The Man Who Loved Dogs

1. Havana, 2004

“Rest in peace” were the pastor’s last words.

If that well-worn phrase, so shamelessly dramatic in the mouth of that figure, had ever held any meaning, it was at that exact moment, as the grave diggers nonchalantly lowered Ana’s coffin into the open grave. The certainty that life can be the worst hell, and that the remains of fear and pain were disappearing forever with that descent, overcame me with paltry relief. I wondered if I wasn’t in some way envious of my wife’s final passage toward silence, since being dead, totally and truly dead, for some can be the closest thing to a blessing from that God with whom Ana tried to involve me, without much success, in the last years of her difficult life.

As soon as the grave diggers finished moving over the stone and placed the wreaths of flowers our friends had brought on the grave, I turned and walked away, resolved to escape the hands patting my shoulder and the habitual expressions of condolence that we always feel obliged to offer. Because at that moment every other word in the world is superfluous: only the pastor’s well-worn formula had meaning and I didn’t want to lose it. Rest and peace: what Ana had finally attained and what I also asked for.

When I sat down inside the Pontiac to await Daniel’s arrival, I knew that I was about to pass out, and I was sure that if my friend didn’t remove me from the cemetery, I would have been unable to find the way back to my life. The September sun was burning the top of the car, but I didn’t feel up to moving to any other place. With what little strength I had left, I closed my eyes to control the vertigo of loss and fatigue while I felt the acidic sweat running down over my eyelids and cheeks, springing from my armpits, neck, arms. It was soaking my back scorched by the vinyl seat until it turned into a warm current that flowed down my legs in search of the cistern of my shoes. I wondered if that foul sweat and my deep exhaustion were not the prelude to my molecular disintegration, or at least the heart attack that would kill me in the next few minutes. It seemed to me that either could be an easy, even desirable solution, although frankly unfair: I didn’t have the right to force my friends to bear two funerals in three days.

“Are you ill, Iván?” Dany’s question, through the window, surprised me. “Holy shit, look at how much you’re sweating. .”

“I want to leave. . But I don’t know how, dammit. .”

“We’re leaving, my friend, don’t worry. Wait a minute, let me give a few pesos to the grave diggers,” he said, my friend’s words transmitting a patent sense of life and reality that seemed strange to me, decidedly remote.

Once again I closed my eyes and remained motionless, sweating, until the car was set in motion. Only once the air coming through the window began to calm me down did I dare to raise my eyelids. Before leaving the cemetery, I was able to see the last row of tombs and mausoleums, eaten away by the sun, weather, and oblivion, as dead as their inhabitants, and — with or without any reason for doing so at that moment — I again asked myself why, amid so many possibilities, some faraway scientists had chosen my name specifically to baptize the ninth tropical storm of that season.

Although at this point in my life I’ve learned — or rather have been taught, and not in a very nice way — not to believe in chance, the coincidences were too many that led the meteorologists to decide, many months ahead of time, that they would call that storm “Ivan”—a masculine name starting with the ninth letter of the alphabet, in Spanish, that had never been used before for that purpose. The fetus of what would become Ivan was spawned by the meeting of ominous clouds in the vicinity of Cape Verde, but it wasn’t until a few days later, already baptized and converted into a hurricane with all of its properties, that it would rear its head in the Caribbean to place us in its ravenous sight. . You’ll see why I think that I have reasons enough to believe that only twisted fate could have determined that that particular cyclone, one of history’s fiercest, would carry my name, just when another hurricane was closing in on my existence.

Even though it had been quite a long time — perhaps too long — since Ana and I had known that her end was decreed, the many years during which we dragged her illnesses had accustomed us to living with them. But the news that her osteoporosis — probably caused by the vitamin-deficient polyneuritis unleashed in the most difficult years of the crisis in the 1990s — had developed into bone cancer, had made us face the evidence of an end that was near, and given me the macabre proof that only a perverse fate could be responsible for burdening my wife specifically with that illness.

From the beginning of the year, Ana’s decline had accelerated, although it was in the middle of July, three months after the definitive diagnosis, that her final agony began. Although Gisela, Ana’s sister, came frequently to help me, I practically had to stop working to take care of my wife; and if we survived those months, it was thanks to the support of friends like Dany, Anselmo, or Frank the doctor, who frequently came through our small apartment in the neighborhood of Lawton to drop off some supplies drawn from the wretched harvests that, for their own subsistence, they managed to obtain in the most devious ways. More than once, Dany offered to come help me with Ana, but I rejected his overtures, since pain and misery are among the few things that, when shared, always multiply.

The scene we lived between the cracked walls of our apartment was as depressing as can be imagined, although the worst thing, under the circumstances, was the strange power with which Ana’s broken body clung to life, even against its owner’s will.

In the early days of September, when Hurricane Ivan, having reached its full potential, had just crossed the Atlantic and was nearing the island of Grenada, Ana had an unexpected period of lucidity and an unforeseen relief to her pain. As it had been her decision not to go to the hospital, a neighboring nurse and our friend Frank had taken over the task of providing her with intravenous fluids and the dose of morphine that kept her in a startling lethargy. Upon seeing that reaction, Frank warned me that this was the denouement and recommended that I give the patient only those foods that she asked for, not insisting on the intravenous fluids and, as long as she wasn’t complaining of pain, stopping all drugs to thus give her some final days of intelligence. Then, as if her life had returned to normal, an Ana with various broken bones and very open eyes became interested again in the world around her. With the television and radio on, she fixed her attention in an obsessive way on the path of the hurricane that had initiated its deathly dance devastating the island of Grenada, where it had left more than twenty dead. On many occasions throughout those days, my wife lectured me on the hurricane’s characteristics, one of the strongest in meteorological history, and attributed its elevated powers to the climate change the planet was undergoing, a mutation of nature that could do away with the human species if the necessary measures were not taken, she told me, completely convinced. That my dying wife was thinking of everyone else’s future only added to the pain I was already suffering.

While the storm neared Jamaica with the obvious intention of later penetrating eastern Cuba, Ana developed a sort of meteorological excitement capable of keeping her on constant alert, a tension she escaped only when sleep conquered her for two or three hours. All of her expectations were related to Ivan’s doings, with the number of dead it left in its path — one in Trinidad, five in Venezuela, another in Colombia, five more in Dominica, fifteen in Jamaica, she added, counting on her crooked fingers — and, above all, the calculations of what it would destroy if it penetrated Cuba through any of the points marked as possible trajectories deduced by the specialists. Ana experienced a kind of cosmic communication at the point of the symbiotic confluence of two bodies that know they are destined to consume themselves in the span of a few days, and I began to speculate whether the illness and the drugs had not made her crazy. I also thought that if the hurricane didn’t come through soon and Ana didn’t calm down, I would be the one who ended up going crazy.

The most critical period — for Ana and, logically, for each of the island’s inhabitants — occurred when Ivan, with sustained winds of approximately 150 miles per hour, began to pass over the seas to the south of Cuba. The hurricane was moving with a lazy arrogance, as if it were perversely choosing the point at which it would inevitably turn north and break the country in two, leaving an enormous wake of ruins and death. With bated breath and her senses clinging to the radio and the color television that a neighbor had lent us, a Bible near one hand and our dog Truco beneath the other, Ana cried, laughed, cursed, and prayed with a strength that was not her own. For more than forty-eight hours she remained in that state, watching Ivan’s careful approach as if her thoughts and prayers were indispensable to keeping the hurricane as far away as possible from the island, blocking it in that almost incredible westward path from which it couldn’t resolve to deviate to the north and flatten the country, as all historic, atmospheric, and planetary logic predicted.

The night of September 12, when information from satellites and radars and the unanimous opinion of meteorologists around the world were certain that Ivan would chart a course for the north and that with its battering gusts, gigantic waves, and rain squalls, it would rejoice in the final destruction of Havana, Ana asked me to remove from the wall of our room the dark, corroded wooden cross that twenty-seven years before the sea had given me — the driftwood cross — and place it at the foot of the bed. Then she begged me to make her a very hot hot chocolate and some toast with butter. If what was supposed to happen happened, that would be her last supper, because the battered ceiling of our apartment would not withstand the force of the hurricane, and she, it goes without saying, refused to move from there. After drinking the hot chocolate and nibbling a piece of toast, Ana asked me to lay the driftwood cross next to her and began to pray with her eyes fixed on the ceiling and on the wooden beams guaranteeing its balance and, perhaps, with her imagination devoted to playing out the images of the apocalypse lying in wait for the city.

The morning of September 14, the meteorologists announced a miracle: Ivan had turned toward the north at last, but it had done so so far to the west of the designated zone that it barely brushed the westernmost point of the island without causing any major damage. Apparently the hurricane had felt remorse for the many calamities piling up, and had steered away from us, convinced that its passing through our country would have been an excess of bad fate. Worn out by so much praying, with her stomach ravaged by lack of food, but satisfied by what she considered to be a personal victory, Ana fell asleep after hearing confirmation of that cosmic whim, and in the grimace that had become habitual on her lips there was something very much like a smile. Ana’s breathing, strained for so many days, was relaxed again and, along with her fingers caressing Truco’s wiry hair, was the only sign in the next two days that she was still alive.

On September 16, practically at nightfall, while the hurricane started to disintegrate on U.S. soil and to lose the already diminished force of its winds, Ana stopped caressing our dog and, a few minutes later, stopped breathing. She was at last resting, I’d like to think, in eternal peace.

In due time you will understand why this story, which is not the story of my life (although it also is), begins as it does. And although you still don’t know who I am or have any idea what I’m going to tell you, perhaps you will have understood something: Ana was a very important person to me. So much so that, to a large degree, it is because of her that this story exists — in black and white, I mean.

Ana crossed my path at one of those all so frequent times during which I was teetering on the edge of a precipice. The glorious Soviet Union had started its death rattle, and the lightning bolts of the crisis that would devastate the whole country in the 1990s were beginning to come down on us. It was predictable that one of the first consequences of the national debacle had been the closing, due to a lack of paper, ink, and electricity, of the veterinary medicine magazine where for ages I had worked as a proofreader. Just like dozens of press workers, from typesetters to editors, I had ended up in an artisans’ workshop where we were supposed to devote ourselves, for an indefinite period of time, to making macramé crafts and polished seed decorations that, everyone knew, no one would be able to or dare to buy. Three days into this new and useless destiny, without even having the decency to quit, I fled from that honeycomb of enraged and frustrated bees and, thanks to my friends the veterinarians whose texts I have reviewed so many times or even rewritten, I was able to start working shortly after as a sort of ubiquitous helper in the likewise poverty-stricken clinic of the University of Havana’s School of Veterinary Medicine.

Sometimes I am so overly suspicious that I come to wonder if that whole series of global, national, and personal decisions (they were even talking about “the end of history,” just when we had begun to have an idea about what the history of the twentieth century was) had as its only objective that I be the one who received, at the end of a rainy afternoon, the desperate and dripping young woman who, carrying a shaggy poodle in her arms, appeared at the clinic and begged me to save her dog, which was afflicted with an intestinal blockage. Since it was after four o’clock and the doctors had already left, I explained to the girl (she and the dog were trembling from the cold and, observing them, I felt my voice falter) that we couldn’t do anything. Then I saw her break into tears: her dog was dying, she said to me; the two veterinarians who had seen him didn’t have anesthesia to operate on him; and since there weren’t any buses in the city, she had come walking in the rain with her dog in her arms, and I had to do something, for the love of God. Something? I still ask myself how it’s possible that I dared to, or if in reality I was already wanting to dare to; but after explaining to the girl that I was not a veterinarian and asking her to write her petition on a piece of paper and sign it, thus freeing me of all responsibility, the dying Tato became my first surgical patient. If the God invoked by the girl had ever decided to protect a dog, it had to be that afternoon, since the operation — about which I had read so much and seen carried out more than once — was a success in practice.

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 immediately 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 virtue 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.

They ate their breakfast in silence and, as always, Lev Davidovich gave Maya some pieces of the soft part of the bread smeared with the rancid butter they were given. Later, Natalia Sedova would confess to him that at that moment, she had seen in his eyes, for the first time since they met, the dark flash of resignation, a frame of mind so removed from his attitude of a year before when, upon trying to deport him from Moscow, it had taken four men to drag him to the train station as he continued to scream and curse the faces of the Grave Diggers of the Revolution.

Followed by his dog, Lev Davidovich returned to the bedroom, where he had already begun to prepare the boxes in which he would place those papers that were all that remained of his belongings, but that were worth as much as or more to him than his life: essays, proclamations, military reports, and peace treaties that changed the fate of the world, but above all, hundreds, thousands of letters signed by Lenin, Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg, and so many other Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, revolutionary Socialists among whom he had lived and fought ever since, while still an adolescent, founding the romantic South Russian Workers’ Union, with the outlandish idea of overthrowing the Czar.

The certainty of defeat pressed on his chest, as if a horse’s hoof were crushing him and asphyxiating him. So he picked up his boot covers and his felt galoshes and took them to the dining room, where Liova was organizing files, and began to put his shoes on, to the young man’s surprise, who asked him what he had in mind. Without answering him, he took the scarves hanging behind the door and, followed by his dog, went out into the wind, the snow, and the grayness of the morning. The storm, unleashed two days earlier, did not seem to have any intention of abating; and upon entering it, he felt how his body and his soul sank in the ice, while the air hurt the skin on his face. He took a few steps toward the street from which he could make out the foothills of the Tien Shan mountains, and it was as if he had hugged the white cloud until he melted into it. He whistled, demanding Maya’s presence, and was relieved when the dog approached him. Resting his hand on the animal’s head, he noticed how the snow began to cover him. If he remained there ten or fifteen minutes, he would turn into a frozen mass and his heart would stop, despite the coats. It could be a good solution, he thought. But if my henchmen won’t kill me yet, he told himself, I won’t do their work for them. Guided by Maya, he walked the few feet back to the cabin: Lev Davidovich knew that as long as he had life left in him, he still had bullets to shoot as well.

Natalia Sedova, Lev Sedov, and Lev Davidovich had sat down to drink one last tea as they waited for the police escort that would conduct them into exile. In the bedroom, the boxes of papers were ready, following a first sorting out in which they had put aside dozens of books that were considered dispensable. Early in the morning, one of the police picked up the discarded books and had barely taken them out of the cabin when he set fire to them after pouring gasoline on them.

Dreitser arrived around eleven. As usual, he entered without knocking and told them the trip would be postponed. Natalia Sedova, ever concerned with practical matters, asked him why he thought the storm would abate the following day. The head of the guards explained that he had just received the weather report but, above all, he knew because he could smell it in the air. It was then that Dreitser, once again in need of projecting his power, said that Maya the dog could not travel with them.

The Exile’s reaction was so violent that it surprised the policeman: Maya was part of his family and was going with him or no one was going. Dreitser reminded him that he wasn’t in any position to issue orders or threats, and Lev Davidovich agreed, but he reminded him that he could still do something crazy that would end the guard’s career and send him back to Siberia — not to his hometown, but to one of those work camps that his boss in the GPU directed. When he observed the immediate effect of his words, Lev Davidovich understood that that man was under great pressure and decided to finish this game without showing any more cards: How was it possible that a Siberian could ask him to abandon a Russian wolfhound? And he lamented that Dreitser had never seen Maya hunt foxes in the frozen tundra. The policeman, slipping out the door, tried to demonstrate that he still had power: they could take the animal, but they would be responsible for cleaning up her shit.

Dreitser’s Siberian sense of smell would be as wrong as the meteorologists’ predictions, and the storm under which they left Alma-Ata, far from abating, grew as the bus moved through the steppe. In the afternoon (he knew it was afternoon only because the clocks indicated so), when they reached the village of Koshmanbet, he confirmed that they had spent seven hours to cover twenty miles of flat road under the ice.

The following day, heading over the frozen track, the bus managed to reach the mountain post of Kurdai, but the attempt to use a tractor to move the seven-car caravan in which they would all travel from that point on was useless and inhumane: seven members of the police escort froze to death along with a notable number of horses. Then Dreitser opted for the sleighs on which they would glide for two more days, until Pishpek was in sight, on flat roads again, where they got into cars.

Frunze, with its mosques and aroma of goat fat escaping from the chimneys, seemed like a saving oasis to the deporters and the deported alike. For the first time since leaving Alma-Ata, they were able to bathe and sleep in beds, and be relieved of the foul-smelling coats whose weight practically prevented them from walking. Confirming that in misery every detail is a luxury, Lev Davidovich even had the opportunity to taste a fragrant Turkish coffee, which he drank until he felt his heart speed up.

That night, before they went to bed, the soldier Igor Dreitser sat down to drink coffee with the Trotskys and inform them that his mission at the head of the guards ended there. Many weeks of cohabitation with the sour-faced Siberian had turned him into a habitual presence, so at the moment of his departure Lev Davidovich wished him good luck and reminded him that it didn’t matter who the party secretary was. It was all the same if it was Lenin, Stalin, Zinoviev, or him. . Men like Dreitser worked for the country, not for a leader. After listening to him, Dreitser shook his hand and, surprisingly, told him that, despite the circumstances, it had been an honor for him to know him; but what truly intrigued him was when the agent, practically in a whisper, informed him that, although the order specified that they burn all of the deportee’s papers, he had decided only to burn a few books. Lev Davidovich had barely managed to process that strange information when he felt the Siberian pressure of Dreitser’s hand on his fingers as the soldier turned around and went out into the darkness and snow.

With the changing of the police team, at the head of which an agent named Bulanov was placed, the deportees held the hope of piercing the veil and finding out the fates assigned to them. However, Bulanov could only inform them that they would take a special train in the Frunze depot, without the order specifying toward where. So much mystery, thought Lev Davidovich, could only be the product of the fear of the improbable but nonetheless dreaded reactions of his decimated followers in Moscow. He also wondered if that entire operation was nothing but an orchestrated pantomime to create confusion and control opinions, a preferred technique of Stalin’s, who on various occasions throughout that year had made rumors circulate about his imminent exile, which, though later denied with greater or less emphasis, had served to spread the idea and pave the way for the sentence that the people would only have news of after the fact.

Only during the months prior to the expulsion, while suffering a political defeat that managed to tie his hands, had Lev Davidovich begun to appreciate, seriously and with horror, the magnitude of Stalin’s manipulative abilities. Incapable of appreciating the Georgian ex-seminarian’s genius for intrigue, his shamelessness in lying and putting together shady deals, Lev Davidovich understood too late that he had underestimated his intelligence, and that Stalin, educated in the catacombs of the clandestine struggle, had learned all the forms of subterranean demolition. He now applied them, for his personal benefit, in search of the same ends for which the Bolshevik Party had used them before: to achieve power. The way in which he disarmed and displaced Lev Davidovich while using the vanity and fears of men who never seemed to have fears or vanities before, the calculated turns of his forces from one extreme to another of the political spectrum, had been a masterwork of manipulation that, to crown the Georgian’s victory, had benefited from the unpredictable blindness and pride of his rival.

Beyond orchestrating his expulsion from the party, and now from the country, Stalin’s great victory had been to turn Trotsky’s voice into the incarnation of the internal enemy of the revolution, of the nation’s stability, of the Leninist legacy, and had crushed him with the wall of propaganda that Lev Davidovich himself had contributed to creating, and against which, due to inviolable principles, he could not oppose if it meant risking the permanence of that system. The struggle on which he had to focus from that moment on would be one against men, against a faction, never against the Idea. But how to fight against them if those men had appropriated the Idea and presented themselves to the country and the world like the very incarnation of the proletarian revolution? It was a question he would continue to ponder after his deportation.

The railroad odyssey of their pilgrimage began as soon as they left Frunze. The snow imposed a slow rhythm on the old English locomotive, which pulled four cars. Throughout his years at the head of the Red Army, when he had to cover the geography of a country deep in civil war, Lev Davidovich came to know almost the entire network of the nation’s railways. On that special train he had traveled, by his calculations, enough miles to go around the world five and a half times. Because of that, after leaving Frunze, he was able to deduce that they were crossing the Asiatic south of the Soviet Union and that his destination could be none other than the Black Sea, one of the ports of which would serve to get him out of the country. To where? Two days later, after a quick stay at a station lost in the steppe, Bulanov arrived with the news that ended their wait: a telegram sent from Moscow informed him that the Turkish government had agreed to receive him as a guest, on a visa for health problems. Upon hearing the news, the deportee’s anxiety felt as frozen solid as if he were traveling naked on top of the train: of all the destinations he had imagined for his exile, Kemal Pasha Ataturk’s Turkey had not figured among the realistic possibilities, unless they wanted to put him on the gallows and decorate his neck with a well-oiled piece of rope, given that, since the triumph of the October Revolution, this neighbor to the south had become one of the bases for the White Russian exiles most aggressively against the Soviet regime, and placing him in that country was like dropping a rabbit in a dog pen. That is why he yelled at Bulanov that he didn’t want to go to Turkey: he could accept being banished from the country the Kremlin had stolen, but the rest of the world did not belong to it and neither did his fate.

When they stopped in legendary Samarkand, Lev Davidovich saw Bulanov and two officers descend from the command headquarters car and disappear into the mosque-like building that served as a station; perhaps they were following through on the deportee’s demands and Moscow would arrange for another visa. On that day the anxious wait for the results of those consultations began, and when it became clear that the process would be delayed, they made the train move forward for over an hour before stopping it on a disused branch line in the middle of the frozen desert. It was then that Natalia Sedova asked Bulanov, while they waited for Moscow’s response, to telegraph her son, Sergei Sedov, and Anya, Liova’s wife, so that they could get together with them for a few days before leaving the country.

Lev Davidovich would never know if the twelve days during which they remained stranded in that spot in the middle of nowhere were due to the delays in the diplomatic consultations or if it was only because of the most devastating snowstorm he’d ever seen, capable of lowering the thermometers to forty degrees below zero. Covered with all of the coats, hats, and blankets at their disposal, they received Seriozha and Anya, who traveled without the children, who were still too little to be exposed to those temperatures. Beneath the occasional gaze of one of the guards, the family enjoyed eight days of pleasant small talk, fierce games of chess, and reading out loud while Lev Davidovich personally took charge of preparing the coffee brought by Sergei. Despite the skepticism of his audience, every time the guards left them alone, Lev Davidovich’s compact optimism was unleashed and he initiated talk of plans to continue the struggle and make his return. At night, when everyone else was sleeping, the deportee curled up into a corner of the car and, listening to the staccato breathing due to the cold epidemic that had run through the convoy, he made the most of his insomnia to write letters of protest directed to the Bolshevik Central Committee and oppositionist struggle programs that, in the end, he decided to keep to himself so as not to compromise Seriozha with any papers that very well could lead him to jail.

The cold was so intense that the locomotive had to turn on its motors from time to time and cover a mile or two just to keep its engines from seizing up. Prevented from going outside by the snow’s intensity (Lev Davidovich didn’t want to lower himself to asking for permission to see Samarkand, the mythical city that centuries before had reigned over all of Central Asia), they awaited the newspapers only to confirm that the news was always disheartening, since every day there were reports of new detentions of anti-Soviet counterrevolutionaries, as they had baptized the members of the opposition. The powerlessness, boredom, the pain in his joints, the difficult digestion of canned food, drove Lev Davidovich to the edge of desperation.

On the twelfth day, Bulanov offered a summary of the responses: Germany was not interested in giving him a visa, not even for health reasons; Austria made excuses; Norway demanded countless documents; France brandished a judicial order from 1916 by which he was not allowed to enter the country. England didn’t even deign to respond. Only Turkey reiterated its disposition to accept him. . Lev Davidovich was certain that, because of who he was and for having done what he had, for him the world had turned into a planet to which he lacked a visa.

As they headed toward Odessa, the former commissar of war had time to make a new account of the actions, convictions, and greater and lesser mistakes of his life, and he thought that, even though they had forced him to turn into a pariah, he did not regret what he had done and felt ready to pay the price for his actions and dreams. He was even more firm in those convictions when the train passed through Odessa and he recalled those years that now seemed tremendously remote, when he had entered the city’s university and understood that his future lay not in mathematics but rather in the struggle against a tyrannical system; thus had begun his endless career as a revolutionary. In Odessa he had introduced the recently founded South Russian Workers’ Union to other clandestine groups, without having a clear idea of their political influence; there he had suffered his first imprisonment, had read Darwin and banished from his young Jewish man’s mind, already too heterodox, the idea of the existence of any supreme being; there he had been judged and sentenced for the first time, and the punishment had also been exile. That time the Czarist henchmen had sent him to Siberia for four years, while now his former comrades in arms were deporting him outside of his own country, perhaps for the rest of his days. And there, in Odessa, he met the affable jailer who supplied him with paper and ink. This was the man whose resounding name he had chosen when, having fled Siberia, some comrades gave him a blank passport so that he could embark on his first exile and, in the space reserved for the name, Trotsky wrote the jailer’s last name, which had accompanied him ever since.

After going around the city by the coast, the train stopped at a branch line that went all the way to the port’s quays. The spectacle that unfolded before the travelers was moving: through the blizzard beating at the windows, they contemplated the extraordinary panorama of the frozen bay, the ships planted in the ice, their spars broken.

Bulanov and some other Cheka agents left the train and boarded a steamship called the Kalinin, while other agents introduced themselves in the car to announce that Sergei Sedov and Anya should leave, since the deportees would soon be embarking. The farewell, at the end of so many days of cohabitation within the walls of the train car, was more devastating than they had imagined. Natalia cried while caressing the face of her little Seriozha, and Liova and Anya hugged as if wanting to transmit through their skin the feeling of abandonment into which they were being thrown by that separation without any foreseeable end. To protect himself, he bid farewell briefly, but as he looked into Seriozha’s eyes, he had the premonition that it was the last time he would see that young man, so healthy and handsome, who had enough intelligence to spurn politics. He hugged him strongly and kissed him on the lips, to take with him some of his warmth and being. Then he withdrew to a corner, followed by Maya, and struggled to drive out of his mind the words Piatakov said to him, at the end of that dismal Central Committee meeting in 1926, when Stalin, with Bukharin’s support, had achieved his expulsion from the Politburo and Lev Davidovich would accuse him in front of the comrades of having turned into the Grave Digger of the Revolution. As he was leaving, the redheaded Piatakov had said to him, with that habit of his of speaking into one’s ear, “Why? Why have you done it?. . He will never forgive you this offense. He will make you pay for it until the third or fourth generation.” He asked himself: Was it possible that Stalin’s political hate would end up extending to these children who represented not just the best of the revolution but of his life? Would his cruelty one day reach Seriozha who had taught the young Svetlana Stalina how to read and count? And he had to answer himself that hate is an unstoppable illness as he stroked his dog’s head and observed for the last time — he felt it deep down inside — the city where thirty years before he had wed himself to the revolution forever.

3

“Yes, tell him yes.”

For the rest of his days, Ramón Mercader would remember that, just a few seconds before pronouncing the words destined to change his life, he had discovered the unhealthy density that accompanies silence in the middle of war. For weeks he had lived amid the din of the bombs, the shots and the engines, the shouted orders and the cries of pain, and it all accumulated in his consciousness like the sounds of life; the sudden leaden fall of that heavy silence, capable of causing a helplessness too much like fear, turned into a troubling presence when he understood that, after that precarious silence, the explosion of death could suddenly take him away.

In the years of imprisonment, of doubts and alienation, to which those four words would lead him, many times Ramón persisted in challenging himself to imagine what would have happened with his life had he said no. He would insist on re-creating a parallel existence, an essentially novelistic journey in which he had never ceased to be called Ramón, to be Ramón, to act like Ramón, perhaps far from his country and his memories, like so many men of his generation, but always being Ramón Mercader del Río in body and, above all, in soul.

Caridad had arrived a few hours before, in the company of little Luis. They had traveled from Barcelona, through Valencia, driving the powerful Ford that was confiscated from some executed aristocrats and which the Catalan communist leaders usually used to get around. The safe conducts, adorned with signatures capable of opening all Republican military controls, had allowed them to reach the side of that rugged mountain of the Sierra de Guadarrama. The temperature, several degrees below zero, had forced them to stay inside the car, covered with blankets and breathing in air polluted by Caridad’s cigarettes, which took Luis to the edge of nausea. When Ramón was at last able to make it down to the safety of the mountainside, bothered by what he considered to be one of his mother’s many customary interferences in his life, his brother Luis was sleeping in the backseat and Caridad, a cigarette in hand, was pacing around the car, kicking rocks and cursing the cold that made her exhale condensed clouds. As soon as she noticed him, the woman enveloped him with her green stare, colder than a night in the sierra, and Ramón remembered that ever since the day they had met again, over a year ago already, his mother had not given him one of those wet kisses that, when he was a child, she used to deposit at the corner of his mouth so that the sweet taste of saliva, with its lingering taste of aniseed, would drip down his taste buds and cause the overwhelming need to keep it in his mouth for longer than the process of his own secretions would allow.

They had not seen each other for several months, ever since Caridad, convalescing from the wounds she received in Albacete, was commissioned by the party to travel to Mexico to gather material support and moral solidarity for the Republican cause. In that time, the woman had changed. It wasn’t that the movement of her left arm was still limited by the lacerations caused by shelling; nor was it because of the recent news of the death of her son Pablo, an adolescent who she herself had forced to go to the front in Madrid, where he’d been crushed by the crawler tracks of an Italian tank. Ramón attributed it to something more visceral that he would discover that night.

“I’ve been waiting for you for six hours. The sun is about to come out and I can’t go much longer without some coffee” was how the woman greeted him, focused on crushing a cigarette under her military boot as she looked at the small, shaggy dog accompanying Ramón.

Cannons roared in the distance and the sound of fighter plane engines was an all-encompassing rumble that descended from the starless sky. Would it snow? Ramón wondered.

“I couldn’t drop my rifle and come running,” he said. “How are you? How’s Luisito?”

“Anxious to see you; that’s why I brought him. I’m fine. Where did that dog come from?”

Ramón smiled and looked at the animal, who was sniffing around the Ford’s wheels.

“He lives with us in the battalion. . He’s really taken to me. He’s handsome, right?” And he bent down. “Churro!” he whispered, and the animal approached him, wagging his tail. Ramón stroked his ears as he picked burrs off of him. He looked up. “Why did you come?”

Caridad looked into his eyes for longer than the young man could bear without averting his gaze, and Ramón stood up.

“They’ve sent me to ask you something. .”

“I can’t believe it. . You’ve come all the way here to ask me a question?” Ramón tried to sound sarcastic.

“Well, yes. The only question that matters: What would you be willing to do to defeat fascism, and for socialism?. . Don’t look at me like that; I’m not kidding. We need to hear you say it.”

Ramón smiled joylessly. Why was she asking him this?

“You’re acting like a recruiting officer. . You and who else need it? Is this a party thing?”

“Answer and then I’ll explain.” Caridad remained serious.

“I don’t know, Caridad. Isn’t that what I’m doing now? Risking my life, working for the party. . Keeping those fascist sons of bitches from entering Madrid.”

“It’s not enough,” she said.

“What do you mean it’s not enough? Don’t make things any harder for me. .”

“Fighting is easy. So is dying. . Thousands of people do it. . Your brother Pablo. . But would you be willing to give up everything? And when I say everything, I mean everything. Any dreams of your own, any scruples, being yourself. .”

“I don’t understand, Caridad,” Ramón said, completely sincere as a sense of alarm grew in his chest. “Are you serious? Can’t you be any clearer? I can’t spend all night here, either,” and he pointed toward the mountain from which he had come.

“I think I’m already speaking very clearly,” she said, and took out another cigarette. At the moment in which she lit the match, the sky was illuminated by the flash of an explosion and the back door of the car opened. Young Luis, covered by a blanket, ran toward Ramón, slipping on the frozen ground, and they held each other in an embrace.

“Wow, Luisito, you’ve become a man.”

Luis sniveled without letting go of his brother.

“And you’re so thin, man. I can feel your bones.”

“It’s the fucking war.”

“And is that your dog? What’s his name?”

“It’s Churro. . He’s not mine, but it’s as if he were. He showed up one day. .” Luis whistled and the animal came to his feet. “He’s a quick learner and he’s so good. . Do you want to take him?” Ramón caressed his younger brother’s messy hair and cleaned his eyes with his thumbs.

Luis looked at his mother, undecided.

“We can’t have dogs now,” she confirmed, smoking avidly. “Sometimes we don’t even have enough to eat ourselves.”

“Churro eats anything, almost nothing,” Ramón said, and instinctively lifted his shoulders to protect himself when a cannon rumbled in the distance. “A whole family could eat with what you spend on tobacco.”

“My cigarettes are not your problem. . Luis, run along with the dog, I need to speak with Ramón,” Caridad ordered, and walked toward an oak tree whose leaves had managed to resist the aggressive winter in the sierra.

Under the tree, Ramón smiled while he watched Luis frolicking with little Churro.

“Are you going to tell me why you came? Who sent you?”

“Kotov. He wants to make you an important proposition,” she said and again fixed him under the green glass of her gaze.

“Kotov is in Barcelona?”

“At the moment. He wants to know if you’re willing to work with him.”

“In the army?”

“No, on more important matters.”

“More important than the war?”

“Much more. This war can be won or it can be lost, but. .”

“What the hell are you saying? We can’t lose, Caridad. With what the Soviets are sending us and the people from the International Brigades, we’re going to fuck those fascists one by one. .”

“That would be great, but tell me. . Do you think we can win a war with the Trotskyists making signals to the fascists in the trenches next to them and with the anarchists taking combat orders to a vote?. . Kotov wants you to work on truly important things.”

“Important like what?”

An explosion shook the mountain, too close to where the three of them were. Instinct pushed Ramón to protect Caridad with his own body and they rolled around on the frozen ground.

“I’m going to go crazy. Don’t those bastards sleep?” he said, on his knees, as he shook the dust off one of the sleeves of Caridad’s cloak.

She stopped his hand and leaned over to pick up the smoking cigarette. Ramón helped her to stand up.

“Kotov thinks you’re a good Communist and that you could be useful in the rear guard.”

“Every day there are more Communists in Spain. Ever since the Soviets and their weapons arrived, the people have a different opinion of us.”

“Don’t believe that, Ramón. People are afraid of us; a lot of them don’t like us. This is a country of imbeciles, hypocritical bigots, and born fascists.”

Ramón watched as his mother exhaled cigarette smoke almost furiously.

“What does Kotov want me for?”

“I’ve already told you: something more important than firing a rifle in a trench full of water and shit.”

“I can’t imagine what he could want from me. . The fascists are moving forward, and if they take Madrid. .” Ramón shook his head, when he felt a slight pressure in his chest. “Shit, Caridad, if I didn’t know you, I would say that you talked to Kotov to get me away from the front. After what happened to Pablo—”

“But you do know me,” she cut him off. “Wars are won in many ways; you should know that. . Ramón, I want to be far away from here before the sun rises. I need an answer.”

Did he know her? Ramón looked at her and asked himself what was left of the refined and worldly woman with whom he, his brothers, and his father used to walk on Sunday afternoons through the Plaza de Cataluña in search of fashionable restaurants or the elegant Italian ice cream shop that had recently opened on the Paseo de Gracia: there was nothing left of that woman, he thought. Caridad was now an androgynous being who reeked of deeply embedded nicotine and sweat, talked like a political commissar, and only thought about the party’s missions, about the party’s politics, about the party’s struggles. Lost in his thoughts, the young man did not notice that, after the mortar explosion that had thrown them to the ground, a heavy silence had settled over the sierra as if the world, overcome by exhaustion and pain, had gone to sleep. Ramón, who had spent so much time submerged in the sounds of war, seemed to have lost the ability to listen to silence, and into his mind, already disturbed by the possibility of a return, floated a memory of the seething Barcelona that he had left a few months earlier, and the tempting image of the young woman who’d given his life a deep sense of meaning.

“Have you seen África? Do you know if she’s still working with the Soviets?” he asked, shamed by the persistence of a hormonal weakness that he could not shake off.

“You’re all talk, Ramón! You’re just as soft as your father,” Caridad said, taking aim at his vulnerable side. Ramón felt that he could hate his mother, but he had to admit she was right: África was an addiction pursuing him.

“I asked you if she was still in Barcelona.”

“Yes, yes. . She’s going around with the advisers. I saw her at La Pedrera a few days ago.”

Ramón noticed that Caridad’s cigarettes were French, very perfumed, so different from the stinky cigarettes that his battalion mates gave him.

“Give me a cigarette.”

“Keep them. .” She handed him the pack. “Ramón, would you be able to give up that woman?”

He had felt that a question like that was coming and that it would be the most difficult one to answer.

“What is it that Kotov wants?” he persisted, evading the response.

“I’ve already told you: that you give up everything that we’ve been told for centuries is important, only to enslave us.”

Ramón felt like he was listening to África. It was as if Caridad’s words spilled forth from the same Kremlin tower, from the same pages of Das Kapital from which África’s came. And it was only then that he became conscious of the silence that had been surrounding them for several minutes. Caridad was África, África was Caridad, and the sacrifice of his entire past was demanded of him now as a duty, while that painful and fragile silence rested on his consciousness, feeding the fear that in the next minute his body could be broken by the mortar, the bullet, or the grenade lying in wait and destined to destroy his existence. Ramón understood that he feared the silence more than the perverse rumblings of the war, and he wished to be far from the place. Without knowing that his life hung on those few words, it was then that he said:

“Yes, tell him yes.”

Caridad smiled. She took her son’s face and, with treacherous precision, planted a long kiss on the corner of his mouth. Ramón felt the woman’s saliva mix with his, but he couldn’t find the taste of aniseed now, not even of the gin that she’d drunk the last time she kissed him; he only received the sickening sweetness of tobacco and the fermented acidity of her heartburn.

“In a few days, you’ll be called to Barcelona. We’ll be waiting for you. Your life is going to change, Ramón. A lot,” she said, and shook the dirt off of herself. “I’m leaving now. The sun is rising.”

As if it were nothing, Ramón spit, turning his head, and lit a cigarette. He walked behind Caridad toward the car, from which Luis emerged with Churro in his arms.

“Let go of the dog and say goodbye to Ramón.”

Luis obeyed her and again hugged his brother.

“We’ll see each other soon in Barcelona. I’ll take you to sign up for the Youth Brigades. You’ve already turned fourteen, right?”

Luis smiled.

“And will you sign me up for the army? All the Communists have gone to the People’s Army. .”

“Don’t rush, Luisillo.” Ramón smiled and hugged him tight. Over the kid’s head he noticed Caridad’s gaze, lost once again. He avoided the unease caused by his mother’s eyes and, in the day’s first light, made out El Escorial’s stony and hostile silhouette.

“Look, Luisito, El Escorial. I’m on the other side, up that slope.”

“And is it always this cold?”

“Cold enough to freeze your skin off.”

“We’re leaving. Get in, Luis,” Caridad interrupted her sons, and Luis, after saying goodbye to Ramón with the militiamen’s salute, went around the car to get in the passenger seat.

“If you see África, tell her I’ll be there soon,” Ramón almost whispered.

Caridad opened the car door but stopped and closed it again.

“Ramón, it goes without saying that this conversation should remain a secret. From this moment on, get it into your head that being willing to give up everything is not a slogan, it’s a way of life.” The young man saw his mother open her military cloak and take out a gleaming Browning. Caridad took a few steps and, without looking at her son, asked, “Are you sure you can do it?”

“Yes,” Ramón said just as a bomb explosion illuminated the distant mountainside, and as Caridad, with weapon in hand, placed Churro in her sights and, not giving her son any time to react, shot him in the head. The animal rolled, pushed by the force of the bullet, and its corpse began to freeze in the cold dawn of the Sierra de Guadarrama.

Winters in Sant Feliu de Guíxols had always been misty, prone to storms that came down from the Pyrenees. Summers, by contrast, are a gift of nature. The rock that rises from the sea forms a mountain that opens up there in a cove of coarse sand, and the water tends to be clearer than anywhere else on the coast of Empordà. In the 1920s, only fishermen and some faithless hermits lived in Sant Feliu, the first fugitives from urban life and modernity. But in summer Barcelona’s wealthy families, the owners of beach houses and mountain cabins, appeared. The Mercader clan was one of the fortunate ones, thanks to the textile business that had received a second wind during the Great War.

His father’s family, related to the local nobility, had accumulated wealth through several generations; like good Catalans, they had been devoted to commerce and industry; Caridad’s family were the owners of a castle in San Miguel de Aras, near Santander, and were colonists who returned from Cuba before the disaster of 1898; they had returned with their fortune in ruins, since part of it had been lost with the blacks they had to free when the end of slavery was declared on the island. Although Pau, Ramón’s father, was several years older than Caridad, in the boy’s eyes they were an enviable couple who shared a passion for horses, like good aristocrats, and just to see them take their horses out to trot, one knew they were excellent riders, she the more talented one.

That summer of 1922 was the first and only one in which the family enjoyed an entire month of sun, beach, and freedom in that cove that their memory would store as the epitome of happiness. Just two years later, when his life began its own winding path, Ramón would learn that his always budget-minded father’s decision to exchange the summer visit to the stone castle of San Miguel for the privacy of the rented house on the Empordà coast was rooted not in his children’s possible enjoyment but rather in the attempt to bring about the repair of something that was already beginning to be unsalvageable: his relationship with his wife.

It was in Sant Feliu de Guíxols that summer that his parents clung to the vestiges of their married life, and it must have been there that they conceived Luis, born in the spring of the following year. A long time later, Ramón would find out that that act of love must have been like the remains of the wave that breaks on the shore to immediately retreat into unreachable depths. Because something unstoppable had begun to grow inside of Caridad before she had conceived his younger brother: hate, a destructive hate that would always pursue her and that not only would give meaning to her own life but would also change the lives of every one of her sons to the point of devastation.

A few months before, with the latent fear caused by anything that brought him closer with his mother, Ramón had dared to ask her about the red bumps standing out on the extremely white skin of her arms and she had barely responded that she was sick. But soon enough, when the storm was unleashed and the bourgeois house in Sant Gervasi was filled with screaming and fighting, he would know that the marks had been made by the needles she used to inject herself with the heroin that she had become addicted to in a parallel life, one that she led at night, beyond the pleasant walls of the family home.

Many years later, on a Mexican night in August 1940, Ramón would hear from Caridad’s lips that it was her respectable, enterprising, and Catholic husband himself who had urged her to take the first step toward the downward spiral from which she would be rescued, after having suffered many humiliations and received an infinite number of blows, by the supreme ideal of the socialist revolution. Pau Mercader, thinking that he would help her overcome the sexual reluctance she had felt ever since they married, had invited her to accompany him to certain exclusive brothels in Barcelona where it was possible to enjoy the sight of the most daring sexual acrobatics through special windows. Here a man and a woman could participate, or two couples, or a man with two women or even three, or two women alone, all experts in erotic positions and fantasies, the men endowed with penises of an exaggerated size, and the women trained to receive natural or artificial objects of disproportionate dimensions in any of their orifices. The results of this experiment met his father’s expectations very poorly, since it caused Caridad to reject his sexual demands even more forcefully, although she took a liking to certain spirits served in those mauve-curtained, dimly lit dens, liqueurs that took away her inhibitions and, at the end of the night, allowed her to open her legs almost as a reflex. A while later, in search of those elixirs, she had begun to frequent the city’s most select bars, many times without her husband, who was increasingly called away by his absorbing business. But soon Caridad would feel that those places had an excess of that which she wasn’t seeking (men willing to inebriate her to throw her in bed) and something, still undefined, was lacking, something capable of motivating her and reconciling her with her own soul.

Then that fine woman, surrounded by luxury and comfort from birth, educated by nuns, an expert rider of Arabian horses, married to that owner of factories who was, by his very nature, removed from the feelings of men who worked for their wealth, removed her jewels and attractive clothing and descended in search of the shadiest corners of the city. She felt another world with her hands when she decided to walk the streets of the Barrio Chino, the darkest plazas of the Raval, the narrow and fetid alleyways near the port. There, as she tasted less sophisticated and more effective alcohol, she discovered a dark humanity, weighed down by frustration and hate, who tended to speak in a language that was new to her about things as tremendous as the need to do away with all religions or to turn the bourgeois, exploitative order — that enemy of man’s dignity, that world from which she herself came — upside down. The anarchist fury, of which she had only a vague notion up until that moment, was like a blow that shook every cell in her body.

With her libertarian friends and the underclass from the ports and the red-light district, Caridad had tried heroin, paid for by her generous purse, and found in its iconoclasm a hidden satisfaction that gave life a more attractive flavor. She rediscovered sex, on a different level and with other ingredients, and practiced it in a primitive way whose existence she had never imagined in her sad married life: she enjoyed it with stevedores, sailors, textile workers, streetcar drivers, and professional agitators, for whom she also bought drinks and heroin with her husband’s money. It satisfied her to prove that among those rebels one’s origins and level of education didn’t matter: she was welcomed among them, since she was a companion willing to break the rules and to free herself from the chains of bourgeois society.

Despite the fact that the four children conceived in her womb were already sleeping in her house, it was in the midst of that vertigo of new feelings and recently learned libertarian sermons that Caridad became conscious of the hate eating away at her and she finally turned into an adult woman. She never knew for certain to what point she shared the anarchists’ ideas out of conviction or out of rebellion, but after getting mixed up with them, she realized that she was working for her own physical and spiritual liberation. On occasion, she even thought that she was taking delight in her degradation because of the disdain she felt for herself and toward everything her life had been and could continue to be. But whether it was out of conviction or hate, Caridad had gone down that path in a way that, from then on, would always be thus: with a fanatical and uncontainable force. To prove it, or perhaps to prove it to herself, she decided to cross her greatest frontiers and, along with her new comrades, planned her absurd class suicide: first she worked with them to promote strikes in the shops belonging to Pau, whom she had turned into the very incarnation of the bourgeois enemy; later, in her spiral of hate, she began to prepare something more irreversible, and with the group of her companions planned the blowing up of one of the factories that the family had in Badalona.

At barely ten years of age, Ramón had no notion of what was happening underneath the family’s surface. Enrolled in one of the city’s most expensive schools, he lived carefree, focusing his free time on physical activities, preferring them to the intellectual tasks that had been practiced in his house since birth where, at established hours, they spoke in four languages: French, English, Castilian Spanish, and Catalan. Perhaps something deeply rooted in his character already existed then, since his best friends were not his classmates or his sports rivals but rather his two dogs, gifts from his maternal grandfather when the boy showed proof of a special weakness for those animals. Santiago and Cuba, baptized by his expatriate grandfather with nostalgic names, had come from Cantabria as mere puppies and the relationship that Ramón established with them was intimate. On Sundays, after Mass, and in the afternoons on which he came home early from school, the boy used to go beyond the city limits in the company of his two Labradors, with whom he shared crackers, long runs, and his predilection for silence. He barely saw his parents. Increasingly, Caridad slept all day and went out in the evening to take up her social life, as she called the nocturnal outings from which she returned with new red bumps on her arms. His father, meanwhile, either stayed at his office very late, trying to salvage his business from the collapse caused by his older brother’s indolence, or enclosed himself in his rooms without any intention of seeing or talking to anyone. In any event, home life continued to be calm, and the dogs even made it satisfactory.

When the police showed up at the Sant Gervasi house, they had two options for Caridad’s fate: jail for being accused of planning attacks against private property, or the insane asylum as a drug addict. Her comrades in arms and debauchery were already behind bars by that time, but Pau’s social position and both of their family names had influenced the police’s decision. In addition, one of Caridad’s brothers, who was a municipal judge in the city, had intervened on her behalf, saying she was a sick woman without any will of her own, manipulated by the diabolical anarchists and syndicalists who were the enemies of order. In an effort to save his own prestige and whatever remained of his bourgeois and Christian marriage, Pau obtained a less radical solution and promised that his wife would no longer frequent the anarchist circles nor take drugs, and he gave his word (and surely some good money) as a guarantee.

Two months later, with the detoxification treatment which Caridad had agreed to undergo completed, the family left for that vacation in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, where they experienced days that came close to happiness and perfect harmony, and Ramón kept them that way in his recollections, where they became his memory’s greatest treasure.

As Caridad’s womb swelled, the family went on with its peaceful routine of daily living. Pau’s business, however, could barely recover in the middle of the crisis brought about by breaking with his dissolute older brother and the workers’ mounting demands. Luis, who would be the last of the brothers, was born in 1923, shortly before Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship began and in the midst of the truce that Caridad would break a year later: because hate is one of the most difficult illnesses to cure and she had become more addicted to revenge than to heroin.

Caridad would go back to her anarchists’ world in a peculiar way. Her brother José, the judge, had confessed that he was experiencing serious financial problems due to some gambling debts that would end his career if they became public knowledge. Caridad promised to help him monetarily in exchange for information: he needed to tell her who the judges would be in the courtrooms where her detained anarchist friends would be tried. With these facts, other colleagues waged an intimidation campaign on the judges, who received letters threatening them with a variety of reprisals if they dared to impose sentences on any libertarian. Pau Mercader quickly discovered the drain on his capital and understood where it was going. With the weakness that always characterized his relationship with Caridad, the man only took measures to ensure that she not have access to great sums and again concentrated on the businesses he was trying to maintain afloat from his new office on Calle Ample.

Upon seeing how her contribution to the cause was being obstructed, Caridad rebelled again: she went back to the brothels, where she drank and took drugs, and to the meetings in which she yelled for an end to the dictatorship, the monarchy, the bourgeois order, and the disintegration of the state and its retrograde institutions. Her brother José planned the most honorable way out with Pau and they managed to have Caridad committed to an insane asylum by a doctor friend.

Fifteen years later, Caridad would describe to Ramón the two months in which she lived in that inferno of cold showers, confinement, injections, brainwashing, and other devastating therapies. That they would try to drive her crazy was something that still enraged her to the point of aggression; and if they didn’t achieve it, it was because Caridad had the luck that her anarchist colleagues came to save her from that prison, threatening to bring down Pau’s business and even the asylum itself if they didn’t set her free. The coercion worked and Pau was forced to bring his wife back; she entered the house in Sant Gervasi only to collect her five children and some suitcases with necessities; where she was going, she didn’t know, but she would not again live near her husband or any of their families, upon whom, she swore, she would take revenge until she made them disappear from the face of the earth.

Facing the evidence that nothing was going to stop her, Pau begged her not to take the children. What was she going to do with five kids? How was she going to maintain them? And above all, since when did she love them so much that she couldn’t live without them? Perhaps it was another form of revenge against her husband, who professed a distant and silent affection for them, since he didn’t know how to be any other way; perhaps she took them in search of some spiritual support; perhaps it was because she already dreamed of making each of them into what they would be in the future. The fact is that, resolved as she was to take her children with her, no pleading made her change her mind.

Everything that would happen from that moment on would take on a sense of novelty and adventure. Ramón, who was already accustomed to Caridad’s crises, accepted the move as a passing tempest and only regretted having to leave Cuba and Santiago, but he calmed down when their cook assured him that she would take care of them until he returned.

In the spring of 1925, with her children in tow, Caridad crossed the French border. Although her purpose was to reach Paris, the woman decided to make a stop in the pleasant city of Dax, perhaps because at that moment she felt unsure of herself, as if she needed to redesign the map of her life, or because she had convinced herself that destroying the system and raising five children at the same time can be more complicated than it appears, especially when — one of the paradoxes of life — you don’t have enough money.

Shortly after arriving in Dax, Ramón and his siblings, with the exception of Luis the baby, entered a public school and Caridad began to look for political company, which she quickly found, since anarchists and syndicalists were everywhere. To keep herself afloat, she began to sell her jewels, but the rate of expenditure imposed by nights out at taverns, cigarettes, a pinch here or there of heroin, and good meals (only a Communist can be hungrier and have less money than an anarchist, Caridad declared) became unsustainable.

For Ramón, this period was an initiation into an apprenticeship that would begin to redefine him. He had just turned twelve; until then he’d been a boy enrolled in exclusive schools, raised in abundance, and suddenly, from one day to the next, he had fallen, if not into poverty, at least into a world much closer to reality, where coins were counted out for snacks and beds remained unmade if one didn’t make them oneself. Small Montse, who was ten, was charged with caring for and feeding Luis, while Pablo had taken on the nuisance of cleaning. Jorge and Ramón, because they were the oldest, were responsible for shopping and, very shortly after, for preparing the meals that would save them from dying of hunger when Caridad didn’t come home on time or returned from her political activities drugged. His friends in Dax were the children of poor villagers and Spanish immigrants, with whom he enjoyed going into the nearby woods to collect truffles, guided by pigs. In that period, Ramón also learned to feel the burn of a cold stare on his skin from the small city’s young bourgeois citizens.

