The Man Who Loved Dogs (18 page)

With the support of África, Joan Brufau, and his colleagues at the head of the Juventudes Unificadas, Ramón exploited the increased revolutionary enthusiasm, and together they quickly conducted a hunt for fresh blood. The “Jaume Graells” battalion (poor Jaume, the group’s first martyr, fell in the defense of Madrid) hurried to leave for the new military destination they had been assigned, a few miles from the Madrid besieged by the Nationalists. Ramón, who was already considered a veteran and proudly showed the wound from the bullet that had grazed the back of his right hand in the first days of the war, would be its commander until the group joined the Fifth Regiment, and for several days he walked around Barcelona displaying the insignia that filled him with militant fervor.

África used the two weeks of October 1936 that Ramón spent in Barcelona before returning to the front to bring him up to speed on the dark political events that were already beginning to take place beneath the air of enthusiasm and combativeness. The greatest danger facing Republican
forces, according to the young woman, was factionalism, which had worsened since the start of the war. Catalan nationalists, syndicalists with an anarchist orientation or socialist affiliation, and renegade Trotskyists like those from the Workers’ Party for Marxist Unification (POUM)—at the front of which was that stubborn thorn Andreu Nin (who was even a member of the Generalitat government)—were already opposed to the communist strategy and had put on the table the most transcendental question of the moment: War
with
revolution, or war
with
victory but
without
revolution? Even before the Soviet advisers and directors of the Comintern had arrived in Spain, the Communist Party had digested Moscow’s ever-correct policies and shown their position clearly: offering massive and immediate assistance to leftist forces with unity in order to obtain military victory and prevent the entrenchment of a fascism that threw itself behind the rebel military offering it massive and immediate aid. Only after that Republican victory could there be talk of establishing the bases for the social revolution whose very mention, at that moment, frightened the fickle democracies, who didn’t need to be frightened, since they ought to be the Republicans’ natural allies against the fascists. The POUM activists, with the Trotskyist philosophy of European revolution, and the anarchists, with their libertarian sermons (motivated by them, criminal excesses had already been committed that were as despicable as those of the rebel soldiers), had opposed this strategy from the start. It was erroneous according to them because they advocated for war and, along with it, revolution against the bourgeois system. That difference in principle foreshadowed fiery battles, and the work of the Communists, África said, was as important on the front as in the rear guard, where they had to fight for the validation of a policy demanded by Soviet advisers who had already conditioned their support on there not being any of the ideological breaks that libertarians and Trotskyists insisted on generating.

“Those revisionists love playing at revolution,” África had said to him. “If we let them, the only thing they’ll achieve is that we’re left on our own and lose the war. They have Trotsky’s sign on their heads and we’re going to have to rip it away from them by fire. Without Soviet assistance, you can’t even dream of victory, so now tell me how in the hell we’re going to make a revolution? It seems like they’ve already forgotten 1934.”

In the luxurious Hispano-Suiza that she drove around, África had taken him to see the poor neighborhoods and towns close to Barcelona
so that Ramón could see the chaos that Trotskyists and anarchists were bringing to the country. Outside Las Ramblas and the city’s central areas, a regrettable desolation had settled, with streets blocked by absurd barricades, paralyzed factories, buildings ransacked to the core, and churches and convents turned into charred ruins. África told him about the executions carried out by the anarchists and about how fear of expressing their opinions was growing among workers. The middle class and many business owners had been divested of their goods, and the project to create a military industry was being run by a sea of syndicalist volunteers. A scarcity of products had taken hold in stores and markets. The people were enthusiastic, that was true, but they were also hungry, and in many places bread could only be acquired through long lines and only if they had the coupons distributed by anarchists and syndicalists, who had become the owners of a city in which central and local government were distant references. Although the anarchists were confident that having entered an era of equality was enough to maintain the support of masses who’d been enslaved for centuries, África asked herself how long the enthusiasm and the faith in victory would last.

