The Man Who Loved Dogs (90 page)

“She’s getting ready for the trip right now. As soon as winter comes, she goes running.”

Yenia smiled as if it were a joke.

“How nice to be able to travel . . . ,” she said, pricked a
pelmeni
, held it in the air, and dared to ask, “Could you ask her to bring us some pretty clothing for the girls? I would pay her, of course,” she rushed to clarify.

Ramón finished chewing and nodded.

“Tell me their sizes. I’ll take care of it.”

“Lionia says you have a very pretty apartment,” Yevgenia Purizova continued, satisfied at having gotten her point across so expeditiously. Surely, in her mind, she could already see the pants, blouses, shoes, and hair barrettes that her daughters could show off, and the distinction that those different objects could give them: it would be that wind from the West, so demonized but so desired by each one of the Soviets.

“We bought the furniture and a lot of the decorative objects with the money we get from the things Roquelia sells . . .” Ramón smiled and poured a little more vinegar over his
pelmenis
before attacking the potatoes and the roast meat.

While Yenia prepared tea and coffee, Ramón tasted one of the apple pastries Galina brought and got ready to face the most arduous part of those Russian banquets. Eitingon would try to liven up the night with his songs and toasts. Muttering under his breath, the host searched for music on the radio, but on almost all of the stations the announcers were talking without any intention of stopping, and when he found one transmitting a piece no one could identify, he left the receiver’s volume on low.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you for a few days now, kid . . . Have you found out through your current friends if they know anything about África?”

Ramón looked him in the eye. The sharp blue of his former mentor’s pupils had dissolved in alcohol, but continued to be sharp.

“Why are you asking me that?”

“Because I lost her trail ever since they took me out of the game . . . I know that during the war she worked as a radio operator with the guerrillas who infiltrated the rear guard and won several medals of courage . . . I imagine she wasn’t one of the ones who were affected by Stalin’s gratitude.”

“ ‘Stalin’s gratitude’?” Galina asked, attracted by such strange words.

“Stalin was very generous with the ones who served him, right? . . .” Eitingon’s laugh was painfully forced. Not even the vodka he had drunk eased his bitterness. “In reality, the best that could happen to you was that
he forgot about you. He didn’t forget about me . . . After the war, the witch hunt began again, inside and outside the Soviet Union. But after the horrors of the Nazis and two atomic bombs, who could criticize him for killing a hundred or two hundred or a thousand former collaborators accused of treason? One of the ones who paid dearly for Stalin’s gratitude was Otto Katz, one of the best agents we ever had. He was the one who pointed out Sylvia Ageloff and prepared the ground for us in New York.”

Sylvia’s name stirred Ramón’s memory more forcefully than África’s or Trotsky’s. He could not forget how, every time the police had them face each other in numerous confrontations, the woman turned into a spitting demon, and when he thought of her, he still felt the warmth of her saliva running down his face.

“No one worked as much or as dirtily as Willi Münzenberg and Otto Katz did to consolidate Stalin’s image in Europe. Willi was killed in France, during the German invasion. I still don’t know if it was the Nazis or us who did it . . . But Otto kept working, and after the war he thought the time had come for his reward. Stalin considered him and others of his kind to be troublemakers and decided the time had come to show his gratitude . . .” Leonid worked himself up and continued. “Otto Katz was locked up in Prague and forced to confess to any number of crimes. The day of his public confession, they had to make him a set of dentures from the teeth of an executed man, since he had lost all of his own teeth during the interrogations. Otto and several others were executed and thrown in a common grave on the outskirts of Prague . . .” And turning toward Ramón, he added: “That’s why I asked you if you’ve heard anything about África.”

Ramón drank the coffee Yevgenia Purizova served him and lit a cigarette.

“She was working in South America until she retired with honors . . . Since I arrived, I’ve only seen her once. Now she gives conferences and belongs to the KGB aristocracy . . . In 1956 she wrote me a letter in prison.”

