The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  Since Seva still hadn’t returned from school, Azteca was sleeping at the door of his study. The mutt had grown into a beautiful dog, though a beauty different from Maya’s aristocratic one, but definitively attractive. Who does Azteca love more, Seva or me? he asked himself, and smiled. Observing the dog, he remembered that he had to feed the rabbits. He went out to the yard and put on his thick gloves, and for several minutes his mind was occupied only with the activity he was carrying out. His rabbits were also beautiful, he thought, and for a few moments he felt far away from the world’s sorrows. It was then that he heard the jail-like screeching of the door. Jacson, he confirmed, as he cursed the moment when he had agreed to see him again. I’ll finish with him as quickly as I can, he thought, and for the last time in his life Lev Davidovich Trotsky caressed the rabbits’ soft fur and directed some words of love to the dog by his side.

  27

  The moment he crossed the armored threshold of the fortress in Coyoacán and saw, in the middle of the yard, the table covered by a tablecloth of bright Mexican colors, he felt how he was regaining control of himself. The fury that had accompanied him all day disappeared, like dust swept away by the wind.

  Ever since Ramón returned to the hotel the night before, the dry aftertaste of the cognac and the bitterness of an explosive rage had settled in his stomach, inducing him to vomit. The belief that his will, his capacity to decide for himself, had evaporated began to besiege him and lead him to feel like an instrument of powerful designs in whose mechanisms he had been enshared, refused any possibility to turn back. The certainty that in three, four, five days he would enter the murky current of history as a murderer caused him an unhealthy mix of militant pride over the action he would carry out and repulsion toward himself over the way in which he had to do it. Several times he asked himself if it wouldn’t have been preferable, for him and for the cause, for his life to have ended beneath the tracks of an Italian tank at Madrid’s doors, like his brother Pablo, before thinking that his mission would only be that of draining the hate that others had accumulated and had guilefully injected into his own spirit.

  That morning, when he woke up, Sylvia had already ordered breakfast, but he barely tasted the coffee and, without saying a word, got in the shower. Ever since the last trip to New York, the woman had noticed that her lover’s affable nature had begun to turn, and the fear that the fantastic relationship could falter made her tremble with anxiety. He had explained to her that business wasn’t going well, that the renovation of the offices was delayed and cost too much, but her feminine instinct yelled that other problems were weighing down the soul of her beloved Jacques.

  Without speaking he got dressed. She, with her black slip, observed him in silence, until she dared to ask: “When are you going to tell me what’s wrong, dear?” He looked at her, almost surprised, as if only at that moment had he noticed her existence.

  “I’ve already told you: business.”

  “Just business?”

  He stopped adjusting his tie.

  “Can you leave me alone? Can you shut up for a while?”

  Sylvia thought that never in almost two years of their relationship had Jacques spoken with that hostile tone, loaded with hate, but she chose to stay silent. When he opened the door, she decided to speak again.

  “Remember that they’re expecting us today in Coyoacán.”

  “Of course I remember,” he said, violently tapping his temple, and went out.

  Ramón wandered the streets of the city center. On two occasions he drank coffee, and almost at noon his body demanded a hit and he entered the Kit Kat Club. Against his habit, he drank a glass of Hennessy advertised by the mirror behind the counter. At two in the afternoon, he opened his second packet of cigarettes that day. He wasn’t hungry, he didn’t want to talk to anyone, he only wanted time to go by and the nightmare in which he was involved to reach its end.

  A little after three he picked up Sylvia at the hotel and at four on the dot he was looking at the multicolored tablecloth spread over the forged-iron table on which they would soon take tea. At that moment he noticed how he was regaining his ability to confine Ramón under the skin of Jacques Mornard.

