descriptions of chemical experiments, short stories, dreams, summaries of books.

I was fascinated by the typewriter and the strange distribution of letters on the keyboard, so different from the order in which children were asked to recite the alphabet in first grade. When I was told that the letters have been distributed in that order to slow down the typing so that it would not jam the machine I was flabbergasted: I typed slowly then, with just one or two fingers, and I had barely learned how to find the letters in the right places on the keyboard. I could hardly imagine somebody typing so fast as to jam the machine. I was even told that the order of letters on the keyboard had to be designed in different ways for different languages, because letters occur with different frequencies, and that got me to regard these machine with even more of a sense of wonder.



There were other mechanisms, no less fascinating. The adding machine looked almost like a typewriter, with a keyboard and a lever, but it did something magnificent and mysterious: it added and multiplied numbers! It took a longer time for me to gain access to the adding machine: it probably was a more expensive piece of equipment and my parents feared, rightly, that I might try to take it apart to find out how it worked. Finally, after I promised repeatedly that I would not try to open it and take the mechanism apart, I was allowed to use it. It was hard to resist the temptation to do exactly what I had promised not to do: I wanted to know how a simple punching of keys and turning of a wheel could perform what I thought only a sentient being was able, sometime with effort, to achieve. Musing over the adding machine, trying to imagine how it might have worked, without having the possibility to verify my hypotheses, was probably what got me to develop an early attraction for the idea of automated computation and I started dreaming the dream of our modern civilization, the dream of intelligent machines. It would be a few years still until I could get my hands on my first computer, but the germs of the fascination I felt with it when the time came had been planted already with the mechanical keys and wheels of the old adding machine.



The most exciting of all the object of the grownup world that surrounded me was certainly the slide ruler. It was a beautiful piece cast in ivory, which had once belonged to my paternal grandfather, the engineer, who had passed it on to my father when he became a student of architecture. This was no adding machine. There was no hidden mechanism to explore or guess: the functioning was all in full sight and very simple apparently. I understood that I had reached a further step in conceptual abstraction, where the difficulty of things did not lie in the complicated way in which a mechanism is assembled (that had always been for me, up to that point, the notion of "complicated") but in something conceptual that resides entirely inside the mind. There was a concept, a mathematical one, by virtue of which the mechanism turned something apparently trivial, like sliding two narrow plates one past the other, into a sophisticated calculation. Something called logarithms. And there were books with tables of logarithms which were consulted in the process of calculation. The slide ruler gave me a different sense of curiosity, not the maverick desire to take mechanisms apart to see how their building blocks are put together, but a sense of longing for deeper understanding, for getting hold of the key that opens the door of meaning.

The home and the world

After some time in school, I was able to spot who were the other misfit in the class, and I began to make some friends. Mine was probably the first generation that was exposed to a moderate amount of multiculturalism: of the forty children in the class only four spoke a different language at home. One was a Persian whose family had smelled trouble and left the country ahead of the Islamic Revolution. One was a Guatemalan, who was having the hardest time in school, the language being so similar that it was nearly impossible to eliminate systematic mistakes. One was a stiff Protestant Swiss German and the fourth, who was to become my closest ally in mischief, was a British who spoke with a very quaint Scottish accent. They were the only other people in that large crowd who looked with puzzlement at things everybody else gave for granted, and who, like me, seemed to perennially ponder over the Chatwin question: "What am I doing here?"

While I continued to speak proper language with the grownups, with my peers I ended up adopting a curious pidgin, born of a most improbable combination of languages.

My father, who noticed that I was so bored at school and who worried about my increasing use of pidgin instead of proper linguistic expressions, decided that, if I was going to speak in several languages, I might as well do it properly. He signed me up for a weekend language school that offered a package of intensive courses for school children covering three major European languages.

It was all very well with that, until my mother realized that one of the three languages I was learning was German. She stormed into the school and dragged me out of the classroom in the middle of a lecture, screaming that over her dead body I was ever going to speak a word of German.

For somebody whose father narrowly escaped ending his days in Auschwitz, and who grew up in the part of the country where German occupation had been the most atrocious, the reaction is understandable.

