Anyway, when he discovered he could get out of the back garden through the gap in the fence, cross the whole of the empty lot and run a few yards down the pavement, then come into the house through the front door, a whole world of possibilities opened up to him. I had to make a kind of miniature door out of an old iron grate and some wires, which I used to close off the gap in the fence whenever we thought it was a bad time to have the dog hanging around near the front door, waiting for his chance to slip inside. For a few months, then, we were able to regulate the flow of the dog around the house at our convenience. It was all going very well, albeit not entirely effortlessly, until one day the dog was in heat and learned—don’t ask me how—to remove the grate. We tried a few techniques for reinforcing it, only for him to realize he could escape around the other side through a few badly filled holes in the hedge. At first I managed to cover one of these holes with a sheet of metal borrowed from a neighbor, but then the dog made another. That one was too difficult to close off, because of the size of the metal sheet it would need and the fact that it was surrounded by a profusion of shrubs and other vegetation, which complicate all human endeavors. And that was how we lost control of the dog until, the heat gone (from him or from the female dog who got him riled up), he seemed to forget about this particular modus operandi. But now he’s remembered, and once again we’ve lost control.

It was in the middle of the saga of the dog’s comings and goings that the cat appeared. A very beautiful white cat, with yellow-green eyes and a particularly haughty sort of elegance. The first time I saw him, he was in the empty lot next door, and I’d just moved the sheet of metal aside to let the dog out. I thought things were really going to kick off. And the dog did indeed make a move in the cat’s direction, but the cat didn’t seem to care. He looked straight at the dog, seeming to hold him back with his gaze, then turned and stalked off, calmly and gracefully, and for reasons beyond my comprehension, the dog didn’t move an inch. He simply stood and watched the cat vacate the lot through one of the broken gates and emerge onto the pavement. The cat hadn’t run away, which would have led to a chase; he’d merely turned his back on the dog and departed peacefully, his gait slow and nonchalant, his head held high and his tail aloft. At that moment, all the dog did was cautiously sniff the places the cat had been and the routes he’d walked, like a police officer collecting fingerprints in order to capture the criminal at a later date.