The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  The Exile knew that he could not change his way of seeing the world. He would not tire of exhorting men of good faith to remain alongside the exploited, even when history and scientific needs seemed to be against them. “Down with science, down with history! If necessary, we must redefine them!” he wrote. “In any event, I will remain on Spartacus’s side, never with the Caesars, and even against science I am going to maintain my trust in the ability of the working masses to free themselves from the yoke of capitalism, since whoever has seen the masses in action knows that it is possible.” Lenin’s mistakes, his own equivocations, those of the Bolshevik Party that permitted the deformation of the utopia, can never be blamed on the workers. Never, he would keep thinking.

  No matter how great his unease, Lev Davidovich felt that life, so arduous, was still capable of compensating him with happiness when Seva at last arrived in Mexico. If his grandparents had not seen photos of the boy, they never would have recognized him. Between the little boy they had said goodbye to in France and the confused and shy thirteen-year-old who arrived in Coyoacán, there was a terrible and devastating story that made them fear for his mental health. But he and Natalia were convinced that love could cure even the deepest wounds, and love was what they had more than enough of, they who did not tire of hugging and kissing him, of admiring his youth in full bloom, despite the fact that both knew the boy’s life would not be easy in a country where he didn’t speak the language, where he had no friends, and where, to top it off, he lived in a fortress.

  Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, after rescuing Seva from the religious boarding school in the South of France where Jeanne had sent him, had traveled with him from France to Mexico fearful of possible attacks. Those friends, the only ones they had left from the days of uncertainty before the revolution, had been one of the great blessings in Lev Davidovich’s existence and made him ask himself how he could have ever been so obtuse as to mistake Molinier’s opportunism for sincere friendship.

  Natalia and the Rosmers took charge of showing Seva around the city, and his grandfather insisted on being his guide on an outing to Teotihuacán. Lev Davidovich demanded that only the bodyguards go with them, since he wanted Seva all to himself. Although they couldn’t climb to the summit of the Pyramid of the Sun, they made a deep journey to the past. They talked about his father, Plato Volkov, of whom Seva did not have specific memories, since he had been deported when the boy was three years old; about his mother, Zina, a victim of horrible revenge; about his uncle Liova, about whom the boy dreamed on many nights; they talked about what were for him the misty days of Prinkipo and Istanbul, of which his mind kept memorable flashes of the fires, the fishing, but above all the company of Maya. He kept a photo of himself at age five with his grandfather, his hair and beard still dark, and the beautiful borzoi, who gave the impression of looking right into the camera in order to eternalize the kindness of her eyes. During the years he lived in Berlin and Paris, Seva had wanted to have another dog, but his nomadic life would not allow him that pleasure. So Lev Davidovich promised him that he could have a dog now, and that it would help him like nothing else to feel that something belonged to him and that he belonged to a place. Poor boy! How much hate had consumed the best part of his life! he would say that night to Natalia Sedova.

  Meanwhile, the Red Army had invaded Finland and the international community was finally comparing Stalin to Hitler. In the article that he wrote on that episode, Lev Davidovich weighed his opinions with extreme care, certain that he would sow confusion and dissent among his followers, who would even label him a Stalinist for expressing an idea that did not seem negotiable even to him, even after that invasion: even with Stalin at the helm, he wrote, the defense of the integrity of the USSR continued to be the priority of the world proletariat.

  A couple of weeks after his arrival, Seva asked Harold Robbins, the new head of the bodyguards, to accompany him on a walk through the neighborhood. Although Natalia and Marguerite were not in favor of it, Alfred and Lev Davidovich thought they should give the child a little freedom, since Seva had shown himself to be a strong boy, and life’s blows did not appear to have affected him. An hour after they left, Seva and Robbins returned . . . with a dog. On one of their drives, the boy had seen his dog’s mother, with a litter, in front of a shack, and of course the dog’s owners were happy for someone to take one of the pups. Upon arriving at the house, he had already been baptized “Azteca,” and he was one of those mutts in possession of an intelligence gained over generations by the struggle for survival.

  The happiness that Lev Davidovich felt over Seva’s presence was clouded over by his break with his old friend Max Shachtman, the collaborator who, ever since his first visit to Prinkipo in 1929, had offered him so much affection and devotion. The defection was a consequence of the separatist fever that was undermining the American Trotskyists, the same as that which had affected the French ten years earlier that preventing the gestation of a unified opposition right at the moment of the fascist ascent. Now the heat of the war and the adoption of the most radical positions regarding the USSR had exacerbated the divisions and new parties were emerging, a little bit closer to or further from the left than others in regard to “matters of principle.” Max Shachtman and James Burnham had turned into leaders of their own party, an offshoot of the Socialist Workers that was reduced to a mere handful of followers with that split.