Learning those languages at that age, however, would have been a very good idea, and if I am still, to this day, using pidgin instead of proper languages when I move around Europe, it is probably due largely to that missed opportunity.

The stuff things are made of

During my first year in school I came to discover something wonderful, whose existence I couldn't even suspect. It didn't happen because of the school, or maybe only indirectly, by effect of the fact that after this new phase of my life began, my mother began to spend a lot more time with me than she had done in previous years. I guess that, somehow, I must have become a more interesting company by then.

My mother had a great secret passion. If you have caught the hints I dropped in previous postings, you already know which.

She had always been the best student at each and every school she attended (for the sake of knowledge only, it is understood). When she was about to finish school and ready to make the crucial decision on a course of higher studies, my grandfather arranged for her to meet his childhood friend, at the time not yet, but soon to become, Nobel laureate. I do not know what conversation took place, but something must have ignited the easily combustible material that constitutes a bright young inquisitive mind. Was it something about the synthesis of macromolecules, about the marvels of polymerization? I do not know. Chemistry became my mothers ever present secretly cultivated life passion.



Why a secret passion and not also a life career? Good question, one that neither I nor, I believe, my mother ever had a clear answer for. Being the bright student she was, she easily won admission, and with flying colors, to the Chemistry program of the then best university in the country, the Polytechnique where the famous chemical scientist himself had studied. She obtained a highly competitive fellowship to support her studies away from home, loved the place and started off distinguishing herself immediately as, needless to say, the best student in the program. She was all set and ready to march on into a bright future of laboratories, experiments, discoveries, passion and wonder.

Very soon and very unexpectedly, she quit the Chemistry program she was enjoying so much and transfered to the Architecture program within the same Polytechnique. It was only thanks to the fact that she immediately became the best student in the other program as well, that she was allowed to maintain her fellowship and continue.

Childhood is a state of captivity we seek at all costs to escape. Often parents fail to realize how badly their offspring need to get rid of their large looming shadows. There is nothing worse parents can do to their grown up children than failing to set them free. She loved Chemistry but could not stand the idea of her father still there breathing on her neck, with his friends, his expectations, his projections. She much preferred to sacrifice the one thing she loved the most and be free, than to remain chained to the umbilical chord of childhood. Her father, who understood the reason behind her choice, did not forgive her. She ran off to her newly chosen destiny and they remained on non-speaking terms for twenty years.



As soon as I was old enough to go to school, my mother started talking to me about Chemistry. I learned how things are made of different elements, and that the varieties of combinations of these ninety something building blocks are responsible for all the different qualities of the things we see: the fact that water is liquid and transparent, the smell of ammonia that spreads around when the cat pees, the fact that certain objects are opaque, shiny, translucent, solid or liquid, it all boils down to these things called molecules. It was the most incredibly wonderful thing I had ever heard, but there was more. There were different bonds between atoms that formed molecules and a way to understand how the physical properties of the different elements recur in families. There was the periodic table. My mother drew for me, using the same large drawing table she used for the architecture blueprints, a giant size reproduction of Mendeleev's periodic table. It occupied the whole stretch of the wall along which my bed stood. I stared at it at night, reading with fascination, atomic number, atomic radius, isotope abundance, melting and boiling points. I noticed that only two of the elements are liquid at ordinary temperature (do you know which ones?). There were other, more mysterious numbers: electronegativity, first ionization energy; and then there was the most wonderful thing of all: electron configuration. Those cryptic codes like 3d^6 4s^2 (that's Iron) or 4d^10 5s (Silver) or 2s^2 2p^3 (Nitrogen) were a code that matched a large drawing my mother had added to the side of the main table, which illustrated schematically a nucleus, surrounded by shells where, she told me, the electrons resided. Some of these orbitals were round (s) some had more complicated shapes (p,d,f). I noticed (I had long hours to look at this thing every night) how p only appeared with atomic number 5 and then again with 13, d only with 21, and then once again with 39. The very last of the transuranic elements were decorated with question marks. Mother told me that we do not really know they are there, but they are expected on the basis of the structure of the shells. What a marvel science was, which could predict such wonders! Other children had guardian angels looking over their sleep. I had guardian atomic shells.



