More than once I had thought about staying in that office forever, answering that phone for the rest of my life. It wasn’t hard to imagine myself at forty or fifty years old, spending the night with my feet up on that same desk, reading the same books over and over. Up till then I had chosen not to think about anything too confusing or elaborate. I never seriously imagined the future, perhaps because I trusted in that thing they call good luck. When I decided to study literature, for example, the only thing I knew was that I liked to read. What sort of work I’d do, what kind of life I wanted: I don’t know if I ever thought about those things—it would have brought nothing but anxiety. And nevertheless, I guess that, as they say, I wanted to come out ahead, I wanted to thrive. The flood was a sign: I had to work in the field I’d studied. Or in other words, to be precise: I had to work with something at least slightly connected to what I had studied. I quit right then. At my good-bye dinner, Portillo gave me a book by Arturo Pérez Reverte, his favorite author.
When I told my students that I was unemployed, they offered to help me, although they didn’t have any money or contacts or anything. I told them it wasn’t necessary, that I had time to look for work, that I had managed to save a bit of money. They looked at me very seriously, but when I told them about the accident at the office, they cracked up, and they agreed that I had to quit. Especially Pamela.
We went to my apartment; we could finally sleep together. It was the beginning of October, the night was pleasant, enticing. We drank an incredible wine, and after sex we watched a game show (she got all the questions right) and a movie. We woke up late, but there was no rush. We stayed in bed for an hour while I caressed her generous legs and looked at her feet, perfect but a little diminished by the turquoise polish, now fairly chipped, that she used on her nails. By then we had decided to raise the price: she charged me ten thousand, and I charged her ten thousand.
“You’re out of work, but your house is full of food,” she told me, laughing. It really was a lot of food, I thought, and I started to fill a bag with cheeses, cold cuts, cups of yogurt, and bottles of wine. I gave it to her. I was young and much more of a dumbass than I am now, it goes without saying. She listened, stunned, to the stupid sentences I said to her. Only then did I realize I had committed a fatal mistake. Pamela looked at me with rage, silent, disconcerted, disappointed. She touched one of her breasts, who knows why, as if it hurt her.
Then she picked up the bag and dumped it furiously at my feet. She was about to leave without saying a word, she’d opened the door but then she stopped, and she told me, in a broken voice, that she was not and would never be a whore. And that I was not, and would never be, a real professor.
TRUE OR FALSE
For Alejandra Costamagna
“I got the cat so you would have something here,” said Daniel, repeating the psychologist’s words exactly, and Lucas showed an enthusiasm that seemed new, unexpected. At his mother’s house—“my true house,” the boy said—there was a little yard where a cat or a small dog could have lived happily, but Maru, on that point, was inflexible: no dog, no cat. But from now on, every other week, the boy would get to spend a couple of days with the cat at Daniel’s house. They named him Pedro, and later, after they found out it was actually a girl cat, and she was pregnant, they started calling her Pedra.
The “true or false” thing came from school—they were the only exercises that Lucas liked, that he did well on, and he insisted on applying the categories to everything, capriciously: Maru’s house was his true house, but for some reason he judged the living room of that same house to be false—and the armchairs in the living room were true, but the door and all the lamps were false. Only some of his toys were true, but those weren’t the ones that he always preferred. Just because something was false didn’t mean the boy disliked it. The few days he spent with his father at the false house, for example, consisted of a bounteous marathon of Nintendo, pizza, and french fries.
Sometimes Lucas was silent, calm, a bit absent: he seemed to be immersed in incommunicable thoughts. But other times he never stopped asking questions, and although, at nine years old, he was starting to resemble a normal child, his father wasn’t satisfied and didn’t know how to interact with him. Daniel was obviously a normal man, because he had married, had a child, endured several years of family life, and then, as all normal men do, gotten divorced. It was also normal for him to run late with the alimony payments he owed his ex-wife—almost always out of pure distraction, because he didn’t have money problems.
Daniel lived on the eleventh floor of a building where pets were not allowed, but Pedra was discreet: she spent her hours licking her shiny black paws and looking down at the street from the slightly grimy balcony. She didn’t need anything other than her bowl of water and a handful of food, which she ate unhurriedly after looking at the dish for a few minutes, as if deciding whether it was really worth the trouble to eat. Daniel had never liked cats; he’d had a few as a child, but they had all really belonged to his brothers. Even so, he was willing to make the effort—a cat is good company, he thought, visualizing an abstract image of a lonely man and his cat. He wasn’t exactly alone, himself, or he was, but he didn’t think that solitude was a problem. He’d had too much company during the years of his marriage: that’s why he’d left his wife, he thought, out of a need for silence. “I separated from my wife for reasons of silence,” Daniel would say, flirtatiously, if someone were to ask him why it had ended, but no one asked him about that anymore, and in any case, that answer wouldn’t be true, or false: he needed silence, but he’d also wanted to save himself, was trying to save himself—or maybe to protect himself—from a life he had never wished for.
