Housebroken (8 page)

But now he was disturbed by the barking and whining of his fellow inmates. In the din of the pound he tried to reconstruct the exact route taken by the three of them from the house to the beach. There was a kiosk. Sometimes they stopped to buy something or chat with the owner, who gave him something to eat: a square of chocolate or a piece of sticky coconut candy. He had no patience in those days, and would dance around the man and the woman, imploring them with growls and jumps to go on walking. But he didn't dare move away without them. The kiosk owner would look at the three of them and laugh, and ask questions: how old is he and what breed is he and what's his name, and when they left the kiosk he would keep on watching them and feel jealous—jealous of how they lit each other's cigarettes, standing facing each other, the man's hand on the woman's shoulder, or the woman's hand pushed into the man's coat pocket; of the big umbrella sheltering them all when it rained; of the proud puppy turning his head back to look at the kiosk receding in the distance.

Sometimes the walk to the sea took a long time because the man and the woman met people they knew. They would each introduce the other to their friends, and the friends would look down and ask: “And who's this? Is he yours? What's his name?” And the man and the woman would answer: “We haven't decided on a name yet.” Sometimes the friends would suggest names and the man and the woman would try the names out on him, but everything seemed too short or too long, too cute or too forbidding, too temporary or too permanent.

Once they ran into the man's matchmaking friend in the street. She hugged the man and kissed him on the cheek and said: “Long time no see.” Then the man introduced her to the woman. The friend smiled and asked the woman: “So where have you been hiding him?” It was a joke but the woman didn't laugh. The friend didn't look very happy either. The man and his friend chatted a bit, and the dog jumped up and down and tugged at the man's shoelaces and jerked his head in the direction of the sea. The friend asked if they'd like to sit somewhere and have coffee. The man hesitated and looked at the woman, but the woman pushed her hand deep into his coat pocket and said that the dog was restless and they should go on with their walk. When the friend said goodbye and turned away, the man looked after her and said to the woman: “She's the one who introduced us.”

“Yes,” said the woman, “I know. She's the one you had an affair with.”

It was hard to find a position to sleep in. The dog tried to imagine his mat but he couldn't. It was the only thing in his life he had been able to take for granted and had therefore never bothered to preserve it in his memory. In the dark he saw the big tin bowl full of dog food, but he wasn't hungry. He remembered his red plastic bowl and he missed it, even though it too had betrayed him in recent months. But it was a symbol of the beginning. In the pound the barking died down and the dog heard sounds of gnawing and scratching and the restless padding of paws on concrete.

He remembered other things: the first six months, the beach full of surprises—shells and fish bones and seaweed and plastic bags and pits full of salty water, cigarette butts, and the jellyish creatures the man and the woman carefully avoided as they walked along the shore. He himself had fallen in love with them at first sight. Whenever he saw one he would go up to it, circle it, sniff it, and bark at it, barks that grew more substantial as he grew bigger. When there was no response he would cautiously reach out with his paw to touch it. It was hard to tell whether they were alive or dead, but once one of them sprayed him with a burning liquid and he ran for comfort to the man and the woman who were busy building castles in the sand.

Later on he learned to beware of the jellyfish. He amused himself with digging and running around in circles and barking at the waves, or else he enjoyed the quiet company of the man and the woman, lying still next to them, moved, like them, by the sunset.

19

The man liked living at the woman's place but he didn't want to give up his own studio apartment. The rent was low, and it wasn't a problem for him to go on paying it and also to pay his share of her rent. He had lived in his place for seven years. He felt that giving it up would be like giving up the love of his life, and even though he had never actually experienced such a love, he was sure it would feel exactly like this. He wanted to keep in touch with it, to visit it from time to time, to smell it, to move around in it, to open and close the windows, to turn the lights on and off, to see how it was getting along without him, to take something from it.

During the first month, which was also the first month of winter, when things were not yet clear, he visited his apartment faithfully two or three times a week, each time taking something else: books he thought he wanted to read, tapes, shoes, clothes, sheets, a mug; he crammed them all quickly into a big bag and hurried out of the apartment as if he was robbing himself.

He would put the bag in the woman's kitchen on the table or on the living-room floor and pretend that he had forgotten all about it. A few days later he would see his things scattered around the house as if they had always been there. The woman put them where they would fit in with her things but also maintain their independence in the shared space; she didn't want the man to feel he had lost them. The books, which were mainly big books, film encyclopedias, she placed on her bookcase, at the end of the top shelf, leaning with all their weight on a row of poetry books in soft covers. The little, miscellaneous things, the uprooted personal things, she put in places where they would be sheltered by larger objects.

She didn't touch his clothes. At first they were scattered around, on the floor, on chairs, hanging on the hooks in the bathroom. She smiled to herself when she saw them making their way, one by one, to her closet. She had cleared a space on the two bottom shelves in the left half of the closet, and pushed her own clothes together in the right half of the closet leaving a few empty coat hangers on the unoccupied part of the rod. For a month she watched the man's clothes wander around the house like a flock of orphans until they found their way to the empty shelves or the empty hangers—close to her own but not touching them. The man and the woman never actually spoke directly about living together, but the things spoke for them, especially the clothes, which spoke the loudest.

Except for one Friday night, when the man went to have dinner with his friends, they spent all their evenings together—something that was equally strange to both of them but affected them in different ways. The woman was the first to panic. One afternoon the man took the dog to the vet for a checkup and immunization shots. She sat in the kitchen and leafed through a new cookbook the man had bought her because he knew that she wanted it and because he found the photos appetizing. Outside a strong wind was blowing, shaking the porch door.

