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“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
.

“I voted for Aylwin and for Frei,” said Daniel in response, revealing that he was totally lost in the conversation. When his guests finally left, he asked the boy if the Catalans were true or false.

“They were weird,” he replied.

*
   
*
   
*

That afternoon they lost the white kitten, the Argentine. Daniel, Lucas, and Pedra searched for it for two hours, but it never turned up. There was no way it could have gotten out, so during the following weeks Daniel had to move around the house with extreme caution. When he got home from work, he went stealthily through the rooms, always barefoot, almost on tiptoe, and he took extra care any time he sat or lay down. One morning, almost a month after it disappeared, he saw the white kitten sleeping peacefully next to its mother. It had returned from who knew where and taken its place with a nonchalance that annoyed Daniel. Over the phone, his son was happy to hear the news, but there was no excited shouting like his father had expected.

“Why are you talking so quietly?” he asked Lucas.

“I don’t want to wake them up,” replied the boy, still whispering.

“Who?”

“The cats.”

“The cats aren’t sleeping,” said Daniel, with a touch of rage. “So you can just talk normally, okay?”

“Don’t lie to me, Dad, I know they’re sleeping.”

“It’s not true. And even if they were sleeping and you shouted over the phone, you wouldn’t wake them up. You know that.”

“Yes, I know. I have to hang up.”

“Did something happen?”

It was the first time his son had hung up on him. He called Maru and she treated him nicely, much more friendly than usual. Nothing
strange here, thought Daniel, resigned, in the middle of the conversation. But suddenly, as though pretending she’d just been struck by a casual thought, Maru said that maybe it would be better for the cats to live with her.

“But you don’t like cats. You have a phobia.”

“No, I don’t have a phobia. I have a phobia with elevators, spiders, and pigeons. What’s that called?”

“What?”

“The fear of pigeons.”

“Colombophobia,” replied Daniel, exasperated. “Stop asking me stupid questions and tell me why you want the cats. You’ve never let the kid have one before.”

“It’s just that Lucas talks to me about them a lot. I’d like to have them live with us. And then give them away gradually, and keep only Pedra. I already talked to some girlfriends who would be thrilled to have a cat.”

Maru and Daniel fought like never before, or, rather, just like before. An inexplicable rhetorical twist had reversed things: not even the best lawyer in the world—and Daniel was not, certainly, the best lawyer in the world—could convince Maru that it was not her right to decide the fate of the cats. The negotiation was long and erratic, since Daniel wasn’t necessarily against the idea, but he hated to lose. He didn’t want them, really, except maybe Pedra—he did everything in his power to keep Pedra. At least ten times he said, “You can have the babies, but Pedra does not leave this house,” and all ten times he had to endure reasonable and dangerous arguments about a mother’s rights.

“You can have the white one, then, if you want her,” said Maru, finally.

“We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl,” said Daniel, for the sheer pleasure of correcting her.

“Lucas thinks it’s a girl,” she replied. “But fine, that’s not the point. Do you or do you not want the white cat, boy or girl?”

He said he did. The day they moved the cats into the true house, the boy was happy.

Daniel still hasn’t decided what to name the white cat. He calls it Argentina or Argentino indiscriminately. When he flops into the armchair to read the paper, the cat comes to sit between the page and his eyes, kneading at his sweater, concentrating intensely.

“I’ve had to get used to reading standing up,” he says, glass in hand, to his neighbors, who have stopped in to say good-bye, because they’re returning to Barcelona soon.

“It must have been hard for you to lose the kittens,” says the playwright.

“It wasn’t too bad,” replies Daniel. “It must be harder to write plays,” he adds, obligingly, and then he asks them why they have to go, since he seems to remember that they were going to leave the following year. The question is, for some reason, inappropriate, and the playwright and his wife stare at the floor, maybe at the same point on the floor.

“It’s personal. Family problems,” says the woman.

“And were you able to write?” asks Daniel, to change the subject.

“Not much,” she says, as if she were in charge of answering the questions directed at her husband. The scene strikes Daniel as grotesque, or at least embarrassing—above all because of that slippery expression “family problems.” He’s been in a good mood, but suddenly he is lost, or bored. He wants them to leave soon.

“And what did you want to write about?” he asks, without the slightest interest.

“He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what about,” she says. “Maybe about the transition.”

“What transition?”

“Chile’s, Spain’s. Both, in comparison.”

Daniel quickly imagines one or two boring plays, with actors who are very old or too young, bellowing like they are at the market. Then he asks how many pages the playwright has written in Santiago.

“Fifty, seventy pages, but none of it works,” answers the woman.

“And how do you know that none of it works?”

“I don’t know, ask him.”

“I am asking him. All of these questions have been for him. I don’t know why you answered.”

