It was a sunny morning, like every morning in that monotonous season – monotonous from the point of view of the climate – around midday. Brandariz had gone up to the attic. First, to change a lock. Then he decided to have a look around before going back down. He wandered through the long, dark corridors and then entered one of the Elevator Rooms.

The vision of the cat inside the Room was instantaneous and rooted him to the spot. Quick as lightning, the cat fled to the roof through the skylight, which was open, jumping off the top of a ladder that had been placed underneath.

Overcoming his rootedness – but not his fear – and wasting no time, Brandariz went over to the ladder. His legs were shaking, but he summoned enough strength to climb the ladder and slam the skylight with its glass lid shut. Just like the cat, he acted with all the speed he could muster, feeling more like the hunted than the hunter. Calmer now, he climbed back down and propped the ladder in a corner.

Fortunately, the skylight in the other Elevator Room was closed – Brandariz went to check this.

As a result, between the cat and the inside of the Caracas, there were now some transparent, fragile – but also for the cat impassable – panes of glass. The cat had ascended from the abyss of the garage to the heights of the roof, but there it had met its perdition.

Brandariz’s mind, however, wasn’t protected by any pane of glass. The cat kept on getting inside, in the most insistent, overwhelming manner. Even when Brandariz was asleep, albeit without its explicit presence. Over and over again, he dreamt he was an open-air prisoner in a prison located in the heights: he could walk from side to side, contemplate the moon and stars at night, but not get out.

When he was awake, things were no better. From time to time, he had to go up to the Elevator Rooms, but he managed to move about at a distance from the skylights. He didn’t want to look through them, however closed they may have been.

He was sure, one way or another, the cat’s vengeance would come tumbling down fatally on top of him. Vengeance for a double reason: because of both the cat and its kittens. Neither its enforced confinement nor its certain death could prevent this.

He never felt safe. Some days, all the cats in the world struck him as accomplices of the cat in the Caracas.

Other days, it was this same cat that transmuted into any cat he came across. And there were even days when he had the impression there was only a single cat, in an invisible place, which manifested itself in all the cats in the world, all of which could be reduced to this one and were identical to, or copies of, it.

With such suppositions as these, there was no rejecting the possibility of action from a distance, vengeance without any physical contact. Brandariz feared something like this when his mother fell seriously ill.

And yet Brandariz refused to seek help for his state of mind from a healer his brother recommended, about whom he himself had a good opinion, having had an exceptionally positive experience. Another relative, I can’t remember who, ventured that Brandariz might have been bewitched by the cat’s “shadow”; were that the case, it would have been a very different shadow from the Shadow of Brandariz and other people. However that may be, in the sphere of more or less demonstrable facts, it was clear that the cat remained incarcerated – incarcerated in an open prison, no doubt, but one without escape.

It couldn’t eat, either. Or drink. In short, it was condemned to a slow death. That said, there was no way it could survive more than a month and a half. I don’t know how Brandariz arrived at such a precise calculation.

I heard the rest from Mr Oia.

It was just before two in the afternoon.

Mr Oia and Brandariz had agreed to go up to the roof that day to check something to do with a chimney. They should have gone up before, but – and this is a deduction of mine – Brandariz had been putting off the task until a little more than a month and a half had passed since the cat’s suicidal run.

In the entrance hall of the Caracas, Mr Oia found Brandariz to be quiet, continually glancing at the floor, worried, thoughtful. It even occurred to him that Brandariz took an age to make up his mind to get into the lift, after they’d had a brief chat.

Normally it was Brandariz who placed the ladder under the skylights, but this time he did so with obvious unwillingness, as if the ladder weighed twice as much as usual. Even after he’d finished, he asked Mr Oia:

“Do you want to go up?”

This was strange because it was always he who went up first.

“You go,” replied Mr Oia because Brandariz was already in position and so as not to vary their custom.

Brandariz started to climb, but as if his body weighed not just twice as much, but triple. When he reached the second rung, he stopped. From this height, he could already open the lid of the skylight, but he froze for a couple of seconds.

In the end, he opened it absent-mindedly, with a bewildered expression, glancing around. He had to climb one more rung and then he would be in a position to exit on to the roof. He climbed this step as if overcoming a weight that was greater than all the previous weights put together but, before going out, he stuck his head out of the skylight, as if wanting to check something. He can’t have been like that for more than two seconds when he uttered, or seemed to utter, or Mr Oia thought he heard, some words, something like “that’s it” – and Brandariz never spoke again. He never even came to.

Some time went by. I came across Mr Oia again. We talked, as is natural, about our mutual friend. Mr Oia told me, in answer to a question of mine, he had never gone up to the roof of the Caracas again. He preferred not to work in that building.

OK then, let us imagine the opposite. Let us suppose he had gone up. What would we have learned? Nothing, I expect. Here, the possibilities are very clear, not like with that famous cat of Schrödinger’s a nephew of mine, a physicist by profession, told me about, even though I couldn’t understand the problem. Here, the possibilities are only three: one, he would have found the cat alive; two, he would have found the cat’s remains; three, he wouldn’t have found anything. What inferences can we draw from any of these that would help us to decipher what Brandariz himself discovered, or thought he discovered, when he poked his head out of the skylight? I don’t see any, to be honest.

I asked Mr Oia whether Brandariz – may he rest in peace – ever discussed cats with him.

“He did indeed.”

He proceeded to explain this to me.

On that unfortunate day, during the brief conversation they’d had before getting in the lift, Mr Oia had told Brandariz how a cousin of his had given him a cat as a present. Brandariz had become very nervous as a result of this information and had even asked Mr Oia what colour it was.

“Something like grey,” Mr Oia had replied.

Mr Oia was a little regretful. Why had he encouraged Brandariz to go up on to the roof when he clearly preferred not to? I didn’t tell him anything I knew, in part because, when it came down to it, I didn’t really know anything.

All the same, I got the impression that Mr Oia’s remorse wasn’t very deep. What I mean is he realized, I think, that Brandariz had been the victim of a complex, dark story and there was no way he could be blamed for his friend’s heart attack. In other words, Mr Oia, from his Shadow, glimpsed the importance of the role played by Brandariz’s own Shadow.

And that’s all there is to it.

I shall only add, as far as I am concerned, that I grew tired of infusions and fell into my old habit, and now I only ever go to real bars, the few there are left, the further away, the dirtier and emptier, the better.

No doubt, I shall have problems again with spiders. In the meantime, my memory has been on the decline: I can’t be sure right now whether the bar-cafeteria of my abstemious period is called Montparnasse or Montmartre.

Text © Heirs of Camilo Gonsar

Translation © Jonathan Dunne