No one could give me specifics about the epidemic. Fulvio said it was “the plague,” in English. Adriano said no, it had been swine flu. Odolinda objected: That was the whole problem, they never identified it. Luz Dar and Hilário kept silent, slowly drinking the whiskey their fathers had poured them from the bottle I’d brought. The Taquinis hadn’t lost anyone to the epidemic, I learned, which explained their unfamiliarity with it. Luz Dar, her voice raucous from the whiskey, said that someone she knew in school had an uncle who died. Hilário, who had grown more and more agitated during the conversation, was muttering something. His father said: Would you mind clarifying, Professor? No offense, Mr. Pasternak, but Hilário here often forgets that not everyone lives on his elevated plane.
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?