“I would like to help you, but I really don’t know how to do it, nor can I,” I said to him, watching the two dogs run on the sand. Dax, it was clear, had lost the elegance of his trot and was stumbling.
“I don’t know how I’m going to deal with this . . .” The man was talking to himself more than with me, his voice on the verge of breaking. “I want to be sure he doesn’t suffer . . .”
The evidence of an approaching death and the revelation of those feelings placated my doubts about López’s identity and, particularly, made me decide to face, in silence, any consequences that could come from my decision, an undoubtedly ideologically questionable one. Death has that capacity. It is so definitive and irreversible that it barely leaves any room for other fears. Even a man like the one I had in front of me that afternoon—a connoisseur of everything about death, according to what he had told me—was frozen before it; he was shaken up in its presence, even when it involved only the death of a dog.
After drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and suffering a coughing fit, López at last started on the story of Ramón Mercader, and he relayed to me the way in which his friend had definitively become a part of history. I listened to him, with my judgment lost, beyond any surprise, and even with a certain delight when the story agreed with the information obtained from my recent reading. At one moment I also discovered that a bothersome and enigmatic mixture of disdain and compassion was taking possession of me—yes, compassion, and I’ve never had any doubts regarding the word or what it denotes—disdain and compassion for that Mornard-Jacson-Mercader willing to carry out what he had assumed as a duty and, above all, as a historic necessity demanded by the future of humanity.
López seemed to be on the edge of exhaustion when he reached the story’s climax. It had been dark for a while and I could barely see his face, but I clung to his words, excited by what I was hearing.
“What remains of the story is your New Year’s gift,” he said at that moment, and he seemed emotional and as though he was feeling a great sense of relief. I still close my eyes today and I can see him in those final minutes of his narration: López had spoken with a whistle in his voice and his left hand over the bandage that always covered his right hand. “My wife is the strangest Communist I know. Even in Moscow she insisted on celebrating Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. To her they’re sacred, and never better said . . . And she won’t want to let me go this week, so it will be difficult for me to come until after the New Year. I have to please her.”
“What should we do, then?” I was feeling anxious and frustrated. An accumulation of terrible evidence and burning questions was suffocating me, but I knew it was best not to touch on them in order to avoid their muddying my relationship with the man, since I still had to go over a decisive phase in the life of Ramón Mercader and, due to everything I had heard, I was anxious to know about it. “Do you want me to call you on the phone?”
He responded immediately:
“No. We’ll see each other January eighth. Can you?”
“I think so.”
“I’ll come on the eighth. If I don’t see you, I’ll come back on the ninth.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, accepting in the absence of any alternative. “What about Dax?”
“I can’t do it now,” López said to me, and held out his hand so I could help him stand up. “Careful, my arms hurt a lot . . . Dax is strong, he’ll hang on. I’m going to wait as long as I can, until the beginning of the year. If I had a friend who would help me . . .”
“Poor Dax,” I said when I saw where the conversation was headed and upon confirming that the borzois were getting closer, wanting to leave already, for their dinnertime had come and gone.
López held out his bandaged hand to me. Without a thought, I smiled at him and shook it. Later, as I kneeled down to pick up the bag with the thermos and give it to him, I dared to voice one of the questions that had been tormenting me:
“I read in a newspaper that Ramón heard Trotsky’s cries for the rest of his life. Did he talk about that cry?”
López coughed and ran his bandaged hand over his face. I would have liked for there to have been more light so I could see his eyes.
“He still heard it when he told me the story, about ten years ago,” he said to me, and began to walk away. “I think he heard it until the end . . . Have a merry Christmas.”
“Lo propio,” I managed to say, flooded by emotion, and I immediately realized that it had been a long time since I had pronounced or heard those words that, in Cuba, were only used as a formula to return Christmas greetings, that holiday banished years ago by the scientifically atheistic island that was too needy of each workday to allow itself the luxury of wasting days off.
