Like Black Magic

I woke up at 5 a.m. I have not been able to sleep in weeks. At 6, I casually checked the airline schedule only to find out that the flight home was leaving Monday night, not Tuesday. And so for the next 11 hours we scurried to get out. It was an emotional day to be sure, not least having to take Lucy away. Still struggling, having gotten 'fixed' last Friday, she had been curled up on her chair for 3 days and now she sensed how this was all unfolding.

She will remain at the residence, with one of the guardiens. In the meantime, I took her to be with S, who teaches in the Communications Dept and who, being an 'animal person' in a place with little tolerance for domestic animals, pledged to take Lucy back to Fez to get her stitches out.

i carried Lucy out to the car. She chose to sit in the passenger seat, facing me, looking like a matron being taken out of a sanitorium for a breath of fresh air. She seemed indifferent, distracted. I spoke to her, mumbling about what a remarkable time it had been, how just a year earlier we'd been running on this very road and she had found the villa, and then how she had disappeared for more than a month. That was always a mystery and I was forever asking where she'd gone and why.... She would not say. I told her about this and that. I encouraged her, the way people do when they give into sentimentality. I hoped that she might acknowledge me somehow but she didn't, which became proof that she knew better, she understood. And so she remained enigmatic and distant. She had gone back to herself. She felt she was being betrayed and there was no way to persuade her otherwise.

I took her to Sandra's and left her off. Sandra has another dog, small and noisey. Lucy made her way inside, saw a couch and got up on it. The other dog danced around like a marionette. And then I left, just like that.