At the end of the last century, we lived for three years in central Mexico, in a fine house that we rented located in the Colonia Estacion on the outskirts of San Miguel de Allende, in the state of Guanajuato.
Our House on Callejon del Perro The single-lane dirt road—and it was no more than a path, really—that dead-ended between our house and the tracks was called Callejón del Perro—Alley of the Dog. At least this was what some people called it—it appeared on no street map that we ever saw, and local people seemed always to laugh when we told them our address. (Once, when an official from Hacienda—that’s the sort of Mexican equivalent of the IRS—came by to verify that Elaine lived at this house when she had applied for permission to sell her artwork in the country, the official told us that she had asked several people in the neighborhood where she might find Callejón del Perro and that no one seemed to have heard of it. She did add, however, that when she tried a different tactic and asked if they knew where the extranjeros [foreigners] lived, our house was immediately pointed out—like I said, we were pretty obvious around here.)
And you may be certain that there were dogs on Callejón del Perro--you probably already know that in Spanish, the very term for a stray dog is “perro callejero.”
One can’t help but notice the dogs in Mexico. Malcolm Lowry, in his classic and powerful novel, Under the Volcano—considered by me and many others to be the most accurate novel about Mexico yet written by a foreigner—makes much of what he terms the “pariah dogs” of Mexico. (Pariah being the term for the lowest castes of society or any outcast—although curiously, Lowry chose not to use the Spanish spelling of the word: paria.) In fact, the pariah dogs may be said to occupy a symbolic position equally as important to that fine novel as does the volcano of its title. Early in the book, the drunken Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, is shadowed by these unfortunate and horrid beasts—the last sentence of Chapter 2, when Geoffrey and Yvonne return to their house on Calle Nicaragua, reads: “A hideous pariah dog followed them in”—and then, when the Consul has been finally murdered and thrown into the deep barranca, Lowry punctuates his dark novel with this last sentence:
“Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”
And it wasn’t just Malcolm Lowry, either. I can recall many years ago reading D. H. Lawrence’s disturbing (to me) account of being in the public market in Oaxaca and seeing a dead dog lying in the aisle and describing how the people simply stepped over the carcass as they went on about their business. That image made a powerful impression on me and it has stayed with me for all these years. And while I have never yet seen such a thing in a public market, I have seen a dead dog on a cobblestone sidewalk in San Miguel and watched as passersby stepped over or around the fly-blown creature.
The dogs in Mexico interest me a great deal. I cannot count the times I have sat on a park bench in some Mexican zócalo and watched as these canine beggars and thieves and con-artists went about their daily struggle to survive in a country where it’s tough going for a good many of the people, never mind the dogs. I’ve watched while two or three mutts sat quietly and patiently begging as an old peasant man squatted on the curb and ate his noonday tortillas and tiny bits of meat—watched fascinated as the old man, no doubt feeling the hunger that those dogs felt more sharply than I ever could, tossed the tiniest of morsels to the animals, each of whom took his share and then—as if he knew this was to be his share and there would be no more—walked away in search of some other benefactor.
And I’ve seen bitches with teats nearly dragging the ground—dragging not because they were swollen with milk, you understand, but rather because they were so flaccid and empty—bitches that were so emaciated I couldn’t imagine how it was they were able even to look for food for themselves much less to muster the will to try and care for puppies.
And dogs with sores and mange and abscesses cowering around street vendors’ stands snatching whatever might fall to the ground. And miserable animals in packs of upwards of fifteen or twenty because a lone female is in heat and the urge to mate has overcome even that to eat . . . the normally timid males snarling savagely at one another, the exhausted bitch panting and glassy-eyed, searching frantically I imagine for some escape from this dusty mob of suitors.
And dog shit. In only one town in the United States—Bisbee, Arizona—and in one city in Europe—Paris—have I ever observed there to be so much dog shit on the sidewalks as there is in San Miguel de Allende. (I had a Parisian acquaintance once—he was associated in some way that I never understood with the French publisher that had translated my novel, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand, and claimed, with all the authority at which the French are so practiced, to have been legally adopted into the White Mountain Apache tribe in central Arizona and in fact to be the only French medicine man in that particular tribe—who assured me that it’s good luck if you step in “zee dog doo-doo” [his phrase, by the way] with your right foot . . . bad luck if it’s with your left. I don’t know, I personally prefer avoiding the stuff altogether, but then maybe I’m just overly fastidious, or else a poor sport.)
Not all of the dogs in Mexico are of this pathetic pariah class, of course. There are in Mexico, it seems to me, mainly two classes of people—the relatively well-off and the miserably poor. And so it is with their dogs. There are those dogs who roam the streets and alleys in search of a handout and then there are those who live in and on the homes of the more well-to-do. These latter are working animals, if you will, whose duty it is to keep the poorer classes away from the properties of the more privileged. Like the shards of broken glass embedded in cement along the tops of walls as a jagged barrier to any who might think to climb over, there are in Mexico watchdogs who live out their lives on the verandahs and flat rooftops of homes and businesses. Better to risk a nasty cut on a broken beer bottle than to brave a climb only to be greeted by some snarling Doberman or Rottweiler.
