Free My Documents by Megan McDowell Alejandro Zambra

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 whetherit 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, andimmediately 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