The Man Who Loved Dogs (91 page)

A few months before, Ramón had made the mistake of discussing that yearning with Santiago Carrillo, the leader of the Spanish Communists. Carrillo had told him, as Ramón expected, that his case was, at the very least, special, and that it wouldn’t be easy to free himself of the chains tying him to Moscow. Didn’t anyone remember that, according to very well-covered-up memories, Carrillo must have been stained by the blood of the regrettable executions of prisoners in Paracuellos? . . . For now, like the rest of the refugees, every night before going to sleep Ramón should pray, communistically, for Franco’s death, and then they would see. But the dream, the beach, the heat, kept beating in him, like an unreachable desire that was not possible to give up.

That late October dinner was a success. Even Roquelia was in a good mood (the proximity of her departure had that effect), and everyone praised Ramón’s culinary skills. Leonid Eitingon, in addition to devouring an impressive quantity of pigs’ feet, drank wine, cava, vodka, and
even Cuban rum from a bottle brought by Elena Feerchstein, and seemed to be the happiest of men. After taking the lead with the toasts, he was the first one to start singing the old words to Republican anthems. With cigars between their lips, they posed for a photo, and Conchita Brufau told half a dozen jokes that revolved around the supposed resurrection of Lenin or Stalin. But the most successful one was about the best way to hunt a lion:

“It’s very easy: you grab a rabbit and begin to beat him and tell him you’re going to kill his whole family . . . Until he confesses that he’s actually a lion dressed as a rabbit.”

“I like seeing all of you like this,” Eitingon said. “Happy and relaxed . . . Perhaps you don’t know that these buildings are made of micro-concrete?”

“Micro-concrete?” Elena Feerchstein asked.

“Twenty percent microphones and the rest is concrete . . .”

That night, impelled by the alcohol he allowed himself on this occasion, Ramón thought that, despite the confinements, silences, deceptions, and even the fear and the obsession with real and imagined microphones, life was worth living. Eitingon was the exultant proof of that. His cynicism, resistant to blows and years in prison, was protective and exemplary. And wasn’t he as cynical as his mentor? He thought that having believed and fought for the greatest utopia ever conceived of required a necessary dose of sacrifice. He, Ramón Mercader, had been one of those dragged along by the subterranean rivers of that battle, and it wasn’t worth evading responsibility or trying to blame his faults on deception and manipulation; he was one of the rotten fruits cultivated in even the best of harvests, and while it was true that others had opened the doors, he had gladly crossed the threshold of hell, convinced that a life in the shadows was necessary for a world of light.

Past midnight, when the goodbyes were imminent, Luis asked Ramón to accompany him to the kitchen. With his nearly finished cigar at the corner of his mouth, Luis leaned against the small table where the crockery that Ramón (as part of his arrangement with Roquelia) had to wash before going to bed was piled.

“What’s going on? Do you need something?” Ramón served himself a little coffee and lit a cigarette. He felt the alcoholic euphoria of a little earlier morphing into a diffuse but absorbing sadness.

“I didn’t want to ruin your party, but . . .”

Ramón looked at his brother and remained silent. Experience had taught him that there was no need to push bad news, as its weight always propels it forward.

“Caridad is coming in two days. She called me this afternoon.”

Ramón looked outside. The sky was reddish, announcing the coming snow. Luis dropped his extinguished tobacco in the wastebasket.

“She asked me if she could stay with you. Since Roquelia is leaving . . .”

“No. Tell her no,” Ramón said, almost without thinking about it, and returned to the living room, where the visitors were putting on their coats to leave. Ramón bid them farewell with promises of speedy reunions, and when Leonid Eitingon went to kiss him, he moved his face and pressed it against the adviser’s ear.

“Caridad is coming,” he told him, and kissed him.

Ramón could see how Eitingon’s blue eyes regained the brilliance dulled by the alcohol. The mere mention of that name seemed to reveal in him intricate chemical reactions that had to be beyond an already worn sexual empathy. He and Caridad were definitively kindred souls, united in their capacity to hate and destroy.

“I’ll call you tomorrow, kid.” He smiled and, with his gloved hand, patted Ramón’s face.

