The Man Who Loved Dogs (11 page)

“
Ix! Dax!
” the man yelled.

When I lifted my gaze, I saw the dogs. I closed the book without thinking twice about it in order to devote myself to contemplating those
extraordinary animals, the first Russian wolfhounds, the valued borzoi, that I had seen outside the pages of a book or the veterinary magazine for which I worked. In the diffuse light of the spring afternoon, the wolfhounds looked perfect while they ran along the seashore, causing explosions of water with their long, heavy legs. I admired the sheen of their white hair, dotted with dark violet on their spines and their back legs, and the sharpness of their snouts, gifted with jaws—according to canine literature—capable of breaking a wolf’s femur.

About sixty feet from them was the silhouette of the man who had called to the dogs. When he began to walk toward where the animals and I were, the first thing I asked myself was who that guy could be to have two seemingly purebred Russian wolfhounds in Cuba in the 1970s. But the animals running and playing shifted my attention again, and with no other motive but curiosity I stood up and walked a few steps toward the shore to better see the borzois, now that the sun was behind me. In that position, I once again heard the man’s voice and for the first time I decided to look at him.

The man must have been around seventy years old (I would later find out that he was almost ten years younger), his salt-and-pepper hair was in a buzz cut, and he wore tortoiseshell glasses. He was tall, olive-skinned, mostly thick but also somewhat gawky. He had two leather leashes in his hands and his right hand was covered by a band of white cloth, as if he were protecting a recent wound. I noticed that he was wearing khaki-colored cotton pants, leather sandals, and a wide, colorful shirt: an outfit that immediately revealed his condition as a foreigner in a country of this-is-all-we’ve-got shirts (striped or checked), run-or-I’ll-kick-your-ass or “stinky feet” shoes (Russian boots or plastic moccasins), and sailcloth or polyester pants that would smother your balls in the summer heat.

We came so close to one another that our eyes inevitably met: I smiled at him, and the man, with the pride of the owner of two Russian wolfhounds, also smiled. After calling to the dogs again, he lit a cigarette and I decided to imitate him, to advance another four, five steps to where the presumed foreigner had stopped.

“Your dogs are beautiful.”

“Thank you,” the man answered. “
Ix! Dax!
” he repeated, and I was still incapable of placing his accent.

“It’s the first time I have ever seen borzois.” I preferred to look at the animals, now that they were running close to their owner.

“They’re the only ones in Cuba,” he said, and I thought: He’s a Spaniard. But there were some strange inflections in his intonation that made me doubt it.

“They need a lot of exercise, although they have to be careful with the heat.”

“Yes, the heat is a problem. That’s why I bring them out here.”

“I’ve read that these animals are very strong but at the same time very delicate. They were the dogs to the Russian czars.” I wondered if it wouldn’t be too daring, but since I had nothing to lose, I made the leap: “Did you bring them from the Soviet Union?”

The man looked toward the sea and dropped his cigarette in the sand.

“Yes, they were given to me in Moscow.”

“I’m sorry, but you’re not Russian, right?”

The man looked me in the eye and snapped the leashes against the leg of his pants. I deduced that perhaps he hadn’t liked being mistaken for a Russian, but I convinced myself that my question did not give the impression of that possibility. Or was he Russian—no, perhaps Georgian or Armenian, by the color of his hair and his skin—and that was why he had that strange intonation and a certain thickness upon pronouncing his words?

At that instant, in the clearing between the casuarinas, I saw a tall, slim black man who, with a towel rolled over his shoulder, observed us without the least reserve, as if he were keeping watch on us. But I turned my gaze when I heard the man in tortoiseshell glasses whispering something in a language I couldn’t place, either, as he put the leashes on the dogs. When the man stood up, I noticed that his steps faltered, as if he’d gotten dizzy, and I heard him breathe with some difficulty. But he immediately asked me:

“How is it that you know so much about dogs?”

“I work for a veterinary magazine and, coincidentally, I just reviewed an article about genetics that a Soviet scientist wrote, and he said a lot about borzois and two other European breeds. Besides, I love dogs,” I answered in one breath.

For the first time the man smiled. The lack of response regarding his origins, his unusual look, and the fact that he had lived in Moscow—in addition to the presence of that tall, slim black man watching us—suggested the possibility to me that the man with the dogs was a diplomat.

“I would like to read that article.”

“I think I could get a copy,” I said, not considering that to fulfill that promise (until the magazine came out, which wouldn’t be for another couple of months) I would most likely have to type up that article full of strange genetic codes myself.

“I love dogs,” the foreigner admitted, using the very verb “to love” in that way in which almost no one ever used it anymore, and in his smile I seemed to glimpse a hidden nostalgia that had nothing to do with what he said next: “Goodbye.”

I mumbled a delayed farewell, and I’m not sure if the man, who was already walking away toward where the tall, slim black man was, heard me. The dogs, when they discovered his intent, started running toward the black man, who got on his knees to welcome them and devoted himself to rubbing their bellies with the towel that had been hanging on his shoulders until then. The foreigner got close to them. He veered off, as if he were making a small turn or it was impossible to walk in a straight line, and after saying something to the black man, he got lost among the casuarinas, followed by the two wolfhounds, who were now walking at their owner’s pace. The black man, who had turned around for a moment to look at me, placed the towel over his shoulder again and followed them, until he also disappeared amid the trees.

When I looked at the coast again, the sun was already touching the sea on the horizon and drawing a red trail that came to its end, with the waves, just a few yards from my feet. The night of March 19, 1977, was beginning.

When I met the man who loved dogs, it had been just over a year since I had started to work as a proofreader at the veterinary magazine. This fate was the result of my third fall, one of the most drastic in my life.

