The Man Who Loved Dogs (62 page)

He dialed the number of Tom’s apartment in Shirley Court and didn’t get an answer. What should he do now? Jacques Mornard took some time to reflect. Tom had put together a plan that escaped his comprehension. Had he managed to use the political differences between the renegade and fat Rivera so that the latter would take the helm of a killer commando unit, or had he simply threatened him with airing his problems with his wife? They spoke of twenty armed men, of hundreds of shots fired but no one killed. How was that possible? With a professional like Felipe inside the house, how was it possible for the Duck to still be alive? There was something murky in the attack that defied the most basic logic. In any event, he thought, the attack’s failure placed him at the front line, where he had fought so hard to get. Tom’s fears regarding the success of the operation were now powerfully highlighted, and he came to wonder whether in reality that failure did not have a purpose. But what? To enter the Duck’s house, have him at the mercy of ten rifles and not kill him—for what? Had he, Ramón, always been the one tasked with the real mission? He felt as if his head were about to explode. The evidence that he
had turned into the true alternative continued to bring him remote revolutionary joy, but with it the ghost of an unexpected fear surreptitiously came to the surface at the responsibility that came with it. He drank more coffee, smoked two more cigarettes, and, when he felt ready to move, put on his hat and climbed into the Buick.

As he drove to Shirley Court, Ramón noticed that his chest was about to burst with anguish. He had never felt that oppression so clearly, and he wondered if it wasn’t angina like the kind Caridad experienced. When he asked the caretaker at the apartments if Mr. and Mrs. Roberts were in, the man explained that they had left the night before.

Ramón Mercader left the Buick in the apartment parking lot and went out toward Reforma, which was congested with pedestrians, vendors, cars, beggars, and even prostitutes with flexible schedules: a multicolored humanity surrounded by engine exhausts and the cries of newspaper boys announcing the miraculous salvation of the “bearded” Trotsky. The city seemed crazed, on the verge of exploding, and the young man felt dizzy amid the crowd and their rejoicing. Leaning against the wall, he lifted his gaze to the clear sky, wiped clean by the previous night’s rain, and was certain that his fate would be decided beneath that bright, clear sky.

23

On May 2, 1939, the Trotskys moved the beds and the worktable and put coal in the ovens. The house at number 19 Avenida Viena was now their house. Although it meant little more than changing prisons, Lev Davidovich felt that with that move he was gaining enormous freedom. Can I feel happy? Do I have the right to that human emotion? he asked himself upon sitting in
his
office and looking around. The yard he could see from the window was ruined and the main work hadn’t been finished yet, since, despite Natalia Sedova’s strict management and the secretaries’ Stakhanovite efforts, the funds had been exhausted. But he couldn’t live under the same roof as Rivera for one more day. Over the last two months, they hadn’t even spoken, and he regretted the way in which that friendship had ended, since he would never be able to forget that, for whatever reason, Rivera had helped him travel to Mexico, had offered his hospitality, and had contributed to his recovery after the terrible experiences at the end of his Norwegian exile.

Ever since he was very young, he had thought that the worst aggression against the human condition was humiliation, because it disarmed the individual, attacking the essence of his dignity. He, who throughout his life had suffered all the insults and slanders possible, had never felt so
close to the verge of humiliation as when Natalia and Jean van Heijenoort prevented him, after his last birthday, from leaving the Casa Azul and going to yell at Rivera about the disgust he felt at his exhibitionism, his macho Mexican positions, his inconsistencies as a political clown. For a long time Lev Davidovich had known that if Rivera had welcomed him into his house, and perhaps even accepted that Rivera’s wife went to his bed, it had only been to use it as a platform for his phony radicalism, a trampoline to the newspaper pages. But when tensions had reached the boiling point, his kindness had come undone and he had shown his true face.