After asking for reports from Barcelona, the Dax police decided that they did not want Caridad in the area and, without further thought, demanded that the family go on their way. So they had to pack their bags again and go to Toulouse, a much larger city, where she thought she could pass unnoticed. There, both to avoid police repression and because she was convinced that her jewels would not cover much more, Caridad began to work as the hostess of a restaurant, since she had the manners and education for the job. Thanks to the owners of that place, who quickly took to the children, Jorge and Ramón were able to enter the École Hotelière de Toulouse, the former to study to be a chef, Ramón to be a maître d’hôtel, and the stability they regained made them embrace the illusion that they would once again be a normal family.

Caridad had definitely not been born to seat the bourgeoisie at tables and smile at them as she suggested entrées. Full of the fury of total revolution and hate for the system, her life seemed miserable to her, a waste of the energies demanded by the fight for freedom. Although the incident was never clarified, Ramón spent his whole life thinking that the massive poisoning of the restaurants’ customers that happened one night could only have been engineered by his mother. Fortunately, no one died, and doubts about the intentionality and, as such, the authorship of the attack were never clarified. But the owners of the business decided to let her go and the commissioner in charge of the case, with reasons enough to suspect Caridad, appeared at their house several days later and demanded that she disappear or he would put her in jail.

Even before the poisoning of the diners, Caridad lived in a stupor and swung like a pendulum from outbursts of enthusiasm or anger to depressive silences into which she fell for days. It was clear that her life, lacking firm ideological support, had lost sense and, when she saw herself deprived of the possibility of the struggle and demolition, she could only see before her a vicious circle of depression, anger, and frustration, with no way out. She then lost control and tried to kill herself by swallowing a handful of tranquilizers.

Jorge and Ramón found her only because they decided to go into her room at night to take her some food. The recollections that Ramón would keep of that moment were always hazy and one could almost think that they had acted on reflex, without stopping to reason. A desperate Ramón dragged her out of the bed, which was covered in excrement and piss. With the help of Jorge, who used a metal prosthetic because of the lingering effects of polio on one of his legs, he managed to drag her to the street. Without noticing her feet scraping over the cobblestones, without feeling the cold or the rain, they managed to take their mother to the avenue and get a taxi to the hospital.

Caridad never spoke of that episode and didn’t ever pronounce a word of gratitude for what her sons had done for her. For many years, Ramón would think that her silence was due to the shame caused by the evident weakness into which she had fallen — she, the woman who wanted to change the world. Besides, to add to her humiliation, when she left the hospital, Caridad had to accept that her husband, notified by the kids, would take responsibility for their custody: the only time Ramón saw his mother cry was the day on which she said goodbye to Jorge and him, to go with Pau and her small children to Barcelona.

In the midst of the storm of love and hate in which they lived for so many years, Caridad would never know, since Ramón never gave her the pleasure of confessing it, that in that moment, seeing her as she set off rescued by the very incarnation of what she most disdained, he had ceased to be a child. He was convinced that his mother was right: if one truly wanted to be free, one had to do something to change that filthy world that wounded people’s dignity. Very soon, Ramón would also learn that change would only come about if many embraced the same flag and, elbow to elbow, fought for it. The revolution had to be made.

4

“Today’s petrified crap. .” Lev Davidovich threw the newspaper against the wall and left his study. As he went down the stairs, he smelled the scent of goat stew that Natalia was preparing for dinner, and that appetizing aroma seemed obscene. Behind his desk he contemplated the beautiful Sara Weber, who was typing with a speed that at that moment seemed automatic, definitively inhuman. He crossed the door to the barren garden and the Turkish policemen smiled at him, willing to follow him, and he stopped them with a gesture. The men acted like they were following his wishes, but they did not let him out of their sight, since the order they received was too precise: their lives depended on the Exile not losing his.

The beauty of the month of April in Prinkipo barely affected him as he, followed by Maya, went down the dune that ended on the coast. He asked himself: What agony could grip the brain of a sensitive and effusive man like Mayakovsky to make him voluntarily decline the aroma of the stew, the magic of a sunset, under the gaze of feminine charms, to shut himself up in the irreversible silence of death? And he walked along the shore to observe his dog’s elegant trot, a gift of nature that also seemed offensively harmonious.

Three years earlier, when they were on the verge of banishing him from Moscow and his good friend Yoffe had shot himself in the hopes that his act would cause a commotion capable of moving the party’s conscience and preventing the catastrophic expulsion of Lev Davidovich and his comrades, he had thought that the drama of the act made sense in the political struggle, even though he didn’t approve of such an exit. But the news he had recently read had shaken him due to the magnitude of the mental castration enclosed in its message. How far had mediocrity and perversion gone for the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky — Mayakovsky of all people — to decide to evade its tentacles by taking his own life? Today’s petrified crap that so alarmed the poet in his final verses, had it overcome him to the point of suicide? The official note drafted in Moscow could not have been more offensive to the memory of the artist who had fought for a new and revolutionary art with the most enthusiasm, the one who had, with the most fervor, handed over to the spirit of a completely new society his poetry laden with screams, chaos, broken harmonies, and triumphant slogans; the one who had most insisted on resisting, on withstanding, the suspicions and pressures with which the bureaucracy besieged the Soviet intelligentsia. The note spoke of a “decadent feeling of personal failure,” and since in the rhetoric implanted in the country the word “decadence” was applied to bourgeois art, society, and life, by making the failure “personal,” they were reaffirming with calculated cruelty that individual condition that could only exist in the bourgeois artist that, they usually said, every creator always carries within, like original sin, no matter how revolutionary he claims he is. The death of the writer, they clarified, didn’t have anything to do with his “social and literary activities,” as if it were possible to separate Mayakovsky from actions that were no more and no less than his very way of breathing.

Something all too malignant and repellent had to have been unleashed in Soviet society if its most fervent spokespeople were beginning to shoot bullets into their own hearts, disgusted before the nausea caused by today’s petrified crap. That suicide was, as Lev Davidovich knew well, the dramatic confirmation that more turbulent times had begun, that the last embers of the marriage of convenience between the revolution and art had gone out, with the predictable sacrifice of art: times in which a man like Mayakovsky, disciplined even to the point of self-annihilation, could feel the disdain of those in power boring into the back of his head, those for whom poets and poetry were aberrations on whom they could perhaps rely to reaffirm their preeminence and whom they could do without when they didn’t need them.

Lev Davidovich recalled that many years before he’d written that history had conquered Tolstoy, but had not broken him. To the end, that genius had been able to maintain his precious gift for moral indignation and thus directed his cry of “I cannot be silent!” against the aristocracy. But Mayakovsky, forcing himself to be a believer, had remained silent and thus ended up broken. He lacked the courage to go into exile when others did so; to stop writing when others broke their pens. He insisted on offering his poetry to political activity and sacrificed his art and his own spirit with that gesture; he pushed himself so much to be an exemplary militant that he had to commit suicide to become a poet again. Mayakovsky’s silence was a harbinger of other silences that were as painful or more so, in all certainty, to come in the future: the political intolerance invading society would not rest until it suffocated it. “As they suffocated the poet, they are trying to smother me,” the Exile would write, stranded next to the oppressive Sea of Marmara that had been surrounding him for a year already.

To the end of his days, Lev Davidovich would remember his first weeks of Turkish exile as a blind transit through which he had to move, feeling his way against walls in constant motion. The first thing that surprised him was that the GPU agents in charge of overseeing his deportation, in addition to giving him $1,500 that they said they owed him for his work, maintained a pleasant attitude toward him despite the fact that, once they had crossed into Turkish waters, he had sent a message to President Kemal Pasha Ataturk advising him that he was settling in Turkey only because he was forced to do so. Afterward, it was the diplomats from the Soviet legation in Istanbul who were as cordial as they would have only been to a first-class guest sent by their government. Because of that, in the face of so much faked kindness, he was not surprised when the European newspapers, encouraged by the rumors spread by Moscow’s ubiquitous men, speculated that perhaps Trotsky had been sent to Turkey by Stalin to foment revolution in the Near East.

Convinced that silence and passivity could be his worst enemies, he decided to take action, and while he insisted on applying for visas from various countries (the president of the German Reichstag had spoken of his country’s willingness to offer him a “freedom asylum”), he wrote an essay, published by some Western newspapers, in which he clarified the conditions of his exile, denounced the persecution and the jailing of his followers in the Soviet Union, and declared Stalin, publicly for the first time, the Grave Digger of the Revolution.

The change in attitude of diplomats and policemen was immediate and, curiously, coincided with the arrival of new refusals to house him from Norway and Austria, and with the news of what was happening in Berlin, where Ernst Thälmann and the Communists loyal to Moscow had started an uproar against the renegade’s possible acceptance there. Expelled without the least consideration from the Soviet consulate and divested of all protection, the Trotskys had to lodge at a small hotel in Istanbul, where their lives were exposed to the predictable aggressions of their enemies, red and white. Even so, as soon as they arrived, Lev Davidovich sent a telegram to Berlin with which he burned the last ship in which he had entrusted his luck: “I interpret silence as a very disloyal refusal.” But he had no sooner sent it off when it seemed insufficient and he reinforced his position with a last message to the Reichstag: “I am very sorry that the possibility is denied to me to study in practice the advantages of the democratic right to asylum.”

The dawn of spring surprised them in that dismal hostel of cracked and dirty walls where they were lodging. Although he didn’t have the foggiest idea what his next steps could be, Lev Davidovich decided to take advantage of the season and get to know the exultant Istanbul in his spare time. But not even the discovery of an exquisite world that went back to the very origins of civilization could manage to shake him out of the pessimistic lethargy into which he had fallen and which made him feel like a stranger to himself: Lev Davidovich Trotsky needed a sword and a battlefield.

A few weeks later he accepted, without much enthusiasm, his wife and his son’s proposal to travel around the Sea of Marmara to the Prinkipo islands. The small volcanic archipelago, an hour and a half from the capital, had been the refuge of dethroned Ottoman princes and the place in which, in 1919, a peace conference to end the Russian civil war had been proposed. Lev Davidovich would use that journey to take his mind off things, sunbathe, and taste the delicate Turkish pastries known as pochas and pides of which Natalia had become a fan. Two young Trotsky sympathizers whom his friend Alfred Rosmer had sent from France a few days before traveled with them to guarantee a minimum of security.

The small steamboat sailed at nine in the morning. Covered in hats, they occupied the prow and enjoyed the scenery that Istanbul’s two halves offered. Lev Davidovich, nonetheless, tried to look beyond the buildings, the pointed churches, the convex mosques; he tried to look for himself in that city in which he did not have a single friend or a trustworthy follower. And he didn’t find himself. He felt that, at that exact moment, his exile was beginning — true, complete, without any support. Aside from his family and a very few friends who had reiterated their solidarity, he was a man who was overwhelmingly alone. His only useful allies for a battle like the one he had to initiate (how? where?) were still confined in work camps or had already given in, but all of them remained within the borders of the Soviet Union, and his relationship with them was snuffed out by distance, repression, and fear.

Every time he evoked that seemingly pleasant morning, Lev Davidovich would remember that he had felt the urgent need to press Natalia Sedova’s hand in his to feel human warmth close to him, to not suffocate from the anxiety caused by the threatening sensation of loss. But he would also remember that at that moment, he had confirmed his decision that, although he was alone, his duty was to fight. If the revolution for which he had fought was prostituting itself in the dictatorship of a czar dressed up as a Bolshevik, then he would have to rip it out by the roots and replant it, because the world needs true revolutions. That decision, he was well aware, would bring him closer to the death that was pursuing him from the Kremlin’s watchtowers. Death, nonetheless, could only be considered an inevitable eventuality: Lev Davidovich had always thought that, since individual sacrifice is often the firewood burned in the pyre of the revolution, the lives of one, ten, one hundred, one thousand men could and even should be devoured if the social tornado demanded it in order to reach its transformative ends. So he laughed when certain newspapers insisted on mentioning his “personal tragedy.” What tragedy were they referring to? he would write. In the superhuman process of the revolution, there was no room for personal tragedies. His tragedy, if anything, was knowing that in his struggle he didn’t have any fellow believers at hand who’d been forged in the ovens of the revolution, nor the economic means and, less still, a party. But he still had what had always been his best weapon: the pen, the same one that had spread his ideas in the contributions he made to Iskra and that, during his first round of exile, had led him to the heart of the struggle on that night in 1901 in which he received the message capable of locating his life as a fighter right in the vortex of history: his pen had been called for at Iskra’s headquarters in London, where he was expected by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, already known as Lenin.

With a wave of his hand, Liova commented that the fishermen’s village visible on the coast was called Büyükada, and the young man’s words brought him back to the reality of an islet covered by pines and dotted with some white buildings. It was then that, tempting fate, he asked if they could disembark there to have lunch: almost without thinking, he added that he liked that place, since it was undoubtedly a calm enough place to write in and had good fishing to test his muscles. Natalia Sedova, who knew him like no one else, watched him and smiled: “What are you thinking, Liovnochek?”

The woman would find out just a week later and be happy: they were going to live in Büyükada, the largest of the islets in the archipelago of exiled princes.

It had not been hard to find the right house to fit their needs and pockets. Built atop a small promontory, about six hundred feet from the dock, its two levels seemed to reach higher and to place historic Propontis at the disposal of its inhabitants. They also appreciated the fact that the building was surrounded by a dense hedge that facilitated security, the responsibility of two policemen sent by the government and some young Frenchmen, fellows of his follower Raymond Molinier. In reality, the villa, the property of an old Turkish Baha’i, was as run-down as its owner, and Natalia Sedova was forced to roll up her sleeves to make it inhabitable. Between all of them — including policemen, watchmen, and even passing journalists — they cleaned, painted, and equipped the furnished spaces that were necessary to eat, sleep, and work. The temporary nature of their settlement in that refuge could be seen in the absence of any objects meant to make it beautiful; there wasn’t even a simple rosebush in the garden: “To plant a single seed in this land would be to accept defeat,” Lev Davidovich had warned his wife, since he still had his mind focused on the centers of battle to which, sooner or later, he thought he would manage to gain access.

Throughout that first year of exile, the most tiresome task facing those guards charged with the revolutionary’s security had been to deal with the journalists intent on getting a scoop, that of welcoming editors from around the world (who had offered contracts for various books and made generous advances capable of alleviating the family’s economic difficulties) and verifying that the followers and friends who began to arrive were who they said they were. At the margin of these interferences, life on an island lost to history, inhabited throughout most of the year only by fishermen and sheepherders, seemed so primitive and slow that any outside presence was immediately detected. And although he was a prisoner, Lev Davidovich had felt almost happy for having found that place where a car had never driven and where things were transported as they were twenty-five centuries before, on the back of a donkey.

Barely settled, the Exile began to prepare his counteroffensive and decided that the first necessity was to unite the opposition outside the Soviet Union, although he would soon discover the extent to which Stalin had anticipated this, tasking his peons in the Communist International with converting Trotsky’s person and ideas into the specter of the revolution’s greatest enemy. As could be expected, there were few European Communists who dared to adopt the “Trotskyist” heresy, especially when it didn’t seem to offer any practical advantages and, soon, would lead to immediate excommunication from the party and even from the ranks of revolutionary fighters. Nonetheless, Lev Davidovich insisted, and he unloaded on the shoulders of his son Liova the organization of the oppositionist movement while he focused on working personally with the most noteworthy followers. The rest of the time he would spend writing an autobiography he had begun in Alma-Ata and gathering information for a planned History of the Russian Revolution.

Among the visitors he received in those initial months were his old comrades Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, the ever politically complicated Pierre Naville and Boris Souvarine, and the impulsive Raymond Molinier, who, with the same enthusiasm with which he would embark on a summer excursion, had dragged along his wife, Jeanne, and his brother Henri. But the first to arrive, as could be expected, had been his good friends Maurice and Magdeleine Paz, whom he had not seen since the Trotskys were expelled from France in the middle of the Great War. The couple’s arrival, weighed down with French cheeses, brought a breath of happiness wrapped in the certainty of a freedom that allowed them the luxury of welcoming old comrades. Throughout the year of deportation in Alma-Ata, the Pazes had been their representatives in Paris and had traveled to Prinkipo to update their accounts and duties and to reconfirm their unshakable solidarity.

One of the conversations they had with the Pazes would take on a strange dimension a few months later when Stalin broke the sacred blood barrier. It had taken place on an afternoon in early May, when Natalia, Liova, Maurice, Magdeleine, and Lev Davidovich, with Maya the dog running ahead, had gone down to the coast to enjoy the afternoon breeze with a carafe of Greek red wine while the Turkish policemen prepared a seafood-based dinner in the Ottoman fashion, seasoned with spices. Due to his excessive exertions in setting up the villa, Lev Davidovich was suffering from a lumbago attack that barely allowed him to make headway on the many writings he was engaged in. After the first glasses of wine, the Pazes had given free rein to their enthusiasm over the possibility of being able to fight alongside the mythical Lev Trotsky. It pleased them that the Exile who was watching the sunset with them in Prinkipo in 1929 was not the same man to whom they had bid goodbye in Paris in 1916, when he moved with an exalted voice but without a specific role in the clandestine movement on whose success very few were betting. Now they said that he was the Exile, known around the world as Lenin’s companion, the leader of the October uprising, the victorious commissar of war and creator of the Red Army, the cheerleader of the Third International, which he had founded with Vladimir Ilyich. Even Maurice, perhaps convinced that his host was in need of encouragement, reminded him that he had been at a height from which it was impossible to descend, from which he was not allowed to withdraw, and he spent his time exalting his historical responsibility, since no Marxist, with perhaps the exception of Lenin, had ever had so much moral authority, as a theorist and as a fighter. And he had concluded: “Your rival is History, not that upstart Stalin who will fall at any moment under the weight of his own ambitions. .”

The Exile tried to downplay that historic greatness, reminding his interlocutor that, besides his back pain, he had nothing else behind him. The hostility surrounding him was infinite and powerful and his main conflict was with a revolution that he had led to triumph and with a state that he had helped to found: that reality was tying one of his two hands.

Despite praises like these and the proofs of affection that arrived with his correspondence every day, Lev Davidovich knew that those followers did not have the scars that can only be left by real combat. Because of that, he silently entrusted the future of his battle to the deportations of oppositionists that Stalin would undoubtedly order; the tempering of those men forged by repression, torture, and confinement, with their convictions unaltered, would strengthen the movement.

The arrival of summer would break the island’s peaceful charm with the noisy and vulgar arrival of businessmen and government employees from Istanbul with the economic means to withdraw to Prinkipo, but not enough to travel to Paris and London. Confined to his house, Lev Davidovich had managed to make a final push in the work in which he reviewed his life, despite not having been able to escape the disappointment he felt as he received news of the orgy of surrenders through which the opposition groups were dragged by their most important leaders. From the recently founded Bulletin Oppozitsii, which they started to edit in Paris, and through the messages filtered to the interior of the Soviet Union in the most incredible ways, he focused on warning his comrades that Stalin would try to make them give up their positions with political promises that he would never keep (Lenin used to say that his specialty was breaking promises) and announcements of rectifications that he would not execute, since they implied the acceptance of compromises that the man from the mountains would never recognize. To those who surrendered, he wrote that Stalin would only admit them into Moscow when they showed up on their knees, willing to recognize that Stalin was always right, and never them, he wrote.

That stream of surrenders convinced Lev Davidovich that his war seemed to be lost, at least within the Soviet Union. Stalin’s sudden about-face, after appropriating the opposition’s economic program and forcing his former rivals to declare themselves supporters of the strategy that was now presented as Stalinist, sealed the political failure that wrote its most regrettable chapter with the surrender of men who, with hands and feet tied, had started to ask themselves why they needed to keep enduring deportations and submitting their family members to the cruelest pressures in order to defend some ideals that, at the end of the day, had already been imposed. The most painful proof of the fall of the opposition had been the announcement that brilliant men like Radek, Smilga, and Preobrazhensky had demonstrated their willingness to reconcile themselves with Stalin’s line, declaring that there was nothing reprehensible about it, once the great objectives for which they had fought had been achieved. Especially despicable to him was the attitude of Radek, who had declared himself an enemy of Trotsky’s ever since the latter had published articles in the imperialist press. The saddest thing was knowing that, with this surrender, those revolutionaries were falling into the category of the semi-forgiven. Presided over by Zinoviev, these men would live in fear of saying a single word out loud, of having an opinion, and would be forced to slither along, turning their heads to watch their shadows.

The most vivid news about the state of the opposition would come to Büyükada through an unexpected channel. It happened at the beginning of August and its messenger was that ghost from the past called Yakov Blumkin.

Blumkin had sent him a message from Istanbul, begging for a meeting. According to his note, the young man was on his way back from India, where he had carried out a counterintelligence mission, and he wished to see him to reiterate his respect and support. Natalia Sedova, when she found out about Blumkin’s desires, had asked her husband not to see him: a meeting with the former terrorist, now a high-ranking GPU officer, could only bring about disgrace. Liova had also expressed his doubts about the usefulness of that meeting, although he’d offered to serve as a mediator in order to keep Blumkin far from the island. But Lev Davidovich thought that they should hear what that man wanted, linked as he was to Lev Davidovich ever since the latter exercised the most dramatic of all his powers: that of letting Blumkin live or sending him to his death.

Twelve years before, when the newly made commissar of war Lev Trotsky had called for him in his office, Blumkin was a callow youth — like a character out of Dostoyevsky — who faced charges that the military tribune would penalize with a death sentence. That young man had been one of two militants in the social-revolutionary party that had tried to kill the German ambassador in Moscow with the intention of discrediting the disputed peace with Germany that the Bolsheviks had signed in Brest-Litovsk at the beginning of 1918. The evening before the trial, after reading some poems written by the young man, Lev Davidovich had asked to meet with him. That night they spoke for hours about Russian and French poetry (they shared an admiration for Baudelaire) and about the irrationality of terrorist methods (if a bomb could solve everything, what was the good of parties, of class struggle?), at the end of which Blumkin had written a letter in which he regretted his action and promised, if he was forgiven, to serve the revolution on any front to which he was assigned. The influence of the powerful commissar was decisive enough to pardon his life, while the German government was informed by official means that the terrorist had been executed. That day Yakov Blumkin’s second life had begun, thanks to Lev Trotsky.

During the civil war, Blumkin had stood out as a counterintelligence agent, something which earned him decorations, promotions, and even militancy in the Bolshevik Party. Considered a traitor by his former comrades, he miraculously escaped two attempts on his life. In the final months of the war, as he recovered from the wounds from the second attempt, he was an adviser to Lev Davidovich, who recommended him to the military academy upon seeing his aptitude. His capacity for espionage missions would lead him to the world of intelligence, and for many years he had shined as one of the stars of the secret service, for whom he still worked despite the fact that everyone, even the GPU’s highest leader, knew that, because of his devotion to Trotsky, his political sympathies were with the opposition.

When Liova relayed the details of his meeting with Blumkin (the former terrorist had gone to India, and now to Turkey, to sell some very old Hasidic manuscripts in order to obtain funds for the government), Lev Davidovich was convinced that the secret agent still had the same affection for him as always. And despite all of Natalia Sedova’s precautions, he agreed to see him.

When Lev Davidovich saw the unmistakably Jewish face of little Yakov, as he used to call him, his large eyes sparkling with intelligence again, he felt a deep happiness infused with waves of nostalgia. They melted in a hug and Blumkin kissed his host’s face and lips many times, only to cry later, as he did on the night in which he had written the saving letter in the office of the powerful commissar of war.

The three visits that Blumkin made to Büyükada in the second week of August were like a reviving breath of air against the discouragement that was overcoming Lev Davidovich. Between evoking the past and news of the present, they laughed, cried, and argued (even about Mayakovsky and the lamentable state of Soviet poetry), and Blumkin, in addition to bringing him up-to-date about the desperate situation for the opposition inside the country, insisted on serving him as a courier during his imminent return to Moscow, since he thought that his work in intelligence had the mission of neutralizing enemies outside of the USSR, but was not incompatible with his oppositionist political ideas.

From the agent’s mouth, Lev Davidovich also heard Radek’s arguments to dramatize a surrender that, according to the young man, could only be a maneuver to gain time. Blumkin, showing his invincible capacity for loyalty, defended his friend Radek’s position, since he also thought that if it was possible to fight from within the party, it was better than doing so outside of it. Lev Davidovich confessed that he no longer trusted the abilities of a party that was led by a man like Stalin and in which Radek was active. But Blumkin was surprised at his pessimism and reminded him that it was he, Lev Trotsky, who could not become weak.

The young man’s departure left a void in the Exile that, weeks later, would be replaced by the malignant feeling of indignation caused by infidelities. The catalyst for the mood change had been a letter from the Pazes in which, following colder greetings than usual, the authors went right to the matter without further ado: “Don’t put too much stock in the weight of your own name,” began that paragraph with the air of an epitaph, which made the revolutionary face the evidence of his political ruin in an alarming way. “For five years, the communist press slandered you to the point that for the masses there is only a vague remembrance of you as the head of the Red Army, as the workers’ leader in October. With each passing day, your name means less, and the machinery that has been unleashed will end up devouring you after your name has been devoured.” Upon reading it for the third time, he had needed to clean his glasses, rubbing them with the edge of his Russian shirt, as if the lenses were truly responsible for the murky perception of words that sounded painful but true. When he stepped away from the window from where he had observed the garden taken over by weeds and, beyond, the oily shine of the former Propontis, he felt that not even his impermeable optimism nor his faith in the cause could remove him from the invasive feeling of solitude that seized him. How many setbacks had taken place in the span of just a few months so that Maurice and Magdeleine Paz would write him that letter poisoned with truths? How had reality come to insist on exchanging a discourse dedicated to the pride of a colossus for these reflections directed at the humiliation of a forgotten man?. . The most insulting thing about the letter was the fact that, just one month before, during their second visit to Prinkipo, the Pazes had not dared to confess to him their apprehensions and had left promising to work for the unity of French Trotskyists, amid whom, they had again confirmed, the Exile’s prestige and ideas had remained unscathed.

For weeks that letter floated around Lev Davidovich’s desk as a testament to what he didn’t want to wash his hands of but that he didn’t want to take care of either. Motivated by the calm brought by the approach of winter, he had focused on serious work and was immersed in the writing of his History of the Russian Revolution. At some point, Natalia Sedova had even told him to answer that letter once and for all and he had made excuses.

Prinkipo’s winter temperatures were nothing like the ones they had experienced the year before, in Alma-Ata. Barely covered with an old coat, Lev Davidovich had gotten used to enjoying the arrival of morning in his study as he drank coffee and contemplated how the dawn’s light filtered in through a silver veil that made the sea sparkle. That day he was ready to work on his History of the Russian Revolution, when Liova entered to pull him out of his deliberations: news had arrived from Moscow. As always, the feeling that something serious could have happened to a loved one wounded the Exile. Liova, as if he couldn’t make up his mind to speak, went to sit on the other side of the table so he would be in front of Lev Davidovich, who remained silent, convinced that he was going to hear something terrible. But his son’s words overwhelmed him. They had executed Blumkin.

Liova had to relay all of the details: there was no news about the agent because for two months he had been shut up in the depths of the Lubyanka, subject to interrogations by his secret police comrades. According to the Soviet informer, the detention had occurred following a denunciation by Radek, whom Blumkin himself had informed of his meetings with Trotsky. Radek, nonetheless, denied that he had betrayed him, and insisted that the GPU had found out on its own that Blumkin visited Trotsky and returned to the Soviet Union with correspondence for the oppositionists. No one knew the exact date on which he had been executed, Liova said.

Lev Davidovich noticed how a feeling of guilt invaded him. Natalia Sedova had been right: he should have never received the young man, since now it seemed clear that Stalin had made him go through Turkey because he knew Blumkin would try to see him and a meeting would allow him to teach the oppositionists a real lesson. But this time Stalin had gone too far: killing his rivals over political disputes was making the same mistake as the Jacobins and opening the revolution’s doors to revenge and fratricidal violence. One of the conditions always demanded by Lenin (who was not very compassionate when politics demanded it of him, he told Liova) was that blood should not run between them. Little Yakov’s death had to serve to stir the consciences of all the Communists obeying Stalin. Blumkin could be the Sacco and Vanzetti of their struggle, he told Liova, who stared at him. If the young man had felt compassion for his father for a moment, by then he must have already been reproaching himself.

When Liova left, Lev Davidovich, his eyes fixed on the sea, thought that he would regret for the rest of his life that his emotional weakness had prevented him from recognizing Blumkin’s presence in Turkey as the start of a sibylline game of chess organized by Stalin. With that spirit, he took a sheet of blank paper and set about to fulfill an outstanding obligation:

M. and Mme. Paz:

Today I’ve received news that highlights the pettiness of people like you, who are nothing more than parlor-room Bolsheviks and for whom the revolution is a pastime. You, who have not suffered repression, torture, or winter in the work camps, have the possibility of giving up the struggle when it doesn’t meet your expectations of success and prominence. But the true revolutionary is born when he subordinates his personal ambitions to an idea. Revolutionaries can be educated or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, but they cannot exist without will, without devotion, without the spirit of sacrifice. And as those qualities do not exist in you, I am grateful to you for having so diligently stepped out of the way.

L. D. Trotsky

In that first year of exile, Lev Davidovich had only been able to count defeats and defections: inside the Soviet Union, the opposition had practically disintegrated, without there being any of the expected deportations. Outside the country, his followers were fighting for a piece of power, over being more or less to the left, or simply abandoned the struggle, as the Pazes did, unable to resist Stalinist pressures or because of a lack of a clear prospect for success. . Perhaps it was for that reason that the news of Mayakovsky’s suicide continued to shake him for weeks, during which he had come to feel guilty for having argued with the poet so many times, perhaps providing fodder to the detractors who had popped up all over the country.

The arrival of the first copies of his anxiously awaited autobiography barely gave him any satisfaction amid so many losses. Upon rereading the work, finished a year earlier, he regretted having dedicated so many pages to a self-defense that was beginning to seem futile in the middle of the torrent of adversities that preyed on his friends’ lives and dignity; his insistence on contextualizing his disagreements with Lenin throughout twenty years of struggle seemed opportunistic, and above all, he reproached himself for not having the courage to recognize, with helpful or perhaps harmful hindsight, the excesses that he himself had committed in order to defend the revolution and its permanence. Although he would never publicly admit it, for many years already Lev Davidovich had regretted the moments in which, from his position of power, he had allowed force to take over, independent of the goals being pursued. The militarization of the railroad unions he imposed, when the outcome of the civil war depended on the locomotives standing still on the country’s tracks, now seemed excessive to him, even when it was upon that measure that the fate of the revolution had rested. He already knew that he would never be able to forgive himself for the attempt to apply the same coercive measures to postwar reconstruction when it became clear that the nation was on the verge of disintegration and it was not possible to persuade disenchanted workers without applying force. On his shoulders lay the responsibility for having removed union leaders, for having erased democracy from workers’ organizations, and for contributing to their turning into amorphous bodies that now gladly used Stalinist bureaucrats to cement their hegemony. As part of the power apparatus, he had also contributed to killing the democracy that he now demanded as an oppositionist.

His role in crushing the Kronshtadt naval base rebellion in the ill-fated month of March 1921 was no less shameful to him. That detachment, whose support guaranteed the success of the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, would demand four years later such basic rights as greater freedom for workers, less despotic treatment for the peasants forced to hand over the bulk of their harvests, and, above all, the sacred right to free elections to the Soviet assemblies. The reasoning that the new sailors of the Baltic fleet were being manipulated by anarchists and counterrevolutionary officers should never have justified the measure that he, as commissar of war, had applied: the squashing of the revolt and the unleashing of violence that even extended to the execution of hostages. For him and for Lenin, it had been clear that the punishment was a political necessity, since even though they knew that the protest had no possibility of turning into the predicted third revolution, they feared that it would aggravate to unsustainable limits the chaos in a country besieged by hunger and economic paralysis.

He knew that if in March 1921 the Bolsheviks had allowed free elections, they probably would have lost power. The Marxist theory, which he and Lenin used to validate all of their decisions, had never considered the circumstance that once the Communists were in power, they could lose the support of the workers. For the first time since the October victory, they should have asked themselves (did we ever ask ourselves? he would confess to Natalia Sedova) if it was fair to establish socialism against or at the margin of majority will. The proletarian dictatorship was meant to eliminate the exploiting classes, but should it also repress the workers? The dilemma had ended up being dramatic and Manichaean: it was not possible to allow the expression of the people’s will, since this could reverse the process itself. But the abolition of that will would deprive the Bolshevik government of its basic legitimacy: once the moment arrived in which the masses ceased to believe, the need arose to make them believe by force. And so they applied force. In Kronshtadt — as Lev Davidovich knew so well — the revolution had begun to devour its own children and he had been bestowed the sad honor of giving the order that started the banquet.

The harshness with which he had acted (generally backed by Lenin) could perhaps have been justified in those years. But now, upon reviewing their attitudes, he couldn’t stop asking himself whether, if he’d had the necessary shamelessness and shrewdness to grab power after Lenin’s death, he would not also have turned into a pseudo-communist czar. Wouldn’t he have raised the excuse of the revolution’s survival to crush rivals, as Lenin did in 1918 to outlaw the parties that had fought for the revolution alongside the Bolsheviks? Would he have been capable of withstanding the democratic relevance of an opposition, of factions within the party, of a press without censorship?

Lev Davidovich would prove how deeply absorbed his energies were in the avatars of politics when his wife surprised him with the news that Liova wished to leave Prinkipo. The hidden tremors that had been shaking the cement of the Büyükada villa for some months were revealed at that moment, when they had already reached earthquake-like proportions. He then remembered that Natalia Sedova had commented once that it wasn’t good for Jeanne Molinier to spend long periods of time with them while Raymond returned to Paris. He had engaged in that conversation on an afternoon in which they had gone on a walk to the impressive structure of the former Prinkipo Palace Hotel, the largest wooden building in all of Europe, and when he heard her, he had sardonically asked what was happening. She smiled while she explained things with her usual pragmatism: what was happening was that wives should be with their husbands and their Liovnochek was getting old and the years had clouded the vision of even a man like him.

Until that moment, the comings and goings of Raymond Molinier had been just one more event in the routine of Büyükada. Gifted with that énergie Molinièresque that was so attractive to Lev Davidovich, he had turned into the mainstay of the opposition in Paris. Excited by the possibility of turning Trotskyism into a political force within the French left, Molinier had placed his devotion, his fortune, and his family at the service of the project, and while he fought in Paris to find new followers, his wife, Jeanne, had turned into the intermediary between the secretariat managed by Liova and the Trotskyist sympathizers in Europe. Molinier’s energy had touched a sensitive nerve in the experienced revolutionary, and that is why he had decided to put the fate of the French opposition in his hands, ignoring the opinions of other comrades, such as Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, who discreetly decided to withdraw from the ring.

But it was only now that he found out that, from the first time that Raymond left his wife in Büyükada, Natalia had sensed what was coming: Jeanne was a young woman gifted with a languor that served to contrast her husband’s bullishness, and every cell of Liova’s body pulsed with his twenty-three years, even when he had given himself over body and soul to the cause. Because of that, while his wife conveyed the news that Jeanne would travel to Paris with the intention of breaking off her relationship with Raymond, and that Liova was planning to go off somewhere else with her, the revolutionary understood how little he had worried about his son’s needs, although he immediately thought that the work of so many months — the Pyrrhic and painful benefit extracted from upsets and defections — could go down the tube, dragged by the egotistical impulse of a man and a woman. And that same night, unable to contain himself, he reprimanded Liova for his sentimental affair, unforgivable in a fighter.

Fortunately, Raymond’s reaction was deeply French, according to Natalia, and he allowed Jeanne to go live with Liova, who was already planning to move to Germany. Lev Davidovich then understood that he had no alternative but to accept his son’s decision: although the young man’s spirit of sacrifice was immeasurable, he could not demand that he invest his youth in a lost island. What would hurt him the most, he wrote, would be losing the only man with him on whom he could unload the weight of his frustrations, the only one from whom he could receive sincere criticism, and the only one whom he could trust to never be the one tasked with stabbing him, serving him poisoned coffee, or sending the bullet through his head that, sooner or later, would take his life.

But his concern over Liova’s departure was momentarily overshadowed by a little-known event that gave Lev Davidovich a bad premonition: the German elections, carried out on September 14, 1930, had turned Hitler’s National Socialist Party into the country’s second most popular. The leap had been to 6 million votes from 800,000 in 1928. Perplexed before the strange political irresponsibility of the German Communists, Lev Davidovich read that the Communists were celebrating their own increase from 3 million to 4.5 million votes, and declared that the Hitlerite upturn was the swan song of a petit bourgeois party condemned to failure. Several months earlier, in one of the letters with which he used to bombard the Soviet party’s Central Committee, he had already warned them about the dangerous establishment of National Socialism in Germany, which he saw as the bearer of an ideology capable of coalescing all of that “human dust” of a petit bourgeoisie crushed by the crisis and eager for revenge. Since then, he’d begun to insist on the need for a strategic alliance between Communists and Socialists to stop the process that could bring the Hitlerites to power. But the response to his premonitory cry of alarm had been the order from Moscow, channeled through the Comintern, that the German party should abstain from any alliance with Socialists and democrats.

Never more than at that moment had Lev Davidovich felt the weight of his sentence. Shut away on an island lost in time, his ability to act was reduced to writing articles and to an organization of scattered followers, when in reality he should have been in the center of events that, he could feel it in his skin, involved the fate of the German working class, the European revolution, and perhaps of the Soviet Union itself. He knew that it was necessary to mobilize the consciousness of the German left, since it was still feasible to avoid the disaster being drawn over the sky of Berlin. Didn’t anyone notice that if his path wasn’t closed off, Hitler would come to power and the Communists would be his first victims? What was happening in Moscow? he asked himself. He sensed that something dark was brewing behind the Kremlin’s red walls. What he still could not imagine was that very soon he would hear, from the highest towers of the Muscovite fortress, the first howls of a macabre creature capable of terrorizing him.

5

The dense air caressed the skin and the sparkling sea hardly emitted a lulling murmur. There, one could feel how the world, on magical days and moments, gives the deceptive impression of being an affable place, tailor-made to the dreams and strangest desires of man. Memory, imbued with that relaxed atmosphere, managed to become lost, and bitterness and sorrows fell into oblivion.

Seated on the sand with my back leaning against the trunk of a casuarina tree, I lit a cigarette and closed my eyes. There was an hour to go until the sun went down, but, as was becoming a habit in my life, I was in no rush and had no expectations. I practically had none, and practically without the practically. The only thing that interested me at the time was enjoying the gift of twilight’s arrival, the fabulous moment at which the sun closes in on the silvery gulf and draws a fiery trail on the surface. In the month of March, with the beach practically deserted, the promise of that vision was the cause for sudden calm within me, the state of closeness to the balance that comforted me and still allowed me to think in the palpable existence of a small happiness tailor-made to my meager ambitions.

Prepared to wait for the sunset in Santa María del Mar, I had taken out the book I was reading from my backpack. It was a volume of short stories by Raymond Chandler, one of the writers at that time, and still today, to whom I was solidly devoted. Getting them from the most unimaginable places, I had managed to make an almost complete collection of Chandler’s works out of Cuban, Spanish, and Argentine editions, and besides five of his seven novels I had several short story collections, including the one I was reading that afternoon, called Killer in the Rain. It was a Bruguera edition, printed in 1975, and along with the title story it had four others, including one called “The Man Who Loved Dogs.” Two hours before, while I was making the journey by bus to the beach, I had started reading the book right at that story, attracted by such a suggestive title that directly touched on my weakness for dogs. Why, amid so many other possibilities, had I decided to take that book on that day and not a different one? (I had at my house, among the many recently obtained and waiting to be read, The Long Goodbye, which would end up being my favorite of Chandler’s novels; Rabbit, Run by Updike; and Conversation in the Cathedral by the already excommunicated Vargas Llosa, that novel that a few weeks later would make me shake with pure envy.) I think I had picked Killer in the Rain completely unconscious of what it could mean and simply because it included that story that features a professional killer who feels a strange predilection for dogs. Was everything organized like a game of chess (another one) in which so many people — that individual whom I would name, precisely, “the man who loved dogs” and I, among others — were pieces in a game of coincidence, of life’s whims or of the inevitable intersections of fate? Teleology, as they call it now? Don’t think I’m exaggerating, that I’m trying to make your hair stand on end, nor that I see cosmic conspiracies in each thing that has happened in my damned life; but if the cold front that had been predicted for that day had not dissolved with a fleeting rain shower, barely altering the thermometers, it’s possible that on that March afternoon in 1977 I would not have been in Santa María del Mar, reading a book that, by coincidence, contained a story called “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” and with nothing better to do but wait for the sun to set over the gulf. If just one of those circumstances had been altered, I would have probably never had the chance to notice that man who stopped a few yards away from where I was to call out to two magisterial dogs who, just at first sight, dazzled me.

“Ix! Dax!” the man yelled.

When I lifted my gaze, I saw the dogs. I closed the book without thinking twice about it in order to devote myself to contemplating those extraordinary animals, the first Russian wolfhounds, the valued borzoi, that I had seen outside the pages of a book or the veterinary magazine for which I worked. In the diffuse light of the spring afternoon, the wolfhounds looked perfect while they ran along the seashore, causing explosions of water with their long, heavy legs. I admired the sheen of their white hair, dotted with dark violet on their spines and their back legs, and the sharpness of their snouts, gifted with jaws — according to canine literature — capable of breaking a wolf’s femur.

About sixty feet from them was the silhouette of the man who had called to the dogs. When he began to walk toward where the animals and I were, the first thing I asked myself was who that guy could be to have two seemingly purebred Russian wolfhounds in Cuba in the 1970s. But the animals running and playing shifted my attention again, and with no other motive but curiosity I stood up and walked a few steps toward the shore to better see the borzois, now that the sun was behind me. In that position, I once again heard the man’s voice and for the first time I decided to look at him.

The man must have been around seventy years old (I would later find out that he was almost ten years younger), his salt-and-pepper hair was in a buzz cut, and he wore tortoiseshell glasses. He was tall, olive-skinned, mostly thick but also somewhat gawky. He had two leather leashes in his hands and his right hand was covered by a band of white cloth, as if he were protecting a recent wound. I noticed that he was wearing khaki-colored cotton pants, leather sandals, and a wide, colorful shirt: an outfit that immediately revealed his condition as a foreigner in a country of this-is-all-we’ve-got shirts (striped or checked), run-or-I’ll-kick-your-ass or “stinky feet” shoes (Russian boots or plastic moccasins), and sailcloth or polyester pants that would smother your balls in the summer heat.

We came so close to one another that our eyes inevitably met: I smiled at him, and the man, with the pride of the owner of two Russian wolfhounds, also smiled. After calling to the dogs again, he lit a cigarette and I decided to imitate him, to advance another four, five steps to where the presumed foreigner had stopped.

“Your dogs are beautiful.”

“Thank you,” the man answered. “Ix! Dax!” he repeated, and I was still incapable of placing his accent.

“It’s the first time I have ever seen borzois.” I preferred to look at the animals, now that they were running close to their owner.

“They’re the only ones in Cuba,” he said, and I thought: He’s a Spaniard. But there were some strange inflections in his intonation that made me doubt it.

“They need a lot of exercise, although they have to be careful with the heat.”

“Yes, the heat is a problem. That’s why I bring them out here.”

“I’ve read that these animals are very strong but at the same time very delicate. They were the dogs to the Russian czars.” I wondered if it wouldn’t be too daring, but since I had nothing to lose, I made the leap: “Did you bring them from the Soviet Union?”

The man looked toward the sea and dropped his cigarette in the sand.

“Yes, they were given to me in Moscow.”

“I’m sorry, but you’re not Russian, right?”

The man looked me in the eye and snapped the leashes against the leg of his pants. I deduced that perhaps he hadn’t liked being mistaken for a Russian, but I convinced myself that my question did not give the impression of that possibility. Or was he Russian — no, perhaps Georgian or Armenian, by the color of his hair and his skin — and that was why he had that strange intonation and a certain thickness upon pronouncing his words?

At that instant, in the clearing between the casuarinas, I saw a tall, slim black man who, with a towel rolled over his shoulder, observed us without the least reserve, as if he were keeping watch on us. But I turned my gaze when I heard the man in tortoiseshell glasses whispering something in a language I couldn’t place, either, as he put the leashes on the dogs. When the man stood up, I noticed that his steps faltered, as if he’d gotten dizzy, and I heard him breathe with some difficulty. But he immediately asked me:

“How is it that you know so much about dogs?”

“I work for a veterinary magazine and, coincidentally, I just reviewed an article about genetics that a Soviet scientist wrote, and he said a lot about borzois and two other European breeds. Besides, I love dogs,” I answered in one breath.

For the first time the man smiled. The lack of response regarding his origins, his unusual look, and the fact that he had lived in Moscow — in addition to the presence of that tall, slim black man watching us — suggested the possibility to me that the man with the dogs was a diplomat.

“I would like to read that article.”

“I think I could get a copy,” I said, not considering that to fulfill that promise (until the magazine came out, which wouldn’t be for another couple of months) I would most likely have to type up that article full of strange genetic codes myself.

“I love dogs,” the foreigner admitted, using the very verb “to love” in that way in which almost no one ever used it anymore, and in his smile I seemed to glimpse a hidden nostalgia that had nothing to do with what he said next: “Goodbye.”

I mumbled a delayed farewell, and I’m not sure if the man, who was already walking away toward where the tall, slim black man was, heard me. The dogs, when they discovered his intent, started running toward the black man, who got on his knees to welcome them and devoted himself to rubbing their bellies with the towel that had been hanging on his shoulders until then. The foreigner got close to them. He veered off, as if he were making a small turn or it was impossible to walk in a straight line, and after saying something to the black man, he got lost among the casuarinas, followed by the two wolfhounds, who were now walking at their owner’s pace. The black man, who had turned around for a moment to look at me, placed the towel over his shoulder again and followed them, until he also disappeared amid the trees.

When I looked at the coast again, the sun was already touching the sea on the horizon and drawing a red trail that came to its end, with the waves, just a few yards from my feet. The night of March 19, 1977, was beginning.

When I met the man who loved dogs, it had been just over a year since I had started to work as a proofreader at the veterinary magazine. This fate was the result of my third fall, one of the most drastic in my life.

In 1973, when I graduated from the university with excellent grades and the added prestige of having published a book, I was selected to work as the editor in chief of the local radio station in Baracoa, the lost and remote town (there are no other adjectives to describe it) that was filled with the pride — according to a combination of historical fact and human imagination — of having had the privilege to be the first villa that was founded, as well as the first capital of the island recently discovered, by the Spanish conquistadors. The promotion to a position with so much responsibility — as the compañero who assisted me at the work placement office, department of recent university graduates, told me — was due to the fact that, in addition to my scholarly achievements, as a young man of my time, I should be willing to go wherever and whenever I was ordered to go, for the necessary amount of time and under whatever conditions, although he decided to omit the fact that, legally, I was obliged to work wherever they sent me due to the stipulations of the call to social service law that all of us recent graduates were meant to fulfill in return for having received our degrees for free. And what the compañero also failed to tell me, despite this being the real reason for which someone decided to select and promote me to Baracoa, was that they had deemed I needed a “corrective” to bring me down and place me squarely in this world, as the saying goes.

The greatest incentive to get me on the bus that would deposit me in Baracoa twenty-six hours later was thinking about the advantage that kind of exile in a tropical Siberia would provide: if anything was plentiful in the place, it would be time to write. That dream beat inside me like a fetus in its placenta, like a biological need. Around that time, I was already pretty lucidly conscious that the stories in my published book were of a calamitous quality, and if they’d received the coveted standing of finalist in a young writers contest, which included the publication of the volume, it was more due to the issues discussed and my approach to them than to the literary value of my texts. I had written those stories imbued by, more so stunned by, the closed, rugged world lived between the four walls of literature and ideology on the island, devastated by the cascade of defenestrations, ejections, expulsions, and “parametraciones” of people who were inconvenient for a variety of reasons carried out in recent years and by the predictable raising of the walls of intolerance and censorship to celestial heights. I was not the only one, or anything close to it, who had acted like the diligent ape Chandler spoke of, and under the romantic conviction that almost all of us had at that time, I had begun to write what, without much room for speculation, should be written at that moment in history (of the nation and all of humanity): stories about hardworking sugarcane cutters, brave soldiers defending the homeland, self-denying workers whose conflicts were related to the hindrances of the bourgeois past still affecting their consciousness — machismo, for example; doubts about the application of work methods, to give another example — legacies that, hardworking, brave, and self-denying as they were, they without a doubt found themselves in the midst of overcoming on their ascent toward the moral condition of New Men. . But sometime later, when I had looked inside myself and made a shy literary attempt to remove myself from that blueprint so as to paint it with different shades, they had slapped me with a ruler so that I would remove my hands.

It now seems strange, almost incomprehensible, to explain that, despite the reality that tried to assault us every day, for many of us that was a period lived in a kind of bubble, in which we kept ourselves (in truth, we were kept) removed from certain fires raging around us, even in our own neighborhoods. I think that one of the reasons that nourished my gullibility (I should say our gullibility) was that at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, when I was going to high school and college, I was a die-hard romantic who cut sugarcane to the point of physical exhaustion during that interminable harvest of 1970, who broke his back planting Caturra coffee, underwent devastating military training to better defend the homeland, and joyously attended parades and political gatherings, always convinced, always armed, with that compact militant enthusiasm and that invincible faith that imbued almost all of us in carrying out almost all of the acts of our lives and, especially, in the patient although certain wait for the luminous better future in which the island would flourish, physically and spiritually, like a garden.

I think that in those years we must have been the only members of our generation in the whole of Western student civilization who, for example, never put a joint between their lips and who, despite the heat running through our veins, would belatedly free ourselves from sexual atavism, led by the damned taboo of virginity (there is nothing closer to communist morality than Catholic precepts); in the Spanish Caribbean, we were the only ones who lived without knowing that salsa music was being born or that the Beatles (the Rolling Stones and Mamas and the Papas too) were the symbol of rebellion and not of imperialist culture, as we were told so many times; and besides, as should be expected, amid other shortcomings and disinformation, we had been, at the time, the least informed about the extent of the physical and philosophical wounds produced in Prague by tanks that acted as more than threats, about the massacre of students in a Mexican plaza called Tlatelolco, about the historic and human devastation unleashed by our dear Comrade Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and about the birth, for people of our age, of another kind of dream, kindled in the streets of Paris and in rock concerts in California.

What we were aware of and very sure of was that only loyalty and more sacrifice was expected of us, obedience and more discipline. Although after the painful failure of the 1970 harvest, we knew that the luminous future was approaching slower than we had thought (I’ll never forget the four months that I spent on a sugarcane field, cutting, cutting, cutting, with all my strength and my faith in each blow of the machete, convinced that that heroic enterprise would be decisive for our exit from underdevelopment, as we had been told so many times). In reality, we barely had a notion of how that political-economic disaster, if you’ll allow me to call it that, had changed the country’s life. The shortcomings that became sharper since then didn’t surprise us, since we were already growing accustomed to them; nor did it alarm us that, as a response to the economic failure, ideological demands would become even more evident, since they were already part of our lives as young revolutionaries aspiring to be true Communists, and we understood or wanted to understand them as necessary. That in the midst of all that effervescence we would find out that two of our university professors had been suspended from their jobs for having confessed to their religious beliefs moved us, but we listened in silence and accepted as logical the accusations destined to cement a decision ratified by the party and with the support of the Ministry of Education. Later, that two other professors would end up being definitively turned out due to their “inverted” sexual preferences didn’t alarm us too much and, if anything, caused a hormonal shakeup, since who would have said that those two professors were a pair of dykes, especially the dark-haired one, who was pretty hot for being forty.

