The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  Karmin and the group of psychologists continued to work with him and Soldier 13 learned to control his anxiety over the delay in announcing his new identity. He knew that he was in the hands of the most capable specialists and, confident in the experience of those masters of survival and transformation, he focused on his training with more determination.

  It was already the second week of December when, after a monotonous day in which his only visitor to the cabin was an inexpressive woman tasked with cleaning and bringing him food, there appeared before him two men with appearances and manners very different from those of the ones he had dealt with since his arrival at the base. One said he was called Cicero and the other Josefino. The first impression they gave was of being a comic vaudeville duo: both were dressed in the same awkward way, they had a deep and practiced hardness in their eyes, and they spoke perfect French with a slight accent that Soldier 13 wasn’t able to place. Almost in unison, they told him that their mission was to turn him into a Belgian named Jacques Mornard. What did he think of the name? Soldier 13 felt himself swell with pride and satisfaction. Finally, he stopped being a student in order to become an agent. Jacques Mornard, he repeated in his mind, while Cicero removed a folder and several books from the briefcase he had with him, placing them on the table surrounded by armchairs.

  “You’re going to learn Jacques Mornard’s life by heart,” he said, and slid the folder toward Soldier 13. “Later, read the books: they have information about Belgium that you also have to include.”

  The so-called Josefino, who had remained standing, started speaking.

  “Write the details you want to include for Mornard, the ones you think should make up part of his personality or his history. What we’re giving you is like the skeleton you’ll use starting now. We’ll add the muscles and blood later.”

  “Why Belgian and not French?” the man who was still Soldier 13 dared to ask. “I lived in France for several years . . .”

  “We know,” Josefino said. “But your past doesn’t exist anymore and will never exist again. You need to be a totally new man.”

  “The New Man,” Cicero said, and Soldier 13 thought he noticed a touch of sarcasm. “From now on, you need to think of yourself as Jacques Mornard. The success of your conversion and, further still, your life will depend on the solidity of your belief in being Jacques Mornard. But take it easy . . . ,” he said, as he stood. The two men left with a smile, without saying any kind of farewell.

  Throughout that week of reading and reflection, Jacques Mornard enjoyed the feeling described by Josefino: it was as if his body, empty until now, were taking form and completing its own structure. Once again having parents, a brother, a birthplace, a school where he had studied and played sports, provided the framework over which he inserted his basic interests, his former preferences as a young bourgeois, and even his most remote memories. Like any person, he had attended many soccer games with his father and his brother and had become the fan of one of the clubs, had his favorite café in Brussels, his own ideas about the Walloons and the Flemings, had had girlfriends and a hobby that turned into a profession: photography. He wasn’t a member of any party, nor did he have any definitive political opinions, but he rejected fascism because it seemed, at the very least, antiaesthetic. About Lev Trotsky’s actions and historic fate, he knew what any educated person did, but all of that debate had to do with communist matters and didn’t concern him. He spoke French and English but wasn’t fluent in Flemish or Walloon, since he had grown up outside of Belgium, and he didn’t speak Russian, either, although he understood Spanish because of all the trips he’d made to Spain before the war. From his family of diplomats, possessors of a certain fortune, he received regular sums that allowed him to live a carefree life with, if anything, a tendency toward waste. He would be a regular old bourgeois guy, a bit boastful, always looking for a good time, with no real worries in life.

  Jacques Mornard understood the importance of the work the psychologists had done with him. The old Ramón he knew would not have liked to be like Jacques; he wouldn’t have even been interested in being friends with him. Between the intellectual levity he now assumed and the Catalan’s political passions and his militant rejection of all ways of bourgeois life, there was an abyss that would have been impossible to bridge without the radical cleaning of his consciousness or the difficult training to which he had been subjected.

  When Josefino and Cicero returned, Jacques Mornard felt like he was about half filled to his capacity. The work that those instructors took up from that moment was that of Platonic demiurges: true creators. They spoke about Jacques as if they had known him their entire lives and they implanted memories, ideas, ways of reacting before certain situations, responses to the simplest and the most complex questions. It ended up being a slow process of continual repetitions, interrupted at times to allow the information to take root in Jacques’s subconscious; who then welcomed the photography professor brought in to initiate him in the mystery of cameras (Jacques fell in love with the Leica, but in addition, he learned how to use the heavy Speed Graphic, the one preferred by press photographers), of lenses, how to judge the light, and the secrets of laboratory work with the chemicals and printing equipment; and then on to the speech therapist who endowed him with Belgian slang expressions, intonations, and soft r’s; to the optometrist who gave him the glasses he would use from then on; to Karmin, who, when Jacques was at the edge of intellectual fatigue, took him out in the snow and, in twelve or fifteen degrees below zero, worked every muscle of his body with an intensity capable of returning him to the cabin physically exhausted but with his mind clear, ready for the next day’s session.

