The Man Who Loved Dogs (21 page)

William was a brilliant guy. That summer he had finished his first year at the medical school with grades that were as high as they were unusual for that period, the most difficult degree. But just after the start of his second year, in September, my brother and his anatomy professor, with whom he had maintained an intimate relationship since the previous year, were accused of being homosexuals by another professor, in a meeting of the party’s leadership in which both teachers were active. Following procedure, a disciplinary commission was put together composed of “all the factors”: the party, the Communist Youth, the Union, and the Students’ Federation and—despite the lack of proof or even of suspicions that they had practiced their aberrations, as they were called on campus—they were subject to interviews in which the professor emphatically denied any homosexual indiscretion. But William, after having rejected that accusation for weeks with all his vehemence, called on a courage that I didn’t know in him and rebelled against an exhausting and repressive cover-up, and said that yes, he was homosexual, and had acted as such from the age of thirteen, actively and passively, although he refused to confess with whom he’d carried out those activities, since that was a private matter and wasn’t anyone’s business but his. Although it was not possible to relate the sexual inclinations of the accused with their behavior as professor and student, and despite the fact that the output and teaching of each one was noteworthy, the sentence was decided beforehand and the commission of “factors” applied its sentence: the professor would be indefinitely expelled from the party and the national teaching system, while William would be removed from the university for two years and definitively from the study of medicine.

Beyond the university suspension, it was the shame that attacked the moral precepts of Antonio and Sara, my parents, head-on that led them to complete the young man’s sentence and to commit what would turn into the most regrettable mistake of their lives: they threw William out of the house, despite my protests (I had always felt pity for my brother), which were not enough to make them see reason. The family that had
been united until then began to disintegrate, and the clan’s final disgrace began to form itself on the horizon.

I know that the story of William’s fall, like many of my own stumblings, may seem exaggerated today, but the truth is that for many years it was common for so many people. At that moment, moved by a feeling of compassion and urged by a Raquelita who was horrified by those manifestations of homophobia and family cruelty, I went out to look for William in all of Havana until I managed to find him . . . at the house of his former professor. Slowly, with all of my caution and patience, I tried to build a different relationship with my brother, and shortly after I would come to replace my primitive feeling of pity with a justified admiration, due to the way in which he was facing his sentence: fighting. It was the complete opposite of what I would have done, of what I had done. William had accepted the expulsion from medical school, but he clamored for the right to continue his university studies, since no rule or law prevented it. Meanwhile, my relationship with my parents deteriorated, and although I continued to live with them, I allowed a wall of tension and resentment to rise in the middle of the house in Víbora Park.

It was at the end of October, in the middle of that family crisis, at the time when the beaches emptied again before the approach of the always light Caribbean fall-winter, that I again met the man who loved dogs. It happened at the same spot as always, at the hour at which evening began to fall, and with the usual succession of characters, including the tall, thin black man. That day I had gone to play squash; I was with Raquelita and did not even think about the possibility of seeing him, although I recognize that I was happy to find him—and even more so his wolfhounds—on the almost deserted beach. The first thing that surprised me upon seeing them was the evidence that the man had lost several pounds, while his breathing had become labored and the color of his skin definitively sick. But I understood that something was not well and I noticed that, seven months after our first contact, his right hand was still bandaged, as if he were covering an incurable ulcer.

After introducing him to my wife (I said
compañera
, as it sounded more modern and appropriate) and asking about his dogs (Dax was experiencing increasingly frequent rages, and a veterinarian had advised López to think about putting him down, something that he had immediately
rejected), I relayed the details of our wedding and talked to him about a book that I had been given to edit about the dangers of genetic degeneration in five dog breeds of different origins, and coincidentally one of the breeds under study was the borzoi. Finally, I dared to ask him about his dizzy spells. López looked at me for a few seconds and, for the first time since we had met, suggested that we sit on the sand.

“The doctors still don’t know, but I’m more fucked-up every day. I can barely even walk my dogs on the beach anymore, one of the things I like the most in life. I’m in and out of the clinic, they take my blood from all over, they search me inside and out, and they never find a damned thing.”

“Then you don’t have anything. Nothing serious, at least,” Raquelita said with her scientific logic.

He looked at her and I got the impression that he was doing it as if he had discovered a small speaking insect. He almost smiled when he said to her:

“I know that I’m dying. I don’t know what, but something is killing me.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said to him.

“You have to take the bull by the horns,” López said, and smiled, looking at the sea. With mechanical gestures, he searched for a cigarette in the pocket of his shirt, which now seemed big on him. He kindly extended the box to Raquelita, but she rejected it with a gesture that was a little brusque.

“Well, for starters, you shouldn’t smoke,” Raquelita interjected.

“At this stage? You know what the only thing is that alleviates my dizziness? Coffee. I drink liters of coffee. And I smoke.”

While the brief October afternoon gave way to darkness, expected at that time of year, the man who loved dogs, with unusual loquacity, confessed that he liked the sea so much because he had been born in Barcelona, on the Mediterranean: the sea, its smell, its color, had become one of his obsessions. If he weren’t so fucked-up and if he had the money, he concluded, he would do whatever he could to return to Spain, to Barcelona, because since that son of a bitch Franco had died, almost all the exiles had been able to return. Although I didn’t understand exactly whether López could or couldn’t return to Spain—if the problem was health, money, or of some other nature—his desolation and his feeling that his death was approaching, far from his place of origin, saddened me.

The man lit another cigarette and, watching Raquelita with a mixture of sarcasm and irony, said:

“The day after tomorrow I leave for Paris . . . I’m going to have some tests done on my lungs.”

