The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  “Doctors do know, but they can’t do it. Veterinarians also know and have that license to kill. Look for one who . . .”

  I felt that I was entering tricky territory and was losing wiggle room and any possibility for escape. But I was still a long way from imagining the degree to which I would sink into an overflowing pit of hate and blood and frustration.

  “I’m also going to die,” the man finally said to me.

  I tried to find my way out by saying something obvious. “We’re all going to die.”

  “The doctors haven’t been able to find anything, but I know that I am dying. Right now I’m dying,” he insisted.

  “Because of the dizziness?” I clung to my logic and to playing the role of someone stupid. “It’s the spine . . . There are even tropical parasites that cause vertigo.”

  “Don’t fuck around, kid. Don’t pretend to be dumb. Listen to what I’m telling you: I’m dying, dammit!”

  I asked myself what the hell was happening: Why, if we barely knew each other, was that man choosing to confide in me that he was dying and that he wanted someone who was able to cut short that suffering?

  “I don’t know why you . . .”

  López smiled. He dragged his heel across the sand until he made a line. At that moment I was still afraid of what that man’s words could say to me.

  “The pretext for going to Moscow was that I was invited to the celebrations for the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution. But I needed to go to see two people. I was able to see them and I had some conversations with those who are killing me.”

  “With whom did you speak?”

  The man stopped moving his foot and looked at his bandaged hand.

  “Iván, I’ve seen death closer than you would be able to imagine. I think I know everything there is to know about death.”

  I recall it as if it were yesterday: it was at that exact moment that I really felt fear, real fear, besides the logical surprise at those unfathomable words. Because never in my life had it occurred to me that someone could confess his capacity for understanding everything there is to know about death. What do you do in a situation like that? I looked at the man and said:

  “When you were in the war, right?”

  He nodded silently, as if my clarification weren’t important, and then said:

  “But I’m incapable of killing a dog. I swear.”

  “War is something else . . .”

  “War is shit,” the man exclaimed almost furiously. “In war, you either kill or you are killed. But I’ve seen the worst side of human beings, especially outside the war. You can’t imagine what a man is capable of, what hate and bitterness can do when they are nurtured . . .”

  More or less at that point, I thought: enough with beating around the bush. The best thing I could have done would have been to stand up and end that conversation that could lead to nothing good. But I didn’t move from where I was, as if I really wanted to know where the man who loved dogs was going with his argument. Was I interested? Until that moment I was motivated by pure inertia. But then the man ratcheted things up:

  “A few years ago, a friend told me a story.” López’s voice suddenly seemed as if it were someone else’s. “It’s a story that very few people knew well and almost all of them are dead. Of course, I asked him not to tell me, but there’s something that worries me.”

  I had decided not to speak again, but López was expectant.

  “What’s that?”

  “My friend died . . . and when I die, and when the only other person dies who, as far as I know, is familiar with all the details, that story will be lost. The truth of the story, I mean.”

  “So why don’t you write it down?”

  “If I shouldn’t even tell it to my children, how am I going to write it down?”

  I nodded, and was glad the man was reaching for another cigarette: the action freed me of the need to ask another question.

  “I asked you to come today because I want to tell you that story, Iván,” the man who loved dogs said to me. “I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve made up my mind. Do you want to hear it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, almost without thinking about it, and I was completely honest. I would later ask myself if that was the most intelligent answer to one of the most unusual questions I had ever been asked in my life: Is it possible to want or not want to hear a story you don’t know, a story about which you don’t know a damned thing? But at that moment it was the only response within my reach.

  “It’s an incredible story; you’ll see that I am not exaggerating. But before I tell it to you, I’m going to ask two things of you.”

  This time I managed to keep my mouth shut.

  “First, don’t be so formal with me anymore. That way it will be easier to explain everything to you. Also, don’t tell anyone, not even your wife; that’s why I asked you to come alone. But above all, I don’t want you to write it down.”

  I stared at the man. The fear had left me and my brain was a spiral of ideas, but there was one that made my head spin.

  “If you’re not supposed to talk about this . . . why do you want to tell me? What are you going to achieve with that?”

  The man put out his cigarette by burying it in the sand.

  “I need to tell it at least once in my life. I can’t die without telling anyone. You’ll see why . . . Oh, and don’t call me usted anymore, ¿vale?”

  I nodded, but my mind could only focus on one thing.

  “Yes, that’s all fine, but why do you want to tell me? You know that I wrote a book,” I added, as if I were raising a paper shield under a steel sword.

  “Because I don’t have anyone better to tell it to, although sometimes it seems like I met you just to be able to tell it to you. Besides, I think it will teach you something.”

  “About death?”

  “Yes. And about life. About truth and lies. It taught me a lot, although a bit too late . . .”

  “You really don’t have anyone to tell this story to? A friend, I don’t know . . . your son?”

