by Toni Sala
It had to be a lie. She separated herself from her mother’s arms and turned on the light. What nonsense. Things like this don’t happen. It’s like the lottery: no one’s ever won it. It might happen to you, maybe in the future, but never right now, in the present. Perhaps in another life. It’s too unreal. She relaxed her head onto the pillow. She settled into her denial. Negating Jaume’s death was her way of accepting it. It lifted a weight off her that had threatened to crush her. Jaume wasn’t dead, her boyfriend since high school hadn’t died in an accident, it couldn’t be. On Friday he had picked her up in his car in Bellaterra; they went to Barcelona to check prices at the travel agencies, and reserved sale tickets for a flight to India that summer. They had those tickets. They had a lot of things to discuss, about the trip and about everything, there were thousands of loose ends to tie up, essential things. If death could be this sudden, then the world would have already stopped spinning—the world was cruel and unfair, but not so precarious. The world is warped, it tends to conspire and get in the way of surprises. Jaume wasn’t dead, it had to be someone else, and therefore Jaume was dead. As dead as it was comforting to deny it, and denying it was very comforting, so comforting it was scary.
Iona’s mother didn’t feel it as intensely. She couldn’t deny it with the same ease. That was why she was whimpering, poor thing, she couldn’t stifle her sobs. She had burned through the first phase of grief without realizing it and couldn’t imagine how alone he had left Iona, with a void beneath her feet: stopped on the bridge dangling between before and after, clinging to denial until she can get out of herself, go find Jaume, go to the last time she’d seen him, twenty-four hours earlier, when he told her:
“I have to go with Xavi to the concert. I owe it to him, he’s my brother, we always help each other out. Come with us if you want.”
He would have taken her by the hand and led her like a lamb to the slaughter. He already knew the path, she just had to go with him. Along the way they would embrace. If there was nothing to be done, it was all the same. What did it matter. Everything converged and became one. She would meld with him before he left. He would take Iona with him, Iona with her terrifying comfort.
Meanwhile, she would wait for reality to show up. Everyone erects barriers against the evils of the world. We all expect death every day without despairing. If nothing can be done, there’s no point in even thinking about it. Someone who’s on death row or terminally ill suffers because they’ve compressed death into the few hours they have left of life. Meanwhile, others live with a death that is a drop of poison diluted in the sea, an invisible mine that floats, adrift. That was how Iona planned to wait for Jaume’s death—until reality came to impose itself on her denial.
To prepare a defense—to try and maintain the denial, ideally until the moment of her own death—she considered her experiences. What training could she count on? She needed every resource. Not even her mother had lived through a trauma like the one she was up against. A girl from the city, from Girona or Barcelona, would make an appointment with a psychologist. In Vidreres, because of the way Vidreres was, she would have to deal with it herself. How long could her denial hold out, accepting Jaume’s death by negating it, in that effective but shaky balance? Tragedies like hers were kept hidden, she wasn’t aware of any other case; she’d be starting from zero, and would have to take advantage of every second—the first moments were precious if she wanted a solid foundation.
She made a list of defensive materials. An inventory of experiences. To start with, she had the death of three grandparents when she was a girl: three expected deaths, old people who lost their appetite for living and shrank like sick dogs at death’s door without making a scene out of it. She knew that the one grandparent she hadn’t met was a woman who, in 1957, when her son was a year old, fell into the house well when she went to fill up a bucket. That was why they’d bricked it up. When her grandfather Enric was alive he told the story every once in a while to warn his grandkids of unexpected dangers. When she least expected it, Jaume was swimming at the bottom of the well.
After her grandparents, over the course of a couple of years, Iona experienced the deaths of three of Can Bou’s five dogs.
Iona was studying veterinary science. Like many of her classmates, she had chosen the field out of a female altruism that had little to do with the heroic extremes of boys who studied to be oncologists or surgeons, the same altruism that led some of her girlfriends—with old or ill people at home instead of dogs and horses—to study nursing. So a certain percentage of the department was farm girls, future farm vets who were more interested in treating hooved animals than working in a clinic with pet dogs that lived in apartments. In her case, it was yet to be determined. For the moment, she was taking the required classes, Animal Biology, Nervous System Structure and Function, Surgery, Anesthesiology.
So she was used to surgical videos and dissecting animals in the lab, but those experiences weren’t of much use to her when—during her second year of study, as part of an internship at the vet’s office in Vidreres—she had to administer a lethal injection. She gave the first of thousands of shots she would give to animals being put down over the course of her professional career, if everything went as it should. It was a boxer who entered the office in the arms of an old man from Llagostera. His owner had come there to avoid the shame of bringing his dog to the clinic in his own town. The boxer had grade-6 leishmaniasis, with lesions in its ears and eyes and a bleeding snout; a five-year-old dog that looked fourteen, dry, feverish, and trembling like a leaf; an animal that couldn’t stand up and was having so much trouble breathing that it had to cough to keep from choking. The veterinarian put it on the table, and Iona shifted her anguish over the dog to anger at its owner. That irresponsible old man deserved a good chewing out—which he wouldn’t get because the poor animal wasn’t the customer, he was—for having let the dog get to such a state. He hadn’t had the charity to give the dog a measly antibiotic, nor the compassion to give him a painkiller, nothing—cheapness that skimped on money and feelings like they were the same thing. Not even a glance to say good-bye to his dog before abandoning him to his fate. It must have been months, probably years, that the owner had looked away to avoid seeing the illness eating away at his dog, and now he was unable to hold out to the end of its agony.
