The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you for a few days now, kid . . . Have you found out through your current friends if they know anything about África?”

  Ramón looked him in the eye. The sharp blue of his former mentor’s pupils had dissolved in alcohol, but continued to be sharp.

  “Why are you asking me that?”

  “Because I lost her trail ever since they took me out of the game . . . I know that during the war she worked as a radio operator with the guerrillas who infiltrated the rear guard and won several medals of courage . . . I imagine she wasn’t one of the ones who were affected by Stalin’s gratitude.”

  “ ‘Stalin’s gratitude’?” Galina asked, attracted by such strange words.

  “Stalin was very generous with the ones who served him, right? . . .” Eitingon’s laugh was painfully forced. Not even the vodka he had drunk eased his bitterness. “In reality, the best that could happen to you was that he forgot about you. He didn’t forget about me . . . After the war, the witch hunt began again, inside and outside the Soviet Union. But after the horrors of the Nazis and two atomic bombs, who could criticize him for killing a hundred or two hundred or a thousand former collaborators accused of treason? One of the ones who paid dearly for Stalin’s gratitude was Otto Katz, one of the best agents we ever had. He was the one who pointed out Sylvia Ageloff and prepared the ground for us in New York.”

  Sylvia’s name stirred Ramón’s memory more forcefully than África’s or Trotsky’s. He could not forget how, every time the police had them face each other in numerous confrontations, the woman turned into a spitting demon, and when he thought of her, he still felt the warmth of her saliva running down his face.

  “No one worked as much or as dirtily as Willi Münzenberg and Otto Katz did to consolidate Stalin’s image in Europe. Willi was killed in France, during the German invasion. I still don’t know if it was the Nazis or us who did it . . . But Otto kept working, and after the war he thought the time had come for his reward. Stalin considered him and others of his kind to be troublemakers and decided the time had come to show his gratitude . . .” Leonid worked himself up and continued. “Otto Katz was locked up in Prague and forced to confess to any number of crimes. The day of his public confession, they had to make him a set of dentures from the teeth of an executed man, since he had lost all of his own teeth during the interrogations. Otto and several others were executed and thrown in a common grave on the outskirts of Prague . . .” And turning toward Ramón, he added: “That’s why I asked you if you’ve heard anything about África.”

  Ramón drank the coffee Yevgenia Purizova served him and lit a cigarette.

  “She was working in South America until she retired with honors . . . Since I arrived, I’ve only seen her once. Now she gives conferences and belongs to the KGB aristocracy . . . In 1956 she wrote me a letter in prison.”

  Ramón would have preferred not to talk about that story that he had buried with so much effort. Because of that, he only told them that, in her letter, África de las Heras told him she was still working and that she was committing a serious infraction by writing to him, even risking her life, but she wanted to tell him that she congratulated him on the integrity—a communist integrity—with which Ramón had faced his years in prison. Ramón did not tell them that what África wrote to him almost amused him—it seemed like a caricature of the harangues the young woman launched in the meetings in Barcelona—if the news that followed had not moved him to the point of tears: Lenina had died two years before, having just turned twenty. His happiness on receiving that letter, signed by María Luisa Yero, but whose handwriting he recognized like the scar etched on his right hand, turned into a death pain from which he would never be able to free himself. Lenina had joined an anti-Franco guerrilla unit and died in a skirmish. Her parents could be proud of her, África said, with unnatural coldness, like someone issuing a war report. Ramón, who had already perfected his strategy of imagining a life parallel to his real one, tried to fit into his impossible existence the daughter he had never met, whom he had never kissed, and tried to conceive of how that girl’s days would have been spent with parents capable of raising her, protecting her, and giving her love. The fact that he had never had even the remotest possibility of influencing the life of a person he created did not alleviate the strange pain caused by the death of a being who, since the beginning, had only been a name. The cause or family? Ramón had felt the weight in his chest of the fundamentalism to which he had submitted and that had prevented him from even weighing the possibility that it was not necessary to abandon his ideas in order to go looking for his daughter. Then he thought he would never forgive África for her sick orthodoxy and for having excluded him from a decision that was also his. But at the same time he had to recognize his own faults and weaknesses. Hadn’t he accepted and considered África’s will as logical, historically and ideologically correct? He had only the small consolation of telling himself that, like Lenina, he would also have fought against Franco and that perhaps having died as she did was preferable to living as he did with an unyielding scream in his ears and the certainty of having been a puppet.