When she saw that I was completely hooked up on the periodic table of the elements, we began to explore the wider world of molecules. That's when I got the most beautiful toy I ever had: a kit to build molecular models.



I would rush to school in the morning, tucking away in the pockets of my coats all the best samples I had built the night before. I showed to everybody the shape of water and ammonia, and when even the molecules of sulphuric acid and nitroglycerine had failed to impress my classmates, I slowly extracted from my pocket the marvel of marvels: the benzene ring! They thought I was showing them some strange bracelet and they showed me bead chains and little mirrors. I was totally baffled.

All the colors of red

Ideological education is a heavy burden to carry.

My parents were suspicious of any conventional toys I may ask for. When they took me on vacation to a sea resort in the summer, I told them that I too wanted some of the little toy cars the other children were playing with on the beach. My father promptly gave me a long and detailed explanation on how toy cars are crypto-fascist instruments of capitalist propaganda. Being the instinctively cynical person I've always been, I thought he just didn't want to buy me a new toy. I was wrong: within a few days I got a large supply of toy excavators, trucks, bulldozers, cranes, tractors and all the imaginable forms of progressive and proletarian motorized vehicles.

Admittedly, an excavator is a lot more fun than a racing car for playing in the sand!



When one day during my first years in school I came home to my mother boasting that I was the best in the class, she beat the hell out of me, telling me (rightly) that one learns things for the pleasure of knowledge and not out of a desire to be better than other people. She yelled at me and insulted me, saying that I was an individualist. Not that, at the time, I had a completely clear idea of what "individualist" meant, but it was certainly something akin to "filthy worm crawling in the mud".

The most serious drawback with this type of education is the fact that I grew up in a world which does not exist and never did. Communism was a beautifully concocted fairytale of the modern era, but its proletarian workers paradise was no more real than dragons, wizards, and princesses of the fairytales of old. More desirable perhaps, more interesting, but certainly no more real.

I believe this contributed substantially in generating that feeling of misplacement that accompanied me through most of my life. In the beginning of my school years, this combined with the fact that I was out of phase with the pace of school education, and surrounded by other children whose families couldn't have been more remote from the world my parents belonged to.

People familiar with other educational systems may at this point wonder why I did not simply enroll directly in the third or fourth instead of the first grade in school, if I was already substantially ahead with things like reading and writing. It seems like a natural idea, but in the country where I grew up this is explicitly forbidden by the law. One cannot enroll in the year (N+1)-st of school education unless one has already attended all the years from 1 to N.
I was told that the reason for this regulation is to prevent parents from creating freak child prodigies who are total social misfits. One has to consider whether it is more alienating to be in the company of children of the same age with whom you have very little in common to communicate, or to be surrounded by slightly older children who share a number of similar experiences.

My social skills with the other children had improved slightly from the preschool days. I had by then learned that there are other possible modes of interaction besides physical confrontation, but I still had a sense of unease. They showed me toys whose purpose and meaning I did not understand, and they seemed even more baffled by the ones I showed them. They talked a great deal about things that had something or another to do with TV, but when I started commenting on how interesting the cathodic tube was, they would go off and talk to someone else.

The trouble is that to me TV, for the very brief period of my life when there was one in the house, was a very interesting machine and it fascinated me like other mechanical devices that belonged to the world of adults, but it never was anything more than that. I think I must have been directly responsible for its final demise.



It was a very old apparatus, sitting precariously on a small coffee table in the corner of a room. Black and white only, of course. The process of turning it on was the most interesting thing about it. It took a good twenty minutes to complete. At first, nothing happened and the screen remained dark. Then, after a few minutes, a minute spec of light appeared in the middle of the screen. It stayed there, mute, shining without anything better to do. Slowly (very slowly) the small bright dot grew in size until the whole screen shone of white light. This wasn't it yet. At this point the object simply appeared to be a table lamp, but another transformation was taking place. The white light transformed itself in horizontal lines of gray, that moved up and down the screen and finally these turned into images and sounds. At that point it ceased to be interesting and I usually switched it off again. I must have been switching it on and off so many times, just to look closely at the process by which the cathodic tube lit up, that pretty soon it broke down irreparably and that was it. My parents were waiting for a good excuse to get rid of the TV-set anyway, since TV also did not fit very well with the principles of ideological education, so they never made any attempt to replace it.

