The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  África had the keys with her to a small apartment in the Barceloneta, and they walked quickly, looking for the alleyways that would make the path to the consummation of their desire shorter. They climbed some dark steps impregnated with the smell of dampness, but when they opened the door, Ramón found a small room dominated by a double bed over which was draped a sheet smelling of soap. With his accumulated anxiety and exhausting feeling of need, Ramón made love to her with an uncontainable fullness and fury. Only when he felt satiated, while he was resting before a new attack, did he dare to start the conversation that he desired as much as the body of the woman whom he would most love in his life.

  África told him that their daughter was fine, although she had not had any news of her for a few weeks. She knew that after the bloody taking of Málaga by the Nationalists, her parents had managed to go to a small town in the Alpujarras where some relatives of theirs lived. Besides, África had had so much work in the office of Pedro, the local leader of the Comintern’s advisers, that she barely had any time left to think about herself and none at all to worry about Lenina, whom her parents would know how to care for.

  “I’m working with the propaganda group,” she explained, and detailed the underground work on public opinion that was aimed at overcoming the resistance of those who were opposed to the Soviet presence in the country, starting with Largo Caballero, who with all slyness accepted the weapons but listened to the advisers’ counsel with clenched teeth. Increasingly, the Socialists, before the evidence of the party’s exponential growth and their growing prestige on the front, were calling them marionettes for Moscow’s designs and accusing them of wanting to control the Republic. The attacks by the POUM’s Trotskyists were worse, making it their duty to unmask their true reactionary essence.

  “I’ve also been asked to work to get all of those people out of the way,” Ramón said, already completely convinced of the need for his new mission, and he told her about his interview with Kotov.

  “You know what, Ramón?” she said. “What you’ve told me could cost you your life.”

  “You also said yes to them. I know I can trust you.”

  “You’re wrong. You can’t trust anyone . . .”

  “Don’t get paranoid, please.”

  África smiled and shook her head no.

  “Comrade, the only way that everything we do will work is if we do it in silence. Get that into your head, because if you don’t, what you’re going to get is a bullet. And listen to me now, because I’m risking things with what I’m going to tell you: the Soviets want to help us win the war, but we’re the ones who have to win it, and if things don’t change, we’ll never win. You are going to be part of that change. As such, forget that you have a soul, that you love anyone, and that I even exist.”

  “That last part is impossible,” he said, and tried to smile.

  “Well, it’s the best thing you could do . . . Ramón, perhaps tonight will be the last time we will see each other for a long time. In a few days I have to leave Barcelona . . . ,” she said as she began to dress, and he watched her, feeling his desires freeze. “And don’t ask me, because I haven’t asked you why or where, either. I’m a soldier and I go wherever they send me.”

  9

  Throughout the spring of 1977, I traveled many times to that beach, and on each occasion, moved by the most innocent curiosity, I sat down under the pines awhile seeking a new encounter, surely improbable, with the owner of the Russian wolfhounds, whom, the same day on which I met him, I had named “the man who loved dogs.”

  Ever since leaving Baracoa two years before, with the cure to my alcoholism completed, and which kept me radically removed from drinking for fifteen years—when the crisis started and I felt that I could again have a drink of rum or a beer and not go up Jacob’s ladder, since I was down that low—I had turned my life around in an important way. Without yet knowing very well what I wanted, and to the surprise of my friends, I had not accepted the placement that was being given me in the information services team of a national radio station, a reward for the work that I was supposed to have carried out in Baracoa, evaluated as excellent. I had begun to trawl in the underworld of the cultural and journalistic sphere, which was still packed with fallen angels who had once been celebrated or controversial writers, journalists, promoters, all defenestrated, perhaps for life, and for a variety of reasons or no reasons at all. That search ended up leading me to the very modest position of proofreader at the Veterinaria Cubana magazine, as its former occupant had died a few weeks before, apparently by his own hand. That work seemed sufficiently obscure, anonymous, far from any possible passions and ambitions, and guaranteed me the two things I needed at that moment: a salary to live on, and peace and a routine to try to recompose my spirits. In due time, I thought, I would try to return to the writing that at that moment I still didn’t think was possible.

