A Dog-Eat-Dog World

Gisela Salim-Peyer reviews Rodrigo Blanco Calderón’s “Simpatía” in advance of the Venezuelan elections.

By Gisela Salim-PeyerJuly 24, 2024

• Fiction

IMAGINE DAILY LIFE in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. Imagine it a few years ago in Venezuela, where people spent hours in line to buy powdered milk for their families or fuel for their cars, where food and medicine were scarce and unaffordable. Now imagine living through that crisis as a dog. It’s almost inconceivable, or it should be. Dog ownership—a symbol of wholesome family life, of care and prosperity—is hard to square with the kind of hardship that has plagued Venezuela. 

In the capital of Caracas, stray dogs are a symbol of a collapse that took many by surprise. In 1998, Hugo Chávez rose to power on a wave of socialist populism promising to use the petroleum-rich country’s oil rents to lift the poor. By the 2010s, that project began to flounder. Loyalists appointed to run the state-owned oil company partook in years of mismanagement and corruption. Chávez died in 2013, and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, had the bad luck of presiding over an economy in ruins and the good luck of inheriting a democracy coming undone. In the decade that followed, as GDP shrank by two-thirds, Maduro’s strategy to stay in power focused more on suppressing dissent than fixing the economy. 

The oil-rich nation and its dog-owning inhabitants could not fathom how quickly daily life was getting worse. As scarcity reigned, hungry people forwent the luxury of canine supplies, which in turn became similarly inaccessible. When the migration waves—which have so far scattered seven million Venezuelans across the world—so did a less remarked-upon crisis, in various cities, of wandering, abandoned dogs—animal casualties of a human exodus. 

Other species, too, were allotted their share of the country’s generalized plight. Buffalo and tapirs in a zoo were stolen by thieves hoping to sell them for their meat. Another zoo decided to euthanize an emaciated lion it couldn’t feed. Still, the situation of dogs, and to a lesser extent cats, was felt more deeply. Perhaps it’s because dogs are humankind’s favorite pets, their loyalty unconditional, their pain undeserved. 

Or perhaps it’s because their suffering was, in many instances, deliberately inflicted. In 2019, a colonel and his wife were arrested in their house close to Caracas, charged with hosting dissident meetings. The police reportedly debated what to do about Thor and Arpa, two brown Neapolitan mastiffs the imprisoned couple owned. Instead of putting them in a shelter or euthanizing them, the police chose to let the dogs starve inside the empty house, patrolling the property to prevent neighbors or animal rights activists from feeding them. 

The gratuitousness of the cruelty begets a question: who would deliberately harm an innocent dog? This is the mystery that animates Simpatía, Venezuelan author Rodrigo Blanco Calderón’s second novel, out in a recent English translation. The Caracas of Simpatía is desolate, families are unhappy, and dogs take it all in. In the book, the question acquires a literal meaning. The murder of a dog called Nevadito—and the mystery of who did it—gradually becomes the novel’s central drama.

In a way, Simpatía is the story of President Maduro’s Venezuela from a dog’s point of view. Protagonist Ulises Kan—whose surname sounds like the Latin canis, as in canine—is a lot like a stray dog himself: an orphan, living off the generosity of others, seeking a family to adopt him. He marries the blue-eyed Paulina, and then befriends Martín, her handsome father, a wealthy retired general. After Paulina tells Ulises, via WhatsApp, that she is leaving Venezuela, seeking a divorce, and selling the luxurious apartment where they both live, Martín takes his son-in-law’s side. He tells Ulises that the apartment is not Paulina’s to sell. It is in Martín’s name, so Ulises gets to stay there for as long as he pleases. 

The logic that guides the general to put his son-in-law’s welfare before his daughter’s is simple. Martín himself makes it explicit as he talks to Ulises in a dog cemetery he kept in the garden of his mansion at the foothills of the Ávila, the majestic tropical mountain at the northern tip of Caracas. Martín says dogs are good, dogs are indeed God, or at least proof of his existence. Women, he adds, might be the opposite of dogs, which means they are the devil, or at least a proof of his existence. “Do you really think so, Martín?” Ulises asks. “Of course I do. Look at Paulina, for example,” Martín replies. Paulina, whom another character compares to a hyena, has always hated dogs. Therefore, she’s a bad person. “The apartment is what she wants, so she can sell it,” Martín continues. “And leave you on the street without a cent, like a dog.”

Martín’s musings might sound comical, but an ethical system where dogs are not just good but also godlike is a pretext Simpatía’s reader must accept. Dogs in Venezuela have certainly had to endure a lot, and those in this novel do so with graceful stoicism and infinite willingness to forgive, licking the hands that mistreat them. “They are like Christ,” Ulises reflects at one point during the novel. “They bear the pain of others, but without the need for crucifixions or suffering.” 

If dogs are like Christ, the mission to save them is no less than a search for religion in a Venezuela that God seems to have deserted. Shortly after Paulina breaks off her marriage with Ulises, Martín dies of a cancer that has been slowly killing him for years. In his will, he stipulates that his mansion is to be turned into a dog shelter. Martín gives Ulises a deadline: if he manages to get the foundation up and running by that date, the apartment he once shared with Paulina will legally become his. 

Martín leaves Ulises instructions and all the money he could possibly need, but that doesn’t mean the job will be easy. Paulina schemes and bribes to get the will annulled. The equipment to build the shelter gets stuck in customs at the border for weeks. Ulises’s name is no accident. In Venezuela, setting up a shelter can be something of an odyssey. Even the name of the mansion that will house the shelter, “Los Argonautas,” or “The Argonauts,” references a struggle befitting Greek mythology. 

