The old dog is tied by a length of rope to a chain-link fence. Its hackles comb up a silent growl as I approach through the edges of the small white town and its eyes burn a high yellow like witch hazel oddly vivid in such a skinny and unkempt old dog. A dog that has known some weather, I’d say. There are no people anywhere to be seen – I am in the last slow mile after dusk and my calves are singing. There is a café up ahead but it is shuttered and dark. I have walked for many hours and in fact for almost fifteen years now. The dog eases into itself again as I come nearer and its flanks relax to this softer breathing and I crouch on my own hind legs by its side to converse for a while among the lights of our eyes.
It’s as if I’ve known you for a long time, she says.
But when I lay my hand to her there is a shiver of nerves again as if she has known the cruelties, too. The town is not entirely quiet. Somewhere tinnily bleating behind shutters there is the sound of a soccer game on the radio or TV. I used to be afraid of the dogs but they got used to me. Ever the more so as I walk I take on the colours and feelings of the places through which I walk and I am no longer a surprise to these places. My once reddish hair has turned a kind of old-man’s green tinge with the years and this is more of it. What the ramifications have been for my stomach you’re as well not hearing. I have very little of the language, even after all this time but the solution to this is straightforward – I don’t talk to people. This arrangement I have found satisfactory enough, as does the rest of humanity, apparently, or what’s to be met of it on the clear blue mornings, on the endless afternoons. We are coming out of a very cold winter in Extremadura which is a place of witches or at least of stories about witches. To be passing the nights, I suppose. The dog has a good part of an Alsatian in her and random bits of mutt and sheepdog and wolf probably and she tells me of a thin life and a harsh one in this cold-hearted, in this love-starved town.
Go on? I says.
The lamps above us catch now and buzz for a moment as their circuits warm and also to mark the sombre hour there is the hollow doom of the church bells – they lay it on heavily enough around these places still. Footsteps as the bells fade out to echoes and there is a girl of about sixteen years of age and she does not see me at all but mouths the words of a popular song, a song that is current, I believe it is a Gaga, I know it well enough myself from the cafés and the concourses – all the years I have doled out in that same old (it seems to me) estación de autobuses that exists at the edge of all these towns, I use them not for the buses but for sleeping – and she moves swaying down the road in a cloud of distraction (if sleep is what you could call it!) and she hums as she goes and she is not a pretty girl exactly but neither plain and what she has in truth is a very beautiful carriage – buenas tardes? She turns in surprise over the shoulder but there is not a glimmer, really, she just blinks and moves on, and the dog simpers and stretches; now there is the chug of a moto as it troubles its lungs to mount a rise in the road and a shutter is pulled inwards with a hard sharp creaking and the sound of the soccer game loudens; all across the silver hills in the east the cold spring night lovelessly descends. February is an awful fucking month just about everywhere. There is a waft of sweet paprika and burnt garlic from a kitchen somewhere. Still there is no life at the café. Whatever is going on with that place. Far away in the north my very old parents must be waiting for me or for word of me, at least; they are waiting for me still at the bottom of the dripping boreen framed by the witchy haw and the whitethorn. It’s what keeps them going, I’d say.
I don’t know what people take me for as I pass along the edges of the roads. What money I have is by now so comically eked out and in such tiny dribs that my clothes are not good at all and as certain as the weeping callouses on the balls of my feet is the need for new boots or for a pair of good trainers at least. I sleep generally where I fall. In doorways sometimes or if the weather’s foul in the cheapest hostals run always by spidery old women in black or in the bus concourses, under the benches, or in the lee of buildings, or on the black sand beaches in the south if the winter is especially long and hard and I’ve turned down the road myself. At one time southerned was a very common word and southerning a practice. For the better of the lungs and so forth. Sometimes I’m not sure what century I’ve mistaken this one for and I wonder would I be better off elsewhere. Sometimes I feel as if my engines are powered on nothing at all but the lights of the cold stars that will emerge above us now. I can get by on almost nothing and it is conceivable that I might become very, very old myself and as spidery.
