The Man Who Loved Dogs (79 page)

“Sylvia and I are leaving for New York tomorrow.”

“Business?” Robbins asked.

“That’s right,” Jacques said, and Robbins returned to the door.

Ramón looked at the yard. He could see only the figures of the Duck and Azteca the dog. He walked toward them slowly.

“Good afternoon.”

The old man didn’t turn around. He had just placed the fresh grass in the metal basket of one of the compartments.

“I’ve brought the article,” he said, taking the typed pages from his raincoat pocket and holding them out as if they were a safe-conduct pass.

“Yes, of course . . . Let me finish,” the condemned man asked.

Jacques Mornard took a few steps toward the center of the yard. He was overcome by dizziness and thought of sitting on the iron bench. At that moment Natalia Sedova came out of the kitchen and walked over to him. At the door’s threshold, Jacques saw Joe Hansen, who waved at him and went back into the house.

“Good afternoon, Madame Natalia.”

“To what do we owe you coming around here again?”

“The article, don’t you remember?” he said, and immediately added: “Tomorrow, we’re going to New York.”

Azteca had gotten close to him and he looked at the dog as if he couldn’t see him. His stomach was in flames; he was sweating again; he feared losing his concentration.

“If you had told me before, I would’ve given you correspondence for some friends,” the woman said sadly.

“I can come back tomorrow morning.”

Natalia thought about it for a moment.

“No, don’t worry . . . So you brought the article?”

“Yes,” he said, and handed it to the woman.

“At least it’s typed. Lev Davidovich doesn’t like to read things that are handwritten,” she said, and pointed at the raincoat. “Why are you carrying that around?”

“I thought it was going to rain. Here the weather changes in just a few minutes . . .”

“In Coyoacán, it has been sunny and hot all day. You’re sweating.”

“I don’t feel very well. My lunch didn’t agree with me.”

“Do you want a cup of tea?”

“No, I still have food at the top of my stomach. It’s suffocating me. But I would love a little water.”

The condemned man had come closer and heard the end of the conversation.

“I’ll go get the water,” Natalia said, and returned to the house.

Jacques turned to the old man.

“It’s the altitude and the spices. They’re going to kill me.”

“You have to take care of your health, Jacson,” the Exile said, taking off his gloves. “You don’t look very well . . .”

“That’s why we’re going to New York: to see a good doctor.”

“A sick stomach can be a curse; I’m telling you because I did mine in by mistreating it for so many years.”

The renegade slapped his legs so that Azteca would come over to him. The dog stood up and put his front feet on the old man’s thighs. He patted the animal with both hands below his ears.

“Sylvia is about to arrive. She’s coming to say goodbye.”

“Little Sylvia is very confused,” the Exile said as he cleaned his glasses with the edge of the light blue shirt he was wearing.

Natalia Sedova returned with a glass of water, placed on a small plate, and Jacques thanked her and drank two sips.

“Let’s see this famous article,” the renegade said, and without further ado he walked to the dining room entrance but stopped, and Jacques almost bumped into him. He addressed his wife in Russian: “Natasha, why don’t you invite them for dinner? They’re leaving tomorrow.”

“I don’t think he’ll want to eat,” she answered, also in Russian. “Look at his face: he’s practically green.”

“He should have had some tea,” the man said, now in French, and resumed walking.

Jacques followed him to his workroom. When they passed the dining room, he saw the table set for dinner, and it seemed an incongruous image. When he entered the office, he saw that the dictaphone had been moved to the side of the desk; in its place before the renegade’s chair were a dozen books, all of them thick and dull looking. The window to the garden was open, as on the previous occasion, and he could see the plants, beaten by the sun, still strong at that hour of the afternoon. The condemned man again cleaned the lenses of his spectacles and, as if he were annoyed, held them up to the light. Finally he moved his chair and Jacques handed him the pages. The man pulled toward him the folder on the desk labeled with Cyrillic characters, perhaps to use it to lean on.

“Do those letters mean ‘Private’?” Jacques asked, without knowing why.

“Do you know Russian?” the Exile asked.

“No . . . but . . .”

“They are some notes. A kind of diary that I write when I can . . .”

“And does it say anything about me?”

The condemned man sat down and said:

“It’s possible.”

