The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  “Yes, my love. I appreciate you letting me go. But if you don’t want me to, I won’t go.”

  Jacques smiled. Things were returning to normal. His preeminence had been reestablished and he understood that he could be very cruel with that defenseless being. Further still, he found it satisfying to do so. Something malignant within him revealed itself in that relationship and he was discovering how much he enjoyed the possibility of bending wills, of generating fear, of exercising power over other people until they crawled in front of him. Would he ever have the chance to exercise that control over Caridad? Though he didn’t have a name or a homeland, he was a man gifted with hate, faith, and, in addition, a power he was going to use as long as possible.

  “Of course I want you to go, if that makes you happy,” he said, satisfied, magnanimous. “I have to go shopping to send my parents some presents for Christmas. What do you want me to give you?”

  Sylvia relaxed. She looked at him and in her myopic eyes were gratitude and love.

  “Don’t worry about me, dear.”

  “I’ll see what I find to surprise you,” he said, and took her hand atop the table and forced her to lean toward him to give her a kiss on the lips.

  Jacques felt the woman was overcome with emotion and told himself that he should administer his power carefully or he could kill her with an overdose.

  Less than two years later, Ramón Mercader would come to understand that the tests of psychological strength he was subjected to during the last bitter weeks of 1938 and the first of 1939 were to be a grotesque rehearsal for the worst experiences that he went through at the most critical moment of his life, and it required all his powers of resistance in order to prevent a total breakdown.

  Although the news arriving from Spain throughout December sketched out the magnitude of the disaster, Jacques Mornard managed to maintain a façade of distant political skepticism. With greater vehemence, he avoided the discussions of politics before him and on one occasion left a meeting when those present insisted on steeping themselves in the unpleasant and silly matters of the war, fascism, and French politics.

  In the solitude of his apartment, however, he read all of the press articles that could reveal something to him about the situation in Spain and listened to the radio news programs as if looking for a ray of hope amid the shadows. But each piece of news was a knife through the heart of his illusions. There he gave free rein to his contained anger, his impotence, and screamed curses, kicked the furniture, and swore to take revenge. Those outbursts, nearly hysterical, left him exhausted and showed him the weakness of Jacques Mornard against the passions of Ramón Mercader, but they reaffirmed his disdain for everything that hinted of fascism, the bourgeoisie, and the betrayal of the proletariat’s ideals. His hidden desires to change places with his brother Luis, who was still fighting with the remains of the Popular Army amid the chaos and the capriciousness of Spanish politicians, turned into an obsession for him, and he swore to himself that when the time came to act against the enemies, he would be implacable and ruthless, like the enemies of his dream were being with that attempt to build a more just world.

  The lack of news from Tom added to his uncertainty. He feared for the fate of his mentor, so prone to involving himself and transgressing limits. If they killed him or made him a prisoner in Spain, all of their efforts and the structure they had helped put together could come crashing down, as had already occurred with other operative lines. Among his worries was also the fact that the time for Sylvia’s return was upon them. The girl said she had to return to her job the second week of February and had set the first day of the month as her departure date. Although Jacques knew that a little bit of pressure could dissuade her, he felt that living with Sylvia any longer would require an effort he wasn’t prepared for and feared that the woman’s sickliness could make him explode at any moment.

  The reappearance of George Mink in the second week of January brought some relief to Jacques Mornard’s anxiety. They met at the Montparnasse cemetery and, on learning the details of the meeting, Jacques thought that he would never completely understand the Soviets: the night before it had snowed relentlessly, and this was supposed to be the coldest day of the year.

  As they had agreed, Mink was waiting for him next to the tomb of Prince D’Achery, Duke of San Donnino, and Madame Viez, in the seventh division of the avenue d’Ouest. The snow had made a compact layer of ice over which he had to walk carefully. The cemetery, as could be expected, was deserted, and upon seeing Mink’s dark figure amid that white landscape, flanked by two lions who made up the prince’s singular mausoleum, Jacques told himself that nothing could seem more suspicious than a meeting at that place in that weather.

