The Man Who Loved Dogs (87 page)

“And you, why did you fight?”

“At the beginning, because I had faith, I wanted to change the world, and because I needed the pair of boots they gave to the Cheka agents. Afterward . . . We already talked about fear, right? Once you enter the system, you can never leave. And I kept fighting because I turned into a cynic—me, too. But after spending fifteen years in prison for having been an efficient cynic, with a few deaths under my belt, you begin to see things in a different light.”

“So how can you live with that?”

“Just like you, Ramón Mercader! The day you killed Trotsky, you knew why you were doing it, you knew you were part of a lie, that you were fighting for a system that depended on fear and on death. You can’t fool me! . . . That is why you entered that house with your legs shaking but resolved to do it, because you knew well that there was no way back. When you talk to Caridad again, ask her what I told her when you arrived in Coyoacán. I told her: ‘Ramón is shitting himself with fear, but he’s already like us, he is one of the cynics.’ ”

“Shut up for a while, please,” Ramón said, though he didn’t know if it was a demand or a plea.

With the edge of his shirt, he cleaned the lenses of his glasses, which had fogged up. In the hands that had held the ice axe, that tortoiseshell frame, purchased by Roquelia on one of her trips to Mexico, seemed like a strange and remote object. At the end of the day, Eitingon was right, he had wrapped his faith tightly around himself, in the conviction that he was fighting for a better world, to then use that faith to avoid the truths about which he did not want to think: the murders, among others, of Nin and Robles; the party’s manipulations before and during the civil war; the murky stories surrounding Lev Sedov, Bob Sheldon, and Rudolf Klement; Yagoda’s strange confession that he himself had witnessed; the manipulation of the events of May 1937 in Barcelona; the vagabond he’d had to kill like a pig in Malakhovka; the lies about Trotsky and his collaboration with the fascists; the malevolent use of Sylvia Ageloff . . . just one of those truths would have been enough for him to recognize that not only was he a ruthless being but he had turned into a cynic.

“In jail, I read Trotsky,” he said, when he adjusted his glasses and observed, with regained clarity, the half-moon scar on the back of his right hand. “All of the prisoners knew I had murdered him, although the majority had no idea who Trotsky was or understood why I had murdered him. They killed for real reasons: the woman who cheated on them, the friend who stole from them, the whore who found herself another pimp . . . One day, when I returned to my cell, I had on my bed a book by Trotsky.
The Revolution Betrayed
. Who had left it there? The fact is that I started to read it and I felt very confused. About a month later another book appeared,
Stalin’s Crimes
, and I read that as well, and I was even more confused. I thought about what I had read and for months I waited for another book, but it never came. I never found out who put them in
my cell. What I did know is that if, before going to Mexico, I had read those books, I believe I would not have killed him . . . But you are right, I was a cynic on the day I killed him. That’s what all of you turned me into. I was a puppet, a wretch who had faith and believed what people like you and Caridad told him.”

“Kid, they fooled all of us.”

“Some more than others, Lionia, some more than others . . .”

“But we gave you all the clues so you could discover the truth, and you didn’t want to discover it. Do you know why? Because you liked being the way you were. Don’t come to me with any stories, Ramón Mercader . . . Besides, things were clear from the beginning: ever since you knew what your mission was, there was no going backward. It didn’t matter what you would read later . . .”

