Dog Symphony

by Sam Munson

  dog symphony

  Copyright © 2018 by Sam Munson

  All rights reserved.

  Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper

  First published in 2018 as New Directions Paperbook 1415

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Munson, Sam, author.

  Title: Dog symphony / by Sam Munson.

  Description: First edition. | New York : New Directions Books, 2018. | “A New Directions Paperbook.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018009878 (print) | LCCN 2018002152 (ebook) | ISBN 9780811227698 (ebook) | ISBN 9780811227681 (alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PS3613.U6936 (print) | LCC PS3613.U6936 D64 2018 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6 — dc23

  eISBN: 9780811227698

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  God, de potentia absoluta, is infinitely everything, infinitely good, bad, just, unjust, compassionate, cruel, stupid, etc., etc. . . .

  — Camilo José Cela San Camilo, 1936

  dog symphony

  1.

  Humans suffer as dogs suffer, they struggle as dogs struggle, they love order as dogs love order. Long live the whistle and baton.

  I came to Argentina at the invitation of Dr. Ana Mariategui. I had known her, at that point, for nine years. She started her academic career at the University of Santiago; the University of Buenos Aires recruited her two years prior to our first meeting. We worked in a minuscule field. I studied the history of prison architecture. She was, in turn, a historiographer of the technical jargon that prison historians use in their profession.

  We had often spoken of visiting each other. I will come to you, she said, and you can show me the sights of the northern capital (her private name for my city); you can come to me, and I will show you the sights of this shithole. I did not use those terms to describe Buenos Aires; in our correspondence I referred to it only as the southern capital. This dilatory premise we conceived and resuscitated many times through our near decade of friendship, but nothing ever came of it. We always met in cities foreign to us both. Prague, where we became acquainted; Lyon, where we slept together for the first time; Austin, Texas, where I was extremely sick and Ana read aloud to me from Dead Souls, which she always carried with her on her travels, along with the Pensées; Istanbul, where we got lost in Kasımpaşa by becoming too drunk to follow our guide’s directions and had to present ourselves at a local police precinct. The sergeant there knew — miraculously — the name of the tour company our academic sponsors had hired, who saved us by shouting into the void through an old, grass-green walkie-talkie. Milan, where we were captured with a third colleague — whose name we could never remember — on a slanted rock near a palazzo (pink, like a urinal cake) in a photograph I kept in my wallet to savor its spectacular compositional failure. I have my back to the camera. Cigarette smoke floats in a ribbon away from my head. Ana’s arms are crossed under her breasts, her signal gesture meaning: fuck off, enough. Our anonymous, balding, fox-faced fellow scholar stands atop the rock with his abdomen thrust forward and covered by an orange vest. He resembling a wooden figurine of V. I. Lenin.

  Ana’s invitation to Buenos Aires thus surprised me. I read it in the hallway outside my apartment door, in the deadened, ticket-of-leave light. The University planned to hold a conference, she wrote, and she was confident she could get me invited. Its architect a new eminence, a man named Sanchis Mira. She knew little about him, except that he had once been a professor of French but now worked in an interdisciplinary field: sociology, politics, law — three streams of shit, Boris Leonidovich, flowing and joining together, she wrote, but if you come, you will at last see for yourself the world’s asshole, the true anus mundi. I wrote back the next day, accepting her pseudoinvitation. I was delighted to do so, for (contra Seneca) we all lose ourselves when we travel, our personalities such as they may be collapse into generalized behavior, and I was curious, most curious, to see this unusual woman at home. In due course (as they say) my official conference invitation arrived, a thick blue-and-white envelope, containing a program of events and a brochure with information about the University. My name appeared on the program with Ana’s. We would be presenting together. A coincidence she must have arranged, I thought.

