The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  Caridad, whom he had hardly seen in two weeks, experienced a relapse of angina that kept her in bed for two days with her left arm cramped and suffering. When the woman was able to come out to the mansion’s devastated garden, Ramón looked for a way to put the persistent Lena at a distance and be alone with her. He had endured too many days of inactivity, he felt tricked by his mother and by Kotov, and he dared to hurl an ultimatum at her.

  “In three days, I’m returning to the front,” he said, but Caridad barely moved her head. “This whole business about silence and responsibility is just to keep me here, to control me.”

  Caridad took a pack of cigarettes out of her coat pocket and the battle she was having with herself must have been agonizing.

  “That’s going to kill you,” he warned her when he saw her remove one of her cigarettes.

  “When I feel like this, all I want is to die,” she said, and began to unroll the cigarette with her fingers and brought the tobacco to her nose to breathe in its aroma. Finally, she threw her torn-up cigarette to the ground and placed another one between her lips without lighting it. “Don’t look at me like that, don’t you dare feel any compassion, because I can’t stand it. I hate my body when it doesn’t listen to me. And don’t come to me with that foolishness about going to the front . . . There are things happening here that you can’t even imagine, and sooner than you can believe, your moment will come. But in due time, Ramón, everything in due time.”

  “I know that story about time by heart already, Caridad.”

  She smiled, but the pain in her arm cut through her happiness. She waited for a few seconds while the burning cramp receded.

  “Story? Let’s see . . . Did you believe the story about Buenaventura Durruti getting killed by a stray bullet?”

  Ramón looked at his mother and felt that he couldn’t say a word.

  “Do you think we can win the war with an anarchist commander who’s more prestigious than all of the communist leaders?”

  “Durruti was fighting for the Republic,” Ramón tried to reason.

  “Durruti was an anarchist; he would’ve been one his entire life. And have you heard the story about the translator who disappeared, a certain Robles?”

  “He was a spy, wasn’t he?”

  “A miserable ass kisser. He was the scapegoat in an internal argument between the military advisers and security. But they didn’t just pick him at random: that Robles knew too much and could have been dangerous. He was not a traitor; they turned him into a traitor.”

  “Do you mean to say that they killed him without him being a traitor?”

  “Yes, and what of it? Do you know how many they’ve killed on one side or the other in these months of war?” Caridad waited for Ramón’s response.

  “A lot, I think.”

  “Almost one hundred thousand, Ramón. As they advance, the fascists execute everyone they consider a Popular Front sympathizer, and on this side the anarchists kill anyone who, according to them, is a bourgeois enemy. And do you know why?”

  “It’s the war” was what occurred to him to say. “The fascists made those the rules of the game . . .”

  “Necessity. For the fascists, it is a necessity to not have any enemies in the rear guard, and for the anarchists to keep being anarchists. And we cannot allow the war to slip out of our hands. We’ve also been killing people and we’re going to have to kill many more, and you—”

  Ramón raised his hand to interrupt her.

  “You brought me here to kill people?”

  “And what the hell were you doing on the front, Ramón?”

  “It’s different: it’s the war.”

  “Enough with the fucking war . . . Isn’t managing to get the party to impose its policies and for the Soviets to continue to support us the most important thing for us winning this war? Isn’t cleaning up the rear guard of enemies and spies part of the war? Isn’t eliminating the fifth columnists in Madrid part of the war?”

  “In Paracuellos they executed people who had nothing to do with the fifth column, and I know that some from the party were involved in that.”

  “Who’s saying that the dead were saboteurs, you or the Falangists?”

  Ramón lowered his head and contained his indignation. In the Sierra de Guadarrama, with a rifle in his hands and a handful of comrades dying of cold and shaking with hunger, and the enemy on the other side of the mountain, everything was simpler.

  “This war you’re about to get into is more important, because if we don’t win it, we won’t win the other, and the comrades who were in the trenches are going to fall like flies when the planes, cannons, rifles, and grenades stop coming from Moscow. Ramón, Spain’s fate is in the hands of people like you . . . So that you get an idea of what’s happening, tonight you’ll go with me to La Pedrera. There is an important meeting. It goes without saying that everything that will be discussed there is secret. You cannot speak there or even say your name, is that clear?”

  “Is África going as well?”

  “Why don’t you forget about that woman for a while, Ramón?”

