From the ages of sixteen to twenty-six I lived through something sacred: my father’s last years, the illness years. I understand why many remember him in his prime, public form—a quirky philosopher and beloved professor in Barcelona—but what happened behind closed doors was more complicated and beautiful, and we experienced it in solitude, not in society.

Dementia did not erase our memories: new, unforgettable images emerged. The person he used to be did not die: a magical, levitating man was born who could speak with gestures and the twitch of a brow. Our bond wasn’t broken—a new father-daughter relationship began, a role reversal suffused with tragic and hilarious moments. He learnt how to communicate beyond language. I learnt how to understand him without sound. For the first time, he let himself be taken care of, and, in this way, he took care of me. Each of these unrepeatable moments belongs to the sacred, and the sacred does not belong to language, because language is sold, bought, traded, and degraded in society. These moments belong to literature.

At home, we were suddenly surrounded by a new kind of family, those whose job it was to help us in this new life. They are still present in the life that opened before me, after his death–and if he were here, he would look at me and say, in Catalan, Anem-hi xino-xano (“Let’s go on slowly”), and we would push aside those who believe that a mute person no longer speaks, that a blind man cannot see, that a helpless body cannot be helped, let alone help others.

Strangely, it was those who had known my father his whole life who were most likely to fall prey to these misconceptions, who saw only what he had lost, not what he had gained. At home, until the end, we lived with dignity, fear and joy. We smoked cigarettes that were actually pencils. We danced elaborate waltzes with only our necks. We talked with our eyelashes, I swear. I don’t remember a more difficult time with my father than the illness years, but also none more true, revealing, and free.

• • •

Sometimes people ask me: why are the characters in my novels ambiguous, physically and morally indecipherable? I don’t have a neat answer, but I admit there’s something to the question: I am drawn to such characters, to puzzling, inscrutable individuals and the way others are unsettled by them. Some readers still ask me if Bertrand Kopp––the slow-witted and clairvoyant protagonist of my first novel—is an intellectually challenged adult or an enlightened visionary. I smile. I like that he embodies contradiction but, most of all, that he embodies the discomfort others—and readers—feel at his very inscrutability.

While it’s impossible to trace influence scientifically—definitive influences are academic self-deceptions—it’s likely I became sensitive to these bizarre, unaccountable characters while caring for my father, an eccentric man made more eccentric by a neurological disease that transformed his speech and behavior, affording him new languages, new visions, new ways of moving through the world. Nevertheless, I started working with these characters before my father’s diagnosis, and this is no mystery to me. Writing—fiction in particular—is often premonitory.

Anyone who has cared for a person with dementia knows that this condition slowly detaches the individual from society. But the opposite is also true: society detaches itself from these individuals. It is the supposedly healthy, linguistically capable beings who struggle to deal with the muteness, the unpredictable reactions, the so-called “loss of self,” which is yet another academic, or rather medical, self-deception. These patients, who were once simply people, start speaking in mysterious languages and acting in unrecognizable ways. But platitudes about the loss of identity are only repeated by those who see the transformation of identity as a threat, and who are unable to follow a man into the dark, where beauty and humor can be found.

Slowly, enigmatically, my father deployed certain techniques to avoid dealing with our incapacity to deal with him. Those who came to visit—if they ever did—would speak to him like a child: they seemed unwilling to learn his new, crazy dialect, they had a fear of the strange and unknowable in their eyes, and so left our unintelligible home quickly, their sense of social duty fulfilled. But if they stayed, they insisted on imposing their presence, their language and rhythm, rather than adapting to our improvised, madcap universe.

When did I first notice my father’s new role as a trickster? It was a Sunday, we were at home in Barcelona, and one of his closest relatives came over. As soon as I told my father that the relative was waiting in the lobby of our building and advancing towards his room, he pretended to be asleep. Or rather sleepy, dozy, in that liminal, in-between state. He moved his head to-and-fro, as if he were dreaming, or performing a dream, and I felt embarrassed for the visitor, but I understood perfectly: my father knew his relative would be chased away by such antics. Before sending him back down to the lobby, I had to apologize for his unfulfilled wish to feel like an altruistic tourist. As soon as I went back into the bedroom, my father opened his eyes. Like a hawk, like a magician, lucid as ever, he said: “Fora?” (“Gone?”) And I replied, “Fora.”

Feigned folly took many forms during the years ahead: from exaggerated enactment of foolishness to straight-up malingering. He could often tell if the person visiting perceived him as inferior (and thus pitiable) or equal (thus a friend). Once the compassionate visitors were out, and the curtains of his theater dropped, he kept about his business––which was not that of a fool or a madman, merely someone experiencing neurological decline who, when met with sweetness and normalcy, rather than a special-circumstances attitude, behaved like a person and not a lunatic.

For years I kept a diary of these tricks, the dissembling tactics he used to play on others’ perceptions of him—especially the professors, the politicians, supposedly respectable figures who could not bear the sight of his declining body and mind. He had been a public figure before he became a private pretender, and I admired his new body and language in a way I had never admired his public persona. It was brutal, it was lonely, but it was often enlivening to experience this alongside him, and I still regard it as the main gift of my twenties. When he was diagnosed, I was 17 and he was 71. In the ten years that followed, I became a novelist and he became an old philosophy professor who had traded sound arguments for wacky hallucinations. I tracked these almost clinically, with the attention that only caregivers and novelists know, when something crucial can be lost unless you bear witness.

