The Man Who Loved Dogs (65 page)

With a cigarette in my mouth, I opened the envelope and immediately noticed that the name of the sender was false. The item sent was a book, published in Spain, and it was written precisely by someone named Germán Sánchez and by Luis Mercader—a book in which, according to the title, Luis relayed, with the help of the journalist Germán Sánchez, the life of his brother Ramón. The first thing I did, of course, was flip
through the book and, upon discovering that it had photos, look at them until I ran into an image that stirred my insides. That big-headed, almost square man with aged features behind his tortoiseshell glasses, that man whose eyes looked at me from the work by Germán Sánchez and Luis Mercader was—there was no longer any doubt—an assassin and also, of course, the man who loved dogs.

I think I’d had the greatest suspicion that Jaime López was not Jaime López at the moment in which he confirmed that Ramón had continued to hear Trotsky’s scream forever. The tone of his voice and the dampness of his look warned me that he was talking about something intimate and painful. A few years later, the letter brought by the nurse moved me a little closer to the belief that the man who loved dogs could be none other than Ramón Mercader himself, no matter how extraordinary the palpable existence, on a Cuban beach, of that character whose presence seemed inconceivable, since reason told me that he had been devoured by history many years before. Weren’t Trotsky, his life and his death, bookish and remote references? How could someone escape from history to wander around with two dogs and a cigarette in his mouth on a beach in
my
reality? With those questions and suspicions, I had tried to leave some room for doubt, I think, above all, with the intent of protecting myself. It wasn’t pleasant for anyone to be convinced that he had a relationship of trust and closeness with a murderer, that he has shaken the hand with which a man was killed, that he has shared coffee, cigarettes, and even very private personal discomforts with that person . . . And it is less pleasant for it to turn out to be that that murderer was precisely the author of one of the most ruthless, calculated, and useless crimes in history. The margin of doubt that I had preserved had given me, nonetheless, a certain peace that ended up being especially necessary when I decided to delve into that story through which, among others, I searched for the reasons that had moved Ramón Mercader—the last truths that perhaps his omniscient friend Jaime López would have never confessed to me. But with the fall of the last parapet, when I found that image, I would always have the certainty that I had never spoken with Jaime López but rather with that man who had once been Ramón Mercader del Río, and also the certainty that Ramón had told me, precisely me (why the hell was it me?), the truth of his life, at least in the way that he understood it—
his
truth and
his
life.

That same night, after dinner, I began to read the book. As I went on, I concluded that only one person could send me that work and put the
last details of that story in my hands—justifications, hypocrisies, silences, and revenge through Luis’s mouth—including the painful exit from this world of Ramón Mercader, which I was still unaware of until that moment. And that person could not have been anyone other than the very black supposed nurse, unnamed and squalid, who, obviously, had to have known much more about her “patient” than, ten years before, she had told me in her sole and very brief visit. If the woman now (perhaps still connected to the family, perhaps with the sons of the man who, now without a doubt—for her as well—was a murderer) took on that work, it couldn’t be solely due to her desire to eliminate the last corners of the ignorance of that “kid” who had shared some afternoons chatting with Jaime López, in another life called Ramón Mercader, in another Jacques Mornard, in another Román Pavlovich . . .

When I read the biography, I found that some of what I knew was confirmed by information that Luis Mercader must have known firsthand, since he had been a witness to the episodes of which he spoke. Meanwhile, other stories contradicted what I knew, and for some reason that I was unaware of at that moment, it turned out that I knew about attitudes and episodes Ramón lived through that his brother omitted or was unaware of. But the most important thing was that, once Jaime López’s identity was confirmed, Ramón Mercader’s final fate known, and the downfall of the world that had cultivated him like a poisonous flower was a reality, I felt completely free of my commitment to maintain my silence. Above all because, with that book sent by a ghost, the certainty had also reached me that the siege to which the man who loved dogs had subjected me while alive—and even after his death—could only have a reason calculated by the mind of a chess player and that was to push me silently but inexorably to write the story he had told me, though he made me promise the opposite.

