Around the same time, the dog took to greeting me effusively whenever I went into the back garden. Over he’d come, wagging his tail, looking at me adoringly and resting his paws on my legs so I could stroke his head. As soon as I’d given him a rub between the ears and a few pats on the back, the dog would turn his head, narrow his eyes, and glare straight at the cat in arrogant disdain. He hadn’t really wanted affection: the whole thing was a performance put on for the benefit of the cat, to show him that he, the dog, was the favorite.

At that point in the cat’s life with us, he was, in our eyes, a she. And not only was he a she, but he was also expecting kittens. During the cat’s first days in the back garden, Alicia—a doctor, and apparently also a cat expert—went out and examined the animal carefully, returning with a decisive verdict: this is a female cat, and she’s pregnant. I thought anxiously about how many cats we’d end up with after a year or two and tried to work out what we’d spend on pet food; by then, feeding both the cat and the dog involved quite an expense. And I wasn’t keen on the idea of a whole troupe of kittens meowing under the kitchen window, either, making their demands in the particularly insistent way cats do. Admittedly, when the cat awoke from one of her innumerable siestas in the sun, stretched, and strolled airily off, her tail waving high, I did see two small, perfectly round shapes poking out quite clearly between her hind legs, under the rectum. Since I steer clear of all medical and feline matters in this house, however, for a long time I respected Alicia’s verdict and went on treating the pregnant cat with all the respect owing to her in her condition as a female and an expectant mother. I let her come and rub herself voluptuously against my legs, and I even started applying a curative lotion to her head and eyes for a rash I’d seen she had. Then Alicia also noticed the existence of the balls, and the cat’s gender was no longer in doubt.

So things went on, the only difference being the dog’s worsening moods and increasingly erratic behavior, which could reasonably be attributed to his being in heat. He spent more time than ever methodically escaping from the back garden in order to sneak into the house through the front door. He also learned to open the wooden door with the mosquito panels on it, when it was so swollen with damp it couldn’t be bolted shut, and used that as another way in. All the dog wanted was to get inside the house and thereby show his dominance over the cat. Since we wouldn’t let him, he instead waited by the front door and greeted anyone who arrived with a practical demonstration of the overpowering joy their visit brought him. For me, these few months were a period of intensive work, what with feeding the two animals, separating them at mealtimes, rubbing lotion onto the cat, making a fuss of the dog to build up his self-esteem, moving the dog from the courtyard to the back garden, and sending him back to the courtyard in disgrace when he snuck in through the front door. All in all, this took up a large part of my day, and my energies.