It had to have been at some point in 1971—the year in which the environment became heated with the express order to hunt down any type of witch that might appear in the distance — when I committed a serious sin of sincerity and innocence in a public way. Everything started when I dared to comment, among my friends, that there were other professors who, thanks to the red ID cards they carried in their pockets, were allowed to keep teaching when everyone knew all too well that they were less capable as educators than the ones who had been removed for being religious; and that there were others, also survivors and holders of this ID, who seemed more like faggots and dykes than the two exterminated professors. I don’t remember if I even added that, in my opinion, neither the beliefs of one set nor the sexual inclinations of the other should be considered a problem as long as they didn’t try to force them upon their students. A few months later, I would find out that this inopportune comment had become the cause of my first fall, when in my growth as a youth militant I was denied entrance in the youth elite due to not having been capable of overcoming certain ideological problems and for lacking in maturity and the ability to understand the decisions made by responsible compañeros. And I accepted the critique and promised to make amends.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, those murky gusts of wind were part of a hurricane blowing silently but devastatingly across the island, bringing with them a concept of society and culture adopted from Soviet models. The inclusion of two sessions of weekly classes set aside for reading political speeches and materials, the renewed demands regarding hair length and pants width, and the critique of students whose preferences leaned toward Western and North American culture, had almost symbiotically integrated themselves into the universe we lived in, and we dealt (at least, I dealt) with all of those fundamentalisms without any great conflicts or worries, without having any notion of the quasi-medieval darknesses and desires for lobotomy underpinning them. Almost without questioning anything.

With all of my political and literary ingenuity weighing me down — and a bit of talent, I think — I started writing those stories out of which I made a volume of almost one hundred pages that I sent off to a contest for unpublished writers. Two months later, surprised and happy, I received the notice that I’d been named a finalist, which, in addition, meant the manuscript’s publication. That success cleaned my spirit of possible doubts, and for the first and only time in my life — perhaps because I was completely wrong — I felt sure of myself, of my possibilities and ideas: I had proved that I was a writer of my time, and now I only had to work toward cementing the ascent to artistic glory and social utility, as we thought of literature back then (that it seemed more like a damned staircase and not the profession for unhappy masochists that it really is).

Between the demands of my studies and the never-ending extracurricular political-ideological activities (as controlled and valued, perhaps even more so, as the scholastic ones) — in addition to the paralysis caused by the drunkenness I felt as a result of my success and the resulting unexpected popularity and preeminence (I was elected secretary for cultural activities of the student federation in my department) but above all, thanks to the real literature I was reading at that time — for almost two years I didn’t write another story that seemed even close to my abilities and ambitions. But by the fourth and final year of my degree, with my book—Blood and Fire—already published, I had to stay in bed for three weeks due to a sprained ankle. Then I wrote a story, longer than the ones I tended to write, in which I found a subject and, after that, a tone and way of looking at reality that made me happy and showed me, without my being a genius, how much I was able to surpass myself. Without a doubt, the reflux from the fatalistic tide, but especially those readings that I had pursued with more effort, trying to find the ethical reasons and technical qualities of the greats — Kafka, Hemingway, García Márquez, Cortázar, Faulkner, Rulfo, Carpentier (damn! how far away from them I was) — bore the most timid fruit in that tale in which I relayed the story of a revolutionary fighter who feels afraid and, before becoming an informer, decides to commit suicide. Of course, I couldn’t even imagine that I was getting ahead of myself and borrowing from my own future of panic-ridden fears and about something worse: their devastating effects.

At the end of January 1973, when the first-semester exams had barely ended, I drafted the final version of that story and took the typed pages to the same university magazine where a year and a half before one of my stories had been published, endorsed by an editorial introduction that spoke of me as a promise of national, almost international literature because of my realist solutions and socialist artistic vision. They received the new work enthusiastically and told me that surely they’d be able to publish it in the March issue or, at the latest, in April. But I didn’t have to wait that long to know how my best story was read and received: one week later, the magazine’s director called me for a meeting in his office and there I experienced the second and, I think, most painful fall in my life. I had just entered when the man, in a rage, spit out the question “How dare you turn this in?” “This” referred to the pages of my story that the infuriated director, disgusted I would say, held in his hands there, behind his desk.

To this day, the unnatural effort of remembering what that powerful man, sure of his ability to fill me with fear, said to me is still too painful. No matter that my story repeated itself so many times, with so many other writers, I’m going to summarize it: that story was inopportune, unpublishable, completely inconceivable, almost counterrevolutionary — and hearing that word, as you can imagine, caused a chill. But despite the seriousness of the matter, he, as the magazine’s director, and los compañeros (all of us knew who they were and what los compañeros did), had decided not to take any measures against me, keeping in mind my previous work, my youth, my obvious ideological confusion, and they were all going to act as if that story had never existed, as if it had never come out of my head. But they and he hoped that something like that would not happen again and that I would think a little bit more when I wrote, since art is one of the revolution’s weapons, he concluded as he folded the sheets, stuck them in a drawer of his desk, and, with overt gestures, locked it with a key that he put in his pocket with the same forcefulness with which he could have swallowed it.

I remember that I left that office burdened with a vague and doughy mixture of feelings (confusion, disquiet, and a lot of fear), but above all, feeling grateful. Yes, very grateful that when I had just four months left to finish my degree, other measures had not been taken against me, and I knew what they could be. Today, besides, I knew exactly what it was to feel FEAR, like that, a fear with a capital F, real, invasive, omnipotent, and ubiquitous, much more devastating than the dread of physical pain or the unknown that all of us have experienced at some point. Because that day what really happened was that they fucked me for the rest of my life, since besides feeling grateful and full of fear, I left there deeply convinced that my story should never have been written, which is the worst thing that they can make a writer think.

It’s obvious that that episode, in addition to my well-tracked commentary about the expulsions of my professors and my recent interest in writers like Camus and Sartre (Sartre, so beloved on the island until just a few years before and now so damned for having dared to voice some criticism that revealed his morally corrupt petit bourgeois ideology), were on another desk the day on which they decided my professional fate as a recent graduate. The brilliant idea they had was to send me, for a necessary purification under the guise of a reward, to the remote Baracoa, where I arrived in the month of September, under the reign of a humid and suffocating heat as I had never felt before, although with the innocent feeling that there I would manage to mend my literary hopes. What I could still not even conceive of was how abysmal that second fall had been, the irreversible inoculation that I had experienced, and because of that I was still convinced that, despite the slipping of the “inopportune” story, I was prepared to ably write the works that my time and circumstances demanded. And with these I would show, incidentally, how receptive and trustworthy I could be.

The radio station’s chief editor was only waiting for my arrival to get away from Baracoa and barely dedicated a week to instructing me on the technical details of my job. At first sight, my responsibility was simple: reviewing the bulletins drafted by two writers and making sure that they were never missing the national news published in the party and its youth arm’s newspapers, nor the chronicles by the official journalists and the volunteer correspondents about the innumerable activities that the provinces’ institutions generated and, especially, those promoted by the party, the Youth, the unions, and the rest of the organizations in the “regional,” as the former and later recovered municipalities were classified. I will never forget my colleague’s smile when he shook my hand and gave me the key to his office, the day on which control was officially ceded to me. And it’s less likely that I will forget the words he whispered:

“Get ready, friend: you either become a cynic here or they’ll turn you to shit. . Welcome to the real reality.”

Its own inhabitants say that hanging over Baracoa is the curse of Pelú, a mad prophet who sentenced it to being the town of never-fulfilled plans. The first thing that they’ll tell you upon arriving is that its fame is based on three lies: that it has a river called Miel (Honey) that doesn’t sweeten anything, because only water runs through it; having a Yunque (Anvil), which is the mountain on which nobody can forge anything; and having a Farola (street lamp) — the name of the highway that connects the “city” with the rest of the country — that doesn’t light up anything.

I knew that Baracoa owed its name to the indigenous chiefdom that existed there when the conquistadors arrived. But very soon I would discover that, four and a half centuries later, it was still a chiefdom, ruled now by the leaders of local organizations. I would also quickly learn that the maxim of “small town, large hell” was never more appropriate than it was there. And to complete my education in real life, in Baracoa I would experience the consequences of my human and intellectual incapacity to deal with caciques and devils every day.

The Radio Ciudad Primada de Cuba Libre station was precisely the medium charged with bringing about a virtual reality even more deceitful than the rivers, mountains, and highways with capricious names, because it was built on plans, promises, goals, and magical numbers that nobody took the care to prove, on constant calls to sacrifice, the watchfulness and discipline with which every one of the local leaders tried to build the staircase for his own ascent — crowned with the prize of getting out of that lost place. My job consisted of receiving phone calls and messages from those figures so that I would look out for their interests, which they always called, of course, the country’s and the people’s interests. And my only alternative was to accept those conditions and, cynically and obediently, order the two alcoholic and moronic automatons who worked as writers to write about expectations exceeded, commitments accepted with revolutionary enthusiasm, goals achieved with patriotic combativeness, and incredible numbers and sacrifices taken on heroically, in order to give a rhetorical form to a nonexistent reality, based almost always on words and slogans, and very seldom on real plantains, sweet potatoes, and pumpkins. The only alternative was to refuse or, further still, quit and run away, and despite what I thought many times, fear of the consequences (canceling my university degree, for starters) paralyzed me, as it did so many others. That was the real reality that my predecessor had welcomed me to.

But instead of doing that job pragmatically and shamelessly, like so many other people, and filling my free time with reading and literary projects, out of my own fear or incapacity to rebel I saw myself dragged by a whirlwind of activities, meetings, rallies, and gatherings always preceded by an invitation to the “journalist compañero” to the eating and drinking fests (who said there are shortages?) organized by the head of the morning and evening edition sectors. With a bit of surprise, I discovered that in that environment, my usual sexual shyness disappeared with the barriers brought down by alcohol, the feeling of escaping from the confinement of that remote place, and the urgency (my own and that of my occasional lovers) to free something within ourselves. I never ate, drank, or screwed so much or with so many women or in such inconceivable places as during those two years, at the end of which I ended up reacting like a cynic capable of lying without any scruples, with gonorrhea that I generously spread around, and — like many of the inhabitants of the area — turned into an alcoholic of the sort who have a drink of aguardiente and a cold beer for breakfast to clear up the effects of last night’s hangover.

Baracoa, it’s time to say it, is one of the island’s most beautiful and magical places, and its inhabitants are surprisingly kind and innocent people. Although I have never returned to visit — I am panic-stricken and terrified by the idea of returning there and by thinking that for some reason I wouldn’t be able to leave again — I recall, like in a haze, the beauty of its sea, its decadent colonial fortresses, its mountains thick with vegetation, its multiple streams and rivers that could become furious, like the Toa. I recall the friendliness of its people — always willing to welcome outsiders and pariahs looking for a place to lose themselves — and the poverty that besieged the city for almost half a millennium and that was its true curse; a poverty that was still throbbing and was always discussed in the past tense, like something that had been definitively overcome, throughout my two years at the head of the “information center” of the local radio station.

Now it seems clear that only by being drunk, rolling around with the first woman to cross my path (who was also drunk if, like me, she was one of the ones sent to work there for two or three years), and wrapping myself in cynicism was it possible for me to resist that journey through reality. My third fall would take place when, back in Havana, I admitted myself to the addiction treatment center of Calixto García Hospital, after having enjoyed a three-week stay in the adjoining wing, where they admitted me to the trauma clinic. I had arrived there on a stretcher, with fractures and wounds received as the result of a tumultuous fight that, perhaps to free some of the fear stuck deep within me, I had unleashed in the first bar I visited upon returning to Havana.

6

Her parents named her África, like the patron saint of Ceuta, where she had been born, and rarely had a name fit someone so well: because she was vigorous, unfathomable, and wild, like the continent to whom she owed her name. Ever since the day he met her, at a meeting of the Young Communists of Cataluña, Ramón felt absorbed by the young woman’s beauty, but above all, it was her rock-solid ideas and her telluric drive that ensnared him: África de las Heras was like an erupting volcano who roared a permanent clamor for revolution. África tended to cite passages by Marx, Engels, and Lenin from memory; she spoke of dear Comrade Stalin as the incarnation of the future on earth and called him with adoration the Guide of the World’s Proletariat while she championed the strictest partisan discipline. Besides, she considered dancing and wine to be bourgeois poisons for the spirit; she seemed to have sewn the book of Marxism under her arm and possessed a militant consciousness that overwhelmed Ramón’s romantic enthusiasm and constantly put him to the test.

Ramón had returned from France a year before, when he was about to turn twenty. Barely arrived in Barcelona, he had managed, thanks to his training as a maître d’hôtel, to be placed at the Ritz as a kitchen aide, and he never knew if it was because of the ideas that Caridad had transmitted to him or because of his own spirit of rebellion, but he soon approached the local Communists and made his first steps toward his enrollment. The Spain that Ramón had found was simmering, waiting for someone to add fuel for the flames to reach the heavens; it was a country in pain that strived to throw off the burden of the past and the frustrations of the present. The dictator Primo de Rivera had just resigned and the monarchists and the Republicans had unsheathed their swords. The unions, dominated by Socialists and anarchists, had multiplied their power but, in comparison with France, the Communists were still very few and, as could be expected in an almost feudal and horribly Catholic country, were ill regarded and frequently pursued.

Ramón enjoyed that tense environment, in which everyone was expecting something to happen very soon and in the end it happened when the Republican Socialists, with the support of the syndicalists, won the municipal elections of 1931, causing the fall of the monarchy and the proclaiming of the Second Republic. Until the end of his life, Ramón would think that he had returned to his country at the exact moment, at the right age, and with his mind bubbling; it was as if his life and history had been lying in wait for each other, each one weaving its story to set him on the path that would lead him, a few years later, to the Sierra de Guadarrama and, from there, to a commitment with the highest responsibility.

The party strategy at the time was to first consolidate the Republic to later radicalize it, and because of that, young Communists supported at that difficult time the government’s feeble measures against the Church’s power and landholdings, for the equality of women and men, for workers’ rights, and, above all, for the rights of the great Spanish rural masses, backward and wretched. Years later, Ramón smiled upon recalling slogans more full of words than solutions; but for all of those years, even during the war, that had been the country of slogans, and each party, each faction, each group, unfurled theirs wherever they could, at meetings and in newspapers, on walls, on display windows, on streetcars, and even on the coal trucks that ran around the cities.

Ramón rode the tide of those years fully and irresponsibly. More than any real knowledge of communist principles, it was his capacity for obedience and self-sacrifice that allowed him to hold a position of prominence on the board of the Young Communists, and that role pushed him to live intensely. Ramón would always long for those days in which, like never before in the history of Spain, he had loved so much, with so much anxiety, as if there were an orgy of physical and intellectual passions.

It was then that he met África de las Heras, the second woman who would be of crucial and also traumatic importance in his life. She was three years older than he was, dark-haired, intelligent, and very beautiful; she never put cosmetics on her face and she lived every second and every act like a true communist militant. Despite Ramón’s already internalized rejection of everything established by the codes of bourgeois morality, he couldn’t help falling in love with her. Like any young man with hormones charged with dynamite, he made it his job to be deserving of the girl’s attention, and threw himself after her in the most frenetic political maelstrom. When he listened to her reasoning, he assumed the theories professed by that red beauty without a single critique and understood (or said he understood in some cases) the risks awaiting the political struggle in a republic of lesser nobles and bourgeoisie; he reaffirmed the idea that the Trotskyists were the most sybilline enemies of the Communists and that anarchists and syndicalists could only be viewed as disposable fellow travelers on the ascent to the highest purposes, which would be divergent when they, the Communists, were able to promote the true revolution led by a necessary proletarian dictatorship. For the first time Ramón would hear insistent talk of Trotsky the opportunist, exiled in Turkey at that time, as the slyest of enemies, and of his Spanish followers as dangerous infiltrators within the working class. But África’s true passion gushed out when she spoke on the political thought and practice of Joseph Stalin, the man who led the Bolshevik revolution to its radiant consolidation. África’s devotion was able to infect him with that terrifying hate for Leon Trotsky and worship of Stalin, without Ramón being able to imagine where those passions would lead him.

When Ramón managed to get África to pay attention to his demands, the young man entered a higher phase of dependency. The complete way of making love with which África crushed him — that uninhibited and elemental wisdom capable of driving him crazy — placed him at the woman’s mercy and gave him equal measures of pleasure and pain, since in his still palpable petit bourgeois weakness he dreamed that África was his, and when he possessed her, he thought he was the luckiest man on earth. But when he saw that she was slipping through his fingers, he experienced attacks of rage-filled jealousy, even though he tried to strengthen himself by accusing himself of lacking the necessary ideological conviction to break down the barriers of emotion and of lacking the drive to reach the revolutionary heights from which that woman’s principles shined, committed as she was only to the cause, wed only to the idea.

África de las Heras would show Ramón that love and family were feelings and circumstances that could bring down the revolutionary: she, for example, had broken with her husband over an overt ideological incompatibility, since he was professing the anarchist-syndicalist creed. Ramón, who already felt the need to free himself from his family ties, barely maintained any relation with his relatives in that time, and since then decided to become stronger and not encourage them. Of Caridad, he received only news that she had been through Paris and now lived in Bordeaux, while he had cut off all contact with his father since, upon returning to Barcelona, he found out through the house’s former cook that Don Pau, selling the family mansion to move in over the warehouses of Calle Ample, had given away Ramón’s dogs to a peasant he had found in the Sant Gervasi market. Of his siblings, he knew that Montse and little Luis had been taken in by his father, that Jorge had also fallen for the party, and that young Pablo, the only one he saw with any frequency, was active in a Catalan nationalist organization, like their father.

But the breaking with his old affections was not difficult because Ramón, in reality, had eyes that saw only what África brought to light as he followed her around Barcelona brainlessly, begging her between meetings and gatherings to give him a couple of hours of passion, for which his flowering body was always ready.

It was precisely in the spring of 1933 when Ramón understood that, no matter how much he ran, he would never catch up with África unless he made a moral and prodigious leap toward the future. While Ramón, África, Jaume Graells, and the leaders of the Young Communists in Barcelona were working to achieve the growth in the militancy that would allow them to become a force of influence in the decentralized Spanish political panorama, Ramón was called to fulfill his military service and sent for four weeks to a training camp near Lérida. When he returned to Barcelona with his first pass, he challenged himself to carry out the plan he elaborated during that month, always calling up the look África would give him in his imagination: Was it a happy one or mocking one? he tormented himself. They arranged to meet at a café close to the cathedral and, to make a big entrance, he waited for África’s arrival using the window of a religious articles shop as a mirror. When he saw her approaching, he controlled his anxiety and let a few more minutes go by. Then he walked toward the café, ready to face the young girl’s reaction to his change of appearance: Ramón was wearing the army’s dress uniform for corporals designated to lead parades. He qualified thanks to his height (he was more than six feet high, taller than the typical Spaniard of his time) and physical abilities (he was able to bend a copper coin between his fingers). Ramón knew that the dress uniform, which included a silver hat, looked marvelous on him, but above all it made him feel different and gave him the pleasure of knowing he was being looked at. The shine of those stripes had made him think that perhaps he could make a career out of the army, where, he would explain to África (whose knowledge seemed infinite), he would carry out effective work gathering recruits for the party and the future revolution.

When Ramón entered the café, he didn’t find her. He thought that she had gone to the bathroom and he went to lean on the bar, where he held back the desire to ask for a drink and opted for chamomile tea. The owner of the café observed him with the admiration that Ramón knew he inspired and served him the tea. When she returned from the lavatory, he stood up with all of his dazzling height. África looked at him with her critical eyes and brought him down with one blow:

“Why did you come all dressed up? Do you like it when people look at you?”

Ramón felt the world falling apart around him and, with difficulty, managed to share his idea of working for the cause from within the reactionary redoubt of the army. The girl only commented that they should consult with their superiors, since it wasn’t a personal decision: a militant responds to his committee and discipline and. .

He understood; that was why he was asking her.

“It could be a good idea,” she said, perhaps as a consolation; but without offering any apology, she told Ramón she had to leave for a meeting.

The young man ordered a cognac and, while he drank it, felt like crying. Since África wouldn’t be returning, he thought he could allow himself that. You’re too soft, Ramón, he told himself. He finished his drink and went out to the street, where a young woman’s intense stare raised his devastated self-esteem.

A few months later, at the very moment he was going from obligatory service to an intended profession in the army, Ramón would have his dreams of feeling important and doing a great service for the revolution crushed when his political affiliation was considered an impediment and the army decided to let him go. Then he swore to himself that the military would pay for that affront.

Reformism leads to restoration: only communist power, mercilessly proletarian, can carry out the deep transformations that a country like this, sick with hate and inequality, demands — as África, always adept at formulas, used to repeat. And Ramón would understand the extent to which that young woman had been right when, at the end of that same year, the conservatives rose up with the electoral victory and began an artful dismantling of the Republican political changes with the repeal of social benefit decrees and the start of an agrarian counterreform that would return the lands to the feudal lords and the country to its interminable Middle Ages.

It was the Asturian miners and the Catalan nationalists who in the month of October 1934 reacted against the laws promoted by the dismal Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right, and first proclaimed a general strike and, in the end, rose up: the miners clamoring for revolution and the nationalists for a statute of autonomy. The young Communists had been given the order to be prepared to intervene, even in a violent way, if the conditions evolved favorably in Barcelona. But the Catalan project was devastated in one blow and before the popular revolt that they were awaiting could begin. By contrast, the Asturian miners’ strike was consolidated and the Young Communists, as part of the communist block, supported the rebels. África and Ramón, disillusioned by the Catalan leaders’ lukewarm response, asked to be sent to Asturias, where things were steaming following the drastic abolition of currency and private property and the creation of a proletarian army. As a reactionary ring was already being set against the miners, the party ordered the young Communists to stay in Barcelona, where they would work to procure the weapons that the rebels needed so badly. Ramón, anxious to get to the action, in that meeting dared to criticize that dilatory tactic, and it was África herself who shook him, alarmed by his inability to understand the party’s strategic decisions at a time of murky historical circumstances. “The party is always right,” she said, “and if you don’t understand, it doesn’t matter: you have to obey,” and she cut the discussion short.

The repression of the miners was brutal and that October Revolution ended up diligently crushed. The casualties — almost 1,400—and the arrested — more than 30,000—convinced Ramón that compassion doesn’t exist, nor can it exist, in a class struggle. And he trusted that someday their day would come: at least dogma stipulated that it would be so.

With the Asturian defeat, the Communists were placed on the black list of the most vigorously pursued enemies. Many were among those imprisoned for their participation in the Asturias events or simply because of their militancy and, as had happened in prerevolutionary Russia, recalled África, so conscious of history, so dialectic, the rest had had to go down into the catacombs, to work from there and wait for the moment (called “revolutionary situation”) to deal a blow to the system.

It was in these circumstances that the Young Communists’ leaders received the mission of creating clandestine cells in the city’s neighborhoods and factories. África went to work in Gràcia and Ramón went into El Raval and La Barceloneta, where he also organized literacy classes. With the goal of making the political work more efficient and of preparing members for future conflicts, Ramón organized a cell with Jaume Graells, Joan Brufau, and other comrades that would present itself as the Peña Artística y Recreativa, and they gave it the least suspicious name they could find: “Miguel de Cervantes.” The Joaquín Costa bar, at the end of Calle Guifré, turned into the meeting place. They went two and three nights a week, many times with África, who developed her skills as an agitator there, with a vehemence that left Ramón ever more entranced by the young woman’s passion and faith in the fate of a humanity without exploiters or exploited. Everything worked according to plan for several months, until they made the mistake of becoming too complacent and were surprised when the police burst in, carrying off seventeen of them (África managed to escape by leaping over a wall difficult for even a man to scale), accusing them of conspiring against the republic to subvert order and institute an atheist and communist dictatorship.

If Ramón had still needed any reasons to convince himself that the whole pantomime of a democratic republic was just a façade and that the system needed to be pulled out by the roots, the eight months he spent in jail in Valencia ended up deepening his convictions. It wasn’t that the accusations hurled at them were false: it was true that they were conspiring to subvert order, but it was also assumed that they had the right to that option in a republic that, according to what was preached, existed in a supposedly democratic country since 1931.

Spain’s prisons were overflowing with prisoners, perversely mixing common prisoners with political ones, although the detained Communists were so great in number that the cell blocks turned into forums where they discussed the party’s projections, the dangerous ascent of fascism in Germany and Italy, the USSR’s economic successes, and the principles of class struggle. The unexpected directive from Moscow, that an alliance be established between the Communists and the leftist parties (except for Trotskyist opportunists) to throw themselves into the fight for power together, even made its way into prison, and Ramón accepted the order without daring to question that radical strategic change. For him, the real punishment of his prison stay was that África did not visit him during all those months or even send a letter, a breath of hope.

The elections of February 1936, won by the new political front of Socialists, Communists, and anarchists, returned power to the left and, immediately, the freedom of those detained for their activism or participation in the 1934 revolts. After eight months of prison, when Ramón stepped out onto the street, he was no longer an impulsive young romantic: he had turned into a man of faith, a terrifying enemy of everything that could block the path to freedom and the proletarian dictatorship. To that goal, he would dedicate every breath of his life, he thought: even if I have to pay the highest of prices for it.

Like many of his prisonmates, Ramón went directly from Valencia to Madrid, where the Popular Front parties had organized a great rally to celebrate victory and the formation of a new government. In the capital, they found that festive and nervous air that reigned over Spain until the start of the war. The wineskins leaped from the sidewalks to the trucks of the recently released, the women tossed flowers at them, and cries of “Long live liberty” and “Death to the monarchy, to the bourgeois, to the landholders, and to the Church” competed. The revolution could be smelled in the air.

In the meeting, Ramón heard General Secretary José Díaz’s speech and for the first time saw an exalted and dramatic woman who looked like a rally herself: Dolores Ibárruri, whom the world would know as La Pasionaria (Passion Flower). To his great pleasure, in the midst of that combative crowd, he felt the longed-for arms grab on to his neck, from which came the perfume of violets that he had not ceased dreaming of during his imprisonment. With every cell of his body, Ramón enjoyed the sound of the voice of the woman for whom, like the world revolution, he was willing to give everything; but upon seeing her, he thought that miracles might exist, for África was a confirmation. In those months, she had become more beautiful, she was rounder and firmer, as if a beneficent cloak, capable of transforming her, had fallen over her face. A few minutes later, when they escaped the crowd inflamed by songs and wine, he would know that something moving really had taken hold of the woman’s body — something that had been distant from his life until that moment: a month and a half before, África had given birth to a girl. Ramón’s daughter.

Ramón Mercader would think, almost until the idea wore out, that in his life, so full of tremendous convulsions, one of the greatest and most instructive things that shook him from head to toe was receiving that news. África told him that she hadn’t gone to see him in prison or brought him up to speed on her pregnancy so as not to weaken him with feelings that were unnecessary for a revolutionary. Besides, she had preferred to deal with her pregnancy alone, since — from the moment she discovered it and was advised not to abort due to how far along she was, she had decided that the baby would not interfere with the greatest purpose of their lives: the revolutionary struggle. Because of that, as her due date approached, she had gone to Málaga, where her parents lived, and there had the girl, whom she had named Lenina de las Heras, to immediately hand her over to her grandparents and return to Barcelona to fight for the Popular Front’s electoral victory, as the party’s committee had ordered her. Her decision to keep the girl far away was irrevocable and nothing would change it: she was only fulfilling her duty to be honest by informing him of what had happened.

A cloud of passionate feelings crowded Ramón’s head. To the surprise of learning he was a father was added África’s determination of keeping with her ideals. Although it all ended up being too overwhelming to digest in one piece, he was surprised to feel a sharp gratefulness toward the woman he loved so much and who showed him her political stature with a drastic and liberating action. Nonetheless, in the deepest recesses of his consciousness, he felt a sliver of curiosity about what the girl he had fathered was like, what it would be like to have her close and raise her. Didn’t África feel the same? Ramón knew that the needs of the struggle would soon erase that blip, and he thought, with more conviction: África is right, family can be a burden to a revolutionary. As they crossed the Plaza de Callao, he believed that much without knowing precisely why.

África opened the door to a café on Gran Vía and, upon entering, the light from the street prevented Ramón from seeing the inside of the place, one of those old bars in Madrid with the walls done over in dark wood. África, as if guided by an interior light, walked to the back, skirting tables and chairs with that confidence so like her. He tried to follow her, leaning on the backs of the chairs, when he made out the silhouette of a woman, according to her hair, in the back, a tall, strong woman, he realized as he got closer. The shadow approached him, and before Ramón had identified her, he felt a tremor run through him when the woman kissed him, so close to the edge of his lips as to leave the unmistakable taste of aniseed in his mouth.

7

Kharalambos moved the rudder slightly and, under the afternoon sun, the boat entered the golden river over a sea that the young fisherman had learned to navigate with his father, his father with his grandfather — just as his grandfather had with his great-grandfather — in an accumulation of knowledge that went back, perhaps, to the days in which Alexander’s armies passed through those waters with the fury and glory of the great king of the Macedonians. More than once, observing Kharalambos’s seafaring expertise, Lev Davidovich had asked himself if the time had come for him to carry out an act of utmost wisdom and throw off all of his defenses to give himself the chance to breathe, for the first time in his adult life, the simple air that nourished the fisherman’s blood, far from the maelstroms of his epoch.

Four years of exile, five of being marginalized, dozens of deaths and deceptions, revolutions betrayed and ferocious repressions, Lev Davidovich added them up and had to admit that there were few reasons for hope. The cosmopolitan man, the protagonist of the struggle, the leader of the multitudes, had begun to grow old at fifty-two: he had never imagined that the corner of the world in which he was living would one day cause him to feel that perhaps he had that which is called a home. And still less that, for a moment, he would wish to give everything up and throw his weapons into the sea.

It had been a year since he had seen Liova leave by the route that Kharalambos now navigated. With a mix of concern and relief, he had accepted the young man’s decision to live his own life, far from his father’s shadow. The receipt of a scholarship to continue studying math and physics at Berlin’s Technische Hochschule had facilitated the paperwork, and Lev Davidovich had decided to make the most of the situation of the young man being transferred to a privileged position, where he would serve as his eyes and voice while he remained immobile in Turkey.

As the date of his departure drew near, Lev Davidovich had evoked, too frequently, the memory of those cold mornings in the tormented Paris of 1915, when Liova had been initiated into political work at just barely eight years of age. They then lived on rue Oudry, close to the place d’Italie, and he spent his nights writing antiwar articles for the Nashe Slovo. In the morning, on the way to school, with young Seriozha by the hand, Liova was in charge of handing over the recently written pages to the print shop. Only with the certainty of separation could Lev Davidovich understand the immense space that Liova occupied in his heart and regretted the outbursts of anger in which, so unfairly, he had accused him of laziness and political immaturity. As happened to him two years before when he separated from Seriozha, after his departure he was seized by the same disastrous feeling that perhaps he would never again see his beloved Liova, but he managed to dispel that feeling through the most realistic inversion of equations: if they didn’t see each other again, it wouldn’t be because Liova would miss their next meeting. The absent one would surely be Lev Davidovich himself, who with each passing day was feeling older and attacked by rivals who wished for his absolute silence.

But the young man’s departure was not Lev Davidovich’s greatest concern during those weeks. With his best foot forward, although full of fears over his inability to deal with domestic problems, he also had to prepare himself for the announced arrival of Zina, his oldest daughter, who had finally obtained a Soviet permit to travel abroad with the purpose of undergoing treatment for her advanced tuberculosis.

In the letters that she sent from Leningrad, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, Zina’s mother, had kept him up-to-date on the girl’s physical and mental deterioration in recent years, above all as she devoted herself to taking care of her sister Nina at the same time that, due to her activism in the opposition, she experienced political repression that had culminated in the deportation of her husband, Plato Volkov, and with her own expulsion from the party and the loss of her job as an economist. Zina would experience the personal touch of pettiness, however, when her exit permit from Soviet territory excluded her little daughter, Olga, who would become a political hostage. With the sentence imposed on an innocent girl, Lev Davidovich would once again see proof of what Piatakov had assured him of years before: Stalin would take revenge on him, treacherously, until the third or fourth generation.

Zina arrived on a sunny morning in January 1931 with young Seva at her side. Natalia, Liova, Jeanne, the secretaries, the bodyguards, the Turkish police, and even Maya followed Lev Davidovich to the dock to welcome them. Each of their moods was as festive as the circumstances allowed and was rewarded by the smile of a thin woman, exultant and expansive, and by the scrutinizing look of a boy, intensely blond, who had rejected the attention of grandparents and uncles to bestow his favoritism on Maya the dog.

Despite her calamitous state of health, Zina immediately proved that she was the daughter of Lev Davidovich and the indefatigable Alexandra Sokolovskaya, who in the clandestine meetings of Nikolaiev had placed in the hands of the young fighter the first Marxist pamphlets he would read in his life. With wheezing breath and besieged by nocturnal fevers, the young woman arrived demanding a role in the political work, willing to show her abilities and her passion. Conscious that she needed medical attention more than additional responsibilities, her father had assigned her the lightest task, although overwhelming in and of itself, of organizing his correspondence, while he charged Natalia with accompanying her to Istanbul, where the doctors started to work with her.

With the letters that Liova began to send him from Berlin, the old fighter managed to get a better sense of the inexorable disaster at the door of the German Communists. Again and again he asked himself how Moscow was displaying such political clumsiness. You didn’t have to be a genius to notice the significance of the rise of Nazism that, without taking power, had already begun a violent offensive, backed by attack forces that in just two months had grown from 100,000 to 400,000 members. The facts revealed that it could not be due to political blindness: the suicidal strategy of the German Communists must have a reason, beyond the explicit guidelines dictated by the masters in Moscow, he thought and wrote.

Some words pronounced in the heart of the Soviet Union revealed a truth that alarmed him. In a hunger-stricken Moscow, where shoes and bread were a luxury, in which dozens of men and women were detained every night without fiscal orders so that they could be sent to Siberian camps, Stalin proclaimed that the country had reached socialism. Socialism? Only then did Lev Davidovich manage to see a ray of light in the darkness: that had to be the origin of the suspicious apathy, the absurd triumphalism that tied the hands of the German Communists, preventing them from any alliance with the country’s forces on the left and center. He was terrified when he understood the real reason behind all of those surprising attitudes was that Stalin, to achieve the concentration of power, could not rely on the ghosts of the possible aggressions of French imperialism or Japanese militarism, but rather needed an enemy like Hitler to cement, with the threat of Nazism, his own ascent. Although Lev Davidovich had always been opposed to the possibility of founding another party, out of respect for Lenin’s ideas and out of the concrete fear of what the schism could cause, the proof of the betrayal that Stalin was carrying out, whose consequences would be devastating for Germany and dangerous even in the Soviet Union itself, had begun to stir doubts in his mind.

Luckily, the presence of little Seva mitigated his fears. Lev Davidovich established a close relationship very different from the one he, so absorbed in the struggle, had had with his own children. The grandson had managed to appropriate the few hours of free time that his grandfather could give him, and between them they had started the habit of going down to the beach every afternoon, where Seva ran with Maya and, whenever the affable Kharalambos allowed it, boarded the fisherman’s boat and navigated out to the cliffs. The affection he felt for the boy lessened his political concerns, and on many occasions he was surprised by a great peace, which allowed him to feel like a grandfather who was beginning to grow old; and for the first time in thirty years he managed to free himself from the urgencies of the struggle. Seva and Maya’s races, the conversations with Kharalambos about the art of fishing, the rides around the Sea of Marmara, would soon become pleasant images that he would cling to in the even more difficult moments that awaited him.

One predawn morning in that first summer he spent with Seva, Lev Davidovich would save his life and that of his family thanks to the insomnia of which he’d always been a victim. Lying on his bed, he let one of those weary nights go by while he listened to nocturnal sounds and thought of his son Sergei. That same morning he had received a letter in which Seriozha assured them that his life in Moscow was following a normal course; he spoke of his recent marriage and of his progress in his scientific studies. Although the young man maintained his aversion to politics, his father’s intuition told him that that distance could not last much longer and that any day now politics would show up at his door. Because of that, after discussing it with Natalia, he had decided not to put off the proposal any longer that Seriozha begin the procedures that would allow him to travel to Berlin to be reunited with his brother. Wrapped up in those deliberations, it had taken him a while to notice Maya’s restlessness; the dog had approached the bed various times, and he had even heard her sniveling. Suddenly a sense of alarm had made him regain his lucidity: the smell of burning wood was unmistakable, and without another thought he had awoken Natalia and run to the room where Seva had been sleeping with the young secretaries ever since his mother had moved to Istanbul to be operated on.

The fire had started on the wall outside the room he used as his office, and Lev Davidovich immediately understood the saboteur’s intention: his papers. While the Turkish policemen, awakened from their slumber, threw buckets of water over the fire that was spreading to the living room, he had left Seva and Maya in Natalia’s care and, with the help of his secretaries, the bodyguards, and the recently arrived Rudolf Klement, he had started moving the papers that represented his memories and most of his life. Amid the smoke and the water being thrown, they had managed to remove the manuscript folders, the files, and many of the books before the ceiling of that part of the villa gave a groan prior to falling.

In those predawn hours, among boxes of papers and books thrown on the floor, Natalia and Lev Davidovich had watched the fire do its work while he caressed the ears of the shaking Maya. Although the work of improvised firemen had prevented the total destruction of the villa, at sunrise they saw that it was left in such a state that it would have to be entirely rebuilt to again be inhabitable. While the rest of them removed the objects and clothing that had been saved, he devoted himself to gathering dozens of books, water-damaged but perhaps salvageable, and to regretting the loss of other volumes and documents (the photos of the revolution! he would always lament) consumed by the fire.

Rudolf Klement, the young German who had traveled to take over for Liova in the secretary’s office, found a house that offered some security, in the Anglo-American residential suburb of Kadıköy, in the outskirts of Istanbul. The residence, in reality, ended up being too small for the family, the secretaries, the bodyguards and the police (four of them since the fire), but above all too small to live with Zina, who — recovered from a surgery that would soon reveal itself to be a complete failure — had begun to demand, with unhealthy vehemence, greater responsibility in the political work.

Several strange events would mark the months that they lived between the oppressive walls of the house in Kadıköy. The first was the possibility, very soon cut short by the joint work of fascists and Communists, that he would travel to Berlin to give some lectures. That predictable setback was a painful disappointment for him: he had again felt on his back the price he had to pay for his past actions and the insuperable weight of a confinement that made him think of that which Napoleon suffered. Do they fear me so much? he had written, exasperated by the invulnerability of the siege that confined him to Turkey and removed him from any possibility of direct participation.

Then there was another attempted fire. Fortunately, this one reached only the backyard shed, and investigators deemed it an accident upon finding the remains of a box of matches Seva had played with on the heating boiler.

The third event, more intriguing and at the same time revealing, happened when they were visited by a high-ranking Turkish domestic security officer charged with informing them that the country’s police had detained a group of Russian émigrés who were preparing an attempt against his life. The leader of the plot had turned out to be former general Turkul, one of the White Guard leaders that the Red Army defeated during the civil war. According to the officer, the conspiracy had been dismantled and he could remain calm, under the hospitality of the Honorable Kemal Pasha Ataturk.

As soon as they said goodbye to the officer, Lev Davidovich commented to Natalia that the framework of the story was shaky. The danger that the Russian émigrés stationed in Turkey would commit violent acts against his person had always been latent. But nothing had happened in over two years, which proved that the White Russians did not deem it a priority or understood that attacking him when he was considered a personal guest of the implacable Kemal Ataturk was a challenge that could only prejudice them.

The worst experience of that time, however, were the tensions caused by Zina’s instability: she was more demanding every day regarding the participation in partisan jobs, but her behavior oscillated between enthusiasm and depression. Although he insisted, in the kindest ways, she had refused to submit herself to psychoanalytic treatment, since, she repeated, she didn’t feel like unearthing all the filth she had accumulated within her. Her disorder had reached a critical point when the failure of her operation was discovered, since the Turkish surgeons had invaded her remaining healthy lung. Fearful for Zina’s life or of a direct confrontation with her, Lev Davidovich ordered Liova to make the necessary arrangements for the woman to travel to Berlin and be seen there by specialists capable of mending her body and her spirit.

Once Zina’s reservations had been overcome, the woman left for Berlin, leaving her father feeling a mixture of relief and a cutting feeling of guilt. Lev Davidovich had promised her that, as soon as she recovered a bit, she would begin to work with Liova and they would send Seva to her. Meanwhile, for his own stability, the young boy would stay in Turkey, although his grandfather knew that behind the decision to keep the boy was a dose of selfishness: Seva had turned into his best medicine against exhaustion and pessimism.

Zinushka had left in the company of Abraham Sobolevicius, Senin the Giant, one of Lev Davidovich’s collaborators based in Berlin, who, coincidentally, had spent a few days at the house in Kadıköy. For the last two years, Senin and his younger brother had turned into his most active correspondents in Germany, but since Liova had been placed at the head of the German followers, relations with the Sobolevicius brothers had undergone a period of tensions, and he attributed it to the preeminence he had given his son in the terrain where the brothers had reigned. The strangest thing in the changed attitude from those comrades was the more or less direct rejection of certain guidelines destined to unmask the irresponsible Stalinist policies regarding the German situation. The resistance of the Sobolevicius brothers, precisely because it came from men who were so experienced, worried Lev Davidovich.

Just a few days after Zina’s departure, information filtered in from Moscow to illuminate like a flash of lightning the darkness in which the Exile had spent two years. The source of the information was trustworthy: it came from Comrade V.V., whose existence only Liova and he were aware of, since his role within the GPU made him especially vulnerable and useful. V.V. warned in a report that he had heard just an echo of a comment about the Sobolevicius brothers carrying out espionage work for the GPU within Trotsky’s closest circle. But placed in its precise context that comment gave form to the riddle of the brothers’ strange attitude.

The discovery of the true nature of the agents — who disappeared as soon as Lev Davidovich made their real affiliation public — plunged him into deep concern. The fact that he had trusted those men to the point of having handed over his daughter to them — of having let them sleep in his house, play with Seva, speak privately with Natasha and with him — warned him of the fragility of any possible system of protection and made evident the dominion Stalin had over his life: for now, the Grave Digger was satisfied with knowing what he was doing and what he was thinking, but what about tomorrow? He was convinced that the fires and the presumed conspiracy of former general Turkul had only been distraction maneuvers in an attack that had barely begun and whose denouement would require neither spectacular actions nor the conspiracies of old White Russian enemies. The final shot would come from a hand, trained by Stalin himself and capable of passing through all the filters of suspicion, until it became the closest thing to a friendly hand. The actions of the Sobolevicius brothers showed him, nonetheless, that his life still seemed necessary for the general secretary to rise to the most absolute of powers. Terrified before the evidence that clarified the reasons for which he’d been allowed to go into exile instead of being killed on the steppes of Alma-Ata, he understood that, while he was alive, he would be the incarnation of the counterrevolution, his image would stain all demands for internal political change, his voice would sound like the perversion of any voice that clamored for a minimum level of truth and justice. Lev Trotsky would be the measure of justifying all repression, the basis for all the explosions of critics and inconvenient people, a side of the enemy coin of the world Communists: the piece that, to be perfect, would soon have the image of Adolf Hitler on its reverse side.

When the reconstruction work on the Büyükada villa was completed, Lev Davidovich demanded to return. Throughout the nine months he lived in Istanbul, the vertigo of transience and the feeling of finding himself at the edge of a cliff never left his spirit, and he had not even managed to progress as he had hoped on the writing of History of the Russian Revolution. For that reason, he trusted that the return to what he now considered his house would allow him to concentrate on what was truly important.

Kharalambos and other villagers were waiting for them on the dock. The Trotskys appreciated a welcome that included a basket of fish, oysters, and fresh seafood; bags of dried fruit tied with goat cheese and plates of the sweets they called apricots; and, as a special treat, a clay pot with a selection of pochas and pides lying inside, needing only to be placed in boiling olive oil to deliver to the palate a Mediterranean voluptuousness so different from the simple tastes of Russian and Ukrainian recipes.

Very soon the Exile regained his work rhythm and dedicated ten and even twelve hours a day to writing the History and to the preparation of two articles for the Bulletin. At the end of the day, with the exhaustion that tended to cause bothersome tearing in his eyes, he called to Seva and, preceded by Maya, they went down to the coast to see the sunset. There he told his grandson stories about the Jews of Yanovska; he told him about his mother, Zinushka, recovering in Berlin; and he taught him, supported by the intelligence of the patient Maya, to communicate with dogs and to interpret their language of attitudes.

Just three weeks later, Lev Davidovich would receive the sword cut unleashed from Moscow as the clearest warning that the war against him would not stop and that he would never be allowed the slightest hint of peace. A perplexed Liova was the one who transmitted the news to him: beginning on February 20, 1932, Lev Trotsky and the members of his family who found themselves outside the territory of the Soviet Union ceased to be citizens of the country and lost all constitutional rights and the protection of the state. The crime committed by the former party member — he was no longer mentioned as a leader — had been participation in counterrevolutionary actions, by virtue of which he was considered an enemy of the people, undeserving of holding the nationality of the world’s first proletarian state. The decree from the Central Committee’s executive presidium, published in Pravda, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, included in the recently enacted sentence of revocation of citizenship, thirty other exiles, also enemies of the people, who in their time had been distinguished Menshevik figures.

As he read that malicious communiqué—which, with calculated malevolence, mixed him with former exiles who he himself and Lenin had invited to emigrate in 1921—he closely examined the details and sought the hidden objective in a measure that he himself had inaugurated in Soviet history. Without a doubt, Stalin’s prime intention was that of turning him into an outlaw, without a state behind him, totally at the mercy of his enemies, among whom you could now count the very Soviet people. But behind it was the logical consequence of turning his supporters within the country from political oppositionists to collaborators with a “foreign” agent and, as such, accusable of the crime of treason, the most feared in days of patriotic and nationalistic fervor.

Before the abyss he and his family were staring at, Lev Davidovich regretted as never before the lack of realism and the excess of trust that had blinded him for years, to the point of allowing, before his very eyes, the birth and growth of that malignant tumor clinging to the Kremlin’s walls called Joseph Stalin. A man like him, who had always valued his own ability to understand the human soul, men’s needs and weaknesses, and had prided himself on having the ability to move consciousnesses and the masses — how had he not noticed the fateful air around that dark being? For years, Stalin had been so insignificant that, as much as Lev Davidovich searched his brain, he never managed to visualize what must have been their first meeting, in London in 1907. Then he was the Trotsky that had behind him the dramatic participation in the 1905 revolution, when he came to be the president of Petrograd’s Soviet; the orator and journalist capable of convincing Lenin or of confronting him and calling him a dictator in the making, a Russian Robespierre. He was a high-ranking, spoiled, and hated revolutionary who would have looked without any great interest at the recently arrived Georgian, uncultured and without history, with his pockmarked face. By contrast, he could recall him at that fleeting meeting in Vienna, during the year of 1913, when somebody introduced him formally, without deeming it necessary to tell the man from the mountains who Trotsky was, since no Russian revolutionary could help but recognize him. Lev Davidovich still remembered on that occasion Stalin had barely held out his hand before turning back to his cup of tea, like a malnourished animal — whom he would only manage to fix in his memory because of that cornered and yellow stare, coming out of small eyes that, like those of a lizard lying in wait (yes, that was the detail!) — didn’t blink. How could he not have noticed that a man with that reptilian stare was a highly dangerous being?

During the vertigo of 1917, on very few occasions Stalin had passed in front of him, like a furtive shadow, and Lev Davidovich had never given him a thought. Later, when he at last stopped to think of him, he discovered that the Georgian had always repelled him because of those qualities that must have been his strength: his essential meanness, his psychological crudity, and that cynicism of the petit bourgeois whom Marxism had freed from many prejudices but without managing to substitute them with a well-assimilated ideological system. Before each one of the attempted approaches carried out by Stalin, he had instinctively stepped back and had unwittingly provided the distance for resentment; but he had not understood the error of his calculation until years later. “The main quality that distinguishes Stalin,” Bukharin had said to him one day, “is laziness; the second, limitless envy of everyone who knows or could know more than he does. He has even undermined Lenin.”

Lev Davidovich would come to have the conviction that his greatest mistake had been not fighting at the moment in which it was already clear that a struggle for power had begun and he had in his hands the crushing victory represented by Lenin’s letters reprimanding Stalin for his brutal handling of the “nationalities question” and the “Testament” in which Vladimir Ilyich asked that the Georgian be removed as party secretary. But at that moment he had thought that Stalin was not a considerable rival and that launching a campaign against the man from the mountains would be viewed as a personal battle to take over Lenin’s position (as it would have been manipulated by Stalin’s followers within the party), and Lev Davidovich was not able to think about that possibility without feeling ashamed. Later he would understand that even with the support of Lenin’s will and opinions, he had lost that battle a long time before: beneath his feet a well-laid-out conspiracy had been organized, and Stalin — with Zinoviev and Kamenev’s complicity and Bukharin’s cowardly support — had disarmed him without his noticing; his fall was already a reality that needed only to be consolidated. The worst, nonetheless, was knowing that his defeat did not signify only his defeat but that of an entire project — and not because he saw his access to power impeded but because he had also facilitated Stalin’s ascent and, with it, the annihilation of the social dream that the unstoppable Georgian was carrying out.

Lev Davidovich needed several days to begin to ponder the response demanded by that decree. Knowing that he was going to be assaulted by enormous and immoral propaganda resources, capable of lying before the eyes of the world without the slightest shame, he debated between drafting a measured communiqué, focused on the illegality of the sentence, and a frontal attack directed against the dictator. But what occupied his mind most vehemently was whether the time had not come to resign from a struggle for the reform of the party and the Soviet state that was becoming all the more unviable: whether the hour had not arrived to throw himself into the void and proclaim the need for a new party capable of recovering the truth of the revolution.

The echoes of the decree would soon begin to penetrate the atmosphere of his private life. Zina, also affected by the punishment, sent him a desperate message from Berlin: How would she now meet with her daughter again, who was still in Leningrad? And she demanded Seva’s presence, since she wanted to live with at least one of her children. Never before that moment had Lev Davidovich felt the burden of family.

A message brought from Moscow by friendly hands arrived at Prinkipo to confirm for Lev Davidovich the magnitude of the disaster that was being forged in his old country. The remittent was Ivan Smirnov, the old Bolshevik he was united with in an intimate friendship, and who had been one of the staunch oppositionists in the summer of 1929. Smirnov had quickly understood that, even though he had been assigned an official position, his fate had been marked by having confronted Stalin under the renegade Trotsky’s banner. Sensing the counteroffensive his old comrade would undertake, Smirnov had decided to run the risk of sending him a report about the proportions of the economic and political devastation ravaging the USSR and that, nonetheless, offered very little hope for the victory of any opposition, at least in the short term.

To justify his capitulation, Smirnov commented that in 1929 the economic about-face unleashed by Stalin seemed a logical and even moderate process that followed the ideas almost step-by-step about industrialization and the collectivization of land that until then had been the program and simultaneously the mark of an opposition accused of being the enemy of the peasants and fanatics of industrial development. However, the crushing of the faction led by Bukharin and the surrenders of the last Trotskyist oppositionists had left Stalin without adversaries and allowed him to turn the war against the enriched peasants in a storm of collectivizing violence that had succeeded in paralyzing Soviet agriculture: first the large landholders, then the medium and small landholders later, upon seeing their wealth threatened by expropriations that included even the hens and guard dogs, had opted for a silent sabotage, and an orgy of animal sacrifices resulted that filled the countryside with foul-smelling bones and the steam of boiling oil, and that finished off half the nation’s livestock. As could be expected, they also began to devour the wheat and all other grains, without stopping at the seeds meant to guarantee the coming harvest, which was only planted and tended to when the peasants were placed at the end of the barrel of a rifle. The neglect was aggravated with the transfer of entire villages and towns from the Ukraine and the Caucasus to the forests and mines of Siberia, from where the government planned to extract the wealth the land had ceased to produce. The predictable result had been a startling famine that ravaged the country from 1930 with no end in sight. In the Ukraine, there was talk of millions of people dead from starvation, and it was even said that there had been acts of cannibalism. In the cities, the people fell over themselves for potatoes in the black market, paying exorbitant amounts of rubles so devalued that many could only engage in commerce through barter. How many lives paid the price of that “attack” on socialism was something that could never be known, and Smirnov was of the opinion that the nation’s agriculture would not recover in the next fifty years.

