The world is a continuum of tastes, scents and sounds. Scents, sounds and bones? Bones, fleas and humans?
Urrrrrf. It’s tough. It’s tough. We never sleep, or rest. We just exist. We can exist from two perspectives: on foot or on land. On two legs or four legs. On land, we observe and meditate, breathing in and moistening the earth with our snout. The rest of the time we run, smell, lick, bite, mate, watch, recognize, track, bite again, follow, chase, cohabitate, I mean live in canine sin and howl and want without really knowing why or for what. Not that we ever think about time all that much. Likely I wouldn’t have even the slightest sense of time if it weren’t for Cipión and Berganza, who started chatting one night and brought into our canine world all the time-related concerns that are unique to humans. The things that until then had no connection whatsoever to our everlasting golden age, where only children and succulent bones were kings and masters of our loyalty and affection. I wasn’t resting last night. I just listened to those things that go down the street, roaring and growling with blazing eyes, making their short, swollen rubbery feet turn and turn. Sometimes the beasts will attack and leave one of us ripped open in the middle of the street. The humans climb in and out of them like it’s nothing, but as soon as we get near them, grufff! the lights go out all of a sudden. Other comrades, I mean other canrades also let their voices be heard: they bark, howling in delight, greeting the night, asking humans to let them in or out, begging for a bone, asking for the freedom to go play, listening to the sounds of the moment. They celebrate at the top of their lungs when a door opens and the humans arrive after being announced by their own scent and the sound of their steps and their keys that sing secrets through the doors’ eyes. We bounce and wag without rest, or try to scare away any human that threatens our family’s den, risking the occasional stone that may punish our flanks. Canrades check their voices—high- or low-pitched bursts of air issue from their canine throats—and watch the night and its various regions of invisible light and clarity. This is the blind time when the air is filled with the round, thick aroma from some females’ hindquarters, real rumps that call us with an indescribable force to practise the best exercise a mammal has ever been tasked with. Sometimes the flurry of activity leads to loud fights, clashing fangs, split ears, snouts dripping with angry foam and all sorts of brave gestures and elegant offences. The most important thing is not to surrender—even the hairiest fighters with the most impressive teeth sometimes wind up exhausted from running and fighting. There’s Kaliman, always chained up, rarely allowed to leave the house, and when he does, he spends more time fighting than enjoying the fruits of his battles. Mmmmmph! I’ve also enjoyed the blind, inexplicable pleasure that follows those skirmishes.
I wag my tail, bark, whimper, smile, beg. Scratch at the door. They open the door. I dash out. Stop, sniff, look. Feel. The vast earth that supports us is still. The street is quiet and I fill my lungs with a symphony of smells, wafting invitations, meals, humans, fluids, distances. I’m not hungry yet but I’m always ready. Something is crawling through the fur behind my ear, bites me with microscopic jaws. I sit back on my hind legs and lean my head sideways…aaaaah! It feels so good to scratch! ¡Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto! I yawn, stretch my front legs, curl my elegant tail. Shake. Greet the day with my voice. Other voices respond by barking in the distance. That’s Bobiscu, the shepherd, true king of the small humans who haven’t learned how to be mean or throw rocks at us yet. I suspect those humans mistake us for their siblings and think we’re alike—there’s no difference between dogs and humans their age. We’re the same. I walk up to the wall, lift my leg and say in my liquid language, “I live here.” Lest someone decide to encroach upon my human dogs and my territory. I listen to the day, my ears perked up, my nose shiny, my eyes alert. There is an entire world of smells before me. I walk up to the church, always sniffing the air, marking my space, christening every corner and post with my name. Sometimes they leave excellent bones outside the church entrance. The time Cipión and Berganza spoke about is nothing more than this very instant. After I urinate I’m ready to own the place. But then, suddenly, fire, deep fire, a furious spear skewers straight through me. Oh, Berganza! Who will bark for me tonight? Could this burning feeling be pain and death? Aoouuuuuuuu! Aooouuuuuuu!
* * *
1 “J’ai peur de te revoir et je le souhaite si tant. Dans ma chambre je garde un drapeau dont je rêve de te l’envoyer pour que tu puisses le montrer sur ton balcon tel un signe de victoire sur la nostalgie—signe de soif de nous-mêmes—car ma patrie, ma terre, mes mots c’est toi, ta voix, tes bras, tes paroles.” Note found in an envelope returned by Canada Post ten years later to the Scribe’s address in Montreal. Stained manila envelope with worn edges. Reason for non-delivery written in boldface: “Le Kurdistan n’existe pas comme pays” (“Kurdistan does not exist as a country”). Contents of the envelope, addressed to a woman named Bolivia, as explained by the poems at the end of this text.
2 “I don’t want to see you again, Alfredo. We shouldn’t be together. I’m leaving you.”
3 “Sir, you are disturbing the peace!”
4 “Montreal is home to the largest trilingual population of any city in North America.”
5 “Coming soon to a theatre near you.”
