The Man Who Loved Dogs (75 page)

Natalia Sedova asked the maid for a second pot of tea at the moment the front door opened and young Seva entered the yard, preceded by the joyous Azteca, who, without paying any attention to the visitors, went to the Exile. The old man smiled, petting the animal and speaking to it in Russian.

“Do you always speak to him in Russian?” Jacques, smiling, asked after greeting Seva, over whose shoulders he even threw his arm.

“Seva speaks to him in French, in the kitchen they speak to him in Spanish, and I speak to him in Russian,” the old man replied. “And he understands us all. The intelligence of dogs is a mystery to human beings. In
many ways I think that they’re intellectually far superior to us, since they have the capacity to understand us, even in several languages, and we are the ones who do not have the intelligence to understand their language.”

“I think you’re right . . . Seva says you’ve always had dogs.”

“Stalin took many things away from me, even the possibility of having dogs. When they kicked me out of Moscow, I had to leave behind two, and when I went into exile, they wanted me to leave without my favorite dog, the only one I was able to take to Alma-Ata. But Maya lived with us in Turkey, and we buried her there. With her, Seva learned to love dogs. It’s true that I have always loved dogs. They have a kindness and a capacity for loyalty that go beyond that of many human beings.”

“I also love dogs,” Jacques said, as if he were ashamed. “But it’s been years since I’ve had one. When all of this is over, I’d like to have two or three.”

“Find yourself a borzoi, a Russian wolfhound. Maya was a borzoi. They’re the most loyal, beautiful, and intelligent dogs in the world . . . with the exception of Azteca, of course,” he said, winking and caressing the dog’s ears more, then hugging him against his chest.

“You know? You’re the second person to tell me about those dogs. An English journalist I once met told me he had one.”

“Listen closely, Jacson: if you ever have a borzoi, you’ll never forget me,” the old man proclaimed, and looked at his watch. He immediately patted Azteca’s side and stood up. “I should take care of the rabbits and I am also behind on some work. It has really been a pleasure talking with you and with the stubborn Sylvia.”

“Would you like me to help you with the rabbits?” Jacques offered.

Sylvia and Natalia smiled, perhaps since they knew the answer.

“Don’t worry, thank you. The rabbits are not as intelligent and they get nervous with strangers.”

Jacques stood up. He looked at the ground, as if he’d lost something, and suddenly reacted.

“Mr. Trotsky . . . I was thinking . . . I would like to write something about the problems of the political parties in the French resistance. I know France very well, but your ideas have made me understand things differently and . . . would you do me the favor of reviewing it?”

The old man turned toward the rabbit cages. The sun was beginning to set. With gestures that seemed mechanical, he popped the buttons on his cuffs to roll up the sleeves of his Russian shirt.

“I promise not to steal too much of your time,” Jacques continued. “Two or three pages. If you read them, I would be more sure of not making a mistake in my analysis.”

“When will you bring it to me?”

“The day after tomorrow: Saturday?”

“All I want is that you not steal a lot of my time.”

“I promise, Mr. Trotsky.”

With the edge of his shirt, the Exile cleaned the lenses of his glasses. He stepped toward Jacques and, with the glasses back on, looked him in the eye.

“Jacson . . . You don’t look Belgian. Saturday at five. Make me read something interesting. Good day.”

The renegade turned toward the rabbit cages. Jacques Mornard, with a smile frozen on his lips, was incapable of responding to his farewell. Only that night, when he placed a sheet in the typewriter, did he understand that, with his last words, the man he had to kill had breathed on his neck.

He awoke with a headache and in a bad mood. He had barely slept despite the exhaustion he was pushed into by those three hours of effort, at the end of which he had only managed to write a couple of messy paragraphs with poorly put-together ideas. How was he going to write something that would end up being interesting to the old man? He was certain that he had again dreamed of a beach and some dogs running on the sand, and he remembered that he had awoken in anguish during the night. The conviction that everything would be over the following day, when he sank the ice axe in the skull of that renegade traitor, instead of calming him, filled him with disquiet. He took a pair of painkillers with his coffee and, when Sylvia asked him where he was going, whispered something about the office and the construction workers, and with his smudged pieces of paper he went out onto the street.

