The Busker

The journalist had asked to meet in a small cafe just off Grafton Street, and Diego arrived ten minutes early, carrying his guitar case out of habit. These days he played in concert halls across Europe, but he still felt most comfortable within sight of the street where it had all begun. "Everyone asks me the same question," he said, smiling. "How does a busker become a professional musician? The honest answer is: a dog."

He had come to Dublin from Lima at twenty-three to study engineering, but the course was expensive and his part-time job in a kitchen barely paid the rent. So, every afternoon after class, he would take his guitar to Grafton Street, find a spot outside a shoe shop and play for two or three hours. "I used to play mostly Peruvian waltzes and some Spanish classical pieces," he explained. "People would stop for a minute, drop a coin and move on. On a good day I made enough for dinner. On a bad day I made enough for a bus ticket."

For almost two years, nothing changed. He used to tell himself that music was just a way to pay the bills, and that his real career would start when he finished his degree. He was quite good at believing it.

Then came a wet Thursday evening in November. It had been raining all afternoon, and the street was almost empty. Diego was about to pack up when a small, very muddy dog appeared and sat down right in front of him, shivering. It had a red collar but no tag. "I didn't know what to do," he said. "So I kept playing. And the dog just sat there, listening, as if it were at a concert."

A few people stopped to look at the strange pair: the guitarist in the rain and his tiny, muddy audience. Someone took a photo. Then a woman came running down the street, out of breath and holding an empty lead. The dog was hers. It had escaped from her car an hour earlier, and she had been searching every street in the area since then. She thanked Diego about ten times, picked the dog up and asked him what he had been playing.

"I told her it was a waltz by a Peruvian composer," Diego said. "She listened for a while longer, in the rain, and then she gave me a card." It turned out that she worked for a music festival in the west of Ireland, and that she had been looking for someone to play at a small event the following summer. She had heard a lot of buskers on Grafton Street, she told him later, but she had never stopped for any of them, because she had always been in too much of a hurry. That night, thanks to her dog, she had been forced to stop.

Meanwhile, the photo of Diego and the dog was spreading online. By the weekend, it had been shared thousands of times, and people were coming to Grafton Street to ask for "the dog song". He started recording videos, and a year later he played his first proper concert, at that small festival, to two hundred people. He never finished his engineering degree. "My mother still hasn't completely forgiven me," he admitted.

The journalist asked if he ever missed busking. Diego thought about it. "I miss the uncertainty," he said. "On the street, nobody has bought a ticket. You have to earn every second of their attention. It taught me more than any teacher." He still came back to Grafton Street once a year, he said, on a Thursday in November, and played for an hour outside the same shoe shop.

And the dog? Diego laughed and took out his phone to show a photo of a gray-faced old terrier asleep on a sofa. "Her name is Pepper," he said. "She's fourteen now. She comes to every one of my Dublin concerts, and she always sits in the front row."