María Sonia Cristoff
TRANS. BY Katherine Silver
The Dogs of Cañadón Seco
The stray dogs that swarm around Cañadón Seco are helping me perceive with much greater clarity what, under other circumstances, appears to be much more ambiguous: the precise moment a spell breaks. Or, whatever we call that moment when a place feels compelled to expel an intruder, who in this case turns out to be me. This tends to happen to every writer in pursuit of a story, who at first is welcomed by a place—its people, its institutions, its landscape, and, as I am finding out now, also its animals—with open arms, eager to find out what she’s researching, what she needs, how they can help. During that initial period, the most insignificant question—what time is it, for example—might lead to a story about the clock that used to be in the main plaza during the 1920s and then was destroyed by a storm at the beginning of the thirties, followed by the story of the struggle between this alderman and that alderman about who can claim credit for installing the new clock that’s there now. The mere mumblings of a stranger can produce an excess of verbosity that one must know how—be able—to translate into the language of hospitality. This onslaught of information creates a special kind of solitude, which is unique, different from all others. One effect of that solitude, which I’ve sometimes experienced on a particularly tired night, is to consider sharing a personal story of my own, talk about a problem that I know I have to deal with when I return home—for example, that I expect a meeting of the residents of my building to discuss for the third time what we should do about the pigeons that have settled into the eaves and don’t let anybody get any sleep—and that’s when I’ve noticed a mild shock, an expression of perplexity, as if they’d glimpsed, through the crack in the door left ajar, the newly arrived guest as she is undressing to get into bed.
But there always comes that moment, as I was saying, when the spell breaks, when the locals’ eagerness to tell their stories, so abundant at the beginning, starts to wane. Like in love, when the end is presaged by a lack of excitement in shared stories—and not in shared sex, as psychologists so often assert on television. For a writer, it’s not always easy to determine the precise moment when the boundaries surrounding a place, which define it, begin to egin to shut her out—like the tissue that produces pus as a barrier against a foreign object—and finally expel her. By the time a series of much more subtle and contradictory signals renders that moment recognizable, it’s already too late. It’s easy to get confused, and then the trap is set: the one investigating goes from being the observer to the observed. The fabric is turned inside out, like the reversible parka of my childhood, and the place scrutinizes her, she becomes the one under the spotlight. At that point she must flee, run off and hide, as if she belonged to a species that cannot be exposed to a certain kind of light.
In Cañadón Seco, the dogs let me know precisely when that moment arrived. They were clear and precise, leaving no room for ambiguities. By then I’d already been in town for a while. I’d walked around the entire place an infinite number of times; I’d gone from one end to the other of those perfectly straight, predictable streets. I’d walked at night, during the day, and even at the time of day when one needs a certain amount of courage to walk through a provincial town: at three in the afternoon, the peak of the siesta, the ghost hour. I’d soaked up the sun in that old amusement park next to the building where the YPF technicians had lived when Cañadón was a prosperous town. I’d spent hours sitting in what could be considered the town square—where spots of green struggle to survive—reading the signs: Protect the plants / Respect the instructions of the caretakers / Don’t damage the trees / Use the trash receptacles. I’d emerged exhausted but unharmed by the excess of imperatives. In other words, for days I’d been in frequent contact with the streets; I’d spent hours outside and nothing or nobody had bothered me; I don’t think I even crossed paths with anyone. Only very infrequently I thought that something—a hand, an arm, a piece of a person—had just barely pushed aside a curtain from inside a house to watch me pass by. During those days the dogs had also watched me pass and hadn’t moved a muscle. They were there, always in groups of ten or more, most of the time asleep, curled up on a street corner. A few times, I’d even gotten close enough to take a picture of the collective reveries of those shabby creatures, a futile attempt to capture the sense of community they exuded even when each roamed who-knows-where in what dream. One or another would manage to open an eye when I stood too close, but that was all; they never reacted to me in any other way. Until the day of the sign, the day when they had to send me their collective message. Enough was enough. They waited for me in a large group on the corner. I saw their fixed stares, their change of attitude. I’m addicted to Animal Planet, and am used to deciphering animal behavior. I tried to keep going as if nothing was happening, when one of them, who seemed to be the leader of the pack, gathered momentum and grabbed my ankle between his teeth. I stood still; he wasn’t biting, just threatening. My desperation at that moment did not come so much from the bite-in-waiting as the fact that when I looked around—at the line of houses that continued to the south, at the road that leads to Caleta Olivia, at the street that supposedly leads to the city center—I saw nobody, not a single soul.