  “Good day, Jacques, my friend.”

  “ ‘Good day’? Wouldn’t you like to have a coffee somewhere warm?”

  “It’s just that I love cemeteries, did you know? For years I’ve been living in a world where no one knows who’s who, what’s real and what’s a lie, and, less still, how long you’ll be alive . . . Here, at least, you feel surrounded by a great certainty, the greatest certainty . . . Besides, what we have today isn’t cold, not real cold . . .”

  “Please, George. Does it have to be here?”

  “Did you know that when Trotsky and Natalia Sedova met, they used to come here to read Baudelaire in front of his tomb?”

  “Even in this shitty cold?”

  “Baudelaire’s tomb is over there. Do you want to see it?”

  They left the frozen cemetery and walked to place Denfert-Rochereau, where Jacques had had coffee before. Even inside the café they picked, Jacques kept his coat on, since he now felt as if the cold were coming from inside of him.

  Mink had returned four days before with orders he had received from Beria personally. Besides, as he expected, in the embassy in Paris they also had guidelines sent by Tom from Spain.

  “What have you heard about Tom? The French are threatening to close the border.”

  “That’s no problem for Tom. He always gets out.”

  “What are the orders? What do I have to do? Should Sylvia leave?”

  “Let her go. But with something to bring her back to you. Promise her marriage.”

  Jacques breathed a sigh of relief at that authorization.

  “So what do I tell her? That I’ll go see her, that she should come in the summer . . .?”

  “Don’t assure her of anything. Tell her you’ll tell her your decision in a letter. The order from Moscow could come tomorrow or in six months, and you have to be ready for that moment. When Tom returns, he’ll organize things. Beria wants him to focus only on this work from now on. Stalin’s orders. Incidentally, Stalin himself named the operation: Utka.”

  “Utka?”

  “Utka, duck . . . And any method would be good to hunt him: poisoning his food or his water, an explosion in his house or car, strangulation, a knife in the back, a blow to the head, a gunshot to the base of his skull.” Mink took a breath and concluded: “Even an attack by an armed group or a bomb dropped from the air haven’t been ruled out.”

  Jacques asked himself into which square of that chess game he would fit. It was obvious that something was finally starting to take shape, although the reasons for the slowness with which the operation was moving escaped him.

  “What did they say in Moscow when they brought down Yezhov?”

  Mink smiled and drank his tea.

  “Nothing. In Moscow, those things aren’t discussed. People were so afraid of Yezhov that they won’t be cured for a long time.”

  Jacques looked toward the place. He couldn’t be bothered to face the cold again to return to his apartment, where Sylvia was waiting for him. He understood that he needed action. At that exact moment, where was África? What was his brother Luis doing? What adventures had Tom embarked on? He didn’t have any alternative but to wait, inactive, acting like a lovestruck man who doesn’t want his lover to leave.

  “When will we see each other again?�
��

  “If there’s nothing new, when Tom returns. If you have anything urgent to ask, go look for me at the cemetery. I always pass by there.”

  In the days prior to Sylvia’s departure, Jacques behaved in a way that Josefino and Cicero, his Malakhovka professors, would have admired. Overcoming his low spirits and his desire to be far from that farce, he exploited the relief getting rid of that woman represented to him to the utmost and showered her with attention and gifts for her and her sisters, and he had the fortitude to make love to her every day until an ecstatic and satisfied Sylvia returned to New York. Jacques had done his job and was happy with the space and freedom he’d recovered.

