“If he doesn’t come today, I’ll go and look for him tomorrow.”
“But, where, Ma’am?” Aurelia, the upstairs maid, snarled.
“Do you remember he said they lived in Colonia Santa Fe?”
“Santa Fe is a whole hill, Ma’am, really big and tall… There aren’t even streets there, just lots.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll go.”
A chocolate-colored dog with the name to match his color had appeared one Friday. He was big, strong, wooly, with white sock feet and a spotless chest. His eyes, the continuation of his coat, were more expressive than Emiliano Zapata’s. Abuela, who was waiting on the corner for a taxi, called to him, “Dog? Dog!” Then, she instructed Aurelia to bring him a French roll while she watched him rummage through the trash.
“Aren’t you going to give me one, too? I’m Chocolate’s owner,” said a beggar, walking up to her.
And so a ritual began, not just on Fridays but every afternoon between noon and one. Abuela would go out to the corner and when Chocolate saw her, he would run over, his eyes melting. He’d lower his head as he approached my grandmother and brush it against her legs, rubbing against her until she soothed him, “It’s okay, Chocolate. It’s okay, little Chocolate.”
The dog would move his head and put his wet snout in Abuela’s gloved hand. She would give him his bread. “Are you thirsty?” she would ask.
Aurelia would bring milk in a bowl, and Chocolate’s owner would get a few coins. “For my cigarettes.” “For a little drink,” he would acknowledge.
The conversation never went beyond, “How’s Chocolate today?”
“Good,” the old man would respond.
Abuela was a woman who would smile and say arrogantly with her nose turned up, ‘’I’m not talking to you; I’m talking to the dog.” Nonetheless, people would stop on the corner of Morena Street and Gabriel Mancera, not just to greet the old woman in a hat, buckled shoes and cane, but also to see the dog off his leash, a mere ruse, standing beside the beggar. The dog’s desire to please was such that one could not help but conclude, “That’s not a dog; he’s a lover.”
He would run around for a little while. Then, he’d stand on his hind legs and just when they would begin to wobble, he would take flight. All four legs would leap high in the air. The Russian Ballet could’ve never achieved such a move! The skill and grace of his acrobatics attracted everyone. His prancing was filled with mischief and seduction, as if he were going to play a joke that had us laughing even before it was told. What a display of agility! How amazing to know that a dog as robust as Chocolate could be so magical! He entertained everyone with his tricks. His muscles articulated playful curves, convincing the audience that life could be a child’s game.
“That dog should be in a circus.”
“What breed is he?”
“I bet he’s the devil,” they would exclaim.
People didn’t know that the display of fantasy was his tribute to my grandmother.
“Chocolate wasn’t cold yesterday, was he? It rained in the afternoon and I thought… Tell me, did he get cold?”
“No,” the old man would grumble.
“Does he have a blanket?”
“No.”
“Aurelia, bring him a blanket.”
“A used one, right?”
“A new one. Bring a white one.”
Aurelia would go reluctantly. She protected Abuela’s things like a Cerberus.
“And where is his house?” Abuela continued.
“Whose house?”
“Chocolate’s.”
“Well, he lives with me.”
“Tell me where.”
“Uh, over there, by the hill.”
“Which hill?”
“Uh, Santa Fe.”
“Oh! And what do you feed him at noon?”
“Whatever there is,” the old man retorted before mumbling something under his breath.
“I don’t understand you. It’s better if Chocolate tells me.” Abuela was right. Most times, you couldn’t understand the old man. Or, maybe, he did not understand the old woman’s inquisitive attitude. “Well, after all, he’s plump. He looks good. Make sure you wrap Chocolate in his blanket tonight, nice and tight.”
The old beggar didn’t seem to pay attention.
Abuela ordered him impatiently, “Look, put the blanket around him twice and wrap him up like a taco so it doesn’t come undone.What an ignorant man,” Abuela commented to Aurelia when she came back. “Poor Chocolate, he would be better off with me.”
Then, she turned to the beggar, angrily, “Where’s the bowl I gave you last week for his food?”
