Free My Documents by Megan McDowell Alejandro Zambra Page A

apartment. She hated elevators, hated that Daniel lived on the eleventh floor—and not only because she was concerned for the boy’s safety, or because of her own phobia, but also because it reminded her, insistently, of that far-off night when Daniel had promised her that there would be no elevators in their life together, that they would always live, so to speak, with their feet on the ground.
    Maru apologized for the visit.
    “We were in the neighborhood,” she said, which was highly unlikely, because they lived on the other side of the city.
    “For a second I thought the kid came alone,” said Daniel.
    “What do you mean, alone?”
    “Alone.”
    “Are you crazy?”
    “No.”
    Daniel toasted some bread and made coffee, which they drank in silence while the boy assigned nationalities to the cats: the white or almost-white cat was Argentine, the black cats were Brazilian, and the gray cats were Chilean.
    Thanks to the group e-mail, Daniel got back in contact with a former classmate from college, a woman who came over one night on the pretense of adopting a cat. After the first pisco and Coke they went to bed, and it was good, or more or less good, as she said the next morning.
    “I mean, I liked it,” she added lightly, but to Daniel it seemed like an aggressive remark. “What happened to you is really strange,” she said next; she had the habit of changing the subject every time she lit a cigarette. “It’s really strange what happened to you—it’s more common for male cats to be mistaken for female, and not the other way around.”
    “What?”
    “Just, it’s normal to not see their cocks well. But you saw a cock on Pedra where there wasn’t one,” said the woman, who hardly had time to laugh at her joke before she told another one: “She’s called Pedra and you’re called padre.”
    Daniel laughed late, irritated.
    “Why do you say ‘cock’?” he asked her.
    “What, I can’t say that?”
    “Women don’t say cock.”
    “But what you put in me last night is called a cock,” she said. “And what Pedra doesn’t have is called a cock.”
    To Daniel it seemed like phony indecency. Before leaving, the woman assured him that she would come by later for the cat, so that, in a fit of optimism, Daniel thought that the scene from the night before would repeat itself over and over: every evening she would come for a cat, sleep with him, and leave at dawn. But it wasn’t like that, not at all. She never came back, didn’t call, didn’t write.
    Someone spread the word that there were cats in the building, so Daniel had to bribe the concierges with a bottle of pisco and a few opportune boxes—as a joke—of Gato Negro wine. Then he needed several whiskeys to neutralize the downstairs neighbors, a Catalan playwright and his wife.
    “We like the country, and the neighborhood is very clean,” they said almost in unison, as if they were competing in a contest that tested their matrimonial harmony. Pedra sniffed at the guests, and the little cats dozed in a pile inside a shoe box. The couple had come to Chile to be near their daughter, who’d just had a baby. The woman spent a lot of time with the granddaughter, and the man tended to stay at home alone—he was in need of a little solitude and inspiration, he explained.
    Solitude and inspiration, thought Daniel later on, lying in bed. He had solitude and he’d never needed inspiration, but the playwright’s words made him think that maybe that was precisely what he was missing: inspiration. His job, however, was very simple, almost mechanical: a lawyer doesn’t need inspiration, but rather the patience to tolerate his superiors, and doubtless also intelligence and subtlety to saw the floor out from under them, and maybe also imagination, but just practical imagination, he told himself, as though definitively resolving the issue.
    I look for inspiration only when I jack off, he thought later, wide awake, evoking the happiness of a table full of