The Man Who Loved Dogs (73 page)

In reality, it was his wife’s support that most encouraged Lev Davidovich to keep going. He knew that she suffered, but she did so in silence, because her character prevented her from weakening. She continued directing the fortification of the house (the walls were made higher, all of the doors were made bulletproof, and the windows were covered with steel curtains), organizing life in the house, and helping Seva regain the Russian language while she kept waiting for, against all evidence, some news that would confirm that Seriozha was still alive. When he saw his Natasha, hardworking and tenacious, and remembered his past indiscretions, a cold shame ran through his body and he concluded that only while affected by transitory madness could he have committed acts that made her suffer.

Outside of his personal sphere, the world was also falling apart. That fourteenth of July, “The Marseillaise” had not been sung at the place de la Bastille, since the Nazis were already in Paris. The campaign had been so devastating that they barely needed thirty-nine days to bring proud France to its knees. Lev Davidovich couldn’t stop thinking about Alfred and Marguerite, since he didn’t have any idea of what could be happening to them and to the rest of his French followers. But it was more painful for him to listen to the declaration of support for the Third Reich
formulated by the Soviet chancellor, the infamous Molotov, and to see the proof of the agreement to repartition Europe concluded by Hitler and Stalin the previous year, as shown by the “annexation” of the Baltic republics to the Soviet empire.

The result of those imperial conquests was that the old Europe was being crushed by the weight of Hitler’s swastika and the Soviet hammer and sickle. Which of the two, when the moment came, would take the first swipe at the other? Lev Davidovich asked himself. He sensed that times of great suffering for his people were approaching. Relying on the scarce optimism he had left, he came to consider that perhaps the country needed a new quota of pain in order to wake up and put the revolutionary dream back in its place.

Lev Davidovich was surprised to receive a visit from General Núñez and Colonel Sánchez Salazar, who came to inform him that thirty people, almost all of them members of the Mexican Communist Party, had been arrested in connection with the May 24 attack. Salazar asked his forgiveness for not forwarding the evidence that allowed them to continue the investigation, and Lev Davidovich responded that if the results warranted it, he not only forgave him but he also congratulated him . . . on his luck.

According to Salazar, shortly after the Exile’s public statement, the police had the incredible good fortune of hearing the comments of a drunk that had put them on the trail of the men in charge of obtaining police uniforms used in the attack. Following this thread, they started to find accomplices until they came to one of the attackers, David Serrano, who led them to discover, on one side, two women tasked with watching the house and distracting the police guards and, on the other, a certain Néstor Sánchez, who, upon being arrested, gave the crucial information that the attack had been led by the painter Siqueiros and a French Jew whose identity none of the detained seemed to know. They already knew that in the attack the brothers-in-law of Siqueiros had been involved, along with his assistant, Antonio Pujol, and the Spanish Communist Rosendo Gómez, all veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Although the statements were confusing, Salazar thought that the French Jew and Pujol had been the ones directly responsible for the attack, since Siqueiros had remained outside the house, next to the police cabin. The order to arrest the painter had been issued, but they didn’t have the least idea where he could be and they feared he was already far from the country. Regarding
the French Jew, perhaps the real architect of the plot, only Siqueiros and Pujol seemed to have been in contact with him. The arrested men even contradicted each other, with some claiming he was Polish.

As he listened to Salazar, Lev Davidovich thought about the degree of perversion that Stalin’s influence had injected into the souls of men like those who, after embracing the Marxist ideal and living through betrayals like those committed in Spain, continued to follow Moscow’s orders and were even capable of attacking other human beings. What made him laugh, in contrast, was the nerve of “El Coronelazo” Siqueiros, who, after organizing the attack, didn’t dare enter the house and direct it. It was regrettable that an artist of his scale had turned into a third-rate gunman, terrorist, and liar.

A few days later, the worst hypothesis was confirmed when the police found the corpse of Bob Sheldon buried in the kitchen of a hut up in Santa Rosa, in the desert of Los Leones. At four in the morning, some of Salazar’s emissaries went to get Lev Davidovich to identify him, but Robbins refused to wake him up and sent Otto Schüssler instead. Nonetheless, in the morning, when Natalia told him what had happened, he asked to go to Santa Rosa, where he met Salazar and General Núñez.

