The Man Who Loved Dogs (48 page)

“What a disgrace! They weren’t able to win and now they come to hide here!”

The blow Ramón served him was brutal. Of the four teeth he knocked out, two fell on the damp earth and two were lost in the stomach of the unfortunate journalist, who would surely ask himself, for the rest of his life, what terrible thing he had said to provoke the ire of that unleashed madman who, to top it all, had disappeared like a breath of air.

18

Of all the battles he’d waged, which did he remember as the most arduous? Those with Lenin in the days of the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks? The tense and dramatic ones of 1917, when the revolution’s birth or abortion was decided? The furious battles of the civil war, always doomed to fratricidal violence? The cruel ones for succession and for control of the party? The ones for physical and political survival in those days of exile and marginalization? And who had been his most fearful adversary: Lenin, Plekhanov, Stalin? When Lev Davidovich looked at the blank page over which he didn’t dare to move his pen, he thought, no, the battle had never been as arduous nor the opponent as tricky, for he had never seen himself forced to fight for something so essential.

Ever since Natalia Sedova left the Casa Azul and he took refuge with the bodyguards in the cabin in the hills of San Miguel Regla, under the pretext of the need for physical exercise, but so pressed to gain distance from the Casa Azul in order to stew in the solitude of his desperation and shame, he had been looking for the most elegant way to initiate a reconciliation with his wife with the knowledge that his dignity should be the first piece he would have to sacrifice in the service of his supreme objective.

The feeling of guilt that had been absent until then had unleashed itself,
and not only because of the damage he had done to Natalia. During that infamous month of June 1937, the lives of two of his dearest and most constant friends had been devoured by Stalin’s fury, while he, submerged in the renewed waves of his libido, dedicated the best part of his intelligence to engineering ways to mock Diego and Natalia’s presence, to run behind Frida to Cristina Kahlo’s nearby house, on Calle Linares, the site of their sexual encounters. Van Heijenoort and the young bodyguards had been made to serve as facilitators of the meetings, lending themselves to the fictions that Lev Davidovich’s feverish brain devised: from hunting and fishing to trips to the mountains, even as far as the search for documents that he had to track down personally, he had used every excuse. For his protectors, the situation had proven to be agonizing, since they knew the physical risks of each escapade and, above all, in a scandalous venting of an affair that could destroy the Exile’s marriage and affect his prestige as a revolutionary generously welcomed in the Casa Azul, or even could provoke a violent reaction from Rivera. But he had decided not to think about anything else, and was concerned only with giving in to his cravings and receiving Frida’s uninhibited sexuality, capable of revealing to him, at his fifty-seven years, means and practices the existence of which he had barely suspected. Never as in those days of lust had madness spun around Lev Davidovich’s mind so forcefully and when he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw the image of a man whom he barely recognized and who, nonetheless, continued to be none other than himself.

On the afternoon of June 11, after a morning round with Frida, he had dedicated himself to documenting one of the darkest passages of his relationship with Stalin: the day in 1907, exactly thirty years before, when they had met in London and, perhaps, when the war between them had commenced. Natalia, who already perceived the density of deceit in the air, entered the room and, without saying a word, placed the newspaper over the page he was writing. Without looking up, Lev Davidovich read the headline and felt the anguish growing in his chest as he devoured the report taken from
Pravda
. In Moscow, the case had been initiated against eight high-ranking Red Army officers, led by Marshal Tukhachevsky, the second in command in the military hierarchy, and the trial had been set for sentencing. The court judging them, the dispatch relayed, was a special section of the Supreme Court and was made up by “the cream of the crop of the glorious Red Army.”

The former commissar of war noticed that, in contrast to the trials
carried out in the previous year, Tukhachevsky and the other generals were not accused of Trotskyism but rather of being members of an organization in the service of the Third Reich. Even when it was already known that the old officers of the Red Army were in Stalin’s sight, Lev Davidovich had not been able to imagine that, unless they had more solid proof of the existence of the conspiracy, the Grave Digger would dare to decapitate the country’s military cupola at a moment in which war seemed inevitable. He knew that ever since Tukhachevsky’s substitution as deputy commissar of defense two months before, many detentions must have been ordered among the high officers; furthermore, he was sure that the fate of those soldiers had been decided when it was made public that the administrative and political person responsible for the army, the old Bolshevik Gamarnik, had committed suicide, while four of his advisers mysteriously disappeared.