  I planned to use the conference to workshop a paper on the innovations that marked out the Butyrka Prison in Moscow as singular, innovations developed during its original construction in the late eighteenth century. I had spent the winter teaching a course on Russia’s prisons, a dubious process I kept Ana informed of through my letters. My lectures, in general, were well attended because I gave high grades to all my students in order to save myself effort. I gave exams and assigned papers, but I did not read the resulting work. I merely ran my eyes over the answers, the paragraphs, the cenotaphic bibliographies, and graded them A, or A minus at worst. As a result, my classes conducted themselves. The students were happy and I was happy. The students had all the freedom they needed to practice their unending moronism, which is, let me add, the inalienable and universal right of students. I remained free to practice my scholarly moronism — the status of that right being far more ambiguous. Ana was sympathetic, yet she understood, she wrote, that despite my cynical praise for student moronism, it might be hindering me. All the more reason to attend this conference. You will never amount to anything, she wrote, if you keep yourself mired at all times in student moronism. The word mired she surrounded, as was her habit, with a fine, mini­aturized drawing for emphasis: a small human figure sinking beneath sharp waves (these resembled the teeth of an animal). The letter contained nothing out of the ordinary. Her prose was ruthless as always, and her handwriting hasty. It worried me all the same. The sarcasm she habitually employed in discussing her work was largely absent from the letter, a sign (I suspected) of anxiety or another unmentioned suffering. I dismissed this as a romantic fantasy and did not mention it to her in my reply. Such concerns are for a husband to worry about, and we did not engage in domestic theater. In her next letter, her sarcasm was restored, at least partially: she wrote that the University is an old whore but its students are not even the progeny of this whore — they are the progeny of a whore’s ideals, phantasms, burgherly poltergeists.

  This remarkable phrase arrived the day it first snowed. Soft, ragged flakes scraped my kitchen window, glaucous in the late morning light. The snowfall continued all day and into the night, through my invigilation of the final exam. My class comprised three human elements. Two student armies, one slightly larger and slightly stupider and one slightly smaller and slightly more intelligent. But in truth the conscripts mustered for each could have served equally well the other faction. And in truth intellect and stupidity remain indistinguishable. I remember them chiefly as a collection of clear, darting eyes and dark mouths. A married couple in late middle age formed the third element, the Zygmunds. Both red-cheeked and childishly excitable, their scalps covered with white, loose, flame-like hair. The student armies had adopted them as shared mascots. The Zygmunds served unwittingly in this capacity. They always sat far in the back, behind the stupidest tier of the stupider army (the armies arranged themselves more or less in order of “intellectual ability”) and did not say much, but their w
ritten work attained a high, even youthful standard of excellence. They themselves had both worked as chemistry professors; in their retirement, they had decided to study history, a private passion of theirs. After the exam, the smaller, less stupid army demanded that we go as a class to a bar to celebrate our liberation, as they called it. The stupider army acceded to this demand, and the Zygmunds came too. We marched across the blanketed grass of the quadrangle and across the avenue gleaming a black gleam from melted snow. The notice boards we passed on the way all held posters for a play being put on, one I’d never heard of: Canis Major. Both student armies began to bark in honor of this at the huge, chalky moon.

  I spoke to no one beside the Zygmunds during this excursion. The student armies dissolved as soon as we entered the bar, but the barking and baying continued in erratic bursts. I sat with the Zygmunds, their eyes and white hair blazing in the improvised and fleet light of the bar, candlelight, firelight, light of civilization. The crepuscular, yellow, orange, oblong, virtuoso, unimprovable, unitary, meridional glow. What you can accomplish in the so-called light of civilization defies definition, I thought. They asked me what my plans for the break were, and I told them I was bound for Buenos Aires, for an academic conference. Mr. Zygmund said, without hesitating, that I must stay with their daughter — she lives in Flores, a truly excellent neighborhood! I refused, saying I could not possibly impose. Mrs. Zygmund, flushed with embarrassment on my behalf, said that they had meant as a paying guest. Their daughter owned and operated, they said, a small hotel. A pension, in fact, called the Pensión Vermesser. They assured me that the hotel was excellent, and I raised my glass to them in a silent valediction.

  I left soon after, walking to my apartment through the thickening snowfall, which had covered the streets and pavements in a fragile, half-luminous sheet. My boots left small voids, and more snow quickly effaced them. When I got home, my phone was ringing, though it was well after midnight. I heard it from the hallway; somehow it was apparent at once that it had been ringing for hours. The ringing continued as I took off my coat and kicked the snow from my boots; it shrilled as I passed the mirror, which showed me — as always — my dark receded hair, my crude jaw, my nostril flesh beset with blackheads, a greasy, cold-reddened ear. No one answered my greeting. I thought I heard a quiet breath, or a sob, or a choked laugh, amid all the hissing emptiness, the true sound of phenomenal existence. I listened. I cried out another hello. Then I hung up.