Bob Sheldon’s corpse was on a coarse table in the yard of the house. Although they had washed him, he had remnants of the dirt and lime that had covered him. His body was perfectly preserved, and on the right side of his head were two bullet holes. When Lev Davidovich saw him, he felt deeply moved, since he was certain that, in collusion with the GPU or not, Bob Sheldon had been another victim of Stalin’s fury against him, and that that corpse could just as well have been that of Liova, to whom he couldn’t say a final goodbye, or little Yakov Blumkin, or the efficient Klement, or Sermux or Posnansky, his old and close secretaries from the days of the civil war, or perhaps the obstinate Andreu Nin or the kind Erwin Wolf—all of them devoured by terror, all of them murdered by Stalin’s criminal fury. The police respected his silence and remained silent themselves for a few minutes. Salazar concluded that Sheldon’s death confirmed his participation in the attack, but Lev Davidovich again refused to accept that theory and asked to return home. He wanted to be alone, with his guilt and his thoughts.

There was no longer any doubt that fate or Stalin’s inscrutable designs had given him an extension, even though he was convinced it would be a short one. He fluctuated between a rush to tie up outstanding issues and
depression over the certainty that everything would very soon be over and his work and dreams would remain in the hands of the unforeseeable fate that posterity would award them. For too many years he had been a pariah, a captive who should behave so as not to bother his hosts. He had been converted into a puppet at whom the rifles of lies were aimed, into a man who was completely alone, who walked through the walled yard of a far-off country, in the company of just a woman, a boy, and a dog, surrounded by dozens of corpses of family members, friends, and comrades. He didn’t have any power, he didn’t have millions of followers, nor did he have a party; barely anyone read his books anymore, but Stalin wanted him dead and in a short while he would swell the lists of Stalinism’s martyrs. And he would do so leaving behind an enormous failure: not that of his existence, which he considered a barely significant circumstance for history, but that of a dream of equality and freedom for the majority, to which he had given his passion . . . Lev Davidovich trusted, nonetheless, that future generations, free of the yoke of totalitarianism, would do justice to that dream and, perhaps, to the stubbornness with which he had maintained it. Because the greater struggle, that of history, would not end with his death and with Stalin’s personal victory—it would start again in a few years, when the statues of the Great Leader were knocked down off their pedestals, he wrote.

Although Lev Davidovich knew that he should forget this turbid attack, each revelation pulled him back to it like a magnet. The story of the supposed Polish or French Jew seemed to lead the Mexican and U.S. police to the trail of an NKVD officer with years of experience in missions carried out in France, Spain, and Japan. Salazar had found out that, under the Jew’s orders, they had rented two houses in Coyoacán to use as support for the attack. Despite those advances, Lev Davidovich was convinced that the identity of the mysterious Jew would remain unknown, as would be the reasons for which a professional like him had not gone into the room and executed the condemned man himself.

The tension experienced in the fortress at Coyoacán turned into a quicksand that sucked in the days. Lev Davidovich couldn’t go back to his previous routine, abnormal in and of itself, but to which he had become accustomed. Nonetheless, whenever he could, he escaped that prison in search of a horizon. The worry over his safety had reached the point that some of his American friends sent him a bulletproof jacket, but he refused to wear it, just as he also forbade that every person who
visited him be frisked or that one of his secretaries be present with him for interviews, be they with journalists or with friends like Nadal, Rühle, or others who came by occasionally.

Around that time Sylvia Ageloff returned from New York, and at Lev Davidovich’s insistence she was invited to come over one afternoon, with Jacson, to have tea. He wanted to thank Jacson for his care with the Rosmers and apologize for not having received him as he should have that afternoon on which, pressed by work, he couldn’t sit down to talk. On that more relaxed occasion, they had a pleasant meeting. Sylvia, who had always revered Lev Davidovich, seemed to be on cloud nine over his deference to her and her companion, while Jacson, loyal to his bourgeois education, had brought Natalia a box of fine chocolates and a gift for Seva.