For Ramón, walking around Moscow during the month of September was like entering a concert when the last movement of the symphony is being executed. The volume of the music rises, all of the instruments participate, the climax is reached, but the notes reveal a sad tiredness, like the warning of an inexorable farewell. As the foliage on the trees changed colors, filling the air with ocher tones, and the sleepy afternoons began to get shorter, the threat of October and the arrival of the cold, the darkness, and the forced enclosure became palpable to Ramón. When the winter came, the old feeling, discovered thirty years before, that the Soviet capital was an enormous village stuck between two worlds would become more agressive, oppressive. The forests that grew within the city, the steppe that seemed to infiltrate itself through its disproportionate avenues and squares, would become painted with snow and ice, turning Moscow into an inscrutable territory, even more remote, populated by wrinkled brows and gross insults. Then his dream of returning to Spain would attack him with renewed insistence. With increasing frequency, as he read or listened to music, he discovered how his mind would escape from the letters or the notes and go to a Catalan beach, with rocky sand, enclosed between the sea and the mountains, where he would find himself again, free from the cold, the loneliness, the rootlessness, and the fear. He was even again called Ramón Mercader and his history disappeared like a bad memory that is finally exorcised. But Spain’s doors were shut to him with a double lock, one on each side. That he had to spend the
rest of his days in that world, always feeling like a prisoner between the impassable four walls of the earth’s largest and most generous country, had turned into an underhanded sort of punishment from which, he well understood, there was no redemption. In search of a relief that he knew to be false, many summer afternoons Ramón escaped from his apartment, with or without Roquelia, and dragged his frustration and disappointment toward the monument to the defeat and the nostalgia of the Spaniards left stranded in Moscow.

“So, at the beginning, how did it go with your compatriots?” Eitingon wanted to know when, on the following Sunday, they met in front of the old
kofeinia
on the Arbat, which was shut down in Stalin’s time because the general secretary came and went down that avenue every day on his way to his dacha in Kuntsevo. By decree, on that whole route there could not be any meeting places, or even trees: in the country of fear, even Stalin lived in fear. In Khrushchev’s time, the place had been turned into a record shop where Ramón had become an assiduous seeker of symphonic treasures at laughable prices.

As they walked without a specific destination, smoking some Cuban cigars that Caridad had sent from Paris (Ramón had to wrap them in damp cloth to bring back something of their Caribbean softness), Ramón told his former mentor that a few months after his arrival in Moscow, taken by his brother Luis, he had begun to visit the Casa de España. He remembered perfectly his disappointing first incursion in that unreal territory, built with calculated doses of memory and unmemory, where the shipwrecked of the lost war swam, encouraged by the vain illusion of reproducing, in the middle of that strange country of the future, a piece of their homeland of the past. Although a good number of the refugees who remained in the USSR were members of the Spanish Communist Party, selected, welcomed, and maintained by their Soviet brothers, Ramón had also found a notable number of the so-called children of the war (renamed Soviet Hispanics) who left the peninsula when they were less than ten years old and came to the Casa de España in search of the best espresso to be had in Moscow and of a fractured cultural identity, to which they obstinately clung.

Luis had warned him that for many years the boss of that displaced tribe was Dolores Ibárruri, already known around the world as La Pasionaria. The woman was so addicted to power and command in the Stalinist sense that the simple possibility of differing with her opinions
was ruled out, at least between the walls of the building and her party, of which she had been president since handing over the—shortened—reins of the general secretaryship in 1960 to Santiago Carrillo. As he listened to his brother, Ramón could not help but remember the night he went with Caridad to La Pedrera and heard the insults André Marty heaped upon La Pasionaria, her head lowered and obedient. But Ramón feared in particular the way in which his former comrades would receive him, and the fact that he could hang on his jacket the two most coveted orders of the USSR would surely not be enough to overcome the suspicions that his personal history would cause in many of them.

“The majority of them are hypocrites,” Ramón said, now using Spanish. “They congratulated me on returning, on my medals, and gave me my membership card as a militant in the Spanish Communist Party, but deep in their eyes I discovered two feelings that the bastards couldn’t hide: fear and disdain. For them I was the living symbol of their great mistake, when they swung like weather vanes at the orders from Moscow and Stalin’s policies and many of them became—we became—hangmen; but I was also the most pathetic proof of that useless obedience . . . Some have never said a word to me. Others have become my friends . . . I think. What really bothers me the most is that they consider themselves the ‘pure ones’ and I am the ‘dirty one,’ the man of the sewer, when the truth is that more than one of them has shit all the way up to his eyeballs.”

