Dog Symphony

by Sam Munson

  I had trouble locating 4300. A building that occupied an entire city block filled the northeast side of Zenz corner to corner. The largest shed I’d yet seen. A monstrous building clad in curd-colored aluminum siding. It looked as I had always imagined the exterior of the Labyrinth to look, but buildings that recall the Labyrinth have become sadly common in all cities. Near its roofline, a blue scrawl of graffiti said: YOUR MOTHER FUCKS NIGHT DOGS. The hand neat and sure, like the hand of a copyist, an eighteenth-century expert flowing on and on through the constellations. I circumnavigated the building, all four sides, thinking it might be 4300. I saw no entry door, no windows, just the blank siding through which came a mild, mechanical hum. Eight bowls, two to a side. Nothing exceptional there. I rested my forehead against the metal — the absence of other pedestrians stripped me of shame — and the vibrations soothed me. My eyelids began to fall. But this strange building was obviously not 4300, so I had to abandon my soothing, subterranean phenomenon.

  On Zenz’s southwest side spread a low, dark structure: an octagonal one-story building with a hooked annex encircling its parking lot. This lay behind a massive, rusted fence. A row of blue vans gleamed in the lot, more or less like blue molars. Or the late-afternoon light itself might have possessed this dental quality. I don’t know, our lives are governed to a certain extent by dental mysteries far more than religious mysteries. But in any case I crossed and surveyed. I was sure that this barracks-like structure would also fail to be what I wanted, that the departmental operator had played an easy, cruel prank on me, but as I approached I saw that the low building was indeed 4300 Zenz. The name spelled out in umber letters beneath the ragged awning was OJEA MEAT DISTRIBUTORS. I saw no sign of life within. The side windows were small and high up like portholes, filthy and covered with metal netting. An empty desk was visible through the dead window in the steel front door; a toy Argentine flag dangled stiffly from its black dowel planted in a pot clearly meant to hold silk flowers. I pressed the button next to this steel door. The buzzer shrilled within, but nothing else happened. The meat and water bowls left here seemed to be hammered from the same dead, crude metal as the door. The blue vans in the lot, parked obliquely, displayed the words MAN’S BEST FRIEND SOCIETY in a dizzying array. Orthodontic. Or heterodontic. My blood thudded at my temples. The silence of the street magnified this drumbeat. Another wedge of geese bumbled east above me. The sun and moon occupied the sky at the same time. The pitted fence abraded my fingers as I laced them through its links. All the preconditions for a “literary” occurrence manifested themselves, and a sick, viscous elation was curdling in my bowels.

  The octagonal building had another door, also of grayish steel, set into its western arm. A door meant to give workers access, I imagined, to these dental, echoing vans. This door opened and a fat, hairy-shouldered man in a white undershirt stepped through, his boot treads creaking against the asphalt of the lot. As the door closed behind him I saw, or imagined I saw, sky-blue cloth, banners or uniforms. The fat man didn’t see me at first. His cigarette lighter failed and he had to resort to matches. Clusters of brown, faint stains speckled his undershirt. Fresher red streaks painted his wide forearms. From the Ojea building, as from the metal sheds in its vicinity, metal whines and cries drifted, treble and sustained. The fat man paced without seeing me, slapped the flank of the lead van in fraternal affection, scratched his balls. In short, a fellow primate. I called out to him: Sir, sir. He ignored me. Or the noise from the Ojea building obscured my words. But eventually, after repeated calls, he stared at me, one hand on the truck side, his cigarette in the other, an image fit only to be smeared with the effluvium of artistic photography, in fact, especially because more geese had appeared and their crooked, tender shadows were touching the asphalt. I waited, I called out again, and the fat man approached without speaking. The blood drying on his skin carried a raw smell. He stared at me through the fence, stared without speaking when the name Mariategui made its appearance, stared and stared. I asked again: Sir, do you know Dr. Mariategui, Ana Mariategui? A colleague of yours? A supervisor? I was given this address by the Department of Social Praxis.

