An impactful feature of “The Fox-Terrier” is the way in which the opening paragraph throws the boundary between fiction and nonfiction into doubt as the narrator mentions a personal detail which is also true of the author: that he has written a book called La revolución en bicicleta, which the real-life Mr. Giardinelli published in 1980. Although Mr. Giardinelli asserts that “The Fox-Terrier” is purely fictional, the use of this true detail as a framing device for the untrue narrative which follows lends the story’s climax a chilling believability. The reader is left wondering, Could it be that this terrible thing really happened? This question leads, in turn, to a larger consideration of human nature and its capacity for cruelty, and the way human evil returns again and again throughout history “like a neverending Piazzolla tango.”
—Translator Cameron Baumgartner
In This is Not the End of the Book, a conversation about books and reading by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, the authors mention a story by Restif de la Bretonne, a French novelist from the eighteenth century whom I haven’t read, that is similar to a story my father used to tell, and which in 1980 I almost included in my book La revolución en bicicleta.
This story takes place in the Paraguay of the sixties, when the general Alfredo Stroessner was at the pinnacle of his fame as a corrupt and bloody dictator, and my old man and his friend, Dámaso Ayala, were working on the freight ships that sailed along the Paraná River between Buenos Aires and Asunción. They sailed together for a decade until Dámaso, a giant man with a serious and reticent personality and a former wrestling champion, returned to Paraguay and my father went to try his luck in Argentina, in Barranqueras and later Resistencia. They visited each other every once in a while, and my father gained the trust of the anti-Stroessner resistance in Paraguay.
I met Dámaso once when he came to Resistencia with two dark-skinned men, huge like him, and a piebald dog, black and white with a docked tail—a fox-terrier. They spent the whole afternoon at our house. I played with Dámaso’s dog in the yard and in the lane, smitten with her because of her personality, which was hyperactive, yappy, and curious. At nightfall they left, and on the way out Dámaso picked up his dog and patted my head in thanks. I never saw him again.
The image I’m left with is of an enormous and simple man, utterly lacking in charisma, whose eyes were pale and transparent like the water over the sandy banks of the Paraná. Rounding out the portrait is this refrain of my father’s: “Dámaso is a man of deeply held convictions; his beliefs are simple, but ironclad.” Dámaso’s political resistance took the form of a sensible and very personal activism, low-profile, one would say nowadays, rigorous and discreet.
I don’t know how much later it was, maybe one year, or two, but a week before Christmas my father came home and told me, his voice dry, “They got Dámaso.”
In those days, to be arrested in Paraguay meant terrible suffering. Dámaso was imprisoned in his hometown, Caacupé, where they subjected him to brutal interrogations and tortured him all night long, and all day, and another day, until, late in the morning on the fourth or fifth day, seeing that he wouldn’t name anyone, they took him into the street with chains on his ankles and wrists and they put him on display in the plaza, as if to show everyone what awaited those who did not comply.
Then, jumping out from the bushes of an adjoining garden where she’d been hiding, Dámaso’s dog appeared. As fast as an Olympic champion she ran to Dámaso and licked his bloody ankles, whining as if to tell him that she’d been waiting there for him and now she would heal his wounds. But a sergeant separated them with a vicious kick, and the commander of the Stroessner troop decided to teach the fettered titan a lesson. The commander signaled for Dámaso’s chains to be loosened, and his subordinates understood that he wanted them to apply the dreaded ley de fuga, the law of flight, which consisted of faking a prisoner’s escape and then mowing him down.
Dámaso realized it was a trick and picked up the dog. He whispered into her ear, he kissed her and threw her far from him, so that he would receive alone the imminent gunfire. But the little dog came back, barking desperately and jumping up and down around him. It seemed she understood what was about to happen and was trying to shield her master with her small body. So Dámaso picked her up again and, looking at the crowd on the other side of the plaza, he offered her up like the chalice of the Eucharist at Christmas Mass. In silence but with his pale eyes fiery and full of blood, like sudden flames, he begged, demanded, that someone look after his friend.
