Dog Symphony

by Sam Munson

  If I kept following Bonifacio east it would end at La Plata, but in that case I could proceed along Carlos Calvo across the river and into the dark Reserva Ecológica, beyond which lay the Atlantic. At the ocean’s edge, the nature preserve breathed, three rough lobes. Lautaro was the next street east, and I could see in the humid night the blue flame of its street sign. After Lautaro would come Carabobo, Pumacahua, Curapaligüé, and Thorne, which took its name from Juan Bautista Thorne, a naval fighter in the wars of the Rosas regime born in my own natal city but to Argentine parents.

  The streetlamps hummed in dignified terror. A bullmastiff, night-colored and sleek, slid from behind a red, rusted, cylindrical mailbox and trotted across my path. Some corpuscles slipped through my heart and lungs.

  3.

  This was how I discovered my error: I thrust my hand automatically into my pocket to fondle the pension keys, and found that coins, centavos, had made the heavy chord I’d heard after shaking my jacket. Now I truly missed Ana. Had it not been so late, I would have tried to track her down and visit her at her apartment, which I had never seen. Instead, I counted the money I had on me — enough to pay for a cheap hotel, I projected, a place where you rented rooms by the hour. I decided to find one, sleep, and head back to the pension after Violeta’s barbiturate trance had come to an end, which I guessed would be sometime before nine so that she could attend to her guests.

  I walked on Mitre all the way to Hualfin without seeing another fellow ambler. On the northeast corner, grayish light poured through the windows of a small, coffin-shaped all-night store. Two bowls glimmered near its door, just like those I’d seen at the pension. One filled with cloudy water and one with a black mass whose stench I could detect even from afar. As I got closer I saw the bowl held putrefied, almost liquefied meat. It made me hesitate before entering but I had no choice, I needed cigarettes. And the store itself, well, there was nothing else unusual about it. A radio paneled in artificial pine played a wild, repetitive song at an almost inaudible volume. No words, just hoarse cries, drumbeats, and bells. Surrounded by the gentle, raucous noise, I purchased a pack of Macedonias, a brand I had never smoked, and the clerk blinked morosely at me as he tendered my change. As though he were trying to remember where he had seen me before. Or perhaps he simply wanted to show me the expressive gaze of defeat. In either case a mild, murky benevolence shone (as they say) from his eyes. I wanted to ask him about the water and rotten meat. The possible explanations I formulated — that he was insane or mourning a lost pet — advised silence. Though I did ask him if he knew anyplace cheap to stay that would take a latecomer. He shook his head no. A white dog, a Samoyed, trotted up to the shop doorway and stuck its head through. The clerk’s quiescent, forlorn face opened as the dog drooled. It watched the rotten meat in the steel bowl, and it nosed the water. Then it trotted away without eating or drinking. The fur around its paws stained by anonymous filth. The clerk shrugged. The night sighed on his behalf.

  Humid quiet extended from street to street, from avenue to avenue. And the boulevards? Also the boulevards. Burgher adventurism proclaims: foreign localities. And further: aesthetic perfection. If you amble through nocturnal streets, truth or some similar defecated ideal will rise from the sewers or rain from the heavens. I don’t know about all that, but I do know that the air of Caballito was mild and the air of Balvanera was milder. As a result I did not suffer during my aimless walk. Whenever I tired myself out I sat down on a bench or some cement stairs to rest. No one interfered with me. I saw no fellow Homo sapiens other than the clerk. I continued submerged in this night, accompanied by a wedge of dogs. Not strays — they wore collars and tags and displayed the slick, warm-looking pelts of domestic animals, like the one I’d seen slipping from behind the red mailbox. The lead dog, the point, so to speak, was a smoke-gray Great Dane with docked ears (shaped like hatchet blades). His head was almost as high as a parking meter he passed. His subaltern dogs (I counted six) kept formation in perfect silence, except for the harmonic jingling of their tags. They followed me — or I followed them — northeast along Morón where, in front of every doorway, commercial or residential, I saw the same two objects: metal bowls. One filled with water and the other with meat. In most cases the deep pink of muscle, but also present were organ meats. Luminous and concentrated darkness. The wandering dogs stopped to eat and drink in regal quiet. Their syncopated lapping rippled through the night. They did not fight over the meat but ate as interior ministers might eat with grave calculation. At certain doorways the meat had been left out and ignored by the dogs long enough to start rotting, to have drawn a wriggling coat of flies, to emit a stink I could detect from far away, like the meat in the all-night store’s bowl.

