Since Daniel Fonseca has already appeared and will continue to appear at various points of this story, I should say something about this friend who had been, in a way, my only literary pupil, if I can call him that. Dany had enrolled in the literature program at the university just when I was doing my last year in journalism. Recommended by a cousin of mine who was his neighbor, one day he showed up at my house in Víbora Park with the always dangerous intention of borrowing some of the books he needed for his classes. Against all logic, I lent them to him, and in order to underline that in the future everything would be as it should be, he pushed the limits of logic even further by returning them to me when his exams were over. Thus his visits started, generally on Saturday afternoons, and we went from textbooks to novels that I suggested to him and with which he began to fill his encyclopedia of ignorance. Around that time Dany listened to me and looked at me like I was a goddamned guru, only because he was an absolute ignoramus, although intelligent, and I was a guy who was five years older, several miles of reading ahead of him, and above all, with a book of stories already published. Neither Dany nor I could have dreamed then that one day that voracious animal, who, before enrolling for a degree in the arts, had spent every hour of his life playing baseball, would end up being a writer—what’s more, a wise and noteworthy writer, which is equal to being something more than acceptable and several levels below brilliant—who at times seemed gifted with a greater literary ability than shown in his published books.
Despite the fact that, by the time of my conversations with López, Dany and I barely saw each other, he didn’t find it strange to see me show up at the large house in Vedado where the publishing house was located. But he was shocked by the reason that brought me there: I needed to find a biography of Trotsky, and among the people I knew, he was the one who seemed most likely to have one. Before Dany could get over his surprise at my unusual request, I explained to him that at the National Library and the Central at the university, there were only some books about Trotsky published by the Progress publishing house, in Moscow, in which the authors devoted themselves to devaluing each act, each thought, even each gesture, the man had made in his life and even in death—the false prophet, the renegade, the enemy of the people, they called him, and it was always several authors, as if one alone couldn’t handle the task of so many accusations—and I was interested in finding something that wasn’t such flagrant propaganda, so blatant that it forced me to question its accuracy. And if anyone would have the material I needed to read, it was the uncle of Dany’s wife Elisa, an old journalist and militant Communist, very active in the country since the 1940s, who in the convulsive times of the sixties had even spent several weeks in prison, with a group of Trotsky sympathizers with whom he maintained personal and, they said, even philosophical relationships.
Now it’s important to remind you that this was in 1977, at the apogee of Soviet imperial grandeur and at the height of its philosophical and propagandistic inflexibility, and that we lived in a country that had accepted its economic model and its very orthodox political orthodoxy. With those important clarifications, you’ll have the more exact context of the dreadful drought of reading materials, information, and even ways of thinking when it came to subjects such as this one, that were particularly sensitive for our beloved Soviet brothers. So you will imagine the terror caused by the mere mention of anything critical—and Trotsky was political criticism personified, ideological evil multiplied to the nth degree. Due to all of this, you’ll understand Daniel’s response:
“What the fuck are you talking about?” He leaped up at learning my intentions and immediately added, in a lower voice and with a look of clinical concern, “Have you gone crazy, my friend? Are you drinking again? What the hell is wrong with you?”
In those years, almost no one on the island, at least that I knew of, had the least acknowledged interest in Trotsky or Trotskyism, among other reasons because that interest—if it came out or surfaced in someone who was crazy enough to reveal it—could not lead to anything more than complications of all kinds. Lots of complications. If listening to certain kinds of Western music, believing in any kind of god, practicing yoga, reading certain novels considered to be ideologically damaging, or writing a shitty story about some poor guy who felt afraid could represent a stigma and even involve punishment, getting into Trotskyism would have been like tying a rope around your own neck, especially for people who moved in the world of culture, teaching, and the social sciences. (I would later learn that some Uruguayan and Chilean refugees who lived on the island around that time dared to talk about the subject with a certain knowledge, although even they, subject to the surrounding pressure, did so in whispers.) Hence my friend’s nearly violent reaction.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Dany,” I answered when he started to calm down. “I’m not going to become a Trotskyist or any shit like that. What I need is to know . . . k-n-o-w, you get it? Or is it also forbidden to know?”
“But you already know that Trotsky is fire!”
“That’s my problem. Get me some book that Elisa’s relative must have and don’t fuck around. I’m not going to tell anyone where I got it from . . .”
