The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  A few months before, with the latent fear caused by anything that brought him closer with his mother, Ramón had dared to ask her about the red bumps standing out on the extremely white skin of her arms and she had barely responded that she was sick. But soon enough, when the storm was unleashed and the bourgeois house in Sant Gervasi was filled with screaming and fighting, he would know that the marks had been made by the needles she used to inject herself with the heroin that she had become addicted to in a parallel life, one that she led at night, beyond the pleasant walls of the family home.

  Many years later, on a Mexican night in August 1940, Ramón would hear from Caridad’s lips that it was her respectable, enterprising, and Catholic husband himself who had urged her to take the first step toward the downward spiral from which she would be rescued, after having suffered many humiliations and received an infinite number of blows, by the supreme ideal of the socialist revolution. Pau Mercader, thinking that he would help her overcome the sexual reluctance she had felt ever since they married, had invited her to accompany him to certain exclusive brothels in Barcelona where it was possible to enjoy the sight of the most daring sexual acrobatics through special windows. Here a man and a woman could participate, or two couples, or a man with two women or even three, or two women alone, all experts in erotic positions and fantasies, the men endowed with penises of an exaggerated size, and the women trained to receive natural or artificial objects of disproportionate dimensions in any of their orifices. The results of this experiment met his father’s expectations very poorly, since it caused Caridad to reject his sexual demands even more forcefully, although she took a liking to certain spirits served in those mauve-curtained, dimly lit dens, liqueurs that took away her inhibitions and, at the end of the night, allowed her to open her legs almost as a reflex. A while later, in search of those elixirs, she had begun to frequent the city’s most select bars, many times without her husband, who was increasingly called away by his absorbing business. But soon Caridad would feel that those places had an excess of that which she wasn’t seeking (men willing to inebriate her to throw her in bed) and something, still undefined, was lacking, something capable of motivating her and reconciling her with her own soul.

  Then that fine woman, surrounded by luxury and comfort from birth, educated by nuns, an expert rider of Arabian horses, married to that owner of factories who was, by his very nature, removed from the feelings of men who worked for their wealth, removed her jewels and attractive clothing and descended in search of the shadiest corners of the city. She felt another world with her hands when she decided to walk the streets of the Barrio Chino, the darkest plazas of the Raval, the narrow and fetid alleyways near the port. There, as she tasted less sophisticated and more effective alcohol, she discovered a dark humanity, weighed down by frustration and hate, who tended to speak in a language that was new to her about things as tremendous as the need to do away with all religions or to turn the bourgeois, exploitative order—that enemy of man’s dignity, that world from which she herself came—upside down. The anarchist fury, of which she had only a vague notion up until that moment, was like a blow that shook every cell in her body.

  With her libertarian friends and the underclass from the ports and the red-light district, Caridad had tried heroin, paid for by her generous purse, and found in its iconoclasm a hidden satisfaction that gave life a more attractive flavor. She rediscovered sex, on a different level and with other ingredients, and practiced it in a primitive way whose existence she had never imagined in her sad married life: she enjoyed it with stevedores, sailors, textile workers, streetcar drivers, and professional agitators, for whom she also bought drinks and heroin with her husband’s money. It satisfied her to prove that among those rebels one’s origins and level of education didn’t matter: she was welcomed among them, since she was a companion willing to break the rules and to free herself from the chains of bourgeois society.

  Despite the fact that the four children conceived in her womb were already sleeping in her house, it was in the midst of that vertigo of new feelings and recently learned libertarian sermons that Caridad became conscious of the hate eating away at her and she finally turned into an adult woman. She never knew for certain to what point she shared the anarchists’ ideas out of conviction or out of rebellion, but after getting mixed up with them, she realized that she was working for her own physical and spiritual liberation. On occasion, she even thought that she was taking delight in her degradation because of the disdain she felt for herself and toward everything her life had been and could continue to be. But whether it was out of conviction or hate, Caridad had gone down that path in a way that, from then on, would always be thus: with a fanatical and uncontainable force. To prove it, or perhaps to prove it to herself, she decided to cross her greatest frontiers and, along with her new comrades, planned her absurd class suicide: first she worked with them to promote strikes in the shops belonging to Pau, whom she had turned into the very incarnation of the bourgeois enemy; later, in her spiral of hate, she began to prepare something more irreversible, and with the group of her companions planned the blowing up of one of the factories that the family had in Badalona.

