The Man Who Loved Dogs (41 page)

When the coast took on all its clarity, his fears rose to the surface and Lev Davidovich made a final demand of Lie: he would only leave the oil tanker if someone he could trust came to meet him. Who? he was thinking, when Jonas Lie gave him the surprising reply that they were going to honor this request, and then he also concentrated on observing the coast.

As the boat approached the port of Tampico, the restless crowds dotted with the blue uniforms of the Mexican police became visible. Although it had been a long time since Lev Davidovich had overcome his fear of death, exultant throngs always forced him to remember those that had surrounded Lenin in August 1918 and from which the pistol of Fanny Kaplan had emerged. But a wave of relief washed over his apprehensions when he discovered, at one end of the jetty, Max Shachtman’s features, George Novack’s good-looking face, and the radiant levity of a woman who could be none other than the painter Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera’s lover.

As soon as they docked, the Trotskys fell into a whirlwind of rejoicing. Several friends of Frida and Diego’s, in addition to the North American followers who had come with Shachtman and Novack, enveloped them in a wave of hugs and congratulations that achieved the miracle of making tears run down Natalia Sedova’s face. Taken to a hotel in the city where a welcome dinner had been organized in their honor, the couple listened to the jumble of information that had been kept from them by Jonas Lie, undoubtedly because of the nature of the news: General Lázaro Cárdenas had not only granted Lev Davidovich indefinite asylum but also considered him his personal guest and, with this welcome message, was sending the presidential train to take them to the capital. At the same time Rivera, who excused himself for not having been able to go to Tampico, offered them, also indefinitely, a room in the Casa Azul, the building he inhabited with Frida in the capital neighborhood of Coyoacán.

The French wines and the strong Mexican tequila aided Lev Davidovich and Natalia in the gastronomical jump from the
mole poblano
to the
puntas de filete a la tampiqueña
, from the fish
a la veracruzana
to the bumpy consistency of the tortillas, colored and enriched with chicken, guacamole, peppers, jitomates, refried beans, onions, and cola-roasted
pork, all of it sprinkled with the fiery chili that demanded another glass of wine or a shot of tequila capable of putting out the fire and clearing the way for a taste of those fruits (mango, pineapple, sapodilla, soursop, and guava), pulpy and sweet, indispensable to topping off the party for European palates overpowered by the textures, smells, consistencies, and flavors that were alien to them. Overwhelmed by that banquet of the senses, Lev Davidovich discovered how his preoccupations dissolved and the tension gave way to an invasive tropical voluptuousness that wrapped him in a beneficial tenderness which, so he wrote, his exhausted body and mind greedily received.

Following their siesta, they resolved to go for a drive with Frida, Shachtman, Novack, and Octavio Fernández, the comrade who had worked the hardest to get them asylum. Nonetheless, the guests soon returned to reality when they saw that the car was placed in a convoy headed by a convertible jeep in which members of the presidential guard, rifles in hand, were traveling. Lev Davidovich thought that not even in paradise would they be completely free.

On the train, Frida brought him up-to-date on the reactions caused by his arrival. As could be expected, General Cárdenas’s decision had been an act of defiant independence, since it had been taken at a moment of great political tensions, right in the middle of an agrarian reform process and with oil nationalization on his agenda. The decision to accept him—the only and understandable condition of which was that the Exile abstain from participating in local political matters—had been an act of sovereignty through which the president expressed his loyalty to his own political ideas more than his sympathy for those of the political refugee. But that decision had turned Cárdenas into the object of a variety of accusations that went from cries of traitor to the Mexican Revolution to fascist ally (uttered by the Communists and the leaders of the Confederation of Workers, the president’s traditional supporters), even of “red anarchist under Trotsky’s orders” (put forward by a bourgeoisie for whom Trotsky and Stalin meant the same thing and for whom the arrival of the former confirmed the ascendance of “the Russians” over the president).

An exultant Diego Rivera was waiting for them in a small station close to Mexico City, and from there—accompanied by other policemen and many friends armed with bottles of cognac and whiskey—they took the path toward that strange residence painted telluric blue.

