The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  Baracoa, it’s time to say it, is one of the island’s most beautiful and magical places, and its inhabitants are surprisingly kind and innocent people. Although I have never returned to visit—I am panic-stricken and terrified by the idea of returning there and by thinking that for some reason I wouldn’t be able to leave again—I recall, like in a haze, the beauty of its sea, its decadent colonial fortresses, its mountains thick with vegetation, its multiple streams and rivers that could become furious, like the Toa. I recall the friendliness of its people—always willing to welcome outsiders and pariahs looking for a place to lose themselves—and the poverty that besieged the city for almost half a millennium and that was its true curse; a poverty that was still throbbing and was always discussed in the past tense, like something that had been definitively overcome, throughout my two years at the head of the “information center” of the local radio station.

  Now it seems clear that only by being drunk, rolling around with the first woman to cross my path (who was also drunk if, like me, she was one of the ones sent to work there for two or three years), and wrapping myself in cynicism was it possible for me to resist that journey through reality. My third fall would take place when, back in Havana, I admitted myself to the addiction treatment center of Calixto García Hospital, after having enjoyed a three-week stay in the adjoining wing, where they admitted me to the trauma clinic. I had arrived there on a stretcher, with fractures and wounds received as the result of a tumultuous fight that, perhaps to free some of the fear stuck deep within me, I had unleashed in the first bar I visited upon returning to Havana.

  6

  Her parents named her África, like the patron saint of Ceuta, where she had been born, and rarely had a name fit someone so well: because she was vigorous, unfathomable, and wild, like the continent to whom she owed her name. Ever since the day he met her, at a meeting of the Young Communists of Cataluña, Ramón felt absorbed by the young woman’s beauty, but above all, it was her rock-solid ideas and her telluric drive that ensnared him: África de las Heras was like an erupting volcano who roared a permanent clamor for revolution. África tended to cite passages by Marx, Engels, and Lenin from memory; she spoke of dear Comrade Stalin as the incarnation of the future on earth and called him with adoration the Guide of the World’s Proletariat while she championed the strictest partisan discipline. Besides, she considered dancing and wine to be bourgeois poisons for the spirit; she seemed to have sewn the book of Marxism under her arm and possessed a militant consciousness that overwhelmed Ramón’s romantic enthusiasm and constantly put him to the test.

  Ramón had returned from France a year before, when he was about to turn twenty. Barely arrived in Barcelona, he had managed, thanks to his training as a maître d’hôtel, to be placed at the Ritz as a kitchen aide, and he never knew if it was because of the ideas that Caridad had transmitted to him or because of his own spirit of rebellion, but he soon approached the local Communists and made his first steps toward his enrollment. The Spain that Ramón had found was simmering, waiting for someone to add fuel for the flames to reach the heavens; it was a country in pain that strived to throw off the burden of the past and the frustrations of the present. The dictator Primo de Rivera had just resigned and the monarchists and the Republicans had unsheathed their swords. The unions, dominated by Socialists and anarchists, had multiplied their power but, in comparison with France, the Communists were still very few and, as could be expected in an almost feudal and horribly Catholic country, were ill regarded and frequently pursued.

  Ramón enjoyed that tense environment, in which everyone was expecting something to happen very soon and in the end it happened when the Republican Socialists, with the support of the syndicalists, won the municipal elections of 1931, causing the fall of the monarchy and the proclaiming of the Second Republic. Until the end of his life, Ramón would think that he had returned to his country at the exact moment, at the right age, and with his mind bubbling; it was as if his life and history had been lying in wait for each other, each one weaving its story to set him on the path that would lead him, a few years later, to the Sierra de Guadarrama and, from there, to a commitment with the highest responsibility.

  The party strategy at the time was to first consolidate the Republic to later radicalize it, and because of that, young Communists supported at that difficult time the government’s feeble measures against the Church’s power and landholdings, for the equality of women and men, for workers’ rights, and, above all, for the rights of the great Spanish rural masses, backward and wretched. Years later, Ramón smiled upon recalling slogans more full of words than solutions; but for all of those years, even during the war, that had been the country of slogans, and each party, each faction, each group, unfurled theirs wherever they could, at meetings and in newspapers, on walls, on display windows, on streetcars, and even on the coal trucks that ran around the cities.

  Ramón rode the tide of those years fully and irresponsibly. More than any real knowledge of communist principles, it was his capacity for obedience and self-sacrifice that allowed him to hold a position of prominence on the board of the Young Communists, and that role pushed him to live intensely. Ramón would always long for those days in which, like never before in the history of Spain, he had loved so much, with so much anxiety, as if there were an orgy of physical and intellectual passions.

