I was in my final year of elementary school when my parents finally separated. It should have happened much earlier for the sake of the common good, but the pressure of conformity in a society that had only so recently and reluctantly accepted modernity imposed a heavy burden on the choices of individual lives. Even then, at the height of the societal changes brought about by the sudden and much needed revolution of the late sixties and early seventies, the notion of family might have been dead and rotten, but it still held its grip on the population with remarkable tenacity.
At that time, my father had just started his new appointment as associate professor in Europe's oldest university.
Yet, when it became known that, in order to embellish his job application and increase the chances of getting the job he had appropriated work that was of my mother's and passed it off as his own, she threatened to throw all his belongings out in the street and filed for divorce. It should be mentioned that the divorce was in fact granted, not on the basis of the serious charges of misappropriation of intellectual work, which the court would not even consider, but on the ground of a silly affair my father had been having with a plump German Fräulein. Such was the mind of the time.
The long and tense years that preceded the split and the unpleasant events that surrounded it had left my mother in a despicable state. Her recurrent episodes of manic depression intensified, alternating between fits of violent rage, depths of depression, alcohol abuse and magical bouts of creative work in between. A life lived with such intensity and despair is not bound to last very long. I understood then and there that the rest of my growing up years were going to be a rush against time, to reach legal maturity and financial independence while my mother was still with me, the threatening specter of a constricted and claustrophobic life with my father looming large in the background. With all my best efforts, I only managed it by a very small margin: I left for the US on New Year's Day of 1994, at the age of 23 with the promise of a first meagre salary just after completing my studies. I had barely made it in time: two years later my mother was dead. I had succeeded in exorcising the specter of my father, the possibility of his gaining control, at least by means of financial dependence, over the course of my life. I had achieved my primary goal: the uncompromising "live free or die" call. Through all those years of tragic intensity, trying to leave childhood behind at high speed, rushing through adolescence and into maturity, I grew to despise the people who linger in childhood forever, who rely on complacent parents for financial support well into their adult life: I never asked for anything, I never got anything, except a clock ticking away, and ticking fast. Except time flying by and a feeling of urge, a need to achieve as quickly as possible my complete independence, a liberation from the quicksands of family, planning my escape like an obstacle race where I found myself over the years negotiating my way around studies, the precarious balance of family life, always on the verge of breaking apart and make my worse nightmares come true, and the historical changes of the world at large, that forced me repeatedly to make unexpected changes of plans at breathtaking speed and without having any time to think of the consequences or to look for possible alternatives. I managed it all quite well altogether, given the initial conditions, but I would not recommend to anybody this sort of "parkour" as a coming of age experience. There's enough in it to purge the most resilient romantic of the myth of idyllic childhood memories.
