Out of Sorts Read Free Page A

Daisy! They’ve found Daisy!” Ferdinand exclaims, opening the door wide.
    “I’m so very sorry, but I’m afraid the news isn’t good.”
    “You found her? Yes or no?” says Ferdinand.
    “Mrs. Suarez, our concierge, will be able to tell you more. She’s downstairs with your dog’s body. I’m really sorry, Mr. Brun.”
    Beatrice takes the old man by the arm and leads him down the thirteen steps separating him from his darling.

Chapter Five
    Miserable as Sin
    For two days Ferdinand has been shut away in his home, huddled in his bed in the fetal position, surrounded by crumpled tissues. He doesn’t want to get up or go out. To go where, anyway? Everything would remind him of Daisy. He’d end up by the vegetable garden where Daisy used to relieve herself on the neighbor ladies’ tomatoes, or by the house where a pug would sit up and safely bark at her from behind his gate.
    The silence in the apartment is oppressive. His old habits now seem senseless. He no longer feels like doing anything, not even eating, just like when he got divorced. He still forces himself to swallow some expired preserves. He throws up a little, but he doesn’t feel well anyway. Death by food poisoning or something else—what does he care? Besides, he’s feeling pressure in his chest, a weight that hinders his breathing. That sense of suffocation doesn’t leave him, as if to fill the void left by Daisy.
    Though sadness and solitude are his new companions, there is still room for an even more invasive feeling: anger. Ferdinand cannot resign himself to accept the theory of an accident. There must be someone to blame, someone on whom to focus his hatred. Daisy was so young, barely four years old. And she was the sweetest creature there was—she wouldn’t have hurt a fly. She’d never even gone near the concierge’s canaries. Even the attacks by the neighbor’s cat, the one in 2B, didn’t affect her. She’d just side-eyed it with panache.
    It’s incomprehensible. Daisy had never tried to escape when he tied her up to the post outside the market. She’d had exemplary patience. And if the knot in her leash had come undone, she wouldn’t have run away. At worst she would have gone home, and for that she had no need to cross the street. She knew the route by heart. They walked it every day. So why? Why had she disappeared? Why had she crossed the road all alone?
    What if this is a case of mistaken identity? What if he is the target? Once again that damned bad luck that takes away his women, one after the other, has struck.
    Ferdinand bellows, not realizing he’s talking out loud, “If you had to take somebody, it should’ve been me, not her! What am I supposed to do now? And what am I going to do with my darling? Cremation or burial?
    “And what about your things, Daisy? I can’t throw them out, not your chew bone, or your threadbare old pillow. I’ll never be able to replace you. I miss you so much, my darling. I think this is the end—my end. There’s nobody left to say hello to me at the door in the morning, to make me take a walk and go buy lunch. Nobody left to look at me with those sweet eyes, or disapproving ones when I rake a TV host over the coals.
    “I’m not anything anymore. Just a grub. I don’t even have a picture of you. Just memories, and mirages, too, when I think I see you in the distance. Sometimes I tell myself that all this is just a terrible nightmare, that the telephone will ring and they’ll tell me about a regrettable mistake. And you’ll be there, alive, tail wagging, happy to see me again. Other times, I dream I wake up and you’re there, we go out for a walk by the lake where you loved watching the mallards so much. I’ve thought a lot about it. I don’t want this life without you. I don’t want to see anybody anymore. I don’t want fake sympathetic looks from my damned neighbors. I know what they’re thinking deep down: ‘Serves him right! He had it coming. He should’ve been nicer. You