The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  It now seems strange, almost incomprehensible, to explain that, despite the reality that tried to assault us every day, for many of us that was a period lived in a kind of bubble, in which we kept ourselves (in truth, we were kept) removed from certain fires raging around us, even in our own neighborhoods. I think that one of the reasons that nourished my gullibility (I should say our gullibility) was that at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, when I was going to high school and college, I was a die-hard romantic who cut sugarcane to the point of physical exhaustion during that interminable harvest of 1970, who broke his back planting Caturra coffee, underwent devastating military training to better defend the homeland, and joyously attended parades and political gatherings, always convinced, always armed, with that compact militant enthusiasm and that invincible faith that imbued almost all of us in carrying out almost all of the acts of our lives and, especially, in the patient although certain wait for the luminous better future in which the island would flourish, physically and spiritually, like a garden.

  I think that in those years we must have been the only members of our generation in the whole of Western student civilization who, for example, never put a joint between their lips and who, despite the heat running through our veins, would belatedly free ourselves from sexual atavism, led by the damned taboo of virginity (there is nothing closer to communist morality than Catholic precepts); in the Spanish Caribbean, we were the only ones who lived without knowing that salsa music was being born or that the Beatles (the Rolling Stones and Mamas and the Papas too) were the symbol of rebellion and not of imperialist culture, as we were told so many times; and besides, as should be expected, amid other shortcomings and disinformation, we had been, at the time, the least informed about the extent of the physical and philosophical wounds produced in Prague by tanks that acted as more than threats, about the massacre of students in a Mexican plaza called Tlatelolco, about the historic and human devastation unleashed by our dear Comrade Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and about the birth, for people of our age, of another kind of dream, kindled in the streets of Paris and in rock concerts in California.

  What we were aware of and very sure of was that only loyalty and more sacrifice was expected of us, obedience and more discipline. Although after the painful failure of the 1970 harvest, we knew that the luminous future was approaching slower than we had thought (I’ll never forget the four months that I spent on a sugarcane field, cutting, cutting, cutting, with all my strength and my faith in each blow of the machete, convinced that that heroic enterprise would be decisive for our exit from underdevelopment, as we had been told so many times). In reality, we barely had a notion of how that political-economic disaster, if you’ll allow me to call it that, had changed the country’s life. The shortcomings that became sharper since then didn’t surprise us, since we were already growing accustomed to them; nor did it alarm us that, as a response to the economic failure, ideological demands would become even more evident, since they were already part of our lives as young revolutionaries aspiring to be true Communists, and we understood or wanted to understand them as necessary. That in the midst of all that effervescence we would find out that two of our university professors had been suspended from their jobs for having confessed to their religious beliefs moved us, but we listened in silence and accepted as logical the accusations destined to cement a decision ratified by the party and with the support of the Ministry of Education. Later, that two other professors would end up being definitively turned out due to their “inverted” sexual preferences didn’t alarm us too much and, if anything, caused a hormonal shakeup, since who would have said that those two professors were a pair of dykes, especially the dark-haired one, who was pretty hot for being forty.

  It had to have been at some point in 1971—the year in which the environment became heated with the express order to hunt down any type of witch that might appear in the distance—when I committed a serious sin of sincerity and innocence in a public way. Everything started when I dared to comment, among my friends, that there were other professors who, thanks to the red ID cards they carried in their pockets, were allowed to keep teaching when everyone knew all too well that they were less capable as educators than the ones who had been removed for being religious; and that there were others, also survivors and holders of this ID, who seemed more like faggots and dykes than the two exterminated professors. I don’t remember if I even added that, in my opinion, neither the beliefs of one set nor the sexual inclinations of the other should be considered a problem as long as they didn’t try to force them upon their students. A few months later, I would find out that this inopportune comment had become the cause of my first fall, when in my growth as a youth militant I was denied entrance in the youth elite due to not having been capable of overcoming certain ideological problems and for lacking in maturity and the ability to understand the decisions made by responsible compañeros. And I accepted the critique and promised to make amends.

  Although I didn’t know it at the time, those murky gusts of wind were part of a hurricane blowing silently but devastatingly across the island, bringing with them a concept of society and culture adopted from Soviet models. The inclusion of two sessions of weekly classes set aside for reading political speeches and materials, the renewed demands regarding hair length and pants width, and the critique of students whose preferences leaned toward Western and North American culture, had almost symbiotically integrated themselves into the universe we lived in, and we dealt (at least, I dealt) with all of those fundamentalisms without any great conflicts or worries, without having any notion of the quasi-medieval darknesses and desires for lobotomy underpinning them. Almost without questioning anything.

