The Man Who Loved Dogs (10 page)

L. D. Trotsky

In that first year of exile, Lev Davidovich had only been able to count defeats and defections: inside the Soviet Union, the opposition had practically disintegrated, without there being any of the expected deportations. Outside the country, his followers were fighting for a piece of power, over being more or less to the left, or simply abandoned the struggle, as the Pazes did, unable to resist Stalinist pressures or because of a lack of a clear prospect for success . . . Perhaps it was for that reason that the news of Mayakovsky’s suicide continued to shake him for weeks, during which
he had come to feel guilty for having argued with the poet so many times, perhaps providing fodder to the detractors who had popped up all over the country.

The arrival of the first copies of his anxiously awaited autobiography barely gave him any satisfaction amid so many losses. Upon rereading the work, finished a year earlier, he regretted having dedicated so many pages to a self-defense that was beginning to seem futile in the middle of the torrent of adversities that preyed on his friends’ lives and dignity; his insistence on contextualizing his disagreements with Lenin throughout twenty years of struggle seemed opportunistic, and above all, he reproached himself for not having the courage to recognize, with helpful or perhaps harmful hindsight, the excesses that he himself had committed in order to defend the revolution and its permanence. Although he would never publicly admit it, for many years already Lev Davidovich had regretted the moments in which, from his position of power, he had allowed force to take over, independent of the goals being pursued. The militarization of the railroad unions he imposed, when the outcome of the civil war depended on the locomotives standing still on the country’s tracks, now seemed excessive to him, even when it was upon that measure that the fate of the revolution had rested. He already knew that he would never be able to forgive himself for the attempt to apply the same coercive measures to postwar reconstruction when it became clear that the nation was on the verge of disintegration and it was not possible to persuade disenchanted workers without applying force. On his shoulders lay the responsibility for having removed union leaders, for having erased democracy from workers’ organizations, and for contributing to their turning into amorphous bodies that now gladly used Stalinist bureaucrats to cement their hegemony. As part of the power apparatus, he had also contributed to killing the democracy that he now demanded as an oppositionist.

His role in crushing the Kronshtadt naval base rebellion in the ill-fated month of March 1921 was no less shameful to him. That detachment, whose support guaranteed the success of the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, would demand four years later such basic rights as greater freedom for workers, less despotic treatment for the peasants forced to hand over the bulk of their harvests, and, above all, the sacred right to free elections to the Soviet assemblies. The reasoning that the new sailors
of the Baltic fleet were being manipulated by anarchists and counterrevolutionary officers should never have justified the measure that he, as commissar of war, had applied: the squashing of the revolt and the unleashing of violence that even extended to the execution of hostages. For him and for Lenin, it had been clear that the punishment was a political necessity, since even though they knew that the protest had no possibility of turning into the predicted third revolution, they feared that it would aggravate to unsustainable limits the chaos in a country besieged by hunger and economic paralysis.

He knew that if in March 1921 the Bolsheviks had allowed free elections, they probably would have lost power. The Marxist theory, which he and Lenin used to validate all of their decisions, had never considered the circumstance that once the Communists were in power, they could lose the support of the workers. For the first time since the October victory, they should have asked themselves (did we ever ask ourselves? he would confess to Natalia Sedova) if it was fair to establish socialism against or at the margin of majority will. The proletarian dictatorship was meant to eliminate the exploiting classes, but should it also repress the workers? The dilemma had ended up being dramatic and Manichaean: it was not possible to allow the expression of the people’s will, since this could reverse the process itself. But the abolition of that will would deprive the Bolshevik government of its basic legitimacy: once the moment arrived in which the masses ceased to believe, the need arose to make them believe by force. And so they applied force. In Kronshtadt—as Lev Davidovich knew so well—the revolution had begun to devour its own children and he had been bestowed the sad honor of giving the order that started the banquet.

