The Man Who Loved Dogs (80 page)

At the end of the 1990s, life in the country had begun to regain a certain normality, lost during the hardest years of the crisis. But while that new
normality returned, it became clear that something very important had come undone along the way and that we were in a strange spiral in which the rules of the game had changed. From that moment on, it would no longer be possible to live on the few pesos of the official salaries, the times of equitable and generalized poverty as a social achievement had ended, and what was starting was what my son Paolo, with a sense of reality that superseded mine, would define as every man for himself (and which he, like many of the children of my generation, applied to his life in the only way within his reach: by leaving the country). There were people like Dany who, relying on cynicism and a better spirit of survival, had more or less managed to adapt themselves to the new reality. He had left his job at the publishing house and bagged all of his literary dreams and now earned much more money as a hired driver of the 1954 Pontiac that he had inherited from his father. Besides, his wife had an attractive job at a Spanish company (where they paid some dollars under the table and gave out a couple of bags of food twice a month) and they lived with some comfort. But the ones who didn’t have anything to hold on to or anywhere to steal from (Ana and I, among many others) began to see things for ourselves as even darker than in the years of the endless blackouts and the breakfasts composed of orange-leaf teas. With Ana retiring early and with my demonstrated incapacity for practical life, the rope we had around our necks did nothing but get tighter, until it had us continuously on the verge of suffocating, from which we were saved only by the gifts that the owners of dogs and cats presented to me for my services and the additional pesos that the pig breeders gave me as payment for the castrations, worm removal, and other jobs for which I charged the ridiculous price of “give me what you want.” But it was clear that we had fallen to the bottom of an atrophied social scale where intelligence, decency, knowledge, and capacity for work gave way before craftiness, proximity to the dollar, political placement, being the son, nephew, or cousin of Someone, the art of making do, inventing, increasing, escaping, pretending, stealing everything that could be stolen. And cynicism, bastard cynicism.

I knew then that for many in my generation it wasn’t going to be possible to come out of that mortal leap unscathed without a safety net: we were the gullible generation; the one made up of those who romantically accept and justify everything with our sights on the future; the ones who cut sugarcane convinced that we should cut it (and, of course, without charging for that infamous work); the ones who went to war because the
proletariat and internationalism required it, and we went without expecting any recompense except for the gratitude of Humanity and History; we were the generation that suffered and resisted the ravages of sexual, religious, ideological, cultural, and even alcoholic intransigence with just a nod of the head and many times without filling up with the resentment or the desperation that leads to flight—that desperation that now opened the eyes of the younger ones and led them to opt for escape before they even got their first kick in the ass. We had grown up seeing (that’s how myopic we were) in each Soviet, Bulgarian, or Czechoslovakian a sincere friend—as Martí said—a proletarian brother, and we had lived under the motto, repeated so many times on school mornings, that the future of humanity belonged completely to socialism (to that socialism that, if anything, had only seemed to us a little ugly aesthetically—only aesthetically grotesque—and incapable of creating, shall we say, a song half as good as “Rocket Man,” or three times less lovely than “Dedicated to the One I Love”; my friend and buddy Mario Conde would put Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” on the list). We went through life removed, in the most hermetic way, from the knowledge of the betrayals that, like that of Republican Spain or invaded Poland, had been committed in the name of that same socialism. We didn’t know anything about the repressions and genocides of peoples, ethnicities, entire political parties, of the mortal persecutions of nonconformists and religious people, of the homicidal fury of the work camps, and the credulity before, during, and after the Moscow trials. Nor did we have the faintest idea of who Trotsky was or why they had killed him, or of the infamous subterranean and even the evident agreements of the USSR with Nazism and imperialism, of the conquering violence of the new Muscovite czars, of the invasions and geographic, human, and cultural mutilations of the acquired territories and of the prostitution of ideas and truths, turned into nauseating slogans by that model socialism, patented and led by the genius of the Great Guide of the World Proletariat, Comrade Stalin, and later patched up by his heirs, defenders of a rigid orthodoxy with which they condemned the smallest deviation from the canon that sustained their excesses and megalomania. Now, with great difficulty, we managed to understand how and why all of that perfection had collapsed like a giant meringue when only two of the bricks of the fortress were moved, a minimal access to information and a slight but decisive loss of fear (always that infamous fear, always, always, always) with which that structure had been
glued together. Two bricks and it came down. The giant had feet made of clay and had only sustained itself thanks to terror and lies. . . . Trotsky’s prophecies ended up coming true and Orwell’s futurist and imaginative fable
1984
ended up turning into a starkly realistic novel. And there we were, not knowing anything . . . or is it that we didn’t want to know?

