The Man Who Loved Dogs (40 page)

“I know what you’re thinking, and it doesn’t surprise me,” the man said, and I felt a new current of fear. “This is a repulsive story that in and of itself devalues millions of speeches made over the course of sixty years . . . And it’s also true that many people ended up finding Ramón repugnant.”
He paused, although he remained immobile. “But try to understand it, dammit, even if you can’t justify it. Ramón is a man from another era, from a really fucked-up time, when even doubting wasn’t allowed. When he told me his story, I placed it in his world and in his time, and then I understood it. Although, to be clear, don’t ever feel pity for him, because Ramón hated that sentiment.”

“If you never saw his grave or went to his burial, how are you so sure that Ramón is dead?” I asked, throwing out my last chance for perseverance, despite the fact that I already knew I’d been defeated by López’s argument.

“I know that he is dead because I saw him several weeks before he died, when he had already been declared terminally ill . . . ,” he said and smiled, with visible sadness. “Look, for your peace of mind, I’m going to give you a reason you won’t be able to deny: Do you think Ramón, after promising that he would remain silent for the rest of his life, and after having maintained that commitment against every tide, would tell his story to the first . . . to the first person he met? If I were Ramón, do you think I would have risked doing it? And besides, for what?”

In a second, I counted ten things López could have called me (from the Cuban
comemierda
—shit eater—and
sapingo
—bullshitter—to the Spanish
gilipollas
—asshole, which he himself had used on occasion), and I thought of so many other reasons to refute López’s last questions (a man who, according to himself, was dying: What could he be afraid of? The only affirmative response would imply that fear is also transmitted, like an inheritance, and includes the fate of those same children who, perhaps to protect them, López, or Mercader—if in fact that man was Ramón Mercader—had decided not to tell the story). But I realized that if I wanted to continue listening, my only option was to believe him; in fact, at that instant, I did believe him. I forced myself to forget or at least put off my doubts until I somehow had the complete certainty that López was López and that Mercader was a ghost without a grave. Or the opposite. But how in the hell was I going to arrive at any of those certainties if I didn’t even know whether a man named Ramón Mercader del Río had existed?

The story’s interruption cut the man who loved dogs’ narrative momentum, and that afternoon he bid me farewell long before the sun set. Although we agreed to meet on Monday, I remained awhile on the sand, fearing that the relationship may have fallen apart due to my suspicions. And if that was the case, I would be left without knowing how the events took place that were to seal the absolute devotion of Ramón Mercader.

In any event, I spent that weekend devoted to the marathon of reading the last volume of Deutscher’s biography,
The Prophet Outcast
, to try to immerse myself in the time in which López’s story was taking place. I remember that when the theatrical figure of Jacques Mornard appeared in the book’s final pages I felt my heart leap in my chest, as if the murderer had entered my room. My brain then began to play tricks on me: the image of Mornard that came to mind was that of López, with his heavy tortoiseshell glasses. I knew that didn’t make sense, since between the young and handsome Mornard and the sallow and, according to him, moribund López, the distance was great. But my imagination insisted on juxtaposing the real and live visage of the owner of the borzois with the elusive body of the Belgian who showed up at the fortress in Coyoacán with the mission of killing the man who, alongside Lenin, had achieved the unthinkable: that the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, and, further still, held on to it afterward by overpowering imperial armies and internal enemies.

Between the pages of the biography’s final volume, I found three newspaper clippings that betrayed the owner of the book’s interest in the relationship between Trotsky and his assassin. One was from the Cuban daily
Información
where, under a large headline, the very owner of the book gave news of the attack suffered by Trotsky on August 20, 1940, and the seriousness of the state he was in at the time the paper was going to print (to a Communist in 1940, that would have seemed like a pro-Trotskyist comment, only because the author didn’t voice his opinion on the event); the second one must have come from a magazine and contained a commentary about the parodies of Trotsky’s murder that Guillermo Cabrera Infante had included in his book
Three Trapped Tigers
(never published in Cuba and, as such, almost unfindable for us); and the last one, a longish undated column with no reference, I found the most revealing, since it spoke of the presence of Ramón Mercader in Moscow after leaving the Mexican jail where he’d served his sentence. The author of the column relayed that a person very close to Mercader—had López been guilty of another breach of trust?—had told him that, since the day of the attack, the assassin carried in his ears the sound of his victim’s cry of pain.