The summers don’t present much of a problem. You can always find cool places. The moto comes into the line of our vision, its engine turns off for the decline of the road and it coasts and a teenage boy steers and parks it beneath a tree across the way from me. He steps off and looks across and nods and lights a cigarette and he looks down along the road after the singing girl and she senses his glance and turns a look back to him – her thick black hair moves – and their glances catch for a moment but as quickly she turns from him and is gone; an old man appears as though from the dust and sits on a half-collapsed bench by a white wall that it seems clear to me was at one time bullet-riddled. Now we all watch each other closely and the sense of this is companionable enough. A heavy-set middle-aged man appears in just a flimsy yellow t-shirt that reads Telefonica Movistar – it’s all go – and he crosses the road to the boy with the moto – he mustn’t feel the cold – and he talks to him and they look down calmly together at the workings of the bike, each of them with their hands on their hips and their cigarettes at a loose dangle from their mouths, and they squint through the smoke at the little moto and its failing organs and the man reaches for it, turns the key, revs the handle, listens with his head inclined at an expert’s careful angle, and lets it dies again and shakes his head. Not long for the road by the looks of things. I crouch on my hind legs with the dog whose snout rests in the curve of my shoulder now and she whispers to me that the girl is named Mercedes and is wanted by not a few of the young louts around this place with big hands on them – these are country people – and she has already in fact given it to one or two of them. On Saturdays. The clocks must have stopped for them. Awful to be sixteen or eighteen and already your finest hour has gambolled past you like a grinning lamb and your moto is fucked also. The sky makes a lurid note of the day’s ending – there are hot flushes of pink and vermillion that would shame a cardinal. The chain link fence encases nothing but a crooked rectangle of dirt and dead tyres and stones – old chicken ground maybe – and it has an air of trapped misery.
And more than that you’re as well not to know, the dog says.
Dogs, I find, are much the same everywhere. Much of a muchness, as my father would say. They know everything about us and they love us all the same. My father when he wanted the sound of the television up or down would say highern it or lowern it. One time in Ronda I nearly fucked myself into the gorge there altogether. A thousand foot fall would have settled the question decisively. But I thought that might be a bit loud. I am not by nature a man who has that kind of show in him. No extravagances, please.
The old man calls across to the pair by the moto. It is a weak scratchy call like an injured bird would make. The pair by the moto ignore him utterly. Another shutter opens. Another TV bleats. The sky pales again as quickly as it coloured. As if somebody has had a Jesuitical word. That ours beneath this vaulted roof might be an austere church. There was a time when I tried to fill the sky with words. Morning and fucking night I was at it. In my innocence, or arrogance – the idea that I might succeed. But I walked out of that life and entered this one.
The teenage boy kicks the back wheel of the fucked moto; the middle-aged man in the t-shirt laughs to make his belly rise and fall. A hunting bird moves across the acres of the sky in the last thin light of the day and a breeze comes up the road with quick news – a tree shakes out its bare branches and moves. There is a rancid olive oil on the air over the odour of stale dog. I’m sorry but there is no pretty way to say it. I wonder if I was to make off with you altogether? I could slip this rope from you as easy as anything.
I’d love to go, she says, and yet I’d not go. Do you know that kind of way?
Oh, I do. I’d love to go home again but I will not go.
Imagine coming up the boreen in Roscommon with my tale of the lost years and my rucksack of woes and the little gaunt tragic sunburnt face on me? Wouldn’t they love to see it coming. I do believe they’re back there still – I believe they’re alive and that I’d know somehow if they weren’t. I stepped onto a train that night in Madrid and out of my life. Love? Don’t mention it.
They must whisper their love to Mercedes as night falls. A hand cupped neatly to the shape of her groin. The question mark of it. The old man gets up from the bench and walks like a clockwork scarecrow by the side of the road. I stand again to stretch out my bones. If I looked hard enough, I’d find a café open someplace among these white-walled streets and hidden turns – I could have coffee with hot milk. But I have nearly had my fill of the cafés. There is only so much of that business you can take. And there is the danger always of the cerveza and the brandy. There are only so many times you can climb over that wall.
I rise onto the tips of my toes and look along the darkening sky and road and here she comes again, Mercedes, and still she jaws vaguely on her song – buenas tardes? Again she ignores me and it is as if she cannot see me even. She carries beneath her arm a carton of table wine – tinto is one of the words I have, and never too far from the tip of my tongue – and a jar of Nutella and in a blue plastic bag a frozen octopus. This will mean a grocer open down the road someplace and a stick of bread for me. Tentacles and spindles and bulbous sacs – I need to dig into myself harder lately for the words of things. The dog is up beside me and she sniffs at the air after Mercedes and the evening falls away from us quickly. I’ll need to decide soon where to lie down tonight. The animal must choose its lair. The first stars burn coldly on the plain and I am so many miles from home. I reach out a last time for you. Your warm skinny flank and the way that you sigh and move closer to me just once more just this last time. I fix a finger under the rough collar of rope and work it to loosen it and you settle in this moment that much closer to me.
A moto runs its troubled lungs; the young girl’s step recedes; the old man’s falters.
The man in the yellow t-shirt passes along and he says hello to the dog and he looks right through me. This is no place for me tonight, I decide – I would rather not their shelter. I’ll move on again and maybe tonight I’ll keep moving all the way through until the sunlight wakes the yellow of the yellow of the fields of rapeseed and in truth I am still drinking some of the time because I have not yet drank her all the way out of my mind and I still have this broken heart.