Watching the old coward leave, Iona suddenly felt a stab of pity. Maybe some sort of competition had arisen between the man and the dog, maybe the old guy was afraid the animal would outlive him. But how was that the dog’s fault? And then, who do you choose? The animal or the person? Was she sure that old man deserved a chewing out? The simplicity, the coldness with which we deal with animals, is the same as how doctors and nurses have to treat their patients at the hospital. But in hospitals they don’t have to deal with putting people down. Iona wasn’t prepared to put Jaume to sleep. The veterinarian passed her the syringe, and she noticed the dog wasn’t wearing a tag. She had no way of knowing its name. The owner had already left the operating room, had probably already paid for the visit and the cremation and left. The vet turned his back to her, leaving her alone with the dog with no name. Who could possibly know who Jaume was with now? She stuck the needle through the rubber lid on the glass vial, sucked up the phenobarbital, and looked into the dog’s eyes, which had a scabby film. She thought that if the owner had left, she could take the dog home, give him a few last days of analgesics and love. This creature passed through the world knowing so little of the good things it had to offer, overestimating the scraps of affection the old man gave it . . . If only she could at least pet it and say its name . . . Hey, dog. What’s your name? But the veterinarian muttered behind her, “Help him, Iona,” and she stabbed the needle in deep, so as not to have to think about it any more; she injected the poison, and ten seconds later the dog’s heart stopped.
That internship didn’t prepare her for the death of her own dogs. Luckily, none of the three had to be put to sleep. The first one died of a tu
mor, the second was run over, and the third got a virus that was too much for him at his age. As with her three grandparents, the deaths all happened over the course of a few months, as if they were following each other. Iona gave the dogs medication, dressed their wounds, and eased their suffering. Against all logic—and now that frightened her—each death was harder to come to terms with than the one before it, as if pain was cumulative, as if the death of the last dog, whose name was Frare, dragged with it the death of the previous one, Lluna, and the death of Lluna still dragged along the death of Bobi, and, further back in time, Bobi’s death dragged with it Grandpa Enric’s, and Grandpa Enric’s the other three, in a chain that each added death made harder to pull, as if Iona had to physically drag around the corpses. Maybe it was that she didn’t want to abandon any of them. Maybe now she’d be forced to let go of the dead weight, maybe she’d have to exchange . . . What? Three dogs? A couple of grandparents? The whole chain, to deal with Jaume?
Each time, Iona learned more about death, which was why each death weighed on her more. She was feeling around in the void, measuring it. Unlike other experiences she’d had, friends, Jaume, college, the shared apartment in Cerdanyola, each new death affected her more. Each death that affected her, that is, because she was also mature enough not to suffer over the deaths of people she barely knew, despite how unfortunate or unpleasant those deaths might be. The death of a stranger, even if it was broadcast live on television—or particularly then—left her indifferent, and she analyzed it with the coldness with which, years later, if everything went the way it should, she would analyze the deaths of tons of dogs and cats, turtles and caged birds if she opened up her own office, or of cows, horses, and pigs if she finally decided to work the farms. But sometimes the death of a stranger—like that first boxer with leishmaniasis—made her guts clench unexpectedly, precisely because it was a stranger: the presence of the void within the void, people or animals about whom she knew their death and only their death, like when she read in an obituary or on a tombstone the first and last name of someone who only existed because they’d ceased to exist, devoured in the flash of a name.
Unlike her younger sister, Iona didn’t miss the burials of any of the three dogs they’d grown up with. She went with her father, the spade, and the bag with the dead dog in it, each time. She wanted to retain the light of their brown and black fur. Person, animal, or landscape—it happened like with the professors at college: learning wasn’t merely receiving, it was an exchange. Nothing was free, getting to know someone meant giving part of your life, and that life was what you cried over later, when he took it with him into the void. And right now Jaume was fleeing like a thief.
With each dog’s death, the burial ground beneath the cherry tree, the part of Can Bou that was the dog cemetery, grew. Iona would never have asked her father to take the dogs to the incinerator, the way vets do and as she would have to with their two riding horses when the moment came. There was an animal hierarchy; they just threw the dead cats into the garbage. But the farmers wanted their loved ones close, so they did with the dogs what they couldn’t, unfortunately, do with their family members and themselves—much less with their friends and fiancés. They bury them at the foot of the cherry tree on the land where they’d been born and had always lived, keep them with them, mix what was taken from them back into their own land.
