The Man Who Loved Dogs (66 page)

Although I still hadn’t begun to go to church with Ana, Dany, Frank, and the few other friends I saw told me I seemed to be working toward my candidacy for beatification and for my ascent to heaven. What was true was that reading and writing about how the greatest utopia men had ever had within their reach had been perverted, diving into the catacombs of a story that seemed more like divine punishment than the work of men drunk with power, eager for control, and with pretensions of historical transcendence, I had learned that true human grandeur lay in the practice of kindness without conditions, in the capacity of giving to those who had nothing, but not what we have left over but rather a part of what little we have—giving until it hurts without practicing the deceitful philosophy of forcing others to accept our concepts of good and truth because (we believe) they’re the only possible ones and because, besides, they should be grateful for what we give them, even when they didn’t ask for it. And although I knew that my cosmogony was entirely impractical
(so what the hell do we do with the economy, money, property, so that all of this works? And what about the predestined ones and those born sons of bitches?), it satisfied me to think that perhaps one day humans would be able to cultivate that philosophy, which seemed so basic, without suffering labor pains or the trauma of being forced, out of pure and free will, out of the ethical need to show solidarity and be democratic. My mental masturbations . . .

Because of that, in silence and also in pain, I was letting myself be dragged toward writing, although without knowing if I would ever dare to show anyone what I had written, or to seek out a greater destiny, since those options didn’t interest me too much. I was only convinced that the exercise of recovering a vanished memory had a lot to do with my responsibility to face life—rather, to face my life. If fate had made me the repository of a cruel and exemplary story, my duty as a human was to preserve it, to extract it from the tsunami of oblivion.

The accumulated need to share the weight of that story that pursued me—along with the repulsion of memories and blame that the visit we made to Cojímar would cause—were the reasons for which I decided to also tell my friend Daniel the details of my relationship with that slippery individual whom I had named “the man who loved dogs.”

Everything came to a head on a summer afternoon in 1994, just when we had hit bottom and it seemed that all the crisis needed was to chew us a few more times in order to swallow us. It wasn’t easy, but that day I pulled Dany out of his apathy and we went to Cojímar on our bicycles, set to witness the spectacle of the moment: the massive exodus, in the least imaginable boats and in daylight, of hundreds, thousands of men, women, and children who were making the most of the border opening decreed by the government to throw themselves to the sea on any floating object, loaded with their desperation, their exhaustion, and their hunger, in search of other horizons.

The establishment, for three or four years, of blackouts lasting eight and even twelve hours daily had served to enable Dany and me to become close again. Since his blackout area (Luyano I) was on the border with mine (Lawton II), we discovered that, in general, when there was no electricity at his house, there was at mine and vice versa. Always on our bicycles, and most times with our respective wives on the back, we tended
to transfer ourselves from darkness to light to watch a movie or a boring baseball game on television (the announcers and the baseball players were thinner, the stadiums almost empty) or simply to talk and be able to see each other’s faces.

Dany, who around that time was still working at the publishing house as the head of the marketing department, was now the one who’d stopped writing. The two short story collections and the two novels he had published in the 1980s had turned him into one of the hopes of Cuban literature, always so full of hope and . . . The fact is that, reading those books, you noticed that in his storytelling there was a dramatic force capable of penetration, with narrative possibilities, but someone with my training could also see that he lacked the necessary daring to jump into the void and risk everything in his writing. There was in his literature something elusive, an intention to search that was suddenly interrupted when the precipice came into view, a lack of final decisiveness to cross the curtain of fire and touch the painful parts of reality. Since I knew him well, I knew that his writings were a mirror of his attitude in the face of life. But now, overwhelmed by the crisis and the almost certain impossibility of publishing in Cuba, he’d fallen into a literary depression from which I tried to bring him out during our nighttime talks. My main argument was that Dany should make the most of his empty days to ponder and write, even if it was by candlelight. That’s how the great Cuban writers of the nineteenth century had done it; besides, his case wasn’t like mine, since he was a writer and couldn’t cease to be so (Ana looked at me silently when I touched on this subject), and writers write. The saddest thing was that my words didn’t seem to produce (actually, didn’t produce) any effect at all, and the passion that pushed him forward in his literary calling must have left him, so that he, always so disciplined, just let the days float by, busy perfecting his strategies of survival and the search for his next meal, like almost all of the island’s inhabitants. On one of those nights, while we were talking about the matter, I proposed that we make an excursion to Cojímar the following day to see with our own eyes what was happening there.

