Memory of Safo

Abstract

42 worldliteraturetoday.org cover feature Memory of Safo Esther Tusquets I did not know how painful it would be to watch the growing decrepitude of someone with whom I had shared so much. With Safo’s life cycle also closed the most fulfilling period of my life, the happiest and the best years. S afo was fair-haired and soft. She had a silky coat, long, drooping ears, sparkling dark-brown eyes, a pointed muzzle, and the hair of her tail so long that the ends dragged on the ground because Safo—a dachshund, a sausage dog, a trolley car dog—had extremely short legs. But she was not a dachshund with smooth hair, or wiry hair, but rather a longhaired dachshund, and that’s why the hair was so soft, and blonde with reddish highlights, very similar to that of Irish setters. Safo had such lively eyes and wagged her tail so jauntily that not even her drooping ears, also so long that they got into the food bowl, managed to give her a sad look. Safo was one of the merriest, liveliest, most stubborn and mischievous dogs I have had. That was the way of my dog Safo. She was born in my parents’ home, the only female in a litter of five puppies. The mother, Chufa (the tiger nut name was given by my brother, amused by the ridiculous appearance of those low, elongated dogs, which we had never had up until then), who had been mine, I had later abandoned, upon getting married and leaving home. Life as a couple seemed to me—even before I first tried it—too risky and uncertain an adventure to involve anyone else in it. I thought that my future life would be unpredictable and on the move, and the dog was used to a methodical , safe, and orderly existence. But I do not know if Chufa ever accepted the fact that it had been for her own good, nor do I know if she ever forgave me. Because she did bark happily when I arrived, and wagged her tail and licked my ear, but it was not the same as before, and from that time on she had a certain severe and reticent air. “Wherever you went, you should have taken me with you,” I read in her eyes. And yet she never got around to telling me so, because she was a very dignified dog—“a real lady,” said Ana María Moix—and she kept to herself the jealousy and pain of abandonment. Safo’s father, whom I only saw once, was a classy male dog, with a very long pedigree full of “vons” and surnames with two s’s. A goldenhaired dog with a distant look, who did his duty efficiently but without enthusiasm, and left the house with the same indifferent air with which he had come, following a couple of blonde foreign humans, who also looked at us, or so it seemed to me (Chufa was an unregistered dog of unknown parentage), with their noses in the air. I would have thrown the three of them down the stairs with a good kick in the rear. And I had to explain to Chufa that they were snobs and idiots, that the quality of a dog (or of a human, of course) is never measured by his pedigree, and that she was a darling dog, the prettiest in the world, and that she should not feel slighted, because it happens that males sometimes behave that way. Two years later Chufa would discover that, although I had been moved by the best of intentions, I had lied through my teeth, because two years later Chufa would find true love, the love of a dog who licked her and sniffed her and pushed her tenderly with his snout and barked to her softly when the intercourse was over and it was not yet time to begin again, a male who wooed her and flattered her tirelessly between one mount and the next, and who, when Chufa was sleeping limp and exhausted inside her basket , lay stretched out to his full length before it July–August 2013 • 43...