The Man Who Loved Dogs Read online

  Depending on how you look at it, Ana was the woman that I most needed or who was least advisable for me at that moment: fifteen years younger than me, too undemanding in the way of material things, horrible and wasteful as a cook, a passionate dog lover, and gifted with a strange sense of reality that made her go from the most eccentric ideas to the firmest and most rational decisions. From the beginning of our relationship she had the ability to make me feel like I had been looking for her for many, many years. That’s why I didn’t find it strange when, a few weeks into the calm and very satisfactory sexual relationship that began the first day I went to the house where Ana lived with a friend to give Tato an IV, the girl threw her belongings into two backpacks and, with her ration book, a box of books, and her nearly recovered poodle, moved into my damp and already peeling apartment in Lawton.

  Besieged by hunger, blackouts, the devaluation of our salaries, and a transportation standstill—amid many other evils—Ana and I lived through a period of ecstasy. Our respective scrawniness, accentuated by the long trips we made on the Chinese bicycles that our workplaces had sold us, turned us into almost ethereal beings, a new species of mutants capable, nonetheless, of dedicating our remaining energies to making love, to talking for hours, and to reading like fiends—for Ana, poetry; for me, a return to novels after a long time without them. But they were also unreal years, lived in a dark and sluggish country, always hot, that was falling apart day by day without quite falling into the troglodytic primitiveness that threatened us. And they were years in which not even the most devastating scarcity was able to stamp out the joy that living together brought Ana and me, like the shipwrecked who tie themselves to one another to either jointly save themselves or perish together.

  Apart from the hunger and the material shortcomings of all kinds that besieged us—although between us we considered them outside us and inevitable, and thus foreign to us—the only sadly personal episodes we experienced at that time were the revelation of the vitamin-deficient polyneuritis that Ana began to suffer from and, later on, the death of Tato at the age of sixteen. The loss of the poodle affected my wife so much that, a couple of weeks later, I tried to alleviate the situation by picking up a stray pup infected with mange, whom Ana immediately started to call “Truco” due to his ability to hide, and whom she fed with rations taken from our paltry survivors’ diet.

  Ana and I had achieved a level of such rapport that, one night, under a blackout, with ill-contained hunger, unease, and heat (how was it possible that it was always so damned hot and that even the moon seemed to shed less light than before?)—as if I were just carrying out a natural need—I began to tell her the story of the meetings that, fourteen years before, I had had with that character whom I had always called, from the very day I met him, “the man who loved dogs.” Until that night on which, almost without prologue and as an outburst, I decided to tell Ana that story, I had never revealed to anyone the subject of my conversations with that man and, less still, my delayed, repressed, and often forgotten desire to write the story he had confided in me. So that she would have a better idea of how I’d been affected by the proximity to that figure and the dreadful story of hate, betrayal, and death that he’d given me, I even gave her some notes to read that many years before, from the ignorance I wallowed in at the time, and almost against my own will, I had not been able to keep myself from writing. She had barely finished reading them when Ana stared at me until the weight of her black eyes—those eyes that would always look like the most living thing of her body—began to berate me and she finally said, with appalling conviction, that she didn’t understand how it was possible that I, especially I, had not written a book about that story that God had put in my path. And looking into her eyes—those same eyes now being eaten by worms—I gave her the answer that had slipped away from me so many times, but the only one that, because it was Ana, I could give her:

  “Fear kept me from writing it.”

  2

  The icy mist swallowed the outline of the last huts, and the caravan again plunged into that distressing whiteness, so limitless, without anything to rest your gaze on. It was at that moment that Lev Davidovich was able to understand why the inhabitants of that rough corner of the world have insisted, since the dawn of time, on worshipping stones.

  The six days that the police and the exiles had spent traveling from Alma-Ata to Frunze, through Kyrgyzstan’s icy steppe, enveloped by an absolute whiteness in which any notion of time and distance was lost, had served to reveal the futility of all human pride and the exact dimension of its cosmic insignificance in the face of the essential power of the eternal. The waves of snow coming down from the sky, in which all trace of the sun had vanished and that threatened to devour everything that dared to challenge its devastating persistence, proved to be an indomitable force which no man could stand up to; it was then that the apparition of a tree, the outline of the mountain, the frozen gully of a river, or a simple rock in the middle of the steppe, turned into something so noteworthy as to become an object of veneration. The natives of those remote deserts have glorified stones, because they assure in their capacity for resistance, that there is a force, enclosed forever inside of them, like the fruit of an eternal will. A few months earlier, while already in the midst of his deportation, Lev Davidovich had read that the sage known as Ibn Battuta, and farther east by the name of Shams ad-Dina, was the one who revealed to his people that the act of kissing a sacred stone results in a comforting spiritual pleasure, since upon doing so the lips experience a sweetness so deep that it leads to the desire to keep kissing it until the end of time. For that reason, wherever there is a sacred stone, it is forbidden to wage battles or kill enemies, as the pureness of hope must be preserved. The visceral wisdom inspiring that doctrine seemed so lucid that Lev Davidovich asked himself if the revolution really had any right to disrupt an ancestral order, perfect in its own way and impossible for a European mind affected by rational and cultural prejudices to gauge. But the political activists sent from Moscow were already in those lands, focused on turning the nomadic tribes into collective farm workers, their mountain goats into state livestock, and in showing Turkmens, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Kyrgyzstanis that their atavistic custom of worshipping stones or trees in the steppe was a deplorable anti-Marxist attitude that they should renounce in the name of progress of a humanity capable of understanding that, at the end of the day, a stone is only a stone and that you don’t feel anything besides simple physical contact when cold and exhaustion have eaten up all human will, and in the middle of frozen desert, a man armed with only his faith finds a piece of stone and takes it to his lips.