  With all of my political and literary ingenuity weighing me down—and a bit of talent, I think—I started writing those stories out of which I made a volume of almost one hundred pages that I sent off to a contest for unpublished writers. Two months later, surprised and happy, I received the notice that I’d been named a finalist, which, in addition, meant the manuscript’s publication. That success cleaned my spirit of possible doubts, and for the first and only time in my life—perhaps because I was completely wrong—I felt sure of myself, of my possibilities and ideas: I had proved that I was a writer of my time, and now I only had to work toward cementing the ascent to artistic glory and social utility, as we thought of literature back then (that it seemed more like a damned staircase and not the profession for unhappy masochists that it really is).

  Between the demands of my studies and the never-ending extracurricular political-ideological activities (as controlled and valued, perhaps even more so, as the scholastic ones)—in addition to the paralysis caused by the drunkenness I felt as a result of my success and the resulting unexpected popularity and preeminence (I was elected secretary for cultural activities of the student federation in my department) but above all, thanks to the real literature I was reading at that time—for almost two years I didn’t write another story that seemed even close to my abilities and ambitions. But by the fourth and final year of my degree, with my book—Blood and Fire—already published, I had to stay in bed for three weeks due to a sprained ankle. Then I wrote a story, longer than the ones I tended to write, in which I found a subject and, after that, a tone and way of looking at reality that made me happy and showed me, without my being a genius, how much I was able to surpass myself. Without a doubt, the reflux from the fatalistic tide, but especially those readings that I had pursued with more effort, trying to find the ethical reasons and technical qualities of the greats—Kafka, Hemingway, García Márquez, Cortázar, Faulkner, Rulfo, Carpentier (damn! how far away from them I was)—bore the most timid fruit in that tale in which I relayed the story of a revolutionary fighter who feels afraid and, before becoming an informer, decides to commit suicide. Of course, I couldn’t even imagine that I was getting ahead of myself and borrowing from my own future of panic-ridden fears and about something worse: their devastating effects.<
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  At the end of January 1973, when the first-semester exams had barely ended, I drafted the final version of that story and took the typed pages to the same university magazine where a year and a half before one of my stories had been published, endorsed by an editorial introduction that spoke of me as a promise of national, almost international literature because of my realist solutions and socialist artistic vision. They received the new work enthusiastically and told me that surely they’d be able to publish it in the March issue or, at the latest, in April. But I didn’t have to wait that long to know how my best story was read and received: one week later, the magazine’s director called me for a meeting in his office and there I experienced the second and, I think, most painful fall in my life. I had just entered when the man, in a rage, spit out the question “How dare you turn this in?” “This” referred to the pages of my story that the infuriated director, disgusted I would say, held in his hands there, behind his desk.

  To this day, the unnatural effort of remembering what that powerful man, sure of his ability to fill me with fear, said to me is still too painful. No matter that my story repeated itself so many times, with so many other writers, I’m going to summarize it: that story was inopportune, unpublishable, completely inconceivable, almost counterrevolutionary—and hearing that word, as you can imagine, caused a chill. But despite the seriousness of the matter, he, as the magazine’s director, and los compañeros (all of us knew who they were and what los compañeros did), had decided not to take any measures against me, keeping in mind my previous work, my youth, my obvious ideological confusion, and they were all going to act as if that story had never existed, as if it had never come out of my head. But they and he hoped that something like that would not happen again and that I would think a little bit more when I wrote, since art is one of the revolution’s weapons, he concluded as he folded the sheets, stuck them in a drawer of his desk, and, with overt gestures, locked it with a key that he put in his pocket with the same forcefulness with which he could have swallowed it.

  I remember that I left that office burdened with a vague and doughy mixture of feelings (confusion, disquiet, and a lot of fear), but above all, feeling grateful. Yes, very grateful that when I had just four months left to finish my degree, other measures had not been taken against me, and I knew what they could be. Today, besides, I knew exactly what it was to feel FEAR, like that, a fear with a capital F, real, invasive, omnipotent, and ubiquitous, much more devastating than the dread of physical pain or the unknown that all of us have experienced at some point. Because that day what really happened was that they fucked me for the rest of my life, since besides feeling grateful and full of fear, I left there deeply convinced that my story should never have been written, which is the worst thing that they can make a writer think.