The spectacle we found turned out to be devastating. While groups of men and women, with tables, metal tanks, tires, nails, and ropes devoted themselves along the coast to giving shape to those artifacts on which they would throw themselves into the sea, other groups arrived in trucks loaded with their already-built boats. Each time one of them arrived, the masses ran to the truck and, after applauding for the recently arrived as if
they were the heroes of some athletic feat, some threw themselves at helping them unload their precious boats, while others, with wads of dollars in their hands, tried to buy a space for the crossing.

In the middle of the chaos, wallets and oars were stolen. Businesses had been set up and were selling barrels of drinking water, compasses, food, hats, sunglasses, cigarettes, matches, lights, and plaster images of the protecting Virgins of La Caridad del Cobre, the patroness of Cuba, and of Regla, Queen of the Sea, and there were even rooms to be rented for amorous goodbyes and bathrooms for greater needs, since the lesser ones were taken care of on the rocks, shamelessly. The police who had to guarantee order watched with their eyes fogged over by confusion, and only intervened reluctantly to calm people down when violence broke out. Meanwhile, a group of people were singing alongside some boys who had arrived with a pair of guitars, as if they were at a camping ground; others argued over the number of passengers that could be taken on a balsa raft so many feet long and talked about the first thing they would eat upon arriving in Miami or about the million-dollar businesses they would start there; and the rest, close to the reefs, were helping the ones launching their craft into the sea and bidding them goodbye with applause, cheers, promises to see each other soon, over there, even farther: way over there. I think I will never forget the big, voluminous black man with his baritone voice who, from his floating balsa raft, yelled at the coast: “
Caballero
, last one out has to turn off the light in the Morro,” and immediately began to sing, in Paul Robeson’s voice:
“Siento un bombo, mamita, m’están llamando
. . .”

“I never imagined I would see something like this,” I said to Daniel, overcome by a deep sadness. “It’s come to this?”

“Hunger rules,” he commented.

“It’s more complicated than hunger, Dany. They lost their faith and they’re escaping. It’s biblical, a biblical exodus . . .”

“This one is too Cuban. Forget about the exodus, this is called escaping, going on the lam, getting the hell out ’cause no one can stand it anymore . . .”

Almost fearfully I dared to ask him:

“So why don’t you go?”

He looked at me, and in his eyes there wasn’t a drop of the sarcasm or cynicism with which he tried to defend himself from the world, but that was no use when he tried to protect himself from himself and his truths.

“Because I’m scared. Because I don’t know if I can start over. Because I’m forty years old. I don’t know, really. And you?”

“Because I don’t want to leave.”

“Don’t fuck around; that’s no answer.”

“But it’s true: I don’t want to leave and that’s it,” I insisted, refusing to give any other reason.

“Iván, were you always this weird?”

Then I kept looking at the sea in silence. With that atmosphere and the unhealthy conversation we had had, an old feeling of blame rose to the surface that was giving me a lump in my throat and bringing tears to my eyes. Why did fear always show up? How long would it pursue me?

“The worst thing that happened to me when William disappeared,” I said, when I at last managed to speak, “was that I blocked myself in and couldn’t vent. I had to pretend with my parents, tell them there was hope, that maybe he was alive somewhere. When we all convinced ourselves that he was at the bottom of the sea, I could no longer cry for my brother . . . But the most fucked-up thing has been thinking about what a son of a bitch luck is. If William had decided to do that two or three months later, he would’ve left through the Mariel. With the expulsion papers from the university, where it said he was an antisocial faggot, they would have put him in a speedboat and he would have left without any trouble.”

