The Man Who Loved Dogs (52 page)

When I no longer expected it, I had a new, alarming and clarifying contact with the man who loved dogs. It was in 1983, a few months before Francesca was born, and I can place it exactly because I clearly remember when Raquelita came to tell me that someone was looking for me and I can see her with that sprawling belly, so different from the one that had accommodated Paolo. If, a few years before, I’d tortured myself by asking myself what astral conjunction had led me to López and turned me, according to him, into an exceptional repository for the story of his deceased friend Ramón Mercader, at that moment I was tormented by the certainty that the man who loved dogs had not arrived in my life only by chance, but rather that he had pursued me intentionally and continued to pursue me even after, by basic logic, I believed him dead and buried—even after, for my own good and through my idleness, I had managed to forget about him and the adverse reactions caused by the story he’d told me: rancor, fear, curiosity, disgust, and the increasingly dormant but still latent and dangerous desire to write.

The letter—if that’s what you could call a parcel of more than fifty sheets in a cramped, almost infantile handwriting but a better than well-composed style—reached me through the hands of a thin, very black woman. According to what she told me, she had been one of the nurses who had taken care of López when his illness worsened. The woman, who barely sat down in the living room of my house and didn’t even dare to make up a name for me to call her, started by demanding the greatest
discretion. She told me that she’d been keeping those papers since the middle of 1978, when
compañero
López, as she called him, gave them to her before leaving Cuba. By that time, the man’s condition had reached a state of utmost severity and he had to leave to receive shock treatment. The woman didn’t know—she said—what the illness was or where López had gone, nor whether he was still alive or if he had died, although she was very sure that the latter had to have happened to him, since he had been doing so badly. She explained that, before leaving, the sick man had asked her, very discreetly, to do him the favor of handing that manila envelope to a young man with whom he’d become friends, and given her my name and the address where I lived. The nurse promised to carry out what he had entrusted to her, but she had taken almost five years to do so because she was afraid it could put her or me at risk. Put me at risk? Why? Wasn’t López merely a Spanish Republican who worked and lived in Cuba with all the imaginable authorizations? Or had the nurse read those papers and discovered other truths? The woman, slippery and precise at the same time, only responded to my third question and added a revelatory afterthought: no, she hadn’t read the letter, nor had she spoken to anyone of its existence, and she was expecting similar discretion from me, above all regarding her role in that story. And before leaving, she made a request that sounded like a warning: if anyone ever asked me where those papers came from, she had never seen anything like them and had never been in the house of the recipient. And she disappeared.

As soon as I started reading the manuscript, I understood two things. First, that the strange nurse had undoubtedly read it and, as a consequence of this act, it had taken her five years to resolve to bring it to me. Second, when I finished reading, I understood even less what had conquered her fears and made her resolve to come see me, but I appreciated that she hadn’t destroyed the letter, as I might have done in that situation.

In a note introducing the document, Jaime López apologized to me for not having returned to the beach, but first his spirits and then his health had prevented him from doing so. The deterioration of Dax’s health and that animal’s impending death had affected him much more than he had expected, and the vertigo he suffered had become so violent that he practically couldn’t walk. It even prevented him from concentrating, and he’d had new encephalograms done and switched his treatment to pills that kept him in a drowsy limbo all day. But he had always kept in mind that he owed “the kid” that part of the story and, excusing his
handwriting—I should have seen the round and beautiful calligraphy he used to have, he said—and any digressions he would surely make, he went into the story about the final years of his old friend Ramón Mercader’s life, thanks to the unexpected meeting with that ghost of the past, right on the day that the first snowfall of the winter of 1968 was falling in Moscow.

