Puppy, Chirla’s bitch, whom she calls as she always wanted to name her daughter [FRAGMENT KSI¡¯KI]

Damaris lives with her husband in a cottage on the Colombian Pacific coast. Living near the dense Amazonian wilderness, wild mountains and the vastness of the unpredictable sea, it barely makes ends meet. She looks after an abandoned property on a daily basis, for which no one has paid her for a long time. The lives of her neighbors are similar: constant poverty and hunger. Damaris had abandoned her dreams of motherhood some time ago, barely accepting that she would never have children. She transfers her feelings to the orphaned puppy, Chirli the bitch, which she calls what she always wanted to name her daughter. Her attitude towards the dog takes on the features of maternal intimacy, and their bond becomes almost unbreakable. Until Chirli runs away. Soon it turns out that this is just the beginning: Chirli, who is already fond of adventure and has matured, felt the call of nature. And in this area, people drown puppies rather than bury them, because each new creature means another mouth to feed. From now on, nothing will be the same as before.

Pilar Quintana “Suka”, trans. Michałowska-Gabrych, Mova Publishing House – excerpt:

– I found her stiff here this morning. Dona Elodia gestured to a fragment of the beach piled high with rubbish carried or exposed by the sea: branches, plastic bags, bottles.

– Poisoned? – Probably so. – And what? Did you bury her? Dona Elodia nodded. – The grandchildren buried it. – At the cemetery? – No. Right here on the beach. Many of the dogs in the town died poisoned. Some said it was a deliberate act, but Damaris couldn’t believe that anyone would be able to do something like that. Certainly, dogs ate poisoned food laid out for rats by accident, or even rats themselves, which, after eating the poison, became easy prey.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Dona Elodia just nodded. The black female dog has been her inseparable companion for a long time. She sat next to her in the tavern and did not leave her step as she went out to church, to her daughter-in-law, to the shop, to the marina … But if dona Elodia was brokenhearted, she did not show it. She put down the puppy she was feeding with a syringe filled with milk from a cup and picked up the next one. There were ten puppies, so tiny they hadn’t even opened their eyes yet.

“They are only six days old,” said Don Elodia. – They won’t.

She wore glasses with thick lenses that enlarged her eyes, and was always old and fat from the waist down. Taciturn, she moved slowly and remained calm even in the high season, when the tavern was full of drunks and children running between the tables. But now she was clearly depressed.

– Why don’t you give them away? Damaris asked. – I’ve already released one, but nobody wants such babies. The season is long over. There were no tables in the tavern, no music, no tourists – nothing but Don Elodia sitting on a bench in the great empty hall and ten puppies in a carton. Damaris watched them closely and finally made a choice.

– Can I take this?

Dona Elodia placed another fed little boy in the carton, picked up the gray-haired and knotted-eared one Damaris had pointed out, and looked at him from behind.

“It’s a girl,” she said.

At low tide, the beach became a vast stretch of black sand resembling mud. At high tide, all the water was flooded, and the waves carried sticks, branches, pips and fallen leaves from the forest to be returned later with the rubbish left by people. Damaris was returning from visiting her aunt, who lived in a neighboring town – more modern, with real hotels and restaurants, just inland behind a military airport. She peered into the tavern out of curiosity, and now she was walking back to her house at the far end of the beach with a bitch she had nothing to wear, so she was carrying her against her breast. The doggy was in her hands and it smelled like milk. Damaris wanted to hug her tightly and cry.

The town consisted of one long sandy road with houses crowded on both sides. These were hovels built on wooden stilts with plank walls and roofs black with fungus. Damaris was a little worried about Rogelio’s reaction to the bitch. He didn’t like dogs; he only kept them to bark and guard the farm. They already had three: Danger, Mucha and Oliwka.

The largest of them, Danger, was like Labradors that soldiers used to sniff tourists’ boats and luggage, but its head was large and square like the pit bulls from the Pacifico Real Hotel in a neighboring town. He was the child of Joshua, a bitch of late memory, who, unlike Rogelio, was fond of dogs. Yes, he also bred them to bark, but he also cared for them and trained them to help with hunting. Once when Rogelio came to visit, one of the puppies walked away from the herd and barked at him. He was less than two months old. Rogelio said he needed such a dog, and when Josue gave him a gift, he named him Danger, which means “danger”. And as befits the name, Danger grew up to be a possessive and courageous dog. Rogelio spoke of him with respect and admiration, but it did not prevent him from yelling at him all the time, shouting “fe!” and raise your hand to remind him that he can get in the skin again.