  Galina broke the silence and took his hand. “What’s wrong, Ramón?”

  Eitingon’s snores brought him back to reality.

  “Nothing, just a bad memory . . . Lionia isn’t going to sing. Shall we leave?”

  The solitude prompted by Roquelia’s trips and the forced confinement brought about by the devastating Muscovite winter allowed Ramón to recover one of his oldest passions: cooking.

  In the years he spent in prison—following that initial period of interrogations, blows, and solitary confinement and ending with his sentence for homicide—he had felt an urgent need to focus his intellectual energies and asked his lawyer to buy him books to study electricity and learn languages. The mysteries of electric flows and the inner lives of languages had always attracted him, and at that moment, with seventeen years of prison ahead of him (he was starting to lose hope that his conspirators could organize his escape) and threatened by the claws of madness, he felt that he could and should satisfy his intellectual curiosities. Thanks to this, his stay in prison was more pleasant. Studying, his mind escaped the creaking Lecumberri, an authentic circle of hell, and his knowledge allowed him freedoms and privileges denied to the illiterate and coarse criminals crowded together in the compound. By 1944, inmate Jacques Mornard, known as Jac by his fellow prisoners, was acting as the person responsible for Lecumberri’s electrical workshop and would soon take over the leadership of carpentry as well as the sound system for the prison’s stage and movie theaters. His rapid rise, supported by certain directors of the prison in contact with emissaries from Moscow, gave rise to more than a little envy, and forced him to remind more than one prisoner that if he had driven an ice axe into the head of a man who had led an army, it mattered very little to him to cut the arm off a fucking nobody. His prestige among his fellow inmates increased notably when, in the middle of his studies of Russian and Italian, he found out about the governmental program through which he could reduce his sentence by one year if he taught fifty of his companions to read. Jac went to work and, with the help of Roquelia, who brought the printed cards, and with that of her cousin Isidro Cortés, imprisoned with him, they managed to teach almost five hundred prisoners how to read, the highest number ever achieved in the entire Mexican penal system. The prison authorities gave him a diploma but communicated to him that they could not apply the stipulated bonus to him unless he recognized his identity and the true motives for his crime. Ramón, as always, repeated that his name was Jacques Mornard and remained satisfied that the inmates who benefited from his work—besides teaching them literacy, he turned many of them into electricians—expressed their gratitude with the most coveted prison currencies: respect and peace.

  But Ramón was always a special prisoner, not only because he enjoyed a certain protection, but also because things worked a different way for him. He wasn’t granted
the reduction in his sentence nor was he allowed to marry Roquelia, since if he married her, he could remain in Mexico and Mexico didn’t want him—though they helped Siqueiros get out of the country. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean consul at that time, took him with him. And Diego Rivera, when he wanted to return to the party, began to say publicly that he had housed Trotsky so it would be easier to kill him and everyone laughed along with him. Ramón was sickened by those things. But he was the rejected one: the hypocrites of the world said they were disgusted by him, even as they laughed at the jokes of the cuckold Rivera and the coward Siqueiros (who had even dared to send him a painting as a gift).

  Once he was settled in Moscow, his knowledge of various languages served to give some meaning to his time and, at the same time, to earn some extra money with his translations. Meanwhile, his love of cooking, also cultivated in prison, besides filling his hours, allowed him to hand himself over to the nostalgia of his Catalan youth and give flight to his dreams.

  For four or five years, Ramón prepared a great dinner to send off Roquelia, who, at the first threat of snow, stepped on the plane taking her to Mexico. On that occasion, in addition to the usual guests he was allowed contact with (Luis and Galina, Conchita Brufau and her Russian husband, a couple of friends from the Casa de España, and Elena Feerchstein, the Soviet Jew with whom he worked on his translations), Leonid Eitingon and his wife Yenia would be there.