Twenty-two dogs, sometimes twenty-seven, and on one occasion thirty; one hundred and twenty feet, thirty tails, accompanied my childhood and adolescence. But then the maids complained and Abuela had to send some to a shelter with three hundred and fifty dogs and twenty cats, declawed, one-eyed, lame, crippled, mangy, hairless, frightened, bruised.
“It’s mange,” she would explain with complete calm, even after she caught it.
Aurelia and Cruz, the cook, would buy yellow sulfur powder and Abuela would rub it slowly onto the animals, so as not to humiliate them. If they had nails like a witch or like a cabaret singer, I had to take them to the veterinarian and have them clipped. Those nails were like stones, flying like deadly torpedoes. The veterinarian, Dr. Appendini, had to use industrial grade cutters. “Step back, child, I don’t want to hit you in the eye,” he would warn me.
Once I suggested hot dogs when Cruz asked Abuela about the day’s menu. It didn’t go well. I left with my tail between my legs.
In reality, the dogs were my siblings. I had an advantage over them because I was the granddaughter, but not much of one. Still, I’d like to think I was her favorite dog of the pack, the puppy with the wet nose (a sign of good health). She called me Truffle, because of my sparkle.
While Abuela ate breakfast accompanied by her pack of dogs, upstairs Aurelia would pick up the urine-stained newspapers and mop the floor with water and disinfectant. Their droppings, wrapped in cones made out of newspaper, went into the garbage, where scavengers would open them like a box of See’s chocolates. More shit left that white limestone house of monogrammed sheets, of designer settees and chairs, of paintings attributed to Da Vinci, than from the whole block, maybe even more than from the entire Colonia del Valle.
At night, her favorite dogs slept in bed with her, something that I never did, except when she was about to die and was very cold. The dogs moved beneath the covers and sometimes moaned.
“Why do they do that, Abuela?”
“They’re dreaming.”
“What are they dreaming about?”
“They’re dreaming about me, that I’m petting them.”
Abuela electrifies them when she calls out to each one of them, “Good morning, gentlemen, good morning, ladies,” she says by way of greeting. Violeta, Tosca, Rigoletto, Norma—all operas—, they leap around her celestial robe, fighting over pastries. “A flauta for you, Dicky; for you, a concha, Amaranta. You get the cuerno, Simon; a banderilla for you, Mimosa. Chango, you only get a bolillo because you bit Brandy so bad he almost died.”
When they grow old, Abuela sends me to the veterinarian to put them to sleep. She hands me a bundle wrapped in a towel. “Il faut l’endormir,” she says, “Death is a dream,” contradicting the playwright Calderón. Regardless, for me even the death of a dog is a horrible thing.
I brought in Blanquita to the clinic and they stuck a rod in her ass and another in her mouth. She sought me out with her gaze and the doctor said to me, “Turn on the switch.”
I never liked Blanquita because she would scratch for hours, then suddenly burrow her snout in her fur, opening a furrow so that she could bear down, curling back her upper lip over her long, cruel, yellow teeth, drilling: ta, ta, ta, ta, ta. She was merciless to the point of drawing blood. Nonetheless, that day, I felt bad. Blanquita curled up and jumped like a trout trying to escape only to fall dead on the operating table. As I went down the stairs at the doctor’s office, I felt as if I were the one with the rod in her ass.
Our garden is a canine graveyard. Each square foot of earth shelters a dog. Almendrita rests beneath the yellow rosebush. A royal Poinciana covers Robespierre. Duke rests beneath a Lady of the Night jasmine. Puppies blossom in this garden, they’re snapdragons of all colors, or Wolf’s Mouth as we call them in Mexico because they catch insects.
Months passed. Seasons changed. Abuela looked beautiful in her straw hat and summer dress, or her black winter bonnet and low-cut suit, a Virgin of Guadalupe medallion hanging from her neck. Cars slowed down as they passed the house and drivers looked her up and down. Day after day, Abuela and the beggar carried on the same conversation on the same corner. If she had gone somewhere, at her return she would find Chocolate and the old man sitting on the sidewalk waiting for her to get out of the taxi, exposing her slip’s many layers of lace. She would hurry over to them. Chocolate raced to meet her. The old man played dumb. If, perhaps, Chocolate was late, Abuela would come and go from the garden gate to the street.