It was the following Monday, December 22, when I had, without yet knowing it, what would be my last conversation with the man who loved dogs. I remember that afternoon perfectly, as never since López started to tell me the story of Ramón had I felt subject to a pressure that until then I had managed to skirt: For my own good, I asked myself a thousand times,
shouldn’t I tell someone official what was happening to me with that Jaime López who insisted on telling
me
a story so terrifying and politically compromising? The fear that was already engulfing me, reinforced by what I read about Trotsky’s end, was a more sordid, much crueler feeling than I even confessed to myself at that moment, as in reality it had not so much to do with the story of horror and betrayal that I was listening to than with the more than probable fact that it would be known that I had spoken to that strange man for several days without deciding to “ask for advice,” as they used to say, which was regarded as my duty. But the very idea of looking for the “
compañero
who minded” at the information center that edited the veterinary magazine (everyone called him that—“the
compañero
who minded”—and everyone knew who he was, since it seems important that we should
all
know of his diffuse but omnipresent existence) and telling him about a conversation that, no matter who López was, I had promised not to talk about, seemed so degrading to myself that I rebelled at the thought of it. I decided at that moment to accept the consequences (was there a less important and ambitious job than mine? Yes, of course, they could, for example, send me back to Baracoa), and for years I covered up that story with a wall of silence, and not even Raquelita knew—she still doesn’t know today, and besides, she would not give a shit to know—what Jaime López told me.

On that afternoon of my runaway fears, having barely arrived at the beach, López confessed that he felt terribly sad: Dax had started to have problems in moving (“He gets dizzy, like me,” he said) and the day that he would have to put him down was growing imminent.

“I know you’re not a veterinarian and I shouldn’t ask this of you,” he said to me without looking at me, “but if you help me, I think it will be easier . . .”

“I would like to help you, but I really don’t know how to do it, nor can I,” I said to him, watching the two dogs run on the sand. Dax, it was clear, had lost the elegance of his trot and was stumbling.

“I don’t know how I’m going to deal with this . . .” The man was talking to himself more than with me, his voice on the verge of breaking. “I want to be sure he doesn’t suffer . . .”

The evidence of an approaching death and the revelation of those feelings placated my doubts about López’s identity and, particularly, made me decide to face, in silence, any consequences that could come from my decision, an undoubtedly ideologically questionable one. Death has that
capacity. It is so definitive and irreversible that it barely leaves any room for other fears. Even a man like the one I had in front of me that afternoon—a connoisseur of everything about death, according to what he had told me—was frozen before it; he was shaken up in its presence, even when it involved only the death of a dog.

After drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and suffering a coughing fit, López at last started on the story of Ramón Mercader, and he relayed to me the way in which his friend had definitively become a part of history. I listened to him, with my judgment lost, beyond any surprise, and even with a certain delight when the story agreed with the information obtained from my recent reading. At one moment I also discovered that a bothersome and enigmatic mixture of disdain and compassion was taking possession of me—yes,
compassion
, and I’ve never had any doubts regarding the word or what it denotes—disdain and compassion for that Mornard-Jacson-Mercader willing to carry out what he had assumed as a duty and, above all, as a historic necessity demanded by the future of humanity.

López seemed to be on the edge of exhaustion when he reached the story’s climax. It had been dark for a while and I could barely see his face, but I clung to his words, excited by what I was hearing.

