The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  Lev Davidovich would prove how deeply absorbed his energies were in the avatars of politics when his wife surprised him with the news that Liova wished to leave Prinkipo. The hidden tremors that had been shaking the cement of the Büyükada villa for some months were revealed at that moment, when they had already reached earthquake-like proportions. He then remembered that Natalia Sedova had commented once that it wasn’t good for Jeanne Molinier to spend long periods of time with them while Raymond returned to Paris. He had engaged in that conversation on an afternoon in which they had gone on a walk to the impressive structure of the former Prinkipo Palace Hotel, the largest wooden building in all of Europe, and when he heard her, he had sardonically asked what was happening. She smiled while she explained things with her usual pragmatism: what was happening was that wives should be with their husbands and their Liovnochek was getting old and the years had clouded the vision of even a man like him.

  Until that moment, the comings and goings of Raymond Molinier had been just one more event in the routine of Büyükada. Gifted with that énergie Molinièresque that was so attractive to Lev Davidovich, he had turned into the mainstay of the opposition in Paris. Excited by the possibility of turning Trotskyism into a political force within the French left, Molinier had placed his devotion, his fortune, and his family at the service of the project, and while he fought in Paris to find new followers, his wife, Jeanne, had turned into the intermediary between the secretariat managed by Liova and the Trotskyist sympathizers in Europe. Molinier’s energy had touched a sensitive nerve in the experienced revolutionary, and that is why he had decided to put the fate of the French opposition in his hands, ignoring the opinions of other comrades, such as Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, who discreetly decided to withdraw from the ring.

  But it was only now that he found out that, from the first time that Raymond left his wife in Büyükada, Natalia had sensed what was coming: Jeanne was a young woman gifted with a languor that served to contrast her husband’s bullishness, and every cell of Liova’s body pulsed with his twenty-three years, even when he had given himself over body and soul to the cause. Because of that, while his wife conveyed the news that Jeanne would travel to Paris with the intention of breaking off her relationship with Raymond, and that Liova was planning to go off somewhere else with her, the revolutionary understood how little he had worried about his son’s needs, although he immediately thought that the work of so many months—the Pyrrhic and painful benefit extracted from upsets and defections—could go down the tube, dragged by the egotistical impulse of a man and a woman. And that same night, unable to contain himself, he reprimanded Liova for his sentimental affair, unforgivable in a fighter.

  Fortunately, Raymond’s reaction was deeply French, according to Natalia, and he allowed Jeanne to go live with Liova, who was already planning to move to Germany. Lev Davidovich then understood that he had no alternative but to accept his son’s decision: although the young man’s spirit of sacrifice was immeasurable, he could not demand that he invest his youth in a lost island. What would hurt him the most, he wrote, would be losing the only man with him on whom he could unload the weight of his frustrations, the only one from whom he could receive sincere criticism, and the only one whom he could trust to never be the one tasked with stabbing him, serving him poisoned coffee, or sending the bullet through his head that, sooner or later, would take his life.

  But his concern over Liova’s departure was momentarily overshadowed by a little-known event that gave Lev Davidovich a bad premonition: the German elections, carried out on September 14, 1930, had turned Hitler’s National Socialist Party into the country’s second most popular. The leap had been to 6 million votes from 800,000 in 1928. Perplexed before the strange political irresponsibility of the German Communists, Lev Davidovich read that the Communists were celebrating their own increase from 3 million to 4.5 million votes, and declared that the Hitlerite upturn was the swan song of a petit bourgeois party condemned to failure. Several months earlier, in one of the letters with which he used to bombard the Soviet party’s Central Committee, he had already warned them about the dangerous establishment of National Socialism in Germany, which he saw as the bearer of an ideology capable of coalescing all of that “human dust” of a petit bourgeoisie crushed by the crisis and eager for revenge. Since then, he’d begun to insist on the need for a strategic alliance between Communists and Socialists to stop the process that could bring the Hitlerites to power. But the response to his premonitory cry of alarm had been the order from Moscow, channeled through the Comintern, that the German party should abstain from any alliance with Socialists and democrats.