The tension had been aggravated by the inevitable collision between Rivera’s ambitions and Lev Davidovich’s sense of responsibility when the latter opposed the painter assuming the role of Mexican secretary of the Fourth International. But things went beyond the permissible limit when Rivera announced his break with General Cárdenas and his decision to support the right-wing presidential candidate Juan Almazán. Although the Exile knew that it was all due to his own insolence, he tried to warn the painter of how damaging his defection would be for Cárdenas’s progressive project, and the response he received had been so offensive that, that very day, he decided to end his stay at the Casa Azul. Trotsky could not give anyone political lessons, his host had told him; only a lunatic could think of organizing an International that was nothing but a vainglorious effort to become the leader of something.

If in another time he had left the Kremlin itself, why not leave the Casa Azul now? If they went somewhere less protected, his life would be in danger, but that did not matter too much to him; however, van Heijenoort reminded him that he was also putting Natalia’s life at risk. Lev Davidovich had to lower his head, although he announced his break with Rivera and his disagreement with the painter’s political about-face, not wanting to be associated with an action that directly affronted General Cárdenas, to whom he felt so committed.

At the beginning of the year, Lev Davidovich had written to Frida, who was still in New York, with the hopes that she would be able to allay the crisis, but she never responded. Meanwhile, Rivera, who now declared himself a supporter of Almazán, was announcing his break with Trotskyism because he considered it a harebrained ideology that played into the fascists’ strategy against the USSR.

Jean and the other secretaries intensified their search for a safe place for them to live and finally opted to rent a brick house with an ample
shaded yard on the nearby Avenida Viena, a dusty street where there were only a few shacks. The house had the advantage of high walls and of being inaccessible from the back, where the Churubusco River ran. But the building had been empty for ten years, and it required a lot of work to make it inhabitable. Once they decided to move, Lev Davidovich tried to offer Diego rent for the months that the renovation of the house would take, but the painter wouldn’t even receive him, making his intention of humiliating the Exile obvious. The tension then reached such a level that van Heijenoort confessed to Lev Davidovich that he even feared Rivera could commit violence.

That domestic crisis barely allowed Lev Davidovich to follow events happening outside the Casa Azul with the care he desired. With much difficulty he had managed to concentrate on the reorganization of the American section and discuss with Josep Nadal the seriousness of Spanish events following Franco’s offensive toward Catalonia, the last of the Republican strongholds apart from Madrid. In Mexico, meanwhile, the attacks against his presence were entering a dangerous spiral, and at the same time that Hernán Laborde, the secretary of the Communist Party, demanded that the government expel him threatening a political rupture if it did not, the right tinged its protests with a dark fascist-inspired anti-Semitism. Lev Davidovich lived surrounded by the feeling that the siege was closing in, that the knives and guns were getting closer and closer to his graying head.

The renovation was turning out to be more complex than they had originally thought, as Natalia had ordered one of the walls be made higher, watchtowers to be built, the covering of all entrances with steel sheets, and the installation of an alarm system. At one point Lev Davidovich had asked if they were preparing a house or a sarcophagus.

Since he spent almost the whole day holed up in his room at the Casa Azul, he made the most of his time by writing an analysis of the foreseeable end of the Spanish Civil War. Spain’s revolutionary movement, if successful, could perhaps have delayed and even prevented the European war. Nadal had told him that, in the final months of the previous year, the Spanish government had asked for more weapons from its allies in a desperate attempt to save the Republic. The Soviets made a shipment through France, but Paris refused to allow the weapons through its borders, and that failure had been definitive. The Soviets, tired of a war without the prospect of a victory, decided to cut off all their commitments, and from that moment Spain was lost. While the fascists were
rolling their military power over Spanish soil, Stalin was turning a blind eye and beginning to concern himself with what had always been his true interest, his neighbors in Eastern Europe.