López made his way across the sand, compacted by the previous day’s rain. Alongside him walked Ix and Dax at a slow pace. The darkness didn’t allow me to see the tall, thin black man, but I knew he was still there, between the casuarinas, waiting patiently. López approached the trees and his figure went blending into the night until he disappeared. As if he had never existed, I thought.
PART TWO
16
What feelings went through him when he saw the silhouette of the most absolute question rising above the line of the horizon? He observed that sea whose scintillating transparency could damage one’s pupils and surely thought that, in contrast to Hernán Cortés, thrown upon that unknown land in search of power and glory, he, if anything, could aspire to find there a point of support for the final days of his existence and the grotesque possibility of vindicating a past in which he had already reached and exhausted his quota of power and glory, of hope and fury.
That nightmarish crossing had lasted twenty days. Ever since they had boarded the Ruth and its horns announced the call for departure along the rugged Norwegian coast, that tanker that regurgitated the unhealthy vapors of petroleum from its cisterns had turned into a physical extension of the imprisonment they suffered in the desolate fjord. Despite the fact that Lev Davidovich, Natalia, and the police escorts were the only passengers on the vessel, the inevitable Jonas Lie and his men made sure to keep the deportees isolated, preventing any radio communication and keeping watch on them even when they were seated at the table of Captain Hagbert Wagge, who was so proud to have a piece of history on board. Confined in the commander’s cabin, Lev Davidovich and Natalia spent the days reading the few books about Mexico they had obtained, thanks to Konrad Knudsen, trying to make out what was waiting for them in that violent and exalted New World, where the price of life could be a simple look interpreted the wrong way and where, as far as they knew, no one was waiting for them.
When the coast took on all its clarity, his fears rose to the surface and Lev Davidovich made a final demand of Lie: he would only leave the oil tanker if someone he could trust came to meet him. Who? he was thinking, when Jonas Lie gave him the surprising reply that they were going to honor this request, and then he also concentrated on observing the coast.
As the boat approached the port of Tampico, the restless crowds dotted with the blue uniforms of the Mexican police became visible. Although it had been a long time since Lev Davidovich had overcome his fear of death, exultant throngs always forced him to remember those that had surrounded Lenin in August 1918 and from which the pistol of Fanny Kaplan had emerged. But a wave of relief washed over his apprehensions when he discovered, at one end of the jetty, Max Shachtman’s features, George Novack’s good-looking face, and the radiant levity of a woman who could be none other than the painter Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera’s lover.
As soon as they docked, the Trotskys fell into a whirlwind of rejoicing. Several friends of Frida and Diego’s, in addition to the North American followers who had come with Shachtman and Novack, enveloped them in a wave of hugs and congratulations that achieved the miracle of making tears run down Natalia Sedova’s face. Taken to a hotel in the city where a welcome dinner had been organized in their honor, the couple listened to the jumble of information t
hat had been kept from them by Jonas Lie, undoubtedly because of the nature of the news: General Lázaro Cárdenas had not only granted Lev Davidovich indefinite asylum but also considered him his personal guest and, with this welcome message, was sending the presidential train to take them to the capital. At the same time Rivera, who excused himself for not having been able to go to Tampico, offered them, also indefinitely, a room in the Casa Azul, the building he inhabited with Frida in the capital neighborhood of Coyoacán.
The French wines and the strong Mexican tequila aided Lev Davidovich and Natalia in the gastronomical jump from the mole poblano to the puntas de filete a la tampiqueña, from the fish a la veracruzana to the bumpy consistency of the tortillas, colored and enriched with chicken, guacamole, peppers, jitomates, refried beans, onions, and cola-roasted pork, all of it sprinkled with the fiery chili that demanded another glass of wine or a shot of tequila capable of putting out the fire and clearing the way for a taste of those fruits (mango, pineapple, sapodilla, soursop, and guava), pulpy and sweet, indispensable to topping off the party for European palates overpowered by the textures, smells, consistencies, and flavors that were alien to them. Overwhelmed by that banquet of the senses, Lev Davidovich discovered how his preoccupations dissolved and the tension gave way to an invasive tropical voluptuousness that wrapped him in a beneficial tenderness which, so he wrote, his exhausted body and mind greedily received.
