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.