Dog Symphony

by Sam Munson

  I knew where I was. La Chacarita. More dogs rushed between the gravestones, more dogs slipped past me. I lay there, and I attempted to cry. I felt no sadness, I felt nothing at all. But one “ought” to cry over such abrupt transformations. Yes, yes, because of my intelligence (and please recall its true definition) I knew what had happened. The sole possible outcome. A great loss, an irreplaceable loss, all cultural authorities tell us. We humans stand atop the world, the world exists only as our extension, in fact as our extended extensiveness. And now, this loss. So I tried to cry, I failed. Weeping is forbidden to dogs.

  The others, my new colleagues, well, they didn’t care that I was just lying around doing nothing. They trotted on past me over the tall, rich grass. The worst was that Fulvio had been correct. He refuted me from the beginning, and pedants suffer refutation as pure torment. Still no weeping, not even a dry, forced sob. I was panting, drooling; my nose snuffled up the mingled and maximal scents the graveyard earth supplied. My colleagues had no difficulty walking. I could not be the only new one, I could not be the only man who had died in Buenos Aires the previous day. So get the fuck up, Pasternak, I thought, get the fuck up.

  I got “up.” I walked. On four legs, on my “arms” and my legs, my fore- and hind legs. My “hands” and my “feet” spread at each step against the cooling grass. It took no real effort, my limbs knew what to do, and they bore me along among the other dogs, quiet and direct. I could not believe my fate, yet it had descended. That’s the trouble with fate, it descends. The need to shit seized my bowels (my soul) as the need to piss had seized my bladder, and I stopped to squat and defecate, my legs searching out the correct, most sturdy position. The dogs still trooped past me as two, then three hot turds slid from my asshole. What pleasure, to defecate in ease and security, no straining or meditative life allowed, merely to shit and to leave the shit behind you as progress toward the gap in the wall. Through which the sun glares above the toothed roofline. As the glowing, pink sky floated along above me, I recalled my days of higher stature. But so what? Those days had ended, as surely as my transformation had sealed the wound in my side. And I’d never been this at ease among humans — never, not once. Though by definition this anxiety would have remained hidden during my human life. Yes, I felt at ease among my new colleagues, even eager. No querulous doubts, no endless speculations. Speculations lie rooted in envy. Pasternak = dog. Dogs possess no envy. QED. I pushed through the press of my colleagues at the hole and crossed the railroad tracks on Warnes. They didn’t speak and they didn’t interfere. More than I can say for my academic colleagues, more than I could have said for any other human. The dogs were running. Which is to say, Pasternak, that we were running, we, we, we. And no one else. We ran and ran, the cooling pavement touched the rubbery, sensitive pads of our feet, of my feet. Night breezes curled into our ears, along our backs. All around me, beneath raised tails, assholes rubious or black, and the greener, yellower blackness of the city night. Now I smelled meat, now saliva poured down my throat, fell from my bouncing jaws, now I smelled the incomparable smell of clean tap water in a clean bowl.

  The city spread before us. A bit higher and a bit darker than before. One thing I can say about the claim that dogs are colorblind is that it is a lie: I saw color with an intense and perfected fervor, every tawny stick, every bluish seam in the pavement, every coagulated brick, every pore in every limestone plinth. But the city spread and spread, its streets locked in place. The same city, the same Buenos Aires. Even the same approaching night. I passed the bench I slept on during my first excursion. Now some bird shit, which I could smell, streaked the marble. Grayish-black, with a grave crimson speck in the center. But this bird shit could not hold my attention. I saw Adriano leaning on the wooden counter of his stand. Hilário sat on a wooden crate. They were both smoking and looking at the stream of dogs pouring through the entrance plaza. I stopped, I broke away from the pack and moved toward them.