Was it pure coincidence or did he consciously pick that horrid night of 1996, after almost twenty years? In the afternoon, a storm of rain and thunder had been unleashed that seemed to announce Armageddon, and when night and the blackout came, there was still a cold and persistent drizzle falling. Because of that, when he knocked at the door, I supposed it was someone pressed to have their animal looked at and, lamenting my luck, went to open the door with one of those little kerosene lanterns in my hand.

And there he was. Despite the time, the darkness, the fact that he had gone completely bald and that he was the person I least expected to find at the door of my house, I recognized the tall, thin black man at first sight and immediately had a very strong certainty that, throughout all those years, he had been watching me in the shadows.

Faced with my silence, the black man said good evening and asked me if we could talk. Of course, I invited him to come inside. Ana was with Tato in the room, trying to listen to a soap opera through the modulated frequency band of our battery-operated radio, and I shouted to her not to worry, I would take care of our guest. With my usual clumsiness, augmented by my surprise, I told the man to be careful with the bowls placed around the room to collect the rain that leaked from the ceiling and I asked him to sit down on one of the iron chairs. After settling in the other chair, I stood up again and asked him if he wanted to drink some coffee.

“Thank you, no. But if you would give me a little bit of water . . .”

I served him a glass. The black man thanked me again, but he drank only a couple of sips and left the glass on the table. Despite the half-light, barely broken by the lantern’s flame, I noticed that in those minutes he had studied the apartment’s atmosphere, as if he needed to formulate an overall opinion about who I was or look for a way to escape in the face of any dangerous situation. Since the black man was thinner, older, without a hair on his head, in the scarce light of the lantern, his face looked like a dark skull—a voice from beyond the grave, I thought.

“Compañero
López asked me to come see you sometime,” he began, as if it was taking a lot of effort to get started. “So here I am.”

You took some time to come, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut. Coming out of the shadows and the past, he would only tell me what he decided to tell me, so it wasn’t worth the trouble of trying to force any specific conversation.

“Did you receive Luis Mercader’s book? At the post office, they guaranteed that if you didn’t receive it, they would return it to me.”

“So how did you know my address?”

“You know that here everything is known,” he said, elusive. And without further ado, as if he were repeating a libretto he had studied for a long time, he explained that in 1976 he was working as a driver for an army leader. One day they called him and told him that, since his superior was being sent to the war in Angola and he was a man of complete confidence, a party militant, a veteran of the clandestine struggle, they were going to entrust him with a special mission, that of driving and to a certain extent taking care of Jaime López, an officer of the Spanish Republican army living in Cuba whom doctors had prohibited from driving his car. They also warned him that in that job he should keep his mouth shut—with everyone. And they asked him if he saw anything strange around the man, he should inform them immediately, and they specified that, when it came to that Spaniard, anything could be strange . . .