Luis Mercader’s book not only freed me of my promise to remain silent but also allowed me to add the last letters to the scattered crossword puzzle of a murderer’s life and work. My first reaction to the news was to feel sorry for myself and for all of those who, tricked and used, had ever believed in the validity of the utopia founded in, then ruined by, the country of the Soviets; more than a sense of rejection, it caused me a feeling of compassion for Mercader himself, and I think that for the first time I understood
the proportions of his faith, of his fears, and the obsession with the silence he would maintain until his last breath.

The second reaction was to tell Ana the entire story, since I felt I would burst if I didn’t pop the pus-filled pimple of fear once and for all. So I told her that, if Luis Mercader had relayed a part of his brother’s life, I at last felt willing and in the intellectual and physical condition to write the story, whatever may happen.

“I don’t understand, Iván, I don’t understand, for God’s sake I really don’t,” Ana would say to me emphatically and (I knew) full of bitterness over the part of the deception that she had to live through herself. “How is it possible for a writer to stop feeling like a writer? Worse still, how can he stop thinking like a writer? How is it that in all this time you didn’t dare to write anything? Didn’t it occur to you to think that at twenty-eight, God had put this story in your hands that could be turned into your novel, the big one . . .”

I stopped talking, nodding my head for each of her statements and questions, and then I responded:

“It didn’t occur to me because it couldn’t occur to me, because I didn’t want it to occur to me, and I searched for every excuse to forget it every time it tried to occur to me. Or do you not know what country we live in right now? Do you have any idea how many writers stopped writing and turned into nothing or, worse still, into anti-writers and were never again able to take flight? Who could bet on things ever changing? Do you know what it is to feel marginalized, forbidden, buried alive at the age of thirty, thirty-five, when you can really begin to be a serious writer, and thinking that the marginalization is forever, to the end of time, or at least until the end of your fucking life?”

“But what could they do to you?” she insisted. “Did they kill you?”

“No, they didn’t kill me.”

“So . . . so . . . what terrible thing could they do to you? Censor your book? What else?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?” She jumped, offended, I think.

“They make you
nothing
. Do you know what it is to turn into
nothing?
Because I do know, because I myself turned into
nothing
. . . And I also know what it is to feel fear.”

So I told her about all of those forgotten writers who not even they themselves remembered, those who wrote the empty and obliging
literature of the seventies and eighties, practically the only kind of literature that one could imagine and compose under the ubiquitous layer of suspicion, intolerance, and national uniformity. And I told her about those who, like myself, innocent and credulous, earned ourselves a “corrective” for having barely dipped our toes, and about those who, after a stay in the inferno of nothing, tried to return and did so with lamentable books, also empty and obliging, with which they achieved an always-conditional pardon and the mutilated feeling that they were writers again because they once more saw their names in print.

Like Rimbaud in his days in Harar, I had preferred to forget that literature existed. Further still, like Isaak Babel—and it’s not that I’m comparing myself with him or with others, for God’s sake—I had opted
to write silence
. At least with my mouth closed, I could feel at peace with myself and keep my fears in check.

When the crisis of the 1990s became more intense, Ana, Tato the poodle, and I were on the verge of dying of starvation, like so many people in a dark country, paralyzed and in the midst of falling apart. Despite everything, I think that for six or seven years, the most difficult and fucked-up of a total and interminable crisis, Ana and I were happy in our stoic and hungry way. That human harmony that saved me from sinking was a true life lesson. In the last years of my marriage with Raquelita, when that bonanza of the 1980s was becoming normal and everything seemed to indicate that the bright future was beginning to turn on its lights—there was food, there was clothing (socialist and ugly, but still clothing and food), there were buses, sometimes even taxis, and houses on the beach that we could rent with our salaries—my inability to be happy prevented me from enjoying, along with my wife and my children, what life was offering me. In contrast, when that false equilibrium disappeared with the end of the Soviet Union and the crisis began, Ana’s presence and love gave me a will to live, to write, to fight for something that was inside and outside me, like in the distant years in which, with all my enthusiasm, I had cut sugarcane, planted coffee, and written a few stories pushed by the faith and the most solid confidence in the future—not just mine but the future of everyone . . .

