Free While the Shark is Sleeping by Milena Agus Page B

looked at him open-mouthed. How could someone who was always locked away practising, who certainly never inspired anyone to confide in him, have worked everything out? That day Zia closed the restaurant, and from then on, when there were specialities, they were for the Sevilla Mendoza family.
    The most difficult moment was when Mauro De Cortes, who hadn’t been answering the phone, sent us a postcard from Greece in which he said he’d taken a year’s unpaid leave and bought, with his girlfriend, another sailing boat. He’d headed off and was travelling the deep dark ocean of the postcard, beyond a little white terrace with red and lilac pots of carnations and geraniums under a little Greek-blue window. Next it was a nighttime terrace, the moon illuminating a yellow chair and a little table with an empty glass. He just said that he was well and hoped the same was true of us.
    We got the idea that God either doesn’t exist or is unjust, because we never won in any of those ill-fated battles and were always playing the role of the dead.
    We didn’t pray and I didn’t write this or any other story. My brother decided to give up school and stay at home alone practising the piano, because he just couldn’t handle his schoolmates any more. Zia decided she was through with men. Definitively. I thought regretfully of him, of those periods when all I’d had to do to be happy was follow orders and take myself off into the world of dreams. And when he phoned me to arrange to see me again and swore to me that he’d tried to carry me away that time at the beach in the postcard but it was like I was made of stone, and he’d waited hours for my phone call, it was hard not to believe it was love. But love had to be something else.

23
The vet
    One of those sad days I go down to take out the rubbish and in the big dumpster next to the Capuchin Convent I hear something whining. Having learnt not to be squeamish, I stand on an old brick and look in and I see a litter of puppies of no particular breed, wet, sticky and smelly. I wonder if it’s better to leave them to die. What kind of a life awaits them? One full of suffering. I’m not going to be able to find homes for five dogs and Zia wouldn’t want them at our place. So I call out to the first person that comes by and that looks right, to ask him for help, or his opinion.
    ‘Excuse me!’
    ‘Yes, what is it?’
    ‘There are five puppies in here. I don’t know if it’s better for them to live or die. I can’t keep them.’
    ‘It’s better for them to live, damn it.’ He comes running up. ‘I’m almost a vet!’
    ‘A vet?’
    So we immediately get the puppies out of the dumpster and place them on the guy’s jacket which he’s laid down on the ground.
    ‘God is strange,’ I say out loud to myself. ‘He seems uninterested in anything and then suddenly he appears before you to save five puppies. I’m so happy for them. A vet.’
    ‘And why do you think Jesus Christ’s turning his back on you?’ the guy asks, as he places the last puppy on the jacket.
    ‘My mother’s dead. My father’s gone off. Zia was sick for a period and wouldn’t get up off the floor. A friend, someone I used to be able to count on, has gone travelling around the Mediterranean in a sailing boat. The man I loved is married. Nonno was really on the ball but he died of an ulcer he’d been carrying around with him from a Nazi concentration camp. My brother’s constantly playing the piano and it’s as though he’s not even there. Plus it’s almost Christmas and there’ll be just the three of us at the table and Nonna will cry and Zia will say, “They deserve a kick up the arse, the lot of them!” My brother will stick around just long enough to gulp something down.’
    ‘And you’ve got no curtains left in the house!’ His face lights up at his witty remark.
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘I mean, you’re a dramatic sort. You know Eleonora Duse, in those scenes where she clings to the curtains,