After that meeting, Lev Davidovich commented to Natalia that Jacson had come across as a peculiar guy. First of all, it was unusual that, without the least shame, he claimed that he didn’t care at all about politics, but when he and Sylvia had argued about her sympathies for Shachtman’s faction, he had taken Lev Davidovich’s side and, with a certain vehemence, had reproached her for her Yankee attitude of thinking Americans are always right. Shortly before leaving, when they were talking about dogs and he had touched on the topic of raising funds for the International’s work, Jacson offered him his experience in the stock market and even the credit and contacts of his affluent boss. At that moment Lev Davidovich recalled that one of his secretaries had commented on that offer of Jacson’s, which he had rejected, convinced that he couldn’t get mixed up in monetary speculations even to support the most idealistic of political projects. In the face of the Exile’s reaction, Jacson excused himself, saying he understood. Lev Davidovich felt at that moment that there was something in that man that didn’t quite come together: the story of the passport bought in France so he wouldn’t have to fight in the war, his willingness to use his boss’s capital to earn money for him, his apathy toward politics despite having worked as a journalist and being the son of diplomats, his open talk about his financial possibilities . . . No, something wasn’t coming together. Although the Exile thought the origins of that inconsistency perhaps came from his bourgeois talkativeness, he told Natalia that perhaps it was worth learning more about Jacson. For now, his care of the Rosmers repaid, the best thing would be not to receive him again, he added.

Sánchez Salazar went to see him to inform him that they had arrested
Siqueiros in a town in the interior. According to the police, since the initial interrogations, always very petulant (and, Lev Davidovich thought, convinced that someone would rescue him from justice’s hands), Siqueiros had denied that the NKVD had been involved in the attack and refused to admit that any French or Pole had participated. He assured them that the idea for the attack had been conceived of by him and his friends in Spain when they learned of the Mexican government’s betrayal of the world proletariat by giving asylum to Trotsky, an apostate capable of ordering his followers to rise up against the Republic in the midst of a civil war. They had resolved to carry out the attack when the war in Europe started, since they believed that they could prevent the traitor from returning to a USSR eventually occupied by his allies, the Nazis. On that point, Lev Davidovich even smiled and asked the policeman if Siqueiros knew that he was a Jew and a Communist. Sánchez Salazar himself admitted that the contradictions were blatant, since the painter had added that the objective of the attack was not to kill him (we would have done so if we had wanted to, he repeated) but to pressure Cárdenas to throw him out of the country. He assured the police that they had prepared the assault without the party’s support, which seemed even more incredible, since all of the commando members were militant Communists. The only thing that made Lev Davidovich happy about that arrest was thinking that probably there would be a trial, and it would provide him the occasion denied to him by the Norwegians to denounce Stalin’s criminal methods and the lies of his regime in a public forum.

It was the afternoon of August 17, while Lev Davidovich was set to distract himself with the rabbits and Azteca, when Sylvia’s boyfriend showed up. The reason for his visit was that, after the conversation he had heard between the girl and the Exile, he had written an article about the defection of the American Trotskyist leaders Shachtman and Burnham. And he recalled that he had mentioned his interest in writing something about those subjects to him and desired to get the old revolutionary’s verdict. Lev Davidovich himself, before they said goodbye, had told him he would review the draft, although he no longer remembered that commitment.

For the next four days, several times Lev Davidovich would ask himself why he had agreed to receive Jacson when he had already decided not to see him again. He would comment to Natalia that he felt sorry for the young man’s political naïveté and for the resounding way in
which he had refused to accept his financial assistance. Whatever the reason, he had allowed the Belgian into his study and started to read the article in order to convince himself definitively that the guy was a fool. Jacson’s piece repeated the four ideas Lev Davidovich had said in the conversation with Sylvia and suddenly jumped to the situation in occupied France without in any way linking one story with the other. What kind of journalist was this character?