The Man Who Loved Dogs (50 page)

For weeks Lev Davidovich would get caught up in that historical dispute. To begin to refute them, he had to accept the responsibility that, as a member of the Politburo, he had approved the suppression of that uprising. He refused to admit that he personally had brought about the crackdown and encouraged the cruelty that accompanied it. “I’m willing to consider that civil war is not exactly a school for humanitarian conduct and that, on one side and the other, unforgivable excesses were committed,” he wrote. “It is true that in Kronshtadt there were innocent victims, and the worst excess was the execution of a group of hostages. But even though innocent men died, which is inadmissible at all times and in all places, and even when I, as the head of the army, was ultimately responsible for what happened there, I cannot admit a comparison between the suffocation of an armed rebellion against a weak government at war with twenty-one enemy armies and the cold and premeditated murder of comrades whose only charge was to think and, perhaps, say that Stalin was not the only or the best option for the proletarian revolution.”

But Lev Davidovich knew that Kronshtadt was going to forever remain a black chapter of the revolution and that he himself, full of shame and pain, would always carry that guilt. He also knew that if in Kronshtadt the Bolsheviks—and he included himself as well as Lenin—had not repressed that rebellion mercilessly, it would have perhaps opened the doors to the restoration of the czar. Revolution and its options could be so simple, so terrible, and so cruel. He thought it then and would think it to the end of his life, and nothing would make him change his mind.

When at the end of November, a letter from Liova arrived with the news that the
Bulletin’s
publication would be delayed in order to include the findings of the Dewey Commission, Lev Davidovich preferred not to respond. In the last letters they exchanged, they had been on the verge of a break. He simply could not believe that Liova had needed four months to prepare the most important edition of the
Bulletin
. All of his excuses were inadmissible and he came to think that there had been negligence and even incompetence on his son’s part. In one of those letters, he had even commented whether it would be better to transfer the publication to New York and place it in the hands of other comrades. Natalia, who had
received other missives from her son, told him that Liova felt offended, since he didn’t understand how his father could be so insensitive, knowing the problems hounding him. Insensitive! A man with Liova’s experience didn’t understand what was at stake? “Liova is an excellent soldier and we’re at war,” he added, without suspecting how much he would very soon regret his outbursts and his lack of sensitivity.

It was at the beginning of the year when they decided that Lev Davidovich would spend some time far from the Casa Azul. Rivera maintained he had seen some suspicious men prowling around and, to be safe, they chose to move him to the house of Antonio Hidalgo, a good friend of the Riveras who lived above the forest of Chapultepec. Lev Davidovich welcomed the idea, since he wished to make the most of his isolation to move forward in the biography of Stalin: he needed to take that dark mist out of his head. Natalia, meanwhile, would stay in Coyoacán, and they agreed that she would visit only if his stay was extended. How long will we live fleeing, hidden, even provoking the paranoia of men like Diego Rivera? he thought as he entered the forest of cypress trees.

The days lived at Antonio Hidalgo’s house soon blended into each other, and of that time he would only clearly remember the afternoon of February 16, 1938. From the window of the studio assigned to him, he saw Rivera cross the garden with his hat in his hand. Lev Davidovich was writing an article at that moment in which he used the Kronshtadt controversy to make a defense of the communist ethic. When Diego reached the studio, he could tell from his face that something serious had happened.

Liova had died in Paris, Rivera said. When Lev Davidovich heard those words, he felt the earth open, leaving him hanging in the air like a marionette. He would never remember if he attacked Diego physically, only that he yelled “Liar! Swine! . . .” until he collapsed in a chair. When he began to recover, Rivera told him that, after reading the news in the afternoon papers, he had telegraphed Paris in search of confirmation. Hidalgo then suggested that Trotsky call Paris to get more information, but he refused. Nothing was going to change the fate of his dead son and the only thing he wanted at that moment was to be with Natalia.