The only response was the frigid silence of the people crowding the sidewalk. They were all watching but no one accepted his offering, not even those who had known Dámaso for years, some of them, perhaps, his friends. To avoid recognizing them, he didn’t look them in the eye, only repeating the listless, agonizing gesture of surrendering his dog. He held her in his hands, devastated that he couldn’t find someone to give her to, until a soldier struck him with the butt of his rifle and the dog fell to the ground and began barking again. Frantic now, she barked and howled and cried the way dogs do in distress, and her piercing barks seemed to condemn the people’s silence. Suddenly she shot across the street, having recognized someone. Dámaso cried out for her to stop, and there was a movement in the crowd like a quick ballet as a guy turned and ran away. The dog barked at an old woman who was praying with a rosary in her hands, and then she ran back and forth among the crowd looking for someone to please have mercy, please save her master from the men in uniform. Her barking filled the noontime and silenced even the cicadas.
Then, as if in that moment the whole world was reduced to the intense desperation of Dámaso’s little dog, a Stroessner official quietly gave the order to release the prisoner and make him run. A sergeant and two soldiers called out an imbecilic warning even though Dámaso clearly hadn’t moved. Dámaso was barely looking at the dog in the plaza before him when, barking ceaselessly, she began to run towards him. Dámaso said no, no, and gestured with his chained hand raised in the air, and in that brief moment a soldier cried, “The prisoner’s escaping, commander!” and this was the signal for the troop to open fire on Dámaso Ayala, who collapsed within seconds, his body riddled with holes.
The villagers watched all this like visitors to an aquarium watching sharks through the glass. The soldiers approached the body with their weapons still smoking, and the dog reached him too, barking as if she wanted to scare away a whole army, until with a heart-wrenching whimper she fell silent and started licking Dámaso’s face. She circled the body, climbed onto the wounded chest, licked the blood from every bullet hole and nipped at his mouth as if demanding he say something, anything, despairing amidst the thunderous quiet of the plaza and that cruelly silent audience.
Then the sergeant ordered the troop to move out and, with a single shot, he blew the dog’s head to bits, murmuring, “Damn dog.”
An even greater silence fell, as if all the sound and noise of the world had died in that plaza and in place of the people there were wax figures, or terracotta.
Then the voice of a woman, strained and quavering, rose in a furious shout: “Murderer!” And another voice, from the back of the anonymous crowd, completed the accusation: “Why would you kill an innocent little dog? Murderer!” And another: “What’d the poor thing ever do to you, that you’d kill her like that?” Others joined the chorus: “Murderer! Murderer!” The soldiers swiftly lifted Dámaso Ayala’s corpse and took it to the barracks. One of them hesitated for a second under the hail of accusations, then picked up the dog as well, while in the tower of the church someone rang the bell, and in a corner store someone else put on a record and Bing Crosby began to sing “Jingle Bells” in English.
I don’t believe Eco and Carrière knew this story, and, believe me, few can rival the literary prestige of a story by a Breton. But what strikes me is the way that reading something can revive a dormant memory. I can hear now my father’s trembling voice; it was hot out and I, a child at the time, felt sad for the rest of the afternoon. Later, I went to play by the banks of that same river, the Paraná, which seems to bring the tropical heat and carry it away, like a neverending Piazzolla tango, burning away the sleepy afternoon then releasing clouds of mosquitos at dusk.
Mempo Giardinelli is a novelist and journalist from the Chaco province of Argentina, best known for his novel Santo oficio de la memoria, which won the 1993 Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize, and for his novel Sultry Moon (Luna caliente), which won the 1983 Mexican National Book Award and was adapted into a film by Vicente Aranda. Giardinelli’s work includes a dozen novels, several short-story collections, essays, and a weekly column in the newspaper Página/12.
Cameron Baumgartner is a literary translator and fiction writer from Charlottesville, Virginia, and an MFA candidate at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she is a Merit Scholar. Other translation work of hers may be found in the Latin American Literary Review.
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