Ulises is an orphan, just like dogs tend to be—separated from their mothers even in the best of scenarios, and reduced to strays in the worst. By putting together a refuge for dogs, Ulises gains something close to a family. He meets Martín’s housekeeper, Señora Carmen—a stereotypical name for Venezuelan housekeepers—who is happy to make arepas every morning. As Ulises’s divorce draws near, Nadine, a dog-loving woman he had pined for since before his marriage, reappears in his life with an insatiable lust. He also begins working with Mariela and Jesús, a couple who had set up an informal charity called “Simpatía por el Perro,” or “Sympathy for the Dog,” which cares for strays. 

The story of Mariela and Jesús appears to draw inspiration from real-life events. In 2017, the police raided Los Verdes, a residential complex close to the tear gas–blurred epicenter of anti-government protests. A dog named Cross barked at the commotion, so the police shot him, leaving the animal in agony and the neighbors aghast. State repression in those months was so brutal that it did not even spare dogs. Pictures of Cross’s disfigured face went viral on social media. And they even made their way into the plot of Simpatía. Mariela and Jesús, who lived close to Los Verdes, agreed to take the dog in and, unable to cure him, euthanized him. 

In the novel, however, the name of the animal is not Cross but Thor, a possible reference to the real-life Thor and Arpa, the dogs that were condemned to starvation after their owners were imprisoned. In 2019, the people who tried to help the real Thor paid dearly: a woman who eventually managed to get the mayor’s permission to take Thor and Arpa to her house was then taken, with the dogs, to a prison in Caracas. Similarly, the book’s Thor incident turns Jesús and Mariela into the targets of a sham investigation, punishing them for helping the dog by accusing them of killing it.

Fortunately, unlike their real-life counterparts, Jesús and Mariela benefit from the protection of General Martín, who learns about their work and uses his military connections to make their legal troubles disappear. As a general, the character is said to have crushed Hugo Chávez’s attempted coup against President Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992, a detail that will endear him to many an exiled Venezuelan reader. Somehow, Martín survived the purges Chávez carried out after he came to power in 1998, which means he can still get favors from the military, which means the plot can move. It might be possible—even in a dictatorship like Venezuela’s—for a man to have it both ways, but it’s certainly implausible. How Martín preserved his mafia-king sway and also his distance from the dictatorship is a question this novel doesn’t address. 

Therein lies a fault of this tale: most of the characters are rendered to be either liked or disliked in a way that makes them unbelievable. Simpatía is a gripping story when it moves from place to place and from action to action. The author, Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, who made a name for himself writing short stories, has a talent for intrigue, but the intrigue promises a depth that these shallow characters cannot deliver. With the exception of Edgardo Aponte—a bon vivant lawyer who thinks up stratagems he’s not clever enough to execute—the more a character is developed, the duller he becomes. Take Ulises, the passive protagonist: when good things happen to him, it’s because he’s smart and virtuous; when they don’t, he’s a blameless victim. 

The very worst characters are all women: Altagracia, a hysteric housewife; Señora Carmen, a subservient housekeeper; Paulina, pure evil; Mariela, mother of dogs; and, of course, Nadine the beautiful. Nadine’s also smart: at one point, she wakes up from a nap with a “strange energy” that “could only be placated with a thousand-page book.” She is always game to watch The Godfather (1972), Ulises’s favorite movie, and delivers one-liners like “You’ve won yourself a first-class blowjob when we get home.” But these cinephilic and sexual proclivities don’t mean Nadine is available to Ulises. She can’t be. Nadine must be elusive, and although a reason is at some point contrived for her frequent absences, the true reason is that she was put in this story to serve as Ulises’s unattainable dream girl, nothing more.

Perhaps all the Manichaeism is fitting. As Martín foretold when he said that dogs are like God, this is a story about good versus evil. In Simpatía, as Ulises shoulders his odyssey, a biblical apocalypse is also looming. Prophets foresee floods that will destroy Caracas if the government doesn’t get there first. Legends announce that Mount Avila is actually a volcano that will erupt any minute. How can Caracas both sink and burn? This is not made clear. The author likes to bring up Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories as well. For some reason, there are also references to Nazi Germany. The allegories continue piling up somewhat clumsily; the biblical, mythological, and miscellaneous cataclysms never cohere.

Toward the novel’s end—forgive me the spoiler—Ulises leaves Venezuela. It seemed almost inevitable. The author Blanco Calderón left too; he’s based in Madrid now. I fled in 2014, as did millions of others, joining a refugee diaspora that has surpassed Syria’s. Venezuelans will vote in presidential elections for the first time in six years on July 28, and although Maduro makes no mention of the people who left, they’re among the main driving forces behind the support of the opposition candidate. Though Maduro faces a highly probable defeat, it remains to be seen if the regime will recognize the results, or if Venezuela might become a different country from the one Blanco Calderón paints in his novel. Most of the literature that Venezuela has produced is about migration, and I initially thought this novel might be an exception. It isn’t. The strays were there because the humans orphaned them. And we humans, when we leave, realize exile is its own type of orphanhood.

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Featured image: Camille Pissarro. Bridge at Caracas, 1854. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. National Gallery of Art (1985.64.108). CC0, nga.gov. Accessed July 24, 2024.