  From Spain, by contrast, only news of the painful death rattles of the war came. Barcelona’s fall seemed to be the final act, and the reports that Franco had entered a city that cheered him filled Ramón Mercader with bitterness. Starting at the end of January, the French papers were picking up, with various degrees of alarm, the news of the scattering of combatants, officers, politicians, and desperate people fearful of reprisals who had leaped to cross the border. There was already talk of hundreds of thousands of people, hungry and without any resources, who would burst the logistical capacities of the forces of order and the possibility of being taken in by the French. Some politicians, at the height of cynicism, recognized that perhaps it would have been better to help them win the war than to be forced now to receive them, feed them, and dress them for who knew how long. The right-wing newspapers, meanwhile, called out their solution: Send them to the colonies. People like that were what was needed in Guyana, in the Congo, and in Senegal.

  Changed by Ramón’s passions, Jacques Mornard noticed that he needed to break out of his inertia, even at the price of sacrificing his discipline. He knew what was at risk if he disobeyed strict orders to stay far away from anything having to do with Spain, but the anger and the desperation won him over. Besides, Tom still hadn’t shown up, and if he did, he would have no reason to tell him. So, on February 6, he took his car, his cameras, and his journalistic credentials and headed toward Le Perthus, the border town that had the largest concentration of refugees.

  At noon on the eighth, when the Belgian journalist Jacques Mornard managed to reach the closest point to the border that the army officers and the French police allowed, the malignant stench of defeat welcomed him. He confirmed that, from the promontory where the press reporters were, he wouldn’t be recognized by any of the people who, already on French territory, were led like sheep by the Senegalese soldiers who were in charge of watching and controlling them. The scene ended up being more pathetic than he was capable of imagining. A human wave, covered with rags, traveling with a few cars or hanging on to the rickety carts pulled by starving horses, or simply on foot, dragging suitcases and bundles in which they had stuffed all of their lives’ belongings, accepted in silence orders that were incomprehensible to them, shouted in French and punctuated by warning gestures and threatening truncheons. Those were people launched into an exodus of biblical proportions, pushed only by the will to survive; beings weighed down with an enormous list of frustrations and tangible losses with gazes from which even dignity had disappeared. Jacques knew that many of those men and women were the same ones who had sung and danced for every Republican victory, the same ones who for a variety of reasons had placed themselves behind the barricades that periodically went up in Barcelona, the same ones who had dreamed of victory, revolution, democracy, and justice, and had, on many occasions, ruthlessly practiced revolutionary violence. Now defeat had reduced them to the condition of pariahs without a dream to hold on to. Many were wearing the uniforms of the Popular Army and, their weapons handed over, were silently following the Senegalese orders (“Reculez! Reculez!” the Africans insisted, enjoying their bit of power) without caring about maintaining a minimum of composure. Jacques learned from a British correspondent, recently arrived from Figueres, that the majority of children escaping from Spain were arriving sick with pneumonia and many of them would die if they didn’t receive immediate medical attention. But the only order the French had was to take all weapons away and lead the refugees, big and small, to some camps enclosed by barbed wire, where they would remain until each one’s fate was decided. A feeling of suffocation had started to take over him and he wasn’t surprised when tears blurred his vision. He gave a half turn and walked away, trying to calm himself down. He forced himself to think that it had been a predictable but not a definitive defeat. That revolutions must also accept their setbacks and prepare themselves for the next attack. That the sacrifice of those defenseless beings, and of those who—like his brother Pablo—had died during those almost three years of war, barely represented a minimal offering before the altar of a history that, in the end, would vindicate them with the glorious victory of the world’s proletariat. The future and the struggle constituted the only hope at that moment of frustration. But he discovered that the slogans weren’t helping him and that at some moment he couldn’t pinpoint in that piercing afternoon, he had lost Jacques Mornard in some corner of his consciousness and had again become, fully and deeply, Ramón Mercader del Río, the Spanish Communist. It was satisfying to him to know that at least Ramón had a higher mission to fulfill in that ruthless world tightly divided between revolutionaries and fascists, between the exploited and exploiters, and that scenes like this one, far from damaging him, strengthened him: his hate was becoming more compact, armored and complete. I am Ramón Mercader and I am full of hate! he yelled in his head. When he turned around to look for the last time at the wretched scene of the debacle that underpinned his convictions, he felt how his cameras moved and remembered that that idiot Jacques Mornard had forgotten to take a single image of the failure. It was at that moment that a French journalist, almost with disgust, pronounced those words that were to change the shape of his smile:

  “What a disgrace! They weren’t able to win and now they come to hide here!”

