The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  Breton was the kind of sharp adversary who brought Lev Davidovich so much pleasure. The challenge of persuading the surrealist reminded him of Alexander Parvus of his youth, when discussing Marxism became his obsession. To reinforce his arguments, Lev Davidovich evoked for Breton the fates of Mayakovsky and Gorky, the forced silences of Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Babel, the degradations of Romain Rolland and of various former surrealists loyal to Stalinism, and insisted that they shouldn’t admit any kind of restrictions, nothing that could lead to the acceptance of things that a dictatorship could impose on the creator with the excuse of political or historic need: art had to follow its own demands, and only those. By accepting political conditions that Lev Davidovich himself had defended (at this point he truly regretted having done so), presently it was impossible to read Soviet poems and novels or see paintings created by the obedient, without feeling horror and disgust. Art in the USSR had turned into a pantomime in which civil servants armed with pens and brushes—watched by civil servants armed with guns—could glorify their great genius leaders. That’s where the slogan of ideological unanimity had led them: the pretext that they were under siege by class enemies, and the eternal justification that it was not the right time to talk about problems and the truth, to give poetry freedom. Artistic creation in Stalin’s time, he thought, would remain the expression of the deepest decadence of the proletarian revolution, and no one had the right to condemn the art of the new society at the risk of repeating that frustrating experience. “For art, freedom is sacred, its only salvation. For art everything has to be everything,” he concluded.

  In those conversations in which they attempted to fix the world, Lev Davidovich discovered with some surprise that, more than any theory, Breton was fascinated by the drama of life itself, and that he frequently brought up the subject of fate and its role in the events that marked one’s destiny. It was during one of these conversations, seemingly insignificant and without anyone recalling how they got to talking about it, that Lev Davidovich confessed to the poet how much he loved dogs. He expressed his regret to Breton that his wandering life had prevented him from having one ever since he said goodbye to his Russian wolfhound at the cemetery wall in Prinkipo, and he spoke to him of Maya’s goodness and the devotion that, in general, dogs of that breed felt for their owners. Then Lev Davidovich realized that the most surreal of the surrealists was a strictly logical man when Breton refuted that idea and claimed that Lev Davidovich was allowing himself to be led by his emotions. Breton explained that, upon speaking of the love that dogs feel, Lev Davidovich was trying to attribute feelings to these beasts that belong only to humans.

  With arguments that were perhaps more passionate than rational, Lev Davidovich tried to convince the Frenchman that a dog feels love for its owner. Hadn’t many stories about that love and friendship been told? If Breton had met Maya and seen her relationship with him, perhaps he would have a different opinion. The poet said that he understood it and clarified that he also loved dogs, but the feeling came from him, the human. A dog, at best, could show that it made a distinction based on how humans treated it: by being afraid of the human being who could cause him pain, for example. But if they accepted that the dog was devoted to someone, they had to also admit that the mosquito was consciously cruel when it bit someone, or that the crabwalk was deliberately retrograde . . . Although he didn’t convince him, Lev Davidovich liked the surrealist image of the purposefully retrograde crab.

  A few days later, they had a less pleasant discussion and with very strange consequences. It happened when Lev Davidovich was waiting for Breton to show him the draft of the manifesto, and the poet said the ideas weren’t coming and that he hadn’t been able to finish it. Perhaps due to all his stress, Lev Davidovich at that moment went into a fit of rage. He reproached Breton for his negligence (he would later regret it, recalling the times he accused Liova of the same) and his inability to understand the importance of getting that document circulating in a Europe that was closer to war every day. Breton defended himself and reminded him that not everyone could live with just one thought in mind. Lev Davidovich’s passion was “unreachable” for him. That he should be called “unreachable” annoyed Lev Davidovich even more, and they were on the verge of a breakup, which Natalia prevented by placing herself on the poet’s side.

  The following day, Lev Davidovich received the news that Breton had suffered an unusual physiological phenomenon: he had fallen into a kind of general paralysis. He could barely move, he couldn’t write, and he was aphasic. The doctors diagnosed him with emotional fatigue and recommended absolute rest. But according to van Heijenoort, Lev Davidovich was the one to blame for Breton’s physical and intellectual freeze: the secretary called it “Trotsky’s breath on your neck,” which, he said, was capable of paralyzing anyone who had a relationship with him since, according to van Heijenoort, exposure to his way of living and thinking unleashed a moral tension that was almost unbearable. Lev Davidovich didn’t realize this, because he had been demanding that of himself for many years, but not everyone could live day and night facing all the powers in the world: fascism, capitalism, Stalinism, reformism, imperialism, all religions, and even rationalism and pragmatism. If a man like Breton confessed to him that he was out of reach and ended up paralyzed, Lev Davidovich had to understand that Breton was not to blame; rather, Comrade Trotsky, who had withstood everything he had to withstand all those years, was an animal of another species. (“I should hope I’m not a cruel mosquito or a reactionary crab,” Lev Davidovich commented to the secretary.)

