Free My Documents by Megan McDowell Alejandro Zambra Page B

good friends who would celebrate that sentence, and then he started to masturbate, taking inspiration, first, from the playwright’s wife, especially her legs, and then from that friend of his who never came back, and finally from Maru, who was still attractive to him, although the image he focused on was one from their youth, from those first years full of motel sex, and especially from a trip home on Route 78, when he drove some twenty kilometers with her bent over, sucking him off. He focused on that memory and proceeded hurriedly, uneasily, greedily, but the semen wouldn’t come—and he didn’t come. It was hard for him to convince himself that he just had to go to sleep, erection and all, still half drunk.
    The next day he was supposed to pick Lucas up, but he woke up late. He called Maru and invented an excuse, told her he had a headache. She put Lucas on the phone and Daniel promised to pickhim up at five. “I learned how to make sushi,” he told him, which was a lie, but Daniel liked to casually toss out that kind of falsehood, to force himself to turn it into truth. After ten minutes online he knew what he needed to buy. In addition to the sushi supplies, he returned from the supermarket with a large bag of Whiskas, a lot of milk, and bottles of Bilz, Pap, and Kem Piña, because he could never manage to remember which of those three sodas was his son’s favorite.
    “These cats need a father,” Lucas told him that night, while he fought with a disastrous sushi roll.
    “Cats don’t have fathers,” answered Daniel, hesitantly. “When they’re in heat, the girl cats have sex with whoever, and the kittens aren’t always even real brothers and sisters.”
    “What?”
    “Just that—they’re not necessarily siblings. They’re half siblings, that’s why they’re different colors. Most likely Pedra had sex with three boy cats: one gray, one white, and one that was black, like her.”
    “I don’t care,” said Lucas, who seemed to have thought about the subject. “I don’t care. I think that these cats definitely need a father.”
    “We already have a lot of cats, Lucas, and also, cats behave differently than humans. The dad cats forget about their babies,” said Daniel, for a second fearing an acidic answer from his son, but it didn’t come. “And the moms do too,” he went oncautiously. “After a little bit, it’s likely that Pedra won’t recognize her babies.”
    “Now that I don’t believe,” said the boy, astonished. “That’s impossible.”
    “You’ll see. Now she looks for them, carries them around in her mouth, gathers them together, and cries if she can’t find them. But soon she’ll forget about them. That’s how animals are.”
    “You seem to know a lot about animals,” said Lucas, in a tone that seemed either ironic or candid.
    “Not really, but your uncles had cats.”
    “But you lived in the same house as them.”
    “Yes, but they weren’t mine.”
    They were in the bedroom, watching a very slow Mexican soccer match, about to fall asleep. Daniel went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and he stayed there for a few minutes watching Pedra, who seemed either committed or resigned to the kittens scrabbling at her teats. He went back to the bedroom; the boy had closed his eyes and was murmuring a kind of litany—Daniel thought he was having a nightmare and shook him lightly, waking him.
    “I wasn’t sleeping, Dad, I was praying.”
    “Praying? And since when do you pray?”
    “Since Monday. On Monday I learned how to pray.”
    “Who taught you?”
    “Mom.”
    “And since when does she pray?”
    “She doesn’t pray. But she taught me to pray, and I like it.”
    They slept, as always, in the same bed. That night there was a tremor and hundreds of dogs howled pitifully as the earth shook, but Daniel and Lucas didn’t wake up. Far off, the thunder of a car crash sounded, as well as the voices of the neighbors, who were arguing or talking or maybe practicing a