That was the last time when I had direct access to TV. The next time in my life when I watched something at my place was in Boston in 1999, when I put the first DVD I ever bought (the movie Dr.Strangelove) into the drive of my desktop computer. In between, I had to do with the occasional TV watching at a friend's place, in my teens, after some study session. Did I miss anything? You tell me.

Learning

School was a tremendous disappointment.

Most children begin to learn how to read and write when they first enter elementary school at the age of six. Having learned how to read at two, I had a four year head start advantage. Four years are an eternity in childhood and I had filled it by reading a large number of books.



There are some that I remember fondly from the early days of my reading adventures. My parents were very careful in the choice of children books: they wanted to be sure to maximize the amount of learning that could be derived from any given book. They were selected for cultural as well as political content.

A very beautiful one was called "The island of the magic squares" and it also marked my first introduction to Art. The book was a fairytale cleverly concocted out of a juxtaposition of paintings by Paul Klee.



I myself was inspired to try some artistic creations. My parents, who among other things Architects ended up doing for a living have been often working in graphic design, had all sorts of material one could dream of, colors, brushes, paint. Soon all the walls in our apartment, up to the height of about three feet, were covered by my frescoes, resembling more Pollock than Klee. Every once in a while, when I had exhausted all the available space on the walls, they would pass a coat of white paint over everything and I was ready to start again.



I had another book with interesting artistic connection, an anti-war booklet meant for older children, illustrated by the anarchist painter Enrico Baj, full of his grotesque generals in uniform and gloomy images of nuclear war.



Some more of my early readings included a beautiful series of three books, "Jungle", "Prehistoric World", and "Pirates" that my father found for me. They contained a good deal of information, presented as an succession of short essays, poems, and artistic drawings, along with a series of simple games I could do on my own, from constructing a cardboard model of a prehistoric fish, to recognizing and reproducing footprints of various animals, to building model pirate vessels out of cereal boxes.

Books were people talking to me. They were the door to the world. Being an only child of working parents, at least until the time when I was old enough to roam the streets with other kids, books were my closest friends.

I slowly moved into more demanding readings, those without illustrations, written in small type and bound in small pocket format, in other words, those that are not meant to catch the eye of children. By the time I started going to school I was already in the habit, which I am still following now, of never leaving home without having at least a book in my pocket.

So, when I finally went to school, in the period while others were still struggling to distinguish one letter of the alphabet from another, I was making my first tentative steps in reading Voltaire, at first with my mother's help, soon on my own.

I understood it perfectly that the other children were just as intelligent and talented as I, but for some reason they had been deprived of a whole four years of education. Even with my adult understanding, I still don't get it why a simple and fundamental learning process is delayed by so much: at an early age the plasticity of a child's brain is enormous, learning how to read is a simple task, the simpler the sooner it is done.

I was bored and restless at school. I wouldn't get it that pupils were supposed to sit at their desks and as soon as I was bored with what was going on, which was very soon, I just shot off to somewhere else in the room and started playing some games on my own. This didn't go down well with the discipline of a conservative school and it was immediate open war between me and the "authorities".

Even though school was not the exciting adventure I had envisioned, something remarkable happened around that time. My mother began to spend a lot more time with me than she had ever done before. I felt as if I had undergone a rite of passage and I was finally worthy of her full attention.

The wind of revolution

It wasn't only in my immediate surroundings that life was in turmoil, but the world at large seemed to echo the high waves we had been wading. One of my earliest sharp memories was of a big commotion in the streets, large crowds assembling with banners, an overall palpable tension in the air, my own parents at home in the same agitated state. A name was repeated many times, "Allende". Somewhere, on a far away corner of the world, one of the most brutal military putsches in history was unfolding. It was the 11th of September, 1973.

While Latin America was being brutalized by military fascists, while the Soviet Union sank into the deep freeze of the Brezhnev era, Western Europe was still blooming in dreams of revolution. Students occupied all the venues of higher learning and turned them into a permanent Woodstock. Philosophers delivered fiery speeches calling people to arms against the tyranny of the bourgeois society. Interpersonal and social relations were undergoing deep changes like metamorphic rocks. They were being reconstituted and reinvented. People were beginning to shed off the burden of traditional society at last, but repression was quick on their heels. Philosophers ended up in jail, students were beaten up by ruthless police forces, anarchists were defenestrated. When a future Nobel laureate for literature protested against the brutality of the repression, his theater house was burnt down and his company evicted. Anyone who called for a radical change in the texture of society was branded a dangerous terrorist.