Ramón asked himself what that man could say about a man like Jacques Mornard, and he realized that he was worrying too much about something insignificant. Even though the conversation had served to definitively displace Jacques and his mind was now occupied only by Ramón, for a few seconds he had almost forgotten his mission. Nonetheless, a piercing desire to read those papers made him think of the possibility of taking them with him when he escaped: it would be like reaching the ultimate degree of perfection to appropriate the body and also the soul of his victim.

Ramón Mercader regained control when, from his position, he again saw the head, the white skin under the sparse hair that, he thought fleetingly, always seemed to need a trim at the bottom. Almost without realizing it, his mind began to work automatically, with simple reasoning, leading to just one purpose; no matter how hard he tried, for many years he could not remember having thought of anything but the mechanics designed to place him behind the seated man. He would not even remember if the beating in his temples or the shortness of breath were bothering him at that moment. Days later, he would start to recover the details and even believed he had embraced, at some moment, the dream of escaping and saving himself. Perhaps he also thought of África and her inability to love. Perhaps about the tumultuous way, in a matter of seconds, he was going to enter history. If it was not a trick of his memory, the image of a beach where two dogs and a boy were running passed through his head. In contrast, he would always remember with shocking clarity the feeling of freedom that began to run through him when he saw the renegade prepare himself to read those typed pages. He noticed how a kind of weightlessness invaded his body and his mind. No, his temples weren’t beating anymore; he wasn’t sweating anymore. Then he tried to recover the hate that that head had to provoke in him and enumerated the reasons he was there, a few inches away from it: the head of the revolution’s greatest enemy, of the most cynical danger threatening the working class; the head of a traitor, a renegade, a terrorist, a reactionary, a fascist. That head held the mind of the man who had violated all the principles of revolutionary ethics and deserved to die, with a nail in the
head, like an animal at the slaughterhouse. The condemned man was reading and, once again, he was crossing out, crossing out, crossing out, with brusque and annoyed gestures. How dare he? Ramón Mercader took out the ice axe. He sensed it hot and exact in his hand. Without taking his eyes off the victim’s head, he placed the raincoat on the low shelves behind him, next to the globe, which tottered and was about to fall. Ramón noticed that his hands were again bathed in sweat, his forehead was burning, but he convinced himself that to end that torture he just needed to lift the metallic spike. He observed the exact spot where he would hit him. One blow and everything would be over. He would be free again: essentially free. Even if the bodyguards killed him, he thought, his freedom would be absolute. Why hadn’t he hit him already? Was he afraid? he asked himself. Was he expecting something to happen that would prevent him from doing it? That a guard would enter, that Natalia Sedova would come in, that the old man would turn around? But no one came, the globe didn’t fall, the ice axe didn’t slip out of his sweaty hand, and the old man didn’t turn around at that moment—but, in French, he said something definitive:

“This is garbage, Jacson,” and he crossed the page with his pencil, from right to left, from left to right.

At that moment Ramón Mercader felt that his victim had given him the order. He lifted his right arm, brought it well behind his head, squeezed the trimmed grip forcefully, and closed his eyes. He couldn’t see, at the last instant, that the condemned man, with the typed pages in his hand, turned his head and had just enough time to discover Jacques Mornard while he was bringing down the ice axe with all of his might in search of the center of his skull.

The cry of horror and pain shook the foundations of that useless fortress on Avenida Viena.

28

I don’t know at exactly what moment I started to think about that; I don’t know if I already had it in my head at the time that I met the man who loved dogs, although I suppose that it must have been afterward. What I am very sure of is that, for years, I was obsessed (it sounds a little exaggerated, but that is the word and, moreover, it is the truth) with being able to determine the exact moment at which the twentieth century would conclude and, with it, the second millennium of the Christian era. Of course, that would in turn determine the moment that would start off the twenty-first century and, also, the third millennium. In my calculations (I always counted by the age) I would be—fifty or fifty-one?—upon the awakening of the new century, according to the date on which the end of the previous one was established—in the year 1999 or in 2000? Although for many the crossroads of the centuries would only be a change of dates and diaries among other, more arduous concerns, I insisted on seeing it another way, because at some moment in the terrible preceding years, I began to expect that that leap in time, as arbitrary as any human convention, would also propitiate a radical turn in my life. Then, against the logic of the Gregorian calendar, which closes its cycles in years with zeros, I accepted, as part of a convention and like many
people in the world, that December 31, 1999—soon after my fiftieth birthday—would be the last day of the century and the millennium. As the date approached, I was excited to know that computer programmers around the globe had worked for years to avoid the computer chaos that the radical alteration of numbers could produce that day, and that the French had placed an enormous clock on the Eiffel Tower counting down the days, the hours, and the minutes to the Great Leap.