No less devastating, Smirnov said, was the way that Stalin had insisted on erasing those elements of memory that didn’t meet with his version of Soviet history, dedicated to promoting his preeminence. A few months before, Riazanov, the director of the Marx-Engels Institute, and Yaroslavsky, the author of the most widely circulated History of the Bolshevik Revolution, had been expelled under the charge of not sufficiently rescuing the Leninist legacy. The real reason was that Riazanov could not prove that Stalin had made any contribution to Marxist theory, and that Yaraslavsky’s History, already sufficiently altered, could not totally glorify Stalin, since the events of the revolution were too recent and too many of its main characters were still living.

Stalin’s violent egotism, his former comrade commented, had taken even more painful paths due to their irreversible and catastrophic effects. With the “Great Change,” the idea had arisen to convert Moscow into the new socialist city; and Stalin placed himself at the head of the project that had started with the transformation of the Kremlin, within whose walls the monasteries of the Miracles and of the Ascension, built in 1358 and 1389, and the magnificent Nicholas Palace, a work from the time of Catherine II, were demolished. Outside of the Kremlin, the most regrettable destruction had been that of the Temple of Christ the Savior, the biggest sacred building in the city, 270 feet high, its walls covered with Finnish granite and marble slabs from Altai and Podole, its dome lit up by bronze sheets, its main cross thirty feet high and its four towers, topped by fourteen bells among which that giant one weighing twenty-four tons stood out, challenging the laws of physics and inspiring the envy of all of Europe’s faithful. That temple, blessed in 1883 before 20,000 people inside, had perished only forty-eight years after its consecration, when Stalin decided that the spot occupied by the church was the ideal place, due to its proximity to the Kremlin and Red Square, to raise the Palace of the Soviets. To Smirnov, that decision had seemed the most triumphant proof of Stalin’s power to choose not only the political fate of the country but also that of its agriculture, livestock, mining, history, linguistics (he recently discovered that capacity of his), and even its architecture, since, with Christ the Savior demolished, he commented that Red Square would look better without the nuisance of St. Basil’s Cathedral. All of this, Smirnov concluded, had occurred under a policy of terror that had shut the mouths of workers and eminent scientists alike — a terror turned not just into fearful obedience but into the apathy of the very people who had led the most spectacular social transformation in human history.

Although his prestige was at an all-time low, Lev Davidovich knew that his Turkish isolation had to end. Perhaps by being somewhere closer to events, his presence might help to prevent greater evils, and for that reason he initiated a new campaign to obtain a visa to any place and under any conditions, and concentrated on France and Norway, since Germany, where his presence would have been the most useful, was ruled out due to the hostility that would rain down upon him from Communists and fascists alike. In fact, his former political comrades were even more aggressive, and in reply to each of the Exile’s warnings about the national socialist danger, he received a barrage of insults from Ernst Thälmann, who declared that Trotsky’s idea of a communist alliance with the left and center was the most dangerous theory of a bankrupt counterrevolutionary.

Sometime in the fall of 1932, a diffuse light came to break up the darkness when the possibility arose for Lev Davidovich to travel to Denmark for a few days, invited by the social democratic students to participate in a conference commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. With a joy that he himself knew was frenzied, he immediately went into action. He was hoping that if he passed through France, Norway, or even Denmark, he could perhaps obtain at least transitory asylum that would allow him to regain space for his political work.

The weeks prior to the trip were charged with tension. Between the transit visas that weren’t arriving, the increasing restrictions the Danes were imposing on his stay, and the calls for anti-Trotsky protests in France, Belgium, and Germany, a less determined man would have given up on an adventure that began with so many discouraging omens.

On November 14, with a Danish visa that allowed them just eight days, the Trotskys left Istanbul, still moved by the news of the recent and dark suicide of Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s young wife. During the nine days it took them to get through Greece, Italy, France, and Belgium, his enemies made the Exile feel that he would have caused less of a commotion if he’d made that journey as the president of a belligerent country or as the leader of a working conspiracy and not as a man who was only accompanied by his past and his condition of exile. To think that his presence could still generate dread among leaders and enemies was, more than proof of adversity, a comforting confirmation that he was still considered someone capable of inciting revolutions.

But three weeks later, enclosed again in Büyükada, Lev Davidovich had to admit that he had only been received with some affability in Mussolini’s Italy, where he was allowed to visit Pompeii on the way out, and to spend a day in Venice on the return trip. The rest of his journey had been a succession of police cordons (he was unsure whether they were meant to protect his life or control him), while the days spent in Copenhagen had passed under the tension of Moscow’s diplomatic protests and a petition from the Danish prince Aage that he be tried as one of the murderers of the family of the last czar who had been the son of a Danish princess.

Nonetheless, he could not deny that he had deeply enjoyed the occasion to talk about the Russian Revolution before a packed auditorium of more than two thousand people, who made him feel the comforting taste of agitation before the masses, to which he had always been so addicted. Moreover, the reencounter with an extreme climate, with a city of dim lights and pallid nights like those of St. Petersburg, had filled him with nostalgia. For that reason, even knowing the response he would receive, he insisted on presenting medical reports testifying to his state of health and the need for specialized treatment. When it was communicated to him that his request hadn’t even been considered by the Danish authorities, Lev Davidovich concluded that if many times he had had doubts about the faithfulness of his friends, he could be sure of the perseverance of his enemies, whichever party or faction they were in.

The return to his island prison, where his papers and books, his grandson Seva and his spoiled Maya were waiting for him, didn’t have the friendly scent of a return home but rather the stench of a seemingly endless marginalization. At the quay, there weren’t enthusiastic or cursing crowds, no police lines or trembling government workers, as there had been in each place they had passed through in recent days, but just some fishermen friends and the Turkish policemen who often sat down at his table. In Prinkipo, his presence didn’t cause any fights, and this fact would make him understand that if his name still generated excitement in Europe, it wasn’t due to what he could do but rather what his enemies demanded as payment for his actions: hostility, repression, rejection. Stalin’s hate, turned into a raison d’état, had put in motion the most powerful marginalization machinery ever directed against a solitary individual. More so, it had become exalted as a universal strategy of a communism controlled from Moscow and even as the editorial policy of dozens of newspapers. For that reason, swallowing the rest of his pride, he had to admit that while in the Kremlin they were determining the moment at which his life would cease to be useful to them, they would keep him trapped in an unbreakable ostracism that would be maintained until they declared the fall of the curtain and the end of the masquerade. And for the first time he dared to think about his life as a tragedy: classic, Greek-style, without the faintest hope of appeal.

The year 1933 arrived with an overwhelming invasion of discouragement. Zina wanted Seva sent to Berlin without any more delays, and, just barely returned from Copenhagen, Lev Davidovich and Natalia had said goodbye to the boy. During the brief meeting they had had as he passed through France, Liova had spoken to them about Zinushka’s lamentable state and the medical suggestion that the presence of a son to take care of her could perhaps provide some benefit for her broken spirit. Although Lev Davidovich and Natalia had thought the same thing many times, they had decided to put the boy’s mental health before his mother’s; but their authority over Seva was limited, and faced with Zinushka’s insistence, they had to compromise. The morning they saw him depart, tearful over having to leave his great friend Maya and Kharalambos’s children, he and Natalia, trained in farewells and losses, could not help but feel that a piece of their hearts was being taken.

The only way that Lev Davidovich found to combat the void was immersing himself in the rewrites, always obsessive, to which he submitted his History of the Russian Revolution, and in the review of materials with the idea of undertaking one of his projects: the history of the civil war, a joint biography of Marx and Engels, a biography of Lenin. Nonetheless, a constant worry kept him alarmed and unfocused, as if he were waiting for something. He never imagined it would arrive in such a cruel way.

The first cable sent by Liova was succinct and devastating: Zinushka had committed suicide in her Berlin apartment and Seva’s location was unknown. The paper in hand, Lev Davidovich closed himself in his room. The impossibility of being close to the events was as painful as what had happened, and he couldn’t stand to hear or see anybody. Although he’d already been expecting an end like this and his bad premonitions of recent days had been centered on the young woman, more painful was the feeling of guilt that assaulted him. He knew perfectly well that Zinushka’s terrible life, and now her death at just thirty years of age, were the fruit of his political passion, of his insistence on leading the salvation of the great masses while he threw the fates of those closest to him onto the fire, sacrificed on the altar of vengeance of a perverted revolution. But what hurt him the most was to think that something could have happened to Seva: the feeling of agony that the boy’s fate caused him was revealed as a new reaction in him, and he chalked it up to old age and exhaustion.

At the end of the afternoon, one of the secretaries arrived in the capital bringing a second cable from Liova that gave some hope. He ran his eyes over the text, skipping over the details of the suicide, until he found the certain relief he was looking for. In a letter left by Zinushka, she noted that she had taken Seva to a Frau K., of whom she gave no other details, but Liova and his comrades were already searching all of Berlin. Tied to that hope, he spent the night awake, trying not to look at the clock. He had decided that in the morning he would get on the first ferry to Istanbul, to try to communicate with Liova by telephone. To his sorrow, he recalled the ill-fated lives of his two daughters too many times, and he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind that a similar misfortune could also mark the lives of Liova, young Seriozha, Seva. Then he wondered whether the moment had not come to execute the only radical measure able to stop that chain of sacrifices: because perhaps his own death could calm the anxiety for revenge that was directed at his clan, hostages of the limitless confrontation. Many times he looked at the mother-of-pearl revolver that Blumkin had brought him from Delhi. Did a revolutionary have the right to abandon the battlefield? Was the life of his children worth more than the fate of an entire class, more than a redeeming idea? Would he give Stalin that gift? Although he knew the answers, the idea of using the revolver fixed itself in his mind with a force he had not known until that day.

At the dock, shaking with the cold breeze coming from the sea, he saw the morning’s first ferry arrive. Among the few passengers traveling at that time and in that season, he made out the figure of his collaborator Rudolf Klement, in whose face he encountered the most encouraging smile and from whose lips he received the most desired news: they had found Seva. For a moment Lev Davidovich was about to give thanks to some god, and he recognized how egotistical he was for the happiness caused by this news. That same afternoon, overcome by tension, he felt how the reserves of energy keeping him afloat were running out and fell on his bed in the throes of a bout of malaria.

A few days later Lev Davidovich received a letter from Alexandra Sokolovskaya, written in Leningrad, where she was at the limit of her ability to resist. As could be expected, it was a letter full of pain and resentment, in which she accused him of having marginalized Zinushka from the political struggle and of having thus pushed her to her death. Without the physical or moral energy to respond to a wounded mother, he chose to accept the blame that was his and to pass on the rest that was not. With the begrudging mental coldness he was capable of, he prepared an open letter to the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee accusing Stalin of Zina’s death, a political exile only because she was part of his family, separated from her daughter, her mother, and her husband for the same reason, thrown out of the party and dismissed from her job only out of the most perverse revenge. Revenge, when it involves innocent people, is even more cruel, more criminal, and more treacherous, he said. But, to his pain, Lev Davidovich had to recognize that Joseph Stalin was as guilty of Zinushka’s death as the supposed Communists, who, in a surfeit of shamelessness at the recently closed party congress had proclaimed Stalin “Genius of the Revolution” and “Father of the World’s Progressive Peoples,” while millions of peasants were dying of hunger throughout the country, hundreds of thousands of men and women languished in labor camps and colonies of deportees, millions of people were without shoes, and Soviet policy was offering up the fate of German and European workers to Nazi voraciousness.

The secretaries prepared the copies that would go out to Moscow and to the newspapers, parties, and political groups of Europe the following day. Lev Davidovich was counting on Zina’s death resonating as Blumkin’s murder hadn’t, and having the capacity to generate compassion that his own exile had not generated. But again History came to yell in his ear, and the echo of more thunderous events buried his hopes, for at the time that his letters were leaving Prinkipo, a wave of justified fear was running through Europe and the world: Hitler had proclaimed himself chancellor of Germany and fascist banners were unfurling across the country amid the cheers of millions of Germans. Berlin was the city of a triumphant Hitler, not that of a young communist political exile and suicide.

8

As soon as he arrived, Ramón had the feeling that Barcelona had aged.

The order from the Popular Army’s chiefs of staff calling him back to the city had arrived at the camp a week after Caridad’s visit to him in the Sierra de Guadarrama. Full of doubts and weighed down with a good dose of shame, Ramón had taken leave of his company members and, his clothing covered with mud, stepped onto the military transport that evacuated the wounded from the front. No pasarán! he had yelled to his trench mates, who responded with the same words: No pasarán! Ramón Mercader did not imagine it would be the last time he would use that slogan.

Six months before, when he returned to Barcelona with the remains of his military regiment destroyed by Franco’s first offensive on Madrid, Ramón had found a city in such a state of political effervescence that, in a few days, he’d already managed to organize a new battalion willing to join the recently created Popular Army. The majority of his surviving comrades joined behind him and dozens of young people from the Columna de Hierro de las Juventudes Socialistas, elated at the possibility of leaving for the Madrid front, where everything seemed to be decided. Faith in victory was the oxygen the city breathed.

For Ramón, in those early days at the start of the conflict, Las Ramblas synthesized the spirit of an exultant Barcelona, drunk with anarchist, communist, and syndicalist dreams. Even when the malignant winds of war and death no longer felt like a viscous presence, hundreds of people ran around dressed in blue workers’ overalls, wearing the badges of a variety of recently created militias, all of them wrapped up in the strident revolutionary marches that clamored from the speakers placed on practically every building, from which hung slogans and banners of the parties loyal to the government. To be a worker, activist, militia man, or soldier of the Republic had become a sign of distinction and one could think that the moneyed classes, like his own family, who had adorned the geography of the place for decades, had disappeared from the face of the rejoicing earth where people greeted each other with their fists held high, exchanged slogans, and prepared themselves for sacrifice, convinced that they had to fight for a human dignity that had been only recently discovered by many.

Ramón had partaken in that crazed atmosphere in which no one seemed to have any true notion of the tragedy pursuing them, and had felt elated, more ready to push forward the wheel of history. A few weeks later, at the war’s most critical moment, when the lifesaving Soviet decision to provide military help to the Republic had arrived, the news, joyously received, had given support to the party and its militants, who had been abandoned during the early weeks swamped by an anarchist tide enjoying the best summer in its history.

With the support of África, Joan Brufau, and his colleagues at the head of the Juventudes Unificadas, Ramón exploited the increased revolutionary enthusiasm, and together they quickly conducted a hunt for fresh blood. The “Jaume Graells” battalion (poor Jaume, the group’s first martyr, fell in the defense of Madrid) hurried to leave for the new military destination they had been assigned, a few miles from the Madrid besieged by the Nationalists. Ramón, who was already considered a veteran and proudly showed the wound from the bullet that had grazed the back of his right hand in the first days of the war, would be its commander until the group joined the Fifth Regiment, and for several days he walked around Barcelona displaying the insignia that filled him with militant fervor.

África used the two weeks of October 1936 that Ramón spent in Barcelona before returning to the front to bring him up to speed on the dark political events that were already beginning to take place beneath the air of enthusiasm and combativeness. The greatest danger facing Republican forces, according to the young woman, was factionalism, which had worsened since the start of the war. Catalan nationalists, syndicalists with an anarchist orientation or socialist affiliation, and renegade Trotskyists like those from the Workers’ Party for Marxist Unification (POUM) — at the front of which was that stubborn thorn Andreu Nin (who was even a member of the Generalitat government) — were already opposed to the communist strategy and had put on the table the most transcendental question of the moment: War with revolution, or war with victory but without revolution? Even before the Soviet advisers and directors of the Comintern had arrived in Spain, the Communist Party had digested Moscow’s ever-correct policies and shown their position clearly: offering massive and immediate assistance to leftist forces with unity in order to obtain military victory and prevent the entrenchment of a fascism that threw itself behind the rebel military offering it massive and immediate aid. Only after that Republican victory could there be talk of establishing the bases for the social revolution whose very mention, at that moment, frightened the fickle democracies, who didn’t need to be frightened, since they ought to be the Republicans’ natural allies against the fascists. The POUM activists, with the Trotskyist philosophy of European revolution, and the anarchists, with their libertarian sermons (motivated by them, criminal excesses had already been committed that were as despicable as those of the rebel soldiers), had opposed this strategy from the start. It was erroneous according to them because they advocated for war and, along with it, revolution against the bourgeois system. That difference in principle foreshadowed fiery battles, and the work of the Communists, África said, was as important on the front as in the rear guard, where they had to fight for the validation of a policy demanded by Soviet advisers who had already conditioned their support on there not being any of the ideological breaks that libertarians and Trotskyists insisted on generating.

“Those revisionists love playing at revolution,” África had said to him. “If we let them, the only thing they’ll achieve is that we’re left on our own and lose the war. They have Trotsky’s sign on their heads and we’re going to have to rip it away from them by fire. Without Soviet assistance, you can’t even dream of victory, so now tell me how in the hell we’re going to make a revolution? It seems like they’ve already forgotten 1934.”

In the luxurious Hispano-Suiza that she drove around, África had taken him to see the poor neighborhoods and towns close to Barcelona so that Ramón could see the chaos that Trotskyists and anarchists were bringing to the country. Outside Las Ramblas and the city’s central areas, a regrettable desolation had settled, with streets blocked by absurd barricades, paralyzed factories, buildings ransacked to the core, and churches and convents turned into charred ruins. África told him about the executions carried out by the anarchists and about how fear of expressing their opinions was growing among workers. The middle class and many business owners had been divested of their goods, and the project to create a military industry was being run by a sea of syndicalist volunteers. A scarcity of products had taken hold in stores and markets. The people were enthusiastic, that was true, but they were also hungry, and in many places bread could only be acquired through long lines and only if they had the coupons distributed by anarchists and syndicalists, who had become the owners of a city in which central and local government were distant references. Although the anarchists were confident that having entered an era of equality was enough to maintain the support of masses who’d been enslaved for centuries, África asked herself how long the enthusiasm and the faith in victory would last.

“This Republic is a brothel and we’ve got to whip it into line.”

Now, in a period of only a few months, with the return of the smell of blood and the roaring from the front where young men like his brother Pablo or his friend Jaume fell daily, Ramón found himself in a tired, more still, disenchanted city, besieged by scarcity and anxious to return to the normality broken by the war and revolutionary dreams. It was as if the people only aspired to live a regular life, sometimes even at the despicable price of surrender. The franquistas’ devastating attack on Málaga, where the rebel infantry and navy, with the support of Italian aviation and troops, had massacred those escaping from the city, had dented people’s faith. Although posters still hung from buildings, from confiscated churches and from the few vehicles that ran through Barcelona, instead of clamoring for unity in victory, they now yelled furiously for the elimination of enemies that a short while before had been considered allies, even brothers. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie, who’d been forgotten up until a few weeks before, were emerging from their caves again: in the still poorly stocked cafés of Las Ramblas fur coats were seen once again amid the proletarian overalls. In the surviving bars, by contrast, it was the anarchist militia who in their idleness drank what they found, played dominoes, smoked foul-smelling cigarettes, and rolled around with the prostitutes whom a few weeks before they had tried to convert to the proletarian revolution. The effervescence of the previous months was losing its splendor, like the faded letters of the posters that, in these same bars, written by the same men, still recalled the Great Plans: DANCE IS THE BROTHEL’S WAITING ROOM; THE TAVERN WEAKENS CHARACTER; THE BAR DEGENERATES THE SPIRIT: LET’S CLOSE THEM!

On the way to the confiscated palace of his relative the Marquis of Villota, Ramón, conscious that he smelled like the hills and gunpowder, felt pride in knowing he was faithful to his purposes and also anxious to find out what his new fate would be. The underlying reasons for Barcelona’s atmospheric change still escaped him, but from that moment he had the notion that concrete — draconian, to be precise — actions were being imposed to restore the broken faith and implant the discipline that had never existed and that the overwhelmed Republic cried for.

While the streetcar went up to the heights of La Bonanova, Ramón remembered the times he and his parents had visited the house of their wealthy and noble relative, the owner of an admirable pack of dogs with whom Ramón spent the visits. That memory seemed remote, almost foreign, as if between those easy days of the past and the difficult hours of the present, many years — perhaps many lives — had traveled through his body, and of the boy Ramón, little more remained than barely a name and fragments of nostalgia. On the high gate of the property, a cardboard sign now hung announcing the location of the headquarters of the Group of Antifascist Women, presided over by Caridad. Although the building could not hide its splendor, the garden had become full of weeds, stripped cars, and starving dogs that Ramón preferred not to look at. Without anyone stopping him, the young man crossed the garden and the palace’s porch, with its Italian marble floor stained by mud and grease and a large photo of an illuminated and serious Stalin hanging in the privileged place where, he remembered perfectly, the marquis displayed a dark still life by Zurbarán. When they informed him that Comrade Caridad was in the back garden, Ramón, who knew his way through the house, searched for the exit from the library and saw a small table under the cypress tree where Caridad and the solid and ruddy Kotov were talking, smiling.

Ramón had met the Soviet man through his mother, when he had just arrived in Barcelona with the first intelligence advisers and those sent from the Comintern. Before Ramón left for Madrid and Caridad for Albacete, they had had many meetings with Kotov. Ramón had admired the marvelous capacity for analysis of that secret agent with transparent and sharp eyes and a slight limp in his left foot that he was sometimes able to hide. Later, when the fall of Madrid seemed imminent, comments reached the young man about the almost suicidal acts of that Moscow emissary, who, following the path of the first Soviet tanks, had many times placed himself at the head of militias and internationalists, violating the Muscovite order that prohibited advisers from directly participating in the actions of war. He also knew that his mother felt devoted to that man, who was capable, according to her, of reading a five-hundred-page book in one night, of reciting almost all of Pushkin’s poetry from memory, and of expressing himself in eight different languages, including Cantonese.

As if she had just seen him that morning, Caridad offered him a seat. Meanwhile, the effusive Kotov welcomed him with a bear hug and offered him a drink of vodka that Ramón rejected. The cold March air did not seem to have any effect on the Soviet, who was dressed in only a crude wool shirt with a multicolored handkerchief tied at his neck; Caridad, by contrast, was covered in blankets.

“How did you leave things in Madrid?” Kotov wanted to know, and Ramón tried to explain to him what could be known or speculated, from a trench twenty miles from the city, about the situation of the interminable battle for the capital, although he expressed his conviction that the offensive initiated in Guadalajara would end like the one at Jarama: it would be a new victory over the fascists.

“That’s a given,” Kotov declared, as if he could predict the future, even of that unpredictable war, and took one of Caridad’s cigarettes from the table. He began to smoke without inhaling. “But now we have a more complex battle here in Barcelona,” he added, and without further ado he painted for Ramón a picture of the political tensions in the Catalan capital in which the Generalitat at last was trying to be something more than an assembly of councillors whom no one obeyed. There, in Barcelona, more than in Madrid, the path of the war could be decided, he assured him.

Listening to Kotov, Ramón recalled the question that Caridad had asked him a few days before and her insistence on the idea that there could be more important fronts in that war. According to Kotov, President Companys seemed ready to discipline his territory and had ordered the requisition of weapons in the dismantling of anarchist and syndicalist vigilante patrols that effectively controlled Barcelona. For the party, the need to neutralize the different Republican, or falsely Republican, factions had become a task of the first order and because of that they should support Companys’s plan. The problem lay in the fact that the communist policy was constantly limited by the hostility of the conciliatory government of the Socialist Largo Caballero, who continued to demonstrate his dislike of them and, what was worse, his inability to direct the war. The panorama became clearer for Ramón when Kotov explained that a group of completely trustworthy militants was going to work for what was presented as an urgent political need: to get rid of those burdens affecting discipline and military will and catalyze the Republican efforts dedicated to unifying the forces. To reach this objective they were going to use all means, from the most aggressive propaganda to the possibility of creating such a crisis that it would lead to a change in the government and allow the replacement of Largo Caballero by a leader capable of obtaining the unity of the forces.

Ramón was beginning to make out the dimensions of the mission he’d been called on to undertake, and he listened to Kotov’s reflections about the urgency of initiating the offensive with a purge of the army, where they had to get rid of some of the leaders who were unconditionally loyal to Largo Caballero. Comrade Stalin himself had suggested that they purge the highest levels and designate more capable leaders: in the Málaga disaster, they had behaved like idiots — worse, like traitors and saboteurs. Therefore it was necessary to remove recalcitrant opponents and, at the same time, achieve the preeminence of the Communists within the Republican alliance, in the army as well as in the institutions. Only thus could they achieve necessary cohesion and begin to dream of victory.

“Kid, in this war many things are being decided for the future of the proletariat, for the whole world, and we can’t go around like wet rags. We know that Largo and his damn Socialists are organizing a miserable campaign against the Soviets, the Communists, and our political commissars. Or does it seem like a coincidence to you that they are talking more and more about how Mexico is offering the Republic disinterested assistance? Some have even accused us of having taken the reserves of Spanish gold to Moscow as payment for the weapons, when everyone knows that — besides selling the Spanish weapons that nobody would sell them — we’re protecting that treasure that could’ve fallen into the hands of the fascists, which would have been the end of the Republic. It’s very clear: at the root there is an alliance between Socialists and Trotskyists to discredit the Soviets. We even suspect that the government is negotiating a pact with the English to carve us out of the game. We would leave as we came in, lamenting the defeat of the Republic, but what about you? You would be the scapegoats and would pay with your blood. Franco is going for everything, with Hitler and Mussolini pushing him on.”

Ramón, angered by what he was listening to, observed Caridad, who lit a cigarette, puffed on it a few times, and threw it far away from her.

“I feel terrible. I have angina,” the woman said, and leaned over the table. “And the damn tobacco. . I think Kotov has been clear.”

Ramón felt his ideas forming a dark medley in his mind. The list of plots, betrayals, and pettiness enumerated by Kotov was overwhelming for him, and the project of a wide antifascist front, in which he had believed and for which he had fought, seemed to undo itself beneath the weight of that information. But he still couldn’t see his place in a decentralized war, in which enemies jumped out from any corner and not just on the battlefield. The adviser stood up and looked him in the eye, forcing him to keep his head held up.

“So that you understand me better: surely you found out that a month ago they withdrew several advisers from the first group that arrived. What you surely don’t know is that right now they’re in Moscow, they’ve been tried, and many of them will be executed. Do you want me to tell you who’s next on the list?” The adviser lowered his voice and paused dramatically. “The order just came that we send Antonov-Ovseyenko, our consul here in Barcelona, back to Moscow. Antonov,” Kotov’s voice changed upon repeating the name, “a symbol in and of himself, the Bolshevik who in 1917 assured the taking of the Winter Palace. . Do you know what it means when he and other former militants are being taken out of the game? Have you read the news about the trials that just took place in Moscow? Well, all of this means that we can’t feel pity for anyone, Ramón, not even for ourselves if we commit the slightest error. Republican Spain needs a government capable of guaranteeing military success. That is why we need to move quickly and carefully.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Ramón was afraid that he had not exactly understood what was drawing itself in his mind, and he found that he was scared by the revelations he was hearing.

“The party has to take real power, even by force if necessary,” Kotov said. “But first we have to clean house.”

Ramón dared to look for Caridad’s glassy green gaze; she was periodically taking sips from a yellowish liquid served in a cup decorated with the Marquis of Villota’s coat of arms.

“Don’t stare anymore: it’s lemon juice, for the angina. .,” she said, and added, “África is working with us, in case you didn’t know.” And Ramón felt a pang. He again looked up at Kotov. And took a step that brought him closer to África.

“What do I have to do?”

“You’ll find out when it’s time. .” Kotov smiled and, after circling for a moment, returned to his chair. “What you need to know now is that if you work with us, you will never again be the Ramón Mercader that you once were. And I should also tell you that if you commit any indiscretions, if you weaken during any mission, we will be very ruthless. And you have no idea how ruthless we can be. If you’re here and have heard all of this, it’s because Caridad has assured us that you are a man who is capable of remaining silent.”

“You can trust me. I’m a Communist and a revolutionary and am willing to make any sacrifice for the cause.”

“I’m glad.” Kotov smiled again. “But I should remind you of something else. . We’re not inviting you to participate in a social club. If you decide to enter, you’ll never be able to leave. And never means never. Is that clear? Would you really be willing to fulfill any mission, make any sacrifice, as you say, even things that other men without our convictions could consider immoral and even criminal?”

Ramón felt himself sinking in quicksand. It was as if his blood had fled his body and left him without any warmth. He thought that África had been subject to the same interrogation, and it wasn’t difficult to guess what her response had been. The ideas of the revolution, socialism, the great human utopia, for which he had fought suddenly seemed like another one of those romantic slogans pinned on the coal trucks led by mules: words. The truth, the whole truth, was enclosed in a question made by the envoy of the only victorious revolution that, to sustain its ideals, practiced a necessary lack of compassion, even with its most beloved children, and demanded the eventual rejection of any atavism. His ascent to that stratospheric level signified turning into much more than a simple follower of the revolution and the rhetoric of its mottos.

“I’m willing,” he said, and suddenly he felt superior.

As he observed the port, where a few ships were anchored, Ramón felt the days of the start of the war becoming so distant that they seemed like flashes from another incarnation, even lived in another body, but above all with another mind.

That afternoon, after taking a shower, Ramón had spoken for a while with little Luis and with a sad-eyed young woman named Lena Imbert, whom he’d gone to bed with once or twice and who had turned into Caridad’s assistant. Instead of taking the Ford that his mother offered him, he preferred to walk to the Paseo de Gracia. He needed to wrap his mind around the new condition of his life, but above all, he needed to speak with África and obtain confirmation from her of the electrifying panorama painted by Kotov. In front of the La Pedrera building, several party militiamen were on guard and Ramón’s military and political credentials were not enough to permit him entry. Since September, that child of Gaudí’s delirium had turned into the general barracks for Soviet intelligence and party leaders in Cataluña and was the city’s most protected building. Ramón managed to have one of the militiamen agree to give a note to Comrade África and he sat down to wait on one of the Paseo’s benches.

A short while later, he felt hunger pangs and went out in search of one of the port’s surviving inns. Later he went to the Church of the Merced and found the very modest building where his father, who he knew was now working as an accountant, was living following the crash of his business. His curiosity fulfilled, he realized that he didn’t feel any desire to see the man, since he couldn’t even imagine what he would talk about with that bourgeois gentleman so attached to his retrograde Catalanism and who was too soft for his liking. He left Calle Ample and headed for the start of Las Ramblas, where he had designated a meeting place with África.

The night was getting cold, his anxiety to see the young woman was tormenting him, and Ramón took refuge in his thoughts. What had been clear for him until a few months before had now turned into a cloudy darkness full of twists and turns. From the enthusiasm with which he had gone to jail, and that with which he had entered La Barceloneta to teach literacy to the sons of workers, as well as the fury with which he would later hand himself over to the organization of the aborted Popular Olympics, he had immediately gone on to defend the Republic from the military coup. Then anarchists, POUM members, Socialists, and Communists fought together to prevent the victory of the coup. Joining a militia and almost immediately afterward the ranks of the new Republican Army were the steps that he naturally took, with all of his enthusiasm and his faith, convinced that his life only had meaning if he was able to defend with a rifle the ideas in which he believed. But after half a year of war, and before the evidence of the political meanness of the British, the Americans, and, above all, the French Socialists, it was clear that only the Soviets would maintain them and that the Republic depended on that support.

Deep in his thoughts, he was surprised by África’s arrival. Since he hadn’t expected to see her, he felt an even greater happiness upon hearing her voice and breathing in the young woman’s unalterably feminine perfume. Ramón kissed her furiously and forced her to step back so he could get a better look at her: he didn’t know if four months of military campaigns amid the stench, cries, blood, and death had influenced his perception, but before him he saw an angel in combat uniform, with her shorn hair giving her a definitively military air.

África had the keys with her to a small apartment in the Barceloneta, and they walked quickly, looking for the alleyways that would make the path to the consummation of their desire shorter. They climbed some dark steps impregnated with the smell of dampness, but when they opened the door, Ramón found a small room dominated by a double bed over which was draped a sheet smelling of soap. With his accumulated anxiety and exhausting feeling of need, Ramón made love to her with an uncontainable fullness and fury. Only when he felt satiated, while he was resting before a new attack, did he dare to start the conversation that he desired as much as the body of the woman whom he would most love in his life.

África told him that their daughter was fine, although she had not had any news of her for a few weeks. She knew that after the bloody taking of Málaga by the Nationalists, her parents had managed to go to a small town in the Alpujarras where some relatives of theirs lived. Besides, África had had so much work in the office of Pedro, the local leader of the Comintern’s advisers, that she barely had any time left to think about herself and none at all to worry about Lenina, whom her parents would know how to care for.

“I’m working with the propaganda group,” she explained, and detailed the underground work on public opinion that was aimed at overcoming the resistance of those who were opposed to the Soviet presence in the country, starting with Largo Caballero, who with all slyness accepted the weapons but listened to the advisers’ counsel with clenched teeth. Increasingly, the Socialists, before the evidence of the party’s exponential growth and their growing prestige on the front, were calling them marionettes for Moscow’s designs and accusing them of wanting to control the Republic. The attacks by the POUM’s Trotskyists were worse, making it their duty to unmask their true reactionary essence.

“I’ve also been asked to work to get all of those people out of the way,” Ramón said, already completely convinced of the need for his new mission, and he told her about his interview with Kotov.

“You know what, Ramón?” she said. “What you’ve told me could cost you your life.”

“You also said yes to them. I know I can trust you.”

“You’re wrong. You can’t trust anyone. .”

“Don’t get paranoid, please.”

África smiled and shook her head no.

“Comrade, the only way that everything we do will work is if we do it in silence. Get that into your head, because if you don’t, what you’re going to get is a bullet. And listen to me now, because I’m risking things with what I’m going to tell you: the Soviets want to help us win the war, but we’re the ones who have to win it, and if things don’t change, we’ll never win. You are going to be part of that change. As such, forget that you have a soul, that you love anyone, and that I even exist.”

“That last part is impossible,” he said, and tried to smile.

“Well, it’s the best thing you could do. . Ramón, perhaps tonight will be the last time we will see each other for a long time. In a few days I have to leave Barcelona. .,” she said as she began to dress, and he watched her, feeling his desires freeze. “And don’t ask me, because I haven’t asked you why or where, either. I’m a soldier and I go wherever they send me.”

9

Throughout the spring of 1977, I traveled many times to that beach, and on each occasion, moved by the most innocent curiosity, I sat down under the pines awhile seeking a new encounter, surely improbable, with the owner of the Russian wolfhounds, whom, the same day on which I met him, I had named “the man who loved dogs.”

Ever since leaving Baracoa two years before, with the cure to my alcoholism completed, and which kept me radically removed from drinking for fifteen years — when the crisis started and I felt that I could again have a drink of rum or a beer and not go up Jacob’s ladder, since I was down that low — I had turned my life around in an important way. Without yet knowing very well what I wanted, and to the surprise of my friends, I had not accepted the placement that was being given me in the information services team of a national radio station, a reward for the work that I was supposed to have carried out in Baracoa, evaluated as excellent. I had begun to trawl in the underworld of the cultural and journalistic sphere, which was still packed with fallen angels who had once been celebrated or controversial writers, journalists, promoters, all defenestrated, perhaps for life, and for a variety of reasons or no reasons at all. That search ended up leading me to the very modest position of proofreader at the Veterinaria Cubana magazine, as its former occupant had died a few weeks before, apparently by his own hand. That work seemed sufficiently obscure, anonymous, far from any possible passions and ambitions, and guaranteed me the two things I needed at that moment: a salary to live on, and peace and a routine to try to recompose my spirits. In due time, I thought, I would try to return to the writing that at that moment I still didn’t think was possible.

In reality, I wasn’t very clear on the way in which I would carry out the attempt to write again, since we were right in the middle of the year 1975 and nothing on the horizon indicated that anything could change in the conception of politics and literature that, under the deadweight of the most rigid orthodoxy, only produced and promoted works like the one I had written four years before: “nonflictive”—as they were later labeled — and complacent, without a hint of social or human tension that was not permeated by the influence of official propaganda. And if there was something I was sure of, it was that that writing no longer had anything to do with the person that I could become. The problem was rooted in the fact that I didn’t have a fucking idea of what kind of literature I should and, above all, perhaps I could write — and far less, the what and the how of the person that I wanted to be.

Around that time in which I was making those trips to the beach — by which, I would later learn, I was tempting my fate — my relationship had already begun with Raquelita, the recently graduated dentist who, that same year, would become my wife. We had met on the same beach during the previous summer and for that reason, from the beginning, she was familiar with my desire to participate in the squash games that were played on the courts of Santa María, El Mégano, and Guanabo, especially those that could take place between November and April, when bathing in the sea ceases to be attractive for Cubans, and only the most fanatical make the trip from Havana to the beaches to enjoy some friendly and challenging games.

In that way, each afternoon that I had to go to the print shop to hand in originals or galleys, instead of returning to the magazine’s editing room, I went by my godmother’s house, where I used to keep my racket, and boarded La Estrella, the mythical route of wobbly Leyland buses that travel between the city and the beaches, until I arrived at the beach of Guanabo.

It was two weeks after our first meeting and following three or four excursions to the beach that, in April already, I again ran into the foreigner with the wolfhounds. The mise-en-scène was very similar to our first encounter: the dogs were running on the sand and, in the distance, their owner followed them with their leashes in his hands and that definitively clumsy gait — drunk, perhaps, I thought that time. That day the man was wearing white pants, a light fabric, and a checked shirt, like a cowboy. I, unlike the first time, remained seated, with the novel I was reading in my hands — I had begun Rabbit, Run, that book that Updike never surpassed. After whistling to the dogs, who barely noticed me, I smiled at the man and greeted him with a nod of my head, which he returned by raising his right hand, still covered with a piece of cloth. A few minutes later, to complete the picture, the tall, thin black man made his appearance, again between the casuarinas.

When the man stopped, I stood up and took a few steps toward him, as if it were a completely coincidental meeting.

“How are you?” I asked him, indecisive about which path to take with the possible conversation.

“I’ve been better,” the man said, and smiled with a certain bitterness.

Since I didn’t smell alcohol on his breath, I was about to ask him if he was sick, since the way he was walking hinted at some problem with his balance. At that moment I noticed that the sallow color of his skin was accentuated, and I thought that perhaps it was due to some illness, perhaps with his liver, circulatory or respiratory, but I abstained from asking and went the safe route.

“So how old are the dogs?”

“They just turned ten. They’re getting old; wolfhounds don’t live long.”

“And how do they cope with summer here in Cuba?”

“We have air-conditioning at the house. .,” he began, but stopped, since without a doubt he knew that in Cuba almost no one could afford that luxury. “But they’ve adapted well. Especially Ix, the female. Dax’s character has changed a little bit lately.”

“Has he gotten aggressive? Sometimes that happens to borzois.”

“Yes, sometimes,” the man said, and I was certain that I had gone too far: only a specialist, or someone who was interested in that breed for some reason, could know those details about the behavior of Russian wolfhounds. I then chose to reveal a part of the truth.

“Ever since I saw them the other day,” I pointed at the animals, “I was so impressed by them that I looked for more information about them. I’m really taken with your dogs.”

The man smiled, less tense, obviously proud.

“A few months ago, they asked me to loan them out for a movie. It tells the story of a rich family that didn’t want to leave Cuba after the revolution, and the director felt that Ix and Dax were perfect for those people. . I had to take them every time they appeared, and the truth is that it was great fun to be at the filming, seeing how a lie is put together that later can look like truth. I have a great desire to see how it all turned out. .”

The conversation went on for a good while, always with the tall, thin black man observing us from the casuarinas; we talked about movies and books, about the pleasant temperature of spring on the island, about my work and the aristocratic line of the borzois, which, according to the man, were already recorded in a French chronicle from the eleventh century, where it is said that when Anna Yaroslavna, daughter of the Grand Duke of Kiev, arrived in Paris to marry Henry I, she came accompanied by three borzois.

“The Russians say quite proudly that the borzois are the dogs of czars and poets, because Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Nicholas II, Pushkin, and Turgenev had these wolfhounds. But the greatest breeder of borzois was the Grand Duke Nicholas, who ended up with various breederies. After the revolution, borzois almost disappeared, and now are the dogs of the nomenclature, as they say.” He made a gesture of pointing up high. “A regular Soviet could not feed these animals, although, in reality, they eat very little for their size. The real problem is that they need a lot of space. If they don’t exercise, they feel terrible.”

That afternoon the man finally satisfied one of the questions hounding me: he told me he was Spanish and that he had lived in Moscow for many years, since the end of the Spanish Civil War, of course, in which he had fought on the Republican side, also of course. He’d been living in Cuba for three years, above all because his wife, who was Mexican, had never adjusted to the Soviet Union: the cold and the Russian character drove her crazy (“crazier than she already is,” he said literally).

When we said goodbye, I also knew that the man was named Jaime López and that he was happy to have seen me again. As on the previous occasion, I saw them walk away, accompanied by the tall, thin black man. Then, driven by curiosity, I waited a couple of minutes and went out to the highway. In the distance, I saw the man, the black man, and the dogs as they crossed the parking lot’s deserted esplanade and approached a white pickup-style Volga, which Ix and Dax entered through the back door. The car, driven by the black man, went out to the highway and moved toward Havana.

Throughout the month of April and during the first weeks of May, López — as the man asked me to call him — and I met on the beach several times, almost always briefly. No matter how much I think about it, I still can’t really explain my persistent interest in that figure, who almost never talked about himself and didn’t seem too interested in me or in the environment of the country where he now lived, despite the fact that, according to what he told me, his mother had been born in Havana when the island was still a Spanish colony. Nonetheless, when the matter of the dogs and his remote family connection with Cuba were exhausted — and in each meeting they became exhausted more quickly — the conversations could broach issues that gave me a little more information about the reserved “man who loved dogs.”

One of the first details that López revealed to me was that in his work he had been assigned a chauffeur (the watchful tall black man who appeared and disappeared amid the casuarinas), not because he was important enough to need it, but rather because he suffered from frequent dizzy spells and he had caused two traffic accidents, luckily minor ones. For the last few months, he told me, he had been undergoing medical tests, increasingly complicated ones; while they had determined that he wasn’t suffering from any neurological or auditory affliction that could cause those bouts of vertigo, the fact was that they were increasingly besieging him with greater insistence and intensity. I also came to learn that he had two children: a boy who was more or less my age, who dreamed of studying to be a merchant ship captain, and a girl, seven years younger, and who was the apple of his eye, he said, with his propensity for ready-made phrases. For periods of time, another “almost” son also lived with them, a nephew of his wife’s, who had become an orphan when he was very little.

On one occasion in which I asked him what kind of work he did in Cuba to have a new car and the possibility of a chauffeur, Jaime López only told me that he was a ministry adviser and immediately changed the subject. And when I wanted to know where he lived, he was elusive, saying “on the other side of the river,” an imprecise direction that no Havana native would have given, since the foul Almendares River had not served as a reference of anything for anyone for years.

With the start of May and rising temperatures, the beach began to receive more visitors, and it became clear that López and his dogs would have to find another place. By then I had lost almost all interest in that impenetrable Spaniard, the son of a Cuban mother about whom he told me nothing (“I don’t like to talk about her,” he said), who had fought in a war about which he didn’t speak (“It hurts me to remember it”), lived in a Moscow about which he had no opinion, and worked and lived in Cuba, in imprecise places marked by a river that had been famous in other times and was currently forgotten. Because of that, when the man who loved dogs disappeared, I didn’t miss him, and if it hadn’t been for the two borzois that I remembered quite frequently, the image of Jaime López would have perhaps disappeared forever from my mind, like the Almendares River and so many other fond characters and places that started disappearing from Havana’s weakened memory.

That summer of 1977 was marked by my ill-fated wedding to Raquelita and, weeks later, the regrettable revelation of my brother William’s homosexuality.

My decision to marry Raquelita surprised my friends, especially when they found out that she wasn’t pregnant. I was simply run over by a visceral need for company, a desire to further strengthen my personal refuge, and she accepted the proposal because — I would find out a few years later, when she decided to leave me and humiliate me as well — being married greatly facilitated the paperwork a relative of hers, very well-placed (the nomenclature), would take care of to exempt her from social service, so unappealing and ideologically strengthening for the rest of the graduates. The wedding took place in a very unconventional way, since we brought the notary to Raquelita’s parents’ house, in Altahabana, and despite it having been my friend Dany who introduced me to my imminent wife, for reasons of antiquity I selected as my witness el negro Frank, recently arrived from his social service as a doctor in Moa, the mining city, the other Cuban Siberia. The party that followed was in the new spirit of the proletarian poor that had been established, with the beer that was sold to newlyweds for a fixed price and the edible and drinkable contributions of both sets of friends. Once the usual honeymoon in a Havana hotel had been enjoyed, we went to live at my house, in Víbora Park. Although we shared the space with my parents and my brother, William, my wife and I had the privacy of a bedroom with its own bathroom, to which we would soon add, to avoid guaranteed frictions with my mother, a small kitchen, taking part of the roofed terrace.

The calm world that I was trying to build experienced a brutal shakeup just a few weeks after the wedding. The truth is that William’s homosexuality had always been, for me and my parents, a reality that we fought even as we refused to see it, and, of course, something that we never talked about. Since he was a boy, William dragged along an underlying femininity that seemed to sink, perhaps disappear, when he entered secondary school. My parents took him to a psychologist and consoled themselves by thinking that, after two years of consultations, he had achieved the miracle of “curing” the kid with an array of injected hormones that had caused the collateral effect of making his cock grow to horselike dimensions. Although in recent years, my relationship with William had become distant, at times prickly, the whole time I suspected that his homosexuality was just latent and would one day raise its head. But I never imagined that upon waking it would turn into a real nightmare that would end up enveloping us all.

Due to the extent of the effect of their nature and fate on this story, I’m urged to make a small commentary about my parents. In reality they were two people who were so normal that it made you feel bad: they were workers, they got along, all they wanted was that William and I would have a good life and go to college, something they had not managed to do. He was a Mason and she Catholic, and they never hid those affiliations in an era in which almost everyone preferred to hide and even renounce these and other petit bourgeois caprices, belonging to a past in the midst of socialist improvement. Ever since I can remember, I recall that my parents tried to instill the conviction, in me as well as in William, that the truth should always be faced, that only work makes man grow, and that, in all situations, the decent behavior of an individual always had the same characteristics (you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not betray, etc.) and, further still, that against those three values (truth, work, and decency) no force in the world could prevail. As you can see, my parents were utterly credulous. Of course, at that time, I didn’t precisely formulate or understand that elemental compendium of Masonic-Christian ethics, nor do I think did my parents. What I’m sure of is that this view of life had a strong influence on my and my brother’s consciousness, and that having been educated with those precepts was not very healthy in an age when perhaps the best thing would have been to learn from the cradle the arts of dissimulation or duplicity as a means of promotion or, at least, as a strategy for survival.

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.

Liova’s messages, weighed down with uncertainty before the path of the events, soon brought news that directly affected the Exile of Büyükada. The prohibition of Bulletin Oppozitsii and, almost immediately, the confiscation of his works from bookstores and libraries and the public burning of entire boxes of the recently published History of the Russian Revolution, was a clear sign that the fascist inquisition had him and his group on their list of enemies. He then decided that it wasn’t the time for running risks and ordered Liova to leave Berlin without delay.

Lev Davidovich’s indignation exploded when he found out that the executive of the Communist International had issued a shameless declaration of support for the German Communist Party, whose political strategy it qualified as impeccable, while it repeated that the victory of the Nazis was just a transitory situation from which progressive forces would emerge victorious. The most worrying thing was that it was not only the domesticated Germans but also the rest of the parties affiliated with the Comintern who had silently complied with that incriminating document of political suicide with predictable consequences. How could the Communists submit themselves to such a crude manipulation? Wasn’t there a drop of responsibility left in those parties that would put them on their guard against a tragedy that threatened their survival and peace in Europe? If they did not at the very least accept the imminence of the danger, he wrote, on the brink of rage, they had to admit that Stalinism had degraded the communist movement to such an incurable degree that trying to reform it was an impossible mission. One of Lev Davidovich’s most intense political doubts was settled at that instant: it was time to throw it all on the fire. With the pain produced by rejecting a son who had gone off the path until he turned into an unrecognizable being, he decided that the moment had arrived to break with the International and, perhaps, to create a new one that would oppose fascism with concrete acts and not with propaganda slogans that hid macabre ulterior motives.

Just a week after Maya’s death, the anticipated news that Daladier’s government was giving him asylum arrived to pull him out of the morass of depression. Although he immediately knew how limited the hospitality being offered him was, he didn’t hesitate to accept: according to the visa, he was authorized to reside in one of the departments in the south, on the condition of not ever visiting Paris, and of submitting to the control of the Ministry of the Interior. More than a refugee, he would again be a prisoner, only now in a central corridor and not in a confinement cell. And from there he thought he could act.

The morning on which the retinue of secretaries, bodyguards, fishermen, and police were going down to the dock where their bags were already waiting, Natalia and Lev Davidovich remained for a few minutes in front of what had been their home. They wanted to say goodbye to Prinkipo, where he had finished his autobiography and written the History of the Russian Revolution; where he had ceased to be a Soviet and had cried over the death of a daughter; and where, in the midst of the worst abandonment, he had decided that his fight was not finished and that he needed to live — to harass the most ruthless power that one man alone, without resources, who was aging by the day could conceive of confronting. Good Kharalambos, who was silently watching him from the path, must have asked himself if it was true that that lonely man had ever been an explosive leader capable of inspiring the masses to revolution. No one would have said so, he surely concluded, as he saw him close the garden gate and lean over to pick some wildflowers on the ground where four years before he had prohibited the planting of a rosebush. When they came close to him, Kharalambos smiled at them, his eyes watering, and accepted the flowers that the deportee extended to him. Without saying a word, Lev Davidovich raised his eyes to the pines hiding the white walls of the cemetery of the islands of the exiled princes.

Nine days later, without the jubilation they expected, Lev Davidovich, Natalia, and Liova arrived at Les Embruns, the villa that Raymond Molinier had rented in the outskirts of Saint-Palais, in the French Midi. The former commissar of war’s entrance into the house had not exactly been dignified: he was trembling with fever, thinking that the pounding in his temples would burst his skull, and felt as if his waist was being broken by a biting and unrelenting pain. Because of that, as soon as he crossed the threshold, he fell on a couch and immediately accepted the aspirins and sleeping pills that Natalia Sedova gave him.

They had barely left Istanbul when he had felt a crisis of lumbago, accompanied by a return of malaria. During the entire crossing, Lev Davidovich had remained in his cabin and even refused to speak with the journalists who were waiting for him in El Pireo, attracted by the rumors of his imminent return to the Soviet Union, after his meeting in France with Stalin’s new commissar of foreign affairs. When Marseille came into sight, dozens of journalists, policemen, and protesters opposed to his presence in France were also waiting for them, and his wife had surprised him with the news that Liova and Molinier had come from the port in a ferry to avoid encountering the crowd that could have upset the authorities. Seeing his son again after a tense separation, and hearing him say that in the course of a few days Jeanne would travel from Paris to bring Seva to him, brought him happiness capable of dulling his pains. He then found out that Molinier had prepared everything so that they disembarked in Cassis, from which they traveled in cars to Saint-Palais. But that almost two-hour-long journey on narrow roads had ended up conquering the recently arrived man’s physical resistance.

The pills were starting to take effect, when Lev Davidovich heard some voices ripping him away from that kind lethargy. He would confess to Natalia Sedova that at first he thought he was dreaming: in his dream someone was screaming “Fire! Fire!” But he had enough lucidity not to brush away the nightmare returning him to the nights of arson in Büyükada and Kadıköy as insignificant. He managed to open his eyes just as he felt his arm being pulled and saw the terrified expression on Liova’s face. Then he knew that reality was greater than the ramblings of his fever, and, leaning on his son, he managed to go out to the garden, above which smoke was floating, and he had the feeling of carrying hell with him. Shit! he thought, and fell on the grass, where he at last found out that the fire (seemingly caused by a train spark that had fallen on the very dry earth) had only affected the hedge and the backyard’s wooden shed.

