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I was at the fish market when it happened. I was staring
into the milky eyes of semi-gutted tuna and snapper,
looking for wan that wouldn’t turn out half-rotted when it
got home. Some fish vendors you just couldn’t trust to be
fresh. The sun leered just off the horizon, staring
cockeyed at this southern hemisphere.
I was inspecting a particularly promising sturgeon when
I felt a small hand against my lower back. I spun. It was
early and the market was not, as of yet, crowded. Looking
behind me, however, I saw no one. There was a tug on my
sleeve and I shifted my view downward. I was faced with a
very small woman. She was ancient and her wiry gray hair
looked like dust. She smelled of wood and her skin was like
tree branches. She had dark, dark eyes and a face like the
surface of tamarind juice. I can’t really explain why
that’s all true, but I’ll tell you it is. You’d understand
if you saw her. I began a sentence that had no end and she
said, “Por favor”-- and thrust her arms toward me and I
didn’t know what she had, but I felt a natural inclination
not to let it fall, so I accepted the dark bundle she
offered me. The old woman hobbled off and I was left
dumbfounded and in a cloud of reeky dust.
The bundle began to squirm. I cringed, winced, flinched,
and partook of all similar activity, but I was holding it,
so there was really no shrinking away from it. I tried to
adjust it, but it started to whimper. The fish market crowd
was growing; the sun was several degrees higher in the sky.
I swiveled my head around and groaned. I looked longingly
at my sturgeon as a man in a wide-brimmed hat paid ten
bólivars for it. “No arroz con pescado” tonight. I
maneuvered out of the market. This was an
inconvenience.
It was a tangle of skinny black legs with hair that
grated like fiberglass shards, flailing about and whining.
I held it out in front of me by its midsection until it
calmed down a bit. It stared vacantly toward my face,
panting. A dry, spongy nose jutted off its skull on a snout
that looked dead and eaten. It had one jagged ear and a
sickly pink tongue. All over it was this variety of
scruffy, matted hair that was falling out in patches and
its bones protruded through its stretched, flea-ridden
skin.
This dog was ugly as all hell.
It had a piece of frayed rope around its neck as a
collar. I supposed it was a pet-dog, not a work-dog or
anything useful like that. It was obvious this dog was a
prime example of failure as anything useful. So what was I
going to do except give it to someone who’d own it? I was
not going to take it home. No way. I set out. It was still
morning yet. Door to door in this little town. “Por favor,
señor, si podría occuparse de ese”-- was usually as far as
I got before I felt the sting of wood or aluminum siding
onto my arms and face. The dog squealed and whimpered as
his head got knocked into my chest.
It began to look hopeless sometime around when I found
my shadow lurking under my feet. By the time my shadow
mimicked my exact height, not only did it look hopeless,
but felt, sounded, and tasted hopeless. It simply reeked of
hopelessness. The fish market had long closed when I
finally found someone to take pity on the scraggly beast.
He was a small adolescent whose mother, he said, loved
animals. Presumably, of course, he meant in soup. That’s
the way the animal had begun to appeal to me, anyhow.
So I was free.
I began to trek home when I noticed the stink of the
filthy dog had not disappeared with its departure. A
buzzing sound in my ears indicated that a flurry of flies
and various other innumerable forms of insect had taken a
liking to my fragrance. I directed my path to a small
tienda, hoping to find some soap to bring home in order to
cleanse my offended body. Groggy and sunstroked, I asked
the shopkeeper, “Tiene sopa aquí?” He responded with an
enthusiastic (if a bit perplexed) “Si, si, allí,”,
indicating a shelf toward the back.
I looked through the dusty air and saw row after row of
cans. I told him I didn’t see what I was looking for. The
muggy air clung to my grimy exterior and the man dutifully
rounded the counter and led me down the side aisle to what
I had been looking. “Aquí,” he said, holding up one of the
cans. I brought the can closer to my face. Indeed, there
was a stick of celery painted on the label.
It was soup.
Soup is not soap.
“No, señor--sopa! Tiene sopa?” He took another can from
the shelf and thrust it toward me.
“Sopa, chico! Es sopa allí!”
I groaned. I wished I had a dictionary more than any
time before in my life. Except that one time, with that
girl--but that’s a story for another time.
It was a dirty week.
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