The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  At that moment, what really still intrigued me was not knowing the final fate of Mercader, of whom I only knew—due to the folded article in the Trotsky biography—that he had gone to jail in Mexico and then been received in Moscow in such a way that was hostile to him and his acts; a city where, according to López, his friend had died, confined to an anonymity that included his grave.

  As I could not get the man who loved dogs out of my mind, I started to think that I ought to do something to find out what Ramón Mercader must have thought, felt, and believed during all those years of punishment and imprisonment, and then later when he returned to a world that no longer seemed (though it continued to be the same) like the world he had left more than twenty years before, full of faith, convictions, and with a death mission in his hands.

  What still hadn’t occurred to me, nor would occur to me until a few years later, was the possibility of putting López’s confession in black and white and less still of writing a book about Mercader’s crime and the history and the interests of his demiurges. Perhaps it was because the story had been left incomplete and many of the details from the part I knew escaped my comprehension and my ability to relate them and situate them in a historical context; or perhaps it was because I didn’t know if López would reappear at some point and, no matter who he might be, I had promised not to tell or write his tale. Perhaps I didn’t think about it because, in reality, I had so forgotten that I had wanted to be a writer at one time that I almost didn’t think like a writer. But the fact was that the idea of writing that inconclusive story did not come to mind, and if it did, it did so in a manner that was too timid—and you’ll see immediately that I’m not picking just any adjective. Only several years later, when I started to squeeze my memory to try to reproduce the details that López had told me, did I learn that the true cause for the long postponement, the only and real cause, had been fear. A fear greater than I could imagine.

  In the months that followed the disappearance of the man who loved dogs, in the most devious ways, almost always in whispers, I pursued the few existing books on the island capable of helping me understand the dramatic relationship between Stalin and Trotsky and what that sick confrontation and Stalin’s success represented for the fate of the Utopia. Searching in the mountain of Stalinist literature that continued to come to the country from Moscow, dusting off chewed-up pamphlets from the 1950s that went from the most basic Trotskyism to the fervent anticommunism of the Cold War—gasping as I read Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in Cuba years before—I started putting together a fragmentary and diffuse knowledge that, despite everything that had been hidden (there were still almost ten years left until glasnost and the first round of revelations of some of that inner world of terror), brought with it an inevitable feeling of surprise and incredulity (disgust would come to the surface soon after), above all because of the crude manipulation of the truth to which so many men had been subjected.

  Meanwhile, whenever I could, I went out to the beach, convinced that I should tempt fate; and many times, when I heard the phone ring, I wondered if it wasn’t López calling me.

  It was a tremendously painful although not so unexpected event that brought me out, abruptly, from the paralysis of waiting, speculation, and reading to which the man who loved dogs had abandoned me. My brother William had fought for two years to overturn the decision to remove him definitively from the medical school. In that battle of letters—almost always unanswered—and interviews with lower-rung civil servants, William had taken a dangerous and challenging path. He demanded that he be accepted at the university and that he not have to hide his irreversible and totally gay sexual orientation. Fearful of what could happen to him (“What else could happen to me, Iván?” he asked me; I answered, “There can always be something else”), I tried to convince him that the ancestral national homophobia, with all of its social, political, cultural, and religious cruelties, wasn’t prepared to take that challenge, but it was prepared to crush whoever launched it. Perhaps my brother and his former anatomy professor, also enrolled in the crusade, had been confused about not only their capacity for withstanding looks of disdain and a variety of humiliations but, above all, their chances of success. The degradation, marginalization, and offenses they saw themselves subject to in the places they went in search of a justice in which they believed ended up devastating them, and at the end of two years of bloody combat they gave up in the worst way: trying to escape by the route that would carry them to possible salvation or an inevitable precipice.

  William’s disappearance took on all of its tragic dimensions when two police agents went to the house in Víbora Park and informed my parents that, according to investigations, their son William Cárdenas Maturell and citizen Felipe Arteaga Martínez, former anatomy professor of the School of Medicine, who, according to a custodian at the marina of the Almendares River, had stolen a motorboat with the purpose of traveling across the Straits of Florida to the United States. The boat, overturned and without the engine, had been found by some fishermen two days ago, about twenty-five miles north of Matanzas, and, according to the U.S. Coast Guard, no one meeting the description of William Cárdenas or Felipe Arteaga had been rescued in the previous ninety-six hours. Had they heard from their son? Did they know anything about his plans?