  2.

  Our arrival was severely delayed. We sat on the tarmac at Pistarini International Airport for one hour, which turned into another. The captain said, again and again, in his murky voice, that we would soon be at our gate. Each time he was proven wrong. The ventilation system filled the stifling cabin with a white roar. Loud complaints kept erupting ahead of me, behind me, to my right. Fuck this, we paid our money, stop fucking around. Among these complaints was another, one that made no sense. It’s those useless fuckers from the department, whispered the seam-faced old woman across the aisle. The man to her right hushed her. Don’t get so upset, he said, it might be them but there’s no point in causing trouble. Close to midnight, we began to taxi toward what the captain promised was our gate. His voice woke me from a dream of Ana, a dream based on the photograph from Milan (I knew this even as I dreamed the dream). Our Lenin-like colleague ran around on all fours while Ana stood on the rock. I was nowhere to be seen. A storm floated leadenly above Lake Como, and the pink palazzo was consumed and left standing as though by invisible flames.

  Before I went to the customs line, before I urinated, I located a payphone and called Ana’s office number. The airport air was cold and sweet, like the melancholy (I assumed) that overtook its namesake during his exile in Tierra del Fuego. I knew there was little chance Ana would be in her office this late, but I had to try. The line bleated. No one answered. I tried again; still nothing. I was disappointed. I had never been to Buenos Aires. In fact it was my first time in the southern hemisphere, and Ana was my sole acquaintance in the southern capital. We hadn’t made any firm plans to meet on the night of my arrival, but I had hoped to see her. My address book was buried at the bottom of my suitcase, and I did not want to paw through my shirts and my papers to reach it. In any case I knew my destination. Before my departure, the Zygmunds had assured me their daughter had an empty room, and had even arranged for her to give me a special rate. The Pensión Vermesser was located, as they had said, in Flores, on José Bonifacio. I surveyed the maps of public transit. I could have gotten there on the Subte, or by taking a long bus ride, but my suitcase was too heavy. I had brought two enormous reference works, Chulkov’s Toward a General Theory and Apukhtin’s monumental work on shackling. (As my suitcase creaked I envied Ana: the Pensées and Dead Souls take up almost no space, being books of pure void.)

  Few other travelers filled the concourse as I headed for the customs line. Not even the tired and furious people I had deplaned with could be seen. The only other human beings, in fact, were four men in sky-blue uniforms, strolling along the wide path between the seating areas for the gates. I did not recognize their uniform markings. As a result of my studies, I was well acquainted with police and corrections uniforms from around the world, but their sky-blue liveries seemed completely new, completely alien. Above their stiff collars floated the jovial, slightly sly communal expression you often see on state-owned faces. One man carried a shovel over his shoulder. Grayish crusts of earth clung to the bright blade. Five more in sky-blue uniforms gathered near the customs line where I stood waiting my turn to approach the bored-looking officer in his hexagonal glass booth. He, at least, wore the familiar uniform of the Argentine customs police — a dim, dusty blue. He stamped my passport. I asked him about the strangely dressed security officers, and he shrugged. To be honest, sir, I can’t tell you exactly what they do here, he muttered. At the taxi line, another contingent in sky blue (much smaller, only two members) hovered near the line’s head, holding clipboards. I ducked into my taxi and gave my destination. My driver grunted. The two officers made quick, spastic notes. As we drove past them they smiled equilateral and enameled smiles. I asked my driver what agency they represented, but he didn’t respond. His nape, raw pink and carbuncular, floated ahead of me in the dimness.