Lev Davidovich’s first encounter with Rivera’s work had been in Paris, during the years of the Great War, when the echoes of the Mexican Revolution reached Europe and, with them, the works of its revolutionary painters. Later, he had closely followed the cultural phenomenon of muralism, of which he even received news during the days of his exile in Alma-Ata, when Andreu Nin sent him a beautiful book about Rivera’s painting that perished in the fire at Prinkipo. In contrast, he had just a superficial notion of Frida’s tormented and symbolic work, but from the moment he found himself surrounded by her paintings, he discovered that his sensibility communicated much better with the woman’s anguished art than with Rivera’s explosive monumentality.

Their hosts had prepared for them the former room of Cristina Kahlo, Frida’s sister. When Rivera had decided to receive them, he bought the young woman a dwelling close to the Casa Azul, by which he announced to the Trotskys that they could use the bedroom to their liking. The painters’ friendliness and the critical state of their finances forced Lev Davidovich to accept what would be, he thought, just a temporary accommodation.

La Casa Azul quickly took on the aspect of a besieged fortress. Several windows had to be covered and some of the walls reinforced, and as soon as the exiled couple arrived, guards started turns of duty. The inside of the home was entrusted to young Trotskyist Americans, while the outside was handled by the local police. Nonetheless, just barely settled in, Lev Davidovich began to feel himself surrounded by an optimism he thought he had already lost, although he forced himself, more for the exhausted Natalia than for himself, to take a break before launching himself back into the struggle that called out to him.

As it had done so many times in his life, politics shook him and reminded him that not even the possibility of the briefest repose had been given to Prometheus and those who dared to be near his rock. And that was the fate that would pursue him to the last day of his life.

The radios and newspapers began to announce that the criminal court put together in Moscow’s House of the Trade Unions was again opening its doors to dramatize a new episode of the Stalinist farce. At first, the number and names of those on trial was unknown, until it was specified that there were thirteen, headed by Radek, who, with his resounding capitulation, had thought himself safe from Stalin’s rage. Also summoned were the redheaded Piatakov, Muralov, Sokolnikov, and Serebriakov,
although it was again Lev Sedov and Lev Davidovich who were the main defendants, in absentia.

Ever since the new proceedings were initiated on January 23, 1937, Lev Davidovich had closed himself up with the radio to try to unearth the logic of that absurdity in which the accused seemed to compete with confessions that were more and more humiliating and unhinged, which were then added to the conspiracies to overthrow the system or assassinate Stalin, the existence of industrial sabotage plans, of massive poisoning of workers and peasants, and even the signing of a secret pact between Hitler, Hirohito, and Trotsky to tear apart the USSR. The saboteurs took on their shoulders all economic failures, hunger, and even railway and industrial accidents with which they had attacked the country and its heroic workers and betrayed the Leader’s trust. One of the accusations in the proceedings placed one of the prisoners in Paris, receiving orders from Trotsky at the moment he was in Barbizon without permission to visit the capital. But the cornerstone of the aborted conspiracy rested on the confession of Piatakov, who declared he had traveled from Berlin to Oslo in 1935 to attend a counterrevolutionary summit with the renegade Trotsky.

Forced to explain their responsibility in that matter, the pusillanimous Norwegian government issued a denial with proof that Piatakov’s presumed plane, coming from Germany, had never landed in Norway in the places or on the dates declared by the prosecutor and accepted by the accused. But it was already known that the angry curses by the former Menshevik Andrei Vyshinsky against the degenerate, rabid, stinking dogs for whom he was asking the death penalty were going to overcome any obstacle or evidence from obstinate reality . . . Lev Davidovich knew, nonetheless, that those unsustainable proceedings hid some objective that went beyond the need to repair the contradictions of the previous proceedings and eliminate another group of old Bolsheviks: something of that goal was becoming clear to him as the names of Bukharin and his companions in the faded opposition of the right were repeated. It was darker and more difficult for him to understand, in contrast, the mention of certain Red Army officers, supposedly linked as well to the Trotskyist conspiracy, treason, and sabotage.

With that political earthquake, the calm of the Casa Azul disappeared. The Exile organized a press conference and, anticipating the foreseeable sentences, declared his purpose of refuting the accusations with undeniable
proof. That declaration, of course, did not stop the court, and before Lev Davidovich could put together his testimony or obtain a single document of proof, the judges in Moscow issued sentences that carried the death penalty for almost all of the prisoners and the surprising sentence of ten years for the indefatigable Radek, who again saved his own skin, at a price known only to him and to Stalin—and only Stalin knew until when.