  My parents, Sara and Antonio, clung to the hope that William was in one of Cuba’s northern keys, on a lost beach in the Bahamas or aboard some ship that, for whatever reason, had not given news of the rescue. But as the days passed and hope began to founder under its own weight, a feeling of blame over not having supported their son and, they more than anyone, having made him feel the weight of rejection, started overtaking their spirits until they were thrown into a depression. For my part, I regretted not having shown William enough solidarity and of having left him alone in that disproportionate battle in which he aspired only for the recognition of his freedom of sexual choice and his right, as a homosexual, to study what he wanted.

  The environment that had been, until then, tense in the house at Víbora Park, became funereal. In just a few months, my parents turned into old people who lived practically enclosed in their bedroom. My house smelled of the grave and guilt, and to escape that atmosphere, I turned into a kind of fugitive who spent as much time as possible at my job and, when I got out, went to sit at the National Library to read about the life and work of writers who had committed suicide (I got into that and I still don’t know where that almost necrophiliac need came from). The sick atmosphere in my house and the physical and mental distance with which I tried to evade it damaged my relationship with Raquelita in a first period of crisis—it appears I attract crises—that hit rock bottom when we decided that the best thing to do would be to separate for a while. As never before in the previous five years, I feared that my loneliness, desperation, the urgency to escape reality, would lead me to the bottle and I would again fall into the well of that addiction.

  The disasters came a year and some odd months following William’s disappearance, and more than two years after my last meeting with the man who loved dogs—I always remembered that a phrase as tender as “Lo propio” was the last thing I said to him, wishing him a Merry Christmas—when in March 1981 my father died and, four months later, it was my mother’s turn. I didn’t call the friends I had left, or the majority of my relatives, or my work colleagues, and because of that, their wakes were attended only by a few neighbors and the relatives who somehow found out what happened.

  I now saw the true dimensions of my solitude and how the decisions of history can come in through the windows of some lives and destroy them from the inside. The family house in Víbora Park, built by my father when I was a boy and William was not born yet, turned into a kind of mausoleum about which ghosts and memories wandered, with echoes of laughter, tears, greetings, and conversations that had taken place there throughout twenty-five years, when we were a family. If we had not been a happy family, we had at least
been a normal one, a clan that, by the logic of life, could even grow with Raquelita joining it and the predictable arrival—at the beginning, demanded by my father—of some grandchildren who would rejuvenate those walls made with his efforts, his love, and his own hands.

  Dany was one of the friends who came to my mother’s wake. Raquelita had called him and he came to keep me company. I remember that at that time Dany was exultant and removed, since his first book of short stories had just been published after having won the same contest in which I had received a mention . . . ten years or ten centuries before. Two days after the burial, Dany came back to my house and asked forgiveness for the disloyalties that, according to him, he’d racked up against me: not having been by my side when William disappeared, when my father died, when Raquelita and I separated, and, above all, for my not having been the first person to receive a copy of his published book, since, as he said, everything he could do and achieve as a writer he owed to me, to my advice, to the books I had made him read.

  As we talked and drank coffee, seated on the terrace that looked over the backyard of my house, I told him that there was nothing to forgive: life is a vertigo and everyone has to manage his own. Since I needed to do so with someone, I confessed to him that a great feeling of guilt was following me and he tried to convince me that I wasn’t responsible for any of what had happened and told me something I hadn’t thought of until then.

  “Iván, the problem is that you’ve spent your life blaming the easiest targets. And you almost always pick yourself, because it’s simpler and that way you can rebel, although what you’re doing is self-flagellation. Do the math and you’ll see that you stopped writing, you became an alcoholic, you buried yourself in that shitty magazine and didn’t even try to get a job you’re worthy of. When I met you, you were an ambitious guy, people said you showed great promise, they put your stories in all the anthologies of young writers being published . . .”

