Disgusting, he tells me. That as early as the afternoon he’d smelled this dog smell coming from the kitchen, this wet-dog smell, but that he’d been doing something and for some bizarre reason he hadn’t wanted to look into it. But it turns out dog smells don’t just disappear. And it also wasn’t just an issue of humidity, of humidity in the room. So later, at night, it offends again. He’s washing the dishes, and now the stench becomes unbearable, out of the question that it’s in his head. So he works up the necessary courage and gets going on it finally. He opens up the little doors to look under the sink; the smell gets stronger. It reeks, there’s no getting around that. He sees the rag we use to wipe the floor off, which we had left there to plug a leak. He lifts it up. First grim finding: under the cloth there’s a tiny cemetery plot of mouse poop. Clearly the mouse taking advantage of the warmth and darkness of the rag, like it’s a burrow. There’s something that’s around here, then. So: he starts to take containers and platters and what have you out from under the sink, and lo and behold, grim finding number two: the rim of one of the serving dishes—it’s a blue one, made of glass, I know exactly which—offers up this sticky mess comprised essentially of hair and something similar to skin. Belonging to a mouse. A hodgepodge of hair stuck to the glass with something that looked a little bit like fishing bait. My stomach turns. But there’s no going back now, the dog smell has completely taken over. Now is the time to face the music. So: the entire lower part of the cabinet is clear (if we prefer not to think about the poop, of course, and let’s just say we do prefer that), and the coast seems to be clear, at least to the naked eye. He takes the broom and sweeps under the base or whatever, a place unreachable by the eye aforementioned, and that’s when he feels something. It reaches him through the plastic bristles, the wooden handle, and from there to his hands, the sense of a mass, the contact of the broom with something that isn’t dust or dirt, something with a weight, that budges. He pushes/sweeps his find up and out from under the sink, all the way out to where he can see it, and there it is, in this order: first a tail, then a disintegrated body (he describes this disintegration in some detail), and finally a disgusting, disgusting little mouse head. I’m the one who says disgusting here, it’s just I can imagine it. Ramiro, for his part, and as repulsive as he also found it, did seem happy to have bested the mouse in their little battle, to have regained his jurisdiction over his kitchen, our kitchen, to have conquered once again the rodent’s space. The state of the creature according to its executioner was (I’m sorry to be so exhaustive, but I needed to know, needed to know what fate had met that being I’d shared my living quarters with for this indeterminate amount of time): ruptured. Apparently the poison, that toxic fuchsia fluid, so/too reminiscent of little anise candies, had caused an implosion in the small stomach of the animal, and detonated its organism from outside in. Apparently it wasn’t quite a rat, but nor did it have the skimpiness of a vesper mouse: it was exactly a mouse, somewhere between brown and green, according to Ramiro; a standard mouse, I add, and Ramiro says yes, triumphant. Disgusting. Now I learn, because your mother tells me, that apparently there are other poisons less aggressive to the beholder and that—instead of rupturing the animal—they dry it out, literally, from the inside, leaving it stiff, as though desiccated. So, even if it takes you a while to find it, it doesn’t rot on you, and you won’t find out about it based on smell. This mouse, our mouse, was generous and let itself be found in a very early phase of its decomposition process. Fortunately I was far away from that death, from the grim finale of that inhabitant of our apartment. Meanwhile Corso, the cat, has fully settled in at this point. It goes without saying that it refused until the very end to get its paws dirty, not to mention its claws, its nose, choosing to keep its distance, the greatest distance possible from the little interloper. And yet Corso has his own theme song now, recounting his comings and goings (the chorus of which goes, Corso, Corso, / come up onto my torso. / Come up and let your hair down. / Come on and then you get down. / And don’t you bite me, / don’t you bite me. / Please will you let me simply play guitar, / Corso, Corso. / Come up onto my torso), an ode to the pacifist/draft-dodging cat. Such is Corso. Come up onto my torso.