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 removed 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.