Or maybe he had wanted, once, to be a father, but it had been a naive, stupid desire. The years they’d lived together (“as a family”), he’d had to be too much of a father. Everything had meaning, every gesture, every sentence held some conclusion or lesson, including his silence, of course—that too. One had to be so cautious with words, so endlessly careful, so sadly pedagogical. He could be a better father from a distance, he had thought, and there was no sense of defeat lurking behind that conclusion.
His plan was to tell the boy that the kittens had died at birth. He was going to drown them without thinking about it much, the way he’d heard it was done: throw them into the toilet, flush, and immediately forget about that bitter secondary scene. But luck was not on his side and they were born on a day when the boy was at his house.
“We can’t keep them, Lucas,” he told the boy that afternoon.
“Of course we can,” replied Lucas. Daniel looked at his son: it occurred to him that they looked alike, or they would in the future—their slightly cleft chins, their curly black hair. He helped the boy put on a back brace the doctor had prescribed for his scoliosis. Lucas also wore braces on his teeth, and a pair of glasses that made his dark eyes, and even his eyelashes, look bigger.
“Do you have homework?” Daniel asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you want to do it?”
“No.”
What they did, instead, was make phone calls, offering the kittens up for adoption. And then they drafted an e-mail that Daniel sent to all his contacts. When he dropped Lucas off at the boy’s true house, he got caught up in a harsh argument with his ex-wife, in which he tried to convince her that she was the one who should take on the responsibility of the kittens.
***
“Sometimes I forget what you’re like,” Maru said to him.
“And what am I like?”
Maru fell silent.
During the following months, the cats opened their eyes and started to drag themselves laboriously across the living room. There were five of them: two black, two gray, and one that was almost entirely white. To avoid repeating the mistake of Pedro/Pedra, Lucas decided not to name them. Now that there were kittens at his father’s house, the boy wanted to be there all the time. For Daniel it was a victory, but an uncomfortable o
ne.
One Thursday, suddenly, at seven in the evening, Lucas showed up at Daniel’s without any advance notice. Five minutes later Maru appeared, panting after climbing the eleven flights of stairs up to his apartment. She hated elevators, hated that Daniel lived on the eleventh floor—and not only because she was concerned for the boy’s safety, or because of her own phobia, but also because it reminded her, insistently, of that far-off night when Daniel had promised her that there would be no elevators in their life together, that they would always live, so to speak, with their feet on the ground.
Maru apologized for the visit.
“We were in the neighborhood,” she said, which was highly unlikely, because they lived on the other side of the city.
“For a second I thought the kid came alone,” said Daniel.
“What do you mean, alone?”
“Alone.”
“Are you crazy?”
“No.”
Daniel toasted some bread and made coffee, which they drank in silence while the boy assigned nationalities to the cats: the white or almost-white cat was Argentine, the black cats were Brazilian, and the gray cats were Chilean.
Thanks to the group e-mail, Daniel got back in contact with a former classmate from college, a woman who came over one night on the pretense of adopting a cat. After the first pisco and Coke they went to bed, and it was good, or more or less good, as she said the next morning.
“I mean, I liked it,” she added lightly, but to Daniel it seemed like an aggressive remark. “What happened to you is really strange,” she said next; she had the habit of changing the subject every time she lit a cigarette. “It’s really strange what happened to you—it’s more common for male cats to be mistaken for female, and not the other way around.”
“What?”
“Just, it’s normal to not see their cocks well. But you saw a cock on Pedra where there wasn’t one,” said the woman, who hardly had time to laugh at her joke before she told another one: “She’s called Pedra and you’re called padre.”
Daniel laughed late, irritated.
“Why do you say ‘cock’?” he asked her.
“What, I can’t say that?”
“Women don’t say cock.”
“But what you put in me last night is called a cock,” she said. “And what Pedra doesn’t have is called a cock.”
To Daniel it seemed like phony indecency. Before leaving, the woman assured him that she would come by later for the cat, so that, in a fit of optimism, Daniel thought that the scene from the night before would repeat itself over and over: every evening she would come for a cat, sleep with him, and leave at dawn. But it wasn’t like that, not at all. She never came back, didn’t call, didn’t write.
Someone spread the word that there were cats in the building, so Daniel had to bribe the concierges with a bottle of pisco and a few opportune boxes—as a joke—of Gato Negro wine. Then he needed several whiskeys to neutralize the downstairs neighbors, a Catalan playwright and his wife.
“We like the country, and the neighborhood is very clean,” they said almost in unison, as if they were competing in a contest that tested their matrimonial harmony. Pedra sniffed at the guests, and the little cats dozed in a pile inside a shoe box. The couple had come to Chile to be near their daughter, who’d just had a baby. The woman spent a lot of time with the granddaughter, and the man tended to stay at home alone—he was in need of a little solitude and inspiration, he explained.
Solitude and inspiration, thought Daniel later on, lying in bed. He had solitude and he’d never needed inspiration, but the playwright’s words made him think that maybe that was precisely what he was missing: inspiration. His job, however, was very simple, almost mechanical: a lawyer doesn’t need inspiration, but rather the patience to tolerate his superiors, and doubtless also intelligence and subtlety to saw the floor out from under them, and maybe also imagination, but just practical imagination, he told himself, as though definitively resolving the issue.