Ramón would have preferred not to talk about that story that he had buried with so much effort. Because of that, he only told them that, in her letter, África de las Heras told him she was still working and that she was committing a serious infraction by writing to him, even risking her life, but she wanted to tell him that she congratulated him on the integrity—a communist integrity—with which Ramón had faced his years in prison. Ramón did not tell them that what África wrote to him almost amused
him—it seemed like a caricature of the harangues the young woman launched in the meetings in Barcelona—if the news that followed had not moved him to the point of tears: Lenina had died two years before, having just turned twenty. His happiness on receiving that letter, signed by María Luisa Yero, but whose handwriting he recognized like the scar etched on his right hand, turned into a death pain from which he would never be able to free himself. Lenina had joined an anti-Franco guerrilla unit and died in a skirmish. Her parents could be proud of her, África said, with unnatural coldness, like someone issuing a war report. Ramón, who had already perfected his strategy of imagining a life parallel to his real one, tried to fit into his impossible existence the daughter he had never met, whom he had never kissed, and tried to conceive of how that girl’s days would have been spent with parents capable of raising her, protecting her, and giving her love. The fact that he had never had even the remotest possibility of influencing the life of a person he created did not alleviate the strange pain caused by the death of a being who, since the beginning, had only been a name. The cause or family? Ramón had felt the weight in his chest of the fundamentalism to which he had submitted and that had prevented him from even weighing the possibility that it was not necessary to abandon his ideas in order to go looking for his daughter. Then he thought he would never forgive África for her sick orthodoxy and for having excluded him from a decision that was also his. But at the same time he had to recognize his own faults and weaknesses. Hadn’t he accepted and considered África’s will as logical, historically and ideologically correct? He had only the small consolation of telling himself that, like Lenina, he would also have fought against Franco and that perhaps having died as she did was preferable to living as he did with an unyielding scream in his ears and the certainty of having been a puppet.

Galina broke the silence and took his hand. “What’s wrong, Ramón?”

Eitingon’s snores brought him back to reality.

“Nothing, just a bad memory . . . Lionia isn’t going to sing. Shall we leave?”

The solitude prompted by Roquelia’s trips and the forced confinement brought about by the devastating Muscovite winter allowed Ramón to recover one of his oldest passions: cooking.

In the years he spent in prison—following that initial period of interrogations, blows, and solitary confinement and ending with his sentence for homicide—he had felt an urgent need to focus his intellectual energies and asked his lawyer to buy him books to study electricity and learn languages. The mysteries of electric flows and the inner lives of languages had always attracted him, and at that moment, with seventeen years of prison ahead of him (he was starting to lose hope that his conspirators could organize his escape) and threatened by the claws of madness, he felt that he could and should satisfy his intellectual curiosities. Thanks to this, his stay in prison was more pleasant. Studying, his mind escaped the creaking Lecumberri, an authentic circle of hell, and his knowledge allowed him freedoms and privileges denied to the illiterate and coarse criminals crowded together in the compound. By 1944, inmate Jacques Mornard, known as Jac by his fellow prisoners, was acting as the person responsible for Lecumberri’s electrical workshop and would soon take over the leadership of carpentry as well as the sound system for the prison’s stage and movie theaters. His rapid rise, supported by certain directors of the prison in contact with emissaries from Moscow, gave rise to more than a little envy, and forced him to remind more than one prisoner that if he had driven an ice axe into the head of a man who had led an army, it mattered very little to him to cut the arm off a fucking nobody. His prestige among his fellow inmates increased notably when, in the middle of his studies of Russian and Italian, he found out about the governmental program through which he could reduce his sentence by one year if he taught fifty of his companions to read. Jac went to work and, with the help of Roquelia, who brought the printed cards, and with that of her cousin Isidro Cortés, imprisoned with him, they managed to teach almost five hundred prisoners how to read, the highest number ever achieved in the entire Mexican penal system. The prison authorities gave him a diploma but communicated to him that they could not apply the stipulated bonus to him unless he recognized his identity and the true motives for his crime. Ramón, as always, repeated that his name was Jacques Mornard and remained satisfied that the inmates who benefited from his work—besides teaching them literacy, he turned many of them into electricians—expressed their gratitude with the most coveted prison currencies: respect and peace.