  It was then that he met África de las Heras, the second woman who would be of crucial and also traumatic importance in his life. She was three years older than he was, dark-haired, intelligent, and very beautiful; she never put cosmetics on her face and she lived every second and every act like a true communist militant. Despite Ramón’s already internalized rejection of everything established by the codes of bourgeois morality, he couldn’t help falling in love with her. Like any young man with hormones charged with dynamite, he made it his job to be deserving of the girl’s attention, and threw himself after her in the most frenetic political maelstrom. When he listened to her reasoning, he assumed the theories professed by that red beauty without a single critique and understood (or said he understood in some cases) the risks awaiting the political struggle in a republic of lesser nobles and bourgeoisie; he reaffirmed the idea that the Trotskyists were the most sybilline enemies of the Communists and that anarchists and syndicalists could only be viewed as disposable fellow travelers on the ascent to the highest purposes, which would be divergent when they, the Communists, were able to promote the true revolution led by a necessary proletarian dictatorship. For the first time Ramón would hear insistent talk of Trotsky the opportunist, exiled in Turkey at that time, as the slyest of enemies, and of his Spanish followers as dangerous infiltrators within the working class. But África’s true passion gushed out when she spoke on the political thought and practice of Joseph Stalin, the man who led the Bolshevik revolution to its radiant consolidation. África’s devotion was able to infect him with that terrifying hate for Leon Trotsky and worship of Stalin, without Ramón being able to imagine where those passions would lead him.

  When Ramón managed to get África to pay attention to his demands, the young man entered a higher phase of dependency. The complete way of making love with which África crushed him—that uninhibited and elemental wisdom capable of driving him crazy—placed him at the woman’s mercy and gave him equal measures of pleasure and pain, since in his still palpable petit bourgeois weakness he dreamed that África was his, and when he possessed her, he thought he was the luckiest man on earth. But when he saw that she was slipping through his fingers, he experienced attacks of rage-filled jealousy, even though he tried to strengthen himself by accusing himself of lacking the necessary ideological conviction to break down the barriers of emotion and of lacking the drive to reach the revolutionary heights from which that woman’s principles shined, committed as she was only to the cause, wed only to the idea.

  África de las Heras would show Ramón that love and family were feelings and circumstances that could bring down the revolut
ionary: she, for example, had broken with her husband over an overt ideological incompatibility, since he was professing the anarchist-syndicalist creed. Ramón, who already felt the need to free himself from his family ties, barely maintained any relation with his relatives in that time, and since then decided to become stronger and not encourage them. Of Caridad, he received only news that she had been through Paris and now lived in Bordeaux, while he had cut off all contact with his father since, upon returning to Barcelona, he found out through the house’s former cook that Don Pau, selling the family mansion to move in over the warehouses of Calle Ample, had given away Ramón’s dogs to a peasant he had found in the Sant Gervasi market. Of his siblings, he knew that Montse and little Luis had been taken in by his father, that Jorge had also fallen for the party, and that young Pablo, the only one he saw with any frequency, was active in a Catalan nationalist organization, like their father.

  But the breaking with his old affections was not difficult because Ramón, in reality, had eyes that saw only what África brought to light as he followed her around Barcelona brainlessly, begging her between meetings and gatherings to give him a couple of hours of passion, for which his flowering body was always ready.

  It was precisely in the spring of 1933 when Ramón understood that, no matter how much he ran, he would never catch up with África unless he made a moral and prodigious leap toward the future. While Ramón, África, Jaume Graells, and the leaders of the Young Communists in Barcelona were working to achieve the growth in the militancy that would allow them to become a force of influence in the decentralized Spanish political panorama, Ramón was called to fulfill his military service and sent for four weeks to a training camp near Lérida. When he returned to Barcelona with his first pass, he challenged himself to carry out the plan he elaborated during that month, always calling up the look África would give him in his imagination: Was it a happy one or mocking one? he tormented himself. They arranged to meet at a café close to the cathedral and, to make a big entrance, he waited for África’s arrival using the window of a religious articles shop as a mirror. When he saw her approaching, he controlled his anxiety and let a few more minutes go by. Then he walked toward the café, ready to face the young girl’s reaction to his change of appearance: Ramón was wearing the army’s dress uniform for corporals designated to lead parades. He qualified thanks to his height (he was more than six feet high, taller than the typical Spaniard of his time) and physical abilities (he was able to bend a copper coin between his fingers). Ramón knew that the dress uniform, which included a silver hat, looked marvelous on him, but above all it made him feel different and gave him the pleasure of knowing he was being looked at. The shine of those stripes had made him think that perhaps he could make a career out of the army, where, he would explain to África (whose knowledge seemed infinite), he would carry out effective work gathering recruits for the party and the future revolution.

  When Ramón entered the café, he didn’t find her. He thought that she had gone to the bathroom and he went to lean on the bar, where he held back the desire to ask for a drink and opted for chamomile tea. The owner of the café observed him with the admiration that Ramón knew he inspired and served him the tea. When she returned from the lavatory, he stood up with all of his dazzling height. África looked at him with her critical eyes and brought him down with one blow:

  “Why did you come all dressed up? Do you like it when people look at you?”

  Ramón felt the world falling apart around him and, with difficulty, managed to share his idea of working for the cause from within the reactionary redoubt of the army. The girl only commented that they should consult with their superiors, since it wasn’t a personal decision: a militant responds to his committee and discipline and . . .

  He understood; that was why he was asking her.

