The Man Who Loved Dogs

16

What feelings went through him when he saw the silhouette of the most absolute question rising above the line of the horizon? He observed that sea whose scintillating transparency could damage one’s pupils and surely thought that, in contrast to Hernán Cortés, thrown upon that unknown land in search of power and glory, he, if anything, could aspire to find there a point of support for the final days of his existence and the grotesque possibility of vindicating a past in which he had already reached and exhausted his quota of power and glory, of hope and fury.

That nightmarish crossing had lasted twenty days. Ever since they had boarded the Ruth and its horns announced the call for departure along the rugged Norwegian coast, that tanker that regurgitated the unhealthy vapors of petroleum from its cisterns had turned into a physical extension of the imprisonment they suffered in the desolate fjord. Despite the fact that Lev Davidovich, Natalia, and the police escorts were the only passengers on the vessel, the inevitable Jonas Lie and his men made sure to keep the deportees isolated, preventing any radio communication and keeping watch on them even when they were seated at the table of Captain Hagbert Wagge, who was so proud to have a piece of history on board. Confined in the commander’s cabin, Lev Davidovich and Natalia spent the days reading the few books about Mexico they had obtained, thanks to Konrad Knudsen, trying to make out what was waiting for them in that violent and exalted New World, where the price of life could be a simple look interpreted the wrong way and where, as far as they knew, no one was waiting for them.

When the coast took on all its clarity, his fears rose to the surface and Lev Davidovich made a final demand of Lie: he would only leave the oil tanker if someone he could trust came to meet him. Who? he was thinking, when Jonas Lie gave him the surprising reply that they were going to honor this request, and then he also concentrated on observing the coast.

As the boat approached the port of Tampico, the restless crowds dotted with the blue uniforms of the Mexican police became visible. Although it had been a long time since Lev Davidovich had overcome his fear of death, exultant throngs always forced him to remember those that had surrounded Lenin in August 1918 and from which the pistol of Fanny Kaplan had emerged. But a wave of relief washed over his apprehensions when he discovered, at one end of the jetty, Max Shachtman’s features, George Novack’s good-looking face, and the radiant levity of a woman who could be none other than the painter Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera’s lover.

As soon as they docked, the Trotskys fell into a whirlwind of rejoicing. Several friends of Frida and Diego’s, in addition to the North American followers who had come with Shachtman and Novack, enveloped them in a wave of hugs and congratulations that achieved the miracle of making tears run down Natalia Sedova’s face. Taken to a hotel in the city where a welcome dinner had been organized in their honor, the couple listened to the jumble of information that had been kept from them by Jonas Lie, undoubtedly because of the nature of the news: General Lázaro Cárdenas had not only granted Lev Davidovich indefinite asylum but also considered him his personal guest and, with this welcome message, was sending the presidential train to take them to the capital. At the same time Rivera, who excused himself for not having been able to go to Tampico, offered them, also indefinitely, a room in the Casa Azul, the building he inhabited with Frida in the capital neighborhood of Coyoacán.

The French wines and the strong Mexican tequila aided Lev Davidovich and Natalia in the gastronomical jump from the mole poblano to the puntas de filete a la tampiqueña, from the fish a la veracruzana to the bumpy consistency of the tortillas, colored and enriched with chicken, guacamole, peppers, jitomates, refried beans, onions, and cola-roasted pork, all of it sprinkled with the fiery chili that demanded another glass of wine or a shot of tequila capable of putting out the fire and clearing the way for a taste of those fruits (mango, pineapple, sapodilla, soursop, and guava), pulpy and sweet, indispensable to topping off the party for European palates overpowered by the textures, smells, consistencies, and flavors that were alien to them. Overwhelmed by that banquet of the senses, Lev Davidovich discovered how his preoccupations dissolved and the tension gave way to an invasive tropical voluptuousness that wrapped him in a beneficial tenderness which, so he wrote, his exhausted body and mind greedily received.

Following their siesta, they resolved to go for a drive with Frida, Shachtman, Novack, and Octavio Fernández, the comrade who had worked the hardest to get them asylum. Nonetheless, the guests soon returned to reality when they saw that the car was placed in a convoy headed by a convertible jeep in which members of the presidential guard, rifles in hand, were traveling. Lev Davidovich thought that not even in paradise would they be completely free.

On the train, Frida brought him up-to-date on the reactions caused by his arrival. As could be expected, General Cárdenas’s decision had been an act of defiant independence, since it had been taken at a moment of great political tensions, right in the middle of an agrarian reform process and with oil nationalization on his agenda. The decision to accept him — the only and understandable condition of which was that the Exile abstain from participating in local political matters — had been an act of sovereignty through which the president expressed his loyalty to his own political ideas more than his sympathy for those of the political refugee. But that decision had turned Cárdenas into the object of a variety of accusations that went from cries of traitor to the Mexican Revolution to fascist ally (uttered by the Communists and the leaders of the Confederation of Workers, the president’s traditional supporters), even of “red anarchist under Trotsky’s orders” (put forward by a bourgeoisie for whom Trotsky and Stalin meant the same thing and for whom the arrival of the former confirmed the ascendance of “the Russians” over the president).

An exultant Diego Rivera was waiting for them in a small station close to Mexico City, and from there — accompanied by other policemen and many friends armed with bottles of cognac and whiskey — they took the path toward that strange residence painted telluric blue.

Lev Davidovich’s first encounter with Rivera’s work had been in Paris, during the years of the Great War, when the echoes of the Mexican Revolution reached Europe and, with them, the works of its revolutionary painters. Later, he had closely followed the cultural phenomenon of muralism, of which he even received news during the days of his exile in Alma-Ata, when Andreu Nin sent him a beautiful book about Rivera’s painting that perished in the fire at Prinkipo. In contrast, he had just a superficial notion of Frida’s tormented and symbolic work, but from the moment he found himself surrounded by her paintings, he discovered that his sensibility communicated much better with the woman’s anguished art than with Rivera’s explosive monumentality.

Their hosts had prepared for them the former room of Cristina Kahlo, Frida’s sister. When Rivera had decided to receive them, he bought the young woman a dwelling close to the Casa Azul, by which he announced to the Trotskys that they could use the bedroom to their liking. The painters’ friendliness and the critical state of their finances forced Lev Davidovich to accept what would be, he thought, just a temporary accommodation.

La Casa Azul quickly took on the aspect of a besieged fortress. Several windows had to be covered and some of the walls reinforced, and as soon as the exiled couple arrived, guards started turns of duty. The inside of the home was entrusted to young Trotskyist Americans, while the outside was handled by the local police. Nonetheless, just barely settled in, Lev Davidovich began to feel himself surrounded by an optimism he thought he had already lost, although he forced himself, more for the exhausted Natalia than for himself, to take a break before launching himself back into the struggle that called out to him.

As it had done so many times in his life, politics shook him and reminded him that not even the possibility of the briefest repose had been given to Prometheus and those who dared to be near his rock. And that was the fate that would pursue him to the last day of his life.

The radios and newspapers began to announce that the criminal court put together in Moscow’s House of the Trade Unions was again opening its doors to dramatize a new episode of the Stalinist farce. At first, the number and names of those on trial was unknown, until it was specified that there were thirteen, headed by Radek, who, with his resounding capitulation, had thought himself safe from Stalin’s rage. Also summoned were the redheaded Piatakov, Muralov, Sokolnikov, and Serebriakov, although it was again Lev Sedov and Lev Davidovich who were the main defendants, in absentia.

Ever since the new proceedings were initiated on January 23, 1937, Lev Davidovich had closed himself up with the radio to try to unearth the logic of that absurdity in which the accused seemed to compete with confessions that were more and more humiliating and unhinged, which were then added to the conspiracies to overthrow the system or assassinate Stalin, the existence of industrial sabotage plans, of massive poisoning of workers and peasants, and even the signing of a secret pact between Hitler, Hirohito, and Trotsky to tear apart the USSR. The saboteurs took on their shoulders all economic failures, hunger, and even railway and industrial accidents with which they had attacked the country and its heroic workers and betrayed the Leader’s trust. One of the accusations in the proceedings placed one of the prisoners in Paris, receiving orders from Trotsky at the moment he was in Barbizon without permission to visit the capital. But the cornerstone of the aborted conspiracy rested on the confession of Piatakov, who declared he had traveled from Berlin to Oslo in 1935 to attend a counterrevolutionary summit with the renegade Trotsky.

Forced to explain their responsibility in that matter, the pusillanimous Norwegian government issued a denial with proof that Piatakov’s presumed plane, coming from Germany, had never landed in Norway in the places or on the dates declared by the prosecutor and accepted by the accused. But it was already known that the angry curses by the former Menshevik Andrei Vyshinsky against the degenerate, rabid, stinking dogs for whom he was asking the death penalty were going to overcome any obstacle or evidence from obstinate reality. . Lev Davidovich knew, nonetheless, that those unsustainable proceedings hid some objective that went beyond the need to repair the contradictions of the previous proceedings and eliminate another group of old Bolsheviks: something of that goal was becoming clear to him as the names of Bukharin and his companions in the faded opposition of the right were repeated. It was darker and more difficult for him to understand, in contrast, the mention of certain Red Army officers, supposedly linked as well to the Trotskyist conspiracy, treason, and sabotage.

With that political earthquake, the calm of the Casa Azul disappeared. The Exile organized a press conference and, anticipating the foreseeable sentences, declared his purpose of refuting the accusations with undeniable proof. That declaration, of course, did not stop the court, and before Lev Davidovich could put together his testimony or obtain a single document of proof, the judges in Moscow issued sentences that carried the death penalty for almost all of the prisoners and the surprising sentence of ten years for the indefatigable Radek, who again saved his own skin, at a price known only to him and to Stalin — and only Stalin knew until when.

Overwhelmed by the news that so many old comrades in arms were going to be executed, Lev Davidovich brandished the only weapon he had at his disposal and again asked Stalin to extradite him and put him on trial. But as he expected, Moscow remained silent and executed the sentenced men with its habitual speed and efficiency. Then he threw the next stone and asked that an international investigative committee be created and repeated his willingness to appear before a Terrorism Commission of the League of Nations and to hand himself over to the Soviet authorities if any of those bodies proved a single one of the accusations. But again the world, fearful and blackmailed, was silent. Convinced that he was playing his last card, the Exile decided to organize a counterproceeding himself where he would denounce the falsity of the charges against him and, at the same time, would turn himself into the accuser of Stalin’s henchmen.

Deep down inside, Lev Davidovich knew that the counterproceeding, if anything, would just scratch the surface, but he threw himself into it with the faith and desperation of a shipwrecked man. For several nights he worked on the idea and had long talks with Rivera, Shachtman, Novack, Natalia, and the recently arrived Jean van Heijenoort, while Frida Kahlo came and went like a restless shadow. Covered with ponchos, watching how Rivera’s pantagruelian voraciousness made bottles of whiskey evaporate and how he devoured dishes of meats burning with chili, they tended to settle in around the orange tree that dominated the backyard of the Casa Azul and debated all the possibilities, although the main challenge lay in finding people with enough moral authority and political independence to legitimize if not legally, at least ethically, a counterproceeding that could perhaps still stir some consciences in the world.

It was the Americans who proposed inviting the nearly octogenarian professor John Dewey to preside over the court. Despite his prestige as a philosopher and pedagogue, to Lev Davidovich he seemed, nonetheless, a man too removed from the intricacies of Soviet politics. Meanwhile, Liova had begun to work in Paris, trying to obtain proof to refute the accusations. The materials Liova sent, in addition to the documents that Natalia, van Heijenoort, and Lev Davidovich had taken from the archives that they had brought to Mexico with them, implied an overwhelming amount of analysis.

Lev Davidovich was working feverishly and desperately and demanded from his collaborators, especially Liova, a superhuman effort. Overcome with anxiety, any carelessness enraged him and he began to label certain failures and delays from his son as negligence, without paying attention to calls to reason from Natalia, that were aimed at reminding him of the precarious conditions in which Liova lived in Paris, where he had even been forced to publish a statement in which he warned of the surveillance he was subject to by the Soviet secret police. In reality, what most bothered Lev Davidovich was receiving a letter in which his son commented that the enormous effort seemed pointless. Even if they managed to get the world’s most prestigious people to testify to his father’s innocence, the results wouldn’t mean anything to those who thought him guilty, and it would bring very little to those who already knew he was innocent. On the other hand, Liova thought that the circulation of the pamphlet Stalin’s Crimes that his father had started to write could be more effective than a trial requested by the accused himself. In a fit of anger, the former commissar of war called the young man a defeatist and even threatened to take away his position at the front of the Russian section of the opposition. Liova responded by asking for forgiveness for not always being able to rise to the heights demanded of him.

At that moment Lev Davidovich received news that gave him some hope that he and Natalia clung to tooth and nail. Thanks to a deserter from the former GPU who had seen himself threatened by the purges also initiated within the repressive apparatus, Liova had managed to learn that his brother, Sergei, had been arrested in Moscow during the witch hunt that preceded the last trial. The informant assured him that he had been sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia, accused of planning the poisoning of workers. In the midst of the prolonged lack of news in which the couple had assumed the worst, the news that the young man (doubtless, after being tortured) had been thrown into the hell on earth of a work camp fell on the Casa Azul like a blessing. Seriozha was alive! In the privacy of their room, they went through the painful motions of encouraging each other, and spoke for many nights about the survival strategies that the young man’s logical mind would rely on and of the integrity he must have shown in order to not accept the confessions that in all certainty they had tried to make him sign in order to take him to trial. They avoided, however, the stabbing images of Sergei tormented by the cruelest systems and didn’t dare to pose the most piercing questions: How had he withstood it without caving in? (What is caving in: confessing to something you haven’t done, going mad, allowing yourself to die?) Where must the limits of Sergei’s resistance have taken him? (Does the brain give in first or does the body?) Which of those imagined tortures had they applied to him or which of the unimaginable ones? (Was Seriozha one of the few who withstood and preferred to die rather than grovel?)

Lev Davidovich did not dare to reveal to Natalia, and less still to Liova, that pessimism was beginning to defeat him when he understood the limited reach of the counterproceeding for which they had worked so hard. Neither the trade union organizations nor the progressive intellectuals, controlled by Moscow’s propaganda and money, had agreed to participate, and only national committees made up of professed anti-Communists and anti-Stalinists dared to offer their support, while men such as Romain Rolland proclaimed Stalin’s integrity, certified the GPU’s humanitarian methods to get confessions, and even denied that there was any intellectual repression in the USSR.

But Lev Davidovich knew that, even in those conditions, he should wage the battle. During the recent meeting of the Central Committee, with the bodies of the most recently executed still warm, the dark Nikolai Yezhov, turned into the dazzling star of the repression, had accused Bukharin and Rykov of training terrorist groups destined to assassinate the Great Leader, for whom they felt “a perverse hate.” Anastas Mikoyan, another one of the red czar’s hunting dogs, made a speech full of cruel comments about the two old Bolsheviks in which he claimed that the much trumpeted closeness between Bukharin and Lenin had never existed. At the end of the session — which, it was reported, Stalin had followed in silence and with his face in consternation over those “revelations”—Bukharin and Rykov were arrested and led to the Lubyanka’s chambers of horror, and it was decided to create a commission of thirty-six militants, including all of the members of the Politburo, with the mission of dictating a partisan verdict against the accused. Among the members of the commission, Lev Davidovich painfully discovered the names of Nadezhda Krupskaya and Maria Ulyanova, Lenin’s widow and sister. The two women, whom Stalin had begun to attack and marginalize even during the leader’s life, had seen Vladimir Ilyich talk and speak with Bukharin countless times and now accepted Mikoyan’s lies, developed by Stalin, in silence. That sordid move allowed Lev Davidovich to see something that had escaped him in previous trials: Stalin had also resolved to turn the few figures of the past that were still with him not just into submissive extras to his lies but into direct accomplices of his criminal fury; whoever was not a victim would be an accomplice and, moreover, would be a henchman. Terror and repression had been established as the policy of a government that adopted persecution and lies as resources of the state and as a lifestyle for all of society. Is that how a “better” society was made? he would ask himself, although he already knew the answer.

When John Dewey arrived in Mexico, under infinite political pressure, he asked for information on the case, which he had yet to read, and refused to meet with Trotsky. He reminded the press that, ideologically, he did not share the accused’s theories and, as president of the commission, would only limit himself to offering some conclusions on the basis of the proof and testimonies presented, and that the only value of those results would be of a moral nature.

On March 10, the Casa Azul looked like a military camp. Inside the building, the harmony of objects and colors had disappeared when the potted plants, wood-grained furniture, and works of art were removed to make space for the members of the jury, journalists, and bodyguards. Outside the mansion, barricades had been erected and dozens of policemen spread out. The morning of the opening, already awaiting the arrival of Dewey and the members of the jury, Diego Rivera observed the yard and, smiling, spoke to his guest about the sacrifices that had to be made for permanent revolution.

Dewey demonstrated an energy that belied his seventy-eight years. As soon as he entered the house, after greeting Diego and Lev Davidovich, he asked to begin. His role and that of the members of the jury, he said, would consist of listening to any testimony that Mr. Trotsky had to offer them, interrogating him, and later offering some conclusions. The pertinence of those sessions, in his opinion, was based on the fact that Mr. Trotsky had been sentenced without the opportunity of making himself heard, which constituted a reason for serious concern to the commission and to the entire world.

That moment initiated perhaps the most intense and absurd week in the life of Lev Davidovich. He could not remember ever having been subjected to the physical and intellectual effort required to contend for hours and hours with the sick logic of the accusations fashioned in Moscow. As the entire counterproceeding was held in English, he constantly feared not being as precise or explicit as he needed and desired to be. At night he barely slept two or three hours, and only when his body overpowered his mind; his stomach, affected by the tension and liters of coffee he drank, had turned into a fiery stone embedded in his abdomen; while his blood pressure, already disturbed by the altitude, had produced a buzzing in his ears and a bothersome pain at the base of his skull. At the end of the sixth day, he was under the impression of being in a strange place, among unknown people talking about incomprehensible matters, and he thought he would pass out, but he knew that speaking before those people was his only alternative, perhaps the last occasion to fight in public for his name and his history, for his ideas and for the mortal remains of a revolution betrayed.

When the time came for his statement, on April 17, the members of the commission saw before them an exhausted man who had to ask Dewey’s permission to remain seated. Nonetheless, when he began his speech, the vehemence of old times returned and those gathered at the Casa Azul saw some of the sparks of the Trotsky who had moved the masses in 1905 and 1917, of the passion that had earned him the devotion of so many men and the eternal hatred of others, from Plekhanov to Stalin. His first conclusion was that, according to the present Soviet government, all of the members of the Politburo that brought triumph to the revolution and accompanied Lenin in the most difficult days of war and hunger and had founded the state — men who had suffered jail, exile, endless repression — in reality had always been traitors to their ideals and, further still, agents at the service of foreign powers who wanted to destroy what they themselves had built. Wasn’t it a paradox that the October leaders, all of them, had ended up being traitors? Or was there perhaps only one traitor and his name was Stalin? He wouldn’t waste time to demonstrate the falseness, let alone the absurdity, of the acts attributed to him, he said, but he pointed out that the governments of Turkey, France, and Norway had corroborated that he had not engaged in any anti-Soviet activities in their territories, since he had remained removed and even confined under police watch. Forgetting his physical weaknesses, he stood up. The ideas bursting within him acted as an impulse that moved him and gave him the strength to go on to the end. His life experience, he reminded them, in which neither triumphs nor failures were scarce, had not destroyed his faith in the future of humanity; on the contrary, they had given him indestructible conviction. He still possessed the faith in reason, in truth, and in human solidarity that at the age of eighteen he brought with him to the neighborhoods of the provincial city of Nikolayev; it had become more mature but no less ardent, and no one nor anything could ever kill it.

His breathing agitated and his head hurting, he took his seat again. His eyes met those of the old American professor and, for a few thick seconds, held his gaze. The silence was dramatic. Before Lev Davidovich’s plea, Dewey had promised to offer some provisional conclusions, but now he froze as if petrified. A sob from Natalia Sedova broke the spell. Finally, Dewey lowered his gaze and looked at his notes and whispered that the session was closed until they reached their conclusions. And he added: anything he might have said would have been an unforgivable anticlimax.

The session barely closed, Lev Davidovich, on Natalia’s orders, decamped to a country house in the beautiful city of Taxco. Although he had asked the secretaries to take the hunting rifles, his fatigue was such that he could only go for a few walks around the city and, almost at the end of his stay, go on an excursion to the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon in Teotihuacán. Fortunately, the headaches, the high blood pressure, and the insomnia began to recede, but Natalia’s strict vigilance kept him in a reclusion that included the blocking of his correspondence.

When they returned to Coyoacán, Lev Davidovich was surprised by a feeling he hadn’t experienced since his days in Prinkipo: he was returning to a place he desired to be. For a man who had lived his entire existence in constant motion, the traditional notion of home had been substituted by the necessity for a place that was propitious for working, and the Casa Azul, with its charms and exotic atmosphere, exercised a beneficent magnetism, to which was added (though Lev Davidovich would never admit to it in his writings) the attractive flitting of the Kahlo sisters, whose attentions had awoken instincts that the years of struggle and isolation had put to sleep. The enjoyment of Cristina’s beauty and Frida’s mysterious charm, the aroma of youth that emanated from both of them and the conversations in which he tended to let compliments slip out that were sometimes awkward and banal, gradually turned into a kind of adolescent game that made his confinement unpredictable and turned the kitchen, the hallways and the yard of the house into places for smiling encounters, while he felt the gaiety also turning back his encroaching old age.

While waiting for Dewey’s conclusions, Lev Davidovich continued to submit evidence that refuted the charge that he had participated in an anti-Soviet conspiracy. He regretted that many of those documents had not reached him weeks earlier, and the idea that Liova had been indolent about sending them set him at the edge of fury. Resolved to punish that unforgivable inefficiency, he delegated his correspondence with Liova to his secretaries, knowing that the young man would immediately get the signal he was transmitting with his silence.

One night at the end of March after dinner, Natalia, Jean van Heijenoort, and Lev Davidovich, along with the residents of the Casa Azul, prolonged one of the pleasant evenings in which the Exile was frequently asked to narrate the most remarkable memories of his life. Since he felt encouraged, he launched into a story about his relationship with Marshal Tukhachevsky, the young and elegant officer who in the days of the civil war, thanks to his capacity as a strategist, was nicknamed “the Russian Bonaparte.” Natalia, who knew those episodes and understood very little English, was the first to retire, and Rivera, who was already storing an impressive quantity of whiskey in his blood, immediately followed her. Frida, overcome by tiredness, was next, and then van Heijenoort discreetly disappeared.

Cristina’s smile, the wine in his system, and the tensions accumulated over several weeks of proximity caused the foreseeable explosion. More than once, at dinners and in outings, Lev Davidovich had slid a hand across Cristina’s legs or arms, only as an affectionate gesture, and she, while flirtatious, had delicately, always with a smile, prevented any advance, yet without completely dissuading him, suggesting perhaps that these flirts and smiles were part of a ritual of approach, so that at last the man made a pass that night. Then, to his surprise, she stopped him and asked that he not confuse admiration and affection with other feelings. Without understanding the reaction of a woman who had seemed to accept his overtures until that moment, Lev Davidovich was struck dumb, his desires frozen.

Annoyed by the failure, ashamed at having given in to an impulse that put his relationship with the owners of the house and, worse still, the stability of his marriage in danger, the man implored his reason to conquer the hormonal rush that had overtaken him. He forced himself to consider whether his intentions with the young woman had not been more than a fleeting intoxication caused by the magnetism of her smooth skin. It was all just an absurd manifestation of a midlife crisis, he told himself.

When Frida found out about what had happened, she assumed the role of confidante and offered the paltry consolation of setting him straight about her sister’s sexual fecklessness; Cristina was so fond of arousing males, and even of the most sordid deception: she had exceeded all limits when she went to bed with Diego himself, something that Frida had accepted, although she would never forgive either her husband or her sister. The painter’s tenderness and understanding, peppered with coquettishness, led Lev Davidovich to ask himself whether he hadn’t miscalculated his possibilities, and he began to redirect his intentions, which soon acquired an overwhelming vehemence, capable of altering his waking and sleeping hours with the image of the woman who had confided such intimate revelations to him.

Wrapped in the dense spiderweb of desire, Lev Davidovich had to rely on all of his discipline to concentrate on his work. Frida’s presence and the very atmosphere of the Casa Azul led him to inertia and digressions when so many political commitments and economic problems called on him. Perhaps the fact of having postponed the drafting of Lenin’s biography in order to devote himself to Stalin’s, for which he had already received an advance, also affected the rhythm of his work. Researching in the archives and searching his memory for everything related to that dark being was a thankless task, and although he intended to turn the book into a grenade against the Grave Digger, at root he felt that he was degrading himself by dedicating his intelligence and his time to it.

A strange and confusing event that occurred in Barcelona on May 3 managed to focus his attention on what was happening in Spain. For several months the civil war had turned into a field for political confrontation between the groups fighting for the Republic, and Lev Davidovich noticed Moscow’s hand behind the accusations and debates between the factions. It could not be a coincidence, he would write, that shortly after the initiation of the Moscow purges and the announcement of military support for the Republic, in the form of Soviet weapons and advisers, a campaign was unleashed against the real and supposed Spanish Trotskyists, who were besieged with the same viciousness and in almost the same words with which the Bolsheviks in the USSR had been accused. His old friend Andreu Nin, from whom he had distanced himself over tactical differences, was one of the first to be thrown out of the governmental apparatus, while his party, the POUM, was turned into the target of propaganda attacks more scathing than those made against the fascist soldiers.

In the tumult of censored and contradictory information coming from Barcelona, the old revolutionary sensed that what had happened regarding the military control of the Republic’s communications building had been just the first step toward achieving the objective of the corrida: to kill the bull of the opposition and bend the government to Soviet will, which would allow Stalin to take the leading role in the European political game. Because of that, he was not surprised when he learned that the first to be placed on the pillory had been the POUM militants. It was clear to him that the aggressiveness with which the Spanish Communists threw themselves at wiping out the POUM was due, more than to old rivalries or the need to achieve a unified government, to the obsession of the master of the Kremlin (who desired the defeat of the POUM even more than the military defeat of Franco and his second-class fascists).

In the final days of that turbulent May, several editions of the recently published The Revolution Betrayed arrived in Coyoacán. The Riveras, to celebrate it, invited the Trotskys and other friends to dine at a restaurant in the city center. Since his spirits had been restored, Lev Davidovich had begun to use the freedom of movement that the Mexican authorities granted him. With some frequency, he traveled to the colorful city in the company of two or three bodyguards, camouflaged in the backseat of a car and covered by a hat and handkerchief that hid even his goatee. Even so, he enjoyed those excursions, and some nights he even devoted himself to wandering the streets to examine and appreciate the cathedral’s heavy Baroque style, the atmosphere of the cantinas and their mariachi music, and the elegance of the old viceregal palaces, always pursued by the smell of tortillas placed over the fire on every corner of the city. The liveliness of Mexico seemed like that of a thriving world sustained by deep cultural mix that, nonetheless, would not be capable, for centuries, of eliminating the barriers separating the races that cohabitated there.

On the night of the celebration, following dinner, the invitees walked the center’s alleyways and read the political proclamations covering the walls, which either accused Cárdenas of being a traitor and a Communist or gave him their support and encouraged him to continue to the end. Trotsky’s name, as could be expected, appeared on several of the painted walls, and went from viva to calls for his death, from “Welcome” to “Leave Mexico.” But that night Lev Davidovich was interested in neither the signs nor the discoveries of the city: he was really searching for intimacy with Frida. The vertigo of the senses into which he had fallen demanded a release that he began to pursue vehemently. Although the painter’s body imposed the barrier of a deformity that had to rely on orthopedic corsets and a cane to help the more affected of her legs, perhaps precisely because of those limitations the woman took on sex and sensuality in an aggressive, effusive way. When Lev Davidovich learned that her open morality had even allowed homosexual relationships, the perverse imp of his virility had unleashed itself in licentious imaginings, creating more urgent needs than those he had experienced in his youth, and than those he had felt in his days as a powerful commissar, when so many female comrades in arms had offered him a release of the accumulated tensions and fervors in solidarity.

Through poems and love letters hidden between the pages of the books he recommended to Frida, Lev Davidovich already demanded an ascent to the physical. The fire that moved him burned with such intensity that he had even managed to overcome the fear that Natalia would suspect an affair. So on that night of revelry, as Diego, Natalia, the friends who joined on the walk, and the secretaries entered the building where one of Rivera’s murals was on display, he purposely stayed behind and, without exchanging any words, pushed Frida against the wall and kissed her on the lips as, between breaths, he repeated how much he desired her. With complete awareness, at that moment, Lev Davidovich was throwing himself into a well of madness and putting in danger every significant thing in his life. But it made him happy, proud, and without the least feeling of guilt, he would tell himself later, convinced that, at the end of the day, it had been worth it to waste in that orgy of the senses the last reserves of his virility.

17

Ramón Mercader was convinced that Paris was the most fatuous city in the world and that the French and their socialist government were betraying Spain, denying it the saving support that the Republic was screaming for. But he felt satisfied when Tom opened the door of the apartment on the top floor of rue Léopold Robert and he discovered how from the windows facing north he could see the boulevard du Montparnasse while from the balcony, looking south, he could make out the boulevard Raspail, where the Café des Arts was.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” Tom commented as he handed him the keys. “Central and discreet, very bourgeois but a little bohemian, as befits you.”

“Jacques likes it,” he admitted, and looked at the wooden tables and bookcases, soulless without any decorations, the empty walls where he should hang some photos. “He has to start to make it his.”

“You have time to get settled. Two or three months, I believe.”

Jacques lit a cigarette and went through the bedroom, the water closet, the bathroom, and the small kitchen, where a glass door permitted a view of the service balcony that led to the building’s interior courtyard. He returned to the living room with a small plate that would serve as an ashtray until he acquired the necessary accessories, in line with his personality. At that moment he was overcome by an unfamiliar feeling, for ever since Caridad had begun running away more than ten years earlier, he had never had anything resembling what the bourgeois call a home.

“I’m going to my hotel,” Tom said, yawning. “Are you going to rest?”

“I need to buy some food. Milk, coffee. .”

“Very well. We’ll see each other tonight. At eight, in front of the Fontaine Saint-Michel. I have a surprise for you.” With more difficulty than at other times, he stood up.

“When are you going to tell me what happened to that leg of yours?”

Tom smiled and left the apartment.

Jacques opened his only suitcase. He took out his shirts and the English cashmere suit and draped them over the armchair so they would air out and recover their shapes. He went down to the street and crossed the boulevard Montparnasse to enter La Closerie des Lilas, nearly empty at midmorning. He asked for a glass of hot milk, a croissant, and a cup of coffee. He used his best Belgian accent and remembered that there was no need to exaggerate. In any event, he would have time to polish those minor defects, he told himself, as he slipped the ashtray from the neighboring table, engraved with the café’s name, into his jacket pocket.

Before leaving, Grigoriev had explained that during his trip to New York he had put into motion the plan that would move Jacques Mornard toward the renegade Lev Trotsky. It seemed so far-fetched and improbable to Ramón that he started to wonder whether it was all made-up. Grigoriev had told him how, under the identity of Mr. Andrew Roberts, he had gotten in touch with Louis Budenz, the director of the Daily Worker. On other occasions, Budenz had collaborated with the Soviet secret services, and now Roberts needed something as simple and as difficult from him as sending to Paris a young woman named Sylvia Ageloff, an active member of the U.S. Trotskyist circles and sister of two other fanatics who had even worked very closely with the Exile. Of course, he didn’t say why he needed Sylvia in France, and although Budenz would only know of the need to move this Trotskyist, Roberts emphasized that everything had to be done with the utmost discretion and he thought it sufficient warning to remind him that, regarding that request, no one besides the two of them could know a single word. Louis Budenz promised to give him an answer as soon as possible.

That night, when he left the bus and passed by Odéon on the way to the Fontaine Saint-Michel, Jacques Mornard felt himself entering the heart of a city in its effervescence. For the Parisians, the war happening on the other side of the Pyrenees and the one to come on the European horizon were as far away as the planet Mars. La nuit parisienne was just as animated as always, and while he waited alongside the fountain, Jacques felt surrounded by life.

Perhaps it was his instinct or a telluric call of his blood that made him turn around. Immediately he saw her among the people as she approached him on Tom’s arm. He noticed how his new identity was thrown into confusion by the mere presence of that battle cry who responded to the name of Caridad del Río. When the woman was in front of him, smiling and proud, dressed with an elegance that seemed out of place (those crocodile-skin high heels, for God’s sake), and whispered in Catalan, “Mare meva, quin home mes ben plantat!” he guessed what was coming: she took him by the neck and kissed his cheek with malevolent precision, placing the heat of her saliva at the edge of his lips. Although Jacques Mornard tried to keep himself afloat, Caridad had cast off the ropes of a Ramón who continued emerging from the depths, dragged up by the invincible taste of aniseed.

At Tom’s suggestion, they looked for Brasserie Belzar, on the rue des Écoles, where someone was waiting for them. Caridad walked between the two men, satisfied, and Ramón decided not to weaken, at least not in an obvious way and certainly not in front of Tom. He wanted to ask about young Luis, who he supposed was still in Paris, and about Montse, who had mentioned to him at some point her intentions of traveling to France. Would Caridad know anything about África, about little Lenina?

Upon entering the brasserie, a man with his head shaved stood up and their party, led by Tom, walked to his table. After shaking the man’s hand, Tom introduced them, speaking in French.

“Our comrade Caridad. This is George Mink.” He turned to his pupil: “Jacques, George will be your contact in Paris.”

“Welcome, Monsieur Mornard. I wish you a pleasant stay in the city.”

As they drank their aperitifs, Caridad talked about how things were going in Spain. According to her, the Popular Army was still showing weaknesses, which she attributed to enemy sabotage. Mink, as if he didn’t understand, commented that with the Trotskyists and the anarchists crushed, he couldn’t fathom what enemies she was referring to, and she leaped up: the incompetents still in the government.

“The army is now armed by the Soviets and eighty percent led by communist officers,” Caridad pointed out, looking directly at Tom, “but even so, we’re still losing battles and the fascists have reached the Mediterranean; they’ve split the peninsula in two. The only explanation is that the heart of the Republic is lacking the necessary ideological purity to win the war. In Spain we need more purges.”

“Poor Spain,” Tom said, and at first Jacques didn’t know what he meant. “There are even Soviet advisers in the public bathrooms already, and the Spanish Communists are the ones flushing the toilets. If we practically control the army, the intelligence, the police, the propaganda, who are they going to purge now?”

“The traitors. We already got rid of Indalecio Prieto. All that time he was waging war on us. He was spending all his time saying that Communists are like automatons who obey the orders of the party’s committee. He was worse than any fifth columnist.”

“Sometimes Prieto seemed enlightened to me,” Tom said, sighing. “I had never seen a minister of war more convinced that he wasn’t going to win the war. . But the real problem is that you, the Spanish Communists, don’t know how to win. Have you listened to yourself speak, Caridad? You sound like a fucking newspaper editorial. All of you talk like that. . And who’s going to pay for the disaster in Spain? Us: Pedro, Orlov, me, and the rest of the advisers. But the truth is that we’re getting tired of hearing you talk and talk and having to push you every day.”

Jacques Mornard had felt the lashing on Ramón’s back. Reasonably or not, the blows were always going to fall on Spanish heads, but he remained silent.

“I don’t know what kind of Communists you are,” Tom continued, as if spitting out old resentment. “You let other people tell you what you should do and they treat you like children. The Comintern wolves are still cutting the cake. Why are they doing that? Because you can’t decide to tell them to go to hell and do things as they should be done.”

“So if we tell them to go to hell,” Ramón began, unable to contain himself at that moment, “them and you, how do we stand up to the Italian units and German aviation? You know we depend on you, that we have no alternative. .”

Tom looked directly into his pupil’s eyes. It was a penetrating and easy-to-decipher look.

“What’s wrong, Jacques? You seem upset. . a man like you. .”

Jacques Mornard noticed the piercing tone of voice and felt overcome by his impotence, but he made one last effort to save his dignity.

“It’s just that we’re always to blame. .”

“No one said that,” Tom replied, his tone changed. “Almost out of nowhere, you’ve made it to where you are: today you are the most influential party in the Republican alliance, and you will always have our support. But you have to grow up once and for all.”

