Funeral for a Dog: A Novel (17 page)

W
E REPORTED ALMOST
everything to the police, David translated. We didn’t say anything about the dog and the gunshot, the Heckler & Koch is in the glove compartment of the pickup. Tuuli smoked a cigarette with the doctor, we signed our statements and were permitted to go. We’ll clear up the rest tomorrow,
gringos
, the police said, we’ll come by. The decision on Rua do Lixo has been made. Red is dead, says Felix, long live blue! On the murderers’ field the blue
trio elétrico
is playing merengue and
forró
again. I with the twenty-four hours of red and blue in my bones scarcely believe my eyes and ears. The garbage street wakes up as if nothing happened. Are the children yelling just as loudly as yesterday? Are the chickens clucking and the goats bleating? Are the men raising their hands in greeting?
Oi, gringos?
Are they raising their bottles? The bell of the church shack in time to all this? Are we supposed to believe in Macumba? And are those vultures up there in the sky? Lula is still lying in the back of the truck, and I with my first dead man in my bones sit next to the animal and swallow my tears. David parks the truck outside the door, we lift the heavy dog off the truck and onto the dried lambskin in the middle of the courtyard. Lula has closed his eyes, he isn’t barking or growling, his leg has stopped bleeding. I can’t go on. I wonder whether Lula will survive, I wonder how to wash off the blood without running water. I wonder whether the police will think we’re the murderers when the investigations continue tomorrow, when they discover the water conduit, when they remember our Heckler & Koch, when they find the great policeman Santos’s dog with us. I take the chain off Lula’s neck and hope that he goes away, but Lula can’t go away.

Flies circle the policeman’s dog and the bloody lambskin. Welcome to Seraverde, says Felix, and Tuuli replies, we should save the dog, two deaths on the first day are too much for me. Amputation? Felix asks with a laugh, right? Tuuli knows what to do, she studies medicine. She sends me to the goats, David to the liquor shacks and Felix to the truck. In the sickroom next to the kitchen she finds isopropyl alcohol and an old scalpel, in the office a roll of packing string. Felix gets the bolt cutter from the pickup, I milk a goat. David gets liquor at one of the shacks, he mixes it with my goat milk. Tuuli pulls Lula’s dried jowls to the side and pours the spiked milk between his teeth. Lula doesn’t resist, he swallows half a bowlful, then he lays his head on the ground. Tuuli rolls a cigarette and takes a sip herself, we pass around the enamel bowl. We tear the Sunday tablecloth of the Fundação Ajuda de Nossa Senhora into fine strips. Then Tuuli stamps out her cigarette and asks for the belt from Felix’s pants, she fastens the drunk dog’s snout shut. Hold tight, she says. So we hold tight: Felix the hind legs, David straddles the animal and clasps the intact foreleg. I hold Lula’s head in one hand and the injured leg in the other, I can see the white bones in the wound. Tuuli now ties off the leg above the knee, come on, she says, as she tightens the tourniquet with all her might, come on, and Lula opens his eyes. Only a little bit more blood comes out. Lula doesn’t move. He doesn’t move when Tuuli cuts into the healthy fur over the wound and opens the flesh. He doesn’t move when she severs the sinews and the bones lie bare. Lula doesn’t flinch when she waves away the flies and disinfects the bolt cutter. He doesn’t tremble like David and he doesn’t clench his teeth like Felix when Tuuli clamps through the bones with two cracking movements. Lula and I don’t look away, his eyes are wide and glassy. With Lula’s head in my hands my vision blurs. The tears I managed to swallow before are dripping on the dog, into his face, into his eyes. Tuuli pours isopropyl alcohol into the wound and binds the flaps of skin with packing string, she bandages the stump with the tablecloth strips. Then it’s over, half of Lula’s left foreleg is lying on the ground. Let go, says Tuuli, standing up. Lula still doesn’t move. My first amputation, says Tuuli, and now she smiles. Then Felix throws up in the enamel bowl, which she holds out to him.