  When Grigoriev returned to Malakhovka toward the end of January, Jacques Mornard was almost a complete man. The adviser told him that he hadn’t managed to conclude his work in Spain and, without Jacques asking him, explained that the state of the war was complicated and desperate, as could be expected, although nothing seemed to indicate that the end was near. The Republican government was confident it could resist until the conflict was swallowed up by the imminent European war and turned into an active part of the antifascist bloc; thus, its situation would be similar to that of the proud democracies who had turned their backs on it under the pretext of nonintervention. But the most important thing, Grigoriev told him, was that he had also had time to take the first steps in the new operation. That is why he would soon leave for New York and Mexico, where he had to hold some important meetings. Before that, however, he wanted to personally work with his new creation.

  His mentor’s presence encouraged Jacques Mornard. The time for leaving the uterus of the training base was close, and with the adviser’s guidance they added the final touches to the Belgian. A hairstylist gave him a new haircut; a tailor prepared a wardrobe of the bare essentials, which would be completed when he traveled to the West; and they added to his profile an enthusiasm for sports cars, whose brands and characteristics, along with the history of European motor racing, he had to study. His prior knowledge of French cuisine and of table manners acquired at the École Hôtelière de Toulouse saved him those lessons, although they instilled a taste for certain Belgian dishes. In response to Jacques’s own proposal, they added a weakness for dogs to his nature. That remote passion of Ramón Mercader’s, located in a deep recess of his consciousness, was compatible with Jacques’s nature and upbringing, and his teachers allowed it. The Labradors of his childhood changed their names of Santiago and Cuba to Adam and Eve, and being able to feel love for dogs made Mornard feel happier with himself.

  Before leaving for America, Grigoriev decided to take him to Moscow again, where he publicly acted like a curious Belgian journalist visiting the mecca of communism. The adviser charged himself with testing for his own satisfaction the solidity of the new personality, and throughout the days on which they shared Grigoriev’s free time, Jacques was on trial the whole time, responding to a variety of questions, and displaying the reactions most suita
ble to his new personality.

  Enjoying his freedom (he knew he was being watched at a distance), Jacques went beyond the Boulevard Ring that enclosed the prerevolutionary city and went into the proletarian neighborhoods, where his presence nearly caused stampedes by alarmed neighbors and where he found a steely, homogenous grayness capable of stirring his insides. He knew that those men, almost all of them émigrés from the countryside during the difficult times of land collectivization, lived in minimal, poorly heated spaces (the so-called kommunalkas), sometimes without running water. Wrapped in coats of the same cut and color, worn out already by the winters, they barely ate from the monotonous and scarce offerings at the empty markets and combated boredom and exhaustion with devastating doses of vodka. But those men were also, like him, soldiers in the battle for the future, whose constant sacrifice constituted the only guarantee that the humanity of the future would enjoy true freedom. The lives of those Moscow inhabitants (looked down upon by true Muscovites) and his (yes, he who was wearing warmly threaded clothing from the West and eating delicacies that had disappeared even from the dreams of those proletarians) were on the same path, on the same battlefront. Only, while their responsibility was daily and modest, his had to be dark and, when the moment came, cruel, but was equally necessary. That was the price that the present charged the men of today for the light of tomorrow.

  On one of those afternoons, seated on a bench in the recently inaugurated Gorky Park, in front of the frozen Moscow River, Grigoriev and Mornard were watching the kids who, with improvised sleighs, were gliding over the layer of ice, happy and oblivious to life’s great sorrows.

  “We’re fighting for them, Jacques,” Grigoriev said, and the Belgian sensed deep sincerity in his mentor’s voice. “And it’s a hard fight.”

  “I know, that’s why I’m here. But I’d like it if they knew that I’m like them, and not some shitty capitalist.”

  Grigoriev nodded and, after a period of silence, spoke with his eyes fixed on the river.

  “Imagine a horse race,” he said, scratching his chin. “That’s how we’re going to work . . . Everyone leaves the gate at once, but some will get closer to the finish line before the others. The conditions on the ground, the opportunities, and each one’s capacities are going to have an influence, but the orders the jockey receives will decide who goes toward the goal first. If he reaches it, the work is over. If he fails, the next one in line has to go.”

  “What number am I?”

  “You’ll be the ace up my sleeve, kid. You’ll always work with me, directly with me. For now, you’re at the end of the line, but that doesn’t mean you’re the last one. It means that you’ll be the surest card, and that I won’t risk you until I have no choice.”

  “And why don’t I go out first and that’s that?”

  “For a lot of reasons that I can’t explain to you now, or perhaps ever. Just understand that’s how it is.”

  Jacques Mornard nodded and lit another one of the French cigarettes he now smoked and that a few days earlier had prompted him to cough and choke.

  “You will be my masterpiece,” Grigoriev continued. “I’m going to put together a real chess game for you. We’re going to start to play thinking about move twenty, thirty, checkmate, from the beginning. It’s going to be an intellectual challenge, something truly beautiful.” The man appeared to be dreaming when he moved and placed himself in front of Jacques. “There’s only one thing that worries me . . .”

