The Man Who Loved Dogs (81 page)

At that moment, I felt that an old and dormant fear was waking in some part of my memory, and I dared to ask him: “And you didn’t tell your bosses that López was seeing me? Wasn’t I one of those ‘strange’ things?”

That was the only time the whole night that the black man smiled.

“No, I didn’t have time to inform. The first time you saw each other, I think you met by coincidence, and I didn’t think much of it. The second time, after you talked, he asked me not to say anything so that you wouldn’t be scared away and he could talk to you. Seems as though he liked you, no?”

“I think something else, but it doesn’t matter . . . So the nurse . . .?”

“She’s my sister. She did me the favor . . . The poor woman, now she’s very ill, she’s going to die at any moment . . . The problem is that López
had tasked me with giving you those papers, but I didn’t dare come . . . Although I didn’t make any report, they learned that you were seeing each other and I imagine they were watching you a little bit and . . .”

In another time, that news would have paralyzed me, but in 1996 it seemed folkloric, even comical because it had been a while since I’d crossed over the borders of nothing and almost reached invisibility. That was why I was more interested in knowing what that man thought and felt than trying to understand what was meant by “watching you a little bit.”

“And now . . . why did you decide to come now, after so many years?”

The tall, thin black man looked at me and I knew I had stepped on a landmine. By what I could see of his face, I realized that he was deciding whether he should stand up and leave my house. Later I thought of the motives for which, at the end of so much time, that man dared to disobey a mandate that perhaps no one remembered and fulfill the promise of coming to see me. Maybe he was dying, like his sister, and he decided that it no longer mattered what could happen to him. Or because things had changed so much, and he was less fearful. Perhaps he dared because, after reading Luis’s book, he understood that it didn’t matter too much if he told me something, since I could get my hands on the information in other ways . . . Or he simply decided because he thought it was his duty to tell me after having promised a dying man: it seemed that someone, for once, had done something normal in this whole story . . .

“Do you think I was a coward?”

I tried to smile before responding.

“No, of course not. I was the one who was shitting myself with fear. And that’s even when I wasn’t sure that they were watching me ‘a little bit’ . . .”

But my response didn’t satisfy him, because he continued with his interrogation.

“Why do you think Luis waited almost fifteen years to write the book? He was already living in Spain. Who could he have been afraid of?” he asked me, maintaining the same timbre, the same intonation, as if he were playing a fixed dramatic role in that frame of mind. “Why did Luis wait until the Soviet Union and the KGB and everything hanging on it disappeared?”

“Out of fear,” I answered, and then I did what I could to look into his eyes when I asked: “So why did you put the book in the mail to me? Nobody asked you to . . .”

“When I read it, it seemed that if there was someone who had to read it, it was you. Especially because Mercader was dead and you didn’t know it. But also to give you an idea of what fear is, how great and long it can be . . .”

“You’re telling me all this because you read López’s letter, right? So tell me, why does it end like that?”

The black man thought again. And he decided to answer me.

“Because López—I mean, Mercader—couldn’t write anymore. In April, when they discovered the cancer in his glands, they sent him for radiation, but it had already spread. In June or July, he was so fucked up that he broke an arm when he went to lift a glass of water. His bones started to shatter. He couldn’t write anymore . . . That’s why it ends like that: suddenly.”

“And do you know if he saw Caridad again?”

“One of the people who worked with López from the beginning told me that his mother had come to see him here at the end of 1974 and that she had ruined his holidays and, in passing, those of his wife and his children. She was a crazy and unbearable woman, he told me. She had friends in Cuba, old Communists she had met here in the 1940s and later in France, and she even passed herself off as a Cuban . . . That must have been the last time they saw each other, because the following year she died in Paris, I imagine desiring to return to Barcelona, like all of the Mercaders, because Franco beat her in the battle against death by a month and kept the doors of Spain shut to her. Through López’s wife I learned that she had died alone and that her neighbors discovered the corpse because of the smell . . .”

While I listened to the stories of abandonment and death that that man was telling me—that man who, despite his decision to come to see me, was still surrounded by fear—I discovered that again a bothersome unease was threatening me, a surreptitious feeling that was too close to compassion.

“Bad luck pursued them. It was like a punishment,” I said.

The black man barely nodded but remained silent, observing the buckets and the cans collecting the water dripping from the roof.

“This house is going to fall down on you,” he said at last.

“You really don’t want coffee?” I asked him again, since I had gotten lost in the conversation, although I knew that I had several holes yet to fill in and I was certain that was the last time I would speak with him.

“No, thank you, really, no. I have to leave already . . . Let me see if I can grab a bus.”

“So why do you know so much about Mercader? Why did he trust you and give you those papers?”

“When we went to walk the dogs, he talked to me a lot. Sometimes I think he told me all of that so that I would then tell someone. Although he never confessed to me who he was or what he had done . . . That, I had to discover on my own. He told you more things than me . . .”

“So what about the borzoi bitch, Ix? What happened to her?”

“You see? Because of that I think that he trusted me a lot. López gave her to me, because his wife didn’t want to keep the dog. It was like the inheritance he left me, right? . . . Ix lived with me for four more years . . .”

“And what about Dax? How did they sacrifice him?”

