Watching the old coward leave, Iona suddenly felt a stab of pity. Maybe some sort of competition had arisen between the man and the dog, maybe the old guy was afraid the animal would outlive him. But how was that the dog’s fault? And then, who do you choose? The animal or the person? Was she sure that old man deserved a chewing out? The simplicity, the coldness with which we deal with animals, is the same as how doctors and nurses have to treat their patients at the hospital. But in hospitals they don’t have to deal with putting people down. Iona wasn’t prepared to put Jaume to sleep. The veterinarian passed her the syringe, and she noticed the dog wasn’t wearing a tag. She had no way of knowing its name. The owner had already left the operating room, had probably already paid for the visit and the cremation and left. The vet turned his back to her, leaving her alone with the dog with no name. Who could possibly know who Jaume was with now? She stuck the needle through the rubber lid on the glass vial, sucked up the phenobarbital, and looked into the dog’s eyes, which had a scabby film. She thought that if the owner had left, she could take the dog home, give him a few last days of analgesics and love. This creature passed through the world knowing so little of the good things it had to offer, overestimating the scraps of affection the old man gave it. . If only she could at least pet it and say its name. . Hey, dog. What’s your name? But the veterinarian muttered behind her, “Help him, Iona,” and she stabbed the needle in deep, so as not to have to think about it any more; she injected the poison, and ten seconds later the dog’s heart stopped.
That internship didn’t prepare her for the death of her own dogs. Luckily, none of the three had to be put to sleep. The first one died of a tumor, the second was run over, and the third got a virus that was too much for him at his age. As with her three grandparents, the deaths all happened over the course of a few months, as if they were following each other. Iona gave the dogs medication, dressed their wounds, and eased their suffering. Against all logic — and now that frightened her — each death was harder to come to terms with than the one before it, as if pain was cumulative, as if the death of the last dog, whose name was Frare, dragged with it the death of the previous one, Lluna, and the death of Lluna still dragged along the death of Bobi, and, further back in time, Bobi’s death dragged with it Grandpa Enric’s, and Grandpa Enric’s the other three, in a chain that each added death made harder to pull, as if Iona had to physically drag around the corpses. Maybe it was that she didn’t want to abandon any of them. Maybe now she’d be forced to let go of the dead weight, maybe she’d have to exchange. . What? Three dogs? A couple of grandparents? The whole chain, to deal with Jaume?
Each time, Iona learned more about death, which was why each death weighed on her more. She was feeling around in the void, measuring it. Unlike other experiences she’d had, friends, Jaume, college, the shared apartment in Cerdanyola, each new death affected her more. Each death that affected her, that is, because she was also mature enough not to suffer over the deaths of people she barely knew, despite how unfortunate or unpleasant those deaths might be. The death of a stranger, even if it was broadcast live on television — or particularly then — left her indifferent, and she analyzed it with the coldness with which, years later, if everything went the way it should, she would analyze the deaths of tons of dogs and cats, turtles and caged birds if she opened up her own office, or of cows, horses, and pigs if she finally decided to work the farms. But sometimes the death of a stranger — like that first boxer with leishmaniasis — made her guts clench unexpectedly, precisely because it was a stranger: the presence of the void within the void, people or animals about whom she knew their death and only their death, like when she read in an obituary or on a tombstone the first and last name of someone who only existed because they’d ceased to exist, devoured in the flash of a name.
Unlike her younger sister, Iona didn’t miss the burials of any of the three dogs they’d grown up with. She went with her father, the spade, and the bag with the dead dog in it, each time. She wanted to retain the light of their brown and black fur. Person, animal, or landscape — it happened like with the professors at college: learning wasn’t merely receiving, it was an exchange. Nothing was free, getting to know someone meant giving part of your life, and that life was what you cried over later, when he took it with him into the void. And right now Jaume was fleeing like a thief.
With each dog’s death, the burial ground beneath the cherry tree, the part of Can Bou that was the dog cemetery, grew. Iona would never have asked her father to take the dogs to the incinerator, the way vets do and as she would have to with their two riding horses when the moment came. There was an animal hierarchy; they just threw the dead cats into the garbage. But the farmers wanted their loved ones close, so they did with the dogs what they couldn’t, unfortunately, do with their family members and themselves — much less with their friends and fiancés. They bury them at the foot of the cherry tree on the land where they’d been born and had always lived, keep them with them, mix what was taken from them back into their own land.
Her father put the old soil bag that now held the dead dog down beneath the cherry tree and started to dig, eight or ten paces from the trunk. Iona worried she’d hear a skeleton breaking, the spade’s tip cracking a jawbone, the rosary of a spine or a tail, even though her father knew perfectly where he’d buried the last dog and shifted around the tree. He went around the cherry tree creating a spiral of dead dogs, beginning at the base of the trunk itself, as if linking up with the chain of corpses that started with the first Suredas who’d lived at Can Bou and planted the first of all the cherry trees, which would later grow in this same spot, one on top of the other, like a tranquil geyser of wood and leaves. Her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had buried the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of the dogs that her father was now burying, and the radius and perimeter of the fenceless cemetery grew around the cherry tree.
They dug up more and more earth each time, and everyone who knew where the dog cemetery was — all the Suredas — could tell by the color of the grass how far it extended. The perimeter was greener, more lush; as if the dead dogs were trying to escape from underground, and had only been able to carry their spoils to the edge of the grass. The cemetery extended about ten meters from the trunk; it was already getting close to Can Bou’s other cherry tree — and would eventually reach the house itself — yet, even still, Iona worried that her father would break some bone with his spade. They were just bones now, nothing more, fragments of white calcium, but in his daughter’s mind they were bits of the vessels that held what the dogs had taken with them, and, if an archeologist ever put them back together, he would no longer be assembling dog skeletons, but rather, jugs, small chests, and cups for the ashes stolen from the living. Each of those three dogs that died after her grandparents’ deaths had snatched an increasingly large bit of Iona’s life from her, each death hurt her more, each one was a stronger earthquake whose epicenter was the last dog’s grave. The trembling, the shaking, the jolts came from the last link in a chain that was choking Iona like a snake around her neck, a spiral that began with three or four dead grandparents and ended with a pack of dogs who ran, crazed by rage and anguish, around the roots of the cherry tree they were tied to, a whirlwind of underground dogs who barked with mouths full of sand, who pursued her, galloping beneath her feet, sticking their open jaws out of the earth like an agave plant and biting her ankles so she could taste death, not abstraction: a precise, clean cut of flesh taken from her person, from her humanity, from all that was contained within the six or seven buried vessels — three or four grandparents, three dogs — alive and dead at the same time. Everything they took from her past, which was also alive and dead at the same time: playing with her grandparents and her dogs, conversations they’d had when she was little, when Iona was a puppy and Frare was a four-year-old girl. They bit her so she would begin to understand what it meant to cease to be oneself, to be devoured, cannibalized by poor Jaume, who would soon join the dogs underground, who came toward her from a distance with his arms emptied of everything he had taken from her, who walked beneath her like her shadow, an image of Iona trembling in the well water.