When he began to work with López, there were already other
compañeros
tasked with taking care of him, of taking him to a special clinic and even of driving him when he went to certain meetings or very specific visits. They never told the black man who López was and, of course, he hadn’t dared to ask, although from the beginning he assumed that with so many people around him dedicated to his care (and to keep watch on him? he wondered), he thought he couldn’t be just any López . . . Almost two years later, when the man was already doing very poorly and some nephews and, later, his brother showed up in Cuba, he learned at last that Jaime López was Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río. Since he had never in his life heard anyone talk about Ramón Mercader and almost nothing about Trotsky, and since he couldn’t ask anyone anything that had to do with that man, he realized that he was involved in something too big for a simple driver, no matter how much of a party militant or army veteran he was. And if they had told him he had to keep quiet, he knew that the best thing was to keep quiet.

The tall, thin black man confirmed for me that Jaime Ramón López had traveled to Cuba in 1974. Although he didn’t know it at the time, he would later come to be certain that they had opened the Soviet cage and allowed Mercader to come to the socialist island, the birthplace of his ancestors, because death had already marked him. Just when the arrangements for his trip were being finalized, suddenly the first flare-up of the strange illness had come up. The doctors at Moscow’s most select clinic, where they treated the Kremlin’s highest in command, diagnosed a hemorrhage caused by a pulmonary infection. Ramón, who until that moment had possessed a constitution capable of resisting twenty years of prison and its attendant horrors, spent three months at the hospital. Later, even when the diagnosis was favorable, he felt that something inside him had come undone. From that moment on, despite the temporary improvements, his body would never again respond to him the same way and he would live until his death with those dizzy spells, intermittent fevers, headaches and sore throats, and a permanent difficulty in breathing. But he still did not know that in reality he had a cancer that would end up corroding his bones and his brain.

“They had run thousands of tests on him,” the black man said to me, and in his voice I seemed to notice a touch of sadness. “I don’t even know how many analyses, encephalograms, X-rays, without finding anything. But when the Cuban oncologists finally saw him, they immediately diagnosed cancer . . . Doesn’t it seem strange?”

“Luis Mercader says that Eitingon was sure that in Moscow they had poisoned his blood with radioactivity. With the gold watch that his comrades from the KGB gave him . . . Activated thallium.”

“Yes, that’s precisely why I’m telling you it’s strange.”

“But I don’t believe it,” I said. “If they had wanted to kill him, they would’ve killed him and that’s that. They had lots of time and opportunity.”

“Yes, that’s also true.” He nodded and almost seemed relieved to accept the possibility. “Well, the doctors found the cancer at the beginning of 1978, after he had spent a few months in bed because the dizzy spells barely let him walk. When that crisis began, he said that it was all because of the pain it caused him to sacrifice his dog, Dax, the male, remember? Because of those dizzy spells, he couldn’t go see you as he had arranged. And a few weeks later, when he didn’t know if he would ever be able to go back outside, he began to write those papers I sent to you years
ago, until he couldn’t write anymore, almost couldn’t even move . . . The poor man was screaming like a madman at the end because of the headaches, and every time he moved, he could break a bone. Morphine kept him alive until October.”

“Just hearing about it gives me pain,” I commented.

“You don’t know anything about pain . . . The worst thing about it was that he never lost his lucidity. In August he was so bad that his brother Luis came to be with him when he died. But Luis had to leave at the end of September because the Soviet permit that, after much struggle, authorized him to return to Spain with his wife, was expiring. Two weeks after his brother left, Ramón received a letter from him: he was in Barcelona already . . . I heard him say that he was going to die with the satisfaction of knowing that at least one person from the family had managed to return . . .”

“So he had asked to come to Cuba?”

“It appears so. It’s not like he had too much to pick from . . . On the one hand, the Soviets didn’t want to release him, and on the other, it wasn’t easy for someone to decide to take him. Of course, no one wanted him . . . I think that coming here was the only alternative. I don’t know how all of this was negotiated, but the condition for him to live here was that he live incognito. Despite that, some people recognized him, but the majority of people who were close to him—almost all of us who tended to him when he was sick and even visited his house, his children’s friends, the doctors—we didn’t know who
compañero
López was in reality. I found out because of the level of trust we came to have. Because I was with him until the end . . .”