The Man Who Loved Dogs (39 page)

After the second conversation, I drew the insidious conclusion that something very important didn’t click in the story of the man who loved dogs. Although I still hadn’t completely developed the cosmic mistrust that I would acquire precisely as a consequence of those meetings (that vocation for suspicion that would bother Raquelita and my friends so much, since it led me to react in an almost mechanical way and to qualify any story capable of minimally challenging plausibility as impossible, as sheer lies), as I listened there was a disquieting but ubiquitous lack of logic that, to begin with, would make me wonder whether some of the episodes of Ramón’s history weren’t being manipulated by his friend and storyteller Jaime López. But only at the end of the third conversation, already in the middle of December, did I discern with certain clarity the crack through which the logic was escaping: How was it possible for López to have such precise information about his friend’s life and feelings? No matter how explicit or detailed Ramón was during the conversations held in Moscow over ten years before, when they met after such a long time without seeing each other and the deceived Ramón Mercader opened all the channels to the most incredible corners of his life to his old comrade Jaime López, the knowledge displayed by the narrator seemed undoubtedly exaggerated and could only be due to two reasons. The first possibility had been cooking in my mind since our initial exchange: López was an out-and-out fabulist who could be coloring the story with brushstrokes from his own palate; the second struck me like a bolt of lightning as I was traveling on the bus to Havana after our third meeting, and it almost drove me to madness: Was Jaime López Ramón Mercader himself? Could that phantasmagoric being relegated to a stormy and lost corner of history, that faceless protagonist of a past plagued by horrors, still exist? Although the only possible responses to those questions was a resounding
no for each, the seed of doubt had fallen on fertile ground and would remain there because a persistent suspicion prevented me from cultivating it: If the man who loved dogs was Ramón Mercader, what the hell was he doing in Cuba? Why in the devil was he telling
me
his story? What was all that bullshit about Jaime López and his mystery?

One of the considerations that had encouraged my doubts about Jaime López’s role in that story arose from the fact that at the time I was listening to him I had some clues that I did not have when I first met him. It was after the second conversation, knowing already where the story was leading, that I decided to go and see my friend Dany in the offices of the publishing house where he had started to work as a “specialist in promotion and distribution.” Although it wasn’t the job Dany had dreamed of, he had accepted it with the hope that, once his two years of social service were over, a coveted editor’s position would become available, and he would have better chances of filling it if he positioned himself in the publishing house’s administrative department.

Since Daniel Fonseca has already appeared and will continue to appear at various points of this story, I should say something about this friend who had been, in a way, my only literary pupil, if I can call him that. Dany had enrolled in the literature program at the university just when I was doing my last year in journalism. Recommended by a cousin of mine who was his neighbor, one day he showed up at my house in Víbora Park with the always dangerous intention of borrowing some of the books he needed for his classes. Against all logic, I lent them to him, and in order to underline that in the future everything would be as it should be, he pushed the limits of logic even further by returning them to me when his exams were over. Thus his visits started, generally on Saturday afternoons, and we went from textbooks to novels that I suggested to him and with which he began to fill his encyclopedia of ignorance. Around that time Dany listened to me and looked at me like I was a goddamned guru, only because he was an absolute ignoramus, although intelligent, and I was a guy who was five years older, several miles of reading ahead of him, and above all, with a book of stories already published. Neither Dany nor I could have dreamed then that one day that voracious animal, who, before enrolling for a degree in the arts, had spent every hour of his life playing baseball, would end up being a writer—what’s more, a wise and noteworthy writer, which is equal to being something more than acceptable and several levels below brilliant—who at times
seemed gifted with a greater literary ability than shown in his published books.

Despite the fact that, by the time of my conversations with López, Dany and I barely saw each other, he didn’t find it strange to see me show up at the large house in Vedado where the publishing house was located. But he was shocked by the reason that brought me there: I needed to find a biography of Trotsky, and among the people I knew, he was the one who seemed most likely to have one. Before Dany could get over his surprise at my unusual request, I explained to him that at the National Library and the Central at the university, there were only some books about Trotsky published by the Progress publishing house, in Moscow, in which the authors devoted themselves to devaluing each act, each thought, even each gesture, the man had made in his life and even in death—the false prophet, the renegade, the enemy of the people, they called him, and it was always several authors, as if one alone couldn’t handle the task of so many accusations—and I was interested in finding something that wasn’t such flagrant propaganda, so blatant that it forced me to question its accuracy. And if anyone would have the material I needed to read, it was the uncle of Dany’s wife Elisa, an old journalist and militant Communist, very active in the country since the 1940s, who in the convulsive times of the sixties had even spent several weeks in prison, with a group of Trotsky sympathizers with whom he maintained personal and, they said, even philosophical relationships.

Now it’s important to remind you that this was in 1977, at the apogee of Soviet imperial grandeur and at the height of its philosophical and propagandistic inflexibility, and that we lived in a country that had accepted its economic model and its very orthodox political orthodoxy. With those important clarifications, you’ll have the more exact context of the dreadful drought of reading materials, information, and even ways of thinking when it came to subjects such as this one, that were particularly sensitive for our beloved Soviet brothers. So you will imagine the terror caused by the mere mention of anything critical—and Trotsky was political criticism personified, ideological evil multiplied to the nth degree. Due to all of this, you’ll understand Daniel’s response:

“What the fuck are you talking about?” He leaped up at learning my intentions and immediately added, in a lower voice and with a look of clinical concern, “Have you gone crazy, my friend? Are you drinking again? What the hell is wrong with you?”