That’s why I took it as a personal affront that, when the date arrived, in Cuba a more logical calculation was made and it was decided, more or less officially and without appeal, that the end of the century would be December 31 of the year 2000 and not the last day of 1999, as the majority thought and wanted. Because of that almost state decree, while the world celebrated the (supposed) arrival of the third millennium and the twenty-first century with great fanfare, on the island we bid the year farewell and greeted the newly arrived one like any other, with the usual anthems and political speeches. After having dreamed for so long of the emergence of that date, I felt that they had swindled me of my excitement and anxiety, and I even refused to watch the brief news flashes on television of the celebrations that, in Tokyo, Madrid, or next to the Eiffel Tower, were greeting the perfect four-figured sign on the historic clocks. My malaise lasted for several months, and when, on December 31, 2000, some Cuban newspaper announced without much interest that the world was truly and Gregorianly arriving at the new millennium, it barely surprised me that no one could be bothered to celebrate what almost all of humanity had already feted. At that moment, I knew all too well that, besides some shitty numbers, nothing would change. And if it did change, it would be for the worst.

I bring up this episode that for many would be insignificant and seemingly removed from what I am telling, because it seems to me that it captures the perfect metaphor: at this moment, I don’t think there are many people who will deny that history and life have treacherously shown no mercy to us, to my generation, and, above all, to our dreams and individual wills, subjected to the straitjacket of decisions that were impossible to appeal. The promises that had fed us in our youth and filled us with faith, participative romanticism, and a spirit of sacrifice turned to salt and water as we were besieged by poverty, exhaustion, confusion, disillusionment, failures, escapes, and upheaval. I’m not exaggerating if I say that we have traversed almost all the possible phases of poverty. But we have also witnessed the dispersal of our most resolved or most desperate
friends, who took the route of exile in search of a less uncertain personal fate, which wasn’t always so. Many of them knew what it meant to be uprooted and the risks of chronic nostalgia that they were throwing themselves into, how many sacrifices and daily concerns they would be subject to, but decided to take on the challenge and set forth for Miami, Mexico, Paris, or Madrid, where they arduously began to rebuild their lives at an age at which, in general, they are already built. The ones who, out of conviction, a spirit of resistance, the need to belong, or simple stubbornness, apathy, or fear of the unknown, chose to stay, more than reconstruct anything, dedicated ourselves to awaiting the arrival of better times while we tried to erect stanchions to avoid collapse (in my case, living between stanchions has not been a metaphor but rather the daily reality of my little room in Lawton). At that point at which life’s compasses go mad and all expectations are lost, so too are all our sacrifices, obediences, deceits, blind beliefs, forgotten slogans, atheisms and cynicisms more or less conscious, more or less induced, and, above all, our battered expectations of the future. Despite that tribal destiny in which I include my own, many times I’ve asked myself whether I have not been specially chosen by that son of a bitch providence: if in the end I haven’t ended up being something like a branded goat designated to receive as many kicks as possible. Because I received the ones that were due to me generationally and historically and also the ones that they gave me cruelly and treacherously in order to sink me and, in passing, to show me that I would never have peace or calm. Because of this, in what was perhaps the best period of my adult life, when I began my relationship with Ana, I fell in love completely for the first time and, thanks to her, I regained the desire and the courage to sit down and write until my wife’s illness began to worsen, crushing any hope I had left. And on December 31, 1999, when they told us that the day of the great change I had been dreaming of for so long would not change anything, not even the disgusting century in which we had been born, I saw the bluebird of my last hope fly out the window of the little apartment in Lawton—an insignificant bird, but one I had raised with care and that the winds of high decisions were taking from my hands. Because the authorities had not even allowed me that innocuous dream.