  Although he asked Shachtman to come to Mexico to discuss his disaffection, Max did not show up, and Lev Davidovich knew the reason: Shachtman knew that he would not be able to stand “Trotsky’s breath on his neck.” At the end of the day, the Exile realized that he had always been bothered by a certain superficiality in Shachtman, but he also had to admit that he had come to love him and that he should at least appreciate the straightforwardness with which Max had announced his break, so different from the enigmatic way in which Molinier and the Pazes before him had done.

  The year 1939 was ending and the war was continuing. Lev Davidovich had turned sixty, and despite everything that had happened, it was the most peaceful New Year he had celebrated ever since he went into exile. He had Seva and Azteca with him, and the dog followed him faithfully when he went outside to care for the rabbits and hens. His beloved Alfred and Marguerite were with them and, together with other friends, bodyguards, and secretaries, they helped him better spend the nighttime hours in intelligent, relaxing conversations, so necessary for his soul. Although the house looked more and more like a fortress and his escapes had become more sporadic, he had the freedom to write and opine, and he did so incessantly, despite the censorship of some editors, like the ones from Life magazine who had feared repercussions from publishing an excerpt from the forthcoming Stalin in which Lenin’s possible poisoning was mentioned. Mexico’s festive atmosphere, despite the war, reached all the way to the walls of Coyoacán, and although it didn’t manage to put out all the embers of the sadness the Trotskys carried with them, it reminded them that, even in the most difficult circumstances, life always tended to put itself back together and make itself tolerable . . .

  Among the visitors he received that season was Sylvia Ageloff, the sister of the efficient Ruth and Hilda, who occasionally assisted him as translators or secretaries in his relations with American Trotskyists. Just like her sisters, Sylvia proved to be a dedicated militant but, above all, a very useful person because of the help she rendered when Fanny Yanovitch fell ill. In addition to English, the girl spoke French, Spanish, and Russian perfectly and was a quick typist . . . But poor Sylvia was also one of the least graceful women that Lev Davidovich had ever met. She was just a little over five feet high, she was thin to the point of emaciation (her arms looked like strings and he imagined that her thighs were the width of his fist), and her face was full of reddish freckles. To top it off, she wore thick glasses, and although her voice had a warmth that was almost seductive, without a doubt she had less taste in fashion than any woman he had ever met. Sylvia’s physical shortcomings were so
noteworthy that Natalia and the Exile discussed them more than once (they had also been the subject of conversation among the bodyguards), and it caused quite a stir when it was learned that Sylvia had a boyfriend . . . and not just anyone, they said, but one who seemed to be well-off, the son of diplomats, and, as Natalia herself would add, very good-looking and five years younger than she was. It went to show that, in questions of love, nothing is written in stone, and beneath any skirt a beast could be hiding. There was so much gossip over the discovery that Lev Davidovich was curious to see the trophy the young woman had snared.

  On March 12, the Soviet Union had to sign an onerous peace treaty with Finland, through which they obtained just a few strips of the original territory they were after. The Red Army’s fiasco had turned into the proof of its weakness. Lev Davidovich saw that episode as a warning: while Stalin was failing in Finland, Hitler and his divisions had invaded and occupied Denmark in just twenty-four hours.

  Later, when Norway was invaded by the Nazis and fell in just a few days, Lev Davidovich knew that the prophecy he had hurled at Trygve Lie three years earlier was on the verge of fulfilling itself: his repressors of yesteryear were turning into political exiles themselves and suffering the humiliation of being refugees with conditions imposed on them. He was sure that their hosts would not be as cruel with them as they had been with him, but the king and the Norwegian ministers would perhaps remember him and the way in which they had treated him.

  In those first months of 1940, the temperature of the war of the Mexican Stalinists against the Exile rose. Laborde and Campa had been thrown out, and now other leaders were being decapitated for the same sin: that of not being sufficiently “anti-Trotsky.” His instinct told him that something was being planned, and it wasn’t good. Amid those purges, they celebrated May Day with a parade strikingly similar to the ones the Nazis and the fascists were organizing in Berlin and Rome: twenty thousand irate Communists gathered by the Mexican Communist Party and the Workers’ Central, but instead of yelling slogans against the war, they had written on their flags OUT WITH TROTSKY! TROTSKY FASCIST! TROTSKY TRAITOR! Perhaps out of a remote sense of modesty they had not written what they yelled most arduously: “Death to Trotsky!” . . . That negativity had put the inhabitants and guards of the fortress-house on alert, since people wrote and yelled like that when they were willing to brandish a gun. The bodyguards adopted new precautions (they placed machine guns in the small windows), they brought more volunteers from the United States, and outside the house they put together a ten-man police guard. Would all of these measures be worth anything? Could they stop the insidious hand that would find its way in through a crack that would be impossible to see with the naked eye? Lev Davidovich asked himself when he watched that armed multitude that surrounded him. And it bothered him, knowing the response beforehand: he was a condemned man and, when they wanted to, they would kill him.

