Dog Symphony

by Sam Munson

Hecklers had now begun to catcall and hurl obscenities at the “ethics-firsters.” Shut up, shut the fuck up, a hoarse female voice shouted again and again. Luxemburg cackled each time. She was now looking down the barrel of her pistol into the quadrangle. Impossible. I attempted to move past Sanchis Mira, but the crowd was too dense. My headache had worsened. The white blooms of pain patchily obliterated the gathering darkness. Not from here, it’s impossible, Luxemburg cried again. Through the white shed’s doorway a new squad of waiters darted, each carrying a steel platter piled with dark slabs. Roast meat. A waiter proffered a platter. The smell nauseated me. Nonetheless, saliva leaped into my mouth. Sanchis Mira took a slab of meat from the platter and held it up for examination. He brought it close to his nose and inhaled. He noted my failure to take up a slab, and — with the meat near his nostrils — said, Mr. Pasternak, surely you won’t refuse our meager hospitality? If I refused, it would mean an end to the conversation, which would mean an effective end to my search for Ana. Nausea, another wave of it, made my stomach flutter. Mr. Pasternak, please, said Sanchis Mira. He himself took another slab and offered it to me. The waiter forced his way through the crowd. Hands emerged, so to speak, from the darkness and removed slab after slab from his platter, and thick cries of delight surrounded his progress. I had no choice, now. I accepted the meat. Its scent, blunt and mildly cloying, almost made me vomit. But its overwhelming (historiographic) flavor, which I could not identify, calmed my nausea instantly, and the liquefied fat leaking onto my tongue silenced my so-called “inner voice.” Sanchis Mira held his wineglass in one hand and his meat in the other, tearing it repeatedly with his enormous, tile-like, incandescent teeth.

  As we ate, a crowd built up around the long white table, forming two writhing lines. There, on the roof, the guards abandoned their posts to help shepherd these lines and to answer the questions from the partygoers waiting in them. Soon, soon, said Luxemburg. The words slipped through the gap in the systolic/diastolic cries now rising more loudly, more shrilly, from the quadrangles, where the ethics-firsters and their opponents spurred each other to greater and greater heights of student moronism. The evening’s entertainment, said my host. He clasped my biceps, as Luxemburg had done, and the grease on his fingers stained my suit jacket. To remove myself from his grasp would have been an even greater insult than refusing the meat, so I accompanied him, as I had accompanied Luxemburg, through the crowd — it parted around him, turning up its arrayed, moist eyes in respect — to the table set with the white cloth and steel bowls, now illuminated by a cone of baronial glare from a tall aluminum-bodied lamp. Money filled the steel bowls. Bills and coins, pesos, dollars, euros, rubles, yen, Turkish lira, even Kenyan shillings, which I recognized only because I had written a paper in graduate school about the chastnyye polyany (a term in my field designating the places in a prison used by the staff and guards, not by prisoners, i.e., the barracks, the offices, the private kitchen and eating rooms) of the Kamiti in Nairobi.

  Two guards in sky blue, their hands on their pistols, flanked the table and stared straight ahead. The crowd around me thrust their arms out and handed money to a waiter behind the table, who counted it, noting the amounts and names, and asked: Left or right? This waiter bore the marks of a severe beating, two greenish edemas around his right eye, jammy blood in the cut on his torn lips, a blue bruise on his cheek, his left ear swollen. Hello, sir, he said to Sanchis Mira, will you be playing tonight? A wet, ragged sound came from his chest as he breathed. Sanchis Mira removed his wallet — an enormous wallet made of red leather. It too bore the golden label GENUINE PAMPAS HARE. The injured waiter would not look at me or at anyone else. He kept his eyes on Sanchis Mira as he took my host’s money. I thrust a sheaf of dollars at him, to see if he would at last look up. He did not, though he did speak to me: Left or right, he asked. I hesitated. Sanchis Mira said: It’s a simple question, Mr. Pasternak. Now is no time to play Hamlet in Russia. I said left; my money went into the left bowl. Academic bodies behind me emitted academic warmth. A loud whistle interrupted this churning. All the partygoers clustered around the bowl table stopped moving and the bruised waiter slammed an oblong Lucite cover over the two bowls. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, Sanchis Mira was repeating.