“No, it would be better if you didn’t call me again . . . I’m sick of rolling around in shit.”

As he washed the dishes, Ramón put a record of Greek songs he had grown fond of on the record player at a very low volume. His mother’s imminent visit was disquieting, and when he was drying the plates, he stopped to observe the arc-shaped scar on his right hand. Those marks on his skin, the scream in his ears, and the shadow of Caridad were like the chains tying him to his past, and the three could be terribly heavy if he tried to move them together. The scar and the scream were indelible, but at least he could keep his mother far away. In prison, accompanied by the scream and the scar, he had continued hating Caridad, blaming her for the failure of his escape plans. But he remembered that during the infinite psychological exams he had been subjected to in Mexico, the specialists thought they saw, in the midst of that hate, the presence of an obsession for the maternal figure that some classified as Oedipal. When he learned of such opinions, he chose to laugh in the psychologists’ faces, but he knew that something lost in his subconscious must have freed itself through an unforeseen channel, alerting the specialists. The memory
of Caridad’s kisses, whose warm and aniseed-flavored saliva caused ambiguous feelings in him; the unease it always caused him to see her in the company of other men; and the uncontrollable power his mother had exercised over him had an unhealthy component from which he had tried to free himself through distance and hostility. The psychologists’ opinion had made him meditate on her attitude toward him and on his weakness before her, and he began to rescue from his memory caresses, words, gestures, closeness, and palpitations that seemed painfully perverse to him.

Despite the exhaustion of an entire day of work and of having drunk more than he usually did, Ramón tossed and turned in his bed, pursued by the idea of a reunion with his mother, until dawn became visible in the sky and he watched the first snowfall of that autumn. Contemplating the snow, Ramón recalled the train trip he had taken at the end of 1960 to the limits of Soviet Asia, in the company of Roquelia, two young KGB officers, their guides and custodians. After twenty years of confinement, that trip was supposed to be a liberation, the enjoyment of moving for days and days, crossing such diverse worlds, crossing time zones and the logic of time (a few feet from where it is now today, you can return to yesterday or jump to tomorrow). With his own eyes, he discovered the country’s economic strength, the schools built across its immense territory, the dignity of the poverty of its Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Siberian children, a new world that made him feel rewarded—made him think that his personal sacrifice had been for something. But the return trip caused a contradictory feeling. It was not due to the fact that, in the two days the train was stopped due to a freeze, the restaurant car had turned into a kind of combination bar and latrine when a group of soldiers took it over and spent each hour of the delay drinking vodka, urinating, and vomiting in corners. What happened was that remaining immobile, surrounded by the infinite and impenetrable whiteness of the frozen steppe, returned to him an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness, more crushing than what he had felt in the many cells in which he had lived. Something in that January Siberian landscape paralyzed and oppressed him. And that oppression, he thought, was the exact opposite of confinement: it was the result of immeasurableness, of the oceanic immensity of the white landscape that could only be seen for a few hours each day. It suffocated him, and he understood that the infinite whiteness could overwhelm him to the point of madness.

Ramón wasn’t aware of the exact moment he had fallen asleep. When
he awoke, close to eight, he saw Ix’s and Dax’s anxious faces next to the bed, long after the time for their morning evacuations had already passed. The brief sleep, nonetheless, had not freed him from the growing unease that plagued him throughout the night.

As he got dressed, he placed the coffee on the stove. He saw on the balcony thermometer that the temperature was minus eight degrees and observed Gorky Park, on the other side of the river, completely covered by clean snow. When he withdrew the coffee pot, he placed the wide blade of a knife very similar to the one he had used in Malakhovka over the gas flame. He drank the coffee, lit a cigarette, and smoked until he saw the color of the steel go red. He put out his cigarette, wetting it in the sink, looked for the dishrag he had used the night before to dry the plates, and folded it twice, biting down forcefully on it. With his left hand, he took the knife’s handle, which had turned from red to white, and, with his eyes closed, placed the tip over the scar on his right hand. The pain made his knees buckle and prompted tears and some smothered cries. He threw the knife into the sink, where he heard it sizzle in the water. When he opened his eyes, he saw wisps of grayish smoke and spit out the rag. The smell of burned flesh was sweet and nauseating. He opened the faucet and stuck his hand under the freezing water as he wet his face with his left hand. Relief came when the cold made his hand fall asleep. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and, after drying his face, covered the seared skin, under which, he supposed, the scar had disappeared. He felt, despite the pain, that his soul weighed less. He took another clean handkerchief, wrapped his hand again, and went out.

