BY DAWN ON SATURDAY, after the worst of the storm had moved on, Richard awoke with the sour aftertaste of having offended Lucia the evening before when he coldly dismissed her fears. He would have liked to be with her while outside the wind and snow lashed the house. Why had he been so abrupt with her? Afraid of falling into the trap of romanticism, which he had avoided for twenty-five years, he never asked himself why he rejected love, because the answer seemed obvious: it was his inescapable penance. Over time he had grown used to his monkish habits and the inner silence of those who live and sleep alone. After hanging up the phone with Lucia he had felt an urge to appear at the basement door with a thermos of tea to keep her company. He was intrigued by this childish fear in a woman who had experienced a fair amount of drama in her life and who seemed invulnerable. He would have liked to probe this breach in Lucia’s fortress but was prevented from doing so by a sense of danger, as if by giving in to this impulse he would find himself on uncertain ground. The feeling of danger was still there. Nothing new in that. Every so often he fell prey to an irrational anxiety, which was why he had his green pills. At such times he felt he was plunging unavoidably into the icy depths of the sea, with no one nearby to stretch out a hand to pull him back to the surface. These fatalistic premonitions had begun in Brazil, brought on by Anita, who lived on the lookout for any sign from the Great Beyond. In the past he had often suffered from these attacks, but had learned to control them.
The instructions given on radio and TV were to remain indoors until the streets had been cleared. Manhattan was still semiparalyzed, with most stores closed, but the subway and buses were running again. Other states were in a worse situation than New York, with houses destroyed, trees uprooted, neighborhoods cut off, and some areas without gas or electricity. The inhabitants had gone back two centuries in a few hours. By comparison, in Brooklyn they had been lucky. Richard went out to clear off the snow from his car before it turned to ice and would need to be scraped off. After returning, he put out food for the cats and made the breakfast he ate every day: oatmeal with almond milk and fruit. He settled down to work on his article about the economic crisis in Brazil that international observers had detected in the run-up to the Olympic Games. He had a student’s thesis to review but would do so later, since he had the whole day before him.
At around three in the afternoon, he realized that one of the cats was missing. Whenever Richard was at home, they made sure to stay close by him. His relationship with them was one of mutual indifference, except with Dois, the only female, who took advantage of the slightest opportunity to jump up and settle herself near him so that he would stroke her. The three males were independent; they had understood from the outset that they were not pets and that their duty was to hunt mice. Richard could see that Um and Quatro were prowling around the kitchen, but there was no sign of Três. Dois was stretched out on the table next to his computer, one of her favorite spots.
He looked throughout the house for the missing male, giving the whistle they all recognized. He found him sprawled out on the second-floor landing, with pink froth around his nostrils. “Come on, Três, get up. What’s wrong with you, my boy?” He managed to set him on his feet, and the cat staggered a few drunken steps before collapsing again. There were flecks of vomit everywhere, which often happened, as sometimes the cats did not properly digest the rodents’ tiny bones. He carried Três to the kitchen, where he tried in vain to make him drink water. While in the midst of doing this, Três’s four legs went rigid and he started to convulse. Richard understood these were symptoms of poisoning. He quickly ran through a mental list of the toxic substances in the house, all of them safely stored. It took him several minutes before he found the cause in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, where he had stored the car’s antifreeze. Some of the fluid had leaked, and Três must have licked it, because there were paw prints on the floor. Richard was sure he had closed the container and the cabinet door properly. He could not understand how the accident had happened, but he’d worry about that later. For now what was most urgent was to take care of the cat; antifreeze was lethal.
Traffic was restricted except for emergencies, which was exactly what this was. He looked up the address of the nearest veterinary hospital, which he remembered passing by at some point. He wrapped the cat in a blanket and put him in his car. He was glad he had brushed the snow off that morning, and relieved the disaster had not occurred the day before while the blizzard was raging. Brooklyn had become a Nordic city, white on white, the angles softened by the snow, empty streets, and a strange peace, as if nature were yawning. “Don’t you dare get the idea of dying, Três, please. You’re a proletarian cat, you’ve got steel guts, a bit of antifreeze is nothing, hang in there,” Richard encouraged him as he drove with painful slowness through the snow, conscious that each extra minute could prove fatal for Três. “Stay calm, pal, hang on. I can’t go any quicker, because if we skid we’re done for. We’re almost there. I’m sorry I can’t go any faster . . .”
A journey that would normally have taken twenty minutes took twice as long. By the time he finally arrived at the clinic, it was snowing again and Três was being shaken with fresh convulsions, bringing up more pink froth. The cat was seen by an efficient veterinarian of few gestures or words. She showed no optimism about the cat or sympathy for his owner. His negligence had caused the accident, she told her assistant in a low voice, although not so low that Richard did not hear. On another occasion he would have reacted to this caustic comment, but a powerful wave of bad memories caught him off guard, and he remained silent, humiliated. This was not the first time that his negligence had proved fatal. From that terrible moment on, he had become so careful and had taken so many precautions that he often felt he went through life walking on eggshells. The vet explained that there was little she could do. The blood and urine tests would show whether the damage to the kidneys was irreversible, in which case the cat was going to suffer and it would be better to give it a dignified end. It had to stay at the clinic; there would be a definitive diagnosis in a couple of days, but he should prepare himself for bad news. Richard nodded, on the verge of tears. He said goodbye to Três with his heart in a knot, feeling the vet’s hard look from behind: an accusation and a sentence rolled into one.
He handed his credit card for the initial deposit to the receptionist, a young woman with carrot-colored hair and a ring in her nose. When she saw how he was shaking, she took pity on him, reassuring him that his pet would be very well looked after, and pointed out the coffee machine. Faced with this gesture of minimal kindness, Richard was overwhelmed by a disproportionate sense of gratitude and let out a deep sob. If anyone had asked him his feelings toward his four pets, he would have answered that he fulfilled his duty by feeding them and cleaning their litter tray. His relationship with the cats was no more than polite, except with Dois, who demanded affection. That was all. Never had he imagined he would come to appreciate those aloof felines as part of the family he did not have. He sat on a chair in the waiting room and drank a cup of watery, bitter coffee while the receptionist looked on sympathetically. After taking two of the green pills for his nerves, and a pink one for his stomach acidity, he gradually regained control. He had to get home.