I might have ended up among them, had I been some fifteen years older. I fit the right psychological profile and that's why I raise red flags with any security agency I come in contact with. I never had the occasion to become a real troublemaker though, I was always too young or too busy with other occupations. I produced my best over my high school years, and got all the right training on how to "hold the square" during a demonstration and similarly useful skills I seldom practiced later in life.

Back to my childhood days, my parents and their friends had been with the revolutionary movement from the start. As former resistance fighters in the late stages of World War II, they sympathized with the new student uprising against a society where fascism had been slowly creeping back, even though by then they were too old to mingle with that crowd of teenagers. I knew Communist and Anarchist songs long before I had heard any of the popular children tunes of the day.

When it came to sending me to school, all of a sudden I was faced with a very different type of environment. At the time, public schools did not offer extra curricular afternoon hours for the pupils whose parents were at work until five or six in the evening. Only a few private schools had that service available. Additionally, my father's parents increased steadily their pressure on the choice of the school. With all those Jews, Anarchists, Communists, and other riffraff in the family, they demanded that I be given at least a few years of proper education in a proper catholic school. Given that the private schools offering afternoon hours were all run by catholic organizations, and that there happened to be one just a block away from where we lived, my parents reluctantly agreed.

That was my first encounter with religion and within a week I was a militant atheist.



When I confided one day to my mother that I couldn't stand churches, priests and nuns, and all that mambo jambo about gods, angels, and demons, she approvingly gave me Voltaire's "Dictionnaire philosophique", which became one of my favorite childhood books.

Others

There were other things that happened during that first stretch of time of my life, before I walked through the first gate and stepped into the social life of preschool. As the reader might have guessed from my quick overview, there were streaks of shadows coloring the family history. These days people prefer to call it bipolar disorder, because the traditional name manic-depression was telling the truth too crudely. The rose by any other name. Like a rose, it has fragrance and thorns and both are transmitted with the chromosomes.

My mother took the full brunt. The worst came, as it often does, after giving birth, and by the time I was ready to get into the outer world of social relations, she was passed her second suicide attempt. I have too blurred a memory of that period to try to concoct a precise storytelling, but one detail I do remember is the dress she wore on the day when she returned home after what had seemed to me like an enormously long period of hospitalization. (It might have lasted just a few days for what I know, but that's how a two years old child perceives things.)

The preschool years, three of them altogether, consisted of a collection of very different experiences. During the first year I was a sickly child, with frequent high fevers that needed endless injections. Within weeks I got to be scared of the sound of the doorbell, which I expected would bring the nurse with the painful needles. This went on for quite some time, creating all sorts of trouble, because what do you do with a sick child when both parents are off at work with a long commute by train? After my mother had to take an unpaid leave of absence, which further deteriorated her general mental state for reasons that are plainly obvious, the crisis was finally resolved by a simple tonsillectomy and I was as good as new.

This ordeal occupied much of my first year in preschool. The second year was altogether different and no less eventful. My mother, who had lost the job from which she took leave, had by then decided to break up with my father and move back to stay with her parents for some time, while she was looking for a new job. I went along, not so much because I was consulted about it (I might have agreed if I had been) but because children are captives of the adult world and so be it.



I remember vaguely a Montessori preschool in the town near the sea. This was different from the preschool I had seldom seen during the previous year, in between my bouts of fever. The basic principle of the Montessori method, that children are capable of self-directed learning activities, appealed to me a lot, but its material realization I found disappointing.

Meanwhile, huge storms were brewing up. My mother, who ran away from home at age eighteen, was ill at ease finding herself back with her parents a good twenty years later. My troubled grandfather, who in the last years of his life had taken up a course of higher education in philosophy, brooding over Horkheimer's "Eclipse of Reason" and over the ghosts of his past, my mother's younger sister, who spent most of her time in extreme mountain climbing, and my twice fugitive mother were making up an explosive combination. The cold reproaching looks of my grandmother ignited it all and, after a fistfight between the two sisters left blood stains on my grandmother's lace tablecloth, we were back to my father's place.

