The Cave by José Saramago

Ever since they sent him back with half the load of crockery, which, it should be said, has not yet been unloaded from the van, Cipriano Algor has, from one moment to the next, ceased to deserve his reputation, gained over a lifetime of much work and few holidays, as an early-rising worker. Now he gets up when the sun has already risen, he washes and shaves more slowly than is strictly necessary for an already closely shaven face and for a body accustomed to cleanliness, he has a light breakfast but takes his time over it, and finally, with no visible lifting of the low spirits with which he got out of bed, he goes to work. Today, however, having spent what remained of the night dreaming about a tiger that came and ate from his hand, he threw off his blankets as soon as the sun had begun to paint the sky with light.

He did not open the window, merely opened the shutter door just a crack to see what the weather was like, at least that is what he thought, or what he wanted to think that he thought, but the fact is that he was not in the habit of doing so, for this man has lived long enough to know that the weather is always there, sunny, as today promises to be, or rainy, as it was yesterday, indeed, when we open the window and raise our nose to the air above, it is merely to find out if the weather is doing what we want it to do. To cut a long story short, when he peered outside, what Cipriano Algor wanted to know was if the dog was still there waiting for them to give him another name or if, tired of waiting fruitlessly, it had gone off in search of a more diligent master. All that could be seen of the dog was a pair of floppy ears and a snout resting on its crossed front paws, but there was no reason to suspect that the rest of its body was not inside the kennel. He's black, said Cipriano Algor.