  “It could be a good idea,” she said, perhaps as a consolation; but without offering any apology, she told Ramón she had to leave for a meeting.

  The young man ordered a cognac and, while he drank it, felt like crying. Since África wouldn’t be returning, he thought he could allow himself that. You’re too soft, Ramón, he told himself. He finished his drink and went out to the street, where a young woman’s intense stare raised his devastated self-esteem.

  A few months later, at the very moment he was going from obligatory service to an intended profession in the army, Ramón would have his dreams of feeling important and doing a great service for the revolution crushed when his political affiliation was considered an impediment and the army decided to let him go. Then he swore to himself that the military would pay for that affront.

  Reformism leads to restoration: only communist power, mercilessly proletarian, can carry out the deep transformations that a country like this, sick with hate and inequality, demands—as África, always adept at formulas, used to repeat. And Ramón would understand the extent to which that young woman had been right when, at the end of that same year, the conservatives rose up with the electoral victory and began an artful dismantling of the Republican political changes with the repeal of social benefit decrees and the start of an agrarian counterreform that would return the lands to the feudal lords and the country to its interminable Middle Ages.

  It was the Asturian miners and the Catalan nationalists who in the month of October 1934 reacted against the laws promoted by the dismal Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right, and first proclaimed a general strike and, in the end, rose up: the miners clamoring for revolution and the nationalists for a statute of autonomy. The young Communists had been given the order to be prepared to intervene, even in a violent way, if the conditions evolved favorably in Barcelona. But the Catalan project was devastated in one blow and before the popular revolt that they were awaiting could begin. By contrast, the Asturian miners’ strike was consolidated and the Young Communists, as part of the communist block, supported the rebels. África and Ramón, disillusioned by the Catalan leaders’ lukewarm response, asked to be sent to Asturias, where things were steaming following the drastic abolition of currency and private property and the creation of a proletarian army. As a reactionary ring was already being set against the miners, the party ordered the young Communists to stay in Barcelona, where they would work to procure the weapons that the rebels needed so badly. Ramón, anxious to get to the action, in that meeting dared to criticize that dilatory tactic, and it was África herself who shook him, alarmed by his inability to understand the party’s strategic decisions at a time of murky historical circumstances. “The party is always right,” she said, “and if you don’t understand, it doesn’t matter: you have to obey,” and she cut the discussion short.

  The repression of the miners was brutal and that October Revolution ended up diligently crushed. The casualties—almost 1,400—and the arrested—more than 30,000—convinced Ramón that compassion doesn’t exist, nor can it exist, in a class struggle. And he trusted that someday their day would come: at least dogma stipulated that it would be so.

  With the Asturian defeat, the Communists were placed on the black list of the most vigorously pursued enemies. Many were among those imprisoned for their participation in the Asturias events or simply because of their militancy and, as had happened in prerevolutionary Russia, recalled África, so conscious of history, so dialectic, the rest had had to go down into the catacombs, to work from there and wait for the moment (called “revolutionary situation”) to deal a blow to the system.

  It was in these circumstances that the Young Communists’ leaders received the mission of creating clandestine cells in the city’s neighborhoods and factories. África went to work in Gràcia and Ramón went into El Raval and La Barceloneta, where he also organized literacy classes. With the goal of making the political work more efficient and of preparing members for future conflicts, Ramón organized a cell with Jaume Graells, Joan Brufau, and other comrades that would present itself as the Peña Artística y Recreativa, and they gave it the least suspicious name they could find: “M
iguel de Cervantes.” The Joaquín Costa bar, at the end of Calle Guifré, turned into the meeting place. They went two and three nights a week, many times with África, who developed her skills as an agitator there, with a vehemence that left Ramón ever more entranced by the young woman’s passion and faith in the fate of a humanity without exploiters or exploited. Everything worked according to plan for several months, until they made the mistake of becoming too complacent and were surprised when the police burst in, carrying off seventeen of them (África managed to escape by leaping over a wall difficult for even a man to scale), accusing them of conspiring against the republic to subvert order and institute an atheist and communist dictatorship.

  If Ramón had still needed any reasons to convince himself that the whole pantomime of a democratic republic was just a façade and that the system needed to be pulled out by the roots, the eight months he spent in jail in Valencia ended up deepening his convictions. It wasn’t that the accusations hurled at them were false: it was true that they were conspiring to subvert order, but it was also assumed that they had the right to that option in a republic that, according to what was preached, existed in a supposedly democratic country since 1931.

  Spain’s prisons were overflowing with prisoners, perversely mixing common prisoners with political ones, although the detained Communists were so great in number that the cell blocks turned into forums where they discussed the party’s projections, the dangerous ascent of fascism in Germany and Italy, the USSR’s economic successes, and the principles of class struggle. The unexpected directive from Moscow, that an alliance be established between the Communists and the leftist parties (except for Trotskyist opportunists) to throw themselves into the fight for power together, even made its way into prison, and Ramón accepted the order without daring to question that radical strategic change. For him, the real punishment of his prison stay was that África did not visit him during all those months or even send a letter, a breath of hope.