Abandoned Dogs
Reviews
By Michael Schaub
On the first page of Simpatía, a character offers a line that could well serve as a statement of purpose for the latest novel from Venezuelan author Rodrigo Blanco Calderón: “It’s true, it is possible to live without dogs, but there’s really no need.”
It’s spoken by Martín Ayala Ayala, Ulises’s father-in-law, a well-connected, retired Venezuelan military general who shares his home with three dogs: Michael, Sonny, and Fredo. (This would make Martín a modern-day version of Vito Corleone, a comparison the reader senses the general would welcome.) Martín and Ulises’s shared love of all things canine forms the basis of Simpatía, an accomplished, winding novel that sings in a translation from Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn.
Ulises, a teacher with a movie obsession, has developed an unusual friendship with Martín, one that lasts even after Paulina—Ulises’s wife and Martín’s daughter—informs her husband via text that she is leaving the country and he is not welcome to join her.
Ulises reacts to the news with remarkable equanimity—he has seen this coming, perhaps, and is not shattered by his wife’s departure. He immediately considers getting a dog of his own; he hasn’t been able to do so in the past because of Paulina’s purported allergy to the animals. (Martín, estranged from his daughter, doubts this; “if anything,” she is “allergic to joy, like her mother,” he snorts.)
Martín, who is ailing from stage 4 pulmonary emphysema, warns Ulises about his daughter’s mercenary outlook, predicting—correctly, it turns out—that Paulina wants to sell the apartment that she shares with Ulises and leave the man “on the street . . . like a dog.”
But Martín, who owns the apartment, has other plans. After the general succumbs to his emphysema, Ulises learns that Martín has left the apartment to him, under one condition: he must coordinate the conversion of Los Argonautas, the general’s home, into the Simpatía por el Perro Foundation, an organization that will be run by Mariela, a veterinarian, and Jesús, a trainer, and will rescue dogs abandoned by their owners who have fled the country to escape the reign of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. And Ulises only has 120 days to make it happen. (The name of the general’s home is a bit of fun mischief from Blanco Calderón: Ulises, already bearing the name of a man on a journey, becomes Jason, and the foundation, his Golden Fleece.)
Ulises, Mariela, and Jesús’s rush to build the foundation in Los Argonautas would be enough for a novel, but Blanco Calderón has other stories to tell, and he tells them beautifully. Ulises reunites with Nadine, a woman he was infatuated with before his marriage to Paulina, and the two kindle a romance—but Ulises soon learns that the woman might not be who she claims to be. He seems unperturbed by this, content to spend nights with Nadine watching their favorite films (The Godfather trilogy, of course, makes an appearance). Nadine, meanwhile, becomes obsessed with the works of Elizabeth von Arnim, the English author who told the story of her life, slantwise, in the 1936 memoir All the Dogs of My Life. (Von Arnim provides one of the novel’s epigraphs: “I would like, to begin with, to say that though parents, husbands, children, lovers, and friends are all very well, they are not dogs.”)
Throughout all this, Blanco Calderón recounts the tribulations of life under Madurismo: shortages, poverty, homes left empty by those who have had to flee, and of course, abandoned dogs. Mariela and Jesús, who recently lost a child, are stalked by officers with SEBIN, Venezuela’s political police force, and driven nearly to despair: “What did God want to take away from them this time? This land really was cursed, if even the dogs could not be saved. They would need to leave Los Argonautas and the country, and take their compassion elsewhere.”
The history of Venezuela is inextricable from this novel, and Blanco Calderón does an excellent job of demonstrating how autocracy has poisoned the lives of the country’s residents. There’s Martín, of course, who remained “untouchable” throughout the Bolivarian Revolution and the regimes of Hugo Chávez and Maduro; it’s implied that the general retained some influence over Chávez. Some key parts of the novel take place in the Hotel Humboldt, overseen by the brother of Martín’s majordomo; the building, a pet project of former Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, was abandoned for decades, a symbol of the country’s unrealized potential (or as Blanco Calderón has it, “the Venezuelan people’s Titanic”).
Blanco Calderón’s thoughtful reflections on Venezuelan government—never didactic or heavy-handed—make this a political novel, but that’s not all that’s going on here. Even more present is the theme of family, and Blanco Calderón handles this beautifully. Ulises was abandoned as a baby and adopted by a couple unable to conceive. But, as he explains to Nadine, “the woman got pregnant just a few months after I moved in with them. Ironic, isn’t it? After that, they never quite knew what to do with me.” Ulises’s double abandonment explains his willingness to be de facto adopted by Martín, as well as his unfazed reaction when he finds out his wife is leaving him. Like a pet dog deserted by his owners, Ulises welcomes affection but knows better than to count on it.
Ulises is far from the only fascinating character in Simpatía. There’s Martín, quicksilver and reluctant to be known, who seems to delight in destabilizing everyone in his orbit, and Nadine, or the person who claims to be her, who comes and goes unpredictably, showing flashes of love amid her deep instability. Blanco Calderón has a deep affection for most of his characters, but it’s most evident in the ones who are broken, or who are one shoulder tap away from being shattered completely.
It’s the writing and translation, however, that make Simpatía such a gorgeous book. When Ulises finally gets his own dog, Blanco Calderón, Hernández González, and Hahn describe in heart-wrenching detail how the man is affected by the pet: “What Ulises found in his dog’s gaze, from the moment he first saw him on the sidewalk at Los Argonautas, was a land that begins where love ends. Peace and joy without the shadows. A mirror that had dropped its veil. The final edge of light before Death.”
And perhaps that’s what Venezuela is to Ulises: a land that begins where love ends. He understands Paulina’s need to leave; he understands why others felt that need too, even if he can’t quite get his head around those who abandoned their dogs the way he was abandoned when he was a child. Simpatía is a marvel of a novel, one that asks what home means when every possible lodestar has gone dim. Or as Ulises thinks: “Maybe that’s what a home was. . . . Wanting to leave a place, just so you can come back.”
Michael Schaub is a member of the board of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Georgetown, Texas.
More Reviews