The Dialogue of the Dogs Read online

  I don’t know what it is about virtue that, understanding little or nothing about it, I still cherished seeing the love, the tenderness, the care and dedication he brought to the education of those boys, nurturing the fragile shoots of their youth so as not to bend or divert them from the road of virtue, which they studied along with their letters. I saw how gently the teachers reproved their charges, and how merciful were their punishments, how apt their examples. They motivated with rewards, and uplifted with wisdom. In short, the teachers painted the ugliness and horror of vice and the beauty of virtue so that, abhorring one and loving the other, their students might realize the destinies for which they’d been born.

  Scipio: So true, Berganza. They say that if Jesuits ran the world, we’d be a lot better off. For spiritual guidance, hardly anyone can touch them. They’re like mirrors that reflect purity, piety, great sagacity and, finally, profound humility—the keystone of all happiness.

  Berganza: Amen to that. To go on with the story, my masters now liked me to carry their haversacks to them all the time, which I gladly did. I lived the life of a king—and even better, because I was carefree. The students liked to play with me, and I was so loving with them that they could put a hand in my mouth, and the littlest ones would ride on my back. They’d throw their caps or hats, and I would fetch them cleanly with a great show of rejoicing. They’d give me all I could eat, and they loved to see that, when they brought me walnuts or filberts, I’d crack them like a monkey, leaving the shells and eating just the meat. Just for fun, one of them brought me a huge salad in a napkin once, which I ate just as if I were human. It was winter, when buttered rolls are all the rage in Seville, and more than one Latin textbook was sold to spoil me with pastry.

  In short, I lived like a well-fed student without hunger or the pox, which is as good as it gets, since if those weren’t such a big part of student life, no other would be happier or more delightful. Among scholars, virtue and fun keep company, and they while away their youth in learning and fun.

  From glory and peace, fate invariably came to wrench me for the proverbial “perfectly good reasons,” which always seem to trump reason itself. It so happened those teachers noticed that, during the half-hour the students got between classes, they preferred to play with me instead of reviewing their lessons. As a result, the faculty told my masters not to bring me to class. The two brothers obeyed, returning me home to my old guard-dog duties. Since the old man had since forgotten the mercy he’d granted in letting me roam free day and night, I had to submit my neck to the chain again, and my body to a dogbed they threw down for me on the floor.

  Ah, friend Scipio, if you but knew what a hard thing it is to pass from a happy state to an unhappy one. When misery and misfortune last too long, they either finish at length in death, or they create a habit and custom of forbearance, which often alleviates the worst. But when from terrible, calamitous luck, suddenly one comes to enjoy great good fortune, feeling venturesome and happy—and then, little by little, the original bad luck returns, and with it the earlier trials and misfortunes—it’s such an excruciating pain that, if it doesn’t kill you, it’s only to torment you the more while you’re still alive.

  As I said, I went back to my dog’s rations, and to the bones that a household serving slave threw me, and even those I had to fight over with two spotted cats. Free and easy, they thought nothing of snatching whatever fell outside the radius of my chain.

  Brother Scipio, may heaven grant you everything you desire if, without taking offense, you’ll let me philosophize just a bit. If I left out the things that have just come to mind, my story would end incomplete and come to nothing.

  Scipio: Berganza, just be sure this sudden itch to philosophize isn’t the devil’s work. Gossip’s best alibi is to hide and sugarcoat its dangers by letting on that you’re just speaking hypothetically, and that invective is just constructive criticism, meant to be helpful. And there’s no backbiter, if you really dig into his background, who isn’t toxic with venom and bile. But hey, knowing this, philosophize all you want.

  Berganza: You can be sure, Scipio, that I’m through gossiping, because I made that vow not to. As I was saying, since I spent all day sitting around, and since idleness leads to woolgathering, I went back over some Latin that had stayed with me from what I’d heard while I was still in class with my masters.

