The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  Ramón Pavlovich took off his thick tortoiseshell glasses and still had time to tell himself that that article showed that nothing had changed, not even the rhetoric. With difficulty, he stood up. No matter how much Roquelia insisted that he eat vegetables, he didn’t lose weight, and with the passing of years he had become a slow and wheezing man. He lifted his feet to step over Ix and Dax, his two Russian wolfhound puppies, who, despite their youth, had turned lazy with the summer heat. Ramón was almost sure that the phone call was for his son Arturo, who, in his adolescence, had taken over the phone. On the tenth ring, he managed to raise the heavy receiver.

  “Da?” he said in Russian, almost annoyed.

  “Merde! You already know how to speak in Russian?” The voice, sarcastic, French, was an arrow that went through the heart of Ramón Pavlovich’s memories.

  “Is it you?” he asked, also in French, feeling his chest and his temples beating.

  “Twenty-eight years without seeing each other, eh, kid? Well, you’re no longer a kid.”

  “Are you in Moscow?

  “Yes, and I’d like to see you. I’ve spent three years wondering if I should call you or not, and today I made up my mind. Can we see each other?”

  “Of course,” Ramón Pavlovich said, after thinking for a few moments. Of course he wanted to see him, although for a thousand reasons he doubted it was appropriate. For starters, he presumed that their conversation was being listened to, and that the meeting would be monitored by security agents, although he decided it was worth the risk.

  “Tomorrow at four, in front of the beer hall in Leningradsky Station. Do you remember? Bring money: now we pay out of our own pockets. And mine aren’t exactly healthy.”

  “How have things gone for you?” Ramón Pavlovich dared to ask.

  “So fucking well,” the man said in Spanish, and repeated before hanging up: “So fucking well. See you tomorrow.”

  Having barely hung up, Ramón Pavlovich heard the scream again. In all those years, that cry of pain, surprise, and anger had pursued him; and although in recent times its insistent presence had dissipated, it was always there, in his mind, like something latent that resolved to activate itself, sometimes by some reminiscence of the past, and many other times without any discernible motive, like a spring he had no ability or possibility of controlling.

  Ever since he’d arrived in Moscow eight years before, he had been wishing to meet with that man (what the hell was his name now? What could his name have originally been before he turned into a perpetually masked man?), and only feared that the death, of one or the other, could prevent the necessary conversation that would get him closer to the truths he had never known and that influenced the path of his life so much. And now, when he already thought that nothing would happen, at last the meeting seemed about to become real, and as usual the initiative had come from his always evasive mentor.

  “Who was it?” Roquelia asked when she came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. “What’s wrong, Ramón? You’re pale . . .”

  He put his glasses back on, took a cigarette from the pack lying on the table next to his reading chair, and lit it.

  “It was him,” he said at last.

  With a cigarette in his hands, Ramón went out to the tiny balcony from which he enjoyed a privileged view of the river and, on the other side, of the tree-lined park. From the heights of his apartment, if he looked to the south, he could see the buildings of the university and the Church of St. Nicholas; if he turned to the north, he could make out the Krymsky Bridge, where he usually crossed over to Gorky Park, and beyond that he could make out the highest towers and palaces of the Kremlin. Ix and Dax followed him and, seated on their hind legs, dedicated themselves to panting and contemplating the tiny pedestrians going back and forth across the quay. Ramón felt a lost feeling of fear return and squeeze his chest. Almost mechanically, he observed his right hand, where, an inch or so from the wound he received in the first days of the war, he had the indelible half-moon-shaped scar. He didn’t like to look at those four marks hanging on his skin, since he preferred not to remember; but memory was like everything in his life ever since that remote early morning on which he said yes—it also acted with insolence independent of the reduced will of its owner.

