Read The Dialogue of the Dogs Online

Authors: Miguel de Cervantes

The Dialogue of the Dogs (6 page)

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 backslide. 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.”

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.

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