• • •

In Spanish, the expression santo loco—in English the “holy fool”—refers to someone who feigns foolishness or insanity: their unconventional behavior is puzzling, irritates those around them, but this shock is often deliberate, planned. Initially Biblical figures, these “fools for Christ” were seen as insane in the eyes of men, of society, because they personified a difference between worldly wisdom and a different, lateral wisdom that only appears in the renunciation of worldly affairs and in connection with God. Its Russian counterpart, the yuródivy, another iteration of the holy fool, also appeared as a dimwit or a madman, and included an element of self-awareness or performance, speaking truth in riddles and parables. Saint Simeon Salos—a sixth century Christian monk—is a paradigmatic holy fool: his feigned insanity, including his pranks, were a ploy to avoid praise for his acts of service.

The figure of the divine dullard is present in several religious traditions, but also in secular histories and literature, including, of course, the illiterate prophet and town fool figures so popular in America. But if Biblical “foolishness” often implied superiority over worldly society, a secular figure like the malingerer might be closer to what I saw in my father. A malingerer, traditionally, is a person who exaggerates a sickness to dispense with a social duty, or to do away with further indignities on top of their already subaltern position, without the consciousness or desire to display superiority. Why, when, and by whom is this behavior displayed? What might this say about the individual who plays the fool or the infirm and about those around him?

Fiction is the richest resource to understand society’s deficiencies and, somewhat circuitously, its fictions. Holy fools and ambiguous malingerers amble all over 19th and 20th century fiction, from Herman Melville’s incompetent sailors and shirkers to Clarice Lispector’s intellectually impaired characters, or Silvina Ocampo’s enigmatic simpletons. Then there’s Flannery O’Connor’s holy freaks, William Faulkner’s feeble-minded oracles, and J.D. Salinger’s wise children and morally blind adults. I could go on, but everyone has their fictional fools in mind. My current favorite is Chance Gardiner, the intellectually handicapped gardener written by Jerzy Kosinski and embodied by Peter Sellers in the film adaptation of Being There (1979). If the eccentricity of (religious) holy fools was meant to call attention to “higher” values, what is the specific aim of modern, secular holy fools? And why do some writers center plots around these outcast, ambiguous, saintly pranksters? What are the values these figures either embody or oppose—especially in the 20th and 21st century?

• • •

As I see it, holy fools represent a kind of impersonal wisdom—a mode of being beyond selfhood as we commonly understand and value it: they appear to act and speak to something beyond themselves, beyond immediate understanding. They are attuned to things the rest of us cannot hear or see. And there is something inherently rebellious about them: in a context (like my father’s) where personal identity and social recognition were the highest good, it felt almost brave to stop producing intelligible work, to become somebody other than one’s recognizable self, to fall silent.

Fiction and caregiving both involve attending to something beyond yourself; “you” are out of the question. My joy in writing comes from abandoning, surrendering myself in the service of a vision, an image, a thought I must perfect with the languages and forms available to me. Attention is the opposite of identity. A writer’s and a caregiver’s identity is their attention, not their self. In the first issue of this magazine, Simon Critchley defined ecstasy as “a way of surpassing the self, of being held outside the confines of your head and the feeling of delight, pleasure or idiot glee that accompanies that experience.” The notion of idiot glee reminded me of the holy fool’s ecstatic behavior, of my father’s unexpected joy when I gave into his new self, when many thought any semblance of self had vanished. If anything, his most primordial quality reemerged: mischievous, amoral intelligence.

The hallucinations and visions resulting from his dementia, which at first frightened us, ceased to do so when I learned to “see” them, too. I imagined what he described in detail, and the truth of these shared delusions—these invisible, ephemeral worlds—were full of intimacy, reinvention, and survival. These moments were surreal, otherworldly, but they were not difficult. We nodded and talked calmly about the cats, the men, the shadows he saw around the house—and my very engagement with the visions, my physical presence, distracted him. After a while, I was able to take him back to my world: to the land of everyday beds, plates, books. This is how his hallucinations ultimately proved themselves to be unthreatening—because he was not alone with them—and how our daily exchanges garnered the eeriness, the laughter, and the reality of dreams.

When attending to neurological diseases, as when writing fiction, the success of the operation depends on the imaginative leap: from a partial vision one builds a fuller picture that only exists in the mind. In a way, my father’s illness and my craft both depended on relinquishing the clichés that others called reality or identity and gaining new insights that felt like divine gifts. Even today, I can see his squalid, smiling face: my father began to assert his impishness as though he was asserting his humanity, which was being stripped away not by his illness but by some of his family and friends. He was a man—the opposite of a saint—and he wished to continue to be one. As holy fools teach us, not even saints are exemplary, there’s a devilish duplicity to them: when visitors ascribed some kind of innocent beatitude to my father, this wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted human touch.