The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

“Does it seem very bad to you?” Jacques Mornard asked after a few seconds, fearing his voice would fail him.

  “You have to rewrite it completely and—”

  “All right,” Jacques interrupted him, and approached the table. “I’ll rewrite it this weekend. Now I have to go. Sylvia is waiting for me to go eat and . . .”

  Jacques needed to leave that oppressive space. The Exile still held sheets in his hand and had turned toward the visitor, to whom he gave an incisive look.

  “Why didn’t you take off your hat?”

  Jacques brought his hand to his forehead and tried to smile.

  “Since I’m in a rush . . .”

  The old man looked at him even more intensely, as if he wanted to penetrate him.

  “Jacson, you’re the strangest Belgian I know,” he said, and handed him the sheets at last, then called in a loud voice, “Natasha!”

  Jacques took the pages and folded them any which way as he noticed how the cold damp of his hands stuck to the paper. Preparing a smile for the woman’s arrival, he managed to return the sheets to the pocket of his raincoat, which was on the verge of getting away from him due to the weight of the instruments of death it was carrying. He mechanically moved his hand until he touched the knife’s handle. The sound of steps getting closer stopped that impulse. Natalia Sedova, with an apron covering her chest and lap, peeked into the studio and, upon seeing Jacques, smiled.

  “I didn’t know that—”

  “Good afternoon, Madame Natalia,” he said, and clutched the knife.

  “Jacson is leaving, dear. Please, see him out.”

  Ramón felt that, instead of a goodbye, the Exile’s words sounded like an expulsion order. He had the knife in his right hand, thinking that it was impossible for that man, accosted by death for so many years, to remain impassive at the bottom of the net in which he had been caught, as if calling for his own end. It wasn’t logical; it was almost incredible that, with his intelligence and his knowledge of the methods of his pursuers, he had believed that whole story about a Belgian deserter dedicated to doing no one knew exactly what business, who worked in a nonexistent office and met with a phantom boss, who said inappropriate things and committed errors en masse, or claimed to be a journalist and wrote an article full of banal remarks—a Belgian who, to top it off, while visiting indoors, forgot to remove his hat. Without looking into his eyes, he asked the Exile, “When can we see each other again?” The silence lasted for an agonizing amount of time. If the renegade said “Never,” his own life would be prolonged while Ramón Mercader would have an unpredictable future, without glory, without history, perhaps without too much time; if he gave the date, he would name the day and time of his death, and of Ramón’s almost certain death. But if he said “Never,” he also thought, the revolver could be the most expedient alternative: two shots for the old man, one for the woman, another for himself. The work would be done and there would be five bullets left over.

  “I’m very busy. I don’t have time,” the condemned man said, and tipped the balance in his favor.

  “Just a few minutes; you already know the article,” mumbled Ramón, and with that plea, both of their lives fell into a precarious balance.

  The Exile took a few seconds to decide his fate, as if he had intuited the tremendous implication his words would have. His future murderer moved his right hand to his waist, resolved to take out the revolver.

  “Tuesday. At five. Don’t do what you did today . . . ,” he said.

  “No, sir,” Ramón murmured, and, without breathing, dragged Jacques Mornard to the garden, in search of the street and the fresh air his lungs, congested by desperation, clamored for. Death was in no hurry; it was taking three days to return by Ramón Mercader’s hand to the fortified house in Coyoacán.

  Ramón would have to wait twenty-eight years to get the answers to the most worrying questions that, from that moment, had begun to take root in his mind. Throughout those years, lived in skins that became all the more outrageous, as befitting a creature born of deceit and the manipulation of feelings, he would always remember those seventy hours—the time period decreed by the condemned man—like a murky journey toward his fate, which had been placed in someone else’s hands ever since that predawn morning in the Sierra de Guadarrama, when Caridad made her request and he said yes.