She enjoyed sitting at the table, feeling the cold tiles under the man's thick socks, and browsing through the recipes. She didn't know whether she liked the book or the fact that the man had bought her a present. Almost every day she saw him showering the dog with gifts, rubber bones, a special shampoo for dogs, a hairbrush, bone-shaped biscuits that he gave the dog as a reward whenever he learned something new, and she regarded these gifts as presents to her as well.

She wondered whether she should try one of the simpler recipes in the book and quickly surveyed the contents of the fridge and the cupboards in her head. She had all the ingredients. She went into the living room, chose one of the man's tapes, and put it into the tape deck. A metallic noise filled the house but didn't overcome the wind, which buffeted the windows and slammed the doors. She checked all the windows to make sure they were securely shut, and closed the doors too. Then she returned to the kitchen, opened the cupboards, took out jars and cans, took out a chicken from the freezer, and put it on the marble counter with its legs pointing at the ceiling.

It felt strange to be in the kitchen without the dog—nobody under her feet, nobody sitting hopefully next to the fridge, nobody dragging a bowl on the floor. There was a stillness in the kitchen that reminded her of life before the dog and the man. She thought of them walking together down the street, the puppy bumping into the man's legs and raising his head from time to time to receive the man's approval for some doggy desire which she understood very well; the man striding next to him with giant steps, double steps that she too found it difficult to keep up with. She imagined them in the car, the man behind the wheel, smoking, listening to the radio, driving fast, and the dog trying to balance himself on the passenger seat, flung from side to side. She tried to imagine the vet's office, the other dogs with their owners, the vet himself, his metal table, and her puppy who didn't know what was waiting for him.

He was definitely their puppy now. The man had volunteered to take him to the vet. He wanted the responsibility, that was clear, and he even seemed to her to enjoy it to such an extent that there were moments when she felt he was appropriating the dog. This happened whenever the man tried to train him, kneeling on the floor, scolding him, encouraging him, explaining to him, dragging him to this or that puddle, locking him in the bathroom, inventing all kinds of punishment. At these moments she felt as if the man and the dog were merging, that they shared an understanding which excluded her. Sometimes they both seemed to be waiting for their meals with the same sense of expectation, with the same trust and belief that at the appointed hour their food would land in its plate. How quickly she had entered this role which gave her a feeling of control, which, although it was as temporary and fragile as the feeling she got from writing notes, had a calming effect and filled her with serenity. It was an acquired serenity, but nonetheless a serenity she had not known before.

She touched the chicken and realized it would take a good few hours to thaw. She could speed the process up by soaking it in water, but she didn't want to do anything to spoil the new recipe. She went into the living room and turned the cassette over to the other side, sat on the sofa, and listened. The music was too noisy for her taste and she couldn't catch the words, if there were any words in all that metal, but she didn't want to turn the tape deck off or change the cassette, because she was afraid of disrupting the delicate balance between the man's things and her things—a balance that now also included smells and sounds. She listened to the music and the wind and the thunder beginning to roll outside, and suddenly she was flooded with joy and restlessness. She thought of the rain about to fall, of the dinner she was going to make, of her new family—the man and herself, and the dog between them like a radiator giving off warmth—and she wondered what made her so sure. The man had not hidden the fact that he had never had a serious relationship, that he had never lived with a woman, that he had never been in love. She found it difficult to believe that this could be true, but when she thought of herself she knew that it was.

Almost everything the man possessed was already comfortably settled in her home. Everything he had accumulated in seven years and succeeded in cramming into his studio apartment, except the furniture, which belonged to the landlady. Two days ago they had driven there together to pick up the remains of his belongings. She looked around at the damp walls, at the bed covered with old newspapers, at some book the man had started reading before he met her, an ashtray, two or three disposable lighters, a miniature tree which had dried up and shed its leaves on the sheet.

If anyone asked her to give an account of her first days with the man, she would have noted that this was the moment she fell in love—the moment when they collected his things, the remnants of his previous life, a moment preceded by many long moments of uncertainty and fear delaying the actual act of falling in love, which had perhaps come long before.

The day after the night when he came to save the dog, they sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. Early in the morning the rain had started coming down in floods, exactly as the forecast had promised, and the man had gone with the dog and her umbrella to buy milk. They sat together in the kitchen and drank coffee. The incident with the bone was not mentioned again, but it seemed to her that the man was angry. She was so preoccupied with her fear of the man getting up, pushing back his chair, putting his cup into the sink, perhaps washing it too, and telling her, this time in so many words, that he didn't want to see her again that she didn't notice another, more substantial event when the man, in a way which he would never be able to explain to himself, began to love her.

20

The puppy was declared a three-month-old mongrel, healthy and full of life. He wouldn't be big, the vet pronounced, he would be medium-sized, and the man felt disappointed for a minute, as if it were his child they were talking about, his genes to blame for the dog being a medium-sized mongrel.

The man had chosen the vet from a list in the phone book because of his name, which had a foreign sound. The man imagined an experienced, elderly doctor. He was surprised when his turn came and he picked the dog up in his arms and went into the little office and found a man of about his own age, with nothing foreign about his appearance, and who didn't seem particularly experienced either. He thought the vet looked like him too: they were both average height, a little heavy, with short black hair and brown eyes. And what surprised him most of all were the vet's nails, which were bitten to the quick, just like his.

The vet asked the man to sit down, which he did, in an old iron chair, with the dog in his lap. The vet put out one hand to pat the dog and with his other hand he opened a desk drawer and took out an index card. He chose a blue pen from a glassful of pens and pencils; the dog snatched it from his hand and began gnawing it. The man apologized and pulled the pen away from the dog, wiped it on his trousers, and returned it to the vet, who laughed and patted the dog again, and then tapped the pen on the card and said: “Name?”