In fact, the dog also predates me in this house, and in this family. I, like the cat, am a relative newcomer. My arrival meant a number of changes for the dog, some for the better and others less so, and I have no idea what the final balance is (though I’d like to think it’s worked out very well for him overall). The dog used to live permanently in our spacious back garden, which is enclosed by a high wall, a hedge, and a wire fence: escape was impossible. He spent most of the day with his paws resting on the fence, looking at the outside world and barking when he thought it necessary. On the street corner, separated from the back garden by the wire fence, there’s an empty lot surrounded by low, crumbling walls. This lot is often visited by children, adults, and animals, some of which would rouse the dog’s baser instincts and send him into fits of furious, insistent barking, and since barking alone wasn’t enough to use up all the energy his instincts unleashed, he’d also run around, sometimes in circles and sometimes in a straight line up and down the length of the fence. He reacted in a similar way to things that happened in the road or on the opposite pavement, a world he knew only by sight and, to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent, by smell. The sense of sight doesn’t mean much to dogs; I imagine the world looks to them like a sort of fuzzy black-and-white film, or the shadows in “The Allegory of the Cave” (see Plato). A dog needs to see things, but most of all he needs to smell things, and smell them up close, at that. Sometimes he even needs to touch them. Although dogs’ hearing is extremely sharp, its main purpose seems to be defensive, and I don’t suppose it adds a great deal to their vital, aesthetic perception of reality.

The dog, then, was a prisoner. At night he was chained up for shadowy reasons I never heard convincingly explained, and at night he also did a lot of barking, or dragged his chains around on the paving stones, or sent his bucket of water crashing over and then pushed it about with his nose.