Liova and Molinier were in a rush to speak with Lev Davidovich, as in just one month the founding assembly of the Fourth International planned by the Exile would take place in Paris. However, stopped by Natalia Sedova, the men had to contain their impatience and give the sick man a few days of peace. Nor could Seva’s anxiously awaited arrival be celebrated as it should have been, due to the fevers overtaking him; he asked Natalia to let him talk to the boy, though, since he wanted to see how his spirits were and explain why his beloved Maya was not with them.

When the fever receded a bit, and particularly when the lumbago pains began to decrease, Lev Davidovich put a deaf ear to his wife’s prohibitions and held a meeting with Lev Sedov, Raymond Molinier, and his coreligionist Max Shachtman, who had accompanied him from Prinkipo. The Exile knew that he was racing the clock and that the four weeks until the constitutive meeting in Paris were forcing them to be especially efficient, since he sensed that he was playing the most important card of his exile. His main concern was Liova and Molinier’s capacity for gatherings, since they would not only be in charge of organizing the meeting but also be his voice, impossible as it was for him to travel to Paris due to the conditions of his asylum. Weighing each of his collaborators’ judgments, the old revolutionary listened to their opinions and immediately was sure that the Fourth International was hanging on a precipice, affected by his own contradictions and created at an adverse time, perhaps too quickly. While Liova offered the dismal panorama (fear and doubts in Germany, dispersion and rivalries in France and Belgium, adventurism in the United States), Molinier trusted in the Exile’s authority to overcome the doubts of many followers and in the possibility of taking advantage of the rise of fascism to call for unity.

Before returning to Paris, Liova would confess to his mother that, for the second time in his life, he had felt compassion for Lev Davidovich and even asked himself if it was worth continuing to fight. Although his father hadn’t given up, the truth was that only his pride, his historic optimism, and his responsibility made him insist on his ideas: at the end of thirty years of revolutionary struggle it was clear, seeing how the world was breaking under the weight of the reaction around him, the totalitarianism, the lies, and the threat of a devastating war, that the man was on his own.

It was precisely that optimism about the future and the laws of history that constituted Lev Davidovich’s mainstay throughout the weeks in which, from his sofa, he devoted up to fifteen hours daily to drafting the thesis to be discussed in Paris. His political perception, altered by events of recent years, allowed him to clarify some of his purposes in calling for a new International, to which he hoped to attract the dispersed Trotskyist groups and those unhappy with the Stalinist policy applied in Germany, and also some radical sectors, which were always difficult to discipline. But its great contradiction continued to be the policy the meeting of parties should adopt regarding the Soviet Union: the situation there was different, and for the time being caution was the priority, since the struggle had no reason to attack the basis of the system if it managed to unmask it and, when the time came, dethrone the bureaucratic excrescence.

The work, in any event, would not be easy. Stalin had already ordered the “friends of the USSR” to initiate a campaign destined to get hold of the antifascist monopoly, at least on the verbal level, since, when it came to action, they didn’t seem too interested in opposing the necessary enemy that had finally emerged from the German ashes. Stalin’s new campaign propagated the myth that the Soviet system was the only possible choice against Hitler and barbarism. While they accused the democracies of being sympathetic to and even having been the cause of fascism, they reduced the ethical and political options to just two: on the one hand terror, made incarnate by fascism; and on the other, hope and the common good, represented by the Communists led by Stalin. The trap was set and Lev Davidovich started to predict the fall of almost all of the West’s progressive forces into the abyss.

Throughout the four weeks he worked on preparing the conference, the pain and fever would not leave him. Many times Natalia tried to tear him away from his work, but he refused, promising that, after the meeting, he would submit to the regimen of her choice. On the brink of collapse, he finished drafting the documents and bid goodbye to van Heijenoort, begging him to forget his wife’s orders and keep him up-to-date.

The anxiety soon gave way to disappointment before a predictable fiasco. The parties and groups represented in Paris were a reflection of the dispersal experienced by the European and American left, discouraged by failure and frightened by Moscow’s pressures. More than a current, his followers formed small grouplets, the majority being dissidents from communist parties, and they stepped back, scared by that new affiliation that demanded a defined anti-Stalinist position and a philosophical practice that was essentially Marxist, guided by the doctrine of permanent revolution as an ideological principle. Lev Davidovich thought that perhaps Molinier’s unrestrained energy and Liova’s inexperience had led to the impossibility of achieving important strategic agreements and because of that, when he found out that only three of the invited parties accepted to join a new coalition, he advised Liova that, to save his honor, he desist from founding the International and announce that the meeting had been just a preliminary conference for the future organization.

Overcome by exhaustion and disappointment, he put his body in Natalia’s hands; she began by confining him to a room without a desk, to which all visitors were forbidden, including Liova. Nonetheless, his mind kept going around in circles, and for several days he thought about the reasons for the failure in Paris. That fiasco proved how much his political power had diminished in five years of almost complete marginalization, although he had to recognize that the political situation in which he now had to act was decisive, so different from that of 1917: the revolutionary positions were withdrawing and it was utopian to wait for a situation capable of unleashing a wave of rebellion to advance through Europe and reach Moscow’s doors. By any measure, the clamor for permanent revolution and the image of a leader who would subvert the Muscovite order as well as the capitalist one began to seem anachronistic.

A few weeks later, when the French authorities lifted some restrictions on his asylum (now he was prevented only from living in Paris and in the Seine department), Lev Davidovich decided to leave Saint-Palais and cut off his dependent relationship with Raymond Molinier. Due to his limited finances, he chose to establish himself in the outskirts of Barbizon, the small town that Millet, Rousseau, and other landscape artists had made famous. Located on the edges of the Fontainbleau forest and less than two hours from Paris, Barbizon represented the advantage of being closer to his followers, although it forced them to again use a corps of bodyguards.

The house was a two-story building, from the turn of the century, that its owners baptized “Ker Monique,” and was only separated from the forest by a dirt path that barely fit a car. Since moving to that place, always perfumed by the scent of the forest, he felt himself regaining his ability to work and was again writing and receiving visits from his followers, to whom he proselytized on an almost individual basis. Thus, he tried to prevent new dissent from forming, as had just occurred in Spain, where the group led by his old friend Andreu Nin had decided to found a party independent of any International, or the one that was led in France by fighters like Simone Weil and Pierre Naville. The most regrettable thing was discovering how much the proposed International had been hurt by Molinier’s political ambitions, capable of planting chaos in the French opposition to the point that, he wrote, they would need years of work to bring together the scarcely hundred or so militants who still followed him.

With Natalia, he spent many afternoons that winter walking to the domesticated forest of oaks and chestnuts that made up the hunting grounds of the French monarchy, and even crossed it to visit the Palais-Royal. Some nights, wanting to treat themselves, they went to eat venison at the nearby Auberge du Grand-Veneur, but he almost always dedicated those hours to catching up on new developments in French literature and with pleasure read a couple of novels by Georges Simenon, that young Belgian who had interviewed him in Prinkipo; he discovered the overwhelming Céline of Journey to the End of the Night, which had been capable of shaking the vocabulary of French literature; and he enjoyed Malraux’s epic Man’s Fate, the novel that the writer gave him during his visit to Saint-Palais.

However, the book that really moved him at that time had arrived from Moscow and served to reveal to him once again why Mayakovsky had chosen to shoot himself through the heart and, at the same time, to prove the extremes to which the totalitarian system can pervert an artist’s talent. This was Belomorsko-Baltiyski Kanal imeni Stalina (The Canal Named in Honor of Stalin). The book had been edited by and had a prologue by Maxim Gorky and brought together texts by thirty-five writers determined to justify the unjustifiable. Ever since the summer, when the canal uniting the White Sea with the Baltic Sea was inaugurated, the “friends of the USSR” and the European communist press had started to praise the great work of socialist engineering and to deem anyone who merely asked about the enterprise’s utility an enemy of the working class. But Gorky’s anthology of texts went beyond the limits of abjection. In his previous hyperbolic book, the novelist had already devoted himself to exalting the humanist effort undertaken in the Solovski lager, where, according to what was declared in Moscow and happily repeated by Gorky, the Soviet penal system fought at thirty degrees below zero to turn common criminals and enemies of the revolution into socially useful men. And now Kanal imeni Stalina proposed to sanctify the horror, documenting the prodigious transformation of the prisoners forced to work on the canal into shining models of the New Soviet Man. The book’s immorality was such that it managed to surprise Lev Davidovich when he thought he was immune to that type of shock. If the French gazetteers could save their souls by saying they were unaware of the truth about what happened in the building of that canal and arguing that they were just repeating what was dictated from Moscow, those Soviet writers could not be unaware of the horror lived by two hundred thousand prisoners (unsatisfied peasants, degraded bureaucrats, political and religious opponents, alcoholics, and even some writers) forced for years to build the locks, dams, and dikes of the canal, which included twenty-five miles of path cut through nothing but rock, just so that Stalin could demonstrate the supremacy of socialist engineering that, coincidentally, he also directed. The death toll during the execution of the work could never be calculated, but every Soviet knew that more than twenty-five thousand prisoners had perished in accidents or had been devoured by the cold and exhaustion. Besides, they all knew that the supplier of the physical labor for the canal had been the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, the maniacal Genrikh Yagoda, and that, for his dedication, Stalin had conferred upon him the Order of Lenin during the inauguration of the canal.

Lev Davidovich was moved to disgust, lamenting the moral degradation of a man like Maxim Gorky, the same Gorky who preferred to go into exile in 1921, still very much convinced that “everything I said about the Bolsheviks’ savageness, about their lack of culture, about the cruelty rooted in sadism, about their ignorance of the Russian people’s psychology, about the facts that they’re carrying out a disgusting experiment with the people and destroying the working class — all of that and much more that I said about Bolshevism is still as potent.” What arguments had Stalin used to achieve the return of a man with those ideas from his comfortable Italian exile? Which ones to force him into the humiliation of signing his name to those books and turning into the accomplice of horrifying crimes against humanity, dignity, and intelligence?

The year 1934 brought with it a ray of hope to Barbizon that would keep Lev Davidovich in suspense for weeks. Through the scarce information channels to which he still had access, he received the news from Moscow that Stalin’s political rivals had conspired to use the Bolshevik Party’s Twenty-Seventh Congress to make the decisive battle for their survival. Many of the activists who, without mentioning Trotsky’s name, continued to support him and considered his return a necessity — in addition to those who had opposed Stalin at some point, and those who for years had been his collaborators and were later expelled by the leader — were thinking of using the congress to remove the Georgian from power through a vote in which they would propose their future politicians. At the head of the heterogeneous group — united only by their hate or fear of Stalin — were old Bolsheviks of various leanings, among them Lenin’s oldest comrades — Zinoviev, Kamenev, Piatakov, the unpredictable Bukharin — and Trotskyist oppositionists who had been readmitted to the party after surrendering. The rumors said that they had placed their faith in the election of Sergei Kirov, the party’s young secretary in Leningrad, a man whose history wasn’t stained with the internal struggles of the 1920s. The reports assured him that Kirov, even though he had refused to reach any agreement with the oppositionists and maintained he was loyal to the general secretary, had criticized Stalin’s collectivizing, industrializing, and repressive excesses and, as a Communist, was willing to accept the congress’s will.

With the experience of expulsion behind him, Lev Davidovich couldn’t stop imagining the tricks Stalin would use to destroy the rebellion in the making, which he followed closely. His ability to divide and use people, blackmail the weakest ones, and terrorize his most committed followers and converts with possible revenge would, without a doubt, shine in those days. Because of that, during the congress’s opening session on February 26, when the initial praise for the five-year plan was heard, the ambitious economic plans for the future were proclaimed, and it was decided to call it the “Congress of Victors,” he had bet that the general secretary’s rivals had lost the battle.

The defeat was confirmed by the summary of the speech by Bukharin, who focused his diatribe on condemning the political position that he himself had led, only to later recognize that “Comrade Stalin was right when, by brilliantly applying the Marxist-Leninist dialectic, he destroyed a series of theoretic proposals from the twisted right, for which I, above all, accept my share of responsibility.” Before that tacit acceptance of failure, Lev Davidovich could not help but admire the courage with which a few activists still dared to propose the propriety of Stalin being relieved of his duties and the need to air out the country’s political environment. The vote against Stalin, which many delegates joined, ultimately was unable to overcome the majority terrorized by the specter of change, the loss of privileges, and possible reprisals. As Piatakov had done to him, now Lev Davidovich could prophesy to Piatakov himself, to Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and even to Kirov, that Stalin would make them pay with blood for their daring and the challenge they had launched.

Barbizon’s pleasant season reached its end with spring. The strange arrest of Rudolf Klement (he had broken the speed limit on his small moped) by a policeman who, previously uninformed by the Sûreté, only now “discovered” Trotsky’s presence in the area, was able to generate a virulent campaign against the government, led by Communists and fascists, who even managed to make a deportation order against him effective.

Fearful of the reprisals announced by the Stalinists and the fascist Cagoulards, Lev Davidovich and Natalia left Barbizon during the night. In order to disguise himself, Lev Davidovich shaved his mustache and beard and changed his rounded glasses, and they escaped to Paris, where they would consult with Liova about what to do.

They chose to disappear from life in Chamonix, the Alpine village near the Swiss and Italian borders, from where expeditions of climbers to Mont Blanc left. A few weeks later, after they were mysteriously discovered by a journalist, the Trotskys were forced by the region’s prefect to go on the move once again. Looking for a lost place on the map, Lev Davidovich made his way to Domène, a small town near Grenoble, where he even decided to go without bodyguards or secretaries. There, he would be a nobody.

Until the end of his life, Lev Davidovich would recall that on the morning of December 2, 1934, he went out to the patio of the house in Domène, where Natalia had hung the recently washed bedclothes. The smell of soap and the morning’s aroma painted a peaceful picture that had seemed definitively unreal before the weight of the news he had just heard on the radio: Sergei Kirov had been killed in his office at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. The Exile’s mind envisioned the scenes of commotion that undoubtedly reigned in the Soviet Union and the assumptions about what would happen from that moment on, which, he knew so well, marked a point of no return.

The reports he heard spoke of massive detentions and of preliminary investigations that linked the intellectual authorship of the murder to the Trotskyist opposition (in which they said the assassin, Leonid Nikolayev, had been active) and the plot against the government, which even included the participation of the Latvian city consul, a Trotskyist “agent,” according to them. Because of that, when he told Natalia what had happened, the woman asked the question that would pursue the man until the end of his days: “What about Seriozha?”

An entire week of anguish ended when Seriozha’s letter arrived, brought from Paris by Liova. In contrast to his previous letters, warm and personal, always directed to his mother, this one was permeated by a cry of alarm. The situation in Moscow had become chaotic, the arrests were endless, everyone was living under the fear of being interrogated, and the apolitical scientist considered his situation “more serious than could be imagined.” When she finished reading the letter, Natalia broke out in sobs. What was happening to her son? Why was the situation so serious? Was this simply to be expected because he was a Trotsky? The anxiety to obtain new news of Sergei grew from then on and left his parents’ lives in suspense, awaiting any confirmation of his fate.

The path events would take became clearer with the news that on December 2, the GPU had executed about one hundred people — all of them arrested before Kirov’s murder — while numerous party members had been imprisoned. Nonetheless, much more light was shed by the series of articles that Bukharin wrote for Izvestia, in which he spoke of the illegality of any type of dissidence within the country, while at the same time repeating Stalin’s motto that opposition only leads to counterrevolution, and exemplified that degradation with the cases of Zinoviev and Kamenev, labeling them as “degenerate fascists.” Because of that, when on the twenty-third of December he heard that Zinoviev and Kamenev had been arrested, accused of being “moral” accomplices to the attack, he had no doubt that a storm had been unleashed of potentially devastating power. Two times Stalin had expelled those old Bolsheviks, Lenin’s comrades; two times he had readmitted them to the party, on each occasion devouring pieces of their human and political stature until they became hovering shadows with no weight but the history of their names. Now, however, the moment of truth seemed to have arrived for two ghosts from the past that he would brutally crush because Stalin owed his ascent to power precisely to them. If at Lenin’s death they had not allied themselves with the (as they believed) limited and clumsy Stalin, all of them insistent on closing off Lev Davidovich’s access to power, Soviet history could have perhaps been different.

Lev Davidovich recalled Zinoviev’s murky stare and Kamenev’s elusive one (he had never understood how his younger sister Olga had been able to marry him) when they accused him of wanting to take power. Joyous about the success they hoped to achieve, they assumed the visible leadership of the offensive against Lev Davidovich and his ideas, accusing him of being a man anxious to be the protagonist, capable of throwing himself into propagating revolution throughout Europe while putting the sacred fate of the Soviet Union at risk. That tragic duo would never regret enough that Faustian hour in which they accepted the hand of that man from the mountains who, in his other hand, concealed a dagger.

Seriozha’s silence hung over the Trotskys in the transition to the year 1935, which arrived with the worst of omens. On the evening of December 31, despite the cold coming down from the mountains, the couple went out for a walk through the nearby fields with the intention of removing themselves from the radio that from Moscow was transmitting patriotic marches, versions of triumphant speeches by the leader, and news such as that the murderer Nikolayev, his wife, his mother-in-law, and thirteen other party members had been executed after they had admitted their links to the Trotskyist opposition and their direct or indirect participation in Kirov’s death. At one point in their walk, Natalia asked him to stop and she sat down on the leaves, surprised by her fatigue. He watched her and saw how her suffering was making her age with a betraying swiftness. Nonetheless, she never complained about her fate and, when she heard her husband complaining, pushed him to take up the path again. Lev Davidovich asked her if she felt ill and she responded that it was just a bit of fatigue, then she fell silent again, as if she had imposed a vow of silence on herself that prevented her from speaking of her agonies: her desperation over the lack of news from Seriozha was in a way admitting that that son could also have been devoured by the crushing violence unleashed by a revolution whose first principle was peace.

The anxiety dulled as the days passed, but for weeks Lev Davidovich wandered like a ghost around the house in Domène. He barely came out of his daze when the news arrived from Moscow that Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the others who were “morally responsible” for Kirov’s death had received sentences of between ten and five years in prison. Almost immediately, they found out that Volkov and Nevelson, the husbands of the deceased Zina and Nina, deported since 1928, had also received new sentences and that his ex-wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, despite her age, would be banished from Leningrad to the colony of Tobolsk, along with Kamenev’s wife, Olga Kameneva. All of those sanctions had a positive side that the Trotskyists clung to: if the known oppositionists and other members of the family were just jailed and deported, Sergei should be alive, even if he had been arrested. But why didn’t he write? Why didn’t anyone mention him?

Adopting her husband’s skepticism, Natalia drafted an open letter, directed at international opinion, in which she declared her conviction that Seriozha, a scientist from Moscow’s Technological Institute, had no political affiliation, and asked that his activities be investigated and his whereabouts revealed. She asked for the intercession of known figures such as Romain Rolland, André Gide, George Bernard Shaw, and various workers’ leaders, since she gauged that the Soviet bureaucracy could not elevate its impunity above public opinion, the leftist intellectuals, and the global working class.

Meanwhile, the voices clamoring against him had become so aggressive that every day Lev Davidovich was expecting to be the victim of a violent act, irrational or premeditated. Because of that, after making his bodyguards come from Paris, he once again mortgaged his hopes of asylum on the stubborn Norway, where the Labor Party had just won the general elections. In his request, he argued that he had health problems but, above all, personal security problems, and as he had done before with France, he reiterated his commitment not to participate in the country’s politics.

When he felt the siege of Stalinist and fascist pressures was about to trap him (there was talk of sending him to some colony, perhaps Guyana), the back door opened again with the arrival of the Norwegian visa. In contrast to what had happened two years earlier, when he left Büyükada, no residue of nostalgia accompanied him in the rushed departure from Domène, where he had lived for almost a year without acquiring a single happy memory.

Accompanied by Liova, they traveled to Paris, where they still had to fight to be given a visa that hadn’t arrived, while the French authorities demanded that they leave the country within forty-eight hours because he had violated the restriction on traveling to the capital. At the moment of his departure, Lev Davidovich gave Liova a letter to be published in the Bulletin. In it he accused the politicians of Democratic France not only of having played dirty with him but also of doing so with the future of the Republic, making shady deals with Moscow while fascism extended throughout the country. “I leave France with a deep love for its people and with unshakable faith in the future of the working class. Sooner or later, they will offer me the hospitality the bourgeoisie has denied me,” he said at the end of the letter, showing his usual optimism. But as they crossed Paris, he felt sickened: he wondered whether a possible return to a proletarian France was not an illusion. Undoubtedly, it was: “Socialism has dug its own grave and I sense it will rot there for a long time,” he wrote.

The warmth with which the Norwegian journalist Konrad Knudsen welcomed him in his house was like a consolation prize after the months of solitude, tension, and confinement experienced in France. The silence and peace he found in the small town of Vexhall were so compact that he could push them aside with his hands, like a velvet curtain. In summer, the sunsets tended to unfold lazily, as if the day didn’t want to leave, while mornings seemed to come forth ready-made from between the tree branches. Ever since arriving at Vexhall, he had acquired the custom of watching those daybreaks as he drank his coffee in the Knudsens’ backyard and inhaled the aroma of the forest.

When they were received in Norway, Lev Davidovich had harbored the fantasy that perhaps there he could escape the tensions that had pursued him throughout almost seven years of deportation and exile. Recently arrived in the country, he had found himself subject to the insults that, with nearly the same emphasis and very similar words, the communist and fascist press hurled at him, trying to turn him into a political problem for the Oslo government. But his Labor Party hosts had aborted the campaign with sharp statements, declaring that the right of asylum could not be a dead letter in a democratic nation and that the Norwegian people, and in particular its workers, felt honored by his presence in the country and would never allow any pressure from Moscow against the hospitality extended to a revolutionary whose name was linked to that of Lenin. In addition, to reduce the tension, numerous ministers had offered the assurance that he could consider the six-month visa a formality. The demands were still that he not participate in internal affairs and that he establish residency outside of Oslo. Because of that, faced with the difficulty of finding the right place, they themselves had asked the social democratic politician and journalist Konrad Knudsen to host them at Vexhall, a town close to Hønefoss, thirty miles from the capital.

Lev Davidovich would always remember his first days at Vexhall as strange and confusing. Lodged in a large room, where a splendid mahogany desk had been placed, he and Natalia had to adapt to the rhythms of a house inhabited by a large family who, in the summertime, enjoyed the freedom to forgo schedules and the ability to shrink or grow without warning. The absence of bodyguards, unnecessary in the Labor Party’s and Knudsen’s opinion, made him look apprehensively at the garden’s open gate and think that the Norwegians’ trust played with limits that were unknown to Stalin and his secret police henchmen. But the most important adaptation to life in Vexhall was the establishment between Knudsen and his guest of what they called “a nonaggression pact,” through which they allowed themselves to discuss politics, but always without questioning their respective positions of Communist and Social Democrat.

If the Exile had any doubts regarding Norwegian hospitality, these disappeared when the minister of justice, Trygve Lie, came to visit him accompanied by Martin Tranmæl, the leader and founder of the Labor Party. Their talk, informal at first, led to an interview that Lie would publish in the Arbeiderbladet, the main labor newspaper, and in which the interviewer and interviewee shook hands despite their political differences.

A few weeks later, although Lev Davidovich’s mind felt a decrease in tension, his body responded with an ubiquitous discomfort that lasted for months. Nonetheless, he shut himself up in his room each day, resolved to withstand the headaches and joint pains to again take up the biography of Lenin that, with decreasing enthusiasm, his North American editor demanded, the only one who wanted it following his German editor’s withdrawal and the lack of interest in his work by the French. But some news that arrived from Moscow, at the beginning of August 1935, led him to wonder whether his efforts should be focused on the leader’s biography or if the reigning cynicism in the Soviet Union demanded a reflection about the horror of the present and the need to reverse it. The edition of Pravda that had alarmed him featured the chronicle of another one of those parties at the Kremlin in which Stalin, after distributing decorations in abundance, had launched into an inevitable speech. This time his words were reduced to a simple victory cry: “Life is improved, comrades, life is happier here! Let’s drink to life and to socialism!” The experience that had allowed him to learn to interpret that man’s movements warned him that this could not be a casual phrase but rather the roar of a lion on a devastating hunt.

For months, Lev Davidovich had been considering each act, putting each fact in its place, trying to understand the goals of the policy of détente generated by the Kremlin after the trial at the beginning of 1935 against Zinoviev, Kamenev, and company, with which the investigation into Kirov’s murder had been closed. Since then, the arrests had decreased and a wave of official optimism, constantly reinforced by propaganda, had started to run through the country while in Moscow they feted distinguished workers and the representatives of various republics; banquets were offered to scientists, athletes, and distinguished government workers; and party leaders at all levels were recognized. After the hunger and the repression of recent years, Stalin was trying to create a climate of security to spread the idea that the difficult times were a thing of the past because they were already living in the times of socialist prosperity. But once that mirage was created, Lev Davidovich knew that the moment would come when Stalin would strike another blow that would shake the country and consolidate a system in which Stalin could, at last, reign without the interference of any rivals.

Save for the news that Seriozha was alive and sequestered in an apartment in Moscow, nothing good would happen during the final weeks of November and the first of December, when his body declared itself exhausted to the point that he feared the end was approaching in that vulgar manner: “Death by exhaustion, how horrible!” he would write. . Nonetheless, perhaps the same awareness that he could die leaving so many unfinished projects resulted in working the miracle of getting him out of bed, almost from one day to the next, with his energy practically recovered. Despite his stiff muscles, an overwhelming feeling of rebirth overcame him, and because of that he dared to accept Knudsen’s invitation to participate in an outing to the countryside in the north of Hønefoss, ideal for skiing at that time of year. In his memory, the most notable event would be when he sunk in the snow to his thighs and required a rescue operation directed by Knudsen and carried out by Jean van Heijenoort and his new assistant, the recently arrived Erwin Wolf.

Shortly after, in the first weeks of 1936, Lev Davidovich received a letter capable of revealing, better than all the available psychoanalytic literature, the most dramatic and exact notion of what fear could be and the unpredictable human mechanisms that it can mobilize. It was written to him by his former adversary Fyodor Dan, exiled in Paris since shortly after the Bolshevik victory. He had known Dan since 1903, when he had been one of the revolutionary Social Democrats who, at the Congress of Brussels, voted against Lenin and, with the rest of the opponents, established Menshevism within the party. Although Dan had been one of the Mensheviks who worked the most to bring the factions together, his loyalty to his group had placed him in the current that was contrary to the proletarian revolution, since he defended the establishment of a parliamentary system in Russia, to which Lev Davidovich was opposed in the month prior to the October coup. Once the Bolshevik victory was definitively established, Dan tried to engineer a rapprochement and later had the decency to recognize defeat and withdraw in silence.

After greeting him and wishing him good health, Dan explained that he dared to write him, after so many years of physical and political distance, because a mutual friend, Dr. Le Savoureux, had insisted that he tell him something that, on many levels, had to do with Lev Davidovich’s past as well as his foreseeable future.

Dan explained to him that Bukharin, despite having been marginalized by Stalin after several castrations, had been sent to Europe with the mission of purchasing some important documents by Marx and Engels that Stalin wanted to deposit in the archives of the former Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, recently augmented with the inclusion of his own name. Bukharin, with enough money to buy the archives and for his maintenance, had been in Vienna, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Berlin before arriving in Paris, where the German Social Democrats possessing the documents had taken the bulk of the archives after Hitler’s rise to power. Bukharin was to negotiate in Paris with a former acquaintance of the old Russian fighters, the Menshevik Boris Nikolayevsky, who was also a friend of Dr. Le Savoureux. In conversation, Bukharin had always seemed reserved, nervous, indecisive, like a man under great stress; and although Nikolayevsky needled him, it was impossible to obtain from him an opinion about what was happening in the USSR, about Kirov’s murder or the imprisonment of Zinoviev and Kamenev, whom Bukharin himself had placed on the pillory with his public accusation that they were fascists. “At the beginning he seemed like a man who was gravely mistrustful,” assured Dan, who, on two or three occasions, in the company of his wife, had seen him and spoken with him about the only subjects Bukharin allowed: French cheeses and literature, his friendship with Lenin and the documents he had to buy. Dan managed to have him comment on Stalin’s politics and, perhaps in a moment of sincerity, Bukharin confessed the great pain he felt about the way the general secretary was demolishing the spirit of the revolution. To anyone knowledgeable about Soviet politics, Dan said, it would have seemed at least curious that Stalin would have picked Bukharin for that operation, more commercial than philosophical or historical, since the direction of the political housecleaning suggested that sooner or later Bukharin, who had dared to defy Stalin at one moment, would be the next victim. But the greatest surprise about Stalin’s decision had yet to come: without Bukharin having even dared to suggest it, the dictator had sent Anna Larina, Bukharin’s young wife, several months pregnant, to Paris. What kind of strange play was that? Why would Stalin open his captive’s door and allow him to desert without leaving his wife behind? Did he prefer to have Bukharin outside of the Soviet Union and not inside the country, where he would always be able to destroy him with the same impunity with which he had expelled Zinoviev and Kamenev, or have him killed like Kirov? Was it a move destined to turn Bukharin into a deserter before he became a martyr? Dan asked himself, forcing Lev Davidovich to ponder this as he read.

A few weeks later, Dan continued, Bukharin received a communiqué from Stalin: he should forget the negotiations, he was no longer interested in Marx’s and Engels’s papers, and he demanded that he appear in Moscow immediately. Dr. Le Savoureux was present when Bukharin received the order and witnessed the anger that came over the face of the prodigal son of Bolshevism, the most promising revolutionary theorist. Le Savoureux had suggested that Bukharin not return: that unforeseen call could only be geared at retaining him and turning him into the victim of repression. Nikolayevsky was of the same opinion, and he reminded Bukharin that if he remained in Europe, he could become a second Trotsky and, together, lead an opposition with greater opportunities to dethrone Stalin. But Bukharin had begun to prepare for his return: he did it in silence, automatically, like a man who willingly and conscientiously directs himself to the scaffold. Le Savoureux, in a fit of rage, asked him how it was possible for a man, who for years had fought against czarism and accompanied Lenin in the darkest days of the struggle, to return like a lamb, to submit himself to a sure punishment. Then Bukharin gave him the most devastating response: “I’m returning out of fear.” Le Savoureux thought he had not understood correctly — perhaps Bukharin’s French had been affected by his nervousness — but when he thought twice about it, he was certain he had heard perfectly well: I’m returning out of fear. Le Savoureux told him that precisely for that reason he should not return — in exile he was more useful to his country and to the revolution — and then Bukharin at last offered his full reasoning: he wasn’t made of the same material as Lev Davidovich and Stalin knew it — and above all, he knew it himself. He would not be able to withstand the pressures Trotsky had experienced for years, and he wasn’t willing to live like a pariah, waiting to be stabbed in the back any day. “I know that sooner or later Stalin is going to finish me off; maybe he’ll kill me, maybe not. But I’m going to return to cling to the possibility that he not think it necessary to kill me. I would rather live with that hope than with the constant fear of knowing I am a condemned man.”

Bukharin returned to Moscow. He took Anna Larina, who was already seven months pregnant. Le Savoureux saw him off at Gare du Nord and later went to meet Nikolayevsky and Dan in the Russian restaurant in the Latin Quarter where they usually ate. The conversation, of course, centered on Bukharin. “Then we realized,” Dan continued, “that Stalin had played with him the whole time, like a cat that pretends to be asleep. But Stalin had bet that he wouldn’t need to run after his captive. He was sure that the poor mouse, overcome with fear, would return to kiss the claws that would tear him apart and devour him when the cat’s appetite required it. It’s impossible to conceive of a sicker and more sadistic attitude. It’s terrible to know that the man capable of doing this is he who leads our country today, the revolution that you and I dreamed of in different ways but with the same passion, and the one dreamed of by Lenin and so many men who Stalin is annihilating and will continue to annihilate in the future. And I’m sure that amid those sacrificed in the Stalinist slaughterhouse will be Bukharin, who was so afraid that he preferred the certainty of death to the risk of every day having to demonstrate the courage to live.”

For weeks, Lev Davidovich fought himself to push the dismal story relayed by Fyodor Dan from his preoccupations. But the image of a pale Bukharin, so different from the exultant and romantic young man who had welcomed him in New York when France banished him in 1916, came back to his mind too frequently; and a few months later, while he was following the trial of a group of old comrades in the newspapers and on the radio, he recalled Bukharin’s sentence over and over again: “I’m returning out of fear.” Then Lev Davidovich understood the exact proportions of the point to which the country he had helped found had turned into a territory dominated by fear. And when he heard the conclusion of that trial, which seemed more like a farce, he had the painful certainty that, with the decision to shoot many of the men who had worked for Bolshevism’s victory, Stalin had poisoned the last ember of the soul of the revolution and one had only to sit and wait for its final agony to arrive, tomorrow, within ten, in twenty years. But the infection was irreversible and fatal.

Ever since he had arrived in Norway the year before, Lev Davidovich frequently commented to Knudsen that, when his health allowed, he would like to go out fishing, and he had told him about his relaxing outings in the Sea of Marmara with his friend Kharalambos. Many things had prevented him from fulfilling that desire until, on August 4, 1936, he got into his host’s car and left in the direction of one of the fjords in the south, where there was a small, desolate island that was said to be ideal for fishing. As they left Vexhall, Knudsen had the impression that a car was following them; he then took a side road and managed to leave their pursuers behind, whom he had identified as men from the fascist party of the so-called Commander Quisling.

When they reached the fjord, a speedboat took them to the islet, where there were numerous wooden cabins. The landscape, wild and peaceful, seemed to Lev Davidovich like the very picture of the world in the first days of creation, and he immediately felt in harmony with its desolate grandeur.

The following morning Lev Davidovich got up early; despite the brisk temperature, he left the cabin and, with a pitcher of coffee in his hand, went to the jetty to see the sun rising between a break in the mountains. Immersed in contemplation, he was startled when Knudsen tapped his shoulder to tell him that they had sent him a message from Vexhall: a group of men dressed as policemen, but who were obviously members of Commander Quisling’s party, had entered the house to search Lev Davidovich’s room. Knudsen’s children and sons-in-law, upon realizing they were imposters, sounded the alarm and managed to kick them out, but they couldn’t stop them from taking some papers. According to Knudsen, that must have been the reason that they had followed them in the car: they wanted to be sure that they were leaving Vexhall.

When he knew that nothing had happened to Knudsen’s family, Lev Davidovich didn’t lend much importance to the episode: if they were looking for his papers while he was out, it meant that they weren’t too interested in him as a person, at least for the time being.

Three days later, Knudsen, Natalia, and Lev Davidovich saw a small plane land on the island and they understood that something unusual was happening. The head of Hønefoss’s judicial police was in it, sent by the minister of justice, Trygve Lie, to interrogate the Exile about the papers that were removed. He wanted to know if in those documents there was any reference made to Norwegian politics, and when Lev Davidovich assured him that in the fourteen months he had spent residing in the country he had not involved himself in its internal affairs, the policeman bid them a good afternoon and returned to the light aircraft. But they couldn’t help feeling unsettled by the visit. Despite being convinced that no one could accuse him of having violated his commitment, Lev Davidovich thought that the minister’s concern must have had some basis that for the moment eluded him.

The following day, as they had breakfast, Knudsen turned on a small radio to listen to the news from Oslo. As Lev Davidovich had only just started to understand Norwegian, he took no notice of the transmission and went out to the yard. A few minutes later Knudsen approached him with a stony face to tell him that something serious was happening in Moscow: they had just announced that they were taking Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen other men to trial, accused of conspiring against Soviet power, of committing Kirov’s murder, and of conspiring with the Gestapo to kill Stalin. The prosecution was asking for the death penalty.

Lev Davidovich looked at his friend and his indignation made him want to slap him. They returned to the cabin and the Exile began to look for some station on the radio that would prove that the information was just a macabre misunderstanding. An hour later, on a German news program, the Soviet agency confirmed what Knudsen had heard and added that the prosecution’s case also accused Lev Trotsky of heading and instigating the conspiracy organized by a Trotskyist-Zinovievist cell in favor of a foreign power and claimed they were using Norway as a base for sending terrorists and assassins to the USSR. Lev Davidovich immediately knew that the bloodiest and most devastating wave of terror had been unleashed in Moscow and that its effects would reach even remote Vexhall, where he had spent the most pleasant days of his exile.

During the trials against the sixteen accused, every time he heard the irate voice of prosecutor Viyshinsky, who, in his role as the Soviet people’s indignant conscience, asked the court for the execution of the rabid dogs on trial, Lev Davidovich recalled those heroic times in which he and Lenin had handed over the reins of the machinery of revolutionary repression to Felix Dzerzhinsky to apply a Red Terror without law or limits capable of saving, by fire and sword, a stuttering revolution that could barely hold itself up. The terror of Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka was the dark arm of the revolution — pitiless as it should have been; as it had to be, one would say — and it annihilated hundreds and thousands of the people’s enemies, of the losers in the class struggle who refused to watch the disappearance of their form of life and their culture of injustice. They, the victors, ruthlessly administered their adversaries’ defeat, and the party had to function as an instrument of History and of its inevitable massive, albeit impersonal, revenge. It had been a merciless, surely excessive, but necessary violence: that of the victorious class over the loser, the straight choice of “us or them. .” But the men that Stalin had decided to kill in that dismal month of August 1936 were Communists, comrades of the struggle, and confronted by that affiliation, the machinery of violence led by Lenin and by Lev Davidovich had always stopped, respectful to the utmost limit. The Stalinist terror, perfected in its previous persecutions (peasants, the religious, the country’s intelligentsia), now seemed on the verge of crossing a sacred boundary.

Lev Davidovich wanted to trust that the farce would stop at the edge of the precipice: Stalin, with some remains of historic sanity, would prevent the catastrophe and show the world his benevolence. Because now it was no longer about the unknown Blumkin, nor was the punishment hidden behind the dark circumstances in which Kirov had died. Many of the accused had been Lenin’s comrades and, for decades, had resisted the czarist repression and deportations; being who they were, they had even submitted to Stalin and played a not-very-credible role in his shocking script: they had incriminated themselves in the most outrageous crimes against the Soviet state and, above all, had admitted that from Turkey, France, and Norway, Trotsky’s shadowy hands and his lieutenant Lev Sedov had led the conspiracy devised by a “Trotskyist-Zinovievist center,” insistent on assassinating Comrade Stalin and reinstating capitalism on the heroic Soviet soil. An insulting lack of respect for the intelligence emanated from that legal horror show: the shamelessness of the show taking place in Moscow demanded a new kind of ideological faith from the worshippers of the boss of the revolution and a new kind of submission that was capable of overcoming political obedience and turning it into criminal complicity.

Like all dictators, Stalin followed the well-worn tradition of accusing his enemies of collaborating with a foreign power and, in the case of Lev Davidovich, he repeated almost the same arguments that the provisional government of 1917 had hurled against Lenin, with proof fabricated by the secret service, to turn him into an agent of the orders of the German Empire with the mission of handing Russia over to the kaiser. In context, Trotsky’s mission was to serve the Soviet Union to the führer. The Exile would later ask himself how he could have been so deluded to have, at times, felt almost calm, to have even convinced himself that the prosecution would find it impossible to present any proof substantiating those accusations. Moreover, the fact that the first claims referred to fifty men arrested and that only sixteen men were brought to trial clearly indicated that they were the ones who had reached an agreement, and in exchange for their self-recriminations Stalin would spare their lives, once the anti-Trotskyist campaign and the annihilation of the opposition had achieved its propaganda purposes.

But raising those implausible accusations without presenting any proof, the court ratified the death penalties for Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, Evdokimov, Mrachkovsky, Bakayev, and another seven who stood accused, including the soldier Dreitser, who had accompanied Lev Davidovich on his departure from Alma-Ata and who had allowed him (had that been his crime?) to take his papers into exile. In the conclusion to the trial, Lev Davidovich also heard the predictable sentence that he was waiting for: Liova and he were guilty of personally preparing and directing — as agents paid by capitalism first, then by fascism — terrorist acts in the Soviet Union and were subject, in the case of being found in Soviet territory, to immediate arrest and trial by the Supreme Court’s military college.

When he heard those sentences issued, Lev Davidovich felt a great sadness for the fate of the revolution enveloping him, since he knew that in the Great Hall of Columns of the House of the Trade Unions in Moscow, and under the flag that announced THE PROLETARIAN COURT IS THE PROTECTOR OF THE REVOLUTION, a final frontier had been crossed. Within and outside of the USSR, perhaps many naïve people and fanatics believed something of what had been said during the trial. But people with a bare minimum of intelligence would have to admit that practically every word pronounced there was false and that a lie had been used to kill thirteen revolutionaries. The trial and execution of those Communists would become, through the centuries, a unique example in the history of organized injustice and a first in the history of credibility. It would signify the murder of true faith: the death rattle of utopia. And the Exile knew all too well that it also laid the groundwork for the charge destined to eliminate the People’s Greatest Enemy, the traitor and terrorist Lev Davidovich Trotsky.

11

The stubbornly springlike and dizzying weeks of March and April of 1937 would remain in Ramón Mercader’s memory like an obscure period in which he felt confused about everything but from which he would suddenly emerge when he came across the most brilliant clarity: that of his solid conviction that ruthlessness was necessary to reach victory.

África’s disappearance had been followed by that of Kotov (had it been coincidental?), who, before leaving, had left Ramón orders that left him confined to the Marquis de Villota’s palace, where at some point he would meet with a colleague of the adviser’s who would introduce himself as Maximus. Due to his strict sense of responsibility he waited, spending his free time in the company of young Luis, with whom he played soccer, and whenever possible providing a little bit of pleasure to the sad-eyed Lena Imbert, with whom he shut himself up in the palace’s stalls, where he had installed a stove and a bed. Although he appreciated that parenthesis in the initial days that allowed him to recover from the tensions, hunger, and nights of insomnia of the four months that he’d spent on the front, he soon felt trapped by the inactivity and began to wonder whether Caridad, following young Pablo’s death, had used her influence to remove him from the dangers of the war and moved him to that Barcelona where, despite Kotov’s prophecies, everything seemed reduced to yelled insults and mandatory slogans, to underground plots, secret meetings, and some execution or other to which the Republican extremists as much as the fascists seemed to be addicted.

In his isolation, Ramón couldn’t gain a clear understanding of the events taking place. The newspapers from the different Republican factions that reached his hands were cut in pieces by a crude censorship that contented itself with removing words and leaving blanks in the spaces formerly occupied by the condemned works. Only the communist dailies, free of the censorship that the party exercised over the rest of the newspapers, escaped that orgy of mutilations. Leaving aside their primitive triumphalism, their editorials allowed Ramón to discern the high temperatures reached by the increasingly furious accusations hurled against the POUM’s Trotskyist-fascists, the CNT’s uncontrollable syndicalists, and the FAI’s tempestuous anarchists. But the most significant thing for him was the growing insistence on criticizing the military, the head of government and war minister, Largo Caballero, and his most trusted men. That hard campaign in which truth and lies were mixed up confirmed for him Kotov’s prediction that they were headed toward a head-on battle against the hordes of conciliators and extremists.

Caridad, whom he had hardly seen in two weeks, experienced a relapse of angina that kept her in bed for two days with her left arm cramped and suffering. When the woman was able to come out to the mansion’s devastated garden, Ramón looked for a way to put the persistent Lena at a distance and be alone with her. He had endured too many days of inactivity, he felt tricked by his mother and by Kotov, and he dared to hurl an ultimatum at her.

“In three days, I’m returning to the front,” he said, but Caridad barely moved her head. “This whole business about silence and responsibility is just to keep me here, to control me.”

Caridad took a pack of cigarettes out of her coat pocket and the battle she was having with herself must have been agonizing.

“That’s going to kill you,” he warned her when he saw her remove one of her cigarettes.

“When I feel like this, all I want is to die,” she said, and began to unroll the cigarette with her fingers and brought the tobacco to her nose to breathe in its aroma. Finally, she threw her torn-up cigarette to the ground and placed another one between her lips without lighting it. “Don’t look at me like that, don’t you dare feel any compassion, because I can’t stand it. I hate my body when it doesn’t listen to me. And don’t come to me with that foolishness about going to the front. . There are things happening here that you can’t even imagine, and sooner than you can believe, your moment will come. But in due time, Ramón, everything in due time.”

“I know that story about time by heart already, Caridad.”

She smiled, but the pain in her arm cut through her happiness. She waited for a few seconds while the burning cramp receded.

“Story? Let’s see. . Did you believe the story about Buenaventura Durruti getting killed by a stray bullet?”

Ramón looked at his mother and felt that he couldn’t say a word.

“Do you think we can win the war with an anarchist commander who’s more prestigious than all of the communist leaders?”

“Durruti was fighting for the Republic,” Ramón tried to reason.

“Durruti was an anarchist; he would’ve been one his entire life. And have you heard the story about the translator who disappeared, a certain Robles?”

“He was a spy, wasn’t he?”

“A miserable ass kisser. He was the scapegoat in an internal argument between the military advisers and security. But they didn’t just pick him at random: that Robles knew too much and could have been dangerous. He was not a traitor; they turned him into a traitor.”

“Do you mean to say that they killed him without him being a traitor?”

“Yes, and what of it? Do you know how many they’ve killed on one side or the other in these months of war?” Caridad waited for Ramón’s response.

“A lot, I think.”

“Almost one hundred thousand, Ramón. As they advance, the fascists execute everyone they consider a Popular Front sympathizer, and on this side the anarchists kill anyone who, according to them, is a bourgeois enemy. And do you know why?”

“It’s the war” was what occurred to him to say. “The fascists made those the rules of the game. .”

“Necessity. For the fascists, it is a necessity to not have any enemies in the rear guard, and for the anarchists to keep being anarchists. And we cannot allow the war to slip out of our hands. We’ve also been killing people and we’re going to have to kill many more, and you—”

Ramón raised his hand to interrupt her.

“You brought me here to kill people?”

“And what the hell were you doing on the front, Ramón?”

“It’s different: it’s the war.”

“Enough with the fucking war. . Isn’t managing to get the party to impose its policies and for the Soviets to continue to support us the most important thing for us winning this war? Isn’t cleaning up the rear guard of enemies and spies part of the war? Isn’t eliminating the fifth columnists in Madrid part of the war?”

“In Paracuellos they executed people who had nothing to do with the fifth column, and I know that some from the party were involved in that.”

“Who’s saying that the dead were saboteurs, you or the Falangists?”

Ramón lowered his head and contained his indignation. In the Sierra de Guadarrama, with a rifle in his hands and a handful of comrades dying of cold and shaking with hunger, and the enemy on the other side of the mountain, everything was simpler.

“This war you’re about to get into is more important, because if we don’t win it, we won’t win the other, and the comrades who were in the trenches are going to fall like flies when the planes, cannons, rifles, and grenades stop coming from Moscow. Ramón, Spain’s fate is in the hands of people like you. . So that you get an idea of what’s happening, tonight you’ll go with me to La Pedrera. There is an important meeting. It goes without saying that everything that will be discussed there is secret. You cannot speak there or even say your name, is that clear?”

“Is África going as well?”

“Why don’t you forget about that woman for a while, Ramón?”

In Caridad’s shadow, Ramón crossed the threshold of La Pedrera that night without the guards stopping him. In one of the rooms on the top floor, enveloped in a cloud of smoke, several men were talking and barely noticed the arrival of Caridad and her young companion. Ramón felt disappointed on not seeing África. Of those present, he recognized only one person, Dolores Ibárruri, who was perhaps the only one not smoking at that moment. There was also a man with a Slavic face whom he would later identify as Comrade Pedro, the Hungarian who commanded the Comintern’s envoys. His attention nonetheless focused on a loud character, hairy and corpulent, with a large head, bulging eyes, and thick lips that made a smacking noise as he spoke. By his way of addressing himself to the others, you could tell he was an irascible guy, and by what he was saying, it appeared that he was one of those who assume everyone is a traitor and who consider any negligence or ineptitude to be a perverse conspiracy or enemy sabotage. Whispering in his ear, Caridad told him that the man was André Marty, and Ramón understood immediately that he was in the presence of something important: if at that moment of the war Marty was so far away from his post as commander of the International Brigades, it could only be for a more important cause. Thanks to his sister Montse, who for weeks had been working as the secretary for that Comintern leader, Ramón knew that he had the reputation of being a cruel and despotic man, and that night the harangue he issued forth corroborated it, festooned as it was with insults. Marty accused the leaders of the party of being weak and inept, since, according to him, the Central Committee practically didn’t exist and the work of the political bureau was terribly primitive and conciliatory: the Spaniards, he said, and pointed to Ibárruri, had to grow up once and for all and stop allowing Codovilla to act like the party was his personal backyard just because he was a Comintern envoy. They should be ashamed that Codovilla was using them like marionettes — and again he looked at La Pasionaria, who lowered her gaze like a beaten dog — and going to the extreme of writing speeches for General Secretary Pepé Díaz and Comrade Dolores Ibárruri just to create the illusion that there was a central committee of Spanish Communists, when in reality it didn’t exist or decide anything. The situation didn’t allow for any more hesitation: they either went for everything or forgot all about even the most minimal possibility of success.

Indignant, Ramón barely heard the closing of the meeting: according to Pedro, the party had to increase its campaign against the government’s management of military operations and internal policies, demand more purges in the military command, and above all be ready to launch an offensive against the saboteurs. The Communists had to assure the success of an operation that would be capable of guaranteeing control over a rear guard free of Trotskyists and anarchists. The Soviet leadership expected that this time the Spaniards would know how to carry out their role.

“It’s now or never,” Pedro was stating, when Ramón, without waiting for Caridad, escaped from the place in search of the pure air on the streets, deserted at that time of night.

Two days later, Maximus showed up at La Bonanova. Each one of the hours that had passed between that meeting and the arrival of Kotov’s envoy, who would at last put Ramón in motion, had served to reaffirm one idea in the young man: the advisers were right in their demands and it was necessary to pull the rug out from under the Republican alliance. Ramón would hand himself over body and soul to that mission and would prove that this Spanish militant was capable not only of obeying but also of thinking and acting, since it wounded his pride as a Communist to have had to listen silently, in his own country, in his own war, how he and his comrades were called feckless revolutionaries by a paranoid who yelled the truth in their faces. It was necessary to act.

Maximus, who, after many weeks of work, Ramón would come to suspect of being Hungarian, turned out to be a specialist in clandestine struggle and destabilization. Under his orders, Ramón joined a six-man action cell (one of the so-called specific groups), all of them Spaniards, of whom only Maximus seemed to know their true identities and whom, because of his presumed admiration for the Roman world, he distinguished with the names of Latin characters — Graco, Caesar, Mario — while he characterized them as praetorians. From that day, Ramón would begin to be called Adriano. It was the first of many names he used, and he felt proud when they renamed him, before he had even the slightest glimpse of the experiences he had to come — not just under other names but in different skins.

Adriano would lament being charged with a mission as innocuous as becoming close with the POUM and establishing the routines of its leaders, especially those of Andreu Nin. Although Maximus had them submitted to a delicate compartmentalization of information and he was unaware of the details of the tasks assigned to the other praetorians, he managed to find out, thanks to his compatriots’ loquacity, that some of them were participating in violent and dangerous acts, as corroborated by the mysterious disappearances, some suspiciously definitive, of certain political rivals who were not very noteworthy but without a doubt bothersome, and who were necessary to take out of the game before it entered the critical stages. Because of this, seeing himself limited to walking down Las Ramblas, entering hotels where some of the POUMists and their sympathizers were staying and finding out the details of the daily activities of the heads of the Trotskyist party, seemed like something beneath his capabilities. He did not suspect that his work would gain importance in future actions and that his efficiency and chameleon-like abilities, noticed by Maximus, would place him on the path to his extraordinary destiny.

Soon Adriano was convinced that, for the good of the cause, Andreu Nin was a man who had to die. Since before the war started and the political rivalries between the Republicans were so violently stirred, the renegade Nin was a declared enemy of the Communists and had been one of the first (echoing Trotsky’s cry of alarm) in declaiming the Moscow trials of 1936 and the others at the beginning of that year as crimes, and in labeling the “friends of the USSR” who defended their legality and propriety as guilty accomplices. He had also been one of those who had most passionately argued for the need for revolution along with the war, for the total struggle against the bourgeois republic, which, in spite of being anti-proletarian, was sustained through the support of those whom Nin called communist collaborators. He disagreed with Soviet aid as if it would have been possible for the government to survive without it. But what had most firmly marked him was his demand, from his post as the conseller for the Generalitat government and in the POUM’s leadership, that the Republic offer asylum to that traitor Trotsky even after his felony was corroborated in the trials that took place in Moscow. Although Companys, the Catalan president, had been forced to remove Nin from his cabinet, the Trotskyist’s arrogance had become so out of control as to make him publicly declare that they would have to kill everyone in the POUM to remove them from the political struggle. Adriano would think that, without a doubt, the best thing would be to make Nin’s wishes come true once and for all.

