Despite the exhaustion of an entire day of work and of having drunk more than he usually did, Ramón tossed and turned in his bed, pursued by the idea of a reunion with his mother, until dawn became visible in the sky and he watched the first snowfall of that autumn. Contemplating the snow, Ramón recalled the train trip he had taken at the end of 1960 to the limits of Soviet Asia, in the company of Roquelia, two young KGB officers, their guides and custodians. After twenty years of confinement, that trip was supposed to be a liberation, the enjoyment of moving for days and days, crossing such diverse worlds, crossing time zones and the logic of time (a few feet from where it is now today, you can return to yesterday or jump to tomorrow). With his own eyes, he discovered the country’s economic strength, the schools built across its immense territory, the dignity of the poverty of its Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Siberian children, a new world that made him feel rewarded—made him think that his personal sacrifice had been for something. But the return trip caused a contradictory feeling. It was not due to the fact that, in the two days the train was stopped due to a freeze, the restaurant car had turned into a kind of combination bar and latrine when a group of soldiers took it over and spent each hour of the delay drinking vodka, urinating, and vomiting in corners. What happened was that remaining immobile, surrounded by the infinite and impenetrable whiteness of the frozen steppe, returned to him an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness, more crushing than what he had felt in the many cells in which he had lived. Something in that January Siberian landscape paralyzed and oppressed him. And that oppression, he thought, was the exact opposite of confinement: it was the result of immeasurableness, of the oceanic immensity of the white landscape that could only be seen for a few hours each day. It suffocated him, and he understood that the infinite whiteness could overwhelm him to the point of madness.
Ramón wasn’t aware of the exact moment he had fallen asleep. When he awoke, close to eight, he saw Ix’s and Dax’s anxious faces next to the bed, long after the time for their morning evacuations had already passed. The brief sleep, nonetheless, had not freed him from the growing unease that plagued him throughout the night.
As he got dressed, he placed the coffee on the stove. He saw on the balcony thermometer that the temperature was minus eight degrees and observed Gorky Park, on the other side of the river, completely covered by clean snow. When he withdrew the coffee pot, he placed the wide blade of a knife very similar to the one he had used in Malakhovka over the gas flame. He drank the coffee, lit a cigarette, and smoked until he saw the color of the steel go red. He put out his cigarette, wetting it in the sink, looked for the dishrag he had used the night before to dry the plates, and folded it twice, biting down forcefully on it. With his left hand, he took the knife’s handle, which had turned from red to white, and, with his eyes closed, placed the tip over the scar on his right hand. The pain made his knees buckle and prompted tears and some smothered cries. He threw the knife into the sink, where he heard it sizzle in the water. When he opened his eyes, he saw wisps of grayish smoke and spit out the rag. The smell of burned flesh was sweet and nauseating. He opened the faucet and stuck his hand under the freezing water as he wet his face with his left hand. Relief came when the cold made his hand fall asleep. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and, after drying his face, covered the seared skin, under which, he supposed, the scar had disappeared. He felt, despite the pain, that his soul weighed less. He took another clean handkerchief, wrapped his hand again, and went out.
Ix and Dax’s anxiety made them bark a couple of times as they went down in the elevator. The building’s watchman made a comment about the weather and the preparations for the parade for the anniversary of the revolution that Ramón, wounded by pain, barely heard. Awkwardly, with his left hand he wrapped his scarf around himself twice and went out to the path, where his borzois were already running with their snouts stuck to the ground. Ix and Dax started to run through the snow, like two children stepping on it for the first time. Snowflakes were still falling here and there and Ramón raised the hood of his jacket. With the dogs’ leashes in his left hand and a cigarette between his lips, he crossed the Frunze Quay and descended the stairs that went down from the sidewalk to a platform that was almost level with the river.
Leaning against the metal railing, with his dogs seated next to him, his jacket sprinkled with snow, and his hand wrapped in a black-polka-dotted handkerchief, Ramón began to smoke with his eyes fixed on the flowing river, on whose banks a layer of glitter had formed. Instead of that dirty and frozen river, would he ever again see the resplendent beach of Sant Feliu de Guíxols? The pain and bitterness painted a frown on his lips, when he said out loud:
“Jo sóc un fantasma.”
Breathing in the frozen air, feeling the burning pain rising up through his arm, again that specter who had once been called Ramón Mercader del Río imagined how his life would have been if on that remote early morning, on the side of the Sierra de Guadarrama, he had said no. Surely, he thought, as he liked to do, he would have died in the war, like so many of his friends and comrades. But above all, he told himself—and that was why he liked to get caught up in that game—that other fate would not have been the worst, because in those days the true Ramón Mercader, young and full of faith, was not afraid of death: he had opened all the windows of his spirit to the collective mind, to the struggle for a world of justice and equality, and if he had died fighting for that better world, he would have earned himself an eternal spot in the paradise of pure heroes. At that moment Ramón thought how much he would have liked to have seen that other Ramón come to his side, the true one, the hero, the pure one, and to be able to tell the story of the man that he himself had been all those years in which he had lived the longest and most sordid of nightmares.