  The pack of seven did not follow any apparent system in choosing which bowls to eat and drink from. The subalterns broke ranks before visiting a bowl and rejoined them after they had finished. At Nazca, I — or rather, we — encountered another, much larger pack. Twenty-eight or twenty-nine dogs at least, all proceeding in the same ministerial silence and equanimity. The wedge was absorbed and assimilated by this larger pack. My innate suspicion of dogs hindered me here. The sheer number pacing along Nazca, the absence of human authorities — all in all it looked like a murky situation, one I did not want to plunge more deeply into, except I did, I did, some yellowed nullity or something like that drove me on to Nazca, among the gathering dogs. All sizes and breeds, they walked or cantered, each dog might itself have been alone, and I might have been alone, except for the stale canine smell that tainted the air above Nazca and above Juan B. Justo, where the number of dogs swelled, by my quick, awed count, into the hundreds without any of the violent sporting common when dogs meet.

  No, these dogs trotted with their eyes on the sidewalks, their black eyes or their blue eyes, and I moved among them, keeping to the sidewalk when I could. Sometimes the mass and volume of the dogs forced me to move all the way into the middle of the street, where I walked along the leprous and human lines of paint on the asphalt. The stale smell grew stronger and stronger, it’s true, but the night kept on accommodating it, as it accommodated the baleful light from the streetlamps — as well as my own visions of Ana asleep alone. At Condarco, I stumbled over a curb and stepped on the left forepaw of a golden retriever. The dog whined but did not spare me another glance. My terror receded. Gavilán disgorged six identical British bulldogs in identical steel-studded collars, a truly ministerial sight. We reached Donato Álvarez and the stream of dogs from Justo expanded into a river. Turbid and slow, to extend the metaphor, although a river made up entirely of dogs is nonsensical. The only physical phenomenon it bore any resemblance to was a colloidal suspension. Or better still, blood cells in a vein, discrete entities in an environment, phenomena bathed in concepts. That’s what filled Donato Álvarez, northwest and southeast, the dual prospect writhing, mighty, indisputable.

  Our apparent destination: Chacarita. I knew nothing about that barrio, beyond the name and precise location of all the streets it contained, and that it was once a collection of small farms owned by the Jesuits, and that it took its name from the mightiest and most perfect cemetery in the city (or vice versa). Between Diáz and Cervantes (not named after the author of the Quixote but another Cervantes) we passed a huge, salmon-pink apartment block set back from the street by a clean, fenced, curving driveway. At either end of this driveway, metal-roofed shelters — guard booths, both filled with yellow light — gleamed above the meat and water bowls. The northwestern bowl filled with fresh meat and the southeastern with rotting meat. The dogs preferred the fresher bowl, soon emptying it. They ignored the rotten meat, contrary to what I knew about the nature of dogs. Like human nature, dog nature will approve the consumption of any filth as long as it is present.

  The private homes on this block and the next all had wooden shrines out front, carved with motionless leaves and looking as though the same hands had built them. At the apex of a small green triangle jutting out i
nto the intersection where Donato Álvarez met García and Espinosa, the dogs formed a semiorderly knot around a cupola in which an uncertain light flickered. A crimson glass hurricane lamp.