6 “Have you seen this film, sir?”
7 “…Modern Girondins, oh patriots! Never forget the last words uttered by he who on his deathbed wrapped himself in the flag…”
8 From the point of view of another scribe and ruthless grammar stickler, the task of writing presents itself as a double impossibility: impossible to achieve and impossible to avoid.
9 “My Alfredo: Thank you for your love. It’s 7 o’clock in the morning and I have to leave you. I like you a lot, my caviar leftist. See you soon, Bolivia.”
10 “People drink firewater because they’re brave.”
11 A new incursion of history, entered by another scribe, notes that members of the Spanish Legion also consider themselves the grooms of death: “Viva la muerte y vivan las cadenas” [“Hail death, hail chains”], the specimens chant. To this we could add the sacred vows chanted by Canadian neo-Nazis before they attack immigrants.
12 One of the scribes, after exquisite sherry-fuelled disquisitions, has suggested that instead of “general,” this should read “general degeneral degenerate.” The reader has the final say.
Scribe! Scribe! Where did you go? What the hell? Why do you throw a talking dog in the middle of a serious story? SCRIIIIIIBE!!
He tried different ways to write, to talk the way a dog would. Perhaps unaware that he was doing so. He spent three Sunday afternoons sitting outside in a small park behind the Museum of Fine Arts on Sherbrooke Street, at the bottom of the Mountain. The property owner’s last wish, perhaps in the late nineteenth century, was to donate it to the city of Montreal. He wanted to give dogs on the island a place to recover their ancient wolf-like freedom, burn up all the energy they’d accumulated penned up over long winter months inside the neighbourhood’s apartment buildings. They would run, bounce, play, bark at the top of their lungs, chase each other around, sniff each other point-blank, wag tails, pose majestically jutting out their chest and tensing every single one of their canine, urban muscles. Sometimes there were courtships and sudden passions that bewildered their owners with their cheerful lack of modesty. A debauched Chihuahua would run around madly after a Great Dane. There were accidents and eager indulgence—a passionate dog confusing fore and aft while trying to hump a female. Some noses, not used to the furry social interaction, simply could not tell one gender from the other. Only puppies would do their own thing, diving and rolling around in the snow, looking for imaginary sticks. Some dogs wore scarves; some of the smaller short-haired ones had custom-knit wool vests. Alfredo suddenly realized that in all his years in Montreal he’d never seen a street dog,
not even a lost dog. Nowhere on this island had a single dog made the qualitative leap from chien-en-soi to chien-pour-soi, the way dogs would roam in absolute freedom among the imaginary windmills of his childhood. He recalled that sometimes those dogs—spiritual children of the Paris Commune—would stand firm in front of him with egalitarian eyes. Did the dog shot to death outside the El Alto church enjoy that canine lucidity in its last moments?
On a Sunday afternoon, coming home to his third-floor apartment on rue Cartier, near Papineau, notre cher Alfgedó, oui, Alfgedó, saw a fantóm par terre waiteeng for heem at dee fgont door, oui, oui. When he saw the person curled up in the hallway, he thought it was a homeless person seeking temporary shelter from the winter. Or a drunkard sleeping it off on the floor, his head hidden under the high collar of a worn winter coat. He inhaled a couple of times, checking for alcohol odour in the air. Nothing. Only a light tobacco smell wafted up from the grey coat. He tiptoed up to the door, trying not to startle the body sleeping in foetal position. He reached the front door and grabbed his key. As he touched the metal tip to the door lock, he heard a weak, hesitant voice: “Alfgedó?” The body stirred and slowly came to. The person stood up leaning against the wall, revealing the tired face of a woman whose features slowly issued forth from the fog of his memory.
“Alfgedó… c’est toi Alfgedó?”
He thought he recognized her voice. What did she look like? “A woman with long black hair and eyes of grey coral.” Yes, it was her! But her long hair was gone. Now it was short and pointing in all directions, as if each strand were raising its hand requesting the floor in a vanishing constitutional assembly. Was she the woman he’d met almost two years ago? He had decided to buy socks the colours of the Bolivian flag as a gesture of silent protest against the viceroy elected president of the colony named Bolivia. He remembered how he’d put them on—almost enraged, almost aggressively—his best garb for all the Latin American parted announced in posters in Côte-des-Neiges corners, at cafés on Saint-Denis, in bus stops.
Was it she? Was this the woman who’d spoken to him about the liberation of Kurdistan? Was she the woman who didn’t have a patria but dreamed of having one, while he had one whose symbols he loathed with all his might? She looked at Alfredo expectantly, not completely recognizing him, or perhaps somewhat afraid of being recognized. After all they’d only spent a short amount of time together. Was this the wrong apartment? Was this the man who used to amuse her with his horrendous French and his tragicomical national explanations? The man who’d kept a straight face while saying he was a registered member of the glorious Broken Bloc? The man she’d held and loved an entire night, shortly before leaving Montreal, not minding, rather enjoying his inexperienced eager hands on her breasts, letting herself be carried by the Amazon River of kisses flowing from his mouth, delighted to be feeling life in her deepest self before setting off on yet another journey in the name of the cause, not knowing whether she’d come back to the island alive.
