AFTER MY PARENTS’ SEPARATION, I SAW LESS AND LESS OF my father. As a rule, we would meet at dinnertime in very expensive restaurants, including one particular Moroccan establishment decorated with questionable taste, where a voluptuous woman in a risqué costume would suddenly appear at the end of the meal to perform a belly dance a few centimeters away from us. Then came the moment that always filled me with horrified embarrassment: with a look that mingled pride and lust, my father would slip a banknote into the elastic of the beautiful Scheherazade’s panties or brassiere. I don’t think he even noticed how, as the elastic of her sequined undergarments snapped, I tried to disappear into thin air.

The belly dance was the best-case scenario—in other words, it meant that he had at least bothered to show up. Two times out of three I would sit on a banquette in some prohibitively expensive restaurant waiting for Monsieur to deign to appear. One time a waiter came over and told me, “Your papa called, he is going to be half an hour late.” Throwing me a wink from the back of the restaurant, he made me a sirop à l’eau. An hour later my father still hadn’t shown up. The waiter, perturbed, brought me a third glass of grenadine. Even as he tried to coax a smile from me, I heard him muttering: “How miserable is that! Making the poor kid wait like that, at ten o’clock at night!” And this time it was the waiter who slipped me a banknote, to pay for the taxi to take me home to my mother, who was, obviously, furious at my father, who had waited until the last minute to let her know that, unfortunately, something had come up.

Then came the predictable day when, presumably encouraged by some new girlfriend who also found me a nuisance, he simply stopped showing up at all. It was around this time that I began to develop a particular affection for café waiters, with whom, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve always felt like part of the family.