The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  In the final days of that turbulent May, several editions of the recently published The Revolution Betrayed arrived in Coyoacán. The Riveras, to celebrate it, invited the Trotskys and other friends to dine at a restaurant in the city center. Since his spirits had been restored, Lev Davidovich had begun to use the freedom of movement that the Mexican authorities granted him. With some frequency, he traveled to the colorful city in the company of two or three bodyguards, camouflaged in the backseat of a car and covered by a hat and handkerchief that hid even his goatee. Even so, he enjoyed those excursions, and some nights he even devoted himself to wandering the streets to examine and appreciate the cathedral’s heavy Baroque style, the atmosphere of the cantinas and their mariachi music, and the elegance of the old viceregal palaces, always pursued by the smell of tortillas placed over the fire on every corner of the city. The liveliness of Mexico seemed like that of a thriving world sustained by deep cultural mix that, nonetheless, would not be capable, for centuries, of eliminating the barriers separating the races that cohabitated there.

  On the night of the celebration, following dinner, the invitees walked the center’s alleyways and read the political proclamations covering the walls, which either accused Cárdenas of being a traitor and a Communist or gave him their support and encouraged him to continue to the end. Trotsky’s name, as could be expected, appeared on several of the painted walls, and went from viva to calls for his death, from “Welcome” to “Leave Mexico.” But that night Lev Davidovich was interested in neither the signs nor the discoveries of the city: he was really searching for intimacy with Frida. The vertigo of the senses into which he had fallen demanded a release that he began to pursue vehemently. Although the painter’s body imposed the barrier of a deformity that had to rely on orthopedic corsets and a cane to help the more affected of her legs, perhaps precisely because of those limitations the woman took on sex and sensuality in an aggressive, effusive way. When Lev Davidovich learned that her open morality had even allowed homosexual relationships, the perverse imp of his virility had unleashed itself in licentious imaginings, creating more urgent needs than those he had experienced in his youth, and than those he had felt in his days as a powerful commissar, when so many female comrades in arms had offered him a release of the accumulated tensions and fervors in solidarity.

  Through poems and love letters hidden between the pages of the books he recommended to Frida, Lev Davidovich already demanded an ascent to the physical. The fire that moved him burned with such intensity that he had even managed to overcome the fear that Natalia would suspect an affair. So on that night of revelry, as Diego, Natalia, the friends who joined on the walk, and the secretaries entered the building where one of Rivera’s murals was on display, he purposely stayed behind and, without exchanging any words, pushed Frida against the wall and kissed her on the lips as, between breaths, he repeated how much he desired her. With complete awareness, at that moment, Lev Davidovich was throwing himself into a well of madness and putting in danger every significant thing in his life. But it made him happy, proud, and without the least feeling of guilt, he would tell himself later, convinced that, at the end of the day, it had been worth it to waste in that orgy of the senses the last reserves of his virility.

  17

  Ramón Mercader was convinced that Paris was the most fatuous city in the world and that the French and their socialist government were betraying Spain, denying it the saving support that the Republic was screaming for. But he felt satisfied when Tom opened the door of the apartment on the top floor of rue Léopold Robert and he discovered how from the windows facing north he could see the boulevard du Montparnasse while from the balcony, looking south, he could make out the boulevard Raspail, where the Café des Arts was.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” Tom commented as he handed him the keys. “Central and discreet, very bourgeois but a little bohemian, as befits you.”

  “Jacques likes it,” he admitted, and looked at the wooden tables and bookcases, soulless without any decorations, the empty walls where he should hang some photos. “He has to start to make it his.”

  “You have time to get settled. Two or three months, I believe.”

  Jacques lit a cigarette and went through the bedroom, the water closet, the bathroom, and the small kitchen, where a glass door permitted a view of the service balcony that led to the building’s interior courtyard. He returned to the living room with a small plate that would serve as an ashtray until he acquired the necessary accessories, in line with his personality. At that moment he was overcome by an unfamiliar feeling, for ever since Caridad had begun running away more than ten years earlier, he had never had anything resembling what the bourgeois call a home.