“What remains of the story is your New Year’s gift,” he said at that moment, and he seemed emotional and as though he was feeling a great sense of relief. I still close my eyes today and I can see him in those final minutes of his narration: López had spoken with a whistle in his voice and his left hand over the bandage that always covered his right hand. “My wife is the strangest Communist I know. Even in Moscow she insisted on celebrating Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. To her they’re sacred, and never better said . . . And she won’t want to let me go this week, so it will be difficult for me to come until after the New Year. I have to please her.”

“What should we do, then?” I was feeling anxious and frustrated. An accumulation of terrible evidence and burning questions was suffocating me, but I knew it was best not to touch on them in order to avoid their muddying my relationship with the man, since I still had to go over a decisive phase in the life of Ramón Mercader and, due to everything I had heard, I was anxious to know about it. “Do you want me to call you on the phone?”

He responded immediately:

“No. We’ll see each other January eighth. Can you?”

“I think so.”

“I’ll come on the eighth. If I don’t see you, I’ll come back on the ninth.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, accepting in the absence of any alternative. “What about Dax?”

“I can’t do it now,” López said to me, and held out his hand so I could help him stand up. “Careful, my arms hurt a lot . . . Dax is strong, he’ll hang on. I’m going to wait as long as I can, until the beginning of the year. If I had a friend who would help me . . .”

“Poor Dax,” I said when I saw where the conversation was headed and upon confirming that the borzois were getting closer, wanting to leave already, for their dinnertime had come and gone.

López held out his bandaged hand to me. Without a thought, I smiled at him and shook it. Later, as I kneeled down to pick up the bag with the thermos and give it to him, I dared to voice one of the questions that had been tormenting me:

“I read in a newspaper that Ramón heard Trotsky’s cries for the rest of his life. Did he talk about that cry?”

López coughed and ran his bandaged hand over his face. I would have liked for there to have been more light so I could see his eyes.

“He still heard it when he told me the story, about ten years ago,” he said to me, and began to walk away. “I think he heard it until the end . . . Have a merry Christmas.”

“
Lo propio
,” I managed to say, flooded by emotion, and I immediately realized that it had been a long time since I had pronounced or heard those words that, in Cuba, were only used as a formula to return Christmas greetings, that holiday banished years ago by the scientifically atheistic island that was too needy of each workday to allow itself the luxury of wasting days off.

López made his way across the sand, compacted by the previous day’s rain. Alongside him walked Ix and Dax at a slow pace. The darkness didn’t allow me to see the tall, thin black man, but I knew he was still there, between the casuarinas, waiting patiently. López approached the trees and his figure went blending into the night until he disappeared. As if he had never existed, I thought.

PART TWO

16

What feelings went through him when he saw the silhouette of the most absolute question rising above the line of the horizon? He observed that sea whose scintillating transparency could damage one’s pupils and surely thought that, in contrast to Hernán Cortés, thrown upon that unknown land in search of power and glory, he, if anything, could aspire to find there a point of support for the final days of his existence and the grotesque possibility of vindicating a past in which he had already reached and exhausted his quota of power and glory, of hope and fury.

That nightmarish crossing had lasted twenty days. Ever since they had boarded the
Ruth
and its horns announced the call for departure along the rugged Norwegian coast, that tanker that regurgitated the unhealthy vapors of petroleum from its cisterns had turned into a physical extension of the imprisonment they suffered in the desolate fjord. Despite the fact that Lev Davidovich, Natalia, and the police escorts were the only passengers on the vessel, the inevitable Jonas Lie and his men made sure to keep the deportees isolated, preventing any radio communication and keeping watch on them even when they were seated at the table of Captain Hagbert Wagge, who was so proud to have a piece of history on board. Confined in the commander’s cabin, Lev Davidovich and Natalia
spent the days reading the few books about Mexico they had obtained, thanks to Konrad Knudsen, trying to make out what was waiting for them in that violent and exalted New World, where the price of life could be a simple look interpreted the wrong way and where, as far as they knew, no one was waiting for them.