  That morning, as soon as Ramón began to work in the kitchen, Roquelia, who hated any change in her routine, shut herself up in her room under the pretext of preparing her suitcases. Since Arturo and Jorge were at school, it was young Laura, seated on a stool, and Dax and Ix the wolfhounds, who were the privileged witnesses of the preparation of the meal and of the chef’s commentaries on the ingredients, proportions, and cooking times. In reality, Ramón had begun to prepare that Catalan meal a week before. The difficulty of finding certain ingredients in Moscow limited Ramón’s gastronomic possibilities, and after running (medals at the ready) to various markets and gathering everything that seemed usable, he had opted for an arroz a banda as his artillery appetizer and some pigs’ feet (he lamented not having found the thyme called for by the traditional recipe) for the big offensive. There would be pan con tomate, and crêpes with orange marmalade would bring the agape to a close. Conchita Brufau would bring some wines from Penedès, while Luis brought two bottles of cava for the toasts the Soviets were such fans of.

  Those gastronomic journeys to their Catalan origins, which he usually shared with Luis and occasionally with his brother Jorge, a professional chef, hid Ramón Mercader’s warmest and most longed-for hope for a return to Spain. During the months Roquelia spent in Mexico, Ramón and Luis multiplied their meetings in the apartment’s kitchen. Besieged by snow, they tended to use meals to bring back memories and voice hopes. Luis, who was already past forty, dreamt that, with the death of El Caudillo (the bastard had to die someday), Spain’s doors could open again to the thousands of refugees still wandering the world. The youngest Mercader still had hope of obtaining an exit visa from the USSR, so complicated for him despite his origins, and very difficult for Galina and his children because of their Soviet nationality. Ramón, in contrast, knew he would never be allowed to leave Soviet territory and that, in addition, no country in the world, starting with Spain, would deign to receive him. But in the dreams he voiced, Ramón usually told Luis about his plans to open a restaurant on the Empordà coast, specifically on the beach of Sant Feliu de Guíxols. There, in the pleasant months of spring and fall, and in the warm ones of summer, he could earn his living preparing dishes that would improve in taste, consistency, and appearance with every effort. Living in front of the sea, free of fear and the feeling of isolation, and without having to hide his own name, would be the happy culmination of his strange and miserable life.

  A few months before, Ramón had made the mistake of discussing that yearning with Santiago Carrillo, the leader of the Spanish Communists. Carrillo had told him, as Ramón expected, that his case was, at the very least, special, and that it wouldn’t be easy to free himself of the chains tying him to Moscow. Didn’t anyone remember that, according to very well-covered-up memories, Carrillo must have been stained by the blood of the regrettable executions of prisoners in Paracuellos? . . . For now, like the rest of the refugees, every night before going to sleep Ramón should pray, communistically, for Franco’s death, and then they would see. But the dream, the beach, the heat, kept beating in him, like an unreachable desire that was not possible to give up.

  That late October dinner was a success. Even Roquelia was in a good mood (the proximity of her departure had that effect), and everyone praised Ramón’s culinary skills. Leonid Eitingon, in addition to devouring an impressive quantity of pigs’ feet, drank wine, cava, vodka, and even Cuban rum from a bottle brought by Elena Feerchstein, and seemed to be the happiest of men. After taking the lead with the toasts, he was the first one to start singing the old words to Republican anthems. With cigars between their lips, they posed for a photo, and Conchita Brufau told half a dozen jokes that revolved around the supposed resurrection of Lenin or Stalin. But the most successful one was about the best way to hunt a lion:

  “It’s very easy: you grab a rabbit and begin to beat him and tell him you’re going to kill his whole family . . . Until he confesses that he’s actually a lion dressed as a rabbit.”

  “I like seeing all of you like this,” Eitingon said. “Happy and relaxed . . . Perhaps you don’t know that these buildings are made of micro-concrete?”