On Callejón del Perro there were always two or three dogs—at the very least. Medium-sized, yellow or mottled brown, mostly. (I’m reminded that Jim Harrison, in his stunningly fine novel, The Road Home, puts forth the proposition that, left to their own devices, all dogs would eventually be brown and medium-sized.) And they were nearly always mangy and dusty, these dogs on Callejón del Perro, oftentimes with patches of black grease from where they had crawled up under the rail cars parked on the sidings to escape the burning sun, there to sleep or to lick themselves and snap at the persistently buzzing flies.
I do not mean for you to suppose that the dogs around our house were in any way common, however. We have known several remarkable dogs on Callejón del Perro. When we first moved there we soon noticed that there are two older males who lived across from us—Elaine called them Vagabundo Uno and Vagabundo Dos, I did not know which was which. They were stand-offish but seemed well-fed and happy. Their principal duty, it seemed to me—one which they carried out with great enthusiasm—was to keep strays away from the seven identical doors of the railroad workers’ quarters directly across the tracks.
Far from stand-offish was the comically short-legged, wiry-haired little female who usually wore a brown leather collar. She seemed to live (or at least hang out) at the place next door. She barked at us the first few times we drove or walked past her doorway, but soon came to see that we were neighbors and would always come wagging over for a few pats whenever she saw us. She had an old scar on her side from what had clearly been a nasty wound, but because she didn’t seem like a young dog or an adult who’d had pups, we just assumed that she was the pet of the women who occupied the small house nearest our own (they fed her regularly, after all) and that she had most likely been spayed. The young girls next door told us that her name was Muñeca—“doll.”
Another special dog was an inevitably dusty, medium-sized female who was very simply as sweet as a dog could be said to be. She always walked with her head cocked to one side as though she had a stiff neck. She often slept under our truck and would come over to greet us whenever we would open our front door. Elaine took to calling her “Blondie” and was understandably surprised when later she asked the old woman at the tienda what the sore-necked dog was called and was told that her name was “Blondie.”
Several months after we moved there, we noticed that Muñeca was getting rounder. Sure enough, she whelped a litter of pups soon after that. And then, within a matter of days, Muñeca and Blondie and all the new pups were gone—disappeared. Gone to the perrera, the girls next door told us—Mexico’s version of the dog pound. For Elaine and me it was terribly sad. While we felt we could not adopt yet another dog—our two were more than we could reasonably manage—we certainly would have paid for Muñeca and Blondie to be spayed. In fact, we had spoken of approaching the neighbors about doing exactly that when Muñeca had her pups.
We were too late. But after that we knew and loved funny little MonoCola (Monkey Tail), and handsome young Ojitos (Sweet Eyes), and three-legged Milagrosa (Miraculous). When we didn’t see MonoCola for several days, María asked at the vivero nearby where we’d often seen him playing with the workers—they said that he had died. It was a hard life there, but we have no doubt there’ll always be dogs on Callejón del Perro.
And you may be certain that there were dogs on Callejón del Perro--you probably already know that in Spanish, the very term for a stray dog is “perro callejero.”
One can’t help but notice the dogs in Mexico. Malcolm Lowry, in his classic and powerful novel, Under the Volcano—considered by me and many others to be the most accurate novel about Mexico yet written by a foreigner—makes much of what he terms the “pariah dogs” of Mexico. (Pariah being the term for the lowest castes of society or any outcast—although curiously, Lowry chose not to use the Spanish spelling of the word: paria.) In fact, the pariah dogs may be said to occupy a symbolic position equally as important to that fine novel as does the volcano of its title. Early in the book, the drunken Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, is shadowed by these unfortunate and horrid beasts—the last sentence of Chapter 2, when Geoffrey and Yvonne return to their house on Calle Nicaragua, reads: “A hideous pariah dog followed them in”—and then, when the Consul has been finally murdered and thrown into the deep barranca, Lowry punctuates his dark novel with this last sentence:
“Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”
And it wasn’t just Malcolm Lowry, either. I can recall many years ago reading D. H. Lawrence’s disturbing (to me) account of being in the public market in Oaxaca and seeing a dead dog lying in the aisle and describing how the people simply stepped over the carcass as they went on about their business. That image made a powerful impression on me and it has stayed with me for all these years. And while I have never yet seen such a thing in a public market, I have seen a dead dog on a cobblestone sidewalk in San Miguel and watched as passersby stepped over or around the fly-blown creature.
The dogs in Mexico interest me a great deal. I cannot count the times I have sat on a park bench in some Mexican zócalo and watched as these canine beggars and thieves and con-artists went about their daily struggle to survive in a country where it’s tough going for a good many of the people, never mind the dogs. I’ve watched while two or three mutts sat quietly and patiently begging as an old peasant man squatted on the curb and ate his noonday tortillas and tiny bits of meat—watched fascinated as the old man, no doubt feeling the hunger that those dogs felt more sharply than I ever could, tossed the tiniest of morsels to the animals, each of whom took his share and then—as if he knew this was to be his share and there would be no more—walked away in search of some other benefactor.