Raquelita’s reaction was immediate and, even more, uncontainable.

“To Paris?” she asked him, and looked at me.

At that time—and still now, for the majority of us—Paris was in another world: it was a universe you could travel to through books, through the films of Truffaut, Godard, and Resnais, and lately, above all, thanks to Cortázar and
Hopscotch
. But that a real-life person would talk about going to Paris in front of us—to the real Paris—sounded as strange and mysterious as Alice’s leap through the looking glass.

“Are you going to be there long?” my wife wanted to know, still impressed.

“It depends. No more than two weeks. At this time of year, Paris is horrible: what they say about the beauty of autumn in Paris is all lies. Besides, I don’t like Paris.”

“You don’t like it?” This time I was the one who asked.

“No, I don’t like Paris, nor do I like the French,” he said, and put his cigarette out in the sand, pushing it almost forcefully. “Well, night already,” the man then explained, as if he were just recovering the notion of the time and place he was in at that instant. “Will you help me?” He extended his arm upward.

I stood up and offered him my right hand. López grabbed on to it with his, still bandaged, and I noticed that, for the first time, I had physical contact with that individual. López stood up, but upon letting go of my hand, his feet stumbled, as if the ground had moved, and I sprang to hold him up by his arms. At that moment, I heard the threatening growls of the wolfhounds and remained immobile, but without letting López go. He understood what was happening and spoke to the dogs in Catalan.

“
Quiets, quiets!
”

As if he had come out of the shadows, without my noticing, the tall, thin black man appeared next to us.

“I’ll help you,” the black man said, and I slowly let go of the man.

“Thanks, kid,” López whispered, and added, looking at Raquelita, “Goodbye, young one, and congratulations,” and he almost smiled. Leaning
on his chauffeur, he moved away with difficulty through the sand in search of the paved path that ran between the beach’s casuarinas.

“What a strange man, Iván,” Raquelita then said to me.

“What’s strange about him? That he’s a foreigner and is sick? That he says Paris is a shit hole?”

“No. There’s something dark about him that scares me,” she commented, and I couldn’t help but smile. Something dark?

10

Lev Davidovich knew that they were plotting something, so he decided to pretend he was asleep. From the rigid bed where he tried to mitigate the pain of the lumbago attack and through the cloudiness of his myopia, he made out Seriozha, who, with careful steps, was entering the rooms of the Kremlin that had been turned into the family apartment after the government moved to Moscow. The boy was carrying what appeared to be a box of sardines in his arms, with the sides bleached by whitewash. A strip of red cloth—Seriozha would confess to him that he had cut a flag, one of the few attainable articles in those times—tried to make a bow to give the package the air of a present. And he could also see, peeking in the door, the complicit faces of Natalia, Liova, Nina, and Zina while small Seriozha walked toward him.

That day Lev Davidovich was turning forty-five and the October Revolution was celebrating its seventh anniversary. His wife and children had decided to give him the best present within their reach, the gift that, they knew well, could best satisfy him. So, when the birthday boy at last sat up, surrounded by his family, he was able to guess what the rattling box of sardines contained. When he managed to release the bow, he lifted
the lid and exaggerated his surprise upon seeing the white-and-red-haired ball that raised its head to him.

Since that day in 1924, Maya had won his heart and become his favorite dog. When in the black spring of 1933 he placed her body in the open grave along the wall of Büyükada’s cemetery, he couldn’t help but recall the moments of happiness given to him by that animal who had become part of his family and whom he had now lost.

For ten days he’d fought to save her life. He made two veterinarians come from the capital. They agreed in their diagnosis: the animal had contracted an incurable infection due to pulmonary bacteria. Despite everything, Lev Davidovich tried to combat the illness with the remedies that Yanovska’s old Jews applied to their dogs and that the pastors of Büyükada tended to prescribe for their own. But Maya’s light went out, and this created another painful reason for the unhealthy sadness surrounding the Exile. Although he was experiencing another one of his lumbago attacks at that time, he insisted on carrying the body of his beloved borzoi in his arms to where she would be buried. Fearing that once he left Büyükada, the villa’s new inhabitants would profane that grave, he had obtained the villagers’ approval to bury her along the cemetery wall. Kharalambos dug the hole and his new secretary, Jean van Heijenoort, prepared a small wooden marker. When he placed her in the grave, Lev Davidovich felt that he was letting go of a good part of his life. In keeping with his style of saying goodbye, he threw a fistful of dirt on the Persian sheet that served as a shroud for the corpse and turned around, to take refuge in the more tangible and oppressive solitude of the Büyükada house.

Ever since receiving news of Zina’s death and of Hitler’s triumphant rise to power, Lev Davidovich had felt the ground under his feet cracking open and had tried to focus his energies on the negotiations taken up again by his French friends, led by his translator Maurice Parijanine and by the Molinier clan, who were pulling strings with the hope that Édouard Daladier’s new radical government would grant him asylum.

Although Lev Davidovich was already expecting the ascent of National Socialism in Germany and knew about the pressures silencing the local Communists, he had insisted on warning them that there was still one last option remaining, and they couldn’t waste it. The coalition that had brought Hitler to power was too heterogeneous, and the left and the
center had to exploit that weakness before the fascist leader consolidated his position. But days had passed without the Communists making even so much as a complaint, as if their fate were not in the balance. He would never forget that the news that the German Reichstag building had burned down on the night of February 27 had reached him while he was writing one of those missives to the German workers. The incomplete and contradictory information summarized at least one alarming certainty: Hitler had announced a state of emergency and the fulfillment of his promise to eradicate Bolshevism in Germany and in the world.