  In reality, I wasn’t very clear on the way in which I would carry out the attempt to write again, since we were right in the middle of the year 1975 and nothing on the horizon indicated that anything could change in the conception of politics and literature that, under the deadweight of the most rigid orthodoxy, only produced and promoted works like the one I had written four years before: “nonflictive”—as they were later labeled—and complacent, without a hint of social or human tension that was not permeated by the influence of official propaganda. And if there was something I was sure of, it was that that writing no longer had anything to do with the person that I could become. The problem was rooted in the fact that I didn’t have a fucking idea of what kind of literature I should and, above all, perhaps I could write—and far less, the what and the how of the person that I wanted to be.

  Around that time in which I was making those trips to the beach—by which, I would later learn, I was tempting my fate—my relationship had already begun with Raquelita, the recently graduated dentist who, that same year, would become my wife. We had met on the same beach during the previous summer and for that reason, from the beginning, she was familiar with my desire to participate in the squash games that were played on the courts of Santa María, El Mégano, and Guanabo, especially those that could take place between November and April, when bathing in the sea ceases to be attractive for Cubans, and only the most fanatical make the trip from Havana to the beaches to enjoy some friendly and challenging games.

  In that way, each afternoon that I had to go to the print shop to hand in originals or galleys, instead of returning to the magazine’s editing room, I went by my godmother’s house, where I used to keep my racket, and boarded La Estrella, the mythical route of wobbly Leyland buses that travel between the city and the beaches, until I arrived at the beach of Guanabo.

  It was two weeks after our first meeting and following three or four excursions to the beach that, in April already, I again ran into the foreigner with the wolfhounds. The mise-en-scène was very similar to our first encounter: the dogs were running on the sand and, in the distance, their owner followed them with their leashes in his hands and that definitively clumsy gait—drunk, perhaps, I thought that time. That day the man was wearing white pants, a light fabric, and a checked shirt, like a cowboy. I, unlike the first time, remained seated, with the novel I was reading in my hands—I had begun Rabbit, Run, that book that Updike never surpassed. After whistling to the dogs, who barely noticed me, I smiled at the man and greeted him with a nod of my head, which he returned by raising his right hand, still covered with a piece of cloth. A few minutes later, to complete the picture, the tall, thin black man made his appearance, again between the casuarinas.

  When the man stopped, I stood up and took a few steps toward him, as if it were a completely coincidental meeting.

  “How are you?” I asked him, indecisive about which path to take with the possible conversation.

  “I’ve been better,” the man said, and smiled with a certain bitterness.

  Since I didn’t smell alcohol on his breath, I was about to ask him if h
e was sick, since the way he was walking hinted at some problem with his balance. At that moment I noticed that the sallow color of his skin was accentuated, and I thought that perhaps it was due to some illness, perhaps with his liver, circulatory or respiratory, but I abstained from asking and went the safe route.

  “So how old are the dogs?”

  “They just turned ten. They’re getting old; wolfhounds don’t live long.”

  “And how do they cope with summer here in Cuba?”

  “We have air-conditioning at the house . . . ,” he began, but stopped, since without a doubt he knew that in Cuba almost no one could afford that luxury. “But they’ve adapted well. Especially Ix, the female. Dax’s character has changed a little bit lately.”

  “Has he gotten aggressive? Sometimes that happens to borzois.”

  “Yes, sometimes,” the man said, and I was certain that I had gone too far: only a specialist, or someone who was interested in that breed for some reason, could know those details about the behavior of Russian wolfhounds. I then chose to reveal a part of the truth.

  “Ever since I saw them the other day,” I pointed at the animals, “I was so impressed by them that I looked for more information about them. I’m really taken with your dogs.”

  The man smiled, less tense, obviously proud.