  Despite the discussions—or perhaps thanks to them—Breton’s presence had a positive effect on Lev Davidovich, whose concern increased, as Natalia had predicted, by Jeanne’s refusal to separate herself from Seva. Any way he looked at it, the woman appeared affected by neurosis, and perhaps had been influenced by someone who had turned her against Liova’s parents: her attitude was so aggressive that she had not allowed Marguerite Rosmer to have a conversation with the boy. Faced with that situation, they had no alternative but to file a lawsuit for Seva’s custody.

  On July 10, the Trotskys, the Bretons—the poet had already recovered—and Diego Rivera left for Pátzcuaro. The manifesto was almost ready and Breton wanted to add the final touches. Some fisherman friends of Diego’s had promised them the best of their catch since Lev Davidovich had a weakness for the fish from Lake Pátzcuaro. Jacqueline and Breton also had a taste for them, which the poet baptized “André Masson’s fish.” The fishermen in mid-task reminded the Exile, with more nostalgia than he could have predicted, of the years in Prinkipo, when he still had faith in the future of the opposition within the Soviet Union and the energy and motivation to go out fishing with kind Kharalambos. What was his friend doing now? he asked himself. Did he still return each evening navigating over the reddish wake drawn by the setting sun on the Sea of Marmara?

  With the manifesto still unfinished, the politician and the poet argued a lot about the effects of Stalinism on artistic creation inside and outside the USSR. Lev Davidovich reminded him how much disgust he felt for Stalin’s sycophants, especially authors such as Rolland, and Malreaux, whom Trotsky had praised so much on reading their first novels and who were now typical of those writers in Paris, London, and New York who were signing statements supporting Stalin without having (or wanting to have) any idea of what was really happening in the USSR. Lev Davidovich would submit each one of them, so convinced of the regime’s goodness, to a test: he would make them live with their families in a sixty-square-foot apartment, without a car, with bad heating, and force them to work ten hours a day in order to succeed in an emulation that produced nothing, earning just a few devalued rubles, eating and wearing what was assigned by their ration books and without the least possibility of traveling abroad or the freedom to express opinions on anything. If at the end of a year they still defended the Stalinist regime and espoused its great philosophical principles, then he would shut them up for another year in one
of the penal colonies that Gorky had considered to be the factories of the new man—that would be the true test (excessive, really, he told himself)—and then they would see how many Rollands or Aragons still raised Stalin’s flag in a Paris bistro.

  They had just returned from Pátzcuaro when Lev Davidovich received the news that on July 14 his collaborator Rudolf Klement had disappeared in Paris without a trace. His previous experiences made him fear deeply for the fate of the young man, for whom he felt great affection. Although the reports he received were untimely and sparse, from the start he felt that there was some connection between Klement’s disappearance and Liova’s death, and he let the French police know in a letter protesting the negligence with which they had handled the investigation.

  Finally, on July 25, the Manifesto for Independent Revolutionary Art was ready. Since Lev Davidovich felt that his name could taint the document politically, he refrained from signing it. For that reason, he asked Rivera to undersign it along with Breton, and the painter agreed. Lev Davidovich believed this to be a first step toward a Federation of Revolutionary and Independent Artists, so necessary for a world trapped between the two most devastating totalitarian systems that had ever existed.

  To send off Breton, Diego and Frida planned a surrealist party. Although the Trotskys were feeling far from festive, they tried not to dampen everyone else’s high spirits. Frida designed for Breton as “high priest of surrealism” a robe adorned with Dalí clocks, Masson fish, and Miró’s colors, and covered it with a Magritte hat. Several of the guests read surrealist poems and Diego toasted with mescal, which was, according to him, the most surrealist liquor.

  Lev Davidovich was trying to fill the void left by the extraordinary Breton by concentrating on writing the resolutions and planning the program of the Fourth International, when an alarming letter arrived from the South of France. It was signed by none other than Klement himself, informing him of his political break with him in aggressive terms, full of invective. The Exile had the terrible feeling that the letter had not been written by his collaborator, unless Klement had written it under duress. One week later his worst fears came true when, on the banks of the Seine, Klement’s dismembered corpse was found.

  Under the dark cloud of Klement’s murder, the constituent assembly of the Fourth International was held at the Rosmers’ villa in Périgny. Although the meeting did not come close to being what Lev Davidovich had wished for, what mattered was that the International existed at all. Following the deaths of Liova and Klement, the assembly was presided over by his old collaborator Max Shachtman, but barely forty delegates attended. The Russian contingent, as had previously been decided, was represented by the practically unknown Étienne.

  Although Lev Davidovich didn’t dare confess it even to Natalia, he knew that act had been, if anything, a cry in the dark. The times they lived in were not particularly propitious for workers’ and Marxist associations without ties to Stalinism, and to prove it, one needed only to take one look at the world: within the USSR, Trotsky had barely any followers left, all of them imprisoned; Europe was rife with defections and Molinier-style divisions, and Socialists and Communists were squashed en masse in Germany and Italy; in Asia, the workers went from failure to failure. Only in the United States had the Trotskyist movement grown with the Socialist Workers Party, thanks to leaders such as Shachtman, James Cannon, and James Burnham. Meanwhile, the communist parties, routinely bowing before Moscow’s demands, had been silenced, and in the United States they had even bent to Roosevelt’s New Deal policy. “But if there’s a war, there will be a revolutionary shakeup,” he wrote. And there would be the Fourth International to prove that it was something more than the dreams of an obstinate man who refused to give up.