The harshness with which he had acted (generally backed by Lenin) could perhaps have been justified in those years. But now, upon reviewing their attitudes, he couldn’t stop asking himself whether, if he’d had the necessary shamelessness and shrewdness to grab power after Lenin’s death, he would not also have turned into a pseudo-communist czar. Wouldn’t he have raised the excuse of the revolution’s survival to crush rivals, as Lenin did in 1918 to outlaw the parties that had fought for the revolution alongside the Bolsheviks? Would he have been capable of withstanding the democratic relevance of an opposition, of factions within the party, of a press without censorship?

Lev Davidovich would prove how deeply absorbed his energies were in the avatars of politics when his wife surprised him with the news that Liova wished to leave Prinkipo. The hidden tremors that had been shaking the cement of the Büyükada villa for some months were revealed at that moment, when they had already reached earthquake-like proportions. He then remembered that Natalia Sedova had commented once that it wasn’t good for Jeanne Molinier to spend long periods of time with them while Raymond returned to Paris. He had engaged in that conversation on an afternoon in which they had gone on a walk to the impressive structure of the former Prinkipo Palace Hotel, the largest wooden building in all of Europe, and when he heard her, he had sardonically asked what was happening. She smiled while she explained things with her usual pragmatism: what was happening was that wives should be with their husbands and their Liovnochek was getting old and the years had clouded the vision of even a man like him.

Until that moment, the comings and goings of Raymond Molinier had been just one more event in the routine of Büyükada. Gifted with that
énergie Molinièresque
that was so attractive to Lev Davidovich, he had turned into the mainstay of the opposition in Paris. Excited by the possibility of turning Trotskyism into a political force within the French left, Molinier had placed his devotion, his fortune, and his family at the service of the project, and while he fought in Paris to find new followers, his wife, Jeanne, had turned into the intermediary between the secretariat managed by Liova and the Trotskyist sympathizers in Europe. Molinier’s energy had touched a sensitive nerve in the experienced revolutionary, and that is why he had decided to put the fate of the French opposition in his hands, ignoring the opinions of other comrades, such as Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, who discreetly decided to withdraw from the ring.

But it was only now that he found out that, from the first time that Raymond left his wife in Büyükada, Natalia had sensed what was coming: Jeanne was a young woman gifted with a languor that served to contrast her husband’s bullishness, and every cell of Liova’s body pulsed with his twenty-three years, even when he had given himself over body and soul to the cause. Because of that, while his wife conveyed the news that Jeanne would travel to Paris with the intention of breaking off her relationship with Raymond, and that Liova was planning to go off somewhere
else with her, the revolutionary understood how little he had worried about his son’s needs, although he immediately thought that the work of so many months—the Pyrrhic and painful benefit extracted from upsets and defections—could go down the tube, dragged by the egotistical impulse of a man and a woman. And that same night, unable to contain himself, he reprimanded Liova for his sentimental affair, unforgivable in a fighter.

Fortunately, Raymond’s reaction was deeply French, according to Natalia, and he allowed Jeanne to go live with Liova, who was already planning to move to Germany. Lev Davidovich then understood that he had no alternative but to accept his son’s decision: although the young man’s spirit of sacrifice was immeasurable, he could not demand that he invest his youth in a lost island. What would hurt him the most, he wrote, would be losing the only man with him on whom he could unload the weight of his frustrations, the only one from whom he could receive sincere criticism, and the only one whom he could trust to never be the one tasked with stabbing him, serving him poisoned coffee, or sending the bullet through his head that, sooner or later, would take his life.

But his concern over Liova’s departure was momentarily overshadowed by a little-known event that gave Lev Davidovich a bad premonition: the German elections, carried out on September 14, 1930, had turned Hitler’s National Socialist Party into the country’s second most popular. The leap had been to 6 million votes from 800,000 in 1928. Perplexed before the strange political irresponsibility of the German Communists, Lev Davidovich read that the Communists were celebrating their own increase from 3 million to 4.5 million votes, and declared that the Hitlerite upturn was the swan song of a petit bourgeois party condemned to failure. Several months earlier, in one of the letters with which he used to bombard the Soviet party’s Central Committee, he had already warned them about the dangerous establishment of National Socialism in Germany, which he saw as the bearer of an ideology capable of coalescing all of that “human dust” of a petit bourgeoisie crushed by the crisis and eager for revenge. Since then, he’d begun to insist on the need for a strategic alliance between Communists and Socialists to stop the process that could bring the Hitlerites to power. But the response to his premonitory cry of alarm had been the order from Moscow, channeled through the Comintern, that the German party should abstain from any alliance with Socialists and democrats.

