The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  The great mystery was how the assailants had managed to enter the compound. The missing Bob Sheldon had been in charge of guarding the main door, and there were two reasons he would have allowed the assailants to enter without consulting with the head of the guard: either Sheldon, previously infiltrated, had always been part of the commando unit, or he had opened to someone who was so familiar that he thought it was unnecessary to consult with anyone.

  When the police arrived, Lev Davidovich was still dressed in his nightshirt. Before talking to his old acquaintance Leandro Sánchez Salazar, the head of the secret police in the capital, he asked that they let him change, although he warned Salazar that he knew who was responsible for the events in the house, which still smelled like gunpowder . . .

  General José Manuel Núñez, director of the national police, assured Lev Davidovich that General Cárdenas had instructed him to personally follow the investigations, and the officer had guaranteed the president that he would find and arrest those responsible. As he did with Salazar, the Exile responded that the task should be easy, since the intellectual author of the attack was Joseph Stalin, and the material authors were agents of the Soviet secret police and members of the Mexican Communist Party. If they arrested those responsible for the party, they would have in their hands the executors of the attack.

  General Núñez did not like those words very much (the same ones the Exile would repeat to the press), nor did Colonel Sánchez Salazar, with whom Lev Davidovich had already had to speak several times since his arrival in Mexico and who had always seemed to him like a typical smart aleck who had opinions about everything. Sánchez Salazar’s opinion, on this occasion, was insulting, since the policeman thought the attack could have been nothing other than an assault prepared by the Trotskys themselves to call attention to themselves and put the blame on Stalin . . . If his experience had not taught him to seek ulterior motives behind everything, the Exile would have been able to understand that Salazar would think that way: what had happened was suspicious and Sheldon’s disappearance didn’t help. The colonel also commented that he didn’t understand how it was possible that, following such a violent attack, the old man could be so calm and in control of his actions and thoughts. It was obvious that the colonel didn’t know him.

  Looking to corroborate his thesis, Salazar detained the secretaries Otto Schüssler and Charles Cornell with the excuse that he needed to interrogate them to collect as much information as possible. He also left with all of the servants: the cook Carmen Palma, who cried when they took her away; Belén Estrada, the cleaning lady; and Melquíades Benítez, the handyman.

  Lev Davidovich would read with shock that the press was initially reporting that Diego Rivera was the possible leader of the attack. That rumor came about because while he was neutralizing the policeman watching the house, the one who seemed to be the head of the assailants had launched cries against Cárdenas and yelled “Viva Almazán!” But Sánchez Salazar’s declarations, that the attack had been staged by the Trotskys, got more attention than the Rivera possibility, and the communist press used the theory of a fake attack to accuse the Exile of wanting to destabilize the government and create a crisis in the Soviet Union—arguments that served them marvelously as they asked for his expulsion from Mexico with renewed fury. What most outraged Lev Davidovich was the realization that, with his version, Salazar was insulating himself from failure. After all, the attack had been prepared and executed without the secret police having the least idea of what was happening.

  Nonetheless, despite the sixty-three shots in the bed, Lev Davidovich would continue to harbor doubts about the intentions of that attack. He came to wonder whether it had not been just a bluff, like the fires in Turkey, and that this time the purpose was to prepare the setting for a definitive action. When he confessed his worries to Natalia, she immediately began to take new security measures, and he reproached her for spending so much money, since it was obvious that when the assassins wanted to come in, they would enter. Besides, he was convinced that the next attack was not going to be the same. As he warned in his letter to the American Jew, the next time it would be a lone man, a professional, who would come from underground, like a mole, without them being able to do anything to avoid it.

  Just one week after the attack, Lev Davidovich said goodbye to the Rosmers. If at another time he would have lamented very much a departure that deprived him of the proximity of good and old friends, at that moment he was almost happy, since he felt responsible for their lives while they were with him. Friendship, like almost all the simple and necessary human satisfactions, had ended up turning into a burden for him. He lived with the memory of those who were his friends, more than those who were capable of resisting the pressures, the attacks, and his own political stubborness. The wake of affections he had left behind was painful: many had died, violently; others had rejected him, and in the cruelest ways; others still had moved away from him, out of sincere or feigned distance from his ideas, his past, his present. Because of that he had come to wonder whether the fate of all those who handed themselves over to political causes was to die in solitude. That tended to be the price of altruism, of power, and, above all, of defeat. But not because of that did he cease to lament the losses of friends for which he had been to blame owing to his political fundamentalism; when blinded by the glitter of politics, he was incapable of understanding the difference between the circumstantial and the permanent. The most insidious trap, he told himself, had been turning politics into a peremptory passion, as he had done, and of having allowed its demands to blind him to the point of placing it above the most human values and conditions. At that point in his life, when very little was left of the utopia for which he had fought, he recognized himself as the loser of the present who still dreams and consoles himself with the reparation that could come in the future.

