I was not looking to have a dog when a tiny orange one was handed to me on the street in Mexico City. I brought it closer to my face, and it licked my nose. As it yawn, the cutest baby yawn I had ever. heard, I noticed that one of its eyes was half blue. I brought it closer to my chest and it fell asleep in my arms as I talked to the man who had given it to me.
"It's a King Cocker Spaniel." The guy said, "he's a boy," and he'll only grow "about as tall as a ruler." He said it with the bravado of a person who absolutely knew what he was talking about. The dog was tiny and obscured by the baby blue hoodie it had on. The hood well over his head was in the shape of an elephants head, big round floppy ears, goggly eyes and blue pipe cleaner folded up like a trunk. My new dog was in there somewhere.
I haggled the man down from $1k pesos to a $100 (about $5US) and after asking my cousin if I could borrow money we walked away with the sleeping puppy. As we walked I brought him to my face, kissed it on the head and took elephant hoodie off so I could get a better look at him. I wondered out-loud what his name should be "Zeus? Proteo? Maybe Argos!" Turning him over I realized he was missing something... and that's why HER name is Anonima, Anonima Autonoma.
I didn't even have a real apartment at the time. I was living in my cousins business on a mattress I put on the floor of an empty office and eating at Fondas around Mexico because I didn't have a kitchen. Anonima was the ray of light in my life that I'd been missing, she was perfect in every way.
Anonima seemingly only care about one thing, 'FOOD!' mainly "where can I get it? and "excuse me, is this edible?" Overnight she surpassed the "as tall as a ruler" stage, and her ears perked up until they stayed up, perpetual satellites, unlike any Cocker Spaniel I had ever seen. She was also smarter than any dog I'd previously met, and could get herself in and out of anywhere she wanted as long as there was food on the other side.
So like any good parent I enrolled her in puppy obedience school where she rocketed to the top of the class, upstaging even Achilles, the trainers beloved Boxer. One day, while at the park, we bumped into Anonima's fawning trainer -Don Jose- and egger to show off his star pupil he said "Take her off the leash and you'll see how good she is at taking commands and she'll even follow us around the park!"
She indeed followed us around and responded to everything Don Jose said, she'd wait and sit when we told her to and come when we would ask her, always following close to my right side with Achilles leading the pack. Don Jose and I got lost in conversation as I asked him about his life when all of the sudden he looked around us and asked Achilles in a panic "¿Donde esta Anonima?" She'd gone and not even Achilles knew where.
I was like a U.S. Marshall in search of his fugitive. I kept arriving at scenes around the park long after she had committed her crimes. Anonima stole a mans sack lunch right from his hand as he about to sit and eat it. He was yelling "Whose dog is this!" as I zoomed past, embarrassed, toward the sound of screams. Two young ladies had been pleasantly surprised by Anonima when she materialized next to them and had covered them with kisses "She ran that way!" they said, pointing toward the bushes.
I could hear the sound of her deep bark and followed it toward the center of the park, "and wait... is that her?" she was on the other side of the chain link fence that separated the park from the amphitheater! I knew exactly why she was there. Earlier that day we had seen a Doña set up trays full of cat food for the local strays. Anonima had somehow managed to jump the 7 foot fence that surrounded that area. She was terrorizing the cats, eating all their food. I screamed at her to stop through the fence, but she barely even glanced at me.
I found the Doña who fed the cats and told her about my star pupil. She was not amused after letting me in and we saw the extend of what Anonima had done. Not only was all the wet cat food gone from the bowls, but she had also managed to find where the old lady kept the extra large bags of dry cat food and was waist deep in a black garbage bag when I encountered her.
I screamed "ANONIMA!" to try to stop her, she glanced up for a second and took off with the whole garbage bag in her mouth. She stubbornly refused to obey any of the commands that just 3 hours before she'd shown such proficiency in. It was getting dark by now, so with the cover of darkness I was able to sneak up while her back was to me. She was very preoccupied with something and the surprise of my hand around her collar aided its disappearance down to her aggressively distended belly.
That night in our new apartment, I had to give her a tomato juice bath, because on top of everything else she had also managed to roll in what I could only guess was a very dead animal. Although unhappy about the bath, she seemed extremely pleased with herself and curled into her bed to fall asleep, she was snoring in no time. Around 3 am the sound of her stomach contracting made me shot out of bed and as my eyes adjusted to the light I saw a large dark mass projectile out of her snout and on to the parquet floor. "What am I looking at?" I asked myself, waking my cousin up in the next room. "is that a whole fish?" she asked.
It was neatly folded like Viennetta ice cream, but smelled like sewage. The thing was so out of context that our minds refused to wrap around the obvious answer. Until, almost vomiting , I had to pick it up and realized It was the giant garbage bag. The very same one I had seen half her body in. Anonima had swallowed it whole.
This was only the start of our adventures.