  His predictions about the imminence of war seemed more accurate when Hitler, after meeting with Chamberlain, called a conference in Munich on September 22 and told the European powers that either they gave him a piece of Czechoslovakia or there would be war. As could be expected, the “powers” sacrificed Czechoslovakia, and Lev Davidovich could see on the horizon, more clearly than ever, the completion of an agreement between Hitler and Stalin that the two dictators had worked on in secret (and not so much) in recent years. For now, he wrote, they should agree to the division of Europe. Hitler was devoted to Aryan supremacy and turning the eastern part of the continent into his field slaves; Stalin dreamed of having a greater empire than any of the czars ever had. When these ambitions collided, there would be war.

  It was around then that the Exile received a letter, this time posted in New York, that would cause him persistent anxiety. Its author introduced himself as an old American Jew of Polish origin who, without practicing his political faith, had followed his history as a revolutionary. He explained to him that he had learned the news relayed to him through a Ukrainian relative, a former member of the GPU, who a few weeks before had deserted and asked for asylum in Japan and had asked him insistently to get in touch with Trotsky. For his security, that would be the only letter he would send and he hoped it would be useful, he said.

  Although that scenario seemed fantastic, the letter had a distinct air of truth. The letter centered on the existence of a Soviet agent, planted in Paris, whose code name was Cupid. That man had come to assume an important role within the French Trotskyist circles, thanks to the infinite naïveté of his followers, who had even permitted him access to secret documents. Meanwhile, Cupid maintained contact with an operative at the Soviet embassy the entire time and collaborated with the Society for the Repatriation of Émigrés, a front for the NKVD that was linked to the deaths of Reiss and Klement. The former agent taking refuge in Japan could not prove it, but due to Cupid’s proximity to the Trotskyist leadership, he thought he must have a more or less direct connection to the death of Lev Sedov. What he did know with certainty was that his mission, besides espionage, would consist of approaching Trotsky and murdering him, if conditions allowed it. He was sure that the Kremlin had already given that order following the March proceedings against Bukharin, Yagoda, and Rakovsky.

  The old Jewish man ended his letter with a revealing story. His relative said he had been present at the interrogation to which they subjected Yakov Blumkin following his trip to Prinkipo. The truth about Blumkin’s arrest was that his wife, also a GPU agent, had been the one to inform on him and accuse him, not only of having contacted the Exile, but even of having given Trotsky a certain amount of money realized from the sale of old manuscripts Blumkin had taken to Turkey. The rumor that Karl Radek had been his informant was a maneuver by the Lubyanka to destroy Radek’s prestige, making him seem like a rat. In that whole proceeding, the former agent stated, Blumkin had acted with integrity and dignity that, in similar circumstances, he had seen in very few men. Despite the brutal torture sessions, Blumkin had refused to sign any type of confession, and the day on which he was executed, he had refused to kneel.

  Lev Davidovich read and reread the letter and consulted with his secretaries and with Natalia. They agreed that there were only two ways to interpret the document: either it was a GPU provocation, behind which they could not see a clear objective, or it had been sent by somebody who knew the purposes of the secret police very well and who, by revealing the presence of an agent in Paris, was pointing precisely at Étienne. Although it was difficult for them to admit that Liova could have let in an enemy (Sobolevicius had introduced them, Lev Davidovich recalled), the very idea that Étienne was in reality one of Stalin’s men made him nauseous. Because of that, in his innermost being, Lev Davidovich wanted the letter to be a trick by the NKVD. Nonetheless, behind the smokescreen, he smelled a whiff of genuineness, and what made him believe in the authenticity of the information was the story of Blumkin’s detention, since until the arrival of the letter not even Natalia had known of the money the young man had given him. But what most led him to believe what the letter said was a certainty that, after the last trial, Stalin needed him much less to bolster his accusations and, as a conse
quence, his time on earth had begun its final countdown.

  That is why Lev Davidovich did not find it strange that, following the creation of the Fourth International, the campaign against him organized by the Mexican Communist Party increased in pressure. The worst thing, however, was the fact that the political heat generated by the founding of the new meeting of parties also entered the Casa Azul, something that bothered Rivera very much. The painter was mad because Lev Davidovich had not supported his candidacy to become the secretary of the Mexican section of the Fourth International. But the reason the Exile had withheld his support was that he didn’t think it would be beneficial for Rivera to sacrifice his creativity for a bureaucratic job that, even if it gave him political direction, would have taken up all his time in meetings and in drafting documents. The second reason—which he was less likely to confess—was that he did not think Diego had sufficient political savvy. Nonetheless, Rivera aspired to political preeminence and felt betrayed by his guest.