His mentor was waiting for him in the apartment at Shirley Court, and after Ramón had relayed the details of the previous afternoon’s visit, his anxiety exploded.

“I know how I have to kill him, but I can’t write a fucking article! He asked that it be something interesting! What interesting things am I going to write for him?”

Tom took the pages that, almost imploringly, Ramón handed him, and told him not to worry about the article.

“I have to do it tomorrow, Tom. Prepare things to help me escape. I can’t wait any longer. I’ll kill him tomorrow,” he repeated.

Caridad was listening to them, seated in one of the armchairs, and Ramón, in his daze, thought he noticed her hands shaking slightly. Tom, the sheets in hand, was looking at the typed lines, full of cross-outs and additions. Then he crumpled the pages, threw them in a corner, and commented, as if it weren’t important, “You’re not going to kill him tomorrow.”

Ramón thought he misheard. Caridad leaned forward.

“If we’ve worked for three years,” he continued, “and we’ve gotten to where we are, it’s for everything to turn out right. You’re not the only one who is risking his life in this. Stalin forgave me the disaster with the Mexicans because we never trusted them too much to begin with, but he is not going to forgive me a second failure. You cannot fail, Ramón, that’s why you’re not going to do it tomorrow.”

“But why not?”

“Because I know what I’m doing; I always know . . . When you are alone with the Duck, you’ll have all the strings in your hands, but you have to be hanging on to them tightly.”

Ramón shifted his head. As always, he felt Tom’s aplomb touch him, and the anguish began to melt away.

Tom lit a cigarette and stood before his small group of troops. He asked Caridad to make coffee and ordered Ramón to go to the pawnshop to buy a typewriter, the portable kind.

When he returned with the typewriter, Caridad offered him coffee and told him Tom was waiting in the bedroom. Ramón found him leaning over the chest of drawers he used as a desk and saw that on the floor there were crumpled pages written in Cyrillic. The adviser demanded silence with a gesture, without ceasing to repeat “
Bliat! Bliat!
” Standing, Ramón waited until the man turned around.

“Come on, I’m going to dictate the article to Caridad and the letter that should accompany it.”

“What letter?”

“The story of a disillusioned Trotskyist.”

“What do I have to do tomorrow?”

“Let’s say it’s a dress rehearsal. You’re going to the traitor’s house with all of your weapons on you, to see if you can get in and out without anyone suspecting anything. You’re going to give him the article and you’re going to be alone with him. The article will be so bad that you’ll have to make a lot of corrections and he himself will give you the option of returning with another draft. That will be the moment, because you’ll have calculated the way in which you’re going to hit him, the way to get out . . . You have to be sure you will do each thing very calmly and very carefully. You already know that if you can get out to the street, I’ll guarantee your escape; but while you’re inside the house, your fate and your life depend on you.”

“I won’t fail. But let me do it tomorrow. What if I can’t see him again?”

“You won’t fail and you won’t do it tomorrow—and you will see him again, that is sure,” Tom said, taking him by the chin and forcing him to look him in the eyes. “The fate of many people depends on you. And it depends on our shutting the mouths of the ones who didn’t trust in us, the Spanish Communists, do you remember? You’re going to show what a Spaniard who has two balls and an ideology in his head is capable of,” and with his right hand he tapped Ramón’s left temple. “You’re going to avenge your dead brother in Madrid, the humiliations your mother had to endure; you’re going to earn the right to be a hero and you’re going to show África that Ramón Mercader is not soft.”