  First he had heard the shrill cry and, when he opened his eyes, saw that the wounded man, with his glasses twisted on his nose, had managed to throw himself at his weapon-holding hand and clung to it to sink his teeth in and force him to release the ice axe stained with blood and brain. What happened in the following minutes had turned into an amalgam of images where some vivid memories were confused with the stories he would hear and read through the years. The stories agreed that, perhaps paralyzed by the scream and the wounded man’s unexpected reaction, he had not even tried to leave the office, and they said that while the bodyguards beat him with their hands and the butts of their revolvers, he had yelled in English: “They have my mother! They’re going to kill my mother!” From what recess of his mind had those unforeseen words come? He remembered, in contrast, having managed to cover his head to protect himself from the blows, and that he started to cry upon thinking he had failed. He could not believe that the old man had resisted the blow and leaped upon him with that desperate force. Then he yelled, begging for them to kill him. He wanted and deserved it. He had failed, he thought.

  Ramón could still feel in his chest a renewal of the oppression that had crushed his breath when, along with the confirmation of the condemned man’s death, he heard the policeman in charge of his interrogation assure him that his victim, already fatally wounded, had saved his life by demanding that his bodyguards stop beating him, since it was necessary to make him speak. That information gave meaning to what happened that afternoon and, in a strange way, fed the cry of pain and horror clinging to his eardrums. From that moment on, he was able to evoke with greater clarity the surprising relief he felt when he stopped being hit on the head with the rifle butts, and he also managed to remember the look of disgust that at that moment Natalia Sedova directed at him and the moment in which Azteca the dog came into the room and approached the wounded man, lying on the floor with a pillow under his head. Ramón was sure he’d seen him caress the dog and heard him say not to let Seva enter.

  In reality, Ramón had only completely regained consciousness when, as it was getting dark already, they had taken him out of the house, handcuffed. Before getting into the ambulance that would take him to the Hospital Cruz Verde, he had looked to his left and, between the blood and the swelling that shot through his right eye, he was able to confirm, beyond the police cars lining Avenida Viena, that the dark green Chrysler had disappeared. In the ambulance, he told the head of his escort to take the letter he had in the pocket of his summer jacket. The pain he felt in his hand, where he had been bitten, and in his bruised head and face did not prevent, while the policeman opened the letter, a wave of relaxation from enveloping him, nor one sole idea, clear and precise, from taking control of his mind: my name is Jacques Mornard, I am Jacques Mornard.

  Tom had warned him that the letter would be his only shield and, whatever happened, he should take cover from lightning and thunderbolts behind it. And so he did throughout the twenty years he spent in the hell on earth of the three Mexican prisons of his sentence. The saddest times were without a doubt the intense months in which they held him in the bulletproof cells of the Sixth Delegation, submitting him to interminable interrogations, periodic beatings, constant slaps, and daily kicks; confrontations with Sylvia, which always included the woman spitting on his face; confrontations with the renegade’s bodyguards and even with several of the participants of the massive attack directed by Siqueiros (“directed by” was figuratively speaking), who, as was foreseen, could not identify him and even less still connect him to the disappeared French Jew. Later came the interviews with Belgian civil servants who demonstrated the falseness of Jacques Mornard’s supposed family and national origins, and the incisive psycho
logical tests, bordering on torture, that demanded all of his physical resistance, his intelligence, and the use of the full arsenal received in Malakhovka to keep his shield raised. The process of re-creating the attack had been especially arduous, when they forced him to represent, with a newspaper rolled up in his hand, the way in which he had hit the condemned man. Behind the mahogany desk, with his newspaper raised, he had the certainty at last that the ice axe had missed its target by a few inches because the renegade, with the pages of the article in his hands, had turned toward him. This also meant that he had had time to see the lethal point coming down and breaking his skull. That vision—which clarified why the forensics determined that the victim had received the blow from the front and explained why the old man had been able to stand up, fight with him, and even live another twenty-four hours—was so brutal that he passed out.

