Sam Munson - Dog Symphony

I got “up.” I walked. On four legs, on my “arms” and my legs, my fore- and hind legs. My “hands” and my “feet” spread at each step against the cooling grass. It took no real effort, my limbs knew what to do, and they bore me along among the other dogs, quiet and direct. I could not believe my fate, yet it had descended. That’s the trouble with fate, it descends. The need to shit seized my bowels (my soul) as the need to piss had seized my bladder, and I stopped to squat and defecate, my legs searching out the correct, most sturdy position. The dogs still trooped past me as two, then three hot turds slid from my asshole. What pleasure, to defecate in ease and security, no straining or meditative life allowed, merely to shit and to leave the shit behind you as progress toward the gap in the wall. Through which the sun glares above the toothed roofline. As the glowing, pink sky floated along above me, I recalled my days of higher stature. But so what? Those days had ended, as surely as my transformation had sealed the wound in my side. And I’d never been this at ease among humans — never, not once. Though by definition this anxiety would have remained hidden during my human life. Yes, I felt at ease among my new colleagues, even eager. No querulous doubts, no endless speculations. Speculations lie rooted in envy. Pasternak = dog. Dogs possess no envy. QED. I pushed through the press of my colleagues at the hole and crossed the railroad tracks on Warnes. They didn’t speak and they didn’t interfere. More than I can say for my academic colleagues, more than I could have said for any other human. The dogs were running. Which is to say, Pasternak, that we were running, we, we, we. And no one else. We ran and ran, the cooling pavement touched the rubbery, sensitive pads of our feet, of my feet. Night breezes curled into our ears, along our backs. All around me, beneath raised tails, assholes rubious or black, and the greener, yellower blackness of the city night. Now I smelled meat, now saliva poured down my throat, fell from my bouncing jaws, now I smelled the incomparable smell of clean tap water in a clean bowl.

The city spread before us. A bit higher and a bit darker than before. One thing I can say about the claim that dogs are colorblind is that it is a lie: I saw color with an intense and perfected fervor, every tawny stick, every bluish seam in the pavement, every coagulated brick, every pore in every limestone plinth. But the city spread and spread, its streets locked in place. The same city, the same Buenos Aires. Even the same approaching night. I passed the bench I slept on during my first excursion. Now some bird shit, which I could smell, streaked the marble. Grayish-black, with a grave crimson speck in the center. But this bird shit could not hold my attention. I saw Adriano leaning on the wooden counter of his stand. Hilário sat on a wooden crate. They were both smoking and looking at the stream of dogs pouring through the entrance plaza. I stopped, I broke away from the pack and moved toward them.

As soon as they noticed me heading their way a stony and simultaneous blankness stiffened their faces. I “called” to them — Adriano! Hilário! — before I could overcome the urge. I said nothing, of course. I just let out three bright, tenor barks and kept on running toward them. I’d almost reached the stand when Hilário rose and Adriano reached under the counter and lifted an aluminum baseball bat. Get the fuck out of here, you worthless motherfucker, he hissed, and darted through the entrance flap in the blue tarpaulin side wall. Hilário said nothing; he took a long step toward me, wound up, and aimed a strong, looping kick at my flank. The blow missed. The breeze from his shoe touched my pelt. There was a gray-pink gobbet of gum stuck to the treads. I smelled its unbearable sweetness. Get out! Get out! Adriano went on screaming, getting closer and closer and adjusting his grip on the bat handle. I only noticed as I was skittering away that Fulvio’s stand was gone, that Adriano was out there alone on the marble pavement.

But I had no time to ponder Fulvio’s absence. The uncle and nephew went on cursing me long after I had rejoined the pack. You motherfucker! Motherfucker! tore through and through the soft night. Hilário even picked up a stone and hurled it at me, but it scraped along the sidewalk and took a bad bounce, ending up in the gutter. The smells of meat and clean water became overpowering, and I rushed along with all my other colleagues, nameless and fleet, to the bowls. Yes, the bowls! How hard to communicate the joy and satisfaction they produced. While a human would have failed miserably under such circumstances, hesitating and hobbling, terrified of being elbowed or yelled at, I ate, I drank, no one prevented me from taking my share, I just stuck my head down and chewed at the meat piled up by the more dutiful residents, and I lapped the same water my colleagues lapped, tasting their saliva, too. We flowed along as a single stream and we ate, we drank, we left no bowl empty. With one exception: none of us had eaten or drunk from a bowl set out in front of a furniture store, Ophuls Home and Garden. The display window expressed a certain sweet and cold melancholy. In it a luminescent bathtub on four clawed legs cowered before a naked mannequin about to dip its blunt, cuneal foot past the white rim. The meat in the bowl was also luminescent, and odorous. The water cloudy. Not as bad as the meat in the bowl at the all-night store. And no sad-eyed clerk to be seen.

You are awake, Pasternak, and you are alive. And while no one is left in this unpredictable life to call you Boris Leonidovich, so you remain. Far from the prisons of the Mongolians, far from the Butyrka, and far from the carcel. Hunger twisted my bowels and more saliva leapt into my long mouth, beneath my thick, pink tongue. Each time I opened it to breathe a husky pant emerged. Warnes passed into darkness ahead of me. The old orphanage west of Punta Arenas lay concealed on its wooded plot to my north. My tail trembled in the warming wind. My goal lay ahead of me, far ahead, and the danger of death and capture beset my way. Yet I did not presume and I did not despair. I was no longer human.

THE ONLY REAL CONCERN facing dogs is the need to go on existing. Although this does not make them afraid of death. It is not the same as the human need for life, which is abstract and proleptic. No, a dog needs only to go on existing for a day, an hour, an instant, that’s all. If death comes in the next instant, it does not matter to him. To fear death, to notice death means you are a slave, a human slave (a pleonasm). Ana’s death, my own death, of these take no note. Death holds terrors only if you live, and dogs do not live. As noted, a dog merely exists. And to exist is to enjoy an ontological purity humans can never attain.

Perhaps the strongest proof of this is the ease with which I accepted my new condition. Apart from the few moments of theatrical and specious internal sorrow over my alleged loss, I had not experienced a single doubt, a single quiver of fear. Since leaving the cemetery I only gained confidence and calm with every step, darting to any meat or water bowl I chose and boldly, brazenly lowering my muzzle. The sight of my reflection in the water made me happy and proud. Look at those bright eyes, look at that healthy tongue and the mighty depths of the nostrils. My god, the apelike mask you once wore. But there was not even the “apelike mask.” A dog has no use for metaphors; metaphors are lies and as such are wholly and eternally foreign to the animal kingdom. This confidence gave me the courage to ignore, as well, the few strangers I saw abroad, to brush past them as I walked and feel no more human need to excuse myself, to apologize for the fact of my occupying space.