  He had at last released my bicep. The crowd was surging to the edge of the roof, pulling me along, among the wet eyes, wet mouths, wet hearts, and wet assholes. The guards stayed behind with the money. The waiter stared off into the vacant night. I almost stumbled among the rushing spectators, but I righted myself — stumbling now would have constituted an irremediable defeat. From the grit-covered parapet, the vista looked simple, even meager. On the other side of the University buildings, into the newspaper-colored distance, a long, irregular banner of waste ground stretched. It was lit by floodlights mounted on steel poles. I could not determine its borders, and the sickening notion apparated or even coalesced: it reached to the sea, Pasternak, to the Atlantic. The floodlights aided this illusion. They were too widely spaced, making it harder to observe the field. In their closed circles of glare you saw every grass-blade, every gleaming, water-filled depression. As a result, in the darkness beyond the glare almost nothing could be seen. Silence? No. A guest, his features obscure in the dimness, leaned next to me, breathing hard. The tarry scent of wine poured out with every exhalation. Factitious ticking. Sanchis Mira was holding up a dim silver pocket watch. Other than that you could say it was quiet.

  The waste field spread before us under the chaotic and useless floodlights, a simple and unreal cloth. I asked this dim guest what we were supposed to be watching, and he hissed: Shut the fuck up, you have to be quiet, otherwise it could be considered undue intervention. As he finished his sentence, a dog trotted up to a light pole and lifted its leg. The white brilliance washed out the dog’s rufous fur to a brick-pink; its shadow trembled on the grass and my heart trembled as well. The animal was a bull terrier. It carried itself with humble strength. Its collar blinked, as it slowly circled the pole, like an eye, like a blinded eye. Like a heliograph, Pasternak, or a heliotrope blossom, I thought. Another dog ambled through the light, this one gun-colored, hugely tall, and bulky-chested. A mastiff. The two nosed each other’s anuses. Their grumblings reached the spectators on the roof, who maintained their silence. Sanchis Mira’s pocket watch was still aloft. Now more dogs arrived, trooping out of the darkness with easy serenity. Dog by dog, a pack of thirteen formed. The reddish dog, the mastiff, a spotted spaniel, two German shepherds standing side by side, an obese puli the color of crematory smoke, a dock-tailed pit bull, a borzoi whose fawn fur had been shaved almost to the skin, a Saint Bernard asleep next to the light pole, a bloodhound resembling (as all bloodhounds do) a prelate or dictator, and three mutts, grayish-brown, who crouched flank to flank in the half dark edging the floodlight pool.

  The man standing next to me was getting excited. His breathing grew deep and coarse. His saliva itself, I suspected, took on a rustic smell. The odor of cooked meat, cooked fat, lymph, blood, the odor of civilization. Or is it culture? It spread, drifted, and lingered. The tick, tick, tick the pocket watch released into the night, like a naked human pulse — my own pulse slowed to match it, though that might simply be an aestheticized memory. Down on the waste field, a new shadow danced. A human shadow. A woman’s. I could not make out her features at this distance. I saw she was a brunette, that’s all. At rest on her shoulder a metal rail or joist. Sanchis Mira held a thick, short silver tube to his lips, connected to a leather cord that encircled his neck, and blew through it. Producing another silence, one inflated to near-bursting. The dogs raced toward the brunette on the field. She cried out. In defiance or despair.

  8.

  When I returned to the Pensión Vermesser, Violeta was shaking meat from a silver bowl into a silver bag by the steps. The morning was overcast, the sky milk white. You keep student hours, Mr. Pasternak, said my hostess.

  I sat on the chilly steps and observed her. I had not slept,
not at all, and though my headache had dissipated, my eyelids abraded my eyes every time I blinked. I found myself forgetting, from moment to moment, the placement of my feet, my hands, my cigarettes. Images from the roof garden trembled in my memory. The ease with which the dark-haired woman had struck down the pack of dogs, one after the other. A truly philosophical demolition. I did not understand why the University was engaged in sponsoring such fights, even if only indirectly. And Violeta’s “explanation” did not help. The clubs of Hecate, she said, that’s what they call themselves. She’d never personally seen any that centered around betting on fights, but knew of gatherings that met regularly to bet on other night-dog activities — the speed with which a certain dog will reach La Chacarita, for example, or whether this or that meat bowl will be visited, or even which dog “belongs” to which human family, all these existed and were even well known; La Nación had recently published an article on them called, she thought, “Fortune’s new friends.”