  “I’m going to my hotel,” Tom said, yawning. “Are you going to rest?”

  “I need to buy some food. Milk, coffee . . .”

  “Very well. We’ll see each other tonight. At eight, in front of the Fontaine Saint-Michel. I have a surprise for you.” With more difficulty than at other times, he stood up.

  “When are you going to tell me what happened to that leg of yours?”

  Tom smiled and left the apartment.

  Jacques opened his only suitcase. He took out his shirts and the English cashmere suit and draped them over the armchair so they would air out and recover their shapes. He went down to the street and crossed the boulevard Montparnasse to enter La Closerie des Lilas, nearly empty at midmorning. He asked for a glass of hot milk, a croissant, and a cup of coffee. He used his best Belgian accent and remembered that there was no need to exaggerate. In any event, he would have time to polish those minor defects, he told himself, as he slipped the ashtray from the neighboring table, engraved with the café’s name, into his jacket pocket.

  Before leaving, Grigoriev had explained that during his trip to New York he had put into motion the plan that would move Jacques Mornard toward the renegade Lev Trotsky. It seemed so far-fetched and improbable to Ramón that he started to wonder whether it was all made-up. Grigoriev had told him how, under the identity of Mr. Andrew Roberts, he had gotten in touch with Louis Budenz, the director of the Daily Worker. On other occasions, Budenz had collaborated with the Soviet secret services, and now Roberts needed something as simple and as difficult from him as sending to Paris a young woman named Sylvia Ageloff, an active member of the U.S. Trotskyist circles and sister of two other fanatics who had even worked very closely with the Exile. Of course, he didn’t say why he needed Sylvia in France, and although Budenz would only know of the need to move this Trotskyist, Roberts emphasized that everything had to be done with the utmost discretion and he thought it sufficient warning to remind him that, regarding that request, no one besides the two of them could know a single word. Louis Budenz promised to give him an answer as soon as possible.

  That night, when he left the bus and passed by Odéon on the way to the Fontaine Saint-Michel, Jacques Mornard felt himself entering the heart of a city in its effervescence. For the Parisians, the war happening on the other side of the Pyrenees and the one to come on the European horizon were as far away as the planet Mars. La nuit parisienne was just as animated as always, and while he waited alongside the fountain, Jacques felt surrounded by life.

  Perhaps it was his instinct or a telluric call of his blood that made him turn around. Immediately he saw her among the people as she approached him on Tom’s arm. He noticed how his new identity was thrown into confusion by the mere presence of that battle cry who responded to the name of Caridad del Río. When the woman was in front of him, smiling and proud, dressed with an elegance that seemed out of place (those crocodile-skin high heels, for God’s sake), and whispered in Catalan, “Mare meva, quin home mes ben plantat!” he guessed what was coming: she took him by the neck and kissed his cheek with malevolent precision, placing the heat of her saliva at the edge of his lips. Although Jacques Mornard tried to keep himself afloat, Caridad had cast off the ropes of a Ramón who continued emerging from the depths, dragged up by the invi
ncible taste of aniseed.

  At Tom’s suggestion, they looked for Brasserie Belzar, on the rue des Écoles, where someone was waiting for them. Caridad walked between the two men, satisfied, and Ramón decided not to weaken, at least not in an obvious way and certainly not in front of Tom. He wanted to ask about young Luis, who he supposed was still in Paris, and about Montse, who had mentioned to him at some point her intentions of traveling to France. Would Caridad know anything about África, about little Lenina?

  Upon entering the brasserie, a man with his head shaved stood up and their party, led by Tom, walked to his table. After shaking the man’s hand, Tom introduced them, speaking in French.

  “Our comrade Caridad. This is George Mink.” He turned to his pupil: “Jacques, George will be your contact in Paris.”

  “Welcome, Monsieur Mornard. I wish you a pleasant stay in the city.”

