The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  “Of course not. But he was one of the ones who helped Stalin turn twenty million people to ash in the name of communism . . . And he didn’t kill just anyone . . . He killed another son of a bitch who, when he was in power, ripped the heads off of who knows how many people . . . All of this is too heavy, Iván. Note that the Russians, after having taken the lid off things, closed it all up again, nice and tight . . . You have to do a lot of terrible things to kill so many people . . .”

  “Mercader was a victim, like most of them,” he protested, less vehemently, as he looked at the lighter the man who loved dogs had left him as an inheritance.

  “He was more than a victim, and that’s why he couldn’t live in peace. Do you know why he told you his story and then wrote this letter? So that you would write about it and publish it . . .”

  Iván rubbed his shaved head forcefully, as if he wanted to erase something inside it. And he was saying he wasn’t crazy?

  “Sometimes I think like you do. But other times I believe it was the need of a dying man. It has to be really fucked-up to live your entire life as if you were someone else, saying you’re someone else, and knowing it’s better to hide behind the other name because you feel ashamed of yourself.”

  “What kind of shitty shame are you talking about? None of them had any shame or anything like it.”

  “Don’t you think he paid for all his faults? Do you know that another prisoner from Lecumberri said that Ramón had been raped in prison?”

  “He had to know what the risks were, and even then he accepted it . . . And it seems fine to me that his ass was ripped open in jail.”

  “He wasn’t running around killing people . . . He was a soldier who followed orders. He did what they asked of him out of obedience and conviction . . .”

  Iván stood up, served more coffee in the cups, but neither of us drank. He was looking at his dog again when he said to me:

  “Do you know how I was sure that López was Mercader, before reading those papers—before seeing the photo?”

  “I don’t know . . . Because of what he said to you about Trotsky’s scream, right?” I guessed, willing to give him a break: at the end of the day, Iván hadn’t killed anybody or helped anyone else get fucked over. He was definitely a victim, after all.

  “No, no, the key was the way he treated his dogs and how he looked at the sea. He was Mercader in search of the happiness he felt in Sant Feliu de Guíxols. His paradise lost . . . Cuba was a placebo.”

  “So how could you keep talking to him after being sure that he was Mercader?”

  Iván looked into my eyes and I stared back. He mechanically drank his coffee, grabbed the cigarette packet, and removed another cigarette. How many was he going to smoke?

  “I think I was never sure that he was Mercader. When López told me about Mercader’s life, it seemed that he was talking about a man from long ago, I don’t know, from the nineteenth century . . . And although it sounds morose, I wanted to know how that story ended. But above all, I felt he needed me to listen to him.” He paused and lit a cigarette. “Do you know what bothers me most about this whole story?”

  “The lies?”

  “Besides the lies.”

  “That Stalin perverted it all? That likely his same comrades killed Mercader, poisoning him with radioactivity?”

  “More than that.”

  I stayed silent. When you looked at it all, everything in that story bothered me. Iván smoked without taking his eyes off of me.

  “What he stuck in here,” he said, and pointed at his shaved head. “When I read those papers and had a clear idea of what Ramón Mercader had done, I felt disgust. But I also felt compassion for him, for the way in which he had been used, for the shame it caused him to be himself. I know: he was a murderer and doesn’t deserve compassion; but I can’t help it, dammit! Maybe it’s true that his own people released radioactivity into his blood to kill him, as Eitingon says, but it wasn’t necessary, because they had already killed him many times. They had taken everything away from him: his name, his past, his will, his dignity. And in the end, for what? Ever since he said yes to Caridad, Ramón lived in a jail that followed him until the very day of his death. Not even by burning his entire body or by believing he was someone else could he get rid of his history . . . But, despite it all, I felt bad knowing how he had ended up, because he had always been a soldier, like so many people . . . And if they killed him, you can’t feel anything but compassion for him. And that compassion makes me feel dirty, contaminated by the faith of a man who should not deserve any compassion, any pity. That’s why I refuse to believe that his own people killed him, because, in a way, that would make him a martyr . . . And I don’t want to publish anything, because just to think that this story could move someone to feel a little bit of compassion makes me want to vomit . . .”