  “I was a fake, Dany: I wasn’t a writer or anything promising. They used me when it was useful because they had already done away with all the real writers. And they punished me when they had to.”

  “But you should have kept writing, dammit!”

  “Brother, I lost all desire.”

  I am sure that at that moment Dany was comparing himself to me. The pupil’s star was beginning its ascent, while that of his teacher, so bright at one time, had gone out and it was already impossible to point out the place in the sky where it had once blinked. I am sure that he felt pity for me. And I didn’t care if that was what he was feeling.

  I think that Dany’s presence saved me from depression and, perhaps, from something worse. Resolved to get me out of that stupor, my friend invited me to readings of his stories and there I saw many of my old writer colleagues, some of them still insistent on being so. Above all, I discovered the existence of a new legion of “young narrators,” as they were called then, who were shyly beginning to write in a different way, tell different stories, with fewer heroes and more fucked-up, sad people, like in real life. Dany started to lend me books that had never been published on the island that he got from his friends who traveled abroad, and even when I knew he didn’t like it very much, he went with me several times to play squash on the courts at the beach, without imagining my second (or was it really my first?) intention of peering out onto the sand with the hope of seeing two Russian wolfhounds followed by a man with tortoiseshell glasses and a bandage on his hand. A few months later, I even allowed myself to be dragged to some literary parties soaked in the abundant alcohols of the illusory bonanza of the eighties (since I didn’t drink, they nicknamed me “Waterboy”), intellectual meetings where you felt that people were beginning to free themselves of certain chains of orthodoxy but, above all (because this was the most interesting to me), where you could always find ethereal poetesses wearing sheer cotton dresses (they said they were Hindu) who refused to wear bras and who were in a state of constant desperation to forget transcendental poetics and receive what we then called, à la Lezama Lima, a “male offering,” or, simply put in good Havanese, “pinga [cock] any which way.”

  I followed Dany through all of those places without much enthusiasm, but at the same time I was feeling, by pure infectiousness rather than out of any real desire, an increasingly perceptible lashing, that started to awaken the monster locked up within me: the desire to write again. It was then, already convinced that López would never return, that I started to write, on some pads of yellow paper I had taken from the magazine, the story that the man who loved dogs had told me. I did so without having the slightest idea what ending I would give to those notes of a story whose avenues were constantly blocked by a lack of knowledge and the impossibility of overcoming it; and, above all, I did it pursued by a growing feeling that I was playing with fire.

  Fortunately for me and the peace of my spirit, the literary heat that Dany’s proximity was causing abandoned me when Raquelita returned to live with me at the beginning of 1982. That same year, we had Paolo, and in 1983 Francesca was born, and I dedicated myself to the illusion that we could still make an ordinary life, with a family and the vivid sound of laughter and the inconsequential tears of children.

  That was an interval of calm. In the country, life was getting better, and I was able to devote myself to raising my children and forging the illusion of a future that would perhaps smile upon them. In Moscow, meanwhile, they even began to talk about changes, of improvement, of transparency, and many of us thought that, yes, it was possible to do it better, live better, indeed, even the Chinese, after having been through a cultural revolution of which we knew nothing or very little, recognized that you didn’t have to live poorly in order to be Socialists. Who would have thought?

  The first hole through which water began to sink the ship of my tranquillity was made when Raquelita asked me for a divorce, in 1988. Although she had tried for years to hold together a marriage that, however you looked at it, didn’t work: what Raquelita called the (shitty) apathy with which I dealt with everything, and what she considered to be my loss of will to fight to defend the most basic things in my (also shitty) life, had ended up disappointing and defeating her. Raquelita had always aspired to things in life, to promotions and rewards, to cars and comforts that seemed ever more possible for everyone in a socialism that was maturing and being perfected. But, according to her—and it was true—I was merely content with holding on to hopes for the future (of everyone else) from a corner of the present where I had huddled up with the single hope that they would leave me alone to live in peace.