  Never more than at that moment had Lev Davidovich felt the weight of his sentence. Shut away on an island lost in time, his ability to act was reduced to writing articles and to an organization of scattered followers, when in reality he should have been in the center of events that, he could feel it in his skin, involved the fate of the German working class, the European revolution, and perhaps of the Soviet Union itself. He knew that it was necessary to mobilize the consciousness of the German left, since it was still feasible to avoid the disaster being drawn over the sky of Berlin. Didn’t anyone notice that if his path wasn’t closed off, Hitler would come to power and the Communists would be his first victims? What was happening in Moscow? he asked himself. He sensed that something dark was brewing behind the Kremlin’s red walls. What he still could not imagine was that very soon he would hear, from the highest towers of the Muscovite fortress, the first howls of a macabre creature capable of terrorizing him.

  5

  The dense air caressed the skin and the sparkling sea hardly emitted a lulling murmur. There, one could feel how the world, on magical days and moments, gives the deceptive impression of being an affable place, tailor-made to the dreams and strangest desires of man. Memory, imbued with that relaxed atmosphere, managed to become lost, and bitterness and sorrows fell into oblivion.

  Seated on the sand with my back leaning against the trunk of a casuarina tree, I lit a cigarette and closed my eyes. There was an hour to go until the sun went down, but, as was becoming a habit in my life, I was in no rush and had no expectations. I practically had none, and practically without the practically. The only thing that interested me at the time was enjoying the gift of twilight’s arrival, the fabulous moment at which the sun closes in on the silvery gulf and draws a fiery trail on the surface. In the month of March, with the beach practically deserted, the promise of that vision was the cause for sudden calm within me, the state of closeness to the balance that comforted me and still allowed me to think in the palpable existence of a small happiness tailor-made to my meager ambitions.

  Prepared to wait for the sunset in Santa María del Mar, I had taken out the book I was reading from my backpack. It was a volume of short stories by Raymond Chandler, one of the writers at that time, and still today, to whom I was solidly devoted. Getting them from the most unimaginable places, I had managed to make an almost complete collection of Chandler’s works out of Cuban, Spanish, and Argentine editions, and besides five of his seven novels I had several short story collections, including the one I was reading that afternoon, called Killer in the Rain. It was a Bruguera edition, printed in 1975, and along with the title story it had four others, including one called “The Man Who Loved Dogs.” Two hours before, while I was making the journey by bus to the beach, I had started reading the book right at that story, attracted by such a suggestive title that directly touched on my weakness for dogs. Why, amid so many other possibilities, had I decided to take that book on that day and not a different one? (I had at my house, among the many recently obtained and waiting to be read, The Long Goodbye, which would end up being my favorite of Chandler’s novels; Rabbit, Run by Updike; and Conversation in the Cathedral by the already excommunicated Vargas Llosa, that novel that a few weeks later would make me shake with pure envy.) I think I had picked Killer in the Rain completely unconscious of what it could mean and simply b
ecause it included that story that features a professional killer who feels a strange predilection for dogs. Was everything organized like a game of chess (another one) in which so many people—that individual whom I would name, precisely, “the man who loved dogs” and I, among others—were pieces in a game of coincidence, of life’s whims or of the inevitable intersections of fate? Teleology, as they call it now? Don’t think I’m exaggerating, that I’m trying to make your hair stand on end, nor that I see cosmic conspiracies in each thing that has happened in my damned life; but if the cold front that had been predicted for that day had not dissolved with a fleeting rain shower, barely altering the thermometers, it’s possible that on that March afternoon in 1977 I would not have been in Santa María del Mar, reading a book that, by coincidence, contained a story called “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” and with nothing better to do but wait for the sun to set over the gulf. If just one of those circumstances had been altered, I would have probably never had the chance to notice that man who stopped a few yards away from where I was to call out to two magisterial dogs who, just at first sight, dazzled me.

  “Ix! Dax!” the man yelled.