  The fat man spat through the chain-link with astonishing precision. The sputum traveled over my shoulder but passed close enough to my face to cause me to leap back. Then he apologized, but a crooked and even ashamed grin twisted and crushed his apology. I did not mean to do that, spit so close, but I have to spit constantly, it’s an affliction, said the fat man. He spat again. Who knows if it was genuine spit and a genuine affliction or a theatrical proof of his previous statement? I asked him if he knew anything, anything at all about Dr. Mariategui, I said once more I’d been given this address by the Department of Social Praxis. You work there, he wanted to know. I told him no. You don’t look like it but I thought I’d ask, he went on. He spat a third time, between his own feet. I don’t know that name, he said, and I don’t know why the University sent you here. We’re a meat packaging company, as I’m sure you figured out. He grinned his broken-spined grin once more, and I saw that fading bruises, faint and greenish, mottled his face and bare arms. Please, I said, I must know, so if you’re fucking with me please stop. My own profanity surprised me.

  I’m not fucking with you, sir. I honestly don’t know anyone by that name, or anything about the Department of Social Praxis, beyond what I said already. He was smiling, his tile-like teeth strong and dark yellow, his gums vivid. Then why did they give me this address, I asked, it can’t be a mistake — the street was just renamed. That’s true, said the spitter, his smile twisting and curling into horns, knives, a trident. Whatever you like. Yes, he said, that has confused people. As he spoke his pupils twitched, and I followed their arc. They had twitched toward a gate in the parking lot fence, closed with a loosely wrapped chain. I wish I could help you, sir, said the spitter, through his pollen-colored smile, I wish I could but I don’t know anything and only employees are authorized to be on the premises. Again his pupils jumped, again they indicated this gate in the fence, secured by its frivolous chain. A gate I could enter if I liked. And at the spitter’s invitation, so to speak, I was already heading toward this door, my molars already locked behind my own painful and obedient grin. The spitter’s smile had widened, as had the blank, titanically empty smile of the sky, the roofline, this deserted precinct. We had reached the gate, and I was waiting for the spitter to unwrap the chain when the door he had first exited opened again. A rat-faced boy in a sky-blue uniform with silver epaulettes leaned through and shouted: Olegario, get inside, what the fuck is the matter with you. The spitter looked at me. Real melancholy in his muddy eyes. He obeyed the uniformed boy. He glanced at me again before the door closed. One meager raindrop stroked my earlobe. Then another.

  9.

  That guy is a real motherfucker, Adriano muttered, or so I hear. He was holding another match (whose flame I could hardly see in the glaring sunlight) to the black mouth of his pipe.

  He meant Sanchis Mira. I told him everything about my bizarre evening on the roof while we were waiting in line at the Cárcel de Devoto. He listened with grave care, nodding, squinting, tapping more brick-brown tobacco into the bowl. He added that while he wished he’d been a professor he was glad he didn’t have to deal with them. He pointed at the squadron of University police standing guard around the entrance gates (next to the two steel bowls reflecting sunlight). Adriano turned out to know even more about the phenomenon of betting on dogs than Violeta did. The clubs of Hecate, he said, that’s nothing new. We had those under Videla and we had them under Rosas, too, it’s just part of our history. Not always dogs, though — at least that’s what it said in the article. And he wasn’t surprised, he added, about my friend. It happens all the time, he said, it started right after the epidemic too. Even before the night dogs showed up.

  The line was composed mostly of old women wearing black kerchiefs striped with lilac. The liveried guards let them in five or six at a time, not bothering them or beratin
g them. They asked for identification and then proffered their upturned caps. The first time I watched an old woman drop coins (they chittered telegraphically) into the cap, I found the gesture so nonsensical that it failed to make any impression, sordid or comical, at all. Adriano already held a fistful of change ready, taken from his wallet which, like the fobs his brother sold, also bore a GENUINE PAMPAS HARE label. I gathered up all the centavos (with their bloody smell) I had in my pockets. The cap the guard at the line’s head offered me displayed a sweat stain on the inner crown, shaped like a pretentious, second-rate nation.

