The Man Who Loved Dogs (57 page)

At the conclusion of their first meeting, weighed down with condolences, Lev Davidovich asked the poet for a few days to organize his thoughts before beginning to work on the project that had brought him to Mexico:
the creation of an International Federation of Revolutionary Artists. Lev Davidovich knew he would work passionately, but that it would require great effort, since not even for someone like Lev Davidovich was it easy to handle the weight of so much death and pain. In addition, the heated situation in Mexico continued to worry him. When President Cárdenas announced the nationalization of oil interests and the U.S. secretary of the treasury responded with the threat of not buying any more Mexican silver, one million people gathered in the Zócalo to express their support for Cárdenas, but at the same time there was talk of possible uprisings against the government. Lev Davidovich knew that these circumstances put him and Natalia in a critical situation, as the NKVD murderers could take the opportunity, in the midst of so much chaos, to pounce on them, indeed he was convinced that, after the last trial, the purge of his former Bolshevik leadership completed, his existence had ceased to be useful to Stalin.

Before Breton and his wife, Jacqueline, left, the Communists in France and Mexico had begun a campaign against him. The French, from which Breton had separated himself in 1935, were accusing him of being a Judas and, of course, something worse, a Trotsky sympathizer; in Mexico, meanwhile, the local Stalinists, with Lombardo Toledano and Hernán Laborde at their head, launched even more aggressive propaganda against the poet and against Lev Davidovich—so aggressive, in fact, that van Heijenoort decided to take some of the bodyguards for Breton’s protection during the conferences he would be giving in the country.

To discuss literature and art, surrealism and vanguardism, political commitment and creative freedom, was a balm for the Exile. Breton’s presence and his literary encouragement reminded Lev Davidovich that ever since his childhood, and later on, when he was a young student, his life’s dream had been to become a writer, although soon after he would subordinate that passion and all others to the revolutionary work that marked his existence.

Guided by Diego, the Bretons and the Trotskys walked around the pre-Columbian ruins and visited museums and local artists who accepted the Exile’s presence. The high priest of surrealism confessed to his astonishment before the multicolored markets, the cemeteries, and the manifestations of popular religiosity, in which he tended to find a “surrealism in a pure state,” more revealing than the shock of the umbrella and the sewing machine on the dissection table, and for that reason he considered Mexico “the chosen land of surrealism.”

When they began to work on the manifesto of writers and revolutionary artists with which they would bring the international federation into creation, Lev Davidovich and Breton must have felt the explosive tension that two stubborn souls could generate, but at the same time the possibility of an understanding born of shared need. From the beginning, Diego made it clear that the theoretical statements would be left to them, although they could count on his signature, since the three were operating with the urgency of offering a political and intellectual alternative to the left that would allow them to reconcile themselves with Marxist thinking at a moment in which many believers, disillusioned by the repression unleashed in Moscow, were beginning to turn their backs on the socialist ideal.

In those conversations, Breton maintained the need to make a major distinction: the intellectuals on the left that had linked their thinking to the Soviet experiment were making a serious conceptual error, since it wasn’t the same to march alongside a revolutionary class as in the steps of the victorious revolution, more so when that revolution was represented by a new leadership insistent on suffocating artistic creation with a totalitarian grip . . . But despite the accusations by the Stalinists, his own distance from the party had not been a break with the revolution and, less still, with the workers and their struggles, he said. His great disagreement with Lev Davidovich revolved around a concept both considered fundamental to establish clearly, and about which the Exile’s position was definitive and nonnegotiable: “Everything is permitted in art.” Upon hearing this, Breton smiled and showed his agreement, but only if an essential clarification was added: everything except attacking the proletarian revolution. Breton recalled that Lev Davidovich himself had said that, and the Exile explained that when he wrote
The Revolution Betrayed
, the aesthetics deformations in the Soviet Union had certainly reached alarming levels, but the events of the last three years had broken the dike. While a proletarian revolution might inevitably pass through a period that was not Thermidorian but rather a terror that negated its own essence, it still had no right to impose conditions restricting artistic freedom: everything has to be permitted in art, he insisted, to which the French man again added: everything except attacking the proletarian revolution. This was the only sacred principle.