Again the black man looked at the ceiling of the apartment, dark and agonizing, as if he feared that its collapse could be imminent.

“In reality, they all ended up fucked-up, even Stalin,” he said, as if that same night, in my ruined and shadowy house, he had had that revelation. He took his eyes off the ceiling and looked at me. “López felt very bad, but one day he asked me to take him with Dax to a little beach that is near Bahía Honda. There’s never anyone there, but since it had recently rained it was a little cold and there wasn’t a single soul around. López let him off the leash, let him run a little while, but Dax got tired right away and started to cough. He spent a lot of time caressing him, talking to him, until his cough went away and he lay down. Dax loved to have his belly dried. After a while, he put the towel over his head and took out a gun . . . López was sure that his dog had died in the best way, without knowing it, almost without having time to feel any pain . . . That was at the end of January. We never went back to the beach . . .” The black man stood up, and at that moment he didn’t seem that tall. “How long has it been since the lights went out?”

“About five hours . . . I try not to keep track. After all . . .”

As we spoke, the man was digging in one of his pockets.

“
Coño
, I almost forgot.”

He took out a piece of cloth, smaller than a handkerchief, and opened it. He took something out and put it on the table: even in the weak light, I was able to recognize the valiant gas lighter that had belonged to Jaime López.

“It’s yours,” he said, and cleared his throat. “That’s your part of the inheritance.”

The end of the century and the millennium were approaching when, of nothing more than old age, Tato, Ana’s poodle, died, and my wife’s osteoporosis entered its most aggressive period with the sustained crisis that left her practically an invalid, with very strong pain, for three months. We had still not imagined the true seriousness of her illness, and all my friends, inside and outside Cuba, began to look for what seemed to be the only remedy for her: vitamins—calcium with vitamin D and B complex, above all—and bone enhancers, including the supposedly miraculous shark cartilage and those Fosamax tablets with such strong effects that, after ingesting them, the patient had to remain upright for an hour. So Ana improved, at the same time that Truco, the mangy stray mutt that I had picked up shortly after Tato’s death, was getting fatter, turning into the family’s happiest and liveliest member.

The expected change of century and millennium passed and the world, having turned into a place that was getting more and more hostile, with more wars and bombs and fundamentalisms of all kinds (as could be expected, after going through the twentieth century), ended up turning into a remote place for me, repellant, with which I was cutting ties, as I let myself drift along on skepticism, sadness, and the certainty that solitude and the most resounding neglect awaited me just around the corner.

What most pained me was seeing how Ana, despite passing improvements, was gradually dying within the four damp and flaking walls of the propped-up little apartment in Lawton. Perhaps because of it, first as a companion to my wife’s desperation, and then as a practicing member, I approached a Methodist church and tried to pin my hopes on the great beyond, where perhaps I would find everything that had been denied to me in the great over here. But my capacity to believe had been ruined forever, and although I read the Bible and attended worship, I constantly broke the rules of a rigid orthodoxy demanded by that faith which had too many unappealable obligations for one lifetime, too many desires to control the faithful and their ideas for a freely chosen religion. Control, damned control. What ended up complicating my credulity was the demand for a necessary Christian humility proclaimed from the pulpits by a theatrical hierarchy, whose sincerity I began to doubt when I learned of the existence of cars, trips abroad, and privileges acquired in exchange for forgetting the past, for complicity and silence. If it had not been for
Ana, more than once I would have told all those pastors where to go and shove it. But she always told me that God was above men, who were sinners by definition, and so I shut my mouth, as was habitual in my life. Then I grabbed onto the essentials that offered me escape and forced myself to believe in what mattered. I didn’t succeed. I didn’t care about the great beyond or the salvation of my immortal soul. Or about the great over here with its manipulated promises of a better future at the cost of a worse present. I would have preferred other compensations.

Looking for medicine for my wife, smoking cigarettes with a suicidal intensity, taking care of Truco after each accident or street fight for which he had such a propensity, practicing a tyrannical religion without faith, looking stoically at the chinks in the walls and ceilings that would eventually lead to the collapse of our small apartment, and curing dogs as poor and scruffy as their owners—these turned into the limits of my shitty life. Each night, after putting Ana to bed (she could no longer do it herself)—and without any desire to read, much less to write—I acquired a taste for climbing my neighbor’s wall and sitting, whether it was hot or cold, on the fork made by the branches of his mango tree. There, under the gaze of Truco, who followed each one of my movements from the hallway, I smoked a couple of cigarettes and felt the plentitude of my defeat, of my anticipated old age, of my cosmic disillusion, and examined the almost dead conscience of the regrettable being that turned into the same man who had once been a boy who was pregnant with illusions, and seemed gifted to tame fate and make it bend down at his feet. What a disaster.

In that incorruptible spirit I asked myself, as I observed the infinity of the universe, who the hell cared what I could say in
one
book? How was it possible that I had let myself be convinced by Ana, but above all by myself, and had tried to write
that
book? Where had I gotten the idea that I, Iván Cárdenas Maturell, wanted to write it and perhaps even publish it? Where, at some point in a far-off life, had I pretended and thought I was a writer? And the only answer within my reach was that the story had pursued me because
it
needed someone to write it. And the bitch had picked me.