Adriano had picked the Hotel Continental as one of his usual stops. Despite the scarcity devastating the city, you could still have a good coffee there and get a pack of French cigarettes. Many of the members of the POUM were staying there and in the nearby Hotel Falcón, and Adriano proved that, with due caution, his presence in those places could become habitual and not at all suspicious. In the end, the various secret agents who roamed about the building ended up being so visible that he felt he could become transparent or, at most, be taken as just another nosy parker.

Periodically, Adriano reported to Maximus, and they both reached the conclusion that the POUMists were terrified by the rise of the communist press, but its leaders didn’t have any possibilities to backtrack nor a full understanding of the abyss they were entering. Between the hotel’s guests and visitors, with whom he managed to start occasional conversations, just one English journalist, a POUM militiaman, commented that in the coming days something serious was going to happen in Barcelona: you could read it in the tension floating in the air. The militiaman-cum-journalist, who had been evacuated from the front in Huesca, was a tall guy, very thin, with a horselike face, and bore the unhealthy coloring of an illness that was surely eating away at him. He was always in the company of his tiny wife and he was always looking around him, as if something were continuously lying in wait for him from behind a column. Adriano had introduced himself with his new nom de guerre and the Englishman said he was called George Orwell and confessed to him that he felt more fearful in a Barcelona hotel than in the frozen trenches of Huesca.

“Do you see that fat man who corners all the foreigners and explains to them that everything that’s happening here is a Trotskyist-anarchist conspiracy?” Orwell asked him, and Adriano furtively looked at the figure. “He is a Russian agent. . It’s the first time I have seen someone professionally and publicly devoted to telling lies — with the exception of journalists and politicians, of course.”

Many years had to pass for Ramón to know who that man was. In 1937 almost no one knew Orwell. But when Ramón read some books about what had happened in Barcelona and found a photo of John Dos Passos, Ramón would have sworn that, just days before everything exploded, he had seen Orwell conversing with Dos Passos in the hotel cafeteria. In those meetings, however, Ramón and Orwell almost never spoke of politics: they tended to talk about dogs. The Englishman and his wife, Eileen, loved dogs and in England they had a borzoi. Through Orwell, Ramón learned of that breed; which, according to the journalist, were the most elegant and beautiful hounds on earth.

What Ramón liked best about his mission was feeling so camouflaged beneath his own skin that, without thinking about it too much, he was capable of reacting like the carefree and simple Adriano. He discovered that using another name, dressing a different way from what he would have considered close to his own tastes, and inventing a previous life dominated by a disillusionment with politics and a rejection of politicians were feelings that he was beginning to secretly enjoy. Thus, with each passing day he felt more like Adriano, was more like Adriano, and could even look at Ramón with a certain distance. He happily discovered that, without África at hand, he could go without his family. Besides, despite his gregarious and partisan spirit, he didn’t have a single friend to whom he felt tied. The only compass he clung to was his responsibility, and he tried to carry it out carefully. Because of that, the day on which he handed over to Maximus the summary of the movements, places frequented by and the personal tastes of the heads of the POUM — particularly exhaustive in the case of Andreu Nin — he thought that the congratulations he received were a reward for Adriano and, only remotely, for the Ramón Mercader who had lent him his body.

Kotov looked like an abandoned statue on the bench in the Plaza de Cataluña. The spring was at its height and the warm sun bathed the city. The adviser, with his face slightly raised, was receiving the heat like a lizard slothful from the rays that were injecting him with life. He had even taken off his jacket and the printed kerchief he regularly wore around his neck, and he remained immobile for a few seconds after Ramón sat down at his side.

“What a marvelous country!” he said at last, and smiled. “I could live here for the rest of my life.”

“Despite the Spaniards?”

“Precisely because of you. Where I come from, the people are like stones. You are all flowers. My country smells like smoked herring and hops; here, it smells of olive oil and wine.”

“Your pals say we’re primitive and practically dumb.”

“Don’t pay too much attention to those lunatics. They confuse ideology with mysticism, and they are no more than walking machines — worse still, they’re fanatics. Here they make themselves look tough, but you should see them when Moscow calls for them. . Na khuy. They shit themselves. Don’t look to them as an example; you don’t want to be like them. You can be so much more.”

“What did Maximus say about me?”

“He’s satisfied and you know it. But today you will stop being Adriano and go back to being Ramón, and as Ramón, you’re going to work with me, for now. Until something else is decided, Adriano doesn’t exist anymore; Maximus never existed. Is that clear?”

Ramón nodded and took off his scarf. Heat was rising from his chest.

“Take advantage, kid, breathe in this peace! Get the most out of every peaceful moment. The struggle is hard and doesn’t give us many occasions like this one. Do you see the calm? Do you feel it?”

Ramón wondered whether it was a rhetorical question, but Kotov’s insistence forced him to look around and answer.

“Yes, of course I feel it.”

“And do you see that building over there, in front of us?”

“Telefónica? How could I not. .?”

Kotov’s laughter interrupted him. The adviser lowered his face and for the first time looked directly at Ramón. His cheeks were glowing, his clear eyes covered to protect them from the intense light.

“It’s a hive of fifth columnists who are preparing a coup d’état against the central government,” Kotov said, and Ramón had to wake up his neurons to pick up the adviser’s thread of reasoning. “Before they do that, we have to fumigate them, like cockroaches, like the enemies they are. We’re losing the war, Ramón. What the fascists did in Guernica is not a crime: it’s a warning. There will be no mercy, and it seems that not all of you understand it. . Those anarchists think that Telefónica belongs to them because, when they rebelled against the military, they went in there and said: It’s ours. And the government is so soft that it hasn’t been able to kick them out. When Guernica was bombed, they went to the extreme of denying the president of the Republic an open line.” Kotov smiled again as if he found that story funny. “In a few days, nothing will remain of this peace.”

“What are we going to do?”

Kotov stayed silent too long for Ramón’s curiosity.

“The fascists keep gaining ground and that midget Franco now has the support of all the parties on the right. Meanwhile, the Republicans are passing the time knocking each other’s eyes out and everyone wants to be his own boss. . No, there can’t be any more thinking. If those fifth columnists carry out a coup d’état, you can forget about Spain. . We have to do something definitive, kid. I’ll be waiting for you at eight at the Plaza de la Universidad.”

Kotov tied the kerchief at his neck and picked up his jacket. Ramón knew he shouldn’t ask anything and saw him walk away with a limp that was more noticeable than on other occasions. From the bench he contemplated, a few feet below him, at the start of Las Ramblas, several sandbags that were once barricades and the carefree or hurried people walking by, dressed as civilians or in the uniforms by which each faction tried to distinguish itself. Ramón felt superior: he was one of those in the know amid a mass of puppets.

Fifteen minutes before eight, Ramón sat on a bench in the Plaza de la Universidad. He saw a parade down Gran Vía, on the way to Sants station, of several trucks filled with recruits from the CNT anarchists’ militia, with their banners beaten by the wind. He assumed they would go out to the front that very night and began to understand the strategy of Kotov and the advisers’ high command. Half an hour later, when anxiety was beginning to torment him, he felt his stomach growing cold. On the other side of the avenue, he saw her coming: of the millions of people on Earth, her figure was the only one he would never mistake.

África got closer and Ramón felt himself losing what control he had imagined he possessed. He walked to the edge of the street and hugged her almost furiously.

“But where the hell. .?”

“Let’s go, they’re waiting for us.”

África’s coolness cut through Ramón’s anxiety, and he immediately sensed that something had changed. As they walked toward the market, África mentioned she had been in Valencia, where the head of government was now located, and had returned when Pedro and Orlov, the very head of the intelligence advisers, had transferred her command post to Barcelona. She had no recent news of Lenina. She assumed she was with her parents, still in the Alpujarra mountains, she said, and closed the subject to further discussion. Near the market, they entered a building and went up the stairs to the third floor. The door opened without their knocking, and in the room that must have sometimes been a living room, Ramón saw Kotov and another five men of whom he only recognized Graco. Two remained standing, while Kotov and the rest were seated on some boxes. No one said hello.

Kotov was precise: they had been given the mission of capturing a man, not even he himself knew his name; he knew only that they were dealing with an anarchist who needed to be taken out of circulation. The man would come out about ten o’clock from a bar two blocks from there and they would recognize him because he would have a red and black scarf. “You and you”—he pointed out Ramón and a dark-haired man, thirty-something years old, who looked like he came from the south—“dressed as Mossos d’Esquadra, you’re going to arrest him and take him to a car that she”—he pointed at África—“is going to signal for you.” The other three would act as support in case something happened. Kotov insisted that everything should be done as a routine arrest; there couldn’t be any shots or drama. The ones in the car would be in charge of driving the man to his fate. Afterward, they would all scatter and wait until he or an envoy of his called them.

The air of mystery and secrecy filled Ramón with joy. He looked at África and smiled at her, since, as he put on the Catalan police uniform, he could feel how his usefulness for the cause was growing. That mission could be the beginning of his definitive entrance into the world of the truly initiated, but working with África was an unexpected reward. He would never remember if he had felt nervous; he would only keep in his memory the feeling of responsibility that overcame him and África’s distant attitude.

The facility with which the arrest played out, the transfer of the man to the car (when he heard him protest, Ramón knew he was Italian), and his departure ended up filling him with enthusiasm. Could everything be so easy? After walking a few blocks away, Ramón took off the jacket and threw it in the garbage can. He felt euphoric, desirous to do something else, and he regretted that Kotov’s order was immediate dispersal once the operation was carried out. To have África so close just to lose her right away. . He looked for one of the dark alleyways that led to El Raval, desiring more adventure than the insipid Lena Imbert could provide. When he stopped to light a cigarette, he felt his blood go cold: the cold metal of the barrel of a revolver was pressed into the back of his head. For a few seconds his mind went blank, until his sense of smell came to his aid.

“You’re going against orders,” he said, without turning around. “You’re the only soldier who smells like violets. Shall we take the tram to La Bonanova or do you still have that little room in La Barceloneta?”

África put the gun away and started walking, forcing Ramón to follow her.

“I wanted to see you because I felt I should be honest with you, Ramón,” she said, and he sensed a tone in her voice that alarmed him.

“What’s going on?”

“There’s nothing going on anymore, Ramón. Forget about me.”

“What are you talking about?” Ramón felt himself shaking. Had he heard correctly?

“I won’t see you again. .”

“But. .”

Ramón stopped and grabbed her by the arm almost violently. She let him but gave him a cold, piercing look. Ramón let go of her.

“I never promised you anything. You should have never fallen in love. Love is a weight and a luxury we cannot afford. Good luck, Ramón,” she said, and without turning around she walked down the street until she was lost around the corner and in the darkness.

Nearly petrified, Ramón was aware of the commotion affecting his muscles and his brain. What the hell was going on? Why was África doing this? Was she following party orders or was it a personal decision?

He walked to the high part of the city, the unease following him. He felt diminished, humiliated, and in his mind signals began to cross, evidence that until that moment had been brushed away, attitudes that in a new light took on a revelatory dimension. And in that wounded wolf’s climb to his lair, Ramón promised himself that África would one day know who he was and what he was capable of.

The explosion that the horse-faced English journalist was waiting for, and that Kotov had prophesied, finally happened. The dry wood of hate and fear, so abundant in Spain, needed only a match, placed precisely, to light the pyre on which, as Caridad would say so many times, the Republic had been purified.

Thanks to the information at his disposal, the playing out of events did not surprise Ramón, although the unpredictable consequences alarmed him. On May 3 the invasion of the Telefónica building by a police contingent, led by the commissar of public order, Rodríguez Salas, bearer of the order dictated by the conseller of interior security to empty the place and hand it over to the government, caused the predictable refusal by the anarchists and their entrenchment in the building’s higher floors. As was also expected, the confrontation began immediately between the police corps belonging to the Republic and the Catalan government and the CNT anarchists and syndicalists, who were joined by the POUM Trotskyists. The accumulated tension and hardened hate exploded and Barcelona became a battlefield.

A few days before, various contingents of anarchist militia, refusing to obey orders from the joint chiefs of staff, had abandoned the front and, with their weapons, had stationed themselves in the city. The authorities, foreseeing possible confrontations, even decided to cancel the May Day celebrations, but on May 2, some members of the Catalanist party opened fire against a group of anarchists, and the tension increased. The police’s plan to empty the Telefónica building was the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused such violence that Ramón would ask himself if the government, with the support of the Socialists and the Communists, would be capable of controlling it and emerging victorious.

On the very morning of May 3 and against his expectations, Ramón received the order to remain in La Bonanova, no matter what happened, until one of Kotov’s men came to get him. At the first light of day, Caridad went out with Luis in her invincible Ford to place the kid with people who would take him to the other side of the Pyrenees. Ramón said goodbye to Luis with a strange presentiment. Before Luis got into the car, Ramón hugged him and asked him to always remember that he was his brother, and everything that he had done and would do in the future would be so that young people like him could enter the paradise of a world without exploiters or exploited, of justice and prosperity: a world without hate and without fear.

When in midafternoon he learned of the incident that had started at the Telefónica and the violent fratricide that followed, Ramón understood that Caridad was taking those precautions because not even those in the party were sure they could control the situation. The anarchists and POUMists, refusing to hand over their weapons, accused the Communist Rodríguez Salas of having provoked them to bring about a confrontation. The Communists, on the other hand, accused their political rivals of rebelling against the official institutions, of thwarting the central government’s work, of generating chaos and disorder, and, directly and indirectly, of planning a coup d’état that would have been the end of the Republic. The bulk of the verbal attack centered on the POUM leaders, who were labeled traitors, instigators, and even the promoters of a planned Trotskyist-fascist coup in collaboration with the Falangists. Ramón understood that he had had the privilege of attending the start of a political game that displayed such a capacity for planning and such mastery for the exploitation of the circumstances that it didn’t cease to surprise him. But he also thought that, as never before, the fate of the Republic was dangling from a thread and it was hard to predict the winner of this round.

Many times he was tempted to go down to La Pedrera in search of the evasive Kotov to ask him to revoke his order to remain far away. The hours of the day became interminable for him, and when at night Caridad returned to the palace of La Bonanova with a rifle placed diagonally across her shoulder, she called him down, saying that even if the Telefónica building had not been seized, that it was all merely a question of a few hours, and that the operation had been a success, since the uprising had proven the libertarians’ and Trotskyists’ crimes. Besides, she trusted that the skirmishes that were still ongoing would soon be under control, since various CNT leaders were mediating them to calm down spirits and an announcement had been made that army contingents were coming from Valencia.

“What I don’t understand is why they have me here,” Ramón complained as Caridad lit one of her cigarettes and, between drags, swallowed pieces of sausage that she washed down with wine.

“There are already more than enough people to kill fifth columnists and traitors. Kotov must know what he wants you for.”

“What’s supposed to happen now?”

“Well, I don’t know. But when we do away with the anarchists and the Trotskyists, it will be clear who’s in charge in Republican Spain. We couldn’t keep dealing with the undisciplined and the traitors or waiting for Largo Caballero to leave quietly. We’re throwing him out right now.”

“And what are the people going to say?”

Caridad put out her cigarette and took another one out of the pack. She took a long drink of wine to get rid of the taste of the sausage in her mouth.

“All of Spain already knows that the POUM Trotskyists, the libertarians, and the Anarchist Federation have gone too far. They’ve rebelled against the government, and in war, we call that betrayal. There are even documents proving the links the Trotskyists have with Franco, but Caballero doesn’t want to accept them. These sons of bitches were slipping maps and even army communication codes to the fascists.”

“Hey, hey. . You know that half of what you’re saying is a lie.”

“Are you sure? Even so, even if it’s a lie, we’ll make it the truth. And that’s what matters: what people believe.”

Ramón nodded. Although it was difficult for him to accept the meanness of that, he recognized how important it was to win the war, and to do so, a purge like that was necessary. Caridad smiled and let her cigarette fall to the ground.

“You have a lot to learn, Ramón. We’re going to set up Negrín and Indalecio Prieto’s radical Socialists with Largo’s conciliators. Rather, we’re going to serve them Largo’s head on a platter for them to tear apart between them.”

“But neither Prieto nor Negrín loves us very much. .”

“They won’t have any choice but to love us. And as soon as they replace Largo and name Negrín or Prieto, we’re going to do away once and for all with the POUM. If the Socialists want to rule, they’re going to have to help us: either they govern with us or they don’t govern at all. We’re going to take the anarchists out of their way, and they’re going to have to thank us for that.”

Ramón nodded and dared at last to ask the question eating away at him:

“And is África involved in all of this?”

Caridad drank two sips of wine.

“She won’t leave Pedro’s side. So she must be very close to everything. .”

Ramón nodded. Jealousy or envy? Perhaps both, plus a few drops of despair.

“And what’s my role in all of this, Caridad?”

“In time, Kotov will tell you. . Look, Ramón, you must learn to have patience and to know that you don’t beat your enemies while they’re standing, but when they are kneeling before you. And you beat them mercilessly, dammit!”

The next morning, after seeing Caridad leave in the Ford, Ramón took the risk of disobeying his orders. He felt smothered in La Bonanova, where the sound of artillery fire barely reached, and went down toward the city, almost without admitting to himself that one of his hopes was to run into África. On the way into town, he avoided the streets where barricades had already been erected and from which sporadic gunfire came. Halted trams and buses cut off traffic, and there were flags unfurled everywhere announcing the political affiliation of the defenders on every corner: Communists, Socialists, anarchists, POUMists, Catalanists, syndicalists, regular troops, militia, and police, in a centrifugal kaleidoscope that convinced the young man of the necessity of the raid: no war could be won with such a chaotic and divided rear guard. The entire city was still on a war footing and the Plaza de Cataluña esplanade looked like the backyard of a barracks. The Telefónica building, where the CNT anarchists were still entrenched, was completely surrounded and in the sights of various pieces of artillery. The besiegers, nonetheless, looked so confident that they were resting, taking advantage of the warm May morning. Avoiding the esplanade, he looked for Las Ramblas and, at the juncture with the Virreina Palace and the Hotel Continental and, further down, by El Falcón, the way was completely empty; only a hurried pedestrian occasionally risked crossing it while waving a white handkerchief. From just around the market, he observed that, on each side of the street, there were men stationed on the roofs, and he assumed that the ones on the Continental were POUM militiamen and leaders. From both sides they shot dispiritedly, and Ramón thought that the fate of the uprising was sealed: the rearguard war looked more like a reenactment than a real confrontation. He felt the temptation to slip back into Adriano’s skin and enter the POUM hangouts with it, but he understood that such indiscipline could end up being very dangerous. The ruthlessness he had sworn himself to could turn against him if someone identified him and denounced his presence in the Trotskyist precincts without his having been sent by a superior.

Just a few days later, Ramón would know the extent to which Kotov trusted Caridad, since the woman’s predictions began to come true. The sporadic confrontations, violent at times, continued for a couple of days, accumulating a toll of dead and wounded, but they started losing intensity, as if wearing out. Various syndicalist and anarchist leaders asked their comrades to lay down their weapons, and when the bulk of the troops sent by the government finally arrived, the rebels had recognized their defeat, the city was practically pacified, and the majority of the key posts were in the hands of the men chosen by the advisers and the party. The battle was now being waged on verbal grounds, with the continuous exchange of accusations in which the communist means of propaganda, free of censorship, had the upper hand and spread the opinion that the CNT syndicalists, the anarchists, and especially the POUMists had caused an uprising that seemed so much like a coup d’état. Ramón thought that the elusive Cataluña was finally falling under the control of the Soviet advisers and the men from the Comintern, while the government was headed into a crisis and Largo Caballero was as good as dead.

The events unfolded at a dizzying speed once the communist press printed that it had proof of the collaboration between the POUM Trotskyists and the fascists. They wrote and spoke of telegrams and even troop-movement maps passed on to the enemy. Largo Caballero, besieged on all sides — or perhaps accepting at last his inability to resolve the problems of the war and the Republic — tendered his resignation. Then, with the support of the Communists and the advisers, Negrín rose to the leadership of the government and, almost as his first measure, announced the outlawing of the POUM and his intention to try its leaders.

Ramón, who felt bothered by not having been closer to the action, was surprised when Maximus appeared, seeking him out. He was accompanied by two unknown men, obviously Spaniards, but who went without any kind of introduction. In silence they went down to the city, a true field after battle, with troops in the plazas, burned-out buildings, and the remains of barricades on the corners. Soldiers were posted everywhere. Ramón had the conviction that a Republican Spain should take advantage of the shakeup and accept once and for all the only salvation that could come from the most ironclad discipline and from head-on Soviet intervention. He thought perhaps André Marty was right when he had called them primitive and incapable, and when Kotov, in his almost poetic manner, had called them romantic and indolent. The young man felt ensnared by agony over the fate of his country and over the dream for which he had spent four years fighting, but an important step had been taken to save it.

Maximus, in the company of Ramón and the other two comrades, stopped the car on the road to Prat, already in the outskirts of the city, and waited for the arrival of another vehicle, which was also occupied by four men, two of whom looked foreign and another one with a resplendent military uniform, although it was missing his rank. Maximus gave the orders, which seemed directed at Ramón more than at his other two companions: the police were getting ready to take a prisoner out of Barcelona, a spy at the service of the nationalists, and he was entrusting them with the mission of taking that man to Valencia, where he would be interrogated. The information the man possessed was vital for breaking apart the enemy’s network and to revealing the extent of the Trotskyist betrayal. But that entire operation had to be carried out with the greatest discretion, and for that reason only men of the utmost confidence were participating.

A few hours later, as night was falling, the police patrol appeared on the road and signaled with its lights. Maximus ordered the men in the second car to place themselves in the rear guard and he, with Ramón and the other two men, placed himself at the front of the convoy and headed toward Valencia. On a few occasions one of the men traveling in the car tried to strike up a conversation, but Maximus demanded silence.

In the predawn hours, they arrived in the outskirts of Valencia, where another patrol was waiting for them. The ones coming from Barcelona stopped and Maximus ordered them not to come out of the car and to remain on guard and, above all, to remain silent. Ramón watched how Maximus went over to the patrol, accompanied by the man dressed in uniform who had traveled in the car that was the last in line. In the darkness he tried to make out what was happening on the highway and he thought he heard Maximus and the men who were waiting speaking in Russian. One of those men looked familiar to him, and although he later thought it could have been Alexander Orlov, head of Soviet intelligence in Spain, the darkness prevented him from being sure. With a flashlight, the uniformed man accompanying Maximus signaled the convoy, and a few minutes later Ramón saw a handcuffed man led by two policemen pass by his car. Despite the sparse light, he was shocked when he was able to identify him: it was Andreu Nin.

At that moment Ramón understood he had been chosen for that mission as a reward for his work involving the POUM. Then the horse-faced English journalist came to mind, as did the words he had said to Adriano in one of their chats at the Hotel Continental a few weeks before:

“Nin is the most Spanish Spaniard I know. If he weren’t so Catalan, he would’ve been a bullfighter or a singer. He exists with just one idea in his mind: revolution. He’s the kind who would allow himself to be killed for it. Fanatics scare me away, but I respect that man.”

Without looking at his accomplices, Ramón said:

“They’re going to have to kill that man.”

One of his companions, the older one, dared to comment:

“Remember what the chief said: they’re going to make him sing about everything he knows regarding the fifth columnists’ plans.”

“He won’t talk.” Ramón felt that conviction so deeply that he was tormented by the desire to get out of the car and tell Maximus and even Orlov himself, if it was Orlov who was now stepping aside to allow Nin into the small covered van. All of that was absurd, and Ramón knew it was going to end in the worst way.

“They can make anyone talk,” the man said, lowering his voice, “and all of those Trotskyists are soft.”

“Not this one. He won’t talk.”

“And why are you so sure, comrade?”

“Because he’s a fanatic and he knows that if he talks, they’re going to kill him anyway, and kill his friends, too. You know something? If I were him, I wouldn’t talk, either.”

12

Over the years, many of the details of my relationship with the man who loved dogs have faded in my memory, although I don’t believe I have forgotten anything essential. What you are reading, in any event, is the reconstruction according to my recollections — subject to the pernicious effects of time — of some conversations and some thoughts that I would only begin to write down, in the form of notes, five years after those encounters on the beach during the year of 1977. In the interim, I had turned into a very different Iván than the one I was when I met Jaime López, and this was, among other reasons and as you will easily come to understand, because of the story that obscure man would tell me. Raquelita was right, as she almost always was: no one could continue being the same person he had been before listening to him.

In the middle of November, precisely on the first day that I returned to the beach after our last encounter, I ran into López again, and I think that for the first time I suspected that perhaps he had been waiting for me. But why? For what? I asked myself, and then I immediately forgot these questions. On that occasion I had gone without Raquel, who tended to work in the afternoons and, at heart, was not too fond of those winter outings to the beach.

After exchanging greetings, we moved on to the subject of the trip to Paris and López’s health, but he cut off that line of conversation by telling me that the French doctors couldn’t find what was wrong with him, either, and that the climate in Paris had been just as detestable as could be expected from that city. I don’t know why that abrupt interruption of a possible chat about something that so interested me — Paris, the dream journey — moved me to ask him the reason he always had his right hand bandaged. Even when I knew that with that question I was brushing the limits of what was permissible in our superficial relationship of insignificant conversations, at that moment I felt a need to know something definitive about him, perhaps moved by the impression that he had made on Raquelita.

“It’s a very ugly burn,” López responded, without thinking about it too much. “It happened to me a few years ago already, but it’s very unpleasant to look at.”

I perceived in his voice a regretful tone that I hadn’t heard from him before. It must not be, I thought, that it bothers him to talk about the burned hand: perhaps he was upset at having burned it, as if it were still burning? In that instant I regretted my indiscretion, and I have never really known if it was a form of compensation or because I needed to vomit up my pent-up anger that I did something unusual for me and told him about the ups and downs my family had experienced in the previous two months since my younger brother controversially came out as a homosexual. I unleashed all the resentment I felt toward my parents for having punished the kid so cruelly. As I spoke, I noticed that I had been so obtuse that until that exact moment, as I confided the details and feelings I hadn’t even revealed to my wife to a person I barely knew, I had concentrated my resentment on my parents’ attitude because in reality I had been ignoring the true origins of what had happened: the persistence of an institutionalized homophobia, of an extended ideological fundamentalism that rejected and repressed anything different and preyed on the most vulnerable ones, on those who don’t adjust to the canons of orthodoxy. Then I understood that not just my parents but I myself had been the pawn of ancestral prejudices, of the surrounding pressures of the time, and, above all, the victim of fear, as much as or more (without a doubt, more) than William. In me, in addition, I felt a certain rancor toward my brother, precisely because it was my brother who had been declared a faggot: I could understand and even accept that two professors may have gone the other way, but this wasn’t the same as knowing — and having others know — that the one who went the other way was my own brother. In any event, I silenced the philosophizing that, in the hands of López (who the hell was López? Who did he work for in Cuba? How in the hell could he go see some doctors in Paris?) or anyone who could decide to use them, could be turned against me, as my own past duly reminded me.

López had listened to me in silence, as if ashamed. Ix and Dax, tired from running, had lain down a few feet from their owner, and the tall, thin black man, somewhere between the casuarinas, had also sat down on their roots. In my memory, that instant has remained frozen like a photograph, as if the world had stopped for a few seconds, even minutes, until López said:

“They always fuck somebody. . I’m sorry for your brother,” and he asked me to help him stand up.

This time he was less dizzy, and he confirmed that in recent days he had been feeling much better. When he was already starting to get farther away, López stopped and asked me to come close. With me just barely arrived at his side, the man who loved dogs started to unfurl the bandage on his right hand and showed me the shiny, flat skin that rose from the tip of his thumb to the center of his hand.

“It’s pretty ugly, right?”

“Like all burns,” I told him, surprised that it was just an old scar.

“It still hurts me some days. .” and he remained silent until he looked into my eyes and told me: “I wasn’t in Paris. I went to Moscow.”

That confession surprised me: Why did he lie to me and why was he now confiding the truth to me? Why should I know he had been in Moscow? Didn’t dozens, hundreds of Cubans go to Moscow every day, for any number of reasons? I remained silent, unable to answer myself, doing the only thing I could do: waiting. Then López began to bandage his hand and asked me:

“Do you think we could see each other the day after tomorrow?”

I took my eyes off his once-again-covered hand and discovered a brilliant moistness in that man’s eyes. Until that day — at least that I knew of — our encounters had been more or less casual run-ins more or less facilitated by the customs or whims of the weather, and had never been arranged beforehand. Why was López asking for another meeting after having shown me that burn hitherto concealed and having confessed to me he had been in Moscow and not in Paris?

“Yes, I think so.”

“So we’ll see each other in two days. . It would be better if your wife were not there,” he warned me, and slapped his legs so Ix and Dax would walk next to him toward where the tall, thin black man was waiting for them.

The coast was full of gray and brownish algae, the swollen corpses of purplish jellyfish, and worn-out wood and stones thrown out by the sea the previous night. There wasn’t a single person visible on the whole swath of sand in the eye’s view. The sun warmed the atmosphere, and although on the beach the wind from the north beat coolly, consistently, the light jacket I was wearing that day was enough. Since I had arrived in advance of the time we set for our meeting, I walked along the shore for a bit. I then saw that those darkened pieces of wood, half hidden by shaggy algae, that seemed to make a cross were, in fact, the limbs of a cross. The wood, corroded, announced that perhaps that cross — about sixteen by eight inches — had spent a lot of time at the mercy of the sea and the sand, but at the same time it was clear that it had just recently arrived on the coast, pushed by the waves from the last cold front. Nothing made it special: they were just two pieces of dark wood, very dense, eroded, gouged, crossed, and fixed together by two rusted screws. Nonetheless, that rustic cross, perhaps because of its worn wood, perhaps because it was where it was (where did it come from? To whom did it belong?), drew me so much that, despite my atheism, I decided to take it with me after washing it in the sea. The shipwrecked cross, I called it, even when I had no clue about its origins and before I suspected how long it would stay with me.

As if he were immune to the temperature, López showed up dressed only in a gray short-sleeved shirt adorned with some enormous pockets. The borzois, made for Siberian temperatures, seemed more than happy. The black man, always between the casuarinas, was wearing a military cape and at some point seemed to have fallen asleep.

From the moment in which the man had invited me to meet him, I had barely been able to think of anything else. I had made a mental summary of how little I knew about him and I couldn’t find a crack that leaked any speculations about the origin of that need to see me and, as I was expecting, to talk to me about something presumably important (that he preferred, or demanded, that Raquelita not hear). Up until our meeting, I was mulling over many possibilities: that López’s son was also gay; that López could use his influence to help William in his case; and, of course, almost instinctively, I thought he was hiding his intention of commenting upon my opinions and was preparing to return with someone who could make trouble for me, just when I had gotten rid of all my dreams and ambitions (I believe that even included my increasingly moribund literary pretensions) and wished for nothing more than a little peace, like the bird trained to happily accept the routine of the cage. Whatever the reasons may be, whatever was going to happen must happen, I concluded, and shortly before four in the afternoon I arrived at Santa María del Mar, without my tennis racket or even a book to read.

López smiled upon seeing me with the wooden cross in my hands. I explained to him how I had found it and he asked to see it.

“It seems very old,” he said as he examined it. “They don’t make these kinds of screws anymore.”

“It came from a shipwreck,” I commented, just to say something.

“Of one of those that leave Cuba in washbasins?” His question exuded a mocking irony.

“I don’t know. Yes, it could be. .”

“The cross was there, waiting for you to find it,” he said, now completely serious as he returned it to me, and I liked the idea. If I had any doubts about what to do with the cross up until that moment, the possibility that finding it had been more than a coincidence convinced me that I had to keep carrying it, since only at that moment was I sure that it had to have been very important to someone I would never meet. Did things like that occur to me because, despite my problems, I could still react like a writer? When did I lose that capacity and so many others?

Instead of sitting on the sand, we made the most of some concrete blocks very close to the sea. That afternoon, López had brought a bag with a thermos full of coffee and two small plastic cups, in which he served the beverage several times. Each time he drank coffee, he removed from his pocket a box of cigarettes and his heavy gas lighter, which was able to resist the gusts of the breeze.

In addition to the coffee, the man who loved dogs also brought some bad news.

“We have to put Dax down,” he told me once we were settled and he looked at the borzois running and splashing in the water.

Surprised by those words, I turned my head to look at the animals.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The veterinarian saw him two days ago. .”

“How can a veterinarian tell you to euthanize a dog like that? Did he bite someone? Didn’t he see how he’s running, that he’s fine?”

López took his time in responding.

“He has a brain tumor. He’ll die in four or five months, and at any moment he’ll start to suffer and could become uncontrollable.”

Then I was the one who remained silent.

“That was what was making him aggressive, not the heat. .,” López added.

“Did they run a scan?” I looked at the animals again.

“And other tests. There’s no chance that they’re mistaken. I’m devastated. No one can fathom how much I love those dogs.”

“I can imagine,” I murmured, recalling the death of Curry, a tailless terrier who spent all of my childhood and part of my adolescence with me.

“In Moscow and here in Havana, they’ve been like two friends. I like to talk to them. I tell them everything, my memories, and I always speak to them in Catalan. And I swear they understand me. . When Dax starts to get worse and I’ve gotten used to the idea. . would you be able to help me with this?”

At first I didn’t understand the question. Then I understood that López was asking me to help him sacrifice Dax, and I reacted.

“No, I’m not a veterinarian. . and even if I were, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

The man was silent. He poured himself more coffee and took out one of his cigarettes.

“Of course, I don’t know why I asked this of you. . It’s just that I have no idea how the hell I am going to. .”

At that moment I thought I sensed that something more terrible than the fate of his sick dog was pursuing this man, and this was confirmed almost immediately.

“If someone told me I was as sick as Dax, I’d like for someone to help me get out of it quickly. Doctors are sometimes incredibly cruel. When the inevitable happens, they should be more humane and have a better understanding of what it feels like to suffer.”

“Doctors do know, but they can’t do it. Veterinarians also know and have that license to kill. Look for one who. .”

I felt that I was entering tricky territory and was losing wiggle room and any possibility for escape. But I was still a long way from imagining the degree to which I would sink into an overflowing pit of hate and blood and frustration.

“I’m also going to die,” the man finally said to me.

I tried to find my way out by saying something obvious. “We’re all going to die.”

“The doctors haven’t been able to find anything, but I know that I am dying. Right now I’m dying,” he insisted.

“Because of the dizziness?” I clung to my logic and to playing the role of someone stupid. “It’s the spine. . There are even tropical parasites that cause vertigo.”

“Don’t fuck around, kid. Don’t pretend to be dumb. Listen to what I’m telling you: I’m dying, dammit!”

I asked myself what the hell was happening: Why, if we barely knew each other, was that man choosing to confide in me that he was dying and that he wanted someone who was able to cut short that suffering?

“I don’t know why you. .”

López smiled. He dragged his heel across the sand until he made a line. At that moment I was still afraid of what that man’s words could say to me.

“The pretext for going to Moscow was that I was invited to the celebrations for the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution. But I needed to go to see two people. I was able to see them and I had some conversations with those who are killing me.”

“With whom did you speak?”

The man stopped moving his foot and looked at his bandaged hand.

“Iván, I’ve seen death closer than you would be able to imagine. I think I know everything there is to know about death.”

I recall it as if it were yesterday: it was at that exact moment that I really felt fear, real fear, besides the logical surprise at those unfathomable words. Because never in my life had it occurred to me that someone could confess his capacity for understanding everything there is to know about death. What do you do in a situation like that? I looked at the man and said:

“When you were in the war, right?”

He nodded silently, as if my clarification weren’t important, and then said:

“But I’m incapable of killing a dog. I swear.”

“War is something else. .”

“War is shit,” the man exclaimed almost furiously. “In war, you either kill or you are killed. But I’ve seen the worst side of human beings, especially outside the war. You can’t imagine what a man is capable of, what hate and bitterness can do when they are nurtured. .”

More or less at that point, I thought: enough with beating around the bush. The best thing I could have done would have been to stand up and end that conversation that could lead to nothing good. But I didn’t move from where I was, as if I really wanted to know where the man who loved dogs was going with his argument. Was I interested? Until that moment I was motivated by pure inertia. But then the man ratcheted things up:

“A few years ago, a friend told me a story.” López’s voice suddenly seemed as if it were someone else’s. “It’s a story that very few people knew well and almost all of them are dead. Of course, I asked him not to tell me, but there’s something that worries me.”

I had decided not to speak again, but López was expectant.

“What’s that?”

“My friend died. . and when I die, and when the only other person dies who, as far as I know, is familiar with all the details, that story will be lost. The truth of the story, I mean.”

“So why don’t you write it down?”

“If I shouldn’t even tell it to my children, how am I going to write it down?”

I nodded, and was glad the man was reaching for another cigarette: the action freed me of the need to ask another question.

“I asked you to come today because I want to tell you that story, Iván,” the man who loved dogs said to me. “I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve made up my mind. Do you want to hear it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, almost without thinking about it, and I was completely honest. I would later ask myself if that was the most intelligent answer to one of the most unusual questions I had ever been asked in my life: Is it possible to want or not want to hear a story you don’t know, a story about which you don’t know a damned thing? But at that moment it was the only response within my reach.

“It’s an incredible story; you’ll see that I am not exaggerating. But before I tell it to you, I’m going to ask two things of you.”

This time I managed to keep my mouth shut.

“First, don’t be so formal with me anymore. That way it will be easier to explain everything to you. Also, don’t tell anyone, not even your wife; that’s why I asked you to come alone. But above all, I don’t want you to write it down.”

I stared at the man. The fear had left me and my brain was a spiral of ideas, but there was one that made my head spin.

“If you’re not supposed to talk about this. . why do you want to tell me? What are you going to achieve with that?”

The man put out his cigarette by burying it in the sand.

“I need to tell it at least once in my life. I can’t die without telling anyone. You’ll see why. . Oh, and don’t call me usted anymore, ¿vale?”

I nodded, but my mind could only focus on one thing.

“Yes, that’s all fine, but why do you want to tell me? You know that I wrote a book,” I added, as if I were raising a paper shield under a steel sword.

“Because I don’t have anyone better to tell it to, although sometimes it seems like I met you just to be able to tell it to you. Besides, I think it will teach you something.”

“About death?”

“Yes. And about life. About truth and lies. It taught me a lot, although a bit too late. .”

“You really don’t have anyone to tell this story to? A friend, I don’t know. . your son?”

“No, not him. .” The reaction was too brusque, as if he were defensive, but his tone changed immediately. “He knows some of it, but. . I told one of my brothers part of it, not all. . And it has been a long time since I’ve had friends, what you would call friends. . But I barely know you, and it’s better that way. I know what I’m saying. . A while back, when I got here, I still wasn’t convinced, but later I realized that you were the best person possible. . So, do you promise you’re not going to write it down or tell anyone?”

It goes without saying that, without having a clear idea of why I was doing it or what I was in for, I said yes and became entangled with him. If I had said I didn’t want to hear any story or that I couldn’t promise that I wouldn’t run out and share it that same day, perhaps this whole story, with all of its deep and sordid details, would have been lost with the death of Jaime López and the other individual who, according to him, was the only one who knew it and wasn’t going to tell it, either. But as I went over the unpredictable sum of coincidences and games of chance that had led me to be sitting in front of the sea that November afternoon, next to a person who was demanding an answer that was beyond me, I could only arrive at one conclusion: the man who loved dogs, his story and mine, were chasing each other around the Earth, like heavenly bodies whose orbits are destined to cross and cause an explosion.

After hearing my affirmative response, the man took another sip of coffee and lit the cigarette he had in his hand.

“Have you ever heard of Ramón Mercader?”

“No,” I admitted, almost without thinking about it.

“That’s normal,” he murmured, with profound conviction and a small smile, a rather sad one, on his lips. “Almost no one knows him. And others would prefer not to know him. What do you know about Leon Trotsky?”

I recalled my fleeting contact with the name and a few moments in the life of that murky figure, practically disappeared from history, unmentionable in Cuba.

“Very little. That he betrayed the Soviet Union. That he was killed in Mexico.” I searched my memory for more. “Of course, that he participated in the October Revolution. In our classes on Marxism, they talked to us about Lenin, a little bit about Stalin, and they told us that Trotsky was a renegade and that Trotskyism was revisionist and counterrevolutionary, an attack on the Soviet Union.”

“I see that they teach you well here. .,” López admitted.

“So who is Ramón Mercader? Why should I know him?”

“Well, you should know who Ramón Mercader was,” he said, and made a long pause, until he decided to continue. “Ramón was my friend — much more than a friend. We met in Barcelona, and later we fought in the war together. . A few years ago, we ran into each other again in Moscow. The Soviet tanks had already entered Prague and everyone was speaking in low voices again.” The man was looking at the sea, as if the keys to his memory were behind the waves. “The city of whispers. The last action against Khrushchev’s détente, against a socialism that dreamed it could still be different. With a human face, they said. .” He remembered and rubbed the back of his cloth-bandage-covered hand. “We saw each other again, the day of the first snowfall of 1968. . Ramón was fifty-five years old, more or less, but he looked like he was ten, fifteen years older. He was fat; he had aged. We hadn’t seen each other since the war. .” He went silent, as if he were pondering all the time that had passed.

“What war?”

“Ours. The Spanish Civil War.”

“And you just ran into each other like that, by coincidence?” The curiosity had already taken hold of me.

“It was as if in some way we had been waiting for each other and suddenly we both went out looking for each other, on that exact day on which snow fell for the first time that year in Moscow.” Now he smiled upon evoking it, but I would only understand many years later why he was looking at his bandaged hand again. “We ran into each other on the Frunze, where he lived, in front of Gorky Park. Ramón had gotten fatter, I already told you, but in addition he was very white, and it would have been difficult for someone besides me to recognize in that man the young guy I had said goodbye to in a trench in the Sierra de Guadarrama, with our fists raised, both of us confident we’d be victorious.” He paused and lit another cigarette. “Later, when Ramón and I began to talk, I realized that the only thing he had left intact of that beautiful time was that image of happiness. An image that he had to help him survive. And for that reason, when he decided to tell me everything, he confided his life’s dream to me: more than anything else in the world, he wanted to return to that Catalan beach at least once before he died. And I think he already knew he was going to die.”

Then the man who loved dogs, with his gaze fixed on the sea again, began to tell me the reasons why his friend Ramón Mercader would recall, for the rest of his days, that just a few seconds before pronouncing the words that would change his existence, he had discovered the unhealthy density that accompanied silence in the midst of war. The crash of bombs, gunfire, and engines, the yelled orders and the cries of pain amid which he had lived for weeks, had accumulated in his consciousness like the sounds of life, and the sudden leaden fall of that heavy silence, able to provoke a helplessness too similar to fear, turned into a disquieting presence when he understood that behind that precarious silence could be hiding the explosion of death.

13

The series of events that began on August 26, 1936, clearly revealed to him the often inextricable reasons why Stalin still hadn’t broken his neck. Totally absorbed in blind combat from that day on, Lev Davidovich understood that the Great Leader’s macabre game still demanded his presence because his back had to serve as a springboard in Stalin’s race to the most inaccessible summits of imperial power. At the same time, he had realized that — once his usefulness as the perfect enemy was exhausted, and all the requisite mutilations had been carried out — Stalin would fix the moment of a death that would then arrive with the same certainty with which snow falls in the Siberian winter.

A few months before, foreseeing some incidents that could complicate the delicate conditions of his asylum, Lev Davidovich had begun to eliminate anything that the Norwegian authorities could use against him. More than the aggressiveness of Commander Quisling’s pro-Nazi party, he was alarmed by the increasing virulence of the local Stalinists, who had added a disquieting rumor to their attacks: with a pounding insistence they warned that “Trotsky the counterrevolutionary” was using Norway as a “base for terrorist activities directed against the Soviet Union and its leaders.” His honed sense of smell warned him that the accusation was not the fruit of some local plots but rather came from farther away and hid the most shadowy ends. Because of that, he asked Liova and his followers to erase his name from the Fourth International executive committee, and at the same time he decided to stop giving interviews and even abstained from participating as a mere spectator in any political act of his host Konrad Knudsen’s parliamentary campaign. His relationship with the outside world was reduced to the outings that, once a week, he and Natalia embarked on with the Knudsens to Hønefoss, where they tended to eat in cheap restaurants and later spent the rest of those evenings at the movies, enjoying one of those Marx Brothers comedies that Natalia Sedova liked so much.

That is why he found it so strange when two Norwegian police officers who arrived at Vexhall that afternoon did not display the kind cordiality with which the country’s authorities had always treated him. Stiff in their roles, they informed him that they were carrying out Minister Trygve Lie’s orders and had only come to hand over a document and return to Oslo with it signed. The younger one, after searching in his folder, extended a sealed envelope. Knudsen and Natalia watched expectantly as he opened it, unfolded the sheet, and, after adjusting his glasses, read it. As he read on, the sheet began to shake slightly. Then Lev Davidovich returned it to the envelope, held it out to the officer who had given it to him, and asked him to tell the minister he could not sign that document and that asking him to do so seemed an undignified gesture on the part of Trygve Lie.

The younger officer looked at his colleague without daring to take the envelope. The policemen were overcome by uncertainty, frozen before an attitude for which they were surely unprepared. At that moment he let the envelope fall, and it came to rest alongside the boot of the older of the two officers, who at last reacted: if Lev Davidovich didn’t sign the document, he could be arrested and handed over to the authorities until he was deported, since they had evidence that he had violated the conditions of his residency permit by involving himself in the political matters of other countries.

Then came the explosion. Wagging his finger in a clear sign of warning, Lev Davidovich yelled at the officers to remind the minister that he had promised not to intervene in Norwegian matters but that he wouldn’t give up for anything in the world a right that was the reason for him being a political exile: to say whatever he thought convenient about what was happening in his home country. As such, he would not sign that document and, if the minister wanted to silence him, he would have to sew Lev Davidovich’s mouth shut or do something to him that would surely bother Stalin greatly: kill him.

A few days later, Lev Davidovich would be forced to recognize that Stalin, political opportunist that he was, had treacherously chosen the most propitious moment to organize the judicial farce in Moscow and try to make him the scapegoat for every conceivable perversity. Hitler’s recent entry into the Rhineland had announced to Europe that the expansionist intentions of German fascism were not just a hysterical speech. Meanwhile, the uprising of part of the Spanish army against the Republic, and the start of a war on whose battlefields Italian troops and German planes and ships were advancing, had placed the governments of the democracies (terrified of the possibility of remaining alone in the face of the fascist enemy) in a situation of almost absolute dependency on Moscow’s decisions. In that situation, when the fates of so many countries were being decided, no one was going to dare to defend some pitiful souls being tried in Moscow and an exile who had been accused, of all things, of being a fascist agent in the pay of Rudolf Hess. He realized that the pressure on the Norwegian government was surely intense and he warned Natalia that they should prepare for greater aggression.

But Lev Davidovich had decided that, while possible, he would exploit his only advantage: the Oslo government couldn’t deport him, since no one would take him, and they didn’t even have the option of handing him over to the Soviets, who didn’t want him, despite his own request to be tried. Stalin wasn’t interested in putting him on trial, even less so when one considered that his repatriation would have to go before a Norwegian court, where he would have the opportunity to refute the accusations made against him and against those who had already been sentenced and executed in Moscow.

Lev Davidovich was certain that a crisis had been unleashed when the court in Oslo summoned him to make a declaration about the raid on Knudsen’s house. Everything became clear when the judge who had summoned him revealed the rules of the game, warning him that, since it was a declaration and not an interrogation, neither the presence of Puntervold, his Norwegian lawyer, or of Natalia, or even Knudsen as the owner of the house, was allowed. Alone, in front of the judge and the court’s secretaries, he had to respond to questions about the nature of the documents that had been removed, in which, he assured, he had not meddled in Norway’s internal affairs or that of any other country besides his own. Then the judge lifted some papers and he understood the trap that had been set for him: this essay proved the contrary, according to the judge, since, with regard to the Popular Front, Lev Davidovich had made a call for revolution in France.

In the article, written after the victory of the alliance of the French left, Lev Davidovich had commented that Léon Blum, at the head of the new government, was just a minimum guarantee that the Stalinist influence would find pitfalls in establishing itself in the country, and he warned that if France managed to radicalize its politics, it could very well turn into the epicenter of the European revolution that he had been waiting for since 1905, the revolution capable of stopping fascism in its tracks and cutting off Stalinism. Nonetheless, according to the judge, that document was proof of his disloyal conduct toward the government that had so generously taken him in, and constituted a violation of the conditions of his asylum. Lev Davidovich asked if they were investigating his political opinions or the burglary of the house where he was staying, carried out by a group of pro-fascists. As if he hadn’t heard him, the judge turned to the court secretary and confirmed that Mr. Trotsky had admitted to being the author of the document that proved his interference in the politics of other countries.

When he was walking toward the door, the police who were guarding him informed him that they had to take him to the nearby Ministry of Justice. Once inside the adjacent building, he was greeted by two functionaries who were so imbued with their character that they seemed to have been plucked from a Chekhov story. After informing him that Minister Lie apologized for not being present, they handed him a declaration that the minister asked him to sign as a requirement for extending his residency permit in the country. As he read the declaration, Lev Davidovich thought his temples would explode if he didn’t give free rein to his anger.

“I, Lev Trotsky,” he had read, “declare that my wife, my secretaries, and I will not carry out, while we find ourselves in Norway, any political activity directed against any state friendly to Norway. I declare that I will reside in the place the government chooses or approves, and that we will not interfere in any way in political matters, that my activities as a writer will be circumscribed to historical and biographical works and memoirs, and that my writings of a theoretical nature will not be directed against the government of any foreign country. I agree to have all correspondence, telegrams, and telephone calls sent or received by me submitted to censorship. .”

The Exile stood up as he crumpled the declaration while wondering how soon they would take him to the prison where they would confine him in order to keep him silenced.

Lev Davidovich would prove that the terrified Norwegians didn’t need to imprison him to submit him to a silence that, whichever way you looked at it, Stalin demanded, determined to cover up any arguments that could draw attention to the lies and contradictions of the judicial farce that had recently taken place in Moscow. Upon his return to Vexhall, from where his secretaries had been removed under deportation orders, he and Natalia were confined to a room given to them by Knudsen, in front of which a pair of guards were placed to prevent all communication — even with the owner of the house. As if it were a child’s game, only more dramatic and macabre, Lev Davidovich slid a formal protest under the door in which he accused the minister of violating the Norwegian constitution with a confinement that was not ordered by any court. The following morning, a policeman handed him a communiqué from Trygve Lie informing him that King Haakon had signed an order that allowed him extraconstitutional extensions in the case of the exiles Lev Davidovich Trotsky and Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. Without a doubt, Lie was determined to allow the silence to cast a shadow of doubt over Lev Davidovich’s innocence.

Convinced that even more turbulent times were coming, Lev Davidovich tasked his secretary Erwin Wolf with taking the latest draft of The Revolution Betrayed to Liova. Although he had considered the book finished in early summer, the events in Moscow led him to delay sending it to the editors, since he was hoping to add his reflections on the trial against Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their partners in fate. Nonetheless, in view of the uncertainty in his own life, he decided to add just a small preface: the book would be a sort of manifesto in which Lev Davidovich adapted his thinking to the need for a political revolution in the Soviet Union, an energetic social change that would allow the overthrow of the system imposed by Stalinism. He did not fail to notice the strange irony surrounding a political proposal that was never conceived of by the most feverish Marxist minds, for whom it would have been impossible to imagine that, once the socialist dream was achieved, it would be necessary to call upon the proletariat to rebel against their own state. The great lesson to be drawn from the book was that, in the same way that the bourgeoisie had created various forms of government, the workers’ state seemed to create its own and Stalinism was proving to be the reactionary and dictatorial form of the socialist model.

