The Man Who Loved Dogs (26 page)

11

The stubbornly springlike and dizzying weeks of March and April of 1937 would remain in Ramón Mercader’s memory like an obscure period in which he felt confused about everything but from which he would suddenly emerge when he came across the most brilliant clarity: that of his solid conviction that ruthlessness was necessary to reach victory.

África’s disappearance had been followed by that of Kotov (had it been coincidental?), who, before leaving, had left Ramón orders that left him confined to the Marquis de Villota’s palace, where at some point he would meet with a colleague of the adviser’s who would introduce himself as Maximus. Due to his strict sense of responsibility he waited, spending his free time in the company of young Luis, with whom he played soccer, and whenever possible providing a little bit of pleasure to the sad-eyed Lena Imbert, with whom he shut himself up in the palace’s stalls, where he had installed a stove and a bed. Although he appreciated that parenthesis in the initial days that allowed him to recover from the tensions, hunger, and nights of insomnia of the four months that he’d spent on the front, he soon felt trapped by the inactivity and began to wonder whether Caridad, following young Pablo’s death, had used her influence to remove him from the dangers of the war and moved him to
that Barcelona where, despite Kotov’s prophecies, everything seemed reduced to yelled insults and mandatory slogans, to underground plots, secret meetings, and some execution or other to which the Republican extremists as much as the fascists seemed to be addicted.

In his isolation, Ramón couldn’t gain a clear understanding of the events taking place. The newspapers from the different Republican factions that reached his hands were cut in pieces by a crude censorship that contented itself with removing words and leaving blanks in the spaces formerly occupied by the condemned works. Only the communist dailies, free of the censorship that the party exercised over the rest of the newspapers, escaped that orgy of mutilations. Leaving aside their primitive triumphalism, their editorials allowed Ramón to discern the high temperatures reached by the increasingly furious accusations hurled against the POUM’s Trotskyist-fascists, the CNT’s uncontrollable syndicalists, and the FAI’s tempestuous anarchists. But the most significant thing for him was the growing insistence on criticizing the military, the head of government and war minister, Largo Caballero, and his most trusted men. That hard campaign in which truth and lies were mixed up confirmed for him Kotov’s prediction that they were headed toward a head-on battle against the hordes of conciliators and extremists.

Caridad, whom he had hardly seen in two weeks, experienced a relapse of angina that kept her in bed for two days with her left arm cramped and suffering. When the woman was able to come out to the mansion’s devastated garden, Ramón looked for a way to put the persistent Lena at a distance and be alone with her. He had endured too many days of inactivity, he felt tricked by his mother and by Kotov, and he dared to hurl an ultimatum at her.

“In three days, I’m returning to the front,” he said, but Caridad barely moved her head. “This whole business about silence and responsibility is just to keep me here, to control me.”

Caridad took a pack of cigarettes out of her coat pocket and the battle she was having with herself must have been agonizing.

“That’s going to kill you,” he warned her when he saw her remove one of her cigarettes.

“When I feel like this, all I want is to die,” she said, and began to unroll the cigarette with her fingers and brought the tobacco to her nose to breathe in its aroma. Finally, she threw her torn-up cigarette to the ground and placed another one between her lips without lighting it.
“Don’t look at me like that, don’t you dare feel any compassion, because I can’t stand it. I hate my body when it doesn’t listen to me. And don’t come to me with that foolishness about going to the front . . . There are things happening here that you can’t even imagine, and sooner than you can believe, your moment will come. But in due time, Ramón, everything in due time.”

“I know that story about time by heart already, Caridad.”

She smiled, but the pain in her arm cut through her happiness. She waited for a few seconds while the burning cramp receded.

“Story? Let’s see . . . Did you believe the story about Buenaventura Durruti getting killed by a stray bullet?”

Ramón looked at his mother and felt that he couldn’t say a word.

“Do you think we can win the war with an anarchist commander who’s more prestigious than all of the communist leaders?”

“Durruti was fighting for the Republic,” Ramón tried to reason.

“Durruti was an anarchist; he would’ve been one his entire life. And have you heard the story about the translator who disappeared, a certain Robles?”

“He was a spy, wasn’t he?”