  “A few months ago, they asked me to loan them out for a movie. It tells the story of a rich family that didn’t want to leave Cuba after the revolution, and the director felt that Ix and Dax were perfect for those people . . . I had to take them every time they appeared, and the truth is that it was great fun to be at the filming, seeing how a lie is put together that later can look like truth. I have a great desire to see how it all turned out . . .”

  The conversation went on for a good while, always with the tall, thin black man observing us from the casuarinas; we talked about movies and books, about the pleasant temperature of spring on the island, about my work and the aristocratic line of the borzois, which, according to the man, were already recorded in a French chronicle from the eleventh century, where it is said that when Anna Yaroslavna, daughter of the Grand Duke of Kiev, arrived in Paris to marry Henry I, she came accompanied by three borzois.

  “The Russians say quite proudly that the borzois are the dogs of czars and poets, because Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Nicholas II, Pushkin, and Turgenev had these wolfhounds. But the greatest breeder of borzois was the Grand Duke Nicholas, who ended up with various breederies. After the revolution, borzois almost disappeared, and now are the dogs of the nomenclature, as they say.” He made a gesture of pointing up high. “A regular Soviet could not feed these animals, although, in reality, they eat very little for their size. The real problem is that they need a lot of space. If they don’t exercise, they feel terrible.”

  That afternoon the man finally satisfied one of the questions hounding me: he told me he was Spanish and that he had lived in Moscow for many years, since the end of the Spanish Civil War, of course, in which he had fought on the Republican side, also of course. He’d been living in Cuba for three years, above all because his wife, who was Mexican, had never adjusted to the Soviet Union: the cold and the Russian character drove her crazy (“crazier than she already is,” he said literally).

  When we said goodbye, I also knew that the man was named Jaime López and that he was happy to have seen me again. As on the previous occasion, I saw them walk away, accompanied by the tall, thin black man. Then, driven by curiosity, I waited a couple of minutes and went out to the highway. In the distance, I saw the man, the black man, and the dogs as they crossed the parking lot’s deserted esplanade and approached a white pickup-style Volga, which Ix and Dax entered through the back door. The car, driven by the black man, went out to the highway and moved toward Havana.

  Throughout the month of April and during the first weeks of May, López—as the man asked me to call him—and I met on the beach several times, almost always briefly. No matter how much I think about it, I still can’t really explain my persistent interest in that figure, who almost never talked about himself and didn’t seem too interested in me or in the environment of the country where he now lived, despite the fact that, according to what he told me, his mother had been born in Havana when the island was still a Spanish colony. Nonetheless, when the matter of the dogs and his remote family connection with Cuba were exhausted—and in each meeting they became exhausted more quickly—the conversations could broach issues that gave me a little more information about the reserved “man who loved dogs.”

  One of the first details that López revealed to me was that in his work he had been assigned a chauffeur (the watchful tall black man who appeared and disappeared amid the casuarinas), not because he was important enough to need it, but rather because he suffered from frequent dizzy spells and he had caused two traffic accidents, luckily minor ones. For the last few months, he told me, he had been undergoing medical tests, increasingly complicated ones; while they had determined that he wasn’t suffering from any neurological or auditory affliction that could cause those bouts of vertigo, the fact was that they were increasingly besieging him with greater insistence and intensity. I also came to learn that he had two children: a boy who was more or less my age, who dreamed of studying to be a merchant ship captain, and a girl, seven years younger, and who was the apple of his eye, he said, with his propensity for ready-made phrases. For periods of time, another “almost” son also lived with them, a nephew of his wife’s, who had become an orphan when he was very little.

  On one occasion in which I asked him what kind of work he did in Cuba to have a new car and the possibility of a chauffeur, Jaime López only told me that he was a ministry adviser and immediately changed the subject. And when I wanted to know where he lived, he was elusive, saying “on the other side of the river,” an imprecise direction that no Havana native would have given, since the foul Almendares River had not served as a reference of anything for anyone for years.