30
Requiem
Thirty-one years ago, Iván confessed to me that for a long time he had dreamed of going to Italy. In the Italy of his yearning, Iván could not have gone without doing several things: visiting the Castel Sant’Angelo; going, as if on a pilgrimage, to Florence and contemplating the Tuscan landscapes that Leonardo had once seen; standing amazed before the city’s Duomo and its green marble; wandering around Pompeii like someone reading an eternal book about the eternity of life, passion, and death; eating a pizza and real spaghetti, preferably in Naples; and, to guarantee his return, throwing a coin in the Trevi Fountain. Until the arrival of the great moment, Iván had fed his dream by studying the works of Leonardo (although it was Caravaggio whom he was really crazy about), seeing Visconti’s and De Sica’s movies, reading Calvino’s and Sciascia’s Sicilian novels, and swallowing the spongy pizzas and bland pastas that became widespread on the island in the seventies and assuaged so much of our hunger for so many years. His was a desire so persistent, so well designed, that I have come to wonder whether in reality Iván had studied journalism with the hope of someday being able to travel (to Italy) in those times when almost no one traveled and no one did so unless it was an official mission.
The first time my friend spoke to me of the existence and later fading of that dream so Cuban and so insular, of escaping from the island, was on the terrace of his house, two or three months after we met. Around that time, I was the worst-read student in the literature department, and that day Iván, after talking to me about his lost hope, put in my hands a novel by Pavese and another one by Calvino, while I asked myself how it was possible that a guy like him could give up and, at just twenty-some years of age, talk about dead dreams when we all knew that we still had a future ahead of us that announced itself as luminous and better.
The last time I saw Iván alive was three days after Ana’s death. That night at the end of September 2004, while we engaged in the strangest conversation, at a given moment I found the story of Iván’s Italian dream in the bottomless bowl of lost desires. I will perhaps never know if the recuperation of that thirty-one-year-old memory was the unconscious manifestation of a premonition or if it was my brain’s preemptive answ
er to the question of the origins of the disaster.
After that night, I would live for several weeks trapped in the swamp of contradictions, feeling myself sinking in the mud of my egotism. In any event, since Iván didn’t come by my house again, I took refuge in his demand not to see him again, since that’s what he had asked upon saying goodbye to me, and I acted in a petty and puerile way, refusing to give in and go in search of him once more, although I knew it was my duty. Nonetheless, every time I ran into friends like black Frank or Anselmo, I asked them if they had seen Iván, and it didn’t surprise me, or rather it calmed me down to always hear that they hadn’t seen him, that he didn’t want to see anyone, that he was writing something. And, like a good mediocre writer (and to top it off, without inspiration), I took refuge behind that excuse and didn’t try to seek him out.
I know that my distance was also due, more than to any envious feelings, to the fear of a responsibility that Iván had thrown at me and that I didn’t know how to manage: what was I going to do with what Iván was writing? Keep it in a drawer, as he did? Try to publish it, as he could also do but didn’t want to? That absurd decision of my friend to hand over his work and his obsession of years to me, cutting all ties with that story and with his own life, seemed to me sick and, above all, cowardly. They were his problem, his book, his story and not mine, I thought.
It goes without saying, at this point, that Ana’s death was a greater blow for Iván than all of us, including Iván himself, could have imagined. Although in his final months, tormented by the impotence and pain caused by seeing her suffer—more than once he had confessed that it was preferable that she finally rest—Ana’s irreversible absence submerged him in a melancholy from which my friend had no power or desire to emerge.
On that last visit I made to the small apartment in Lawton, the first thing I confirmed was how urgently Iván had to pull himself away from those testimonies of pain amid which he had lived for I don’t know how many years. The activity that had unfolded in the days leading up to the burial had to have been frenetic, since, when I entered his house, the first thing I noticed was the disappearance of all hospital-related objects, which had overtaken that space. Along with the reclining bed and the wheelchair, the support for the IVs, the bedpans, the needles and the medicine bottles and even the color television with remote control (lent by a neighbor, so that Ana could entertain herself with something easier to see than the blinking black-and-white TV set that a client from the clinic had given to Iván before leaving Cuba a few years before). The floors smelled of cheap disinfectant and the walls, as always, of mildew, not alcohol and liniments. Even Iván had thrown himself into a metamorphosis. He had shaved his head and was exhibiting a skull plagued with hills and crossed by the river of the scar that, many years before, had been given to him by his adversaries in the bar fight that landed him in the trauma center of Calixto García Hospital.
The change in the atmosphere and his appearance—which was like that of someone recently released from a concentration camp—made the physical devastation my friend had suffered in recent months more palpable (at some point the idea had crossed my mind that Iván was going to disappear and go to heaven), and better prepared me to hear, at the end of that night, the word, the feeling capable of paralyzing him that he had hidden for ten years, ashamed by the significance enclosed in an inappropriate reaction: compassion. Because at the end it wasn’t so much fear as that cunning noun, from which he tried to free himself, the brick that maintains the building of delays, mysteries, concealment, behind which Iván had been lost.