  A week before, Lev Davidovich had seen how they wrested away from him the last few stones that still allowed him to orient himself on the turbulent political map of his country. He would later write that that morning he’d awoken petrified and overwhelmed by a bad premonition. Convinced that he was not just shaking because of the cold, he had tried to control his spasms and had managed to make out the tattered chair-turned-night-table in the shadows. He had felt around until he found his glasses, the shakes making him fail twice at placing the metallic stems over his ears. In the milky light of the winter dawn, he had finally managed to spy on the wall the almanac adorned with the image of some statues of young people from the Leninist Komsomol that had been sent to him from Moscow a few days before without his knowing who sent it, since the envelope and the possible letter from the sender had disappeared, like all of his correspondence in recent months. Only at that moment, as the numbered evidence of the calendar and the rough wall it hung from brought him back to his reality, did he have the certainty that he had woken up with that anxiety due to having lost the notion of where he was and when he was waking. For that reason he felt a palpable relief upon discovering that it was January 20, 1929, and he was in Alma-Ata, lying on a squeaking cot, and that at his side was his wife, Natalia Sedova.

  Taking care not to move the straw mattress, he sat up. He immediatel
y felt the pressure of Maya’s snout on his knees: his dog greeted him, and he rubbed her ears, in which he found warmth and a comforting sense of reality. Dressed in a rawhide cloak and a scarf around his neck, he emptied his bladder in the toilet and moved to the room that was simultaneously kitchen and dining room, already lit by two gas lamps and heated by the stove on which rested the samovar, prepared by his personal jailer. In the mornings he had always preferred coffee, but he had already resigned himself to accept what was assigned to him by Alma-Ata’s miserly bureaucrats and its secret police guards. Seated at the table close by the stove, he began taking a few sips of that strong tea, too green for his liking, from a china cup while he caressed Maya’s head, without suspecting that he would soon receive the most perfidious confirmation that his life and even his death had ceased to belong to him.

  Exactly one year before, he had been confined to Alma-Ata, at the limit of Asian Russia, closer to the Chinese border than to the last station of any Russian railway. In reality, ever since he, his wife, and their son Liova had stepped out of the snow-covered truck in which they had covered the final stretch of their road to a malicious deportation, Lev Davidovich had begun to wait for death. He was convinced that if by a miracle he survived malaria and dysentery, the order to eliminate him was going to come sooner or later (“If he dies so far away, by the time people find out about it, he will already be well buried,” his enemies thought, without a doubt). But while they waited for that to happen, his adversaries had decided to make the most of their time and devoted themselves to annihilating him from history and memory, which had also become the party’s property. The publication of his books, just when he had reached the twenty-first volume, had been halted, and an operation was being carried out to remove copies from bookstores and libraries; at the same time, his name, slandered at first and then discredited, began to be erased from historical accounts, tributes, newspaper articles, even from photographs, until they made him feel how he was turning into an absolute nothing, a black hole in the memory of the people. For that reason, Lev Davidovich thought that if anything had saved his life until then, it was fear of the schism that the decision to eliminate him could cause, if there was indeed something still capable of altering the consciousness of a country deformed by fear, slogans, and lies. But one year of enforced silence, accumulating low blows without any chance to reciprocate, seeing how the remains of the opposition he had led were dismantled, convinced him that his disappearance was becoming more necessary every day for the macabre decline toward despotism of the great proletarian revolution.

  That year of 1928 had been, he didn’t even doubt it, the worst of his life, even though he had lived through many other terrible times confined in Czarist jails or wandering penniless and with little hope through half of Europe. But during each disheartening circumstance, he had been sustained by the conviction that all sacrifices were necessary when aspiring to the greater good of the revolution. Why should he fight now, if the revolution had already been in power for ten years? The answer was becoming clearer to him every day: to remove it from the perverse abyss of a reaction that was intent on killing human civilization’s greatest ideals. But how? That was still the great question, and the possible responses crossed his mind, in a chaos of contradictions with the capacity to paralyze him in the midst of his strange struggle as a marginalized Communist against other Communists who had stolen the revolution.

  With censored and even falsified information he had followed the miserable start of a process of ideological destabilization, of the confusion of political positions that had been undefined until recently, through which Stalin and his minions stripped him of his words and ideas, by the malevolent procedure of appropriating the same programs through which he had been harassed to the point of being thrown out of the party.

