Dog (2 page)

I shook my head, feeling dizzy and delirious and wondering if I were sick—food poisoning or another bug.

The dizziness didn't fade when I looked at the other two saints. One had no visible wound, but blood was gushing from his open mouth. The other, though still standing, had been disemboweled, plaster intestines at his feet.

I glanced at Jennifer. This was fake blood, silly blood—shiny red paint over plaster—and not a dead, gutted dog—but—

There was a look of horror on her face, but not from the blood. She was staring at the feet of the fourth saint, the disemboweled one. There, a small, squat plaster dog with an impossibly round stomach sat sniffing at the entrails.

We didn't need to say a thing. We left the alcove, putting it behind us as if it were simply bad art, and re-joined the little tour group.

As we left the cathedral, I stopped our guide—an educated, well-dressed American ex-pat who obviously wished she were doing something else.

“Why all the blood?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“All the blood—the bloody saints—in the alcove?”

She squinted, not understanding, then got it.

“That's what you get when you mix the blood-sacrifice Aztecs with the Catholic emphasis on suffering.”

I thought I knew what she meant, but wasn't sure.

“And the dog? Why—”

But she was already walking toward the front of the group.

*   *   *

Over the next two days we drove to villages famous for their beautiful pottery. We loved Mexican ceramics, the talent and technical skill of uneducated, humble artisans—not elite gallery artists—making their regions world-famous just by carrying on the traditions they knew. The power of it. The beauty. This is how it felt to our hearts, young as they were. As we drove, stopping as long as we wished whenever we wished, we found the famous green-glazed bowls of Michoacán in the first villages; then, hours later, red-glazed Colima bowls and hand-polished armadillos, birds and human figures in the next.

In the last village we found the dogs.

Jennifer froze when we saw the table outside the little house where the potter lived, one of dozens in the village.

I nudged her with my elbow. “Oh, stop it. They look like puppies with big tummies. Puppies didn't kill that dog—”

I stopped. I was probably making it worse. We both stared at the ceramic dog-pots on the table. All of them were a smooth, beautiful, rusty red. All had hollow, pipe-like chutes protruding from their back—for some liquid. All had immense bellies. We recognized them from books. Colima dogs. Pre-Columbian replicas.

She sighed at last, her eyes crinkling. A smile soon followed, and what sounded like a laugh of acceptance. Whether she was forcing the cheerfulness or actually feeling it, I didn't know, but it would be real enough if we simply kept moving, kept having romantic fun.

I was, I realized—and it made me smile—going to buy one of the smooth, pot-bellied red-earth dogs for Tony, who'd asked for a souvenir, and what better one was there? A dog. One that wouldn't attack him, but that would just sit there looking like a puppy. It was hilarious. We'd both have a laugh.

The artist's wife was doing the selling. There were two other tourists—Aussies, I think—and when she got to us, I'd chosen the dog I thought Tony would like best. I paid, and the woman left to get change for a ten-dollar bill. My eyes wandered and found another kind of dog-pot, an open bowl, but the same kind of dog. It sat by the screen door to the artist's shack, where he made his wares, and I had to step around the table to get to it. There were two of them, one on either side of the door, like guardians, and I wasn't sure whether they were for sale or not. I liked the idea—how this one was a bowl—something Tony could put his keys and wallet in—and either it was for sale or it wasn't. No harm in asking.

I picked up the closest of the two. It was slick inside, as if something had once been kept in it. Whatever it was, it had made the clay even redder there. Iron. Old pigment.

I brought it back to the table. When the woman returned, she was fussing with the change. I asked her in the best Spanish I could whether the dog in my hand was for sale too. She didn't look up. She said, “Yes, yes—for sale!” and kept fussing with the money, which dropped to the ground.

“Is it the same price?” I asked in Spanish.

“All same price,” she said in English.