“No one could even dream that what happened was going to happen. Even this right now, did you ever imagine that we were going to see something like this? People leaving and the police watching them as if it were nothing?”

“It’s as if William was marked by tragedy. Just for being a homosexual or for being my brother . . . I don’t know, but it’s not fair.”

At sunset we decided to go back. I felt too overcome by that human stampede capable of creating in my mind the closest image to my brother’s last decision and of stirring the dirty waters of a never-resolved memory—never buried, like William’s body.

Night had already fallen when we arrived at Dany’s house, where, fortunately, there was electricity that day. We drank water, mixed grain coffee, and ate some sandwiches with fish
picadillo
rounded out by boiled banana peels. Daniel knew that for two or three years I had been allowing myself to drink alcohol again, although only on certain occasions and in reduced quantities. So, since he knew me, he knew that at that moment I needed a drink. He opened the closet where he kept his strategic
reserve and took out one of the bottles of
añejo
rum that Elisa, whenever she had a chance, stole from work. Seated on the chairs in the living room, with two fans on high speed, we drank almost without looking at each other, and I felt that what had happened that day had somehow prepared me for what I had thought of doing and finally did.

“I’m trying to write a book” was the way in which it occurred to me to bring up the subject, and immediately it seemed cruel to say that you’re writing to a writer who has dried up; it is like insulting his mother. I know it all too well. But I didn’t stop myself and I explained that for a while I had been trying to give shape to a story I had run into sixteen years before.

“So why didn’t you write it before?”

“I didn’t want to, I couldn’t, I didn’t even know . . . Now I think that I want to, I can, and, more or less, I know.”

So I told him the basics of my meetings in 1977 with the man who loved dogs and the details of the story that, through the strangest ways and in pieces, he had given me since then. I don’t quite know why, but before doing so I imposed a condition and asked him to please respect it: he should never speak to me about that matter if I didn’t bring it up. Now I know I did it to protect myself, as was my custom.

When I finished telling him the story, including the search for the Trotsky biography in which I had involved him, I felt, for the first time, that I was really writing a book. It was a feeling between joy and torment that I had lost many years before, but that had not left me, like a chronic illness. The terrible thing, nonetheless, was that at that moment I was also fully conscious that Ramón Mercader was causing me, more than anyone else, that inappropriate feeling that he himself rejected and that frightened me by the mere fact of feeling it: compassion.

The conversation with Daniel and the immediate effects it generated served to dust off and revise what I had already written. I perceived, as a visceral necessity of that story, the existence of another voice, another perspective, capable of complementing and contrasting what the man who loved dogs had told me. And very soon I discovered that my intention of understanding the life of Ramón Mercader implied trying to understand that of his victim as well, since that murderer would only be complete, as an executioner and a human being, if the object of his act accompanied him, the repository of his hate and the hate of the men who induced and armed him.

For years I had dedicated myself to gathering the little information existing in the country about the twisted conspiracy to kill Trotsky and about the awful, chaotic, and frustrating epoch in which the crime was committed. I recalled the joyful tension with which many of us searched for the few glasnost magazines that during those years of revelations and hopes entered the island, until they were removed from the newsstands—so we wouldn’t be ideologically contaminated by certain truths that had been buried for so many years, said the good censors. But my need to know more, at least a little more, threw me into an obstinate and subterranean search for information that would take me from one book to another (obtained with more difficulty than the previous one) and to confirm for myself that we had lived in programmed ignorance for decades, our knowledge and credulity systematically manipulated. To begin with—and a couple of conversations with Daniel and Ana reaffirmed this—very few people in the country had any idea who Trotsky had been, what the reasons for his political downfall were, the persecution he had suffered, and the death they gave him; fewer still were those who knew how the revolutionary’s execution had been organized and who had carried out the final mandate; practically no one knew, either, the extremes reached by Bolshevik cruelty in the hands of that same Trotsky in his days of maximum power; and almost no one had an exact idea of the subsequent felonies and massacres of the Stalinist era—all that barbarity justified by the struggle for a better world. And the ones who did know something kept quiet.