  In Caridad’s shadow, Ramón crossed the threshold of La Pedrera that night without the guards stopping him. In one of the rooms on the top floor, enveloped in a cloud of smoke, several men were talking and barely noticed the arrival of Caridad and her young companion. Ramón felt disappointed on not seeing África. Of those present, he recognized only one person, Dolores Ibárruri, who was perhaps the only one not smoking at that moment. There was also a man with a Slavic face whom he would later identify as Comrade Pedro, the Hungarian who commanded the Comintern’s envoys. His attention nonetheless focused on a loud character, hairy and corpulent, with a large head, bulging eyes, and thick lips that made a smacking noise as he spoke. By his way of addressing himself to the others, you could tell he was an irascible guy, and by what he was saying, it appeared that he was one of those who assume everyone is a traitor and who consider any negligence or ineptitude to be a perverse conspiracy or enemy sabotage. Whispering in his ear, Caridad told him that the man was André Marty, and Ramón understood immediately that he was in the presence of something important: if at that moment of the war Marty was so far away from his post as commander of the International Brigades, it could only be for a more important cause. Thanks to his sister Montse, who for weeks had been working as the secretary for that Comintern leader, Ramón knew that he had the reputation of being a cruel and despotic man, and that night the harangue he issued forth corroborated it, festooned as it was with insults. Marty accused the leaders of the party of being weak and inept, since, according to him, the Central Committee practically didn’t exist and the work of the political bureau was terribly primitive and conciliatory: the Spaniards, he said, and pointed to Ibárruri, had to grow up once and for all and stop allowing Codovilla to act like the party was his personal backyard just because he was a Comintern envoy. They should be ashamed that Codovilla was using them like marionettes—and again he looked at La Pasionaria, who lowered her gaze like a beaten dog—and going to the extreme of writing speeches for General Secretary Pepé Díaz and Comrade Dolores Ibárruri just to create the illusion that there was a central committee of Spanish Communists, when in reality it didn’t exist or decide anything. The situation didn’t allow for any more hesitation: they either went for everything or forgot all about even the most minimal possibility of success.

  Indignant, Ramón barely heard the closing of the meeting: according to Pedro, the party had to increase its campaign against the government’s management of military operations and internal policies, demand more purges in the military command, and above all be ready to launch an offensive against the saboteurs. The Communists had to assure the success of an operation that would be capable of guaranteeing control over a rear guard free of Trotskyists and anarchists. The Soviet leadership expected that this time the Spaniards would know how to carry out their role.

  “It’s now or never,” Pedro was stating, when Ramón, without
waiting for Caridad, escaped from the place in search of the pure air on the streets, deserted at that time of night.

  Two days later, Maximus showed up at La Bonanova. Each one of the hours that had passed between that meeting and the arrival of Kotov’s envoy, who would at last put Ramón in motion, had served to reaffirm one idea in the young man: the advisers were right in their demands and it was necessary to pull the rug out from under the Republican alliance. Ramón would hand himself over body and soul to that mission and would prove that this Spanish militant was capable not only of obeying but also of thinking and acting, since it wounded his pride as a Communist to have had to listen silently, in his own country, in his own war, how he and his comrades were called feckless revolutionaries by a paranoid who yelled the truth in their faces. It was necessary to act.

  Maximus, who, after many weeks of work, Ramón would come to suspect of being Hungarian, turned out to be a specialist in clandestine struggle and destabilization. Under his orders, Ramón joined a six-man action cell (one of the so-called specific groups), all of them Spaniards, of whom only Maximus seemed to know their true identities and whom, because of his presumed admiration for the Roman world, he distinguished with the names of Latin characters—Graco, Caesar, Mario—while he characterized them as praetorians. From that day, Ramón would begin to be called Adriano. It was the first of many names he used, and he felt proud when they renamed him, before he had even the slightest glimpse of the experiences he had to come—not just under other names but in different skins.

  Adriano would lament being charged with a mission as innocuous as becoming close with the POUM and establishing the routines of its leaders, especially those of Andreu Nin. Although Maximus had them submitted to a delicate compartmentalization of information and he was unaware of the details of the tasks assigned to the other praetorians, he managed to find out, thanks to his compatriots’ loquacity, that some of them were participating in violent and dangerous acts, as corroborated by the mysterious disappearances, some suspiciously definitive, of certain political rivals who were not very noteworthy but without a doubt bothersome, and who were necessary to take out of the game before it entered the critical stages. Because of this, seeing himself limited to walking down Las Ramblas, entering hotels where some of the POUMists and their sympathizers were staying and finding out the details of the daily activities of the heads of the Trotskyist party, seemed like something beneath his capabilities. He did not suspect that his work would gain importance in future actions and that his efficiency and chameleon-like abilities, noticed by Maximus, would place him on the path to his extraordinary destiny.

  Soon Adriano was convinced that, for the good of the cause, Andreu Nin was a man who had to die. Since before the war started and the political rivalries between the Republicans were so violently stirred, the renegade Nin was a declared enemy of the Communists and had been one of the first (echoing Trotsky’s cry of alarm) in declaiming the Moscow trials of 1936 and the others at the beginning of that year as crimes, and in labeling the “friends of the USSR” who defended their legality and propriety as guilty accomplices. He had also been one of those who had most passionately argued for the need for revolution along with the war, for the total struggle against the bourgeois republic, which, in spite of being anti-proletarian, was sustained through the support of those whom Nin called communist collaborators. He disagreed with Soviet aid as if it would have been possible for the government to survive without it. But what had most firmly marked him was his demand, from his post as the conseller for the Generalitat government and in the POUM’s leadership, that the Republic offer asylum to that traitor Trotsky even after his felony was corroborated in the trials that took place in Moscow. Although Companys, the Catalan president, had been forced to remove Nin from his cabinet, the Trotskyist’s arrogance had become so out of control as to make him publicly declare that they would have to kill everyone in the POUM to remove them from the political struggle. Adriano would think that, without a doubt, the best thing would be to make Nin’s wishes come true once and for all.