  I looked at my friend and felt that I was finally beginning to understand something. His life (if you’ve come this far, you already know) had been a series of disgraces and unwarranted but unavoidable frustrations—so many and at the same time so common that it seemed incredible that the weight of his times and his circumstances could fall on one man alone. It was as if he personally was chosen to receive each one of the blows meant for an entire generation of people forced to be gullible. To top it off, he had lived with that damned story inside him for almost thirty years and had the disgrace that Ana, the purest thing in his life, should reproduce with her death Ramón Mercader’s final torture and that he should see himself forced to watch, day after day, an agony that couldn’t cease to remind him of a despicable and despised murderer. Even so, along with indignation, Iván felt compassion for that man and his fate, and that feeling provoked an intense rancor toward himself.

  “Iván, he was one of them and they treated him ruthlessly, as they taught him from the beginning that others should be treated. But he doesn’t deserve your compassion for any of that.”

  Iván thought for a few seconds. He must have been weighing the consequences of what he wanted to tell me, and just by looking at him I sensed that it wasn’t going to be anything pleasant. It was at that moment that I remembered, I’m not sure through what association of ideas, the story of Iván’s desire to travel to Italy.

  “It’s just that I can’t go on . . .” he said at last. “I’ve spent my entire damned life with the feeling of trying to escape from something that always grabs me, and I’m tired of running . . . Now, take those papers and leave. Go on, I want to lie down.”

  Almost relieved, I stood up, but I did not grab the papers. When I went to leave, I turned around and saw him smoking again. Iván had his eyes fixed on Truco, who was sleeping in the corner. I felt pity for my friend and for his dog, real and justified pity, but also an enormous desire to tell it all to go to hell, to curse the entire world, to disappear. Of course, I didn’t need to ask Iván what he had been trying to escape from throughout his life; I knew that he was fleeing from fear, but as he himself said, no matter how much you run and hide, fear always gets you. I know all too well.

  “We’re fucked. All of us,” I said. I don’t know if I said it out loud.

  How is it possible that I let so much time go by? It’s true that I was—am—also afraid, but Iván deserved more from me.

  It wasn’t until December 22 that I finally went out to search for Iván. My wife gave me the excuse, although it wasn’t very good, that she wanted to invite him over to eat with us the night of the twenty-fourth. The problem was that Iván and I both had always hated the holidays and viewed the festive spirit that people assumed around that time as an obligation.

  When I got to his apartment, I found the door and the window shut. I knocked several times, without any response. Something about the house seemed strange to me, although at that moment I didn’t notice what could be out of the ordinary, besides the inscrutability and the silence.

  Since it was barely three in the afternoon, I went to the veterinary clinic where Iván worked and also found it close
d, with the chain and the lock he tended to put between the door and the doorframe. I asked a woman who lived across the street and she told me that Iván had not come for two or three days, and that had her worried: he was never away for so long.

  I returned to Iván’s block and knocked on the house of the neighbor who had lent the color television during Ana’s illness. The man recognized me and invited me in, but I told him I was in a rush and just wanted to know if he had seen Iván.

  “Three days . . . No, I haven’t seen him in about three days.”

  I thanked him and, out of basic courtesy, I wished him a Merry Christmas, and the man responded with two words full of meaning:

  “Lo propio.”

  When I was walking toward the Pontiac, asking myself where in the hell Iván could have gone, I remembered that the Christmastime formula his neighbor had offered me was the same one that, according to my friend, he had said by way of farewell to the man who loved dogs, on the very day they met for the last time, exactly twenty-seven years ago. And at that moment, a light went off in my head. How was it possible that Truco didn’t bark when I knocked at the door of the apartment? Iván and Ana’s dog was a compulsive barker, and he would have stopped making noise for only a few reasons: if he was very sick, or if he wasn’t at home, or—the most probable—because he had died, perhaps of melancholy over Ana’s absence.

