The Dialogue of the Dogs Read online

  Seeing that the Breton didn’t have money for a bribe, the constable couldn’t wait, and prepared to take from the landlady what the Breton couldn’t cough up. He rang for her, and in she came half-naked. When she heard the yammering and complaining from the Breton and saw Colindres in the buff and wailing, the constable apoplectic, the notary not much happier, and the deputies pocketing everything that wasn’t nailed down, the landlady wasn’t exactly thrilled. Then the constable ordered her to put some clothes on and come with him to jail for running a house of ill repute.

  After that, it was off to the races! Voices rose, chaos mounted, and finally the landlady said: “Mister constable, mister notary, you can’t fool me. I see your whole scheme. You can keep your bullying and threats. Now shut your mouths and go with God. If not, by my faith, I’ll throw caution out the window and shout this whole story from the housetops. I know Colindres all too well, and I also know that for many months the constable has been her pimp. Don’t make me dwell on this. Just give the man back his money and let’s be reasonable, because I am an honorable woman, and my husband has his patent of nobility, with its ad porcupinium re memorandum and its seals, God be praised. I run this establishment like a regular lady, without bothering anybody. I’ve posted my license out where the whole world can see it, so keep your sob stories because I’ve heard them all. If any women have ever set foot here with my blessing, I’m Helen of Troy. But the lodgers all have keys, and I’m not some sphinx who can see through walls.”

  This harangue of the landlady’s, and how she read them all like a book, gave my masters pause. But since she was the only mark left with any money, they insisted on taking her to jail anyway. She complained to high heaven of the idiocy and injustice they were visiting on her with her husband away—him being such a prominent hidalgo, of course.

  Meanwhile, the Breton bellowed for his fifty florins. The deputies swore they hadn’t seen the breeches, so help them God. The notary suspected that Colindres had the florins on her and motioned for the constable to frisk her, since she customarily acquainted herself with the pockets and purses of everybody she met. She countered that the Breton was drunk and had to be lying about the money.

  Basically, everything was confusion, shouts and oaths, without any hope of peace. They’d probably still be arguing if at that moment the magistrate hadn’t walked in. He’d been on his way to visit the posada already and had heard the commotion. He asked the source of all this ruckus, and the landlady was only too happy to fill him in. She pointed out the temptress Colindres, who was already dressed by now, and disclosed her infamous friendship with the constable. She detailed their tricks and their modus operandi, and again denied that any shady woman had ever entered the house with her consent.

  She all but canonized herself, and deified her husband. She hollered to a servant to run and fetch her husband’s patent of nobility out of the strongbox, so the magistrate could see it and know just from looking that such an honorable man’s wife could never put a foot wrong. If she ran a hostelry, it was because she had no choice, and God only knew how it weighed on her. If she could only have enough to live on, she would hang up her keyring this minute.

  The magistrate, angered by all this talk and brandishing of documents, said, “Madam chatelaine, I’d love to believe that your husband has a certificate of nobility—so long as you’ll confess to me that he’s a noble innkeeper.”

  “And proud of it,” the landlady responded. “What family tree anywhere, however sturdy, doesn’t have a little blight?”

  “All I can tell you, sister, is that you had better get dressed, because I’m taking you in.”

  This news knocked the landlady for a loop. She raked her hair and raised her voice but, for all that, the officious magistrate took everybody to jail—the Breton, Colindres, and the landlady together.

  Later I found out that the Breton lost his fifty florins plus ten more in legal fees, the innkeeper just as much, and that Colindres escaped unscathed. The same day they released her she hooked a sailor, who offset what the Breton had cost her by succumbing to the same shenanigans. So you see, Scipio, what a lot of harm a little bacon can do.

  Scipio: What your master’s flimflammery can do, is more like it.

  Berganza: Just you listen, because there’s more—though, naturally, it pains me to speak ill of constables and notaries.