  One day, when Alfred Rosmer got sick, Lev Davidovich finally saw Sylvia’s boyfriend, since it was the young man who took Alfred to the clinic and insisted on paying for his medicine. According to Marguerite, Sylvia had not wanted to introduce her boyfriend because he had problems with his papers and was in Mexico illegally; according to Natalia, always sharp, the girl’s fear was due to the boyfriend being involved in certain murky businesses from which he earned the money that he spent so freely. Hopefully, poor Sylvia won’t lose him, the Exile would remark to his wife.

  May 23 had been a routine day in the house. Lev Davidovich had worked a lot and he felt exhausted when he ran out in the afternoon to feed his rabbits, helped by Seva and accompanied by Azteca. At some point he spoke with Harold Robbins and asked that they not maintain their habitual educational talks with the new guys in the guard that evening, since he was exhausted and had slept poorly for several nights. After dinner, he talked for a while with his wife and the Rosmers, then returned to his study to organize the documents that he intended to work with the following morning. A little earlier than usual, he took a sleeping pill to find the rest he needed so much and went to bed.

  Despite the fact that he had spent twelve years waiting for it, on occasion he was capable of forgetting that, that very day, perhaps during the most peaceful moment of the evening, death could knock on his door. In the best Soviet way, he had learned to live with that expectation, to carry its imminence as if it were a tight-fitting shirt. And he’d already decided that he should keep moving forward in the meantime. Although he didn’t fear death, and at times even desired it, an almost sick sense of duty compelled him to take a variety of measures to evade it. Perhaps because of that same mechanism of self-defense, when the explosions woke him, he thought that they were fireworks and rockets being set off in some feria being celebrated in Coyoacán around that time. He understood that they were gunshots and that they were coming from very close by only when Natalia pushed him from the bed and threw him to the floor. Had the hour of his departure arrived, just like that, when he was dressed in a nightgown and curled up against a wall? Lev Davidovich even had time to consider it a very undecorous way to die. Would he end up laid out with his nightshirt raised and his privates exposed? The condemned man closed his legs and readied himself to die.

  24

  One tiring and typically sweaty afternoon in 1993, the screw that kept me connected to Ramón Mercader’s story turned again. I had barely left the bag loaded with bananas, malangas, and mangoes on the floor, and put away the bike on which I had gone to and from Melena del Sur in search of those provisions, when Ana gave me the strange news that I had received a package in the mail. I don’t even know how many years it had been since I received so much as a letter, less still a package. The friends who left the island wrote once, at most twice, and never did so again, urged to separate themselves from a past that pierced them and that we reminded them of. As I gulped down a liter of sugar-spiked water, I examined the manila envelope with the CERTIFIED notice stamped across it and read the name of the sender written in the corner, Germán Sánchez, and the address of the post office in Marianao, at the other end of the city.

  With a cigarette in my mouth, I opened the envelope and immediately noticed that the name of the sender was false. The item sent was a book, published in Spain, and it was written precisely by someone named Germán Sánchez and by Luis Mercader—a book in which, according to the title, Luis relayed, with the help of the journalist Germán Sánchez, the life of his brother Ramón. The first thing I did, of course, was flip through the book and, upon discovering that it had photos, look at them until I ran into an image that stirred my insides. That big-headed, almost square man with aged features behind his tortoiseshell glasses, that man whose eyes looked at me from the work by Germán Sánchez and Luis Mercader was—there was no longer any doubt—an assassin and also, of course, the man who loved dogs.

  I think I’d had the greatest suspicion that Jaime López was not Jaime López at the moment in which he confirmed that Ramón had continued to hear Trotsky’s scream forever. The tone of his voice and the dampness of his look warned me that he was talking about something intimate and painful. A few years later, the letter brought by the nurse moved me a little closer to the belief that the man who loved dogs could be none other than Ramón Mercader himself, no matter how extraordinary the palpable existence, on a Cuban beach, of that character whose presence seemed inconceivable, since reason told me that he had been devoured by history many years before. Weren’t Trotsky, his life and his death, bookish and remote references? How could someone escape from history to wander around with two dogs and a cigarette in his mouth on a beach in my reality? With those questions and suspicions, I had tried to leave some room for doubt, I think, above all, with the intent of protecting myself. It wasn’t pleasant for anyone to be convinced that he had a relationship of trust and closeness with a murderer, that he has shaken the hand with which a man was killed, that he has shared coffee, cigarettes, and even very private personal discomforts with that person . . . And it is less pleasant f
or it to turn out to be that that murderer was precisely the author of one of the most ruthless, calculated, and useless crimes in history. The margin of doubt that I had preserved had given me, nonetheless, a certain peace that ended up being especially necessary when I decided to delve into that story through which, among others, I searched for the reasons that had moved Ramón Mercader—the last truths that perhaps his omniscient friend Jaime López would have never confessed to me. But with the fall of the last parapet, when I found that image, I would always have the certainty that I had never spoken with Jaime López but rather with that man who had once been Ramón Mercader del Río, and also the certainty that Ramón had told me, precisely me (why the hell was it me?), the truth of his life, at least in the way that he understood it—his truth and his life.