  “My obedience? My silence?”

  Grigoriev smiled, shaking his head.

  “I’m worried about whether, when the moment for checkmate arrives, Jacques Mornard isn’t going to lose heart. I know that Ramón and Soldier 13 wouldn’t lose heart. But Jacques . . . It’s a mission that could end up being very difficult: perhaps you have to think not only about killing but about dying as well . . .”

  Jacques threw his cigarette to the side and thought for a few moments.

  “It’s strange,” he began. “Jacques Mornard fills me almost entirely, but there are spaces he can’t reach. My hate and my fury are intact; my faith is the same. And those things aren’t going to melt away. I know what I am doing and I feel proud. I also know that I will never be able to express that pride, but that, in and of itself, makes me stronger. If the moment comes, I’ll be the truth of the proletariat, the hate of the oppressed. And I’ll do it for them . . .” He pointed at the children playing. “You can rest assured. Jacques is a wretch. But Ramón will always be ready for anything. Dying included . . .”

  Jacques Mornard possessed a peculiar ability to face time. He had internalized that each action should be carried out at a precise moment and that the anxiety to rush events was something foreign to his nature and his mission: his time had historic dimensions, it ran over human timescales, and its proportions sprouted from philosophical necessity. Several years later he would ask himself whether that ability that had spared him from the daily ruts, hardships, and tedium hadn’t been instilled in him intentionally, in anticipation of just how necessary it would be for him to resist sanely and in silence the long years of his imprisonment.

  Ever since Grigoriev left and he returned to the Malakhovka base without an exact idea of the weeks and months he’d have to wait to go into action, he dove into the task of polishing the visible and even invisible edges of his new identity. In the company of Josefino and Cicero, he took long walks through the forest, repeating his family and his own life’s history while he used his Leica to find suggestive compositions, expressive light, daring approaches. He devoted many hours to reading newspapers and studying Belgian city maps and tourist guides until he felt like he was capable of walking through Brussels or Liège without getting lost. He brought himself up-to-date on the tumultuous political situation in France and studied Mexico’s recent history. That time, which he would have found exasperating at another point, now seemed pleasant, free of any trauma.

  In the French newspapers they had started to give him, he read about how the Soviet prosecutor was preparing a case against twelve former party members and former state civil servants accused of serious crimes that went from treason against the homeland to anti-Bolshevik behavior and murder. The most mentioned names were those of Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, former leaders of the so-called rightist opposition within the party; that of Genrikh Yagoda, the dismissed commissar of the interior who was responsible for the investigation of the trials in 1936 and 1937; and that of the Christian Rakovsky, the most stubborn of the Trotskyist oppositionists. On the bench would also be ambassadors and even doctors, such as Dr. Levin, Lenin and Stalin’s personal doctor since the revolution, accused of having poisoned, among others, Gorky and his son Max under Yagoda’s orders. The entire country knew that the accused had been detained for several long months and that their trial was imminent. Nonetheless, Jacques Mornard could not cease to be alarmed by the extent to which the crimes of those men, like those of the traitors judged in 1936 and 1937, had placed the very existence of the country, in which they held the highest positions and against which they had worked, in danger, according to what he read, from the very start of the revolutionary process. All of them, allied with the Trotskyist opportunists, were the very essence of the most concealed betrayal, of the worst felony.

  One article he read in those papers surprised him even more than the news of the trial. It spoke of the death in Paris of Lev Sedov, Trotsky’s son and closest collaborator, and it discussed the strange circumstances of that event, which was being investigated by local police. Jacques Mornard was convinced that his death, just when they were setting into motion the machinery to do away with the old traitor, couldn’t be an act of coincidence or nature, and when Grigoriev finally returned to Malakhovka, he dared to confirm his suspicions.

  “Do you think it could have been us?” Grigoriev sighed in exhaustion as he settled into one of the cabin’s armchairs.

  “I would think it very strange if it weren’t.”

  “Yes, it
would be strange. But coincidences exist, my dear Jacques; postoperative complications are frequent . . . Why would we risk killing that wretch who was already half-dead and living like a pauper in Paris, trying to find followers that don’t exist? To alarm the old man and make things more difficult for ourselves?”

  Jacques thought for a few moments and dared to ask something that the demiurges didn’t manage to erase from his mind.

  “So why did you kill Andreu Nin?”

  “Because he was a traitor, and you know that,” Grigoriev said in a rush.

  “You didn’t kill him because he wouldn’t talk?”

  The other man smiled weakly. He looked exhausted.

  “Forget about that. Come on, grab your things. We’re moving to Moscow.”

  The apartment where they stayed was close to the Three Stations Square, on Groholsky Lane, close to the Botanical Gardens. It was an old house with three floors that had belonged to a tea exporter whose family, decimated by exile and the rigors of the new reality, had been crowded onto the ground floor. Grigoriev and Jacques installed themselves in an apartment with its own bathroom on the second floor, and only then did the mentor tell him that they would leave for Paris in two days.