The deaths of the last two dogs, Lluna and Frare, hurt more than the deaths of all four grandparents put together. It wasn’t a question of quantity, but rather of quality. Maybe it’s that one suffering has nothing to do with another: pain, when it’s so great, just blends together, no matter what the source. Or that was what she liked to think. Was that why she studied veterinary science? To learn to care more about a person’s death than an animal’s? To prepare herself for Jaume’s death? Did her inconsolable grief over Frare’s death have anything to do with him being an animal and not a person? People are much more limited, people have that mechanical part, that rational, abstract, imposed part: reason. It’s like poison because it pushes life into a corner, adulterates it, separates it from itself. That was how she was managing, right now, to experience her boyfriend’s death so happily, so cerebrally; thanks to that she could fool herself with denial that denied on another level, because each level, each superimposed level of awareness, distanced her from the truth of death. Every person — her mother sobbing beside her, wondering if she should keep on sobbing, whether sobbing was really helping her daughter or in fact the opposite — was the separation of a person, death in life; every person would always be incomplete because they couldn’t ever reach themselves, at least in this life they couldn’t ever catch up to themselves, and it was a question she often asked herself while she was studying for exams or writing a term paper, immersed in the classifications of breeds and species and chemical formulas, a question that she still hadn’t found the right way to phrase but was something like: could she ever catch up to the animals that she would cure? Just like when she jammed that needle into the boxer, wasn’t she like a god to those animals and, as a god, a defective being, beneath her creation, which she was forced to set free — to believe in — and, therefore, to lose for herself, just like parents lost their children because they remain beneath them, as all creators remain beneath their creations?
She saw it with the experience she was starting to have of the enormous death that was — that over time would become — the death of her beloved, of her future, of someone like her, on her level, of that which she had started to pursue and that was perhaps her herself, Iona herself. Animals, on the other hand, in their purity, live more deeply, closer to the heart of the universe, closer to the heart of life, without the painful, banal distractions people have; they have a pure experience of hate and love, of sex and motherhood, of family and food, of sickness and, above all, death. If only she could have learned more from the death of her three dogs! Animals were ahead of people, in a world without animals man would never understand himself, he wouldn’t know how to behave or how to accept his situation. Dogs’ loyalty and love for the humans they live with give rise to greater loyalty and love in their owners. First the dog and then the person. She had also seen it with the two horses at Can Bou, one for each sister.
From animals, man learned to settle. What could he possibly figure out for himself, stuck in his lie? Lies can’t even exist on their own. Man had to imitate animals in order to be someone and survive. There are no tragedies in nature; there is no expectation of pain. There is a single, authentic pain. Just one, and it is real.
Every death told her: you are dead and that’s why you must live. You have to live because you’re dead. If you weren’t dead, it wouldn’t make sense for you to live. But you are dead, and therefore you have to live life and not live death. If you were alive, you’d have to live death. That’s why you’re dead: live life. But Iona still remained in denial, waiting for the arrival of authentic death.
“You go with your sister tonight and I’ll take my brother, okay?”
“Why don’t you lend him your car and we’ll take mine?”
“Because his is in the shop, he crashed it last night. He drove it into a ravine. He drives like a psycho, and I don’t trust him with my things, you know how he is, all he ever thinks about is girls. Look what he did to his car, and you want me to lend him mine, one he’s never driven before, so he can kill himself? You want him to drive my car off a cliff? What am I gonna drive then? Yours?”
Poor Xavi. They should have lent it to him. He wouldn’t have done worse than his brother.
The morning after that conversation, her mother was weeping in Iona’s room, waiting for her daughter to get dressed. It had been more than ten years since Iona had been naked in front of her mother, but she didn’t ask her to leave and just swallowed her embarrassment. She was thinking about how provisional denial is; the wave of reality was heading toward her, underground. Soon, the only thing she’d be able to do would be to flee. Until one day she’d wake up and find that it had all been fake. But that might take some time. Her life from now on had to be parenthetical, until the wave of reality flooded the dream of Jaume’s death and it turned out that he was alive.
“What should I wear?”
“Wear whatever you were planning to. You don’t have to go anywhere. Llúcia asked me not to take you there. They won’t open the viewing room until this afternoon.”
She pulled off her shirt and presented her body to her mother as if returning a recyclable. The last person who saw her naked was Jaume.
Would her mother have taken off her clothes in front of her? Iona’s mother couldn’t think that much. She was too sad, she was sobbing, crying; she was surprised by her daughter’s impassivity, but Iona couldn’t cry with her, she had to think, she had to feed her brain because leaving it alone would be like leaving a hungry baby alone with a plate of poison.
She saw a drop of blood on the sheets. She felt wetness on her inner thigh. Her period had come early to eliminate any doubt. Her body didn’t want to deny it. Animals accepted, they went straight to sadness, like her mother. She remembered how sad the dogs had been, their eyes damp and their ears lowered, when Grandpa Enric died, when the other dogs died. The knots were coming loose, the blood dripped down, there was nothing you could do, you didn’t even feel it coming. It was the protest, the wave of reality. As a person she could deny it, as an animal she couldn’t.
That intensity ate away at her. The blood had written on the sheet: HE LEAVES NO ORPHANS. Her mother stopped mid-sob and hugged the pillow. “Thank God.” Her daughter, menstruating, naked, twenty-one years old, her reproductive system at its peak. . In college they were studying mammal morphology, animal reproduction and obstetrics, she would find herself one day acting as a midwife to dogs and cats. If everything went as it should, she would help birth foals, calves, and piglets, she would interfere in the privacy of entering life, and then she would intervene in the exit, sometimes of the same animal, because it wasn’t unusual for a veterinarian to find herself having to put down an animal she had helped to bring into the world. She would inseminate and she would sterilize. Come here, boy; that’s it, now, go on ahead.