One day Chocolate didn’t show up, nor the next day. After a week, Abuela declared, “Tomorrow we’ll go early and look for him.”
At nine thirty, the woman who found it difficult to be ready by noon was out at the corner.
“Tasi … tasi … tasiii!” Aurelia, who never could pronounce the letter x, shouted. When one stopped, she smiled seductively, “Are you available?”
“For you, yes, sweetie.”
The taxi driver dropped off the three of us in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps, Abuela’s conversations with the old man had gone beyond asking about Chocolate’s health because she showed no fear as she got out of the taxi. One second after closing the car door, she began to call out to the desolate plateau, “Chocolate, Chocolate!”
The sun burned our eyes. As she walked, leaning on a cane whose tip served as a whistle to hail taxis, I watched the dust cover her shoes, her legs, the brim of her hat. Beneath it, the almost invisible veil of her voilette surrounded her features in a halo of poetry. She inquired in the scant dwellings, Aurelia behind her, “Do you know a dog named Chocolate?”
“The one that belongs to Doña Cata?”
“No.”
“What does its owner look like, Miss?” (Abuela hated people calling her Miss.)
“An old man, a beggar.”
“Oh, then no.”
“He’s a strong dog… Oh! You yourselves have a dog. What’s her name?”
“Paloma, Miss, and she just had a litter. Twelve. It’s probably best if you don’t touch her because she’s nursing.”
People got to Abuela by way of their dogs. A person with a dog was part dog and therefore worthy of attention. Most of her relationships were established because of dogs. I saw Paloma’s owners grow on Abuela before my very eyes.
“And what do you feed her?”
“Um, tortillas, bones …”
“And her pups?”
“We drowned them. There was one left, but Paloma doesn’t want her, and the truth is…”
“I’ll pick the puppy up on my way back. She’ll be better off with me.”
The next stop was a little corner store called The Barely There. Drawing herself tall, past the flushed beauty of her face, Abuela addressed the clerk, “Do you know a dog named Chocolate?”
“Hmmm … that name is very common.”
“Have you seen a big, strong dog that answers to the name Chocolate?” Abuela insisted.
“All the big ones are called Chocolate and the little ones too, Chocolate or Chocolatito.”
Abuela handed out one and five peso bills with her gloved hand while people stared at her. Finally exasperated, she began to call from the little store out onto the dusty and dilapidated streets, “Chocolate, Chocolate, Chocolate!”
“Ma’am, twenty dogs are going to come running, all named Chocolate, but none of them yours.”
“It’s such a common name,” Aurelia repeated, fed up. I was also irritated realizing the dog’s name would be an obstacle to finding him. If it had been named Nebuchadnezzar, he’d already be here.
“Ma’am, may I have a soft drink? I can’t take this thirst any more. Wouldn’t you like a glass of water? What am I saying? I don’t think they have water here. No, look, child,” Aurelia motioned to the desert. “They don’t have water here because they haven’t put down pipes… So, a soft drink.”
“Get one, Aurelia,” Abuela conceded. “I’m not thirsty.” Suddenly, as if she’d had an epiphany, she asked, “And the pipes?” More than conviction, my family has lived by bits of instinct. Feminine instinct. Instinct is like Divine Providence.
“The pipes? The pipes are farther up. If you walk, you’ll get tired. Maybe you should send your little girl.” The storekeeper looked in my direction.
Indignant, Abuela pointedly responded, “I can walk perfectly.”
A neighbor echoed, “I’ve seen a dog fitting that description over there, but the pipes are real far up.”
The woman raised her arm and the sight of her dark armpits, brilliant with sweat, disturbed me.
“There ain’t no one around here that can take you, Ma’am,” the clerk warned.
“I can do it myself.”