“This Republic is a brothel and we’ve got to whip it into line.”

Now, in a period of only a few months, with the return of the smell of blood and the roaring from the front where young men like his brother Pablo or his friend Jaume fell daily, Ramón found himself in a tired, more still, disenchanted city, besieged by scarcity and anxious to return to the normality broken by the war and revolutionary dreams. It was as if the people only aspired to live a regular life, sometimes even at the despicable price of surrender. The
franquistas
’ devastating attack on Málaga, where the rebel infantry and navy, with the support of Italian aviation and troops, had massacred those escaping from the city, had dented people’s faith. Although posters still hung from buildings, from confiscated churches and from the few vehicles that ran through Barcelona, instead of clamoring for unity in victory, they now yelled furiously for the elimination of enemies that a short while before had been considered allies, even brothers. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie, who’d been forgotten up until a few weeks before, were emerging from their caves again: in the still poorly stocked cafés of Las Ramblas fur coats were seen once again amid the proletarian overalls. In the surviving bars, by contrast, it was the anarchist militia who in their idleness drank what they found, played dominoes, smoked foul-smelling cigarettes, and rolled around with the
prostitutes whom a few weeks before they had tried to convert to the proletarian revolution. The effervescence of the previous months was losing its splendor, like the faded letters of the posters that, in these same bars, written by the same men, still recalled the Great Plans:
DANCE IS THE BROTHEL’S WAITING ROOM; THE TAVERN WEAKENS CHARACTER; THE BAR DEGENERATES THE SPIRIT: LET’S CLOSE THEM
!

On the way to the confiscated palace of his relative the Marquis of Villota, Ramón, conscious that he smelled like the hills and gunpowder, felt pride in knowing he was faithful to his purposes and also anxious to find out what his new fate would be. The underlying reasons for Barcelona’s atmospheric change still escaped him, but from that moment he had the notion that concrete—draconian, to be precise—actions were being imposed to restore the broken faith and implant the discipline that had never existed and that the overwhelmed Republic cried for.

While the streetcar went up to the heights of La Bonanova, Ramón remembered the times he and his parents had visited the house of their wealthy and noble relative, the owner of an admirable pack of dogs with whom Ramón spent the visits. That memory seemed remote, almost foreign, as if between those easy days of the past and the difficult hours of the present, many years—perhaps many lives—had traveled through his body, and of the boy Ramón, little more remained than barely a name and fragments of nostalgia. On the high gate of the property, a cardboard sign now hung announcing the location of the headquarters of the Group of Antifascist Women, presided over by Caridad. Although the building could not hide its splendor, the garden had become full of weeds, stripped cars, and starving dogs that Ramón preferred not to look at. Without anyone stopping him, the young man crossed the garden and the palace’s porch, with its Italian marble floor stained by mud and grease and a large photo of an illuminated and serious Stalin hanging in the privileged place where, he remembered perfectly, the marquis displayed a dark still life by Zurbarán. When they informed him that Comrade Caridad was in the back garden, Ramón, who knew his way through the house, searched for the exit from the library and saw a small table under the cypress tree where Caridad and the solid and ruddy Kotov were talking, smiling.

Ramón had met the Soviet man through his mother, when he had just arrived in Barcelona with the first intelligence advisers and those sent from the Comintern. Before Ramón left for Madrid and Caridad for Albacete, they had had many meetings with Kotov. Ramón had admired
the marvelous capacity for analysis of that secret agent with transparent and sharp eyes and a slight limp in his left foot that he was sometimes able to hide. Later, when the fall of Madrid seemed imminent, comments reached the young man about the almost suicidal acts of that Moscow emissary, who, following the path of the first Soviet tanks, had many times placed himself at the head of militias and internationalists, violating the Muscovite order that prohibited advisers from directly participating in the actions of war. He also knew that his mother felt devoted to that man, who was capable, according to her, of reading a five-hundred-page book in one night, of reciting almost all of Pushkin’s poetry from memory, and of expressing himself in eight different languages, including Cantonese.