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Pedro, alias El Bueno, The Good, has a pack of Particulares cigarettes in one hand and a thick chain he holds onto tightly in the other. He uses it to scare off the dogs. It’s a lot more effective than the sticks some of his neighbors use, he says, by way of recommendation. The chains don’t bounce off their backs. Today is his day off. Though, like everybody else, he ends up doing on that day the same things he does on all the other days. His work fundamentally consists of waiting, and for waiting, there’s nothing like a good cigarette. Keeps you company, doesn’t talk, doesn’t ask questions. El Bueno works for one of the many multinational service providers that opened in the area after the YPF restructuring, a company that does oil-well cementing. He and his team come along after the others have bored the wells and installed the tubing. They pour the cement between the well walls and the tubing, and that’s it. That’s how specialized everything is these days. There’s a long time between when they pour the cement and when it dries—twenty-four, sometimes forty-eight hours. The setting time, they call it. When he’s not smoking while he’s waiting, El Bueno is watching TV or listening to music. His colleagues, too. Sometimes they talk. Especially when they work in the South, in the Rio Gallegos area, where snow often blocks the roads, and they have to spend days stuck in their little cubicles, totally isolated. His cell phone rings, interrupting him, but Pedro resumes talking without taking a breath. From this corner, like from so many others, you can see the boundaries of Cañadón, the exact spot where the last house surrenders to the desert. The surrounding meseta looks like gray, dense volcanic lava, which at any moment is going to completely bury the town.
That guy over there, running—he points to him—is the delegate from the Union of State Petroleum Workers. It used to be the SUPE, the Sindicato mUnido Petrolero del Estado, and after privatization, it became the SUPeH, the Sindicato Unido de Petróleo e Hidrocarburo. The delegate wears gold-framed eyeglasses and is trailed by a little white dog. He always runs at this time of day, that’s why he has that body, El Bueno opines. Thin but wiry. It’s the second time he runs past this corner, which apparently is part of his circuit. El Bueno lights another cigarette; no, he’s not very involved in all that union stuff. And if he were, he wouldn’t join the SUPeH but rather Petroleros Privados. The SUPeH is dead, it was our grandfathers’ union. The only thing it does now is buy medicine for the company’s retirees. The delegate runs by for the third time, like a hamster.
Moving his hands as if they were the blades on a crazed windmill, the president of the Cañadón Development Association tells me, in the same hyperbolic style with which he describes his plans to lift the town out of its misery, that he has been forced to propose a Resolution to control the dogs in the town:
—WHEREAS: Because of the uncontrolled increase in the canine population that has led to an increase in incidences of dog bites, some of a serious and traumatic nature, as well as because of dogs loose on the streets, some of whom exhibit aggressive behavior, children and adults are unable to move about freely, either walking or using a bicycle as a means of transportation.
—WHEREAS: Having had the opportunity to receive verbally and in writing a range of opinions from residents, who have raised the problem of “loose dogs on public streets,” the conclusion has been reached that in most cases these animals have owners, who, due to ignorance or a lack of awareness of their responsibilities, leave them loose on public streets, causing a range of inconveniences and dangers to the residents, especially those who use the streets of the town.
—WHEREAS: The issue of animal health is intimately connected to human health, for the former can carry many diseases (zoonotic diseases) and can constitute potential dangers to public health. It is essential that we educate people to show respect for the animals and their fellow citizens, as these animals share the town with people . . . excerpt from Resolution No. 409,
Cañadón Seco Development Association, November 1, 2002
My understanding is that in Cañadón, animals share the town with people and not vice versa, which makes me greatly admire this place and have no desire to leave. I decide to stay a little longer, even if that means a bite or an ambush. A spell doesn’t necessarily break instantaneously on both sides, which is where the problem often resides. The dogs give me their message, but I don’t want to leave. I remain in the town like those splinters that burrow under the surface of the skin, that can be felt but not found easily enough to remove. I remain like an ingrown nail, obstinate in my discomfort. What I do these days, so that people don’t look at me and dogs don’t bite me, is not go outside, practically not move from here, inside. In the town restaurant they let me use a table as if it were my desk, and that’s where I spend my days.
María Sonia Cristoff is the author of five works of fiction and nonfiction, including False Calm and Include Me Out, and lives in Buenos Aires, where she teaches creative writing. Her journalism can be found in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Perfil, and La Nación. She has edited volumes on literary nonfiction (Idea crónica and Pasaje a Oriente) and participated in a series of collective works. Her work has been translated into six languages.
Katherine Silver is an award-winning translator and the former director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Her recent and forthcoming translations include works by María Sonia Cristoff, Daniel Sada, César Aira, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Julio Cortázar, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Julio Ramón Ribeyro. She has also translated José Emilio Pacheco, Elena Poniatowska, Jorge Franco, Martín Adán, Pedro Lemebel, and others.