The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  The events unfolded at a dizzying speed once the communist press printed that it had proof of the collaboration between the POUM Trotskyists and the fascists. They wrote and spoke of telegrams and even troop-movement maps passed on to the enemy. Largo Caballero, besieged on all sides—or perhaps accepting at last his inability to resolve the problems of the war and the Republic—tendered his resignation. Then, with the support of the Communists and the advisers, Negrín rose to the leadership of the government and, almost as his first measure, announced the outlawing of the POUM and his intention to try its leaders.

  Ramón, who felt bothered by not having been closer to the action, was surprised when Maximus appeared, seeking him out. He was accompanied by two unknown men, obviously Spaniards, but who went without any kind of introduction. In silence they went down to the city, a true field after battle, with troops in the plazas, burned-out buildings, and the remains of barricades on the corners. Soldiers were posted everywhere. Ramón had the conviction that a Republican Spain should take advantage of the shakeup and accept once and for all the only salvation that could come from the most ironclad discipline and from head-on Soviet intervention. He thought perhaps André Marty was right when he had called them primitive and incapable, and when Kotov, in his almost poetic manner, had called them romantic and indolent. The young man felt ensnared by agony over the fate of his country and over the dream for which he had spent four years fighting, but an important step had been taken to save it.

  Maximus, in the company of Ramón and the other two comrades, stopped the car on the road to Prat, already in the outskirts of the city, and waited for the arrival of another vehicle, which was also occupied by four men, two of whom looked foreign and another one with a resplendent military uniform, although it was missing his rank. Maximus gave the orders, which seemed directed at Ramón more than at his other two companions: the police were getting ready to take a prisoner out of Barcelona, a spy at the service of the nationalists, and he was entrusting them with the mission of taking that man to Valencia, where he would be interrogated. The information the man possessed was vital for breaking apart the enemy’s network and to revealing the extent of the Trotskyist betrayal. But that entire operation had to be carried out with the greatest discretion, and for that reason only men of the utmost confidence were participating.

  A few hours later, as night was falling, the police patrol appeared on the road and signaled with its lights. Maximus ordered the men in the second car to place themselves in the rear guard and he, with Ramón and the other two men, placed himself at the front of the convoy and headed toward Valencia. On a few occasions one of the men traveling in the car tried to strike up a conversation, but Maximus demanded silence.

  In the predawn hours, they arrived in the outskirts of Valencia, where another patrol was waiting for them. The ones coming from Barcelona stopped and Maximus ordered them not to come out of the car and to remain on guard and, above all, to remain silent. Ramón watched how Maximus went over to the patrol, accompanied by the man dressed in uniform who had traveled in the car that was the last in line. In the darkness he tried to make out what was happening on the highway and he thought he heard Maximus and the men who were waiting speaking in Russian. One of those men looked familiar to him, and although he later thought it could have been Alexander Orlov, head of Soviet intelligence in Spain, the darkness prevented him from being sure. With a flashlight, the uniformed man accompanying Maximus signaled the convoy, and a few minutes later Ramón saw a handcuffed man led by two policemen pass by his car. Despite the sparse light, he was shocked when he was able to identify him: it was Andreu Nin.

  At that moment Ramón understood he had been chosen for that mission as a reward for his work involving the POUM. Then the horse-faced English journalist came to mind, as did the words he had said to Adriano in one of their chats at the Hotel Continental a few weeks before:

  “Nin is the most Spanish Spaniard I know. If he weren’t so Catalan, he would’ve been a bullfighter or a singer. He exists with just one idea in his mind: revolution. He’s the kind who would allow himself to be killed for it. Fanatics scare me away, but I respect that man.”

  Without looking at his accomplices, Ramón said:

  “They’re going to have to kill that man.”

  One of his companions, the older one, dared to comment:

  “Remember what the chief said: they’re going to make him sing about everything he knows regarding the fifth columnists’ plans.”

  “He won’t talk.” Ramón felt that conviction so deeply that he was tormented by the desire to get out of the car and tell Maximus and even Orlov himself, if it was Orlov who was now stepping aside to allow Nin into the small covered van. All of that was absurd, and Ramón knew it was going to end in the worst way.

  “They can make anyone talk,” the man said, lowering his voice, “and all of those Trotskyists are soft.”

  “Not this one. He won’t talk.”

  “And why are you so sure, comrade?”

  “Because he’s a fanatic and he knows that if he talks, they’re going to kill him anyway, and kill his friends, too. You know something? If I were him, I wouldn’t talk, either.”

  12

  Over the years, many of the details of my relationship with the man who loved dogs have faded in my memory, although I don’t believe I have forgotten anything essential. What you are reading, in any event, is the reconstruction according to my recollections—subject to the pernicious effects of time—of some conversations and some thoughts that I would only begin to write down, in the form of notes, five years after those encounters on the beach during the year of 1977. In the interim, I had turned into a very different Iván than the one I was when I met Jaime López, and this was, among other reasons and as you will easily come to understand, because of the story that obscure man would tell me. Raquelita was right, as she almost always was: no one could continue being the same person he had been before listening to him.