That wasn’t true. The climb was difficult. Drops of salt water ran down Abuela’s face and settled on her upper lip. We walked like explorers, testing the ground so we wouldn’t slide down. The prints left by her high-heel shoes, sinking deeper and deeper in the sand, and the round hole left by her cane worried me to the point of physical pain. Something bad is going to happen to us, I thought.
Suddenly, half-a-dozen curious children appeared, following us, pointing out where we might find possible Chocolates.
“I know a family around here that has a dog named Chocolate.”
“That’s not true, Ma’am. It’s a lie. He just wants to swindle you.”
“It is true, Ma’am. They live right over there, behind that hill. I’ll take you. The dog is tall, a really big dog, the color of watery coffee.”
“The color of a bean,” another contradicted.
“Stewed beans or refried beans?” asked a third.
The children, over whom she had no control, surrounded my grandmother. Their mocking exhausted her more than the search. They crossed in front of her and their voices exploded in the heat, “Chocolate? I saw him yesterday. He was going down to the graveyard. Can I have a peso?”
A group of skinny dogs joined our entourage too. A yellow one looked as sickly as the necklace of dry lemons that some compassionate hand put around his neck to alleviate the distemper. The dog sat on his hind legs and tried to scratch himself, but the effort almost killed him. He began to pant pitifully. Abuela approached him.
“Don’t go near him, Ma’am, he’ll jump on you and bite you!”
“He’s got consumption!”
“He bites, that dog bites! Be careful, Ma’am!”
Abuela picked up the dog in her arms and for the first time the children were silent. She opened his mouth to help him breathe. She cleaned the dark sleep that had hardened around his eyes forming stone-like scabs. The poor dog rested its pitiful face against her shoulder and I looked at the people with pride. Yes, she’s my grandmother, I wanted to say, that’s my grandmother. All she has to do is walk up to an animal with her arms outstretched and they surrender to her. They immediately understand her intentions.
“Whose dog is this?” She asked.
“We don’t know.”
“He can’t live far because he’s too sick to walk. If he doesn’t belong to anyone, I’ll take him with me.”
Abuela always asked if dogs belonged to someone, as if stray dogs were the most valuable possession.
“Are you sure he doesn’t belong to anyone?” She insisted.
“It’s the government’s,” suggested a boy.
“Every dog on the street belongs to the government,” said another emphatically.
Just about then, Aurelia, exhausted, because in addition to everything else she has one leg shorter than the other, looked around for another store. She found it and, this time, without asking, ordered a Chaparrita, a soda in a short bottle, just like her. She asked the owner, “You don’t happen to know anything about a brown dog that goes around with a street cleaner or beggar, God only knows what he does?”
“Not really, but doña Matilde might know. She sells food to the scavengers.”
“And where does this doña Matilde live?” Aurelia inquired.
“Right around the corner.”
“On the other side of the hill?” She asked with skepticism. “We’ve been looking for the darn animal for two hours.”
Doña Matilde looked like a clay pot. It made sense that she sold food. “Don Loreto has a dog like that,” she informed us.
“And where does he live?”
“What?” She laughed.
“Yes, which house is his?”
“What do you mean house? How’s don Loreto gonna have a house? He lives in one of the huge drainpipes they abandoned in the valley.”
Abuela surveyed the valley and after spotting what she thought was a pipe, she made another stop at the store and asked the clerk, “May we leave Yellow here a moment while we go to the pipe?”
She meant the sickly dog she was still carrying in her arms.
“Yes, of course, whatever you want. That dog won’t move from here anyway. He can hardly walk.”
The pipes were located at the top of the mountain. We walked in the middle of a violent dryness; our eyes, burning. There were no more cardboard huts with roofs made of asbestos. The children continued to yell, paying no attention to Abuela, “Be quiet, children!” “Go away, children!” Aurelia hobbled along. There weren’t any more stores here. She’d have to wait for her third soft drink. Everything we were doing seemed long and useless to her.
Abuela, in spite of her physical fortitude, breathed difficultly through her pointed nose. She looked toward the cliff and renewed her climb; her body was her will.