“When do you return to Spain?” Mink asked, taking advantage of the more relaxed moment, and Tom sighed.

“In two days. I’m setting things up here and then I leave again. Yezhov insists that I keep working with Orlov. But it’s taxing to have my mind on two different matters. . I only have one head and I’m trying to put it in two places.”

Caridad looked at him and, with a caution that was uncharacteristic of her, said:

“There’s a rumor among the people that the advisers are going to leave us to our fate. They even talk about the ill will of some. .”

“The ones saying that are ungrateful. . I want to leave because I have another mission. I’ve sweat blood in Spain and put my own skin in front of Italian tanks in Madrid when no one could give a damn about the city. .” Tom drank from a glass of wine that had been served and looked at the tablecloth, startlingly white, as if he were looking for a nonexistent stain. “No one can say that I want to abandon you.”

Silence settled over the table and Mink seized upon it as he refilled his empty glass.

“I know that the situation in Spain hurts, but we have some other minor problems, like what we’re going to order, right? I recommend the Alsatian choucroute; the sausages are first-rate. Although I’m opting for the cassoulet, I love duck. .”

Before Tom stepped back into Kotov’s skin and returned to Spain, Jacques received advice that was really an order: he was to erase Spain and the war from his head. To Jacques Mornard, what was happening to the south of the Pyrenees was just news read in the papers. Ramón could not allow that passion to crack his identity, not even in the most intimate circles, and as a preventative measure Tom forbade him from seeing or talking to Caridad until he authorized it. The subtle machinery that he had put into motion made Ramón’s sentimental, patriotic gaffe unacceptable. Ramón Mercader had proven to be capable of placing himself above those weaknesses and his passions should not see the light of day until they were called upon for a greater cause, perhaps the same greater cause.

George Mink, the son of Ukrainians who emigrated to France in the days of the Russian Civil War, became responsible from then on for placing Jacques in the Parisian world that befitted him. They spent weeks going to the bohemian haunts of the Rive Gauche, and the Hippodrome, where Jacques practiced his theoretical knowledge of betting; they wandered the historic and now dilapidated streets of Le Marais, got close to the chorus girls of the Moulin Rouge, inviting them to champagne; and they surveyed at the steering wheel the streets of Paris learned from the maps Jacques studied in Malakhovka. As if he were visiting a sanctuary, George took him to Le Gemy Club, where Louis Leplée was presenting his great discovery, La Môme Piaf, a volatile and rather scruffy little woman who, with an enormous voice, sang songs full of vulgar phrases and daring metaphors that, nonetheless, left the Belgian bored and speechless. With Jacques at the wheel, they visited Brussels and Liège, the fabulous castles of the Loire basin, and trained the young man’s palate with Belgian chocolates, French wine and cheeses, hearty Norman plates, and the subtle aromas of provençal cuisine. The apartment on rue Léopold Robert took on a bourgeois and informal air, and Jacques dressed himself in the wares of some German Jewish tailors recently installed in Le Marais, ending up with twelve hats in his closet. The whole time they remained removed from French political circles, the world of Russian émigrés, and the haunts of Spanish Republicans, where the spies of the whole planet’s secret services milled about as if they had been gathered for a general convention of the shadow world.

When Tom returned at the beginning of June, he observed with satisfaction how his creature had progressed and felt pleased at having known how to find in a primitive Catalan Communist that diamond he was now polishing to perfection. Once his time in Spain was up, Tom had returned to New York, to learn that the Sylvia Ageloff line had been activated and that it would begin to run in the month of July when the girl, a high school teacher, took her summer vacation and, thanks to the enthusiasm and economic generosity of her old friend Ruby Weil, embarked on the trip of her dreams to Paris. Without telling him who the person in the photograph was, Tom gave Jacques a picture of Ruby Weil and saw that the young man’s eyes lit up.

“She’s not bad,” he admitted.

Tom smiled and, without saying anything, gave him a second photo of a woman close to thirty, with rounded, Coke-bottle glasses, a thin face covered in freckles and straight hair falling gracelessly, through which the points of her ears stuck out.

“Every wine is not a Bordeaux, Jacques,” Tom said, continuing to smile. “This is Sylvia Ageloff, your hare. If you cook her well enough, she’ll even taste good.”

To soften the shock, Tom told him that he had also been in Mexico, where other parts of the operation had been set in motion. While the men from the Comintern had assigned the Communist Party the mission of raising popular spirits against the presence of the renegade in Mexico, four agents, all of them Spaniards, had been planted in the capital to carry out the operation if the order was given and if the possibilities for success were considered real.

“You are perhaps living the best vacation of your life, in Paris, far from the war, with money to burn. If you have to gnaw that bone”—he tapped the photographed face of Sylvia Ageloff with his nail and smiled—“and in the end you’re not the one to carry out the job, we’ll give you a good discount on your debts.”

Jacques thought there were worse sacrifices, and with that consolation he resolved to await the arrival of the woman who, if he was lucky, would be his channel to the remote Coyoacán and, perhaps, to history.

At the beginning of July, Tom and Mink disappeared and those days of pleasant summer waiting for moment zero were for Jacques Mornard slow days, darkened by the galloping crisis affecting the government coalition of the Popular Front in France. Above all, he was bothered by the worsening news that came from Spain, where the evacuation of International Brigade volunteers had begun without the Popular Army, despite the intrepid campaign of the Ebro, managing to push back the pro-Franco troops or kick them out of the strip they’d opened up to the Mediterranean. The vestiges of Ramón still beating within Jacques couldn’t help but be irritated by those failures, but his discipline allowed him to keep himself far from the places where the evacuated volunteers gathered before returning to their respective countries. Ramón would have liked to have heard their stories.

On July 15, without Jacques expecting him, a pale and agitated Tom went to see him at the apartment on rue Léopold Robert. Without even saying hello, Tom told him that a serious complication had arisen: everything seemed to indicate that Orlov, head of the Soviet intelligence advisers in Spain, had deserted. At that moment, for the first time, Jacques would see a streak of weakness in that man whom he admired so much for his aplomb in any circumstance. But very soon he understood the dimensions of the disaster tormenting him.

“We’re after him, but the son of a bitch knows all our methods and how we do things. We know he’s in France, perhaps even right here in Paris, and the truth is that I think he’ll escape us.”

“Are you sure he deserted?”

“He had no other choice.”

“Wasn’t he your right-hand man?”

“So much so that he knows the entire network of Soviet espionage in Europe.”

Jacques felt a tremor go through him.

“Does he also know about me?”

“No,” Tom reassured him. “You’re beyond his reach. But not the comrades who are in Mexico. You can’t imagine what Orlov knows. As they say in Spain, that swine left us with our asses hanging in the air. . It’s a disaster.”

“I swear I don’t understand. Orlov was a traitor?”

Tom lit a cigarette, as if he needed that break.

“No, I don’t think so, and that’s the worst part. They forced him to desert. What happened was that crazy Yezhov sent Orlov a telegram telling him he should come to Paris, take a car from the embassy, and show up in Antwerp to board a ship where there would be a very important meeting with an envoy of his. Orlov didn’t even need to be too intelligent to realize that if he showed up, he would end up dead, like Antonov-Ovseyenko and other advisers that Yezhov had called for. On the eleventh, he left Spain and disappeared.”

Jacques Mornard felt his head spinning. Something too sick and out of control was happening and, based on what Tom was saying, the consequences could be unpredictable.

“If Beria and Comrade Stalin don’t stop Yezhov, everything is going to get fucked up.”

“So why don’t they just stop him, goddammit?” Jacques cried out.

“Bloody hell, because Stalin doesn’t want to!” Tom yelled, throwing his cigarette to the floor. “Because he doesn’t want to!”

Tom stood up. The fury possessing him was unfamiliar to Jacques, who remained silent until the other man, back in control of himself, again spoke.

“Your plan is still on. Orlov doesn’t even know you exist and that’s our guarantee. Now it’s more important than ever that you do everything right. As long as we don’t know where Orlov is and what information he’s going to release, we’re up in the air. For now, we’ve put three of the comrades in Mexico in quarantine and have taken the other one out for good. . Orlov knew that agent personally. He himself recommended him for a job with the utmost responsibility.”

Jacques remained silent. He knew that Tom needed to get out all of those tensions and that he was doing it in front of him because he trusted his discretion and required his intelligence, perhaps more than ever before.

“I’m going to tell you something you were going to find out at some point, and it doesn’t make sense anymore for you not to know. The agent we removed from Mexico is a woman and she was working under the name Patria. When the time came, if it had been necessary, you and she would have worked together. .”

Ramón gave a start. Was it possible that Yezhov’s foolish act had deprived him of something so beautiful that he couldn’t have even dreamed of it?

“Are you talking about. .?”

“África de las Heras. When you arrived at Malakhovka, she was in cabin 9. She left there two months before you. Orlov doesn’t know where she is, but he knows her and we can’t risk her. She’s too valuable.”

Ramón Mercader stood up and went to the window from which he could see the boulevard du Montparnasse. Evening was falling and the cafés, with their tables in the sun, had filled with locals, carefree and pleasant, who would talk about the great and small things in their lives, perhaps anodyne, but theirs. To know that for weeks he had had África thirty yards away from him without being allowed to see her was not a comforting piece of news. It was a mutilation, one more, of the many he’d had to endure to reach the dark point of his life in which he found himself: without a past, without a present, with a future in which he would depend on others, on the impalpable paths of history. Ramón turned around and looked at Tom, who, with his head down, was smoking again.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of my responsibilities. I’m not going to fail you. . So, is she well?”

Behind the bar’s counter was the longest, cleanest, and most precise mirror Ramón Mercader would see in his whole life. It was the mirror against which he would compare every other mirror in the world, the mirror in which he wanted to see himself, especially the frozen Moscow morning of 1968 that, feeling the abrasive pain in his right hand and observing his reflection in the new glass walls of the mausoleum of the god of the world’s proletarians, he saw the emptiness pursuing his shadowy life. He thought that if he’d been in front of that magic mirror at the Ritz, he would have surely seen himself, as he did on those afternoons in 1938, when he was Jacques Mornard and he walked around with his faith and his health intact, wearing a suit of muslin or twill that was crisp because of the starch, swollen with pride at knowing he was at the center of the battle for the future of mankind.

Before he left, Tom had explained to him, with his usual meticulousness, how that first meeting with Sylvia Ageloff and Ruby Weil would go. On the afternoon of July 19, Jacques would run into the women at the bar of the Hôtel Ritz, where Ruby and Sylvia would go in the company of the bookseller Gertrude Allison, so that he, taking advantage of his client relationship with Allison, would be introduced to the tourists and invite them for a drink. At that moment, Sylvia would fall in the Belgian’s sights; from that moment on, the way in which she was gunned down would depend only upon the abilities and the steady hand of Jacques Mornard.

But that afternoon, seated in front of the gin and tonic barely sprinkled with gin, he was again thinking that perhaps África’s brusque change in attitude, when they separated in Barcelona, had nothing to do with other men and was only due to orders to cut off her old relationships before getting involved with her new mission. Relieved by that thought, he watched, through the mirror, the noisy and smiling entrance of four women. He recognized Allison, the blond Ruby Weil, and told himself that the tall, young one must be Marie Crapeau, a French friend of the bookseller’s. He then focused on the freckly one with glasses, with milky skin, who hid her extreme thinness below a wide, pleated skirt and a flounced blouse, and he felt how the glass perfectly reflected back the overwhelming ugliness of Sylvia Ageloff. He saw her sit at a table and decided to turn around in order to observe, like the other patrons, the women who came in with such a ruckus. He understood at that moment that Jacques Mornard was about to grow up.

Gertrude Allison gave a cry of authentic surprise:

“But look who’s here! Hi, Jacques!”

Smiling, with his glass in hand, he approached the women, allowing his personal charm, his elegance, and his cologne to spread and start his work. Gertrude made the introductions and when he shook Sylvia’s hand, he had the feeling of touching a small and feeble bird. Gertrude Allison explained to him who her friends were, two Americans on holiday in Paris, and invited him to sit down. He didn’t want to interrupt their party, but if she insisted. . on the condition that they allow him to buy them all drinks.

“Jacques is a photographer,” Gertrude explained. “Are you still working for Ce Soir?”

“Whenever they ask me to,” he said nonchalantly.

Gertrude turned to the women and explained:

“He’s one of those lucky ones who doesn’t have to work to live.”

“It’s not like that,” he clarified modestly.

“But let me tell you that these friends here”—she pointed at Sylvia and Ruby—“prefer workers, all sweaty and hairy. . They’re Marxists, Leninists, and several more ‘-ists’. .”

“Trotskyists.” Sylvia barely smiled, but she couldn’t help herself. “I’m a Trotskyist,” she repeated, and the woman’s warm but sharp voice entered Jacques’s ears.

“She sings ‘The Internationale’ in the shower,” Gertrude Allison concluded, and they all, even Sylvia, smiled, relaxed.

“I congratulate you,” he said, making his lack of interest obvious. “I love people who believe in something. But for me, politics. .” and he backed up the phrase with a shrug of his shoulders. “I’m more interested in shower songs. .”

The table was set and Jacques took charge of ordering the dishes and distributing the silverware. Half an hour later, when Gertrude and Marie left, he decided to stay in the company of the tourists for a while longer, and when they said goodbye, they agreed to meet to go to the Hippodrome, where he had to take some photos of the races the next day. And if they didn’t have any other engagements, he offered to show them the Parisian night life once his work was done.

Jacques Mornard’s charm, his splendid way of spending money, his car, his knowledge of Parisian night life, and his apartment with a bohemian air just off the boulevard du Montparnasse, where they ended the night drinking a glass of port, turned out to be irresistible, especially for someone like Sylvia Ageloff, who didn’t understand why that young man (who obviously was not even twenty-eight years old, as he said he was) seemed to prefer her over Ruby Weil when it came to directing his flirtatious comments.

The following morning, a phone call from Tom got Jacques out of bed and they agreed to meet for a meal at La Coupole. As they drank an aperitif, Jacques told him all was going according to plan and the only thing left for him to do was ask Sylvia Ageloff to take off her pants. So that everything would work as efficiently as possible, the best thing to do would be to take Ruby far away from Paris, and Tom told him George would take care of it.

“Now let’s eat something, I don’t know when I’ll be able to sit down at a table again.” Tom placed the cigarettes alongside the ash tray. “Orlov showed up.”

Jacques waited. He knew Tom would only tell him what he could.

“He’s in Montreal, requesting a visa to enter the United States. When he came through Paris, he realized we have people watching the U.S. embassy, so he went to the Canadian one. He had more passports on him than a consular office and they were all very good. . I had gotten them for him myself.”

“And how did you learn he was in Canada?”

The waiter arrived and they ordered their food.

“Orlov is the most son-of-a-bitch son of a bitch there ever was in the world.” Tom’s voice was a mixture of anger and admiration. “Just barely arrived, he sent a communiqué to Comrade Stalin with a copy to Yezhov. He proposes a deal: if they don’t take any reprisals against his mother and his mother-in-law, who live in the USSR, he’ll give the U.S. secret services just a little bit of bait and keep the big stuff to himself. And what he knows is very, very big. He could destroy years of our work. But if something happens to one of those women, his wife, his children, or him, a lawyer will be in charge of making a public statement of everything he knows that is already being kept in the vault of a bank in New York.”

“So what do they say in Moscow? Do they think he’ll keep his end of the deal?”

“I don’t know what they’re saying there, but I think so. He knows we can make his mother and his mother-in-law’s lives very difficult and that we can find him wherever he goes. You know what? Because of Yezhov, we’ve lost the most intelligent and cynical devil we had. I think Beria is about to reach an agreement with him.”

“What about the operations in Mexico?”

“That whole operation is being quarantined, until we see how things fall. Comrade Stalin asked me, in the meantime, to go to Spain and try to fix the disaster Orlov left behind.”

“What do I do, then?”

“You’re still the great white hope. The chess game has already begun and the opening moves are usually decisive. . and unrepeatable. You have all my trust, Jacques. Take care of Sylvia. We’ll take care of the rest.”

Sylvia Ageloff looked at Jacques Mornard’s nakedness and thought she was living a fairy tale. She knew that to think like that was tremendously corny, but it was impossible to come to terms with it in any other way. If that young man, the son of diplomats, refined, educated, beautiful, and worldly, was not Prince Charming himself, what else could he be? The passion with which Jacques awoke the rusted springs of her libido had pushed her beyond all imaginable ecstasy, to the degree of accepting his condition that they abstain from discussing politics, the one constant in her loveless militant’s life.

The days spent wandering around Paris, Chartres, and the Loire Valley; the weekend in Brussels, where Jacques showed her the sites of his childhood, although he refused (to Sylvia’s passing annoyance) to take her to his parents’ house; her lover’s limitless understanding (he agreed to take her to Barbizon so she could see, at the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest, the house called Ker Monique that had housed her idealized Lev Davidovich three years before) — all of this, complemented by nights in the most luxurious restaurants and the most popular cafés where bohemian Parisian intellectuals gathered (at the Café de Flore, Jacques showed a gowned Sylvia the table around which Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and other young people who called themselves existentialists drank and argued; at Le Gemy Club, he made her listen to Édith Piaf two tables away from Maurice Chevalier) and, above all, with those predawn hours in which Jacques Mornard’s virility hammered into the center of her life — in just a few weeks, turned her into a marionette whose movements originated from and ended with the fingers of one man.

Just one concern had remained with Sylvia during those days of glory. When she had just arrived in Paris, in mid-July, there had been a commotion in Trotskyist circles over the disappearance of Rudolf Klement, one of Trotsky’s closest assistants and the executive secretary of the planned Fourth Communist International. From Mexico, the Exile had sent his protest to the French police, since the letter in which Klement said he was resigning from the International and Trotskyism was, according to him, a crude hoax by the Soviet intelligence services. For that reason, when Klement’s dismembered corpse was found on August 26 on the banks of the Seine, Sylvia Ageloff fell into a state of depression from which she would only emerge to attend, as an interpreter, the founding meeting of the Trotskyist International in Périgny, in the outskirts of Paris.

In one of his fleeting appearances, Tom advised Jacques to support Sylvia emotionally and politically, to finish forging his dominion over her.

“There’s a problem,” Jacques said, looking at the waters of the Seine that had washed over Klement’s corpse. “Sylvia has to go back to her high school in October. What’s better, let her go or keep her here?”

“Orlov is already in the United States and it looks like he’s going to fulfill his end of the deal. But Beria has stopped special operations until they get Yezhov out of the way. I think the best thing is for you to keep her here and consolidate your position. Is it difficult?” Jacques smiled and shook his head as he threw his cigarette butt in the river. “So Sylvia is at peace, let’s get her some job. It’s better if she keeps herself busy and earns a few francs.”

“Don’t worry, Sylvia won’t make any trouble for us.”

Tom observed Jacques Mornard and smiled.

“You’re my hero. . and you deserve a story I’ve owed you for a long time. Shall we have some vodka?”

They crossed the place du Châtelet toward rue de Rivoli, where some Polish Jews had set up a restaurant specializing in kosher dishes, Ukrainian and Belorussian, served in an abundance that would scare off their French competitors. Once the vodka was served, Tom suggested to Jacques that he allow him to order, and the young man agreed. After having two stiff drinks, Tom lit one of his cigarettes.

“Are you going to tell me how you ended up lame?”

“And two or three other things. . Let’s see, the limp I owe to a Cossack from Denikin’s white army. He slashed me in the calf with a saber and severed my tendons. This was in 1920, when I was head of the Cheka in Bashkina. The doctors thought I wouldn’t walk again, but six months later, all I had left was this intermittent limp that you see. . It had been a year since I’d left the Socialist Revolutionary Party and I’d become a member of the Bolshevik Party, although since the civil war started I was enlisted in the Red Army, always with the idea that I’d be moved on to the Cheka. Do you know why? Because a friend who had entered the Cheka overwhelmed me with what he told me. They were the whip of God, they had no law, and they got two pairs of boots per year, cigarettes, a bag of sausages. They even had cars for work. When I was able to enter, I saw that it was true, the Chekists gave us carte blanche and good shoes! But don’t go thinking it was easy to make my way up, and don’t think that I’m going to tell you the things I did to get my first stripes and make it to chief in a city within one month. . When the war ended, they took me to Moscow, so I could go to the military school, and when I got out, they called me from the Department of Foreigners. As it happened, in 1926, I was working in China, with Chiang Kai-shek. When the coup against the Communists happened in Shanghai, we Soviet advisers fell into disgrace and they started killing us like rabid dogs. They put my boss, Mikhail Borodin, as well as other colleagues, in jail, accusing them of being ‘enemies of the Chinese people,’ and they were torturing them before killing them. I managed to rescue them and get them out of the country, but I had to return to Shanghai to avoid those sons of bitches razing the Soviet consulate to the ground. . That really cost me. Chiang Kai-shek’s men beat me so badly, they left me for dead. Bliat! I was lucky. A Chinese friend picked me up: I traveled for twenty-two days in an oxcart, covered with straw, until they left me for dead at the border. . For rescuing Borodin and the others, they gave me the Order of the Red Flag, which, incidentally, I should now return because they just executed Borodin after accusing him of being ‘an enemy of the Soviet people.’ ” Tom smiled sadly and threw back his vodka. “I had barely recovered when they sent me here, so I could start to penetrate what would be my destiny, the West. Then something happened that you may already suspect. .”

“You met Caridad,” Ramón said, who at some point in the conversation had ceased to be Jacques Mornard.

“She was a different woman. She was seven years older than me, but even when she denied it, had a fit, rolled around on the ground, you could see she had class. I liked her and we began to have a relationship.”

“That still continues.”

“Uh-huh. At that time, she was a little lost, although she sympathized with Maurice Thorez’s Communists. And I was working with them. .”

“Did she join the party because of you?”

“She would have joined anyway. Caridad needed to change her life; she was screaming out for an ideology to center her.”

“Is Caridad a collaborator or does she work with you?”

“She started collaborating with us in 1930, but she became part of the staff in 1934 and did her first work in Asturias, during the miners’ uprising. . That will clarify many things about her that perhaps you didn’t understand before.”

The young man nodded, trying to place certain memories of Caridad’s actions.

“That’s why she returned to Spain when the Popular Front won. And that’s why she’s here, in Paris. Or is it because she’s your lover?”

“In Spain she worked for us, and now she’s here because she will be very useful in this operation and because things there are going from bad to worse. . The Republic is falling to pieces. In a few days, Negrín is going to propose the exit of the International Brigades. He still believes that Great Britain and France can support them, and that with that support they can even win the war. But Great Britain and France are shaking with fear and are courting Hitler and aren’t going to bet a dime on you. Forgive me for bringing the subject up, but I should tell you so you don’t have any illusions. The war is lost. They’re never going to manage to resist until a European war starts, as Negrín wants.”

“And you’re not going to give them any more help?”

“It’s no longer a question of weapons, although we don’t have enough to just go around wasting them. All of Europe is going to deny them everything, even water. And within the Republic, morale is fucked. When Franco decides to take on Barcelona, it’s all over. .”

Ramón perceived the sincerity of Tom’s words. But he refused to give him the pleasure of getting scolded for talking about the fate of his country. He felt how his usual fury gripped him and he preferred to move on to something else.

“You have a wife in Moscow, right?”

Tom smiled.

“Not one, two. .”

“So you picked me because I’m one of Caridad’s sons?”

The adviser was quiet for a few seconds.

“Would you believe me if I said no?. . Ever since I saw you the first time, I knew you were someone special. I’ve been watching you for years. . And I always had a hunch about you. That’s why, when Orlov received the order that we should look for Spaniards suitable for working in secret missions, I immediately thought that you were the best candidate. But something warned me that I shouldn’t discuss you with Orlov or the others. Now I know why. You’re too valuable to be put in just anyone’s hands. .”

Ramón didn’t know whether he should feel flattered or offended at having been chosen like a stud. Besides, despite what the man said, Caridad’s shadow kept lurking in the background of that story. But the possibility of being at the epicenter of a great event based on his own merits gave him a burning satisfaction.

“If you can, tell me something else, just to know. .”

“The less you know, the better.”

“So, well. . are you ever going to tell me your real name?”

Tom smiled and finished swallowing one of the meat pies served as appetizers and drank more vodka, staring at the young man.

“What’s a name, Jacques? Or are you Ramón now? Those dogs you like so much have names. So what? They’re still dogs. Yesterday I was Grigoriev, before I was Kotov, now I’m Tom here and Roberts in New York. Do you know what they call me in the Lubyanka?. . Leonid Alexandrovich. I gave myself that name so they wouldn’t know mine, because they were going to notice that I’m Jewish, and many people in Russia don’t like us Jews. . I am the same and I am different each moment. I am all of them and I am none of them, because I’m just one more person, so very small, in the fight for a dream. A person and a name are nothing. . Look, there’s something very important they taught me when I had just entered the Cheka: a man can be relegated, substituted. The individual is not an unrepeatable unit but rather a concept that is added to and makes up a mass that is real. But man as an individual isn’t sacred and, as such, is expendable. That’s why we’ve charged against all religions, especially Christianity, that state that foolishness about man being made in the likeness of God. That allows us to be ruthless, to let go of the compassion that gives way to pity: the worst sin doesn’t exist. Do you know what that means?. . It’s better that neither you nor I have a real name and that we forget we ever had one. Ivan, Fyodor, Leonid? It’s all the same shit; it’s nothing. Nomina odiosa sunt. The dream is what matters, not the man, and even less the name. No one is important; we’re all expendable. . And if you end up touching revolutionary glory, you’ll do so without having a real name. Perhaps you will never have one. But you will be a formidable part of the greatest dream humanity has ever had.” And, raising his cup of vodka, he toasted, “Here’s to the nameless ones!”

As soon as he opened the door, he had the feeling that something terrible had happened. He thought of young Luis; that an order was canceling the operation or Jacques Mornard’s existence. It had been six months since he had seen her and he had enjoyed that distance. All he felt was relief when Caridad smiled at him as if they had sat down for dinner together the night before. She placed a cigarette at the edge of her mouth as she observed his naked and recently showered torso.

“Malaguanyada bellesa!” she said in Catalan as she caressed her son’s nipple and walked into the apartment.

Ramón couldn’t help getting goose bumps and, with all the delicacy allowed by his anger and his weakness, he moved Caridad’s warm hand away.

“What are you doing here? Didn’t we decide that no—” Without thinking about it, he had also spoken in Catalan.

“He sent me. I know better than you what can and can’t be done.”

Caridad had changed in the months that had passed since their only meeting in Paris. It was as if she had gone back in time and buried the holster-wearing Republican combatant who had walked around Barcelona and who she still dragged along despite the tight clothing and the crocodile-skin shoes. She now dressed with the elegant informality of a bohemian woman; her hair was lighter and the waves were distinct; she wore makeup on her face, her nails were long, and she smelled like expensive perfume. She exerted control over high-heeled shoes and even smoked with different movements. It was possible for Jacques to see in Caridad the last remains of the Caridad Ramón had known many years before, before the fall that led to her depression and suicide attempt.

“How’s it going with your Trotskyist lizard?” she continued in Catalan as she took off the silk foulard covering her neck and shoulders. With measured movements she settled into one of the leather armchairs, in front of the window through which one could see the already ocher-colored tops of boulevard Raspail’s trees.

“As it should,” he said, and went to his room in search of a satin robe.

“Make some coffee, please.”

Without answering, he went to the kitchen to prepare it.

“What does Tom want?” he asked from the kitchen.

“Tom has to stay in Spain, so he sent me. .”

“And what’s the matter with George?”

“He’s in Moscow.”

“Did Yezhov send for him?” Ramón looked into the living room and saw Caridad with a cigarette in one hand and a lighter in the other, her gaze fixed on the window as if she were addressing the panes.

“Yezhov isn’t going to send for anyone anymore. They’ve taken him out of the game. Now Beria is in charge.”

“When did that happen?” Ramón took one step into the living room, his attention divided between the brewing coffee and what Caridad was telling him.

“A week ago. Tom asked me to come and tell you, because things could go into motion at any moment. As soon as Beria cleans up Yezhov’s shit and Comrade Stalin gives the order, we’ll go into action. When Mink comes back, we’ll know more. .”

Ramón felt his muscles tense. It was the best news he could have received.

“Have they told you anything about Orlov?”

“He’s in Washington, singing like a canary. He still presents a threat to many projects, but not for ours. In the end, it wasn’t because of him that we took the other comrades out of Mexico who were already there.”

“The Spaniards?”

Caridad lit her cigarette before responding.

“Yes. With Yezhov, almost the entire New York and Mexican networks went down. A disaster. .”

Ramón Mercader tried to place himself in the new puzzle of betrayals, desertions, purges, and real or fictitious dangers and, as tended to happen to him, he felt lost. The ultimate reasons for Moscow’s decisions were too intricate, and perhaps not even Tom himself could know all of the complexities of those witch hunts. He just reaffirmed the necessity to himself, often repeated by Tom, of discretion as the best immunization to guard himself against betrayals. But in the welter of tensions at play, he noticed more clearly what his mentor had considered to be the value of his actions. It was a contradictory feeling, of fear at the responsibility and joy over knowing he was closer to the great mission. He took the coffee off the flame and started to serve it.

“What about Tom? Will he stay in Spain?” he asked in French.

“Yes, for now.” She continued to speak in Catalan. “There’s not much to do there, but he has to stay until the end. Negrín is fighting with him, but he can’t live without him. . the Republican army keeps sliding back. Spain is lost, Ramón.”

“Don’t say that to me, goddammit!” he yelled, again in French, and the coffee spilled on one of the small plates. “And don’t speak to me in Catalan!”

Caridad didn’t flinch and he waited to calm down. He didn’t know if it was the news of Spain or the uncertainty this added to Luis’s fate — weeks before he had crossed the border to join the Republican army — or simply his mother’s malevolent insistence on stirring up the past and poking at the cracks in Jacques Mornard’s identity. He finished serving the coffee and entered the living room carrying the cups on a tray. He sat down in front of her, taking care that his robe not open.

“What does Tom think will happen?”

“Franco’s troops are going for Catalonia,” she answered, now in Spanish. “And he thinks they’re not going to be able to stop them. Ever since these French faggots and those shitty Brits signed that pact with Hitler and Mussolini, not only did Czechoslovakia get fucked but we also got fucked: no one can help us anymore. . Estem ben fotuts, noi. T’asseguro que estem ben fotuts. .”

“So what are the Soviets going to do?”

“They can’t do anything. If they meddle in Spain, a war will start that would be the end of the Soviet Union. .”

Ramón listened to Caridad’s argument. In some way he agreed with her, but it was painful for him to confirm that the Soviets were withdrawing as Hitler swallowed up Czechoslovakia and gave Franco more and more support. Perhaps the Soviet tactic of allowing the sacrifice of the Republic was the only possible one, but it was still cruel. The party, at least, had accepted it, and La Pasionaria herself said that if the Republic had to be lost, it would be lost: they could not compromise the fate of the USSR, the great homeland of communism. . But what was going to happen to those men, Communists or mere Republicans, who had fought, obeyed, and believed for two and a half years for nothing? Would they be left at the mercy of the pro-Franco forces? Where could young Luis be fighting right now? Ramón preferred not to ask his questions out loud. He observed how Caridad finished her coffee and returned it to the tray. Then he leaned over and tasted his. It had gone cold.

“Tom doesn’t want me to talk about Spain. Jacques isn’t interested in Spain.” He tried to pull himself together.

“Jacques reads the papers, doesn’t he? What’s he going to say when his Trotskyist girlfriend tells him that Stalin is going to make a pact with Hitler, as well as with the French and the English? Because that’s what that renegade louse is writing in that fucking bulletin of his.”

“Jacques would tell her the same thing: Change the subject; that’s not his problem.”

Caridad looked at him with that green and piercing intensity that he had always feared so much.

“Be careful. That woman is a fanatic, and Trotsky is her god.”

Jacques smiled. He had a card up his sleeve to defeat Caridad.

“You’re mistaken. I’m her god, and Trotsky, if anything, is her prophet.”

“You’ve become sarcastic and subtle, kid,” she said, smiling.

Caridad stood up and started to place the foulard over her shoulders. Ramón was pulled between wanting her to stay and wanting her to go. Speaking in Catalan again had been like visiting a closed-off region of himself that he hadn’t wanted to enter but, once inside, provoked a sense of comfortable belonging. Besides, he knew she was in touch with Montse and, above all, with young Luis, and perhaps even knew something about África. But now was the least appropriate time to roll over before her and show his weaknesses. It was the first time that he had felt truly superior to her and he didn’t want to squander the feeling.

Caridad’s visit left him full of expectations regarding the orders that could come from Moscow, but also the bitter taste of the fate of the Republic that, as much as he tried, Jacques Mornard could not remove from the mind of Ramón Mercader. Because of that, on that early December afternoon, he had to call on all his discipline to bury Ramón’s passions deep inside himself when Sylvia asked him to accompany her to see some U.S. comrades who had fought in Spain, members of the international troops evacuated by the government of the Republic, who were now in Paris.

“What do I have to do with those people?” he asked, making clear his annoyance at the proposal.

Sylvia, surprised and perhaps even offended, tried to convince him.

“Those people were fighting against fascism, Jacques. Although there are many beliefs I don’t share with them, I respect them and I admire them. The majority of them didn’t even know how to march when they went to Spain, but they’ve been able to fight for all of us.”

“I didn’t ask them to fight for me,” he managed to say.

“They didn’t ask you, either. But they know that many things are decided in Spain, that the rise of fascism is a problem for everyone, you included.”

Winter had come quickly and the air was sharp. Jacques took her by the arm and made her enter a café. They sat down at a table to the side, and before the waiter could approach them, Jacques shouted:

“Two coffees!” He focused on Sylvia. “What did we agree?”

The girl took off her glasses, steamed up by the change in temperature, and rubbed the lenses with the edge of her skirt. At that moment Jacques realized he was afraid of himself. How could she be so ugly, so stupid, so much of an imbecile as to tell him who was fighting for what? How long could he stand to be next to a being who disgusted him?

“I’m sorry, my love. I didn’t mean to—”

“It doesn’t seem like it.”

“It’s just that it really is important. In Spain, a lot is decided and Stalin is again letting Hitler and the fascists get their way. Stalin never wanted or allowed the Spaniards to make the revolution that would have saved them and. .”

“What are you talking about?” Jacques asked, and he immediately understood that he had made a mistake.

Jacques simply couldn’t care what Sylvia was talking about and he made himself regain his control. Neither those loathsome accusations nor Sylvia Ageloff’s ugliness would get the best of him. They were served their coffee and the break helped him regain his composure.

“Sylvia, if you want, go see those saviors of humanity and talk to them about Stalin and your beloved Trotsky. You have every right to. But don’t involve me in it. I’m just not interested. Can you understand that for once, dammit?”

The woman shrunk into herself and sank into a long silence; finally she took a sip of coffee. Two months before, Sylvia’s insistence on talking about politics had caused the couple’s first serious argument. That afternoon, Jacques had accompanied her to the villa of the Trotskyist Alfred Rosmer, in Périgny, so the girl could serve as the secretary at the meeting that, according to Sylvia herself, had signified the abortion rather than the birth of the Trotskyist International. As they were returning to Paris, after castigating her and making her promise she wouldn’t speak of those matters again, Jacques took advantage of the situation to try to make her give up her return trip to New York at the beginning of the new school year and to drop the hint — as if he were placing a noose around Sylvia’s neck — that they should be formally engaged. But political passion was once again betraying Sylvia, who, fearful of her lover’s reaction, murmured:

“Yes, my love. I appreciate you letting me go. But if you don’t want me to, I won’t go.”

Jacques smiled. Things were returning to normal. His preeminence had been reestablished and he understood that he could be very cruel with that defenseless being. Further still, he found it satisfying to do so. Something malignant within him revealed itself in that relationship and he was discovering how much he enjoyed the possibility of bending wills, of generating fear, of exercising power over other people until they crawled in front of him. Would he ever have the chance to exercise that control over Caridad? Though he didn’t have a name or a homeland, he was a man gifted with hate, faith, and, in addition, a power he was going to use as long as possible.

“Of course I want you to go, if that makes you happy,” he said, satisfied, magnanimous. “I have to go shopping to send my parents some presents for Christmas. What do you want me to give you?”

Sylvia relaxed. She looked at him and in her myopic eyes were gratitude and love.

“Don’t worry about me, dear.”