As I read, I felt the horror spilling out of me. According to the man who loved dogs, during that coincidental meeting Ramón had told him the details I already knew about his entrance into the shadow world, his spiritual and even physical transformation, and his actions as Jacques Mornard and under the name of Frank Jacson. But he had also confided everything that, with the passing of years, he had managed to learn about himself, and of the machinations and the most sinister purposes of the men who took him to Coyoacán and put an ice axe in his hands. If before I had thought that López frequently exceeded the limits of credibility, what he relayed in that long missive surpassed the conceivable, despite everything that, since our last meeting, I had been able to read about the dark but well-covered-up world of Stalinism.

As is easy to infer, that story (received a few years before the glasnost revelations) was like an explosion of light illuminating not only Mercader’s dismal fate, but also that of millions of men. It was the very chronicle of the debasement of a dream and the testimony of one of the most abject crimes ever committed, because it not only concerned the fate of Trotsky, at the end of the day a contender in that game of power and the protagonist in various historical horrors, but also that of many millions of people dragged—without their asking, many times without anyone ever asking them what they wanted—by the undertow of history and by the fury of their patrons, disguised as benefactors, messiahs, chosen ones, as sons of historical necessity and of the unavoidable dialectics of class struggle . . .

But when I read Jaime López’s letter, I couldn’t suspect that another ten years would have to pass—almost sixteen since my last meeting with him—for me to hit upon the clues that would finally allow me to put together all the pieces of that puzzle made with cards of misery and tons of manipulation and concealment: the components that shaped the times and molded the work of Ramón Mercader. Those ten years ended up being the ones that saw the birth and death of the hopes of
perestroika
. Those years caused for many the surprises that the opening of Soviet glasnost generated; exposure of the true faces of characters like Ceauşescu and the change in China’s economic path, with the subsequent revelation
of the horrors of its genocidal Cultural Revolution, carried out in the name of Marxist purity. Those were the years of a historic rupture that would change not only the world’s political balance but even the colors on maps, philosophical truths, and, above all, it would change men. In those years, we crossed the bridge that went from enthusiasm for what could be improved to disappointment at confirming that the great dream was terminally ill and that, in its name, genocides had been committed like that in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. For that reason, in the end, what once seemed indestructible finished up undone, and what seemed to us incredible or false resulted in being just the tip of the iceberg that hid in its depths the most macabre truths about what had happened in the world for which Ramón Mercader had fought. Those were the revelations that helped us bring the blurry shapes into focus that, for years, we had barely been able to make out in the shadows or give a definitive outline to, as shocking as it is now easy to see. Those were the times when the great disenchantment set in.

20

Jacques felt that he was going backward in time. As soon as he saw him, he remembered the meeting with Kotov, two years before, in the still-pleasant Plaza de Cataluña. Now Tom, with the top of his jacket open and holding in one hand that patterned handkerchief with which he usually covered his throat, was taking in the miserly March sun with the eagerness of a bear recently awoken from his winter slumber. But in those two years, everything had changed for Ramón. That meeting, on a bench at the Luxembourg Gardens, was proof of many transformations, including the disappearance of the Spanish dream and the kilos lost by the adviser since the last time they had met.

“What a blessing! Isn’t it?” Tom said, without moving from his position.

“At least you prefer parks and not cemeteries,” he commented, and settled down next to his boss. Before him was an extensive view of the pond, the palace, and the gardens, where some yellow flowers with purple stems, born in the last islets of snow, fought to announce the end of winter. With the gift of the first rays of spring sun, the elderly and their nursemaids had taken over the benches, and Tom seemed proud and happy.

“Moscow was an ice floe.”

“Did you come from there?”

The Soviet barely nodded. Jacques lit a cigarette and waited. He already knew these rituals.

“I wanted to go to Madrid with what was left of the Republic but they ordered me out. Well, there’s not much left to do. The end is a question of days . . .
Bliat!”

