The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  That same night, after dinner, I began to read the book. As I went on, I concluded that only one person could send me that work and put the last details of that story in my hands—justifications, hypocrisies, silences, and revenge through Luis’s mouth—including the painful exit from this world of Ramón Mercader, which I was still unaware of until that moment. And that person could not have been anyone other than the very black supposed nurse, unnamed and squalid, who, obviously, had to have known much more about her “patient” than, ten years before, she had told me in her sole and very brief visit. If the woman now (perhaps still connected to the family, perhaps with the sons of the man who, now without a doubt—for her as well—was a murderer) took on that work, it couldn’t be solely due to her desire to eliminate the last corners of the ignorance of that “kid” who had shared some afternoons chatting with Jaime López, in another life called Ramón Mercader, in another Jacques Mornard, in another Román Pavlovich . . .

  When I read the biography, I found that some of what I knew was confirmed by information that Luis Mercader must have known firsthand, since he had been a witness to the episodes of which he spoke. Meanwhile, other stories contradicted what I knew, and for some reason that I was unaware of at that moment, it turned out that I knew about attitudes and episodes Ramón lived through that his brother omitted or was unaware of. But the most important thing was that, once Jaime López’s identity was confirmed, Ramón Mercader’s final fate known, and the downfall of the world that had cultivated him like a poisonous flower was a reality, I felt completely free of my commitment to maintain my silence. Above all because, with that book sent by a ghost, the certainty had also reached me that the siege to which the man who loved dogs had subjected me while alive—and even after his death—could only have a reason calculated by the mind of a chess player and that was to push me silently but inexorably to write the story he had told me, though he made me promise the opposite.

  Luis Mercader’s book not only freed me of my promise to remain silent but also allowed me to add the last letters to the scattered crossword puzzle of a murderer’s life and work. My first reaction to the news was to feel sorry for myself and for all of those who, tricked and used, had ever believed in the validity of the utopia founded in, then ruined by, the country of the Soviets; more than a sense of rejection, it caused me a feeling of compassion for Mercader himself, and I think that for the first time I understood the proportions of his faith, of his fears, and the obsession with the silence he would maintain until his last breath.

  The second reaction was to tell Ana the entire story, since I felt I would burst if I didn’t pop the pus-filled pimple of fear once and for all. So I told her that, if Luis Mercader had relayed a part of his brother’s life, I at last felt willing and in the intellectual and physical condition to write the story, whatever may happen.

  “I don’t understand, Iván, I don’t understand, for God’s sake I really don’t,” Ana would say to me emphatically and (I knew) full of bitterness over the part of the deception that she had to live through herself. “How is it possible for a writer to stop feeling like a writer? Worse still, how can he stop thinking like a writer? How is it that in all this time you didn’t dare to write anything? Didn’t it occur to you to think that at twenty-eight, God had put this story in your hands that could be turned into your novel, the big one . . .”

  I stopped talking, nodding my head for each of her statements and questions, and then I responded:

  “It didn’t occur to me because it couldn’t occur to me, because I didn’t want it to occur to me, and I searched for every excuse to forget it every time it tried to occur to me. Or do you not know what country we live in right now? Do you have any idea how many writers stopped writing and turned into nothing or, worse still, into anti-writers and were never again able to take flight? Who could bet on things ever changing? Do you know what it is to feel marginalized, forbidden, buried alive at the age of thirty, thirty-five, when you can really begin to be a serious writer, and thinking that the marginalization is forever, to the end of time, or at least until the end of your fucking life?”

  “But what could they do to you?” she insisted. “Did they kill you?”

  “No, they didn’t kill me.”

  “So . . . so . . . what terrible thing could they do to you? Censor your book? What else?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?” She jumped, offended, I think.

  “They make you nothing. Do you know what it is to turn into nothing? Because I do know, because I myself turned into nothing . . . And I also know what it is to feel fear.”