“I’ll see what I find to surprise you,” he said, and took her hand atop the table and forced her to lean toward him to give her a kiss on the lips.

Jacques felt the woman was overcome with emotion and told himself that he should administer his power carefully or he could kill her with an overdose.

Less than two years later, Ramón Mercader would come to understand that the tests of psychological strength he was subjected to during the last bitter weeks of 1938 and the first of 1939 were to be a grotesque rehearsal for the worst experiences that he went through at the most critical moment of his life, and it required all his powers of resistance in order to prevent a total breakdown.

Although the news arriving from Spain throughout December sketched out the magnitude of the disaster, Jacques Mornard managed to maintain a façade of distant political skepticism. With greater vehemence, he avoided the discussions of politics before him and on one occasion left a meeting when those present insisted on steeping themselves in the unpleasant and silly matters of the war, fascism, and French politics.

In the solitude of his apartment, however, he read all of the press articles that could reveal something to him about the situation in Spain and listened to the radio news programs as if looking for a ray of hope amid the shadows. But each piece of news was a knife through the heart of his illusions. There he gave free rein to his contained anger, his impotence, and screamed curses, kicked the furniture, and swore to take revenge. Those outbursts, nearly hysterical, left him exhausted and showed him the weakness of Jacques Mornard against the passions of Ramón Mercader, but they reaffirmed his disdain for everything that hinted of fascism, the bourgeoisie, and the betrayal of the proletariat’s ideals. His hidden desires to change places with his brother Luis, who was still fighting with the remains of the Popular Army amid the chaos and the capriciousness of Spanish politicians, turned into an obsession for him, and he swore to himself that when the time came to act against the enemies, he would be implacable and ruthless, like the enemies of his dream were being with that attempt to build a more just world.

The lack of news from Tom added to his uncertainty. He feared for the fate of his mentor, so prone to involving himself and transgressing limits. If they killed him or made him a prisoner in Spain, all of their efforts and the structure they had helped put together could come crashing down, as had already occurred with other operative lines. Among his worries was also the fact that the time for Sylvia’s return was upon them. The girl said she had to return to her job the second week of February and had set the first day of the month as her departure date. Although Jacques knew that a little bit of pressure could dissuade her, he felt that living with Sylvia any longer would require an effort he wasn’t prepared for and feared that the woman’s sickliness could make him explode at any moment.

The reappearance of George Mink in the second week of January brought some relief to Jacques Mornard’s anxiety. They met at the Montparnasse cemetery and, on learning the details of the meeting, Jacques thought that he would never completely understand the Soviets: the night before it had snowed relentlessly, and this was supposed to be the coldest day of the year.

As they had agreed, Mink was waiting for him next to the tomb of Prince D’Achery, Duke of San Donnino, and Madame Viez, in the seventh division of the avenue d’Ouest. The snow had made a compact layer of ice over which he had to walk carefully. The cemetery, as could be expected, was deserted, and upon seeing Mink’s dark figure amid that white landscape, flanked by two lions who made up the prince’s singular mausoleum, Jacques told himself that nothing could seem more suspicious than a meeting at that place in that weather.

“Good day, Jacques, my friend.”

“ ‘Good day’? Wouldn’t you like to have a coffee somewhere warm?”

“It’s just that I love cemeteries, did you know? For years I’ve been living in a world where no one knows who’s who, what’s real and what’s a lie, and, less still, how long you’ll be alive. . Here, at least, you feel surrounded by a great certainty, the greatest certainty. . Besides, what we have today isn’t cold, not real cold. .”

“Please, George. Does it have to be here?”

“Did you know that when Trotsky and Natalia Sedova met, they used to come here to read Baudelaire in front of his tomb?”

“Even in this shitty cold?”

“Baudelaire’s tomb is over there. Do you want to see it?”

They left the frozen cemetery and walked to place Denfert-Rochereau, where Jacques had had coffee before. Even inside the café they picked, Jacques kept his coat on, since he now felt as if the cold were coming from inside of him.

Mink had returned four days before with orders he had received from Beria personally. Besides, as he expected, in the embassy in Paris they also had guidelines sent by Tom from Spain.

“What have you heard about Tom? The French are threatening to close the border.”

“That’s no problem for Tom. He always gets out.”

“What are the orders? What do I have to do? Should Sylvia leave?”

“Let her go. But with something to bring her back to you. Promise her marriage.”

Jacques breathed a sigh of relief at that authorization.

“So what do I tell her? That I’ll go see her, that she should come in the summer. .?”

“Don’t assure her of anything. Tell her you’ll tell her your decision in a letter. The order from Moscow could come tomorrow or in six months, and you have to be ready for that moment. When Tom returns, he’ll organize things. Beria wants him to focus only on this work from now on. Stalin’s orders. Incidentally, Stalin himself named the operation: Utka.”

“Utka?”

“Utka, duck. . And any method would be good to hunt him: poisoning his food or his water, an explosion in his house or car, strangulation, a knife in the back, a blow to the head, a gunshot to the base of his skull.” Mink took a breath and concluded: “Even an attack by an armed group or a bomb dropped from the air haven’t been ruled out.”

Jacques asked himself into which square of that chess game he would fit. It was obvious that something was finally starting to take shape, although the reasons for the slowness with which the operation was moving escaped him.

“What did they say in Moscow when they brought down Yezhov?”

Mink smiled and drank his tea.

“Nothing. In Moscow, those things aren’t discussed. People were so afraid of Yezhov that they won’t be cured for a long time.”

Jacques looked toward the place. He couldn’t be bothered to face the cold again to return to his apartment, where Sylvia was waiting for him. He understood that he needed action. At that exact moment, where was África? What was his brother Luis doing? What adventures had Tom embarked on? He didn’t have any alternative but to wait, inactive, acting like a lovestruck man who doesn’t want his lover to leave.

“When will we see each other again?”

“If there’s nothing new, when Tom returns. If you have anything urgent to ask, go look for me at the cemetery. I always pass by there.”

In the days prior to Sylvia’s departure, Jacques behaved in a way that Josefino and Cicero, his Malakhovka professors, would have admired. Overcoming his low spirits and his desire to be far from that farce, he exploited the relief getting rid of that woman represented to him to the utmost and showered her with attention and gifts for her and her sisters, and he had the fortitude to make love to her every day until an ecstatic and satisfied Sylvia returned to New York. Jacques had done his job and was happy with the space and freedom he’d recovered.

From Spain, by contrast, only news of the painful death rattles of the war came. Barcelona’s fall seemed to be the final act, and the reports that Franco had entered a city that cheered him filled Ramón Mercader with bitterness. Starting at the end of January, the French papers were picking up, with various degrees of alarm, the news of the scattering of combatants, officers, politicians, and desperate people fearful of reprisals who had leaped to cross the border. There was already talk of hundreds of thousands of people, hungry and without any resources, who would burst the logistical capacities of the forces of order and the possibility of being taken in by the French. Some politicians, at the height of cynicism, recognized that perhaps it would have been better to help them win the war than to be forced now to receive them, feed them, and dress them for who knew how long. The right-wing newspapers, meanwhile, called out their solution: Send them to the colonies. People like that were what was needed in Guyana, in the Congo, and in Senegal.

Changed by Ramón’s passions, Jacques Mornard noticed that he needed to break out of his inertia, even at the price of sacrificing his discipline. He knew what was at risk if he disobeyed strict orders to stay far away from anything having to do with Spain, but the anger and the desperation won him over. Besides, Tom still hadn’t shown up, and if he did, he would have no reason to tell him. So, on February 6, he took his car, his cameras, and his journalistic credentials and headed toward Le Perthus, the border town that had the largest concentration of refugees.

At noon on the eighth, when the Belgian journalist Jacques Mornard managed to reach the closest point to the border that the army officers and the French police allowed, the malignant stench of defeat welcomed him. He confirmed that, from the promontory where the press reporters were, he wouldn’t be recognized by any of the people who, already on French territory, were led like sheep by the Senegalese soldiers who were in charge of watching and controlling them. The scene ended up being more pathetic than he was capable of imagining. A human wave, covered with rags, traveling with a few cars or hanging on to the rickety carts pulled by starving horses, or simply on foot, dragging suitcases and bundles in which they had stuffed all of their lives’ belongings, accepted in silence orders that were incomprehensible to them, shouted in French and punctuated by warning gestures and threatening truncheons. Those were people launched into an exodus of biblical proportions, pushed only by the will to survive; beings weighed down with an enormous list of frustrations and tangible losses with gazes from which even dignity had disappeared. Jacques knew that many of those men and women were the same ones who had sung and danced for every Republican victory, the same ones who for a variety of reasons had placed themselves behind the barricades that periodically went up in Barcelona, the same ones who had dreamed of victory, revolution, democracy, and justice, and had, on many occasions, ruthlessly practiced revolutionary violence. Now defeat had reduced them to the condition of pariahs without a dream to hold on to. Many were wearing the uniforms of the Popular Army and, their weapons handed over, were silently following the Senegalese orders (“Reculez! Reculez!” the Africans insisted, enjoying their bit of power) without caring about maintaining a minimum of composure. Jacques learned from a British correspondent, recently arrived from Figueres, that the majority of children escaping from Spain were arriving sick with pneumonia and many of them would die if they didn’t receive immediate medical attention. But the only order the French had was to take all weapons away and lead the refugees, big and small, to some camps enclosed by barbed wire, where they would remain until each one’s fate was decided. A feeling of suffocation had started to take over him and he wasn’t surprised when tears blurred his vision. He gave a half turn and walked away, trying to calm himself down. He forced himself to think that it had been a predictable but not a definitive defeat. That revolutions must also accept their setbacks and prepare themselves for the next attack. That the sacrifice of those defenseless beings, and of those who — like his brother Pablo — had died during those almost three years of war, barely represented a minimal offering before the altar of a history that, in the end, would vindicate them with the glorious victory of the world’s proletariat. The future and the struggle constituted the only hope at that moment of frustration. But he discovered that the slogans weren’t helping him and that at some moment he couldn’t pinpoint in that piercing afternoon, he had lost Jacques Mornard in some corner of his consciousness and had again become, fully and deeply, Ramón Mercader del Río, the Spanish Communist. It was satisfying to him to know that at least Ramón had a higher mission to fulfill in that ruthless world tightly divided between revolutionaries and fascists, between the exploited and exploiters, and that scenes like this one, far from damaging him, strengthened him: his hate was becoming more compact, armored and complete. I am Ramón Mercader and I am full of hate! he yelled in his head. When he turned around to look for the last time at the wretched scene of the debacle that underpinned his convictions, he felt how his cameras moved and remembered that that idiot Jacques Mornard had forgotten to take a single image of the failure. It was at that moment that a French journalist, almost with disgust, pronounced those words that were to change the shape of his smile:

“What a disgrace! They weren’t able to win and now they come to hide here!”

The blow Ramón served him was brutal. Of the four teeth he knocked out, two fell on the damp earth and two were lost in the stomach of the unfortunate journalist, who would surely ask himself, for the rest of his life, what terrible thing he had said to provoke the ire of that unleashed madman who, to top it all, had disappeared like a breath of air.

18

Of all the battles he’d waged, which did he remember as the most arduous? Those with Lenin in the days of the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks? The tense and dramatic ones of 1917, when the revolution’s birth or abortion was decided? The furious battles of the civil war, always doomed to fratricidal violence? The cruel ones for succession and for control of the party? The ones for physical and political survival in those days of exile and marginalization? And who had been his most fearful adversary: Lenin, Plekhanov, Stalin? When Lev Davidovich looked at the blank page over which he didn’t dare to move his pen, he thought, no, the battle had never been as arduous nor the opponent as tricky, for he had never seen himself forced to fight for something so essential.

Ever since Natalia Sedova left the Casa Azul and he took refuge with the bodyguards in the cabin in the hills of San Miguel Regla, under the pretext of the need for physical exercise, but so pressed to gain distance from the Casa Azul in order to stew in the solitude of his desperation and shame, he had been looking for the most elegant way to initiate a reconciliation with his wife with the knowledge that his dignity should be the first piece he would have to sacrifice in the service of his supreme objective.

The feeling of guilt that had been absent until then had unleashed itself, and not only because of the damage he had done to Natalia. During that infamous month of June 1937, the lives of two of his dearest and most constant friends had been devoured by Stalin’s fury, while he, submerged in the renewed waves of his libido, dedicated the best part of his intelligence to engineering ways to mock Diego and Natalia’s presence, to run behind Frida to Cristina Kahlo’s nearby house, on Calle Linares, the site of their sexual encounters. Van Heijenoort and the young bodyguards had been made to serve as facilitators of the meetings, lending themselves to the fictions that Lev Davidovich’s feverish brain devised: from hunting and fishing to trips to the mountains, even as far as the search for documents that he had to track down personally, he had used every excuse. For his protectors, the situation had proven to be agonizing, since they knew the physical risks of each escapade and, above all, in a scandalous venting of an affair that could destroy the Exile’s marriage and affect his prestige as a revolutionary generously welcomed in the Casa Azul, or even could provoke a violent reaction from Rivera. But he had decided not to think about anything else, and was concerned only with giving in to his cravings and receiving Frida’s uninhibited sexuality, capable of revealing to him, at his fifty-seven years, means and practices the existence of which he had barely suspected. Never as in those days of lust had madness spun around Lev Davidovich’s mind so forcefully and when he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw the image of a man whom he barely recognized and who, nonetheless, continued to be none other than himself.

On the afternoon of June 11, after a morning round with Frida, he had dedicated himself to documenting one of the darkest passages of his relationship with Stalin: the day in 1907, exactly thirty years before, when they had met in London and, perhaps, when the war between them had commenced. Natalia, who already perceived the density of deceit in the air, entered the room and, without saying a word, placed the newspaper over the page he was writing. Without looking up, Lev Davidovich read the headline and felt the anguish growing in his chest as he devoured the report taken from Pravda. In Moscow, the case had been initiated against eight high-ranking Red Army officers, led by Marshal Tukhachevsky, the second in command in the military hierarchy, and the trial had been set for sentencing. The court judging them, the dispatch relayed, was a special section of the Supreme Court and was made up by “the cream of the crop of the glorious Red Army.”

The former commissar of war noticed that, in contrast to the trials carried out in the previous year, Tukhachevsky and the other generals were not accused of Trotskyism but rather of being members of an organization in the service of the Third Reich. Even when it was already known that the old officers of the Red Army were in Stalin’s sight, Lev Davidovich had not been able to imagine that, unless they had more solid proof of the existence of the conspiracy, the Grave Digger would dare to decapitate the country’s military cupola at a moment in which war seemed inevitable. He knew that ever since Tukhachevsky’s substitution as deputy commissar of defense two months before, many detentions must have been ordered among the high officers; furthermore, he was sure that the fate of those soldiers had been decided when it was made public that the administrative and political person responsible for the army, the old Bolshevik Gamarnik, had committed suicide, while four of his advisers mysteriously disappeared.

The next morning, Moscow reported the summary execution of the accused, who, they assured, had confessed their treason. Stupefaction and pain had paralyzed Lev Davidovich: he knew that perhaps Stalin was right in fearing that the leaders of the army could plot a conspiracy to remove him from power, but it was inadmissible to accuse those men — military mainstays of the revolution from its darkest days — of being the agents of a fascist power, especially when the list of prisoners was headed by, precisely, Communists and Jews such as generals Yakir, Eidemann, and Feldmann. But if in reality the soldiers had conspired, why hadn’t they acted? Why had they delayed the coup when they were warned that they were sought after?

Never before had Lev Davidovich felt fear like that for the future of the revolution and the country, at the same time that he was convinced that if Stalin dared to take that mortal leap, it was because he had Hitler’s promise in hand to respect the borders of the USSR in case of war. If that was not the case, the fascist leaders had to think that Stalin was definitively crazy to accept the story of a conspiracy that no rational being would believe, since the mere fact of placing three high-ranking officers of Jewish origins as the heads of a pro-German plot would have been incredible even for the Nazis themselves, the supposed friends of the traitors. The inevitable conclusion had been that, with that process, Stalin was taking another step in his rapprochement with Hitler, whom he had denounced so many times since the electoral rise of Fascism.

For several days Lev Davidovich had ceased to look for Frida in order to take refuge in the sure comfort of his Natasha, for whom the death of Tukhachevsky, like so many others who stirred in her memory, were losses of people for whom she felt affection. How many more was Stalin going to kill? Natalia asked him one night as they drank coffee in their room, and he offered his response to her: as long as there remained one Bolshevik with the memory of the past, the henchmen would have work. The war to the death was no longer against the opposition but against history. To do it right, Stalin had to kill all those who knew Lenin, and those who knew Lev Davidovich, and, of course, those who knew Stalin. . He had to silence all those who had been witnesses to his failures, to the genocide of the collectivization, of the murdering madness of his work camps. . and then he would still have to remove from the world those who had helped annihilate the opposition, the past, history, and also annoying witnesses. . “And Sergei? Liova? Why hasn’t he already come for us?” the woman then asked herself. He saw that Natalia Sedova’s eyes had the vague glimmer of pain and felt in his chest the pressure of the shame over his weaknesses and refused to tell her that his sons were as condemned to die as the two of them. Perhaps tormented by the pain, at that moment he committed one of the most unforgivable slips of his life and asked Natalia if she was afraid of dying. From dull blue, her eyes went to the color of steel, like that of a wet dagger, and he felt a fear that he had never had of anything in his life: no, she didn’t fear death, the woman said. She worried only that respect and trust might die.

Feeling himself drowning in shame, Lev Davidovich thought the time had come to put an end to his relationship with Frida.

Days later, Lev Davidovich would tell himself that another piece of news, this time arriving from Spain, had been the one to blame for delaying the decision to cut off his clandestine affair. The confirmation that his old colleague Andreu Nin had disappeared after being detained, accused of charges similar to those used in Moscow, threatened to drown him in depression and prevented him from overcoming his compulsive need for the voracious sex of Diego Rivera’s wife.

The story of Nin’s detention and disappearance was full of contradictions and, as usual, challenged credulity. Through various sources, the Exile managed to establish that on June 16 the police had taken the Catalan Communist out of Barcelona to Valencia. The last confirmed news placed him, on the night of June 22, at a special prison in Alcalá de Henares, from where, according to the official press, he had been bizarrely rescued by a German commando, charged with taking him to fascist territory and, later, of sending him to Berlin.

The accusation that Nin was one of Franco’s spies was crude and unsustainable: Stalin’s men in Spain hadn’t even concerned themselves too much with the believability of their accusations. The disappearance and almost certain death of that friend who more than ten years earlier Lev Davidovich had met in Moscow and who had joined the opposition without ever renouncing his own political criteria as a convinced and anarchic Communist could only be due to the shocking capacity Nin had to resist the tortures of the GPU without signing the statements that, with all certainty, were placed before him. A fighter like Nin would’ve known, from the beginning of his Calvary, that his fate was decreed, but that the prestige of his party and the lives of his comrades, accused of promoting a coup d’état, depended on his lips. So conquering Stalin must have become his last obsession as he was tortured and he refused to sign the condemnation of the Spanish left and of his own memory.

The image of a young, always war-like Tukhachevsky who had become one of the mainstays in the middle of the civil war of the recently created Red Army, and Andreu Nin’s awkward and passionate image, that of a man dazzled by the Soviet reality but always questioning it, would accompany Lev Davidovich to the burial of his last grasp of youth. Yet after the first erotic encounters, Frida had started to send him signals that could be read as holding back that the man, drunk with sex, had refused or been incapable of understanding, even when it hadn’t gone unnoticed that, after the first meetings, she had tried to evade him (her political and sexual curiosity perhaps satisfied, her possible revenge against Rivera’s infidelities fulfilled), causing him to pursue her with even more fury. When at last they lay down in intimacy, she tried to finish quickly as he confessed over and over again how much he loved her, desired her, dreamed about her.

The tension went up like a barricade inside the Casa Azul, and it was Natalia Sedova who, at the beginning of July, lit the fuse when, without consulting with anyone, she moved to an apartment in the city center, giving Rivera the excuse that she preferred to be alone as she underwent medical treatment for “feminine problems.” Faced with that situation, Frida must have understood that their foolishness was beginning to reach the limits of what could be controlled, and that same afternoon had entered the guest room and attacked her lover along the flank he least expected: they had to clarify things once and for all, and he should make a definitive decision: was he leaving his wife or staying with her? The challenge had stirred the man, but he responded without thinking and he told her he had never thought of making such a choice. With difficult steps, Frida approached him and caressed her lover’s face and, calling him Piochitas — from the name Mexicans give to a goatee — told him the game had ended. It was no longer fun and they could hurt other people who didn’t deserve it, and she didn’t say it because of Diego, an alcoholic pig, nor because of herself, whom Diego had turned into an untamed pig; she said it because of Natalia, who was a queen.

At that moment Lev Davidovich had understood that perhaps he would never manage to know through exact science what chemical reaction had burned inside Frida to make her throw herself into their affair. He would ask himself whether he had been used just as an instrument of revenge against Rivera (was it possible that the painter hadn’t noticed anything?); whether his historic halo might have motivated the young woman’s dazzling curiosity; even whether pity at seeing him suffer before her sister’s rejection had convinced Frida, who was so liberal, that indulging the sexual appetite of a man who was twice her age was just an act of enjoyable pity that didn’t impact her relaxed morality at all. But when Frida’s perfume had gone from the air in the room, Lev Davidovich managed to smile. Had the game really ended? Only for Frida. It was now up to him to clean up the filth dammed up in his spirit and try to salvage, with the least amount of damage possible, Natalia Sedova’s trust and love. But thirty years of companionship warned him that he would have to deal with an indomitable animal who devoted the same vehemence to her solidarity as to her hate, to her love as to rejection. I’m scared, he thought.

A few days later, observing the arid mountains of San Miguel from his window, a Lev Davidovich already resolved to sacrifice his dignity and overcome his fears took a piece of paper and began the most intense and strange correspondence, of up to two letters per day, in which he recognized his emotional and biological dependence on his wife. When she left the Casa Azul, Natalia had left him a note capable of wounding him like a dagger. She had looked at herself in the mirror, she said, and seen the death of her charms at the hands of old age. She didn’t reproach him for anything, but she stated that what he had done was an irreversible act. Lev Davidovich had understood the meaning of the message: that her old age was coming at the end of thirty years of a life in common, throughout which Natasha had lived by and for him. At that moment he began to write pleas, often signed as “Your faithful old dog,” a sort of increasingly plaintive knocking on the doors of a heart he was trying to reconquer with memories of yesterday and sentimental and physical needs of the present, expressed at times in language so direct that he surprised himself. . When at last he received a letter from her, concerned by the pessimism that prevented her husband from focusing on his work, he knew the battle was won and that the victor had been his dear Natasha’s sense of kindness: “You will continue to carry me on your shoulders, Nata, as you have carried me throughout your life,” he wrote to her, and on the following day, with the inevitable entourage, he took the road to the capital in search of the woman of his life.

An event in Paris, of which Liova informed him, attracted his attention when they returned to the Casa Azul. Ignace Reiss, the nom de guerre of one of the heads of the Soviet secret service in Europe, had approached Lev Sedov to communicate his intention to desert. The young man, with understandable caution, held two meetings with the agent, who told him, among other horrors, that Yezhov and several soldiers designated by Stalin had been the ones who, in agreement with the Germans, fabricated the false accusations used to try the heads of the Red Army. According to Reiss, the purge of soldiers, which was still in progress, was not only necessary for Stalin’s political security but also part of the collaboration sustaining Stalinism and Nazism, under the cover of their respective hates, and had the objective of facilitating the alliance with which they would arrive at the war. The secret services were playing the most active role, for the time being, in that cooperative effort, and what most horrified Reiss was the betrayal that such a machination represented for all the revolutionaries in the world who were enlisting in the antifascist struggle along with the USSR — for the Communists who, despite what happened in Moscow, still obeyed.

As Trotsky read the reports about Reiss, the Exile felt growing disgust at the betrayal of the most sacred principles. And despite the disgraces that Reiss had surely committed due to his profession, he couldn’t help but feel admiration for a man who, he knew well, had placed his neck under the executioner’s axe. His greatest fear, however, was that Reiss’s break had implicated Liova and the Fourth International, and that when in anger Stalin let loose his henchmen, the Trotskyists were going to once again be his scapegoat.

Lev Davidovich didn’t have to wait much longer to find out the denouement of that story that would end up touching the very center of his life: on September 6, Liova gave him the news that, a few days earlier, Reiss had been killed on a highway close to Lausanne. The police suspected that the committee for the repatriation of Russian citizens, one of the NKVD fronts created in Paris, was responsible. That same day, by a parallel route, he received another letter, sent by his collaborator Rudolf Klement, in which he commented that Reiss had assured him that one of the plans of the Stalinist police was the elimination of the Trotskyists outside the USSR and that Lev Sedov topped the list. Thus, Klement advised the evacuation of the young man, who was already on the edge of a physical and nervous breakdown due to the political and economic tensions under which he was carrying out his work, exacerbated by personal complications ever since his wife, Jeanne, had declared herself a supporter of her ex-husband Raymond Molinier’s political faction. Because of that, following a conversation with Natalia in which they weighed the options for the young man’s future, Lev Davidovich wrote to Liova, asking his opinion regarding Klement’s fears, before proposing any alternative measures to protect his life.

As they waited for Liova’s response, the long-awaited verdict of the Dewey commission finally arrived. As Lev Davidovich had foreseen, Dewey and the rest of the members of the jury had reached the conclusion that the Moscow trials of August 1936 and January 1937 had been fraudulent and, as a result, declared him and his son innocent. Excited, he sent a telegram to Liova, demanding that he get as much publicity for the results of the counterproceeding as he could, and that he gather journalists and reporters to initiate a propaganda offensive. At the same time Lev Davidovich would devote himself to preparing the articles to accompany the text of the sentence in a special edition of the Bulletin.

Just a few months later, Lev Davidovich would try to clarify the ways in which his personal life and history became intertwined in those moments until they drove him to his greatest tragedy, because in the middle of the storm of optimism unleashed by the verdict they received Liova’s response. The young man (like his father) considered that for the time being he was irreplaceable in Paris and could not delegate his duties to Klement, who was already tasked with coordinating the Fourth International, or to Étienne, his most responsible collaborator. It was true, he confessed, that he had financial problems, that he was living in a cold attic, that his relationship with Jeanne had become complicated, and that what had happened in Moscow had affected him more than he originally thought it would, since practically all of the men he had grown up surrounded by and who had been his role models had gone down one by one after admitting to horrible betrayals. Natalia and Lev Davidovich again discussed Liova’s fate, and at that moment it seemed to them unfair to ask him to come to Mexico, almost certainly without his wife, to shut himself away, since, if he didn’t hide, he would just be substituting one danger for another. Lev Davidovich then told his wife that he trusted in Liova’s ability to take care of himself, and that perhaps Stalin would think that killing him would be excessive. “Nothing is excessive for him,” Natalia commented. Despite agreeing with her husband, she would have preferred to have the boy closer to them.

It was around that time that a certain Josep Nadal showed up in Coyoacán. The man said he was Catalan, a POUM militant, and a very close friend of Andreu Nin. In light of the repression unleashed in Spain against his party, Nadal had preferred to get as far away as possible. Since he was asking for an interview with Comrade Trotsky, van Heijenoort held a meeting with him and, upon returning, confessed to Lev Davidovich that he had felt a stinging in his back as he talked to the man. The deaths of Nin and Reiss warned Lev Davidovich and his inner circle of the new Stalinist offensive outside the USSR, and they all knew that any humble Spanish worker, any German refugee, any French intellectual, could be the black angel sent by Moscow. But, motivated by what the Catalan seemed to know about Nin’s disappearance, Lev Davidovich decided to see him on the condition that Jean van Heijenoort be present during the interview.

The Catalan ended up being a loquacious man with sharp reasoning who, despite his excessive love of cigarettes, captivated Lev Davidovich. According to him, there was no doubt: Nin was dead and his murderers had been directed by the men in Moscow who were imposing their rule on the Republican alliance. The comments he had heard pointed at a Soviet adviser named Kotov and the French Communist André Marty, famous for his brutality, as the organizers of the operation charged with kidnapping Nin and eliminating him when he refused to sign confessions of his collaboration with Franco’s supporters.

Nadal, who, due to his proximity to Nin, was familiar with many political secrets, would confirm to Lev Davidovich several of his suspicions about Moscow’s strategy in Spain. For him, it was clear that Stalin was playing for the domination and eventual sacrifice of the Republic with several cards, and one of them was financial. After getting Negrín, in his days as the minister of finance, to authorize the Spanish treasury to be moved to Soviet territory, an enormous amount of money seemed to have evaporated and now new payments in cash were demanded of the Republican government for military assistance. The weapons received, Nin had told him, were sufficient for the Republic to resist in the short term but insufficient to stand up to the fascists supported by Hitler and Mussolini, and the real reason that they didn’t sell more war matériel to the government was that Stalin wasn’t interested in a Republican army that was well enough equipped to aspire to victory; once they reached that point, they could end up being uncontrollable. . But since the financial yoke didn’t guarantee control, Stalin had also ordered the political manipulation of the Republic.

The offensive against the POUM’s “Trotskyists,” the anarchists, syndicalist groups, and even the Socialists who did not agree with Moscow’s policies had begun in 1936, but the great repression had started after the events in Barcelona in May. According to Nadal, the results of that operation could already be felt; the Communists now dominated the three sectors that most interested Stalin: domestic security, the army, and propaganda. Meanwhile, the Comintern advisers and the men from the GPU were working out in the open, deciding political positions and directing the repression. The two most visible representatives of the Communist International had been, until a few weeks before, the Frenchman Marty and the Argentinean Vittorio Codovilla, the former in charge of the International Brigades and the latter in control of the Communist Party. The hatefulness of these men was so palpable that Marty was called “the Butcher from Albacete” because of his cruelty with the international volunteers, and Codovilla was such a dictator that the International itself had to replace him with the more discreet Palmiro Togliatti.

Lev Davidovich listened to the POUMist’s statement without asking any questions. Nadal was smoking with old-fashioned relish; the abstinence he had been subject to in Spain still made him anxious. Calling him Comrade Trotsky, he then asked what would remain of the dream of the Soviet society, the dream of justice, democracy, and equality, when it became known that it was the men from Moscow who had ordered the murders of Nin and of other revolutionaries? What would happen when they found out that the men from the USSR had manipulated the Communists and ordered the political and even physical destruction of those who were opposed while at the same time demanding more money in return for weapons and advisers? What would survive when it was known that they were stopping the proletarian revolution?. . Lev Davidovich bid farewell to Nadal almost convinced that at least that man would not be the murderer Stalin would send for him. And no, he had told him as he shook his hand: he didn’t know what was going to be left standing of the poor communist dream.

That November, the revolution celebrated its twentieth anniversary and Lev Davidovich turned fifty-eight. Since his birthday nearly coincided with the Day of the Dead, which Mexicans celebrated with a party that aimed to bring the deceased back to life and give the living a peek over the threshold of the great beyond, Diego and Frida filled the Casa Azul with skulls dressed in the strangest ways and built an altar, with candles and food, to remember their deceased. That Mexican proximity to death seemed healthy to Lev Davidovich, because it familiarized them with the only goal all lives shared, the only one from which it was not possible to escape, even for Stalin.

But Lev Davidovich was not in the mood for a celebration. A few days earlier, information had reached him that, following Marshal Tukhachevsky’s fall, Yezhov had been merciless with his family. While two of his brothers, his mother, and the marshal’s wife were executed, one of his daughters, who was thirteen (and whom Lev Davidovich had carried as a newborn), had committed suicide out of pure terror. The family purge didn’t surprise him too much, as it seemed to be a habitual practice. His own sister Olga had been arrested and her oldest son executed for being guilty only of being the wife and son of Kamenev, who led the Soviet council in October 1917; three brothers, a sister, and Stephan, the oldest son of Zinoviev himself, who protected Lenin in the most difficult days of 1917, had also been executed, while another three brothers, four nephews, and who knew how many relatives of that old Bolshevik remained in the so-called gulags that were really death camps. And poor Seriozha: What had happened to his son?

Ever since Yezhov had taken over for Yagoda, the wave of terror unleashed ten years before with forced land collectivization and the struggle against the peasant landowners had reached levels of insanity that seemed poised to devour a country made prostrate by fear and the practice of denunciation. It was said that in state offices, schools, and factories, one out of every five people was a habitual GPU informant. It was also known that Yezhov boasted openly of his anti-Semitism, of the pleasure he received from participating in interrogations, and that his greatest joy was hearing a detainee, beaten by torture and blackmail, incriminate himself. He and his interrogators warned the victims that, if they didn’t confess, their relatives would be executed or deported to camps where they would not survive. “You will not be able to save yourself and you will condemn them” was the most efficient formula to obtain the confession of crimes that had never been committed. Would his son Sergei have been able to withstand those threats, the physical and mental pain? he used to ask the people with whom he spoke. “Should I still nurse the hope that he has survived in a prison camp in the Arctic, almost without food, with workdays that even the toughest can only withstand for three months before kneeling down like living corpses?”

Lev Davidovich’s most recent sorrow had arrived from an unexpected source. For several weeks, a group of writers and political activists who claimed to be close to the positions of the old revolutionary had devoted themselves, in the fervor of the twenty-year October anniversary, to finding the defects of the Bolshevik system that led to the birth of Stalinism. To that end, they had wanted to examine the bloody repression of the Kronshtadt sailors’ uprising and decided to publicize Trotsky’s responsibility for the event. The most repeated argument had been that this repression could be considered the first act of “Stalinist terror” and compared the military response and the execution of the hostages with Stalin’s purges. Because of his responsibility, they considered the then commissar of war the father of those methods of repression and terror.

It had been so painful for Lev Davidovich to learn that men like Max Eastman, Victor Serge, and Boris Souvarine held those opinions about an act that had been hounding him for years, but above all it bothered him that they took a military mutiny, which occurred during times of civil war, out of context and placed it alongside rigged trials and summary executions of civilians occurring in times of peace. But it hurt him even more that they did not realize that the discussion only served to benefit Stalin just when Lev Davidovich was most insistent on denouncing the terror in which those who opposed the man from the mountains — and many men and women who hadn’t even dreamed of opposing him — lived and died.

For weeks Lev Davidovich would get caught up in that historical dispute. To begin to refute them, he had to accept the responsibility that, as a member of the Politburo, he had approved the suppression of that uprising. He refused to admit that he personally had brought about the crackdown and encouraged the cruelty that accompanied it. “I’m willing to consider that civil war is not exactly a school for humanitarian conduct and that, on one side and the other, unforgivable excesses were committed,” he wrote. “It is true that in Kronshtadt there were innocent victims, and the worst excess was the execution of a group of hostages. But even though innocent men died, which is inadmissible at all times and in all places, and even when I, as the head of the army, was ultimately responsible for what happened there, I cannot admit a comparison between the suffocation of an armed rebellion against a weak government at war with twenty-one enemy armies and the cold and premeditated murder of comrades whose only charge was to think and, perhaps, say that Stalin was not the only or the best option for the proletarian revolution.”

But Lev Davidovich knew that Kronshtadt was going to forever remain a black chapter of the revolution and that he himself, full of shame and pain, would always carry that guilt. He also knew that if in Kronshtadt the Bolsheviks — and he included himself as well as Lenin — had not repressed that rebellion mercilessly, it would have perhaps opened the doors to the restoration of the czar. Revolution and its options could be so simple, so terrible, and so cruel. He thought it then and would think it to the end of his life, and nothing would make him change his mind.

When at the end of November, a letter from Liova arrived with the news that the Bulletin’s publication would be delayed in order to include the findings of the Dewey Commission, Lev Davidovich preferred not to respond. In the last letters they exchanged, they had been on the verge of a break. He simply could not believe that Liova had needed four months to prepare the most important edition of the Bulletin. All of his excuses were inadmissible and he came to think that there had been negligence and even incompetence on his son’s part. In one of those letters, he had even commented whether it would be better to transfer the publication to New York and place it in the hands of other comrades. Natalia, who had received other missives from her son, told him that Liova felt offended, since he didn’t understand how his father could be so insensitive, knowing the problems hounding him. Insensitive! A man with Liova’s experience didn’t understand what was at stake? “Liova is an excellent soldier and we’re at war,” he added, without suspecting how much he would very soon regret his outbursts and his lack of sensitivity.