As if she had just seen him that morning, Caridad offered him a seat. Meanwhile, the effusive Kotov welcomed him with a bear hug and offered him a drink of vodka that Ramón rejected. The cold March air did not seem to have any effect on the Soviet, who was dressed in only a crude wool shirt with a multicolored handkerchief tied at his neck; Caridad, by contrast, was covered in blankets.

“How did you leave things in Madrid?” Kotov wanted to know, and Ramón tried to explain to him what could be known or speculated, from a trench twenty miles from the city, about the situation of the interminable battle for the capital, although he expressed his conviction that the offensive initiated in Guadalajara would end like the one at Jarama: it would be a new victory over the fascists.

“That’s a given,” Kotov declared, as if he could predict the future, even of that unpredictable war, and took one of Caridad’s cigarettes from the table. He began to smoke without inhaling. “But now we have a more complex battle here in Barcelona,” he added, and without further ado he painted for Ramón a picture of the political tensions in the Catalan capital in which the Generalitat at last was trying to be something more than an assembly of councillors whom no one obeyed. There, in Barcelona, more than in Madrid, the path of the war could be decided, he assured him.

Listening to Kotov, Ramón recalled the question that Caridad had asked him a few days before and her insistence on the idea that there could be more important fronts in that war. According to Kotov, President Companys seemed ready to discipline his territory and had ordered the requisition of weapons in the dismantling of anarchist and syndicalist vigilante patrols that effectively controlled Barcelona. For the party, the
need to neutralize the different Republican, or falsely Republican, factions had become a task of the first order and because of that they should support Companys’s plan. The problem lay in the fact that the communist policy was constantly limited by the hostility of the conciliatory government of the Socialist Largo Caballero, who continued to demonstrate his dislike of them and, what was worse, his inability to direct the war. The panorama became clearer for Ramón when Kotov explained that a group of completely trustworthy militants was going to work for what was presented as an urgent political need: to get rid of those burdens affecting discipline and military will and catalyze the Republican efforts dedicated to unifying the forces. To reach this objective they were going to use all means, from the most aggressive propaganda to the possibility of creating such a crisis that it would lead to a change in the government and allow the replacement of Largo Caballero by a leader capable of obtaining the unity of the forces.

Ramón was beginning to make out the dimensions of the mission he’d been called on to undertake, and he listened to Kotov’s reflections about the urgency of initiating the offensive with a purge of the army, where they had to get rid of some of the leaders who were unconditionally loyal to Largo Caballero. Comrade Stalin himself had suggested that they purge the highest levels and designate more capable leaders: in the Málaga disaster, they had behaved like idiots—worse, like traitors and saboteurs. Therefore it was necessary to remove recalcitrant opponents and, at the same time, achieve the preeminence of the Communists within the Republican alliance, in the army as well as in the institutions. Only thus could they achieve necessary cohesion and begin to dream of victory.

“Kid, in this war many things are being decided for the future of the proletariat, for the whole world, and we can’t go around like wet rags. We know that Largo and his damn Socialists are organizing a miserable campaign against the Soviets, the Communists, and our political commissars. Or does it seem like a coincidence to you that they are talking more and more about how Mexico is offering the Republic disinterested assistance? Some have even accused us of having taken the reserves of Spanish gold to Moscow as payment for the weapons, when everyone knows that—besides selling the Spanish weapons that nobody would sell them—we’re protecting that treasure that could’ve fallen into the hands of the fascists, which would have been the end of the Republic. It’s very clear: at the root
there is an alliance between Socialists and Trotskyists to discredit the Soviets. We even suspect that the government is negotiating a pact with the English to carve us out of the game. We would leave as we came in, lamenting the defeat of the Republic, but what about you? You would be the scapegoats and would pay with your blood. Franco is going for everything, with Hitler and Mussolini pushing him on.”