  When I found my comprehension somewhat improved by this habit, I determined, as if I already knew how to talk even then, to take advantage of this exercise whenever I could—but not as some ignoramuses do. There are those who interlard their conversations from time to time with some brief, pithy Latin phrase, giving strangers to understand that they’re great Latinists when they hardly know how to decline a noun or conjugate a verb.

  Scipio: That’s not as bad as those who actually know Latin. Some of them are so oblivious that they’ll spray it around like spit, even when they’re talking with a shoemaker or a seamstress.

  Berganza: It just shows you that anyone who speaks Latin before the clueless sins as much as those who speak it cluelessly themselves.

  Scipio: Another thing you ought to know is that speaking Latin doesn’t keep you from being an ass.

  Berganza: Well, who doubts that? The reason is clear. In Roman times everybody spoke Latin as their mother tongue, yet there must’ve been some morons even then. Speaking Latin didn’t absolve them of stupidity.

  Scipio: Berganza old sport, it takes brains to know when to shut up in your own language and when to speak in Latin.

  Berganza: So it does, since you can sound like an idiot as easily in Latin as in your own language. I’ve known erudite boneheads and tiresome grammarians, and Latin-spewing dilettantes who can effortlessly exasperate anybody not just once, but repeatedly.

  Scipio: Enough already. Get on with your philosophizing.

  Berganza: That was it—what I just got through saying.

  Scipio: What?

  Berganza: All that about Latin and the vernacular, which I started and you helped me finish.

  Scipio: You call all that negativity philosophizing? So that’s how it is! Keep on making excuses for this damned epidemic of slander and—call it what you like—it’ll have them calling us Cynics, the original gossiping dogs. For crying out loud, shut up already and get on with your story.

  Berganza: How can I continue my story if I shut up?

  Scipio: I mean get to the point, and quit pinning so many extra tails on your story that it looks like an octopus.

  Berganza: Speak forthrightly. All this about tails just won’t do.

  Scipio: You’re wrong if you think it’s not rude and crude to call things by their right names, as if it weren’t better, if you have to call them something, to use roundabouts and curlicues to get around the unpleasantness of hearing them described clearly. Handsome is as handsome sounds.

  Berganza: All right then, I believe you. And, as I was saying, as if it weren’t enough that fate banished me from my classes and the joyful, relaxed life I’d spent in them, leashing me behind a door, replacing the generosity of the students with the meanness of an African slave girl—this also made me paranoid, where before I’d known only quiet and rest. Take it from me, Scipio, misfortune finds the unfortunate, even if they hide in the farthest corners of the earth.

  I say this because the slave girl was in love with another African, also a slave of the house. He slept on a porch between the inner and outer doors of my station, and they couldn’t meet except at night. With that in mind, they’d stolen or copied the housekeys, and most every night the slave girl slipped downstairs and, stopping my mouth with some piece of meat or cheese, let the African in. Together they had a gay old time, thanks to my silence, and at the cost of many things the slave girl pilfered for me. Some days my conscience tormented me over her gifts, but without them my flanks would’ve pinched my ribs, and I’d’ve looked more like a greyhound than a mastiff. Still, owing to my good nature, I wanted to do right by my master, since I was ac
cepting his hospitality and eating his bread. This is always the right thing to do, not just for our famously loyal kind, but for all who serve.

  Scipio: Now that’s what I call philosophy, Berganza, because its logic derives from plain truth and clear understanding. But go on, and don’t spin out your yarn—you don’t want me to say tale—so endlessly.

  Berganza: But first I beg you to tell me, if you know, what philosophy is. Though I use the word, I don’t know what it means. I only know that it’s supposed to be good.

  Scipio: Here it is in a nutshell—the expression has two Greek roots, philos and sophia. Philos means love, and sophia means science, so that philosophy means “love of science,” and a philosopher, a lover of science.

  Berganza: How wise you are, Scipio. Who the devil taught you Greek?

  Scipio: Berganza, you really are an idiot if you make a big deal out of this. These are things that any schoolchild knows, and just as many people fake their way through Greek as they do Latin.