  As soon as they noticed me heading their way a stony and simultaneous blankness stiffened their faces. I “called” to them — Adriano! Hilário! — before I could overcome the urge. I said nothing, of course. I just let out three bright, tenor barks and kept on running toward them. I’d almost reached the stand when Hilário rose and Adriano reached under the counter and lifted an aluminum baseball bat. Get the fuck out of here, you worthless motherfucker, he hissed, and darted through the entrance flap in the blue tarpaulin side wall. Hilário said nothing; he took a long step toward me, wound up, and aimed a strong, looping kick at my flank. The blow missed. The breeze from his shoe touched my pelt. There was a gray-pink gobbet of gum stuck to the treads. I smelled its unbearable sweetness. Get out! Get out! Adriano went on screaming, getting closer and closer and adjusting his grip on the bat handle. I only noticed as I was skittering away that Fulvio’s stand was gone, that Adriano was out there alone on the marble pavement.

  But I had no time to ponder Fulvio’s absence. The uncle and nephew went on cursing me long after I had rejoined the pack. You motherfucker! Motherfucker! tore through and through the soft night. Hilário even picked up a stone and hurled it at me, but it scraped along the sidewalk and took a bad bounce, ending up in the gutter. The smells of meat and clean water became overpowering, and I rushed along with all my other colleagues, nameless and fleet, to the bowls. Yes, the bowls! How hard to communicate the joy and satisfaction they produced. While a human would have failed miserably under such circumstances, hesitating and hobbling, terrified of being elbowed or yelled at, I ate, I drank, no one prevented me from taking my share, I just stuck my head down and chewed at the meat piled up by the more dutiful residents, and I lapped the same water my colleagues lapped, tasting their saliva, too. We flowed along as a single stream and we ate, we drank, we left no bowl empty. With one exception: none of us had eaten or drunk from a bowl set out in front of a furniture store, Ophuls Home and Garden. The display window expressed a certain sweet and cold melancholy. In it a luminescent bathtub on four clawed legs cowered before a naked mannequin about to dip its blunt, cuneal foot past the white rim. The meat in the bowl was also luminescent, and odorous. The water cloudy. Not as bad as the meat in the bowl at the all-night store. And no sad-eyed clerk to be seen.

  You are awake, Pasternak, and you are alive. And while no one is left in this unpredictable life to call you Boris Leonidovich, so you remain. Far from the prisons of the Mongolians, far from the Butyrka, and far from the carcel. Hunger twisted my bowels and more saliva leapt into my long mouth, beneath my thick, pink tongue. Each time I opened it to breathe a husky pant emerged. Warnes passed into darkness ahead of me. The old orphanage west of Punta Arenas lay concealed on its wooded plot to my north. My tail trembled in the warming wind. My goal lay ahead of me, far ahead, and the danger of death and capture beset my way. Yet I did not presume and I did not despair. I was no longer human.

  17.

  The only real concern facing dogs is the need to go on existing. Although this does not make them afraid of death. It is not the same as the human need for life, which is abstract and proleptic. No, a dog needs only to go on existing for a day, an hour, an instant, that’s all. If death comes in the next instant, it does not matter to him. To fear death, to notice death means you are a slave, a human slave (a pleonasm). Ana’s death, my own death, of these take no note. Death holds terrors only if you live, and dogs do not live. As noted, a dog merely exists. And to exist is to enjoy an ontological purity humans can never attain.

  Perhaps the strongest proof of this is the ease with which I accepted my new condition. Apart from the few moments of theatrical and specious internal sorrow over my alleged loss, I had not experienced a single doubt, a single quiver of fear. Since leaving the cemetery I only gained confidence and calm with every step, darting to any meat or water bowl I chose and boldly, brazenly lowering my muzzle. The sight of my reflection in the water made me happy and proud. Look at those bright eyes, look at that healthy tongue and the mighty depths
of the nostrils. My god, the apelike mask you once wore. But there was not even the “apelike mask.” A dog has no use for metaphors; metaphors are lies and as such are wholly and eternally foreign to the animal kingdom. This confidence gave me the courage to ignore, as well, the few strangers I saw abroad, to brush past them as I walked and feel no more human need to excuse myself, to apologize for the fact of my occupying space.

