It wasn’t love at first sight with me and Simón. In fact, I didn’t want him. I had been promised a labrador, but when we met in 2004 he turned out to be a street dog – one of the estimated 66,000 strays that prowl the streets of Bogotá, a deep-black furred creature with a white chest who may have been the grandson of a labrador. He was aggressive and I was scared of him, yet we took him home. After all, we had driven for eight hours from my home city, Bucaramanga, to collect him after my uncle, while looking for his missing cat, had found this “labrador” in an alley.
My uncle said the dog was about six months old, judging by how short he was. On the way back, he vomited in the car the whole way. To be fair, Bucaramanga is at the top of a plateau; to get there, you drive along Pescadero, a steep, winding road that snakes its way up the Chicamocha canyon. It’s enough to make anyone queasy.
After a few days, Simón became less aggressive and we started to connect; he loved loud music and sang while I played the harmonica. His howling conveyed emotion extremely well. At the beginning, he slept beside my bed. After a couple of months, he moved next to me. We ended up deeply in love. I would take him everywhere with me – no need for a lead.
One day, while we were walking through a crowd, I lost Simón. We were far from home and we had got there by bus, so he couldn’t mark the path, as he would have had we walked. The next day, after looking for him all morning, I went home empty-handed to find him waiting for me. A reunion worthy of a romcom.
This experience opened a new world to Simón, as he realised he could go out by himself and come home as he pleased. Whenever we opened the main gate of the house, he would find a way to squeeze through, spend a night or two out, then come back in the wee small hours. He still loved walks with me, but when he noticed we were heading home, he would run off on a solo adventure. I let him be, knowing that he would come back. At about 3am, he would howl his lungs out until we opened up for him.
Simón was a city dweller. Friends would tell me: “I saw your dog here or there.” After a bath, a good sleep and a big meal, he would start to make plans to escape for his night adventures. He never grew taller, so it wasn’t that he was less than a year old – he was just short.
He lived his first life on the streets, the second as a house pet and the third combining the best of both worlds. Whenever someone asked what breed he was, I would say: “A street fighter.”