Despite his protests, I had touched a fiber of Dany’s intellectual curiosity: faster than I expected (given the not-very-close relationship he maintained with the old former Trotskyist), he introduced me to an author and a biography that I had never heard of: Isaac Deutscher, and his trilogy about “the prophet” unarmed, armed, and outcast, in editions published in Mexico in the late 1960s. The morning on which he handed over the three volumes, after forcing me to make every conceivable promise that I would return the books as soon as possible, I went by my workplace and asked for the rest of the month as vacation. Besides the trips to the beach, what I remember best about those days was the consuming intensity with which I read that voluminous biography of the revolutionary named Leon Bronstein and the subsequent proof of my monumental ignorance of the historical truths (truths?) of the times and events amid which that man had lived, events and times so Russian and so far-off, starting with the October Revolution (I’ve never understood very well what happened in Petrograd that seventh of November, which was really October 25, and how the Winter Palace that no one wanted to defend in the end was taken and that automatically marked the triumph of the revolution and handed power over to the Bolsheviks) and followed, among other things, by some also very strange dynastic battles between revolutionaries in which only Stalin seemed willing to take power and by some nearly silenced proceedings in Moscow (that seemed never, ever to have existed to us) in which the prisoners were their worst prosecutors. At the end of that parade of manifestations of the “Russian soul” (if we don’t understand something about the Russians, it always seems to be because of their souls) was the corroboration of the old leader’s assassination, something that had disappeared in the Soviet books devoted to him, since Trotsky (perhaps because he was Ukrainian and not Russian) seemed rather to have died of a cold or, better yet, been consumed one day by a trembling fit, as if he were a character in an Emilio Salgari novel.
Thanks to that biography, the person who traveled to the beach from the third meeting onward was just beginning to be someone capable of processing elements of that story through a different lens. Now my ears insisted on interpreting information that, with summary knowledge of the events and their actors, I intended to place on a board whose coordinates were becoming familiar.
A few days after being bit by the bizarre but logical suspicion that López may not be López and that Mercader may not be dead, I arrived at the beach ready to try to force the man to confess the truth about his identity—if that truth existed, something of which I was not sure. I cautiously waited for the right moment to voice my doubts and I found the occasion when López was talking about the commotion the controversial Molotov-Ribbentrop pact caused in Ramón and his mother, Caridad del Río.
“You know what?” I asked without looking at him. “Of everyth
ing you’ve told me, there’s something I can’t believe.”
López lit one of his cigarettes with a gas lighter. Before his silence I continued:
“No one could know this much about another person’s life. No matter how much the person told you. It’s impossible.”
López was smoking unhurriedly, and I got the impression that he hadn’t heard my words. Later I would understand that a guy like me would barely have been able to move that rock: the man was a specialist in answering only what he wanted to, and his strategy was to take the frying pan out of my hands, grip the handle, and beat me over the head with it.
“What are you thinking? That what I’ve been telling you is a lie?” He took his glasses off for a few moments, held them up to the light, then wet them with his tongue to clean off the salt spray that had clung to them.
“I don’t know,” I said, and hesitated. His voice had taken on a tone capable of freezing my impulses, and that’s why I chose my words very carefully: “How is it possible that you know so much about Ramón? Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that Caridad and your mother, both of them, were born in Cuba? I’m thinking that—”
“That I’m Ramón’s brother? Or that I was his boss?”
I quickly weighed those possibilities without realizing that, with them, the man did nothing more than make me weaken in my convictions. But he didn’t leave me too much time to think, since he immediately cut to the chase.
“Or perhaps you think I am Ramón?” he asked.
I looked at him in silence. In the previous weeks the man who loved dogs had been noticeably losing weight, his skin had become much more opaque, greenish, and he frequently suffered from a sore throat and was overcome by coughing fits that he managed to control with sips of water sweetened by honey from a bottle that now always accompanied him. But at that moment there was a burning intensity in his eyes, and I have to admit, it scared me.
“Ramón is dead and buried, kid. And the worst thing is that he has turned into a ghost. If you look in all the cemeteries in the Soviet Union, you won’t ever find his grave. I myself don’t even know the name under which he was buried . . . I already told you: among the things Ramón gave to the cause were his name and his freedom to make decisions . . . Besides, if I’m telling you all of this, why would I deceive you about the rest of it? What does it matter who I am? Further still: What would change if I were Ramón?”
The answers came to my mind: it matters because what you’re telling me is the History of Deception and everything would change if you were Ramón, since nobody (at least I thought) would have wanted to be Ramón Mercader. Because Ramón caused disgust and engendered fear . . . But it goes without saying that I didn’t dare to say these things.
“I know what you’re thinking, and it doesn’t surprise me,” the man said, and I felt a new current of fear. “This is a repulsive story that in and of itself devalues millions of speeches made over the course of sixty years . . . And it’s also true that many people ended up finding Ramón repugnant.” He paused, although he remained immobile. “But try to understand it, dammit, even if you can’t justify it. Ramón is a man from another era, from a really fucked-up time, when even doubting wasn’t allowed. When he told me his story, I placed it in his world and in his time, and then I understood it. Although, to be clear, don’t ever feel pity for him, because Ramón hated that sentiment.”
“If you never saw his grave or went to his burial, how are you so sure that Ramón is dead?” I asked, throwing out my last chance for perseverance, despite the fact that I already knew I’d been defeated by López’s argument.
“I know that he is dead because I saw him several weeks before he died, when he had already been declared terminally ill . . . ,” he said and smiled, with visible sadness. “Look, for your peace of mind, I’m going to give you a reason you won’t be able to deny: Do you think Ramón, after promising that he would remain silent for the rest of his life, and after having maintained that commitment against every tide, would tell his story to the first . . . to the first person he met? If I were Ramón, do you think I would have risked doing it? And besides, for what?”