In 1973, when I graduated from the university with excellent grades and the added prestige of having published a book, I was selected to work as the editor in chief of the local radio station in Baracoa, the lost and remote town (there are no other adjectives to describe it) that was filled with the pride—according to a combination of historical fact and human imagination—of having had the privilege to be the first
villa
that was founded, as well as the first capital of the island recently discovered, by the Spanish conquistadors. The promotion to a position with so much responsibility—as the
compañero
who assisted me at the work placement
office, department of recent university graduates, told me—was due to the fact that, in addition to my scholarly achievements, as a young man of my time, I should be willing to go wherever and whenever I was ordered to go, for the necessary amount of time and under whatever conditions, although he decided to omit the fact that, legally, I was obliged to work wherever they sent me due to the stipulations of the call to social service law that all of us recent graduates were meant to fulfill in return for having received our degrees for free. And what the
compañero
also failed to tell me, despite this being the real reason for which someone decided
to select and promote me
to Baracoa, was that they had deemed I needed a “corrective” to bring me down and place me squarely in this world, as the saying goes.

The greatest incentive to get me on the bus that would deposit me in Baracoa twenty-six hours later was thinking about the advantage that kind of exile in a tropical Siberia would provide: if anything was plentiful in the place, it would be time to write. That dream beat inside me like a fetus in its placenta, like a biological need. Around that time, I was already pretty lucidly conscious that the stories in my published book were of a calamitous quality, and if they’d received the coveted standing of finalist in a young writers contest, which included the publication of the volume, it was more due to the issues discussed and my approach to them than to the literary value of my texts. I had written those stories imbued by, more so stunned by, the closed, rugged world lived between the four walls of literature and ideology on the island, devastated by the cascade of defenestrations, ejections, expulsions, and “
parametraciones
” of people who were inconvenient for a variety of reasons carried out in recent years and by the predictable raising of the walls of intolerance and censorship to celestial heights. I was not the only one, or anything close to it, who had acted like the diligent ape Chandler spoke of, and under the romantic conviction that almost all of us had at that time, I had begun to write what, without much room for speculation,
should
be written at that moment in history (of the nation and all of humanity): stories about hardworking sugarcane cutters, brave soldiers defending the homeland, self-denying workers whose conflicts were related to the hindrances of the bourgeois past still affecting their consciousness—machismo, for example; doubts about the application of work methods, to give another example—legacies that, hardworking, brave, and self-denying as they were, they without a doubt found themselves in the midst of overcoming
on their ascent toward the moral condition of New Men . . . But sometime later, when I had looked inside myself and made a shy literary attempt to remove myself from that blueprint so as to paint it with different shades, they had slapped me with a ruler so that I would remove my hands.

It now seems strange, almost incomprehensible, to explain that, despite the reality that tried to assault us every day, for many of us that was a period lived in a kind of bubble, in which we kept ourselves (in truth, we were kept) removed from certain fires raging around us, even in our own neighborhoods. I think that one of the reasons that nourished my gullibility (I should say
our
gullibility) was that at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, when I was going to high school and college, I was a die-hard romantic who cut sugarcane to the point of physical exhaustion during that interminable harvest of 1970, who broke his back planting Caturra coffee, underwent devastating military training to better defend the homeland, and joyously attended parades and political gatherings, always convinced, always armed, with that compact militant enthusiasm and that invincible faith that imbued almost all of us in carrying out almost all of the acts of our lives and, especially, in the patient although certain wait for the luminous better future in which the island would flourish, physically and spiritually, like a garden.

I think that in those years we must have been the only members of our generation in the whole of Western student civilization who, for example, never put a joint between their lips and who, despite the heat running through our veins, would belatedly free ourselves from sexual atavism, led by the damned taboo of virginity (there is nothing closer to communist morality than Catholic precepts); in the Spanish Caribbean, we were the only ones who lived without knowing that salsa music was being born or that the Beatles (the Rolling Stones and Mamas and the Papas
too
) were the symbol of rebellion and not of imperialist culture, as we were told so many times; and besides, as should be expected, amid other shortcomings and disinformation, we had been, at the time, the least informed about the extent of the physical and philosophical wounds produced in Prague by tanks that acted as more than threats, about the massacre of students in a Mexican plaza called Tlatelolco, about the historic and human devastation unleashed by our dear Comrade Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and about the birth, for people of our age, of another kind of dream, kindled in the streets of Paris and in rock concerts in California.

What we were aware of and very sure of was that only loyalty and
more sacrifice was expected of us, obedience and more discipline. Although after the painful failure of the 1970 harvest, we knew that the luminous future was approaching slower than we had thought (I’ll never forget the four months that I spent on a sugarcane field, cutting, cutting, cutting, with all my strength and my faith in each blow of the machete, convinced that that heroic enterprise would be decisive for our exit from underdevelopment, as we had been told so many times). In reality, we barely had a notion of how that political-economic disaster, if you’ll allow me to call it that, had changed the country’s life. The shortcomings that became sharper since then didn’t surprise us, since we were already growing accustomed to them; nor did it alarm us that, as a response to the economic failure, ideological demands would become even more evident, since they were already part of our lives as young revolutionaries aspiring to be true Communists, and we understood or wanted to understand them as necessary. That in the midst of all that effervescence we would find out that two of our university professors had been suspended from their jobs for having confessed to their religious beliefs moved us, but we listened in silence and accepted as logical the accusations destined to cement a decision ratified by the party and with the support of the Ministry of Education. Later, that two other professors would end up being definitively turned out due to their “inverted” sexual preferences didn’t alarm us too much and, if anything, caused a hormonal shakeup, since who would have said that those two professors were a pair of dykes, especially the dark-haired one, who was pretty hot for being forty.