There began my third year of preschool, in the same place where I had done my first. This time I was healthy and strong and I didn't miss a day. So there came a time when I finally discovered the other children. During the previous year I had discovered my cousin, who was my same age, but now that I was alone again I finally noticed that others were there. I cannot say much in praise of my social skills: mostly I learned how to fight. I had a powerful jab, thrown with my left fist, which was good enough to discourage anyone looking for a fight. I applied it with generosity.

After establishing my dominance by brute force, I resorted to a trick which must be well known to all primitive societies where clan structure is based on the same principles that dominate the social life of five year old children. I appealed to magical thinking. Children (and not a few adults) are doused in magical thinking and it's always easy to manipulate that to one's advantage. I challenged others to bite my arm as hard as they possibly could, claiming that my supernatural strength would cause me to feel no pain. It was just good psychological control, but it sufficed to enshrine my position in the group without fear of further challenge. I despised it all. I kept spending my days there, in that same dusty courtyard, waiting for my parents to return from work and bring me home. Home was the place where interesting things happened. I liked home back then.



Both my parents liked to spend time playing games with me and my toys. Because they did not like each other's company, and because both had other work to do, I had separate playing sessions with either one of them. At around that time my toys were conventional, for a brief period. My father, who for incomprehensible reasons was fond of old Western movies of the John Wayne and Gary Cooper type, had given me a set of toy soldiers with Indians and Cowboys. No toy soldiers of the modern World War II type were ever allowed in the house. The playful revival of a genocide that happened a century earlier in another continent is easier than the one that happened yesterday in your backyard. I didn't give the Cowboys as much as a second look, but the Indians had red skins, wore feathers, spoke to eagles and had, at least in my playful narrative, a control over the forces of nature that white skin with forked tongue couldn't dream of. So it was that, in my games, American history took a much different course.

My mother spent less time with me, in those days, than father did. She was working hard, late into the night. She had a longer commute to go to work each day, came home later and generally too tired to do much with the remains of her day. When she had time for me, she told me beautiful stories, of animals living in the jungles, of distant worlds made of giant clouds, moons covered with ice, asteroids, deep oceans where whales sang long and beautiful songs. I had a poster of the craters of the moon hanging next to my bed and she showed me places up there where people walked. They had strange and mysterious names: "Sea of Tranquility", "Ocean of Storms", "Descartes", "Taurus-Littrow".

Then the time came when something very promising was about to begin: a word I heard many times, which evoked wonders and mysteries in my mind, another door that was about to open up into a new era of life -- school.

Origins

It was in that brief part of early childhood, before and during the time when I went to preschool, that I got to meet my grandfathers. Both were born in the 19th century, both of them fought in World War I and were too old to fight in War World II. Both died at a ripe old age in the 1970s, one of colon cancer, the other of cardiovascular complications. My grandmothers were also born in the 19th century, but both of them lived well into their late 90s, so I got a chance to know them a little better.

Generations walked with long strides in my family, across large stretches of history. The world of my grandparents youth had not yet seen the Russian Revolution, nor the World Wars. It was a world in which gentlemen officers in Austrian-Hungarian uniforms and white gloves sat in cafes thinking of wars still in terms of Napoleonic campaigns. The world my parents grew up in was a hell of carpet bombing, concentration camps and gas chambers, of resistance fighters and invading armies. My childhood took place at the height of the Cold War, in a nuclear age where people walked in space, and lasted up until the early days of the Perestroyka. How can one try to take a family picture when history rushes past at such a speed!

My mother's family had an interesting history. My grandmother belonged to a decayed noble family where generations of manic-depressive had squandered the patrimony, destroyed the "good name" of the family, and blew their heads off or jumped off moving trains, or committed other highly choreographic suicides. In the time of my grandmother their best possession was debts.

My grandmother was the most frigid person you could possibly imagine. She was afraid, even terrified, of any display of emotions. Who wouldn't, after growing up in that clan of people whose emotional lives had been a category five hurricane.

