Barefoot Dogs (10 page)

The vet is located on Vallehermoso, a few blocks away from the apartment. Zurbarán and I pass in front of it from time to time, whenever I decide to walk him east instead of south. It’s called Anubis Clínica Veterinaria, bookended between a futon boutique called Cha Chi Nap and Tintorería La Rosa de los Prodigios, a dry cleaner’s.

Catalina is pushing the stroller forward with the baby inside. He’s chewing on the sombrero of the stuffed Emiliano Zapata that my older sister Laura gave him as a farewell gift. She didn’t lose her sense of humor after my father disappeared. She said Madrileños would look at Belisario with that toy and think we were a family of Zapatistas, exiles of a different kind. No one laughed.

I glance at the baby. He is determined to tear the outrageous toy apart. I suddenly wish I had the courage to hold him. Sing him to sleep. Comfort him in my arms. Make him feel safe.

We’re about to enter the clinic when Catalina stops and says we need to talk first.

“Are the three of us going in there with him?” she asks.

I frown. I don’t get where she’s going.

“I don’t think a veterinary clinic is the healthiest place for a young baby.”

“Well,” I say, peeking through the window, “looks like a pretty hygienic place to me. This is Europe. I bet those European cats and dogs are healthier than the three of us put together.”

“Remember that nice playground I took Belisario to a couple days ago?” she asks. “It’s just around the corner. Why don’t you and him wait for me and Zurby there?”

I hate when she calls him Zurby. This is a mutt with a severed tail, not a goddamn poodle.

“Don’t know. I think it’s better if I take care of the dog. What if Belisario gets hungry and you’re not there?”

“He just ate before we came,” she says. “He’ll be fine. I can take care of Zurby. You always take him out for walks. Let me give you a hand with him for once.” And she adds, “Also, it would be great if you guys could spend some time on your own, mommy-free.”

I glare at her.

“Why are you doing this?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do?”

“Yes, you do.”

She sighs and scratches the tip of her nose. The baby keeps gurgling; he’s now shaking Zapata like he wants to break it.

“Let’s not talk about this here, okay?”

“You brought it up, not me.”

“I brought what up?”

“You know what. Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

We look at each other. I fear I might have a panic attack right here. My eyes get moist. Hers too.

• • •

After the second box arrived, Alcázar advised us to move abroad; he said no one in Mexico could guarantee our safety anymore. Victoriano ordered everybody in the family to leave as soon as possible. We moved to Madrid because Catalina and the baby could get Spanish passports quickly. During the Civil War, her grandparents fled Toledo and ended up in Mexico City. When Franco died and the dictatorship ended, it was too late to go back.

When we landed in Barajas, no one was waiting for us.

Laura and her family moved to Austin; Carolina and her family to Palo Alto; Daniela and hers to Stamford. Victoriano is the only one who remains in Mexico, taking care of everything we left behind until he can leave too.

We don’t know anybody here.

“You know I love you,” Catalina mumbles. Her face is red, eyes swollen. The dog’s taking a nap by the stroller’s wheels. Beads of sweat break out on my sides, my chest, my temples. “But you can’t keep doing this,” she adds. “You have to be with him. He needs you.”

It’s getting hotter by the minute. The air is sandy and narcotic, and the sidewalk feels chewy under my feet. The honeyed scent of the sycamore trees that green Madrid’s arid streets, and which I’ve never smelled before, gets stuffy in my nose.

“I take care of Zurbarán,” is all I say. She doesn’t challenge me. She looks at Belisario, who has thrust the toy aside and is now exploring his fingers with his mouth. I look at the dog, his ruby tongue dangling from his mouth.

“We’ll be at the playground,” she says quietly. “Meet us there when you finish.”

I want to tell her I love her. Tell her I’m sorry we’re going through this shit because of my family. Grab her and Belisario and Zurbarán, and take a cab to Barajas and get us flight tickets back to Mexico City and fuck the rest, but I just nod.

I pull Zurbarán gently by the leash, and the two of us walk into the vet.

The smell.

It reeks of dog food and birdseed and disinfectant. The AC must be broken; it’s almost as hot in here as it is out in the street. High-pitched barks and running water and the muffled chatter of female voices come from the back of the clinic. The ceiling is too low; the neon lights, bright blue and sickening.