Her father put the old soil bag that now held the dead dog down beneath the cherry tree and started to dig, eight or ten paces from the trunk. Iona worried she’d hear a skeleton breaking, the spade’s tip cracking a jawbone, the rosary of a spine or a tail, even though her father knew perfectly where he’d buried the last dog and shifted around the tree. He went around the cherry tree creating a spiral of dead dogs, beginning at the base of the trunk itself, as if linking up with the chain of corpses that started with the first Suredas who’d lived at Can Bou and planted the first of all the cherry trees, which would later grow in this same spot, one on top of the other, like a tranquil geyser of wood and leaves. Her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had buried the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of the dogs that her father was now burying, and the radius and perimeter of the fenceless cemetery grew around the cherry tree.
They dug up more and more earth each time, and everyone who knew where the dog cemetery was—all the Suredas—could tell by the color of the grass how far it extended. The perimeter was greener, more lush; as if the dead dogs were trying to escape from underground, and had only been able to carry their spoils to the edge of the grass. The cemetery extended about ten meters from the trunk; it was already getting close to Can Bou’s other cherry tree—and would eventually reach the house itself—yet, even still, Iona worried that her father would break some bone with his spade. They were just bones now, nothing more, fragments of white calcium, but in his daughter’s mind they were bits of the vessels that held what the dogs had taken with them, and, if an archeologist ever put them back together, he would no longer be assembling dog skeletons, but rather, jugs, small chests, and cups for the ashes stolen from the living. Each of those three dogs that died after her grandparents’ deaths had snatched an increasingly large bit of Iona’s life from her, each death hurt her more, each one was a stronger earthquake whose epicenter was the last dog’s grave. The trembling, the shaking, the jolts came from the last link in a chain that was choking Iona like a snake around her neck, a spiral that began with three or four dead grandparents and ended with a pack of dogs who ran, crazed by rage and anguish, around the roots of the cherry tree they were tied to, a whirlwind of underground dogs who barked with mouths full of sand, who pursued her, galloping beneath her feet, sticking their open jaws out of the earth like an agave plant and biting her ankles so she could taste death, not abstraction: a precise, clean cut of flesh taken from her person, from her humanity, from all that was contained within the six or seven buried vessels—three or four grandparents, three dogs—alive and dead at the same time. Everything they took from her past, which was also alive and dead at the same time: playing with her grandparents and her dogs, conversations they’d had when she was little, when Iona was a puppy and Frare was a four-year-old girl. They bit her so she would begin to understand what it meant to cease to be oneself, to be devoured, cannibalized by poor Jaume, who would soon join the dogs underground, who came toward her from a distance with his arms emptied of everything he had taken from her, who walked beneath her like her shadow, an image of Iona trembling in the well water.
The deaths of the last two dogs, Lluna and Frare, hurt more than the deaths of all four grandparents put together. It wasn’t a question of quantity, but rather of quality. Maybe it’s that one suffering has nothing to do with another: pain, when it’s so great, just blends together, no matter what the source. Or that was what she liked to think. Was that why she studied veterinary science? To learn to care more about a person’s death than an animal’s? To prepare herself for Jaume’s death? Did her inconsolable grief over Frare’s death have anything to do with him being an animal and not a person? People are much more limited, people have that mechanical part, that rational, abstract, imposed part: reason. It’s like poison because it pushes life into a corner, adulterates it, separates it from itself. That was how she was managing, right now, to experience her boyfriend’s death so happily, so cerebrally; thanks to that she could fool herself with denial that denied on another level, because each level, each superimposed level of awareness, distanced her from the truth of death. Every person—her mother sobbing beside her, wondering if she should keep on sobbing, whether sobbing was really helping her daughter or in fact the opposite—was the separation of a person, death in life; every person would always be incomplete because they couldn’t ever reach themselves, at least in this life they couldn’t ever catch up to themselves, and it was a question she often asked herself while she was studying for exams or writing a term paper, immersed in the classifications of breeds and species and chemical formulas, a question that she
still hadn’t found the right way to phrase but was something like: could she ever catch up to the animals that she would cure? Just like when she jammed that needle into the boxer, wasn’t she like a god to those animals and, as a god, a defective being, beneath her creation, which she was forced to set free—to believe in—and, therefore, to lose for herself, just like parents lost their children because they remain beneath them, as all creators remain beneath their creations?
She saw it with the experience she was starting to have of the enormous death that was—that over time would become—the death of her beloved, of her future, of someone like her, on her level, of that which she had started to pursue and that was perhaps her herself, Iona herself. Animals, on the other hand, in their purity, live more deeply, closer to the heart of the universe, closer to the heart of life, without the painful, banal distractions people have; they have a pure experience of hate and love, of sex and motherhood, of family and food, of sickness and, above all, death. If only she could have learned more from the death of her three dogs! Animals were ahead of people, in a world without animals man would never understand himself, he wouldn’t know how to behave or how to accept his situation. Dogs’ loyalty and love for the humans they live with give rise to greater loyalty and love in their owners. First the dog and then the person. She had also seen it with the two horses at Can Bou, one for each sister.
From animals, man learned to settle. What could he possibly figure out for himself, stuck in his lie? Lies can’t even exist on their own. Man had to imitate animals in order to be someone and survive. There are no tragedies in nature; there is no expectation of pain. There is a single, authentic pain. Just one, and it is real.