One day, Much appeared in their yard – small, thin and fearful. It was evident that he had a difficult childhood. Danger didn’t try to chase him away, so they let him stay. He had a wound on his tail that became infected after a few days. Before Damaris and Rogelio saw it, the wound was filled with larvae.

– Did you see? Asked Damaris, who thought she saw a ripe fly flying out of there.

Rogelio didn’t notice anything, and when she explained to him, he laughed aloud and said that they finally had a name for this pet.

– And now the bastard, Muchu! – he ordered.

He grabbed the dog by the tip of its tail, picked up the machete, and before Damaris understood what was happening, he cut off its tail in one motion. The fly howled and sprang to run, and the woman looked at her husband in horror, who, still holding the wormed tail in his hand, shrugged and said he only wanted to stop the infection. But she was sure he did it for fun.

The youngest of the dogs, Oliwek, was the son of Danger and a chocolate Labrador girl from the neighborhood, allegedly purebred. He resembled his father, though his coat was longer and brighter. He was the most suspicious of all three. None of the dogs approached Rogelio, and none trusted people, but Olive did not approach anyone, and his distrust was so great that he did not eat, if only someone was in sight. Damaris knew that Rogelio loved to sneak up the dogs from behind when they were busy eating, and beat them with the thin guadua bamboo stalk that he kept solely for that purpose. Sometimes they were punished, and sometimes because he was enjoying the beatings. To make matters worse, Oliwek was treacherous: he quietly crept from behind and bit.

Everything will be different with the bitch, she told herself. She’s mine. I won’t let Rogelio hurt her. I won’t even give him a wry look at her.

She walked into don Jaime’s shop and showed him the pup. “What a baby,” he said. The shop only had a counter and one wall, but you could buy anything from edgy to nails and screws. Don Jaime was from the outback. He had come here penniless at the time the naval base was being built, and he had mated with a local woman, black and poorer than himself. Some said he got rich thanks to magic, but Damaris thought he was just good and hardworking.

That day he sold her vegetables for the week, bread for tomorrow’s breakfast, a bag of powdered milk and a syringe to feed the puppy. For this he added cardboard.

Rogelio was black, stocky, and muscular, with a perpetually angry expression. When she brought the puppy, he was cleaning the lawnmower engine in the yard. He didn’t even say hello.

– Another dog? Don’t think about taking care of him. – Who’s asking you to? She pouted and headed straight home.

The syringe didn’t work. Damaris was strong but clumsy, her fingers as thick as the rest of her body. Whenever she pressed the plunger, she immediately pushed it all the way down and a stream of milk shot out from the bitch’s mouth, splashing in all directions. The little one couldn’t lick yet, so she couldn’t drink from the bowl, and the baby feeding bottles that were sold in town were too big. Don Jaime suggested that she use the dropper. She tried, but at such a pace, drop by drop, the dog would never? he didn’t drink. Eventually it occurred to her to dip the bread in milk and let the baby suck on it. This was it! The female dog ate the whole thing in the blink of an eye.

The cottage they lived in was not on the beach, but on a wooded slope where the whites of the city had built their vacation homes – large and beautiful, with gardens, paved paths, and swimming pools. There were high, steep stairs to the town, which required constant scrubbing, because after numerous rains, mud had accumulated there and someone could slip. Then it was time to cross the cove – a wide, rushing branch of the sea that filled up at high tide and emptied at low tide.

In the morning the water was high, so in order to buy bread for the bitch, Damaris had to get up at dawn, take the oar from the house and carry it on her shoulder, go down the stairs, push the canoe away from the pier, swim to the other side, tie the canoe to the palm tree, take the oar to the house of one of the fishermen who live by the cove, ask him, his wife or children to keep them, listen to the complaints and stories of a neighbor, and walk halfway across town to don Jaime’s shop … and then walk the same way the other way. And so every day, even when it rained.