  “Micro-concrete?” Elena Feerchstein asked.

  “Twenty percent microphones and the rest is concrete . . .”

  That night, impelled by the alcohol he allowed himself on this occasion, Ramón thought that, despite the confinements, silences, deceptions, and even the fear and the obsession with real and imagined microphones, life was worth living. Eitingon was the exultant proof of that. His cynicism, resistant to blows and years in prison, was protective and exemplary. And wasn’t he as cynical as his mentor? He thought that having believed and fought for the greatest utopia ever conceived of required a necessary dose of sacrifice. He, Ramón Mercader, had been one of those dragged along by the subterranean rivers of that battle, and it wasn’t worth evading responsibility or trying to blame his faults on deception and manipulation; he was one of the rotten fruits cultivated in even the best of harvests, and while it was true that others had opened the doors, he had gladly crossed the threshold of hell, convinced that a life in the shadows was necessary for a world of light.

  Past midnight, when the goodbyes were imminent, Luis asked Ramón to accompany him to the kitchen. With his nearly finished cigar at the corner of his mouth, Luis leaned against the small table where the crockery that Ramón (as part of his arrangement with Roquelia) had to wash before going to bed was piled.

  “What’s going on? Do you need something?” Ramón served himself a little coffee and lit a cigarette. He felt the alcoholic euphoria of a little earlier morphing into a diffuse but absorbing sadness.

  “I didn’t want to ruin your party, but . . .”

  Ramón looked at his brother and remained silent. Experience had taught him that there was no need to push bad news, as its weight always propels it forward.

  “Caridad is coming in two days. She called me this afternoon.”

  Ramón looked outside. The sky was reddish, announcing the coming snow. Luis dropped his extinguished tobacco in the wastebasket.

  “She asked me if she could stay with you. Since Roquelia is leaving . . .”

  “No. Tell her no,” Ramón said, almost without thinking about it, and returned to the living room, where the visitors were putting on their coats to leave. Ramón bid them farewell with promises of speedy reunions, and when Leonid Eitingon went to kiss him, he moved his face and pressed it against the adviser’s ear.

  “Caridad is coming,” he told him, and kissed him.

  Ramón could see how Eitingon’s blu
e eyes regained the brilliance dulled by the alcohol. The mere mention of that name seemed to reveal in him intricate chemical reactions that had to be beyond an already worn sexual empathy. He and Caridad were definitively kindred souls, united in their capacity to hate and destroy.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, kid.” He smiled and, with his gloved hand, patted Ramón’s face.

  “No, it would be better if you didn’t call me again . . . I’m sick of rolling around in shit.”

  As he washed the dishes, Ramón put a record of Greek songs he had grown fond of on the record player at a very low volume. His mother’s imminent visit was disquieting, and when he was drying the plates, he stopped to observe the arc-shaped scar on his right hand. Those marks on his skin, the scream in his ears, and the shadow of Caridad were like the chains tying him to his past, and the three could be terribly heavy if he tried to move them together. The scar and the scream were indelible, but at least he could keep his mother far away. In prison, accompanied by the scream and the scar, he had continued hating Caridad, blaming her for the failure of his escape plans. But he remembered that during the infinite psychological exams he had been subjected to in Mexico, the specialists thought they saw, in the midst of that hate, the presence of an obsession for the maternal figure that some classified as Oedipal. When he learned of such opinions, he chose to laugh in the psychologists’ faces, but he knew that something lost in his subconscious must have freed itself through an unforeseen channel, alerting the specialists. The memory of Caridad’s kisses, whose warm and aniseed-flavored saliva caused ambiguous feelings in him; the unease it always caused him to see her in the company of other men; and the uncontrollable power his mother had exercised over him had an unhealthy component from which he had tried to free himself through distance and hostility. The psychologists’ opinion had made him meditate on her attitude toward him and on his weakness before her, and he began to rescue from his memory caresses, words, gestures, closeness, and palpitations that seemed painfully perverse to him.