There had been no information about Seriozha for many months when an American journalist who had recently arrived in New York after a stay in Moscow wrote the Trotskys, telling them that a colleague of his had managed to interview a prisoner just released by the new head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria. The former prisoner had relayed that, a few months before, he had seen Sergei Sedov alive, and another detainee had told him that Seriozha had been in the Vorkuta camp in 1936, during the Trotskyists’ strike, where he had been on the verge of dying of hunger; but in 1937 he had been transferred to the shadowy prison of Butyrka, in Moscow, where he had been subjected to torture to force him to sign a confession against his father: he was one of the few prisoners who withstood it without surrendering. The anonymous prisoner said he had met him in a camp in the subarctic, where other inmates talked about Sergei Sedov as if he were an unbreakable man.

Natalia and Lev Davidovich had believed the news heart and soul, even when their minds thought it would be difficult for their son to have been able to escape Vorkuta or Butyrka with his life, places that were worse than the sixth circle of hell. But Lev Davidovich couldn’t avoid feeling proud when they kept hearing the same description of Seriozha’s attitude; the only thing about which there was no doubt was that he had resisted the interrogations without signing confessions against his father. So they consoled themselves by thinking that if Stalin had preyed upon his innocent life, Seriozha had conquered him with his silence.

A new congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held at the beginning of the year, had left Lev Davidovich several certainties. On the international level, it had made Stalin’s willingness to seek an alliance with Hitler more obvious; on the national level, it underscored the cynical pretension of carrying out yet another revision of history by blaming the expelled heads of the GPU for the excesses of the purge. To the indignation of very few and to popular acceptance of his good intentions, the “great captain” criticized those who carried out the purge, since it had been accompanied by “more mistakes than expected” (his own words). So everything would have turned out okay if only the expected mistakes had been committed? How many was it acceptable to execute by mistake? The most alarming thing was that none of those in the world
who recognized Stalin’s honesty seemed to recall that, a few months earlier, the man from the mountains had sent pompous congratulations to Yezhov and the heads of NKVD. It only seemed to matter to them that the genius had warned them about the existence of “deficiencies” in the operation, such as the “simplified investigation procedures” and the lack of witnesses and proof. So where was Stalin while that was happening? the Exile had asked a world that would not respond to him.

In reality, the most dramatic of the revelations of the congress was the proof that the general secretary had finally ascended to the heights of power. The terror of those last years had allowed him to remove from the scene, in one way or another, eighteen of the twenty-seven members of the Politburo elected in the last congress presided over by Lenin, and to leave the heads on just twenty percent of the members of the Central Committee elected in 1934, the last time the situation was on the verge of slipping out of his hands. Stalin had proven to be a real genius of political chicanery, and his successful elimination of any opposition within the party (relying on the agreement promoted by Lenin over the illegality of factions) turned into his most efficient political weapon to make democracy disappear and, later, to establish terror and carry out the purges that gave him absolute power. Perhaps the first mistake of Bolshevism, Lev Davidovich thought, was the radical elimination of the political tendencies opposed to it, and once that policy went from outside society to inside the party, the end of the utopia had begun. If freedom of expression had been allowed in society and within the party, terror would not have been able to take root. That was why Stalin had embarked on the political and intellectual purge in such a way that everything would fall under the control of a state devoured by the party—and a party devoured by the general secretary. This was exactly what Lev Davidovich, before the aborted revolution of 1905, predicted to Lenin would happen.

To top off that series of defeats, one afternoon in March, Josep Nadal arrived at the Casa Azul with several newspapers in his hands and a look of disappointment on his face. The Republican army had surrendered and Franco’s troops were marching through Madrid. Lev Davidovich knew that in the coming months the reprisals would be terrible and he felt pity for the Republicans who had not been able to or had not wanted to flee Spain. The saddest thing was seeing how a courageous country that had had the revolution at the tips of its fingers had been sacrificed by
the owners of the revolution and socialism, just as years before they had done to the Chinese Communists and the German workers. Was it so difficult to see that series of betrayals? he asked, looking into Nadal’s face.