BURIED DOGS
I
The telephone rang at seven in the morning, but Iona’s mother let her sleep. Around nine, since she hadn’t woken up on her own, her mother knocked gently on the door to her room. She went in without turning on the light, sat on the bed, and asked her daughter for a hug. She held her in her arms until Iona started to cry.
“Jaume and Xavi had an accident.”
Iona counted the seconds that passed without her mother saying anything more. She waited ten more seconds and then counted to twenty in her head. She bit her tongue—“both of them?”—took in a deep breath and, to put an end to the suffering, said: “Yes.”
It had to be a lie. She separated herself from her mother’s arms and turned on the light. What nonsense. Things like this don’t happen. It’s like the lottery: no one’s ever won it. It might happen to you, maybe in the future, but never right now, in the present. Perhaps in another life. It’s too unreal. She relaxed her head onto the pillow. She settled into her denial. Negating Jaume’s death was her way of accepting it. It lifted a weight off her that had threatened to crush her. Jaume wasn’t dead, her boyfriend since high school hadn’t died in an accident, it couldn’t be. On Friday he had picked her up in his car in Bellaterra; they went to Barcelona to check prices at the travel agencies, and reserved sale tickets for a flight to India that summer. They had those tickets. They had a lot of things to discuss, about the trip and about everything, there were thousands of loose ends to tie up, essential things. If death could be this sudden, then the world would have already stopped spinning — the world was cruel and unfair, but not so precarious. The world is warped, it tends to conspire and get in the way of surprises. Jaume wasn’t dead, it had to be someone else, and therefore Jaume was dead. As dead as it was comforting to deny it, and denying it was very comforting, so comforting it was scary.
Iona’s mother didn’t feel it as intensely. She couldn’t deny it with the same ease. That was why she was whimpering, poor thing, she couldn’t stifle her sobs. She had burned through the first phase of grief without realizing it and couldn’t imagine how alone he had left Iona, with a void beneath her feet: stopped on the bridge dangling between before and after, clinging to denial until she can get out of herself, go find Jaume, go to the last time she’d seen him, twenty-four hours earlier, when he told her:
“I have to go with Xavi to the concert. I owe it to him, he’s my brother, we always help each other out. Come with us if you want.”
He would have taken her by the hand and led her like a lamb to the slaughter. He already knew the path, she just had to go with him. Along the way they would embrace. If there was nothing to be done, it was all the same. What did it matter. Everything converged and became one. She would meld with him before he left. He would take Iona with him, Iona with her terrifying comfort.
Meanwhile, she would wait for reality to show up. Everyone erects barriers against the evils of the world. We all expect death every day without despairing. If nothing can be done, there’s no point in even thinking about it. Someone who’s on death row or terminally ill suffers because they’ve compressed death into the few hours they have left of life. Meanwhile, others live with a death that is a drop of poison diluted in the sea, an invisible mine that floats, adrift. That was how Iona planned to wait for Jaume’s death — until reality came to impose itself on her denial.
To prepare a defense — to try and maintain the denial, ideally until the moment of her own death — she considered her experiences. What training could she count on? She needed every resource. Not even her mother had lived through a trauma like the one she was up against. A girl from the city, from Girona or Barcelona, would make an appointment with a psychologist. In Vidreres, because of the way Vidreres was, she would have to deal with it herself. How long could her denial hold out, accepting Jaume’s death by negating it, in that effective but shaky balance? Tragedies like hers were kept hidden, she wasn’t aware of any other case; she’d be starting from zero, and would have to take advantage of every second — the first moments were precious if she wanted a solid foundation.
She made a list of defensive materials. An inventory of experiences. To start with, she had the death of three grandparents when she was a girclass="underline" three expected deaths, old people who lost their appetite for living and shrank like sick dogs at death’s door without making a scene out of it. She knew that the one grandparent she hadn’t met was a woman who, in 1957, when her son was a year old, fell into the house well when she went to fill up a bucket. That was why they’d bricked it up. When her grandfather Enric was alive he told the story every once in a while to warn his grandkids of unexpected dangers. When she least expected it, Jaume was swimming at the bottom of the well.
After her grandparents, over the course of a couple of years, Iona experienced the deaths of three of Can Bou’s five dogs.
Iona was studying veterinary science. Like many of her classmates, she had chosen the field out of a female altruism that had little to do with the heroic extremes of boys who studied to be oncologists or surgeons, the same altruism that led some of her girlfriends — with old or ill people at home instead of dogs and horses — to study nursing. So a certain percentage of the department was farm girls, future farm vets who were more interested in treating hooved animals than working in a clinic with pet dogs that lived in apartments. In her case, it was yet to be determined. For the moment, she was taking the required classes, Animal Biology, Nervous System Structure and Function, Surgery, Anesthesiology.
So she was used to surgical videos and dissecting animals in the lab, but those experiences weren’t of much use to her when — during her second year of study, as part of an internship at the vet’s office in Vidreres — she had to administer a lethal injection. She gave the first of thousands of shots she would give to animals being put down over the course of her professional career, if everything went as it should. It was a boxer who entered the office in the arms of an old man from Llagostera. His owner had come there to avoid the shame of bringing his dog to the clinic in his own town. The boxer had grade-6 leishmaniasis, with lesions in its ears and eyes and a bleeding snout; a five-year-old dog that looked fourteen, dry, feverish, and trembling like a leaf; an animal that couldn’t stand up and was having so much trouble breathing that it had to cough to keep from choking. The veterinarian put it on the table, and Iona shifted her anguish over the dog to anger at its owner. That irresponsible old man deserved a good chewing out — which he wouldn’t get because the poor animal wasn’t the customer, he was — for having let the dog get to such a state. He hadn’t had the charity to give the dog a measly antibiotic, nor the compassion to give him a painkiller, nothing — cheapness that skimped on money and feelings like they were the same thing. Not even a glance to say good-bye to his dog before abandoning him to his fate. It must have been months, probably years, that the owner had looked away to avoid seeing the illness eating away at his dog, and now he was unable to hold out to the end of its agony.