Unlike most women in the early years of the 20th century, my grandmother worked all through her life. She held a highly coveted state employment as a teacher, a very highly regarded job in those days. As part of an attempt to unify the languages of a country that had never been a country, teachers were sent to work in places often far away from their own town of origin. So it was that she, who oddly enough bore the first name of a Roman emperor, found herself the school teacher of a small village on a steep mountain range that looks down on blue Mediterranean waters. Fishermen folks, for the first time obliged by a distant authority to send their children to school.

That is where she met and married my grandfather, who, being a Jew and therefore the only villager who could read and write properly, had become the headmaster of the school. How could he possibly not fall in love with the newly arrived teacher from the city, with the aristocratic manners and the cold distant look?

My grandfather was himself familiar with stormy mood disorders and the fact that my grandmother, despite her fears of everything emotional and irrational, decided to marry him just confirms uncounted numbers of psychological theories I won't bother to recall here.

He came from a family of people who fancied themselves descendant from none other than the great Darius of the Greco-Persian Wars and who gave their children names such as Xerxes, Artaphernes, Anatolia, Lydia, Olympus, just to make it as clear as possible that they wanted nothing to do with the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Additionally, my grandfather and his father were Anarchists, who were not extraneous to thinking that blowing up a king of two would have done the country a lot of good. Instead, in the muddy trenches of World War I, it was my grandfather's skull that was blown up by a shrapnel, the missing piece of bone later replaced by a large metal plaque.

The dark side of my grandfather's personality fully emerged only after the end of World War II, when he returned from a Nazi concentration camp were prisoners due to be shipped off to the crematories of Birkenau were kept in wait for a repair of the railroad tracks, which fortunately never took place. He owed his life to those bombed out railroad running along the coastal line, but the post traumatic stress disorder that accompanied him ever since the months he spent in that camp clouded over in a fog of resentment and violence the rest of his days.

I don't know exactly the dynamics by which this happened, but my grandfather became very close friend in childhood with a bright kid with a special talent for science who went on some decades later to win the Nobel prize for Chemistry. This encounter had a lasting effect on my grandfather's imagination and a direct influence, some years down the line, on a special passion for science that my mother developed in her youth, but more on that later.

My father's side of the family album was quite interesting as well. His grandmother (my grand-grandmother) was a wealthy businesswoman in a time, the mid 19th century, where such a concept hardly existed. She had inherited a chain of hotels and restaurants in a big city, which she ran like clockwork making huge profit. She was prone to fits of acute depression alternating with grandiose schemes and visions. She married, because so society required, to a navy officer from whom she had two children, my grandmother and her older brother. Her married life alternated between the quiet times when her husband was out wading sea storms and the much stormier times when he was back at home. It didn't last long. He disappeared from her life one day, only to show up years later in New York. She went on with her life and business.

My grandmother was packed off to a boarding school in a nuns convent from the age of six, with the rationale that the life her mother conducted was not considered suitable for educating a well to do girl in the late 19th century. She remained with the nuns until the earliest time when it was acceptable to marry her off. So, while her mother lived a life of freedom above and beyond her time, she saw to it that her own daughter would be trapped safely back into the most conservative of bourgeois of societies. She was married off to a quiet engineer with a stable and conservative catholic background. She never worked, she spawned four children of which one died of pneumonia, and dedicated her most insignificant life to being a shadow. The surviving children, my father and his two sisters, went on to fulfill very different destinies.

My grandmother's brother, meanwhile, inherited all of my grand-grandmother's wealth and promptly squandered it in gambling, alcohol and women. Always too high or too low like his mother, but without her great sense of business, he lost himself in Casinos and bars. My grandmother, on the other hand, was never prone to manic highs, maybe because there was so little in her life to be high about, but she suffered from severe unipolar depressions culminating in repeated suicide attempts.

My father, much like my maternal grandmother, was terrified of any display of emotions and anything that he perceived as an irrational component of the human soul. His interactions with other human beings were on the verge of being autistic. The fact that my mother found herself attracted to him confirms a different sort of psychological theory that I am convinced of and that I want to put forward here: women tend to choose male partners who most resemble their own mother, never their father! Mind it, you'll see that I am right.