  Jake Cooper had accompanied them to the table, told a couple of jokes, and confirmed their dinner on Tuesday the twentieth, his day off. They agreed to see each other at Café Central at seven, since Cooper wanted to make the most of his day walking around with Jenny through the Zócalo area and the markets. The silence Jacques had maintained until that moment seemed to disappear and Sylvia would tell him that night that, evidently, visiting the fortified house in Coyoacán had been a balm for his worries.

  Just five minutes later the renegade and his wife came out of the house. Jacques Mornard observed that the old man looked exhausted and stood up to shake his hand. At that moment he understood that for the first time he was touching the incredibly soft skin of the man he would kill.

  “So at last . . . Jacson or Mornard?” the Exile asked with a sarcastic smile on his thick lips and a disquieting shine in his eagle eyes.

  “Don’t be impertinent, Liovnochek,” Natalia reprimanded him.

  “Whatever is easier, sir. ‘Jacson’ is an accident that will follow me for I don’t know how long.”

  “For quite some time,” the old man said. “This war could go on for another few years. And you know what? The longer it lasts, the more devastating it is, the more possibilities that workers will at last understand that only revolutionary action can save them as a class,” he said, as if a soapbox had been placed under his feet.

  “So what role could the Soviet Union have in that action?” Jacques dared to ask.

  “The Soviet Union needs a new revolution to bring about a great social and political but not economic change,” the renegade began. “Although the bureaucracy took all the power, the economic base of society is still socialist. And that’s a gain that can’t be lost.”

  Sylvia coughed, as if asking to change the conversation. “Lev Davidovich . . . I, like many, think that ever since Stalin signed the friendship pact with Hitler, the Soviet Union cannot consider itself a socialist country but rather an ally of imperialism,” she said. “That’s why it’s invading all of Eastern Europe.”

  The arrival of the maid with the tray, cups, pot of tea, and plate of pastries made the Exile pause for a moment. But as soon as the woman placed the tray on the table, the man jumped like a spring.

  “Dear Sylvia, that’s what the long-standing anticommunists say and now also Burnham and Shachtman to justify their break with the Fourth International. I continue to maintain that the duty of all the world’s Communists is to defend the Soviet Union if it’s attacked by the German fascists or any imperialists, because the country’s social bases are still, in and of themselves, an immense progress in the history of humanity. Despite the crimes and the prison camps, the Soviet Union has the right to defend itself and the Communists have the moral responsibility to stand together with Soviet workers to preserve the essence of the revolution . . . But if the social explosion that I expect occurs and the socialist revolution triumphs in several countries, those same workers will have the mission of helping their Soviet comrades free themselves of the gangsters of Stalinist bureaucracy. That’s why it’s so important to strengthen our International and why your friends’ attitude is so regrettable . . .”

  Jacques Mornard observed how Natalia Sedova served the tea. For a moment the smell of the recently baked pastries had alleviated his stomachache, but the Exile’s words had taken away his appetite. That man had just one passion and was always talking as if he were leading the masses, pushed by a disproportionate vehemence regarding his diminished audience, but with a very convincing and seductive logic. Ramón concluded that listening to him for too long could be dangerous and he took refuge in the evidence that the last door on the way to the fulfillment of his mission was coming into view, and he decided to focus on opening it. Within an effusiveness Sylvia was unfamiliar with, he th
en launched into supporting the Exile’s theory and criticizing the inconsistent attitudes of Burnham and Shachtman, who were removing themselves at the moment when unity was needed. Echoing his host, he criticized Stalin but defended the idea that the USSR maintained its socialist nature, and agreed with the Exile about the necessity of universal revolution, until, through some twists in the conversation, they ended up on the difficulties of the French resistance against a German army that practically controlled the whole country.

  Natalia Sedova asked the maid for a second pot of tea at the moment the front door opened and young Seva entered the yard, preceded by the joyous Azteca, who, without paying any attention to the visitors, went to the Exile. The old man smiled, petting the animal and speaking to it in Russian.

  “Do you always speak to him in Russian?” Jacques, smiling, asked after greeting Seva, over whose shoulders he even threw his arm.