  He also remembered the difficult moment in which the instructing judge spoke to him of the evidence that his real name was Ramón Mercader del Río, Catalan in origin, since some Spanish refugees had recognized his photo in the newspapers, and even put a snapshot in front of him, taken in Barcelona, in which he appeared dressed as a soldier. The existence of that proof came with more interrogations and torturers with the purpose of wresting from him the confession that everyone wanted to hear. The head of the secret police, Sánchez Salazar, seemed to have taken a personal interest in the need to hear that confession from his lips, and hundreds, thousands of times he repeated the same questions: “Who provided you with the weapon? Who were your accomplices? Who sent you here? Who helped you? Who provided the funds for the attack? What is your real name?” His answers, in every case, every year, and in every situation, had always been consistent with the letter: no one had armed him; he had no accomplices; he had traveled with the money supplied to him by a member of the Fourth International whose name he had forgotten; his only contact in Mexico had been a certain Bartolo, he didn’t remember if it was Pérez or Paris; he was called Jacques Mornard Vandendreschs and had been born in Tehran, where his parents, Belgian diplomats, were posted, and with whom he later lived in Brussels; and he didn’t know anything about any Mercader del Río, and although they looked a lot alike, he could not be the man from the photo.

  His ability to resist in silence and almost arrogantly maintain what everyone knew was a lie gave him back the power and convictions lost in the days before his act. From inside, a feeling of superiority was growing in the certainty that they would not break him. More than once he thought of Andreu Nin and of the hard work he made for his captors when he wouldn’t admit to the faults they tried to lay on his head. Ramón knew that if the promised protection arrived, and if none of those venal policemen or the prisoners with whom he would soon live received the order to eliminate him, he could resist for as long as necessary, in the conditions and with the specifications they imposed on him, since he knew that his life depended solely on that resistance. And, at least at the beginning, Kotov seemed to have come through, although he could only see that at the end of seven months of isolation and harassment, when they allowed him at last to receive a visit from his lawyer, Octavio Medellín Ostos, hired the day after the fatal assault by a woman named Eustasia Pérez. That woman, whom the lawyer had not seen again, had handed him a large sum of money for him to use for Ramón’s case until she or a designee of hers got in touch with him. Ramón then understood that he was not alone, and when Medellín Ostos asked him to tell him the truth in order to help him, he repeated again, word for word, the content of that letter he had handed to the police.

  “Do you expect me to believe you, Señor Mornard?” the lawyer said to him, looking into his eyes.

  “I only expect you to defend me, Counselor. In the best possible way.”

  “It has already been proven that everything you’re saying to me is nothing but lies. You’re not Belgian, nor does Jacques Mornard exist; you were never a Trotskyist, nor did you plan the murder a week before. It’s very difficult this way . . .”

  “So what can I do if, despite what everyone wants to believe and say, that is the only truth?”

  “We got off on the wrong foot,” the man lamented. “Let’s break it down: the Mexican government is going to push until you confess, because your crime has caused an international scandal. For weeks here, people even forgot about the war. Did they tell you that Trotsky’s funeral had the largest crowds seen in this country for the death of a foreigner? They know that your identity is false and that you understand Spanish as if it were your native language. All of this they have demonstrated by conceding you the honor of giving you the first polygraph test done in Mexico. They’ve proven that the story of your meetings with Trotsky to prepare attacks in the Soviet Union is a lie, since the house’s visitors book confirms that you didn’t spend more than two hours total with him, the majority of that time in front of other people. Everyone knows that your friend Bartolo Paris is a ghost and that the letter you handed over and have repeated to me is a mockery. Whoever wrote that letter is a cynic with the greatest disdain for intelligence, since he knew that those lies would be discovered in ten minutes. With all of this against you and with the government insistent on getting the truth, how can you expect me to defend you if I know that you’re a liar?”

  “You’re the lawyer, not me. I killed him for the reasons I say in the letter. That is all I can say. And I need you to do me a favor. Buy me some prescription glasses, since I can’t see anything lately,” he said, willing to face all the consequences.

  Ramón experienced a shock when Roquelia came out to the balcony with a glass of water and a cup of coffee on the colorful Uzbek tray.

  “What does that man want from you now?” she asked while Ramón Pavlovich drank the water.

  “To talk, Roque, only to talk,” he said, and gave her back the glass, ready to drink the coffee.

  “Do you need to roll around in the past? Isn’t it better to live in the present?”

  “You don’t understand me, Roque. It’s been twenty-eight years of silence . . . I have to know . . .”

  “Ramón, you have to recognize that things are not good. Look at Czechoslovakia . . . Do you think they’ll ever let you leave here?”

  “Forget about that already, please. You know they’ll never let me leave. Besides, I don’t have anywhere to fucking go . . .”

