Alejandro Zambra - My Documents

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 .

“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.