Ix and Dax’s anxiety made them bark a couple of times as they went down in the elevator. The building’s watchman made a comment about the weather and the preparations for the parade for the anniversary of the revolution that Ramón, wounded by pain, barely heard. Awkwardly, with his left hand he wrapped his scarf around himself twice and went out to the path, where his borzois were already running with their snouts stuck to the ground. Ix and Dax started to run through the snow, like two children stepping on it for the first time. Snowflakes were still falling here and there and Ramón raised the hood of his jacket. With the dogs’ leashes in his left hand and a cigarette between his lips, he crossed the Frunze Quay and descended the stairs that went down from the sidewalk to a platform that was almost level with the river.

Leaning against the metal railing, with his dogs seated next to him,
his jacket sprinkled with snow, and his hand wrapped in a black-polka-dotted handkerchief, Ramón began to smoke with his eyes fixed on the flowing river, on whose banks a layer of glitter had formed. Instead of that dirty and frozen river, would he ever again see the resplendent beach of Sant Feliu de Guíxols? The pain and bitterness painted a frown on his lips, when he said out loud:

“
Jo sóc un fantasma
.”

Breathing in the frozen air, feeling the burning pain rising up through his arm, again that specter who had once been called Ramón Mercader del Río imagined how his life would have been if on that remote early morning, on the side of the Sierra de Guadarrama, he had said no. Surely, he thought, as he liked to do, he would have died in the war, like so many of his friends and comrades. But above all, he told himself—and that was why he liked to get caught up in that game—that other fate would not have been the worst, because in those days the true Ramón Mercader, young and full of faith, was not afraid of death: he had opened all the windows of his spirit to the collective mind, to the struggle for a world of justice and equality, and if he had died fighting for that better world, he would have earned himself an eternal spot in the paradise of pure heroes. At that moment Ramón thought how much he would have liked to have seen that other Ramón come to his side, the true one, the hero, the pure one, and to be able to tell the story of the man that he himself had been all those years in which he had lived the longest and most sordid of nightmares.

30

Requiem

Thirty-one years ago, Iván confessed to me that for a long time he had dreamed of going to Italy. In the Italy of his yearning, Iván could not have gone without doing several things: visiting the Castel Sant’Angelo; going, as if on a pilgrimage, to Florence and contemplating the Tuscan landscapes that Leonardo had once seen; standing amazed before the city’s Duomo and its green marble; wandering around Pompeii like someone reading an eternal book about the eternity of life, passion, and death; eating a pizza and real spaghetti, preferably in Naples; and, to guarantee his return, throwing a coin in the Trevi Fountain. Until the arrival of the great moment, Iván had fed his dream by studying the works of Leonardo (although it was Caravaggio whom he was really crazy about), seeing Visconti’s and De Sica’s movies, reading Calvino’s and Sciascia’s Sicilian novels, and swallowing the spongy pizzas and bland pastas that became widespread on the island in the seventies and assuaged so much of our hunger for so many years. His was a desire so persistent, so well designed, that I have come to wonder whether in reality Iván had studied journalism with the hope of someday being able to travel (to Italy) in those times when almost no one traveled and no one did so unless it was an official mission.

The first time my friend spoke to me of the existence and later fading of that dream so Cuban and so insular, of escaping from the island, was on the terrace of his house, two or three months after we met. Around that time, I was the worst-read student in the literature department, and that day Iván, after talking to me about his lost hope, put in my hands a novel by Pavese and another one by Calvino, while I asked myself how it was possible that a guy like him could give up and, at just twenty-some years of age, talk about dead dreams when we all knew that we still had a future ahead of us that announced itself as luminous and better.