Because urban transport had practically disappeared, from the beginning of the nineties, five days a week I pedaled on my Chinese bicycle the
six miles to get there, and six to return, that separated my house from the veterinary school. In a few months I ended up so thin that more than once, looking at my profile in a mirror, I couldn’t do anything but ask myself if a devouring cancer hadn’t invaded my body. As far as she was concerned, Ana would suffer—as a result of the daily exercise on her bicycle, the lack of necessary calories, and bad genetic luck—the worst consequences of those terrible years, since, like many other people, she was diagnosed with a vitamin-deficient polyneuritis (the same one that spread across the German concentration camps) that, in her case, would later turn into an irreversible osteoporosis, a prelude to the cancer that would eventually kill her.

Devoted to taking care of Ana at the start of her illnesses (she was almost blind for a few months), in 1993 I chose to leave the job at the veterinary school when I received the opportunity to establish a first aid clinic in an unoccupied room close to our house. From that moment on, with the consent (but not a shred of support) of the local powers, I turned into the neighborhood amateur veterinarian, tasked with the immunization campaigns against rabies. Although in reality it wasn’t a lot of money, I earned three times as much as my old salary, and I earmarked every peso obtained to finding food for my wife. Once a week, to stretch out my scarce funds, I climbed upon my bike and went to Melena del Sur, twenty miles from the city, to purchase fruits and vegetables directly from the countryside and to trade my abilities as a castrator and worm remover of pigs for a bit of meat and some eggs. If a few months earlier I had seemed like a cancer patient, the new efforts had turned me into a ghost, and to this day even I can’t explain to myself how I came out alive and lucid from that war for survival, which even included everything from operating on the vocal cords of hundreds of urban pigs to silence their shrill cries to getting into a fistfight (in which knives even came out) with the veterinarian who tried to steal my clients in Melena del Sur. At the bottom of the abyss, accosted on all sides, instincts can be stronger than beliefs, I learned.

Besides the slow and stumbling work of writing to which I returned after receiving Luis Mercader’s book—I had never had any idea of how difficult it could be to really write, with responsibility and a view of the consequences and, to top it off, trying to get into the head of someone who existed, and resolving to think and feel like him—that dark and hostile period had the reward of allowing me to completely bring forth
from within myself what should really have been my life’s vocation: from the rustic and basic clinic I had established in the neighborhood, not only did I vaccinate dogs and castrate or silence pigs, but I was also able to devote myself to helping all of those who, like myself, loved animals, especially dogs. Sometimes I didn’t even know where to get the medicines and instruments to keep the clinic doors open, and there were days on which even aspirin disappeared from the island and the School of Veterinary Medicine recommended curing skin diseases with chamomile fermentations or feverfew and intestinal problems with massages and prayers to St. Luis Beltrán. The nominal fees I charged the animals’ owners barely covered my expenses and would not have been enough for Ana and me to survive. My reputation as a good person, more than as an efficient veterinarian, spread in the area and people came to see me with animals as thin as they were (can you imagine a thin snake?) and, almost against all reason in those dark days, gave me medicines, stitches, bandages they had left over for some reason, as a display of solidarity between the fucked, which is the only true kind. And being a part of that solidarity in which Ana involved herself whenever she could—many times she was my assistant in the vaccinations, the sterilizations, and the massive worm removals that I organized—removed from me any pretension of recognition or personal transcendence and was elemental in making me the person who seemed like the one I had always wanted to be, the one who, even now, I have most liked being.