  When I lifted my gaze, I saw the dogs. I closed the book without thinking twice about it in order to devote myself to contemplating those extraordinary animals, the first Russian wolfhounds, the valued borzoi, that I had seen outside the pages of a book or the veterinary magazine for which I worked. In the diffuse light of the spring afternoon, the wolfhounds looked perfect while they ran along the seashore, causing explosions of water with their long, heavy legs. I admired the sheen of their white hair, dotted with dark violet on their spines and their back legs, and the sharpness of their snouts, gifted with jaws—according to canine literature—capable of breaking a wolf’s femur.

  About sixty feet from them was the silhouette of the man who had called to the dogs. When he began to walk toward where the animals and I were, the first thing I asked myself was who that guy could be to have two seemingly purebred Russian wolfhounds in Cuba in the 1970s. But the animals running and playing shifted my attention again, and with no other motive but curiosity I stood up and walked a few steps toward the shore to better see the borzois, now that the sun was behind me. In that position, I once again heard the man’s voice and for the first time I decided to look at him.

  The man must have been around seventy years old (I would later find out that he was almost ten years younger), his salt-and-pepper hair was in a buzz cut, and he wore tortoiseshell glasses. He was tall, olive-skinned, mostly thick but also somewhat gawky. He had two leather leashes in his hands and his right hand was covered by a band of white cloth, as if he were protecting a recent wound. I noticed that he was wearing khaki-colored cotton pants, leather sandals, and a wide, colorful shirt: an outfit that immediately revealed his condition as a foreigner in a country of this-is-all-we’ve-got shirts (striped or checked), run-or-I’ll-kick-your-ass or “stinky feet” shoes (Russian boots or plastic moccasins), and sailcloth or polyester pants that would smother your balls in the summer heat.

  We came so close to one another that our eyes inevitably met: I smiled at him, and the man, with the pride of the owner of two Russian wolfhounds, also smiled. After calling to the dogs again, he lit a cigarette and I decided to imitate him, to advance another four, five steps to where the presumed foreigner had stopped.

  “Your dogs are beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” the man answered. “Ix! Dax!” he repeated, and I was still incapable of placing his accent.

  “It’s the first time I have ever seen borzois.” I preferred to look at the animals, now that they were running close to their owner.

  “They’re the only ones in Cuba,” he said, and I thought: He’s a Spaniard. But there were some strange inflections in his intonation that made me doubt it.

  “They need a lot of exercise, although they have to be careful with the heat.”

  “Yes, the heat is a problem. That’s why I bring them out here.”

  “I’ve read that these animals are very strong but at the same time very delicate. They were the dogs to the Russian czars.” I wondered if it wouldn’t be too daring, but since I had nothing to lose, I made the leap: “Did you bring them from the Soviet Union?”

  The man looked toward the sea and dropped his cigarette in the sand.

  “Yes, they were given to me in Moscow.”

  “I’m sorry, but you’re not Russian, right?”

  The man looked me in the eye and snapped the leashes against the leg of his pants. I deduced that perhaps he hadn’t liked being mistaken for a Russian, but I convinced myself that my question did not give the impression of that possibility. Or was he Russian—no, perhaps Georgian or Armenian, by the color of his hair and his skin—and that was why he had that strange intonation and a certain thickness upon pronouncing his words?

  At that instant, in the clearing between the casuarinas, I saw a tall, slim black man who, with a towel rolled over his shoulder, observed us without the least reserve, as if he were keeping watch on us. But I turned my gaze when I heard the man in tortoiseshell glasses whispering something in a language I couldn’t place, either, as he put the leashes on the dogs. When the man stood up, I noticed that his steps faltered, as if he’d gotten dizzy, and I heard him breathe with some difficulty. But he immediately asked me:

  “How is it that you know so much about dogs?”

  “I work for a veterinary magazine and, coincidentally, I just reviewed an article about genetics that a Soviet scientist wrote, and he said a lot about borzois and two other European breeds. Besides, I love dogs,” I answered in one breath.

  For the first time the man smiled. The lack of response regarding his origins, his unusual look, and the fact that he had lived in Moscow—in addition to the presence of that tall, slim black man watching us—suggested the possibility to me that the man with the dogs was a diplomat.

