Books Burn Badly

Popsy’s Delivery

PINCHE WAS WATCHING TV. The owners had gone on holiday, so he was living like a king. All he had to do was keep the house warm. Those were his orders. He’d light the fires and then sit back to watch TV. That horse that could speak. Black Beauty. He understood everything after a few months. Spoke perfect English, like the horse. Who wouldn’t? But as for me, I had to do the rest. The dogs. Look after the dogs. Besides watching that horse on TV, he could have taken care of the dogs. He said he would but, when it comes to dogs, who’d believe him? The only animal deserving of his attention was Black Beauty. So better to forget about Pinche. I like animals. When I told the lady of the house my mother had a donkey to carry the clothes called Grumpy, she almost cried with emotion.

‘Grumpy!’

‘That’s right, madam. Grumpy.’

What I wanted was for her to talk to me in English, since I wasn’t around for Black Beauty to teach me, but what she wanted was for me to talk to her in Spanish. She was an actress and had always dreamed of one day speaking Spanish. Sometimes, when Pinche and I spoke Galician, she’d listen in to our conversation. She obviously thought something funny was going on and we were trying to wind her up with a secret language we’d invented. She didn’t know this language existed. She knew about Catalan and Basque. I explained it was a poor person’s language, how could she know? But it wasn’t something we’d come up with to annoy her. Thing is I couldn’t talk Spanish to Pinche, it made me laugh. What, Spanish? No, Spanish didn’t make me laugh, what made me laugh was talking it to Pinche and Pinche talking it to me. To her? No. Talking it to her didn’t make me laugh. Why should it? ‘All right, madam, you talk English to me in the mornings and in the afternoons I’ll talk Spanish.’ It seemed a good deal. She was almost always out in the afternoons. But, after that, she stopped going out. When the weather was good, we’d sit outside, chatting away. If I got paid for talking, I’d be rich by now. In the mornings, however, when she was due to speak to me in English, she’d fall silent. I’m not saying she wanted to save her words, keep them to herself. Though it would have been better for her if I spoke English well, then we wouldn’t have had a problem when she asked me to ‘clean the corner’ and I understood cona or ‘fanny’, went all red, somehow managed to stop myself saying, ‘Clean your own!’ And she came up to me, what was wrong, was I offended? We laughed a lot after that, when I explained. Same thing happened when she asked me to ‘collect the gateau’. What did she mean, collect the gato, the ‘cat’? Ah, nonsense. After a while, you joke about it. Words like to play with us. The more serious we look to them, the more they play. I knew very well if she didn’t speak much, it wasn’t to save her words. No doubt she was outgoing enough in her time. She’d been an actress. They once showed a film on TV she’d worked on. A film a dozen or so years old. There we were, the four of us — her husband and her, Pinche and me — and it was all very funny to start with. She was good. But it faded after a while, as if the light on the screen had dwindled. No, she wouldn’t talk much in the mornings. She’d hang anxiously around the phones and, if one rang, it was as if the cuckoo had sung after a long winter. She could be on the phone for hours.

He didn’t like talking much. He’d been a pilot, he told me one day, a fighter pilot. Then commercial flights.

They’d insisted we shouldn’t leave the dog alone. But I wasn’t going to run after the dog all day long, with Pinche in the role of major-domo.

So there he was, watching TV. Ensconced in the armchair. A roaring fire in every fireplace. Like a lord, talking English to Black Beauty. And I ran downstairs to fetch him because, after all, a man is a man.

‘Where is she?’

‘On the bed.’

‘Which bed?’

‘The lady’s. With six puppies.’

‘What?’

I’d managed the birth. I’d been very nervous to start with because she’d climbed on to the bed. Unthinkable where I come from. That a dog should give birth on the bed, on top of a pink satin bedspread. A water bed, what’s more. Brand name, Zodiac. I didn’t believe the lady when she said it was a water bed. She told me to have a go and wouldn’t let up until I did. She was right. Very strange to begin with. Then it was like lying on a river. How nice the way the water moved! You could close your eyes and just float. But now it was Popsy lying there, giving birth, her eyes on me. What did the bed, the pink satin, matter? I was fully aware everything would have been the same had I not been there, except for one thing. Her look. Which alighted on mine, light on light, shade on shade. Lots of looks meet in life. Your eyes take in what others see. At the end of the day, you might have been credulous, naked, saintly, raped, murdered, beloved, recognised, invisible, a kiss, a thorn, a harpy, an Amazon. One time I took Pinche to see the eye doctor, the doctor explained to me — or rather told me, the way he talked was like a tale — that inside each retina of the eye there are millions of tiny rods which gather the light. Each look we give each other must have its own rod. But the dog’s look as she gave birth was different. A gift that required every single rod. Because it didn’t meet mine, it landed on it. She left me her look. Such a beautiful thing, and she entrusted it to me.

I went down to fetch Pinche because she’d closed her eyes. It was her first delivery. She’d borne six pups and I was afraid she’d expire from the effort. I’ve seen that happen as a child. A dead cat whose kittens are still suckling. Apparently mothers have milk for a day after they die. Popsy was exhausted. But when we came back, she’d recovered some of her strength. There she was, on the pink satin bedspread, licking her puppies.

Pinche was annoyed.

‘Little blighters, trust them to pick the weekend! I’ll have to go for a sack.’

‘A sack? What do you want a sack for?’

‘What do you think? The sooner they go in the river, the better. She shouldn’t grow too fond of them. The sooner, the better.’

I gave him the look Popsy had given me.

‘No, Pinche, no more throwing dogs in the river.’

‘Well, I don’t mind. Or do you think I like drowning dogs? As far as I’m concerned, we can leave them where they are.’

He lit the fire in the bedroom. Got over his bad mood. Went to have a look at the litter and intoned, ‘Boy, boy, girl, boy, boy, girl. How very considerate! You know what we’re going to do? Pop down to the cellar and open one of those vastly expensive bottles of French wine.’

I was about to protest, but recalled something Polka used to say, ‘Matter is neither created nor destroyed, it is simply transformed.’