Cave of the Dog

Michele Stepto

In the Phlegrean Fields near Naples there is a cave in which carbonic acid gas collects along the floor from time to time. When the gas is present, which is most of the time, the wanderer enters at his or her peril. The ancients thought of the cave as an entrance to the realm of the dead, and who can argue with them? Whoever lies down to sleep there, out of the wind and weather, will probably not rise again in this world.

For centuries, the cave has attracted the curious. Guides to the area used to bring with them a dog whom they would hold upside down by the legs, dangling it over the cave floor in order to test the air. If the dog lost consciousness, it meant the cave was full of gas. The dog was then dragged out and doused in the water of a nearby lake, whereupon it usually came to. Not always, however. Many dogs died in this way over the centuries, through bad timing or malice. Or wanton curiosity: Mark Twain, traveling in the Naples area, went looking for a dog he could bring along with him to the cave. “I longed to see this grotto,” he remembered. “I resolved to take a dog and hold him myself; suffocate him a little, and time him; suffocate him some more and then finish him.” Modern-day Italians are quite sentimental about their dogs and wouldn’t dream of abusing even a stray in this way. They keep them as pets and don’t expect them to be particularly useful. But this wasn’t always the case. One can imagine that in times past a dog who would not hunt or failed to guard its master’s house might find itself being dangled by its legs over the floor of the Grotto del Cane, breathing its last in demonstration of the cave’s fatal properties.

In the days when the Arabs were raiding the Neapolitan coast, their fearsome dogs were sometimes captured and kept until they might be taken to the cave for mass extinction. The death row in which these curs were held was usually a Neapolitan farmyard belonging to a farmer willing to undertake the task in exchange for a few soldi. When he had collected four or five such dogs, he would tie them to the sides of his cart, carry them to the cave, and dangle each one a good long time over the cave floor, until he was certain it wouldn’t revive, and afterwards he would dump the lot of carcasses down one of the numerous vents in the Phleghrean Fields, whence the dogs found their way to Elysium.

I wish I could report that even one of these dogs managed to free itself, but there is no record of such an escape. A story is told of one animal who earned a kind of reprieve, however, a small, handsome bitch whose name has been lost, if it was ever known. Shortly after she was billeted with her farmer-jailer, she whelped a litter of seven puppies, and the farmer, one Rosello, seeing the puppies crawling like worms over her teats, took pity on her and placed a basin of water where she could reach it. Perhaps out of gratitude or because her new condition had aroused in her some tender instinct, the animal now did Rosello a good turn. Later that same day the farmer’s infant son stumbled merrily into the farmyard looking for amusement and, spotting a ram who had been sequestered for gelding, lurched toward the frightened animal. The boy moved quickly, if unsteadily, and the bitch just as quickly put herself in his path, though this meant coming out to the end of her chain and leaving her blind brood behind. She did not bark or growl. She simply moved into the boy’s line of sight, whereupon the child sat down abruptly and clapped his hands in delight. From where he was sharpening a knife, Rosello saw it all, and saw the child the next moment pull himself upright by the bitch’s ears.

Since she had saved his son, as he reckoned, Rosello decided he would save one of her pups and raise it as his own. He delayed taking her to the cave until he judged the puppies might be weaned, and then he picked the likeliest of the brood and placed the rest in a large sack. Inside the sack the puppies squirmed and tussled, but their dam stood by patiently, as if she trusted Rosello to know what he was doing. When he put the sack into the cart, she leapt in after it, and when he threw the sack into the cave she followed it in and lay down next to it, with her head on her paws, and did not move again.

The saved pup Rosello dubbed Saracen, a talismanic name meant to induce valor in its bearer. Whether Saracen was indeed valorous is not known. Certainly, he guarded Rosello’s farmyard well enough to survive to an old age. Nothing larger than a chicken was ever lost on his watch, which Rosello considered small payment for the creature’s loyalty, for he was fiercely protective of the boy his dam had saved, as if he knew what service she had rendered the child. Except for those times when Saracen’s love life called him away, the boy and the dog were always together. They romped in Rosello’s farmyard when the boy was small, and later pastured sheep together in the neighboring fields. The years passed quickly, as years do, and by the time the boy was ten Saracen was feeling his age. His hips ached and his fleas had become intolerable. The least movement caused him pain. One day he wandered off, looking for a place where he might lie down for a nice, long nap, and the boy followed him. When they came to the cave, Saracen went in first and lay down, and when he didn’t get up the boy must have gone in after him. That is what Rosello concluded when he found them a day later, the boy’s hand resting lightly along the back of Saracen’s neck, as if he had been trying to rouse his companion before he himself fell asleep.

This would not happen now, when the properties of the cave are well understood and warnings to the traveler copiously displayed along the path that leads up to it. The way in is even blocked. Something resembling a wooden sawhorse has been jammed fast into the opening, and will not budge. A flag bearing a jaunty skull and crossbones, culled from a child’s pirate kit perhaps, has been stapled to it, though the message it sends is far from clear. A determined dog might still find its way in.

_______________________________________________________________

Michele Stepto has taught in the English and African-American Studies departments at Yale and at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.  She has published a translation from the Spanish of the Catalina de Erauso memoir under the title Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, along with works of history and fiction for younger and adult readers. Her historical fiction has appeared in The Copperfield Review and Lacuna.