  “Seva speaks to him in French, in the kitchen they speak to him in Spanish, and I speak to him in Russian,” the old man replied. “And he understands us all. The intelligence of dogs is a mystery to human beings. In many ways I think that they’re intellectually far superior to us, since they have the capacity to understand us, even in several languages, and we are the ones who do not have the intelligence to understand their language.”

  “I think you’re right . . . Seva says you’ve always had dogs.”

  “Stalin took many things away from me, even the possibility of having dogs. When they kicked me out of Moscow, I had to leave behind two, and when I went into exile, they wanted me to leave without my favorite dog, the only one I was able to take to Alma-Ata. But Maya lived with us in Turkey, and we buried her there. With her, Seva learned to love dogs. It’s true that I have always loved dogs. They have a kindness and a capacity for loyalty that go beyond that of many human beings.”

  “I also love dogs,” Jacques said, as if he were ashamed. “But it’s been years since I’ve had one. When all of this is over, I’d like to have two or three.”

  “Find yourself a borzoi, a Russian wolfhound. Maya was a borzoi. They’re the most loyal, beautiful, and intelligent dogs in the world . . . with the exception of Azteca, of course,” he said, winking and caressing the dog’s ears more, then hugging him against his chest.

  “You know? You’re the second person to tell me about those dogs. An English journalist I once met told me he had one.”

  “Listen closely, Jacson: if you ever have a borzoi, you’ll never forget me,” the old man proclaimed, and looked at his watch. He immediately patted Azteca’s side and stood up. “I should take care of the rabbits and I am also behind on some work. It has really been a pleasure talking with you and with the stubborn Sylvia.”

  “Would you like me to help you with the rabbits?” Jacques offered.

  Sylvia and Natalia smiled, perhaps since they knew the answer.

  “Don’t worry, thank you. The rabbits are not as intelligent and they get nervous with strangers.”

  Jacques stood up. He looked at the ground, as if he’d lost something, and suddenly reacted.

  “Mr. Trotsky . . . I was thinking . . . I would like to write something about the problems of the political parties in the French resistance. I know France very well, but your ideas have made me understand things differently and . . . would you do me the favor of reviewing it?”

  The old man turned toward the rabbit cages. The sun was beginning to set. With gestures that seemed mechanical, he popped the buttons on his cuffs to roll up the sleeves of his Russian shirt.

  “I promise not to steal too much of your time,” Jacques continued. “Two or three pages. If you read them, I would be more sure of not making a mistake in my analysis.”

  “When will you bring it to me?”

  “The day after tomorrow: Saturday?”

  “All I want is that you not steal a lot of my time.”

  “I promise, Mr. Trotsky.”

  With the edge of his shirt, the Exile cleaned the lenses of his glasses. He stepped toward Jacques and, with the glasses back on, looked him in the eye.

  “Jacson . . . You don’t look Belgian. Saturday at five. Make me read something interesting. Good day.”

  The renegade turned toward the rabbit cages. Jacques Mornard, with a smile frozen on his lips, was incapable of responding to his farewell. Only that night, when he placed a sheet in the typewriter, did he understand that, with his last words, the man he had to kill had breathed on his neck.

  He awoke with a headache and in a bad mood. He had barely slept despite the exhaustion he was pushed into by those three hours of effort, at the end of which he had only managed to write a couple of messy paragraphs with poorly put-together ideas. How was he going to write something that would end up being interesting to the old man? He was certain that he had again dreamed of a beach and some dogs running on the sand, and he remembered that he had awoken in anguish during the night. The conviction that everything would be over the following day, when he sank the ice axe in the skull of that renegade traitor, instead of calming him, filled him with disquiet. He took a pair of painkillers with his coffee and, when Sylvia asked him where he was going, whispered something about the office and the construction workers, and with his smudged pieces of paper he went out onto the street.