  So I told her about all of those forgotten writers who not even they themselves remembered, those who wrote the empty and obliging literature of the seventies and eighties, practically the only kind of literature that one could imagine and compose under the ubiquitous layer of suspicion, intolerance, and national uniformity. And I told her about those who, like myself, innocent and credulous, earned ourselves a “corrective” for having barely dipped our toes, and about those who, after a stay in the inferno of nothing, tried to return and did so with lamentable books, also empty and obliging, with which they achieved an always-conditional pardon and the mutilated feeling that they were writers again because they once more saw their names in print.

  Like Rimbaud in his days in Harar, I had preferred to forget that literature existed. Further still, like Isaak Babel—and it’s not that I’m comparing myself with him or with others, for God’s sake—I had opted to write silence. At least with my mouth closed, I could feel at peace with myself and keep my fears in check.

  When the crisis of the 1990s became more intense, Ana, Tato the poodle, and I were on the verge of dying of starvation, like so many people in a dark country, paralyzed and in the midst of falling apart. Despite everything, I think that for six or seven years, the most difficult and fucked-up of a total and interminable crisis, Ana and I were happy in our stoic and hungry way. That human harmony that saved me from sinking was a true life lesson. In the last years of my marriage with Raquelita, when that bonanza of the 1980s was becoming normal and everything seemed to indicate that the bright future was beginning to turn on its lights—there was food, there was clothing (socialist and ugly, but still clothing and food), there were buses, sometimes even taxis, and houses on the beach that we could rent with our salaries—my inability to be happy prevented me from enjoying, along with my wife and my children, what life was offering me. In contrast, when that false equilibrium disappeared with the end of the Soviet Union and the crisis began, Ana’s presence and love gave me a will to live, to write, to fight for something that was inside and outside me, like in the distant years in which, with all my enthusiasm, I had cut sugarcane, planted coffee, and written a few stories pushed by the faith and the most solid confidence in the future—not just mine but the future of everyone . . .

  Because urban transport had practically disappeared, from the beginning of the nineties, five days a week I pedaled on my Chinese bicycle the six miles to get there, and six to return, that separated my house from the veterinary school. In a few months I ended up so thin that more than once, looking at my profile in a mirror, I couldn’t do anything but ask myself if a devouring cancer hadn’t invaded my body. As far as she was concerned, Ana would suffer—as a result of the daily exercise on her bicycle, the lack of necessary calories, and bad genetic luck—the worst consequences of those terrible years, since, like many other people, she was diagnosed with a vitamin-deficient polyneuritis (the same one that spread across the German concentration camps) that, in her case, would later turn into an irreversible osteoporosis, a prelude to the cancer that would eventually kill her.

  Devoted to taking care of Ana at the start of her illnesses (she was almost blind for a few months), in 1993 I chose to leave the job at the veterinary school when I received the opportunity to establish a first aid clinic in an unoccupied room close to our house. From that moment on, with the con
sent (but not a shred of support) of the local powers, I turned into the neighborhood amateur veterinarian, tasked with the immunization campaigns against rabies. Although in reality it wasn’t a lot of money, I earned three times as much as my old salary, and I earmarked every peso obtained to finding food for my wife. Once a week, to stretch out my scarce funds, I climbed upon my bike and went to Melena del Sur, twenty miles from the city, to purchase fruits and vegetables directly from the countryside and to trade my abilities as a castrator and worm remover of pigs for a bit of meat and some eggs. If a few months earlier I had seemed like a cancer patient, the new efforts had turned me into a ghost, and to this day even I can’t explain to myself how I came out alive and lucid from that war for survival, which even included everything from operating on the vocal cords of hundreds of urban pigs to silence their shrill cries to getting into a fistfight (in which knives even came out) with the veterinarian who tried to steal my clients in Melena del Sur. At the bottom of the abyss, accosted on all sides, instincts can be stronger than beliefs, I learned.