Breton was the kind of sharp adversary who brought Lev Davidovich so much pleasure. The challenge of persuading the surrealist reminded him of Alexander Parvus of his youth, when discussing Marxism became his obsession. To reinforce his arguments, Lev Davidovich evoked
for Breton the fates of Mayakovsky and Gorky, the forced silences of Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Babel, the degradations of Romain Rolland and of various former surrealists loyal to Stalinism, and insisted that they shouldn’t admit any kind of restrictions, nothing that could lead to the acceptance of things that a dictatorship could impose on the creator with the excuse of political or historic need: art had to follow its own demands, and only those. By accepting political conditions that Lev Davidovich himself had defended (at this point he truly regretted having done so), presently it was impossible to read Soviet poems and novels or see paintings created by the obedient, without feeling horror and disgust. Art in the USSR had turned into a pantomime in which civil servants armed with pens and brushes—watched by civil servants armed with guns—could glorify their great genius leaders. That’s where the slogan of ideological unanimity had led them: the pretext that they were under siege by class enemies, and the eternal justification that it was not the right time to talk about problems and the truth, to give poetry freedom. Artistic creation in Stalin’s time, he thought, would remain the expression of the deepest decadence of the proletarian revolution, and no one had the right to condemn the art of the new society at the risk of repeating that frustrating experience. “For art, freedom is sacred, its only salvation. For art everything has to be
everything,”
he concluded.

In those conversations in which they attempted to fix the world, Lev Davidovich discovered with some surprise that, more than any theory, Breton was fascinated by the drama of life itself, and that he frequently brought up the subject of fate and its role in the events that marked one’s destiny. It was during one of these conversations, seemingly insignificant and without anyone recalling how they got to talking about it, that Lev Davidovich confessed to the poet how much he loved dogs. He expressed his regret to Breton that his wandering life had prevented him from having one ever since he said goodbye to his Russian wolfhound at the cemetery wall in Prinkipo, and he spoke to him of Maya’s goodness and the devotion that, in general, dogs of that breed felt for their owners. Then Lev Davidovich realized that the most surreal of the surrealists was a strictly logical man when Breton refuted that idea and claimed that Lev Davidovich was allowing himself to be led by his emotions. Breton explained that, upon speaking of the love that dogs feel, Lev Davidovich was trying to attribute feelings to these beasts that belong only to humans.

With arguments that were perhaps more passionate than rational, Lev Davidovich tried to convince the Frenchman that a dog feels love for its owner. Hadn’t many stories about that love and friendship been told? If Breton had met Maya and seen her relationship with him, perhaps he would have a different opinion. The poet said that he understood it and clarified that he also loved dogs, but the feeling came from him, the human. A dog, at best, could show that it made a distinction based on how humans treated it: by being afraid of the human being who could cause him pain, for example. But if they accepted that the dog was devoted to someone, they had to also admit that the mosquito was consciously cruel when it bit someone, or that the crabwalk was deliberately retrograde . . . Although he didn’t convince him, Lev Davidovich liked the surrealist image of the purposefully retrograde crab.

A few days later, they had a less pleasant discussion and with very strange consequences. It happened when Lev Davidovich was waiting for Breton to show him the draft of the manifesto, and the poet said the ideas weren’t coming and that he hadn’t been able to finish it. Perhaps due to all his stress, Lev Davidovich at that moment went into a fit of rage. He reproached Breton for his negligence (he would later regret it, recalling the times he accused Liova of the same) and his inability to understand the importance of getting that document circulating in a Europe that was closer to war every day. Breton defended himself and reminded him that not everyone could live with just one thought in mind. Lev Davidovich’s passion was “unreachable” for him. That he should be called “unreachable” annoyed Lev Davidovich even more, and they were on the verge of a breakup, which Natalia prevented by placing herself on the poet’s side.