  The blow Ramón served him was brutal. Of the four teeth he knocked out, two fell on the damp earth and two were lost in the stomach of the unfortunate journalist, who would surely ask himself, for the rest of his life, what terrible thing he had said to provoke the ire of that unleashed madman who, to top it all, had disappeared like a breath of air.

  18

  Of all the battles he’d waged, which did he remember as the most arduous? Those with Lenin in the days of the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks? The tense and dramatic ones of 1917, when the revolution’s birth or abortion was decided? The furious battles of the civil war, always doomed to fratricidal violence? The cruel ones for succession and for control of the party? The ones for physical and political survival in those days of exile and marginalization? And who had been his most fearful adversary: Lenin, Plekhanov, Stalin? When Lev Davidovich looked at the blank page over which he didn’t dare to move his pen, he thought, no, the battle had never been as arduous nor the opponent as tricky, for he had never seen himself forced to fight for something so essential.

  Ever since Natalia Sedova left the Casa Azul and he took refuge with the bodyguards in the cabin in the hills of San Miguel Regla, under the pretext of the need for physical exercise, but so pressed to gain distance from the Casa Azul in order to stew in the solitude of his desperation and shame, he had been looking for the most elegant way to initiate a reconciliation with his wife with the knowledge that his dignity should be the first piece he would have to sacrifice in the service of his supreme objective.

  The feeling of guilt that had been absent until then had unleashed itself, and not only because of the damage he had done to Natalia. During that infamous month of June 1937, the lives of two of his dearest and most constant friends had been devoured by Stalin’s fury, while he, submerged in the renewed waves of his libido, dedicated the best part of his intelligence to engineering ways to mock Diego and Natalia’s presence, to run behind Frida to Cristina Kahlo’s nearby house, on Calle Linares, the site of their sexual encounters. Van Heijen
oort and the young bodyguards had been made to serve as facilitators of the meetings, lending themselves to the fictions that Lev Davidovich’s feverish brain devised: from hunting and fishing to trips to the mountains, even as far as the search for documents that he had to track down personally, he had used every excuse. For his protectors, the situation had proven to be agonizing, since they knew the physical risks of each escapade and, above all, in a scandalous venting of an affair that could destroy the Exile’s marriage and affect his prestige as a revolutionary generously welcomed in the Casa Azul, or even could provoke a violent reaction from Rivera. But he had decided not to think about anything else, and was concerned only with giving in to his cravings and receiving Frida’s uninhibited sexuality, capable of revealing to him, at his fifty-seven years, means and practices the existence of which he had barely suspected. Never as in those days of lust had madness spun around Lev Davidovich’s mind so forcefully and when he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw the image of a man whom he barely recognized and who, nonetheless, continued to be none other than himself.

  On the afternoon of June 11, after a morning round with Frida, he had dedicated himself to documenting one of the darkest passages of his relationship with Stalin: the day in 1907, exactly thirty years before, when they had met in London and, perhaps, when the war between them had commenced. Natalia, who already perceived the density of deceit in the air, entered the room and, without saying a word, placed the newspaper over the page he was writing. Without looking up, Lev Davidovich read the headline and felt the anguish growing in his chest as he devoured the report taken from Pravda. In Moscow, the case had been initiated against eight high-ranking Red Army officers, led by Marshal Tukhachevsky, the second in command in the military hierarchy, and the trial had been set for sentencing. The court judging them, the dispatch relayed, was a special section of the Supreme Court and was made up by “the cream of the crop of the glorious Red Army.”