  Besides the slow and stumbling work of writing to which I returned after receiving Luis Mercader’s book—I had never had any idea of how difficult it could be to really write, with responsibility and a view of the consequences and, to top it off, trying to get into the head of someone who existed, and resolving to think and feel like him—that dark and hostile period had the reward of allowing me to completely bring forth from within myself what should really have been my life’s vocation: from the rustic and basic clinic I had established in the neighborhood, not only did I vaccinate dogs and castrate or silence pigs, but I was also able to devote myself to helping all of those who, like myself, loved animals, especially dogs. Sometimes I didn’t even know where to get the medicines and instruments to keep the clinic doors open, and there were days on which even aspirin disappeared from the island and the School of Veterinary Medicine recommended curing skin diseases with chamomile fermentations or feverfew and intestinal problems with massages and prayers to St. Luis Beltrán. The nominal fees I charged the animals’ owners barely covered my expenses and would not have been enough for Ana and me to survive. My reputation as a good person, more than as an efficient veterinarian, spread in the area and people came to see me with animals as thin as they were (can you imagine a thin snake?) and, almost against all reason in those dark days, gave me medicines, stitches, bandages they had left over for some reason, as a display of solidarity between the fucked, which is the only true kind. And being a part of that solidarity in which Ana involved herself whenever she could—many times she was my assistant in the vaccinations, the sterilizations, and the massive worm removals that I organized—removed from me any pretension of recognition or personal transcendence and was elemental in making me the person who seemed like the one I had always wanted to be, the one who, even now, I have most liked being.

  Although I still hadn’t begun to go to church with Ana, Dany, Frank, and the few other friends I saw told me I seemed to be working toward my candidacy for beatification and for my ascent to heaven. What was true was that reading and writing about how the greatest utopia men had ever had within their reach had been perverted, diving into the catacombs of a story that seemed more like divine punishment than the work of men drunk with power, eager for control, and with pretensions of historical transcendence, I had learned that true human grandeur lay in the practice of kindness without conditions, in the capacity of giving to those who had nothing, but not what we have left over but rather a part of what little we have—giving until it hurts without practicing the deceitful philosophy of forcing others to accept our concepts of good and truth because (we believe) they’re the only possible ones and because, besides, they should be grateful for what we give them, even when they didn’t ask for it. And although I knew that my cosmogony was entirely impractical (so what the hell do we do with the economy, money, property, so that all of this works? And what about the predestined ones and those born sons of bitches?), it satisfied me to think that perhaps one day humans would be able to cultivate that philosophy, which seemed so basic, without suffering labor pains or the trauma of being forced, out of pure and free will, out of the ethical need to show solidarity and be democratic. My mental masturbations . . .

  Because of that, in silence and also in pain, I was letting myself be dragged toward writing, although without knowing if I would ever dare to show anyone what I had written, or to seek out a greater destiny, since those options didn’t interest me too much. I was only convinced that the exercise of recovering a vanished memory had a lot to do with my responsibility to face life—rather, to face my life. If fate had made me the repository of a cruel and exemplary story, my duty as a human was to preserve it, to extract it from the tsunami of oblivion.

  The accumulated need to share the weight of that story that pursued me—along with the repulsion of memories and blame that the visit we made to Cojímar would cause—were the reasons for which I decided to also tell my friend Daniel the details of my relationship with that slippery individual whom I had named “the man who loved dogs.”

  Everything came to a head on a summer afternoon in 1994, just when we had hit bottom and it seemed that all the crisis needed was to chew us a few more times in order to swallow us. It wasn’t easy, but that day I pulled Dany out of his apathy and we went to Cojímar on our bicycles, set to witness the spectacle of the moment: the massive exodus, in the least imaginable boats and in daylight, of hundreds, thousands of men, women, and children who were making the most of the border opening decreed by the government to throw themselves to the sea on any floating object, loaded with their desperation, their exhaustion, and their hunger, in search of other horizons.