And I’ve seen bitches with teats nearly dragging the ground—dragging not because they were swollen with milk, you understand, but rather because they were so flaccid and empty—bitches that were so emaciated I couldn’t imagine how it was they were able even to look for food for themselves much less to muster the will to try and care for puppies.
And dogs with sores and mange and abscesses cowering around street vendors’ stands snatching whatever might fall to the ground. And miserable animals in packs of upwards of fifteen or twenty because a lone female is in heat and the urge to mate has overcome even that to eat . . . the normally timid males snarling savagely at one another, the exhausted bitch panting and glassy-eyed, searching frantically I imagine for some escape from this dusty mob of suitors.
And dog shit. In only one town in the United States—Bisbee, Arizona—and in one city in Europe—Paris—have I ever observed there to be so much dog shit on the sidewalks as there is in San Miguel de Allende. (I had a Parisian acquaintance once—he was associated in some way that I never understood with the French publisher that had translated my novel, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand, and claimed, with all the authority at which the French are so practiced, to have been legally adopted into the White Mountain Apache tribe in central Arizona and in fact to be the only French medicine man in that particular tribe—who assured me that it’s good luck if you step in “zee dog doo-doo” [his phrase, by the way] with your right foot . . . bad luck if it’s with your left. I don’t know, I personally prefer avoiding the stuff altogether, but then maybe I’m just overly fastidious, or else a poor sport.)
Not all of the dogs in Mexico are of this pathetic pariah class, of course. There are in Mexico, it seems to me, mainly two classes of people—the relatively well-off and the miserably poor. And so it is with their dogs. There are those dogs who roam the streets and alleys in search of a handout and then there are those who live in and on the homes of the more well-to-do. These latter are working animals, if you will, whose duty it is to keep the poorer classes away from the properties of the more privileged. Like the shards of broken glass embedded in cement along the tops of walls as a jagged barrier to any who might think to climb over, there are in Mexico watchdogs who live out their lives on the verandahs and flat rooftops of homes and businesses. Better to risk a nasty cut on a broken beer bottle than to brave a climb only to be greeted by some snarling Doberman or Rottweiler.
On Callejón del Perro there were always two or three dogs—at the very least. Medium-sized, yellow or mottled brown, mostly. (I’m reminded that Jim Harrison, in his stunningly fine novel, The Road Home, puts forth the proposition that, left to their own devices, all dogs would eventually be brown and medium-sized.) And they were nearly always mangy and dusty, these dogs on Callejón del Perro, oftentimes with patches of black grease from where they had crawled up under the rail cars parked on the sidings to escape the burning sun, there to sleep or to lick themselves and snap at the persistently buzzing flies.
I do not mean for you to suppose that the dogs around our house were in any way common, however. We have known several remarkable dogs on Callejón del Perro. When we first moved there we soon noticed that there are two older males who lived across from us—Elaine called them Vagabundo Uno and Vagabundo Dos, I did not know which was which. They were stand-offish but seemed well-fed and happy. Their principal duty, it seemed to me—one which they carried out with great enthusiasm—was to keep strays away from the seven identical doors of the railroad workers’ quarters directly across the tracks.
Far from stand-offish was the comically short-legged, wiry-haired little female who usually wore a brown leather collar. She seemed to live (or at least hang out) at the place next door. She barked at us the first few times we drove or walked past her doorway, but soon came to see that we were neighbors and would always come wagging over for a few pats whenever she saw us. She had an old scar on her side from what had clearly been a nasty wound, but because she didn’t seem like a young dog or an adult who’d had pups, we just assumed that she was the pet of the women who occupied the small house nearest our own (they fed her regularly, after all) and that she had most likely been spayed. The young girls next door told us that her name was Muñeca—“doll.”
Another special dog was an inevitably dusty, medium-sized female who was very simply as sweet as a dog could be said to be. She always walked with her head cocked to one side as though she had a stiff neck. She often slept under our truck and would come over to greet us whenever we would open our front door. Elaine took to calling her “Blondie” and was understandably surprised when later she asked the old woman at the tienda what the sore-necked dog was called and was told that her name was “Blondie.”
Several months after we moved there, we noticed that Muñeca was getting rounder. Sure enough, she whelped a litter of pups soon after that. And then, within a matter of days, Muñeca and Blondie and all the new pups were gone—disappeared. Gone to the perrera, the girls next door told us—Mexico’s version of the dog pound. For Elaine and me it was terribly sad. While we felt we could not adopt yet another dog—our two were more than we could reasonably manage—we certainly would have paid for Muñeca and Blondie to be spayed. In fact, we had spoken of approaching the neighbors about doing exactly that when Muñeca had her pups.
We were too late. But after that we knew and loved funny little MonoCola (Monkey Tail), and handsome young Ojitos (Sweet Eyes), and three-legged Milagrosa (Miraculous). When we didn’t see MonoCola for several days, María asked at the vivero nearby where we’d often seen him playing with the workers—they said that he had died. It was a hard life there, but we have no doubt there’ll always be dogs on Callejón del Perro.