  “No, not him . . .” The reaction was too brusque, as if he were defensive, but his tone changed immediately. “He knows some of it, but . . . I told one of my brothers part of it, not all . . . And it has been a long time since I’ve had friends, what you would call friends . . . But I barely know you, and it’s better that way. I know what I’m saying . . . A while back, when I got here, I still wasn’t convinced, but later I realized that you were the best person possible . . . So, do you promise you’re not going to write it down or tell anyone?”

  It goes without saying that, without having a clear idea of why I was doing it or what I was in for, I said yes and became entangled with him. If I had said I didn’t want to hear any story or that I couldn’t promise that I wouldn’t run out and share it that same day, perhaps this whole story, with all of its deep and sordid details, would have been lost with the death of Jaime López and the other individual who, according to him, was the only one who knew it and wasn’t going to tell it, either. But as I went over the unpredictable sum of coincidences and games of chance that had led me to be sitting in front of the sea that November afternoon, next to a person who was demanding an answer that was beyond me, I could only arrive at one conclusion: the man who loved dogs, his story and mine, were chasing each other around the Earth, like heavenly bodies whose orbits are destined to cross and cause an explosion.

  After hearing my affirmative response, the man took another sip of coffee and lit the cigarette he had in his hand.

  “Have you ever heard of Ramón Mercader?”

  “No,” I admitted, almost without thinking about it.

  “That’s normal,” he murmured, with profound conviction and a small smile, a rather sad one, on his lips. “Almost no one knows him. And others would prefer not to know him. What do you know about Leon Trotsky?”

  I recalled my fleeting contact with the name and a few moments in the life of that murky figure, pra
ctically disappeared from history, unmentionable in Cuba.

  “Very little. That he betrayed the Soviet Union. That he was killed in Mexico.” I searched my memory for more. “Of course, that he participated in the October Revolution. In our classes on Marxism, they talked to us about Lenin, a little bit about Stalin, and they told us that Trotsky was a renegade and that Trotskyism was revisionist and counterrevolutionary, an attack on the Soviet Union.”

  “I see that they teach you well here . . . ,” López admitted.

  “So who is Ramón Mercader? Why should I know him?”

  “Well, you should know who Ramón Mercader was,” he said, and made a long pause, until he decided to continue. “Ramón was my friend—much more than a friend. We met in Barcelona, and later we fought in the war together . . . A few years ago, we ran into each other again in Moscow. The Soviet tanks had already entered Prague and everyone was speaking in low voices again.” The man was looking at the sea, as if the keys to his memory were behind the waves. “The city of whispers. The last action against Khrushchev’s détente, against a socialism that dreamed it could still be different. With a human face, they said . . .” He remembered and rubbed the back of his cloth-bandage-covered hand. “We saw each other again, the day of the first snowfall of 1968 . . . Ramón was fifty-five years old, more or less, but he looked like he was ten, fifteen years older. He was fat; he had aged. We hadn’t seen each other since the war . . .” He went silent, as if he were pondering all the time that had passed.

  “What war?”

  “Ours. The Spanish Civil War.”

  “And you just ran into each other like that, by coincidence?” The curiosity had already taken hold of me.

  “It was as if in some way we had been waiting for each other and suddenly we both went out looking for each other, on that exact day on which snow fell for the first time that year in Moscow.” Now he smiled upon evoking it, but I would only understand many years later why he was looking at his bandaged hand again. “We ran into each other on the Frunze, where he lived, in front of Gorky Park. Ramón had gotten fatter, I already told you, but in addition he was very white, and it would have been difficult for someone besides me to recognize in that man the young guy I had said goodbye to in a trench in the Sierra de Guadarrama, with our fists raised, both of us confident we’d be victorious.” He paused and lit another cigarette. “Later, when Ramón and I began to talk, I realized that the only thing he had left intact of that beautiful time was that image of happiness. An image that he had to help him survive. And for that reason, when he decided to tell me everything, he confided his life’s dream to me: more than anything else in the world, he wanted to return to that Catalan beach at least once before he died. And I think he already knew he was going to die.”

  Then the man who loved dogs, with his gaze fixed on the sea again, began to tell me the reasons why his friend Ramón Mercader would recall, for the rest of his days, that just a few seconds before pronouncing the words that would change his existence, he had discovered the unhealthy density that accompanied silence in the midst of war. The crash of bombs, gunfire, and engines, the yelled orders and the cries of pain amid which he had lived for weeks, had accumulated in his consciousness like the sounds of life, and the sudden leaden fall of that heavy silence, able to provoke a helplessness too similar to fear, turned into a disquieting presence when he understood that behind that precarious silence could be hiding the explosion of death.

  13

  The series of events that began on August 26, 1936, clearly revealed to him the often inextricable reasons why Stalin still hadn’t broken his neck. Totally absorbed in blind combat from that day on, Lev Davidovich understood that the Great Leader’s macabre game still demanded his presence because his back had to serve as a springboard in Stalin’s race to the most inaccessible summits of imperial power. At the same time, he had realized that—once his usefulness as the perfect enemy was exhausted, and all the requisite mutilations had been carried out—Stalin would fix the moment of a death that would then arrive with the same certainty with which snow falls in the Siberian winter.