“And even further up,” the former Soviet adviser confirmed.

They turned left in front of the statue of Gogol, as if they had agreed without any need for words.

“Did La Pasionaria recognize you?” Eitingon wanted to know.

“Yes, she recognized me, but she made it look like she didn’t. She has always acted like I am not worthy of her. Caridad says she’ll throw herself at her neck one of these days . . .”

“I should go with you one day . . . if they would let me. A few of those telling tales there would shit themselves if they saw me. They know that Kotov knows many, many stories. And if you killed Trotsky it is because we sent you to kill him. Some of them snuffed out other people because we sent them—and sometimes without our sending them—because they thought they were more worthy of being our friends if they were ruthless . . .”

The almost physiological urgency to move through known territory, no matter how thorny, had turned Ramón into a regular at the Casa de
España. Moscow continued to be for him a city of codes and difficult languages to process, and at least there, amid Stalinist Communists, some Khrushchevists, and simple Republicans weighed down by nostalgia and frustration, they had a perverse language that united them: defeat. Thanks to his brother Luis and to his own capacity for hiding his feelings, Ramón established closer relationships with old comrades from the romantic days of the struggle in Barcelona and with a few new acquaintances who, despite everything, respected him, or at least tolerated him, not as much for what he had done but for the way in which he had withstood twenty years of imprisonment and had proven he was a Spaniard, a Catalan of the kind who cannot be broken, who, moreover, preferred a fragrant stew to a solianka stinking of cabbage.

“Solianka doesn’t stink of cabbage,” Lionia protested. “One day I’ll treat you to one, prepared by me, of course.”

“Something very fucked-up happened to me when I asked to be part of the group in charge of drafting the history of the civil war, the one they started to publish in 1966 to commemorate thirty years from the start of combat.”

“I already read it and what I found didn’t surprise me. Franco’s crimes and those of his people are the most terrible episode of what happened in Spain, what gave the war its tone—everyone knows that. But they’re not the only bad stories.”

“And you know that all too well, correct?” Ramón attacked, and Eitingon shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, the whole rigmarole of writing the book would be directed by La Pasionaria, and she didn’t seem very happy with my being part of the team. But others insisted; I don’t know if it’s because they felt bad for me. In the end—so I would leave them alone, I think—they assigned me the task of interviewing veterans of the war and gathering their remembrances and interpretations of the events they lived through or knew of firsthand. As I already expected, every one I interviewed insisted on telling it the way it best suited them, sometimes without any shame, and only remembered what meshed with their political ideas, with their version of the war. Do you know how many spoke to me of the ‘removals’ of prisoners in Madrid and Valencia, of the executions in Paracuellos?”

“None.”

Ramón looked at his former mentor and had to smile.

“It was as if they hadn’t existed . . . Fear still hounded them and they
didn’t dare utter any truth. The worst was seeing how they twisted stories that I myself lived, that you lived when you were Kotov. The executions in Paracuellos were an anarchist thing, according to them. And the taking of the Telefónica is still a necessary action to get rid of the Trotskyists and the fifth columnists that had been found. They justify or don’t speak of Nin’s disappearance; some insist on minimizing the importance of the International Brigades in the defense of Madrid; they don’t remember anything about the plans you prepared for them to get the other groups out of the way . . .”

As a member of the research committee, Ramón made a decision that he only shared with his brother Luis. He went to the Academy of History of the USSR, which was financing (and controlling) the project and its future publication, and began to study the documents placed at the disposal of historians. Since at that time, Roquelia, horrified by the Muscovite winter, had made her first trip to Mexico with Arturo and Laura, Ramón had more than enough time to devote to the research, and he discovered, at first puzzled and then shocked, that the documentation available to him was not only partial—overwhelmingly favorable to the Soviet and Comintern’s collaboration with the Republic—but also on occasion manipulated and differing from the experience he had lived through.