  Berganza: That’s what I’m saying, and I only wish somebody would put those people under a winepress and squeeze out the meager trickle of their erudition. That way they wouldn’t keep dazzling the world with the glitter of their broken Greek and false Latin, as the Portuguese dazzle the Guinea men.

  Scipio: Now Berganza, bite your tongue—and I should make a meal of mine—because all we’re doing is gossiping again.

  Berganza: Yes, but at least I’m not obliged to do what I’ve heard that somebody called Corondas did, a Tyrian who made a law that, on penalty of death, nobody should enter his city’s forum armed. Forgetting this, one day he entered the council chambers wearing his broadsword. Alerted to his crime, and remembering the sentence decreed for it, he promptly unsheathed his sword and ran himself through—the first to make the law, to break it, and to pay the penalty.

  What I said was never intended as law, just a pledge that I’d bite my tongue whenever you found me guilty of gossiping. Nowadays, though, nobody behaves with the legality and rigor of old. Today they make a law and tomorrow they break it, and maybe it’s better that way. After all, no sooner does somebody promise to change his habits than he immediately falls into worse ones. It’s one thing to extol discipline and another to exercise it, and there’s a vast chasm between the saying and the doing. So let the devil bite his tongue, but I’m not about to bite mine here, where nobody can see me or praise my fine character.

  Scipio: To go by that, Berganza, if you were a man you’d be a hypocrite. Everything you do would be for show, feigned, false, put on only to puff yourself up like all the hypocrites do.

  Berganza: I don’t know what I’d do as a man. I only know what I want to do now—not hold myself back, bottling up so many remarks that I don’t know when I’ll get around to them. On top of that, I’m afraid that sundown will plunge us back into darkness, with our tongues tied again.

  Scipio: That’s in God’s hands. On with your story, and don’t swerve from the straight and narrow with irrelevant detours. That way, however long you take, you’ll get there faster.

  Berganza: As I was saying, once I saw the insolence, thievery, and dishonesty of those slaves, I determined, like any good servant, to hinder them as best I could. I was good at this, and before I left I succeeded. The slave girl would come down, as I said, to disport with the African, confident that the meat or bread or cheese they threw me would make me mute. Gifts can do a lot, Scipio.

  Scipio: Plenty. Don’t dawdle, and get on with it.

  Berganza: I remember when I was studying, I heard an instructor recite a Latin proverb, which they called an apothegm, that went, Habet bovem in lingua.

  Scipio: Oh, out comes the Latin! Have you already forgotten what we just said about everybody who shoehorns Latin into everyday conversation?

  Berganza: But the Latin fits perfectly here. You must know that the Athenians used to have a coin stamped with the figure of an ox. When some judge blew a case because he’d been bribed, they’d say he had an ox on his tongue.

  Scipio: And what does that have to do with anything?

  Berganza: Isn’t it clear that the bribes of the slave girl made me mute for days on end, and that, when she went down to see her beloved African, I couldn’t bring myself to bark? As I said, gifts can do a lot.

  Scipio: I just agreed that they do. If it weren’t going to take us even longer, I’d give you a thousand examples of how much gifts can do. Maybe I will, if I ever get a word in edgewise.

  Berganza: God grant what you desire. Now listen. In the end, my good faith won out over the evil gifts of the slave girl. One inky night, as she was coming down for her usual pastime, I went after her without barking, so as not to disturb the household, and in an instant I tore her shift to shreds and gouged her thigh. That little maneuver sufficed to keep her bedridden for more than a week, faking I don’t know what illness for her masters. She healed up, returned another night, and I tangled with the bitch again. Without biting her, I clawed her all over as if I were carding a fleece. Our battles were silent. I always emerged the victor and the slave girl slunk off, checked and grouchy.

  But her fury took its toll on my coat, and my health. She discontinued my ration and the soup bones, and little by little you could make out the knobs of my spine. Nevertheless, though they kept me from eating, they couldn’t keep me from barking. So the slave girl, to finish me off once and for all, served me a sponge fried in lard.