  Scipio: Sure, they’re not all crooks. Many, many notaries are good, faithful, and law-abiding, and only want to be of service without hurting anybody. Not all of them paper you to death with lawsuits, or leak information to the other side, or pad their hours. Nor do they go poking into strangers’ lives to drum up business, or get in bed with the judge to play “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”

  Nor do all constables consort with bums, no-goodniks, or girlfriends to help them work some grift. Many, many of them are classy and well brought up. Plenty of them aren’t your arrogant, insolent, misbegotten ratfinks, like those who go around flophouses measuring strangers’ swords and, if they find them a hair past legal, throw the book at them. And certainly they don’t all cut you loose right after they arrest you, or act as judge and jury whenever they feel like it.

  Berganza: My master the constable took the high road. He boasted about his valor and his arrest record. His bravery held up well enough without endangering his person, but his purse was not so lucky. One day at the Jerez Gate he captured six famous ruffians singlehandedly. I couldn’t help him because I was muzzled with a rope, which he, too, kept on me by day and only removed at night. I stood marveling at his daring, his brio and courage. He dodged in and out among the ruffians’ six swords as if they were cornstalks. It was a marvelous thing to see how deftly he lunged—the thrusts, the parries, the calculation, and his eye ever alert for anyone sneaking up behind him.

  Finally, in my opinion and anyone else’s who saw or even heard about the fight, he loomed as a new Rodamonte, having dueled his enemies from the gate to the marble-columned college of Mase Rodrigo, which was more than one hundred steps away. There he left them safely in custody and returned to collect the battle trophies, three scabbards in all. He went to deliver these to the magistrate—who, if I’m not mistaken, was then the licentiate Sarmiento of Valladares, famed for the destruction of Sauceda Prison. People goggled at my master as he strode the streets, pointing as if to say,

  “That’s the brave one who dared to pluck the flower of Andalusian manhood.”

  He passed what was left of the day swanning around the city, and night found us in Triana street hard by the powder mill. My master having cased the place (as they say in their lingo) to see if anyone was watching, he then stepped into a house. I went in after him, and there in a courtyard all unbuckled and without cape or sword, we discovered all the thugs from the fight. The one who looked like the host had a great pitcher of wine in one hand and a great tankard in the other, which he raised, brimming with foamy wine, to toast the whole company. No sooner had they seen my master than everybody went up to him with open arms and toasted him too. He returned every toast and would’ve raised more of his own if he’d seen even the slightest percentage in it, being a nice enough guy, and reluctant to offend anybody over trifles.

  To tell you now all that passed between them over supper would plunge me into a labyrinth impossible to escape. There were the robberies they bragged about, the women they extolled or slandered, the toasts they swapped. Add to this the fallen bandits they mourned, the fencing moves they demonstrated—halfway through the meal, they even hoisted themselves up and started dueling with their hands, illustrating various feints, employing fine swordsman’s jargon—and, last but not least, the august personage of their host, whom they all respected as lord and master.

  Finally I came to understand that the owner of the house, whom they called Pegleg, was doubtless a front for thieves and a backer of crimes, and that my master’s fight had been rehearsed down to the timing of the retreat and the forfeit of their scabbards. My master paid them
cash for their performances right there and then, plus what Pegleg said the supper cost. The meal lasted almost till dawn, with great rejoicing all around.

  As a kind of dessert, they fed my master a tip on a new ruffian who had just hit town from abroad. This character must have been tougher than they were, and they were ratting him out just from envy. My master arrested him the next night, naked and in bed. If he’d been dressed, I could see just from looking at him, he wouldn’t have gone so quietly.

  With this capture, hard on the heels of the swordfight, my cowardly master’s fame grew. He was really no braver than a rabbit, but the checks he picked up and the drinks he stood polished his valiant reputation to a high shine. Everything he piled up from wages and bribes, he just as quickly pissed away down the drain of his renown.