  At the Pensión Vermesser, the Zygmunds’ daughter Violeta came out to welcome me despite the time. Watch your step, she shouted as I got out of the taxi. I almost tripped over two large stainless-steel bowls — fresh, red slabs of meat lay in one and clear water filled the other — near the brief limestone staircase that led up to her bluish doorway. The steps glowed, more or less, in the moonlight. Inside the pension, pale oblong shapes decorated the white parlor walls, left — I assumed — by taken-down pictures. Violeta swept a strong-looking hand through air as she guided me deeper into the pension. I am having everything reframed, she explained. A woman my age cannot allow student framing efforts to deface her walls. From the silent floor rose a harsh, addictive smell — wood polish. I recognized it at once. The smell permeated my room as well. Four right angles, one window overlooking the street, an oak bedstead, the carved footboard displaying two bas-relief whippets curled in sleep. A Formica desk mimicked the oak. Through a narrow doorway the hard yellow bathroom tile glared its dental glare. A fly darted in and out of the milk-glass bathroom window louvers. Up close, a fly’s head resembles a ceremonial mace covered in verdigris — that’s a fact. But I merely observed from a distance.

  Violeta told me I was free to do as I liked, but that I must make sure to bring my three keys — to the gate, the front door, and this bedroom — with me if I planned to go out. She required massive doses of barbiturates to sleep and would not, she assured me, awake to let me in no matter how loudly I yelled or rang the buzzer. The absence of other guests meant I was on my own. I thanked her for the warning and asked if Dr. Mariategui had called. That’s an unusual name, said Violeta. I know only one Mariategui and he too is a doctor, he’s a nephrologist in Colegia
les. But no, I’ve gotten no calls today. None at all. I run a quiet house. Quiet is essential. My mother and father tell me you’re a writer and thinker. So I’m sure you will agree.

  It was now far too late to call Ana at home. I decided instead to revise the paper I planned to present at the conference. I laid out my typescript and the reference works I’d brought with me and uncapped my two plastic pens, one green and one blue. As soon as I sat down to work, however, a sudden nausea beset me. I have always hated my profession. Yet I could, I admit, follow no other. Each time I traveled this hatred hardened and worsened. I tried to emend the first paragraph, but found myself on my feet, unpacking my shirts. My last name inked into the collars: Pasternak. No relation to the poet, novelist, and correspondent with Rilke. My namesake never packed or unpacked anything, he had servants. And Rilke wore the same shirt at all times to express his fake poverty and material indifference. I sat down at the desk again, but it was no use. My handwriting crawled across the typed pages, useless and smeared. My head began to throb. I poured cold water onto my hair and face and I changed my socks. I decided to take a long (and mendacious) walk. On my way out, I grabbed my gray jacket and shook it. A heavy metallic chord sounded. This was my shorthand method of checking to see if the jacket contained my keys, a method I had developed in my own apartment. It had never failed me. Below my feet the rooms and corridors of the pension extended left and right, and beyond them, as noted, nocturnal affairs, nocturnal matters and events, stars or their absence, qualia in that family. In the living room, a mouse waited under the piano. (For what?)

  I walked along without heed. I have a natural talent for memorizing maps and plans. I believe this is what led me to my profession. All serious students of prison architecture must possess this facility. For weeks prior to my trip I had memorized maps of Buenos Aires. This pathological habit now meant that I felt totally secure in my wanderings, totally secure in my arbitrary decision to head east on José Bonifacio. (And as far as the so-called Spanish language is concerned, I have always spoken it fluently.) At regular intervals along the sidewalk, thin poplar trees pointed upward into the night. The pavement gave up the warmth it had accumulated during the day. After twenty minutes of this heedless walking, I read the street-sign plaque on the nearest building to check my progress. The deep blue plaque, covered with the bitter shine of fired enamel, displayed the simple, lyrical name: Camacuá. That’s where I stood. North of Directorio and the Plaza de la Misericordia. An enormous, crooked eucalyptus tree creaked next to a gabled house with its windows boarded. A quiet, enleafed intersection, nothing much. The air damp and warmish. Through it the drilling whines of mosquitoes passed like current. I missed Ana. In fact, the expression “drilling whines of mosquitoes passed like current” I had stolen from her. Her letters contained numerous rich phrases alongside her lacerating sarcasm. Had she been present, I thought, she could have explained this gabled house or provided a vicious and satirical history of its inhabitants. Though she had lived in Buenos Aires for more than a decade, she regarded almost all Argentines as cryptofascists.