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Excerpt from Animals by Michel Laub

XIII

After my father died, my mother was left alone. His death came in the wake of a particularly grim period in her life, during which she had also lost her best friend. My sister had a Labrador puppy whose life was devoted to drooling, trashing the apartment, stealing food and barking at night, and my mother came to enjoy looking after him and taking him to a square frequented by other dogs and their owners or trainers. My mother likes to talk about my father but there’s nothing morbid about this, not at all, and I like it too because every now and then her memories include something I didn’t know or had forgotten: the time he won a prize from the Engineering Council, the time he decided to have a barbecue and to fan the hot coals with a hairdryer, the time he made me a little theatre out of modelling clay because I was having nightmares about giant otters.

XIV

In 1977, a sergeant saved a child in the zoo in Brasilia. She had falled into the enclosure containing giant otters, and the sergeant leaped in after her and was attacked and later died in the hospital when the bites he had received became infected. The incident was featured on the TV news for days afterwards, and one night my dad called me into his room, where he had placed the ‘theatre’ on the bed with a towel as the curtain and behind it various dolls. He had made them all himself. The story always began with giant otters, about the babies they had and how they swam on their backs when eating fish. My dad told the story over several nights, explaining that giant otters are only aggressive when they feel threatened and that, besides, such creatures were unknown in Porto Alegre. I would watch this show before going to sleep and my mum says I never again woke up screaming.