  I thought it likely that the dogs, after reaching Warnes, would head over to Newbery and then turn onto Guzmán to reach the main cemetery entrance with its mighty colonnade shining (as they say) in the moonlight, in the metaphorical moonlight. I’d never seen the entrance, but I knew it from the photos in my atlases and city guidebooks. I knew the layout with such precision that I could mentally count the involutes in the shadow cast by the iron cemetery gate. Warnes spread before us, and the press of dogs, their strong smell — mingled now with a harsher odor rising from the ramifying rivulets of dog piss — grew closer, more adherent. The body shops and auto-parts stores lining the blocks of Warnes between Trelles and Oroño proffered the richest meat-bowl displays yet, displays truly commensurate with a rigorous commercial life. Light-streaked chrome bulged behind windows under awnings made of the pollen-yellow canvas that auto-parts stores favor around the world. Grimy steel security lattices screened the doors of these shops, and the bowl shrines before them put the other ones I had seen to shame. The store owners made use of the local elements, i.e., hubcaps, raw sheet-metal plaques for spot welding, and mirror fragments. You could tell owners had made these shrines. The care visible in their construction proved they were not the work of mere lackeys. The mightiest shrine dominated the intersection of Warnes and Dickman, a ziggurat walled with corrugated iron shingling and encircled, netted, in fine-linked drive chains of galvanized steel. The mild wind moaned as it passed through this structure, and I stopped walking in order to listen, though my companions just went on trooping, increasing their numbers, went on flowing. From the ziggurat roof a hood ornament, quite new and greasy, protruded. A naked young woman bent backward by ecstasy, by the wind. No nipples, no genitals, smooth thighs and smooth eyes.

  There were no cars on Warnes, and the railway tracks between the street and the southern wall of the cemetery threw off implacable gleams. Toward these implacable gleams, across the asphalt and then the tracks, the dogs trooped without fear. Not toward the entrance on Guzmán. No, they headed instead for a point in the cemetery’s outer wall directly across Warnes from Almirante Seguí, Francisco José, another naval mastermind, I thought — his face, surmounted by an absurd Napoleonic curl, appeared in the city atlas I’d studied before coming. Around this inexplicable point their congregation was thickest and most active, nails scraping runnels, for example, in the narrow strip of bare earth between the cemetery and tracks, bare earth also occupied in absorbing urine and slaver.

  The wall itself, I saw, that was their aim. The wall that (in the stupidest way possible) separates the living from the dead. No burgher can resist a cemetery wall, so I pressed forward among the knee-high and supernally polite masses. Their pelts stroked my shins. At times a tongue brushed me, or even a tooth, with no intent. I reached the bare verge and struck with my toes a dull, hard blow against a rail hiding itself in the canine darkness before the dogs’ true goal became apparent. Their polite writhing expressed a single purpose: to struggle through a break in the cemetery wall shaped like an onion dome. (Lukovichnaya glava to my namesake, though in my profession the phrase means “toilet bowl.”) Here, any observer would expect their calm to erupt, here — here and nowhere else would they reveal their true nature. Yet sedate motion reigned, the diffuse, sickly light from the streetlamps flowed peaceably on, and the silence did not suffer. Not at all.

  The lawns beyond the wall looked almost black in the moonlight. The stone monuments gave off a gentle and mycoform effulgence. Every time I tried to get through this gap — the sweet, wide, and somber lawns of the cemetery were calling me onward — I failed. The dogs congregated too thickly. While they had so far ignored me, I did not want to offend or provoke them. So I gave up, that’s all. I crossed the bare verge now moistened by urine; I crossed the train tracks now thrumming, mildly thrumming; I followed the cemetery wall along Warnes and turned on Newbery, where a massive bank of sycamore screened both the cemetery and its brown wall from view. I planned to pass through the mighty colonnade, to climb over the iron gate if necessary. Those involutes twisted and swayed in the night, and I would climb them, I would ascend. To what? To the cemetery. If it is permissible to say “ascend to the cemetery.” It seemed an ideal place to spend the night, walled and containing only the dead and these calm dogs. My absorption in the night-dog phenomenon meant I had not yet found an open hotel or flophouse. I did not know what the penal statutes dealing with cemetery trespass demanded in Buenos Aires. In my most recent survey of their crime statistics I had not found one mention of cemetery trespass, and the statutes governing it had evaded my research.