  His mentor was waiting for him in the apartment at Shirley Court, and after Ramón had relayed the details of the previous afternoon’s visit, his anxiety exploded.

  “I know how I have to kill him, but I can’t write a fucking article! He asked that it be something interesting! What interesting things am I going to write for him?”

  Tom took the pages that, almost imploringly, Ramón handed him, and told him not to worry about the article.

  “I have to do it tomorrow, Tom. Prepare things to help me escape. I can’t wait any longer. I’ll kill him tomorrow,” he repeated.

  Caridad was listening to them, seated in one of the armchairs, and Ramón, in his daze, thought he noticed her hands shaking slightly. Tom, the sheets in hand, was looking at the typed lines, full of cross-outs and additions. Then he crumpled the pages, threw them in a corner, and commented, as if it weren’t important, “You’re not going to kill him tomorrow.”

  Ramón thought he misheard. Caridad leaned forward.

  “If we’ve worked for three years,” he continued, “and we’ve gotten to where we are, it’s for everything to turn out right. You’re not the only one who is risking his life in this. Stalin forgave me the disaster with the Mexicans because we never trusted them too much to begin with, but he is not going to forgive me a second failure. You cannot fail, Ramón, that’s why you’re not going to do it tomorrow.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because I know what I’m doing; I always know . . . When you are alone with the Duck, you’ll have all the strings in your hands, but you have to be hanging on to them tightly.”

  Ramón shifted his head. As always, he felt Tom’s aplomb touch him, and the anguish began to melt away.

  Tom lit a cigarette and stood before his small group of troops. He asked Caridad to make coffee and ordered Ramón to go to the pawnshop to buy a typewriter, the portable kind.

  When he returned with the typewriter, Caridad offered him coffee and told him Tom was waiting in the bedroom. Ramón found him leaning over the chest of drawers he used as a desk and saw that on the floor there were crumpled pages written in Cyrillic. The adviser demanded silence with a gesture, without ceasing to repeat “Bliat! Bliat!” Standing, Ramón waited until the man turned around.

  “Come on, I’m going to dictate the article to Caridad and the letter that should accompany it.”

  “What letter?”

  “The story of a disillusioned Trotskyist.”

  “What do I have to do tomorrow?”

  “Let’s say it’s a dress rehearsal. You’re going to the traitor’s house with all of your weapons on you, to see if you can get in and out without anyone suspecting anything. You’re going to give him the a
rticle and you’re going to be alone with him. The article will be so bad that you’ll have to make a lot of corrections and he himself will give you the option of returning with another draft. That will be the moment, because you’ll have calculated the way in which you’re going to hit him, the way to get out . . . You have to be sure you will do each thing very calmly and very carefully. You already know that if you can get out to the street, I’ll guarantee your escape; but while you’re inside the house, your fate and your life depend on you.”

  “I won’t fail. But let me do it tomorrow. What if I can’t see him again?”

  “You won’t fail and you won’t do it tomorrow—and you will see him again, that is sure,” Tom said, taking him by the chin and forcing him to look him in the eyes. “The fate of many people depends on you. And it depends on our shutting the mouths of the ones who didn’t trust in us, the Spanish Communists, do you remember? You’re going to show what a Spaniard who has two balls and an ideology in his head is capable of,” and with his right hand he tapped Ramón’s left temple. “You’re going to avenge your dead brother in Madrid, the humiliations your mother had to endure; you’re going to earn the right to be a hero and you’re going to show África that Ramón Mercader is not soft.”

  “Thank you,” Ramón said, without knowing why he said it, as he felt the pressure of his tutor’s hands turning into a sweaty heat over his face. At that moment he convinced himself that Caridad’s story of her humiliations, mentioned in passing by Tom, in reality was part of a strategy concocted by his mother and the agent to sharpen his hate; that was the only explanation for Tom knowing of the conversation in the Gillow. How was it possible that Tom also knew that África had accused him of being too soft?