I have found that sensation a few times since: lost in the tangle of vines, in the jungles of northern Peru, running from an ambush; setting a bomb in the bitter cold of the sierra beneath a concrete bridge. But like a drug, each time the adrenaline rush is less powerful, and each culminating boom means less and less.
I have not painted since that night of the dogs. Not a stroke of black or red, not animal or canvas.
And I will not paint again.
Only the walls of my cell — if they catch me — a shade recalling sky, so my dreary last days can be spent in grace.
What I recall of him: a thin and shadowy mustache and the gun. I remember the diminutive length of the barrel and its otherworldly gleam, backlit as it was by his flashlight. There was something drunken about the way he swayed, the unsteady manner in which he held his pistol, arm outstretched and wavering. I imagine he stumbled upon me after a few drinks with friends. “Hey, you there!” he called. “Stop! Police!” Picture this: a man in this light shouting, gun held unsteadily, as if by a puppeteer. I looked back toward him and said meekly, drawing on an innocence I could not have possessed, “Yes?”
“The hell are you doing?” he shouted from behind the blinding light.
I scoured my mind for explanations but found none. The truth sounded implausible; especially the truth. The silence was punctuated by the dog’s pained cry. “This mutt bit my little brother,” I said.
He kept the barrel trained on me, skeptical, but stepped closer. “Is he rabid?”
“I’m not sure, Officer.”
Bent over the dog, he examined its dying body. Blood ran in thin streams through the grass, fanning out toward the edge of the street. It reminded me of the maps I studied in grade school, of the Amazon Basin with its web of crooked tributaries flowing to the sea.
“Where’s your brother? Has he been seen by a doctor?”
I nodded. “He’s with my mother at home,” I said and waved my arm to indicate a place not far away in no particular direction. There was a glint of kindness in him, though I knew he didn’t exactly believe me. I was not as accustomed to lying as you might think. I was afraid that he might see through me. So I continued. I told of my brother, the terrible bite, the awful scream I had heard, the red, fleshy face of the wound. His innocence, his shining eyes, his smile, his grace. I gave my brother all the qualities I lacked, made him beautiful and funny, as perfect as the blond puppets they use to sell soap on television. I was sweating, my heart racing, telling him of the jokes he told, the grades he got. A smart one, my brother! And then I gave him a name: “Manuel, but we call him Manolo, Manolito,” I said, and the officer, gun in hand, softened.
“That’s my name.”
I looked up, not quite sure what he meant.
“I’m Manolo too,” he said delicately, almost laughing. I chuckled nervously. The dog whimpered again. We faced each other in the still of the broad avenue and shared a smile.
The officer put his gun in the holster and moved to shake my hand. I wiped the blade of my knife on my thigh and put it down. We shook hands firmly, like men. “Manuel Carrión,” he said.
And I said a name as well, though of course not mine and not Pintor.
He was a cholo like me, I knew it by the way he spoke. His father worked with his hands, as surely as he had cousins or brothers or friends who worked with their fists. He said he was pleased to meet me. “But what are you doing exactly? Killing this mutt?” he asked. “What will that accomplish?”
“I chased it down to see if it was rabid. The little bitch struggled with me. I guess I got carried away.”
Carrión nodded and leaned over the dog once again. With his nightstick he poked it in its belly, eliciting a muted, pathetic yelp. He peered into its eyes for a particular shade of yellow and into its gaping mouth for the frothy telltale saliva. “No rabies. I think Manolito is going to be fine.”
I was relieved for a brother I didn’t have, for a bite that never was. My heart swelled. I imagined Manolito and his long, healthy days, running, playing among friends, his wound healed with not even a scar. I loved my fictitious brother.
Carrión was drunk and kind. If things had gone differently that black morning this episode might have become one of his favorite stories, when asked by a friend or cousin over a drink, “Hey, cholo, what’s it like out there?” Compa, let me tell you about the night I helped a man kill a dog. No, that sounds too banal. Hombre, one time, I came upon a man decapitating a street mutt…. Who knows how he would tell the story now? Or if he would tell it at all?
“I used to be just like your Manolito,” he was saying, “always getting into something. I liked to fight the big guys, but I was small. Always coming home with a broken this or a bruised that.” Carrión spoke warmly now. “Are you taking him anywhere? The mutt, I mean.”
“The doctor wanted to examine it,” I said, “just to make sure.”
Carrión nodded. “Of course. Good luck.” He stood up to leave, unfolding himself, clearing grass from his knees. “You should put it out of its misery, you know. No point in being cruel.”
I liked him. How simple and mundane.
I thanked the officer and assured him I would. We were pulling away, our good-byes restless on our tongues, when suddenly there was a noise, an abbreviated yelp. Looking up, I saw one of my compañeros, breathless, not thirty meters away, crouching savagely over a dog (white), holding it up by its muzzle, arm raised, knife in hand, poised to enter the fleshy underside of its neck. He had come down a side street and hadn’t seen us until it was too late. Now he saw us and stopped. Confusion. Panic. Fearful, I reverted to form, abandoned my revolutionary training: I wanted to paint it, the brutal outline of a man at war with a mutt, caught in the act, frozen arms akimbo. I saw what I had looked like. Carrión looked my way, puzzled, then back at my compañero, and for a moment the three of us were caught in a triangle of wants, questions, and fears — a record skipping, a still life, a mutually-agreed-upon pause during which we each considered in silence the intricate and unfortunate relationships that connected us. An instant, nothing more.
Then Carrión drew his gun, just as I grasped my knife. My compañero let the dog drop unceremoniously to the sidewalk and took off running down the avenue away from the plaza. The white dog scampered off, still whimpering. And Carrión faced me, whatever shadow of friendship we had briefly cultivated lost in fog. My options ticked off before me like the outline of a brutal text: (A) stab the cop, quickly; (B) run, run fast, imbecile! (C) die like a man. And that was all my mind produced. Despairing, only my last choice made any sense. Can it even be called a choice? I held my blade, true, but weakly and without conviction. I made as if to rise, perhaps even run, but there was nothing there. And while I dawdled with limp and half-formed thoughts, Carrión acted: forgave me, inexplicably spared me, struck me with the butt of his gun and ran off in pursuit of my comrade — sealing his own fate.
He died that night.
Reeling, I fell toward what I recognized as death. It was only sleep. Into the grass, clutching my jaw, eyes closed, my sight swelled into black. Half-dead dogs howled and whimpered. In the distance, I heard a gunshot.
absence
On his second day in New York, Wari walked around Midtown looking halfheartedly for the airline office. He’d decided to forget everything. It was an early September day; the pleasant remains of summer made the city warm and inviting. He meandered in and out of sidewalk traffic, marveled at the hulking mass of the buildings, and confirmed, in his mind, that the city was the capital of the world. On the train, he’d seen break dancing and heard Andean flutes. He’d watched a Chinese man play a duet with Beethoven on a strange electronic harmonica. In Times Square, a Dominican man danced a frenetic merengue with a life-size doll. The crowds milled about, smiling, tossing money carelessly at the dancer, laughing when his hands slipped lustily over the curve of the doll’s ass.