In those years, almost no one on the island, at least that I knew of, had the least acknowledged interest in Trotsky or Trotskyism, among other reasons because that interest—if it came out or surfaced in someone who was crazy enough to reveal it—could not lead to anything more than complications of all kinds. Lots of complications. If listening to certain kinds of Western music, believing in any kind of god, practicing yoga, reading certain novels considered to be ideologically damaging, or writing a shitty story about some poor guy who felt afraid could represent a stigma and even involve punishment, getting into Trotskyism would have been like tying a rope around your own neck, especially for people who moved in the world of culture, teaching, and the social sciences. (I would later learn that some Uruguayan and Chilean refugees who lived on the island around that time dared to talk about the subject with a certain knowledge, although even they, subject to the surrounding pressure, did so in whispers.) Hence my friend’s nearly violent reaction.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Dany,” I answered when he started to calm down. “I’m not going to become a Trotskyist or any shit like that. What I need is to know . . . k-n-o-w, you get it? Or is it also forbidden
to know
?”

“But you already
know
that Trotsky is fire!”

“That’s my problem. Get me some book that Elisa’s relative must have and don’t fuck around. I’m not going to tell anyone where I got it from . . .”

Despite his protests, I had touched a fiber of Dany’s intellectual curiosity: faster than I expected (given the not-very-close relationship he maintained with the old former Trotskyist), he introduced me to an author and a biography that I had never heard of: Isaac Deutscher, and his trilogy about “the prophet” unarmed, armed, and outcast, in editions published in Mexico in the late 1960s. The morning on which he handed over the three volumes, after forcing me to make every conceivable promise that I would return the books as soon as possible, I went by my workplace and asked for the rest of the month as vacation. Besides the trips to the beach, what I remember best about those days was the consuming intensity with which I read that voluminous biography of the revolutionary named Leon Bronstein and the subsequent proof of my monumental ignorance of the historical truths (truths?) of the times and events amid which that man had lived, events and times so Russian and so far-off, starting with the October Revolution (I’ve never understood very well what happened in Petrograd that seventh of November, which was really October 25, and how the Winter Palace that no one wanted to defend in the end was taken
and that automatically marked the triumph of the revolution and handed power over to the Bolsheviks) and followed, among other things, by some also very strange dynastic battles between revolutionaries in which only Stalin seemed willing to take power and by some nearly silenced proceedings in Moscow (that seemed never, ever to have existed to us) in which the prisoners were their worst prosecutors. At the end of that parade of manifestations of the “Russian soul” (if we don’t understand something about the Russians, it always seems to be because of their souls) was the corroboration of the old leader’s assassination, something that had disappeared in the Soviet books devoted to him, since Trotsky (perhaps because he was Ukrainian and not Russian) seemed rather to have died of a cold or, better yet, been consumed one day by a trembling fit, as if he were a character in an Emilio Salgari novel.

Thanks to that biography, the person who traveled to the beach from the third meeting onward was just beginning to be someone capable of processing elements of that story through a different lens. Now my ears insisted on interpreting information that, with summary knowledge of the events and their actors, I intended to place on a board whose coordinates were becoming familiar.

A few days after being bit by the bizarre but logical suspicion that López may not be López and that Mercader may not be dead, I arrived at the beach ready to try to force the man to confess the truth about his identity—if that truth existed, something of which I was not sure. I cautiously waited for the right moment to voice my doubts and I found the occasion when López was talking about the commotion the controversial Molotov-Ribbentrop pact caused in Ramón and his mother, Caridad del Río.

“You know what?” I asked without looking at him. “Of everything you’ve told me, there’s something I can’t believe.”

López lit one of his cigarettes with a gas lighter. Before his silence I continued:

“No one could know this much about another person’s life. No matter how much the person told you. It’s impossible.”

López was smoking unhurriedly, and I got the impression that he hadn’t heard my words. Later I would understand that a guy like me would barely have been able to move that rock: the man was a specialist in answering only what he wanted to, and his strategy was to take the frying pan out of my hands, grip the handle, and beat me over the head with it.

“What are you thinking? That what I’ve been telling you is a lie?” He took his glasses off for a few moments, held them up to the light, then wet them with his tongue to clean off the salt spray that had clung to them.

“I don’t know,” I said, and hesitated. His voice had taken on a tone capable of freezing my impulses, and that’s why I chose my words very carefully: “How is it possible that you know so much about Ramón? Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that Caridad and your mother, both of them, were born in Cuba? I’m thinking that—”

“That I’m Ramón’s brother? Or that I was his boss?”

I quickly weighed those possibilities without realizing that, with them, the man did nothing more than make me weaken in my convictions. But he didn’t leave me too much time to think, since he immediately cut to the chase.

“Or perhaps you think I am Ramón?” he asked.

I looked at him in silence. In the previous weeks the man who loved dogs had been noticeably losing weight, his skin had become much more opaque, greenish, and he frequently suffered from a sore throat and was overcome by coughing fits that he managed to control with sips of water sweetened by honey from a bottle that now always accompanied him. But at that moment there was a burning intensity in his eyes, and I have to admit, it scared me.

“Ramón is dead and buried, kid. And the worst thing is that he has turned into a ghost. If you look in all the cemeteries in the Soviet Union, you won’t ever find his grave. I myself don’t even know the name under which he was buried . . . I already told you: among the things Ramón gave to the cause were his name and his freedom to make decisions . . . Besides, if I’m telling you all of this, why would I deceive you about the rest of it? What does it matter who I am? Further still: What would change if I were Ramón?”

The answers came to my mind: it matters because what you’re telling me is the History of Deception and everything would change if you were Ramón, since nobody (at least I thought) would have wanted to be Ramón Mercader. Because Ramón caused disgust and engendered fear . . . But it goes without saying that I didn’t dare to say these things.