  That night, when exhaustion overcame him, he managed to sleep for a few hours without being attacked by nightmares. When he awoke, he saw Sylvia, seated at the vanity table, the black slip and her myopic glasses on, and prayed that the woman would not speak. He worried that his fear and rage would explode on that pathetic being whose life he had used. Since the previous afternoon, he had discovered that his hate, far from disappearing, in reality had multiplied and it could now expand in unforeseeable directions: he hated the world; he hated every single person he saw, with their lives (at least on the surface) ruled by their wills and decisions; and above all, he hated himself. When he returned from Coyoacán, he had gotten into an argument with a driver who tried to pass him. At the next intersection, when they were stopped at a red light, he got out of his car and, with the Star in his hand, completely worked up, had run up to the other car and pointed the barrel of the gun at the head of the trembling driver as he yelled insults, as if he needed to get out the explosive violence that was burning inside him. Now, upon remembering the scene, he felt a deep shame at the lack of control that could have ruined the work of three years.

  “Order coffee; I’m going to work,” he said, and went to the bathroom. When he returned, breakfast was on the vanity table and he drank his coffee and lit the first of many cigarettes he would smoke that day. Sylvia looked at him, disconcerted, her eyes wet, and he warned her, “Don’t talk to me, I’m worried.”

  “But, Jacques . . .”

  His eyes must have had such violence in them that the woman stepped away from him, crying, and shut herself up in the bathroom.

  Ramón had decided not to see Tom or Caridad, at least on that day. With the article corrected by the renegade, he sat down in front of the portable typewriter that Tom had demanded he use and felt how much he hated Trotsky’s arrogance at marking the text with comments such as foolish! banal! unsustainable! as if he were rubbing his superior intelligence in his face.

  Slowly, he tried to make a clean draft, changing just a few words. He knew that what he said was no longer important, or even how he said it, just that it have the appearance of being the result of revision, to obtain from the renegade the few minutes of attention that he needed. Nonetheless, his fingers trained to squeeze throats, hold weapons, wound and kill, got tangled in the keys, and forced him to rip up the pages and start again.

  Sylvia came out of the bathroom completely dressed and, without talking, left the room. When Ramón managed to finish the first page, he felt exhausted, as if he had cut down an entire forest with an axe. He ate some crackers, drank the rest of the cold coffee, and threw himself on the bed, a fresh cigarette between his lips.

  At some point, he fell asleep and awoke with a start when the door to the room opened. Sylvia Ageloff, thinner and more vulnerable than ever, was looking at him from the foot of the bed.

  “My love, what’s wrong? Is it because of me? What did I do?”

  “Don’t say such stupid things. I’m worried. Can’t I be worried? And can’t you shut up? Are you such an idiot you don’t understand what it means to shut . . . up?”

  Sylvia burst into tears and Jacques felt the desire to hit her. As he got dressed, he remembered África. How would it have been if she had been there with him in that difficult time? Would she have reinforced the conviction that was cracking? Would she have had the necessary power to remove him from that well of doubts, fears, misdirected hate? It only managed to shore him up to think that África, wherever she was, would surely tremble with pride when she knew that he was the one who would carry out the mission for which so many of the world’s Communists, including her, had been willing to give their lives.
With that image in mind, he ran out onto the street and wandered until he exhausted himself. For the first time in three days he was hungry and entered a restaurant, where he ordered the Pátzcuaro fish and a glass of French white wine. Later he walked to the cathedral and looked at the beggars clustering in its porticos, like beings thrown away by the earth and the heavens. The night’s fresh air and the clear firmament managed to calm him down, and Ramón remembered the beach he had dreamed of a few nights before and wished he were on the sand, in front of the crystal sea of that cove.

  When he returned to the hotel, Sylvia was sleeping. He turned on a light, sat down in front of the typewriter again, and at the end of two hours had the article ready that would return him to the fortress in Coyoacán.

  Perhaps due to the long nap he had taken in the middle of the day, sleep didn’t come to him until past four in the morning. The hours of wakefulness turned into a maddening parade of visions about the execution that his brain was creating, uncontrollably. About what would happen afterward, by contrast, he had just one image: a dark void that he could only associate with his own death.