  A few months before, foreseeing some incidents that could complicate the delicate conditions of his asylum, Lev Davidovich had begun to eliminate anything that the Norwegian authorities could use against him. More than the aggressiveness of Commander Quisling’s pro-Nazi party, he was alarmed by the increasing virulence of the local Stalinists, who had added a disquieting rumor to their attacks: with a pounding insistence they warned that “Trotsky the counterrevolutionary” was using Norway as a “base for terrorist activities directed against the Soviet Union and its leaders.” His honed sense of smell warned him that the accusation was not the fruit of some local plots but rather came from farther away and hid the most shadowy ends. Because of that, he asked Liova and his followers to erase his name from the Fourth International executive committee, and at the same time he decided to stop giving interviews and even abstained from participating as a mere spectator in any political act of his host Konrad Knudsen’s parliamentary campaign. His relationship with the outside world was reduced to the outings that, once a week, he and Natalia embarked on with the Knudsens to Hønefoss, where they tended to eat in cheap restaurants and later spent the rest of those evenings at the movies, enjoying one of those Marx Brothers comedies that Natalia Sedova liked so much.

  That is why he found it so strange when two Norwegian police officers who arrived at Vexhall that afternoon did not display the kind cordiality with which the country’s authorities had always treated him. Stiff in their roles, they informed him that they were carrying out Minister Trygve Lie’s orders and had only come to hand over a document and return to Oslo with it signed. The younger one, after searching in his folder, extended a sealed envelope. Knudsen and Natalia watched expectantly as he opened it, unfolded the sheet, and, after adjusting his glasses, read it. As he read on, the sheet began to shake slightly. Then Lev Davidovich returned it to the envelope, held it out to the officer who had given it to him, and asked him to tell the minister he could not sign that document and that asking him to do so seemed an undignified gesture on the part of Trygve Lie.

  The younger officer looked at his colleague without daring to take the envelope. The policemen were overcome by uncertainty, frozen before an attitude for which they were surely unprepared. At that moment he let the envelope fall, and it came to rest alongside the boot of the older of the two officers, who at last reacted: if Lev Davidovich didn’t sign the document, he could be arrested and handed over to the authorities until he was deported, since they had evidence that he had violated the conditions of his residency permit by involving himself in the political matters of other countries.

  Then came the explosion. Wagging his finger in a clear sign of warning, Lev Davidovich yelled at the officers to remind the minister that he had promised not to intervene in Norwegian matters but that he wouldn’t give up for anything in the world a right that was the reason for him being a political exile: to say whatever he thought convenient about what was happening in his home country. As such, he would not sign that document and, if the minister wanted to silence him, he would have to sew Lev Davidovich’s mouth shut or do something to him that would surely bother Stalin greatly: kill him.

  A few days later, Lev Davidovich would be forced to recognize that Stalin, political opportunist that he was, had treacherously chosen the most propitious moment to organize the judicial farce in Moscow and try to make him the scapegoat for every conceivable perversity. Hitler’s recent entry into the Rhineland had announced to Europe that the expansionist intentions of German fascism were not just a hysterical speech. Meanwhile, the uprising of part of the Spanish army against the Republic, and the start of a war on whose battlefields Italian troops and German planes and ships were advancing, had placed the governments of the democracies (terrified of the possibility of remaining alone in the face of the fascist enemy) in a situation of almost absolute dependency on Moscow’s decisions.
In that situation, when the fates of so many countries were being decided, no one was going to dare to defend some pitiful souls being tried in Moscow and an exile who had been accused, of all things, of being a fascist agent in the pay of Rudolf Hess. He realized that the pressure on the Norwegian government was surely intense and he warned Natalia that they should prepare for greater aggression.

  But Lev Davidovich had decided that, while possible, he would exploit his only advantage: the Oslo government couldn’t deport him, since no one would take him, and they didn’t even have the option of handing him over to the Soviets, who didn’t want him, despite his own request to be tried. Stalin wasn’t interested in putting him on trial, even less so when one considered that his repatriation would have to go before a Norwegian court, where he would have the opportunity to refute the accusations made against him and against those who had already been sentenced and executed in Moscow.

  Lev Davidovich was certain that a crisis had been unleashed when the court in Oslo summoned him to make a declaration about the raid on Knudsen’s house. Everything became clear when the judge who had summoned him revealed the rules of the game, warning him that, since it was a declaration and not an interrogation, neither the presence of Puntervold, his Norwegian lawyer, or of Natalia, or even Knudsen as the owner of the house, was allowed. Alone, in front of the judge and the court’s secretaries, he had to respond to questions about the nature of the documents that had been removed, in which, he assured, he had not meddled in Norway’s internal affairs or that of any other country besides his own. Then the judge lifted some papers and he understood the trap that had been set for him: this essay proved the contrary, according to the judge, since, with regard to the Popular Front, Lev Davidovich had made a call for revolution in France.