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 one.
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.