“A miserable ass kisser. He was the scapegoat in an internal argument between the military advisers and security. But they didn’t just pick him at random: that Robles knew too much and could have been dangerous. He was not a traitor; they turned him into a traitor.”

“Do you mean to say that they killed him without him being a traitor?”

“Yes, and what of it? Do you know how many they’ve killed on one side or the other in these months of war?” Caridad waited for Ramón’s response.

“A lot, I think.”

“Almost one hundred thousand, Ramón. As they advance, the fascists execute everyone they consider a Popular Front sympathizer, and on this side the anarchists kill anyone who, according to them, is a bourgeois enemy. And do you know why?”

“It’s the war” was what occurred to him to say. “The fascists made those the rules of the game . . .”

“Necessity. For the fascists, it is a necessity to not have any enemies in the rear guard, and for the anarchists to keep being anarchists. And we cannot allow the war to slip out of our hands. We’ve also been killing people and we’re going to have to kill many more, and you—”

Ramón raised his hand to interrupt her.

“You brought me here to kill people?”

“And what the hell were you doing on the front, Ramón?”

“It’s different: it’s the war.”

“Enough with the fucking war . . . Isn’t managing to get the party to impose its policies and for the Soviets to continue to support us the most important thing for us winning this war? Isn’t cleaning up the rear guard of enemies and spies part of the war? Isn’t eliminating the fifth columnists in Madrid part of the war?”

“In Paracuellos they executed people who had nothing to do with the fifth column, and I know that some from the party were involved in that.”

“Who’s saying that the dead were saboteurs, you or the Falangists?”

Ramón lowered his head and contained his indignation. In the Sierra de Guadarrama, with a rifle in his hands and a handful of comrades dying of cold and shaking with hunger, and the enemy on the other side of the mountain, everything was simpler.

“This war you’re about to get into is more important, because if we don’t win it, we won’t win the other, and the comrades who were in the trenches are going to fall like flies when the planes, cannons, rifles, and grenades stop coming from Moscow. Ramón, Spain’s fate is in the hands of people like you . . . So that you get an idea of what’s happening, tonight you’ll go with me to La Pedrera. There is an important meeting. It goes without saying that everything that will be discussed there is secret. You cannot speak there or even say your name, is that clear?”

“Is África going as well?”

“Why don’t you forget about that woman for a while, Ramón?”

In Caridad’s shadow, Ramón crossed the threshold of La Pedrera that night without the guards stopping him. In one of the rooms on the top floor, enveloped in a cloud of smoke, several men were talking and barely noticed the arrival of Caridad and her young companion. Ramón felt disappointed on not seeing África. Of those present, he recognized only one person, Dolores Ibárruri, who was perhaps the only one not smoking at that moment. There was also a man with a Slavic face whom he would later identify as Comrade Pedro, the Hungarian who commanded the Comintern’s envoys. His attention nonetheless focused on a loud character, hairy and corpulent, with a large head, bulging eyes, and thick lips that made a smacking noise as he spoke. By his way of addressing himself
to the others, you could tell he was an irascible guy, and by what he was saying, it appeared that he was one of those who assume everyone is a traitor and who consider any negligence or ineptitude to be a perverse conspiracy or enemy sabotage. Whispering in his ear, Caridad told him that the man was André Marty, and Ramón understood immediately that he was in the presence of something important: if at that moment of the war Marty was so far away from his post as commander of the International Brigades, it could only be for a more important cause. Thanks to his sister Montse, who for weeks had been working as the secretary for that Comintern leader, Ramón knew that he had the reputation of being a cruel and despotic man, and that night the harangue he issued forth corroborated it, festooned as it was with insults. Marty accused the leaders of the party of being weak and inept, since, according to him, the Central Committee practically didn’t exist and the work of the political bureau was terribly primitive and conciliatory: the Spaniards, he said, and pointed to Ibárruri, had to grow up once and for all and stop allowing Codovilla to act like the party was his personal backyard just because he was a Comintern envoy. They should be ashamed that Codovilla was using them like marionettes—and again he looked at La Pasionaria, who lowered her gaze like a beaten dog—and going to the extreme of writing speeches for General Secretary Pepé Díaz and Comrade Dolores Ibárruri just to create the illusion that there was a central committee of Spanish Communists, when in reality it didn’t exist or decide anything. The situation didn’t allow for any more hesitation: they either went for everything or forgot all about even the most minimal possibility of success.

