That dog had no name.
He was only called
the dog
because he died before he was baptized.
Miguel never found out how he had gotten home.
His father used to take him to a small fruit orchard and there that small and full of courage dog used to chase a truck that passed from time to time on the road.
He barked wildly after him until he got tired and then returned to his mistress, proud of the courage he had shown.
One day, he misjudged the distance, jumped ahead of time, and was run over by a truck.
Those were the years when dogs crushed by cars remained on the road for several days without anyone taking care of their bloody spoils.
When this happened Miguel was an altar boy.
“
Introibo ad altare Dei”,
said the priest at the beginning of the mass and this time the death of that humble and brave dog drew the first tears from the boy at the foot of the altar.
"The ranks are tight, strong, martial, our squads are looking to tomorrow," Miguel sang with his arms raised at school, who would long associate that nameless dog with the Latin of the mass and with patriotic voices that encouraged him to be half monk and half soldier.
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Trip to hell in a cherry colored BMW
If the biography of any person can be written through the dogs that have passed through his life, that nameless pooch crushed by a truck on a road enveloped in the desolate silence of the post-war period is at the bottom of Miguel's memory , who after so many years has not been able to avoid his death from that of a black and merciless Spain.
In nautical language there is a sailor's knot called dog hangers.
Miguel never forgot a brutal image that presided over his childhood.
It was Good Friday, the day on which, according to the priest, Christ died crucified.
In his forays through the mountains that same afternoon when the Nazarene was on the cross, Miguel discovered a hanged greyhound in the shadow of the castle, while the breeze brought to that cork oak the choir of a Via Crucis that sang: "Forgive your town, sir,
do not be eternally angry, forgive him, Lord”.
And the same breeze of prayer swayed the dog on the esparto rope.
It would be from some hunter who had dispensed with his services due to old age or lack of reflexes to chase hares or bring partridges to the feet of their owner.
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Captures
When that nameless dog was crushed to death, Miguel already knew how to read a book of poems for children, which the school teacher had given him.
"An ungrateful foot stepped on a mallow and she, who ignores what revenge is, perfumes it with her fragrance."
How could Miguel be a lyrical poet tomorrow if he had in the depths of his memory the image of those two dogs, one crushed by a truck and the other hanged on Good Friday in a cork oak?
Miguel also read
Feats
of War and
Captain Thunder
, which would help him to get excited about the future.
Acne on the forehead, fuzz on the mustache and the first growth of pubic hair joined the reading
of Jules Verne 's
A Fifteen-Year-Old Captain .
And if you asked him even today what he remembers from then, Miguel would say that they were the happy times of the
Chevalier
, a clever and naughty dog, honey-colored, with an incredible sense of smell, who was his inseparable friend like the Dingo dog in Jules Verne's novel. .
One day before Miguel arrived in town on vacation, after several months of absence,
Chevalier
he already seemed to sense it and was very restless.
He was his playmate for years.
He could make him dance, enter the cape, climb the trees and he had a blind obedience, except when he sniffed the heat of a dog several kilometers away and then he would disappear and a while later he would come back covered in mud and maybe with some injury , product of a street brawl with a rival.
Then he would enter the house under the chairs very slowly, as if ashamed of his bad life.
One of the customs of that black Spain consisted of tying a can of the tail of the dogs surprised in their mating.
Miguel feared that this derision would happen to
Chevalier
, since in that case he would never recover the pride of being an admired dog, that every afternoon hearing the tractor several kilometers away, he would go out with a shotgun to the outskirts to meet him on the highway and would enter the town very happily mounted on one of the fenders, a ceremony that was repeated every afternoon of those summers in which Miguel struggled to understand what had really happened in the Civil War, why people had killed each other brothers, while all his dream was to be a sailor as in the novel
A fifteen-year-old captain
with the dog
Chevalier
always at his side.
(To be continue).
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