It was at the beginning of the year when they decided that Lev Davidovich would spend some time far from the Casa Azul. Rivera maintained he had seen some suspicious men prowling around and, to be safe, they chose to move him to the house of Antonio Hidalgo, a good friend of the Riveras who lived above the forest of Chapultepec. Lev Davidovich welcomed the idea, since he wished to make the most of his isolation to move forward in the biography of Stalin: he needed to take that dark mist out of his head. Natalia, meanwhile, would stay in Coyoacán, and they agreed that she would visit only if his stay was extended. How long will we live fleeing, hidden, even provoking the paranoia of men like Diego Rivera? he thought as he entered the forest of cypress trees.

The days lived at Antonio Hidalgo’s house soon blended into each other, and of that time he would only clearly remember the afternoon of February 16, 1938. From the window of the studio assigned to him, he saw Rivera cross the garden with his hat in his hand. Lev Davidovich was writing an article at that moment in which he used the Kronshtadt controversy to make a defense of the communist ethic. When Diego reached the studio, he could tell from his face that something serious had happened.

Liova had died in Paris, Rivera said. When Lev Davidovich heard those words, he felt the earth open, leaving him hanging in the air like a marionette. He would never remember if he attacked Diego physically, only that he yelled “Liar! Swine!. .” until he collapsed in a chair. When he began to recover, Rivera told him that, after reading the news in the afternoon papers, he had telegraphed Paris in search of confirmation. Hidalgo then suggested that Trotsky call Paris to get more information, but he refused. Nothing was going to change the fate of his dead son and the only thing he wanted at that moment was to be with Natalia.

Before starting back, Lev Davidovich demanded that Diego share all the information that he had. What had happened was and would continue to be confusing. On February 8, one of Liova’s illnesses flared up and the doctors diagnosed him with appendicitis and decided on an emergency operation. To avoid any GPU agents, Liova entered a private clinic in the outskirts of Paris run by Russian émigrés. His location was known only by Jeanne and his collaborator, Étienne. Taking extreme cautions, Liova registered himself at the clinic as Monsieur Martin. The operation was a success, but four days later, for reasons that were still unknown, the young man suffered a strange setback. According to the witnesses, he was wandering the clinic, delirious and screaming in pain. The doctors operated on him again, but his body, overcome by exhaustion, did not withstand the second surgery.

As they drove to Coyoacán, Lev Davidovich felt his temples pounding and his body shaking. He couldn’t stop thinking that his son had died alone, far from his mother, without having seen his daughters again, lost as they were in the Soviet Union. And that Liova had been barely thirty-two years old. When he entered his room, he saw Natalia Sedova seated on the bed, looking at old family photos. As never before in his life, he wished to die that very second, disappear forever before being forced to give his wife the news. When she saw him (never had she seen him so defenseless and aged, she would tell him weeks later), she rose, lifted up by the only two questions she could formulate: Liova? Seriozha? The human mind is a great mystery, but without a doubt it is at the same time wise and sibylline, since at that moment, the Exile felt he would have preferred to say “Seriozha” instead of “Liova.” Sergei’s life, if he still had it, belonged to Stalin; Liova’s seemed more his, more real. The pain he was going to cause Natalia was so great that he didn’t dare say “has died” and stammered that little Liova was very sick. Natalia Sedova didn’t need more in order to know the truth.

They spent eight days shut up, without receiving visitors or condolences, barely eating, just he and Natalia. She read and reread the letters from her dead son and cried; he, lying down next to her, cried with her, lamenting the young man’s luck, speculating about how he should have protected him, how he should have treated him, blaming himself for not having acknowledged his work every day, for not having forced him to leave France. But he decided that he didn’t want to forget the pain, either. It was the third child he had lost and he didn’t know if he should cry over Seriozha, who was perhaps already dead, also destroyed by the hatred of a criminal.

Slowly, they began to unravel the sordid knot that had wound around Liova’s mysterious last days and understood that there was something dark in his death, and that those shadows could only have come from one place: the Kremlin. The doctors at the clinic continued to be unable to explain the reasons for his setback, but one of them had confessed to Jeanne that he suspected Liova had been poisoned with some unknown substance. To Jeanne and Étienne, it seemed strange that Liova had decided to camouflage his origins at a Russian clinic, of all places, and said they didn’t know who could have suggested that place. Furthermore, they didn’t know who, besides themselves and Klement, knew of his location.

Lev Davidovich was convinced that the guilt he felt would never leave him. The boy’s death, whatever the reason for it was, seemed more linked to his father’s fate than his own; it was a direct consequence of his father’s life and acts. Liova’s absence had left him and Natalia in unfathomable pain, since they felt that none of their children had been closer to them. “He was our young part. And I can’t forgive myself that we weren’t able to save him,” he wrote as a farewell homage. “The old generation with which we once embarked on the road to revolution has been swept from the stage. What the deportations and the czarist jails, the deprivations of exile, war, and illnesses didn’t do has been achieved by Stalin, the worst scourge of the revolution,” he wrote in the final lines of Liova’s obituary, convinced that, sooner or later, the world would know with certainty that Stalin had killed the boy who, during their cold and impoverished Paris mornings, on the way to school, turned in at the printer the calls for peace and the proletarian revolution for which he lived and now has died. . “Let the pain turn into anger, to give me the power to go on!” he wrote and wept again.

19

January 8, 1978, might have been the coldest day that winter, and I blamed the temperature and the intermittent rain sweeping the sea for the absence of the man who loved dogs. Had he perhaps gotten sick, and for that reason missed our prearranged meeting? The following afternoon I had barely handed in the corrected proofs at the printer’s when I ran to the line for the Estrella bus and returned to the beach. Although it was still cold, the sky had cleared and the sea was unusually calm for that time of year. Walking on the shoreline or leaning against some casuarina, I waited, again in vain, until night fell. The following ten days, resisting Raquelita’s protests, crossing the city like a man condemned, I repeated that routine and returned to that stretch of beach six times and prayed for the appearance of that man, his dogs, and the conclusion of that absorbing story.

As I played tricks with my mind in order to summon his return — I threw coins in the air, closed my eyes for ten minutes, counted the seconds, things like that — I weighed each of the possibilities that could justify López’s absence, although Dax’s announced sacrifice and the man’s health problems seemed to me the most probable. On the sixth or seventh fruitless day I began to consider whether the best thing wouldn’t be to find out how to get to López — the trail of the singular borzois, actors in a film, seemed the most plausible — but a few days later I decided I had no right to do so and that the best thing for me was not to try: it was already dangerous enough to play with fire, but it was quite another thing to jump into it. Finally, on the verge of a crisis with Raquelita and already well into February, I started to space out my trips to the beach, and as if I were curing myself of another addiction, I looked for every way possible to overcome the anxiety that the expectant void had left me.

Many years later I would confess to my friend Dany that the day I went to return his books about Trotsky I was on the verge of overcoming my fears and telling him the story of my meetings with the man who loved dogs. The fact of being the only repository of a story capable, in and of itself, of bringing down the foundations of so many dreams urged me to drain myself of the horror with which I’d been infected and produced in me a kind of mental vertigo, worse than the vertigo López himself suffered. That murky handling of ideals, the manipulation and hiding of the truth, crime as state policy, the cynical construction of a big lie, caused me indignation and more and new fears.

At that moment, what really still intrigued me was not knowing the final fate of Mercader, of whom I only knew — due to the folded article in the Trotsky biography — that he had gone to jail in Mexico and then been received in Moscow in such a way that was hostile to him and his acts; a city where, according to López, his friend had died, confined to an anonymity that included his grave.

As I could not get the man who loved dogs out of my mind, I started to think that I ought to do something to find out what Ramón Mercader must have thought, felt, and believed during all those years of punishment and imprisonment, and then later when he returned to a world that no longer seemed (though it continued to be the same) like the world he had left more than twenty years before, full of faith, convictions, and with a death mission in his hands.

What still hadn’t occurred to me, nor would occur to me until a few years later, was the possibility of putting López’s confession in black and white and less still of writing a book about Mercader’s crime and the history and the interests of his demiurges. Perhaps it was because the story had been left incomplete and many of the details from the part I knew escaped my comprehension and my ability to relate them and situate them in a historical context; or perhaps it was because I didn’t know if López would reappear at some point and, no matter who he might be, I had promised not to tell or write his tale. Perhaps I didn’t think about it because, in reality, I had so forgotten that I had wanted to be a writer at one time that I almost didn’t think like a writer. But the fact was that the idea of writing that inconclusive story did not come to mind, and if it did, it did so in a manner that was too timid — and you’ll see immediately that I’m not picking just any adjective. Only several years later, when I started to squeeze my memory to try to reproduce the details that López had told me, did I learn that the true cause for the long postponement, the only and real cause, had been fear. A fear greater than I could imagine.

In the months that followed the disappearance of the man who loved dogs, in the most devious ways, almost always in whispers, I pursued the few existing books on the island capable of helping me understand the dramatic relationship between Stalin and Trotsky and what that sick confrontation and Stalin’s success represented for the fate of the Utopia. Searching in the mountain of Stalinist literature that continued to come to the country from Moscow, dusting off chewed-up pamphlets from the 1950s that went from the most basic Trotskyism to the fervent anticommunism of the Cold War — gasping as I read Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in Cuba years before — I started putting together a fragmentary and diffuse knowledge that, despite everything that had been hidden (there were still almost ten years left until glasnost and the first round of revelations of some of that inner world of terror), brought with it an inevitable feeling of surprise and incredulity (disgust would come to the surface soon after), above all because of the crude manipulation of the truth to which so many men had been subjected.

Meanwhile, whenever I could, I went out to the beach, convinced that I should tempt fate; and many times, when I heard the phone ring, I wondered if it wasn’t López calling me.

It was a tremendously painful although not so unexpected event that brought me out, abruptly, from the paralysis of waiting, speculation, and reading to which the man who loved dogs had abandoned me. My brother William had fought for two years to overturn the decision to remove him definitively from the medical school. In that battle of letters — almost always unanswered — and interviews with lower-rung civil servants, William had taken a dangerous and challenging path. He demanded that he be accepted at the university and that he not have to hide his irreversible and totally gay sexual orientation. Fearful of what could happen to him (“What else could happen to me, Iván?” he asked me; I answered, “There can always be something else”), I tried to convince him that the ancestral national homophobia, with all of its social, political, cultural, and religious cruelties, wasn’t prepared to take that challenge, but it was prepared to crush whoever launched it. Perhaps my brother and his former anatomy professor, also enrolled in the crusade, had been confused about not only their capacity for withstanding looks of disdain and a variety of humiliations but, above all, their chances of success. The degradation, marginalization, and offenses they saw themselves subject to in the places they went in search of a justice in which they believed ended up devastating them, and at the end of two years of bloody combat they gave up in the worst way: trying to escape by the route that would carry them to possible salvation or an inevitable precipice.

William’s disappearance took on all of its tragic dimensions when two police agents went to the house in Víbora Park and informed my parents that, according to investigations, their son William Cárdenas Maturell and citizen Felipe Arteaga Martínez, former anatomy professor of the School of Medicine, who, according to a custodian at the marina of the Almendares River, had stolen a motorboat with the purpose of traveling across the Straits of Florida to the United States. The boat, overturned and without the engine, had been found by some fishermen two days ago, about twenty-five miles north of Matanzas, and, according to the U.S. Coast Guard, no one meeting the description of William Cárdenas or Felipe Arteaga had been rescued in the previous ninety-six hours. Had they heard from their son? Did they know anything about his plans?

My parents, Sara and Antonio, clung to the hope that William was in one of Cuba’s northern keys, on a lost beach in the Bahamas or aboard some ship that, for whatever reason, had not given news of the rescue. But as the days passed and hope began to founder under its own weight, a feeling of blame over not having supported their son and, they more than anyone, having made him feel the weight of rejection, started overtaking their spirits until they were thrown into a depression. For my part, I regretted not having shown William enough solidarity and of having left him alone in that disproportionate battle in which he aspired only for the recognition of his freedom of sexual choice and his right, as a homosexual, to study what he wanted.

The environment that had been, until then, tense in the house at Víbora Park, became funereal. In just a few months, my parents turned into old people who lived practically enclosed in their bedroom. My house smelled of the grave and guilt, and to escape that atmosphere, I turned into a kind of fugitive who spent as much time as possible at my job and, when I got out, went to sit at the National Library to read about the life and work of writers who had committed suicide (I got into that and I still don’t know where that almost necrophiliac need came from). The sick atmosphere in my house and the physical and mental distance with which I tried to evade it damaged my relationship with Raquelita in a first period of crisis — it appears I attract crises — that hit rock bottom when we decided that the best thing to do would be to separate for a while. As never before in the previous five years, I feared that my loneliness, desperation, the urgency to escape reality, would lead me to the bottle and I would again fall into the well of that addiction.

The disasters came a year and some odd months following William’s disappearance, and more than two years after my last meeting with the man who loved dogs — I always remembered that a phrase as tender as “Lo propio” was the last thing I said to him, wishing him a Merry Christmas — when in March 1981 my father died and, four months later, it was my mother’s turn. I didn’t call the friends I had left, or the majority of my relatives, or my work colleagues, and because of that, their wakes were attended only by a few neighbors and the relatives who somehow found out what happened.

I now saw the true dimensions of my solitude and how the decisions of history can come in through the windows of some lives and destroy them from the inside. The family house in Víbora Park, built by my father when I was a boy and William was not born yet, turned into a kind of mausoleum about which ghosts and memories wandered, with echoes of laughter, tears, greetings, and conversations that had taken place there throughout twenty-five years, when we were a family. If we had not been a happy family, we had at least been a normal one, a clan that, by the logic of life, could even grow with Raquelita joining it and the predictable arrival — at the beginning, demanded by my father — of some grandchildren who would rejuvenate those walls made with his efforts, his love, and his own hands.

Dany was one of the friends who came to my mother’s wake. Raquelita had called him and he came to keep me company. I remember that at that time Dany was exultant and removed, since his first book of short stories had just been published after having won the same contest in which I had received a mention. . ten years or ten centuries before. Two days after the burial, Dany came back to my house and asked forgiveness for the disloyalties that, according to him, he’d racked up against me: not having been by my side when William disappeared, when my father died, when Raquelita and I separated, and, above all, for my not having been the first person to receive a copy of his published book, since, as he said, everything he could do and achieve as a writer he owed to me, to my advice, to the books I had made him read.

As we talked and drank coffee, seated on the terrace that looked over the backyard of my house, I told him that there was nothing to forgive: life is a vertigo and everyone has to manage his own. Since I needed to do so with someone, I confessed to him that a great feeling of guilt was following me and he tried to convince me that I wasn’t responsible for any of what had happened and told me something I hadn’t thought of until then.

“Iván, the problem is that you’ve spent your life blaming the easiest targets. And you almost always pick yourself, because it’s simpler and that way you can rebel, although what you’re doing is self-flagellation. Do the math and you’ll see that you stopped writing, you became an alcoholic, you buried yourself in that shitty magazine and didn’t even try to get a job you’re worthy of. When I met you, you were an ambitious guy, people said you showed great promise, they put your stories in all the anthologies of young writers being published. .”

“I was a fake, Dany: I wasn’t a writer or anything promising. They used me when it was useful because they had already done away with all the real writers. And they punished me when they had to.”

“But you should have kept writing, dammit!”

“Brother, I lost all desire.”

I am sure that at that moment Dany was comparing himself to me. The pupil’s star was beginning its ascent, while that of his teacher, so bright at one time, had gone out and it was already impossible to point out the place in the sky where it had once blinked. I am sure that he felt pity for me. And I didn’t care if that was what he was feeling.

I think that Dany’s presence saved me from depression and, perhaps, from something worse. Resolved to get me out of that stupor, my friend invited me to readings of his stories and there I saw many of my old writer colleagues, some of them still insistent on being so. Above all, I discovered the existence of a new legion of “young narrators,” as they were called then, who were shyly beginning to write in a different way, tell different stories, with fewer heroes and more fucked-up, sad people, like in real life. Dany started to lend me books that had never been published on the island that he got from his friends who traveled abroad, and even when I knew he didn’t like it very much, he went with me several times to play squash on the courts at the beach, without imagining my second (or was it really my first?) intention of peering out onto the sand with the hope of seeing two Russian wolfhounds followed by a man with tortoiseshell glasses and a bandage on his hand. A few months later, I even allowed myself to be dragged to some literary parties soaked in the abundant alcohols of the illusory bonanza of the eighties (since I didn’t drink, they nicknamed me “Waterboy”), intellectual meetings where you felt that people were beginning to free themselves of certain chains of orthodoxy but, above all (because this was the most interesting to me), where you could always find ethereal poetesses wearing sheer cotton dresses (they said they were Hindu) who refused to wear bras and who were in a state of constant desperation to forget transcendental poetics and receive what we then called, à la Lezama Lima, a “male offering,” or, simply put in good Havanese, “pinga [cock] any which way.”

I followed Dany through all of those places without much enthusiasm, but at the same time I was feeling, by pure infectiousness rather than out of any real desire, an increasingly perceptible lashing, that started to awaken the monster locked up within me: the desire to write again. It was then, already convinced that López would never return, that I started to write, on some pads of yellow paper I had taken from the magazine, the story that the man who loved dogs had told me. I did so without having the slightest idea what ending I would give to those notes of a story whose avenues were constantly blocked by a lack of knowledge and the impossibility of overcoming it; and, above all, I did it pursued by a growing feeling that I was playing with fire.

Fortunately for me and the peace of my spirit, the literary heat that Dany’s proximity was causing abandoned me when Raquelita returned to live with me at the beginning of 1982. That same year, we had Paolo, and in 1983 Francesca was born, and I dedicated myself to the illusion that we could still make an ordinary life, with a family and the vivid sound of laughter and the inconsequential tears of children.

That was an interval of calm. In the country, life was getting better, and I was able to devote myself to raising my children and forging the illusion of a future that would perhaps smile upon them. In Moscow, meanwhile, they even began to talk about changes, of improvement, of transparency, and many of us thought that, yes, it was possible to do it better, live better, indeed, even the Chinese, after having been through a cultural revolution of which we knew nothing or very little, recognized that you didn’t have to live poorly in order to be Socialists. Who would have thought?

The first hole through which water began to sink the ship of my tranquillity was made when Raquelita asked me for a divorce, in 1988. Although she had tried for years to hold together a marriage that, however you looked at it, didn’t work: what Raquelita called the (shitty) apathy with which I dealt with everything, and what she considered to be my loss of will to fight to defend the most basic things in my (also shitty) life, had ended up disappointing and defeating her. Raquelita had always aspired to things in life, to promotions and rewards, to cars and comforts that seemed ever more possible for everyone in a socialism that was maturing and being perfected. But, according to her — and it was true — I was merely content with holding on to hopes for the future (of everyone else) from a corner of the present where I had huddled up with the single hope that they would leave me alone to live in peace.

“You’re miserable, a loser, a good-for-nothing,” she said to me (many times) in those days. “You’re not a writer or anything. You tricked me and I can’t take it anymore.”

And she tended to add when she really wanted to bring me down even further:

“If you don’t want to live your life, hang yourself from a tree, because I’m going to do everything possible to live mine and even the impossible to guarantee that my children live theirs.”

Even though she was partially right in her fits of anger — I was and am a wretch: a misery — Raquelita suffered a semantic betrayal: more than a loser, I was defeated, and between one state and another, there was (there is, there will always be) an abyss of connotations and implications. And, despite that, with her flight, she was also paying the price of her poor aim: I had never been the man she was looking for, and I still don’t understand how someone so perceptive when it came to calculations made that enormous error of appreciation.

The real blow was being separated from my children, and I suffered their absence bitterly when they became prolonged absences. This time even Dany had to admit how right I was when I picked myself to blame for what had happened, despite the fact that, as always, I wasn’t the only one at fault. This new fall — what number was this already? Could it be twelve? — into the solitude and the void was completed when, without any will to put up a fight, I accepted, with the divorce petition, the permuta, or trade, of the house in Víbora Park for two lesser spaces: a little house with a backyard and two bedrooms in the neighborhood of El Sevillano for Raquelita and the kids, and a small apartment, damp, with cracked walls and little natural light, in Lawton for me. I recognize, nonetheless, that I felt a certain freedom when I said goodbye to the family home, full of memories, and started my hermit’s life, from which I was brought out two years later, by that girl who looked like a tiny fragile bird and who, with tears in her eyes, begged me to save her poodle, affected by an intestinal obstruction.

When I no longer expected it, I had a new, alarming and clarifying contact with the man who loved dogs. It was in 1983, a few months before Francesca was born, and I can place it exactly because I clearly remember when Raquelita came to tell me that someone was looking for me and I can see her with that sprawling belly, so different from the one that had accommodated Paolo. If, a few years before, I’d tortured myself by asking myself what astral conjunction had led me to López and turned me, according to him, into an exceptional repository for the story of his deceased friend Ramón Mercader, at that moment I was tormented by the certainty that the man who loved dogs had not arrived in my life only by chance, but rather that he had pursued me intentionally and continued to pursue me even after, by basic logic, I believed him dead and buried — even after, for my own good and through my idleness, I had managed to forget about him and the adverse reactions caused by the story he’d told me: rancor, fear, curiosity, disgust, and the increasingly dormant but still latent and dangerous desire to write.

The letter — if that’s what you could call a parcel of more than fifty sheets in a cramped, almost infantile handwriting but a better than well-composed style — reached me through the hands of a thin, very black woman. According to what she told me, she had been one of the nurses who had taken care of López when his illness worsened. The woman, who barely sat down in the living room of my house and didn’t even dare to make up a name for me to call her, started by demanding the greatest discretion. She told me that she’d been keeping those papers since the middle of 1978, when compañero López, as she called him, gave them to her before leaving Cuba. By that time, the man’s condition had reached a state of utmost severity and he had to leave to receive shock treatment. The woman didn’t know — she said — what the illness was or where López had gone, nor whether he was still alive or if he had died, although she was very sure that the latter had to have happened to him, since he had been doing so badly. She explained that, before leaving, the sick man had asked her, very discreetly, to do him the favor of handing that manila envelope to a young man with whom he’d become friends, and given her my name and the address where I lived. The nurse promised to carry out what he had entrusted to her, but she had taken almost five years to do so because she was afraid it could put her or me at risk. Put me at risk? Why? Wasn’t López merely a Spanish Republican who worked and lived in Cuba with all the imaginable authorizations? Or had the nurse read those papers and discovered other truths? The woman, slippery and precise at the same time, only responded to my third question and added a revelatory afterthought: no, she hadn’t read the letter, nor had she spoken to anyone of its existence, and she was expecting similar discretion from me, above all regarding her role in that story. And before leaving, she made a request that sounded like a warning: if anyone ever asked me where those papers came from, she had never seen anything like them and had never been in the house of the recipient. And she disappeared.

As soon as I started reading the manuscript, I understood two things. First, that the strange nurse had undoubtedly read it and, as a consequence of this act, it had taken her five years to resolve to bring it to me. Second, when I finished reading, I understood even less what had conquered her fears and made her resolve to come see me, but I appreciated that she hadn’t destroyed the letter, as I might have done in that situation.

In a note introducing the document, Jaime López apologized to me for not having returned to the beach, but first his spirits and then his health had prevented him from doing so. The deterioration of Dax’s health and that animal’s impending death had affected him much more than he had expected, and the vertigo he suffered had become so violent that he practically couldn’t walk. It even prevented him from concentrating, and he’d had new encephalograms done and switched his treatment to pills that kept him in a drowsy limbo all day. But he had always kept in mind that he owed “the kid” that part of the story and, excusing his handwriting — I should have seen the round and beautiful calligraphy he used to have, he said — and any digressions he would surely make, he went into the story about the final years of his old friend Ramón Mercader’s life, thanks to the unexpected meeting with that ghost of the past, right on the day that the first snowfall of the winter of 1968 was falling in Moscow.

As I read, I felt the horror spilling out of me. According to the man who loved dogs, during that coincidental meeting Ramón had told him the details I already knew about his entrance into the shadow world, his spiritual and even physical transformation, and his actions as Jacques Mornard and under the name of Frank Jacson. But he had also confided everything that, with the passing of years, he had managed to learn about himself, and of the machinations and the most sinister purposes of the men who took him to Coyoacán and put an ice axe in his hands. If before I had thought that López frequently exceeded the limits of credibility, what he relayed in that long missive surpassed the conceivable, despite everything that, since our last meeting, I had been able to read about the dark but well-covered-up world of Stalinism.

As is easy to infer, that story (received a few years before the glasnost revelations) was like an explosion of light illuminating not only Mercader’s dismal fate, but also that of millions of men. It was the very chronicle of the debasement of a dream and the testimony of one of the most abject crimes ever committed, because it not only concerned the fate of Trotsky, at the end of the day a contender in that game of power and the protagonist in various historical horrors, but also that of many millions of people dragged — without their asking, many times without anyone ever asking them what they wanted — by the undertow of history and by the fury of their patrons, disguised as benefactors, messiahs, chosen ones, as sons of historical necessity and of the unavoidable dialectics of class struggle. .

But when I read Jaime López’s letter, I couldn’t suspect that another ten years would have to pass — almost sixteen since my last meeting with him — for me to hit upon the clues that would finally allow me to put together all the pieces of that puzzle made with cards of misery and tons of manipulation and concealment: the components that shaped the times and molded the work of Ramón Mercader. Those ten years ended up being the ones that saw the birth and death of the hopes of perestroika. Those years caused for many the surprises that the opening of Soviet glasnost generated; exposure of the true faces of characters like Ceauşescu and the change in China’s economic path, with the subsequent revelation of the horrors of its genocidal Cultural Revolution, carried out in the name of Marxist purity. Those were the years of a historic rupture that would change not only the world’s political balance but even the colors on maps, philosophical truths, and, above all, it would change men. In those years, we crossed the bridge that went from enthusiasm for what could be improved to disappointment at confirming that the great dream was terminally ill and that, in its name, genocides had been committed like that in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. For that reason, in the end, what once seemed indestructible finished up undone, and what seemed to us incredible or false resulted in being just the tip of the iceberg that hid in its depths the most macabre truths about what had happened in the world for which Ramón Mercader had fought. Those were the revelations that helped us bring the blurry shapes into focus that, for years, we had barely been able to make out in the shadows or give a definitive outline to, as shocking as it is now easy to see. Those were the times when the great disenchantment set in.

20

Jacques felt that he was going backward in time. As soon as he saw him, he remembered the meeting with Kotov, two years before, in the still-pleasant Plaza de Cataluña. Now Tom, with the top of his jacket open and holding in one hand that patterned handkerchief with which he usually covered his throat, was taking in the miserly March sun with the eagerness of a bear recently awoken from his winter slumber. But in those two years, everything had changed for Ramón. That meeting, on a bench at the Luxembourg Gardens, was proof of many transformations, including the disappearance of the Spanish dream and the kilos lost by the adviser since the last time they had met.

“What a blessing! Isn’t it?” Tom said, without moving from his position.

“At least you prefer parks and not cemeteries,” he commented, and settled down next to his boss. Before him was an extensive view of the pond, the palace, and the gardens, where some yellow flowers with purple stems, born in the last islets of snow, fought to announce the end of winter. With the gift of the first rays of spring sun, the elderly and their nursemaids had taken over the benches, and Tom seemed proud and happy.

“Moscow was an ice floe.”

“Did you come from there?”

The Soviet barely nodded. Jacques lit a cigarette and waited. He already knew these rituals.

“I wanted to go to Madrid with what was left of the Republic but they ordered me out. Well, there’s not much left to do. The end is a question of days. . Bliat!”

Jacques felt Ramón’s indignation besieging him again, but he knew to hold back the fit of anger that could end up being inappropriate. For several days, he had been carrying the rage it caused him to know that Great Britain and France had reached the extremes of cynicism by recognizing the fascist caudillo as the legitimate leader of Spain. And now the French, always proud of their republican democracy, were not only interning the refugees in concentration camps, but they had gone and named Pétain their ambassador to Franco’s government, even when the Republic still existed. What hurt him most, nonetheless, was having read in the Parisian newspapers that the Soviets had also disengaged from Spain when they saw the final disaster arrive.

“What are they saying in Moscow?” he dared to ask.

“You and I know that without unity you can’t beat the enemy. And it’s true. Right now the Republicans are killing each other in Madrid, while Franco is getting his boots shined to go parade down La Gran Via. Poor Spain, what’s in store for it isn’t easy. .”

Jacques regretted asking. For defeat, there was invariably one reason and one predictable culprit, always the same one.

Tom stayed silent, still immobile, as if the only important thing was to receive those weak rays of sun.

“I met in Moscow with Beria and Sudoplatov, the operative officer who will serve as our link. Stalin asked us to get the machinery going.”

“Are we leaving for Mexico?” Jacques Mornard immediately regretted that his anxiety betrayed him.

“You’re not going anywhere, not yet. I’m leaving in a few days. The Duck bought himself a house and is going to move. I have to do reconnaissance of the terrain, make some adjustments, organize a few things. . The chess game.”

“So what do I do?”

“Wait, my dear Jacques, wait. And meanwhile, don’t think of doing anything crazy. That whole thing about showing your face in Le Perthus and going about punching men. .” Tom had slowly lowered his head and, after wiping his handkerchief across his face, rested a cold and distant stare on Jacques Mornard, who felt himself go cold inside. “I always know everything, mudak. . Don’t play around with me. Never. One day I can rip your balls off and. .”

The young man kept silent. Any reasoning could worsen his situation.

“I know it’s hard for a man like you,” Tom continued as he knotted his handkerchief around his neck, “but discipline and obedience come first. I thought you had learned that. .” He looked at his pupil again. “What’s more important, a personal impulse or a mission?”

Jacques knew it was a rhetorical question, but Tom’s pause forced him to respond.

“The mission. But I’m not made of stone. .”

“What’s more important,” the other man continued, raising his voice, “holding on to the terrain you’ve gained or losing someone from whom we expect so much? Don’t answer me, don’t answer me, just think. .” Tom gave him time to think, as if it were really necessary, and added, “We’re going to create other options for Mexico. We practically have to start from the beginning, planting the possible operatives and deciding in a few months which one of them we’ll use. But you’ll go on your own path; you’re still my secret weapon. And I don’t have the luxury of losing you. I know you’re not made of stone. . I spoke of you to Comrade Stalin and he agrees that we should hold on to you as our ace in the hole.”

Ramón couldn’t believe it. Comrade Stalin knew about him? He knew of his existence? Amid his infinite number of concerns, he counted among them? He was hard-pressed to control his pride to rise to the circumstances, confessing what he considered to be his greatest weakness.

“Excuse me, Tom, but there are days on which I can’t stop being Ramón Mercader.”

“I already know that, and it’s logical it should be that way. But Jacques Mornard needs to know how to control Ramón Mercader. That’s the point. Can you release or retain Ramón Mercader at your will?”

“I don’t know. .”

Tom moved his lower body for the first time. He tried to find the best position to look at the young man and smiled at him.

“A very important moment is coming for you now: you’re going to be Ramón Mercader and Jacques Mornard at the same time. You have to learn to take one or the other out at each specific moment, because when the time comes, you’re going to have to get out of Jacques to become Ramón almost without thinking about it. For the people who know you in Paris, you will continue to be Jacques Mornard. In the meantime, Ramón is going to again be in touch with Caridad, his siblings, and to that intimate circle he will be a Spanish Communist full of hate for the fascists and fifth-columnist Trotskyists and bourgeois traitors who finished off the Republic and who would give anything to make the Soviet Union disappear.”

“Don’t worry. I have that hate nailed right here,” and he pointed at his own chest, where he felt hate beating, very close to where his pride was throbbing.

“Starting now, Caridad is part of the operation. She, you, and I are a team. What we do, only we will know about. George Mink will be outside this circle. . Listen to me, kid: we’re at the center of something very big, something historic, and perhaps life will give you the opportunity to render a priceless service to the struggle for the revolution and for communism. Are you ready to do something that could be the greatest glory for a Communist and the envy of millions of revolutionaries around the world?”

Ramón Mercader watched Tom’s eyes for a few moments: they were so transparent that he could almost see through them. He then remembered Lenin’s corpse and the glasses in which he had seen himself, superimposed on the face of the Great Leader. And he knew he was privileged.

“Don’t doubt it for a second,” he said. “I’m ready.”

Ramón felt more comfortable ever since he could live with Jacques Mornard as if he were a suit that he only wore on special occasions.

During the weeks of waiting, which turned into months, he forced the Belgian to write frequently to Sylvia, always promising a quick reunion. He walked around Paris and visited the woman’s friends, especially Gertrude Allison the bookseller and the young Marie Crapeau, with whom he went to the cinema several times to see Marx Brothers comedies, where he laughed so much that he cried. Jacques went to the Hippodrome, which had turned into a meeting point for the hundreds of spies of all possible nationalities who milled around the city, and to Les Deux Magots and other sites favored by the Parisian bohemia, wonderfully removed from the dangers on the horizon.

In the meantime, Ramón, in Caridad’s company, traveled with young Luis, recently returned from Spain, and with the reappeared Lena Imbert to Antwerp, where the young people left for the Soviet Union so that Luis could continue his studies and grow as a revolutionary in the homeland of the proletariat and amid the Spanish Communists trapped in exile. On several occasions they visited his sister Montse, living in Paris with her husband, Jacques Dudouyt, whose only notable quality, according to Caridad, was his ability to cook.

Looking for signs of the new times, Ramón and Caridad followed with interest the information coming from Moscow, where Comrade Stalin was leading a new party congress before which, with his usual bravery, he dared to criticize the excesses of certain civil servants during the purges and proceedings of previous years. As they already expected, the greatest reprimands came down on Yezhov’s head and they foretold a fate similar to that of his predecessor, Yagoda. But the most important thing for the Soviet Union, at that time before the threat of imperialist wars, was obtaining the perfect unity of the people behind a monolithic party, like the one that emerged from a congress in which the general secretary dismissed more than three-quarters of the members of the Central Committee elected four years before and substituted them with men of unbreakable revolutionary faith. The demands of the present had imposed themselves and Comrade Stalin was preparing the country for the most ironclad ideological resistance.

Ramón discovered in that time that his relationship with Caridad was taking on a different nature. The fact that he was now the one at the center of a mission whose proportions she couldn’t even fathom on the morning that she presented it to him in the Sierra Guadarrama, placed him at a height that his mother could not reach. In the face of powers that were beyond her, she had to check her habit of trying to control his destiny. Perhaps Tom’s influence had contributed to that change, demanding that she remain in a triangular relationship that depended so much on the balance of all of its parts. To see how Caridad ceased to be an oppressive presence relieved him and helped to make his period of forced inactivity less complicated by unnecessary quarrels.

As frenetically mobile as ever, Tom had left for New York and Mexico at the beginning of April, shortly after the definitive entrance of Franco’s troops in Madrid. When he returned, at the end of July, the agent came back with a mix of satisfaction and concern over the progress of an operation that was still unfolding at a cautious rhythm.

During a week that, at Tom’s suggestion, they all spent in Aix-en-Provence, as well as going over Cézanne’s route and enjoying the subtleties of Provençal food, which the adviser adored, Ramón and Caridad learned the details of the machinery that had been put into motion. In parallel to what they were doing, Tom explained, Comrade Grigulievich (from the beginning, Ramón would ask himself if that was George Mink’s new name) had established himself in Mexico and begun to work with the local group that would eventually carry out an action against the Duck. Relying on a Comintern envoy, they had begun by trying to obtain the Mexican party’s support, only to discover (to no great surprise) that two of its leaders, Hernán Laborde and Valentín Campa, didn’t dare to join a possible action, holding up the excuse that they considered Trotsky to be a political corpse and that any violent act against him could complicate the party’s relations with President Cárdenas. That hesitancy by the leadership had not prevented them from achieving two other objectives: finding a group of militants willing to carry out an armed attack against the renegade, and the preparation of a massive campaign rejecting Trotsky’s presence in Mexico, with which they sought to create a state of hostile, even aggressive opinion against the Exile.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Tom’s colleagues had managed to infiltrate several young Communists into the ranks of the Trotskyists with the intention of getting one of them sent as a bodyguard to the Duck’s lair. That man, if he managed to be placed inside the renegade’s home, would have the mission of informing on his movements and, according to one of the prepared plans, would even facilitate the entrance of a commando or solitary agent charged with perpetrating the attack. As Tom himself had been able to confirm, Trotsky’s new house was practically impregnable. Apart from the features of the house itself (high walls, bulletproof doors, a river running alongside it that made it nearly impossible to access it by one side), there was also a watch system composed of seven armed men, in addition to which there were Mexican policemen protecting the residence, and an electric mechanism that activated lights and sounded alarms.