Before starting back, Lev Davidovich demanded that Diego share all the information that he had. What had happened was and would continue to be confusing. On February 8, one of Liova’s illnesses flared up and the doctors diagnosed him with appendicitis and decided on an emergency operation. To avoid any GPU agents, Liova entered a private clinic in the
outskirts of Paris run by Russian émigrés. His location was known only by Jeanne and his collaborator, Étienne. Taking extreme cautions, Liova registered himself at the clinic as Monsieur Martin. The operation was a success, but four days later, for reasons that were still unknown, the young man suffered a strange setback. According to the witnesses, he was wandering the clinic, delirious and screaming in pain. The doctors operated on him again, but his body, overcome by exhaustion, did not withstand the second surgery.

As they drove to Coyoacán, Lev Davidovich felt his temples pounding and his body shaking. He couldn’t stop thinking that his son had died alone, far from his mother, without having seen his daughters again, lost as they were in the Soviet Union. And that Liova had been barely thirty-two years old. When he entered his room, he saw Natalia Sedova seated on the bed, looking at old family photos. As never before in his life, he wished to die that very second, disappear forever before being forced to give his wife the news. When she saw him (never had she seen him so defenseless and aged, she would tell him weeks later), she rose, lifted up by the only two questions she could formulate: Liova? Seriozha? The human mind is a great mystery, but without a doubt it is at the same time wise and sibylline, since at that moment, the Exile felt he would have preferred to say “Seriozha” instead of “Liova.” Sergei’s life, if he still had it, belonged to Stalin; Liova’s seemed more his, more real. The pain he was going to cause Natalia was so great that he didn’t dare say “has died” and stammered that little Liova was very sick. Natalia Sedova didn’t need more in order to know the truth.

They spent eight days shut up, without receiving visitors or condolences, barely eating, just he and Natalia. She read and reread the letters from her dead son and cried; he, lying down next to her, cried with her, lamenting the young man’s luck, speculating about how he should have protected him, how he should have treated him, blaming himself for not having acknowledged his work every day, for not having forced him to leave France. But he decided that he didn’t want to forget the pain, either. It was the third child he had lost and he didn’t know if he should cry over Seriozha, who was perhaps already dead, also destroyed by the hatred of a criminal.

Slowly, they began to unravel the sordid knot that had wound around Liova’s mysterious last days and understood that there was something dark in his death, and that those shadows could only have come from one place: the Kremlin. The doctors at the clinic continued to be unable to explain the reasons for his setback, but one of them had confessed to
Jeanne that he suspected Liova had been poisoned with some unknown substance. To Jeanne and Étienne, it seemed strange that Liova had decided to camouflage his origins at a Russian clinic, of all places, and said they didn’t know who could have suggested that place. Furthermore, they didn’t know who, besides themselves and Klement, knew of his location.

Lev Davidovich was convinced that the guilt he felt would never leave him. The boy’s death, whatever the reason for it was, seemed more linked to his father’s fate than his own; it was a direct consequence of his father’s life and acts. Liova’s absence had left him and Natalia in unfathomable pain, since they felt that none of their children had been closer to them. “He was our young part. And I can’t forgive myself that we weren’t able to save him,” he wrote as a farewell homage. “The old generation with which we once embarked on the road to revolution has been swept from the stage. What the deportations and the czarist jails, the deprivations of exile, war, and illnesses didn’t do has been achieved by Stalin, the worst scourge of the revolution,” he wrote in the final lines of Liova’s obituary, convinced that, sooner or later, the world would know with certainty that Stalin had killed the boy who, during their cold and impoverished Paris mornings, on the way to school, turned in at the printer the calls for peace and the proletarian revolution for which he lived and now has died . . . “Let the pain turn into anger, to give me the power to go on!” he wrote and wept again.

19

January 8, 1978, might have been the coldest day that winter, and I blamed the temperature and the intermittent rain sweeping the sea for the absence of the man who loved dogs. Had he perhaps gotten sick, and for that reason missed our prearranged meeting? The following afternoon I had barely handed in the corrected proofs at the printer’s when I ran to the line for the Estrella bus and returned to the beach. Although it was still cold, the sky had cleared and the sea was unusually calm for that time of year. Walking on the shoreline or leaning against some casuarina, I waited, again in vain, until night fell. The following ten days, resisting Raquelita’s protests, crossing the city like a man condemned, I repeated that routine and returned to that stretch of beach six times and prayed for the appearance of that man, his dogs, and the conclusion of that absorbing story.

