The Man Who Loved Dogs Read Free

that began the first day I went to the house where Ana lived with a friend to give Tato an IV, the girl threw her belongings into two backpacks and, with her ration book, a box of books, and her nearly recovered poodle, moved into my damp and already peeling apartment in Lawton.
    Besieged by hunger, blackouts, the devaluation of our salaries, and a transportation standstill—amid many other evils—Ana and I lived through a period of ecstasy. Our respective scrawniness, accentuated by the long trips we made on the Chinese bicycles that our workplaces had sold us, turned us into almost ethereal beings, a new species of mutants capable, nonetheless, of dedicating our remaining energies to makinglove, to talking for hours, and to reading like fiends—for Ana, poetry; for me, a return to novels after a long time without them. But they were also unreal years, lived in a dark and sluggish country, always hot, that was falling apart day by day without quite falling into the troglodytic primitiveness that threatened us. And they were years in which not even the most devastating scarcity was able to stamp out the joy that living together brought Ana and me, like the shipwrecked who tie themselves to one another to either jointly save themselves or perish together.
    Apart from the hunger and the material shortcomings of all kinds that besieged us—although between us we considered them outside us and inevitable, and thus foreign to us—the only sadly personal episodes we experienced at that time were the revelation of the vitamin-deficient polyneuritis that Ana began to suffer from and, later on, the death of Tato at the age of sixteen. The loss of the poodle affected my wife so much that, a couple of weeks later, I tried to alleviate the situation by picking up a stray pup infected with mange, whom Ana immediately started to call “Truco” due to his ability to hide, and whom she fed with rations taken from our paltry survivors’ diet.
    Ana and I had achieved a level of such rapport that, one night, under a blackout, with ill-contained hunger, unease, and heat (how was it possible that it was always so damned hot and that even the moon seemed to shed less light than before?)—as if I were just carrying out a natural need—I began to tell her the story of the meetings that, fourteen years before, I had had with that character whom I had always called, from the very day I met him, “the man who loved dogs.” Until that night on which, almost without prologue and as an outburst, I decided to tell Ana that story, I had never revealed to anyone the subject of my conversations with that man and, less still, my delayed, repressed, and often forgotten desire to write the story he had confided in me. So that she would have a better idea of how I’d been affected by the proximity to that figure and the dreadful story of hate, betrayal, and death that he’d given me, I even gave her some notes to read that many years before, from the ignorance I wallowed in at the time, and almost against my own will, I had not been able to keep myself from writing. She had barely finished reading them when Ana stared at me until the weight of her black eyes—those eyes that would always look like the most living thing of her body—began to berate me and she finally said, with appalling conviction, that she didn’t understand how it was possible that I, especially I, had not written a bookabout that story that God had put in my path. And looking into her eyes—those same eyes now being eaten by worms—I gave her the answer that had slipped away from me so many times, but the only one that, because it was Ana, I could give her:
    “Fear kept me from writing it.”

2
    The icy mist swallowed the outline of the last huts, and the caravan again plunged into that distressing whiteness, so limitless, without anything to rest your gaze on. It was at that moment that Lev Davidovich was able to understand why the inhabitants of that rough corner of the