“Why in the hell did you do that to your head? Do you know what you look like?” I said to him as soon as I saw him, but my friend didn’t answer and accepted, with a sad smile, the container full to the brim with food my wife had prepared for him. In silence, Iván began to serve himself and, before sitting down to eat, went to the room and came back with an envelope in his hands.
“A long time ago you wanted to read this . . .”
As soon as I heard him, I guessed what it was about. They had to be, and in fact they were, the pages written more than twenty-five years before by Jaime López, the papers whose existence I had known about for ten years and that, every time the subject came up, I asked Iván to let me read, since I considered that, by reading them, I would touch with my own hands the elusive soul of the man who loved dogs.
As he ate, I delved into that story, the reflections and letters about the years in Moscow of a Ramón Mercader who, in a sick way, insisted on clinging to the embarrassing mediation through the ventriloquist Jaime López and in presenting himself as a person who could be viewed with a certain distance. Or was it that he felt so stripped of his own self, so removed from the original Ramón Mercader that he preferred, to the end, to continue being one of his disguises? The essential man, the primary one, the one who had been in the Sierra de Guadarrama—had he been devoured by the mission, the dogma, and the ruthlessness of history until turning into a character who could only be seen in the distance? What was written gave off the bad flavor of a confession barely capable of hiding the request for forgiveness and the frustration of a man who, from the perspective given to him by years and experienced events, at last confronted himself and what he had signified in a sordid intrigue destined to devour him to the last cell.
But the most alarming thing, at least for me, was discovering the commentaries and questions that, in tiny letters, Iván had added in the margins of the pages, with different-colored inks and a variety of nuances—signs of an excessive and obsessive return to those words over the course of the years. I asked myself whether Iván, more than interrogating the author of the confession, had not been looking for an answer lost within himself. The papers, in addition, were greasy, as if they had been through many hands, when I knew that Iván and the tall, thin black man who brought them to him (and Ana?) were the only ones who had laid eyes on them. I was alarmed by the relationship my friend could have established with that confidence and with the intangible being living behind it.
“I’m left with a desire to know what happened once Caridad arrived in Moscow and how Ramón managed to get them to allow him to leave . . . ,” I told him when I finished reading, without daring to comment that my real concern had to do with him. Then Iván handed me a cup of recently made coffee and turned around, as if my curiosity did not interest him.
On the small table, Iván began to serve Truco’s food. Since I’m not especially fond of dogs, that night I had forgotten about the animal, and it was only at that moment that I realized he had not come out to greet me. I looked for him and found him under an armchair, his eyes wide open, lying on a piece of fabric. Iván brought him the plastic plate; Truco smelled the food, but didn’t muster any enthusiasm to taste it.
“Come on, boy, eat,” Iván said to him, kneeling next to the animal, and added tenderly, as if he were surprised: “Come on, look, it’s meat!”
“Is he sick?”
“He’s sad,” Iván assured me while he ran his hand over Truco’s head. I noticed the dog’s eyes, and although I’m not the type to believe those things, I seemed to detect a certain pain in his damp and disconsolate gaze. Iván showed him some food, but the dog turned his head. “He knows what happened. He hasn’t eaten for three days. Poor Truco.”
Iván’s voice sounded regretful. He moved away from Truco, washed his hands, and drank his coffee. Seated at the table, he lit a cigarette while looking at his dog, and I remember that I thought: Iván is going to cry.
“What Truco has is called melancholy, and it’s an illness that cures itself or it can kill him . . . ,” he said, nearly dragging out the words. He took a few drags from his cigarette and finally looked at me. “Take those papers with you. I don’t want them near me.”
“What’s wrong, Iván?” His attitude, more than surprising me, was starting to worry me. In his eyes there was a damp sadness identical to the one floating in his dog’s look.
“Meeting that man was
the worst thing that happened to me in my life. And quite a few fucked-up things have happened to me . . . I’m going to finish writing about how I met him and why I didn’t dare to tell his story from the beginning. I don’t want to do it, but I have to write it. When I finish, I’m going to give you all of my papers so you can do whatever you want with them . . . I am not a writer nor was I ever, and I’m not interested in publishing it or in having anyone reading it . . .”
Iván left his cigarette in the ashtray on the table. He seemed very tired, as if nothing mattered to him, and it even seemed to me that he was breathing with difficulty, like an asthmatic. When I was about to reproach him for his last words, he got ahead of me.
“I am also a ghost . . .”
At that moment I understood what Iván was trying to say to me a little bit better. And I thought the worst: he’s going to kill himself.
“Why are you going to give me everything you’ve written? What does that mean?” I dared to ask him, fearing the worst, and I wanted to make things less dramatic. “Look, you’re not Kafka . . .”
“I’m not going to kill myself,” he said to me, after letting me suffer for a few seconds. “I’m not crazy, either. It’s just that I don’t want to see those papers anymore. It’s better for you to have them, since you are still a writer . . . But if you want, you can burn them; it’s all the same to me . . .”
“I don’t understand, Iván. Doesn’t the truth matter to you? That man was a son of a bitch and there’s no excuse nor . . .”
“What truth? What is the truth? And he wasn’t the only son of a bitch who did inexcusable things.”
The Man Who Loved Dogs Page 70