A young nurse with piercings and bright green hair checks us in. She’s tiny like a hummingbird. It’s hard to believe she could save any living thing’s life, but she moves resolutely around the dog. She squats down next to him and pets him.

“You’re such a handsome guy,” she says. Zurbarán wags his whole body. Whenever he gets excited, he looks like he’s dancing salsa. The nurse cracks up and pets him again, playing with his crooked ears. “What’s wrong with his paws?” she asks.

“Oh, nothing,” I say, surprised by the question. “I brought him in because he’s been throwing up all night.”

“I see,” she says, the cheerful tone slipping. “But there’s also something wrong with his paws, isn’t there?”

“What do you mean?”

She holds one of the dog’s front paws and carefully folds it up so I can see. Zurbarán lets out a short cry. The nurse stares at me. No longer charming or sweet. I avert my gaze to the tiled white, stained floor, and blink. Blink.

“See this paw?” she asks with severity. “Don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed.”

The paw’s pad is blistered and bleeding, a yellowish fluid mixed with blood. She comforts Zurbarán with little coos while she checks the other pads. All of them look the same. I don’t know what to say. She rises and takes Zurbarán’s leash away from me.

“What’s his name?” she asks. I say it. She doesn’t react. Doesn’t say, “What an original name” or, “Cool!” the things I used to get when I introduced him to people back home. She tells me to take a seat, and coaxes Zurbarán to come along with her.

I watch the nurse and my dog walk away through a corridor decorated with posters of animals and one that shows Victoria Abril as she dressed in the movie
Kika
, petting a macaw, along with the caption “Tropical Birds Belong in the Wild!”

I’m alone in the waiting area. The silence swells achy in my ears.

• • •

We were not with my family when the second box arrived. After the baby was born, Alcázar suggested that we go to the family’s weekend house in San Miguel de Allende. We’d feel more relaxed there, he said. Victoriano called one evening a few weeks later. Eva, our maid, picked up the phone and said we were busy giving Belisario a bath. Catalina was. I was in the bedroom, installing a play yard we’d received as a gift days before. While I inspected the instructions, I heard my wife in the bathroom say, “Who’s my little marmot?” The smell of baby shampoo reached my nose, and I imagined Belisario covered in bubbles. I imagined us far away, in a place where
the baby had just been born and nothing else had changed. I could almost bring myself to join Catalina in the bathroom to bathe our son together. It was a balmy moment of light, a lapse of happiness.

Eva knocked on the door. I said we were busy, and she replied that it was my brother. That it was an emergency.

“This is it, Martín,” Victoriano said.

“What happened?”

“You guys need to come back right now. I think this is fucking it.”

“Calm down.” I heard my own voice shudder. “Tell me what happened.”

He breathed heavily into the phone, as if he hadn’t heard my question. I’d never heard Victoriano in such a state. He’s the oldest son. Dad’s golden boy. Everything Victoriano did was always so fucking wondrous in his eyes. Always so impossible to beat. But that evening he’d become frail and antsy, a damselfly.

He couldn’t go on at first. He broke down on the phone. My heart started to pound. I was filled with anticipation and horror.

“Another box arrived,” he mumbled after a while.

“What was in it?” I asked, my mind going blank, limbs numb.

“I can’t say it on the phone. Come back as soon as possible; we’ll talk here.”

“Tell me what was in that box,” I insisted.

In the bathroom, Catalina praised the little marmot for being such a sport. It was raining outside. I wondered if it was raining in Mexico City as well. I wondered about the size of this new box.

“Was it an ear?” I heard myself asking out loud.

Victoriano kept weeping, unable to reply. Something had changed between us. I felt so calm I was startled. Drunk with a feeling that was new to me.

“Tell me what was in the box.”

“Are you gonna tell Catalina?” he finally said.

“What the hell do you care if I do? Was it a hand, his head?”

“Shut the fuck up. Please,” he begged.

Once when we were young, I went into Victoriano’s room and found him with a friend from school, jerking off together. I didn’t understand what they were doing, but their alarmed expressions signaled that it was something of consequence. I closed the door and ran to the backyard, where I hid till the maid called us in for dinner. That night Victoriano came into my room. He approached my bed and promised that if I ever told anyone what I’d seen, he’d kill me with his own hands. I was four or five; he was already a teenager.

“What was in the box?”

In the bathroom, I could hear Catalina take Belisario out of the tub. “Oh, my! My little marmot has turned into a bunny!” she cheered. I imagined him smiling at her.