“Thank you,” Ramón said, without knowing why he said it, as he felt the pressure of his tutor’s hands turning into a sweaty heat over his face. At that moment he convinced himself that Caridad’s story of her humiliations, mentioned in passing by Tom, in reality was part of a strategy concocted by his mother and the agent to sharpen his hate; that was the only explanation for Tom knowing of the conversation in the Gillow. How was it possible that Tom also knew that África had accused him of being too soft?

“Come on, to work.” Tom patted him on the shoulder and brought him out of his thoughts. “You have to memorize the letter we’re going to write. When you’re done, you drop it on the floor and leave. But if they catch you, that letter is your shield. You have to say that your name is Jacques Mornard and repeat what that letter says. But they are not going to get you—no. You’re my boy and you’ll get out. I’m telling you . . .”

They went back to the living room. Caridad, standing, was smoking. The tension had made the worldly woman she had been in recent months
disappear; her features were sharp again, hard, androgynous, as if she were also preparing herself for war.

“Sit down and type,” Tom ordered, and she threw her cigarette butt in a corner and settled down in front of the typewriter placed on the table. She ran a sheet through the roller and looked at the man.

“What are you going to write?”

“The letter.” Tom dropped into the armchair, with a pained look on his face. He stretched his body on the seat, read something from the pages he had filled with Cyrillic characters, and closed his eyes. “We’ll put a date on it later. Begin! ‘Dear Sirs: Upon writing this letter, I have no other objective, in the event that something should happen to me, than to clarify . . .’ No, wait . . .” And he held out his hand like a blind man feeling his way around. “Better: ‘than to explain to public opinion the motives that brought me to execute the act of justice I have set out to do.’ ”

Tom interrupted himself, his eyes still closed and some sheets in his hands, deciding his next words. Ramón was standing and smoking, and he observed his mentor and his mother and saw two different beings concentrating, doing a job responsibly. The phrases that the man was inventing and the woman was imprinting on the pages were a human being’s sentence and a murderer’s confession, but Tom and Caridad’s demeanor displayed such comfort with the idea of death that they seemed like two actors in a play.

Through Tom’s mouth, Jacques Mornard was beginning to speak about his origins, his profession, the political inclinations that led him to participate in Trotskyist organizations.

“ ‘I was a devoted student of Lev Trotsky and would’ve given my last drop of blood for the cause. I started studying as much as had been written about the different revolutionary movements in order to instruct myself and that way become more useful to the cause,’ period.”

“Same paragraph?” Caridad asked. Tom shook his head. “Just a moment,” she said, and placed a new sheet in the roller.

“Read me what’s already written,” Tom asked, and Caridad complied. At the end the adviser opened his eyes and looked at Ramón. “What do you think?”

“Sylvia will challenge it.”

“When Sylvia speaks, you’re going to be very far away. Caridad, read it again.”

Tom closed his eyes again, and as soon as Caridad finished her reading,
he began to put together the story of a member of the Fourth International committee who, after various conversations in Paris, had proposed to Jacques a trip to Mexico with the objective of meeting Trotsky. Mornard, excited, accepted, and the member of the International (“You never knew his name,” he clarified to Ramón; “That’s not believable,” he replied; “I could give a shit about believability,” the other one sighed) gave him money and even a passport to leave Europe.

Suddenly Tom stood up, ripped up the pages he still had in his hands, and uttered a Russian curse. Ramón noticed that his limping, absent in recent months, had returned. At that moment he had the feeling that it was Kotov who was going to the kitchen and returning with a bottle of vodka. He placed a glass on the table where Caridad was working and served himself an overlarge amount. He made it disappear in one swallow.

“We have to give the idea that Trotsky was already waiting for Jacques because he wanted something from him. And Jacques has to seem very sentimental, a little dumb . . .”

“Ramón is right. No one is going to believe that story,” Caridad said.

“When have we ever worried about people’s intelligence? We have to tell them what interests us. What they believe is their concern. What has to remain clear is that Trotsky is a traitor, a terrorist of the worst kind, that he’s being financed by imperialism . . .”