It’s already noon when I start the pump again. We washed Lula with drinking water, the lambskin we threw into the fire, followed by our bloody T-shirts and pants, then Lula’s leg. Tuuli is sitting next to the dog and smoking. At one point she changes the bandage. Lula is sleeping, Felix and David are lying in their hammocks. The stink of the diesel pump mingles with the smoldering lambskin and the blood. I’m waiting for the padre with his cap. Today is Sunday, and on Sunday the padre takes off his cap and reads three consecutive Masses, first on Rua do Lixo, then in Majada, lastly for the glue-sniffing children of Mimoso. Any minute now his Peugeot will pull up in front of the Fundação Ajuda de Nossa Senhora and honk, any minute he’ll want to eat with them, but no one has cooked. I’m sitting next to Tuuli and waiting for the police. We’ve burned what was left of the weed, but our fear remains. Why, I don’t know, and of what, I only suspect. I said everything I could say, I told them everything I understood, but still the fear is stuck in my bones. The motor is running, the pump pumps, and just as I’m about to turn off the motor, there’s a soft burble. I take Tuuli’s hand and point to the sound. Then comes more and more. The tower is still standing, the tower doesn’t even creak alarmingly, we hear the water gurgling into the tank. The pipes seem to be watertight. I run into the bedroom and wake Felix and David. The water, I say, the water! Felix gets the Heckler & Koch out of the drawer and fires into the sky, as if he wanted to shoot the fear dead from behind. Peace to the huts! he sings, war to the palaces! To the tower of Seraverde! he cheers. On the decisive Sunday in Seraverde, the day of district policeman José Santos Tourão Splitter’s death, the day of Lula’s greatest pain, the day of Tuuli’s first amputation, the day of her arrival in the lives of Dirk Svensson and Felix Blaumeiser, the diesel motor pumps the first water into the garbage street. We test the water fountain in the courtyard, we let the faucet run, we pour water on our faces, we try the shower and the shower works, we bathe in the first water of Rua do Lixo, we stand in the midday sun, we rinse the sleep out of our eyes and the fear out of our bones, we wash the blood off the doorstep and off the iron door, we give Lula a drink.

(Bar del Porto)

Mandelkern! Svensson’s loud knocking wakes me too early and much too fast, I must have slept less than an hour. Mandelkern? I become aware only slowly that I’m in Svensson’s house, on his lake: Svensson’s desk under the window, his books and pictures (the suitcase under the desk). I’m dizzy from not enough sleep and too much gin. Yes? I ask, and Svensson is immediately standing in the room and holding out one of his shirts to me, his voice too loud and too firm for the early morning:

Take your notebooks, Mandelkern, and come with me!

My first thought: the
Astroland
manuscript. Last night I opened the suitcase with Tuuli’s hairpin and unwrapped the packet, in it almost three hundred typed manuscript pages, the title page a photo of Astroland covered with scrawls. At first I turned the pages drunkenly, then I sobered up over the course of Svensson’s story. After the first third I could concentrate better and read until the candle had burned down, then read on in the moonlight, it didn’t rain all night. I read
Astroland
through from beginning to end like a child under the blanket. I couldn’t stop, even though I was tired, even though the manuscript isn’t intended for my eyes (forbidden time, forbidden book).
Astroland
tells a love-triangle story, two men, a woman and a dog: Svensson, Tuuli and Felix. The dog is named Lua or Lula. Svensson has apparently tried to find words for the past years (1993-2003). His life story has turned for him into a sort of novel, maybe a roman à clef (I used Tuuli’s hairpin). The story takes place in Europe, North and South America, Svensson’s characters have endless possibilities and no obligations, they’re always on the move, tourists in search of a home, like those “nostalgia tourists” journeying back to their roots abroad (Elisabeth and me in 2003). Svensson’s story should have ended on the Italian side of Lake Lugano. That is, here.

