The Dialogue of the Dogs (5 page)

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 burst 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.

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.