“Okay.” I paid the woman again, told her to keep the change, and with a dog under each arm headed to the car. I wanted us back on the main road and at our hotel before dark because I wasn't sure what night driving was like on rural roads. It might have been
stupid
, and I knew what Tony would say.

*   *   *

The anthropologist, a man named Rocha, who taught at the institute, also taught at the university. He needed the institute work for financial reasons. He was married and had a mistress, they said. I hadn't talked to him before. I hadn't had any reason to, but now I did. I wanted to know something about Tony's dog so I could show Tony I'd learned at least something about a country he'd always know more about than I would--and if I had the chance, I'd ask the man, too, about dogs in this country … why they acted the way they did … if it didn't seem offensive.

The chance to ask about the bowl came on Tuesday.

I told him in the best Spanish I could, nervous as hell—because it was a test of my language progress—how I'd bought a ceramic bowl in Metaca, a dog, one with a big tummy.

He was listening, but didn't look up. He was a thin man, almost dainty, and he was marking papers. He'd talk to me only if he could also get work done as he did.

“Of course,” he answered in English. He was thinking, I'm sure, that not bothering with Spanish would get this conversation over a lot faster. “A Colima dog. A replica—an item for the perennial tourist trade. An imitation of the artifacts found at La Campana and El Chanal.” His English command was impeccable, very idiomatic.

He was marking away. If I didn't say anything else, it would be fine with him.

“Why were those dogs so fat?”

He looked up for a moment, then back down, and sighed.

“An interesting question. The traditional answer is ‘food for the living and dead.' You fattened them and buried them with the dead, but you also ate them. The Chichimec—whose practices spread far north, even into your own country, and farther east within it than you might imagine—ate dogs. They believed dogs could help you pass successfully across the Great Lake into the Afterlife. If you ate them, it aided you in your journey, but it also helped you here in this life. You ate them at banquets; you ate them more commonly. One kind had short legs, so they could not run from you, and was probably barkless since their purpose was not to guard your holdings, but simply to provide food both secular and ceremonial. You fattened them with corn. You would not feed them protein. Fowl and dogs were the Chichimec source of protein. This is the traditional view, but I have often felt.…”

He was looking at me now and had stopped marking. He was either trying to inundate me with information—to overwhelm me and make me go away—or it was personal to him, what he was saying, and he wanted to share it, but with caution. He knew I was teaching at “colleges” in the US, even if the idea of a “community college” was alien to him. Was I suddenly a younger colleague to him, someone who would listen, someone he might trust? At least a curious graduate student?

“I have often felt,” he continued, eyes a little wider, “—and it has caused trouble with my colleagues—that the dogs' bellies were full for another reason.”

“Yes?”

“I believe … I believe the dogs ate human flesh as well. Why? So that human beings, by being eaten themselves, could complete the cycle of life … and death.” He took a deep breath, waiting to see if I were pulling away. I wasn't. “There is evidence. You may find it in four partial mummies. The bigger dog, the long-legged variety—which was called
itzcuintli
and was not at all like today's dogs, despite what people believe—existed, as did the smaller. Both kinds, the Chichimec believed, helped guide a man across the lake into the afterlife, but also helped him die at his appointed time should he not be willing to go.…”

He'd stopped again, checking my face.

“My conclusions, I confess,” he went on, looking down again, but as if embarrassed, “are the result of my doctoral work—my ongoing studies for fifteen years. Some have been traditional studies. Some, less so—”

We'd heard that he hadn't finished work on his doctorate even after so long and how this had hurt his career in a country where the pressure for orthodoxy was even greater than in ours. He had, his fellow instructors said, explored “theories too unconventional to be safe.”

Still looking down at the floor, he said:

“I have concluded that three thousand years ago, and earlier, the ancestors of the Chichimecs—whose culture spread from this country into your own—had dogs that ate human flesh, just as human beings ate their flesh. They acquired the human flesh they needed violently, whenever Death called; that is, when Death called to both the human being whose time had come and to the very dogs who would help the human being make his crossing.…”

There was something he wanted to add—I could tell from his eyes—but should he do it?