  At barely ten years of age, Ramón had no notion of what was happening underneath the family’s surface. Enrolled in one of the city’s most expensive schools, he lived carefree, focusing his free time on physical activities, preferring them to the intellectual tasks that had been practiced in his house since birth where, at established hours, they spoke in four languages: French, English, Castilian Spanish, and Catalan. Perhaps something deeply rooted in his character already existed then, since his best friends were not his classmates or his sports rivals but rather his two dogs, gifts from his maternal grandfather when the boy showed proof of a special weakness for those animals. Santiago and Cuba, baptized by his expatriate grandfather with nostalgic names, had come from Cantabria as mere puppies and the relationship that Ramón established with them was intimate. On Sundays, after Mass, and in the afternoons on which he came home early from school, the boy used to go beyond the city limits in the company of his two Labradors, with whom he shared crackers, long runs, and his predilection for silence. He barely saw his parents. Increasingly, Caridad slept all day and went out in the evening to take up her social life, as she called the nocturnal outings from which she returned with new red bumps on her arms. His father, meanwhile, either stayed at his office very late, trying to salvage his business from the collapse caused by his older brother’s indolence, or enclosed himself in his rooms without any intention of seeing or talking to anyone. In any event, home life continued to be calm, and the dogs even made it satisfactory.

  When the police showed up at the Sant Gervasi house, they had two options for Caridad’s fate: jail for being accused of planning attacks against private property, or the insane asylum as a drug addict. Her comrades in arms and debauchery were already behind bars by that time, but Pau’s social position and both of their family names had influenced the police’s decision. In addition, one of Caridad’s brothers, who was a municipal judge in the city, had intervened on her behalf, saying she was a sick woman without any will of her own, manipulated by the diabolical anarchists and syndicalists who were the enemies of order. In an effort to save his own prestige and whatever remained of his bourgeois and Christian marriage, Pau obtained a less radical solution and promised that his wife would no longer frequent the anarchist circles nor take drugs, and he gave his word (and surely some good money) as a guarantee.

  Two months later, with the detoxification treatment which Caridad had agreed to undergo completed, the family left for that vacation in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, where they experienced days that came close to happiness and perfect harmony, and Ramón kept them that way in his recollections, where they became his memory’s greatest treasure.

  As Caridad’s womb swelled, the family went on with its peaceful routine of daily living. Pau’s business, however, could barely recover in the middle of the crisis
brought about by breaking with his dissolute older brother and the workers’ mounting demands. Luis, who would be the last of the brothers, was born in 1923, shortly before Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship began and in the midst of the truce that Caridad would break a year later: because hate is one of the most difficult illnesses to cure and she had become more addicted to revenge than to heroin.

  Caridad would go back to her anarchists’ world in a peculiar way. Her brother José, the judge, had confessed that he was experiencing serious financial problems due to some gambling debts that would end his career if they became public knowledge. Caridad promised to help him monetarily in exchange for information: he needed to tell her who the judges would be in the courtrooms where her detained anarchist friends would be tried. With these facts, other colleagues waged an intimidation campaign on the judges, who received letters threatening them with a variety of reprisals if they dared to impose sentences on any libertarian. Pau Mercader quickly discovered the drain on his capital and understood where it was going. With the weakness that always characterized his relationship with Caridad, the man only took measures to ensure that she not have access to great sums and again concentrated on the businesses he was trying to maintain afloat from his new office on Calle Ample.

  Upon seeing how her contribution to the cause was being obstructed, Caridad rebelled again: she went back to the brothels, where she drank and took drugs, and to the meetings in which she yelled for an end to the dictatorship, the monarchy, the bourgeois order, and the disintegration of the state and its retrograde institutions. Her brother José planned the most honorable way out with Pau and they managed to have Caridad committed to an insane asylum by a doctor friend.

  Fifteen years later, Caridad would describe to Ramón the two months in which she lived in that inferno of cold showers, confinement, injections, brainwashing, and other devastating therapies. That they would try to drive her crazy was something that still enraged her to the point of aggression; and if they didn’t achieve it, it was because Caridad had the luck that her anarchist colleagues came to save her from that prison, threatening to bring down Pau’s business and even the asylum itself if they didn’t set her free. The coercion worked and Pau was forced to bring his wife back; she entered the house in Sant Gervasi only to collect her five children and some suitcases with necessities; where she was going, she didn’t know, but she would not again live near her husband or any of their families, upon whom, she swore, she would take revenge until she made them disappear from the face of the earth.

  Facing the evidence that nothing was going to stop her, Pau begged her not to take the children. What was she going to do with five kids? How was she going to maintain them? And above all, since when did she love them so much that she couldn’t live without them? Perhaps it was another form of revenge against her husband, who professed a distant and silent affection for them, since he didn’t know how to be any other way; perhaps she took them in search of some spiritual support; perhaps it was because she already dreamed of making each of them into what they would be in the future. The fact is that, resolved as she was to take her children with her, no pleading made her change her mind.

  Everything that would happen from that moment on would take on a sense of novelty and adventure. Ramón, who was already accustomed to Caridad’s crises, accepted the move as a passing tempest and only regretted having to leave Cuba and Santiago, but he calmed down when their cook assured him that she would take care of them until he returned.

