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.