As I played tricks with my mind in order to summon his return—I threw coins in the air, closed my eyes for ten minutes, counted the seconds, things like that—I weighed each of the possibilities that could justify López’s absence, although Dax’s announced sacrifice and the man’s health problems seemed to me the most probable. On the sixth or seventh fruitless day I began to consider whether the best thing wouldn’t be to find out how to get to López—the trail of the singular borzois, actors in
a film, seemed the most plausible—but a few days later I decided I had no right to do so and that the best thing for me was not to try: it was already dangerous enough to play with fire, but it was quite another thing to jump into it. Finally, on the verge of a crisis with Raquelita and already well into February, I started to space out my trips to the beach, and as if I were curing myself of another addiction, I looked for every way possible to overcome the anxiety that the expectant void had left me.

Many years later I would confess to my friend Dany that the day I went to return his books about Trotsky I was on the verge of overcoming my fears and telling him the story of my meetings with the man who loved dogs. The fact of being the only repository of a story capable, in and of itself, of bringing down the foundations of so many dreams urged me to drain myself of the horror with which I’d been infected and produced in me a kind of mental vertigo, worse than the vertigo López himself suffered. That murky handling of ideals, the manipulation and hiding of the truth, crime as state policy, the cynical construction of a big lie, caused me indignation and more and new fears.

At that moment, what really still intrigued me was not knowing the final fate of Mercader, of whom I only knew—due to the folded article in the Trotsky biography—that he had gone to jail in Mexico and then been received in Moscow in such a way that was hostile to him and his acts; a city where, according to López, his friend had died, confined to an anonymity that included his grave.

As I could not get the man who loved dogs out of my mind, I started to think that I ought to do something to find out what Ramón Mercader must have thought, felt, and believed during all those years of punishment and imprisonment, and then later when he returned to a world that no longer seemed (though it continued to be the same) like the world he had left more than twenty years before, full of faith, convictions, and with a death mission in his hands.

What still hadn’t occurred to me, nor would occur to me until a few years later, was the possibility of putting López’s confession in black and white and less still of writing a book about Mercader’s crime and the history and the interests of his demiurges. Perhaps it was because the story had been left incomplete and many of the details from the part I knew escaped my comprehension and my ability to relate them and situate them in a historical context; or perhaps it was because I didn’t know if López would reappear at some point and, no matter who he might be, I
had promised not to tell or write his tale. Perhaps I didn’t think about it because, in reality, I had so forgotten that I had wanted to be a writer at one time that I almost didn’t think like a writer. But the fact was that the idea of writing that inconclusive story did not come to mind, and if it did, it did so in a manner that was too timid—and you’ll see immediately that I’m not picking just any adjective. Only several years later, when I started to squeeze my memory to try to reproduce the details that López had told me, did I learn that the true cause for the long postponement, the only and real cause, had been fear. A fear greater than I could imagine.

In the months that followed the disappearance of the man who loved dogs, in the most devious ways, almost always in whispers, I pursued the few existing books on the island capable of helping me understand the dramatic relationship between Stalin and Trotsky and what that sick confrontation and Stalin’s success represented for the fate of the Utopia. Searching in the mountain of Stalinist literature that continued to come to the country from Moscow, dusting off chewed-up pamphlets from the 1950s that went from the most basic Trotskyism to the fervent anticommunism of the Cold War—gasping as I read Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, published in Cuba years before—I started putting together a fragmentary and diffuse knowledge that, despite everything that had been hidden (there were still almost ten years left until glasnost and the first round of revelations of some of that inner world of terror), brought with it an inevitable feeling of surprise and incredulity (disgust would come to the surface soon after), above all because of the crude manipulation of the truth to which so many men had been subjected.