The Man Who Loved Dogs (74 page)

In his anxiety to hear Lev Davidovich’s opinion, Jacson had stood behind him the entire time, leaning on the edge of the worktable, reading over the Exile’s shoulder what he was marking in the text. That warm pressure over the back of his neck soon provoked the Exile’s fear. As he folded the pages, he called Natalia so she would accompany Jacson to the door and he explained to the young man that he had to rewrite the article if he intended to publish it. The man took the pages with the face of a beaten dog, and, upon seeing him, Lev Davidovich again felt sorry for him. Perhaps because of that, when the Belgian asked if he could bring him the rewritten text, he said yes, thinking that the appropriate and necessary response was no. Nonetheless, during dinner he told Natalia that he didn’t want to receive him again; he didn’t like that man, who, for starters, could not be Belgian, since no Belgian with the least education (and this one was the son of diplomats) would even think to breathe down the neck of a person he barely knew.

On what would be the second-to-last sunrise of his life and the last of which he would be conscious, Lev Davidovich awoke with the feeling of having slept like a child. The sleeping pills he had been prescribed had a relaxing effect that allowed him to sleep and awaken with energy, in contrast to the ones he had taken a few months before, which caused a sticky inertia. In the morning, he spent more time than usual with the rabbits, since just to see them confirmed how much he had abandoned them since the doctor had recommended rest in light of his elevated blood pressure. He had tried to explain that being with the rabbits and with Azteca, far from exhausting him, comforted him. But the doctor insisted that he not make physical efforts, and even prohibited him from writing. The bastard must be from the GPU, he thought.

The work morning lasted longer than usual. He had insisted on drafting an article for his American comrades about the theories of revolutionary
defeatism and the way to adopt it in a situation different to that of 1917, keeping in mind that the current imperialist war, as he had declared on more than one occasion, was a development of the previous one, a consequence of the deepening of the capitalist conflicts, for which it was necessary to look at reality with a new lens.

The good news of the day had been the cable brought by Rigualt, his Mexican lawyer, confirming that his papers were finally in safe hands at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Rigualt had also brought him a gift, two tins of red caviar. At lunchtime he asked Natalia to open one and he himself served it. As soon as the caviar touched his taste buds, he felt a wave that took him back to the first days of the Bolshevik government, when they had just installed themselves at the Kremlin. In those days he and his family lived in the Knights’ House, where before the revolution the czar’s civil servants had lived. The house had been divided into rooms, and in one of those lived the Trotskys, separated by a hallway from the rooms occupied by Lenin, his wife, and his sister. The dining room they used was common to both rooms, and the food they were served was terrible. They didn’t eat anything but salted beef, and the flour and the pearl barley they used to prepare the soup were full of sand. The only thing that was appetizing and abundant (because they couldn’t export it) was red caviar. The memory of that caviar had forever become associated with those first years of the revolution, when the political tasks they faced were so big and unknown that they lived in perpetual vertigo and, even so, Vladimir Ilyich, whenever he could, dedicated some minutes to playing with Lev Davidovich’s children. That final midday, as he devoured the caviar, he again asked himself if all great dreams were condemned to perversion and failure.

After a brief siesta, he returned to his study, determined to finish various projects in order to dedicate himself fully to revising the biography of Stalin. Now he wanted to include in the book what was apparently the last letter that Bukharin had written to the Grave Digger while he waited for the verdict to his appeal. They were a few lines, very dramatic, even worse, sullen, that some friendly hands had sent on to him and that, ever since then, he had not been able to stop thinking about. In the letter, Bukharin, sentenced to death, didn’t even ask for clemency anymore but rather for a reason: “Koba, why do you need me to die?” Bukharin didn’t know? Because he knew why Stalin wanted them dead—all of them.

He took up his work again, dictating some ideas for an article with
which he intended to respond to the new verbal attacks of the Mexican Stalinists, but at some point he lost his concentration and remembered that Jacson, Sylvia’s boyfriend, had announced he would return that afternoon with his rewritten article. Just thinking about seeing that man and reading his string of banal remarks disgusted him. I’ll get rid of him in a couple of minutes and then I’ll give the definitive order that I will not receive him anymore, under any pretext, he thought.