  As they drank their aperitifs, Caridad talked about how things were going in Spain. According to her, the Popular Army was still showing weaknesses, which she attributed to enemy sabotage. Mink, as if he didn’t understand, commented that with the Trotskyists and the anarchists crushed, he couldn’t fathom what enemies she was referring to, and she leaped up: the incompetents still in the government.

  “The army is now armed by the Soviets and eighty percent led by communist officers,” Caridad pointed out, looking directly at Tom, “but even so, we’re still losing battles and the fascists have reached the Mediterranean; they’ve split the peninsula in two. The only explanation is that the heart of the Republic is lacking the necessary ideological purity to win the war. In Spain we need more purges.”

  “Poor Spain,” Tom said, and at first Jacques didn’t know what he meant. “There are even Soviet advisers in the public bathrooms already, and the Spanish Communists are the ones flushing the toilets. If we practically control the army, the intelligence, the police, the propaganda, who are they going to purge now?”

  “The traitors. We already got rid of Indalecio Prieto. All that time he was waging war on us. He was spending all his time saying that Communists are like automatons who obey the orders of the party’s committee. He was worse than any fifth columnist.”

  “Sometimes Prieto seemed enlightened to me,” Tom said, sighing. “I had never seen a minister of war more convinced that he wasn’t going to win the war . . . But the real problem is that you, the Spanish Communists, don’t know how to win. Have you listened to yourself speak, Caridad? You sound like a fucking newspaper editorial. All of you talk like that . . . And who’s going to pay for the disaster in Spain? Us: Pedro, Orlov, me, and the rest of the advisers. But the truth is that we’re getting tired of hearing you talk and talk and having to push you every day.”

  Jacques Mornard had felt the lashing on Ramón’s back. Reasonably or not, the blows were always going to fall on Spanish heads, but he remained silent.

  “I don’t know what kind of Communists you are,” Tom continued, as if spitting out old resentment. “You let other people tell you what you should do and they treat you like children. The Comintern wolves are still cutting the cake. Why are they doing that? Because you can’t decide to tell them to go to hell and do things as they should be done.”

  “So if we tell them to go to hell,” Ramón began, unable to contain himself at that moment, “them and you, how do we stand up to the Italian units and German aviation? You know we depend on you, that we have no alternative . . .”

  Tom looked directly into his pupil’s eyes. It was a penetrating and easy-to-decipher look.

  “What’s wrong, Jacques? You seem upset . . . a man like you . . .”

  Jacques Mornard noticed the piercing tone of voice and felt overcome by his impotence, but he made one last effort to save his dignity.

  “It’s just that we’re always to blame . . .”

  “No one said that,” Tom replied, his tone changed. “Almost out of nowhere, you’ve made it to where you are: today you are the most influential party in the Republican alliance, and you will always have our support. But you have to grow up once and for all.”

  “When do you return to Spain?” Mink asked, taking advantage of the more relaxed moment, and Tom sighed.

  “In two days. I’m setting things up here and then I leave again. Yezhov insists that I keep working with Orlov. But it’s taxing to have my mind on two different matters . . . I only have one head and I’m trying to put it in two places.”

  Caridad looked at him and, with a caution that was uncharacteristic of her, said:

  “There’s a rumor among the people that the advisers are going to leave us to our fate. They even talk about the ill will of some . . .”

  “The ones saying that are ungrateful . . . I want to leave because I have another mission. I’ve sweat blood in Spain and put my own skin in front of Italian tanks in Madrid when no one could give a damn about the city . . .” Tom drank from a glass of wine that had been served and looked at the tablecloth, startlingly white, as if he were looking for a nonexistent stain. “No one can say that I want to abandon you.”

  Silence settled over the table and Mink seized upon it as he refilled his empty glass.

  “I know that the situation in Spain hurts, but we have some other minor problems, like what we’re going to order, right? I recommend the Alsatian choucroute; the sausages are first-rate. Although I’m opting for the cassoulet, I love duck . . .”