  Better still, I had no obligation to anyone, to any place, any instant. I could turn aside from my path whenever I wished and adopt an entirely new route. Going along one street did not tether me to that street; passing a turnoff did not foreclose on that turnoff. A ceaseless and mindless improvisation, without the sickening awareness of improvising that improvising itself creates. Action followed action, event followed event. I paced along, and the calm moon came out. I lapped at a bowl, and a newscaster shouted from a radio. Some corpuscles slipped through my heart and lungs. The tall, rust-spotted crimson mailbox I was at rest behind cooled my neck. The human in the gray cloth jacket walking toward me as if in a dream stopped when I slipped out from behind the mailbox and sauntered past him toward Camacuá. Around us, the drilling whines of mosquitoes passed through the damp air like current.

  I had no evil intent but the human regarded me with surprise all the same, and I wondered if he was another traveler, another visitor to the pension. This brief encounter took place between two lakes of pure night on a pavement gleaming in places with rain. I smelled the heartbreaking scent of wet pavement, first, and the dragged scent, the smeared scent shod feet leave behind, as well as urine, which electrified me, and feces, a contemplative scent, dust (which smells the way moonlight looks) and the fragrances of combustion, ozone, and burning esters.

  The footsteps of the jacket-wearing human faded in the distance, beyond the last penumbra of streetlamp light. From Thorne I passed to Curapaligüé, from Curapaligüé to Pumacahua, Carabobo, and Lautaro. The pavement was giving off warmth and the meat bowls, which shone in semiregular lines extending along either curb, were piled with meat. I knew precisely what this meat was. But the meat quivered in the bowls, and I quivered in answer. I lowered my blunt muzzle to the meat and chewed as my saliva spurted and my hind paws scraped the sidewalk. The meat was fresh, strong smelling, and fibrous. Each water bowl I lapped from showed me my blunted face, my night-colored fur, my yellowed eyes. I listened for the whistles and drumbeats trailing from radios, and I interrupted my meal to scan Bonifacio for MAN’S BEST FRIEND SOCIETY vans, but without fear, without even any “interest,” to use the human phrase. I did not see one, not one, not a single van. Though absence proves nothing to a dog.

  Before I reached Camacuá, I smelled them: Macedonias. The empty night carried their scent to me. Hard and perceptible as cement, for example, or as the limestone steps gleaming in the jaundiced light five yards, six yards ahead. I paused to observe these steps. A poplar’s bent shadow lay across them, and above them the coal of a cigarette glowed. At the top, where the tree shadow ended, sat Violeta. She had not noticed me yet; she sat with her knees raised and her arms on her knees, her hair restrained by an amethyst band. I trotted forward and my nails tapped the sidewalk. That Violeta heard me approach I knew, though she did not turn her head. Her eyes, the whites and the dark pupils, slid wetly, that’s all. Her meat bowl full. A white blot afloat on the surface of the water in the water bowl: the streetlamp in reflection. This image shattered as I plunged my muzzle in.

  Two colleagues passed by, a pug and a Labrador, both shuffling along with their muzzles close to the cooling sidewalk. The Labrador sank (as a joke) his canines into the rugose pelt covering the short neck of the pug, a vague pinkish-gray like worn wallpaper. The pug danced away and snapped his own jaws shut, but his asthmatic breathing destroyed the effect. Both dogs ignored Violeta and me, and she did not look at them, she kept her dark gaze on my dark fur, watching me as I ate. The meat slabs in her bowl were cold, slightly stiff. This made them harder to chew but it masked their flavor. The minuscule, wet noise her bowed lips made as they left the cigarette butt accompanied my vigorous chewing. I finished eating, I drank again, I inhaled some smoke that was drifting my way, and I scraped at my muzzle with my left forepaw. (Curiously, my metempsychosis had changed my dominant “hand.”)

  I looked up at my former hostess expecting nothing and I received nothing. She stared into my eyes. Were it not for my inability to speak, I could have conveyed my true being. I am Pasternak, despite this form, I am Pasternak, your former client and guest. Though I was not Pasternak, I was a dog, a black bullmastiff, broad in the shoulder and chest as I had been during human life, with a blunt face and one torn ear, weighing (I estimated) sixty pounds. Violeta ground out her cigarette and returned to the parlor, and I ate the last red fragments from the bowl. My legs wanted to go on, but I was at the mercy of no one and nothing, not even my legs, so instead I trotted around the side of the pension to the wooden garden gate, which I saw was ajar. Beyond, leafy darkness. I pushed it open with my muzzle and my left paw. On the other side, two ceramic roosters, both sky blue, stood guard.