While he was waiting for Jacson, he observed that, outside his study, it was a beautiful afternoon. The Mexican summer could be hard but not cruel. Even in August, at least in Coyoacán, there was always a breeze. Lev Davidovich lamented that the windows facing the streets were covered and cut off the flow of fresh air and the possibility of seeing people pass by, the fruit and flower vendors with their perfumes and colors. He knew that, despite the misery, the war, and death, beyond the walls he lived between there crawled a normal and small life that tried to make do day by day, a life he had dreamed of many times as if it were a great privilege that had been taken away from him.

Since Seva still hadn’t returned from school, Azteca was sleeping at the door of his study. The mutt had grown into a beautiful dog, though a beauty different from Maya’s aristocratic one, but definitively attractive. Who does Azteca love more, Seva or me? he asked himself, and smiled. Observing the dog, he remembered that he had to feed the rabbits. He went out to the yard and put on his thick gloves, and for several minutes his mind was occupied only with the activity he was carrying out. His rabbits were also beautiful, he thought, and for a few moments he felt far away from the world’s sorrows. It was then that he heard the jail-like screeching of the door. Jacson, he confirmed, as he cursed the moment when he had agreed to see him again. I’ll finish with him as quickly as I can, he thought, and for the last time in his life Lev Davidovich Trotsky caressed the rabbits’ soft fur and directed some words of love to the dog by his side.

27

The moment he crossed the armored threshold of the fortress in Coyoacán and saw, in the middle of the yard, the table covered by a tablecloth of bright Mexican colors, he felt how he was regaining control of himself. The fury that had accompanied him all day disappeared, like dust swept away by the wind.

Ever since Ramón returned to the hotel the night before, the dry aftertaste of the cognac and the bitterness of an explosive rage had settled in his stomach, inducing him to vomit. The belief that his will, his capacity to decide for himself, had evaporated began to besiege him and lead him to feel like an instrument of powerful designs in whose mechanisms he had been enshared, refused any possibility to turn back. The certainty that in three, four, five days he would enter the murky current of history as a murderer caused him an unhealthy mix of militant pride over the action he would carry out and repulsion toward himself over the way in which he had to do it. Several times he asked himself if it wouldn’t have been preferable, for him and for the cause, for his life to have ended beneath the tracks of an Italian tank at Madrid’s doors, like his brother Pablo, before thinking that his mission would only be that of draining
the hate that others had accumulated and had guilefully injected into his own spirit.

That morning, when he woke up, Sylvia had already ordered breakfast, but he barely tasted the coffee and, without saying a word, got in the shower. Ever since the last trip to New York, the woman had noticed that her lover’s affable nature had begun to turn, and the fear that the fantastic relationship could falter made her tremble with anxiety. He had explained to her that business wasn’t going well, that the renovation of the offices was delayed and cost too much, but her feminine instinct yelled that other problems were weighing down the soul of her beloved Jacques.

Without speaking he got dressed. She, with her black slip, observed him in silence, until she dared to ask: “When are you going to tell me what’s wrong, dear?” He looked at her, almost surprised, as if only at that moment had he noticed her existence.

“I’ve already told you: business.”

“Just business?”

He stopped adjusting his tie.

“Can you leave me alone? Can you shut up for a while?”

Sylvia thought that never in almost two years of their relationship had Jacques spoken with that hostile tone, loaded with hate, but she chose to stay silent. When he opened the door, she decided to speak again.

“Remember that they’re expecting us today in Coyoacán.”

“Of course I remember,” he said, violently tapping his temple, and went out.

Ramón wandered the streets of the city center. On two occasions he drank coffee, and almost at noon his body demanded a hit and he entered the Kit Kat Club. Against his habit, he drank a glass of Hennessy advertised by the mirror behind the counter. At two in the afternoon, he opened his second packet of cigarettes that day. He wasn’t hungry, he didn’t want to talk to anyone, he only wanted time to go by and the nightmare in which he was involved to reach its end.