“Until we have a man inside there, the cook who works in the Duck’s house will keep us informed. She’s a party agent.”

“And where does Jacques fit into those plans?” Ramón wanted to know; he didn’t see himself anywhere on that mortal chessboard, sketched out in all its details, in which the renegade seemed perfectly surrounded, without the possibility for escape.

“Everyone has his place. Jacques is going to keep moving forward, don’t worry,” the adviser said, and drank from his glass of wine.

Tom, Caridad, and Ramón sat at one of the tables that the restaurant owners, taking advantage of the summer season, had placed on the sidewalk on the town’s main street. They had already selected their dishes — Ramón, out of pure coincidence, had opted for a duck-based dish — and ordered a light, fresh wine that awakened their palates. They conveyed the image of three pleasant middle-class people on holiday and Caridad and Ramón’s table manners, Tom’s Panama hat, and the worldly gastronomical tastes each one had would have placed them in the category of the illustrious bourgeois, people familiar with the pleasures of life that are bought with money.

“When they give me the orders, the three of us are going to Mexico,” Tom said, and looked at Ramón. “Jacques Mornard’s role in this hunt will depend on many things that are still far-off. But it could be crucial for Sylvia to be able to get him into the house. We still don’t know if we will get the American spy in there, so the possibility of Jacques being close could be important. And, if necessary, if everything we’re planning fails or is not safe for one reason or another, then Jacques would go into action.”

“Why not use the cook?” Caridad asked. “She could poison him. .”

“That’s a last resort. Stalin has asked for something resounding, an exemplary punishment.”

“But couldn’t the American do it?” the woman insisted.

Tom looked at her and served himself more wine.

“In principle, yes. He could be a disillusioned Trotskyist who fought with his leader. . but what if it fails and he’s detained? Who can guarantee that man’s silence?” Tom allowed for an expectant pause before answering himself. “It’s a risk we can’t take. . Never, in any case, can the Soviet Union and Comrade Stalin be visibly involved in the action. Do you hear me, Ramón?” The man’s voice had broken its monotonous rhythm to turn emphatic. “That’s why we’re working with Mexicans, so it looks like something to do with politics and local quarreling. The Mexicans would have no information about Grigulievich’s connection to me and even less of my own connection to Moscow. We’re thinking that some man of ours, a supposed Spanish Republican who met them in the war, will help Grigulievich and control things from the inside. If they do things well, then congratulations, the work is done and we’ll have had a vacation in the tropics.”

“Mexico City isn’t quite tropical, shall we say,” Caridad dared to correct him, and Tom laughed heartily.

“My dear, the tropics are anywhere you don’t have to spend half of the year cursing and damning the cold to hell and walking in the fucking snow.”

Paris seemed to be at the point of melting under the sun and fear. The temperatures of war, incredibly high during that hot August, had at last put an end to the politicians’ indifference and had given way to a nervous preoccupation with the growing aggressiveness of Nazi speeches, which had already caused the mobilization of the army and the reserves. Alarming news of great concentrations of troops in Germany circulated and people were discussing what the next objective could be of an aggressive empire that had already swallowed up Austria and part of Czechoslovakia and now had an exhausted but loyal ally to the south of the Pyrenees. After many delays and self-deception, the imminence of war settled into the fears of the Parisians.

Tom had disappeared again without announcing where he was going. Ramón, using Jacques Mornard more often, insistently wandered the world he had shared with Sylvia, as he found in Trotskyist circles a level of alarm that bordered on hysteria. From Mexico, the Exile had launched a warning campaign about the looming military conflagration, and on each occasion he expressed his fears over Soviet defensive weakness caused as a result of the purges to which the Red Army had been subjected in the past two years. Jacques Mornard, always removed from political passions, listened to those arguments and couldn’t help but notice in them an underground incitation to the enemies of the Soviet Union to take advantage of the situation about which the renegade was so insistent.

On the morning of August 23, a nervous and shaken Caridad, appearing as if she had returned to the murky days of the past, turned up at Jacques’s apartment. The young man, who was drinking a pot of coffee to try to dispel the effects of the champagne he had consumed the night before, guessed the gravity of the events that the woman would immediately reveal and snapped out of his fog through pure alarm.

“The Soviet Union and the Nazis signed a pact,” Caridad whispered in Spanish, and although the young man didn’t understand what those words meant, what madness they referred to, he felt that it was Ramón who, already completely lucid, was listening to his mother. “They’re saying it on all the stations. The newspapers are going to run a midday edition. Molotov and Ribbentrop have signed it. A pact of friendship and nonaggression. What the hell is happening?”

Ramón tried to process the information, but he felt that something eluded him. Comrade Stalin had made a pact with Hitler? What the Duck predicted had happened?

“What else are they saying, Caridad? What else are they saying?” he yelled, standing before the woman.

“That’s what they’re saying, collons! A pact with the fascists!”

Ramón waited a few seconds, as if he needed the shock to dissolve amid the reasons he desperately started to search for, like those pigs who sniffed for truffles in the Dax of his adolescence, and he clung to the most solid argument he had at hand:

“Stalin knows what he’s doing; he always knows. Don’t rush into things. If he signed an agreement with Hitler, it’s because he has reason to do so. He must have done it because of something. .”

“At Concorde and on Rivoli, they’ve burned Soviet flags. Many people are saying they’re going to resign from the party, that they feel betrayed. .” Caridad licked her wound.

“The fucking French can’t speak of betrayal, dammit! Ribbentrop was chatting with them here in Paris while Franco was massacring the Republicans.”

Caridad let herself fall on the sofa; she lacked the energy to refute or support Ramón’s words, who, despite the conviction he had just expressed, could not overcome the dizziness that had taken hold of him. Where the hell was Tom? Why wasn’t he here with his reasoning? How could he have left now, of all times, when he most needed him?

“So when in the fuck is Tom coming?” he yelled at last, without being fully conscious of the extent to which he depended on his mentor’s words and ideas.

For years Ramón would remember that bitter day. With all of the preconceptions underpinning his beliefs broken, he faced the inconceivable. The rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler was what Trotsky had prophesied for years. As he would come to know a few months later, the deception ended up being so painful that various Spanish Communists, imprisoned in Franco’s jails, committed suicide out of shame and disillusionment upon learning of the accord. It was the last defeat their convictions could take.

The following day, when Ramón, full of doubts, with his radio on and surrounded by newspapers, opened the door certain that he would find Caridad there again, the smiling face he ran into had the effect of immediately returning the calm he had lost for a day and a half.

“A master move,” Tom said, and patted Ramón’s shoulder as he walked by his side. “An incredible move. .”

“Were you in Moscow?” The anxiety still ruled him.

“Would you make some coffee?” The recently arrived swept the newspapers on the sofa aside with one hand without putting any special emphasis on this action: he was just cleaning a place where trash had accumulated in order to make himself more comfortable, with a sigh, as if he were very weary. “I’ve barely slept in two days,” he remarked, and Ramón understood the order. He went to the kitchen to make some coffee and listened to Tom from there. “Tell me the truth. What did you think? It will stay between you and me.”

Ramón noticed that, despite the heat, his hands were cold.

“That Stalin knows what he’s doing,” Ramón said.

“Really? Then I congratulate you, because Comrade Stalin has never been more sure of anything. He’s even sure of the European Communists’ doubts.”

“I’m a Spanish Communist,” Ramón replied, and heard Tom roar with laughter.

“Yes, of course, and you’ll recall that a year ago, the European democracies silently accepted it when Hitler bit off a piece of Czechoslovakia. And now they don’t want Stalin to protect the Soviet Union?”

Ramón came out with the coffee, served in two great mugs, and almost in a hurry Tom began to drink his.

“Listen to me, kid, because you should understand what happened and why it happened. Comrade Stalin needs time to rebuild the Red Army. Between spies, traitors, and renegades, they had to purge thirty-six thousand officers from the army and four thousand from the navy. There was no other choice but to execute thirteen of the fifteen troop commanders, taking out more than sixty percent of those in command. And do you know why he did it? Because Stalin is great. He learned the lesson and now he can’t allow the same thing to happen to us that happened to you in Spain. . Now, tell me, do you think you can fight against the German army like that?”

Ramón tasted his coffee. A hint of logic was beginning to slice through the thickness of his doubts. Tom leaned toward him and continued.

“Stalin cannot allow Germany to invade Poland and reach the Soviet border. First would be the morale factor: that would be like handing over a piece of us. And, from Poland, the fascists would be just one step from Kiev, Minsk, and Leningrad.”

“So what guarantees the pact?”

“For starters, that eastern Poland will be ours. It’s the best way to keep them far from Kiev and Leningrad. With the Germans that far away and with a bit of time for Stalin to better prepare the Red Army, perhaps they’ll decide not to attack the Soviet Union. That is what Stalin is seeking with the pact. Are you beginning to understand?” Ramón nodded and Tom, leaning back, continued: “The numbers are clear. The German army has eighty divisions. They have enough to launch an attack against the West or the Soviet Union, but not both fronts at the same time. Hitler knows it and that’s why he agreed to sign it. But that piece of paper doesn’t mean anything; it doesn’t mean we’ll renounce anything. Look at it like a tactical solution, because it has just one goal and that is to gain time and space.”

“I understand,” Ramón said as he felt his tensions diminishing. “In any event—” he began, but Tom interrupted him.

“I’m glad you understand, because you’re going to have to accept many things that could seem strange to other people. The war is just around the corner, and when it begins, we’re going to have to make very serious decisions. But remember that the Soviet Union has the right and the duty to defend itself, even at the expense of Poland or whoever. . Fortunately, we have Comrade Stalin, and he sees farther than all the bourgeois politicians. . so far that he gave the order for you to go into action.”

Ramón felt a shudder go through him. The unforeseen twist in the conversation, which suddenly included him in a gigantic political maneuver, erased the last trace of doubt and filled him with pride.

“He already gave the order?”

“We’re getting close. . It all depends on what happens in the coming months. If the Germans sweep Europe, we’ll go into action. We can’t run the risk of the Duck staying alive. The Germans can use him as the head of a counterrevolution. And he is so desperate for power, so full of hate for the Soviet Union, that he wouldn’t hesitate for a second to lend himself as Hitler’s puppet in an offensive against us.”

“So what do we do?”

Tom fished in the pocket of his shirt and removed a passport.

“We can’t risk you getting stuck if they seal the borders. . You’re going to New York. . Jacques Mornard is leaving because the war is about to start and he’s not willing to fight for others. You bought this Canadian passport for three thousand dollars and you’re going to see Sylvia before you go to Mexico, where you have a job as the agent for a businessman, a certain Peter Lubeck, importer of raw materials. .”

“Will I then be Jacques Mornard again?”

“Full-time, although with two names. According to this passport, you’re Frank Jacson. . And don’t worry, Caridad and I are going to be nearby the whole time.”

Ramón looked at the passport. Beneath his photographed face, he read his new name, and he felt happy knowing that he was getting close to the battlefront where the future of the socialist revolution could be decided. When he lifted his gaze, he saw that Tom had fallen asleep, with his head hanging over his shoulder. From his mouth, a deep snore began to reverberate. Ramón left him to recover his energy. For them, the war was about to begin.

In the days pierced by the doubts that would arise, and in the very difficult years that would follow, Ramón Mercader spent many hours recalling the life of Jacques Mornard and came to discover that he felt admiration and pity for him in similar measure. What Jacques did on that occasion, for example, was something mechanical, a decision that, at that moment, seemed to be the only possible one: as soon as he disembarked in New York, he went to see Sylvia. He didn’t even consider the possibility of taking a couple of days to enjoy the city without having to drag around the deadweight of that taxing woman. Definitively, Jacques was a little foolish and obeyed Ramón’s puritanism and Tom’s orders too closely, he would think when he was in a position to examine Jacques from a critical distance and see how he could have acted differently.

When she opened the door and saw him, Sylvia was on the verge of passing out. Despite the letters in which he confirmed his love, his promise of matrimony, and the proximity of their next encounter, that woman — dazzled as she was and would be until she was brutally removed from her dream — had trembled every day their separation lasted, fearing that that gift from the sky would disappear and return her to the solitude of an ugly thirty-something with no expectations. During those months of distance, she had suffered every moment thinking that Jacques could fall in love with another woman or that he wouldn’t fit into her regular life, so full of meetings and political work, or that Jacques was too much of a man for so little a woman. . Now the happiness of having him before her made tears spring to her eyes, and she kissed him as if she wanted to make him definitively real with the warmth of her lips.

“My love, my love, my love,” she kept repeating, like a woman possessed, as she began to drag Jacques toward the bedroom of her small Brooklyn apartment.

That night, her appetites fulfilled, Sylvia was at last able to find out that her lover had turned into a deserter. He explained that his sustained decision not to enlist in the army had led him to buy a passport on the black market, thanks to which he was able to leave France. His mother’s generosity had provided him the money for the purchase of the passport (“They’ve gotten so expensive because of the war,” he said) and for the trip, along with a few thousand dollars more to bring with him so that they could live on in New York until something economically satisfactory came up. Faced with the decision of her man who had come searching for her after burning all his bridges, Sylvia felt giddy with happiness.

Jacques insisted they go out to dinner. She suggested a nearby restaurant, as she planned the outings they would make to familiarize her lover with New York. At the newsstand, the vendor was ready to close the blinds and Jacques hurried to buy an evening paper. As he arrived at the stand, the headline repeated on all the evening papers burned itself into his retinas, Germany had invaded Poland.

With various newspapers in their hands, they entered the humble restaurant, furnished with Formica tables, settled in, and commented that that was, without a doubt, the start of the war. The British and French reactions to the German invasion were of a tone that could only lead to a formal declaration of war, and there was speculation about whether the United States would join. As he read, Jacques understood that, once again, Tom had analyzed the Soviet strategy keenly and knew that he now found himself a few steps closer to carrying out his mission.

Sylvia ended up being an excellent guide to the city. Because of her political work and her community-based activities, she knew every inch of the metropolis. Jacques could see with his own eyes the cohabitation, in a limited space, the dazzling splendor and miserable poverty on which that mirror of capitalism sustained itself. With Tom still in Europe, he dedicated all of his time to Sylvia and felt proud that he was able to satisfy the needs of a constantly hungry woman.

As he and Tom had decided, starting on September 25, Jacques went on alternate days to a bar on Broadway where, at some point, Tom would find him to pass on his new instructions. The pretext he gave Sylvia for his absences was that he needed to find an old classmate who had been living in the city for years and who was connected enough to find him a good job.

The afternoon of October 1, when he saw Andrew Roberts enter, dressed in overwhelming elegance and displaying very sophisticated manners, Ramón felt a wave of envy. How many faces could that man use? Which of the stories he had told him could be true? As well as his loyalty to the cause, what visible part of him was real? Now he seemed like an actor from those Chicago mobster movies that Americans liked so much. Even his laughter fit his appearance, cinematographic and gangsterlike.

“Lots of work?” he asked in English when he sat down next to Jacques.

“I would say too much, Mr. Roberts. That woman always wants more.”

“Use your Spanish fury. If you were Swedish, you’d be fucked.” And he laughed sonorously as he addressed the bartender: “The usual, Jimmy. For my friend, too.”

“What about Caridad?” Jacques asked, hiding his surprise over the familiarity with which Roberts treated the bartender.

“For now, forget about her. I want you to spend all your time living and thinking like Jacques Mornard.”

“Why did it take you so long?”

“With the war, everything got complicated. I had to look for a new passport. I couldn’t leave as a Pole.”

“Any news from Mexico?”

“Everything is on. I need you there in two weeks.”

“To do something?”

“You have to become familiar with the terrain. Ever since the Red Army entered Poland, things have been going as Comrade Stalin foresaw. I have a feeling the order is about to be given.”

Mr. Roberts accepted his frozen vodka and, before the bartender could place the small glass before Jacques, he was already returning his, empty.

“You’re thirsty today, Mr. Roberts,” said Jimmy, who refilled his glass and withdrew.

“In a few days, Europe is going to turn into an inferno,” Roberts sighed.

“Do I take Sylvia with me?”

“For now, it’s preferable to leave her here. You have a job in Mexico at an importing company. Your Belgian friend put you in touch with Mr. Lubeck, who needs someone who speaks several languages and is able to inspire more confidence than a Mexican. It’s an easy and well-paid job. . We’ll need Sylvia in Mexico later on, when you control the terrain.”

“What about the American spy?”

The bartender returned with another vodka and Roberts gave him his successful, tough-guy smile.

“Nothing yet. But it’s better that way. If he arrived now, it would be too soon. Grigulievich is having a hell of a time with the Mexicans. Each one wants to do things his own way and do them straightaway.”

Jacques tasted his vodka and Roberts downed his.

“From now on, you’re Jacson for all legal matters; to Sylvia and the people you meet through her, you’re Jacques. Be careful with the way you speak. The idea is that little by little you start improving your Spanish.”

The bartender removed his empty glass and returned it full. Roberts smiled at him. Slowly, Jacques finished his vodka.

“You seem worried, kid,” Roberts said.

“Sometimes I am afraid that all of this”—Jacques Mornard opened his arms, indicating the bar, the city—“is all just for fun. I’ve spent two years preparing myself for something I might never do. I left my comrades in Spain, I don’t have a single friend, I’ve turned into someone else, and it could all be in vain.”

Mr. Roberts let him finish and stayed silent for a few moments.

“This work is like that, kid. Lots of lines are cast, even though there’s just one fish. Each one of us is a line. One of us will have the possibility of getting the fish and the others will return empty, but they’ll have carried out their role in the water. It will be crucial for you to manage to get close to the Duck. Everything we learn about how that house works will help us a lot. But meanwhile, you’ll still be a fishing line with a hook at the end. And I assure you that you’re the one who will be closest to the fish, with the best bait. At the definitive moment, perhaps you won’t take all the glory, but you’ll have done your job in a disciplined way, silently, and although no one will ever know that you were so close to the great responsibility, the men of the future will have a better and surer world thanks to people like you.”

“I appreciate the consolation. Lately, you talk like Caridad.”

“It’s not a consolation or a speech, it’s the truth. So go to Mexico and get ready. . Remember that from the first time I saw you in Barcelona I had a very strong feeling about you, and I’m not the kind who makes mistakes. That’s why we are here. Of the ones in Mexico, do you know how many know I exist? None. And they will never know. If they’re not the ones in charge of getting the Duck out of the way, no one will ever know there was a certain Roberts — no, a certain Tom. . bah, no, it was Grigoriev; or was it Kotov? Anyway, there should have been a man who placed them before history. Who was it?. . I am a soldier who fights in the shadows and only aspires to fulfill my duty.” Mr. Roberts took out some bills and placed a glass on top of them. “Let’s go around the corner: they’re showing the latest Marx Brothers film.”

Jacques smiled and looked at his mentor.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Roberts, I have a dinner date with my fiancée. I hope we see each other soon. Thanks for the drink.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Jacson. Good luck with your girlfriend and your job.”

The men shook hands and Roberts saw Jacques walk away toward the door. Then he went back to his chair and leaned with his elbows on the bar.

“Jimmy, I think my glass is empty.”

He signed the name “Jacques Mornard” and carefully folded the sheet. When he tried to slip it into the envelope engraved with the Hotel Montejo’s letterhead, Ramón was again certain that the makers of loose sheets of paper and the makers of correspondence envelopes should come to an agreement: either one side cuts a few millimeters off the sheets or the other adds a few to the envelopes. Nothing bothered him more than when something he wished to remain pure was unnecessarily damaged, and because of that, he used the utmost care when placing the sheet in the envelope. With his tongue, he wet the glue and closed the packet, wedging it under the lamp to get it perfect.

He finished getting dressed and, before putting on his hat, wrote his name below the letterhead and, in the middle of the envelope, Sylvia Ageloff’s address. He went downstairs, gave the letter to the reception desk, and went out onto Paseo de la Reforma. Amid the usual noise, he walked on the sidewalk in search of the garage where he liked to park his sparkling Buick and looked distantly at the Indian woman who was selling hot tortillas on a stone dish. The sweetish smell of the corn flour stayed with him until he entered his car, shiny and black. Without looking at the city map, he headed to Coyoacán.

It had been a week since Jacques Mornard, with a passport issued in the name of the Canadian citizen Frank Jacson (why not Jackson? Who the hell had lost that k that forced him to explain so much?), had arrived in Mexico City. Besides the various letters he wrote to Sylvia, he began to prepare the indispensable logistics of his mission and had been fine-tuning his identity. After buying the car secondhand but in perfect condition, he opened a mailbox in an office building on Calle Bucareli, giving the concierge the excuse that, while he looked for a place, he needed to receive correspondence somewhere that wasn’t a hotel. In addition, he had wandered around offices, restaurants, and businesses in the city center, practicing his Spanish with a French accent, and spent hours reading the newspapers with the greatest circulation, seeking to bring himself up-to-speed on the nuances of local politics until he had an approximate idea of the way that, when the time came and before different interlocutors, he should be able to talk about every issue. He had noticed, as usually occurs, that while the parties on the right were very clear about their purposes, the ones on the left were absorbed in the most uncontrollable controversies. Finally, he had again studied the recently purchased maps of Mexico (the ones he had handled in Paris he had ripped apart before leaving, to keep Sylvia from seeing them in his suitcases) and regained an image of the city, now putting a face to some of its streets, plazas, and parks.

Despite the chronic lack of signs, he drove without making a single wrong turn until he reached the intersection of Londres and Allende, in Coyoacán. He stopped the car and locked it. Protecting himself from the sun with the dark gold-rimmed glasses he bought in New York, he observed the Casa Azul, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo’s property, where the Exile had lived for over two years. It was a building surrounded by high walls painted in exultant colors, and he noticed that on one of the side walls he could tell the different texture of the squares that must have been windows but were covered, out of fear, perhaps, long after the walls were built. Smoking a cigarette, he walked away in search of Calle Morelos to access Avenida Viena, which was really a stony alleyway that ran parallel to the moribund Churubusco River. Two blocks before reaching the fortress, he approached a small business and asked for a soda from a sleepy, toothless salesclerk. The house, ocher and walled, took over the block it rose from. The watch towers, soaring over the high fences, gave a privileged view of the men who, at that moment, were speaking animatedly and, at intervals, looking inside the dwelling as if they were expecting something. On the corner, they had built a wooden shack in front of which was a policeman, and he discovered two other uniformed men milling in front of the steel-sheeted gates for cars to enter. A smaller door to the right served to allow access to visitors and inhabitants. The air around it breathed secular poverty, and the image of a medieval castle surrounded by serfs’ huts came to Jacques Mornard’s mind.

Having drunk just about half the soda, he walked toward the fortified house. He tried to fix in his mind every detail, every tree and sunken stone in the earth, of that so-called avenue. Without stopping, with his hat and his glasses on, he passed in front of the Duck’s lair. If at the Casa Azul he had noticed the signs of fear, now he had beside him a monument to anxiety. The man who had cloistered himself behind those walls was convinced that his life had been marked and should know that, when the time came, neither steel nor stones nor the guards would be able to save him, because he was condemned by history.

As he turned the corner and discovered two more policemen at that part of the wall, he heard a metallic screeching and slowed down to look over his shoulder. The gate opened and a car — a Dodge, he noted immediately — peeked out onto the stony street. A stocky blond man was at the wheel and another man, with a hard look and a rifle raised between his legs, was in the passenger seat. From one of the towers came a voice that, in English, announced everything was clear, and the Dodge was barely on the street when the gate began to close. Jacques walked two steps toward the closest building and, violating a basic rule, turned around to watch the car pass by, through the back windows of which he saw a woman with light hair who fit the well-studied image of Natalia Ivanovna Sedova, and behind the driver, just a few feet from his hands, he sighted the graying hair, the sharp face made longer by the goatee, of the Great Traitor. The car sped up, lifting dust in the street, and made its way toward the road leading out of the city. Jacques started walking again, regaining the rhythm of a carefree man, without much interest in what surrounded him.

Back in his Buick, on the highway heading back toward the city, Jacques Mornard tried to imagine how he would feel if he ever met that malevolent man who, so long ago, had managed to place himself so close to revolutionary glory and now survived justly detested, sentenced by the infinite betrayals he had committed due to his lust for power and his basic deceitfulness. If Jacques made it in front of him, would he be able to control himself and not throw himself at the neck of that louse who had encouraged the POUM fifth columnists and who was now shouting about supposed Soviet military weakness? Like an eruption, Ramón Mercader came out of Jacques Mornard’s pores. With all his energy, he wished at that moment for life to offer him the great chance to be the ruthless arm of the most sacred and just hate. He was willing to pay whatever price was necessary, silently, without aspiring to anything. And he felt convinced that he was ready to fulfill history’s mandate.

Tom and Caridad were a couple from Marseille, comfortable but not rich, who had decided to get some distance from the events in Europe and await the evolution of a war that the fascists would eventually take to France. Life in Mexico was sufficiently cheap for their finances to withstand (doing some business or other with a brother of Tom’s based in New York), and while they looked for an appropriate house, they lived in the Shirley Court apartments, on Calle Sullivan, which was, coincidentally, very close to the Hotel Montejo. They spoke Spanish perfectly but were very reserved, very little given to socializing, although they loved small trips, in which they could invest several days.

It was the beginning of November when Frank Jacson answered a call from his old friend Tom, inviting him to visit him at Shirley Court. When he arrived at the appointed time, Caridad was waiting for him in the apartment’s small entryway. Inside, seated at the dining room table, Tom was reviewing some papers when Jacson entered. The adviser was dressed very informally, with a denim jacket, a handkerchief around his neck, and hiking boots. Even the smile with which he welcomed the young man was different from the one that, a month before, had lit up the face of the man who had then called himself Mr. Roberts.

“My friend Jacson!” He stood up and pointed at the armchairs in the living room. “How’s the city treating you?”

Jacques settled in and observed that Caridad disappeared behind a partition where he assumed the kitchen was.

“The coffee is disgusting.”

“We’re already fixing that, right, ma chérie?”

Caridad said “Of course” without leaving the kitchen, and Tom added:

“Cuban coffee, you’ll see.”

“Anything new?” Jacques wanted to know as he took out his cigarettes.

“Everything’s moving forward; the siege is starting to take shape.”

“What should I do in the meantime?”

“Same as you’ve been doing. Get to know the city and, if possible, come to understand a little bit about how Mexicans think. Keep Sylvia in New York for a few more weeks. Tell her you have a lot of work piling up at the office, since your boss is traveling outside Mexico for a few weeks.”

Caridad came in with the tray and small cups. It smelled like real coffee. The men took their cups and Caridad sat down to drink from hers as well. The cigarette smoke created a cloud in the room. Caridad’s silence warned Jacques that something was going on, and he didn’t have to wait too long to find out.

“Ramón,” Tom said, and paused. “Why do you insist on disobeying me?”

Surprised by the question and by hearing his name, Ramón searched for the possible infraction in his mind and immediately found it.

“I wanted to get a first impression of the terrain.”

“What the fuck kind of impression?” Tom yelled, and even Caridad was startled in her seat. “Yob tvoyu mat! You do what I tell you to do and nothing else besides what I say! Suka! It’s the second time you go beyond your limits and it will be the last time. If you try to do what you feel like again, your story is over, and in truth, kid, then you won’t want to be in any of your guises.”

Ramón was ashamed and confused. Who could have noticed his presence in Coyoacán? The toothless salesclerk who sold him the soda? The man with the crutches sleeping on the street? Whoever it was, Tom seemed to have eyes everywhere.

“It was a mistake,” he admitted.

“Kid, I expect mistakes from everyone else. I’m going to have to live with all the blunders from that bunch of Mexicans we’re putting together, with those made by those imbeciles from the Comintern who think they own the revolution and are nothing more than vedettes whom we can leave with their asses hanging in the air with just one breath. But not you. . Get it into your head for once and for fucking all that you don’t think, you just obey; you don’t act, you just execute; you don’t decide, you just fulfill. You’re going to be my hand on that son of a bitch’s neck and my voice is going to be that of Comrade Stalin, and Stalin thinks for all of us. . Bliat!”

“It won’t happen again, I promise.”

The adviser looked at him long and intensely, and his face began to relax.

“What did you think of the coffee?” he then asked, in a friendlier voice and even with a smile.

Since that afternoon, Jacques Mornard felt as never before the viscous density of the days of passivity. It was as if he had a lottery ticket in his hands whose drawing was delayed and, with it, his future. He lacked the concentration to read anything besides newspapers, his character kept him far from cantinas and brothels, and he opted for sleeping the greatest quantity of hours possible. He even found himself hoping that they would order him to bring Sylvia; that way, at least he would have something to focus on, someone with whom he could use his Jacques Mornard brain and even experience a mediocre but sure release of his diminished sexual appetites. In Tom and Caridad’s company, he took trips to the pyramids of Teotihuacán, to Lake Xochimilco, and to the city of Puebla, which reminded him so much of some Castilian towns, with more churches than schools. A couple of times, he went out with Tom to the San Ángel area, to practice shooting a handgun and hone his skills with sharp-edged weapons. One night a week, accompanied by Caridad as well, they went out to eat together at some restaurant in the city center, where Tom eagerly devoured dishes loaded with that hot sauce capable of making Ramón and Caridad cry. They talked about the war (the Soviet army had finally launched itself into what should be a crushing expedition against Finland), about Grigulievich’s group’s advances, about the escalation of the campaign orchestrated by Vittorio Vidali, the Comintern man, against the renegade’s presence in Mexico, and about the Mexican Communist Party purges that would soon be carried out. Loyal to his role, Ramón Mercader only spoke and acted like Jacques Mornard, but the events seemed to be moving in slow motion and anxiety was taking over the repressed but burning Ramón. When he was alone, without the obligation to look like a wasteful and fun playboy, the young man spent many of his nights going to the movies where they played new Westerns and films with his beloved Marx Brothers. Groucho’s boutades, which he liked to repeat in front of the mirror, still seemed like the height of the verbal genius he’d never had and that he admired so much in those who did.

When, in the middle of December, Tom told him it was time to make Sylvia come, Ramón Mercader knew that something had at last started to move. The strike could happen at any moment and the smell of risk cleared his mind of the mist of forced inactivity. The Duck hunt had begun.

21

The House of the Trade Unions in Moscow is a great work of nineteenth-century Russian architecture. The architect Kazakov had turned the eighteenth-century building into a club for the Muscovite aristocracy, and in its luxurious Hall of Columns, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy had danced, and Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Liszt, and Rachmaninov had played their music. After the revolution, the hall, with its excellent acoustics, was used for party meetings and press conferences. There Lenin’s voice was heard dozens of times; there the funeral chapel was erected from which the remains of the leader would exit toward the mausoleum on Red Square. But Lev Davidovich was convinced that the compound was going to pass into posterity for having housed the most grotesque judicial farce of the century, and on March 2 of the already disastrous year of 1938, when the Hall of Columns’ doors were opened again, he also knew that death was returning to that historic building ready to gather another harvest.

Ever since they began to cry over the fate of their son Liova, Natalia and Lev Davidovich had learned in too painful a way what it meant to harbor one last hope, since they now had only one — Seriozha’s life — to cling to. Although it had been months since they’d received news of the young man, the fact that they didn’t know if he was dead allowed them to embrace the improbable but still conceivable hope that he was still alive. Their only other hope was Seva. Besides them, the boy was the only member of the family living outside the Soviet Union, and they begged Jeanne to bring him to Mexico, at least for a few months, and, with his presence, help them lessen the pain of the loss they had suffered.

But Jeanne wanted to request a more exhaustive investigation into Liova’s cause of death and was willing to hire an attorney, a friend of the Moliniers, despite Rosenthal, the Trotskys’ legal representative in France, being of the opinion that they shouldn’t mix the Molinier group up in the case. In the most diplomatic way, Lev Davidovich asked the woman to leave the investigation request in his hands, but she insisted on moving forward and had decided that Seva would remain with her in Paris, since, she said, he had turned into her best support. Natalia Sedova was the first one to foresee that devastating conflicts were coming from that flank.

Meanwhile, the efficient Étienne had committed himself to continuing the work of the Bulletin in Paris. In his last months, Liova had assured his father that the publication was in circulation often thanks to Étienne’s dedication. Liova’s trust in the young man was such that, in case of emergency, he had given him a key to the mailbox where he received personal correspondence. Now Étienne offered to continue the task begun by Liova, along with Klement, on the planned constitution of the Fourth International. “Hopefully, Étienne will be half as efficient as our poor Liova,” Lev Davidovich commented, knowing how much he was fooling himself.

The news that the Military Council of the Supreme Court would go into session again in the Hall of Columns didn’t surprise him. Lev Davidovich expected that at any moment the machinery of terror would again be set in motion, since Stalin needed to complete his work of erasing the collective memory that he had initiated with Kirov’s murder and carefully and efficiently continued over the last three years. In a way that made him feel miserable, Lev Davidovich tried to concentrate on the details of the new judicial farce, trying to remove from his mind the obsessive feeling of guilt and pain that had plagued him since his son’s death.

When the list of the twenty-one accused was unveiled, Lev Davidovich found many predictable names: Rykov, Bukharin, Rakovsky, Yagoda, and Trotsky himself, in absentia. They would also try the memory of Lev Sedov, his eternal deputy, and lesser-known characters, including doctors, ambassadors, and civil servants. Of the accused, thirteen were of Jewish origin, and such an insistence on subjecting Jews to those proceedings could be read as another sign of compliance toward Hitler and as a testimony of Stalin’s visceral anti-Semitism. The charges were none too original, since they repeated the accusations of the previous trials, although there were more, since there always had to be more: terrorism against the people and the party leaders, poisonings. . The greatest novelty was that several of the accused had fallen so low in the markets of espionage and crime that they were blamed for serving not just German and Japanese intelligence but also Polish intelligence, and not only for wanting to assassinate Comrade Stalin but also for having poisoned Gorky and his son Max. Since they didn’t seem to be criminal enough, the crimes now expanded to the time of the revolution and even previous dates, when the state that would try them didn’t yet exist. The prosecutor’s master move was to accuse Yagoda of having acted as an instrument of Trotskyist aggression by which, throughout the ten years that he had pursued, imprisoned, and tortured Lev Davidovich’s comrades and confined thousands of people to death camps, his criminal excesses were due to counterrevolutionary orders that came from Trotsky himself and not at the disposition of Stalin.

Feeling how that aggression for the truth was giving him back his energy, the Exile wrote that the Grave Digger of the Revolution was going beyond all his previous experience and the limits of the most militant credulity. The irrationality of the accusations was such that it was nearly impossible to conceive of a counterattack, although at the beginning he decided to respond with sarcasm: he wrote that he had such power that under his orders, given from France, Norway, or Mexico, dozens of civil servants and ambassadors with whom he had never spoken turned into agents of foreign powers and sent him money, lots of money, to maintain his terrorist organization; leaders of industry became saboteurs; respectable doctors devoted themselves to poisoning their patients. The only problem, he would comment, was that those men had been chosen by Stalin himself, since it had been many years since he’d appointed anyone in the USSR.

The incredible confessions heard during the ten days that the proceedings lasted, and the way in which they humiliated men loaded with history, such as Bukharin and Rykov, didn’t surprise Lev Davidovich. He was greatly saddened to read the self-incriminations of a fighter like the radical Rakovsky (so close to death that he was allowed to sit while making his statement), who acknowledged having allowed himself to be led by Trotskyist theories, despite the fact that Trotsky had confessed to him in 1926 that he was a British agent. What extremes had they gone to in order to break the dignity of a man who had withstood years of deportations and imprisonments without giving up his convictions and who knew he was at the end of his life? Did any of them really think that, with his confession, he was rendering a service to the USSR, as they were forced to claim? Lev Davidovich was incapable of understanding those displays of submission and cowardice.

One prime setback in the proceedings showed the seams in their fabrication, and Krestinsky was at the center of it. For an entire afternoon he dared to maintain that his confessions, made before the secret police, were false and declared himself innocent of all charges. But the following morning, when he took the stand, Krestinsky admitted that the previous accusations and some more, surely developed in a hurry, were true. What means had they used to break a man who was already convinced he would be executed? The new GPU was developing methods that would horrify the world the day it found out about them, methods thanks to which the most spectacular revelation of the proceedings was produced when Yagoda, after declaring himself innocent and receiving the same treatment as Krestinsky, confessed to having prepared Kirov’s murder under Rykov’s orders, since the latter was envious of the young man’s meteoric rise.