  It’s obvious that that episode, in addition to my well-tracked commentary about the expulsions of my professors and my recent interest in writers like Camus and Sartre (Sartre, so beloved on the island until just a few years before and now so damned for having dared to voice some criticism that revealed his morally corrupt petit bourgeois ideology), were on another desk the day on which they decided my professional fate as a recent graduate. The brilliant idea they had was to send me, for a necessary purification under the guise of a reward, to the remote Baracoa, where I arrived in the month of September, under the reign of a humid and suffocating heat as I had never felt before, although with the innocent feeling that there I would manage to mend my literary hopes. What I could still not even conceive of was how abysmal that second fall had been, the irreversible inoculation that I had experienced, and because of that I was still convinced that, despite the slipping of the “inopportune” story, I was prepared to ably write the works that my time and circumstances demanded. And with these I would show, incidentally, how receptive and trustworthy I could be.

  The radio station’s chief editor was only waiting for my arrival to get away from Baracoa and barely dedicated a week to instructing me on the technical details of my job. At first sight, my responsibility was simple: reviewing the bulletins drafted by two writers and making sure that they were never missing the national news published in the party and its youth arm’s newspapers, nor the chronicles by the official journalists and the volunteer correspondents about the innumerable activities that the provinces’ institutions generated and, especially, those promoted by the party, the Youth, the unions, and the rest of the organizations in the “regional,” as the former and later recovered municipalities were classified. I will never forget my colleague’s smile when he shook my hand and gave me the key to his office, the day on which control was officially ceded to me. And it’s less likely that I will forget the words he whispered:

  “Get ready, friend: you either become a cynic here or they’ll turn you to shit . . . Welcome to the real reality.”

  Its own inhabitants say that hanging over Baracoa is the curse of Pelú, a mad prophet who sentenced it to being the town of never-fulfilled plans. The first thing that they’ll tell you upon arriving is that its fame is based on three lies: that it has a river called Miel (Honey) that doesn’t sweeten anything, because only water runs through it; having a Yunque (Anvil), which is the mountain on which nobody can forge anything; and having a Farola (street lamp)—the name of the highway that connects the “city” with the rest of the country—that doesn’t light up anything.

  I knew that Baracoa owed its name to the indigenous chiefdom that existed there when the conquistadors arrived. But very soon I would discover that, four and a half centuries later, it was still a chiefdom, ruled now by the leaders of local organizations. I would also quickly learn that the maxim of “small town, large hell” was never more appropriate than it was there. And to complete my education in real life, in Baracoa I would experience the consequences of my human and intellectual incapacity to deal with caciques and devils every day.

  The Radio Ciudad Primada de Cuba Libre station was precisely the medium charged with bringing about a virtual reality even more deceitful than the rivers, mountains, and highways with capricious names, because it was built on plans, promises, goals, and magical numbers that nobody took the care to prove, on constant calls to sacrifice, the watchfulness and discipline with which every one of the local leaders tried to build the staircase for his own ascent—crowned with the prize of getting out of that lost place. My job consisted of receiving phone calls and messages from those figures so that I would look out for their interests, which they always called, of course, the country’s and the people’s interests. And my only alternative was to accept those conditions and, cynically and obediently, order the two alcoholic and moronic automatons who worked as writers to write about expectations exceeded, commitments accepted with revolutionary enthusiasm, goals achieved with patriotic combativeness, and incredible numbers and sacrifices taken on heroically, in order to give a rhetorical form to a nonexistent reality, based almost always on words and slogans, and very seldom on real plantains, sweet potatoes, and pumpkins. The only alternative was to refuse or, further still, quit and run away, and despite what I thought many times, fear of the consequences (canceling my university degree, for starters) paralyzed me, as it did so many others. That was the real reality that my predecessor had welcomed me to.

  But instead of doing that job pragmatically and shamelessly, like so many other people, and filling my free time with reading and literary projects, out of my own fear or incapacity to rebel I saw myself dragged by a whirlwind of activities, meetings, rallies, and gatherings always preceded by an invitation to the “journalist compañero” to the eating and drinking fests (who said there are shortages?) organized by the head of the morning and evening edition sectors. With a bit of surprise, I discovered that in that environment, my usual sexual shyness disappeared with the barriers brought down by alcohol, the feeling of escaping from the confinement of that remote place, and the urgency (my own and that of my occasional lovers) to free something within ourselves. I never ate,
drank, or screwed so much or with so many women or in such inconceivable places as during those two years, at the end of which I ended up reacting like a cynic capable of lying without any scruples, with gonorrhea that I generously spread around, and—like many of the inhabitants of the area—turned into an alcoholic of the sort who have a drink of aguardiente and a cold beer for breakfast to clear up the effects of last night’s hangover.