  I decided that if I was caught by a night watchman I would tell him I was a “writer.” (NB: the generalized “writer” does not exist; all real talent clings to specific forms.) I would explain to this theoretical watchman that spending a night in La Chacarita was essential to my “writing.” I found a pen in my jacket pocket: that’s proof. Also a folded paper scrap in my wallet, on which I wrote down the words oak upright, night, canine might, hubcap manufacturer’s delight. The fetus of a poem: more proof. The dogs now trotted with increased, almost desperate speed down Newbery as I jogged up it, and even the ones urinating or defecating did so in a human hurry. I’d never seen anything like it before. Dogs always take their time shitting and pissing and here they were, shitting and pissing on the run, their quiet howls less frequent. Fewer galloped past now, unhappy stragglers heading for the gap in the cemetery wall. The moon was down. The first livid tints of the sunrise stained the sky. The long streets that led to the ocean began to reveal themselves.

  No police or cemetery watchmen in the entrance plaza, only two periwinkle nylon tents fronted by crude wooden counters, facing each other with martial indifference. The last dogs ran past, real blurs, yowling and barking, ragged echoes multiplying, and I lay full-length on a cool, whitish bench. I closed my eyes. I listened to the rapid rustling of the nylon and the rarer and rarer shouts from the dogs as the air warmed around me. In short, I passed out at the foot of my goal. And that’s how I knew I was still human.

  4.

  The murmurs of two flower vendors mingled in the stagnant heat. The vendors occupied the two tents. They shared one skinny lackey, a teenaged boy with no shirt, who darted back and forth between the tents spraying water on the flowers from a plastic bottle, adjusting their blossoms, repositioning their stems in their green buckets, and muttering to his two masters.

  Southern sunlight coated the white marble entrance plaza, the flagstones, and the benches. Like incipient blindness. When I staggered into the shade of the blue-lipped tent roof, I found relief, though the pollen-thickened air was hard to breathe. The lilies and freesia crammed into the buckets emitted their suffocating and meretricious (in the literal sense) smell. Green, raw-looking shelves above and behind the green buckets held a small variety of other goods: cigarettes, gum, plastic combs, antacid tablets, bottled water, fringed leather key-ring fobs to which gold-leaf labels reading (in English) GENUINE PAMPAS HARE had been affixed. I bought a bottle of water so I would have an excuse to speak to the vendor, ask him what time it was and if he had any matches. I had not put my wristwatch on before my walk and had exhausted the matchbook the sad clerk had given me. I thought you were going to ask me for a beer, said the vendor, you look like a derelict. Pollen speckled his iron-colored hair. We don’t sell any, he went on, but maybe we should. I said that I never knew anyone to lose money selling beer. The vendor told me my Spanish was good, so good he didn’t believe I was a tourist. And I know you’re not from Uruguay, you’re too tall, he said. I didn’t see any other customers, and the vendor must have noticed me noticing, because he spoke up: We don’t get a lot of customers at this time of day, but we stay open anyway. His counterpart cried out that they had to, you never knew what was going to h
appen, what if someone showed up to visit a relative and we weren’t here to sell them flowers?

  They were brothers, it turned out. The Taquini brothers. They had operated the stands for eleven years, said Fulvio (the elder, who sold me the water), eleven good years. The water worsened my headache but cooled my throat, so I kept drinking and drinking, while glancing around to see if the dogs were present, asleep in the humble (even humiliating) shadows dogs like. I saw none. I asked Fulvio where they’d gone. He looked off into the stony glare beyond the tent, and I repeated my question. What dogs, said Fulvio.