The dog portraits: Xochi, the godmother.
Her gaze made me flinch.
A note and content warning1
We called her Xochi, which meant comal in Amuzgo, but not because she reminded us of a tortilla griddle. Because the word, dismembered and held up to the light, meant vessel of the moon, and we’ve always liked the buried poetry of his language. She came to us a few months shy of adult, an eager, thick-coated stripling, with eyes that sought reassurance. I didn’t want her; it was Isma who insisted, who had always wanted some kind of German shepherd. We’d had a Belgian shepherd puppy but Totoro had died of a case of worms too bad to solve despite my best efforts, and that disaster had, to my mind, been the end of it, until he brought Xochi home, panting and jumping on her leash.
It took her and Kisaantom two days to acclimate to one another, and then they played all the time. Kisaantom was, I could tell, delighted. She finally had a companion exactly her size. Maclovio, who only sometimes deigned to play with her, seemed put out by his new superfluity. He might not always want to play, but he enjoyed the dignity of being asked.
I don’t know when I first started noticing that she seemed a little off. A little wild. After a half-hour of playing, Kisaantom had to back away or hide. When Xochi barked, you thought the stars were falling. But she was sweet to our littlest Frijolito, a chihuahua puppy who would perch on Xochi’s hip at dinnertime and wait for food to be served. I couldn’t figure her out. She was full of something, no, everything, full and overflowing, searching and searching. Her gaze made me flinch.
Isma told me that his sister had found her for us with an acquaintance. They hadn’t had anywhere enough room for her and had been glad to give her up. She hadn’t been actively mistreated, but she’d been confined, starved of affection, and discouraged from the selfhood that even the smallest pups with just-opened eyes will worm their way into. She’d spent every day of her short life tied to a post on a three foot leash, and then we gave her a mountain.
She fell in with bad company. Kichom, the split-eared loner, the derelict and the gentleman thief, at seven by far the oldest of our crew and quite an old man for a pueblo dog. After Isma’s grandfather died, he’d learned to live on his own—before we moved to town, he’d been scrounging his way through backyards, robbing a tortilla here, a chicken leg there. You never saw him skinny, but you often saw him running. Xochi knew a survivor when she saw one. She trailed after him, a student to his sensei, and though he affected to ignore her, he didn’t make her leave him alone either. They would go off for hours together. One day, we got a call from my mother-in-law. We hadn’t seen either of them since the day before. Oh, she told us, they’re both here! Even though Xochi had only made the trip from our hill to town once before—a four kilometer journey—she’d followed Kichom straight there. This was ludicrous behavior from a dog whose previous territory had been a circle with a three-foot radius. She was impervious to our scolding. Her eyes were filled, now, with every place she had never been. She jumped on me and held her muzzle to my chin as though to say, Alaya, Alaya, did you know how much there is to see?
She had her first litter and we kept one of the males, a black one we called Kwi. That maternal instinct we’d glimpsed with Frijolito came out in full—she stayed with the seven puppies for most hours of the day and let them nurse until she grew hollow, no matter how much we fed her. The puppies were fat as hamsters. As soon as they could eat on their own, though, she found her sensei and went back to the hills. There was so much she’d missed!
She got wilder.
As Kwi stretched out, she’d take him with her on her journeys. She made sure he was in the lead when they left as a pack, and I began to regret that we’d named him one, which I’d only done to distinguish him from Bei, two, the coffee-colored girl we’d given to Xochi’s original owners2. He was a sweet puppy but insufferably sure of himself, and so dog-oriented that I wasn’t sure at first if he even noticed the two of us outside of mealtime. He certainly didn’t seem to listen to anything we told him. I blamed Xochi for his wild stubbornness, but she was as people-oriented as ever, running to me whenever I scolded her, bouncing her paws on my chest and looking at me with those hungry eyes, saying See, see, Alaya? Did you see everything yet?
It was impossible for me to dislike Xochi but sometimes it was impossible for me to embrace her. I too had gone running, heedless, through hills and returned hungry for more. I knew what it was like to want to see everything. I still did. Maybe that was why she pressed on something dense inside of me. The bubble that hid my clean shoreline. The bubble dense with a lifetime of other people’s shit. And my own, and my own.
We nicknamed her the madrina, the godmother. She did not suffer fools. One day Kisaantom made the grave error of trying to nose some of Xochi’s food out of her bowl. Xochi went after her before I realized what was happening. I was alone that day and I screamed and hauled and hit them with the broom for three minutes while she worried at poor Kisaantom’s neck like a chicken. They only broke apart after I dumped a bucket of water over both of them. Lessons I never expected to learn from having a pack of dogs: when males fight they make a lot of noise, but they bite the ears and soft mouth the throat. When two bitches fight, one might not walk away from it. Kisaantom had a hematoma on her throat that the vet had to drain and she still wheezes when she runs. They don’t play anymore.
A few months ago Xochi returned from one of her walkabouts with her snout slashed and bleeding. It had happened to some of the other dogs, but until then Xochi had seemed too smart to get into it with one of the tejones or coatis, what my sister calls “jungle raccoons” for the inch-long shivs they keep for claws. I don’t remember how many stitches she needed, but imagine rudimentary reconstructive surgery. Now that it’s healed, she really does look like Scarface, the madrina of the pack, who will never, ever stop running the hills or making sure her son has the best of everything.
I’m waiting on her now, actually. Those hungry eyes that are always so incongruously bright every time she returns home, so ready to share with me, so desperate for me to acknowledge that yes, yes, my love, I see everything you have to give, I see every place you haven’t been, I see every place you want to see, I see your sun, and I see the moon of your name, the wide silver moon, and you her open vessel.
Hello, dear readers! This one took me longer than expected. Sometimes writing just doesn’t go in the direction or at the speed you expect it to. My health is much better than it was, but there’s still some ups and downs. Nevertheless, I am delighted to have begun my dog portrait series, as you can see, with the beautiful Xochi. There are six more dogs, so you can expect six more portraits—on no particular schedule, in no particular order. The rest will probably be for paid subscribers, though.
CW: Animal-on-animal violence. Some of the incidents in this portrait will seem extreme by US/urban standards of dog rearing. I’ve thought a lot about how I present them here, particularly whether or not I should take more time to explain the context, or justify our choices. In the end, I’ve decided to mostly present life here as it is with a minimum of explanation. I might write an essay about my own acclimation to what I call “country decisions”—like the fact that the dogs all roam freely—but I don’t want these portraits of my dogs to be about that. They live in their own context, and we take joy in watching them thrive in it.
They wanted the puppy for their grandchild this time. Letting Xochi have this first litter and giving them one of the puppies had been the condition of adopting her.
This is a splendid portrait, and I'm so glad that it's the first of a series.