But the star of the trial, as to be expected, was Nikolai Bukharin, who, at the end of a one-year stay in the pits of the Lubyanka, seemed ready to undertake the last act of his political and human self-demolition. Although he denied being responsible for the most dreadful acts of terrorism and espionage, Lev Davidovich thought he noticed that his tactic was to accept the unacceptable with a conviction and emphasis with which he hoped to show the most perceptive observers the falsity of the indictment. The old revolutionary nonetheless noticed the error of perspective Bukharin was committing by trying to give a cry of alarm to the alarmed, for whom (despite the silence they maintained) all of those accusations would be as hard to believe as those of previous trials. But the great masses, the ones who followed the course of the proceedings in Moscow and in the world, came to just one conclusion from his words, which validated the charges and destroyed the prisoner’s strategy: Bukharin confessed, they said, and that was what was important. To end up kneeling and sobbing, admitting to fictitious crimes, Bukharin had preferred to return to Moscow? Lev Davidovich asked himself, recalling the dramatic letter that Fyodor Dan sent him three years before.

To Lev Davidovich, it seemed clear that in the proceedings Stalin demanded more than a truth: he demanded the human and political destruction of the accused. When he executed the accused in the previous trials, he had forced them to die conscious that they had not only debased themselves but had condemned many innocents as well. For that reason it surprised him that Bukharin, who without a doubt had learned the lesson of the Bolsheviks who had preceded him in that moment of peril, should retain the deluded hope of saving his own life. In one of the many letters that he wrote to Stalin from the depths of the Lubyanka and that the Grave Digger was sure to have circulated in certain circles, Bukharin finally told him that all he felt for him, for the party, and for the cause was a grandiose and infinite love, and he bid farewell embracing him in his thoughts. . Lev Davidovich could imagine Stalin’s satisfaction upon receiving messages like that one, which turned him into one of the few executioners in history to receive the worship of one of his victims as he pushed him toward death. .

On March 11 the trial closed for sentencing. Four days later, Pravda confirmed those sentenced to death had been executed. .

Ever since that spectacle started to unfold, Lev Davidovich had been shutting himself up in his room, as it was painful to try to answer the questions posed to him by journalists, followers, secretaries, and bodyguards, all in search of some logic beyond the hate, the conspiratorial obsession, and the criminal insanity of the man who governed over one-sixth of the earth and influenced the minds of millions of men and women around the world. Lev Davidovich knew that Stalin’s only possible objective in these proceedings was to discredit and eliminate real and potential adversaries and blame them for every one of his failures. What escaped them was that the discrediting was directed inward at Soviet society, which undoubtedly believed everything that was propagated, no matter how difficult it was to take in. The other great purpose was to make fear extensive and omnipresent, especially in those who had something to lose. Because of that, the first targets of those purges had been, in reality, the bureaucrats. Following that strategy, Stalin beat dozens of his acolytes, including various members of the Politburo and party secretaries in the republics, Stalinists who, from one day to the next, were labeled traitors, spies, or inept. If the oppositionists of other times had been publicly dishonored, the Stalinists, by contrast, tended to be destroyed in silence, without open proceedings, in the same way that the Communists of various countries taking refuge in the USSR were decimated along with those whom Stalin, after using them, seemed to have turned upon.

The most terrible thing was knowing that those sweeps had affected all of Soviet society. As could be expected in a vertical and horizontal state of terror, the participation of the masses in the purges contributed to its geometric diffusion because it was impossible to undertake a witch hunt like the one experienced in the USSR without exacerbating people’s basest instincts and, above all, without each person being terrified of being caught in the net for any reason, even no reason. Terror had the effect of stimulating envy and the desire for revenge; it created an atmosphere of collective hysteria and, worse still, of indifference before the fate of others. Once the purge was unleashed, it fed on itself and released infernal forces that made it keep growing and moving forward. .

Weeks before, Lev Davidovich had received dramatic proof of the horror endured by his compatriots when an old friend, miraculously escaped to Finland, wrote him: “It’s terrible to confirm that a system born to rescue human dignity has resorted to rewards, glorification, the encouragement of denunciations, and feeds on everything that is humanly vile. I feel the nausea rise in my throat when I hear people say: they’ve shot M., they’ve shot P., shot, shot, shot. The words, after hearing them so much, lose their meaning. The people say them with greater calm, as if they were saying: we’re going to the theater. I, who lived these years in fear and felt the compulsion to denounce (I confess so with terror, but without any feeling of guilt), have lost in my mind the brutal semantics of the verb ‘to shoot’. . I feel that we’ve reached the end of justice on earth, the limits of human dignity. That too many people have perished in the name of what, they promised us, would be a better society. .”

André Breton’s arrival brought Lev Davidovich out of the well of his personal and historic sorrows. Diego and Frida received him with enthusiasm. Breton was the guru of surrealism, the eternal nonconformist capable of challenging the most sacred dogmas, such as when he noted that he and his friends were affiliating themselves with the French Communist Party and accepting party discipline as citizens. . but not as surrealists.

At the conclusion of their first meeting, weighed down with condolences, Lev Davidovich asked the poet for a few days to organize his thoughts before beginning to work on the project that had brought him to Mexico: the creation of an International Federation of Revolutionary Artists. Lev Davidovich knew he would work passionately, but that it would require great effort, since not even for someone like Lev Davidovich was it easy to handle the weight of so much death and pain. In addition, the heated situation in Mexico continued to worry him. When President Cárdenas announced the nationalization of oil interests and the U.S. secretary of the treasury responded with the threat of not buying any more Mexican silver, one million people gathered in the Zócalo to express their support for Cárdenas, but at the same time there was talk of possible uprisings against the government. Lev Davidovich knew that these circumstances put him and Natalia in a critical situation, as the NKVD murderers could take the opportunity, in the midst of so much chaos, to pounce on them, indeed he was convinced that, after the last trial, the purge of his former Bolshevik leadership completed, his existence had ceased to be useful to Stalin.

Before Breton and his wife, Jacqueline, left, the Communists in France and Mexico had begun a campaign against him. The French, from which Breton had separated himself in 1935, were accusing him of being a Judas and, of course, something worse, a Trotsky sympathizer; in Mexico, meanwhile, the local Stalinists, with Lombardo Toledano and Hernán Laborde at their head, launched even more aggressive propaganda against the poet and against Lev Davidovich — so aggressive, in fact, that van Heijenoort decided to take some of the bodyguards for Breton’s protection during the conferences he would be giving in the country.

To discuss literature and art, surrealism and vanguardism, political commitment and creative freedom, was a balm for the Exile. Breton’s presence and his literary encouragement reminded Lev Davidovich that ever since his childhood, and later on, when he was a young student, his life’s dream had been to become a writer, although soon after he would subordinate that passion and all others to the revolutionary work that marked his existence.

Guided by Diego, the Bretons and the Trotskys walked around the pre-Columbian ruins and visited museums and local artists who accepted the Exile’s presence. The high priest of surrealism confessed to his astonishment before the multicolored markets, the cemeteries, and the manifestations of popular religiosity, in which he tended to find a “surrealism in a pure state,” more revealing than the shock of the umbrella and the sewing machine on the dissection table, and for that reason he considered Mexico “the chosen land of surrealism.”

When they began to work on the manifesto of writers and revolutionary artists with which they would bring the international federation into creation, Lev Davidovich and Breton must have felt the explosive tension that two stubborn souls could generate, but at the same time the possibility of an understanding born of shared need. From the beginning, Diego made it clear that the theoretical statements would be left to them, although they could count on his signature, since the three were operating with the urgency of offering a political and intellectual alternative to the left that would allow them to reconcile themselves with Marxist thinking at a moment in which many believers, disillusioned by the repression unleashed in Moscow, were beginning to turn their backs on the socialist ideal.

In those conversations, Breton maintained the need to make a major distinction: the intellectuals on the left that had linked their thinking to the Soviet experiment were making a serious conceptual error, since it wasn’t the same to march alongside a revolutionary class as in the steps of the victorious revolution, more so when that revolution was represented by a new leadership insistent on suffocating artistic creation with a totalitarian grip. . But despite the accusations by the Stalinists, his own distance from the party had not been a break with the revolution and, less still, with the workers and their struggles, he said. His great disagreement with Lev Davidovich revolved around a concept both considered fundamental to establish clearly, and about which the Exile’s position was definitive and nonnegotiable: “Everything is permitted in art.” Upon hearing this, Breton smiled and showed his agreement, but only if an essential clarification was added: everything except attacking the proletarian revolution. Breton recalled that Lev Davidovich himself had said that, and the Exile explained that when he wrote The Revolution Betrayed, the aesthetics deformations in the Soviet Union had certainly reached alarming levels, but the events of the last three years had broken the dike. While a proletarian revolution might inevitably pass through a period that was not Thermidorian but rather a terror that negated its own essence, it still had no right to impose conditions restricting artistic freedom: everything has to be permitted in art, he insisted, to which the French man again added: everything except attacking the proletarian revolution. This was the only sacred principle.

Breton was the kind of sharp adversary who brought Lev Davidovich so much pleasure. The challenge of persuading the surrealist reminded him of Alexander Parvus of his youth, when discussing Marxism became his obsession. To reinforce his arguments, Lev Davidovich evoked for Breton the fates of Mayakovsky and Gorky, the forced silences of Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Babel, the degradations of Romain Rolland and of various former surrealists loyal to Stalinism, and insisted that they shouldn’t admit any kind of restrictions, nothing that could lead to the acceptance of things that a dictatorship could impose on the creator with the excuse of political or historic need: art had to follow its own demands, and only those. By accepting political conditions that Lev Davidovich himself had defended (at this point he truly regretted having done so), presently it was impossible to read Soviet poems and novels or see paintings created by the obedient, without feeling horror and disgust. Art in the USSR had turned into a pantomime in which civil servants armed with pens and brushes — watched by civil servants armed with guns — could glorify their great genius leaders. That’s where the slogan of ideological unanimity had led them: the pretext that they were under siege by class enemies, and the eternal justification that it was not the right time to talk about problems and the truth, to give poetry freedom. Artistic creation in Stalin’s time, he thought, would remain the expression of the deepest decadence of the proletarian revolution, and no one had the right to condemn the art of the new society at the risk of repeating that frustrating experience. “For art, freedom is sacred, its only salvation. For art everything has to be everything,” he concluded.

In those conversations in which they attempted to fix the world, Lev Davidovich discovered with some surprise that, more than any theory, Breton was fascinated by the drama of life itself, and that he frequently brought up the subject of fate and its role in the events that marked one’s destiny. It was during one of these conversations, seemingly insignificant and without anyone recalling how they got to talking about it, that Lev Davidovich confessed to the poet how much he loved dogs. He expressed his regret to Breton that his wandering life had prevented him from having one ever since he said goodbye to his Russian wolfhound at the cemetery wall in Prinkipo, and he spoke to him of Maya’s goodness and the devotion that, in general, dogs of that breed felt for their owners. Then Lev Davidovich realized that the most surreal of the surrealists was a strictly logical man when Breton refuted that idea and claimed that Lev Davidovich was allowing himself to be led by his emotions. Breton explained that, upon speaking of the love that dogs feel, Lev Davidovich was trying to attribute feelings to these beasts that belong only to humans.

With arguments that were perhaps more passionate than rational, Lev Davidovich tried to convince the Frenchman that a dog feels love for its owner. Hadn’t many stories about that love and friendship been told? If Breton had met Maya and seen her relationship with him, perhaps he would have a different opinion. The poet said that he understood it and clarified that he also loved dogs, but the feeling came from him, the human. A dog, at best, could show that it made a distinction based on how humans treated it: by being afraid of the human being who could cause him pain, for example. But if they accepted that the dog was devoted to someone, they had to also admit that the mosquito was consciously cruel when it bit someone, or that the crabwalk was deliberately retrograde. . Although he didn’t convince him, Lev Davidovich liked the surrealist image of the purposefully retrograde crab.

A few days later, they had a less pleasant discussion and with very strange consequences. It happened when Lev Davidovich was waiting for Breton to show him the draft of the manifesto, and the poet said the ideas weren’t coming and that he hadn’t been able to finish it. Perhaps due to all his stress, Lev Davidovich at that moment went into a fit of rage. He reproached Breton for his negligence (he would later regret it, recalling the times he accused Liova of the same) and his inability to understand the importance of getting that document circulating in a Europe that was closer to war every day. Breton defended himself and reminded him that not everyone could live with just one thought in mind. Lev Davidovich’s passion was “unreachable” for him. That he should be called “unreachable” annoyed Lev Davidovich even more, and they were on the verge of a breakup, which Natalia prevented by placing herself on the poet’s side.

The following day, Lev Davidovich received the news that Breton had suffered an unusual physiological phenomenon: he had fallen into a kind of general paralysis. He could barely move, he couldn’t write, and he was aphasic. The doctors diagnosed him with emotional fatigue and recommended absolute rest. But according to van Heijenoort, Lev Davidovich was the one to blame for Breton’s physical and intellectual freeze: the secretary called it “Trotsky’s breath on your neck,” which, he said, was capable of paralyzing anyone who had a relationship with him since, according to van Heijenoort, exposure to his way of living and thinking unleashed a moral tension that was almost unbearable. Lev Davidovich didn’t realize this, because he had been demanding that of himself for many years, but not everyone could live day and night facing all the powers in the world: fascism, capitalism, Stalinism, reformism, imperialism, all religions, and even rationalism and pragmatism. If a man like Breton confessed to him that he was out of reach and ended up paralyzed, Lev Davidovich had to understand that Breton was not to blame; rather, Comrade Trotsky, who had withstood everything he had to withstand all those years, was an animal of another species. (“I should hope I’m not a cruel mosquito or a reactionary crab,” Lev Davidovich commented to the secretary.)

Despite the discussions — or perhaps thanks to them — Breton’s presence had a positive effect on Lev Davidovich, whose concern increased, as Natalia had predicted, by Jeanne’s refusal to separate herself from Seva. Any way he looked at it, the woman appeared affected by neurosis, and perhaps had been influenced by someone who had turned her against Liova’s parents: her attitude was so aggressive that she had not allowed Marguerite Rosmer to have a conversation with the boy. Faced with that situation, they had no alternative but to file a lawsuit for Seva’s custody.

On July 10, the Trotskys, the Bretons — the poet had already recovered — and Diego Rivera left for Pátzcuaro. The manifesto was almost ready and Breton wanted to add the final touches. Some fisherman friends of Diego’s had promised them the best of their catch since Lev Davidovich had a weakness for the fish from Lake Pátzcuaro. Jacqueline and Breton also had a taste for them, which the poet baptized “André Masson’s fish.” The fishermen in mid-task reminded the Exile, with more nostalgia than he could have predicted, of the years in Prinkipo, when he still had faith in the future of the opposition within the Soviet Union and the energy and motivation to go out fishing with kind Kharalambos. What was his friend doing now? he asked himself. Did he still return each evening navigating over the reddish wake drawn by the setting sun on the Sea of Marmara?

With the manifesto still unfinished, the politician and the poet argued a lot about the effects of Stalinism on artistic creation inside and outside the USSR. Lev Davidovich reminded him how much disgust he felt for Stalin’s sycophants, especially authors such as Rolland, and Malreaux, whom Trotsky had praised so much on reading their first novels and who were now typical of those writers in Paris, London, and New York who were signing statements supporting Stalin without having (or wanting to have) any idea of what was really happening in the USSR. Lev Davidovich would submit each one of them, so convinced of the regime’s goodness, to a test: he would make them live with their families in a sixty-square-foot apartment, without a car, with bad heating, and force them to work ten hours a day in order to succeed in an emulation that produced nothing, earning just a few devalued rubles, eating and wearing what was assigned by their ration books and without the least possibility of traveling abroad or the freedom to express opinions on anything. If at the end of a year they still defended the Stalinist regime and espoused its great philosophical principles, then he would shut them up for another year in one of the penal colonies that Gorky had considered to be the factories of the new man — that would be the true test (excessive, really, he told himself) — and then they would see how many Rollands or Aragons still raised Stalin’s flag in a Paris bistro.

They had just returned from Pátzcuaro when Lev Davidovich received the news that on July 14 his collaborator Rudolf Klement had disappeared in Paris without a trace. His previous experiences made him fear deeply for the fate of the young man, for whom he felt great affection. Although the reports he received were untimely and sparse, from the start he felt that there was some connection between Klement’s disappearance and Liova’s death, and he let the French police know in a letter protesting the negligence with which they had handled the investigation.

Finally, on July 25, the Manifesto for Independent Revolutionary Art was ready. Since Lev Davidovich felt that his name could taint the document politically, he refrained from signing it. For that reason, he asked Rivera to undersign it along with Breton, and the painter agreed. Lev Davidovich believed this to be a first step toward a Federation of Revolutionary and Independent Artists, so necessary for a world trapped between the two most devastating totalitarian systems that had ever existed.

To send off Breton, Diego and Frida planned a surrealist party. Although the Trotskys were feeling far from festive, they tried not to dampen everyone else’s high spirits. Frida designed for Breton as “high priest of surrealism” a robe adorned with Dalí clocks, Masson fish, and Miró’s colors, and covered it with a Magritte hat. Several of the guests read surrealist poems and Diego toasted with mescal, which was, according to him, the most surrealist liquor.

Lev Davidovich was trying to fill the void left by the extraordinary Breton by concentrating on writing the resolutions and planning the program of the Fourth International, when an alarming letter arrived from the South of France. It was signed by none other than Klement himself, informing him of his political break with him in aggressive terms, full of invective. The Exile had the terrible feeling that the letter had not been written by his collaborator, unless Klement had written it under duress. One week later his worst fears came true when, on the banks of the Seine, Klement’s dismembered corpse was found.

Under the dark cloud of Klement’s murder, the constituent assembly of the Fourth International was held at the Rosmers’ villa in Périgny. Although the meeting did not come close to being what Lev Davidovich had wished for, what mattered was that the International existed at all. Following the deaths of Liova and Klement, the assembly was presided over by his old collaborator Max Shachtman, but barely forty delegates attended. The Russian contingent, as had previously been decided, was represented by the practically unknown Étienne.

Although Lev Davidovich didn’t dare confess it even to Natalia, he knew that act had been, if anything, a cry in the dark. The times they lived in were not particularly propitious for workers’ and Marxist associations without ties to Stalinism, and to prove it, one needed only to take one look at the world: within the USSR, Trotsky had barely any followers left, all of them imprisoned; Europe was rife with defections and Molinier-style divisions, and Socialists and Communists were squashed en masse in Germany and Italy; in Asia, the workers went from failure to failure. Only in the United States had the Trotskyist movement grown with the Socialist Workers Party, thanks to leaders such as Shachtman, James Cannon, and James Burnham. Meanwhile, the communist parties, routinely bowing before Moscow’s demands, had been silenced, and in the United States they had even bent to Roosevelt’s New Deal policy. “But if there’s a war, there will be a revolutionary shakeup,” he wrote. And there would be the Fourth International to prove that it was something more than the dreams of an obstinate man who refused to give up.

His predictions about the imminence of war seemed more accurate when Hitler, after meeting with Chamberlain, called a conference in Munich on September 22 and told the European powers that either they gave him a piece of Czechoslovakia or there would be war. As could be expected, the “powers” sacrificed Czechoslovakia, and Lev Davidovich could see on the horizon, more clearly than ever, the completion of an agreement between Hitler and Stalin that the two dictators had worked on in secret (and not so much) in recent years. For now, he wrote, they should agree to the division of Europe. Hitler was devoted to Aryan supremacy and turning the eastern part of the continent into his field slaves; Stalin dreamed of having a greater empire than any of the czars ever had. When these ambitions collided, there would be war.

It was around then that the Exile received a letter, this time posted in New York, that would cause him persistent anxiety. Its author introduced himself as an old American Jew of Polish origin who, without practicing his political faith, had followed his history as a revolutionary. He explained to him that he had learned the news relayed to him through a Ukrainian relative, a former member of the GPU, who a few weeks before had deserted and asked for asylum in Japan and had asked him insistently to get in touch with Trotsky. For his security, that would be the only letter he would send and he hoped it would be useful, he said.

Although that scenario seemed fantastic, the letter had a distinct air of truth. The letter centered on the existence of a Soviet agent, planted in Paris, whose code name was Cupid. That man had come to assume an important role within the French Trotskyist circles, thanks to the infinite naïveté of his followers, who had even permitted him access to secret documents. Meanwhile, Cupid maintained contact with an operative at the Soviet embassy the entire time and collaborated with the Society for the Repatriation of Émigrés, a front for the NKVD that was linked to the deaths of Reiss and Klement. The former agent taking refuge in Japan could not prove it, but due to Cupid’s proximity to the Trotskyist leadership, he thought he must have a more or less direct connection to the death of Lev Sedov. What he did know with certainty was that his mission, besides espionage, would consist of approaching Trotsky and murdering him, if conditions allowed it. He was sure that the Kremlin had already given that order following the March proceedings against Bukharin, Yagoda, and Rakovsky.

The old Jewish man ended his letter with a revealing story. His relative said he had been present at the interrogation to which they subjected Yakov Blumkin following his trip to Prinkipo. The truth about Blumkin’s arrest was that his wife, also a GPU agent, had been the one to inform on him and accuse him, not only of having contacted the Exile, but even of having given Trotsky a certain amount of money realized from the sale of old manuscripts Blumkin had taken to Turkey. The rumor that Karl Radek had been his informant was a maneuver by the Lubyanka to destroy Radek’s prestige, making him seem like a rat. In that whole proceeding, the former agent stated, Blumkin had acted with integrity and dignity that, in similar circumstances, he had seen in very few men. Despite the brutal torture sessions, Blumkin had refused to sign any type of confession, and the day on which he was executed, he had refused to kneel.

Lev Davidovich read and reread the letter and consulted with his secretaries and with Natalia. They agreed that there were only two ways to interpret the document: either it was a GPU provocation, behind which they could not see a clear objective, or it had been sent by somebody who knew the purposes of the secret police very well and who, by revealing the presence of an agent in Paris, was pointing precisely at Étienne. Although it was difficult for them to admit that Liova could have let in an enemy (Sobolevicius had introduced them, Lev Davidovich recalled), the very idea that Étienne was in reality one of Stalin’s men made him nauseous. Because of that, in his innermost being, Lev Davidovich wanted the letter to be a trick by the NKVD. Nonetheless, behind the smokescreen, he smelled a whiff of genuineness, and what made him believe in the authenticity of the information was the story of Blumkin’s detention, since until the arrival of the letter not even Natalia had known of the money the young man had given him. But what most led him to believe what the letter said was a certainty that, after the last trial, Stalin needed him much less to bolster his accusations and, as a consequence, his time on earth had begun its final countdown.

That is why Lev Davidovich did not find it strange that, following the creation of the Fourth International, the campaign against him organized by the Mexican Communist Party increased in pressure. The worst thing, however, was the fact that the political heat generated by the founding of the new meeting of parties also entered the Casa Azul, something that bothered Rivera very much. The painter was mad because Lev Davidovich had not supported his candidacy to become the secretary of the Mexican section of the Fourth International. But the reason the Exile had withheld his support was that he didn’t think it would be beneficial for Rivera to sacrifice his creativity for a bureaucratic job that, even if it gave him political direction, would have taken up all his time in meetings and in drafting documents. The second reason — which he was less likely to confess — was that he did not think Diego had sufficient political savvy. Nonetheless, Rivera aspired to political preeminence and felt betrayed by his guest.

A few days before his birthday, Lev Davidovich received a report from his former correspondent V.V., who told him that now his boss at the NKVD, that midget Yezhov, had been removed and, shortly after, jailed under charges of abuse of power and treason. Like Yagoda, Yezhov was going to die, and the real reason was that, as always, Stalin needed a scapegoat in order to make his own innocence shine.

V.V. told him in detail how, under Yezhov’s command, the labor camps had ceased to be Yagoda’s prisons, managed cruelly and with disdain, where people died from hunger and the elements. Under Yezhov, the propaganda about the excellence of the Soviet reeducation of criminals had been forgotten, and the so-called gulags had been turned into camps of systematic extermination, where the prisoners were forced to work until their deaths, or were murdered, in unprecedented numbers. But Yezhov’s terror had not been as irrational and sick as it seemed. For example, in February 1937, Stalin told his peon Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern general secretary, that the foreign Communists received in Moscow were “playing with the enemy” and immediately tasked Yezhov with solving the problem. One year later, of the 394 members of the executive committee of the International who lived in the USSR, only 170 were still alive, the rest having been executed or sent to death camps. There were Germans, Austrians, Yugoslavs, Italians, Bulgarians, Finns, Balts, British, Frenchmen, and Poles among them, while the proportion of sentenced Jews was once again noteworthy. In that witch hunt, Stalin eliminated more leaders of the German Communist Party from before 1933 than Hitler himself had. Of the sixty-eight leaders who, after obeying his policies and allowing fascism to rise, fled to seek refuge in the homeland of communism, more than forty had been executed or died in the camps; so many Poles were eliminated that their faction in the party had to be dissolved.

As he read and wrote notes on V.V.’s letter, Lev Davidovich felt himself sinking under the weight of the revelations. Could he hold out hope that someday humanity would come to know how many hundreds of thousands of people had been executed by Stalin’s henchmen? How many true Communists had he taken out? He was convinced that both totals were dizzying, to which one had to add the millions of peasants who had died of hunger in the Ukraine and other regions due to the catastrophe of collectivization, and the millions who had perished in the resettlement of entire towns ordered by the former commissar for nationalities. In all certainty, he thought, we’re dealing with the greatest massacre in peacetime history, and the worst thing is that we will never know the true and terrible proportions of the genocide, since for many of those sentenced there was no criminal proceeding, trial, or sentence. The majority had died in jails, suffocated in trains, frozen in the Siberian camps, or been executed on the banks of rivers and precipices so that the corpses would be dragged under by the waters or covered by avalanches of earth and snow. .

The feeling of finding himself at the mercy of that terror was accentuated when Victor Serge and other friends from Paris confirmed that Étienne was the agent Cupid, linked to the deaths of Liova, Reiss, and Klement. In addition, they accused the young man of having manipulated Jeanne to cause the break that ended in the trial over Seva’s custody (favoring the Trotskys, fortunately) and of intervening in the investigation of Liova’s death, slowing down the police’s work rather than helping it. But, at the same time, the Rosmers and other comrades had tried in vain to find a gap in Étienne’s behavior, and Lev Davidovich still refused to accept the conclusion of his other friends. During all of those months, Étienne’s efficiency had been prodigious: never before had the Bulletin come out so regularly, and in all of his work prior to and following the establishment of the International, his dedication had been exemplary. He knew, nonetheless, that all of that diligence could have been a mask behind which an enemy agent was hiding. He decided that the only solution was to confront Étienne with the accusations against him and demand that he prove his innocence.

Jeanne, in turn, refusing to acknowledge the court’s verdict, had fled from Paris, taking Seva and the part of the archives Liova had kept, reasoning that they belonged to her, since she had been his wife. Marguerite Rosmer, willingly and kindly, had taken it as a question of honor to find the boy and guaranteed Natalia that she would bring him to Mexico. Poor Seva! The woman then exclaimed that with his biological father in a concentration camp; his mother dead by suicide, practically in front of him; his adoptive father dead under strange circumstances that pointed to Stalin; his tutor seemingly gone mad, turning all of his frustrations against him; his grandparents in exile; another grandmother confined to a prison camp; dead aunts and disappeared uncles, siblings, and cousins who were never heard from again. . was there ever a victim more innocent and at the same time more exemplary of Stalin’s hate than that small Vsevolod Volkov?

Despite so many losses and the charged atmosphere in the Casa Azul — especially since Frida’s departure for New York, where an exhibit of hers had been organized — Natalia Sedova decided to celebrate her husband’s fifty-ninth birthday. A few trusted friends came to see him (Otto Rühle, who had stayed to live in Mexico; Max Shachtman; Octavio Fernández; Pep Nadal; and others), joined by secretaries and bodyguards. Natalia had prepared various dishes, mostly Mexican but also Russian, French, and Turkish. Rivera’s bad taste was on display when he gave him a Day of the Dead candied skull with the label “Stalin” on its forehead. Meanwhile, Shachtman gave a sort of speech, half in jest, half-serious, and made a portrait of the feted man: “His hair is messy, his face tan, his blue eyes are as penetrating as always. L.D. is still a good-looking man. A dandy, as Victor Serge says, who gave me this tidbit, with which Lenin tried to explain who our beloved Trotsky was, and is. ‘Do you know what Lev Davidovich’s response will be when the dour-faced officer in charge of his execution squad asks him his last wish?’ Lenin asked. ‘Well, our comrade will look at him, approach him respectfully and ask him: is there any chance, sir, that you have a comb so I could smooth my hair?’ ”

But the real portrait was sketched by the person who knew him best, Natalia Sedova, who wrote: “L.D. is alone. We walk through the small garden in Coyoacán, and are surrounded by ghosts with their foreheads riddled with holes. . Sometimes I hear him, when he’s working, and he sighs and talks to himself out loud: ‘how exhausting. . I can’t go on!’ Many times friends surprise him talking alone with famous shadows, their skulls broken by the henchmen’s bullets, friends of yesteryear become penitents, overshadowed by infamy and lies, accusing L.D., Lenin’s companion. . He sees Rakovsky, his beloved brother who, like a prince, offered his enormous fortune to the revolutionary movement. He sees Smirnov, brilliant and happy; Muralov, the general with the enormous mustache, a Red Army hero. . He sees his children Nina, Zina, Liova, his beloved Blumkin, Yoffe, Tukhachevsky, Andreu Nin, Klement, Wolf. All of them dead. All of them. L.D. is alone.”

22

Jacques Mornard truly felt happy when he saw Sylvia Ageloff’s thin figure in the airport hall. She was wearing one of those black dresses that, on Gertrude Allison’s advice, she had begun to wear ever since her stay in Paris, since, according to the bookseller, that color highlighted the whiteness of her skin. Since then, so conscious of her ugliness, the woman had followed the advice with the hope of offering something more enticing to her adored Jacques, against whose chest she threw herself, shuddering with emotion.

The week before, with the year 1940 barely begun, Tom had told Jacques that the Spanish agent Felipe, one of those who was frozen after Orlov’s desertion, had arrived in Mexico. Felipe was coming back from Moscow to take charge, as the operative officer at the head of the action, of the group of Mexicans — former combatants in Spain — who were training to strike against the renegade. The Spaniard, who had been turned into an ambiguous French — or was it Polish — Jew, would be to his local subordinates a man without a name, he would just be the Jewish Comrade. Grigulievich, who had remained in the shadows the whole time, would pass the reins on to Felipe, while Tom would begin to devise and prepare other actions. The second piece of encouraging news was that, if everything went as planned, the American spy would arrive in two to three months to take the place of one of the bodyguards whose period of service in the Exile’s house was about to end. Tom assured him that the operation was entering the adjustment period, but was careful to mention to him that at that moment Jacques Mornard had moved back to the second or third line of attack. In other words, his stock had fallen.

For several days, Jacques and Sylvia lived a kind of honeymoon in their room at the Montejo. At Jacques’s insistence, the woman delayed her Coyoacán visit more than she wanted in order to say hello to her admired Lev Davidovich, for whom she brought correspondence and to whom she wanted to reiterate her willingness to help in anything he needed while she was in Mexico. When Sylvia made the appointments to be received at the house on Avenida Viena, Jacques offered to take her in his car, but only on the condition that under no circumstances would he mix himself up with her friends. It was that he simply wasn’t interested, and just as he respected Sylvia’s political passions, he wanted her to accept his lack of interest in that whole pathetic story about Communists fighting with other Communists.

“You don’t understand anything,” Sylvia said, smiling, enjoying the superiority she felt, at least in that terrain.

“More than you know,” Jacques refuted her. “Have you already read in the papers what the Mexican Communists are doing to each other?”

“It’s a Stalinist purge. They removed the general secretary, Laborde, and Valentín Campa not because they were bad Communists but because they didn’t want to obey some order from Moscow. It’s the usual. .”

Jacques laughed, so much that tears came to his eyes.

“My God, they’re all the same. That side says that everything bad that happens is due to agents and Trotskyist provocations, and all of you see Stalin’s ghost and his policemen even in your soup.”

“The difference is that we are right.”

“Please, Sylvia. . The world can’t live between Stalinist and Trotskyist conspiracies.”

“Do me the favor of not comparing the two. Stalin is a murderer who has killed with hunger and executed millions of Soviets and thousands of Communists throughout the world. He invaded Poland and now Finland in agreement with Hitler and he’s obsessed with murdering Lev Davidovich and. .”

Jacques gave a half turn and entered the bathroom.

“Let me finish! Listen to me for once!”

Jacques returned to the room and stared at her. He got close to her and, with the tips of his fingers, forcefully, he tapped her two or three times on the temple. He felt an almost uncontrollable desire to hurt her and Sylvia didn’t know how to react to his new attitude.

“Get it well into your head that I could care less about all of these stories. Are you going to Coyoacán or not?”

Already in the car, Jacques assured her that he had an approximate idea of how to get to the suburb where the Exile lived, although he had to ask a few times to be sure that he was going the right way. When at last they turned onto Avenida Viena, a quagmire because of the recent rains, he couldn’t avoid exclaiming, “My God, where has this man put himself?”

“The only place he was given asylum. And if he lives like this, it is because, as you say, he’s obsessed with Stalinist conspiracies.”

Jacques had stopped the car in front of the building and a Mexican policeman approached him. When the woman got out of the car, they yelled from the watchtower it was okay. Then Jacques moved the car to the opposite side of the road and parked it farther away from the armored gate. Sylvia, in front of the visitors’ door, waited for them to open it, and just as she entered, the heavy barrier closed behind her.

Despite the fact that the temperature was fairly low, Jacques got out of the Buick and, with a cigarette at his lips, leaned against the hood, willing to wait.

When Sylvia emerged, three quarters of an hour later, she came in the company of a man as tall as Jacques but perhaps stockier. Sylvia introduced him as Otto Schüssler, one of Comrade Trotsky’s secretaries. Jacques held out his hand, introducing himself as Frank Jacson, and exchanged the usual polite phrases with Otto. He had the impression he was being examined and opted for an attitude halfway between shyness and arrogance, a bit stupid and boisterous, the one that best seemed as if it could express his ignorance of politics and his indifference to everything that place signified.

“Sylvia tells us that you’re going to be here for a while,” Otto noted casually.

“Well, I don’t know for sure; it depends on business. For now, everything’s going well. And if there’s easy money to be made, then I’m here.”

“Jacques—” Sylvia said, and stopped herself, conscious of her mistake and a little embarrassed by her lover’s words. “I mean Frank. . came to open an office in Mexico.”

Otto Schüssler arched his eyebrows. Jacques didn’t give him time to think about it any further.

“My name is Jacques Mornard, but I travel as Frank Jacson. I am a Belgian army deserter and I don’t know when I’ll be able to return to my country. I’m not willing to fight for something the politicians didn’t know how to take care of when they had the chance.”

“It’s a point of view. .” Otto paused. “Mornard. . Jacson?”

“If you’re not the immigration police, however you like.”

“Jacson, then.” Otto smiled and held out his hand. “Take good care of little Sylvia. All of us here love her and her sisters a lot.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, and, after opening Sylvia’s door, walked around the car, avoiding the mud, and took his place behind the wheel.

“Nice car,” Otto commented through Sylvia’s window.

“And very safe. Since I have to travel throughout the whole country. .”

Schüssler patted the roof softly and Jacques began to drive away.

“Will they approve of me to be your boyfriend?”

Sylvia looked ahead, her cheeks flushed.

“I couldn’t avoid it, dear. It’s not the bodyguards’ paranoia. They are expecting something. Things have gotten really heated. Please understand.”

“I understand. A Stalinist conspiracy,” he said and smiled. “So how’s your boss?”

“He’s not my boss. . And he’s fine, working a lot. He wants to finish the biography of Stalin as soon as possible.”

“Trotsky is writing a biography of Stalin?” Jacques’s surprise made him slow down.

“He’s the only one who can tell the truth about that monster. The rest are dead or are his accomplices.”

Jacques moved his head, as if he were denying something remote, and sped up.

“I am dying of hunger. What do you want to eat?”

“Whitefish from Pátzcuaro,” she said, as if she had already thought about it.

