by Sam Munson
Hilário looked at his father, wheezed, and said: It never happened, it’s complete nonsense.
Fulvio said that as long as Hilário lived under his roof he would show respect, especially in the presence of company. Hilário responded in a calm voice: All the rules about politeness in the world, he said, won’t change anything. The so-called epidemic never happened, it just didn’t. And these dogs are not the dead, Dad, you’re just using that as an excuse. Oho, said Fulvio, now you’re an expert in business affairs! Quite a son I’ve raised. Hilário looked again at his cousin, whose gentle and crooked smile encompassed him, me, her father, her aunt and uncle, and the dandelion leaves in the cracked wooden bowl.
I don’t claim to be any sort of expert, but I do know that if basic reality isn’t worth suffering for then nothing is. He drained his glass and he too smiled, the ineffable smile that afflicts you in your youth, causeless and indeed humiliating. There you go again, Professor, said Fulvio. He sounded less sure in his use of the title. And rightly so. Academic work and reality stand in endless opposition. Who knows the eventual victor?
10.
After the meal, while Fulvio and Adriano cleared the table and Odolinda scraped the crumbs from the cloth, Hilário and Luz Dar escorted me out onto their veranda. It overlooked Iturri (the Taquinis lived on Santos Dumont, near the corner). The floor planks and rails, to which orange plaques of eroded paint adhered, sang beneath us. Luz Dar and Hilário settled next to each other on a wooden swing bench; I leaned out over the railing into the night. The marijuana they smoked perfumed the otherwise scentless air, sweet and harsh. Luz Dar offered me the joint. I said no, I was too old for it. She and her cousin both chuckled. I peered down into the street. A navy-blue van was idling on Iturri, waiting with the precise, cold hunger of the state. My fears returned as I read the lettering: MAN’S BEST FRIEND SOCIETY.
Hilário said, through a cough, that they had something to do with the dogs, that they fed them or something. Luz Dar objected: Why would they feed them when everyone leaves meat out for them? Then maybe they sterilize them, Hilário muttered. It’s a shame it’s not possible to sterilize dogs at a distance. I think I read that in a story once. The van doors opened and three people in sky-blue uniforms got out, yawning and stretching. The cold hunger of the state, no doubt. Two carried round clubs made of white pine. The driver had a plastic bag filled with raw slabs of meat, which I pointed out to Hilário and Luz Dar. They didn’t believe me at first but agreed, once they had come to lean beside me on the railing, that it must have something to do with the night dogs. I told them that I was going down to investigate, and they both sputtered out laughs. Are you fucking crazy, said Luz Dar, they’ll arrest you. I pointed out that they were (judging by their uniforms) employees of the Department of Social Praxis, not members of the police force. She said it didn’t matter, the cops let them arrest people, she’d seen it happen. You think people only stay inside at night because of the dogs? No, the University cops are out too, though they keep themselves well hidden. Her voice grew raucous and hardened. She seemed to be on the verge of tears. Just don’t tell them you came from here, said Hilário, don’t give them our address. The coal of the joint glowed and lit up his forehead, his thin eyebrows, and the liquid glare his beautiful cousin was directing at me.
I assured them I would not reveal any information. The promise seemed absurd as I said it. What authority did a group of dogcatchers have over human life? And I had to investigate, these were the vans from Avenida Zenz. I asked the two cousins to make my excuses to their parents for me. They said nothing, they smoked, that’s all. I crept back inside, past a room (drowned in the blue glow of television) from which sweet, idle fraternal/matrimonial chatter drifted, interrupted by frantic outbursts (Boca was losing). In the kitchen, I found a back exit, a screen door. Beyond it juniper thickets hovered in the darkness. As I padded out onto the Taquinis’ tiny lawn the creaking of the verandah swing slowed, slowed, ceased. The human voices in the upstairs parlor: these too faded. On the roof of the blue van two dark protuberances emerged, round and hard-looking, on thick stalks. I saw them as I was trotting over, screening myself with the juniper hedges, until I was near enough to observe the driver and the other two.