  I knew her wickedness for what it was. I saw that the sponge was worse than poison, because the stomach of anybody who ate it would swell up till it carried him off. Since it seemed impossible to guard against the trickery of such sworn enemies, I decided to make tracks, and steal away right under their very eyes.

  One day I found myself unchained, and without saying goodbye to anyone in the house, I stepped out into the street. In less than a hundred steps, luck had brought me to the constable I mentioned at the start of my story, who was a great friend of my old master Nicky Flatnose. No sooner had he seen me than he recognized me and called my name. I greeted him too, answering his call with the accustomed show of caresses. He took me by the collar and said to his two deputies, “This is the famous watchdog who belonged to a great friend of mine. Let’s take him home.” The deputies approved, and said if I proved helpful to them, they’d vouch for me. They wanted to put me on a leash, but my new master said it wasn’t necessary, that I would follow along without one because I knew him.

  I’ve forgotten to tell you that a gypsy in a bar had taken off my collar with the oiled spikes, the one I’d taken with me when I retired from the shepherd’s life. I was already walking around without it, so the constable put a collar worked in Moorish leather on me instead. Consider, Scipio, the revolving wheel of my fortunes: yesterday a student, today a deputy.

  Scipio: That’s just the way of the world. It won’t do to go exaggerating the inequities of fate, as if there were really all that much difference between carrying a badge or a basket of scraps. I can’t stand listening to guys complain about bad luck when all they ever wanted out of life was to luck into an easy living. The whining, the tantrums they throw! You know they do! And all so somebody listening will think that only a bad break could’ve shanghaied them from easy street to skid row.

  Berganza: You have a point. Anyway, this constable used to hang out with a certain notary. They had fallen in with two hussies, more or less—really just less. It’s true they had pretty good features, but they lied, and sashayed around like harlots. These women served the constables as lures for their peculiar variety of landlocked fishing. They dressed so that anyone within a rifleshot would know them for loose women. They always kept an eye peeled for out-of-towners when the market fair came to Cadiz and Seville, and they reaped quite a harvest. Nary a Breton was safe from their attentions, and when these paragons of womanhood met up with such a greaseball, they’d alert the constable and the notary as to which inn they were bound for. Once the strumpet got her mark upstairs, these legal eagles would bu
rst in and arrest the lot of them on morals charges. Somehow, though, the victims never made it to jail, because they always bought their way off.

  It so happened that Colindres, the constable’s paramour, bewitched one Breton all the way from his bunions to his brilliantined hair. She engineered supper and a tryst at his inn, and gave the signal to her boyfriend. No sooner had she and the Breton disrobed than the constable, the notary, and two henchmen turned up. The lovers were interrupted, and the constable inflated the charges and ordered them to throw on their clothes, because he was running them in. The Breton scourged himself piteously. Overcome by mercy, the notary stepped in and, with much beseeching, argued their fine down to only one hundred reales. The Breton reached for the chamois breeches he’d put on a chair at the foot of the bed, where he had money to pay for his freedom, but the breeches weren’t there, nor could they be.

  You see, as soon I’d entered the suite, a scent like bacon had reached my nostrils and unstrung me completely. I followed the smell and found its source in a pocket of the breeches. What a hunk of gourmet ham I found there! To devour and savor it without making any noise, I dragged the pants out into the street. There I applied myself to the ham for all I was worth. When I came back to the room the Breton was exclaiming, in adulterated and bastardized, though still intelligible pidgin, that he wanted his pants back—and the fifty gold florins therein. The notary assumed that either Colindres or the henchmen had lifted them, and the constable thought so too. He called them all aside, but nobody confessed to anything, and all hell promptly broke loose. Seeing what was happening, I trotted back into the street where I’d left the pants to bring them back, since what good was money to me? But I didn’t find them, because some lucky pedestrian had already helped himself.