  In the middle of November, precisely on the first day that I returned to the beach after our last encounter, I ran into López again, and I think that for the first time I suspected that perhaps he had been waiting for me. But why? For what? I asked myself, and then I immediately forgot these questions. On that occasion I had gone without Raquel, who tended to work in the afternoons and, at heart, was not too fond of those winter outings to the beach.

  After exchanging greetings, we moved on to the subject of the trip to Paris and López’s health, but he cut off that line of conversation by telling me that the French doctors couldn’t find what was wrong with him, either, and that the climate in Paris had been just as detestable as could be expected from that city. I don’t know why that abrupt interruption of a possible chat about something that so interested me—Paris, the dream journey—moved me to ask him the reason he always had his right hand bandaged. Even when I knew that with that question I was brushing the limits of what was permissible in our superficial relationship of insignificant conversations, at that moment I felt a need to know something definitive about him, perhaps moved by the impression that he had made on Raquelita.

  “It’s a very ugly burn,” López responded, without thinking about it too much. “It happened to me a few years ago already, but it’s very unpleasant to look at.”

  I perceived in his voice a regretful tone that I hadn’t heard from him before. It must not be, I thought, that it bothers him to talk about the burned hand: perhaps he was upset at having burned it, as if it were still burning? In that instant I regretted my indiscretion, and I have never really known if it was a form of compensation or because I needed to vomit up my pent-up anger that I did something unusual for me and told him about the ups and downs my family had experienced in the previous two months since my younger brother controversially came out as a homosexual. I unleashed all the resentment I felt toward my parents for having punished the kid so cruelly. As I spoke, I noticed that I had been so obtuse that until that exact moment, as I
confided the details and feelings I hadn’t even revealed to my wife to a person I barely knew, I had concentrated my resentment on my parents’ attitude because in reality I had been ignoring the true origins of what had happened: the persistence of an institutionalized homophobia, of an extended ideological fundamentalism that rejected and repressed anything different and preyed on the most vulnerable ones, on those who don’t adjust to the canons of orthodoxy. Then I understood that not just my parents but I myself had been the pawn of ancestral prejudices, of the surrounding pressures of the time, and, above all, the victim of fear, as much as or more (without a doubt, more) than William. In me, in addition, I felt a certain rancor toward my brother, precisely because it was my brother who had been declared a faggot: I could understand and even accept that two professors may have gone the other way, but this wasn’t the same as knowing—and having others know—that the one who went the other way was my own brother. In any event, I silenced the philosophizing that, in the hands of López (who the hell was López? Who did he work for in Cuba? How in the hell could he go see some doctors in Paris?) or anyone who could decide to use them, could be turned against me, as my own past duly reminded me.

  López had listened to me in silence, as if ashamed. Ix and Dax, tired from running, had lain down a few feet from their owner, and the tall, thin black man, somewhere between the casuarinas, had also sat down on their roots. In my memory, that instant has remained frozen like a photograph, as if the world had stopped for a few seconds, even minutes, until López said:

  “They always fuck somebody . . . I’m sorry for your brother,” and he asked me to help him stand up.

  This time he was less dizzy, and he confirmed that in recent days he had been feeling much better. When he was already starting to get farther away, López stopped and asked me to come close. With me just barely arrived at his side, the man who loved dogs started to unfurl the bandage on his right hand and showed me the shiny, flat skin that rose from the tip of his thumb to the center of his hand.

  “It’s pretty ugly, right?”

  “Like all burns,” I told him, surprised that it was just an old scar.

  “It still hurts me some days . . .” and he remained silent until he looked into my eyes and told me: “I wasn’t in Paris. I went to Moscow.”

  That confession surprised me: Why did he lie to me and why was he now confiding the truth to me? Why should I know he had been in Moscow? Didn’t dozens, hundreds of Cubans go to Moscow every day, for any number of reasons? I remained silent, unable to answer myself, doing the only thing I could do: waiting. Then López began to bandage his hand and asked me:

  “Do you think we could see each other the day after tomorrow?”

  I took my eyes off his once-again-covered hand and discovered a brilliant moistness in that man’s eyes. Until that day—at least that I knew of—our encounters had been more or less casual run-ins more or less facilitated by the customs or whims of the weather, and had never been arranged beforehand. Why was López asking for another meeting after having shown me that burn hitherto concealed and having confessed to me he had been in Moscow and not in Paris?

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “So we’ll see each other in two days . . . It would be better if your wife were not there,” he warned me, and slapped his legs so Ix and Dax would walk next to him toward where the tall, thin black man was waiting for them.