Indignant, Ramón barely heard the closing of the meeting: according to Pedro, the party had to increase its campaign against the government’s management of military operations and internal policies, demand more purges in the military command, and above all be ready to launch an offensive against the saboteurs. The Communists had to assure the success of an operation that would be capable of guaranteeing control over a rear guard free of Trotskyists and anarchists. The Soviet leadership expected that this time the Spaniards would know how to carry out their role.

“It’s now or never,” Pedro was stating, when Ramón, without waiting for Caridad, escaped from the place in search of the pure air on the streets, deserted at that time of night.

Two days later, Maximus showed up at La Bonanova. Each one of the hours that had passed between that meeting and the arrival of Kotov’s
envoy, who would at last put Ramón in motion, had served to reaffirm one idea in the young man: the advisers were right in their demands and it was necessary to pull the rug out from under the Republican alliance. Ramón would hand himself over body and soul to that mission and would prove that this Spanish militant was capable not only of obeying but also of thinking and acting, since it wounded his pride as a Communist to have had to listen silently, in his own country, in his own war, how he and his comrades were called feckless revolutionaries by a paranoid who yelled the truth in their faces. It was necessary to act.

Maximus, who, after many weeks of work, Ramón would come to suspect of being Hungarian, turned out to be a specialist in clandestine struggle and destabilization. Under his orders, Ramón joined a six-man action cell (one of the so-called specific groups), all of them Spaniards, of whom only Maximus seemed to know their true identities and whom, because of his presumed admiration for the Roman world, he distinguished with the names of Latin characters—Graco, Caesar, Mario—while he characterized them as praetorians. From that day, Ramón would begin to be called Adriano. It was the first of many names he used, and he felt proud when they renamed him, before he had even the slightest glimpse of the experiences he had to come—not just under other names but in different skins.

Adriano would lament being charged with a mission as innocuous as becoming close with the POUM and establishing the routines of its leaders, especially those of Andreu Nin. Although Maximus had them submitted to a delicate compartmentalization of information and he was unaware of the details of the tasks assigned to the other praetorians, he managed to find out, thanks to his compatriots’ loquacity, that some of them were participating in violent and dangerous acts, as corroborated by the mysterious disappearances, some suspiciously definitive, of certain political rivals who were not very noteworthy but without a doubt bothersome, and who were necessary to take out of the game before it entered the critical stages. Because of this, seeing himself limited to walking down Las Ramblas, entering hotels where some of the POUMists and their sympathizers were staying and finding out the details of the daily activities of the heads of the Trotskyist party, seemed like something beneath his capabilities. He did not suspect that his work would
gain importance in future actions and that his efficiency and chameleon-like abilities, noticed by Maximus, would place him on the path to his extraordinary destiny.

Soon Adriano was convinced that, for the good of the cause, Andreu Nin was a man who had to die. Since before the war started and the political rivalries between the Republicans were so violently stirred, the renegade Nin was a declared enemy of the Communists and had been one of the first (echoing Trotsky’s cry of alarm) in declaiming the Moscow trials of 1936 and the others at the beginning of that year as crimes, and in labeling the “friends of the USSR” who defended their legality and propriety as guilty accomplices. He had also been one of those who had most passionately argued for the need for revolution along with the war, for the total struggle against the bourgeois republic, which, in spite of being anti-proletarian, was sustained through the support of those whom Nin called communist collaborators. He disagreed with Soviet aid as if it would have been possible for the government to survive without it. But what had most firmly marked him was his demand, from his post as the
conseller
for the Generalitat government and in the POUM’s leadership, that the Republic offer asylum to that traitor Trotsky even after his felony was corroborated in the trials that took place in Moscow. Although Companys, the Catalan president, had been forced to remove Nin from his cabinet, the Trotskyist’s arrogance had become so out of control as to make him publicly declare that they would have to kill everyone in the POUM to remove them from the political struggle. Adriano would think that, without a doubt, the best thing would be to make Nin’s wishes come true once and for all.