But Ramón was always a special prisoner, not only because he enjoyed a certain protection, but also because things worked a different way for
him. He wasn’t granted the reduction in his sentence nor was he allowed to marry Roquelia, since if he married her, he could remain in Mexico and Mexico didn’t want him—though they helped Siqueiros get out of the country. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean consul at that time, took him with him. And Diego Rivera, when he wanted to return to the party, began to say publicly that he had housed Trotsky so it would be easier to kill him and everyone laughed along with him. Ramón was sickened by those things. But he was the rejected one: the hypocrites of the world said they were disgusted by him, even as they laughed at the jokes of the cuckold Rivera and the coward Siqueiros (who had even dared to send him a painting as a gift).

Once he was settled in Moscow, his knowledge of various languages served to give some meaning to his time and, at the same time, to earn some extra money with his translations. Meanwhile, his love of cooking, also cultivated in prison, besides filling his hours, allowed him to hand himself over to the nostalgia of his Catalan youth and give flight to his dreams.

For four or five years, Ramón prepared a great dinner to send off Roquelia, who, at the first threat of snow, stepped on the plane taking her to Mexico. On that occasion, in addition to the usual guests he was allowed contact with (Luis and Galina, Conchita Brufau and her Russian husband, a couple of friends from the Casa de España, and Elena Feerchstein, the Soviet Jew with whom he worked on his translations), Leonid Eitingon and his wife Yenia would be there.

That morning, as soon as Ramón began to work in the kitchen, Roquelia, who hated any change in her routine, shut herself up in her room under the pretext of preparing her suitcases. Since Arturo and Jorge were at school, it was young Laura, seated on a stool, and Dax and Ix the wolfhounds, who were the privileged witnesses of the preparation of the meal and of the chef’s commentaries on the ingredients, proportions, and cooking times. In reality, Ramón had begun to prepare that Catalan meal a week before. The difficulty of finding certain ingredients in Moscow limited Ramón’s gastronomic possibilities, and after running (medals at the ready) to various markets and gathering everything that seemed usable, he had opted for an
arroz a banda
as his artillery appetizer and some pigs’ feet (he lamented not having found the thyme called for by the traditional recipe) for the big offensive. There would be
pan con tomate
, and crêpes with orange marmalade would bring the agape to a close.
Conchita Brufau would bring some wines from Penedès, while Luis brought two bottles of cava for the toasts the Soviets were such fans of.

Those gastronomic journeys to their Catalan origins, which he usually shared with Luis and occasionally with his brother Jorge, a professional chef, hid Ramón Mercader’s warmest and most longed-for hope for a return to Spain. During the months Roquelia spent in Mexico, Ramón and Luis multiplied their meetings in the apartment’s kitchen. Besieged by snow, they tended to use meals to bring back memories and voice hopes. Luis, who was already past forty, dreamt that, with the death of El Caudillo (the bastard had to die someday), Spain’s doors could open again to the thousands of refugees still wandering the world. The youngest Mercader still had hope of obtaining an exit visa from the USSR, so complicated for him despite his origins, and very difficult for Galina and his children because of their Soviet nationality. Ramón, in contrast, knew he would never be allowed to leave Soviet territory and that, in addition, no country in the world, starting with Spain, would deign to receive him. But in the dreams he voiced, Ramón usually told Luis about his plans to open a restaurant on the Empordà coast, specifically on the beach of Sant Feliu de Guíxols. There, in the pleasant months of spring and fall, and in the warm ones of summer, he could earn his living preparing dishes that would improve in taste, consistency, and appearance with every effort. Living in front of the sea, free of fear and the feeling of isolation, and without having to hide his own name, would be the happy culmination of his strange and miserable life.