The playwright is still aggrieved. The woman is caressing his hair. She whispers something to him in Catalan, and right away,
without looking at Daniel, they leave the apartment. They are sad and offended, but Daniel doesn’t care. He feels, for some reason, furious. He drinks whiskey until dawn; from time to time the Argentine cat jumps up, compassionately, onto his lap. He thinks of his son. He feels like calling him but doesn’t do it. He thinks about saving money to buy a house on the beach. He thinks about changing something, anything: paint some walls, buy a few grams of coke, let his beard grow out, improve his English, learn martial arts. Suddenly he looks at the cat and he finds a name for it—a perfect, androgynous name—but immediately, in his drunkenness, he forgets it. How is it possible, so quickly, to forget a name? he wonders. And then he doesn’t think about anything anymore, because he drops onto the carpet and doesn’t wake up until the following afternoon. He finds, while grappling with his budding hangover, that he’s missed work, that he hasn’t heard his phone ring ten or fifteen times, that he’s missed many e-mails. The cat is sleeping beside him, purring. Daniel tries to see if it has a penis or not. “Nothing,” he says out loud. “You don’t have a cock. You’re a girl cat,” he tells it, solemnly. “You are a true girl cat.”

He gets up, prepares an Alka-Seltzer, and drinks it without waiting for the tablet to dissolve entirely. His head hurts, but he still puts on an album he’s discovered recently, a selection of old waltzes, tangos, and fox-trots that remind him of his grandfather. While he showers, the cat chases his shadow on the shower curtain. He sings, half aloud, more sad than happy, along with a silly song—“Once a blonde was ready to die / for my love / not a lie / When her father found out / he got so mad / He tried to wipe me right off the map.”

Then he lies down on the bed for a few minutes, with the towel around his waist, still wet, like he always does. The phone rings: it’s the playwright, who wants to apologize for the night before by inviting him to dine.

“In Chile we don’t ‘dine,’ in Chile we ‘eat,’” he answers. “And I don’t want to dine or eat. I want to jerk off,” he says, forcing a crude tone of voice.

“So jerk off, man, no worries, we’ll wait for you,” says the playwright, laughing.

“I’m not going over there,” replies Daniel, with melodramatic gravity. “I’m not alone.”

It’s two in the morning. The cat is sleeping on the computer keyboard. Daniel looks at himself in the bathroom mirror, maybe searching for scratches or bruises. Then he lies down and masturbates mechanically, without thinking about anyone. He wipes the semen on the sheets as he falls asleep.

MEMORIES OF A PERSONAL COMPUTER

I
t was bought on March 15, 2000, for four hundred thousand eighty pesos, payable in thirty-six monthly installments. Max tried to fit the three boxes into the trunk of a taxi, but there wasn’t enough room, so he had to use string and a bungee cord to secure everything; it was a short trip, though, only ten blocks to Plaza Italia. Once in the apartment, Max installed the heavy CPU as best he could under the dining-room table, arranged the cables in a more or less harmonic way, and played like a kid with the Bubble Wrap it had been packaged in. Before solemnly starting up the system, he took a moment to look at everything deliberately, fascinated: the keyboard seemed
impeccable to him, the monitor, perfect, and he even thought that the mouse and speakers were somehow pleasant.

He was twenty-three years old, it was the first computer he’d owned, and he didn’t know exactly what he wanted it for, considering he barely knew how to turn it on and open the word processor. But it was necessary to have a computer, everyone said so, even his mother, who’d promised to help him with the payments. He worked as an assistant at the university and he thought that maybe he could type up the reading tests, or transcribe his old notes, written by hand or laboriously typed on an old Olympia typewriter on which he had also written all his undergraduate papers, provoking the laughter or admiration of his classmates, who were, by then, all using computers.

The first thing he did was transcribe the poems he had written over the past several years—short texts, elliptical and incidental, which were considered good by no one, but weren’t considered bad either. Something happened, though, when he saw those words on the screen, words that had made so much sense in his notebooks: he began to doubt the verses, and he let himself get carried along by a different rhythm—maybe one that was more visual than musical. But instead of feeling like the change of style was an experiment, he pulled back, got frustrated, and very often just deleted the poems and started over again, or wasted time changing fonts or moving the pointer of the mouse from one side of the screen to the other, in straight lines, in diagonals, in circles. He didn’t give up his notebooks or his pen, though, and at the first slip-up, he splattered ink all over the keyboard, which also had to
endure the threatening presence of countless cups of coffee and a continuous rain of ash, because Max almost never made it to the ashtray, and he smoked a lot while he wrote, or, rather, he wrote a little while he smoked a lot. Years later the accumulated grime would lead to the loss of the vowel
a
and the consonant
t
, but that’s getting ahead of things, and it would be best, for now, to respect the proper sequence of events.