“C’est toi, Alfgedó, Alfgedó?... Mon gauchiste-caviar?”
“Is that you…Bolivia?”
He remembered the smell of gunpowder and smoke in her words. And this is just a rhetorical figure because Alfredo believed he remembered clearly the perfume she’d been wearing the night they met. (What was it?)
“Yes, it’s me, Alfredo. Bolivia, is that you? C’est toi, la femme du Kurdistan?’
“Sí, sí, c’est moi!”
“The one who ran away with my favourite socks?”
He immediately regretted saying that. You cheap miser! To be thinking about your famous antipatriotic socks right now, when the woman you’ve spent months looking for all over the island is standing right here in front of you ¡Tacalo tenías que ser, che!
“Alfgedó! C’est toi…c’est toi!”
“Come on in, come on in,” Alfredo urged, inviting her inside. She stood up as if she were carrying centuries of exhaustion on her shoulders, then sat down to drink the hot chocolate he’d prepared to take away the February chill, always nipping at your toes. They said a few words but mostly observed each other, trying to recognize in one another’s features any signs or evidence of what and how much they had changed, what still remained in their memory of what they each had been to the other during the short time they’d shared so long ago. He recognized Marseille in her accent. She laughed, reminiscing about the morning she left, stealing Alfredo’s tricolour socks as a memento. And for the cause. He told her he’d looked for her month after month in every single Montreal neighbourhood, every corner, looked for her even in the old winding Quebec City streets, in Toronto’s linguistic labyrinths, in the mazes of bars and ports in Halifax. He had waited for her at the tattooed, knife-scored tables of Winnipeg’s only hamburger joint, looked for her in every train car of the Edmonton-bound iron horse—the miniature train that traverses the rugged, dense geography of the Canadian Shield across the endless prairies flaming in the sunset—and called at doors in places where no one could ever give him even a sliver of information, only met him with mistrust. Alfredo didn’t have much time to talk: after drinking her hot chocolate, she got up, walked over to the bed and collapsed into a deep sleep that would last three consecutive days.
Upon awaking, struggle against an extreme sensation—enormous weight upon eyelids. The first thing in sight was the bedroom ceiling and a blurry shape, perhaps a giant fly in the middle of the washed-out space, suspended and trapped in fate’s invisible spider threads; then, trying to think back to what had led to such a painful and pitiful physical condition. Reaching out for the self next to that circumstance, cookies—Christie Premium Low In Fat—offered by the nightstand to the right of the narrow hospital bed. Past the cookies were spherical shapes identifiable as citrus fruits. An attempt to reach out farther and explore the limits of the immediate universe, thwarted by a pinching sensation in a nerve. Something piercing through under the skin, deep inside in veins that ran, not with blood, but with slow asphalt rivers amidst thick curtains of rising vapour, asphalt poured and raked and rolled slowly by pavers despite the frigid winter temperatures to cover potholes left behind by salt and ice, as Alfredo walked to the Jean-Talon Market, where immigrants from every tongue and every latitude perform their silent work: the gradual integration of local Canadians into the spontaneous cosmopolitanism newcomers have built one drop at a time in Montreal. Charm their palate, subjugate their senses, please their taste buds with subtle delights from cultures from faraway horizons—a seemingly steady and effective mechanism. The life of many Quebeckers had irreversibly changed after their first morsel of a whimsical cherimoya, the first sweet taste of prickly pears melting in their mouth—a constellation of seeds that opens into an intricate, sugary, cosmic explosion, arousing images of unfamiliar geographies, other eyes to see the world, imaginary memories of freckled-faced lovers. Many unions—some of the flesh, some of the spirit—had undergone slow ripening among Chinese lettuces, Vietnamese herbs, Punjab curry and delicate rice noodles from the Philippines. Women and men who had arrived on this island from faraway regions of the planet would devour each other in an urgent kitchen table feast, while they prepared an avocado salad with minced onions and tomatoes, drizzled with lime juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. In bedrooms all over the island, the blood of men and women bloomed on flushed faces and necks, on sweaty chests, next to the first eroticized yuccas with a few drops of lemon juice. Seeing a small fresh fig open ripe and dark and sex-like on their fingertips, many construction workers with unruly moustaches and callused hands would stop in the middle of the street, suddenly blushed, moved by the fruit’s carnal revelation, by its sweetly opened flesh, their eyes flooded by gusts of memories issuing forth from the deepest corners of their love and remembrance. This is the way—Alfredo thought as he wandered through the market stalls looking for the best eggplants, to roast and serve to the woman who’d come to his door all the way from the war and bombs and the ghost of an imagined patria—t
his is the way we will succeed in founding collective identities that favour all gastronomic differences. Vivent les papilles libres! Vive le Québec ivre!
Red, Yellow and Green Page 10
