The dogs are dead.
Died within a week of each other.
The dogs, my best friends when I was growing up. We buried them at the end of the garden,
underneath the rubber tree. If you cut
the bark of a rubber tree in a crosshatch fashion, a white, milky colloid
issues forth. This is latex, from which
you get natural rubber. You’re supposed
to catch it in an old paint can, or at least that’s what I used to do as a
child. Then you store it up. The whole process is called ‘tapping’.
When I was young, my father took me to a commercial rubber
factory. The dogs came too - although
they had no interest in our rubber tree, beyond it’s convenience as a urinating
post. I remember saying to my father
that the rubber being manufactured looked like large loaves of bread or great
rolls of shit. He cuffed me around the
ear, told me not to use language like that.
Language like what? I replied.
Goodness knows where you learned to talk that, he sighed. Then he showed me a part of the factory where
the workers – bare-chested Iquitos ,
naked torsos moist with sweat – were making vulcanised rubber. The
rubber is heated, and sulphur, sometimes carbon are added to improve resistance
and elasticity. When we got back to the
car, my father pointed out that the tyres on his Jupiter were made of
vulcanised rubber.
It was on the way
home from the rubber factory one of the dogs started whining. And in evening they were both off their
dinner. It’s the heat, said my
father. It’s always hot, I said. They’ll be alright, he said. I went to bed worrying about them all the
same, but sure enough the next morning on their walk they seemed happy enough –
chasing dragonflies, and at regular intervals disappearing into the scrub to
ferret out whatever prizes they could find.
Memory is an
interesting thing. I am typically
forgetful. The kind who goes upstairs
and then on the landing wonders what I am doing and why I am there. What am I looking for? I think to
myself. Then again, there are passages
in my life I can recall with near clarity, where events have crystallised in
sequence, forever enshrined in the vestiges of my mind. The week we went to the rubber factory is one
of those times.
I can’t say for
sure if my recollection stems from the visit to the rubber factory, my first experience
of industry of any kind, or now that the dogs are dead, what may have been the
first signs of the internal bleeding they would both succumb to, or whether
it’s the discovery we made on our morning walk - the dogs and I.
We were about to
turn home, on our usual mile long circuit around the plantation grounds, when
the dogs, who had disappeared off the overgrown path, started
barking loudly and excitedly. I picked
up a broken branch and began beating my way through the brush towards them. As I approached I became aware of a fetid
stench, so bad I had to pull the collar of my shirt over my
nose, fighting back the tall grass with my free hand until I saw why the dogs
were making such a noise.
If I came upon it
now, now that I am middle aged, more easily moved, afraid even, I think it
would affect me more than it did back then.
It’s a strange thing, memory. For
when I set eyes on the girl, who could not have been much beyond my eight
years, stripped of her clothes, neck snapped, swollen body, blackened and
bruised, daylight in her eyes, I recall she reminded me of a discarded Cream of
Wheat doll, whose blue and unkissed lips had never, at any moment, breathed
life or looked the sallow mask of death in the face.
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