Following their siesta, they resolved to go for a drive with Frida, Shachtman, Novack, and Octavio Fernández, the comrade who had worked the hardest to get them asylum. Nonetheless, the guests soon returned to reality when they saw that the car was placed in a convoy headed by a convertible jeep in which members of the presidential guard, rifles in hand, were traveling. Lev Davidovich thought that not even in paradise would they be completely free.
On the train, Frida brought him up-to-date on the reactions caused by his arrival. As could be expected, General Cárdenas’s decision had been an act of defiant independence, since it had been taken at a moment of great political tensions, right in the middle of an agrarian reform process and with oil nationalization on his agenda. The decision to accept him—the only and understandable condition of which was that the Exile abstain from participating in local political matters—had been an act of sovereignty through which the president expressed his loyalty to his own political ideas more than his sympathy for those of the political refugee. But that decision had turned Cárdenas into the object of a variety of accusations that went from cries of traitor to the Mexican Revolution to fascist ally (uttered by the Communists and the leaders of the Confederation of Workers, the president’s traditional supporters), even of “red anarchist under Trotsky’s orders” (put forward by a bourgeoisie for whom Trotsky and Stalin meant the same thing and for whom the arrival of the former confirmed the ascendance of “the Russians” over the president).
An exultant Diego Rivera was waiting for them in a small station close to Mexico City, and from there—accompanied by other policemen and many friends armed with bottles of cognac and whiskey—they took the path toward that strange residence painted telluric blue.
Lev Davidovich’s first encounter with Rivera’s work had been in Paris, during the years of the Great War, when the echoes of the Mexican Revolution reached Europe and, with them, the works of its revolutionary painters. Later, he had closely followed the cultural phenomenon of muralism, of which he even received news during the days of his exile in Alma-Ata, when Andreu Nin sent him a beautiful book about Rivera’s painting that perished in the fire at Prinkipo. In contrast, he had just a superficial notion of Frida’s tormented and symbolic work, but from the moment he found himself surrounded by her paintings, he discovered that his sensibility communicated much better with the woman’s anguished art than with Rivera’s explosive monumentality.
Their hosts had prepared for them the former room of Cristina Kahlo, Frida’s sister. When Rivera had decided to receive them, he bought the young woman a dwelling close to the Casa Azul, by which he announced to the Trotskys that they could use the bedroom to their liking. The painters’ friendliness and the critical state of their finances forced Lev Davidovich to accept what would be, he thought, just a temporary accommodation.
La Casa Azul quickly took on the aspect of a besieged fortress. Several windows had to be covered and some of the walls reinforced, and as soon as the exiled couple arrived, guards started turns of duty. The inside of the home was entrusted to young Trotskyist Americans, while the outside was handled by the local police. Nonetheless, just barely settled in, Lev Davidovich began to feel himself surrounded by an optimism he thought he had already lost, although he forced himself, more for the exhausted Natalia than for himself, to take a break before launching himself back into the struggle that called out to him.
As it had done so many times in his life, politics shook him and reminded him that not even the possibility of the briefest repose had been given to Prometheus and those who dared to be near his rock. And that was the fate that would pursue him to the last day of his life.
The radios and newspapers began to announce that the criminal court put together in Moscow’s House of the Trade Unions was again opening its doors to dramatize a new episode of the Stalinist farce. At first, the number and names of those on trial was unknown, until it was specified that there were thirteen, headed by Radek, who, with his resounding capitulation, had thought himself safe from Stalin’s rage. Also summoned were the redheaded Piatakov, Muralov, Sokolnikov, and Serebriakov, although it was again Lev Sedov and Lev Davidovich who were the main defendants, in absentia.
