The Dialogue of the Dogs Read online

  He lowered the stick and I jumped, all the time feeling sorry for the targets of his sarcastic digs.

  Then he turned to the gallery and declaimed, “Don’t think for a minute, worthy senators, that what this dog knows is anything to sneeze at. I have taught him twenty-four tricks that even a hawk would fly in to see. You’d walk thirty leagues just to watch the least of them. He knows how to dance the sarabande and the chaconne better than their own inventors, to drink himself a cask of wine without spilling a drop, and to chant his scales as good as any Benedictine. All these things and too many others yet to tell, your mercies will see over all the days that our troop stops here. For now, let’s see The Learned Dog jump again, and from there things will really get interesting.”

  With this he kept his “senators” in suspense, and got them all fired up to see everything I could do. My master turned to me and said, “Gavilan my boy, go back and, with your effortless agility and grace, do all the jumps you’ve just done, only backwards. But you have to do it in tribute to the famous witch who they say used to live around here.”

  He had hardly said this before the head nurse of the hospital, an old woman who looked well over sixty, raised her voice and screeched, “Knave, charlatan, trickster, whoreson, there’s no witch here! If by this you mean Camacha, she has already paid for her sin, and where she is, God knows. If you mean me, fancy boy, I am not now, nor have I ever in my life been a witch. And if anybody ever thought me one, thanks to false witnesses, an arbitrary law, and a capricious, ill-informed judge, well, the whole world now knows the life I lead in penitence—not for some witchcraft I didn’t do, but for the many sins I’ve admitted.

  “So, you base drummer, get out of my hospital, or I swear by all that’s holy, I’ll get you out.” And with this, she began to scream so many insults at my master that she reduced him to terrified confusion. The upshot was, no way would she let the show go on. All this fuss didn’t weigh on my master for long, because he got to keep the money, and merely postponed the show he’d missed there for another day and another hospital.

  The people left cursing the old woman, calling her not just a witch but a sorceress, and not just old but hairy, too. Despite all this, we stayed in the hospital that night, and when the old woman found me alone on the grounds she asked, “Is it you, Montiel? Is it you, perchance, my boy?” I lifted my head and looked up at her for a long time. When she saw this, she bent down to me with tears in her eyes and threw her arms around my neck. She would’ve kissed me on the lips if I’d let her, but that was disgusting, and I wouldn’t stand for it.

  Scipio: I agree completely. Who wants to kiss an old crone, or be kissed by one?

  Berganza: And now what I want to tell you is something I should’ve told you at the start of my story, so we wouldn’t have wasted so much time talking about how we can talk. Get a load of what this old woman said to me:

  “Montiel my boy, come along behind me, so you’ll recognize my room. Arrange to come back tonight, and we can be alone there. I’ll leave the door open. You should realize that I have many things to tell you about your life that will do you good.”

  I bowed my head as a token of obedience, which, as she told me afterward, did the trick of persuading her that I was the dog Montiel she was looking for. Dazed and confused, I waited for nightfall in hopes that it would clear up the mystery, or the miracle, of what the old woman had told me. Since I’d heard her called a witch, I expected amazing things from the very sight and sound of her.

  I finally arrived at her room, which was dark, narrow and low, lit only by the dim glow of an earthenware lamp. The old woman trimmed the wick and sat down on a small trunk. Pulling me toward her without a word, she hugged me again, and again I had to take care that she didn’t kiss me. The first thing she said to me was,

  “I had hoped that, before these eyes of mine closed on the world for the last time, heaven might vouchsafe me one more look at you, my boy. Now that I’ve seen you, let death deliver me from this tiresome life. You must understand, child, that in this village there once lived the most famous witch the world has ever known. They called her Camacha de Montilla, and she was so unique in her black arts that all the Circes, Ericthos, and Medeas that I hear the history books are full of—even they couldn’t touch her. She’d freeze the clouds whenever she felt like it, covering the face of the sun with them, and she could calm the most turbid sky with just a look. She’d whisk men in an instant to distant lands, and she’d miraculously repair young ladies who had proven careless in protecting their virtue. She chaperoned widows, so as to safeguard at least the illusion of their bereavement. She annulled and arranged marriages as she pleased. In December she had fresh roses in her garden, and she reaped wheat in January. Making watercress grow in a cistern was hardly the greatest of her exploits, nor was making an image of the living or the dead appear, on request, in a mirror, or on the fingernail of a child.

