Mantilla, May 2006–June 2009
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The writing of this novel may have begun during the month of October 1989, when, though many did not yet suspect it, the Berlin Wall was perilously close to falling over and collapsing, which it did just a few weeks later.
At the time, I had just turned thirty-four and was making what would be my first trip to Mexico. Since I was convinced that Coyoacán was a very different place from the rest of the city, I managed to get Ramón Arencibia, a Cuban-Mexican friend and the owner of Mexico City’s ugliest car, to take me to visit the house where Leon Trotsky lived and died. Despite my almost absolute ignorance of the ins and outs of that former Bolshevik leader’s life and ideas (like any Cuban of my generation), and, as such, of not being even remotely Trotskyist, I think the fact that I was so moved as I wandered around that place—converted into a museum several years before and into a real monument to the anxiety, fear, and triumph of hate during the time the Trotskys lived there—provided the seeds from which, after a long incubation period, sprouted the idea of writing this novel.
When I faced developing the idea, more than fifteen years later and in the twenty-first century, with the USSR already dead and buried, I wanted to use the story of Trotsky’s murder to reflect on how the twentieth century’s great utopia was corrupted, that process in which so many invested their hopes and in which so many of us lost dreams, years, and even blood and lives. That is why I followed the episodes and chronology of Trotsky’s life, in the years during which he was deported, harassed, and finally killed, with as much accuracy as possible (remember that we’re talking about a novel, despite the overwhelming presence of history on each of its pages), and I tried to rescue what is known with certainty—in reality, very little—about the life or lives of Ramón Mercader, built in large part on speculation rooted in what could be verified and what was historically and contextually possible. The exercise that falls somewhere between verifiable history and fiction is as valid in the case of Mercader as it is for the many other real characters that appear in this novelistic tale—I repeat novelistic—and as such is organized according to the freedoms and demands of fiction.
Between the proposal of writing this novel and the exercise of actually writing it came years of thinking, reading, researching, discussion, and, above all, delving with shock and horror into at least a part of the truth of one of the twentieth century’s exemplary stories and of the biographies of those shadowy but real characters who appear in the book. In this drawn-out process, the cooperation, knowledge, experience, and previous research of many people were essential to me. In some cases, they shared with me their experiences and even their doubts about a story that was often buried or twisted by leaders who, for seventy years, were the owners of power and, of course, history.
As always, between writing and the publication of what I had written, I would need the help that various friends extended in looking for information and, above all, in reading the many versions through which I shaped the novel, and in discussing its content and literary answers, an exchange which little by little allowed me to make adjustments regarding everything from the punctuation and the narrative viewpoints all the way to the historical and philosophical visions that I handle in the more than five hundred pages of this book.
That is why I want to express my enormous gratitude to all who, in one way or another, at one stage or other, with their patience, knowledge, or common sense, or simply behind the wheel of a car (like my friend Ramón Arencibia), helped me to conceive, outline, write, and rewrite this novel many times. In Spain, Javier Rioyo; José Luis López Linares; Jaime Botella; Felipe Hernández Cava; Luis Plantier; Xabier Eizaguirre; Emilia Anglada; and my old friend, who is of course Cuban, Lourdes Gómez, gave me their invaluable support. Moscow would never have revealed itself to me without the generosity and willing collaboration of Victor Andresco, Miguel Bas, Alexander Kazachkov (Shura), Tatiana Pigariova, Jorge Martí, and Mirta Karcick. In France, Elisa Rabelo and François Crozade, and my dear editor, Anne Marie Métailié, were my pillars. My good friend Johnny Andersen was my guide to Trotsky’s Danish footsteps. I appreciate the reading by, the very valuable biographic contributions of, and the intelligence of my Mexican friends Miguel Díaz Reynoso and Gerardo Arreola, perhaps the most enthusiastic supporters of this project, and of the Peruvian researcher Gabriel García Higueras and of my Argentine friend Darío Alessandro. From Canada and England came the support of my professor-friends John Kirk and Steve Wilkinson. And among my many Cuban collaborators (or almost Cuban in some cases), I can’t leave out the bookseller Barbarito, Dalia Acosta, Helena Núñez, Stanislav Verbov, Alex Fleites, Fernando Rodríguez, Estela Navarro, Juan Manuel Tabío, José Luis Ferrer (on the other side of the pond), Leonel Maza, Harold Gratmages, Doctor Fermín and Doctor Azcue, Lourdes Torres, Arturo Arango, and Rafael Acosta.
As is the case with my latest books, I’d like to note my special gratitude, for their work, passion, trust, and patience, to my Spanish editors Beatriz de Moura, Antonio López Lamadrid, and, above all, Juan Cerezo, who reviewed the book word by word with an intelligence, dedication, and love that few editors have anymore and that even fewer employ. My gratitude goes as well to Ana Estevan, who took care of editing the text. I have not forgotten, either, the enthusiastic and sharp reading by Madame Anne Marie Métailié . . .
Finally, I think I will never be able to completely appreciate the “Stakhanovist” work of my most loyal and persistent readers, Elena Zayas, in Paris, and Vivian Lechuga, here in Havana, who practically wrote the novel with me.
And, it couldn’t be any other way, I must leave written testament of my deepest and most constant gratitude to my Lucía, who plunged into the story and helped me like no one else, and gave me the best ideas, but who, above all, put up with me during these five years of sadness, joy, doubts, and fears (remember Iván?), in which I devoted mornings, afternoons, evenings, and late nights to developing, shaping, and wresting from within me this exemplary story of love, madness, and death that, I hope, adds something to the history of how and why the utopia was corrupted and, perhaps, provokes compassion.
Leonardo Padura Fuentes
Always in Mantilla, Havana, summer 2009
The Man Who Loved Dogs Page 72