Never more than at that moment had Lev Davidovich felt the weight of his sentence. Shut away on an island lost in time, his ability to act was reduced to writing articles and to an organization of scattered followers, when in reality he should have been in the center of events that, he could feel it in his skin, involved the fate of the German working class, the European revolution, and perhaps of the Soviet Union itself. He knew that it was necessary to mobilize the consciousness of the German left, since it was still feasible to avoid the disaster being drawn over the sky of Berlin. Didn’t anyone notice that if his path wasn’t closed off, Hitler would come to power and the Communists would be his first victims? What was happening in Moscow? he asked himself. He sensed that something dark was brewing behind the Kremlin’s red walls. What he still could not imagine was that very soon he would hear, from the highest towers of the Muscovite fortress, the first howls of a macabre creature capable of terrorizing him.

5

The dense air caressed the skin and the sparkling sea hardly emitted a lulling murmur. There, one could feel how the world, on magical days and moments, gives the deceptive impression of being an affable place, tailor-made to the dreams and strangest desires of man. Memory, imbued with that relaxed atmosphere, managed to become lost, and bitterness and sorrows fell into oblivion.

Seated on the sand with my back leaning against the trunk of a casuarina tree, I lit a cigarette and closed my eyes. There was an hour to go until the sun went down, but, as was becoming a habit in my life, I was in no rush and had no expectations. I practically had none, and practically without the practically. The only thing that interested me at the time was enjoying the gift of twilight’s arrival, the fabulous moment at which the sun closes in on the silvery gulf and draws a fiery trail on the surface. In the month of March, with the beach practically deserted, the promise of that vision was the cause for sudden calm within me, the state of closeness to the balance that comforted me and still allowed me to think in the palpable existence of a small happiness tailor-made to my meager ambitions.

Prepared to wait for the sunset in Santa María del Mar, I had taken out the book I was reading from my backpack. It was a volume of short
stories by Raymond Chandler, one of the writers at that time, and still today, to whom I was solidly devoted. Getting them from the most unimaginable places, I had managed to make an almost complete collection of Chandler’s works out of Cuban, Spanish, and Argentine editions, and besides five of his seven novels I had several short story collections, including the one I was reading that afternoon, called
Killer in the Rain
. It was a Bruguera edition, printed in 1975, and along with the title story it had four others, including one called “The Man Who Loved Dogs.” Two hours before, while I was making the journey by bus to the beach, I had started reading the book right at that story, attracted by such a suggestive title that directly touched on my weakness for dogs. Why, amid so many other possibilities, had I decided to take
that
book on
that
day and not a different one? (I had at my house, among the many recently obtained and waiting to be read,
The Long Goodbye
, which would end up being my favorite of Chandler’s novels;
Rabbit, Run
by Updike; and
Conversation in the Cathedral
by the already excommunicated Vargas Llosa, that novel that a few weeks later would make me shake with pure envy.) I think I had picked
Killer in the Rain
completely unconscious of what it could mean and simply because it included that story that features a professional killer who feels a strange predilection for dogs. Was everything organized like a game of chess (another one) in which so many people—that individual whom I would name, precisely, “the man who loved dogs” and I, among others—were pieces in a game of coincidence, of life’s whims or of the inevitable intersections of fate? Teleology, as they call it now? Don’t think I’m exaggerating, that I’m trying to make your hair stand on end, nor that I see cosmic conspiracies in each thing that has happened in my damned life; but if the cold front that had been predicted for that day had not dissolved with a fleeting rain shower, barely altering the thermometers, it’s possible that on that March afternoon in 1977 I would not have been in Santa María del Mar, reading a book that, by coincidence, contained a story called “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” and with nothing better to do but wait for the sun to set over the gulf. If just one of those circumstances had been altered, I would have probably never had the chance to notice that man who stopped a few yards away from where I was to call out to two magisterial dogs who, just at first sight, dazzled me.