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.