You’re quite right. I love you and miss you, Beto.
The next day they chose to go to the lake and fish, under the supervision of Miko Lahm of course, because he was the expert and we could learn from him. But Marko, my owner, didn’t like his friends’ plan and decided to stay at home. He spoke sharply to Paulina, then went to his room. I don’t know why he hates her. Perhaps he wanted to sleep with her. I decided to stay with him in the house. We probably felt like customers at a cafe — we would sit together but each of us would live in his own labyrinthine world, with his own concerns. When they left, nobody paid any attention to Marko. I wanted to share my sense that something was troubling him and tell them all why he was depressed. But I swallowed the idea, because being obtrusive makes some of them more depressed. The Finns don’t speak much or ask many questions. I tell you, this country, with the cold, the snow and the silence, suits me more than anywhere else. It’s as if the environment and the introverted people here were made to measure for my temperament. I so much wanted to tell Marko that Finland was a big icy shirt that fit me well. All I needed was a glimmer of light. A slight human touch would have been enough to dress my wounds. But Marko didn’t need me or anything other than himself. He humiliated me from the moment I arrived here till the end. In his company I suffered from very strange nightmares. I had no choice. I imagined life on the mean streets again, and the loss of face, in your eyes and the eyes of others, if I decided to go back.
I lived with him for a year and a half like a pampered slave. From the start he paid lots of money to put me up. He got me a passport and spent lavishly on my food and other needs, but he was damned miserly when it came to interacting with me. He wasn’t interested in me. I was like any of the hundreds of old things that packed the dirty studio where we lived. I already told you he was an artist. His beard almost reached his waist. He had shaved his head and wore red trousers and shabby sports shoes. He had two shirts — one black and one blue. The only valuable thing he owned was an Italian bicycle, which was old but rare. He was crazy about buying things from secondhand shops. His studio was like a rubbish dump. We could hardly move inside it. I didn’t even understand his bohemianism — it struck me as contradictory. At first I felt he had brought me to his town in order to relieve his bitter loneliness, but my presence alongside him was just a message, or a wall he set up between himself and others. He would take me along to bars, out in the streets and to the shops, just to prove that he was different from others or perhaps to challenge their fears of anything strange or different. We would often sit in the park for hours, and all he would do was watch people as they looked at us, or answer with a few brief words when one of them came up and asked what country I came from. I was like a totemic mask a tourist brought out for small children. We didn’t play or have fun in those beautiful gardens. The conversation between us was sparse. Sometimes he would say a few words about how dark the winter is in Finland and sometimes he would remind me of the difference between the heat of the sun in Finland and the heat of the sun in my city. His silence, or the way he spoke so rarely, it reminded me of myself when I was very young. At that age I wouldn’t speak for days on end. I had had trouble pronouncing some sounds, and when I opened my mouth, I sounded like a foreigner learning Spanish.
Marko was just a scratch on one of his mysterious paintings. That’s how I started to imagine him: a scratch on a canvas painted white. Perhaps a grey scratch, like the trace of a cat’s claw or the fingernail of a man smothered with a pillow. Believe me, Beto, as long as there’s imagination, there’s crime.
When I started imagining Marko as a scratch on a painting, I wanted to get inside his mind. One’s imagination, if constantly enriched, can reach many secret places, including the imaginations and minds of others. Isn’t that what we were taught in the Wise Tails school? I spent more than half an hour, that day, wandering around that house in the forest. Eventually I sloped up to the second floor, pushed the door open and went into his room. Marko was drinking alcohol straight from the bottle and didn’t pay me any attention. I went downstairs again and had a snooze at the front door. I dreamt I was writing on the blackboard, then I started wiping white chalk all over the black surface. Then a beautiful female came in, with a tube of lipstick in her hand. She looked like the geography teacher in our first academy. She planted a kiss on my cheek and drew a thick red line on the board, then went out crying. When I opened my eyes I heard hurried footsteps on the stairs. It must be Marko. It seemed to me that this dream of mine was pure pain. He stroked my neck and staggered off to piss against the trunk of the tree. Perhaps Marko had been drawing while I was dreaming. I quickly sneaked back into his room. There was a painting on which the oil hadn’t dried yet, a painting just in red. In it there was something like the eye of a wolf. It wasn’t coloured differently but, instead of a brush, he had used a small knife to scrape off the red, exposing the black beneath. The scrapings were those wolf’s eyes. They looked distorted, as if a shaky hand had done them.
Through the window I caught sight of Marko going into the sauna. He filled his bag with bottles of beer, took his Italian bike and a rifle from the sauna, and started whistling. I joined him and we set off into the depths of the forest. We sat down close to a giant tree and he started to clean the rifle. I was sitting close to him and thinking about the resemblance between us. We are both pessimistic and dreamy, and perhaps frightened of symbols. For sure he wouldn’t pay much attention to the mind of someone like me. Perhaps he felt superior deep down, because I’m just a tramp he adopted from the streets of Ciudad del Sol. Perhaps he even sees my bohemianism as a worthless bohemianism. He’s a civilized bohemian and I’m a savage bohemian. I might be wrong. Perhaps he hated my mind and perhaps he thought I was making fun of his silence and his worries. Did my being in his company expose the fragility of his life? Once he took me to a bar. It was a snowy night and a biting cold had the city in its grip. As we were going back to the studio, he slipped and fell flat on his face. I thought he had died. He was still holding my leash and I was worried I might freeze out there. I tried to revive him but he started cursing me and my past life, and making fun of the culture of Ciudad del Sol. I managed to get away from him and raced back to the bar to seek help. They carried him to the studio and I spent the night scrutinising his face. Why did he bring me into his life if it had to be walled off by all this sadness, loneliness and suspicion?