Jacques felt Ramón’s indignation besieging him again, but he knew to hold back the fit of anger that could end up being inappropriate. For several days, he had been carrying the rage it caused him to know that Great Britain and France had reached the extremes of cynicism by recognizing the fascist caudillo as the legitimate leader of Spain. And now the French, always proud of their republican democracy, were not only interning the refugees in concentration camps, but they had gone and named Pétain their ambassador to Franco’s government, even when the Republic still existed. What hurt him most, nonetheless, was having read in the Parisian newspapers that the Soviets had also disengaged from Spain when they saw the final disaster arrive.

“What are they saying in Moscow?” he dared to ask.

“You and I know that without unity you can’t beat the enemy. And it’s true. Right now the Republicans are killing each other in Madrid, while Franco is getting his boots shined to go parade down La Gran Via. Poor Spain, what’s in store for it isn’t easy . . .”

Jacques regretted asking. For defeat, there was invariably one reason and one predictable culprit, always the same one.

Tom stayed silent, still immobile, as if the only important thing was to receive those weak rays of sun.

“I met in Moscow with Beria and Sudoplatov, the operative officer who will serve as our link. Stalin asked us to get the machinery going.”

“Are we leaving for Mexico?” Jacques Mornard immediately regretted that his anxiety betrayed him.

“You’re not going anywhere, not yet. I’m leaving in a few days. The Duck bought himself a house and is going to move. I have to do reconnaissance of the terrain, make some adjustments, organize a few things . . . The chess game.”

“So what do I do?”

“Wait, my dear Jacques, wait. And meanwhile, don’t think of doing anything crazy. That whole thing about showing your face in Le Perthus and going about punching men . . .” Tom had slowly lowered his head
and, after wiping his handkerchief across his face, rested a cold and distant stare on Jacques Mornard, who felt himself go cold inside. “I always know everything,
mudak
. . . Don’t play around with me. Never. One day I can rip your balls off and . . .”

The young man kept silent. Any reasoning could worsen his situation.

“I know it’s hard for a man like you,” Tom continued as he knotted his handkerchief around his neck, “but discipline and obedience come first. I thought you had learned that . . .” He looked at his pupil again. “What’s more important, a personal impulse or a mission?”

Jacques knew it was a rhetorical question, but Tom’s pause forced him to respond.

“The mission. But I’m not made of stone . . .”

“What’s more important,” the other man continued, raising his voice, “holding on to the terrain you’ve gained or losing someone from whom we expect so much? Don’t answer me, don’t answer me, just think . . .” Tom gave him time to think, as if it were really necessary, and added, “We’re going to create other options for Mexico. We practically have to start from the beginning, planting the possible operatives and deciding in a few months which one of them we’ll use. But you’ll go on your own path; you’re still my secret weapon. And I don’t have the luxury of losing you. I know you’re not made of stone . . . I spoke of you to Comrade Stalin and he agrees that we should hold on to you as our ace in the hole.”

Ramón couldn’t believe it. Comrade Stalin knew about him? He knew of his existence? Amid his infinite number of concerns, he counted among them? He was hard-pressed to control his pride to rise to the circumstances, confessing what he considered to be his greatest weakness.

“Excuse me, Tom, but there are days on which I can’t stop being Ramón Mercader.”

“I already know that, and it’s logical it should be that way. But Jacques Mornard needs to know how to control Ramón Mercader. That’s the point. Can you release or retain Ramón Mercader at your will?”

“I don’t know . . .”

Tom moved his lower body for the first time. He tried to find the best position to look at the young man and smiled at him.

“A very important moment is coming for you now: you’re going to be Ramón Mercader and Jacques Mornard at the same time. You have to learn to take one or the other out at each specific moment, because when the time comes, you’re going to have to get out of Jacques to become
Ramón almost without thinking about it. For the people who know you in Paris, you will continue to be Jacques Mornard. In the meantime, Ramón is going to again be in touch with Caridad, his siblings, and to that intimate circle he will be a Spanish Communist full of hate for the fascists and fifth-columnist Trotskyists and bourgeois traitors who finished off the Republic and who would give anything to make the Soviet Union disappear.”