  Before Tom stepped back into Kotov’s skin and returned to Spain, Jacques received advice that was really an order: he was to erase Spain and the war from his head. To Jacques Mornard, what was happening to the south of the Pyrenees was just news read in the papers. Ramón could not allow that passion to crack his identity, not even in the most intimate circles, and as a preventative measure Tom forbade him from seeing or talking to Caridad until he authorized it. The subtle machinery that he had put into motion made Ramón’s sentimental, patriotic gaffe unacceptable. Ramón Mercader had proven to be capable of placing himself above those weaknesses and his passions should not see the light of day until they were called upon for a greater cause, perhaps the same greater cause.

  George Mink, the son of Ukrainians who emigrated to France in the days of the Russian Civil War, became responsible from then on for placing Jacques in the Parisian world that befitted him. They spent weeks going to the bohemian haunts of the Rive Gauche, and the Hippodrome, where Jacques practiced his theoretical knowledge of betting; they wandered the historic and now dilapidated streets of Le Marais, got close to the chorus girls of the Moulin Rouge, inviting them to champagne; and they surveyed at the steering wheel the streets of Paris learned from the maps Jacques studied in Malakhovka. As if he were visiting a sanctuary, George took him to Le Gemy Club, where Louis Leplée was presenting his great discovery, La Môme Piaf, a volatile and rather scruffy little woman who, with an enormous voice, sang songs full of vulgar phrases and daring metaphors that, nonetheless, left the Belgian bored and speechless. With Jacques at the wheel, they visited Brussels and Liège, the fabulous castles of the Loire basin, and trained the young man’s palate with Belgian chocolates, French wine and cheeses, hearty Norman plates, and the subtle aromas of provençal cuisine. The apartment on rue Léopold Robert took on a bourgeois and informal air, and Jacques dressed himself in the wares of some German Jewish tailors recently installed in Le Marais, ending up with twelve hats in his closet. The whole time they remained removed from French political circles, the world of Russian émigrés, and the haunts of Spanish Republicans, where the spies of the whole planet’s secret services milled about as if they had been gathered for a general convention of the shadow world.

  When Tom returned at the beginning of June, he observed with satisfaction how his creature had progressed and felt pleased at having known how to find in a primitive Catalan Communist that diamond he was now polishing to perfection. Once his time in Spain was up, Tom had returned to New York, to learn that the Sylvia Ageloff line had been activated and that it would begin to run in the month
of July when the girl, a high school teacher, took her summer vacation and, thanks to the enthusiasm and economic generosity of her old friend Ruby Weil, embarked on the trip of her dreams to Paris. Without telling him who the person in the photograph was, Tom gave Jacques a picture of Ruby Weil and saw that the young man’s eyes lit up.

  “She’s not bad,” he admitted.

  Tom smiled and, without saying anything, gave him a second photo of a woman close to thirty, with rounded, Coke-bottle glasses, a thin face covered in freckles and straight hair falling gracelessly, through which the points of her ears stuck out.

  “Every wine is not a Bordeaux, Jacques,” Tom said, continuing to smile. “This is Sylvia Ageloff, your hare. If you cook her well enough, she’ll even taste good.”

  To soften the shock, Tom told him that he had also been in Mexico, where other parts of the operation had been set in motion. While the men from the Comintern had assigned the Communist Party the mission of raising popular spirits against the presence of the renegade in Mexico, four agents, all of them Spaniards, had been planted in the capital to carry out the operation if the order was given and if the possibilities for success were considered real.

  “You are perhaps living the best vacation of your life, in Paris, far from the war, with money to burn. If you have to gnaw that bone”—he tapped the photographed face of Sylvia Ageloff with his nail and smiled—“and in the end you’re not the one to carry out the job, we’ll give you a good discount on your debts.”

  Jacques thought there were worse sacrifices, and with that consolation he resolved to await the arrival of the woman who, if he was lucky, would be his channel to the remote Coyoacán and, perhaps, to history.