  At that moment of deep thought, he heard the door to the house open with a creak of frozen wood and saw the soldier Dreitser enter, dragging in a cloud of cold air. The new head of the GPU watch group tended to demonstrate his power by entering the house without deigning to knock at that door which had been stripped of locks. Covered by a hat with ear flaps and a leather cloak, the policeman had begun to shake off the snow without daring to look at him, because he knew that he was the bearer of an order that only one man in the entire territory of the Soviet Union was capable of devising and, furthermore, of carrying out.

  Three weeks earlier, Dreitser had arrived as a sort of black messenger from the Kremlin, bearing new restrictions and the ultimatum that if Trotsky didn’t halt his oppositionist campaign amid the colonies of deportees, he would be completely isolated from political life. What campaign, since it had been months since he could send or receive correspondence? And what new isolation was he being threatened with if not death? To make his control more evident, the agent had decreed a prohibition on Lev Davidovich and his son Lev Sedov going out to hunt, knowing that with those snowfalls it was impossible to hunt. Nevertheless, he confiscated shotguns and cartridges in order to demonstrate his will and his power.

  When he managed to free himself of the snow layered on his coat, Dreitser approached the samovar to serve himself tea. By the motion of the wind, Lev Davidovich had deduced that it must be less than thirty degrees below zero outside and that the empire of interminable snow, with the exception of some redeeming stones, was the only thing that existed on that damned steppe. Following his first sip of tea, Dreitser had at last spoken and, with his Siberian bear accent, told him that he had a letter that came from Moscow. It wasn’t difficult for him to imagine that a letter capable of passing postal control could only bring the worst news, and this was confirmed by the fact that for the first time Dreitser had addressed him without calling him “Comrade Trotsky,” the last title he’d kept in his turbulent decline from the heights of power to the solitude of banishment.

  Ever since receiving the news of the death of his daughter Nina from tuberculosis in July, Lev Davidovich had lived with the fear that other family misfortunes would occur, a by-product of regular life or, as he feared more with each passing day, of hate. Zina, his other daughter from his first marriage, had had a nervous breakdown, and her husband Plato Volkov was, like other oppositionists, already in a work camp in the Arctic Circle. Fortunately, his son Liova was with them, and the young Seriozha, the Homo apoliticus of the family, remained a stranger to partisan struggles.

  Natalia Sedova’s voice, saying good morning while simultaneously cursing the cold, reached him at that moment. He waited for her to enter, met with joy by Maya, and felt his heart shrink: Would he be capable of transmitting fatal news to Natasha about the fate of her beloved Seriozha? With a mug in her hands she had sat down in the chair and he watched her. She’s still a beautiful woman, he thought, according to what he would write later. Then he told her that they had correspondence from Moscow and the woman also became tense.

  Dreitser had left his mug next to the stove to rummage in his pockets in search of his pack of unbearable Turkmeni cigarettes and, as if taking advantage of the act, stuck his hand in the interior compartment of his cloak, from which he removed the yellow envelope. For a second it seemed that he had the intention of opening it, but he chose to place the packet on the table. Trying to hide his anxiety, Lev Davidovich looked at Natalia, then at the stampless envelope where his name was imprinted, and threw the cold tea in the corner. He handed the mug to Dreitser, who was forced to take it and return to the samovar to refill it. Although he had always had a flair for the theatrical, he understood that he was wasting his histrionics before that reduced audience, and without waiting for the tea he opened the envelope. It contained one sheet, typewritten, with the GPU seal and was undated. After replacing his glasses, he spent less than one minute reading it but remained silent, this time without any dramatic gestures: surprise at the incredible had left him speechless. Citizen Lev Davidovich Trotsky should leave the country within a period of twenty-four hours. His expulsion, without a specific destination, had been decided by virtu
e of the recently created Article 58/10, useful for everything, although in his case, according to the letter, he was accused of “carrying out counterrevolutionary campaigns in order to organize a clandestine party hostile to the Soviets . . .” Still silent, he passed the note to his wife.

  Natalia Sedova, her hands atop the rough wooden table, looked at him, petrified by the severity of the decision that, rather than condemning them to freeze to death in some corner of the country, forced them to take the road to an exile that appeared like a dark cloud. Twenty-three years of a life together, sharing pains and successes, failures and glories, allowed Lev Davidovich to read the woman’s thoughts through her blue eyes. Exiled, the leader who had moved the country’s consciousness in 1905, who had made the uprising of October 1917 a triumph and had created an army in the midst of chaos and saved the revolution in those years of imperialist invasions and civil war? Banished for disagreements over political and economic strategy? she had thought. If it were not so pathetic, that order would have been risible.

  As he stood up, he sarcastically asked Dreitser if he had any idea when and where the first congress of his “clandestine party” would take place, but the messenger limited himself to demanding that he confirm the receipt of the communication. In the margin of the order, Lev Davidovich wrote, “The GPU’s decree, criminal in substance and illegal in form, has been communicated to me on the date of January 20, 1929.” He signed it quickly and pegged the page with a dirty knife. Then he looked at his wife, who was still in shock, and asked her to wake Liova. They would barely have time to gather their papers and books. He walked to the bedroom, followed by Maya, as if impelled by haste, although in reality, Lev Davidovich had fled for fear that the police and his wife would see him cry over the impotence caused by humiliation and lies.