With the hope that it would still be possible to save the revolution, Lev Davidovich had tried to separate Marxism from the Stalinist distortion, which he qualified as a government by a bureaucratic minority that, by force, coercion, fear, and the suppression of any hint of democracy, protected its interests against the majority dissatisfaction within the country and against all the revolutionary outbreaks of class struggles in the world. And he ended up asking himself: If the social dream and economic utopia supporting it had become corrupt to the core, what remained of the greatest experiment that man had ever dreamed of? And he answered himself: nothing. Or there would remain, for the future, the imprint of an egotism that had used and deceived the world’s working class; the memory would persist of the fiercest and most contemptuous dictatorship that human delirium could conceive. The Soviet Union would bequeath to the future its failure and the fear of many generations in search of the dream of equality that, in real life, had turned into the majority’s nightmare.

The premonition that had pushed him to order Wolf to send on The Revolution Betrayed took shape on September 2. That day, he and Natalia felt like they were opening the pages of the darkest chapter of the storm that had become their lives and were certain that the Stalinist machine would not stop until it asphyxiated them. The transfer order drily informed them that their destination would be a place selected by the minister of justice and they were allowed to take only their personal effects. The policemen, by contrast, had the deference to allow them to say goodbye to the numerous members of the Knudsen family. The air in the house had acquired the unhealthy heaviness of a funeral, and Konrad’s young children cried to see them leave like pariahs after having shared a year with them during which the family had acquired a new member (Erwin Wolf and Hjordis, one of Knudsen’s daughters, had married), a preference for coffee, and, as that moment proved, the notion that truth does not always prevail in the world.

The destination chosen for them was a hamlet called Sundby, in an almost uninhabited fjord near Hurum, twenty miles to the south of Oslo. The ministry had rented a two-story house that the couple would share with a score of policemen devoted to smoking and playing cards, and where the restrictions would end up being worse than those of a prison regime. They were not authorized to leave, and the only person allowed to visit them was Puntervold the lawyer, whose papers were inspected as he entered and again as he left. In addition, they only received newspapers and correspondence after they had been crudely censored with scissors and black ink by a government employee who, like Jonas Lie, the head of the guards watching them, proudly proclaimed his militancy in Quisling’s National Socialist Party.

The captives barely had an idea of what was happening outside that remote fjord until Knudsen managed to have their radio, which had been confiscated when they were in Oslo, returned to them. Thus Lev Davidovich was able to get a measure of Stalin’s success with his Norwegian collaborators when he heard prosecutor Vishinsky’s declorations that if Trotsky hadn’t responded to his ministry’s accusations, it was because he had no way to challenge them, and that the silence of the Exile’s friends in the socialist governments of Norway, France, Spain, and Belgium only proved the impossibility of refuting the irrefutable. Lev Davidovich understood that he should make himself heard or he would be lost forever: the most blatant of lies, repeated over and over again without anyone refuting it, would end up becoming the truth. He had already thought: They want to silence me, but they will not succeed.

Using the invisible ink that Knudsen had managed to get to him in a cough syrup bottle, he prepared a letter to Liova in which he ordered him to launch a counterattack, and he accompanied it with a declaration, directed at the press, in which he refuted the accusations against him and accused Stalin of having staged the August trial with the goal of suppressing dissatisfaction in the USSR and eliminating all kinds of opposition by means of a criminal offensive that began with Kirov’s assassination. In addition, he pointed to the nonexistence of lines of communication with any person in Soviet territory, including his younger son Sergei, whom he had not heard from in over nine months. And finally, he expressed to the Norwegian government his willingness to have all of the accusations against him evaluated and asked for an international commission of workers’ organizations to be created to investigate the charges and to try him publicly. .

On September 15, like a voice from the great beyond, he made himself heard with that cry: it was the warning that Lev Davidovich Trotsky was not giving up.

Even though the Exile had avoided mentioning in his statement the controversy with the Norwegian authorities and the humiliating events of recent days and he had dated it August 27 (the eve of his appearance at the court in Oslo), the ministry of justice forbade him in advance from making any written communications.

For that reason, although Lev Davidovich had been certain for several months that he didn’t have enough years left in his life to turn back the political current that had turned him into a pariah and the revolution into a fratricidal bloodbath, he decided to try to make his statement resonate as strongly as possible. To begin with, he ordered Puntervold to sue the editors of the Norwegian newspapers Vrit Volk and Arbeideren—the former Nazi and the latter Stalinist sympathizers — in hopes of breaking his seclusion and being heard in an open court. The lawyer presented the petition on October 6 and informed him that the process had been initiated to settle it before the month’s end. But October would go by without the proceedings beginning. An explanation arrived on the thirtieth: Lie had stopped the trial’s process, protected under a new provisional royal decree according to which “a foreigner confined under the terms of the decree of August 31, 1936, cannot appear as a plaintiff before a Norwegian court without the concurrence of the minister of justice.”

On November 7, Puntervold traveled to Sundby to give Lev Davidovich, on behalf of Konrad Knudsen, a beautiful cake to celebrate his fifty-seventh birthday and the nineteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Jonas Lie, the fascist head of the police guards, accompanied the attorney while he handed over the dessert and even said celebratory words to the prisoner, wishing him (he was so conceited that he did so without irony) many years of happiness. They then asked Lie for a little bit of privacy to celebrate the unanticipated gift. As soon as they were alone, Natalia cut the cake and they extracted a small roll of paper. Lev Davidovich shut himself up in the bathroom to read it. Knudsen knew that, in the last two months, this was the story that most intrigued him, but it was only very recently that he had managed to learn the details that he was now revealing to the Exile in tiny script, doing so without adjectives and with many abbreviations.

According to Knudsen, on August 29, three days after Lev Davidovich was confined in Vexhall, the Soviet government asked Trygve Lie, who was substituting for the minister of foreign affairs, to throw out the political exile, since he was using Norway, they insisted, as a base to commit sabotage against the Soviet Union. The extension of his asylum, they threatened, would cause the relations between the two countries to deteriorate. Lie declared that when he shut Trotsky away on August 26, that request had not been made to him yet, and therefore no one could accuse him of having confined Trotsky due to Soviet pressure. Nonetheless, Yakubovich, the Russian ambassador, made sure to comment that several days before, when Lev Davidovich had given an interview for Arbeiderbladet, he had verbally conveyed that same message to Trygve Lie. On that occasion, the ambassador had threatened a political crisis and even the rupture of economic relations. The Norwegian fishermen and sailors, conveniently up to speed on the dispute, feared a reprisal that would harm them, and Oslo ceded under the pressure and assigned Lie the role of suppressor. It was then that the minister proposed that Trotsky sign the declaration of submission to him with which Lie hoped to appease the Soviets, but upon not achieving Trotsky’s cooperation, he was obliged to order the confinement in Sundby.

Armed with the invisible ink, Lev Davidovich began to prepare a letter to Liova and his French attorney, Gérard Rosenthal. Feeling free of any commitment to the Norwegian politicians, he relayed the details and causes for his isolation and asked his son to step up his responses to Stalin. Now, more than ever, he knew that the only possibility for him was not to surrender — that silence could only result in the victory of the puppet Lie, with Stalin pulling his strings.

By means of the radio and the few censored newspapers that he was allowed to receive, the captive tried to keep himself up-to-date on what was happening beyond the fjord. With a few drops of bitter satisfaction he learned that, just as he had forecast, in Moscow and in the rest of the country the arrests of real or fabricated oppositionists continued. Among those who had been falling was the infamous Karl Radek, just after he had called for the death of the “super-bandit Trotsky” in the press; he also found out about the arrest of that wretched Piatakov, who had thought he had saved himself when he declared that Trotskyists had to be eradicated like carrion. As was predictable, at the end of September, Yagoda had been removed from his post as the leader of the GPU, and this role had been assigned to an obscure character named Nikolai Yezhov, in whose hands Stalin placed the baton so that he could conduct in a new chapter of the terror: Lev Davidovich knew that in Moscow they needed to organize another farce to try to fix the botched August proceedings and to eliminate accomplices who knew too much, such as Yagoda or the infamous Radek.

Another one of his focal points of interest was the development of the war in Spain, which could turn following Stalin’s recently announced offer of logistical support to the Republic. But it didn’t surprise him to know that along with the weapons — even before them — Soviet agents had traveled to Madrid, establishing guidelines and mining the territory so that Moscow’s interests could flourish. Despite the devious nature of that operation, Lev Davidovich thought how much he would have liked to be in that effervescent and chaotic Spain. A few months before, when the nature of the Republic was defined with the electoral victory of the Popular Front, he had written to Companys, the Catalan president, asking him for a visa that, a few days later, the central government roundly denied him. In his way, Lev Davidovich begged for the Republicans to resist the advance of rebel troops that aimed to take over Madrid, although he already sensed that for the Spanish revolutionaries it would be easier to defeat the fascists than the persistent and creepy Stalinists to whom they had opened the back door.

The good news that Knudsen had won the parliamentary elections in his district reached the fjord, reinforced by the release, surprisingly allowed, of Le livre rouge sur le procès de Moscou, published by Liova in Paris. Lev Davidovich confirmed that the pamphlet managed to show, in an irrefutable way, the incongruities and falsehoods of the Moscow prosecutors while it warned the world that a trial where no proof is presented, based on self-incriminating confessions of prisoners detained for over a year, could not have any legal value.

The best news for the deportee had been confirming that Liova, when the moment came to make decisions, was also capable of doing so.

In the letters that his son had sent him, before and after the publication of the Red Book (letters that Puntervold tried to recite to him from memory), the tension the young man had been experiencing, especially after the August proceedings, filtered through. While the trials in Moscow had had the positive effect of bringing old comrades like Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer closer together and disposed to come out in defense of Lev Davidovich, it had also unleashed in Liova a feeling of being trapped that wouldn’t leave him and that led him to worry that he could be kidnapped or assassinated. His situation had become complicated by the exhaustion of funds to pay for the printing of the Bulletin and by family tensions, given that ever since the political rupture with Molinier, Jeanne was saying she felt closer to her ex-husband’s position than to that of Liova and his father. Nonetheless, his greatest concern, the young man insisted, wasn’t for himself or his marriage but rather for something much more valuable: Lev Davidovich’s personal and historical archives, kept in Paris. Liova had managed for part of these papers to be donated to the Dutch Institute for Social History, and at the beginning of November he had handed over another part to the institute’s French branch. The rest, which contained some of the most confidential files, he had placed under the watch of his friend Mark Zborowski, an efficient and refined Polish-Ukrainian whom everyone called Étienne.

Very soon, the matter of the archives would prove to be more than an obsession of Liova’s when, with the new packet barely handed over to the institute, what he had feared so much occurred. On the night of November 6, a group of men entered the building and took some of the files. To the police, it was clear they were dealing with a professional and political operation, since there were no other valuable objects missing from the place. The strange thing was that the burglars had known about the existence of a warehouse that was known only to people in whom Liova had absolute confidence. Furthermore, if the burglars knew about that secret paperwork, why did they enter the institute and not Étienne’s apartment, where the most valuable documents were kept? Liova accused the GPU of the theft, but, like the fires in the Prinkipo and Kadıköy houses, his father perceived that a murky story was hidden behind it.

On November 21, Puntervold put an end to the weak hope of the Trotskys: U.S. president Roosevelt had once again rejected the asylum petition submitted by Lev Davidovich. Their last alternatives were now the improbable request by Andreu Nin as a member of the Catalan government that he be received in Spain and the one Liova had initiated through Ana Brenner, a close friend of Diego Rivera’s, for the painter to intervene before Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas so that he would grant Trotsky asylum. For Lev Davidovich, the possibility of going to Mexico — perhaps the most realistic one at that moment — was disquieting: he knew that in that country his life would be in as much danger as if he lay down to sleep naked on the coast of the frozen fjord of Hurum.

At the moment of his strictest confinement, Lev Davidovich received a visit from Trygve Lie, whom he had not seen since the beginning of the crisis. Lie brought some provisions sent by Knudsen, including a bag of coffee that Natalia opened and began to prepare right away. After drinking the beverage, the minister told the captive that he had come to tell him that the trial against Quisling’s men would take place on December 11. Lev Davidovich couldn’t suppress a smile. Would he be allowed to speak in public? Trygve Lie averted his gaze and told him that the trial would be held behind closed doors. Although Lev Davidovich felt himself bursting with anger, he managed to calm down and asked the minister if in the morning, as he looked into the mirror to shave, he wasn’t ashamed to look into his own face. Lie turned bright red, but he waited a few seconds before reproaching his guest’s ingratitude: being the politician he was, he should know the demands that politics often imposed. But the other man’s clarification was immediate: Lie was a politician; he was a revolutionary. . Or was Lie willing to endure for his political principles what he had for his? he asked, and Trygve Lie stood up, convinced that he should never allow Lev Davidovich the ability to speak in an open courtroom. Nonetheless, in an effort to revive some goodwill, the minister reached into the pile of books on the table and lifted a volume of one of Ibsen’s works: An Enemy of the People. Lev Davidovich saw the opportunity to comment on how appropriate that work was in his current situation: Stockmann the politician who betrays his brother was extraordinarily similar to Lie and his friends, and he recited a passage from memory: “It remains to be seen whether evil and cowardice are powerful enough to seal the lips of a free and honorable man.” He immediately bid good evening to the minister and held out his hand so he would return the book to him.

Without looking at the confined man, Trygve Lie replied that there were many ways of sealing lips and even sealing off the life of an “honorable” man: in a few days, they would transfer him to a smaller house, far from Oslo, since the ministry couldn’t continue to cover the cost of the rent and maintenance of Lev Davidovich and his guards in that place. Then he threw the book on the table and went out into the snow.

Lev Davidovich attended the trial against Quisling’s men, even when he knew that the proceeding was just a smokescreen behind which the Norwegian laborites and National Socialists were shaking hands, happy to have cooperated in Lev Davidovich’s marginalization. Nonetheless, in his statements, he took advantage of the occasion to denounce the fact that the trial was taking place behind closed doors at Stalin’s request to the fascistic minister Trygve Lie.

Because of that, a week later, when he was advised of a new visit from Lie, Lev Davidovich prepared himself for the worst. The minister remained standing, without removing his coat and without looking at Lev Davidovich, and told him that President Cárdenas had granted him asylum in Mexico and the Trotskys would leave immediately.

Although the prospect of moving to Mexico still seemed dangerous to him, the Exile tried to convince himself that it was preferable to die at the hands of a murderer than to continue living in that captivity that threatened to continue until it crushed him. The speed with which the Norwegians rushed to throw him out of the country — they didn’t even allow him a brief stay in France to see Liova — revealed the tensions that, because of him, Lie and the other ministers must have been living under for the previous four months. Nonetheless, Lev Davidovich thought that he could not miss his last opportunity and reminded Lie that everything he and his government had committed against him had been an act of capitulation and, like all capitulations, would have its price, since he knew that the day was quickly approaching when the fascists would arrive in Norway and turn them all into exiles. The only thing Lev Davidovich desired was that when that happened, the minister and his friends would find a government that would treat them like they had treated him. Trygve Lie, frozen in the center of the room, listened to that prophecy with a slight smile on his lips, incapable of imagining the overwhelming and dramatic way in which Lev Davidovich’s prediction would come true.

Natalia prepared the luggage while Lev Davidovich, still fearful that the hurried departure could be leading them into some kind of trap, devoted himself to setting off warning flares. He quickly drafted an article against the Royal Office’s English lawyer, and the French lawyer, a member of the Ligue des droits de l’Homme, who had certified the legality of the Moscow proceedings, and wrote Liova a letter, to which he gave the value of a will. He stated that Liova and Seriozha were his heirs should anything happen to him and their mother during their journey to Mexico or anywhere else. He also entrusted Liova never to forget his brother and asked him, should he meet him again, to tell him that his parents had never forgotten him, either.

On December 19, 1936, enveloped in the opaque light of winter, they got into the car that took them out of the fjord of Hurum. Lev Davidovich contemplated the Norwegian landscape and, as he would write shortly afterward, made a silent tally of his exile, to confirm that the losses and frustrations were many more than the doubtful gains. Nine years of marginalization and attacks had managed to turn him into a pariah, a new wandering Jew sentenced to ridicule and the anticipation of a terrible death that would arrive when the humiliation had exhausted its usefulness and quota for sadism. He was leaving Europe, perhaps forever — and in it the corpses of so many comrades and the tombs of his two daughters. With him, he took the faint hope that Liova and Sergei would be able to resist and, at least, escape that whirlwind with their lives intact; they were leaving the illusions, the past, the glory, and the ghosts, including those of the revolution for which he had fought for so many years. “But with me, I am also taking life,” he would write, “and as beaten down as they think I am, while I still breathe, I have not been defeated.”

14

Román Pavlovich smiled as if he were coming back to life when Grigoriev deciphered the Cyrillic characters for him and read the name stamped on the passport: R-O-M-A-N P-A-V–L-O-V–I-C-H L-O-P-O-V. The Soviet had moved his index finger over the letters and the recently baptized Román, son of Pablo, after smiling, kept staring at the rigid and unfamiliar symbols as he struggled to etch them in his mind. In the passport photo, taken in the basement of the building occupied by the Soviet Embassy in Valencia, he seemed older, as if he’d been transformed since the last time he’d seen himself in a mirror. But he liked the face of Román Pavlovich: it was more solid, as if molded by the rugged life in the Caucasus where, according to the document, he’d been born. Then Grigoriev held out his hand in a demanding manner, and he returned the passport feeling as if a piece of his soul were breaking away.

Ever since they landed at the military airport, Román Pavlovich had felt himself falling into an impenetrable world. The Russian language surrounded him with the same density as the sour and oily stench given off by the officers who took him to a sealed room where Grigoriev held a brief interview with two of them. Now, settled in the back car seat he was sharing with Grigoriev, he felt his nose clearing with the warm air coming in through the window and, with the caresses of his own language, felt himself recovering a certain equilibrium.

“Are we very far from Moscow?” he asked, looking at the dense pine forest the road crossed through.

“We’re closer than we were yesterday,” Grigoriev said.

“So when will you take me there?”

“You didn’t come to do sightseeing,” Grigoriev stated, and Ramón was certain that the man’s tone had become harsher for some reason.

Ramón decided to stay silent. He wasn’t going to allow anyone to ruin the happiness he’d felt ever since, upon returning to Barcelona, Kotov had told him he’d been selected to travel to socialism’s homeland with the mission of preparing himself to fight for the triumph of the world revolution. Without giving him any further details, the adviser warned him that the weeks would be very intense, during which the utmost would be demanded of his body and mind.

The pine forest had become more impenetrable when, at a curve of the road, the coniferous monotony was broken by a concrete wall they rode next to for hundreds of yards until they reached a huge metallic portal that opened with a screech like a prison door. Ramón Mercader’s senses were heightened, ready to notice the smallest detail. Behind the door, which closed again as soon as the car cleared the entrance, ran a narrow circular track that they began to follow counterclockwise. To the left, in what appeared to be the center of a gigantic rotunda, were more pines, separated every so often by tracks that, like spokes, were swallowed by the forest’s dense center. To the left, set apart by metallic fences flanked by pruned and compact bushes, were some brick cabins on whose doors were numbers that seemed to go in random order: 11, 3, 8, 2, 7. . as if the numbers had been dictated by some lottery announcer.

The car stopped in front of cabin 13, and when Grigoriev murmured “We’re here,” Ramón was convinced that those figures held their own significance: 1913 was the year of his birth. After they got out of the car, it disappeared around the curve of the rotunda and Grigoriev walked to the cabin and opened the door, drawing back the exterior lock. Ramón, who had only a cloth bag into which they had allowed him to throw some underwear, rushed to cross the threshold so that his material and spiritual guide could close the door after him.

The cabin’s living room was set up like a classroom for one student, with a desk, a table with a chair, a chalkboard, and a world map unfurled on the wall. To one side, there was a low table and, around it, four leather-covered armchairs. Two uniformed men stood in front of them; one was wearing a standard-issue uniform, with his rank displayed on his shoulders, and the other one had on a pair of black field overalls without any markings. The officer approached Grigoriev and, smiling, hugged him, then kissed him on the cheeks and lips, as they murmured words in Russian. The one in the field uniform gave Grigoriev a martial salute and he, instead of responding, held out his hand and said something to him in that gravelly language. Only then did the officer turn to Ramón and speak in French.

“Welcome to our base, Comrade Román Pavlovich. I’m Marshal Koniev, head of the facility, and this”—he pointed at the man dressed in black—“is Lieutenant Karmin, your official trainer. Please sit down. Some tea?”

Román Pavlovich smiled and took his seat as the other three settled into the remaining ones.

“Is coffee possible, Marshal?” he asked, also in French.

“Of course! Lieutenant, please. .” As Karmin withdrew to the kitchen, the marshal lit a cigarette and looked at Román Pavlovich. “Tonight, before they bring you dinner, Lieutenant Karmin will explain the internal rules, which must be strictly and absolutely followed. I want you to know beforehand that you will not be able to leave this cabin unless you’re accompanied by your training officer, by me, or by your operative officer, Comrade Grigoriev. And I’m also telling you straightaway that for any infraction, there’s only one result: expulsion.”

The marshal was silent, and as if it had been planned, Karmin returned with a wooden tray on which sat a steaming kettle releasing the aroma of coffee. As soon as he tasted it, Román Pavlovich regretted having asked for that too-sweet and weak concoction and wondered if the rules would allow him to prepare his own infusion.

Without asking permission, Grigoriev and the marshal began to speak in Russian and Román Pavlovich assumed they were going over the details of his stay. Lieutenant Karmin was drinking his tea with his eyes fixed on the mug, as if he expected to find a snake at the bottom. The dialogue went on for several minutes, with Koniev as the main speaker, and ended when Grigoriev gave Román Pavlovich’s passport to the marshal, who looked at his new pupil.

“Until we decide your new identity, you’ll be Soldier 13,” he informed him, and with an almost theatrical gesture, to Ramón’s surprise, he ripped up the passport. Ramón suddenly felt himself turning into a nameless ghost, without a compass or any way back, as the marshal’s last words confirmed. “Or you won’t be anyone.”

Grigoriev and Soldier 13 had breakfast in the cabin’s kitchen and the latter had the satisfaction of preparing his own coffee. It was a reddish powder without any smell from which it would be difficult to obtain a satisfactory infusion — although, prepared by him, it was at least drinkable. Grigoriev invited him to go for a walk and they left the cabin through the back door. Beyond a few feet of swept dirt, the overwhelming presence of the pine forest came back into view and, through it, about one hundred yards from the house, the metallic fences covered with galvanized planks that separated the terrains of each cabin. As they entered the forest, Soldier 13 noticed that his guide limped slightly.

The night before, Lieutenant Karmin had explained the rules of the base that would have to be followed with absolute obedience. Ramón was told that he wouldn’t have any contact with anyone who was not authorized by him and the marshal and it was explained why: in the future, his life could depend on none of the school’s students having ever seen his face and him never having seen theirs, either. All who entered that compound were men of exceptional intelligence, and demands would be made of them accordingly. The remaining conditions of his stay, since he was a soldier who was selected for special missions, would be explained to him by Comrade Grigoriev, he said, and he couldn’t help but feel a rush of pride that he was part of a select group.

But on that summer day of 1937, Soldier 13 would have a real notion of the point to which his life had changed when he found out what the important mission was that would open the gates of the proletarian heavens. Grigoriev began to sketch out the current situation in the USSR and how it involved them. As Ramón knew, the previous year the party and the government had initiated a battle to the death against the Trotskyists and oppositionists remaining in the country. It had been especially painful to discover, just a few months later, that a group of the Red Army’s most prestigious officers, among them Marshal Tukhachevsky, had allied themselves with German intelligence with the intention of carrying out a coup d’état, deposing Stalin, and making a pact with the fascists. The proof found was irrefutable and the soldiers themselves had been tried and shot a few weeks ago, while the removal of dangerous elements from the army continued and the purge of the party was being completed. That operation, he continued, had been led by Comrade Yezhov, the commissar of internal affairs, under Comrade Stalin’s direct supervision. So now, Grigoriev said, and despite the fact that they were surrounded only by conifers, he lowered his voice to a whisper: ever since the crisis involving Yagoda, the former commissar of the interior accused of treason and Trotskyism, Yezhov had started a witch hunt within the secret forces themselves, in the NKVD counterintelligence as well as in military intelligence, and out of an excess of zeal or because of his desire to erase former officers from the map in order to replace them with his most trusted men, he was putting at risk the very existence of those organizations.

“Comrade Stalin has let him act because he thinks it’s necessary to eliminate any of Yagoda’s men who could be linked to acts of treason.” Grigoriev stopped walking. “And there is no one better than Yezhov for that job. But at the same time he has moved a lot of responsibilities out of his hands, such as foreign intelligence, and has entrusted them to Comrade Lavrentiy Beria. This base and the plans being made within it, for example. Everything will go well for us as long as that division of labor is maintained, but if Yezhov’s purge causes a confrontation with Beria — who at the end of the day is a subordinate — and charges against us, we’re going to have a very, very rough time. Although that’s not the worst of it: the most serious thing is that the lines of work beginning here could be lost, including ours.”

“And why is Comrade Stalin risking something like that happening?”

“He has his reasons; he always has them,” Grigoriev said, and spit at a pine. He remained silent for a few seconds. “My situation is especially complicated for two reasons: first, because Yezhov considers me a man from Yagoda’s time, although I entered intelligence well before; second, because I’m Jewish and it’s obvious that he doesn’t like Jews, like many people. . That’s why it’s safer for me to go on in Spain and try to make myself indispensable there.”

Perhaps overwhelmed by the information he was receiving, because of the words being uttered in Spanish, or because of the uplifting effect of discovering again beneath the dry Grigoriev the Kotov he knew or thought he knew, Ramón felt that he was becoming himself again and that the vertigo of newness and incomprehensible sounds amid which he had lived for the last few days had begun to recede, despite having the impression that they were placing him at the edge of a precipice where they would abandon him without any kind of hold in sight or in reach.

“So what is the mission Comrade Stalin needs us for?”

“The most important one.” He paused for some time, as if he were thinking. “That is why I am obliged to tell you now, because whether we move forward or not depends on your willingness.”

“Which is?” Ramón didn’t want to play guessing games. The best thing, he thought, was to grab the bull by the horns.

“Comrade Stalin thinks the moment has arrived. . We’re going to prepare Trotsky’s exit from this world.”

Ramón couldn’t avoid the shock. He wanted to think he had misheard, but he knew that he had understood perfectly well and that at that same moment, due only to having heard those words of Kotov’s, his life had fallen into an extraordinary dimension.

“What do you mean by ‘prepare’?” he managed to ask.

“To start working toward it. Putting together the masterstroke. That’s why you and other Spanish Communists are here.”

“You’re going to prepare us to kill him?”

“We’re going to prepare you for lots of things.”

“So why in the hell do we have to be Spaniards?”

Kotov smiled and moved a giant pinecone with his foot. He said that, in his opinion, Spaniards would never be good secret agents. Although in their favor they had a mixture of recklessness and innate cruelty that made them capable of killing or dying (that is a great virtue) and they were also fanatical (you need a good dose of fanaticism for this job), they also carried the defect of being too spontaneous, at times even friendly and dramatic, and at heart they were all a little bit boastful, and their boastfulness made them talkers, and this was difficult to eradicate. .

“What you’re saying isn’t very encouraging. I don’t understand—”

“This mission is for men who speak Spanish as their first language. That’s the first reason. The second is that they’re capable of overcoming any scruples.”

Ramón thought to what point those defects and virtues were also his and concluded that Kotov was mostly right, except for the boastfulness.

“But the real reason for all of you being here is because I think you can do it,” Kotov concluded.

Ramón looked at the forest. A flame of pride had been lit in his mind, displacing any other fear. What would África have thought if she had overheard this conversation? Would she really have thought he was too weak? What had Kotov seen in him?

“Tell me, Ramón: if necessary, would you be able to kill an enemy of the revolution?”

The young man looked at Kotov and he held his gaze.

“If it were necessary, of course I would do it.”

The adviser smiled and his look recovered the twinkle he had lost in the last few days. He pointed at Ramón’s chest with one finger.

“Can you imagine the honor of being chosen to take that treacherous scum Trotsky out of this world? Do you know that for years and years that renegade has been working to destroy the revolution and that he is a filthy rat who has sold out to the Germans and the Japanese? That he has even planned massive poisonings of Soviet workers to sow terror within the country? That his adventurist philosophy can put the future of the proletariat in danger, here, over in Spain, in the entire world?”

Ramón looked at the forest again. His mind was blank, as if all the channels of his intelligence had been broken, but he said:

“What I don’t understand is why you’ve waited until now to do away with that traitor.”

“You don’t have to understand anything. I already told you: Stalin has his reasons and we the duty to obey. . By the way, how many times have you heard the word ‘obedience’ in the last two days?”

“I don’t know — several.”

“And you’ll hear it a thousand more times, because it’s the most important word. After it come ‘loyalty’ and ‘discretion.’ This is the holy trinity and you should tattoo it on your forehead, because after having heard what I’ve told you, you’ll have noticed that there are only two paths for you: one to glory and another to the work camps, where you don’t have the least idea of how little the life of a poor guy who doesn’t even have a name and is considered a traitor is worth. . Let’s go, they must be waiting for us.”

When they entered the cabin, Marshal Koniev and Karmin stood up and gave military salutes. While Soldier 13 settled into his desk, Grigoriev said something to the two soldiers. Then Grigoriev and the marshal sat down on the armchairs in the back. Karmin, with his black suit, went to the blackboard and seemed to melt into it. Ramón noticed that his hands were clammy and he heard Kotov’s last words echo in his brain.

“Soldier 13,” Karmin said in a clean and southern French that evoked his days in Dax and Toulouse, “your mentor has told us that you’re ready to begin training. But before beginning our work, you’ll be subjected to a variety of physical and psychological tests so we can get an exact evaluation of you. If the results are satisfactory, as we expect, you’ll begin to receive history lessons about the Bolshevik Party, international politics, Marxism-Leninism, and psychology. We’ll also teach you survival, interrogation, and hand-to-hand combat techniques and you’ll practice parachuting and using a variety of firearms. The most important part of your training, however, will be the work we do on your personality. You’ll learn, above all, that you will never again be the person you were before arriving at this base. We’re going to completely remake you from the inside out. It’s slow and difficult work, but if you’re able to overcome it, you’ll be ready to receive any of the identities we decide to choose for the mission. This identity still hasn’t been determined, but whatever it may be, you will never again be a Spaniard, nor should you speak in Spanish or, less still, in Catalan. For now, you will speak in French and think in French. We’ll even try to make you dream in French. Our specialists will help you in this task, but I repeat: your will is essential to obtaining success.”

Soldier 13 thought that the expectations were perhaps too high, but he nodded in silence, as he already sensed that all of that knowledge could be useful for the mission Kotov had spoken about to him.

“Good. To begin, we need you to pass a very simple but definitive test, since it will teach you many things. Come with me!”

Karmin walked to the back door and Soldier 13 followed him. Behind them went Grigoriev and Koniev. The morning was now warmer and from the pine forest came a perfumed scent. On a small wooden table, Soldier 13 saw three different kinds of knives and he thought he’d be taught how to use them. From amid the pines at that moment came a soldier, dressed like Karmin, who was dragging a dirty man with greasy hair, dressed in rags, whose stench was stronger than the forest’s aroma.

“Take a good look at this man,” Karmin said. “He’s scum, an enemy of the people.”

Soldier 13 barely looked at the destitute man when, without using any other words, Karmin yelled:

“Kill him!”

Soldier 13, surprised by the cry, felt doubly confused: Was the order real? And who was it being given to: Soldier 13, Ramón Mercader, or the ephemeral Román Pavlovich? But he didn’t have time to think any further, since Karmin took his standard-issue Nagant out of the case and cocked it.

“Yob tvoyu mat! Are you going to liquidate him or do I have to do it?” Soldier 13 looked at the daggers and took one with a short, wide blade that, without knowing why, seemed the most appropriate. Appropriate? To kill an enemy of the revolution? He felt his legs tremble when he took the first step. He tried to convince himself that this could only be a test: when the moment came, they would order him to stop and would take that beggar out of there. He walked to the stinking man, in whose eyes he noticed a growing fear. The man said something in Russian that he couldn’t understand, although he perceived it as a plea in which the word tovarich was repeated as he took one, two steps backward, his body trembling. Soldier 13 kept walking forward with the dagger at his hips, waiting to hear the order to stop, the command that wasn’t coming, while he got closer and closer to the foul-smelling beggar.

Soldier 13 saw the plea in the man’s eyes, just five feet from him, and he could hear the silence. Nothing else. In his mind, a word took shape: “obedience,” and a question: “weak?” África’s image passed like lightning through his brain. Then he took another step, moved the dagger back to give it momentum, and understood that the other man was incapable of fleeing or even of moving back. Terror had paralyzed him and made him start sweating. Should he kill a man like that, in cold blood, to prove his loyalty to a grandiose cause? Was this the ruthlessness with which you had to treat the enemies of the people in the land of justice? What did that have to do with Trotsky’s betrayals, with the excesses of the Spanish fascists? No, he told himself, the order would come, they would stop him, they would all laugh, and he moved the dagger a few more inches until it was in the position to attack. And then he didn’t think about it anymore: he launched his weapon hand in search of the beggar’s abdomen and found that, at that moment, he was Soldier 13, that Ramón Mercader had disappeared, that he was fulfilling the first sacred principle: obedience. The dagger continued its journey in pursuit of a defenseless man, paralyzed by fear, and when it was about to sink into his abdomen, over which the man’s hands were crossed in an attempt to protect himself, those same hands moved at an inconceivable speed, diverted the course of the piece of steel, and Soldier 13 received a very strong kick in the chin, which toppled him backward, unconscious.

In just a few weeks, Soldier 13 became aware of a mutation in the colors of his consciousness. As the theoretical classes were filling his brain with philosophical, historical, and political arguments to make his faith unbreakable, the sessions with the psychologists were draining his mind of the deadweight of experiences, memories, fears, and illusions forged over the course of a life and of a past that he detached himself from as if they were skinning him. He was overwhelmed to see how his personal history was becoming a foggy haze and how even recent events, like Kotov’s last recommendations before he returned to Spain, seemed so diffuse that he sometimes asked himself if he hadn’t lived them in another remote and murky existence.

During those months was when Ramón really began to stop being Ramón and only became him again when the man they were turning him into was suffocating and, to save him, the former Ramón Mercader had to come to the surface. Or whenever they ordered him to go out and get some sun. But he was never again the same Ramón Mercader del Río.

The man who in his nebulous past had adopted communist ideals through his juvenile romanticism and África’s harangues now began to assume a scientifically maintained faith, whose materialization was the new Soviet society where humanity had finally achieved the greatest height of dignity. The revolutionary struggle, intuitive and chaotic, that had been carried out against the oligarchy, the bourgeoisie, fascism, and traitors was made concrete with new coherence and foundations in the historic necessity of the struggle of the proletariat to materialize the utopia of equality and in the mission of the party to lead this great contest. He learned that if that struggle could appear ruthless at times, it was always just. At the root of each of these ideas were Stalinist theories and practices, the wisdom and the strategic vision of Comrade Stalin, the general secretary who stood above history, at the front of the world’s proletariat, as the brilliant heir of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The conviction that the future of humanity belonged to socialism turned into his creed, and he learned that, for the Soviet Union to reach that future, any sacrifice, any act, was historically justified and not even the most minimal dissidence was admissible. On this point they added to his studies lessons about class hatred and, visualizing his class enemies, his convictions became more solid.

October arrived and the temperatures started to drop. Karmin announced that, without stopping the theoretical sessions and the meetings with psychologists, they would begin the physical training. Soldier 13 had the hope that he would at last leave the base and would perhaps see with his own eyes part of the shining reality of the country of the Soviets. However, except for the two weeks during which they moved to the Ural Mountains to submit him to resistance tests in extreme conditions (from which he returned six kilos lighter, but proud of having been congratulated by Karmin), the rest of his education was carried out in the forests of Malakhovka. There he mastered shooting with a rifle, pistol, and machine gun; learned to fight with a knife, a sword, and an axe, acquired personal defense methods that used only his hands and feet, and was taught how to be precise in the lobbing of grenades as well as the art of scaling walls and the processes of demolition. With the first cycle complete, they insisted on his learning how to eliminate one or more enemies with the various weapons he was skilled in using, first identifying the weak points in his opponents’ defenses and then the corners of their anatomy where the desired effects might be achieved with the most efficiency. The enemies with whom he trained, specialists in various forms of aggression, were always labeled Trotskyist dogs, Trotskyist renegades, Trotskyist traitors, until the mere mention of that adjective caused a hormonal discharge.

Soldier 13 would recall that the most crucial moment of his conversion and training was when they taught him to resist the psychological methods of torture and interrogation, in which they included, in order to achieve the necessary realism, acts of physical aggression that demonstrated to him the incredible human faculty of invention in inflicting modes of suffering on fellow human beings. The goal of that lesson, nonetheless, was not just the acquisition of the ability to stay silent but rather, and above all, to not allow himself to be manipulated by the interrogators, to cut off any bridge of understanding that could open a channel to his weaknesses, and, further still, to get the interrogators to believe stories that would confuse them and distance them from the truth. They showed him that it was much harder to keep a secret than to get it out of someone, and they educated him in roundabout psychological games, like the evocation of dreams or the reflection of supposed sick obsessions.

When, at the end of November, Grigoriev reappeared on the base, Soldier 13 was already — even the trainers could guarantee it — a man of marble, convinced of the need to carry out whatever mission was asked of him, forged to resist a variety of attacks in silence, gifted with a visceral hatred against the Trotskyist enemies, and ready to be turned into the person they were to assign him. His instructors’ satisfaction was obvious, indeed the diamond in the rough found by Grigoriev seemed like a marvelous stone, brilliant in all its facets — political, philosophical, linguistic, physical, psychological — and he had been reinforced with the best armor, because he was a man who was capable of remaining silent, of exploiting his hatred, of not feeling any compassion, and of dying for the cause. He had become an obedient and ruthless machine.

That afternoon Soldier 13 was wearing a black uniform similar to that of his personal trainer, but designed for winter temperatures. Grigoriev, accompanied by Marshal Koniev, entered the cabin, greeted him with a martial salute, and, without removing any of the garments with which he protected himself from the cold, crossed the room in search of the back exit. With an order from Karmin, Soldier 13 followed him and, upon arriving in the snowy yard, was about to smile when he saw, laid out on a small table, three knives similar to the ones he had been offered on the first day of his initiation. Soldier 13 immediately understood what was expected of him, and when he saw the instructor pushing a man from within the forest, dressed in rags, shuddering with fear and cold, he was set to give him the lesson that now, he was sure, he was capable of giving.

“Soldier 13!” Karmin said. “You already know. . In front of you is a Trotskyist dog, enemy of the people. Kill him!”

Soldier 13 chose the English army field knife. He had barely grasped it when he felt his skin warming up to the point that he didn’t feel the cold as his muscles turned into an extension of the steel blade and his feet into snakes slithering toward the victim. The man was begging and Karmin, ten or so feet behind him, was kind enough to translate: “He swears he is innocent, that he hasn’t conspired, he says he hates Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and all of the traitors of the working class; he insists that Comrade Stalin is his father and asks that proletarian justice be carried out with him, please. Do you believe any of this?” Soldier 13 shook his head and kept walking toward the man, whose tremors seemed as authentic as the plea for mercy in his eyes. At that moment he thought he discovered a different strategy in the begging dog who was protesting with open arms, without retreating, as if he were melted into the snow. When he moved the knife to get momentum, he carried out a quick play of hands and changed his grip. He wouldn’t direct his attack at the abdomen but rather the neck, so that the supposed beggar could divert the steel blade’s movement but not prevent him from kicking him then with all of his might in his crotch, first, and then, once he was on his knees, digging his heel into his chin, with a half turn of his legs.

Soldier 13 held his breath, ready for attack. He kept his eyes on those of his alleged victim and, with a closed arc, threw his arm from his right side in search of the jugular of the man, whose eyes did not lose their terrorized expression until the knife dug into his neck and, a second later, spurted a stream of blood that came out of his mouth and ended up on the chest of the black, quilted uniform of his executor. Soldier 13 felt the man’s deadweight on his shoulder, held up by the knife, until he saw how he crumpled and freed the dented steel, from which a few drops of blood fell onto the already reddened snow. Soldier 13 would never remember whether he felt cold at any point.

As the car moved forward and the forest thinned, Grigoriev recalled his arrival in Moscow, in the chaotic and violent days leading up to the October triumph. Without ceasing to listen, Soldier 13 thought that, just four months before, the young Ramón who had inhabited him would have loved to visit red revolutionary Moscow, the pilgrimage site of all the world’s Communists. But he had lost all curiosity and was now making the visit with the same discipline and lack of passion with which he would have followed an order. While he listened to his mentor’s words, he impressed on his mind the details of the trip with the meticulousness of a professional.

Grigoriev and Marshal Koniev had commented that they would take a break between his training sessions. Due to his excellent results, he had been given permission so he could enjoy a weekend in the capital. Soon, Soldier 13 would learn that he would be allowed to leave the base with other intentions.

The persistent snow of recent days covered plazas and buildings, cupolas and parks, and the Moscow River was a sinuous mirror. As soon as they began the tour, Ramón felt as if he were entering a city with the air of a feudal town with vast spaces, which caused a feeling of inconsistency between his reality and his ambitions, an impossibility of definition that would only reveal its origins to him years later when he understood that, despite its grandeur and arrogance, the Soviet capital was still a territory in conflict, the meeting point of two worlds with fluid borders there — East and West, Christianity and Orthodoxy, the European and the Byzantine — that lost their original nature and gave way to something different, definitive and essentially Muscovite. Red Square was, as he expected, the first stop, and, as they crossed it, its dimensions gave the impression of being vaster than the photographs of the parades had forged in his imagination. Although Saint Basil’s colorful onion-shaped cupolas surprised him with their colors and shapes, in reality they seemed exotic and indecipherable, as if they were speaking Russian or some other Eastern language; the red walls and towers of the Kremlin, by contrast, seemed closer, more representative of the country’s ancestral grandeur. With a special pass, they were able to avoid the line that, in those temperatures of twelve degrees below zero and between the floral offerings petrified by the cold, men, women, and children, from all parts of the USSR and the world, was made in respectful silence to spend a scarce few minutes before the mummified corpse of the founder of the Soviet state. The excitement he expected to feel upon entering that mausoleum, half Pharaonic and half Greek, escaped him, for it took him some effort to absorb, through a glass whose reflections broke the mummy’s face into poorly fitted panes, the emanations of grandeur of the man who had achieved the materialization of humanity’s most prized and elusive dream: a society of equals.

With another authorization permit, meticulously reviewed by the guards, they walked to the Trinity Tower, through which they entered the Kremlin’s walls, against which the snow had been shoveled. While Grigoriev led Soldier 13 through the interior streets that led to the plaza in front of the cathedral, he showed him the places where alterations had been made after demolishing some old chapels from the time of the first czars and nearly stopped the tour to signal, at the closest possible range, the windows of the administrative offices from where the greatest country on earth was led.

“Comrade Stalin works there?”

“Part of the day,” Grigoriev responded. “And up until a few years ago, he had his apartment there.” He pointed at the old senate building, built under Catherine the Great. “Ever since his wife committed suicide, he left those rooms and always sleeps at his dacha in Kuntsevo. He likes to settle the most important matters there, since he almost always works all night. He sleeps very little and works a lot, but he’s strong as an ox.”

When they left the walled compound, they went by the huge GUM department store, where people from all over the city came with the hope, often disappointed, of treating their stomachs to a surprise. In front of the Museum of History, they took former Nikolskaya Street, renamed October Twenty-Fifth, to go up the hill leading to the small plaza reigned over by a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, behind which rose the nation’s most feared building.

Grigoriev pointed. “Voilà, the Lubyanka.”

Soldier 13 knew the history of that edifice and devoted himself to contemplating it in silence. The former insurance house, ocher-colored and bleak, had twenty years before received the men — converted into apocalyptic proletarian scourges of the Earth — who had assumed the responsibility of defending the revolution, by any means necessary, when besieged by its internal and external enemies. Just by looking at the building, so dense that it appeared to be set in the ground, and flanked by a sidewalk completely devoid of people, one could feel the force of the most real ruthlessness emanating from it — a ruthlessness that, like the will of an unforgiving god, decides over life and death, without respect for procedure or indeed law. Soldier 13 knew that behind those walls his own fate was being handled, and that, in some way, he had turned into one more brick in that magnificent building that, in darkness, had done so much for the survival of the revolution. The enslaving power of the Lubyanka would soon be his power, he thought.

“As you can see, people avoid passing by here,” Grigoriev said, and paused. “This is the plaza of fear. It’s a fear that we have cultivated with great care, a necessary fear. A lot of stories about the Lubyanka are told, almost all of them terrible. And you know what? The majority of them are true. The bourgeoisie uses fear very well, and we had to learn it and practice it. Without fear, you can’t lead or push a country into the future.”

“The proletariat has the right to defend itself in any way,” Soldier 13 said, and Grigoriev smiled.

“I see that they’ve stuffed you full of slogans. You can save them when you’re with me.”

Limping slightly, Grigoriev led him to the boulevard of theaters and they entered Petrovka Street, where Soldier 13 found a pulsing life that contrasted sharply with the sidereal solitude of the Lubyanka. His mentor had told him they would look for an adequate place to eat and talk, safe from indiscretions. Before a building with a modernist air that reminded Soldier 13 of Barcelona, a man at the top of a flight of stairs that went down to a basement from the sidewalk was marching on the spot to battle the cold. Soldier 13 was certain the man was waiting for them, since he observed them determinedly as he marched: one arm moved to the rhythm, and the hand of his other arm, crossed over his chest in a strange position, moved two restless fingers up by his lapel. As they passed him, Grigoriev mumbled a “Nyet,” and they went down to the semibasement, whose skylights were on street level, and went into what Soldier 13 would be hard-pressed to qualify as a beer hall. Elbow to elbow at high tables, without any chairs around, were several clusters of men and women shouting as they drank big sips of a hop-colored liquid to which they added generous streams from the small bottles of vodka they carried in whichever of the many pockets of their coats. Without ceasing to talk and drink, they all greedily ate small fillets of smoked herring on pieces of black bread and strips of dark meat from some kind of dried fish that they beat several times against the table in order to facilitate the extraction of the fillets, which they swallowed almost without chewing. The stench of the fish, the stinking draft beer, the smoke of that unbearable Russian tobacco called mahorka, and the smell of human sweat under coats that reeked of damp sheepskin resulted in an environment that was too disagreeable, and Soldier 13, prepared to resist a wide variety of discomforts, begged Grigoriev to find somewhere else. Grigoriev smiled understandingly.

“Yes, this requires special training. The truth is that the people chosen by the providence of history need more soap and water, right?”

When they left, the man with two fingers on his lapel was continuing his exercises, but this time he didn’t even look at them. As they went back to the boulevard, Grigoriev finally revealed the mystery of the solitary marcher: he was a drinker looking for two companions with whom to share some glasses of yorsh, the mixture of vodka and beer that everyone was drinking in the basement.

“Russians are great drinkers, but they’re competitive drinkers. There are two things they don’t like: beer that isn’t loaded with vodka, because it seems like a waste of time and money, and not having a point of reference regarding the quantity of drink they’re swallowing. That’s why they drink together or compete against each other. And that comrade, as you saw his two fingers, was looking for some partners for the job. .”

After walking for a few blocks back toward the Kremlin, they went into Manezh Plaza, and Grigoriev, holding on to his arm to stop him, asked him to look at the monumental building rising before them. On the main entrance, Soldier 13 saw a sign in Cyrillic that he was able to read: HOTEL MOSCOW. He contemplated that block of masonry, several stories high (ten, twelve — its structure made it difficult to know), with a colonnade supporting a terraced roof that projected out, and he immediately noticed a strange lack of balance.

“Do you see it?” Grigoriev said, and added, “It’s the first great hotel built by Soviet power. A triumph of socialist architecture.”

Soldier 13 nodded and remained silent, as he had been taught. The building seemed monstrous, something hideous fallen from the sky and embedded by force into a plaza with whose spirit it painfully contrasted. The most unusual thing was the asymmetry of the two halves of the structure, which opened out behind the façade. One had supporting columns and the other one didn’t; the floors above the left tower had arched windows, while the one on the right tower looked strict and square; the two cornices were of different heights — in an incompatible juxtaposition of proportions and styles that produced a disconcerting effect, capable of reaffirming the first sensation of aggressive ugliness.

“It’s horrible,” he whispered.

“Now I’ll explain to you what happened,” Soldier 13’s guide told him and they crossed over to the hotel’s large doors, where, thanks to an ID flashed before the doorman, they were able to enter. After a careful survey by Grigoriev, they settled in at a table in the deserted bar, which smelled like a bar and only vaguely like dried fish, and where Soldier 13 discovered that, after showing another credential (Grigoriev appeared to have all the ones requested in Moscow), it was possible to drink French wine and eat slices of Norwegian salmon and braised veal.

“Why did they make the building like that?” Soldier 13 wanted to know.

“Calm down, kid, I’ll tell you about that later,” Grigoriev said, and drank his vodka in one gulp and refilled his glass with the small, wide-mouthed bottle that the comrade waiter had left close at hand. “Three days ago I was at a very, very secret meeting at the Kuntsevo dacha. Since it directly affects you, I’m going to tell you part of what was discussed there. You know that if what I told you in Barcelona was worth your life, and the lives of África, Caridad, and your brothers are worth what you’ve seen and learned in Malakhovka, then what I’m going to tell you now is priceless. And I’ll remind you that if there was no way back before, now your only option is to move forward and keep your mouth shut, with everyone and forever.”

Soldier 13 listened to Grigoriev’s words and noticed a wave of satisfaction running through him. He wasn’t scared, nor did it matter to him that there was no escape except to move forward, since neither fear nor escape in any other way fitted in his mind anymore.

“You can speak,” he said, and moved his glass of wine aside after taking a sip.

Grigoriev preferred to take another drink of vodka before getting into things: Comrade Stalin in person had conferred on him the honor of being the one responsible for the operation against the renegade Trotsky, and had given him the order to set it in motion. At the Kuntsevo meeting, the only participants were Comrade Stalin, Vice Commissar Beria, and himself. They had begun by discussing the internal situation at the Commissariat of the Interior and Beria assured him that Yezhov would not intervene in this operation. Furthermore, he added, that that crazy midget’s days were numbered and now it was he, Beria, who was at the head of all the special operations that Yezhov, with his persecution mania, would have stopped or dismantled. But the Trotsky operation was born at that moment and Grigoriev, with the necessary discretion, would not only carry it out successfully but also do it with the propaganda effect they wanted.

Upon hearing Beria’s last words, Comrade Stalin seemed to wake up from his lethargy and lifted a hand to request silence, Grigoriev recounted. During the conversation, he had been trying some sips from his cup of Georgian wine mixed with Lagidze, a type of lemonade that also came from Georgia; according to what Grigoriev explained to him, he drank that compound under medical authorization, since it had been proven that the mixture of those two ancestral beverages stimulated circulation and relaxed the muscles. As Comrade Beria said so well, the Leader said, the hunt for the degenerate traitor and fascist had begun. He, personally, had decided that Grigoriev would be the director in situ of the operation, but Comrade Beria should receive weekly reports from Grigoriev and, if necessary, daily reports, about which the Leader would be updated when necessary and in any case at least once every fifteen days. Grigoriev, as the official operative in charge of the mission, would have a direct superior within the commissariat, an agent who would answer only to Beria and with whom Grigoriev should discuss all logistical questions, although he wanted him to know that he had all necessary human and economic resources at his disposal, since doing away with that traitor was considered a number one priority by the Soviet state as well as a necessity for the future of international communism. The plan, which should be prepared with the utmost care, would have to meet some important conditions: the first, that it would not be possible to find any trace that would link any Soviet body to the operation; second, that the final action only be carried out when he — Stalin personally, he reiterated — gave the order; and then came other conditions — for example, that the best place to carry out the plan was Mexico and that, if possible, the executioners be Mexicans and Spaniards or, as a last resort, men from the Comintern’s secret services, although Beria, Grigoriev, and the official operative (we still haven’t decided who, Beria had whispered) had to organize various alternatives that Stalin personally had also to approve. Grigoriev would work without worrying about collateral effects such as a possible crisis with that imbecile Cárdenas’s government, because, once the moment arrived, they would make the Mexican swallow his own arrogance in the way he had acted when he had protested over the asylum granted to the renegade. Stronger democracies, such as France, Norway, and Denmark, had been brought to their knees when they tried to challenge him and he had seen himself forced to turn a few screws.