The following day, Lev Davidovich received the news that Breton had suffered an unusual physiological phenomenon: he had fallen into a kind of general paralysis. He could barely move, he couldn’t write, and he was aphasic. The doctors diagnosed him with emotional fatigue and recommended absolute rest. But according to van Heijenoort, Lev Davidovich was the one to blame for Breton’s physical and intellectual freeze: the secretary called it “Trotsky’s breath on your neck,” which, he said, was capable of paralyzing anyone who had a relationship with him since, according to van Heijenoort, exposure to his way of living and thinking unleashed a moral tension that was almost unbearable. Lev Davidovich didn’t realize this, because he had been demanding that of himself for many years, but not everyone could live day and night facing all the powers in the world:
fascism, capitalism, Stalinism, reformism, imperialism, all religions, and even rationalism and pragmatism. If a man like Breton confessed to him that he was out of reach and ended up paralyzed, Lev Davidovich had to understand that Breton was not to blame; rather, Comrade Trotsky, who had withstood everything he had to withstand all those years, was an animal of another species. (“I should hope I’m not a cruel mosquito or a reactionary crab,” Lev Davidovich commented to the secretary.)

Despite the discussions—or perhaps thanks to them—Breton’s presence had a positive effect on Lev Davidovich, whose concern increased, as Natalia had predicted, by Jeanne’s refusal to separate herself from Seva. Any way he looked at it, the woman appeared affected by neurosis, and perhaps had been influenced by someone who had turned her against Liova’s parents: her attitude was so aggressive that she had not allowed Marguerite Rosmer to have a conversation with the boy. Faced with that situation, they had no alternative but to file a lawsuit for Seva’s custody.

On July 10, the Trotskys, the Bretons—the poet had already recovered—and Diego Rivera left for Pátzcuaro. The manifesto was almost ready and Breton wanted to add the final touches. Some fisherman friends of Diego’s had promised them the best of their catch since Lev Davidovich had a weakness for the fish from Lake Pátzcuaro. Jacqueline and Breton also had a taste for them, which the poet baptized “André Masson’s fish.” The fishermen in mid-task reminded the Exile, with more nostalgia than he could have predicted, of the years in Prinkipo, when he still had faith in the future of the opposition within the Soviet Union and the energy and motivation to go out fishing with kind Kharalambos. What was his friend doing now? he asked himself. Did he still return each evening navigating over the reddish wake drawn by the setting sun on the Sea of Marmara?

With the manifesto still unfinished, the politician and the poet argued a lot about the effects of Stalinism on artistic creation inside and outside the USSR. Lev Davidovich reminded him how much disgust he felt for Stalin’s sycophants, especially authors such as Rolland, and Malreaux, whom Trotsky had praised so much on reading their first novels and who were now typical of those writers in Paris, London, and New York who were signing statements supporting Stalin without having (or wanting to have) any idea of what was really happening in the USSR. Lev Davidovich would submit each one of them, so convinced of the regime’s goodness, to a test: he would make them live with their families in a sixty-square-foot apartment, without a car, with bad heating, and force them
to work ten hours a day in order to succeed in an emulation that produced nothing, earning just a few devalued rubles, eating and wearing what was assigned by their ration books and without the least possibility of traveling abroad or the freedom to express opinions on anything. If at the end of a year they still defended the Stalinist regime and espoused its great philosophical principles, then he would shut them up for another year in one of the penal colonies that Gorky had considered to be the factories of the new man—that would be the true test (excessive, really, he told himself)—and then they would see how many Rollands or Aragons still raised Stalin’s flag in a Paris bistro.

They had just returned from Pátzcuaro when Lev Davidovich received the news that on July 14 his collaborator Rudolf Klement had disappeared in Paris without a trace. His previous experiences made him fear deeply for the fate of the young man, for whom he felt great affection. Although the reports he received were untimely and sparse, from the start he felt that there was some connection between Klement’s disappearance and Liova’s death, and he let the French police know in a letter protesting the negligence with which they had handled the investigation.