The dog that looked like Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, pictured with her 'cocker spaniel', 'Pinka', in 1939.Getty

One generation equals 15 years.

It is approximately the time that the life of a dog lasts.

That unit of measurement that is used to fix a group of writers, artists and politicians in history also serves to delimit a human biography, in this case Miguel's own, according to the dogs that have passed through his life.

Except for that nameless mongrel who was crushed to death by a truck and the

, a playmate during the summers of his adolescence with readings in the hammock and who was sacrificed with a shotgun at point - blank range by a day laborer when the pain he suffered in his chest was already unbearable . the last few days, the other dogs are buried under a lemon tree in the garden near the sea.

Of all of them Miguel recognizes to have received a teaching.

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Virginia Woolf in London

In the last years of the Franco regime a few months old dog came into his life that a friend had given him.

She was a blonde cocker spaniel, born to champion parents in Kensington and educated in a prestigious kennel in London's Bloomsbury neighborhood.

She was called

and with it Miguel went through the last throes of the dictatorship, the arrival of democracy and the convulsions of reaction, including the frustrated coup d'état, until the accession of the socialists to the Government.

He had a long, curved forehead;

If you look closely, he resembled Virginia Woolf and the languid and elegant way of lounging on the sofa could be similar to how that writer who reigned over a golden gang composed of intelligent, frivolous, modern and inane beings from Cambridge would do it.

In his house at 46 Gordon Square in the Bloomsbury neighborhood, the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the art critic Clive Bell, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the writer Gerald Brenan, the novelist EM Forster,

the writer Katherine Mansfield and the painters Dora Carrington and Duncan Grant.

They wore flowing clothes and soft hats when hunting lepidoptera in the gardens of their country houses;

they traveled to Greece and Constantinople with many trunks lined with canvas and there they combined the vision of Phidias or the Blue Mosque with the contemplation of ragged children, which allowed them to be both aesthetic and elegantly compassionate;

then, under chocolate-flavored pipe smoke, in Gordon Square, they discussed psychoanalysis, quantum theory, the Fabians, new economics, and Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Picasso.

Some played at being communists and even risked the double game of espionage.

They always had a purebred dog at their feet by the fireplace or a lulu in their arms.

Those beings seemed happy halfway between intelligence and neurosis in a convoluted web of intertwined relationships beyond good and evil, but their butter-colored fabrics covered the same greasy passions of ordinary mortals.

In the end, his whole philosophy came down to holding house parties dressed as sultans.

They may have had purebred dogs, but

would not have detracted from them because her gestures had that

unparalleled

She would certainly have been well received in the most select dog club.

How to explain that Miguel just by looking at his dog could imagine that fascinating world of Bloomsbury?

Analyzing each of his movements was already a lesson, beyond having read

Miguel had learned from his dog to enjoy a love without guilt, because he arrived at the time he arrived home, early or at dawn, drunk or serene, defeated or victorious, she always welcomed him happily wagging her tail.

The beauty of amorality, the belief that there is no force more powerful than aesthetics were teachings that Miguel intuited when he closely contemplated the character of his dog Deél

He barked only what was necessary.

He never did it when the boy from the supermarket, the postman or the plumber came home, as do dogs without pedigree.

He didn't bark at friends or beggars either.

He only emitted his untimely barks when there was some disorder in his surroundings.

Who will the dog bark at?

Why is she so restless she?

Perhaps it was an unexpected reflection of the sun on the lawn in the garden or the passing of someone on the street who, by smell, sensed that it was unpleasant.

She was just a neurotic, like Virginia Woolf.

Perhaps she had the same headaches and that point of hysteria that never hurts if you think you're an artist.

That was enough for him to have joined the Bloomsbury dog ​​pack and have access to the Gordon Square fireside rug.

the dog

He knew everything about Miguel and always responded with an understanding gesture to any state of mind, good or bad, of his owner.

She is buried under a lemon tree and on the ground that covers her Miguel planted some petunias.

When she died

she had not yet started her disenchantment.

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