The Man Who Loved Dogs (82 page)

PART THREE

Apocalypse

29

Moscow, 1968

       
A second time they summoned the man who had been blind.

       
“Give glory to God by telling the truth,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.”

       
He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”

John 9:24–25

Moscow could also be infernally torrid, and the afternoon of August 23, 1968, had to have been the hottest of the season. But, thanks to their medals, they didn’t have to show any kind of credentials for the doors of the decrepit Hotel Moscow to open to them and for the fresh air of the screeching air conditioners to welcome them.

In recent years, Ramón Pavlovich had resorted to the tactic of hanging the powerful medals of Hero of the Soviet Union and the Order of Lenin on his lapel, which managed to force open, without violence, almost all of the doors in the greatest and most closed country in the world. In reality, it had been Roquelia who made that fabulous discovery, one winter morning in 1961, as she shivered in an endless line that snaked all the way toward October Twenty-Fifth Street, in front of the windows of a shop in the GUM gallery. Cursing her luck, the cold, the lines, and the shoving that she had to stoically withstand, Roquelia had seen a man with crutches and a missing leg pass in front of the crowd of aspiring
purchasers and, without asking permission, enter the store and leave with six packages of the coveted Hungarian salami and twelve cans of the elusive crabmeat from Kamchatka. The impunity with which the wounded man passed before the combative Russian matrons at the head of the line—who limited themselves to pressing their faces against the establishment’s window to count, in agony but in whispers, the number of salamis the man was dropping into his bag (terrified at the possibility of hearing the cry most feared by the Soviets: “It’s all gone, comrades!”)—had moved her in a proletarian way, since even in Mexico, or in any other capitalist country, there had never been deference like that toward an invalid. Because of that, when the man dropped the last item in his bag (into which two bottles of vodka had also fallen), Roquelia made use of gestures and her rudimentary Russian and discussed the matter with the woman who was behind her in line; she was surprised to find out, or in reality thought she found out, that the man’s mutilation had nothing to do with his privilege, which actually came from the medal hanging on the pocket of his frayed cloak. The wounded man was a hero of the USSR and, as such, he was authorized to go in front of everyone else in every line, even when they had slept on the sidewalk overnight to have the certainty of obtaining the desired product. What Roquelia was sure of was that the man’s decoration (she approached him almost to the point of impertinence and nausea, because of the stench he gave off) was similar to one her husband had in a drawer at home. Because of that, the following night, when she attended a party with Ramón organized by the Casa de España, Roquelia asked the old exiled Republican women and was certain that her life in Moscow had changed. From that day on, whenever she went out in search of some product in deficit (the list could be interminable), she made her husband go with her. From his jacket she hung the prestigious medals to obtain Bulgarian sausages and Hungarian salami and toilet paper, oranges and tickets to the Bolshoi alike.

The previous afternoon, the phone had rung while Ramón Pavlovich was reading an issue of
L’Humanité
that, every morning, he bought at the newsstand located on the north exit of Gorky Park, next to the Frunze Quay. Roquelia, always resistant to lifting the apparatus and speaking in Russian, shouted to him from the kitchen to answer the phone. Ramón hated any interruption in the rhythm of his reading or when he was listening to Bach, Beethoven, and Falla, and it was especially annoying that
afternoon, since he was caught up in an article that showed how the Czech revisionists had worked cunningly for an onerous capitalist restoration, turning their backs on the will of the country’s workers and peasants. The Red Army, with its opportune entrance into Prague, invited by the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, only meant to guarantee the continuity of the socialist option chosen by the great masses of that country, the piece argued.

Ramón Pavlovich took off his thick tortoiseshell glasses and still had time to tell himself that that article showed that nothing had changed, not even the rhetoric. With difficulty, he stood up. No matter how much Roquelia insisted that he eat vegetables, he didn’t lose weight, and with the passing of years he had become a slow and wheezing man. He lifted his feet to step over Ix and Dax, his two Russian wolfhound puppies, who, despite their youth, had turned lazy with the summer heat. Ramón was almost sure that the phone call was for his son Arturo, who, in his adolescence, had taken over the phone. On the tenth ring, he managed to raise the heavy receiver.