“Then he explained to me why the moment had come for concocting a plan, but not for carrying it out. The essence of everything is the war, the start of the war and the paths it will follow,” Grigoriev said, and served himself vodka again, although he didn’t drink it. “The war is going to start at any moment.”

“And why should I know all of this?” Soldier 13 asked, stupefied by how everything he’d just heard weighed on his shoulders.

Grigoriev now seemed more relaxed and drank more vodka.

“In a week we have to decide who you will be. We have more than enough Mexicans and Spaniards and we need more Frenchmen, Americans. We’re going to create several independent operative groups, and you can be sure that only four people on earth will know of your existence: Stalin, Beria, the official operative, and me.”

“Are you thinking it will be me who carries out the mission?”

“You’re going to be on the front line, although I still don’t know where. . But since you’re going to work with me, I prefer that you know, starting now, what’s expected of you should that be the case. . Experience tells me that the person who knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it works better.”

Soldier 13 remained silent while Grigoriev tasted the salmon. Outside, the afternoon had given way to night and he could see a stretch of Okhotny Ryad Street, poorly lit and almost deserted.

“Stalin said something else to me. .” Grigoriev began, and lifted his hand to ask for another chekushka of vodka. When the waiter walked away, he looked at his student. “This mission doesn’t allow for failure. If I fail, I’ll pay for it with my balls.”

“He said it to you just like that?”

“Comrade Stalin tends to be a very direct man. And it can bother him very much if his orders aren’t followed well. . So you understand me: what you saw of this hotel is a monument to the obedience he demands and expects. . Listen closely, it can teach you a lot: when he decided that Moscow needed a new image, he picked this site to have a hotel built to host its most distinguished visitors. Based on his suggestions, he asked that two different projects be presented to him. Since he thinks that Moscow should begin to turn into the capital of proletarian architecture, he has his own ideas about it. He made them known to Shchusev the designer and to the architects Saveliev and Stapran and tasked them with the plans, sure that they would know how to interpret what he had in mind. The architects trembled upon hearing what Stalin was asking of them, and each one, of his own accord, designed what he thought the Leader’s ideas could be. But when Shchusev presented the two projects, he couldn’t see them right away — he had other problems — and no one knows why, but the following week the plans were given back to Shchusev the designer. . both of them authorized by Comrade Stalin. How was it possible? they asked themselves. Did he want two hotels or did he want both projects, or had he signed off on both by mistake? The only solution was to ask Comrade Stalin if he had made a mistake, but who dared to bother him during his vacation to Sochi? Besides, the general secretary was never wrong. Then Shchusev was inspired, like the genius he is: they would carry out both projects in a single building, half according to Saveliev and the other half according to Stapran. . Thus was this freakish building born, and Shchusev, Saveliev, and Stapran managed to come out gracefully. The building is absurd, an aesthetic horror, but it exists and it conforms to Comrade Stalin’s ideas and decisions. I learned the lesson, and I hope that you are also capable of understanding it. Cheers, Soldier 13!” he said, and drank to the bottom of his glass of vodka.

Kotov should die, Grigoriev announced. He regretted leaving Soldier 13 at that exact moment, perhaps the most beautiful one of the process of his rebirth, but he had to return to Spain to begin preparing the funeral for his other self. One is born, another dies, that’s the dialectic of life, and he explained to Soldier 13 that, before devoting himself body and soul to the new mission, he should transfer his responsibilities in Spain to other comrades. The handoff could only be done on the ground and in a time frame that was perhaps prolonged because of the state of the war: although the nationalists had gained ground, the industrial and most populous part of the country was still in Republican hands, and while they hung on to it, they could hope for victory. Upon hearing this comment, Soldier 13 felt the cunning pull of nostalgia, but he managed to contain Ramón’s desires and abstained from asking a single question. But he couldn’t deny that the mention of the war and Kotov’s imminent departure stirred his still-painful attachment to what had been until very recently his war, his homeland, and his passions. Only the consciousness that none of that belonged to him anymore or would again belong to him, at least in the same way, and the pride of knowing that he was now part of a select group, located at the heart of the struggle for socialism’s future, saved him from wavering. He lived for faith, obedience and hate: if it wasn’t an order, it didn’t exist for him. África included. África most of all.

Karmin and the group of psychologists continued to work with him and Soldier 13 learned to control his anxiety over the delay in announcing his new identity. He knew that he was in the hands of the most capable specialists and, confident in the experience of those masters of survival and transformation, he focused on his training with more determination.

It was already the second week of December when, after a monotonous day in which his only visitor to the cabin was an inexpressive woman tasked with cleaning and bringing him food, there appeared before him two men with appearances and manners very different from those of the ones he had dealt with since his arrival at the base. One said he was called Cicero and the other Josefino. The first impression they gave was of being a comic vaudeville duo: both were dressed in the same awkward way, they had a deep and practiced hardness in their eyes, and they spoke perfect French with a slight accent that Soldier 13 wasn’t able to place. Almost in unison, they told him that their mission was to turn him into a Belgian named Jacques Mornard. What did he think of the name? Soldier 13 felt himself swell with pride and satisfaction. Finally, he stopped being a student in order to become an agent. Jacques Mornard, he repeated in his mind, while Cicero removed a folder and several books from the briefcase he had with him, placing them on the table surrounded by armchairs.

“You’re going to learn Jacques Mornard’s life by heart,” he said, and slid the folder toward Soldier 13. “Later, read the books: they have information about Belgium that you also have to include.”

The so-called Josefino, who had remained standing, started speaking.

“Write the details you want to include for Mornard, the ones you think should make up part of his personality or his history. What we’re giving you is like the skeleton you’ll use starting now. We’ll add the muscles and blood later.”

“Why Belgian and not French?” the man who was still Soldier 13 dared to ask. “I lived in France for several years. .”

“We know,” Josefino said. “But your past doesn’t exist anymore and will never exist again. You need to be a totally new man.”

“The New Man,” Cicero said, and Soldier 13 thought he noticed a touch of sarcasm. “From now on, you need to think of yourself as Jacques Mornard. The success of your conversion and, further still, your life will depend on the solidity of your belief in being Jacques Mornard. But take it easy. .,” he said, as he stood. The two men left with a smile, without saying any kind of farewell.

Throughout that week of reading and reflection, Jacques Mornard enjoyed the feeling described by Josefino: it was as if his body, empty until now, were taking form and completing its own structure. Once again having parents, a brother, a birthplace, a school where he had studied and played sports, provided the framework over which he inserted his basic interests, his former preferences as a young bourgeois, and even his most remote memories. Like any person, he had attended many soccer games with his father and his brother and had become the fan of one of the clubs, had his favorite café in Brussels, his own ideas about the Walloons and the Flemings, had had girlfriends and a hobby that turned into a profession: photography. He wasn’t a member of any party, nor did he have any definitive political opinions, but he rejected fascism because it seemed, at the very least, antiaesthetic. About Lev Trotsky’s actions and historic fate, he knew what any educated person did, but all of that debate had to do with communist matters and didn’t concern him. He spoke French and English but wasn’t fluent in Flemish or Walloon, since he had grown up outside of Belgium, and he didn’t speak Russian, either, although he understood Spanish because of all the trips he’d made to Spain before the war. From his family of diplomats, possessors of a certain fortune, he received regular sums that allowed him to live a carefree life with, if anything, a tendency toward waste. He would be a regular old bourgeois guy, a bit boastful, always looking for a good time, with no real worries in life.

Jacques Mornard understood the importance of the work the psychologists had done with him. The old Ramón he knew would not have liked to be like Jacques; he wouldn’t have even been interested in being friends with him. Between the intellectual levity he now assumed and the Catalan’s political passions and his militant rejection of all ways of bourgeois life, there was an abyss that would have been impossible to bridge without the radical cleaning of his consciousness or the difficult training to which he had been subjected.

When Josefino and Cicero returned, Jacques Mornard felt like he was about half filled to his capacity. The work that those instructors took up from that moment was that of Platonic demiurges: true creators. They spoke about Jacques as if they had known him their entire lives and they implanted memories, ideas, ways of reacting before certain situations, responses to the simplest and the most complex questions. It ended up being a slow process of continual repetitions, interrupted at times to allow the information to take root in Jacques’s subconscious; who then welcomed the photography professor brought in to initiate him in the mystery of cameras (Jacques fell in love with the Leica, but in addition, he learned how to use the heavy Speed Graphic, the one preferred by press photographers), of lenses, how to judge the light, and the secrets of laboratory work with the chemicals and printing equipment; and then on to the speech therapist who endowed him with Belgian slang expressions, intonations, and soft r’s; to the optometrist who gave him the glasses he would use from then on; to Karmin, who, when Jacques was at the edge of intellectual fatigue, took him out in the snow and, in twelve or fifteen degrees below zero, worked every muscle of his body with an intensity capable of returning him to the cabin physically exhausted but with his mind clear, ready for the next day’s session.

When Grigoriev returned to Malakhovka toward the end of January, Jacques Mornard was almost a complete man. The adviser told him that he hadn’t managed to conclude his work in Spain and, without Jacques asking him, explained that the state of the war was complicated and desperate, as could be expected, although nothing seemed to indicate that the end was near. The Republican government was confident it could resist until the conflict was swallowed up by the imminent European war and turned into an active part of the antifascist bloc; thus, its situation would be similar to that of the proud democracies who had turned their backs on it under the pretext of nonintervention. But the most important thing, Grigoriev told him, was that he had also had time to take the first steps in the new operation. That is why he would soon leave for New York and Mexico, where he had to hold some important meetings. Before that, however, he wanted to personally work with his new creation.

His mentor’s presence encouraged Jacques Mornard. The time for leaving the uterus of the training base was close, and with the adviser’s guidance they added the final touches to the Belgian. A hairstylist gave him a new haircut; a tailor prepared a wardrobe of the bare essentials, which would be completed when he traveled to the West; and they added to his profile an enthusiasm for sports cars, whose brands and characteristics, along with the history of European motor racing, he had to study. His prior knowledge of French cuisine and of table manners acquired at the École Hôtelière de Toulouse saved him those lessons, although they instilled a taste for certain Belgian dishes. In response to Jacques’s own proposal, they added a weakness for dogs to his nature. That remote passion of Ramón Mercader’s, located in a deep recess of his consciousness, was compatible with Jacques’s nature and upbringing, and his teachers allowed it. The Labradors of his childhood changed their names of Santiago and Cuba to Adam and Eve, and being able to feel love for dogs made Mornard feel happier with himself.

Before leaving for America, Grigoriev decided to take him to Moscow again, where he publicly acted like a curious Belgian journalist visiting the mecca of communism. The adviser charged himself with testing for his own satisfaction the solidity of the new personality, and throughout the days on which they shared Grigoriev’s free time, Jacques was on trial the whole time, responding to a variety of questions, and displaying the reactions most suitable to his new personality.

Enjoying his freedom (he knew he was being watched at a distance), Jacques went beyond the Boulevard Ring that enclosed the prerevolutionary city and went into the proletarian neighborhoods, where his presence nearly caused stampedes by alarmed neighbors and where he found a steely, homogenous grayness capable of stirring his insides. He knew that those men, almost all of them émigrés from the countryside during the difficult times of land collectivization, lived in minimal, poorly heated spaces (the so-called kommunalkas), sometimes without running water. Wrapped in coats of the same cut and color, worn out already by the winters, they barely ate from the monotonous and scarce offerings at the empty markets and combated boredom and exhaustion with devastating doses of vodka. But those men were also, like him, soldiers in the battle for the future, whose constant sacrifice constituted the only guarantee that the humanity of the future would enjoy true freedom. The lives of those Moscow inhabitants (looked down upon by true Muscovites) and his (yes, he who was wearing warmly threaded clothing from the West and eating delicacies that had disappeared even from the dreams of those proletarians) were on the same path, on the same battlefront. Only, while their responsibility was daily and modest, his had to be dark and, when the moment came, cruel, but was equally necessary. That was the price that the present charged the men of today for the light of tomorrow.

On one of those afternoons, seated on a bench in the recently inaugurated Gorky Park, in front of the frozen Moscow River, Grigoriev and Mornard were watching the kids who, with improvised sleighs, were gliding over the layer of ice, happy and oblivious to life’s great sorrows.

“We’re fighting for them, Jacques,” Grigoriev said, and the Belgian sensed deep sincerity in his mentor’s voice. “And it’s a hard fight.”

“I know, that’s why I’m here. But I’d like it if they knew that I’m like them, and not some shitty capitalist.”

Grigoriev nodded and, after a period of silence, spoke with his eyes fixed on the river.

“Imagine a horse race,” he said, scratching his chin. “That’s how we’re going to work. . Everyone leaves the gate at once, but some will get closer to the finish line before the others. The conditions on the ground, the opportunities, and each one’s capacities are going to have an influence, but the orders the jockey receives will decide who goes toward the goal first. If he reaches it, the work is over. If he fails, the next one in line has to go.”

“What number am I?”

“You’ll be the ace up my sleeve, kid. You’ll always work with me, directly with me. For now, you’re at the end of the line, but that doesn’t mean you’re the last one. It means that you’ll be the surest card, and that I won’t risk you until I have no choice.”

“And why don’t I go out first and that’s that?”

“For a lot of reasons that I can’t explain to you now, or perhaps ever. Just understand that’s how it is.”

Jacques Mornard nodded and lit another one of the French cigarettes he now smoked and that a few days earlier had prompted him to cough and choke.

“You will be my masterpiece,” Grigoriev continued. “I’m going to put together a real chess game for you. We’re going to start to play thinking about move twenty, thirty, checkmate, from the beginning. It’s going to be an intellectual challenge, something truly beautiful.” The man appeared to be dreaming when he moved and placed himself in front of Jacques. “There’s only one thing that worries me. .”

“My obedience? My silence?”

Grigoriev smiled, shaking his head.

“I’m worried about whether, when the moment for checkmate arrives, Jacques Mornard isn’t going to lose heart. I know that Ramón and Soldier 13 wouldn’t lose heart. But Jacques. . It’s a mission that could end up being very difficult: perhaps you have to think not only about killing but about dying as well. .”

Jacques threw his cigarette to the side and thought for a few moments.

“It’s strange,” he began. “Jacques Mornard fills me almost entirely, but there are spaces he can’t reach. My hate and my fury are intact; my faith is the same. And those things aren’t going to melt away. I know what I am doing and I feel proud. I also know that I will never be able to express that pride, but that, in and of itself, makes me stronger. If the moment comes, I’ll be the truth of the proletariat, the hate of the oppressed. And I’ll do it for them. .” He pointed at the children playing. “You can rest assured. Jacques is a wretch. But Ramón will always be ready for anything. Dying included. .”

Jacques Mornard possessed a peculiar ability to face time. He had internalized that each action should be carried out at a precise moment and that the anxiety to rush events was something foreign to his nature and his mission: his time had historic dimensions, it ran over human timescales, and its proportions sprouted from philosophical necessity. Several years later he would ask himself whether that ability that had spared him from the daily ruts, hardships, and tedium hadn’t been instilled in him intentionally, in anticipation of just how necessary it would be for him to resist sanely and in silence the long years of his imprisonment.

Ever since Grigoriev left and he returned to the Malakhovka base without an exact idea of the weeks and months he’d have to wait to go into action, he dove into the task of polishing the visible and even invisible edges of his new identity. In the company of Josefino and Cicero, he took long walks through the forest, repeating his family and his own life’s history while he used his Leica to find suggestive compositions, expressive light, daring approaches. He devoted many hours to reading newspapers and studying Belgian city maps and tourist guides until he felt like he was capable of walking through Brussels or Liège without getting lost. He brought himself up-to-date on the tumultuous political situation in France and studied Mexico’s recent history. That time, which he would have found exasperating at another point, now seemed pleasant, free of any trauma.

In the French newspapers they had started to give him, he read about how the Soviet prosecutor was preparing a case against twelve former party members and former state civil servants accused of serious crimes that went from treason against the homeland to anti-Bolshevik behavior and murder. The most mentioned names were those of Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, former leaders of the so-called rightist opposition within the party; that of Genrikh Yagoda, the dismissed commissar of the interior who was responsible for the investigation of the trials in 1936 and 1937; and that of the Christian Rakovsky, the most stubborn of the Trotskyist oppositionists. On the bench would also be ambassadors and even doctors, such as Dr. Levin, Lenin and Stalin’s personal doctor since the revolution, accused of having poisoned, among others, Gorky and his son Max under Yagoda’s orders. The entire country knew that the accused had been detained for several long months and that their trial was imminent. Nonetheless, Jacques Mornard could not cease to be alarmed by the extent to which the crimes of those men, like those of the traitors judged in 1936 and 1937, had placed the very existence of the country, in which they held the highest positions and against which they had worked, in danger, according to what he read, from the very start of the revolutionary process. All of them, allied with the Trotskyist opportunists, were the very essence of the most concealed betrayal, of the worst felony.

One article he read in those papers surprised him even more than the news of the trial. It spoke of the death in Paris of Lev Sedov, Trotsky’s son and closest collaborator, and it discussed the strange circumstances of that event, which was being investigated by local police. Jacques Mornard was convinced that his death, just when they were setting into motion the machinery to do away with the old traitor, couldn’t be an act of coincidence or nature, and when Grigoriev finally returned to Malakhovka, he dared to confirm his suspicions.

“Do you think it could have been us?” Grigoriev sighed in exhaustion as he settled into one of the cabin’s armchairs.

“I would think it very strange if it weren’t.”

“Yes, it would be strange. But coincidences exist, my dear Jacques; postoperative complications are frequent. . Why would we risk killing that wretch who was already half-dead and living like a pauper in Paris, trying to find followers that don’t exist? To alarm the old man and make things more difficult for ourselves?”

Jacques thought for a few moments and dared to ask something that the demiurges didn’t manage to erase from his mind.

“So why did you kill Andreu Nin?”

“Because he was a traitor, and you know that,” Grigoriev said in a rush.

“You didn’t kill him because he wouldn’t talk?”

The other man smiled weakly. He looked exhausted.

“Forget about that. Come on, grab your things. We’re moving to Moscow.”

The apartment where they stayed was close to the Three Stations Square, on Groholsky Lane, close to the Botanical Gardens. It was an old house with three floors that had belonged to a tea exporter whose family, decimated by exile and the rigors of the new reality, had been crowded onto the ground floor. Grigoriev and Jacques installed themselves in an apartment with its own bathroom on the second floor, and only then did the mentor tell him that they would leave for Paris in two days.

On March 2, Jacques followed the information on the radio about the opening of the first session of the Military Council of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union. According to reports, there were about five hundred people in the room, and their focal point was the aged and stammering Bukharin. Prosecutor Vyshinsky presented the charges, already known by all: The accused, in alliance with the absent Lev Davidovich Trotsky and his deceased son and deputy, Lev Sedov, were not only murderers, terrorists, and spies, but they had also been counterrevolutionary agents since the start of the revolution and even before. In 1918, Trotsky and his accomplices had already conspired to assassinate Lenin as well as Stalin and the first Soviet president, Sverdlov. In the prosecutor’s possession were legal statements declaring how Trotsky had become a German agent in 1921 and a British intelligence operative in 1926, along with some of his comrades in conspiracy there present. In his treacherous degradation, his last criminal efforts had been selling information to the Polish secret services and conspiring, with some of the accused, to cause mass poisonings of Soviet citizens, fortunately impeded by the tireless actions of the NKVD.

Since Grigoriev came and went from the apartment without offering Jacques any explanations, the latter decided to take advantage of his time by taking long walks around Moscow, and wherever he went, the Belgian found a city that was shocked and outraged. Throughout those days of terrible revelations, the people even seemed less concerned by the awful quality of the bread or the lack of shoes and happy to know that their leaders had managed to dismantle another conspiracy. The people’s indignation grew as the accused admitted to ever more shocking crimes. But the surprise reached its climax when Bukharin admitted the monstrosity of his crimes and recognized that he was responsible, politically and legally, for promoting defeatism and planning acts of sabotage (even when he personally, he clarified, did not take part in the preparation of any concrete act and denied his participation in the most sinister acts of terrorism and sabotage). What was clear was that Bukharin had finalized his declaration in such a way that only made him a traitor. “Kneeling before the party and the country,” he said, “I await your verdict.” Jacques noticed that Bukharin’s declaration included a great number of present and past evils, almost inconceivable in a man who, until two years earlier, was moving at the highest levels of the party. But that night in the beer halls, streets, metro cars, in the lines and amid the drunks who milled around the sordid triangle of the three stations (Leningradsky, Kazansky, and Yaroslavl), Jacques heard the same words again and again: “Bukharin has confessed,” and the same conclusion: “Now they’re really going to shoot him.”

When Grigoriev announced the following morning that he had a gift for him, Jacques thought that the time of their departure had come.

“Today we’re going to the trial,” Grigoriev said, to Jacques’s great surprise, and added, “Yagoda is taking the stand.”

It was just a little after eight when they exited Okhotny Ryad Station and walked toward the House of the Trade Unions. On the boulevard of theaters, at the plaza where the Bolshoi Theater rose up in front of the Hotel Metropol, a protest was taking place and people were shouting and waving signs demanding the death of the Trotskyist, anti-Bolshevik traitors. Their indignation was vehement but not chaotic, and Jacques confirmed that the groups were organized by unions, factories, and schools, and that their slogans came directly from Pravda editorials.

Through the line of soldiers stationed at the top of Pushkinskaya Street, they managed to make their way toward the building where, prior to the October victory, the indolent Russian aristocracy had taken its pleasures. They went up the staircase, a tremendous display of marble, bronze, and glass, in search of the historic Hall of the Columns, where the geniuses of Russian music had played their scores and the great figures of the previous century had danced. Thanks to the revolution, the compound’s fate had changed, like that of the entire country: in it, the Bolsheviks had made many of their revolutionary speeches, and even between the twenty-eight magnificent marble-covered wooden columns to which the hall owed its name, Lenin’s corpse had had its wake before being moved to the mausoleum where he now rested; the trials of August 1936 and February 1937 had also been carried out there, marking the beginning and continuing the painful but necessary purge of a party, a state, and a government resolved not to stop even before history in order to give birth to a new History.

Moved to silence, Jacques took the seat Grigoriev pointed out to him. Party civil servants, leaders of the Komsomol, directors of the Comintern, foreign diplomats, and accredited journalists were filling the hall when, at nine on the dot, the judges, the prosecutors, and finally the accused and their lawyers made their entrance. The tension in the air was dark and unhealthy, when Jacques Mornard leaned toward his mentor to whisper in his ear:

“Is Comrade Stalin coming today?”

“He has too many important things to do to waste his time listening to these treacherous dogs confess.”

When Vyshinsky called Genrikh Yagoda to make his statement, a murmur went through the hall. Jacques Mornard saw a man stand who was rather small, nearly bald, with a Hitleresque mustache that made him look like a ferret. It was difficult to recognize in that individual, incapable of keeping control over his hands, the man who for many years possessed the power to decide the life and death of so many citizens and who, for many years, had hidden a traitor.

“Are you willing to confess the crimes of which you are accused, Genrikh Yagoda?” Vyshinsky inquired.

“Yes,” the prisoner said immediately, and paused before continuing. “I confess because I have understood the perversity of what I and the rest of the accused have done and because I believe that we shouldn’t leave this world with such terrible crimes on our conscience. With my confession, I hope to serve the Soviet brotherhood and inform the world that the party has always been right and that we, criminals outside the law, have been wrong.”

Vyshinsky, satisfied, began the interrogation with questions laced with sarcasm, and each one of Yagoda’s responses caused a stir or a cry of indignation in the room. Jacques Mornard, still capable of being surprised before certain Russian attitudes, noticed the theatricality emanating from those figures, from their words, their outfits, their gestures, and even from the scenery: their actions reminded him of certain puppet and marionette tableaus that he had enjoyed in the South of France, those mise-en-scènes in which, with necessary haughtiness, the inexhaustible tales of Robert the Devil, Roland, and the Knights of the Round Table were told.

Yagoda admitted to having conspired to carry out a coup d’état, in collusion with the German, English, and Japanese secret services; he admitted his participation in the Trotskyist plot to make an attempt on Stalin’s life, in some poisonings, and in the murder of Maxim Gorky; he accepted having planned a restoration of the bourgeoisie in Russia and, carrying out one of Trotsky’s plans, of having committed an excess of repressive operations aimed at destabilizing the country. But when Vyshinsky, more than happy over what he had reaped, asked him about his role in the murder of Max, son of Gorky, Yagoda didn’t answer. Vyshinsky demanded a response, but the prisoner maintained his silence. The tension became thick and the prosecutor’s voice resonated between the columns when he yelled at the prisoner to confess his role in Max’s murder. From his chair, tensely, Jacques noticed that Yagoda’s hands were trembling in an uncontrollable way when, looking at the court, in a barely audible voice, he denied having participated in the murder of Gorky’s son and added, in a pleading tone:

“I want to confess that I lied during the proceedings. I haven’t committed any of the crimes I am accused of and that I admitted to. I ask you, Comrade Prosecutor, not to interrogate me about the motives for my lie. I was always loyal to the Soviet Union, to the party, and to Comrade Stalin, and as a Communist, I can’t incriminate myself in crimes I didn’t commit.”

Jacques Mornard understood that something strange was happening. Vyshinsky’s face, those of the judges, the expressions around the courtroom and even of the accused, revealed a bewilderment that, from the public area, had turned into a wasp’s nest of voices revealing disbelief, surprise, and indignation, when the principal judge’s voice rose above the cacophony and declared a recess until the afternoon.

“How interesting!” Grigoriev said to him, excited. “Let’s go and eat. I promise that this afternoon you’re going to see something you will never forget.”

When they returned, Jacques Mornard saw entering the Hall of Columns a Yagoda who appeared to have aged ten years in just five hours. When the judge demanded it of him, the accused rose with difficulty. He looked like a corpse.

“Does the accused maintain this morning’s declaration?” the judge wanted to know, and Yagoda shook his head in the negative.

“I recognize my guilt for everything of which I am accused,” he said, and made a long pause until the applause, whistles, and cries of “Death to the treacherous dog” from many of the spectators were silenced by the judge’s gavel. “I don’t think it’s necessary to repeat the list of my crimes and I don’t expect to tone down the seriousness of my crimes. But since I know that Soviet laws know no revenge, I ask for forgiveness. I address you, my judges; you, from the Cheka; you, Comrade Stalin, to say: Forgive me!”

“No, there will be no forgiveness for you!” Vyshinsky yelled at that moment, unable to hide his satisfaction and his hate. “You will die like a dog! You all deserve to die like dogs!”

Grigoriev nudged a pale-faced Jacques with his elbow and motioned with his head, standing up.

“There’s nothing else to see anymore,” he said to him, leaving the hall.

Jacques Mornard couldn’t help feeling confused. It took great effort to find any reasoning behind Yagoda’s disparate actions. Out on the street, Grigoriev asked the chauffeur driving them around the city to take them directly to the safe house. When they got out, he bid goodbye to the chauffeur with the order to come pick them up in a couple of hours. Instead of going up the stairs, Grigoriev motioned to Jacques and they went out to the building’s courtyard, through which they accessed a street by which, always in silence, they walked toward the crowded Three Stations Square. Without stopping, Grigoriev made his way to Leningradsky Station. Nearly elbowing their way through, they entered the only place serving alcoholic beverages and the adviser asked for two pints of beer.

“What did you make of what you saw?”

Jacques Mornard immediately knew that the question had too many layers and that his response could be of value to his future.

“Do you want the truth?”

“I expect the truth,” the other man said, and served himself a second glass, which he filled with a stream of the vodka he carried in his pocket.

“Yagoda didn’t confess of his own volition. Everything sounded like a play.”

Grigoriev looked at him, pensive, drank a big sip of the yorsh, and, his eyes fixed on Jacques Mornard’s, poured more than half of the chekushka of vodka into his pitcher and drank it.

“Yagoda knows all the methods in existence to make someone confess. He invented many of them and I can assure you that he was very creative. Of course, some were already applied to him before the trial. Didn’t you notice how his teeth moved? Who knows who that set of teeth belonged to. . But that wretch, in his delirium, believed he could resist. . Three days ago, Krestinsky thought the same thing and ended up confessing everything. . Yezhov didn’t even need three hours to convince Yagoda that it’s not possible to resist if one is guilty. Only absolute innocence can save you, and even then, many innocents are capable of confessing that they crucified Christ as long as you leave them alone and kill them as soon as possible.”

“Are you telling me that Yagoda is guilty of everything the prosecutor says?”

“I don’t know about everything, or almost everything, or just a part, but he’s guilty. And that made him weak. Despite that weakness, he fought; you can’t deny his determination. Today has been a good day for you, Jacques. I wanted to show you how a man grovels, but you’ve had the privilege of seeing how he collapses and sinks. I hope you’ve learned the lesson: no one resists. Not even Yagoda. Neither will Yezhov when his turn comes.”

Jacques Mornard drank almost his entire pint of beer in one gulp. He felt his lungs congest, threatening to suffocate him, until his nasal passages snorted like a locomotive starting up; he still had to wait a few seconds to recover his breath. That lesson might have been extremely arduous, but he at least learned that ethyl alcohol vapor had the advantage of removing the stench of the atmosphere from his nose.

“Are you going to tell me now what happened with Andreu Nin?” he asked when he was at last able to speak.

Grigoriev smiled while he shook his head.

“You’re so stubborn. . What do you want me to say? That Catalan was so crazy that he didn’t confess. He pissed off everyone and—”

“I knew all along he was not going to confess,” he said, and moved the pitcher of beer to Grigoriev. His mentor dropped a stream of vodka into it. “Not even if you’d drowned him in vodka. .”

15

Throughout the last week of November and the month of December 1977, I had six meetings, all arranged beforehand, with the man who loved dogs. The winter, an indecisive one, would dissolve toward the end of the year in two or three cold fronts that exhausted themselves in their transit through the Gulf of Mexico, bringing only a few drizzles to the island that were incapable of altering the thermometers and some murky waves that broke the peacefulness of the sea in front of which we held our conversations. Captivated by the man’s words, I would run from my job to the beach barely thinking about anything but our next agreed encounter. Listening to and trying to digest that story, in which nearly all the incidents constituted revelations of a buried reality, of a truth that wasn’t even imagined by me or by the people I knew, had turned into an obsession. What I was discovering as I listened, added to that which I had started to read, deeply disturbed me, while the flame of a visceral fear devoured me, without being able, despite everything, to burn away desire to know.

Ever since the man began to paint the journey of his friend Ramón Mercader, starting with his childhood and youth in Barcelona, the doors began to open for me to a universe of whose existence until then I’d had only vague and orthodox notions, with categorical distinctions between the good and the bad but whose inner workings I didn’t know: professions of a sincere and all-consuming faith mixed with intrigue, dirty games, lies always believed as truth, and never-suspected truths that highlighted my innocence and ignorance with dazzling flashes. As López moved through his story, on several occasions I was on the verge of refuting him, of yelling at him that that couldn’t be, but I always held back and limited myself to asking some question when I felt things went beyond my credulity or understanding, and I kept listening to an account that melted away many of my beliefs and reorganized some of the other notions that they had instilled in me.

After the second conversation, I drew the insidious conclusion that something very important didn’t click in the story of the man who loved dogs. Although I still hadn’t completely developed the cosmic mistrust that I would acquire precisely as a consequence of those meetings (that vocation for suspicion that would bother Raquelita and my friends so much, since it led me to react in an almost mechanical way and to qualify any story capable of minimally challenging plausibility as impossible, as sheer lies), as I listened there was a disquieting but ubiquitous lack of logic that, to begin with, would make me wonder whether some of the episodes of Ramón’s history weren’t being manipulated by his friend and storyteller Jaime López. But only at the end of the third conversation, already in the middle of December, did I discern with certain clarity the crack through which the logic was escaping: How was it possible for López to have such precise information about his friend’s life and feelings? No matter how explicit or detailed Ramón was during the conversations held in Moscow over ten years before, when they met after such a long time without seeing each other and the deceived Ramón Mercader opened all the channels to the most incredible corners of his life to his old comrade Jaime López, the knowledge displayed by the narrator seemed undoubtedly exaggerated and could only be due to two reasons. The first possibility had been cooking in my mind since our initial exchange: López was an out-and-out fabulist who could be coloring the story with brushstrokes from his own palate; the second struck me like a bolt of lightning as I was traveling on the bus to Havana after our third meeting, and it almost drove me to madness: Was Jaime López Ramón Mercader himself? Could that phantasmagoric being relegated to a stormy and lost corner of history, that faceless protagonist of a past plagued by horrors, still exist? Although the only possible responses to those questions was a resounding no for each, the seed of doubt had fallen on fertile ground and would remain there because a persistent suspicion prevented me from cultivating it: If the man who loved dogs was Ramón Mercader, what the hell was he doing in Cuba? Why in the devil was he telling me his story? What was all that bullshit about Jaime López and his mystery?

One of the considerations that had encouraged my doubts about Jaime López’s role in that story arose from the fact that at the time I was listening to him I had some clues that I did not have when I first met him. It was after the second conversation, knowing already where the story was leading, that I decided to go and see my friend Dany in the offices of the publishing house where he had started to work as a “specialist in promotion and distribution.” Although it wasn’t the job Dany had dreamed of, he had accepted it with the hope that, once his two years of social service were over, a coveted editor’s position would become available, and he would have better chances of filling it if he positioned himself in the publishing house’s administrative department.

Since Daniel Fonseca has already appeared and will continue to appear at various points of this story, I should say something about this friend who had been, in a way, my only literary pupil, if I can call him that. Dany had enrolled in the literature program at the university just when I was doing my last year in journalism. Recommended by a cousin of mine who was his neighbor, one day he showed up at my house in Víbora Park with the always dangerous intention of borrowing some of the books he needed for his classes. Against all logic, I lent them to him, and in order to underline that in the future everything would be as it should be, he pushed the limits of logic even further by returning them to me when his exams were over. Thus his visits started, generally on Saturday afternoons, and we went from textbooks to novels that I suggested to him and with which he began to fill his encyclopedia of ignorance. Around that time Dany listened to me and looked at me like I was a goddamned guru, only because he was an absolute ignoramus, although intelligent, and I was a guy who was five years older, several miles of reading ahead of him, and above all, with a book of stories already published. Neither Dany nor I could have dreamed then that one day that voracious animal, who, before enrolling for a degree in the arts, had spent every hour of his life playing baseball, would end up being a writer — what’s more, a wise and noteworthy writer, which is equal to being something more than acceptable and several levels below brilliant — who at times seemed gifted with a greater literary ability than shown in his published books.

Despite the fact that, by the time of my conversations with López, Dany and I barely saw each other, he didn’t find it strange to see me show up at the large house in Vedado where the publishing house was located. But he was shocked by the reason that brought me there: I needed to find a biography of Trotsky, and among the people I knew, he was the one who seemed most likely to have one. Before Dany could get over his surprise at my unusual request, I explained to him that at the National Library and the Central at the university, there were only some books about Trotsky published by the Progress publishing house, in Moscow, in which the authors devoted themselves to devaluing each act, each thought, even each gesture, the man had made in his life and even in death — the false prophet, the renegade, the enemy of the people, they called him, and it was always several authors, as if one alone couldn’t handle the task of so many accusations — and I was interested in finding something that wasn’t such flagrant propaganda, so blatant that it forced me to question its accuracy. And if anyone would have the material I needed to read, it was the uncle of Dany’s wife Elisa, an old journalist and militant Communist, very active in the country since the 1940s, who in the convulsive times of the sixties had even spent several weeks in prison, with a group of Trotsky sympathizers with whom he maintained personal and, they said, even philosophical relationships.

Now it’s important to remind you that this was in 1977, at the apogee of Soviet imperial grandeur and at the height of its philosophical and propagandistic inflexibility, and that we lived in a country that had accepted its economic model and its very orthodox political orthodoxy. With those important clarifications, you’ll have the more exact context of the dreadful drought of reading materials, information, and even ways of thinking when it came to subjects such as this one, that were particularly sensitive for our beloved Soviet brothers. So you will imagine the terror caused by the mere mention of anything critical — and Trotsky was political criticism personified, ideological evil multiplied to the nth degree. Due to all of this, you’ll understand Daniel’s response:

“What the fuck are you talking about?” He leaped up at learning my intentions and immediately added, in a lower voice and with a look of clinical concern, “Have you gone crazy, my friend? Are you drinking again? What the hell is wrong with you?”

In those years, almost no one on the island, at least that I knew of, had the least acknowledged interest in Trotsky or Trotskyism, among other reasons because that interest — if it came out or surfaced in someone who was crazy enough to reveal it — could not lead to anything more than complications of all kinds. Lots of complications. If listening to certain kinds of Western music, believing in any kind of god, practicing yoga, reading certain novels considered to be ideologically damaging, or writing a shitty story about some poor guy who felt afraid could represent a stigma and even involve punishment, getting into Trotskyism would have been like tying a rope around your own neck, especially for people who moved in the world of culture, teaching, and the social sciences. (I would later learn that some Uruguayan and Chilean refugees who lived on the island around that time dared to talk about the subject with a certain knowledge, although even they, subject to the surrounding pressure, did so in whispers.) Hence my friend’s nearly violent reaction.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Dany,” I answered when he started to calm down. “I’m not going to become a Trotskyist or any shit like that. What I need is to know. . k-n-o-w, you get it? Or is it also forbidden to know?”

“But you already know that Trotsky is fire!”

“That’s my problem. Get me some book that Elisa’s relative must have and don’t fuck around. I’m not going to tell anyone where I got it from. .”

Despite his protests, I had touched a fiber of Dany’s intellectual curiosity: faster than I expected (given the not-very-close relationship he maintained with the old former Trotskyist), he introduced me to an author and a biography that I had never heard of: Isaac Deutscher, and his trilogy about “the prophet” unarmed, armed, and outcast, in editions published in Mexico in the late 1960s. The morning on which he handed over the three volumes, after forcing me to make every conceivable promise that I would return the books as soon as possible, I went by my workplace and asked for the rest of the month as vacation. Besides the trips to the beach, what I remember best about those days was the consuming intensity with which I read that voluminous biography of the revolutionary named Leon Bronstein and the subsequent proof of my monumental ignorance of the historical truths (truths?) of the times and events amid which that man had lived, events and times so Russian and so far-off, starting with the October Revolution (I’ve never understood very well what happened in Petrograd that seventh of November, which was really October 25, and how the Winter Palace that no one wanted to defend in the end was taken and that automatically marked the triumph of the revolution and handed power over to the Bolsheviks) and followed, among other things, by some also very strange dynastic battles between revolutionaries in which only Stalin seemed willing to take power and by some nearly silenced proceedings in Moscow (that seemed never, ever to have existed to us) in which the prisoners were their worst prosecutors. At the end of that parade of manifestations of the “Russian soul” (if we don’t understand something about the Russians, it always seems to be because of their souls) was the corroboration of the old leader’s assassination, something that had disappeared in the Soviet books devoted to him, since Trotsky (perhaps because he was Ukrainian and not Russian) seemed rather to have died of a cold or, better yet, been consumed one day by a trembling fit, as if he were a character in an Emilio Salgari novel.

Thanks to that biography, the person who traveled to the beach from the third meeting onward was just beginning to be someone capable of processing elements of that story through a different lens. Now my ears insisted on interpreting information that, with summary knowledge of the events and their actors, I intended to place on a board whose coordinates were becoming familiar.

A few days after being bit by the bizarre but logical suspicion that López may not be López and that Mercader may not be dead, I arrived at the beach ready to try to force the man to confess the truth about his identity — if that truth existed, something of which I was not sure. I cautiously waited for the right moment to voice my doubts and I found the occasion when López was talking about the commotion the controversial Molotov-Ribbentrop pact caused in Ramón and his mother, Caridad del Río.

“You know what?” I asked without looking at him. “Of everything you’ve told me, there’s something I can’t believe.”

López lit one of his cigarettes with a gas lighter. Before his silence I continued:

“No one could know this much about another person’s life. No matter how much the person told you. It’s impossible.”

López was smoking unhurriedly, and I got the impression that he hadn’t heard my words. Later I would understand that a guy like me would barely have been able to move that rock: the man was a specialist in answering only what he wanted to, and his strategy was to take the frying pan out of my hands, grip the handle, and beat me over the head with it.

“What are you thinking? That what I’ve been telling you is a lie?” He took his glasses off for a few moments, held them up to the light, then wet them with his tongue to clean off the salt spray that had clung to them.

“I don’t know,” I said, and hesitated. His voice had taken on a tone capable of freezing my impulses, and that’s why I chose my words very carefully: “How is it possible that you know so much about Ramón? Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that Caridad and your mother, both of them, were born in Cuba? I’m thinking that—”

“That I’m Ramón’s brother? Or that I was his boss?”

I quickly weighed those possibilities without realizing that, with them, the man did nothing more than make me weaken in my convictions. But he didn’t leave me too much time to think, since he immediately cut to the chase.

“Or perhaps you think I am Ramón?” he asked.

I looked at him in silence. In the previous weeks the man who loved dogs had been noticeably losing weight, his skin had become much more opaque, greenish, and he frequently suffered from a sore throat and was overcome by coughing fits that he managed to control with sips of water sweetened by honey from a bottle that now always accompanied him. But at that moment there was a burning intensity in his eyes, and I have to admit, it scared me.

“Ramón is dead and buried, kid. And the worst thing is that he has turned into a ghost. If you look in all the cemeteries in the Soviet Union, you won’t ever find his grave. I myself don’t even know the name under which he was buried. . I already told you: among the things Ramón gave to the cause were his name and his freedom to make decisions. . Besides, if I’m telling you all of this, why would I deceive you about the rest of it? What does it matter who I am? Further still: What would change if I were Ramón?”

The answers came to my mind: it matters because what you’re telling me is the History of Deception and everything would change if you were Ramón, since nobody (at least I thought) would have wanted to be Ramón Mercader. Because Ramón caused disgust and engendered fear. . But it goes without saying that I didn’t dare to say these things.

“I know what you’re thinking, and it doesn’t surprise me,” the man said, and I felt a new current of fear. “This is a repulsive story that in and of itself devalues millions of speeches made over the course of sixty years. . And it’s also true that many people ended up finding Ramón repugnant.” He paused, although he remained immobile. “But try to understand it, dammit, even if you can’t justify it. Ramón is a man from another era, from a really fucked-up time, when even doubting wasn’t allowed. When he told me his story, I placed it in his world and in his time, and then I understood it. Although, to be clear, don’t ever feel pity for him, because Ramón hated that sentiment.”

“If you never saw his grave or went to his burial, how are you so sure that Ramón is dead?” I asked, throwing out my last chance for perseverance, despite the fact that I already knew I’d been defeated by López’s argument.

“I know that he is dead because I saw him several weeks before he died, when he had already been declared terminally ill. .,” he said and smiled, with visible sadness. “Look, for your peace of mind, I’m going to give you a reason you won’t be able to deny: Do you think Ramón, after promising that he would remain silent for the rest of his life, and after having maintained that commitment against every tide, would tell his story to the first. . to the first person he met? If I were Ramón, do you think I would have risked doing it? And besides, for what?”

In a second, I counted ten things López could have called me (from the Cuban comemierda—shit eater — and sapingo—bullshitter — to the Spanish gilipollas—asshole, which he himself had used on occasion), and I thought of so many other reasons to refute López’s last questions (a man who, according to himself, was dying: What could he be afraid of? The only affirmative response would imply that fear is also transmitted, like an inheritance, and includes the fate of those same children who, perhaps to protect them, López, or Mercader — if in fact that man was Ramón Mercader — had decided not to tell the story). But I realized that if I wanted to continue listening, my only option was to believe him; in fact, at that instant, I did believe him. I forced myself to forget or at least put off my doubts until I somehow had the complete certainty that López was López and that Mercader was a ghost without a grave. Or the opposite. But how in the hell was I going to arrive at any of those certainties if I didn’t even know whether a man named Ramón Mercader del Río had existed?

The story’s interruption cut the man who loved dogs’ narrative momentum, and that afternoon he bid me farewell long before the sun set. Although we agreed to meet on Monday, I remained awhile on the sand, fearing that the relationship may have fallen apart due to my suspicions. And if that was the case, I would be left without knowing how the events took place that were to seal the absolute devotion of Ramón Mercader.

In any event, I spent that weekend devoted to the marathon of reading the last volume of Deutscher’s biography, The Prophet Outcast, to try to immerse myself in the time in which López’s story was taking place. I remember that when the theatrical figure of Jacques Mornard appeared in the book’s final pages I felt my heart leap in my chest, as if the murderer had entered my room. My brain then began to play tricks on me: the image of Mornard that came to mind was that of López, with his heavy tortoiseshell glasses. I knew that didn’t make sense, since between the young and handsome Mornard and the sallow and, according to him, moribund López, the distance was great. But my imagination insisted on juxtaposing the real and live visage of the owner of the borzois with the elusive body of the Belgian who showed up at the fortress in Coyoacán with the mission of killing the man who, alongside Lenin, had achieved the unthinkable: that the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, and, further still, held on to it afterward by overpowering imperial armies and internal enemies.

Between the pages of the biography’s final volume, I found three newspaper clippings that betrayed the owner of the book’s interest in the relationship between Trotsky and his assassin. One was from the Cuban daily Información where, under a large headline, the very owner of the book gave news of the attack suffered by Trotsky on August 20, 1940, and the seriousness of the state he was in at the time the paper was going to print (to a Communist in 1940, that would have seemed like a pro-Trotskyist comment, only because the author didn’t voice his opinion on the event); the second one must have come from a magazine and contained a commentary about the parodies of Trotsky’s murder that Guillermo Cabrera Infante had included in his book Three Trapped Tigers (never published in Cuba and, as such, almost unfindable for us); and the last one, a longish undated column with no reference, I found the most revealing, since it spoke of the presence of Ramón Mercader in Moscow after leaving the Mexican jail where he’d served his sentence. The author of the column relayed that a person very close to Mercader — had López been guilty of another breach of trust? — had told him that, since the day of the attack, the assassin carried in his ears the sound of his victim’s cry of pain.

It was the following Monday, December 22, when I had, without yet knowing it, what would be my last conversation with the man who loved dogs. I remember that afternoon perfectly, as never since López started to tell me the story of Ramón had I felt subject to a pressure that until then I had managed to skirt: For my own good, I asked myself a thousand times, shouldn’t I tell someone official what was happening to me with that Jaime López who insisted on telling me a story so terrifying and politically compromising? The fear that was already engulfing me, reinforced by what I read about Trotsky’s end, was a more sordid, much crueler feeling than I even confessed to myself at that moment, as in reality it had not so much to do with the story of horror and betrayal that I was listening to than with the more than probable fact that it would be known that I had spoken to that strange man for several days without deciding to “ask for advice,” as they used to say, which was regarded as my duty. But the very idea of looking for the “compañero who minded” at the information center that edited the veterinary magazine (everyone called him that—“the compañero who minded”—and everyone knew who he was, since it seems important that we should all know of his diffuse but omnipresent existence) and telling him about a conversation that, no matter who López was, I had promised not to talk about, seemed so degrading to myself that I rebelled at the thought of it. I decided at that moment to accept the consequences (was there a less important and ambitious job than mine? Yes, of course, they could, for example, send me back to Baracoa), and for years I covered up that story with a wall of silence, and not even Raquelita knew — she still doesn’t know today, and besides, she would not give a shit to know — what Jaime López told me.

On that afternoon of my runaway fears, having barely arrived at the beach, López confessed that he felt terribly sad: Dax had started to have problems in moving (“He gets dizzy, like me,” he said) and the day that he would have to put him down was growing imminent.

“I know you’re not a veterinarian and I shouldn’t ask this of you,” he said to me without looking at me, “but if you help me, I think it will be easier. .”

“I would like to help you, but I really don’t know how to do it, nor can I,” I said to him, watching the two dogs run on the sand. Dax, it was clear, had lost the elegance of his trot and was stumbling.

“I don’t know how I’m going to deal with this. .” The man was talking to himself more than with me, his voice on the verge of breaking. “I want to be sure he doesn’t suffer. .”

The evidence of an approaching death and the revelation of those feelings placated my doubts about López’s identity and, particularly, made me decide to face, in silence, any consequences that could come from my decision, an undoubtedly ideologically questionable one. Death has that capacity. It is so definitive and irreversible that it barely leaves any room for other fears. Even a man like the one I had in front of me that afternoon — a connoisseur of everything about death, according to what he had told me — was frozen before it; he was shaken up in its presence, even when it involved only the death of a dog.

After drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and suffering a coughing fit, López at last started on the story of Ramón Mercader, and he relayed to me the way in which his friend had definitively become a part of history. I listened to him, with my judgment lost, beyond any surprise, and even with a certain delight when the story agreed with the information obtained from my recent reading. At one moment I also discovered that a bothersome and enigmatic mixture of disdain and compassion was taking possession of me — yes, compassion, and I’ve never had any doubts regarding the word or what it denotes — disdain and compassion for that Mornard-Jacson-Mercader willing to carry out what he had assumed as a duty and, above all, as a historic necessity demanded by the future of humanity.

López seemed to be on the edge of exhaustion when he reached the story’s climax. It had been dark for a while and I could barely see his face, but I clung to his words, excited by what I was hearing.

“What remains of the story is your New Year’s gift,” he said at that moment, and he seemed emotional and as though he was feeling a great sense of relief. I still close my eyes today and I can see him in those final minutes of his narration: López had spoken with a whistle in his voice and his left hand over the bandage that always covered his right hand. “My wife is the strangest Communist I know. Even in Moscow she insisted on celebrating Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. To her they’re sacred, and never better said. . And she won’t want to let me go this week, so it will be difficult for me to come until after the New Year. I have to please her.”

“What should we do, then?” I was feeling anxious and frustrated. An accumulation of terrible evidence and burning questions was suffocating me, but I knew it was best not to touch on them in order to avoid their muddying my relationship with the man, since I still had to go over a decisive phase in the life of Ramón Mercader and, due to everything I had heard, I was anxious to know about it. “Do you want me to call you on the phone?”

He responded immediately:

“No. We’ll see each other January eighth. Can you?”

“I think so.”

“I’ll come on the eighth. If I don’t see you, I’ll come back on the ninth.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, accepting in the absence of any alternative. “What about Dax?”

“I can’t do it now,” López said to me, and held out his hand so I could help him stand up. “Careful, my arms hurt a lot. . Dax is strong, he’ll hang on. I’m going to wait as long as I can, until the beginning of the year. If I had a friend who would help me. .”

“Poor Dax,” I said when I saw where the conversation was headed and upon confirming that the borzois were getting closer, wanting to leave already, for their dinnertime had come and gone.

López held out his bandaged hand to me. Without a thought, I smiled at him and shook it. Later, as I kneeled down to pick up the bag with the thermos and give it to him, I dared to voice one of the questions that had been tormenting me:

“I read in a newspaper that Ramón heard Trotsky’s cries for the rest of his life. Did he talk about that cry?”

López coughed and ran his bandaged hand over his face. I would have liked for there to have been more light so I could see his eyes.

“He still heard it when he told me the story, about ten years ago,” he said to me, and began to walk away. “I think he heard it until the end. . Have a merry Christmas.”

“Lo propio,” I managed to say, flooded by emotion, and I immediately realized that it had been a long time since I had pronounced or heard those words that, in Cuba, were only used as a formula to return Christmas greetings, that holiday banished years ago by the scientifically atheistic island that was too needy of each workday to allow itself the luxury of wasting days off.

López made his way across the sand, compacted by the previous day’s rain. Alongside him walked Ix and Dax at a slow pace. The darkness didn’t allow me to see the tall, thin black man, but I knew he was still there, between the casuarinas, waiting patiently. López approached the trees and his figure went blending into the night until he disappeared. As if he had never existed, I thought.