Elena Garro: The Day We Were Dogs. Summary and analysis
In Elena Garro’s The Day We Were Dogs, two girls, Eva and Leli, are left alone in a large house in the countryside while their family flees the summer heat. Amid abandonment and boredom, they decide to symbolically transform themselves into dogs and join the world of Toni, the house dog chained up in the garden. They adopt the names Cristo and Buda and live a day in a parallel time, alien to the human order. There, they witness a scene of violence: two men fight, and one kills the other. Soldiers interrogate the dog-girls, who respond with barks, and the murderer is arrested. The crime, however, marks them; the game is broken, and when they return home, they can no longer maintain the animal fiction. The night is filled with ghostly presences, and the girls realize that they have crossed a line: the experience of crime has expelled them from innocence and any possible heaven, even the one imagined for dogs.