  He took the first sip of coffee and looked at his wife. Not even Roquelia, after fifteen years together, could understand what that meeting with his old mentor meant to him. From the beginning, even when he was convinced that Roquelia had been sent to him by his distant bosses, he had decided to keep the woman at the margin of the deepest details of his relationship with the world of shadows, since not knowing was the best way to be protected. He had taken the same attitude with his brother Luis, since they had met again in Moscow and the latter had confided in him, very secretly, his aspiration of one day returning to Spain.

  “Don’t worry, they can’t do anything to me anymore. They already did it all,” he said, and finished his coffee.

  “They can always do more. And now we have children . . .”

  “Nothing’s going to happen. If I don’t talk . . . I’m going out to walk the dogs.”

  With a cigarette in one hand and the leashes in the other, he got into the elevator with his wolfhounds and pushed the button for the ground floor. That building on the Frunze Quay, where he had moved just two years before, was inhabited by local party leaders, heads of business, and a couple of high-level foreign refugees, and had the privileges of an elevator, an intercom on the ground floor (diligently operated by the soldier employed as a doorman), granite floors, a bathroom in every apartment, a washing machine, and, above all, a magnificent location on the banks of the Moscow River, in front of Gorky Park and fifteen minutes by foot from the city center. Arturo and Laura, his children, were the ones who most enjoyed the park, where they ice-skated in winter and played sports in the summer. Ix and Dax also benefited from the park in the mornings,
but in the afternoons their walk was limited to the tree-lined path that ran next to the avenue on the quay, where their owner had taught them to run and jump without getting close to the street.

  Ramón let the dogs go and made the most of an unoccupied bench under the shade of some lilac trees, their branches still loaded with bells of flowers. He liked to watch his wolfhounds run, observing how their brownish hair moved while their long legs seemed to barely touch the grass, how they trotted with perfect elegance. Ever since the absurd and cruel death of Churro, the shaggy little dog who got into his trench in the Sierra de Guadarrama, he had not had another opportunity to care for a dog. In the first years in Moscow, before the adoption of Arturo and Laura, he wanted to have a puppy, but the arrival of the children, so wished for by the sterile Roquelia, had forced him to postpone that desire, since space did not exactly abound in the Khrushchevesque building in the Sokol neighborhood where they were then living. Nonetheless, when his brother Luis, perhaps fulfilling some mysterious and unappealable mandates, appeared at his Frunze apartment with the two small borzois, Ramón knew that those dogs were a reward and at the same time a punishment he had to take on, like another burden of that enduring past—from the man who, with patience and treachery, had molded his fate.

  Ramón remembered that, when they issued the sentence of twenty years’ incarceration, the maximum penalty allowed by the Mexican penal code, and transferred him to the dismal prison of Lecumberri (they were justified in calling it “the Black Palace”), the certainty that had sustained him until that moment suffered an upheaval; and in the creaking of that circular building, overpopulated by murderers of all kinds, his life was entering a suffocating tunnel. Only if Kotov’s promise still stood, and the silence maintained during those almost two years mattered, would his life find any support. Otherwise, he would be like a shipwrecked man in the place where a man’s life was valued at only a few pesos. The fear of dying, which had barely figured among his weaknesses, from that moment on came to accompany and torment him. Ramón knew that if he were dead he would be much less compromising for the men who, as the policeman Sánchez Salazar said, had provided his hands with the weapons. Nonetheless, the worst thing was thinking that protecting him or preparing his escape was no longer among the priorities of those same men, and less still of Kotov, who was surely enmeshed in other missions more important than protecting a soldier captured by the enemy and considered a casualty of battle. With that painful certainty he faced each new day, and more than once he would open his eyes, with his pupils fixed on the oppressive ceiling of his cell, appropriating the words he had heard his victim say: “I’ve been given another day of grace. Will it be the last?” Ever since then, the impression that his fate and that of the man he was ordered to kill had become confused thanks to a macabre confluence had pursued him without rest, just like the incorruptible scream that resounded in his ears or the half-moon-shaped scar that, for exactly twenty-eight years and two days, he wore on his right hand.