“
Da?
” he said in Russian, almost annoyed.

“
Merde!
You already know how to speak in Russian?” The voice, sarcastic, French, was an arrow that went through the heart of Ramón Pavlovich’s memories.

“Is it you?” he asked, also in French, feeling his chest and his temples beating.

“Twenty-eight years without seeing each other, eh, kid? Well, you’re no longer a kid.”

“Are you in Moscow?

“Yes, and I’d like to see you. I’ve spent three years wondering if I should call you or not, and today I made up my mind. Can we see each other?”

“Of course,” Ramón Pavlovich said, after thinking for a few moments. Of course he wanted to see him, although for a thousand reasons he doubted it was appropriate. For starters, he presumed that their conversation was being listened to, and that the meeting would be monitored by security agents, although he decided it was worth the risk.

“Tomorrow at four, in front of the beer hall in Leningradsky Station. Do you remember? Bring money: now we pay out of our own pockets. And mine aren’t exactly healthy.”

“How have things gone for you?” Ramón Pavlovich dared to ask.

“So fucking well,” the man said in Spanish, and repeated before hanging up: “So fucking well. See you tomorrow.”

Having barely hung up, Ramón Pavlovich heard the scream again. In all those years, that cry of pain, surprise, and anger had pursued him; and although in recent times its insistent presence had dissipated, it was always there, in his mind, like something latent that resolved to activate itself, sometimes by some reminiscence of the past, and many other times without any discernible motive, like a spring he had no ability or possibility of controlling.

Ever since he’d arrived in Moscow eight years before, he had been wishing to meet with that man (what the hell was his name now? What could his name have originally been before he turned into a perpetually masked man?), and only feared that the death, of one or the other, could prevent the necessary conversation that would get him closer to the truths he had never known and that influenced the path of his life so much. And now, when he already thought that nothing would happen, at last the meeting seemed about to become real, and as usual the initiative had come from his always evasive mentor.

“Who was it?” Roquelia asked when she came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. “What’s wrong, Ramón? You’re pale . . .”

He put his glasses back on, took a cigarette from the pack lying on the table next to his reading chair, and lit it.

“It was him,” he said at last.

With a cigarette in his hands, Ramón went out to the tiny balcony from which he enjoyed a privileged view of the river and, on the other side, of the tree-lined park. From the heights of his apartment, if he looked to the south, he could see the buildings of the university and the Church of St. Nicholas; if he turned to the north, he could make out the Krymsky Bridge, where he usually crossed over to Gorky Park, and beyond that he could make out the highest towers and palaces of the Kremlin. Ix and Dax followed him and, seated on their hind legs, dedicated themselves to panting and contemplating the tiny pedestrians going back and forth across the quay. Ramón felt a lost feeling of fear return and squeeze his chest. Almost mechanically, he observed his right hand, where, an inch or so from the wound he received in the first days of the war, he had the indelible half-moon-shaped scar. He didn’t like to look at those four marks hanging on his skin, since he preferred not to remember; but
memory was like everything in his life ever since that remote early morning on which he said yes—it also acted with insolence independent of the reduced will of its owner.

First he had heard the shrill cry and, when he opened his eyes, saw that the wounded man, with his glasses twisted on his nose, had managed to throw himself at his weapon-holding hand and clung to it to sink his teeth in and force him to release the ice axe stained with blood and brain. What happened in the following minutes had turned into an amalgam of images where some vivid memories were confused with the stories he would hear and read through the years. The stories agreed that, perhaps paralyzed by the scream and the wounded man’s unexpected reaction, he had not even tried to leave the office, and they said that while the bodyguards beat him with their hands and the butts of their revolvers, he had yelled in English: “They have my mother! They’re going to kill my mother!” From what recess of his mind had those unforeseen words come? He remembered, in contrast, having managed to cover his head to protect himself from the blows, and that he started to cry upon thinking he had failed. He could not believe that the old man had resisted the blow and leaped upon him with that desperate force. Then he yelled, begging for them to kill him. He wanted and deserved it. He had failed, he thought.