  “You’re miserable, a loser, a good-for-nothing,” she said to me (many times) in those days. “You’re not a writer or anything. You tricked me and I can’t take it anymore.”

  And she tended to add when she really wanted to bring me down even further:

  “If you don’t want to live your life, hang yourself from a tree, because I’m going to do everything possible to live mine and even the impossible to guarantee that my children live theirs.”

  Even though she was partially right in her fits of anger—I was and am a wretch: a misery—Raquelita suffered a semantic betrayal: more than a loser, I was defeated, and between one state and another, there was (there is, there will always be) an abyss of connotations and implications. And, despite that, with her flight, she was also paying the price of her poor aim: I had never been the man she was looking for, and I still don’t understand how someone so perceptive when it came to calculations made that enormous error of appreciation.

  The real blow was being separated from my children, and I suffered their absence bitterly when they became prolonged absences. This time even Dany had to admit how right I was when I picked myself to blame for what had happened, despite the fact that, as always, I wasn’t the only one at fault. This new fall—what number was this already? Could it be twelve?—into the solitude and the void was completed when, without any will to put up a fight, I accepted, with the divorce petition, the permuta, or tra
de, of the house in Víbora Park for two lesser spaces: a little house with a backyard and two bedrooms in the neighborhood of El Sevillano for Raquelita and the kids, and a small apartment, damp, with cracked walls and little natural light, in Lawton for me. I recognize, nonetheless, that I felt a certain freedom when I said goodbye to the family home, full of memories, and started my hermit’s life, from which I was brought out two years later, by that girl who looked like a tiny fragile bird and who, with tears in her eyes, begged me to save her poodle, affected by an intestinal obstruction.

  When I no longer expected it, I had a new, alarming and clarifying contact with the man who loved dogs. It was in 1983, a few months before Francesca was born, and I can place it exactly because I clearly remember when Raquelita came to tell me that someone was looking for me and I can see her with that sprawling belly, so different from the one that had accommodated Paolo. If, a few years before, I’d tortured myself by asking myself what astral conjunction had led me to López and turned me, according to him, into an exceptional repository for the story of his deceased friend Ramón Mercader, at that moment I was tormented by the certainty that the man who loved dogs had not arrived in my life only by chance, but rather that he had pursued me intentionally and continued to pursue me even after, by basic logic, I believed him dead and buried—even after, for my own good and through my idleness, I had managed to forget about him and the adverse reactions caused by the story he’d told me: rancor, fear, curiosity, disgust, and the increasingly dormant but still latent and dangerous desire to write.

  The letter—if that’s what you could call a parcel of more than fifty sheets in a cramped, almost infantile handwriting but a better than well-composed style—reached me through the hands of a thin, very black woman. According to what she told me, she had been one of the nurses who had taken care of López when his illness worsened. The woman, who barely sat down in the living room of my house and didn’t even dare to make up a name for me to call her, started by demanding the greatest discretion. She told me that she’d been keeping those papers since the middle of 1978, when compañero López, as she called him, gave them to her before leaving Cuba. By that time, the man’s condition had reached a state of utmost severity and he had to leave to receive shock treatment. The woman didn’t know—she said—what the illness was or where López had gone, nor whether he was still alive or if he had died, although she was very sure that the latter had to have happened to him, since he had been doing so badly. She explained that, before leaving, the sick man had asked her, very discreetly, to do him the favor of handing that manila envelope to a young man with whom he’d become friends, and given her my name and the address where I lived. The nurse promised to carry out what he had entrusted to her, but she had taken almost five years to do so because she was afraid it could put her or me at risk. Put me at risk? Why? Wasn’t López merely a Spanish Republican who worked and lived in Cuba with all the imaginable authorizations? Or had the nurse read those papers and discovered other truths? The woman, slippery and precise at the same time, only responded to my third question and added a revelatory afterthought: no, she hadn’t read the letter, nor had she spoken to anyone of its existence, and she was expecting similar discretion from me, above all regarding her role in that story. And before leaving, she made a request that sounded like a warning: if anyone ever asked me where those papers came from, she had never seen anything like them and had never been in the house of the recipient. And she disappeared.