Ever since the new proceedings were initiated on January 23, 1937, Lev Davidovich had closed himself up with the radio to try to unearth the logic of that absurdity in which the accused seemed to compete with confessions that were more and more humiliating and unhinged, which were then added to the conspiracies to overthrow the system or assassinate Stalin, the existence of industrial sabotage plans, of massive poisoning of workers and peasants, and even the signing of a secret pact between Hitler, Hirohito, and Trotsky to tear apart the USSR. The saboteurs took on their shoulders all economic failures, hunger, and even railway and industrial accidents with which they had attacked the country and its heroic workers and betrayed the Leader’s trust. One of the accusations in the proceedings placed one of the prisoners in Paris, receiving orders from Trotsky at the moment he was in Barbizon without permission to visit the capital. But the cornerstone of the aborted conspiracy rested on the confession of Piatakov, who declared he had traveled from Berlin to Oslo in 1935 to attend a counterrevolutionary summit with the renegade Trotsky.
Forced to explain their responsibility in that matter, the pusillanimous Norwegian government issued a denial with proof that Piatakov’s presumed plane, coming from Germany, had never landed in Norway in the places or on the dates declared by the prosecutor and accepted by the accused. But it was already known that the angry curses by the former Menshevik Andrei Vyshinsky against the degenerate, rabid, stinking dogs for whom he was asking the death penalty were going to overcome any obstacle or evidence from obstinate reality . . . Lev Davidovich knew, nonetheless, that those unsustainable proceedings hid some objective that went beyond the need to repair the contradictions of the previous proceedings and eliminate another group of old Bolsheviks: something of that goal was becoming clear to him as the names of Bukharin and his companions in the faded opposition of the right were repeated. It was darker and more difficult for him to understand, in contrast, the mention of certain Red Army officers, supposedly linked as well to the Trotskyist conspiracy, treason, and sabotage.
With that political earthquake, the calm of the Casa Azul disappeared. The Exile organized a press conference and, anticipating the foreseeable sentences, declared his purpose of refuting the accusations with undeniable proof. That declaration, of course, did not stop the court, and before Lev Davidovich could put together his testimony or obtain a single document of proof, the judges
in Moscow issued sentences that carried the death penalty for almost all of the prisoners and the surprising sentence of ten years for the indefatigable Radek, who again saved his own skin, at a price known only to him and to Stalin—and only Stalin knew until when.
Overwhelmed by the news that so many old comrades in arms were going to be executed, Lev Davidovich brandished the only weapon he had at his disposal and again asked Stalin to extradite him and put him on trial. But as he expected, Moscow remained silent and executed the sentenced men with its habitual speed and efficiency. Then he threw the next stone and asked that an international investigative committee be created and repeated his willingness to appear before a Terrorism Commission of the League of Nations and to hand himself over to the Soviet authorities if any of those bodies proved a single one of the accusations. But again the world, fearful and blackmailed, was silent. Convinced that he was playing his last card, the Exile decided to organize a counterproceeding himself where he would denounce the falsity of the charges against him and, at the same time, would turn himself into the accuser of Stalin’s henchmen.
Deep down inside, Lev Davidovich knew that the counterproceeding, if anything, would just scratch the surface, but he threw himself into it with the faith and desperation of a shipwrecked man. For several nights he worked on the idea and had long talks with Rivera, Shachtman, Novack, Natalia, and the recently arrived Jean van Heijenoort, while Frida Kahlo came and went like a restless shadow. Covered with ponchos, watching how Rivera’s pantagruelian voraciousness made bottles of whiskey evaporate and how he devoured dishes of meats burning with chili, they tended to settle in around the orange tree that dominated the backyard of the Casa Azul and debated all the possibilities, although the main challenge lay in finding people with enough moral authority and political independence to legitimize if not legally, at least ethically, a counterproceeding that could perhaps still stir some consciences in the world.
The Man Who Loved Dogs Page 31