I always kept an eye on them whenever I was home, as if with that look, severe and exact, an imminent confrontation could be averted. I of course felt solidarity with her. I could feel her fear and her anxiety at being cornered, feel her need to hide. Fish are perhaps the only domestic animals that don’t make noise. But they taught me that screams can be silent. Vincent adopted an ostensibly more neutral position, betrayed nonetheless by the humorous comments he dropped now and again: “What’s wrong with the female? Is she against reproduction?” or “Keep calm, brother, even if you’re getting impatient. Remember that laws today are made by and for women.”

Meanwhile the baby was floating in amniotic fluid inside my belly. At the last visit to the obstetrician we’d been told that she was “engaged” and that was what I was feeling in my hips. Sometimes, in the silence of the afternoon, I’d hear my sacrum bones crunching. The thirty-fifth week had passed. It was a question of days. The more I thought about it, the greater was my need for everything to be in order in the apartment, and in truth, everything was except for the relationship between our pets. So I insisted on buying the fish tank that weekend. The home we picked out for our Bettas was a green aquarium that could hold up to ten liters of water, as the book recommended, tall but narrow at the base so it would fit on our bookcase. It was Vincent’s idea to put it there, where it would take up an entire shelf but not a single centimeter of living room surface space. We had to relocate several adaptations of The Civil Code for the Siamese fighting fish who had thus far, perhaps aware of our peacekeeping intentions, remained calm. In truth I did relax when, after several failed attempts and a technician’s visit, the fish were settled in and the female had, at last, a cave she could hide in.