As we approached, she began to shout with a voice cracking from both dryness and hope, “Chocolate? Chocolate? Chocolate!”
I don’t know how she managed to find such a voice. Nothing moved, only the children running toward the Acropolis of pipes. Abuela’s voice, each time a little more worn, guided them, “Chocolate!”
Above, concrete rings so big that the sky was visible through them challenged us. A solitary ash tree, young and squalid, grew at the summit. “There used to be a lot of oak trees but they cut them down because they’re gonna build a health clinic,” some kid explained.
Then the brown dog came out of nowhere. He recognized us immediately and came to Abuela in the same adorable way he did at their usual corner. In spite of his size, she took him in her arms and began the descent with her trophy. “It’s better if you walk, Chocolalito. Let’s go home.”
But Chocolate didn’t move. He merely wagged his tale wildly. Then, he began to bark like people cry.
“Look, Ma’am, he’s crying. Come here, Chocolate, come on,” Aurelia intervened.
“What’s wrong, Chocolate?” Abuela questioned exasperated.
“He does not want to leave his owner,” Aurelia shouted. “We’ve got to get permission from him.”
Abuela remembered the old beggar and looked back at the giant abandoned tunnels.
After some hesitation, I mustered up the courage to enter one. The tube stank of urine and feces, but I continued in, my heart beating forcefully. Five steps inside, I saw a person squatting over a mountain of rags and newspapers, an accumulation of misery crowned with a felt hat.
“We’ve come to get Chocolate,” my voice echoed inside the tube.
I crawled out on all fours. My grandmother looked at me approvingly and we stood facing each other. She was redder than a shrimp, her eyes fixed on the concrete tube. Aurelia glared at us like a lynx.
“Come, Chocolate, let’s go,” I said.
The dog that had caused our discomfort didn’t show a single sign of understanding, neither barking nor wagging his tail. Only when Abuela said, “Chocolate” in a pitiful tone did he seem to doubt.
Abuela understood that Chocolate wouldn’t leave without his owner and a moment later she ordered the mountain of rags blinking in the sunlight, “Very well, you come too.”
The old man hesitated and Abuela lost her demanding voice. Her tone became more compliant and urgent. The roles had changed. Now it was the old man who had something to offer and had become unattainable, as if suddenly there were a sign hanging from the tunnel reading, Do Not Disturb.
“Chocolate can’t stay here. You must understand that he’ll die,” she insisted. Pieces of sentences, a word here and there rang in my ears: “Don’t be selfish.” “Give him a chance.” “What do you have to offer him?”
In response, the old man stood and began to pick up his belongings. “Let me get my things.”
“What things? The only thing I see is junk.”
We were silent as we descended the hill, but Abuela, as promised, stopped in front of the last store and yelled so that they could hear her inside, “I’m here for Yellow.”
We also picked up the mangy and mistreated puppy at the first store. As we approached the highway, a taxi appeared amid the dust. Upon seeing it, the old man straightened up. With even more vigor, he sat in the seat next to the driver. Abuela wrapped Chocolate in her cape, put the puppy on the floorboard, and Aurelia and I scrunched together in spite of the fact that Yellow was occupying less and less space.
At home, Aurelia and Cruz bathed all of them. Chocolate wasn’t any trouble, nor was Paloma’s daughter. Yellow went to doggy heaven clean.
The servants put the old man to soak in the tub. Next, they dressed him. Abuela offered him her deceased husband’s clothes, the hard collars of Doucet, Jeune & Sons, a striped shirt, a tweed jacket. She also gave him Oxford grey cashmere slacks, Ortega cufflinks, a Cifonelli silk tie. Everything suited him. We never imagined this man who walked hunched over could be so tall. His thin neck escaped from the collar and the tie flowed on him like a stream. He allowed himself to be dressed without as much as a blink.
“The only thing he has asked for,” announced Abuela to me, “are those cigarettes called Faritos. You can buy them behind the cathedral.”
