This story has three characters. Three important ones, that is; three worth mentioning. Others may pop in here and there, but they don't mean anything. There is the police officer, pointing his gun at me. Manolo Carrión, or so he told me from the barrel of his gun; he had a small mouth touched with a wisp of a moustache and dark eyes hidden beneath a heavy brow. He frightened me. I can admit that now. There is me, Pintor, brandishing a knife I kept clean throughout, wiping the blade back and forth against my thigh like an obsessive. I was younger then, 25 years old, but looked much the same: in a word, ugly. Without pride I can tell you that my eyes are too far apart, my nose not right. I'm told I have always possessed an uninviting smile. Family pictures bear this out. And then there is the dog, with thick black fur and enormous yellow eyes, bleeding red into a Lima gutter. He died, whimpering, but not without a struggle.

It was foggy, Lima asleep in haze.

I'll start with the dog.

***

There were ten of us, maybe eleven. Names? We shared one: compañero. All of us, except me, whom they sometimes called Pintor for my erstwhile talents with the brush. We formed an uncertain circle around a dead dog, under the dim lights just off the plaza. July 28, 1979. Our first revolutionary act, announcing ourselves to the nation. We strung up dogs from all the street lamps, covered them with terse and angry slogans, Die Capitalist Dogs and such; leaving the beasts there for the people to see how fanatical we could be. It is clear now that we didn't scare anyone so much as we disturbed them and convinced them of our peculiar mania, our worship of frivolous violence. Fear would come later. Killing street dogs in the bleak gray hours before sunrise, the morning of Independence Day, July 28. Decent people slept. We made war, fashioned it with our hands, our knives, and our sweat.

Everything was going well until we ran out of black dogs.

Earlier, one of the comp...