They were waiting. The meat-bag holder whistled a short phrase from the Dog Symphony. The club wielders whistled the next. All three chuckled, a glottal syncopated laugh. Possibly only one laugh but issuing from three throats. They choked it off before it could die naturally. The meat-bag holder eyed the van. On the lip of the rolled-down passenger window a well-molded arm in a sky-blue sleeve rested, the hand thin and strong, the nails blunt, a silver watch manacling the wrist. This fourth figure, not in uniform, was otherwise concealed by darkness. The juniper leaves pricked my face as I looked through the hedge gaps. The driver had opened her bag of meat and tossed the slabs out onto the asphalt of Iturri, where they landed with wet, osculatory noises. The two club wielders stood and stared toward Newbery, tapping their palms with their weapons. Faint, sparse barks and a narcotic rustling. I heard those familiar noises, along with the chiming the tags of the night dogs made, a chiming that grew louder, clearer and clearer, until I realized that a pack was ambling along Iturri, ready to join their fellows in the rush to La Chacarita. The meat that had been thrown into the street stopped the dogs and they began to chew with the same subtle care they displayed during my first observations.
The bag holder whistled. Two floodlights — the dark roof protuberances — burned to life. I had to shield my eyes with fingers made pink by the glare. When I was able to look at the street through the hedge again I saw four dogs, a Hungarian mudi, two whippets, and a juvenile rottweiler, all light-stunned, rags of meat dangling from their jaws. Blood tinted the whippets’ adze faces. They stood shivering monastically as the club wielders went to work, striking the night dogs (almost regretfully) on their necks, just behind the bulges of their skulls. Each dog made a yelping whine as it went down. Once the dogs hit the asphalt, the club wielders — their escutcheon-shaped badges blank with light — struck them again across the skull. They had not killed the animals. I saw the pelts between the ribs of the lean whippets inflating and deflating. The club wielders threw open the rear van doors; the van’s cargo area had been fitted with a cage — and in this cage sat and whined two other dogs, a beagle and a Weimaraner, on short chain leashes looped through dirty steel grommets screwed into the van wall. The club wielders tossed the unconscious dogs through the cage door. The taller one started to fasten new chains around their necks while the four were still dazed; the shorter one kept watch, club at the ready, on the beagle and the Weimaraner. The two dogs just stared. The bag holder came around to the cage with a clipboard and the hideous noise of writing arose. The taller club wielder said: Should we let her have a look at them now? The bag holder spat out her answer: Of course. The passenger door had already opened and the fourth figure was striding toward the oval zone lit by the flood lamps, striding and striding, the way a goddess strides across a field, a classical meadow flooded with light, for example. But before the woman had entered the oval of glare (she stood at its lip, rendered completely obscure by her proximity to the light) the shorter club wielder aimed his cudgel across the street at the juniper hedge concealing me and screamed: Hey asshole, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?
I started to run as soon as the club wielder turned to face me. His wide cheeks grimy with stubble, afloat in the white light, adrift in the white light, aloft in the white light. A face I almost, in fact, recognized. I ran southeast on Iturri, so they would have to pull the van around if they wanted to chase me in it, I thought, and ran along Concepción Arenal toward the Parque Los Andes. There I could hide myself among Paraná pines, jacaranda, bryophytes, and the underbrush my namesake wrote about with such diarrheal eloquence. The empty streets aided me here. I was able to run with tremendous speed and ease because I faced no human obstructions, no hate-filled primate stare. The few dogs
not already on Newbery paid me no mind; they either ate and drank or trotted on, their breathing velvety and punctuated by the modest chiming of tags. I wanted to warn them — but dogs do not speak and do not understand (or so I thought then). I said nothing. The wide-faced club wielder kept shouting behind me: Hey asshole! Hey asshole, get back here! His breath more and more ragged between each cry and his footsteps slowing, as if sleep were descending upon him. Victor, let him go, a female voice shouted. Fuck you, Victor shouted back, it’s our job. Yet I heard only his footsteps. I realized these were the footsteps of a drunken man. The light, inconsequent stagger that expresses drunken inquiry. By the time I reached the lip of the park, I heard nothing at all behind me except for dimming shouts. He’s just some asshole, let him run, I won’t report you, and you have to admit he’ll probably end up with us anyway. Under these circumstances this Victor ended his pursuit and I stumbled across a high, cracked curb into the park.