  Overcome by a bad feeling, I switched course and went in search of the only public telephone working in the neighborhood, at the newspaper and magazine stand that doesn’t sell newspapers or magazines. From there I managed to call Frank’s and Anselmo’s houses, and both of them confirmed that Iván hadn’t been by in a long time. Then I called Raquelita and she said she hadn’t seen Iván in ages and it would be better if she never again saw that “miserable comemierda.” Sitting in the Pontiac, I started to think and saw very few alternatives. I didn’t have the least idea of where to look for him, although I knew I should look for him. In this country, people don’t tend to disappear: when someone gets lost it’s because the sea swallowed them up or because they still don’t have enough coins to make a phone call from the first telephone they find in Miami. But that wouldn’t be Iván. Not at this point, not after everything he had lived through inside the island’s four walls.

  Suddenly I was inspired. I started the car and went to the cemetery. That place was deserted after the last burial of the afternoon. I looked for Ana’s grave, in her family’s section, and found everything in the horrifying state of neglect that the dead are always left in. A long time before, the floral wreaths had given way to the dust and dirt that had again taken over a place that didn’t seem to have been visited by anyone for several weeks.

  Outside the cemetery, I found another working telephone and called Gisela, Ana’s sister. She didn’t know anything about Iván, either; he hadn’t even called her again after the burial. More and more alarmed, I remembered his family in Antilla, out in the east, with whom he had gone to live for a few weeks after leaving the ward for drug addicts at Calixto García Hospital. Since I was in the neighborhood of El Vedado, I drove to Raquelita’s house (the spectacular mansion that her second husband, a fat jeweler and trafficker whom most of Havana knew as Alcides “the magician,” one of socialism’s winners, had “managed” to get for her) and I managed to get his ex to find, in an old notebook, a telephone number for Serafín and María, the cousins of Iván’s mother, out in Antilla. Raquelita, despite herself, had become infected with my concern and made the call herself, receiving the same response: that the relatives in Antilla didn’t even know about Ana’s death. When I left Raquelita’s mansion, I was weighed down by an additional pain in my chest, since it was obvious that Francesca wasn’t too interested in what could have happened to her father, although it didn’t surprise me to know that she was also trying to figure out how to leave the island—a decision that her brother Paolo and my children, typical representatives of their generation, had already beaten her to.

  At night, as I pushed around, rather than ate, what my wife had served, I noticed how the worry had turned into a feeling of guilt, since I was convinced that something very serious had happened. I told my wife about the afternoon’s search and she gave me the idea, which I hadn’t thought of, of going to the police. It seemed ridiculous and excessive to me, but I started to consider the possibility. Something could have happened to him: perhaps he was in the hospital after having been in an accident, or having a heart attack; I don’t know what the hell I thought. And what if he had really gotten on a balsa raft and still hadn’t arrived anywhere or had drowned like his brother, William? . . . Almost at midnight I got dressed again, resolved to file a report at the station on Acosta Avenue, and when I was just two blocks away from the police building, I felt a flash of certainty. I went off course and went down to Lawton. I still didn’t know (nor do I know now) why I was convinced of what I would find.

  I entered the apartment through the dark and slippery hallway. In my hand I had the sledgehammer that I always keep in the Pontiac’s trunk. In front of the door, I was surrounded by a stench I hadn’t noticed that afternoon, giving proof to my bad feeling. Nonetheless, I knocked several times, yelled Iván’s name and Truco’s. Only silence answered. I didn’t wait any longer. With just one blow of the sledgehammer, I busted open the door, so rotten it almost fell off the frame. The stench intensified immediately, and I felt for the light switch, taking care not to run into the wooden stanchions holding up the structure. When the apartment lit up, I saw what I never wanted to see: in the other room was the bed, sunk in, its legs broken by the weight on top of it. On top of the mattress, also sunk in by the weight, I managed to make out the shape of some legs, an arm, part of a human head, and also something of the yellow fur of a dog below the pieces of wood, concrete, and plaster. I raised my sight and saw that from the ceiling were hanging a few pins of steel, rotted and gnawed away, and beyond that, a flat and remote sky, without stars.