  He woke up when the sun was rising and noticed his broken body was almost inert. He cursed time, which wasn’t moving, which seemed to have stopped at that torturous impasse, as if insistent on making him lose his mind. He dressed and went down to the hotel restaurant, where he drank coffee and smoked until eight o’clock and got into the Buick heading in the direction of Shirley Court.

  Tom had just woken up, his eyes still puffy with sleep. He offered him coffee and Ramón refused: if he drank another cup, his heart would explode. Caridad came out of the bedroom wrapped in a robe and with her hair wet. While Tom was taking a shower, Caridad and Ramón sat in the living room, looking into each other’s eyes.

  “I know they’re going to kill me,” he said. “I have no way to escape.”

  “Don’t think like that. We’ll be waiting for you. You just have to get one foot out onto the street and we’ll take care of the rest. Under gunfire if necessary . . .”

  “Don’t say that to me again! You know it’s a lie, that everything is a lie.”

  “We’ll be there, Ramón! How could you think that I’m going to abandon you?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “This is different.”

  “Of course it is. I’m not going to get out of there alive.”

  The door to the bedroom opened and Tom popped his head in, although Ramón could see his whole body, naked, and his pubis, covered in saffron-colored curls.

  “Enough with the stupidities, dammit!”

  Ramón and Caridad remained in silence until Tom returned dressed and took Ramón by the arm.

  “Walk,” he demanded, and almost ripped him from the armchair.

  They got into the dark green Chrysler and Tom headed for Reforma, toward Chapultepec. The morning was warm, but as they entered the forest, a cool, perfumed breeze came in through the car window. They left the car and walked until they found a fallen trunk on which they sat.

  “Why didn’t you come to see me yesterday?”

  “I didn’t want to see anyone.”

  “You’re not going to have an attack of hysteria, are you?”

  Ramón stayed silent.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “We agreed I would come back tomorrow, Tuesday, at five.”

  “I already know that. Give me the fucking details,” the adviser demanded, and with his eyes fixed on the grass he listened to Ramón’s story, which stuck to the facts and left out his thoughts.

  Tom stood up and limped a couple steps.

  “Suka! This fucking leg . . . It cramps up every once in a while.” From his pocket he brought out the letter written three days before. “Sign it as ‘Jac,’ so it will be more confusing: Jacques, Jacson . . . And date it tomorrow. When you have to talk about the letter, you say that you wrote it before entering the house and that you threw out the typewriter on the way. You have to get rid of it . . .”

  Ramón put the letter away and remained silent.

  “Don’t you trust me anymore?” Tom asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Ramón answered, in all honesty.

  “Let’s see. As you can imagine, I’ve never told you the whole truth, because you can’t nor should you know it. For your own good and for that of other people. But everything I have told you is true. Everything we planned has come about in the way I’ve told you it would. Until today. And tomorrow, what we want to happen will happen. I never guaranteed you that you would escape from that house or that you would get out unscathed after killing the Duck. I talked to you about a historic mission and my responsibility to get you out of this country if you managed to get out of the house. You have my word that I will get you out, but if you don’t believe it, forget it and think of what’s necessary. The important thing is to kill that man and, if possible, to not fall into the hands of the police. My trust in you is infinite, but you’ve seen with your own eyes how the toughest men in the world, who seem to withstand everything, will confess to what they haven’t done. So the best thing would be for you to get out, because I can’t be completely sure of your silence. What I am sure of is that if you talk, your life will be worth less than a gob of spit,” he said, and spit on the grass. “And your mother’s life even less; and, it goes without saying, mine, who will be the first to have his head cut off. If you don’t talk, we will always be with you and guarantee you our support at all times, wherever you are . . . It couldn’t be clearer.”

  The young man looked at the forest, trying to process those words.