A car’s ignition coughed and coughed, its motor wheezed and thrummed, but the sound faded. Heading westward, I thought. I had almost regained my breath when two loud, at-hand, penitential sounds broke the leafy silence. Or rather the enleafed silence. Nine or ten yards from the ombu stand I was concealed in, near a crushed Quilmes can coated with oblique streetlamp glow, two brown mutts copulated vigorously. They kept up countermelodic howls, answered from near and far by howls and cries of their fellows. The night calling out to itself.
11.
My retreat to the Parque Los Andes lasted for hours, until I was absolutely sure no University police remained nearby. I got back to the Pensión Vermesser exhausted, but I did not sleep. As morning arrived, gray and gold, I planned my return to campus. I called a taxi after I showered. The shower did nothing to alleviate my exhaustion. I greeted the impassive, deep-eyed driver with a stony nod. The distance between my head and feet seemed to increase and decrease without warning. My visual field fishbowled as I dragged the sandy detritus of another sleepless night from the corners of my eyes.
There was an official reason for my visit. The conference was proceeding at its normal pace, indifferent to my inane and hard-to-understand difficulties. I was due to participate in a session taking as its theme — here I also saw Ana’s arranging hand — a subject that had fascinated me since I first entered my profession: the prison system of ancient Mongolia. Our most primal prison, our most supreme and invisible prison. Nothing but pits dug out of the Scythian earth supervised by a jailer on horseback. This system contained many surprising intricacies, more than enough material to keep a conference in vivid and rebarbative argument all day.
But I had no intention of showing up, no intention of running into the boy who looked like Che or a new set of student agitators. No, I went back to campus because I planned to enter Ana’s office, to batter its door down if necessary, to break its chiropractic glass. Like all second-rate thinkers I played out two opposing scenes in my head.
The first: Ana alive and well, dressed in her simple and opulent clothing, laughing her hoarse, proleptic laugh at my concerns. You are adrift, Boris Leonidovich. Her normal rebuke. Thereupon I would chastise her, demand explanations for her absence, for the night dogs, for Sanchis Mira, for the Department itself, for Luxemburg, for the vans and for the occluded night I had plunged into.
The second: pure void.
Students flowed through the first floor of the social sciences faculty, the divisions between the tag wearers and those with naked necks yet more evident. Among them, security officers ambled and strutted, laughing and calling to each other. They held up their right hands and tapped their rigid fingers against the thumb, like a maw opening and closing, in time with the drumbeats of the Dog Symphony, now playing openly from radios students carried. The tag wearers mimicked this gesture, and I did as well. One officer caught me in his gaze. Not malicious, just curious.
The elevator door opened on eight and revealed a pristine wall, painted delicate blue. The floors no longer puce tile but sealed concrete, brutally gleaming (and tinted a deep night blue). Cool, sweet air moved lightly around me. The ventilation system had been improved as well. The blues, like sea and sky, accompanied me. The reception area was painted in the same two shades; the desk was new, it looked like ebony, and the visitor seats were Barcelona chairs, crisscrossed by leather straps. They lacked the golden, rabbit-shaped label. I knelt on the cold floor to check. The east wing of the department, which did not contain Ana’s office, stretched openly to my right. All the piled boxes, all the ossification, the shoes and laces, the spectacles, all these had gone. The hallway was vacant and utterly still. The doors, white, all stood open, and the odor of drying paint came from them. The black-and-gold names gone, though the rippling glass itself remained.
The west wing was under construction. Opaque plastic drop cloths hung from the ceiling, covering whole sections of wall. Here, the blue sealed concrete flooring had not been completely installed. A black seam divided it from the old puce tiling. Wooden sawhorses (stenciled DSP in sky blue) stood poised in their obscene manner along the walls. The air stank of ozone, fresh sheetrock, sawdust. The corridor stretched and stretched, growing dimmer and then fading into complete darkness: I passed through the hall, holding my lighter up as a torch. Either no electricity flowed here or the light fixtures had not been connected. Thuds and sawing noises, filtered by distance, colluded. The hall stretched much farther than I would have thought possible given the size of the building. Then again, I was suffering from a lack of sleep and a more general disorientation.