I look for inspiration only when I jack off, he thought later, wide awake, evoking the happiness of a table full of good friends who would celebrate that sentence, and then he started to masturbate, taking inspiration, first, from the playwright’s wife, especially her legs, and then from that friend of his who never came back, and finally from Maru, who was still attractive to him, although the image he focused on was one from their youth, from those first years full of motel sex, and especially from a trip home on Route 78, when he drove some twenty kilometers with her bent over, sucking him off. He focused on that memory and proceeded hurriedly, uneasily, greedily, but the semen wouldn’t come—and he didn’t come. It was hard for him to convince himself that he just had to go to sleep, erection and all, still half drunk.
The next day he was supposed to pick Lucas up, but he woke up late. He called Maru and invented an excuse, told her he had a headache. She put Lucas on the phone and Daniel promised to pick him up at five. “I learned how to make sushi,” he told him, which was a lie, but Daniel liked to casually toss out that kind of falsehood, to force himself to turn it into truth. After ten minutes online he knew what he needed to buy. In addition to the sushi supplies, he returned from the supermarket with a large bag of Whiskas, a lot of milk, and bottles of Bilz, Pap, and Kem Piña, because he could never manage to remember which of those three sodas was his son’s favorite.
“These cats need a father,” Lucas told him that night, while he fought with a disastrous sushi roll.
“Cats don’t have fathers,” answered Daniel, hesitantly. “When they’re in heat, the girl cats have sex with whoever, and the kittens aren’t always even real brothers and sisters.”
“What?”
“Just that—they’re not necessarily siblings. They’re half siblings, that’s why they’re different colors. Most likely Pedra had sex with three boy cats: one gray, one white, and one that was black, like her.”
“I don’t care,” said Lucas, who seemed to have thought about the subject. “I don’t care. I think that these cats definitely need a father.”
“We already have a lot of cats, Lucas, and also, cats behave differently than humans. The dad cats forget about their babies,” said Daniel, for a second fearing an acidic answer from his son, but it didn’t come. “And the moms do too,” he went on cautiously. “After a little bit, it’s likely that Pedra won’t recognize her babies.”
“Now that I don’t believe,” said the boy, astonished. “That’s impossible.”
“You’ll see. Now she looks for them, carries them around in her mouth, gathers them together, and cries if she can’t find them. But soon she’ll forget about them. That’s how animals are.”
“You seem to know a lot about animals,” said Lucas, in a tone that seemed either ironic or candid.
“Not really, but your uncles had cats.”
“But you lived in the same house as them.”
“Yes, but they weren’t mine.”
They were in the bedroom, watching a very slow Mexican soccer match, about to fall asleep. Daniel went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and he stayed there for a few minutes watching Pedra, who seemed either committed or resigned to the kittens scrabbling at her teats. He went back to the bedroom; the boy had closed his eyes and was murmuring a kind of litany—Daniel thought he was having a nightmare and shook him lightly, waking him.
“I wasn’t sleeping, Dad, I was praying.”
“Praying? And since when do you pray?”
“Since Monday. On Monday I learned how to pray.”
“Who taught you?”
“Mom.”
“And since when does she pray?”
“She doesn’t pray. But she taught me to pray, and I like it.”
They slept, as always, in the same bed. That night there was a tremor and hundreds of dogs howled pitifully as the earth shook, but Daniel and Lucas didn’t wake up. Far off, the thunder of a car crash sounded, as well as the voices of the neighbors, who were arguing or talking or
maybe practicing a scene in which two people argued or talked. But Daniel and Lucas slept well, breakfasted better, and spent the morning playing Double Dragon.
“I’m sure that Pedra’s babies are true,” Lucas told his father later, at the park.
“Without a doubt they are true, they’re completely true, you can be sure of that. A friend of mine told me recently that our confusion about Pedra was strange. Normally, according to my friend, people think boy cats are girls, not that girl cats are boys.”
“I don’t understand,” said the child.
“I don’t understand too well either. It’s complicated. Forget about it.”
“Forget about your friend?”
“Yes, my friend,” said Daniel, annoyed.
***
Daniel invited the Catalans over for coffee.
“You all have a wonderful country,” said the playwright’s wife, looking at the boy.
“Lucas thinks that Santiago is false,” Daniel told his guests.
“No!” shouted the boy. “Chile is false, Santiago is true.”
“And Barcelona?” they asked. Lucas shrugged and started to play with some papers on the floor, as though he were one of the cats. He was wearing shorts and his legs were covered in scratches, as were his arms and his right cheek.
“The situation in Chile is incredible,” said the playwright, with either a reflective or a questioning tone. “Doesn’t it bother you that Pinochet still has so much power? Aren’t people afraid that the dictatorship will come back?”
“Weren’t you just talking about how peaceful Chile is?” Daniel answered.
“That’s precisely what bothers me about the situation here,” said the playwright, sententiously. “Everything is so calm, so civilized.” Then he strung together a speech featuring words that reminded Daniel of some papers he’d had to read once upon a time, in those tedious elective courses at university: globalization, postmodernity, hegemony.
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