  “She was famous for turning men into animals, in particular for keeping a sacristan for six years in the form of a mule. Really and truly, how she did it I’ve never been able to grasp. They say of those old mages that they turned men into beasts, but the wisest say it was nothing of the kind, that with their great beauty and blandishments they attracted men in the ways those men liked best, and before long enslaved them until they seemed like beasts.

  “But in you, my boy, experience tells me the opposite. I know you’re a rational person in the semblance of a dog, unless Camacha has contrived this illusion with the black art called tropelía, which makes one thing look like another. Come what may, the thing that weighs on me is that neither I nor your mother, though we both studied under the great Camacha, ever came to know as much as she did. And this wasn’t for want of ingenuity, or ability, or soul, which we had in spades, but because of her malice. She never wanted to teach us her best spells, but wanted to keep them for herself.

  “Your mother, my boy, went by Montiela, and she was second only to Camacha. My name is Canizares, and if not as wise as those two, my ambition was at least as healthy. Truth is, your mother’s appetite for drawing a circle and stepping inside with a legion of demons, surpassed even Camacha’s. Me, I was always a bit shy, and contented myself with conjuring half a legion. But, taking nothing away from either of them, I had them both licked in preparing the ointments that we witches use to anoint ourselves, nor could those today who follow and keep our rules ever match me.

  “You have to understand, my boy, that since I see how swiftly my life is receding from me on the wings of time, I’ve wanted for a while now to leave behind all the vices of witchery that I reveled in for so many years. The only thing left me is the fascination of being a sorceress, which is a very difficult vice to kick. Your mother was the same way. She swore off many vices and did many good works in this life, but at the last she died a witch. She didn’t die of any illness, but from the sting of envy that Camacha, her teacher, bore her, either because of some other jealous rift, which I could never discover, or probably because Montiela was on her way to knowing as much as she did.

  “So when your mother entered her confinement and the hour of the birth arrived, it was your godmother Camacha who received with her own hands what she delivered, and showed her she had borne two puppies. The moment your mother saw them she cried to Camacha, ‘There is evil here, there is derangement!’

  ‘But sister Montiela, I am your friend. I will cover up this birth. You concentrate on getting healthy, and rest assured that this your disgrace will stay entombed in silence. Don’t worry about a thing, since we both know that, save your porter friend Rodríguez, you haven’t been near anyone for quite some time. So your canine litter must come from some other source, and herald some mystery.’

  “Your mother and I, since I was present the whole time, were dumbstruck. Camacha left and took the puppies. I stayed to help Montiela, and she just couldn’t believe what had happened to her.

  “Camacha’s last day arrived and, in the final hour of her life, she to
ld your mother how she had changed her sons into dogs because of the grudge she bore. But she said to rest easy, because they would recapture their shapes when they least expected, only not before they’d seen the following with their own eyes:

  They’ll revert to their rightful guise

  When they descry with their own eyes

  The high and mighty dunked in suet

  And the humble lifted to the skies

  By a hand with strength enough to do it.

  “Camacha said this to your dying mother, as I say.