  The establishment, for three or four years, of blackouts lasting eight and even twelve hours daily had served to enable Dany and me to become close again. Since his blackout area (Luyano I) was on the border with mine (Lawton II), we discovered that, in general, when there was no electricity at his house, there was at mine and vice versa. Always on our bicycles, and most times with our respective wives on the back, we tended to transfer ourselves from darkness to light to watch a movie or a boring baseball game on television (the announcers and the baseball players were thinner, the stadiums almost empty) or simply to talk and be able to see each other’s faces.

  Dany, who around that time was still working at the publishing house as the head of the marketing department, was now the one who’d stopped writing. The two short story collections and the two novels he had published in the 1980s had turned him into one of the hopes of Cuban literature, always so full of hope and . . . The fact is that, reading those books, you noticed that in his storytelling there was a dramatic force capable of penetration, with narrative possibilities, but someone with my training could also see that he lacked the necessary daring to jump into the void and risk everything in his writing. There was in his literature something elusive, an intention to search that was suddenly interrupted when the precipice came into view, a lack of final decisiveness to cross the curtain of fire and touch the painful parts of reality. Since I knew him well, I knew that his writings were a mirror of his attitude in the face of life. But now, overwhelmed by the crisis and the almost certain impossibility of publishing in Cuba, he’d fallen into a literary depression from which I tried to bring him out during our nighttime talks. My main argument was that Dany should make the most of his empty days to ponder and write, even if it was by candlelight. That’s how the great Cuban writers of the nineteenth century had done it; besides, his case wasn’t like mine, since he was a writer and couldn’t cease to be so (Ana looked at me silently when I touched on this subject), and writers write. The saddest thing was that my words didn’t seem to produce (actually, didn’t produce) any effect at all, and the passion that pushed him forward in his literary calling must have left him, so that he, always so disciplined, just let the days float by, busy perfecting his strategies of survival and the search for his next meal, like almost a
ll of the island’s inhabitants. On one of those nights, while we were talking about the matter, I proposed that we make an excursion to Cojímar the following day to see with our own eyes what was happening there.

  The spectacle we found turned out to be devastating. While groups of men and women, with tables, metal tanks, tires, nails, and ropes devoted themselves along the coast to giving shape to those artifacts on which they would throw themselves into the sea, other groups arrived in trucks loaded with their already-built boats. Each time one of them arrived, the masses ran to the truck and, after applauding for the recently arrived as if they were the heroes of some athletic feat, some threw themselves at helping them unload their precious boats, while others, with wads of dollars in their hands, tried to buy a space for the crossing.

  In the middle of the chaos, wallets and oars were stolen. Businesses had been set up and were selling barrels of drinking water, compasses, food, hats, sunglasses, cigarettes, matches, lights, and plaster images of the protecting Virgins of La Caridad del Cobre, the patroness of Cuba, and of Regla, Queen of the Sea, and there were even rooms to be rented for amorous goodbyes and bathrooms for greater needs, since the lesser ones were taken care of on the rocks, shamelessly. The police who had to guarantee order watched with their eyes fogged over by confusion, and only intervened reluctantly to calm people down when violence broke out. Meanwhile, a group of people were singing alongside some boys who had arrived with a pair of guitars, as if they were at a camping ground; others argued over the number of passengers that could be taken on a balsa raft so many feet long and talked about the first thing they would eat upon arriving in Miami or about the million-dollar businesses they would start there; and the rest, close to the reefs, were helping the ones launching their craft into the sea and bidding them goodbye with applause, cheers, promises to see each other soon, over there, even farther: way over there. I think I will never forget the big, voluminous black man with his baritone voice who, from his floating balsa raft, yelled at the coast: “Caballero, last one out has to turn off the light in the Morro,” and immediately began to sing, in Paul Robeson’s voice: “Siento un bombo, mamita, m’están llamando . . .”