Marcelo Caruso
02/28/2020 - 18:00
- Clarín.com
- Society
When I was 25 I inherited from my twin sister Bernardo, the most anti-dog dog I have ever seen. She had just separated, I was quite depressed, had returned to live with our mother and had lent me her apartment with a pet included. A year later, when we moved to our first house, (a 45 square meter duplex, attached to the Atanor factory in Munro), my wife and I decided to keep Bernardo with us.
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He was a mestizo of black color, not very tall, who, although difficult to believe, faded . All the brand new white walls of our little duplex went on to have a kind of dark gray boiserie because Bernardo rubbed and scratched continuously because (the height of a dog, if any) in addition to fading, he was allergic to Fleas and bites sprouted terribly.
Single photo. The image of the author's wife with Bernardo and the cat Fidel.
The animal, on top of it, had hair so oily that it made it virtually impermeable, so bathing it was a task of hours: the hose jets and the jugs of warm water struggled with serious disadvantages to reach the leather. The shampoo almost did not foam, but when we managed to get through that hirsute hair, when we managed to create white foam, leaving it like a sheep with a wolf's snout, the fight immediately became the titanic task of drying it.
He stayed several days in a state of humidity, something more than smelly, with us taking care not to wallow on the ground or on even worse surfaces, something that inevitably happened at the first carelessness. Bernardo had been raised with a somewhat chaotic freedom regime by my sister and her ex. During their brief marriage they lived in a hallway PH at the back, which always had the entrance door wide open, and the dog came and went as he pleased to the street . That custom tortured us, because our duplex stood in an area where it was little less than suicidal to have something open.
Bernardo asked to leave and asked to enter dozens of times a day, and scratched the wood of the door, both on one side and the other, with carpenter-like nails. Besides, I wasn't used to going out with a collar and leash either. When he put them on, he lay down how long he was, with the face of a punished animal. When he said: “Bernardo, come on, get up!”, He jumped everything that the leash allowed, to get scattered on the floor again.
The times I tried to get him used to it, I took him to the jumps, as if he had walked a toad of fifteen kilos . Another custom acquired with my sister's ex-husband: Bernardo accompanied me to buy cigarettes and jumped like a condemned man if he didn't give him the package to carry in his mouth. At first it was funny, I love walking and pet carrying the shopping as loud as possible. But sooner rather than later I found that he was distracted with great ease, and spit the bundle anywhere, even in the street water.
As his jumps were totally unstoppable, I resigned myself to always buy two bundles, one for me and one for him to take ; If I was lucky and I followed him without distracting me, I was able to rescue him. In addition to not being able to take it out on a leash, what made it more difficult to go out with him were two issues that brought me not a few problems: the first was that he was furiously bellicose with other dogs, ignoring the relative sizes of his opponents, and the second that, at bus stops, he approached with extreme stealth behind those who waited and pissed their pants, bags, and any object they supported on the floor.
Surely the reader is wondering what we were doing with such a spawn. The answer is simple: we were young, we had no children and we loved animals . But it is necessary to be fair to Bernardo. Just as he tortured us with his misconduct, so he was also loving with us and we were surprised the day we took a kitten of less than twenty days, which the mother did not breastfeed.
We thought that, lost for lost, he might survive, if the dog did not eat it. Not only did he not eat it: among the bottles that my wife gave him, Bernardo was guarding next to the shoe box where we had placed him, and, if the kitten managed to get out, he would gently take it from his head with his mouth and return to deposit it inside.
I washed it as if it had been the same mother. And not a few of his care made that cat, whose name was Fidel, lived with us for more than eighteen years. It was a truly unusual duo. They played the whole day, ate from the same plate, slept next to each other. When we castrated Fidel, the dog returned to stand guard by his side until he woke up from anesthesia. As he looked drunk, he propped it up against the walls with his muzzle and helped him walk by correcting his wobbly steps.
Four years later things took a turn, say, complicated, with my wife's pregnancy. Flaunting a formidable intuition, Bernardo knew it even before my wife. And although it is hard to believe, he changed his bad behavior for the worse . Shattered curtains, urinated our bed, chewed furniture and clothes thoroughly. We live the first month of that pregnancy celebrating the future arrival of the baby, but also in a continuous state of anxiety due to the surprises that each return to the duplex had after work.
Even so, we bought the bassinet and prepared the trousseau of who in a short time would be called Marcia. I carried a bucket of paint and thoroughly bleached the walls. Because we wanted our daughter to live in forty-five square meters of neatness.
One afternoon in April or early May I arrived in the duplex before my wife. Bernardo had not destroyed anything during that day. Fidel showed off his feline indifference. I made some mattes and went to sit in the tiny garden of the tiny bottom. The declining sun was on one of the newly painted walls and, as it descended in the west, it raised its beam of light on the white surface.