Beginnings

Childhood is a miserable state of captivity, which by an enormous dilation of perceptive time seems to last an eternity, even though it merely occupies a small fraction of a person's life. We humans spend a good deal of our life trying to escape the grasp of childhood and the rest trying to fend off the coming of old age. What is left in between we call living.

It is difficult to place memories in early childhood. Mostly they are reconstructed memories from later hearsay of adult witnesses, colored by adult interpretation. One can focus at least on objects that impressed a memory of themselves early on. I probably have to get to about the time when I was already between two and three years old to locate some of them.

Three years old is a good demarcation point, since that's when I started going to preschool, hence to meet other human beings of my same type (other fellow captives of the childhood shackles). Before I was alone in a world of grownups who exerted complete control over my every mode of existence.

So I will use this first landmark and talk about a before and an after. There will be many other before and afters, many other gates and passageways that separate chambers of existence. Tight sealed doors opening up at determined times and just so briefly as to let a person through. They mark the one way steps in the ascent towards adulthood.

In that first before I remember learning how to read. I was the only one who already could read in the first year of preschool. My mother taught me, with that method by which you recognize words as a whole and learn later to break them down into individual letters. I always thought I owe it to that if I can read so fast, by just taking in words without having to assemble them out of any finer structure. By comparison, with the other alphabets I learned later in life, such as Greek or Cyrillic, I had to re-learn reading in a more traditional "letters first" manner, and, even at times when I was reading in these alphabets frequently, I never managed to read as fast as with the "words first" method. On the other hand, I am totally helpless at the kind of game like saying words in reverse, as, even for simple words, I cannot build in my mind an image of them as composed of an ordered set of letters, let along read these letters one by one in the opposite direction. For much the same reason, I am very bad at telling aloud the spelling of a word, or reconstructing a word when I hear its spelling, even though I generally make very few spelling mistakes when writing.



Learning how to write wasn't as easy. I had to be told repeatedly that the left to right direction matters and that the method I was following, getting to the end of the line and starting the next line in the opposite direction, was not allowed. I much later learned how to read ancient Greek inscriptions and then I also learned the term "boustrophedonic", denoting precisely the habit of writing alternating lines from left to right and from right to left (literally, in the way the oxes drag the plough in successive furrows). This method of writing was widely used in the archaic Greek period, as well as by the Etruscan and the early Roman. It is known in Babylon and in several other ancient cultures. I wish I had known at the time when my preschool teacher yelled at me for spoiling the piece of paper she gave me with my absurd way of writing. So short is the collective memory of civilization. So close are our early individual steps into the world to the ones we collectively took as a species just a few thousands of years ago.



A beautiful toy I remember from that same before was one my parents must have found in some strange producer of psychological and cognitive tests and wasn't meant at all as a toy for pre-preschool children, but never mind that. I loved it. It was a large brown carton box containing a number of plastic objects in different shapes and colors. They came in three shapes: triangle, square, and circle; in three colors: red, yellow, and blue; in three sizes: large, medium, small; and in three levels of thickness. You get the point: it was about set theory. Group together all the things that are yellow and large but not very thick, those that are circles but not blue, and so on. I spent hours with that beautiful toy, thinking up all possible and/or/not combinations I could come up with. I guess that was my first glimpse into the mathematical mind.

Who am I?

I am the other face of Janus, the one that looks away from the future and into the past. I am the water drop that slips down the wells of memory.

I was born in 1969. I missed the Moon landing by a few months.

I can imagine my pregnant mother watching it, up into the early hours of the night, on that old black and white cathodic tube, which was the only TV set I ever saw in close quarters. How much she must have enjoyed it, my mother who loved to read stories of space travel and landings on other worlds. How great it must have felt to see the space age becoming a reality at last. How short lived that dream of people conquering space and walking on other planets.

I was born in a Mediterranean country, but too far away from the sea and too close to the mountain to experience the clemency of a warm weather.

This is a guided tour of the hallways of memory. It is the story of a romance with science and a rite of passage into many worlds.

I am half of a person now. My other half, the one who looks into the future, writes on other blogs about what will be. I have the less pleasurable task of writing about what has been.

I will climb upstream along the river of time in order to understand why I became who I am.