  The evening before the Rosmers’ trip, Lev Davidovich learned that, from the day in which Alfred got sick, the couple had become friends with Sylvia’s boyfriend and the youngster had offered to take them to Veracruz, where they would take the ship to New York on their way to France. Jacson, as that Belgian man said he was called, appeared to be a handsome man, although a little slow catching on. The morning of the departure, Lev Davidovich was feeding the rabbits for the first time when the young man approached him, interested in the animals’ breed. Lev Davidovich had then felt rage against the presence of a stranger in the house, but he recalled that the Rosmers had invited him and, by his looks, deduced who he was. Still annoyed, he responded anyway, making his disgust obvious, and Jacson had discreetly withdrawn. Later on, he would see him talking to Seva, for whom he had brought a gift, and he was ashamed of his attitude. It was then that he told Natalia to invite him to breakfast, but the young man accepted only a cup of tea.

  The decision to return to France with the Nazis knocking on Paris’s doors had seemed to him an attitude worthy of Alfred Rosmer’s greatness. As he tended to do, that morning he shook his friend’s hand, gave a kiss to Marguerite, asked them to take care of themselves, then went to his study, since he didn’t want to see them leave. At his age and with the GPU breathing down his neck, he assumed all farewells were definitive . . . At the house, with more men on watch and more tension, the couple’s absence was immediately noticeable.

  Finding that his cacti were the main victims of the attack caused Lev Davidovich real disgust. Several had been stepped on, others had lost their arms, and he worked for days to save them, although he knew well that with all his effort he was only looking to bring back a certain normalcy to the life of a house that had never had it and, until the end, would live in a permanent state of war.

  During all those events something had made a favorable impression on the Exile: Seva’s character. The boy was just fourteen years old and behaved with integrity. He didn’t seem nervous and said he was worried about his grandparents, not himself. Just thinking that something serious could have happened to him made Lev Davidovich feel sick. To
have made him come from France just so they could kill him here would be something he couldn’t withstand. Because of that, when he saw him playing in the yard with Azteca, he felt great pain over the fate that without meaning to he had saddled him with. It was ironic that he had fought to build a better world and that around him he had only managed to generate pain, death, and humiliation. The best testimony to his failure was the heartbreaking presence of a boy confined within four bulletproof walls when he should be playing soccer in a field in Moscow or Odessa.

  Thanks to Lev Davidovich’s persistence, President Cárdenas ordered the release of his assistants and Lev Davidovich wrote a statement trying to put things in perspective. In addition to accusing Stalin and the GPU—as he insisted on calling the Kremlin’s secret police—of attacking his house and of the deaths of Liova and Klement in Paris, of Erwin Wolf in Barcelona, of Ignace Reiss in Lausanne, he asked for the interrogation of the Mexican communist leaders, especially Lombardo Toledano and the painter Alfaro Siqueiros, who had been missing since the day of the attack. Would the Mexican judges be brave enough to do what the French and the Norwegians had never done? Would the investigators take the truth by the horns?

  As could be expected, his new article was met with fury by the Stalinists. El Popular, the newspaper of the Workers’ Confederation, published an essay by a certain Enrique Ramírez in which he asserted that Trotsky had organized the whole attack in order to blame the Communists. Meanwhile, from his hiding place, Siqueiros made a sarcastic statement in which he also accused Trotsky of having attacked himself. The way in which those men, who called themselves Communists, rolled around in lies and used them even to defend crimes deeply disgusted him.

  But Lev Davidovich’s statement achieved the desired effect when Sánchez Salazar saw himself forced to admit that “new” evidence had led him to discard the hypothesis that Lev Davidovich himself had orchestrated the attack. That evidence, nonetheless, also managed to fill the Exile with doubt, as the policeman insisted that only with collaboration on the inside would it have been possible for the assailants to enter. They believed the inside man was Bob Sheldon.

  That young man had arrived at the house seven weeks before the attack. Like other bodyguards whom Lev Davidovich had employed in Mexico, he came “certified” by his comrades in New York, but Salazar insisted that it was impossible for Trotsky to guarantee that Sheldon had not been trained by the NKVD. Although the policeman’s logic was irrefutable, Lev Davidovich responded that it was absurd to consider Sheldon an infiltrated man. What he didn’t tell him, nor would he ever tell him, was that he couldn’t accept that theory because it would prove that not even his closest collaborators were trustworthy. It would also show the plausibility of the Soviet secret police’s favorite trick: making it seem that his death was the work of a Trotskyist militant who had attacked him over some political disagreement.

  In the middle of that wave of accusations, allegations, and insults, some American followers proposed to Lev Davidovich that he travel clandestinely to the United States, where they would hide him. Without even thinking about it, he refused. His time for clandestine struggle had passed and he had no right to disappear to save his own life, especially at a moment in which the future of human civilization was being decided. “My naked head has to withstand until the end of the infernal black night: it is my fate and I must accept it,” he wrote to them as he forced himself to return to normalcy, even when attempting it seemed absurd. He lived in a house that reminded him of the first jail he had been held in, forty years before, since the bulletproof doors made the same noise. But at the same time he felt strong and animated, and because of that, when he felt that he was suffocating in his imprisonment, he defied all of his protectors’ safeguards and took up his excursions to the countryside again.