  “Your mother wrote these words down and committed them to memory, and I fixed them in mine against the day I’d be able to tell one of you. The better to recognize you, I’ve called every dog I see whose color matches yours by your mother’s name, just to see if one might respond to a name so unusual for a dog. This afternoon, when I saw you performing so many wonders and heard you called The Learned Dog, and when you raised your head to look at me after I called you in the corral, I came to believe that you are Montiela’s son. So it’s with great pleasure that I can finally tell you your origins, and how to recover your true form. I only wish you could restore yourself as easily as Apuleius prescribed in The Golden Ass, namely, by eating a rose. But your transformation depends on other people’s actions, not yours. What to do, my boy, is to commend yourself deep in your heart to God and hope that these, I don’t want to call them prophecies, that these poetic divinations will come true. This will surely happen, since the great Camacha said it would. You and your brother, if he’s alive, will finally see yourselves as you desire.

  “What grieves me is that, with my end just around the corner, I won’t have the chance to see it. Many times I’ve wanted to ask The Horned One how your predicament will turn out, but I haven’t dared, because he never gives a straight answer to what we ask, only rejoinders vulnerable to different readings. There’s no point asking our dark lord and master anything, because he mixes truth in with a thousand lies. I’ve decided he doesn’t know anything of the future for certain, but only by conjecture.

  “Still, he has us witches so enthralled that, even after all his heinous deceits, we can’t leave him. Instead we go a long way to see him and, on a great lawn, we come together in a numberless throng, witches and warlocks both. They give us insipid food, and other things come to pass that for the sake of truth, God, and my very soul, I dare not tell, so filthy are they, and I don’t want to offend your chaste ears.

  Some suppose that we only go to these sabbaths in a trance, and there the Devil merely clouds our minds with pipe dreams, which afterward we describe as if they’d really happened to us. Others say no, that we really go, body and soul. I hold that both these opinions are true. We can’t know the difference, because everything that happens to us in our imagination is so intense that there’s no telling what’s really true. The Inquisition has performed experiments on some of us in their dungeons, and I think they’ve demonstrated the truth of what I say.

  “My child, I’ve wanted to swear off this evil, and I’ve tried a thousand times. I take solace in my work as a matron and nurse to the poor, and some who die keep me alive with what they bequeath, or what I find among their rags, which I have the responsibility of delousing. I pray rarely, and in public. I gossip often, and in private. I’d rather be a hypocrite than a confessed sinner. The sight of my good works is starting to erase my past crimes from the memories of those who know me. In short, feigned sanctity doesn’t hurt anybody but the one who feigns it. Look, Montiel, I give you this advice: be as good as you can, and if you’re going to be wicked, hide it as well as you can. I’m a witch. I don’t deny it. Your mother was a witch and a sorceress, also undeniable, but the eminently noble front we put up did us credit all over.

  “Three days before she died, the two of us were traipsing through a valley of the Pyrenees on a grand tour. When she died, though, she looked so peaceful and serene that, if not for a wince or two she made a quarter of an hour before her soul departed, she lay on her deathbed as if it were a bridal bower. What pierced her heart was the thought of her two sons, and she was so firm and unshakable that, even at the hour of her death, she couldn’t forgive Camacha. I closed her eyes and accompanied her to the grave, and there I left her for the last time, though I haven’t lost all hope of seeing her before I die. They say she walks through cemeteries and crossroads around here in different guises, so maybe someday I’ll find her, and ask her if she’d have me do anything to put her soul at rest.”

  Every last thing the crone told me in praise of the woman she called my mother was a lance through my heart, and I wanted to leap at her and sink my fangs into her flesh. If I didn’t, it was only to keep death from taking her in such a sinful condition. Finally she told me that she planned that night to anoint herself with oils and go to one of her witches’ sabbaths, and that once there she planned to ask the Devil what my future held. I wanted to ask her what ointments she meant, and she must’ve read my mind, because she responded as if I had asked out loud:

  “This unguent we witches use to anoint ourselves is made from the juices of herbs, which are very cold, and not, as some vulgarly say, from the blood of children we smother. Here you may as well also ask me what pleasure or profit the Devil takes in making us kill the innocent in the first place, since he knows that being baptized, and consequently immaculate and without sin, they go right to heaven, and he suffers excruciating torment for every Christian soul that escapes him. I don’t know how to answer this except with what the proverb says: ‘Some there are who would put out both eyes so long as their enemy loses one.’