A little after three he picked up Sylvia at the hotel and at four on the dot he was looking at the multicolored tablecloth spread over the forged-iron table on which they would soon take tea. At that moment he noticed how he was regaining his ability to confine Ramón under the skin of Jacques Mornard.

Jake Cooper had accompanied them to the table, told a couple of jokes, and confirmed their dinner on Tuesday the twentieth, his day off.
They agreed to see each other at Café Central at seven, since Cooper wanted to make the most of his day walking around with Jenny through the Zócalo area and the markets. The silence Jacques had maintained until that moment seemed to disappear and Sylvia would tell him that night that, evidently, visiting the fortified house in Coyoacán had been a balm for his worries.

Just five minutes later the renegade and his wife came out of the house. Jacques Mornard observed that the old man looked exhausted and stood up to shake his hand. At that moment he understood that for the first time he was touching the incredibly soft skin of the man he would kill.

“So at last . . . Jacson or Mornard?” the Exile asked with a sarcastic smile on his thick lips and a disquieting shine in his eagle eyes.

“Don’t be impertinent, Liovnochek,” Natalia reprimanded him.

“Whatever is easier, sir. ‘Jacson’ is an accident that will follow me for I don’t know how long.”

“For quite some time,” the old man said. “This war could go on for another few years. And you know what? The longer it lasts, the more devastating it is, the more possibilities that workers will at last understand that only revolutionary action can save them as a class,” he said, as if a soapbox had been placed under his feet.

“So what role could the Soviet Union have in that action?” Jacques dared to ask.

“The Soviet Union needs a new revolution to bring about a great social and political but not economic change,” the renegade began. “Although the bureaucracy took all the power, the economic base of society is still socialist. And that’s a gain that can’t be lost.”

Sylvia coughed, as if asking to change the conversation. “Lev Davidovich . . . I, like many, think that ever since Stalin signed the friendship pact with Hitler, the Soviet Union cannot consider itself a socialist country but rather an ally of imperialism,” she said. “That’s why it’s invading all of Eastern Europe.”

The arrival of the maid with the tray, cups, pot of tea, and plate of pastries made the Exile pause for a moment. But as soon as the woman placed the tray on the table, the man jumped like a spring.

“Dear Sylvia, that’s what the long-standing anticommunists say and now also Burnham and Shachtman to justify their break with the Fourth International. I continue to maintain that the duty of all the world’s Communists is to defend the Soviet Union if it’s attacked by the German fascists
or any imperialists, because the country’s social bases are still, in and of themselves, an immense progress in the history of humanity. Despite the crimes and the prison camps, the Soviet Union has the right to defend itself and the Communists have the moral responsibility to stand together with Soviet workers to preserve the essence of the revolution . . . But if the social explosion that I expect occurs and the socialist revolution triumphs in several countries, those same workers will have the mission of helping their Soviet comrades free themselves of the gangsters of Stalinist bureaucracy. That’s why it’s so important to strengthen our International and why your friends’ attitude is so regrettable . . .”

Jacques Mornard observed how Natalia Sedova served the tea. For a moment the smell of the recently baked pastries had alleviated his stomachache, but the Exile’s words had taken away his appetite. That man had just one passion and was always talking as if he were leading the masses, pushed by a disproportionate vehemence regarding his diminished audience, but with a very convincing and seductive logic. Ramón concluded that listening to him for too long could be dangerous and he took refuge in the evidence that the last door on the way to the fulfillment of his mission was coming into view, and he decided to focus on opening it. Within an effusiveness Sylvia was unfamiliar with, he then launched into supporting the Exile’s theory and criticizing the inconsistent attitudes of Burnham and Shachtman, who were removing themselves at the moment when unity was needed. Echoing his host, he criticized Stalin but defended the idea that the USSR maintained its socialist nature, and agreed with the Exile about the necessity of universal revolution, until, through some twists in the conversation, they ended up on the difficulties of the French resistance against a German army that practically controlled the whole country.