I went to get the cigarettes and, after eating, the old man smoked one, rocking beneath the cypress tree that casts the best shade. He looked more content than Chocolate. That’s how at sixteen years old I got a new grandfather. Since I never knew mine, it might as well be him, even though he didn’t play golf or bridge, or dress in clothes from Harrods of London, or make heartbreaking accounts of how he had lost his businesses.
That evening, I carried Yellow’s pitiful sore-covered body outside and buried it.
Fifty years later, I can still hear paws on the stairs. The dogs descend, tripping, biting each other, a lighting bolt of hyenas. I detest them. They horrify me. I love them. They obsess me. They growl. They bark.
My grandmother had been a young widow, with black veils and a deep white neckline. She could be mischievous. When she invited Piedita Iturbe de Hohenlohe to dinner, she set on the table a beautiful serving bowl made of crystal with four black plums inside. Since there were six of us, we looked at the compote trying to figure out what to do. That night, she explained, “It was to teach that snob a lesson.”
Abuela took several trains. She made land in Karlsbad, in Marienbad, in Vichy. She went to Termoli for the curative power of their baths. She traveled with her own sheets and samovar. They called her the “Madonna of the Sleeping Cars.” When she could no longer travel, she remarried. Very late, at a quarter to twelve.
One day at noon she confirmed, “Believe me when I say that one is better off alone.” From that day on she grew fond of dogs.
My mother also loved them. For me, the third generation, love is a dog that wags its tail and comes to greet me.
Being a dog has its advantages and I have confirmed that on countless occasions. My grandmother trusted me because I have the eyes of a faithful dog. I was Tid, Cucu, Didi, Little Girl, Baby Girl, Girlushka, Chiquitita, Little Flower, the one who shits like a goat, plop, plop, plop, in the clear water of the commode, the one who sings as she climbs the stairs, the ray of sunshine. She would say I had the nose of a healthy dog and that my forehead and rump were always cool.
Abuela allowed dogs to lick her, although she would laugh and hide if they tried to kiss her mouth. But I like animals to kiss me, especially cats because of their scratchy tongue. Ah, the color of a cat’s tongue, pink, seashell, intimate! Being a dog also taught me to come to terms with men just as they are, in all their elegance, in all their haplessness, without feeling revulsion for them. Dogs taught me to accept men’s smells, their shit, their fangs fittest for betrayal. I took them in my arms like Abuela did, and to those I didn’t love, I’ve asked for forgiveness.
I can still see Chocolate dancing in front of Abuela like no man ever did for me. Except one, one who one day jumped the fence of my house and caused my will to oscillate between him and a street dancer who one day filled my roads with the thousand paws of his seduction.
They say that childhood and adolescence return when one is about to die. I now often remember my dog years, my dog days, my canine paradise that smelled of horsemeat boiling in pots in the ranch at noontime. I also recall that nighttime ritual that always bothered me, when by the light of a small lantern, Abuela lifted her nightgown and looked carefully, not just on her naked body but in the pleats and frills of the silk, for the dreaded enemy, fleas. The inspection could last half an hour. Or more. In the darkness, the whiteness of her body was blinding. Not such that I couldn’t discern her milky breasts, two consecrated hosts that she raised in the shadows, her thighs, her arms of mother of pearl, her hands rummaging as they prowled for the small black insect. She was my Little White Riding Hood, and even though I didn’t know what it could mean, I was her wolf. Since then, I’ve never been able to listen to that fairy tale without thinking about the forests I had to tear down to get to Abuela. I long for the flea, nearly invisible, the flea that from one moment to the next could jump up to the roof, or come to fall on the black triangle of my pubis, in whose deep foliage, I would never recover.
Although I have never been able to find anyone or anything that can replace the nocturnal trepidation into which Abuela unknowingly initiated me, one night, only one night, I thought I might repeat the exciting and mysterious ritual when a lover told me, “You move like a flea.”
No flea has bitten me since Abuela died but I collect miniature dressed fleas in memory of that woman, that white woman with a black dot that sucked her blood and whom I loved with all the strength of my sixteen years. She made me discover a sensuality that the Marquis de Sade should have included in one of his treatises on virtue.