Ramón could still feel in his chest a renewal of the oppression that had crushed his breath when, along with the confirmation of the condemned man’s death, he heard the policeman in charge of his interrogation assure him that his victim, already fatally wounded, had saved his life by demanding that his bodyguards stop beating him, since it was necessary to make him speak. That information gave meaning to what happened that afternoon and, in a strange way, fed the cry of pain and horror clinging to his eardrums. From that moment on, he was able to evoke with greater clarity the surprising relief he felt when he stopped being hit on the head with the rifle butts, and he also managed to remember the look of disgust that at that moment Natalia Sedova directed at him and the moment in which Azteca the dog came into the room and approached the wounded man, lying on the floor with a pillow under his head. Ramón was sure he’d seen him caress the dog and heard him say not to let Seva enter.

In reality, Ramón had only completely regained consciousness when, as it was getting dark already, they had taken him out of the house, handcuffed. Before getting into the ambulance that would take him to the
Hospital Cruz Verde, he had looked to his left and, between the blood and the swelling that shot through his right eye, he was able to confirm, beyond the police cars lining Avenida Viena, that the dark green Chrysler had disappeared. In the ambulance, he told the head of his escort to take the letter he had in the pocket of his summer jacket. The pain he felt in his hand, where he had been bitten, and in his bruised head and face did not prevent, while the policeman opened the letter, a wave of relaxation from enveloping him, nor one sole idea, clear and precise, from taking control of his mind: my name is Jacques Mornard, I am Jacques Mornard.

Tom had warned him that the letter would be his only shield and, whatever happened, he should take cover from lightning and thunderbolts behind it. And so he did throughout the twenty years he spent in the hell on earth of the three Mexican prisons of his sentence. The saddest times were without a doubt the intense months in which they held him in the bulletproof cells of the Sixth Delegation, submitting him to interminable interrogations, periodic beatings, constant slaps, and daily kicks; confrontations with Sylvia, which always included the woman spitting on his face; confrontations with the renegade’s bodyguards and even with several of the participants of the massive attack directed by Siqueiros (“directed by” was figuratively speaking), who, as was foreseen, could not identify him and even less still connect him to the disappeared French Jew. Later came the interviews with Belgian civil servants who demonstrated the falseness of Jacques Mornard’s supposed family and national origins, and the incisive psychological tests, bordering on torture, that demanded all of his physical resistance, his intelligence, and the use of the full arsenal received in Malakhovka to keep his shield raised. The process of re-creating the attack had been especially arduous, when they forced him to represent, with a newspaper rolled up in his hand, the way in which he had hit the condemned man. Behind the mahogany desk, with his newspaper raised, he had the certainty at last that the ice axe had missed its target by a few inches because the renegade, with the pages of the article in his hands, had turned toward him. This also meant that he had had time to see the lethal point coming down and breaking his skull. That vision—which clarified why the forensics determined that the victim had received the blow from the front and explained why the old man had been able to stand up, fight with him, and even live another twenty-four hours—was so brutal that he passed out.

He also remembered the difficult moment in which the instructing judge spoke to him of the evidence that his real name was Ramón Mercader del Río, Catalan in origin, since some Spanish refugees had recognized his photo in the newspapers, and even put a snapshot in front of him, taken in Barcelona, in which he appeared dressed as a soldier. The existence of that proof came with more interrogations and torturers with the purpose of wresting from him the confession that everyone wanted to hear. The head of the secret police, Sánchez Salazar, seemed to have taken a personal interest in the need to hear that confession from his lips, and hundreds, thousands of times he repeated the same questions: “Who provided you with the weapon? Who were your accomplices? Who sent you here? Who helped you? Who provided the funds for the attack? What is your real name?” His answers, in every case, every year, and in every situation, had always been consistent with the letter: no one had armed him; he had no accomplices; he had traveled with the money supplied to him by a member of the Fourth International whose name he had forgotten; his only contact in Mexico had been a certain Bartolo, he didn’t remember if it was Pérez or Paris; he was called Jacques Mornard Vandendreschs and had been born in Tehran, where his parents, Belgian diplomats, were posted, and with whom he later lived in Brussels; and he didn’t know anything about any Mercader del Río, and although they looked a lot alike, he could not be the man from the photo.