I have to confess it: she’s the best of the wives I’ve had. She’s the fourth, I’ve been widowed three times, fortunately without the added burden of children. They all died on me when they were young: it seemed like a curse.

‘What did you do to her?’ my friends said after the funeral of the third. ‘You have to tell us now.’ They had become suspicious, unwilling to accept that it was a simple case of pneumonia.

But this Gilda, I admit to myself, is a treasure. A good girl, as I said, docile, helpful, all she needs is a cheap little necklace a couple of times a year. She washes and irons her skirts for herself, and every day she combs and grooms herself with incredible care. The house gleams like a mirror. In the kitchen – well, there she doesn’t manage so well. She’s too predictable, she can’t figure out more than the same three or four dishes. But I knew that right from the beginning, when I bought her from that circus that had gone bust after a tornado destroyed the tent and broke the tamer’s leg.

‘She can do everything,’ the owner of the circus told me at the time. ‘Better than a maid. I swear I wouldn’t be selling her if it wasn’t for that disaster … We gave her a good training … She doesn’t eat much, you know? Nothing, really … You’re getting a good deal.’

Gilda has been with me for three years now. She’s robust and healthy, and takes care of herself from her ears to the tip of her tail. She smells of cologne, soap and talcum powder.

She loves me. Maybe even too much. Not that she expects me to be particularly effusive, sometimes all she needs is a caress, poor thing, but she moves around me with the huge weight of love that she feels, and I can smell its heat, its constant intensity.

‘Bee-ba,’ she says to me every now and again under her breath, closing her eyes and quivering, and then I know that I have to stroke her in a certain way, until her grunting gently fades into an almost imperceptible sigh.

Or maybe I give in, and then for the next three or four days she bustles about like a madwoman, polishing the furniture, beating the cushions, scouring the pans, lighting my cigarettes, humming in the bath, blowing me anxious little kisses with the tips of her fingers from the end of the corridor. Or else she summons her courage and grooms me, smoothly moving the brush back and forth between the top of my skull and the back of my neck. She loves grooming me, and it’s a joy she knows she can obtain only in exceptional cases. As she moves the brush, I feel her warm breath blowing between my skin and my shirt collar, interspersed with the occasional very light, very shy kiss.

When she does that, I say ‘Good girl’ and continue to read my newspaper, while she resumes brushing my hair, placated and contented by the masterful tone of my voice.