I, who naively hoped to see her immaculate, discovered a number of small dark spots . It looked like the effect that the sun has on the eyes when we look straight ahead and I didn't give it much importance. But as the evening ended, I noticed that the spots, far from disappearing, followed the beam of light and seemed to group together. It was enough to approach me to recognize ticks, hundreds of ticks , that ascended the wall following the warmth of the sun. What I felt was horror. "Where do I bring my baby to live?" I asked myself, while I was poisoning them.
At that moment I made the decision to give Bernardo. My wife agreed. My sister, who at that point had lost, say, parental authority over the animal, was limited to an ambiguous silence. Making the decision was somewhat easy. The difficult thing would be to find someone "weird" enough to love that faint eczematous and semi-bare black dog. And yet I found it. God have in his glory that venerable old lady who lived with a grandson a few meters from my work, and about twelve blocks from our duplex, and who told me that I just needed a dog to take care of the house and play with the child.
So one day in April, or early May, I took Bernardo there. I returned crying to the duplex, trying to recognize myself in that insensitive man, capable of getting rid of a pet I had lived with for several years. But after a few days I practically danced with happiness, feeling the peace descending upon our home like a blessed mantle.
They were wonderful months. The belly grew and throbbed. My partner rounded day by day . She was the most beautiful pregnant woman on earth. I wrote, and somehow I also developed what my first book would be. Fullness, that is the word that rightly defines that period. Time unfolded smoothly. My wife went on work leave. On January 6 or 7 there was a storm that precipitated the birth of Marcia.
What to say when I saw Marcia making her way to life, in the delivery room. A whole person of two kilos seven hundred and fifty grams, a perfect miracle, with powerful lungs to cry , hungry for milk and tenderness.
There is something undeniably adamic in the first contemplation of those tiny unique features, in the full hands, in the silky subtlety of the hair of a newcomer. Being a father, giving life, seemed to me the closest to feeling God, and I had a devastating certainty of eternity, of perpetuation, against whom I would continue the palpitations of our blood and our flesh.
I remember that I went down the avenue and from the public telephone of a bar I prepared to give the good news. At that time there was a television advertising, I do not remember what product, in which a young man warned of the birth of his son from a public telephone, and he did so with such tenderness that people queuing to use the phone allowed him to continue talking and calling indefinitely. Well, that happened to me. Only to the publicity I added torrents of italic tears, without the slightest modesty .
That day and the next I went to the duplex to bathe and sleep, and then again to the clinic where my girls were. I suppose that I am nothing original when saying that my head was a menjunje of enthusiasms and plans for the future. Somehow unclear, I sensed that I was living a crucial moment, when I was weakening, moving away from me, the figure of a son who had inhabited me from my own birth, and began to gravitate the role of father, something that filled me The mind of exalted responsibility.
My daughter is 31 years old today and a wonderful brother. My role in fatherhood, surely, was full of potholes, fruits of my own bad character, of inexperience, fears, helplessness in solving various issues, lack of time and too many more. But thirty-one years ago we were blank sheets waiting to be written. And mine was to take care of taking my wife and the newcomer to our duplex .
My older sister lent me her car and I left for the clinic. There was the joy of walking for the first time with Marcia in my arms, so fragile and light that it made me think I was carrying a cotton flake. I must say that neither my wife nor I wanted people to be in the duplex, waiting for us. No mother-in-law, no brothers-in-law, no friends, no neighbors, no brand new uncles and aunts. The three of us, the cat and nobody else.
And so it was, with only one exception. When parking the car in front of the duplex, sitting and alert, with a rare expression, was Bernardo. He had escaped from the old lady's house. Something stabbed my heart and my wife. Did you know? Chance?
When he opened the door, he greeted Fidel and went with us to the bedroom where we placed the bassinet. He stood on two legs on the edge, smelled and watched the baby for about half a minute , and after receiving some caresses, he headed for the door. I opened it. I said, "Well, Bernardo, go to Granny's house." Although it is hard to believe, we saw him move away. I went the next day to see if he had returned with her. He had returned. Some time later, in front of the gate of the house, I saw him and tried to call him, to greet him. He never approached me again.
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Marcelo Caruso was born in Buenos Aires in 1958. He studied Literature and History of the Arts. In 1988 he received the first prize of the Hispano-American Short Story Contest of Puebla, Mexico, and the first ex aequo prize of short story at the Biennial of Young Art of the Municipality of Buenos Aires. He has published the book of stories "A fish in the immense night" (1988) and "Brüll" (1996), his first novel, which won the First Prize of the Fortabat Foundation Novel, was a finalist for the Planeta del Sur Prize in South 1995 and was distinguished with the First Municipal Prize of the City of Buenos Aires in the novel category in 1996. In 2019 he received the first Clarín de Novel Award for his work "Black the pain of the world".