This corridor ended in a false wall made of sky-blue duvetyn and black metal struts; a door, also of cloth, was set into it. I opened it halfway, and the duvetyn door revealed more puce linoleum and planted upon it two legs in sky-blue pants with silver piping. I pushed harder, the panel swung fully outward. There, diagonally across this improvised exit, was Ana’s office. Its door now stood ajar. Beyond, the room itself was empty, empty of everything except its old desk and faint squares on the walls. I knew from a photograph she’d sent me what had once concealed these whiter patches: her own photographs of Juan Filloy, the only Argentine writer she respected (I always pretended I knew who he was to oblige her). The names on the doors to either side — Zinny and de Gandia — gone. Ana’s name still remained. In part. A lackey in sky-blue coveralls was effacing it with a rag and a glass beaker of solvent. The lackey wore a silver badge like those I’d seen flashing on the chests of the University police, but he was a lackey and nothing else, I could tell from his loose lower lip and dull stare. A short silver whistle on a leather thong hung from his loose-skinned neck. To the thong was affixed a golden label: GENUINE PAMPAS HARE. The silver whistle beat time against his concave chest as he spread solvent, rubbed, and clucked.
Ana’s name was hard to eradicate. The lackey slid a putty knife from his pants pocket and began to chip at the gold-and-black paint. He chastised himself under his breath: Be careful, be careful, man, if you break this you’ll be lower than shit. The noise of the knife against the glass, the insupportable and reverential noise — that’s what made me finally speak. Excuse me, I said, but what are you doing? Such a question cannot be asked without sounding like you have just shambled on stage in a hideous, wooden play of domestic life. I knew that, yet I asked it. And even asked it again. The lackey looked at me. His knife stopped. Then he smiled a smile punctuated by a golden incisor and said: No need to worry, sir, it’s all authorized. The knife scraped and scraped. More shreds of Ana’s name flaked down to the tiling. The lackey went back to work with his rag.
I told him to stop, at once. He did, though he tried — by a series of blinks and grimaces — to mask his instant obedience as surprise. This is fully authorized, sir, whined the lackey, I have full authorization. From whom, I said, making sure to be grammatical. From the boss, sir, he said. What boss, I said. From Dr. Sanchis Mira, he said. And where, I said, is Dr. Mariategui? The lackey shrugged. I heard she went on sabbatical. He returned
to scraping and rubbing, and I walked past him into Ana’s office. I caught an esteric whiff of his solvent. You can’t go in there, he mumbled. I didn’t respond. Even her scent — soap and sand — had dissipated. The lackey started whining again when I tore open Ana’s desk drawers. You can’t, sir, you just can’t, moaned the lackey. The first one empty. In the second, gray grit. In the third: an enormous canine taken from a jaw, its root intact.
The lackey froze, rag aloft. The silence deep enough to reveal the slopping noise the solvent made against the sides of its jar. It doesn’t concern me, it doesn’t concern me, sir, I’m just here as maintenance, just doing construction, said the lackey. What is this, I shouted. My voice had taken on a nauseating, false-thunder rattle. The lackey dropped his solvent beaker. The glass splintered and an acrid, brief gust made my eyes water. The lackey was already running off down the hall. On the glass panel only the letter E remained.
In Ana’s office, I found nothing else. There was one window, which overlooked from eight floors up a deep concrete service area crammed with sky-blue dumpsters holding construction debris. This view explained nothing. And neither did the white patches once screened by Filloy. My throat burned, stinging tears careened down my face. I wept into my hands.
A loud, curt noise startled me. The doorknob striking the bared office wall and leaving a lunar dent. Four legitimate representatives of sky-blue authority now crowded the open doorway. Two men and two women. Their faces gentle and, so to speak, nullified. Their apparent squad leader, a woman with sharp, high cheekbones and an inky, minuscule mole at the upper-right-hand corner of her rich lips, called back into the hallway: This is the one? It was Luxemburg, who had first accosted me in this hallway the night of the cocktail reception. Mr. Pasternak, said Luxemburg, put it down. Her command baffled me and I stepped forward to ask for clarification. Put it down, you fucking faggot, she said — her voice level and velvety — or are you deaf? She pointed at the tooth.