Astroland

Svensson and I in white shirts and flip-flops, he holds the door for me, I carry my red plastic bag with the notebooks out of his room (headache). My second thought, as I pass Svensson on my way out the door: I won’t be able to take the manuscript with me if he’s bringing me to Lugano now. I should leave with the hidden stories, but the stack of paper is in Svensson’s old suitcase (
Astroland
is the reason I’m here). After you, Mandelkern, says Svensson, closing the door behind me, after you (as if nothing happened). I wrapped up the stack of paper again and put it back in the suitcase when the roosters began to crow (my journalistic thoroughness).

Tuuli

On the stairs, passing the pictures of black, dying animals, I’m struck by the question of why Svensson wants to get my departure over with today and so early in the morning, of all times, even though yesterday my presence still seemed to be pleasant to him (we ate his fish, drank his wine, his gin). Tuuli and I offered each other cigarettes by the pack. I smoked what I could smoke, my night was short (now I’m paying for it). Then in the kitchen the emptied ashtray, the sorted empty bottles, the clean plates (the glass shards in the middle of the table). Svensson hurries ahead, and I follow him like a dog (my sudden nausea, the spring in his step). My third thought: I got too close to Tuuli. We sleep in adjacent rooms, I could have knocked on her door. She seems to still be asleep, she and the boy are nowhere to be seen (her Finnish-plumed singing on the other side of the wall while I was reading). I won’t meet her again, I think, as Svensson and I walk side by side to the water, I don’t even know her last name. I wonder what I’ve done wrong, why Svensson wants to get rid of me. Could he be more than just strange? 288 meters. The air over the lake is slightly hazy this morning, distant chainsaws, the sun is still waiting behind the mountains. Svensson is bigger than I, the borrowed shirt flutters around my body, the sleeves too long, I have to roll them up (his shoulders and strides, as if he made a decision).

Lua’s Spot

A yellow swan stretches its neck. It stretches it up along the wooden side of the boat and toward Svensson, he feeds it seeds from his pants pocket and mimics the animal (the forward and back of both heads). When I reach out my hand, the swan hisses, as if I came too close to it.
Cygnus olor
, says Svensson, directing me to the bench in the bow, the mute swan. I feel like I’m going to throw up, Svensson has jumped onto the boat and is observing me from the stern as I clumsily climb on (he doesn’t help me). Lua is still lying motionlessly by the water, he doesn’t even lift his head when Svensson revs up the outboard motor (Evinrude 25). Lua doesn’t look up when the motor starts only on the seventh try, when Svensson laughs and curses, when the swan thrusts out its head and hisses (the multihued gas on the water, in its feathers). The mute swan, says Svensson, commits for life. Above all during mating season the males are very aggressive and defend their territory against people too. They hiss and with a well-aimed blow of the wingtip can break human bones. Then he turns his wrist,
Macumba
rises steeply and moves out onto the lake in a wide curve (for a few seconds I’m looking down at Svensson). House and dog quickly grow smaller, the swan soars from the water with three or four heavy strokes of its wings and follows the boat. He likes these birds, says Svensson, they have their memories and their freedom. That’s enough for them. But that freedom doesn’t last forever either. Memories disappear too, if one doesn’t do anything to stop it. Svensson observes the swan. Of course animals can’t tell their stories. He looks at me. Of course not, I say, because I now have to say something (the pollen on the water’s surface like souls). Just as none of us can tell our own stories. As an author of children’s books he must be acquainted with this dilemma, I say, but also as a novelist

(I break off)

Then my fast talking about myself as an ethnologist and my notes, as if I could take back my remark (the remaining color drains from our faces). Svensson suddenly smiles at me, he rolls up his sleeves once more, showing me his upper arms. Then he revs up the motor somewhat and steers
Macumba
in a straight line into the middle of the lake. The passing thought: the suitcase, his manuscript, Svensson has noticed my spying. Now he wants to get rid of me. You look at surfaces, says Svensson, and make your articles out of them. What do you know about writing, Mandelkern?