  And I hope, she went on — perhaps because I said nothing — that the dogs haven’t lowered your opinion of the city. I always sleep through their appearance and in any case my immediate family is all alive, as far as I know. That’s why I just refreeze and defrost the same steaks, she said, they never visit me anyway, and you have to save money where you can. Before I could ask the next logical question, i.e., why she put out bowls at all if the dogs never came to the Pensión Vermesser, she was already smiling and speaking: And you know very well, Mr. Pasternak, that as a hotelkeeper I have to go along with tradition, even if I am skeptical of it. Otherwise my business would suffer.

  My need to speak with Ana, to confirm her involvement in all this, had deepened during my long walk home. The jubilant screams from the small segment of the crowd that bet on the woman and the disgusted sighs from those who had bet on the dogs — these I recalled with perfect clarity. I did not object to the killing of the dogs. The only alternative was for the woman to have been torn apart by their teeth, as if by a storm. The scene had nonetheless left me uneasy. Yet if Ana was involved with this, then I too could permit myself to remain involved. A sophomoric induction, Pasternak. I tried to find Ana’s personal phone numbers, home and cellular, but I discovered that her entry in my address book contained only her phone number at the University. This increased my dizziness, and revived the floodlit nausea I had experienced on the rooftop. I remembered having written down her personal phone number sometime during our third year as friends, while she was reading Pascal in my bed, in a stiff wavering circle of lamplight. Or possibly Gogol. Yet now: nothing. As if in disproof of the esoteric theories I was beginning, automatically, to construct, my books lay open and naked on the desk, my spare shirts hung whitely in the closet, my socks and underwear cowered in the uppermost dresser drawer, and my razor stared from the migraine-yellow porcelain cup on the sink rim. All where I had left them, all as I had left them. Sleeping the trustful sleep of objects.

  The phone book on the table listed four Mariateguis. One was Violeta’s doctor friend; the two others also had male first names. The third was a woman, and though her first name, Jacinta, was not my colleague’s first name, I tried anyway. I reached an answering machine, which played a long segment of the Dog Symphony before the message began. The woman it belonged to was clearly young. Her voice was an octave higher than my colleague’s. I left nine or ten seconds of silence on her answering machine as retribution. The lilac stems in the vase next to the telephone, curved like two canine grins, mocked me. I could think of nothing else to do, so I called her number at the history department again, expecting either the goatish song of the busy signal or sheer nothing. To my shock, a male voice answered after the first ring: Department of Social Praxis. It was so similar to Sanchis Mira’s that I slammed down the greasy, green receiver in fear. Sweat lined my armpits, my perineum, my forehead. The ashen taste of the Macedonias, a really putrid brand, lined my mouth. Violeta’s song cut off and then resumed indoors. I lifted the phone and dialed yet again. The dry male voice announced once more: Department of Social Praxis. I asked for Dr. Ana Mariategui and the operator told me to wait. During the pause, I heard nothing, at first, and then a cheap and melancholy piano tune, which I recognized but couldn’t identify. All music says the same thing, in the end. There’s no need to specify what it is. Yet I struggled to recall the name of this melody and failed. The operator came back on and said that Dr. Mariategui was not available, but that he would be happy to pass on a message to her. I asked if I could come see Dr. Mariategui, what her office hours were. I added that I was a visiting academic she had sponsored, that I was attending a conference, but the operator interrupted me before I could explain about my field of research.

  You need to come in to discuss such matters, sir, he said (I realized his voice was nothing like Sanchis Mira’s, nothing at all) and began without preamble to read a list of dates and times. I missed the first three and asked him to repeat them. He answered: Do you want to resolve the issue or should I just report you to our administrators? The earliest time we have, in any case, is the day after tomorrow, is that soon enough? I told him no and apologized (for what crime I did not know). The operator said nothing. Hello, I said, hello? One moment, sir, said the operator, I want to make sure I am getting this down correctly. You are declining to come in for an interview. I assured him that there was no need for me to come in, I merely needed an address. Coming in for an interview is in my experience the best way to handle matters of this kind, sir, said the operator. His voice was clotted. As if with hidden laughter. I replied that I did not have the time at the moment, though I regretted this fact. It is regrettable, sir, said the operator, and asked me how to spell my last name. I did; I waited for him to ask if I was related to the famous Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago. But he did not. He coughed, or grunted, or choked back another laugh, and said that he was now seeing an address entered in the record for Dr. Mariategui: Avenida Julio Zenz 4300. I thanked him. The saliva filling my mouth blurred the word; droplets spurted out onto the octagonal table, and a few, to my disgust, even hit the lilac. If you should decide to come in, sir, he went on, as I highly recommend, please remember to bring an ID and proof of travel. A plane ticket, anything like that. Otherwise we would have no idea whether you actually came to Buenos Aires.