  “I would like to read that article.”

  “I think I could get a copy,” I said, not considering that to fulfill that promise (until the magazine came out, which wouldn’t be for another couple of months) I would most likely have to type up that article full of strange genetic codes myself.

  “I love dogs,” the foreigner admitted, using the very verb “to love” in that way in which almost no one ever used it anymore, and in his smile I seemed to glimpse a hidden nostalgia that had nothing to do with what he said next: “Goodbye.”

  I mumbled a delayed farewell, and I’m not sure if the man, who was already walking away toward where the tall, slim black man was, heard me. The dogs, when they discovered his intent, started running toward the black man, who got on his knees to welcome them and devoted himself to rubbing their bellies with the towel that had been hanging on his shoulders until then. The foreigner got close to them. He veered off, as if he were making a small turn or it was impossible to walk in a straight line, and after saying something to the black man, he got lost among the casuarinas, followed by the two wolfhounds, who were now walking at their owner’s pace. The black man, who had turned around for a moment to look at me, placed the towel over his shoulder again and followed them, until he also disappeared amid the trees.

  When I looked at the coast again, the sun was already touching the sea on the horizon and drawing a red trail that came to its end, with the waves, just a few yards from my feet. The night of March 19, 1977, was beginning.

  When I met the man who loved dogs, it had been just over a year since I had started to work as a proofreader at the veterinary magazine. This fate was the result of my third fall, one of the most drastic in my life.

  In 1973, when I graduated from the university with excellent grades and the added prestige of having published a book, I was selected to work as the editor in chief of the local radio station in Baracoa, the lost and remote town (there are no other adjectives to describe it) that was filled with the pride—according to a combination of historical fact and human imagination—of having had the privilege to be
the first villa that was founded, as well as the first capital of the island recently discovered, by the Spanish conquistadors. The promotion to a position with so much responsibility—as the compañero who assisted me at the work placement office, department of recent university graduates, told me—was due to the fact that, in addition to my scholarly achievements, as a young man of my time, I should be willing to go wherever and whenever I was ordered to go, for the necessary amount of time and under whatever conditions, although he decided to omit the fact that, legally, I was obliged to work wherever they sent me due to the stipulations of the call to social service law that all of us recent graduates were meant to fulfill in return for having received our degrees for free. And what the compañero also failed to tell me, despite this being the real reason for which someone decided to select and promote me to Baracoa, was that they had deemed I needed a “corrective” to bring me down and place me squarely in this world, as the saying goes.

  The greatest incentive to get me on the bus that would deposit me in Baracoa twenty-six hours later was thinking about the advantage that kind of exile in a tropical Siberia would provide: if anything was plentiful in the place, it would be time to write. That dream beat inside me like a fetus in its placenta, like a biological need. Around that time, I was already pretty lucidly conscious that the stories in my published book were of a calamitous quality, and if they’d received the coveted standing of finalist in a young writers contest, which included the publication of the volume, it was more due to the issues discussed and my approach to them than to the literary value of my texts. I had written those stories imbued by, more so stunned by, the closed, rugged world lived between the four walls of literature and ideology on the island, devastated by the cascade of defenestrations, ejections, expulsions, and “parametraciones” of people who were inconvenient for a variety of reasons carried out in recent years and by the predictable raising of the walls of intolerance and censorship to celestial heights. I was not the only one, or anything close to it, who had acted like the diligent ape Chandler spoke of, and under the romantic conviction that almost all of us had at that time, I had begun to write what, without much room for speculation, should be written at that moment in history (of the nation and all of humanity): stories about hardworking sugarcane cutters, brave soldiers defending the homeland, self-denying workers whose conflicts were related to the hindrances of the bourgeois past still affecting their consciousness—machismo, for example; doubts about the application of work methods, to give another example—legacies that, hardworking, brave, and self-denying as they were, they without a doubt found themselves in the midst of overcoming on their ascent toward the moral condition of New Men . . . But sometime later, when I had looked inside myself and made a shy literary attempt to remove myself from that blueprint so as to paint it with different shades, they had slapped me with a ruler so that I would remove my hands.