He went ahead slowly.

“They ran in packs,
mijo
—the short-legged ones and the long-legged ones together. Artifacts in the Colima regions suggest this as well. They ate human beings, and human beings returned the favor. It was a symbiosis not unlike the million-year-old understanding between African bushmen and lions, but in this instance a very
physical
one—one driven by religious beliefs.”

And then he said it—the riskiest thing of all:

“I also believe those dogs did not disappear.”

I blinked. In another situation I'd have argued—I loved a good intellectual argument—but something about what he was saying left me without words. I was thinking of the dogs.

My expression changed, I'm sure. A moment's fear. A willingness—however brief—to believe. He'd stood up.

“You've seen evidence yourself perhaps?” he said. “It is all around us here even if it is not always scientific.”

I finally said: “I don't think I've been here long enough to know, Señor.”

He stared at me for a moment, and then, with a look of defeat, sat back down and began marking again.

“May I bring the dog-bowl tomorrow to show to you?” I asked.

Without looking up, he answered: “Of course. You are a student here.”

*   *   *

I kept the dog-bowl in a paper bag, padded with newspaper, because it wouldn't fit into my backpack. When school let out the next day, I found him sitting at the lunch tables, marking again.

When I pulled it out—checking it for chips and breaks (it was fine) and inspecting again the slick interior of the bowl—he didn't look at it. I said, “Is there anything else you can tell me about this pot—why it's a bowl when the other dogs weren't.”

When he finally glanced at it, he got up suddenly.

“Where did you find this?”

I told him.

“You should leave it there—in this country.”

“Why?”

“The woman was wrong. It should not have been for sale.”

“I bought it.”

“This does not matter. You should leave it.”

He would say no more. He was staring at me.

I wrapped the bowl back up, thanked him, and went back to the house. Jennifer was happily playing with the family's youngest, the dark boy. She'd also gotten a letter written to her mom and dad—something I hadn't yet done to my own.

II.

Itzcuintli's body is the blood and flesh of both life and death, and by eating it The People gain the strength to live this life in physical bodies and also enter the afterlife as spirit when Xilotl wishes it. But Itzcuintli must eat too, and what better food than the flesh and blood of human beings? In this way, the Sacred Dog and The People guarantee Eternal Life for each other in a shared cannibalism.…

—
letter from Professor Carlos Rocha to Professor Jose Xavier Cortes

Jennifer had been born into a privileged family of savvy businessmen in the capital of a Deep South state—a family which, like so many of her parents' generation and mine, valued males over females. Her father could be a little cruel, but her mother certainly wasn't; they collaborated, however, on making a hero of her older brother and in the process making her—despite her delightful innocence, creative talent and joyful appreciation of everything and everyone in the world—a black sheep. Like many black sheep—or at least those who don't want to stick around and define themselves as invisible or worse—she left quietly after high school, without loud rancor, attended college out of state with the help of her grandmother, and pursued painting and sculpture and her love of children. The decade was right for it. You could be a bohemian without operatic formality or the 50's beret-wearing obligations of it. You could simply be a young person in a decade of rebellion—neither Flower Child nor Establishment preppie—and be happy, especially if you found someone like you and made a life for yourself, building one way or another a family in which you were not so unimportant.

I loved her, of course, for her graciousness and strength and generosity of heart, but I also loved the idea that she was a “big toe” Native American. A proverbial Southern family secret. They didn't talk about it much; in the Deep South, in the staid professional circles of the Great Generation, it was a good idea not to talk about such things. But her father's mother was quite insistent that all of them on her father's side had Indian blood—“Natchez stock”—in them. And she was the kind of woman who didn't tolerate denial, as her husband must have learned early on. Rich white men and their shadows. It helped us laugh when the family's alpha males became too overbearing.