  The layout of the carcel did not correspond in any way to the plans of it I had seen. The prison had long been a basic instructional text for aspirants to my field. We all knew it by heart. Even my colleagues whose memories fell short of mine at least knew the carcel. When the structural changes had been made, Adriano didn’t know exactly. Some time after the epidemic, he said. The oblong garrison you passed through to enter was still there but in the center of the courtyard the fences I remembered from my studies had been demolished, creating a wide, broken-skinned expanse of concrete across which the old women moved with complete freedom, their striped kerchiefs fluttering. From the cracks in the asphalt grew rugged dandelions. The old ladies gathered up handfuls of these as they passed, crammed them into their purses or carried them tenderly in curled hands.

  The tiered cellblocks — once the residences of luminaries, of the southern capital’s most phosphorescent luminaries — had been torn down. Their foundations remained, jagged, periodontal, enclosing patches of gravel, gray stones into which lines of blue stones had been set. On the last remaining walls, the outer walls, black oblong loudspeakers hung. It’s the church, said Adriano, you’ll see, they’re behind all of this. He muttered these words with downcast and mildly ashamed eyes. The center of the coffin-shaped grounds of the prison, on which all these old women seemed bent to converge (though I now saw a few other tourists, including four Germans in shorts, their knees crimson and their identical alpenstocks chopping the air), held a stumpy, open building made of cinder blocks and roofed with tin shingles. These looked molten in the sun. The old women here pressed thickly and strongly, they made forward movement difficult. You had to move at their numb, reverential pace or not move at all. We were gradually swept forward by this tidal motion, this erosive and mysterious motion, and I was able to see the building more clearly: it was a shrine, and within the gloom under its tin roof hundreds of squat candles burned and flickered. A name was lettered in orange paint on a wooden plaque hanging from the roof edge: SAN CRISTóBAL.

  The saint wore a purple robe. He was toweringly tall. The crude-cut hands, painted white, gripped the robe under its white collar. And from the collar up . . . I could not believe what I saw. A dog’s head on the saint’s shoulders. St. Christopher has a dog’s head, Adriano whispered to me, I don’t know why but you can look it up, I remember from school. As he spoke, from the loudspeakers mounted on the inner courtyard wall came a breathy recording of bells. The Dog Symphony: that’s what it was, played on a carillon. The old ladies surged forward, one more human wave, and those in the first rank knelt and started to pray, they asked the saint to intercede for their dead sons and daughters, their dead sisters and husbands, on the perilous journey from death back into life, a journey like the journey our savior himself took. The prayer sounded rehearsed to me. Adriano said some priest had written it after the dogs first showed up. Or maybe not a priest at all, but some other authority — he couldn’t remember. We’d reached the shrine itself now, buoyed by the flood of old women. A damp cold emanated from the wooden walls and from the plaster statue itself. Steel troughs filled with white candles stood before the concrete hexagon beneath the shrine.

  Adriano was kneeling, now, fumbling up a candle from the trough and lighting it with his own (secular) matches. He didn’t look at me, only at St. Christopher. The daylight once more rendered the flame almost invisible; but once he had placed it on the metal stands within the shrine it blazed a vivid orange, the color of the letters on the sign identifying the saint. I was now the sole person standing. Adriano muttered over his clasped hands, his eyes closed, rocking in the same cardiovascular rhythm as the old women. Around me the bent, hill-shaped backs, the gaudy and funereal kerchiefs, and the tolling song. Adriano interrupted his prayer to direct a guilty look at me, as though saying: What can I do? I don’t know where my instinct to kneel and join him came from, but burgher adventurism demands that you engage in such displays. Then again, it could have been my natural cowardice. I did not take a candle but I did murmur, over and over, a curt prayer for Ana’s safety as the soap-scented clothes of the old women rustled next to my ears. In the dim shrine, the candlelight spattered on a halo made of gold-painted plaster surrounding the canine head. You see, murmured Adriano, you see.