The next morning, Moscow reported the summary execution of the accused, who, they assured, had confessed their treason. Stupefaction and pain had paralyzed Lev Davidovich: he knew that perhaps Stalin was right in fearing that the leaders of the army could plot a conspiracy to remove him from power, but it was inadmissible to accuse those men—military mainstays of the revolution from its darkest days—of being the agents of a fascist power, especially when the list of prisoners was headed by, precisely, Communists and Jews such as generals Yakir, Eidemann, and Feldmann. But if in reality the soldiers had conspired, why hadn’t they acted? Why had they delayed the coup when they were warned that they were sought after?

Never before had Lev Davidovich felt fear like that for the future of the revolution and the country, at the same time that he was convinced that if Stalin dared to take that mortal leap, it was because he had Hitler’s promise in hand to respect the borders of the USSR in case of war. If that was not the case, the fascist leaders had to think that Stalin was definitively crazy to accept the story of a conspiracy that no rational being would believe, since the mere fact of placing three high-ranking officers of Jewish origins as the heads of a pro-German plot would have been incredible even for the Nazis themselves, the supposed friends of the traitors. The inevitable conclusion had been that, with that process, Stalin was taking another step in his rapprochement with Hitler, whom he had denounced so many times since the electoral rise of Fascism.

For several days Lev Davidovich had ceased to look for Frida in order
to take refuge in the sure comfort of his Natasha, for whom the death of Tukhachevsky, like so many others who stirred in her memory, were losses of people for whom she felt affection. How many more was Stalin going to kill? Natalia asked him one night as they drank coffee in their room, and he offered his response to her: as long as there remained one Bolshevik with the memory of the past, the henchmen would have work. The war to the death was no longer against the opposition but against history. To do it right, Stalin had to kill all those who knew Lenin, and those who knew Lev Davidovich, and, of course, those who knew Stalin . . . He had to silence all those who had been witnesses to his failures, to the genocide of the collectivization, of the murdering madness of his work camps . . . and then he would still have to remove from the world those who had helped annihilate the opposition, the past, history, and also annoying witnesses . . . “And Sergei? Liova? Why hasn’t he already come for us?” the woman then asked herself. He saw that Natalia Sedova’s eyes had the vague glimmer of pain and felt in his chest the pressure of the shame over his weaknesses and refused to tell her that his sons were as condemned to die as the two of them. Perhaps tormented by the pain, at that moment he committed one of the most unforgivable slips of his life and asked Natalia if she was afraid of dying. From dull blue, her eyes went to the color of steel, like that of a wet dagger, and he felt a fear that he had never had of anything in his life: no, she didn’t fear death, the woman said. She worried only that respect and trust might die.

Feeling himself drowning in shame, Lev Davidovich thought the time had come to put an end to his relationship with Frida.

Days later, Lev Davidovich would tell himself that another piece of news, this time arriving from Spain, had been the one to blame for delaying the decision to cut off his clandestine affair. The confirmation that his old colleague Andreu Nin had disappeared after being detained, accused of charges similar to those used in Moscow, threatened to drown him in depression and prevented him from overcoming his compulsive need for the voracious sex of Diego Rivera’s wife.

The story of Nin’s detention and disappearance was full of contradictions and, as usual, challenged credulity. Through various sources, the Exile managed to establish that on June 16 the police had taken the Catalan Communist out of Barcelona to Valencia. The last confirmed
news placed him, on the night of June 22, at a special prison in Alcalá de Henares, from where, according to the official press, he had been bizarrely rescued by a German commando, charged with taking him to fascist territory and, later, of sending him to Berlin.

The accusation that Nin was one of Franco’s spies was crude and unsustainable: Stalin’s men in Spain hadn’t even concerned themselves too much with the believability of their accusations. The disappearance and almost certain death of that friend who more than ten years earlier Lev Davidovich had met in Moscow and who had joined the opposition without ever renouncing his own political criteria as a convinced and anarchic Communist could only be due to the shocking capacity Nin had to resist the tortures of the GPU without signing the statements that, with all certainty, were placed before him. A fighter like Nin would’ve known, from the beginning of his Calvary, that his fate was decreed, but that the prestige of his party and the lives of his comrades, accused of promoting a coup d’état, depended on his lips. So conquering Stalin must have become his last obsession as he was tortured and he refused to sign the condemnation of the Spanish left and of his own memory.