“Where have you tasted it?”

“I just learned that it’s one of Lev Davidovich’s favorite dishes.”

“I know somewhere where they make it. . Let’s go see if your boss has good taste.”

“You’re an angel,” Sylvia said, and moved her left hand between Jacques Mornard’s legs. It appeared that being so close to her admired Lev Davidovich awoke all of her appetites.

Tom and Caridad had disappeared again. A few days before, at the Shirley Court apartment, Tom had warned Jacques that at any moment he would leave Mexico to receive orders, perhaps definitive ones. During the length of his absence, the young man would have just one mission: to get closer, with the most carefree attitude, to the Duck’s house and become familiar with his guards. Under no circumstances should he ask Sylvia to introduce him into the fortress, but if they invited him, he should not refuse. If he had the opportunity to meet the Exile, he should demonstrate respect and admiration, but in rather low doses, and he should even act a little shy. In his mind, he should photograph the territory and start to plan an exit strategy in case he or anyone else was tasked with carrying out the mission. The escape was just as important as the action, Tom insisted. His eventual entrance should be gained on the belief that a guy like him could never be a threat against anyone.

Jacques had a glimpse of how his fate was linked to that of the renegade when Sylvia was required by her idol to assist him in his work for two or three weeks: Mademoiselle Yanovitch, tasked with transcribing the recordings of articles the Exile dictated in Russian, had taken ill, and Sylvia’s presence in Mexico was a blessing. Jacques, who had a few days free, since Mr. Lubeck was in the United States on important business, offered to take her every morning to the house on Avenida Viena and return in the afternoon to pick her up. While she helped her “boss,” he would be updating papers and correspondence in the rented office of the Ermita building. The only problem was that if Sylvia finished early, she had to wait for him, because, with typical Mexican inefficiency, the phone Jacques had requested two months earlier had yet to be installed.

Throughout the month of February, the couple showed up in front of Trotsky’s house three or four days a week, and Jacques, without getting out of the car, blew his horn a few times to announce Sylvia’s arrival; the door was immediately opened for her. In the afternoons, when he returned, Sylvia was rarely waiting outside, and because of that he had to park the car and smoke a cigarette as she finished her work. In those first days, Jacques Mornard smoked without paying too much attention to the house. He became a regular presence for the guards, who, always seeing him dressed so elegantly, took to calling him “Sylvia’s husband” or “Jacson.” Thus the distance between them faded. Otto Schüssler, a car enthusiast, was the one who returned to break the ice and, whenever he could, went out to the street to speak with him, since the Belgian man was practically an expert on race cars. More than once Sylvia, sitting in the Buick already, had to wait for Jacques, Otto, and even some of the other guards covering the tower to finish their conversation about engines, clutches, and brake systems.

One of the first afternoons on which they became involved in one of these talks, Jacques had turned around when he heard some joyful barking. He discovered an adolescent boy (the renegade’s grandson, Seva Volkov, whom he recognized immediately) going out to the street in the company of a dog of an unknown breed. The image of the dog and the young boy disturbed him for a moment and, forgetting the conversation with Schüssler, he took a few steps toward the house and whistled to the animal, who observed him with his ears raised. Jacques snapped his fingers at the dog, who, indecisive, looked at the adolescent boy. Seva then patted him on the neck and took two steps toward Sylvia’s husband, who kneeled down to pet the animal.

Jacques Mornard patted the straight reddish fur with the pads of his fingers with real satisfaction. He allowed his hands to be licked and, in a voice inaudible to the rest, said some words of affection in French. For a few moments he was disconnected from the world, in a corner of time and space in which only he, the dog, and some memories he had thought buried existed. When he regained his bearings, still kneeling, he lifted his gaze toward Seva and asked him the pet’s name.

“Azteca,” the kid said.

“He’s beautiful,” Mornard admitted. “So he’s yours, right?”

“Yes, I brought him when he was a puppy.”

“When I was a boy, I had two. Adam and Eve. Labradors.”

“Azteca is a mutt. But my grandfather always had Russian wolfhounds.”

“Did he have borzois?” The question was filled with admiration. “They’re the most beautiful hounds in the world. I would’ve given anything to have one.”

“The last one was called Maya. I knew her.”

“So you’re going for a walk with Azteca?” he asked as he petted the ecstatic animal’s ears.

“We’re going to the river. .”

Jacques stood up and smiled.

“I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Jacson, Sylvia’s boyfriend.”

“I’m Seva,” the young boy said.

“Have fun, Seva. . Goodbye, Azteca,” he said, and the dog wagged his tail.

“He likes you,” Seva said, smiling, and walked toward the nearby intersection. At that moment Jacques Mornard could feel in the air how the fortress’s bulletproof door was beginning to melt before him. He was making more and more friends behind those walls.

One afternoon at the end of February, when he turned down Morelos toward Viena, he noticed that Sylvia was waiting for him by the door to the house, in the company of a couple he immediately recognized thanks to the photographs he had studied so many times. As he always did, he stopped the car on the other side of the street, got out, and kissed Sylvia. She introduced him to Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, reminding him that a year and a half before, when he had taken her to Périgny for the founding meeting of the Fourth International, he had been in front of the couple’s house.

“Yes, of course. . Beautiful house,” Jacques said with his usual lightness. “Are you vacationing in Mexico?”

Alfred Rosmer explained to him that he had traveled to accompany Seva Volkov, who until recently had lived in France (“I already know him, him and Azteca,” the Belgian pointed out, smiling). They spoke about the situation in Paris, of the military mobilization of young Frenchmen, and when they said goodbye fifteen minutes later, the Rosmers and the Mornards promised to dine together at one of the city’s restaurants the young man knew. With a touch of bourgeois boastfulness, Jacques made it clear that he was treating.

When Mademoiselle Yanovitch was able to return to her job, Sylvia ceased to be indispensable, but Jacques and his Buick returned frequently to the fortress on Avenida Viena, where no one thought his presence unusual anymore. Once a week they stopped by to pick up the Rosmers to go and dine in the city center or, if they were willing, to the nearby city of Cuernavaca, and on the occasional Sunday to the farther-off Puebla. During those outings, they talked about the human and the divine and Jacques had to listen, with admiring attention, to stories about the great friendship between the Rosmers and the Trotskys, begun before the Great War—“Huh, when I was learning to read,” Jacques commented one day, though in reality he had already studied the details of that relationship — and, with obvious boredom, the conversations between the Rosmers and Sylvia about the disastrous Soviet invasion of Finland and the imminent Nazi offensive in Western Europe, the growing aggressiveness of Mexican communist propaganda against Lev Davidovich, and even matters of internal politics of the not-very-healthy Fourth International. He showed greater interest when he learned that Trotsky owned a hardy collection of cacti and devoted a couple of hours a day to raising rabbits. But Mornard’s favorite topic was bohemian life in Paris, to which he had introduced Sylvia during the months they lived in France, and about which he ended up being much more in the know than the Rosmers.

One night after Jacques had gone down to get cigarettes and returned to the hotel room, Sylvia told him that a Mr. Roberts had called him: he needed to see him urgently over a business matter. The following morning, when Jacques arrived at the apartment in Shirley Court, Tom himself opened the door to him. His mentor informed him that Caridad was in Havana and would return in a few days. He had had some very important meetings, he added, his eyes fixed on Jacques.

“The time to hunt the Duck has come,” he said.

Ramón felt the impact of those words in his stomach. Tom gave him time to process the news and then told him about his most recent meeting with Comrade Stalin, this time at a dacha he owned about sixty miles from Moscow, where he held the most secret meetings. In addition to Tom, Beria and Sudoplatov had been there, and regarding what was discussed there, Ramón only had to know — he noted that he had called him “Ramón” but always spoke French — what concerned him directly, since they were vital matters for the Soviet state. The young man nodded and lit a cigarette, consumed by anxiety.

“The renegade is preparing the great betrayal,” Tom began, looking at his hands. “An agent of ours passed on the fact that the Germans and the traitor are reaching an agreement to use him as the head of a takeover government when the Nazis decide to invade the Soviet Union. They need a puppet, and there is none better than Trotsky. Through another channel, we learned that he’s willing to collaborate with the Americans if they’re the ones who, if the war goes in that direction, end up invading the Soviet Union. He’s even willing to make a pact with the devil.”

“Goddamn him!” Ramón said, unable to control himself.

“There is more. .,” Tom continued. “In the Soviet Union, we’ve arrested two Trotskyist agents under orders to assassinate Comrade Stalin. They have both confessed, but this time it has been decided not to publicize it, because with the war you have to move with the greatest caution.”

“So what’s the order?” Ramón asked, wishing to hear only one response.

“The order is to take him out of the game before the end of the summer. Hitler is now going to attack the West and he’s not going to try anything against the USSR, but if he advances through Europe as quickly as we think he will, in a few months he can turn against us.”

“Despite the pact?”

“Do you believe in the word of that crazy protector of Aryan purity?”

Ramón shook his head for a long time. Hitler was not his concern and his mentor’s subsequent words confirmed it.

“In a few weeks, our American spy arrives in Mexico. From that moment everything is going to move quickly. First we’ll play the Mexican group card. Last night I was already with Felipe and he thinks that if the American does his job, they will be able to do theirs.”

“So what do I do?” Ramón’s disappointment was obvious.

“Keep moving forward as if nothing has happened. I know you have become close with the Rosmers, and they and your beloved Sylvia are going to open the doors of the house for you.”

“Sylvia has to go back to New York in a few days. .”

“Let her go. You will go on like you have until now, and when the Mexicans’ attack takes place, whatever happens, you will continue that routine. If things turn out as we expect, then we all leave in a few days. If it fails, you bring Sylvia and we start with another plan.”

Ramón looked at the adviser and said, with all his conviction, “I can do it better than the Mexicans.” Tom’s blue eyes were like two precious stones: happiness made them shine and gave them that sharp, translucent clarity.

“We’re soldiers and we follow orders. But don’t feel sorry for yourself: this is a long struggle and you are worth a lot. . Comrade Stalin knows you are the best we have. That’s why we want you on the bench: so that if we need to, you can go in and score the goal. And in the future, remember, every damned second of your life, that the most important thing is the revolution and that it deserves any sacrifice. You are Soldier 13 and you have no mercy, you are not afraid, you do not have a soul. You are a Communist from head to toe, Ramón Mercader.”

Jacques Mornard spent several days examining himself: he wanted to know where he had gone wrong for Stalin to order, and Tom to allow, that others be in charge of the operation. He was so close! Sylvia’s return to New York was a relief and allowed him to wallow in his depression. He lamented how Orlov’s desertion had prevented África from being with him in Mexico at that moment. With her at his side, he would at least have had a real consolation and more concrete possibilities of having been selected. He and África, together, would have been capable of bringing down the walls of the traitor’s house and freeing the world of that louse who had sold himself to the fascists.

Before traveling, Sylvia had made him promise that he would not go to the Exile’s house until she returned. The unbridled aggression of the Mexican Stalinists forced the fortress guards and the police to be on maximum alert, and Jacques’s presence, with a false passport and without any concrete motive to go to the house, could cause problems with the Mexican authorities that she preferred to avoid. He promised her that he would not go to Coyoacán, since he had plans to take advantage of his beloved’s absence to travel to the south, where Mr. Lubeck wanted to set up some new business.

As soon as Sylvia left, Tom ordered Ramón to leave the Hotel Montejo and move to a tourist complex located near the Buenavista train station. At some point in the next few weeks, Tom would bring him some of the weapons that he could use in an attack on the Duck’s house, and the complex, with its wide tree-lined gardens, interior paths, and separate bungalows where different people came and went every day, was ideal for first hiding and then removing a travel trunk. Tom confirmed that none of those participating in the operation knew of his existence and that he personally would take care of bringing in and taking out the weapons.

Ramón stayed in his cabin for several days, smoking, sleeping, and barely eating. An inertia caused by disappointment and forced inactivity lowered his spirits. He felt duped. It seemed unfair that almost two years of work, of planned movements, should only serve to make him the custodian of the weapons that others would use. Convinced that with a little more time he would be in a position to execute the order and even of leaving the act unscathed, he considered himself the best choice. That story about sending the Mexicans so it would look like a matter of local disputes was difficult to swallow. Was Caridad behind that decision? Did she doubt his ability or had she tried to keep him far from danger, with her unbearable propensity to control and decide the lives of her children? After several days of being holed up, the morning that he read in the papers that the German armies had begun their advance to the west, invading Norway and Denmark, he felt his anguish rising and decided that he, too, should go into action and besiege the enemy.

The afternoon he showed up in Coyoacán, it was Harold Robbins, the head of the renegade’s praetorian guard, who greeted him from the watchtower. A smiling Jacques explained that he had returned to the city the day before and needed to see the Rosmers. Robbins sent notice to Alfred and Marguerite and asked if he wanted to enter the house to talk more comfortably. Jacques felt so happy his chest burst, but he immediately told him not to worry, he would just be a few minutes.

Alfred and Marguerite received him at the door. He told them about his work trip and the letters in which Sylvia sent her regards, and gave Marguerite a sculpture of an indigenous goddess with a feline face and the body of a woman, purchased that morning in one of the city’s markets, telling her that he had seen it in Oaxaca and had immediately thought she would like it. Meanwhile, there was a change of guard in the watchtower and Robbins, before coming down to say goodbye to Jacson, ceded his place to a young man with light-colored hair and very pale skin whom the Belgian was seeing for the first time.

“Is he new?” he asked the Rosmers as he waved at the unknown man.

“He arrived a few days ago. His name is Bob Sheldon and he comes from New York,” Alfred Rosmer explained, and Jacques wondered whether that wasn’t the man Tom had been waiting for to release the pack of Mexicans.

Since he now had free time again, Jacques proposed seeing the Rosmers in two days for dinner. They had mentioned a French restaurant recently opened in the city center and he was eager to try it, but he didn’t feel like going alone. The Rosmers accepted and said he should come pick them up on Friday at seven in the evening.

That Friday, April 18, two seemingly unrelated events confirmed for Ramón Mercader that his fate was to enter history as a servant of the cause of the world’s proletariat. In the morning, as he was walking through the gardens of the tourist complex, he found a mountaineer’s ice axe driven into a mahogany tree. The complex owner’s son, a kid with a slight stutter with whom he had spoken a couple of times, had told him he practiced mountain climbing and even insisted on showing him his equipment. The ice axe driven into the tree was with all certainty the mountain climber’s and, given the various wounds on the mahogany’s bark, the young man had undoubtedly used its straight, compact trunk for his training. Ramón had to pull hard to dislodge the ice axe from the tree trunk. When he had it in his hands and hefted it, he felt a current of emotion run through him. The spike was a lethal weapon. Ramón chose a place in the mahogany where the bark was a few inches thick. He stepped back and brought the ice axe down, sinking it just above the place he had aimed at. Again he worked hard to free the steel point from the tree, and when he had the ice axe in his hand again, he thought that it was the perfect instrument of death. When he returned to his cabin, he wrapped it up in a towel and put it in the suitcase he usually kept locked.

The second proof of his fate revealed itself when, upon arriving at the fortress on Avenida Viena to pick up the Rosmers, Otto Schüssler told him that Alfred was laid up with a severe attack of dysentery. Lev Davidovich insisted he should go to the hospital, since it could be an appendicitis attack under the diarrhea. Jacques didn’t think twice about it, telling Otto that he himself would take Alfred to the doctor; that way none of them would have to leave the house.

Jacques spent almost the entire night with the Rosmers. The doctors at the French clinic, following a series of tests, declared that Alfred was suffering from an especially aggressive parasite, aggravated by a lack of antibodies for tropical predators in Europeans. Montezuma’s revenge, they called it. After paying the bill and buying the medicines, Jacques returned to Coyoacán with Marguerite and Alfred, who was much improved thanks to the IV he had been given. As he usually did when he came for Sylvia, Jacques beeped the horn of his Buick twice, and from the watchtower they called out that Jacson was coming back with the Rosmers. Robbins and Schüssler opened the bulletproof door and went out into the street to find that everything seemed to have been resolved. Between the two bodyguards, they helped Alfred enter the house, while Marguerite, her attention divided between her husband and the kind Jacques, hesitated before the open door, through which the young man could see Natalia Sedova and, behind her, the unmistakable head of the renegade, who was dressed in a bathrobe. At that moment Natalia Sedova came to the door to congratulate Marguerite on the incident’s happy resolution and to thank Mr. Jacson for being at their disposal. It was then that Natalia asked him if he wanted to come in to have coffee or eat something.

“No, thank you, madame. It’s very late and Alfred has to rest.”

“Please, Jacques,” Marguerite Rosmer insisted. “You’ve been so kind.”

“No, don’t worry, it was my duty,” he said, and immediately threw his hook into the water: “Another day, when Sylvia’s back.” Then he began to walk away, smiling, as Marguerite reiterated her gratitude and Alfred’s.

The following morning Jacques wrote to Sylvia, telling her he had found himself forced to break his promise not to visit the Trotskys’ house, sharing the details of what had happened, and declaring how anxious he was to have her back in Mexico. His brain, meanwhile, was buzzing with satisfaction, because the bulletproof doors of the fortress on Avenida Viena were now merely curtains that he could part softly with the back of his hand.

Tom and Caridad showed up one night at the end of April and unleashed the earthquake that would change Ramón Mercader’s life forever. They had called midafternoon announcing they would visit at 9:30 that night and asking him to be ready when they arrived in a dark green Chrysler. Sensing that their reappearance would have profound implications for his life, he had eaten very little and was seated on the wall of the flower bed, smoking a cigarette, thinking that he would like to have a dog — no, two would be better — with whom he could run, rolling around in the sand of some beach, caressing their fur. He became angry as he remembered that the last one he had had a relationship with had been Churro, who came from no one knew where and was part of the Republican army, when the lights of the car turning toward his cabin shined on him and moved forward until the vehicle stopped in front of him.

Tom got out, jingling the car keys in his hand, and motioned to Ramón to follow him. Caridad got out on the other side and, after unsuccessfully trying to kiss her son, walked to the cabin. Tom opened the back and Ramón saw the trunk inside. Tom warned him it was heavy, and between the two of them they lifted the long chest and walked toward the cabin, where Caridad was holding the door open for them. As if he had already thought everything out, Tom steered them to the bedroom and they placed the trunk to the side of the closet.

Caridad was waiting for them in the living room, sitting in an armchair. It seemed to Ramón that she had gained weight in recent weeks and looked strong and energetic, as she had in the ever more distant days in which she wandered the streets of Barcelona in a confiscated Ford and demonstrated her toughness by shooting a dog. Ramón cursed the ambiguous feelings his mother generated in him. Meanwhile, Tom, sitting in front of Ramón, explained that the trunk would be there for no more than two weeks.

“The wheels are turning,” he concluded.

“Is the spy Bob Sheldon?” Ramón asked.

“Yes, and as I imagined, we can’t expect much from him. The Jewish Comrade is working on him and is confident that at least he’ll be good enough to open the door.”

The young man kept his silence. His situation bothered him.

“What’s wrong, Ramón?” Caridad asked him, leaning toward him. “When you get strange like this. .”

“You and he already know. But don’t worry. After all. .”

“Are you going to have a tantrum?” Tom’s tone was sarcastic. “I’m not going to repeat what you already know. You and I follow orders. It’s that simple. Everyone serves the revolution where and when the revolution decides.”

“What do I do in the meantime?”

“Wait,” Tom said. “When the attack is about to happen, I’ll tell you what to do. Go by Coyoacán every once in a while and say hi to your friends. If you find out anything that could be useful, find me. If not, we’ll keep our distance.”

“It’s better like this, Ramón,” Caridad said. “Tom knows you can do it, but this is a very complicated political problem. Killing that son of a bitch will have consequences and the Soviet Union cannot afford to be implicated. . That’s all.”

“I understand, Caridad, I understand,” he said, and stood up. “Coffee?”

From that night on, Ramón lived feeling like his insides had been emptied. He felt that, after having to put so much of himself beneath the false skin of Jacques Mornard, it had rebelled and trapped his real and neglected self. Now it was Jacques wandering the city streets, traveling in his black Buick at suicidal speeds, passing by the fortress on Avenida Viena to ask about Alfred Rosmer’s health and have trivial conversations with Robbins, Otto Schüssler, Joseph Hansen, Jake Cooper, and even with the recently arrived Bob Sheldon, whom he had invited to have a beer more than once in the noisy cantina where the toothless salesclerk had disappeared and was replaced by a young woman; it was Jacques who smiled, wrote love letters to Sylvia Ageloff and looked with interest at the shop windows of shoe stores and tailors of a city as splendid as it was besieged by misery that was, to a guy like him, invisible. Meanwhile, Ramón, a ghost, conjugated the verb “to wait” in all of its tenses and possible uses, which in Spanish can also mean to expect and to hope, and felt how life was passing by him without even deigning to look at him.

On the morning of May 1, he had gone all the way to Paseo de la Reforma, where workers and union members were marching, to see the signs and sheets asking not for the renegade’s expulsion but rather for the death of the fascist traitor, and he felt that claim didn’t include him. Disoriented, without expectations, he spent hours in bed smoking, looking at the ceiling, repeating the same piercing questions, asking himself, After everything happens, then what? This sacrifice and self-denial, for what? The glory he thought he had at arm’s reach — where had it gone to? Ramón had handed over his soul to that mission because he wanted to be the main player, and it didn’t matter to him that he had to kill, or even be killed, if he achieved his goal. He felt prepared to remain in darkness his entire life, nameless and without his own existence, but with the communist pride of knowing he had done something great for others. He wanted to be chosen by Marxist providence and at that moment he thought that he would never be anyone or anything. So, two weeks later, when Tom returned to reclaim the trunk, Ramón felt he would never play an important role in that plot.

“When will it be?”

They had placed the weapons in the Chrysler’s trunk and were sitting in the cabin’s armchairs, looking each other in the eye.

“Soon.” Tom seemed annoyed.

“Is something wrong?”

Tom smiled sadly and looked at the floor, where he was lightly tapping the tiles with the tip of his shoe.

“I’m afraid, Ramón.”

His mentor’s response surprised him. It didn’t escape his notice that Tom was calling him Ramón again as he confessed something he never expected to hear from that man’s lips. Should he believe him?

“Grigulievich and Felipe have prepared everything as best as they can, but they have no confidence in their men. Sheldon can do his job, but the others. .”

“Who will be at the front?”

“The Jewish Comrade.”

“And he doesn’t have any confidence in himself?”

“It’s going to be an attack with many people, many shots. A Mexican-style show. . They are men with experience in war, but an attack like this is something else.”

“So why don’t you cancel it?”

“You remember the Hotel Moscow, right? Who is going to tell Stalin that the attack will be canceled?”

Ramón leaned forward. He could hear Tom’s breathing.

“And what will you say to him if they fail?. . Let me go with them, goddammit. .”

Tom looked him in the eye. Ramón felt anxiety in his chest.

“It would be a solution, but it’s not possible. When they identify you, they’re going to realize that it’s not an action planned by the Mexicans but rather a conspiracy coming from elsewhere.”

“So what if someone identifies Felipe?”

“He would be a Spaniard who was with the Mexicans in the civil war. That front has already been established.”

“I’m also a Spaniard. . And Belgian, and—”

“It can’t be, Ramón! The attack is perfect, but something unexpected could always happen: they could injure the Duck and he could survive, I don’t know. I myself told Comrade Stalin that he should consider the possibility of failure. And I also told him that if that happened, you would enter the game. But it can’t be canceled, nor can I send you. .” Tom stood up, lit a cigarette, and looked toward the garden. “You should be happy to not have to participate in this. You know that the lives of all who enter that house can be very difficult from that moment on. All they have to do is capture one and the rest will fall like dominoes. And they’re going to catch them, that’s certain. . Besides, from the beginning I told you that you are my best option, but not the first. If they do things well, it’s better for everyone; that’s how we planned it. Did you see what happened on May Day, how the Trotskyists and the Communists fought in the street? Who is going to suspect us when a group of Mexican Communists execute a traitor who is even collaborating with the Americans to carry out a coup d’état in Mexico? And in any event, even if they tell the police whatever they want to, there will be no evidence that those men were mixed up with us. .”

“I understand what you’re saying. But you can’t ask me to be happy to have worked for three years for nothing.”

Tom at last smiled. He crushed the cigarette butt in the ashtray and walked to the door.

“I hope you never lose that faith you have, Ramón Mercader. You can’t imagine how much you’ll need it if your turn comes to enter the scene. I assure you, it is not easy to kill a man like that son of a bitch Trotsky.”

Jacques Mornard put the water for the coffee on the stove and adjusted the belt on the boxing robe he used around the house. When he went out to the small entryway he confirmed that the morning papers had not arrived. The previous week, he had doubled the tip for the kid who brought the papers on the condition that they be left at his door before seven in the morning. He returned to the kitchen, percolated coffee, and drank a small cup. He lit a cigarette and walked to the caretaker’s office. The month of May was almost over, but the morning was cool thanks to the previous night’s rain. He walked down the gravel path and cursed as he felt his slippers becoming damp. At the door to the cabin that served as the concierge’s office, the morning caretaker was placing gardening tools in a wheelbarrow.

“Good morning, Mr. Jacson, how can I help you?” The man was smiling and making small bows.

“The paperboy, what happened to him today?”

The caretaker’s smile widened. His teeth were incredibly white and, miraculously, he wasn’t missing any.

“It’s that the papers haven’t come out yet. They’re waiting.”

“What kind of thing is it that the papers haven’t come out yet?”

“Oh, señor, it’s because of what happened last night.” The caretaker smiled again. “They tried to kill that bearded Trotsky. They’re saying it on the radio.”

Ramón gave a half turn and, without saying goodbye to the caretaker, returned to his cabin. If he understood correctly, the man had been talking about an attack, not an execution. He turned on the radio and searched until he found a station reporting the news. An armed commando unit had entered Leon Trotsky’s house just before dawn that morning and, despite the numerous shots fired, had not achieved their purpose of killing the exiled revolutionary. The attackers — they said that Diego Rivera, gun in hand, was among them — had managed to flee, and President Cárdenas himself had ordered an exhaustive investigation until the perpetrators of the aborted crime were found. As he digested those words — Diego Rivera was part of the attack? — and tried to predict the consequences, Ramón felt a strange mixture of anxiety and happiness coming over him. As he dressed hurriedly, he continued to listen and learned that there was talk of one wounded, of attackers dressed as soldiers and policemen, of the kidnapping of one of the renegade’s bodyguards.

He dialed the number of Tom’s apartment in Shirley Court and didn’t get an answer. What should he do now? Jacques Mornard took some time to reflect. Tom had put together a plan that escaped his comprehension. Had he managed to use the political differences between the renegade and fat Rivera so that the latter would take the helm of a killer commando unit, or had he simply threatened him with airing his problems with his wife? They spoke of twenty armed men, of hundreds of shots fired but no one killed. How was that possible? With a professional like Felipe inside the house, how was it possible for the Duck to still be alive? There was something murky in the attack that defied the most basic logic. In any event, he thought, the attack’s failure placed him at the front line, where he had fought so hard to get. Tom’s fears regarding the success of the operation were now powerfully highlighted, and he came to wonder whether in reality that failure did not have a purpose. But what? To enter the Duck’s house, have him at the mercy of ten rifles and not kill him — for what? Had he, Ramón, always been the one tasked with the real mission? He felt as if his head were about to explode. The evidence that he had turned into the true alternative continued to bring him remote revolutionary joy, but with it the ghost of an unexpected fear surreptitiously came to the surface at the responsibility that came with it. He drank more coffee, smoked two more cigarettes, and, when he felt ready to move, put on his hat and climbed into the Buick.

As he drove to Shirley Court, Ramón noticed that his chest was about to burst with anguish. He had never felt that oppression so clearly, and he wondered if it wasn’t angina like the kind Caridad experienced. When he asked the caretaker at the apartments if Mr. and Mrs. Roberts were in, the man explained that they had left the night before.

Ramón Mercader left the Buick in the apartment parking lot and went out toward Reforma, which was congested with pedestrians, vendors, cars, beggars, and even prostitutes with flexible schedules: a multicolored humanity surrounded by engine exhausts and the cries of newspaper boys announcing the miraculous salvation of the “bearded” Trotsky. The city seemed crazed, on the verge of exploding, and the young man felt dizzy amid the crowd and their rejoicing. Leaning against the wall, he lifted his gaze to the clear sky, wiped clean by the previous night’s rain, and was certain that his fate would be decided beneath that bright, clear sky.

23

On May 2, 1939, the Trotskys moved the beds and the worktable and put coal in the ovens. The house at number 19 Avenida Viena was now their house. Although it meant little more than changing prisons, Lev Davidovich felt that with that move he was gaining enormous freedom. Can I feel happy? Do I have the right to that human emotion? he asked himself upon sitting in his office and looking around. The yard he could see from the window was ruined and the main work hadn’t been finished yet, since, despite Natalia Sedova’s strict management and the secretaries’ Stakhanovite efforts, the funds had been exhausted. But he couldn’t live under the same roof as Rivera for one more day. Over the last two months, they hadn’t even spoken, and he regretted the way in which that friendship had ended, since he would never be able to forget that, for whatever reason, Rivera had helped him travel to Mexico, had offered his hospitality, and had contributed to his recovery after the terrible experiences at the end of his Norwegian exile.

Ever since he was very young, he had thought that the worst aggression against the human condition was humiliation, because it disarmed the individual, attacking the essence of his dignity. He, who throughout his life had suffered all the insults and slanders possible, had never felt so close to the verge of humiliation as when Natalia and Jean van Heijenoort prevented him, after his last birthday, from leaving the Casa Azul and going to yell at Rivera about the disgust he felt at his exhibitionism, his macho Mexican positions, his inconsistencies as a political clown. For a long time Lev Davidovich had known that if Rivera had welcomed him into his house, and perhaps even accepted that Rivera’s wife went to his bed, it had only been to use it as a platform for his phony radicalism, a trampoline to the newspaper pages. But when tensions had reached the boiling point, his kindness had come undone and he had shown his true face.

The tension had been aggravated by the inevitable collision between Rivera’s ambitions and Lev Davidovich’s sense of responsibility when the latter opposed the painter assuming the role of Mexican secretary of the Fourth International. But things went beyond the permissible limit when Rivera announced his break with General Cárdenas and his decision to support the right-wing presidential candidate Juan Almazán. Although the Exile knew that it was all due to his own insolence, he tried to warn the painter of how damaging his defection would be for Cárdenas’s progressive project, and the response he received had been so offensive that, that very day, he decided to end his stay at the Casa Azul. Trotsky could not give anyone political lessons, his host had told him; only a lunatic could think of organizing an International that was nothing but a vainglorious effort to become the leader of something.

If in another time he had left the Kremlin itself, why not leave the Casa Azul now? If they went somewhere less protected, his life would be in danger, but that did not matter too much to him; however, van Heijenoort reminded him that he was also putting Natalia’s life at risk. Lev Davidovich had to lower his head, although he announced his break with Rivera and his disagreement with the painter’s political about-face, not wanting to be associated with an action that directly affronted General Cárdenas, to whom he felt so committed.

At the beginning of the year, Lev Davidovich had written to Frida, who was still in New York, with the hopes that she would be able to allay the crisis, but she never responded. Meanwhile, Rivera, who now declared himself a supporter of Almazán, was announcing his break with Trotskyism because he considered it a harebrained ideology that played into the fascists’ strategy against the USSR.

Jean and the other secretaries intensified their search for a safe place for them to live and finally opted to rent a brick house with an ample shaded yard on the nearby Avenida Viena, a dusty street where there were only a few shacks. The house had the advantage of high walls and of being inaccessible from the back, where the Churubusco River ran. But the building had been empty for ten years, and it required a lot of work to make it inhabitable. Once they decided to move, Lev Davidovich tried to offer Diego rent for the months that the renovation of the house would take, but the painter wouldn’t even receive him, making his intention of humiliating the Exile obvious. The tension then reached such a level that van Heijenoort confessed to Lev Davidovich that he even feared Rivera could commit violence.

That domestic crisis barely allowed Lev Davidovich to follow events happening outside the Casa Azul with the care he desired. With much difficulty he had managed to concentrate on the reorganization of the American section and discuss with Josep Nadal the seriousness of Spanish events following Franco’s offensive toward Catalonia, the last of the Republican strongholds apart from Madrid. In Mexico, meanwhile, the attacks against his presence were entering a dangerous spiral, and at the same time that Hernán Laborde, the secretary of the Communist Party, demanded that the government expel him threatening a political rupture if it did not, the right tinged its protests with a dark fascist-inspired anti-Semitism. Lev Davidovich lived surrounded by the feeling that the siege was closing in, that the knives and guns were getting closer and closer to his graying head.

The renovation was turning out to be more complex than they had originally thought, as Natalia had ordered one of the walls be made higher, watchtowers to be built, the covering of all entrances with steel sheets, and the installation of an alarm system. At one point Lev Davidovich had asked if they were preparing a house or a sarcophagus.

Since he spent almost the whole day holed up in his room at the Casa Azul, he made the most of his time by writing an analysis of the foreseeable end of the Spanish Civil War. Spain’s revolutionary movement, if successful, could perhaps have delayed and even prevented the European war. Nadal had told him that, in the final months of the previous year, the Spanish government had asked for more weapons from its allies in a desperate attempt to save the Republic. The Soviets made a shipment through France, but Paris refused to allow the weapons through its borders, and that failure had been definitive. The Soviets, tired of a war without the prospect of a victory, decided to cut off all their commitments, and from that moment Spain was lost. While the fascists were rolling their military power over Spanish soil, Stalin was turning a blind eye and beginning to concern himself with what had always been his true interest, his neighbors in Eastern Europe.

There had been no information about Seriozha for many months when an American journalist who had recently arrived in New York after a stay in Moscow wrote the Trotskys, telling them that a colleague of his had managed to interview a prisoner just released by the new head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria. The former prisoner had relayed that, a few months before, he had seen Sergei Sedov alive, and another detainee had told him that Seriozha had been in the Vorkuta camp in 1936, during the Trotskyists’ strike, where he had been on the verge of dying of hunger; but in 1937 he had been transferred to the shadowy prison of Butyrka, in Moscow, where he had been subjected to torture to force him to sign a confession against his father: he was one of the few prisoners who withstood it without surrendering. The anonymous prisoner said he had met him in a camp in the subarctic, where other inmates talked about Sergei Sedov as if he were an unbreakable man.

Natalia and Lev Davidovich had believed the news heart and soul, even when their minds thought it would be difficult for their son to have been able to escape Vorkuta or Butyrka with his life, places that were worse than the sixth circle of hell. But Lev Davidovich couldn’t avoid feeling proud when they kept hearing the same description of Seriozha’s attitude; the only thing about which there was no doubt was that he had resisted the interrogations without signing confessions against his father. So they consoled themselves by thinking that if Stalin had preyed upon his innocent life, Seriozha had conquered him with his silence.

A new congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held at the beginning of the year, had left Lev Davidovich several certainties. On the international level, it had made Stalin’s willingness to seek an alliance with Hitler more obvious; on the national level, it underscored the cynical pretension of carrying out yet another revision of history by blaming the expelled heads of the GPU for the excesses of the purge. To the indignation of very few and to popular acceptance of his good intentions, the “great captain” criticized those who carried out the purge, since it had been accompanied by “more mistakes than expected” (his own words). So everything would have turned out okay if only the expected mistakes had been committed? How many was it acceptable to execute by mistake? The most alarming thing was that none of those in the world who recognized Stalin’s honesty seemed to recall that, a few months earlier, the man from the mountains had sent pompous congratulations to Yezhov and the heads of NKVD. It only seemed to matter to them that the genius had warned them about the existence of “deficiencies” in the operation, such as the “simplified investigation procedures” and the lack of witnesses and proof. So where was Stalin while that was happening? the Exile had asked a world that would not respond to him.

In reality, the most dramatic of the revelations of the congress was the proof that the general secretary had finally ascended to the heights of power. The terror of those last years had allowed him to remove from the scene, in one way or another, eighteen of the twenty-seven members of the Politburo elected in the last congress presided over by Lenin, and to leave the heads on just twenty percent of the members of the Central Committee elected in 1934, the last time the situation was on the verge of slipping out of his hands. Stalin had proven to be a real genius of political chicanery, and his successful elimination of any opposition within the party (relying on the agreement promoted by Lenin over the illegality of factions) turned into his most efficient political weapon to make democracy disappear and, later, to establish terror and carry out the purges that gave him absolute power. Perhaps the first mistake of Bolshevism, Lev Davidovich thought, was the radical elimination of the political tendencies opposed to it, and once that policy went from outside society to inside the party, the end of the utopia had begun. If freedom of expression had been allowed in society and within the party, terror would not have been able to take root. That was why Stalin had embarked on the political and intellectual purge in such a way that everything would fall under the control of a state devoured by the party — and a party devoured by the general secretary. This was exactly what Lev Davidovich, before the aborted revolution of 1905, predicted to Lenin would happen.

