Dispatches from Colombia: How to Make a Dog Disappear

Every morning here in Bogotá, bright and too early, a vehicle piled high with barking dogs rolls down Carrera 23. My street.
The dogmobile pulls to a stop directly beneath the apartment window. Oh, how the beasts bark! They moan like womanless fratboys on a bad tequila binge. They howl like wolves with bad toothaches. The cheerful, probably deaf, dogmobile driver bounds from the cab, scoops up a Pomeranian brought to the curb by a lady in a housecoat. How sweet! She’s sending little Velveeta away for the day! Velveeta will ride the dogmobile with her good buddies to what one imagines as a puppy dog amusement park, with fire-hydrant water features and meat cotton candy. Ta-ta, Velveeta!
We never need alarm clocks on our street. Bow-wow! Wake up, you sleepyheads! Can’t you see it’s 5:17 a.m.? You’re burning daylight! Bow-WOW!
Strict laws exist, thank goodness, against doggycide. But I must confess, shamefully, that the urge to sew barking snouts shut has crossed my mind. Hey, if my elementary school teachers in Alabama did it to me, why not?
After a painful few minutes, the barking bus takes its Doppler effect merrily down the road to the next neighborhood. Lights come on, one building after the next, as the baying fades.
I ran into a similar noise problem many years ago when I lived in Italy. And I must offer an author’s note at this point: Depending on whether those involved in this story still live and seek vengeance, this recounting may simply be alternative fact … a story I made up. From scratch. You decide.
I lived in Verona with a fine friend named Brad. In those days, I could sometimes hit a fastball, and by some extraordinary stroke of luck, this off-and-on-again skill took me to a position at third base for Verona Arsenal, an amateur team at the lowest levels of organized baseball in the country.
To stay the season, Brad let me share space with him in a 15th-century palazzo, a magnificent two-story Palladian-style villa with a huge cobbled courtyard. The deep-throated bells of the Duomo, a Roman Catholic cathedral built in 1187, rang two blocks away, and flocks of pigeons ruffled the air every time one of us left our first-floor apartment.
Things should have been perfect. Four-legged problems spoiled perfection.
Directly above the apartment lived an Italian duke and duchess (no kidding). They owned two giant schnauzers, solid black, big dogs that didn’t much like baseball players or people named Brad. Whenever the beasts lurked in the courtyard, we took great care entering or leaving the apartment, slinking along the walls like craven housecats.
All too often the dogs spotted us, and came bounding and baying and growling. A maiming bite always felt just a moment away, though the big black animals mostly just tortured us. They drew near and breathed moistly on our hands. We remained motionless while the animals sniffed and circled and growled. They worked as a team; if you kept an eye on one, the other went behind you.