  With the start of May and rising temperatures, the beach began to receive more visitors, and it became clear that López and his dogs would have to find another place. By then I had lost almost all interest in that impenetrable Spaniard, the son of a Cuban mother about whom he told me nothing (“I don’t like to talk about her,” he said), who had fought in a war about which he didn’t speak (“It hurts me to remember it”), lived in a Moscow about which he had no opinion, and worked and lived in Cuba, in imprecise places marked by a river that had been famous in other times and was currently forgotten. Because of that, when the man who loved dogs disappeared, I didn’t miss him, and if it hadn’t been for the two borzois that I remembered quite frequently, the image of Jaime López would have perhaps disappeared forever from my mind, like the Almendares River and so many other fond characters and places that started disappearing from Havana’s weakened memory.

  That summer of 1977 was marked by my ill-fated wedding to Raquelita and, weeks later, the regrettable revelation of my brother William’s homosexuality.

  My decision to marry Raquelita surprised my friends, especially when they found out that she wasn’t pregnant. I was simply run over by a visceral need for company, a desire to further strengthen my personal refuge, and she accepted the proposal because—I would find out a few years later, when she decided to leave me and humiliate me as well—being married greatly facilitated the paperwork a relative of hers, very well-placed (the nomenclature), would take care of to exempt her from social service, so unappealing and ideologically strengthening for the rest of the graduates. The wedding took place in a very unconventional way, since we brought the notary to Raquelita’s parents’ house, in Altahabana, and despite it having been my friend Dany who introduced me to my imminent wife, for reasons of antiquity I selected as my witness el negro Frank, recently arrived from his social service as a doctor in Moa, the mining city, the other Cuban Siberia. The party that followed was in the new spirit of the proletarian poor that had been established, with the beer that was
sold to newlyweds for a fixed price and the edible and drinkable contributions of both sets of friends. Once the usual honeymoon in a Havana hotel had been enjoyed, we went to live at my house, in Víbora Park. Although we shared the space with my parents and my brother, William, my wife and I had the privacy of a bedroom with its own bathroom, to which we would soon add, to avoid guaranteed frictions with my mother, a small kitchen, taking part of the roofed terrace.

  The calm world that I was trying to build experienced a brutal shakeup just a few weeks after the wedding. The truth is that William’s homosexuality had always been, for me and my parents, a reality that we fought even as we refused to see it, and, of course, something that we never talked about. Since he was a boy, William dragged along an underlying femininity that seemed to sink, perhaps disappear, when he entered secondary school. My parents took him to a psychologist and consoled themselves by thinking that, after two years of consultations, he had achieved the miracle of “curing” the kid with an array of injected hormones that had caused the collateral effect of making his cock grow to horselike dimensions. Although in recent years, my relationship with William had become distant, at times prickly, the whole time I suspected that his homosexuality was just latent and would one day raise its head. But I never imagined that upon waking it would turn into a real nightmare that would end up enveloping us all.

  Due to the extent of the effect of their nature and fate on this story, I’m urged to make a small commentary about my parents. In reality they were two people who were so normal that it made you feel bad: they were workers, they got along, all they wanted was that William and I would have a good life and go to college, something they had not managed to do. He was a Mason and she Catholic, and they never hid those affiliations in an era in which almost everyone preferred to hide and even renounce these and other petit bourgeois caprices, belonging to a past in the midst of socialist improvement. Ever since I can remember, I recall that my parents tried to instill the conviction, in me as well as in William, that the truth should always be faced, that only work makes man grow, and that, in all situations, the decent behavior of an individual always had the same characteristics (you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not betray, etc.) and, further still, that against those three values (truth, work, and decency) no force in the world could prevail. As you can see, my parents were utterly credulous. Of course, at that time, I didn’t precisely formulate or understand that elemental compendium of Masonic-Christian ethics, nor do I think did my parents. What I’m sure of is that this view of life had a strong influence on my and my brother’s consciousness, and that having been educated with those precepts was not very healthy in an age when perhaps the best thing would have been to learn from the cradle the arts of dissimulation or duplicity as a means of promotion or, at least, as a strategy for survival.