  In the spring of 1925, with her children in tow, Caridad crossed the French border. Although her purpose was to reach Paris, the woman decided to make a stop in the pleasant city of Dax, perhaps because at that moment she felt unsure of herself, as if she needed to redesign the map of her life, or because she had convinced herself that destroying the system and raising five children at the same time can be more complicated than it appears, especially when—one of the paradoxes of life—you don’t have enough money.

  Shortly after arriving in Dax, Ramón and his siblings, with the exception of Luis the baby, entered a public school and Caridad began to look for political company, which she quickly found, since anarchists and syndicalists were everywhere. To keep herself afloat, she began to sell her jewels, but the rate of expenditure imposed by nights out at taverns, cigarettes, a pinch here or there of heroin, and good meals (only a Communist can be hungrier and have less money than an anarchist, Caridad declared) became unsustainable.

  For Ramón, this period was an initiation into an apprenticeship that would begin to redefine him. He had just turned twelve; until then he’d been a boy enrolled in exclusive schools, raised in abundance, and suddenly, from one day to the next, he had fallen, if not into poverty, at least into a world much closer to reality, where coins were counted out for snacks and beds remained unmade if one didn’t make them oneself. Small Montse, who was ten, was charged with caring for and feeding Luis, while Pablo had taken on the nuisance of cleaning. Jorge and Ramón, because they were the oldest, were responsible for shopping and, very shortly after, for preparing the meals that would save them from dying of hunger when Caridad didn’t come home on time or returned from her political activities drugged. His friends in Dax were the children of poor villagers and Spanish immigrants, with whom he enjoyed going into the nearby woods to collect truffles, guided by pigs. In that period, Ramón also learned to feel the burn of a cold stare on his skin from the small city’s young bourgeois citizens.

  After asking for reports from Barcelona, the Dax police decided that they did not want Caridad in the area and, without further thought, demanded that the family go on their way. So they had to pack their bags again and go to Toulouse, a much larger city, where she thought she could pass unnoticed. There, both to avoid police repression and because she was convinced that her jewels would not cover much more, Caridad began to work as the hostess of a restaurant, since she had the manners and education for the job. Thanks to the owners of that place, who quickly took to the children, Jorge and Ramón were able to enter the École Hotelière de Toulouse, the former to study to be a chef, Ramón to be a maître d’hôtel, and the stability they regained made them embrace the illusion that they would once again be a normal family.

  Caridad had definitely not been born to seat the bourgeoisie at tables and smile at them as she suggested entrées. Full of the fury of total revolution and hate for the system, her life seemed miserable to her, a waste of the energies demanded by the fight for freedom. Although the incident was never clarified, Ramón spent his whole life thinking that the massive poisoning of the restaurants’ customers that happened one night could only have been engineered by his mother. Fortunately, no one died, and doubts about the intentionality and, as such, the authorship of the attack were never clarified. But the owners of the business decided to let her go and the commissioner in charge of the case, with reasons enough to suspect Caridad, appeared at their house several days later and demanded that she disappear or he would put her in jail.

  Even before the poisoning of the diners, Caridad lived in a stupor and swung like a pendulum from outbursts of enthusiasm or anger to depressive silences into which she fell for days. It was clear that her life, lacking firm ideological support, had lost sense and, when she saw herself deprived of the possibility of the struggle and demolition, she could only see before her a vicious circle of depression, anger, and frustration, with no way out. She then lost control and tried to kill herself by swallowing a handful of tranquilizers.

  Jorge and Ramón found her only because they decided to go into her room at night to take her some food. The recollections that Ramón would keep of that moment were always hazy and one could almost think that they had acted on reflex, without stopping to reason. A desperate Ramón dragged her out of the bed, which was covered in excrement and piss. With the help of Jorge, who used a metal prosthetic because of the lingering effects of polio on one of his legs, he managed to drag her to the street. Without noticing her feet scraping over the
cobblestones, without feeling the cold or the rain, they managed to take their mother to the avenue and get a taxi to the hospital.

  Caridad never spoke of that episode and didn’t ever pronounce a word of gratitude for what her sons had done for her. For many years, Ramón would think that her silence was due to the shame caused by the evident weakness into which she had fallen—she, the woman who wanted to change the world. Besides, to add to her humiliation, when she left the hospital, Caridad had to accept that her husband, notified by the kids, would take responsibility for their custody: the only time Ramón saw his mother cry was the day on which she said goodbye to Jorge and him, to go with Pau and her small children to Barcelona.

  In the midst of the storm of love and hate in which they lived for so many years, Caridad would never know, since Ramón never gave her the pleasure of confessing it, that in that moment, seeing her as she set off rescued by the very incarnation of what she most disdained, he had ceased to be a child. He was convinced that his mother was right: if one truly wanted to be free, one had to do something to change that filthy world that wounded people’s dignity. Very soon, Ramón would also learn that change would only come about if many embraced the same flag and, elbow to elbow, fought for it. The revolution had to be made.