  The city atlas I’d brought with me (my memory for maps is tremendous but not infallible) did not depict Avenida Zenz. No mention in the index and none in the brief, dead biographies of famous sites the atlas offered as ancillary entertainment. I peered and peered through a magnifying glass framed in frail puce plastic and attached with a nylon cord to the book itself, but I saw no Zenz; in the lowest desk drawer I found a telephone directory and was leafing through it in the hopes of discovering a dweller on Zenz at random — a desperate, frivolous hope, I admit — when Violeta called to me from the parlor threshold. She was flushed from the housecleaning. She carried a blue-and-white checked rag and a plastic spray bottle full of pinkish liquid (like blood and rendered fat, mingling). Sweat beads decorated her hairline, and through the loose armholes of her shirt I saw the dark tufts in her deep axillae flaring. She asked me if something was wrong. I assured her that no, everything was fine, that I was fine. She told me I looked exhausted, though my exhaustion had long since left me, it had drained away on my journey home, or during the rooftop events, or at another point in the ichorous flow. I explained my predicament. She knew exactly where Avenida Julio Zenz was. I was ashamed. After all, so far I had conducted my (external) affairs with perfect alacrity and poise, and the Zenz affair represented a defeat, that I could not deny. She said Zenz was a new street, or a new name for an old street in La Boca; it used to be Parker. The writer it was renamed to honor just died, she said, in the epidemic. There’s no way they could have updated the maps. So don’t blame yourself, Mr. Pasternak.

  La Boca, The Mouth. Every tourist knows the name of that barrio, Pasternak. It’s famous throughout the world. I ordinarily would neve
r have visited such a place. On my travels I preferred to find the truly anonymous, truly empty zones of a city. I was never perfectly successful, and this trip had occasioned many hindrances. La Boca was home to the Boca Juniors, a soccer team. Soccer is another prison, in which the wardens and guards outnumber the inmates by a thousand or ten thousand to one. And while Caminito was crowded, and while the houses as I walked south displayed colors (red, orange, yellow, pink) corrupted by the endless viewing. This complexion did not last. The Riachuelo, dull and metallic, visually impure, flowed alongside me as I crossed Alfredo Palacios, a street named after an Argentine senator. The first socialist, if memory serves, in the Chamber of Deputies. A man with an imitative mustache meant to suggest some Russian exploder. His name repeated now by blue, silent plaques among sheds with corrugated aluminum sides that filled most of the street lots here, among the shrill metallic cries of saws or drill presses. The smell of the river poured lazily through the silent air between the sheds. I looked into the few stores that I passed. One sold only hubcaps, another orthotic shoes, the walls of a third glittered telegraphically with key blanks. The Dog Symphony trembled and trilled from a radio in the orthotic shoe store. All three, of course, had meat bowls set out. All six bowls were empty. The key-store owners had housed theirs under a wooden roof cut from a lemon crate (you could see the painted, ruined lemons) and shingled with oxidized keys.

  I found Parker quite quickly, or Avenida Zenz, as it was now known. Its new nameplate was smaller than the old one, and a whitish penumbra surrounded it against the dirtied brick wall. The city had shown Zenz a great dishonor in naming this street after him. I didn’t know the man’s work, of course; I’ve never had time for contemporary literature. But even so: Parker (or Zenz) was one block long. This was why, I assumed, it had been chosen. So that minimal damage would be done to existent atlases. Atlases, census records, subway maps — all these the great city values more than a dead or dying writer. Notwithstanding the shit-flecked fan dances porteños perform if Borges or Cortázar enters the conversation. Zenz (or Parker) ran from Coronel Salvadores to California; I was standing at the California end, staring along the street into a barren triangular field on Salvadores. The little street was silent, sentried by one lone leafless poplar. The Riachuelo’s hard glints fired whenever I looked east and south, beyond the thrumming sheds that separated Zenz from the concrete shingle and the water. Above me a vapid sky in which geese honked as they flapped.