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PARTISAN REVIEW
time the assurance of our own bodies, as if the open wound showed
us once and for all that we had been existing and that existence itself
is going. I got married somewhat late. Your mother, who lived such
a short life , passed through my house like a dream and left me my
son, already grown, but weak still and full of fear of the world . For
me fatherhood was an event so important that it changed not only
my life then but my earlier life. All that I had lived up to that mom–
ent came to be a fact which my memory retained only by imposition,
not because it had any importance . I felt, when I could call myself
father , when my son was born, that my life had begu n, in another
way, to lack meaning, at least the meaning it had had before . I felt
that my son prolonged my life a little more, saved me from the sor–
rows which I felt then and which were announcements of my
paralysis . And I must also say that in some moments I felt being a
father was a tearing apart, something related to animals, those
creatures we call animals, which feel but do not seem to notice pain.
No doubt, a less cruel form of prolongation in time belongs to us
men, and I should have preferred to divide like amoebas, because in
any case that division did not mean a rending asunder but a final
and decisive action which ended then and there. When you began to
grow up, I was tortured by the suffering of seeing you in the situa–
tion of permanent struggle with the hostile world which I knew too
well, I saw and felt your small body and weak bones, and I was afraid
of earthquakes, thieves, bats , and I don't know how many other
things . I began to go to the library to read books that might help me
protect you, books about diseases, work, and earth, astronomy, and
in general books related to whatever surrounded you above or
below, intending to protect you. That anguish fortunately soon
passed . You grew, gradually acquired that expression of yours
which means security and mastery of the world. Afterwards I
discovered that no danger could now spy you out. Then I began to
fear for myself; I suffered under the presumption that I might fail
you and not help you at some moment in your life . But at the same
time you were alive, articulating your first words, and at those
moments I almost wanted to die, to see if with my death I made your
existence more secure.
Nonetheless , that was the happiest time. Your momma , whom
you resemble so much , was still alive. Separation and fear were
remote things . In the first place, because, with the first cycle com–
pleted, separation seemed to have ended, and in that case the
definitive act of division of the amoeba had been completed, so that