In a second, I counted ten things López could have called me (from the Cuban comemierda—shit eater—and sapingo—bullshitter—to the Spanish gilipollas—asshole, which he himself had used on occasion), and I thought of so many other reasons to refute López’s last questions (a man who, according to himself, was dying: What could he be afraid of? The only affirmative response would imply that fear is also transmitted, like an inheritance, and includes the fate of those same children who, perhaps to protect them, López, or Mercader—if in fact that man was Ramón Mercader—had decided not to tell the story). But I realized that if I wanted to continue listening, my only option was to believe him; in fact, at that instant, I did believe him. I forced myself to forget or at least put off my doubts until I somehow had the complete certainty that López was López and that Mercader was a ghost without a grave. Or the opposite. But how in the hell was I going to arrive at any of those certainties if I didn’t even know whether a man named Ramón Mercader del Río had existed?
The story’s interruption cut the man who loved dogs’ narrative momentum, and that afternoon he bid me farewell long before the sun set. Although we agreed to meet on Monday, I remained awhile on the sand, fearing that the relationship may have fallen apart due to my suspicions. And if that was the case, I would be left without knowing how the events took place that were to seal the absolute devotion of Ramón Mercader.
In any event, I spent that weekend devoted to the marathon of reading the last volume of Deutscher’s biography, The Prophet Outcast, to try to immerse myself in the time in which López’s story was taking place. I remember that when the theatrical figure of Jacques Mornard appeared in the book’s final pages I felt my heart leap in my chest, as if the murderer had entered my room. My brain then began to play tricks on me: the image of Mornard that came to mind was that of López, with his heavy tortoiseshell glasses. I knew that didn’t make sense, since between the young and handsome Mornard and the sallow and, according to him, moribund López, the distance was great. But my imagination insisted on juxtaposing the real and live visage of the owner of the borzois with the elusive body of the Belgian who showed up at the fortress in Coyoacán with the mission of killing the man who, alongside Lenin, had achieved the unthinkable: that the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, and, further still, held on to it afterward by overpowering imperial armies and internal enemies.
Between the pages of the biography’s final volume, I found three newspaper clippings that betrayed the owner of the book’s interest in the relationship between Trotsky and his assassin. One was from the Cuban daily Información where, under a large headline, the very owner of the book gave news of the attack suffered by Trotsky on August 20, 1940, and the seriousness of the state he was in at the time the paper was going to print (to a Communist in 1940, that would have seemed like a pro-Trotskyist comment, only because the author didn’t voice his opinion on the event); the second one must have come from a magazine and contained a commentary about the parodies of Trotsky’s murder that Guillermo Cabrera Infante had included in his book Three Trapped Tigers (never published in Cuba and, as such, almost unfindable for us); and the last one, a longish undated column with no reference, I found the most revealing, since it spoke of the presence of Ramón Mercader in Moscow after leaving the Mexican jail where he’d served his sentence. The author of the column relayed that a person very close to Mercader—had López been guilty of another breach of trust?—had told him that, since the day of the attack, the assassin carried in his ears the sound of his victim’s cry of pain.
It was the following Monday, December 22, when I had, without yet knowing it, what would be my last conversation with the man who loved dogs. I remember that afternoon perfectly, as never since López started to tell me the story of Ramón had I felt subject to a pressure that until then I had managed to skirt: For my own good,
I asked myself a thousand times, shouldn’t I tell someone official what was happening to me with that Jaime López who insisted on telling me a story so terrifying and politically compromising? The fear that was already engulfing me, reinforced by what I read about Trotsky’s end, was a more sordid, much crueler feeling than I even confessed to myself at that moment, as in reality it had not so much to do with the story of horror and betrayal that I was listening to than with the more than probable fact that it would be known that I had spoken to that strange man for several days without deciding to “ask for advice,” as they used to say, which was regarded as my duty. But the very idea of looking for the “compañero who minded” at the information center that edited the veterinary magazine (everyone called him that—“the compañero who minded”—and everyone knew who he was, since it seems important that we should all know of his diffuse but omnipresent existence) and telling him about a conversation that, no matter who López was, I had promised not to talk about, seemed so degrading to myself that I rebelled at the thought of it. I decided at that moment to accept the consequences (was there a less important and ambitious job than mine? Yes, of course, they could, for example, send me back to Baracoa), and for years I covered up that story with a wall of silence, and not even Raquelita knew—she still doesn’t know today, and besides, she would not give a shit to know—what Jaime López told me.
On that afternoon of my runaway fears, having barely arrived at the beach, López confessed that he felt terribly sad: Dax had started to have problems in moving (“He gets dizzy, like me,” he said) and the day that he would have to put him down was growing imminent.
“I know you’re not a veterinarian and I shouldn’t ask this of you,” he said to me without looking at me, “but if you help me, I think it will be easier . . .”
The Man Who Loved Dogs Page 30