  But be patient now and listen to something that happened to him, this time without my adding so much as a comma. Two thieves had stolen a very fine horse in Antequerra. They took it to Seville, and to sell it safely they used a gambit that struck me as ingenious. They went to stay in different inns, and one went to court and filed a petition that a certain Pedro de Losada owed him four hundred reales, the amount of the loan proven by a signed I.O.U. The magistrate sent for this Losada, to verify the signature. If Losada admitted it, they would either impound his property to cover the debt or throw him in jail. This magistrate tapped my master and his friend the notary to accompany the petitioning thief, who then took everybody to his confederate’s inn. There, “Losada” promptly acknowledged his signature, confessed the debt, and offered the stolen horse as collateral.

  The first time my master saw the horse he fell madly in love with him, and called dibs if it should ever come up for sale. Sure enough, the thief with the horse waited out a brief escrow and put it up for auction. He wound up unloading it at the fire-sale price of five hundred reales, to a catspaw my master had put up to buying it for him. The horse was worth half again as much as it went for, but the seller needed a quick sale, so he palmed his merchandise off on the first bidder. One thief collected on a debt he wasn’t owed, the other got a receipt he didn’t need, and my master wound up with the horse, which brought more bad luck down on his head than Sejanus of old did for the Romans. The thieves went off in search of other marks and, two days later, after my master had spit-shined the horse’s harness and other appurtenances, he appeared astride it in the plaza St. Francis, looking more vacuous and pompous than a rube dressed up in his Sunday best. Everyone congratulated him on such a good buy, assuring him that it was worth one hundred fifty ducats as sure as five cents is worth a nickel. Cutting and strutting on his mount, he soon saw his own tragedy enacted in the theater of that selfsame plaza. In the midst of all his prancing and promenading, two impressive, well-dressed men arrived.

  “Praise God, it’s my horse Ironfoot,” one cried, “who was stolen from me a few days ago in Antequerra!” All four servants with him instantly corroborated his claim that this was Ironfoot, the stolen steed. This floored my master. The owner sued for his horse back, and proofs were put forward. The true owner’s case was airtight enough that the verdict went against my master, and he was unhorsed. Word got around of the thieves’ sleight of hand—how the long arm of the law had intervened to help them fence what they had stolen—and all rejoiced that my master’s avarice had finally proven his undoing.

  And his woes didn’t stop there. That night the magistrate himself rounded up a posse of us, because he’d heard that thieves were abroad in the barrios of San Julian, and just as the vigilantes reached a crossroads, off to the side we saw a man running. The magistrate took me by the collar and sicced me on him, shouting, “After the thief, Gavilan! Good boy! Get the thief, Gavilan, get the thief!”

  Already tired of the constable’s misdeeds, I complied with the magistrate’s orders to the letter and lunged for my own master. Before he knew it I’d knocked him down, and if they hadn’t pulled me off him, I’d’ve taken it out of his hide in spades. By the time they dragged us apart, we looked like the proverbial dog’s breakfast. The other constables wanted to punish me, even put me down, and they would’ve done it too if the magistrate hadn’t said, “Nobody touches him. The dog only did as he was told.”

  Everyone understood, and without goodbyes I slipped away through a gap in the wall and into the countryside. Before dawn I got to Mairena, a town four leagues from Seville. There I had the good luck to find a company of soldiers who I heard were going to embark for Cartagena. Four of my most recent master’s ruffian friends numbered among them, and the drum major had been a constable himself—and, like so many of the best drummers, a great showoff. They all recognized me and talked at me, and asked me about my master as if I could actually respond. But the one who showed me the most affection was the drummer, and I determined to stay with him, if he would have me, and take ship with them even as far as Italy or Flanders. Though the saying goes that “If you’re stupid at home, you’ll be stupid in Rome,” I think, and you should agree, that traveling and meeting different people makes a man wise.

  Scipio: That’s so true. I remember hearing one of my masters, who was no fool, say that the famous Greek Ulysses earned his reputation for wisdom purely by traveling a lot and spending time with people from all over. So I agree with your decision to go wherever they took you.

  Berganza: It so happens the drummer, who now had the chance to show off more than ever, began to teach me to dance to his drum, and to do other tricks so difficult that no other dog could ever learn them.