  He and Fulvio lived, I learned, across from La Chacarita in a three-story house plastered and painted the color of tangerines. Over the meal he invited me to, which was neither lunch nor dinner, the brothers explained that they had grown up in this house and that they intended for their children to live in it after their own deaths. The teenage flower lackey was Fulvio’s son, Hilário. He was more than a lackey: he was also a veterinary intern at a rural clinic. Adriano’s daughter was named Luz Dar. Her cousin spent the whole meal casting lost, lustful glances at her breasts and eyes, at her sleek hair. She possessed a physical beauty (soft, snubbed melancholic chin; dewy irises; impeccable blackness behind her impeccable teeth) that stilled criticism and even observation. Her mother was dead. Her aunt, Fulvio’s wife, kept a watchful eye on Hilário as we ate an enormous salad, dandelion greens and tomatoes, and then rice and roasted eggplants, along with sweating cans of Quilmes beer, which everyone in the Taquini family seemed to prefer to wine. They served no meat, for which Fulvio and his wife Odolinda apologized. Prices have never been so high, Fulvio said, and you already know the sad state of my business affairs.

  Ojea Meat Distributors was, it seemed, a well-known meat company, though none of the Taquinis could explain why Ana might be working there. A simple transcription error by the Department, a malicious prank by the man who answered the phone: both were possible. Hilário mentioned a friend who had found his own phone number disconnected for no reason. The number no longer worked, he said, and he was in this way cut off from the world. Both Odolinda and Fulvio agreed that it had become hard to contact people since the epidemic. Odolinda said I shouldn’t get confused, this was not the second coming of the dictatorship — whatever I might think, Rosas or Videla was nowhere to be seen in all this. She blamed Ana’s absence on what she first called “national preoccupation,” and then “civic preoccupation.” We are all trying our best to understand what these dogs mean, whether they are, in fact . . . here she trailed off, as if she did not want to disagree with her husband and brother-in-law before strangers. It was too late, Fulvio was already shouting that she had no right to question the night-dog phenomenon, he worked too hard and she saw the evidence herself of what they were. We can’t even afford fucking meat anymore, my love, Fulvio shouted, fists clenched. Odolinda shook her index finger near her husband’s black nostrils and cried out: Don’t tell me what to think, don’t be an asshole.

  After they both apologized for this outburst (first to me, then to each other, then to their family members), Adriano related the story of our journey to see St. Christopher. Fulvio spat, literally spat, each time Adriano mentioned the cynocephalic saint. His wife said: Don’t be so theatrical, Fulvito. Her admonition warm, concealing her craterous laugh. Luz Dar said it was a shame they had knocked down the old prison. In a sense, said Luz Dar, you could call it our real heritage. Hilário fervently agreed, eyeing her breasts. Or they could have left it up, but as a museum, or they could have turned it into an office building. Anything would be better, said Fulvio. They could have built a dog crematorium. Luz Dar turned her (lightly cross-eyed) gaze to her cousin — who in a swift jerk remove
d his finger from his nose — and then to me. I did not want to weigh in on the dog question, I said, as a relative stranger. Adriano said his brother was right (I also kept quiet about his having lit a votive candle). Fulvio also did not know the exact date of the transformation of the carcel, and this troubled me far more than my having missed the news of the epidemic: the transformation of the Cárcel de Devoto into a shrine represented a massive loss to my profession. Odolinda blamed the University police cadres. They like keeping secrets for their own sake, she said. For example, I was trying to look up an old classmate of mine who works there, and they simply refuse to admit that she exists. They claimed her records were lost or stolen. It’s part of our civic preoccupation, I suppose, she went on, but it’s worrisome, as you yourself know, Mr. Pasternak.

  No one could give me specifics about the epidemic. Fulvio said it was “the plague,” in English. Adriano said no, it had been swine flu. Odolinda objected: That was the whole problem, they never identified it. Luz Dar and Hilário kept silent, slowly drinking the whiskey their fathers had poured them from the bottle I’d brought. The Taquinis hadn’t lost anyone to the epidemic, I learned, which explained their unfamiliarity with it. Luz Dar, her voice raucous from the whiskey, said that someone she knew in school had an uncle who died. Hilário, who had grown more and more agitated during the conversation, was muttering something. His father said: Would you mind clarifying, Professor? No offense, Mr. Pasternak, but Hilário here often forgets that not everyone lives on his elevated plane.