The image of a young, always war-like Tukhachevsky who had become one of the mainstays in the middle of the civil war of the recently created Red Army, and Andreu Nin’s awkward and passionate image, that of a man dazzled by the Soviet reality but always questioning it, would accompany Lev Davidovich to the burial of his last grasp of youth. Yet after the first erotic encounters, Frida had started to send him signals that could be read as holding back that the man, drunk with sex, had refused or been incapable of understanding, even when it hadn’t gone unnoticed that, after the first meetings, she had tried to evade him (her political and sexual curiosity perhaps satisfied, her possible revenge against Rivera’s infidelities fulfilled), causing him to pursue her with even more fury. When at last they lay down in intimacy, she tried to finish quickly as he confessed over and over again how much he loved her, desired her, dreamed about her.

The tension went up like a barricade inside the Casa Azul, and it was Natalia Sedova who, at the beginning of July, lit the fuse when, without consulting with anyone, she moved to an apartment in the city center, giving Rivera the excuse that she preferred to be alone as she underwent medical treatment for “feminine problems.” Faced with that situation, Frida must have understood that their foolishness was beginning to reach the limits of what could be controlled, and that same afternoon had entered
the guest room and attacked her lover along the flank he least expected: they had to clarify things once and for all, and he should make a definitive decision: was he leaving his wife or staying with her? The challenge had stirred the man, but he responded without thinking and he told her he had never thought of making such a choice. With difficult steps, Frida approached him and caressed her lover’s face and, calling him Piochitas—from the name Mexicans give to a goatee—told him the game had ended. It was no longer fun and they could hurt other people who didn’t deserve it, and she didn’t say it because of Diego, an alcoholic pig, nor because of herself, whom Diego had turned into an untamed pig; she said it because of Natalia, who was a queen.

At that moment Lev Davidovich had understood that perhaps he would never manage to know through exact science what chemical reaction had burned inside Frida to make her throw herself into their affair. He would ask himself whether he had been used just as an instrument of revenge against Rivera (was it possible that the painter hadn’t noticed anything?); whether his historic halo might have motivated the young woman’s dazzling curiosity; even whether pity at seeing him suffer before her sister’s rejection had convinced Frida, who was so liberal, that indulging the sexual appetite of a man who was twice her age was just an act of enjoyable pity that didn’t impact her relaxed morality at all. But when Frida’s perfume had gone from the air in the room, Lev Davidovich managed to smile. Had the game really ended? Only for Frida. It was now up to him to clean up the filth dammed up in his spirit and try to salvage, with the least amount of damage possible, Natalia Sedova’s trust and love. But thirty years of companionship warned him that he would have to deal with an indomitable animal who devoted the same vehemence to her solidarity as to her hate, to her love as to rejection. I’m scared, he thought.

A few days later, observing the arid mountains of San Miguel from his window, a Lev Davidovich already resolved to sacrifice his dignity and overcome his fears took a piece of paper and began the most intense and strange correspondence, of up to two letters per day, in which he recognized his emotional and biological dependence on his wife. When she left the Casa Azul, Natalia had left him a note capable of wounding him like a dagger. She had looked at herself in the mirror, she said, and seen the death of her charms at the hands of old age. She didn’t reproach him for anything, but she stated that what he had done was an irreversible act. Lev Davidovich had understood the meaning of the message: that her old
age was coming at the end of thirty years of a life in common, throughout which Natasha had lived by and for him. At that moment he began to write pleas, often signed as “Your faithful old dog,” a sort of increasingly plaintive knocking on the doors of a heart he was trying to reconquer with memories of yesterday and sentimental and physical needs of the present, expressed at times in language so direct that he surprised himself . . . When at last he received a letter from her, concerned by the pessimism that prevented her husband from focusing on his work, he knew the battle was won and that the victor had been his dear Natasha’s sense of kindness: “You will continue to carry me on your shoulders, Nata, as you have carried me throughout your life,” he wrote to her, and on the following day, with the inevitable entourage, he took the road to the capital in search of the woman of his life.