  Progress was intermittent, since we were almost out of the neighborhood where the soldiers had been press-ganged, and they had no martinet to keep them in line. The captain was young, but a very good horseman and a good Christian. The guardsman wasn’t many months removed from the royal scullery.

  The sergeant was battle-tested and wise, and great at mustering the troops and harrying them from the barracks toward the docks.

  On this company of scurrilous reprobates marched, insulting every place they passed, and making matters worse by cursing most the one person who least deserved it. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown—or the sergeant’s chevrons—since some of his charges will always resent him for the privileges of the rest. He can’t dispel that dissension, even with the best will in the world, since almost everything in a war brings with it hardship, regimentation, and inconvenience.

  Meantime, in less than a fortnight, thanks to my own innate ability and the tutelage of the fellow I’d taken as my patron, I learned to roll over for applause, instead of rolling drunks for a crooked constable. He taught me the curvets of a Neapolitan horse and to walk in circles like a mule around a gristmill, along with other things that, if I hadn’t taken care not to overdo it, would’ve called into question whether I wasn’t some sort of hellhound. He called me “The Learned Dog.” We’d scarcely arrive at an inn before he’d walk all around town banging his drum. He asked everybody if they wanted to come to this house, or that hospital, and see the marvelous talents and tricks of The Learned Dog, and all for eight maravedis—or even half that, if the town was small enough.

  After flackery like this, the whole village turned out to see me, and they all went away rapt and happy for the privilege. My master was rolling in it now, and set up six of his friends like kings. Greed and envy awoke in the other scalawags a will to steal me, and they went around waiting for their chance.

  This idea of making a living while doing nothing useful at all has a lot to recommend it. That’s why there are so many puppeteers in Spain, so many traveling shows and sellers of pins and sheet music, since all their wares, even if they sold the lot of them, wouldn’t be worth a day’s honest wages. Yet not one of these people budges from their chowhouses or taverns the whole year through, which tells me that the tidal wave of their alcohol intake must flow from some wellspring other than their work ethic. All of them are useless, irredeemable vagabonds, just winesponges and maggots.

  Scipio: That’ll do, Berganza. Let’s not backs
lide. Keep going, because the night is getting short, and I’d hate for the sun to light up the sky and throw us back into a dark age of silence.

  Berganza: Silence is golden, so listen and glisten. When my master saw how well I imitated the Neapolitan canter, and since it’s easy to add to tricks once they’ve been invented, he made me some handworked leather trappings and a little sedan chair that fit on my back. Above it he put a little manikin with a small lance for tilting at hoops, and taught me to run straight toward a ring he had hung between two poles. On show days he let it get around that The Learned Dog would tilt at rings and perform other new, never-before-seen feats—which I then proceeded to ad-lib, as they say, so as not to make my master out a liar.

  We arrived, then, after a prodigious tramp, at Montilla, home of the great and famous holy man Marqués de Priego, master of the house of Aguilar and Montilla. They put my master up in a wayfarer’s hospital because he’d called ahead for himself. He then went around posting the usual handbills and, since the fame of The Learned Dog’s abilities and wit had preceded him, in less than an hour the courtyard had filled with people. My master fairly glowed to see the bounty of his harvest, and that day he played the showman to perfection.

  The entertainment began with a series of jumps I made through the hoop of a sieve, as big around as a barrel stave. My master cued me with the usual questions. When he lowered a rattan cane he carried, it was always the signal for a jump, and when he held it up, I knew to stand still. His first command that day (the most memorable of my life) was to call, “Come, friend Gavilan, jump for that randy old man you know who dyes his beard black. If you’d prefer not to, jump for the pomp and circumstance of Doña Pimpinela de Plafagonia, who used to run around with that Galician waitress in Valdeastillas. Don’t you like magic, Gavilan my boy? Then jump for the scholar Pasillas, who calls himself doctor even though he never graduated. My, but you’re lazy! Why don’t you jump? Ah, now I take your meaning—jump for the wine of Esquivias, famous as those of Ciudad Real, San Martín and Rivadavia.”