My grandmother knew she shouldn’t talk about such things in front of people, so as to protect my father, who could get into trouble. My father knew that he shouldn’t talk about other things and locked himself up with the radio in the kitchen, so as not to screw up my life (that’s what my mother said). I knew that I shouldn’t talk about anything I’d heard at home, so the police wouldn’t come and screw up my parents’ lives. A long chain of secrets and lies that made us a normal family. Like all the others. That was the greatest trick of the whole conspiracy—being like the others.
INVISIBLE INK
At five I learned to read, by six it was already an illness. The indiscriminate guzzling of books. Some kind of literary bulimia. I would read whatever I found and soon reached my mother’s bookshelf and that purple volume with a hard cover and a large title reading “Criminology.” The first chapter began with the sentence that before the socialist revolution of September 9th, criminology did not exist. While the following one, already having forgotten this, stated that the study of bourgeois criminology was necessary for two reasons: first, to denounce its reactionary essence, and second, to recover everything of value within it . . .
The denunciation was the most interesting part. Only there, between the lines and the distorted quotations, could you understand what was going on in the world after all.
Bourgeois criminology had nevertheless discovered several “minor” things, such as the lie detector, forensic psychology, dactyloscopy. I liked the title Finger Prints (1897) by some Francis Galton or other, a bourgeois criminologist.
At the root of revolutionary criminology, of course, stood Lenin. It was obvious that the criminal was in his blood. At the same time, he had laid the foundations of all the other sciences and all textbooks confirmed this ab-so-lute-ly (to use one of his favorite words). “Language is the most important means of human communication” was written above the blackboard in the classroom. That genius of the banal.
But the most interesting things in that purple textbook on criminology were the parts on forensic photography, weapons and . . . invisible ink. “Invisible inks are solutions of organic or inorganic substances: fruit juices, onion, sugar solutions, urine, saliva, quinine . . .”
This repulsed and attracted me at the same time. I had never imagined spies as bedwetters writing with urine, syrup, and spit. Scribbling your secret messages in various secretions? Ugh. On the other hand, though, the very accessibility of invisible ink was a welcome discovery. I had everything I needed at hand. For starters, I decided to forgo urine, I went down to the cellar, grabbed a jar of canned peaches, opened it and with the end of a matchstick slowly wrote out the two most secret pages in my diary.
Here I will show part of what was written with invisible fruit ink:
What, so you don’t see anything? That means it really is invisible. If only I could write a whole novel in such ink.
SIDE CORRIDOR
After all the evidence that the history of the past four billion years is written in the DNA of living creatures, the saying that “the universe is a library” has long since ceased to be a metaphor. But now we will need a new literacy. We’ve got a lot of reading ahead of us. When Mr. Jorge said that he imagined heaven as a library without beginning or end, he most likely, without suspecting it, was thinking about the endless shelves of deoxyribonucleic acid.
I am books.
DAD, WHAT’S A MINOTAUR?
We bang around like Minotaurs in these basements, to heck with their . . . friggin’ housing fund and lists. My father made heroic attempts not to curse in front of my mother and me, not unlike his attempts to quit smoking. I was sure that he secretly made up for it, smoking up all those skipped cigarettes and cursing out all those unsaid curses. My father’s line following his stumble over the nozzle of our Rocket vacuum cleaner would have important consequences for me. I knew what “friggin” and “housing fund” were, just as I knew about “extremely indigent,” “Pershing,” and so on, but I didn’t know what a Minotaur was. Nor whether it was one of the good guys (our guys) or the bad guys. At that time, I divided everything into those two categories. I discovered with surprise that adults did, too. The world was divided in two—good vs. bad, ours vs. yours. We, as luck would have it, had ended up our side, hence that of “the good guys.” However, I had heard my father say in the evenings after the news: “Come on now, how is that idiot Jimmy Carter to blame for the fact that I live in a basement and that there’s no lids for the canning jars?!” My mother, who was always more sensible, would shush him. Did they think I would let something slip in front of the local cop who lived two doors down? And they really did draw Jimmy Carter like an idiot in caricatures, with huge teeth, a star-spangled top hat clapped over his eyes, chomping on a winged rocket rather than a cigar.
I’ve gone down other corridors again, I keep getting mixed up when I turn back. Past time is distinguishable from the present due to one essential feature—it never runs in one direction. Where did I start? Good thing I’m writing this down, otherwise I’d never find the thread again . . .
We bang around like Minotaurs in these basements . . . That was the line . . . and it immediately entered my as-of-yet unassembled catalogue of epiphanies, of all those revelations, which as a rule appeared in the most unexpected and even inconvenient of moments. My father tripped over the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner because he didn’t see it, because it was cramped, we lived underground, the afternoon was overcast, the window was low, and the sun failed to reach down there.
Dad, what’s a Minotaur? I asked. My father pretended not to hear me. Dad, is the Minotaur on our side? I think this question irked him all the more. The next day he brought me that old complete edition of Ancient Greek myths from somewhere. I never set the book down again. I entered into the Minotaur then and don’t recall ever coming out. He was me. A boy who spent long days and nights in the basement of the palace, while his parents worked as kings or slept with bulls.
Never mind that the book makes him out to be a monster. I was inside him and I know the whole story. A huge mistake and calumny lie hidden there, exceptional injustice. I am the Minotaur and I am not bloodthirsty, I don’t want to eat seven youths and seven maidens, I don’t know why I’ve been locked up, it’s not my fault . . . And I am terribly afraid of the dark.
AGAINST AN ABANDONMENT: THE CASE OF M.
In the basement of the palace in Crete, Daedalus built a labyrinth of such confounding galleries that once you went inside it you could never find the exit again. Minos locked up his family’s shame, his wife Pasiphaë’s son, in this underground labyrinth. She conceived this son by a bull sent by the god Poseidon. The Minotaur—a monster with a human body and a bull’s head. Every nine years the Athenians were forced to send seven maidens and seven youths to be devoured by him. Then the hero Theseus appeared, who decided to kill the Minotaur. Without her father’s knowledge, Ariadne gave Theseus a sharp sword and a ball of string. He tied the string to the entrance and set off down the endless corridors to hunt the Minotaur. He walked and walked until he suddenly heard a terrible roar—the monster was rushing toward him with its enormous horns. A frightful battle ensued. Finally, Theseus grabbed the Minotaur by the horns and plunged his sharp sword into his chest. The monster slumped to the ground and Theseus dragged him all the way back to the entrance.
—Ancient Greek Myths and Legends
DOSSIER
Most honorable members of the jury, living and dead, from all times and geographies, ladies and gentlemen collectors and tellers of myths, and you, most honorable Mr. Minos, the present judge from the underworld.
Over the course of 37 years I have been preparing this case, “The