  With that impulse, which he knew was epilogical, he sat down to give shape to his final will and testament. “For forty-three years of my conscious life, I have been a revolutionary,” he wrote, “and for forty-two, I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again, I would try to avoid this or that mistake, but the general course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, but rather more firm today, than it was in the days of my youth.”

  At that point he must have lifted his gaze from the page. It had to appear to him so revealing that the entire life of a man who had been at the summit of his epoch could be summarized in those few words: surely he was at the point of laughing—for the first time in many days. All of the struggles, the suffering, the successes, and the vanities could be expressed with such simplicity? What resistance could the monuments, the titles, the fury and glory of power, offer before that incorruptible reality, more powerful than any human will? He was thinking this at the precise moment when he saw his wife approaching across the patio, making a small gesture of greeting. She opened a window wide to permit a breeze to enter his study. From his seat he could see the grass border at the foot of the wall, a flowering bougainvillea, the profile of some cacti, the Mexican sky of that clear blue, and the light of the sun everywhere. “Life is beautiful, the senses celebrate its festival . . . May the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the utmost,” he added to what was written, calling up the vital burst of that moment.

  Lev Davidovich had never imagined that preparing himself for his end through the writing of his last will could provide him with such compact calm. With very few words he managed to resolve the practical things in his life: he left his wife, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova, his literary rights, since the money that his books would yield was the only material thing he could bequeath her, and she was the only beneficiary possible after the profound sifting to which his family had been subjected. The house, which they had at last managed to buy, had been put in Natalia’s name, and his archives had already been sold to protect them from the GPU. There was nothing else. When he thought about what he had and what he had lost, the losses were so numerous that he felt he had died several years before and was now enjoying an extension, something like a coda to the history of his life in which his will no longer intervened. He felt as if he was enjoying an extemporaneous lucidity that had been awarded to him so he could take a look at events that didn’t come to a close with the exit of the main character.

  “I am sixty years old and my body wants to collect payment for the excesses to which I submitted it. I hope it gives me a quick end, that it doesn’t force me to suffer a long agony, like Lenin. But if this were the case and I find it impossible to lead a life that was moderately normal, I want to reserve a decision to put an end to my existence: I have always thought that a clean suicide is preferable to a dirty death.” But Lev Davidovich didn’t write that the origins of that feeling of a bad end came from very far away, both in time and in space. His death, planned many years before in an office of the Kremlin, was now among Stalin’s priorities, but not, as some said, out of fear of the words Lev Davidovich poured into the biography he was writing: Stalin felt himself above words. Why, then? For years the man from the mountains had devoted himself to exterminating his party followers to make sure, like the gangster he had always been, that an avenging hand would not be able to come for him out of the darkness; besides, he had isolated Lev Davidovich and knew very well that, for the Exile, it was more and more difficult to place himself at the front of the new communist movement, as demonstrated by the farce that the Fourth International had become. The danger to the life of the political exile had begun precisely when Stalin felt that he had squeezed all the juice out of him that he needed to feed his repressions inside and outside the Soviet Union. And, like an obsolete machine, he had decided to send him to the junk yard and avoid any risk of a reactivation.

  “My squalid material legacy completed,” he started to write again, “I want to take advantage of this testa
ment to remember that, besides the happiness of having been a fighter for the socialist cause, I’ve had the fortune of being able to share my life with a woman like Natalia Sedova, capable of giving me sons like Liova and Seriozha. Throughout almost forty years of shared life, she has been an inexhaustible source of tenderness and magnanimity. She has experienced great suffering. But I find some consolation in the certainty that she has also known days of happiness. I lament not having been able to give her more of these days: it only brings me relief to know that, in the essential things, I never deceived her. Ever since I met her, she knew that she was committed to a man led by the idea of the revolution, and she never felt like this was an adversary, but rather a companion in the journey of life, that has been that of the struggle for a better world.” He signed each one of the pages, sealed them, and tried to forget them.

  In reality, it was his wife’s support that most encouraged Lev Davidovich to keep going. He knew that she suffered, but she did so in silence, because her character prevented her from weakening. She continued directing the fortification of the house (the walls were made higher, all of the doors were made bulletproof, and the windows were covered with steel curtains), organizing life in the house, and helping Seva regain the Russian language while she kept waiting for, against all evidence, some news that would confirm that Seriozha was still alive. When he saw his Natasha, hardworking and tenacious, and remembered his past indiscretions, a cold shame ran through his body and he concluded that only while affected by transitory madness could he have committed acts that made her suffer.

  Outside of his personal sphere, the world was also falling apart. That fourteenth of July, “The Marseillaise” had not been sung at the place de la Bastille, since the Nazis were already in Paris. The campaign had been so devastating that they barely needed thirty-nine days to bring proud France to its knees. Lev Davidovich couldn’t stop thinking about Alfred and Marguerite, since he didn’t have any idea of what could be happening to them and to the rest of his French followers. But it was more painful for him to listen to the declaration of support for the Third Reich formulated by the Soviet chancellor, the infamous Molotov, and to see the proof of the agreement to repartition Europe concluded by Hitler and Stalin the previous year, as shown by the “annexation” of the Baltic republics to the Soviet empire.