“It was the other foot, wasn’t it?”

Victoriano didn’t reply; he kept sobbing like the frightened little kid he never was. Seconds passed. I tried to picture my father, and I couldn’t. I tried to picture Victoriano on the other end. The image made me feel far away from him.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last. My voice was now as shaken as his. There we were, two little sissies on each end of the line. My father would have been ashamed.

“I’m so afraid,” he mumbled. “I don’t know what to do.”

I wanted to tell him I knew exactly how he felt, but I didn’t.

• • •

Hours later, a young doctor with a powerful mustache and a sorrowful gaze asks me if I’m the owner of the Mexican dog. I say I am. He introduces himself as Dr. Ybarra. He asks me to come with him to his office. He says we need to talk.

It’s past two. Dawn is breaking back where I belong. Night has turned into ashes scattered across the firmament, turned into daylight. The city’s waking up, still dead.

On our walk back from the vet, stores and offices close their doors as we pass, in preparation for lunchtime. Only bars and restaurants remain open. Madrileños flock to them en masse as if they were serving salvation.

Sun high in the sky, white and unforgiving. All around the world people are dying by the thousands. I am still alive. Why.

Zurbarán’s paws are wrapped in bandages, his feet look like a ballerina’s, but he doesn’t limp anymore. He’s a wonder of nature, a hallucination, a specter. We all are to some extent. Only we haven’t noticed. We haven’t decomposed yet.

I haven’t told Catalina what the vet said; Zurbarán doesn’t look that ill anymore. When we met them at the playground, she didn’t ask questions. As if I’d simply come back from walking Zurbarán around the block. On our way home, she points out things that surprise her in the street, the word
béigol
on a sign, a white, silky skirt in a store display, the absence of electric cables hanging from poles. She’s either fooling me, saving her resentment for when we get to the apartment, or letting go.

“Look at you, Mr. Pickle!” the doorman says when he greets us at the entrance to our building and sees Belisario in the stroller, napping. “Enjoying yourself in dreams!”

His name’s Antonio, and he lives with his family on the top floor of the building. He stammers every now and then, and because he’s from the south, he speaks very fast. Sometimes I catch only half of what he says. He’s in his fifties, and his facial
skin looks sunburnt after spending a monthlong vacation at the beach.

Mr. Pickle is a stupid name for a baby, but I don’t complain.

“I had three boys, and they all look like their mother!” He bursts out in laughter. “But look at him, he’s a little you, huh?” I forge a grin and look at Belisario. I rest my eyes on his dangling, blushed, sweaty earlobes. That’s where I look in public, so people don’t think I’m avoiding him.

“He is, right?” I chuckle, hands in my pockets. It sounds fake, but he doesn’t know me that well. Catalina does, and I feel her stare, judging me.

Antonio notices Zurbarán’s bandages. He asks what’s happened. His inquisitiveness makes me feel nostalgic for the help we had back home. An ambulance rushes by. Madrid won’t shut up.

“Oh, well,” I say dismissively, “apparently he’s having a bit of a hard time getting used to the Spanish heat. His paws are a bit sore, that’s all.”

Zurbarán is resting by the door, in the shade. He hasn’t once tried to wiggle out of the bandages. Antonio pets him, playing with his ears. If I were the dog, I’d be sick of so much cooing, but he seems to like it.

“It’s always hard to get used to a new place,” Antonio says, and places his hand on my shoulder and squeezes gently. “I know what you guys are going through. I once was an immigrant myself. Have I told you the story of my family?”

He has, the very first time we met, when he noted our accents were different and asked where we’d come from, but he tells it again anyway.

“I was eight when we left Málaga; Dad couldn’t make a living. We wound up in Paris; my parents landed jobs taking care of an apartment building on the Île de Saint-Louis. Dad,
Mom, Carmen, my sister, Paquito, my brother, and me, the eldest, lived in the basement. It was a majestic five-story property from the seventeenth century, prettiest thing I’d ever seen. But the place where we lived, oh God. It was a rusty room next to the central chimney. In the winter the smell of burnt firewood made it hard to breathe, and in the summer everything stank like sewage, the air tasted like rotten eggs. The room was so tiny we just had space for a small table we crowded around for every meal, and a full-size bed we all crammed into to sleep. We’d left home for the fanciest neighborhood in the world’s most beautiful city, but we lived like war refugees.”