  Adriano had picked the Hotel Continental as one of his usual stops. Despite the scarcity devastating the city, you could still have a good coffee there and get a pack of French cigarettes. Many of the members of the POUM were staying there and in the nearby Hotel Falcón, and Adriano proved that, with due caution, his presence in those places could become habitual and not at all suspicious. In the end, the various secret agents who roamed about the building ended up being so visible that he felt he could become transparent or, at most, be taken as just another nosy parker.

  Periodically, Adriano reported to Maximus, and they both reached the conclusion that the POUMists were terrified by the rise of the communist press, but its leaders didn’t have any possibilities to backtrack nor a full understanding of the abyss they were entering. Between the hotel’s guests and visitors, with whom he managed to start occasional conversations, just one English journalist, a POUM militiaman, commented that in the coming days something serious was going to happen in Barcelona: you could read it in the tension floating in the air. The militiaman-cum-journalist, who had been evacuated from the front in Huesca, was a tall guy, very thin, with a horselike face, and bore the unhealthy coloring of an illness that was surely eating away at him. He was always in the company of his tiny wife and he was always looking around him, as if something were continuously lying in wait for him from behind a column. Adriano had introduced himself with his new nom de guerre and the Englishman said he was called George Orwell and confessed to him that he felt more fearful in a Barcelona hotel than in the frozen trenches of Huesca.

  “Do you see that fat man who corners all the foreigners and explains to them that everything that’s happening here is a Trotskyist-anarchist conspiracy?” Orwell asked him, and Adriano furtively looked at the figure. “He is a Russian agent . . . It’s the first time I have seen someone professionally and publicly devoted to telling lies—with the exception of journalists and politicians, of course.”

  Many years had to pass for Ramón to know who that man was. In 1937 almost no one knew Orwell. But when Ramón read some books about what had happened in Barcelona and found a photo of John Dos Passos, Ramón would have sworn that, just days before everything exploded, he had seen Orwell conversing with Dos Passos in the hotel cafeteria. In those meetings, however, Ramón and Orwell almost never spoke of politics: they tended to talk about dogs. The Englishman and his wife, Eileen, loved dogs and in England they had a borzoi. Through Orwell, Ramón learned of that breed; which, according to the journalist, were the most elegant and beautiful hounds on earth.

  What Ramón liked best about his mission was feeling so camouflaged beneath his own skin that, without thinking about it too much, he was capable of reacting like the carefree and simple Adriano. He discovered that using another name, dressing a different way from what he would have considered close to his own tastes, and inventing a previous life dominated by a disillusionment with politics and a rejection of politicians were feelings that he was beginning to secretly enjoy. Thus, with each passing day he felt more like Adriano, was more like Adriano, and could even look at Ramón with a certain distance. He happily discovered that, without África at hand, he could go without his family. Besides, despite his gregarious and partisan spirit, he didn’t have a single friend to whom he felt tied. The only compass he clung to was his responsibility, and he tried to carry it out carefully. Because of that, the day on which he handed over to Maximus the summary of the movements, places frequented by and the personal tastes of the heads of the POUM—particularly exhaustive in the case of Andreu Nin—he thought that the congratulations he received were a reward for Adriano and, only remotely, for the Ramón Mercader who had lent him his body.

  Kotov looked like an abandoned statue on the bench in the Plaza de Cataluña. The spring was at its height and the warm sun bathed the city. The adviser, with his face slightly raised, was receiving the heat like a lizard slothful from the ray
s that were injecting him with life. He had even taken off his jacket and the printed kerchief he regularly wore around his neck, and he remained immobile for a few seconds after Ramón sat down at his side.

  “What a marvelous country!” he said at last, and smiled. “I could live here for the rest of my life.”

  “Despite the Spaniards?”

  “Precisely because of you. Where I come from, the people are like stones. You are all flowers. My country smells like smoked herring and hops; here, it smells of olive oil and wine.”

  “Your pals say we’re primitive and practically dumb.”

  “Don’t pay too much attention to those lunatics. They confuse ideology with mysticism, and they are no more than walking machines—worse still, they’re fanatics. Here they make themselves look tough, but you should see them when Moscow calls for them . . . Na khuy. They shit themselves. Don’t look to them as an example; you don’t want to be like them. You can be so much more.”

  “What did Maximus say about me?”

  “He’s satisfied and you know it. But today you will stop being Adriano and go back to being Ramón, and as Ramón, you’re going to work with me, for now. Until something else is decided, Adriano doesn’t exist anymore; Maximus never existed. Is that clear?”

  Ramón nodded and took off his scarf. Heat was rising from his chest.

  “Take advantage, kid, breathe in this peace! Get the most out of every peaceful moment. The struggle is hard and doesn’t give us many occasions like this one. Do you see the calm? Do you feel it?”