  “He must encourage infanticide for the sorrow that killing children gives their parents, which is the greatest that can be imagined. What matters most to him is to make us commit cruel and perverse sins at every opportunity. And God permits all this as punishment for our sins, since without his permission, I’ve seen from experience that the Devil can’t even distract an ant. This is so true that once, when I begged our master to destroy a vineyard belonging to one of my enemies, he said he couldn’t touch even a leaf of it, because God wouldn’t let him. When you grow up to be a man, you’ll understand that all the woes bedeviling people, kings, cities, and towns—the sudden deaths, shipwrecks, comeuppances, in a word all the evils they call catastrophes—come from the hand of the Almighty, according to His will, and that all the cursed calamities and banes originate and proceed from ourselves alone. God is literally impeccable, without sin, from which we can only conclude that we are the authors of our own evildoing, and we conceive it in our own intentions, words, and deeds.

  “For our sins, God lets us commit them.

  “You may be wondering, my boy, if you’re still following this, who made me a theologian. Maybe you’re even saying to yourself, ‘Just listen to the old whore! Why doesn’t she give up witchcraft and return to God, since she knows so much? Doesn’t she know that He’s faster to forgive sins than to permit them?’

  “To this I would respond—if you’d asked me—that the habit of vice becomes second nature, and witchcraft becomes like a muscle. Even in the heat of its frenzy, which is extreme, it carries a chill that freezes and numbs the soul as it burns. It leads to a kind of oblivion, until you don’t recognize either the threat of God’s hell or the glory of His heaven. As a sin of flesh and appetite, inevitably it deadens the senses, warping and beguiling them and keeping them from working as they should. So our souls stay useless, lazy and dispirited, incapable of even a single good thought. Mired like this in the swamp of our misery, they refuse to reach up to God’s outstretched hand, extended in His mercy to lift us up. Mine is one of these souls I’ve painted. I see and understand everything, but because decadence has manacled my will, I have always been, and will always be, wicked.

  “But let’s leave this and get back to this business of the unguents. As I said, they’re so cold that they deprive us of our senses, and we stay splayed and naked on the floor. That’s when they say we hallucinate everything tha
t only seems to be really happening. Other times, after anointing, it feels as if our shapes shift, and we turn into chickens, or owls or crows, and fly to the place where our master awaits us. There we resume our original form and enjoy those delights that I refrain from confiding, since it scandalizes the memory to recall them, and the tongue recoils from speaking them aloud.

  “And yet, for all this, I am a witch, and I cover my many failings with the cloak of hypocrisy. How true that if some esteem me and honor me as good, then plenty more, not two fingers’ width from my ear, call me by a shameful name, the one immortalized by an angry judge who in times past weighed the cases of myself and your mother. He delegated his fury to the hands of a torturer who, his palm ungreased, applied his full, unstinting power to our backs. But this is past, as all things must pass. Memories go blank, life doesn’t come back, language turns halting, and new events evict the old.

  “I am a hospital matron. I try to set a good example, and my oils give me release. I am not so old that I can’t live another year, though I’m seventy-five. I can’t fast because of my age, nor kneel because of dropsy, nor walk in the fiesta because of my weak legs, nor give alms because I’m poor myself. I can’t think noble thoughts, because I’m partial to gossip. I can’t act nobly without first thinking nobly, which I can never do. Still, I believe God is good and compassionate and knows what’s in store for me, and that’s enough. Let’s end this exchange here, since it truly makes me sad. Come, my boy, and watch me anoint myself. Make hay while the sun shines, things go better with cake, and you can’t cry with your eyes squeezed shut in laughter. What I mean is, though the pleasures the Devil gives us are false and specious, still, pleasure is pleasure, and imagining pleasure is more pleasurable than enjoying it anyway—though true pleasure should work the other way around.”