  I grabbed one of the steel chairs and dropped into it. Before me was a disaster with apocalyptic resonance, the ruins of a house and a whole city, but above all, of dreams and lives. That murderous pile of rubble was a mausoleum that was apt for the death of my friend Iván Cárdenas Maturell, a good man whom fate, life, and history had destroyed. His cracked world had at last come undone and devoured him in that absurd and terrible way. The worst thing was knowing that in some way—in many ways—Iván’s disappearance was also the disappearance of my world and the world of so many people who shared our space and our time. Iván had at last escaped, and left me as a legacy his cosmic frustrations, the malignant weight of a compassion that I didn’t want to feel and a cardboard box, marked with my name, with all of those papers written by him and by Ramón Mercader, which were the best picture of his soul and his time . . . What was Iván thinking of when he heard the wooden beams creaking and saw death coming down on him from the sky, dragged by inertia and gravity, the only forces still capable of moving us? It’s possible he wasn’t thinking about anything: he had finished writing what he needed to write, only to fulfill a physiological need, and his life had turned into the most desolate of all voids. This is what we come to after so much walking, with our eyes blindfolded. And at that moment I remembered Iván telling me about his dog’s melancholy, of the infinite freedom and the open windows to the collective mentality . . . And again the vague image came to mind of the Trevi Fountain, where neither Iván nor I were ever able to throw a coin.

  At last, I’ve been able to read all of Iván’s papers. More than five hundred typed pages, full of cross-outs and additions, but carefully ordered in three manila envelopes that he had also marked with my full name, Daniel Fonseca Ledesma, so as to avoid any confusion.

  As I was reading, I felt how Iván ceased to be a person who was writing and turned into a character within what was written. In his story, my friend emerges as a representative of our times, like a figure who is sometimes exaggeratedly tragic, although with an indisputable breat
h of reality. Because Iván’s role is to represent the masses, the multitude condemned to anonymity, and his character also functions as a metaphor for his generation and as the prosaic result of a historic defeat.

  Although I tried to avoid it, and I twisted and turned and denied it to myself, as I read I started to feel compassion rise within me. But only for Iván, only for my friend, because he does deserve it, and a lot of it: he deserves it like all victims, like all the tragic creatures whose fates were decreed by forces greater than they were, that overwhelmed them and manipulated them until they were turned into shit. This has been our collective destiny, and to hell with Trotsky with his obstinate fanaticism and his belief that personal tragedies don’t exist, only changes in social and superhuman stages. So what about people? Did any of them ever think about people? Did they ask me, did they ask Iván, if we agreed to postpone our dreams, lives, and everything else until they disappeared (dreams, life, and even the Holy Spirit) in historical fatigue and the perverted utopia?

  I won’t think about it too much, because I might regret it. I’ll do the only thing I can do if I don’t want to condemn myself to forever dragging around the deadweight of a story of crimes and deceptions, if I don’t want to inherit every ounce of the fear that pursued Iván, if I don’t want to feel guilty for having obeyed or disobeyed my friend’s will. I am returning what belongs to him.

  I am arranging these papers in a small cardboard box. I am beginning to seal it with tape until the entire surface is covered with the steel-colored strips. This morning I buried Truco next to the wall of the backyard of my house, and inside the death shroud I made for him I placed a copy of Iván’s long-ago book of short stories, Mercader’s lighter, and Ana’s Bible. This afternoon, when they close my friend’s casket, the shipwrecked cross (of all of our shipwrecks) and this cardboard box, full of shit, of hate, and of tons of frustration and a lot of fear will go with him—to heaven or to the materialist putrefaction of death. Perhaps to a planet where truth still matters. Or to a star where there is no fear and where we can even be happy that we feel compassion. To a galaxy where perhaps Iván knows what to do with a sea-worn cross and with this story, which isn’t his story but in reality is, and which is also mine and that of so many other people who didn’t ask to be in it but who couldn’t escape it. They will perhaps go to a utopian place where my friend knows, without any doubt, what the hell to do with truth, trust, and compassion.