Among the inhabitants of the apartment building on Paraguay Street, where I live, the spirit of emulation is quite intense.
It's true that for a long time they limited themselves to rivaling one another in dogs, cats, canaries or parrots. The most exotic among them never went beyond little squirrels or a turtle. I myself had a beautiful German shepherd named Joey that was just slightly smaller than our apartment. However, besides Joey - and this was something completely unknown -, there lived with my wife and me a lovely spider of the species Lycosa pampeana.
One morning, at nine o'clock, while I was feeding my pet, the neighbor from 7-C - whom I had never even seen before - came by to borrow my newspaper for a moment, for who knows what confused reason. Afterwards, without managing to leave, he just stood there for a long time with the newspaper in his hand. He was staring, fascinated, at Gertrude, and in his stare there was something that made me shudder. It was the spirit of emulation.
The next day he came by to show me the scorpion he had just bought. In the hallway, the maid of the people who live in 7-D overheard our dialogue on the life, habits and feeding of spiders, scorpions and ticks. That very afternoon her employers acquired a crab.
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