To a backdrop of Spanish Hombres, Catalonian style, the greyhounds coarse around the track.
Barcelona’s dog stadium.
From two steel doors, the muzzled, lean hunters appear, blinking in the sunlight, led by a never changing team of handlers, they parade before the punters.
Initially, there are about a hundred disinterested spectators, but their numbers grow as the ‘off’ approaches.
At the outset of the first race the crowd has swelled.
An eager anticipation swirls in the atmosphere, and the hounds bark in their cages, awaiting the starter’s signal for the Hare to run.
Each day from the apartment window, for you cannot miss it, I note the same procedure.
The starter is an old man with a crippled leg.
He seems to live in the dark, cavernous kennels where the dogs are kept.
He shuffles from it, disdainfully unaffected by the excited crowd, to another small, dark, hut.
He blinks, like the hounds, as if unaccustomed to natural sunlight.
He reaches his sombre destination disappears and a bell rings.
The traps open.
There is a roar as the hounds scamper after what looks like, at first sight, a cut out white sock, which inflates, as it gathers speed.
The Greyhounds never catch this pretend Hare.
It runs forever.
Sometimes, for I calculate there is a minimum of 49 races a week, and being affected by the continual action from the stadium, I imagine the dogs never change.
They are the same hounds in each race, doomed to always fail in their pursuit, of a mythic creature, disguised as a white cotton sock and stretched over a piece, of bizarrely woven, wire.
The race is over.
They rake the sandy track.
Gamblers tear up losing bets.
There is a brief pause.
Time to change the number on each dog.
The crippled starter adds or subtracts a little tinting, on the coat of each ‘competitor’, so they appear apparently different.
They receive another shot of ‘methadrine’.
Then he returns with the same hounds.
Each dog out again, under a different name.
They are condemned forever to run this track, day in day out, winning but never reaching their prey.
The black hound gave me this idea.
He never wins, always there, or thereabouts, as they say in gambling parlance, but never winning.
Each race has a black hound, which has varying white markings on its body.
There are at least seven races each day, seven days a week, sometimes twice a day.
Now that is working for a living.