  The coast was full of gray and brownish algae, the swollen corpses of purplish jellyfish, and worn-out wood and stones thrown out by the sea the previous night. There wasn’t a single person visible on the whole swath of sand in the eye’s view. The sun warmed the atmosphere, and although on the beach the wind from the north beat coolly, consistently, the light jacket I was wearing that day was enough. Since I had arrived in advance of the time we set for our meeting, I walked along the shore for a bit. I then saw that those darkened pieces of wood, half hidden by shaggy algae, that seemed to make a cross were, in fact, the limbs of a cross. The wood, corroded, announced that perhaps that cross—about sixteen by eight inches—had spent a lot of time at the mercy of the sea and the sand, but at the same time it was clear that it had just recently arrived on the coast, pushed by the waves from the last cold front. Nothing made it special: they were just two pieces of dark wood, very dense, eroded, gouged, crossed, and fixed together by two rusted screws. Nonetheless, that rustic cross, perhaps because of its worn wood, perhaps because it was where it was (where did it come from? To whom did it belong?), drew me so much that, despite my atheism, I decided to take it with me after washing it in the sea. The shipwrecked cross, I called it, even when I had no clue about its origins and before I suspected how long it would stay with me.

  As if he were immune to the temperature, López showed up dressed only in a gray short-sleeved shirt adorned with some enormous pockets. The borzois, made for Siberian temperatures, seemed more than happy. The black man, always between the casuarinas, was wearing a military cape and at some point seemed to have fallen asleep.

  From the moment in which the man had invited me to meet him, I had barely been able to think of anything else. I had made a mental summary of how little I knew about him and I couldn’t find a crack that leaked any speculations about the origin of that need to see me and, as I was expecting, to talk to me about something presumably important (that he preferred, or demanded, that Raquelita not hear). Up until our meeting, I was mulling over many possibilities: that López’s son was also gay; that López could use his influence to help William in his case; and, of course, almost instinctively, I thought he was hiding his intention of commenting upon my opinions and was preparing to return with someone who could make trouble for me, just when I had gotten rid of all my dreams and ambitions (I believe that even included my increasingly moribund literary pretensions) and wished for nothing more than a little peace, like the bird trained to happily accept the routine of the cage. Whatever the reasons may be, whatever was going to happen must happen, I concluded, and shortly before four in the afternoon I arrived at Santa María del Mar, without my tennis racket or even a book to read.

  López smiled upon seeing me with the wooden cross in my hands. I explained to him how I had found it and he asked to see it.

  “It seems very old,” he said as he examined it. “They don’t make these kinds of screws anymore.”

  “It came from a shipwreck,” I commented, just to say something.

  “Of one of those that leave Cuba in washbasins?” His question exuded a mocking irony.

  “I don’t know. Yes, it could be . . .”

  “The cross was there, waiting for you to find it,” he said, now completely serious as he returned it to me, and I liked the idea. If I had any doubts about what to do with the cross up until that moment, the possibility that finding it had been more than a coincidence convinced me that I had to keep carrying it, since only at that moment was I sure that it had to have been very important to someone I would never meet. Did things like that occur to me because, despite my problems, I could still react like a writer? When did I lose that capacity and so many others?

  Instead of sitting on the sand, we made the most of some concrete blocks very close to the sea. That afternoon, López had brought a bag with a thermos full of coffee and two small plastic cups, in which he served the beverage several times. Each time he drank coffee, he removed from his pocket a box of cigarettes and his heavy gas lighter, which was able to resist the gusts of the breeze.

  In addition to the coffee, the man who loved dogs also brought some bad news.

  “We have to put Dax down,” he told me once we were settled and he looked at the borzois running and splashing in the water.

  Surprised by those words, I turned my head to look at the animals.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “The veterinarian saw him two days ago . . .”

  “How can a veterinarian tell you to euthanize a dog like that? Did he bite someone? Didn’t he see how he’s running, that he’
s fine?”

  López took his time in responding.

  “He has a brain tumor. He’ll die in four or five months, and at any moment he’ll start to suffer and could become uncontrollable.”

  Then I was the one who remained silent.

  “That was what was making him aggressive, not the heat . . . ,” López added.

  “Did they run a scan?” I looked at the animals again.

  “And other tests. There’s no chance that they’re mistaken. I’m devastated. No one can fathom how much I love those dogs.”

  “I can imagine,” I murmured, recalling the death of Curry, a tailless terrier who spent all of my childhood and part of my adolescence with me.

  “In Moscow and here in Havana, they’ve been like two friends. I like to talk to them. I tell them everything, my memories, and I always speak to them in Catalan. And I swear they understand me . . . When Dax starts to get worse and I’ve gotten used to the idea . . . would you be able to help me with this?”

  At first I didn’t understand the question. Then I understood that López was asking me to help him sacrifice Dax, and I reacted.

  “No, I’m not a veterinarian . . . and even if I were, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

  The man was silent. He poured himself more coffee and took out one of his cigarettes.

  “Of course, I don’t know why I asked this of you . . . It’s just that I have no idea how the hell I am going to . . .”

  At that moment I thought I sensed that something more terrible than the fate of his sick dog was pursuing this man, and this was confirmed almost immediately.

  “If someone told me I was as sick as Dax, I’d like for someone to help me get out of it quickly. Doctors are sometimes incredibly cruel. When the inevitable happens, they should be more humane and have a better understanding of what it feels like to suffer.”