Overwhelmed by the news that so many old comrades in arms were going to be executed, Lev Davidovich brandished the only weapon he had at his disposal and again asked Stalin to extradite him and put him on trial. But as he expected, Moscow remained silent and executed the sentenced men with its habitual speed and efficiency. Then he threw the next stone and asked that an international investigative committee be created and repeated his willingness to appear before a Terrorism Commission of the League of Nations and to hand himself over to the Soviet authorities if any of those bodies proved a single one of the accusations. But again the world, fearful and blackmailed, was silent. Convinced that he was playing his last card, the Exile decided to organize a counterproceeding himself where he would denounce the falsity of the charges against him and, at the same time, would turn himself into the accuser of Stalin’s henchmen.

Deep down inside, Lev Davidovich knew that the counterproceeding, if anything, would just scratch the surface, but he threw himself into it with the faith and desperation of a shipwrecked man. For several nights he worked on the idea and had long talks with Rivera, Shachtman, Novack, Natalia, and the recently arrived Jean van Heijenoort, while Frida Kahlo came and went like a restless shadow. Covered with ponchos, watching how Rivera’s pantagruelian voraciousness made bottles of whiskey evaporate and how he devoured dishes of meats burning with chili, they tended to settle in around the orange tree that dominated the backyard of the Casa Azul and debated all the possibilities, although the main challenge lay in finding people with enough moral authority and political independence to legitimize if not legally, at least ethically, a counterproceeding that could perhaps still stir some consciences in the world.

It was the Americans who proposed inviting the nearly octogenarian professor John Dewey to preside over the court. Despite his prestige as a philosopher and pedagogue, to Lev Davidovich he seemed, nonetheless,
a man too removed from the intricacies of Soviet politics. Meanwhile, Liova had begun to work in Paris, trying to obtain proof to refute the accusations. The materials Liova sent, in addition to the documents that Natalia, van Heijenoort, and Lev Davidovich had taken from the archives that they had brought to Mexico with them, implied an overwhelming amount of analysis.

Lev Davidovich was working feverishly and desperately and demanded from his collaborators, especially Liova, a superhuman effort. Overcome with anxiety, any carelessness enraged him and he began to label certain failures and delays from his son as negligence, without paying attention to calls to reason from Natalia, that were aimed at reminding him of the precarious conditions in which Liova lived in Paris, where he had even been forced to publish a statement in which he warned of the surveillance he was subject to by the Soviet secret police. In reality, what most bothered Lev Davidovich was receiving a letter in which his son commented that the enormous effort seemed pointless. Even if they managed to get the world’s most prestigious people to testify to his father’s innocence, the results wouldn’t mean anything to those who thought him guilty, and it would bring very little to those who already knew he was innocent. On the other hand, Liova thought that the circulation of the pamphlet
Stalin’s Crimes
that his father had started to write could be more effective than a trial requested by the accused himself. In a fit of anger, the former commissar of war called the young man a defeatist and even threatened to take away his position at the front of the Russian section of the opposition. Liova responded by asking for forgiveness for not always being able to rise to the heights demanded of him.

At that moment Lev Davidovich received news that gave him some hope that he and Natalia clung to tooth and nail. Thanks to a deserter from the former GPU who had seen himself threatened by the purges also initiated within the repressive apparatus, Liova had managed to learn that his brother, Sergei, had been arrested in Moscow during the witch hunt that preceded the last trial. The informant assured him that he had been sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia, accused of planning the poisoning of workers. In the midst of the prolonged lack of news in which the couple had assumed the worst, the news that the young man (doubtless, after being tortured) had been thrown into the hell on earth of a work camp fell on the Casa Azul like a blessing. Seriozha was alive! In the privacy of their room, they went through the painful motions of
encouraging each other, and spoke for many nights about the survival strategies that the young man’s logical mind would rely on and of the integrity he must have shown in order to not accept the confessions that in all certainty they had tried to make him sign in order to take him to trial. They avoided, however, the stabbing images of Sergei tormented by the cruelest systems and didn’t dare to pose the most piercing questions: How had he withstood it without caving in? (What is caving in: confessing to something you haven’t done, going mad, allowing yourself to die?) Where must the limits of Sergei’s resistance have taken him? (Does the brain give in first or does the body?) Which of those imagined tortures had they applied to him or which of the unimaginable ones? (Was Seriozha one of the few who withstood and preferred to die rather than grovel?)