  From the garden, you could see into the back parlor. (I was reclining near her lush tomato patch, amid the strong, narcotic smell of their vines and leaves.) Six strangers gathered there, in the lacquerous light. They had Northern European accents; Danish, I thought, because their heads had the square, nobly stupid quality Danish skulls possess (shaped by the wind, the sea, and other such healthy elemental phenomena). The Spanish they spoke, while technically sound, flowed from their mouths in the accents of a stone fish. Their voices, stiffened by burgherly excitement, floated out above me in the warm darkness. Violeta was explaining to them, as she had once to me, that she did not understand the origin of the night dogs, but that she herself had never been affected by them adversely. I hope they will not lower your opinion of our city, she added. The guests all chimed in to assure her that such a thing would never occur, that in Copenhagen (had I been a human, this confirmation of my theory would have gratified me, as a dog I felt nothing, nothing at all) dogs also ran wild at night. It was a new phenomenon, said a female guest, but we have all gotten used to it and indeed would not know what to do in a city where dogs did not occupy the streets after sunset. But here, added a man, here it is like something from a story, whereas at home we could not say that. No, no, said the female guest, it is nothing like a story, you cannot compare real life to a story. Violeta’s face I could not see. She had turned her back to the window. Light poured through her thin shirt, revealing her dark, ample, erect body.

  The man had spoken loudly. His North Sea voice echoed through the dark garden. An embarrassed silence rose among the guests. Violeta filled it by observing that she had to go begin her nightly struggle to sleep. She pointed out three wine bottles on the sideboard and informed the guests that they were welcome to drink them, as she could not due to her barbiturate consumption. Soon, in her bedroom, the lights came on. I looked upward. She was undressing, removing her white shirt and purple lace brassiere, freeing her heavy, lightly deflated breasts, the left much larger than the right, the areolas broad and dark. In the flesh beneath them a red dent from the brassiere’s wire. She concealed these philosophical breasts again beneath a green T-shirt with a white logo across it: JUMBO. Her window was open, so as the guests fell into vinous silence I listened for her voice. Inner instinct pricked me, alerting me that she would soon begin to speak, and she did. It was clear that she was speaking into a telephone. She was asking for the twenty-four-hour service line, waiting, repeating her request, and thanking the operator. She then explained that she had a problem she wanted to report. At that point she moved away from the window and I lost her voice. As a merely existent being, I did not concern myself with this.

  The parlor activities went on and on. The Danes opened and closed their teeth in a hidden and sublime order, one I could not despite my generally improved senses detect. They talked about further plans for the trip, the cultural a
nd aesthetic “events” that lay ahead. As if forming a swamp. We really must get out to Mendoza, said the woman, and marine laughter broke forth once more, though she had not said anything amusing. I rose and stretched my limbs as I prepared to canter between the blue roosters and back out onto José Bonifacio. But a noise, a mechanical sound — the indignant noise a van engine makes as it spins down — gave me pause. The chalky beam of a flashlight flashed across the garden fence.

  I held my breath. Above the fence a sky-blue hat cruised along, then stopped. The garden gate sang as it was pushed fully open. Between the two sky-blue roosters I observed two sky-blue legs. The ovoid of glare from the flashlight traveled across the brick path. The legs belonged to an officer I did not recognize. He was young, thin, and short; he had the face of a mole, puffy and blind. His baton hung at his left side, his pistol at his left. On his upper lip a faint reddish down sprouted. He gave a soft whistle and called out: Here, boy. I looked up at Violeta’s window again, expecting her to be standing against it and watching, but she was gone, the window was dark, and the Danish guests were laughing their nasal, watery laughs. The officer approached the tomato patch and moved the light across it. I had forgotten to shut my eyes, and he must have seen them flashing green or yellow, because he muttered to himself: There you are, boy, come on, boy. He was carrying in his free hand a pink slab of meat, which he waved back and forth. The meat was almost the same shade as his fat, light-coated cheeks.