Interview (nausea)

Macumba & my decision

Svensson asks if I can swim as I take his advice and surrender the gin, wine, and fish to the lake. Svensson says I shouldn’t lean out too far, one shouldn’t lean out all too far anyway (little fish feed on the vomit on the surface of the lake). It must have been the cigarettes, I think, I smoked almost the whole pack (eventually smokers’ sperm give up). I haven’t slept. Svensson revs up the motor again and turns the gas lever. He’s sorry, he says, in situations like this it’s necessary to maintain the stability of swaying boats, he says, it’s like riding a bicycle, you can’t just stand still (Svensson revs up his voice). The boats of the Guardia di Finanza have a fairly strong wake, so he’d better bring me ashore now. Svensson steers
Macumba
in a wide and scarcely perceptible curve back toward the shore, and by the time I can finally stand up again, we’ve almost reached the small port (my pants wet at the knees from the water in the boat). I could wait for him on solid ground and in the fresh air, says Svensson, he has some errands to run, I should watch the fishermen. I could also take the ferry to Lugano and leave. Whatever you like, he says and steers the boat carefully to the ferry dock of the small village on the other side of the rock shelf,

You decide, Mandelkern,

and then Svensson’s friendliness catches me completely off guard as I cling to the steel ladder on the quay of Osteno (as if he were pursuing a strategy). With his hand he keeps
Macumba
away from the concrete piers, and declares what a pleasure this has been for him. I hope I was some help to you, he says, your questions are questions I sometimes ask myself! He’d like to continue our conversation, out here there’s not much chance to talk. With Kiki Kaufman, for example, he speaks exclusively English, and Lua too has grown taciturn (he says: in another language one is another person). Tuuli refuses to remember anything, says Svensson, shifting the outboard into first gear, Tuuli only thinks about tomorrow, the boy is ultimately a mystery to him anyway (Svensson is now talking as if he wanted to tell me these things). Then he revs up the motor and
Macumba
stirs the green water. Feel better, Mandelkern, Svensson shouts as he departs, leaving me behind on the dock (Macumba is a sort of voodoo among Brazilian peasants, that much I learned last night). On the dock a ferry timetable (Società Navigazione Lago di Lugano).

Piazza G. Matteotti, Osteno, 8:30 AM

It will get better soon, I think, a short stroll through the village will dispel the nausea, the fresh air the burning from the tobacco, a coffee the fatigue (solid ground underfoot). Osteno a deserted place without a real restaurant, without a supermarket and with only one café, early in the morning the two plazas are empty (Piazza Ugo Ricci, Piazza G. Matteotti). In the morning fog a black eagle with outspread wings commemorates the local dead (World War I + II). The only store in the village is closed, a paint and lacquer shop (Colorificio). On the wall of the village hall a poster announcing a fair in Porlezza for the summer of 2002 (Luna Park), there are also the recent deaths in the village. I follow the serpentine Via Val d’Intelvi up the mountain, in the cemetery overlooking the village an old woman in an army raincoat is kneeling in front of a gravestone. To avoid intruding, I wait among the urn compartments at the other end. I wait for the wretched nausea to go away (she nods at me before she leaves). On the small gravel grave a tiny brass bicycle and a wooden model of a boat, behind the gravestone a beer glass for watering flowers (Aronne Gobbi, 1937–2002). Felix Blaumeiser must have died the same year, if I am to believe Svensson, but his
Astroland
manuscript breaks off at that decisive point. I should ask my main informant. In the whole cemetery there are no living plants, on the Via Mulino behind it only stinging nettles (I throw up into the weeds).

How do I get out of here?

Porlezza 13:05

Osteno 13:20

San Mamete 13:28