  “I would like to be the Ramón I was three years ago, before the lies started,” he said, without realizing that he had begun to speak in Spanish. “I would like to enter that house tomorrow and smash the life of a renegade traitor and be sure that I’m doing it for the cause. Now I don’t know the difference between the cause and lies.”

  Tom lit a cigarette and focused on the blades of grass he was moving with a stick. When he spoke, he continued to do so in French.

  “Truth and lies are too relative, and in this work that you and I do, there’s no border between the two. This is a dark war and the only truth that matters is that you follow orders. It’s all the same if, to get to that moment, we climb a mountain of lies or truths.”

  “That’s cynical.”

  “Perhaps . . . Do you want a truth? I’ll remind you of one: the truth is that the Duck is a threat to the Soviet Union right now. We are at a point in which everything that is not with Stalin is in favor of Hitler, without any in between. What do a few lies matter if they save our great truth?”

  Ramón stood up. Tom discovered that the fear and doubts had made an obvious mark on his pupil’s soul. But he was certain that Ramón had understood the essence of his situation: there was no turning back for him.

  “What you told me about África, that thing about me being soft . . . Did she tell you that?”

  Tom dropped the stick he was moving around in the dirt.

  “África is a fanatic, a machine, not a woman. Don’t you realize that a person like that cannot love anyone? For her, everything is a fucking competition to see who says more slogans. And if that crazy woman ever thought you were soft, now she’s going to know how wrong she was . . .”

  Ramón felt the effect of those words. His muscles relaxed.

  “Kid, go to your hotel, eat something, try to sleep. Think only that you’re going to leave that house alive and that once you get to Moscow you’ll be a hero . . . I’ll take care of the rest. We’re going to take you to Santiago de Cuba. I wanted to get you out to Guatemala, but Caridad wants to go with you to Santiago, because she hasn’t been back since they took her to Spain. She tells a whole story about how her father was the first one to free the black slaves.”

  “Another tall tale,” Ramón said, and nearly smiled. Tom shook his head, smiling. “My grandparents were shameless exploiters and that’s how they got so rich . . .
When will we see each other again?”

  “I have to arrange a lot of things. I hope we’ll see each other tomorrow when you finish your work at the Duck’s house. Incidentally, do you know what you’re going to be called when you leave there? Juan Pérez González. Original, right?”

  Ramón didn’t answer. Tom stood up and, in silence, they went down to where the Chrysler was parked. The adviser drove to the city center, his eyes fixed on the road. When they entered the parking lot of Shirley Court, he looked for the Buick and stopped next to it.

  “I worked with you the best I could. I have taken you to the door of the most protected man on earth and I’ve shown you that it’s possible to do it. Now everything is left to you, and the rest depends on luck. That’s why I wish you all the luck in the world. We’ll see you tomorrow when you leave the house . . . Incidentally, Caridad says that the best rum in the world is in Santiago de Cuba and that her grandfather, the one who freed the slaves, was a business associate of the first Bacardis. I hope the three of us together can confirm it. The thing about the rum, of course.”

  Ramón recalled the conversation he had had with his mother a few days before. He then asked himself if Tom had ordered Caridad to tell that sordid story from which, if it was true, the hate marking their lives was born.

  “We’ll see each other tomorrow,” he said, and when he went to get out of the car, he felt Tom’s hand clutching his arm. The adviser leaned toward him and Ramón let himself be kissed on both cheeks, and finally he felt the man’s lips on his own. Tom released him and patted his shoulder.

  Ramón Mercader had to wait twenty-eight years to get another kiss from the man who had led him to the shore of history.

  Sylvia insisted that they go to the hospital. Jacques took two more painkillers and, with a damp handkerchief over his eyes, leaned his head on the pillow and begged her to leave him alone. The tiredness, the pain, and, at last, the relief brought by the pills plunged him into sleep, and when he awoke the following morning, he didn’t know where or who he was. The hotel room, Sylvia, the typewriter on which he had placed the pages of the article, brought him back to reality and into the soul of Jacques Mornard.