To top off that series of defeats, one afternoon in March, Josep Nadal arrived at the Casa Azul with several newspapers in his hands and a look of disappointment on his face. The Republican army had surrendered and Franco’s troops were marching through Madrid. Lev Davidovich knew that in the coming months the reprisals would be terrible and he felt pity for the Republicans who had not been able to or had not wanted to flee Spain. The saddest thing was seeing how a courageous country that had had the revolution at the tips of its fingers had been sacrificed by the owners of the revolution and socialism, just as years before they had done to the Chinese Communists and the German workers. Was it so difficult to see that series of betrayals? he asked, looking into Nadal’s face.

Their new lives at the house on Avenida Viena forced the family to depend only on their own economic resources. Lev Davidovich’s author royalties were smaller every day: only the advance paid for the English edition of Stalin and his contributions to newspapers allowed them to stay afloat. He was bitter that part of that money had disappeared in the effort to turn the estate into a trench, because no matter how high the walls were, no matter how impregnable the doors seemed, when the GPU order was given, they would find a crack in the defenses and reach him. And he sensed — in fact knew — that the order had been given: the more imminent the war, the closer his death.

Natalia and the bodyguards tried to extend their vigilance to every single person who visited them, but Lev Davidovich refused to be so suspicious as to succumb to paranoia. The great advantage of living in his own house was being able to deal freely with the people who interested him, and from the moment they moved in, he had begun to receive visits from politicians, philosophers, university professors, Mexican sympathizers and those from other countries, including recently arrived Spanish Republicans, many of whom had felt uncomfortable around Rivera or, simply, had preferred not to visit Trotsky at the Casa Azul. Those meetings and the friends he kept were his contact with the world, and their opinions served to inform him, to reaffirm or temper his ideas.

Regularly, the Trotskys went out of town in the car they had purchased. They made the decision to leave randomly, almost by surprise, and the employees of the house never knew when it would happen, and on occasion not even the bodyguards — whom van Heijenoort alerted about the outings with very little notice — knew their schedule. Since the situation in Mexico was getting more and more explosive (from the start of the electoral campaign, the Exile’s presence had become a hotly debated issue), they barely visited the city, and when they did, Lev Davidovich hid himself in the backseat. But decidedly the outings to the countryside were the ones Lev Davidovich most enjoyed. He took long walks that stimulated his body, dulled by so many hours of sedentary work, and he devoted himself to what would become one of his favorite hobbies, collecting rare cacti, which he replanted in the yard of his home. The marvelous variety of those plants turned the search for specimens into an adventure that sometimes took the Trotskys over difficult terrain and gave them many hours of exercise as they dug up the cacti with picks and shovels and transported them to the car. Natalia called those outings “days of forced labor,” but returning to the house with specimens that they planted with the utmost care was the prize for that work. One afternoon, as they planted one of the most singular cacti in his collection, Lev Davidovich remembered the order not to sow a single rosebush in the house at Büyükada. Were those cacti the image of his defeat?

When the house was minimally set up for work, Lev Davidovich decided to make a final push to complete his Stalin biography. Natalia, so radical in her attitudes, insisted that he was debasing his talents by dedicating himself to deconstructing the Georgian, and she thought that many would have doubts about his objectivity due to the confrontation between the two of them over so many years. His editors had also encouraged him to write a biography of Lenin and spoke of sizable advances. But Lev Davidovich wanted to show the world the red czar’s true face. Even when he knew he was blinded by his passion, he didn’t reach the point of distorting the truth. Moreover, the monstrosities and crimes of Stalin’s era disgusted him, and he wanted that feeling to pervade the work. If from his pages a sinister figure rose almost reptilelike, it was because Stalin was in fact that way. Stalin’s years of infighting had given him that capacity to work for his promotion behind the scenes and one day take all power — aided by Lenin’s indolence, by Zinoviev’s, Kamenev’s and Bukharin’s congenital fear, and by Lev Davidovich’s own damned pride, he said. Or was the dictatorship an unavoidable historical necessity, the system’s only possibility? But what most encouraged Lev Davidovich to dedicate himself to writing that devastating book was the belief that, as had happened to the also deified Nero after his death, Stalin statues would be brought down and his name erased from everything — because history’s revenge tends to be more thorough than that of the most powerful emperor who ever existed. Lev Davidovich was sure that, when Louis XIV declared “L’état, c’est moi,” he was pronouncing an almost liberal formula in comparison with the reality of Stalin’s regime. The totalitarian state he had created went well beyond Caesar’s — and for that reason the general secretary could say, with all honesty, “La societé, c’est moi.” But the world should remember that both Stalin and the society custom built for him were deeply sick beings. The terror of those years had not been just a political instrument but also personal pleasure, an orgy of the senses for the Grave Digger and the dregs of Russian society. No one should find it strange that the terror should have come to include his own family and those closest to him (Why did Nadezhda Alliluyeva commit suicide? Give me a convincing answer that doesn’t have Stalin pointing the gun, he thought). The most terrible thing was the certainty that the terror had reached Lenin himself, whom, Lev Davidovich was convinced, Stalin had poisoned, since he knew that Vladimir Ilyich, if his devastated body and mind allowed it, would have named Lev Davidovich his successor as general secretary.

As the summer of 1939 went on, Lev Davidovich was certain that the start of the war in Europe was a question of days. The atmosphere in his own surroundings was also heating up, and he agreed with his secretaries and friends that he needed to be more careful about his movements. The animosity of local Stalinists was growing, and that was bound to result in more attempts on his life. Over the last year, the demands that he leave Mexico had turned into a campaign for his head. He knew that if the war started, Stalin would do almost anything to destroy him, since, even in his isolation, he was the only one capable of challenging him and Stalin could not run the risk that Lev Davidovich would return to Soviet territory and organize opposition to the system.

Natalia continued the work of fortifying the house and decided to reduce the visits of journalists, professors, and sympathizers who requested meetings. The number of men who protected him increased, although they faced the problem that those young men came to Mexico for a few months and, just when they had become familiar with their duties, had to return to their countries. The result of that collective paranoia was that he returned to living practically sequestered and his marginalization became especially painful in those summer days, the most pleasant for walking and fishing. Resolved to find a distraction from his many hours of work, he then had the idea of raising rabbits and hens, and began to ask for books on those subjects, for if he was going to try it, he would do so scientifically.

What most worried Natalia Sedova was that her husband’s health, so weakened in recent years, was suffering at an altitude that could cause a permanent state of high blood pressure. His digestion was difficult, and only light food, at set hours, saved him from greater ills. Definitively, the life of a pariah lived for so many years was taking its toll, and when he was on the verge of turning sixty, Lev Davidovich himself had to admit that he had turned into an old man, to the point that many people called him simply “the Old Man.”

When Lev Davidovich wrote about the impending war, he couldn’t help but warn that the USSR would perhaps end up being an easy victim of German tanks and aviation. Stalin, who accused Trotsky of being an opportunist and a traitor when he published this analysis, had weakened the military power of the country to the point that, everyone knew, only a miracle could save them. And that miracle — nobody could say it better than Lev Davidovich — was the Soviet soldier, whose capacity for sacrifice was unrivaled in the world. But the price to be paid would be many lives that could have been saved. What did Stalin need to withstand a German attack? Above all, time, he wrote. Time to reinforce the borders and rebuild the leaderless army. And he also needed for Western Europe to resist the fascist onslaught, at least for a while. Because of that, when on August 23, 1939, the news broke, Lev Davidovich was not really surprised, although he felt deep disgust. The radio stations, the world’s newspapers on the left and the right, communist or fascist, big or small, all had the same headline that day: the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed a pact of nonaggression, a pact of understanding. .

The news that von Ribbentrop and Molotov, as foreign ministers, had reached an agreement, of which, obviously, only a part had been made public, surprised more people in the world than Lev Davidovich would have imagined. A treaty that left Hitler’s hands free to attack the West was incomprehensible for those who willingly and even unwillingly had, despite the terror and the criminal proceedings, continued to defend Stalin as the great leader of the working class. For that reason, the Exile dared to predict that for centuries that date was going to be remembered as one of the most extraordinary betrayals of man’s fate and gullibility.

Lev Davidovich knew that Stalin would soon argue that the defense of the USSR was the priority, and that if the West had given free rein to German expansionism with the Munich Pact, the USSR, too, had the right to avoid a war with Germany. And he would be partially right. But the muddy trail of humiliation could never be erased, he wrote; seeing that the USSR’s radical antifascism was not what it seemed would cause massive disappointment, and the faith of millions of believers, who had resisted all tests, might be lost forever. But the demoralized workers and militants would perhaps soon have the opportunity to turn shame into an impulse to achieve the postponed revolution. Days of pain were coming, he concluded, but perhaps also times of glory for a new generation of Bolsheviks armed with the bitter experience of life, both inside and outside the Soviet Union.

Less than ten days later, when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, Lev Davidovich noted that the Germans seemed to penetrate Polish territory with too much caution, as if their tanks were advancing with the brakes on. But when, two weeks later, Soviet troops entered Poland, the Exile understood the conditions of the pact. The two dictators, as he had assumed, were spreading their hands over the once again sacrificed Poland. The curious thing was that the Western powers that had declared war on the Nazis accepted, without great protest, that Stalin would do the same as Hitler. The hypocrisy of the policy, he thought, would have disastrous consequences.

At that moment, Lev Davidovich was a man with his soul divided in anguish. Someday, he told himself, they would recognize that it was the mistakes of revolutionaries, more than the pressures of imperialism, that had delayed the great changes of human society; but even with that conviction and after so much infamy, political lows, and crimes of all kinds, he continued to believe that defense of the USSR against fascism and imperialism constituted the great duty of the workers of the world. Because Stalin was not the USSR, nor the representative of the true Soviet dream.

It shamed him, because of what it meant for the socialist ideal, to know that after invading Poland, Stalin was imposing the Soviet order there with the same fury with which Hitler exported fascist ideology. That crude imposition of the Soviet model on Poland and the Western Ukraine would bring about the demoralization of European workers once they saw the political opportunism of Stalinism. The inhabitants of those conquered regions, historic victims of the Russian and German empires, surely already asked themselves what differences existed between one invader and another, and Lev Davidovich would not be surprised if, very soon, many of those people came to consider the Nazis their liberators from Stalinist tyranny.

Even so, Lev Davidovich felt the contradiction like an overwhelming weight, not knowing if it was possible to oppose Stalinism while still defending the USSR. It anguished him not to be able to discern whether all of that bureaucracy was already a new class, incubated by the revolution, or just the excrescence that he had always thought it was. He needed to convince himself that it was still possible to show the difference between fascism and Stalinism and try to show all honest men, dumbfounded by the low blows of that Thermidorean bureaucracy, that the USSR still contained the essence of the revolution and that essence was what had to be defended and preserved. But if, as some said, won over by the evidence, the working class had shown with the Russian experience its inability to govern itself, then one would have to admit that the Marxist concept of society and socialism was mistaken. Was Marxism just one more ideology, a form of false consciousness that led its supporters and the oppressed classes to believe they were fighting for their own ends when in reality they were benefiting the interests of a new governing class?. . Just thinking of it caused him intense pain. The victory of Stalin and his regime would be raised like the triumph of reality over philosophical illusion and as an inevitable act of historical stagnation. Many, himself included, would see themselves forced to recognize that Stalinism did not have its roots in Russia’s backwardness nor in the hostile imperialist atmosphere, as had been said, but rather in the proletariat’s inability to become the governing class. He would also have to admit that the USSR had been no more than the precursor of a new system of exploitation and that its political structure had to breed, inevitably, a new dictatorship, albeit adorned with a different thetoric. .

The Exile knew that he could not change his way of seeing the world. He would not tire of exhorting men of good faith to remain alongside the exploited, even when history and scientific needs seemed to be against them. “Down with science, down with history! If necessary, we must redefine them!” he wrote. “In any event, I will remain on Spartacus’s side, never with the Caesars, and even against science I am going to maintain my trust in the ability of the working masses to free themselves from the yoke of capitalism, since whoever has seen the masses in action knows that it is possible.” Lenin’s mistakes, his own equivocations, those of the Bolshevik Party that permitted the deformation of the utopia, can never be blamed on the workers. Never, he would keep thinking.

No matter how great his unease, Lev Davidovich felt that life, so arduous, was still capable of compensating him with happiness when Seva at last arrived in Mexico. If his grandparents had not seen photos of the boy, they never would have recognized him. Between the little boy they had said goodbye to in France and the confused and shy thirteen-year-old who arrived in Coyoacán, there was a terrible and devastating story that made them fear for his mental health. But he and Natalia were convinced that love could cure even the deepest wounds, and love was what they had more than enough of, they who did not tire of hugging and kissing him, of admiring his youth in full bloom, despite the fact that both knew the boy’s life would not be easy in a country where he didn’t speak the language, where he had no friends, and where, to top it off, he lived in a fortress.

Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, after rescuing Seva from the religious boarding school in the South of France where Jeanne had sent him, had traveled with him from France to Mexico fearful of possible attacks. Those friends, the only ones they had left from the days of uncertainty before the revolution, had been one of the great blessings in Lev Davidovich’s existence and made him ask himself how he could have ever been so obtuse as to mistake Molinier’s opportunism for sincere friendship.

Natalia and the Rosmers took charge of showing Seva around the city, and his grandfather insisted on being his guide on an outing to Teotihuacán. Lev Davidovich demanded that only the bodyguards go with them, since he wanted Seva all to himself. Although they couldn’t climb to the summit of the Pyramid of the Sun, they made a deep journey to the past. They talked about his father, Plato Volkov, of whom Seva did not have specific memories, since he had been deported when the boy was three years old; about his mother, Zina, a victim of horrible revenge; about his uncle Liova, about whom the boy dreamed on many nights; they talked about what were for him the misty days of Prinkipo and Istanbul, of which his mind kept memorable flashes of the fires, the fishing, but above all the company of Maya. He kept a photo of himself at age five with his grandfather, his hair and beard still dark, and the beautiful borzoi, who gave the impression of looking right into the camera in order to eternalize the kindness of her eyes. During the years he lived in Berlin and Paris, Seva had wanted to have another dog, but his nomadic life would not allow him that pleasure. So Lev Davidovich promised him that he could have a dog now, and that it would help him like nothing else to feel that something belonged to him and that he belonged to a place. Poor boy! How much hate had consumed the best part of his life! he would say that night to Natalia Sedova.

Meanwhile, the Red Army had invaded Finland and the international community was finally comparing Stalin to Hitler. In the article that he wrote on that episode, Lev Davidovich weighed his opinions with extreme care, certain that he would sow confusion and dissent among his followers, who would even label him a Stalinist for expressing an idea that did not seem negotiable even to him, even after that invasion: even with Stalin at the helm, he wrote, the defense of the integrity of the USSR continued to be the priority of the world proletariat.

A couple of weeks after his arrival, Seva asked Harold Robbins, the new head of the bodyguards, to accompany him on a walk through the neighborhood. Although Natalia and Marguerite were not in favor of it, Alfred and Lev Davidovich thought they should give the child a little freedom, since Seva had shown himself to be a strong boy, and life’s blows did not appear to have affected him. An hour after they left, Seva and Robbins returned. . with a dog. On one of their drives, the boy had seen his dog’s mother, with a litter, in front of a shack, and of course the dog’s owners were happy for someone to take one of the pups. Upon arriving at the house, he had already been baptized “Azteca,” and he was one of those mutts in possession of an intelligence gained over generations by the struggle for survival.

The happiness that Lev Davidovich felt over Seva’s presence was clouded over by his break with his old friend Max Shachtman, the collaborator who, ever since his first visit to Prinkipo in 1929, had offered him so much affection and devotion. The defection was a consequence of the separatist fever that was undermining the American Trotskyists, the same as that which had affected the French ten years earlier that preventing the gestation of a unified opposition right at the moment of the fascist ascent. Now the heat of the war and the adoption of the most radical positions regarding the USSR had exacerbated the divisions and new parties were emerging, a little bit closer to or further from the left than others in regard to “matters of principle.” Max Shachtman and James Burnham had turned into leaders of their own party, an offshoot of the Socialist Workers that was reduced to a mere handful of followers with that split.

Although he asked Shachtman to come to Mexico to discuss his disaffection, Max did not show up, and Lev Davidovich knew the reason: Shachtman knew that he would not be able to stand “Trotsky’s breath on his neck.” At the end of the day, the Exile realized that he had always been bothered by a certain superficiality in Shachtman, but he also had to admit that he had come to love him and that he should at least appreciate the straightforwardness with which Max had announced his break, so different from the enigmatic way in which Molinier and the Pazes before him had done.

The year 1939 was ending and the war was continuing. Lev Davidovich had turned sixty, and despite everything that had happened, it was the most peaceful New Year he had celebrated ever since he went into exile. He had Seva and Azteca with him, and the dog followed him faithfully when he went outside to care for the rabbits and hens. His beloved Alfred and Marguerite were with them and, together with other friends, bodyguards, and secretaries, they helped him better spend the nighttime hours in intelligent, relaxing conversations, so necessary for his soul. Although the house looked more and more like a fortress and his escapes had become more sporadic, he had the freedom to write and opine, and he did so incessantly, despite the censorship of some editors, like the ones from Life magazine who had feared repercussions from publishing an excerpt from the forthcoming Stalin in which Lenin’s possible poisoning was mentioned. Mexico’s festive atmosphere, despite the war, reached all the way to the walls of Coyoacán, and although it didn’t manage to put out all the embers of the sadness the Trotskys carried with them, it reminded them that, even in the most difficult circumstances, life always tended to put itself back together and make itself tolerable. .

Among the visitors he received that season was Sylvia Ageloff, the sister of the efficient Ruth and Hilda, who occasionally assisted him as translators or secretaries in his relations with American Trotskyists. Just like her sisters, Sylvia proved to be a dedicated militant but, above all, a very useful person because of the help she rendered when Fanny Yanovitch fell ill. In addition to English, the girl spoke French, Spanish, and Russian perfectly and was a quick typist. . But poor Sylvia was also one of the least graceful women that Lev Davidovich had ever met. She was just a little over five feet high, she was thin to the point of emaciation (her arms looked like strings and he imagined that her thighs were the width of his fist), and her face was full of reddish freckles. To top it off, she wore thick glasses, and although her voice had a warmth that was almost seductive, without a doubt she had less taste in fashion than any woman he had ever met. Sylvia’s physical shortcomings were so noteworthy that Natalia and the Exile discussed them more than once (they had also been the subject of conversation among the bodyguards), and it caused quite a stir when it was learned that Sylvia had a boyfriend. . and not just anyone, they said, but one who seemed to be well-off, the son of diplomats, and, as Natalia herself would add, very good-looking and five years younger than she was. It went to show that, in questions of love, nothing is written in stone, and beneath any skirt a beast could be hiding. There was so much gossip over the discovery that Lev Davidovich was curious to see the trophy the young woman had snared.

On March 12, the Soviet Union had to sign an onerous peace treaty with Finland, through which they obtained just a few strips of the original territory they were after. The Red Army’s fiasco had turned into the proof of its weakness. Lev Davidovich saw that episode as a warning: while Stalin was failing in Finland, Hitler and his divisions had invaded and occupied Denmark in just twenty-four hours.

Later, when Norway was invaded by the Nazis and fell in just a few days, Lev Davidovich knew that the prophecy he had hurled at Trygve Lie three years earlier was on the verge of fulfilling itself: his repressors of yesteryear were turning into political exiles themselves and suffering the humiliation of being refugees with conditions imposed on them. He was sure that their hosts would not be as cruel with them as they had been with him, but the king and the Norwegian ministers would perhaps remember him and the way in which they had treated him.

In those first months of 1940, the temperature of the war of the Mexican Stalinists against the Exile rose. Laborde and Campa had been thrown out, and now other leaders were being decapitated for the same sin: that of not being sufficiently “anti-Trotsky.” His instinct told him that something was being planned, and it wasn’t good. Amid those purges, they celebrated May Day with a parade strikingly similar to the ones the Nazis and the fascists were organizing in Berlin and Rome: twenty thousand irate Communists gathered by the Mexican Communist Party and the Workers’ Central, but instead of yelling slogans against the war, they had written on their flags OUT WITH TROTSKY! TROTSKY FASCIST! TROTSKY TRAITOR! Perhaps out of a remote sense of modesty they had not written what they yelled most arduously: “Death to Trotsky!”. . That negativity had put the inhabitants and guards of the fortress-house on alert, since people wrote and yelled like that when they were willing to brandish a gun. The bodyguards adopted new precautions (they placed machine guns in the small windows), they brought more volunteers from the United States, and outside the house they put together a ten-man police guard. Would all of these measures be worth anything? Could they stop the insidious hand that would find its way in through a crack that would be impossible to see with the naked eye? Lev Davidovich asked himself when he watched that armed multitude that surrounded him. And it bothered him, knowing the response beforehand: he was a condemned man and, when they wanted to, they would kill him.

One day, when Alfred Rosmer got sick, Lev Davidovich finally saw Sylvia’s boyfriend, since it was the young man who took Alfred to the clinic and insisted on paying for his medicine. According to Marguerite, Sylvia had not wanted to introduce her boyfriend because he had problems with his papers and was in Mexico illegally; according to Natalia, always sharp, the girl’s fear was due to the boyfriend being involved in certain murky businesses from which he earned the money that he spent so freely. Hopefully, poor Sylvia won’t lose him, the Exile would remark to his wife.

May 23 had been a routine day in the house. Lev Davidovich had worked a lot and he felt exhausted when he ran out in the afternoon to feed his rabbits, helped by Seva and accompanied by Azteca. At some point he spoke with Harold Robbins and asked that they not maintain their habitual educational talks with the new guys in the guard that evening, since he was exhausted and had slept poorly for several nights. After dinner, he talked for a while with his wife and the Rosmers, then returned to his study to organize the documents that he intended to work with the following morning. A little earlier than usual, he took a sleeping pill to find the rest he needed so much and went to bed.

Despite the fact that he had spent twelve years waiting for it, on occasion he was capable of forgetting that, that very day, perhaps during the most peaceful moment of the evening, death could knock on his door. In the best Soviet way, he had learned to live with that expectation, to carry its imminence as if it were a tight-fitting shirt. And he’d already decided that he should keep moving forward in the meantime. Although he didn’t fear death, and at times even desired it, an almost sick sense of duty compelled him to take a variety of measures to evade it. Perhaps because of that same mechanism of self-defense, when the explosions woke him, he thought that they were fireworks and rockets being set off in some feria being celebrated in Coyoacán around that time. He understood that they were gunshots and that they were coming from very close by only when Natalia pushed him from the bed and threw him to the floor. Had the hour of his departure arrived, just like that, when he was dressed in a nightgown and curled up against a wall? Lev Davidovich even had time to consider it a very undecorous way to die. Would he end up laid out with his nightshirt raised and his privates exposed? The condemned man closed his legs and readied himself to die.

24

One tiring and typically sweaty afternoon in 1993, the screw that kept me connected to Ramón Mercader’s story turned again. I had barely left the bag loaded with bananas, malangas, and mangoes on the floor, and put away the bike on which I had gone to and from Melena del Sur in search of those provisions, when Ana gave me the strange news that I had received a package in the mail. I don’t even know how many years it had been since I received so much as a letter, less still a package. The friends who left the island wrote once, at most twice, and never did so again, urged to separate themselves from a past that pierced them and that we reminded them of. As I gulped down a liter of sugar-spiked water, I examined the manila envelope with the CERTIFIED notice stamped across it and read the name of the sender written in the corner, Germán Sánchez, and the address of the post office in Marianao, at the other end of the city.

With a cigarette in my mouth, I opened the envelope and immediately noticed that the name of the sender was false. The item sent was a book, published in Spain, and it was written precisely by someone named Germán Sánchez and by Luis Mercader — a book in which, according to the title, Luis relayed, with the help of the journalist Germán Sánchez, the life of his brother Ramón. The first thing I did, of course, was flip through the book and, upon discovering that it had photos, look at them until I ran into an image that stirred my insides. That big-headed, almost square man with aged features behind his tortoiseshell glasses, that man whose eyes looked at me from the work by Germán Sánchez and Luis Mercader was — there was no longer any doubt — an assassin and also, of course, the man who loved dogs.

I think I’d had the greatest suspicion that Jaime López was not Jaime López at the moment in which he confirmed that Ramón had continued to hear Trotsky’s scream forever. The tone of his voice and the dampness of his look warned me that he was talking about something intimate and painful. A few years later, the letter brought by the nurse moved me a little closer to the belief that the man who loved dogs could be none other than Ramón Mercader himself, no matter how extraordinary the palpable existence, on a Cuban beach, of that character whose presence seemed inconceivable, since reason told me that he had been devoured by history many years before. Weren’t Trotsky, his life and his death, bookish and remote references? How could someone escape from history to wander around with two dogs and a cigarette in his mouth on a beach in my reality? With those questions and suspicions, I had tried to leave some room for doubt, I think, above all, with the intent of protecting myself. It wasn’t pleasant for anyone to be convinced that he had a relationship of trust and closeness with a murderer, that he has shaken the hand with which a man was killed, that he has shared coffee, cigarettes, and even very private personal discomforts with that person. . And it is less pleasant for it to turn out to be that that murderer was precisely the author of one of the most ruthless, calculated, and useless crimes in history. The margin of doubt that I had preserved had given me, nonetheless, a certain peace that ended up being especially necessary when I decided to delve into that story through which, among others, I searched for the reasons that had moved Ramón Mercader — the last truths that perhaps his omniscient friend Jaime López would have never confessed to me. But with the fall of the last parapet, when I found that image, I would always have the certainty that I had never spoken with Jaime López but rather with that man who had once been Ramón Mercader del Río, and also the certainty that Ramón had told me, precisely me (why the hell was it me?), the truth of his life, at least in the way that he understood it—his truth and his life.

That same night, after dinner, I began to read the book. As I went on, I concluded that only one person could send me that work and put the last details of that story in my hands — justifications, hypocrisies, silences, and revenge through Luis’s mouth — including the painful exit from this world of Ramón Mercader, which I was still unaware of until that moment. And that person could not have been anyone other than the very black supposed nurse, unnamed and squalid, who, obviously, had to have known much more about her “patient” than, ten years before, she had told me in her sole and very brief visit. If the woman now (perhaps still connected to the family, perhaps with the sons of the man who, now without a doubt — for her as well — was a murderer) took on that work, it couldn’t be solely due to her desire to eliminate the last corners of the ignorance of that “kid” who had shared some afternoons chatting with Jaime López, in another life called Ramón Mercader, in another Jacques Mornard, in another Román Pavlovich. .

When I read the biography, I found that some of what I knew was confirmed by information that Luis Mercader must have known firsthand, since he had been a witness to the episodes of which he spoke. Meanwhile, other stories contradicted what I knew, and for some reason that I was unaware of at that moment, it turned out that I knew about attitudes and episodes Ramón lived through that his brother omitted or was unaware of. But the most important thing was that, once Jaime López’s identity was confirmed, Ramón Mercader’s final fate known, and the downfall of the world that had cultivated him like a poisonous flower was a reality, I felt completely free of my commitment to maintain my silence. Above all because, with that book sent by a ghost, the certainty had also reached me that the siege to which the man who loved dogs had subjected me while alive — and even after his death — could only have a reason calculated by the mind of a chess player and that was to push me silently but inexorably to write the story he had told me, though he made me promise the opposite.

Luis Mercader’s book not only freed me of my promise to remain silent but also allowed me to add the last letters to the scattered crossword puzzle of a murderer’s life and work. My first reaction to the news was to feel sorry for myself and for all of those who, tricked and used, had ever believed in the validity of the utopia founded in, then ruined by, the country of the Soviets; more than a sense of rejection, it caused me a feeling of compassion for Mercader himself, and I think that for the first time I understood the proportions of his faith, of his fears, and the obsession with the silence he would maintain until his last breath.

The second reaction was to tell Ana the entire story, since I felt I would burst if I didn’t pop the pus-filled pimple of fear once and for all. So I told her that, if Luis Mercader had relayed a part of his brother’s life, I at last felt willing and in the intellectual and physical condition to write the story, whatever may happen.

“I don’t understand, Iván, I don’t understand, for God’s sake I really don’t,” Ana would say to me emphatically and (I knew) full of bitterness over the part of the deception that she had to live through herself. “How is it possible for a writer to stop feeling like a writer? Worse still, how can he stop thinking like a writer? How is it that in all this time you didn’t dare to write anything? Didn’t it occur to you to think that at twenty-eight, God had put this story in your hands that could be turned into your novel, the big one. .”

I stopped talking, nodding my head for each of her statements and questions, and then I responded:

“It didn’t occur to me because it couldn’t occur to me, because I didn’t want it to occur to me, and I searched for every excuse to forget it every time it tried to occur to me. Or do you not know what country we live in right now? Do you have any idea how many writers stopped writing and turned into nothing or, worse still, into anti-writers and were never again able to take flight? Who could bet on things ever changing? Do you know what it is to feel marginalized, forbidden, buried alive at the age of thirty, thirty-five, when you can really begin to be a serious writer, and thinking that the marginalization is forever, to the end of time, or at least until the end of your fucking life?”

“But what could they do to you?” she insisted. “Did they kill you?”

“No, they didn’t kill me.”

“So. . so. . what terrible thing could they do to you? Censor your book? What else?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?” She jumped, offended, I think.

“They make you nothing. Do you know what it is to turn into nothing? Because I do know, because I myself turned into nothing. . And I also know what it is to feel fear.”

So I told her about all of those forgotten writers who not even they themselves remembered, those who wrote the empty and obliging literature of the seventies and eighties, practically the only kind of literature that one could imagine and compose under the ubiquitous layer of suspicion, intolerance, and national uniformity. And I told her about those who, like myself, innocent and credulous, earned ourselves a “corrective” for having barely dipped our toes, and about those who, after a stay in the inferno of nothing, tried to return and did so with lamentable books, also empty and obliging, with which they achieved an always-conditional pardon and the mutilated feeling that they were writers again because they once more saw their names in print.

Like Rimbaud in his days in Harar, I had preferred to forget that literature existed. Further still, like Isaak Babel — and it’s not that I’m comparing myself with him or with others, for God’s sake — I had opted to write silence. At least with my mouth closed, I could feel at peace with myself and keep my fears in check.

When the crisis of the 1990s became more intense, Ana, Tato the poodle, and I were on the verge of dying of starvation, like so many people in a dark country, paralyzed and in the midst of falling apart. Despite everything, I think that for six or seven years, the most difficult and fucked-up of a total and interminable crisis, Ana and I were happy in our stoic and hungry way. That human harmony that saved me from sinking was a true life lesson. In the last years of my marriage with Raquelita, when that bonanza of the 1980s was becoming normal and everything seemed to indicate that the bright future was beginning to turn on its lights — there was food, there was clothing (socialist and ugly, but still clothing and food), there were buses, sometimes even taxis, and houses on the beach that we could rent with our salaries — my inability to be happy prevented me from enjoying, along with my wife and my children, what life was offering me. In contrast, when that false equilibrium disappeared with the end of the Soviet Union and the crisis began, Ana’s presence and love gave me a will to live, to write, to fight for something that was inside and outside me, like in the distant years in which, with all my enthusiasm, I had cut sugarcane, planted coffee, and written a few stories pushed by the faith and the most solid confidence in the future — not just mine but the future of everyone. .

Because urban transport had practically disappeared, from the beginning of the nineties, five days a week I pedaled on my Chinese bicycle the six miles to get there, and six to return, that separated my house from the veterinary school. In a few months I ended up so thin that more than once, looking at my profile in a mirror, I couldn’t do anything but ask myself if a devouring cancer hadn’t invaded my body. As far as she was concerned, Ana would suffer — as a result of the daily exercise on her bicycle, the lack of necessary calories, and bad genetic luck — the worst consequences of those terrible years, since, like many other people, she was diagnosed with a vitamin-deficient polyneuritis (the same one that spread across the German concentration camps) that, in her case, would later turn into an irreversible osteoporosis, a prelude to the cancer that would eventually kill her.

Devoted to taking care of Ana at the start of her illnesses (she was almost blind for a few months), in 1993 I chose to leave the job at the veterinary school when I received the opportunity to establish a first aid clinic in an unoccupied room close to our house. From that moment on, with the consent (but not a shred of support) of the local powers, I turned into the neighborhood amateur veterinarian, tasked with the immunization campaigns against rabies. Although in reality it wasn’t a lot of money, I earned three times as much as my old salary, and I earmarked every peso obtained to finding food for my wife. Once a week, to stretch out my scarce funds, I climbed upon my bike and went to Melena del Sur, twenty miles from the city, to purchase fruits and vegetables directly from the countryside and to trade my abilities as a castrator and worm remover of pigs for a bit of meat and some eggs. If a few months earlier I had seemed like a cancer patient, the new efforts had turned me into a ghost, and to this day even I can’t explain to myself how I came out alive and lucid from that war for survival, which even included everything from operating on the vocal cords of hundreds of urban pigs to silence their shrill cries to getting into a fistfight (in which knives even came out) with the veterinarian who tried to steal my clients in Melena del Sur. At the bottom of the abyss, accosted on all sides, instincts can be stronger than beliefs, I learned.

Besides the slow and stumbling work of writing to which I returned after receiving Luis Mercader’s book — I had never had any idea of how difficult it could be to really write, with responsibility and a view of the consequences and, to top it off, trying to get into the head of someone who existed, and resolving to think and feel like him — that dark and hostile period had the reward of allowing me to completely bring forth from within myself what should really have been my life’s vocation: from the rustic and basic clinic I had established in the neighborhood, not only did I vaccinate dogs and castrate or silence pigs, but I was also able to devote myself to helping all of those who, like myself, loved animals, especially dogs. Sometimes I didn’t even know where to get the medicines and instruments to keep the clinic doors open, and there were days on which even aspirin disappeared from the island and the School of Veterinary Medicine recommended curing skin diseases with chamomile fermentations or feverfew and intestinal problems with massages and prayers to St. Luis Beltrán. The nominal fees I charged the animals’ owners barely covered my expenses and would not have been enough for Ana and me to survive. My reputation as a good person, more than as an efficient veterinarian, spread in the area and people came to see me with animals as thin as they were (can you imagine a thin snake?) and, almost against all reason in those dark days, gave me medicines, stitches, bandages they had left over for some reason, as a display of solidarity between the fucked, which is the only true kind. And being a part of that solidarity in which Ana involved herself whenever she could — many times she was my assistant in the vaccinations, the sterilizations, and the massive worm removals that I organized — removed from me any pretension of recognition or personal transcendence and was elemental in making me the person who seemed like the one I had always wanted to be, the one who, even now, I have most liked being.

Although I still hadn’t begun to go to church with Ana, Dany, Frank, and the few other friends I saw told me I seemed to be working toward my candidacy for beatification and for my ascent to heaven. What was true was that reading and writing about how the greatest utopia men had ever had within their reach had been perverted, diving into the catacombs of a story that seemed more like divine punishment than the work of men drunk with power, eager for control, and with pretensions of historical transcendence, I had learned that true human grandeur lay in the practice of kindness without conditions, in the capacity of giving to those who had nothing, but not what we have left over but rather a part of what little we have — giving until it hurts without practicing the deceitful philosophy of forcing others to accept our concepts of good and truth because (we believe) they’re the only possible ones and because, besides, they should be grateful for what we give them, even when they didn’t ask for it. And although I knew that my cosmogony was entirely impractical (so what the hell do we do with the economy, money, property, so that all of this works? And what about the predestined ones and those born sons of bitches?), it satisfied me to think that perhaps one day humans would be able to cultivate that philosophy, which seemed so basic, without suffering labor pains or the trauma of being forced, out of pure and free will, out of the ethical need to show solidarity and be democratic. My mental masturbations. .

Because of that, in silence and also in pain, I was letting myself be dragged toward writing, although without knowing if I would ever dare to show anyone what I had written, or to seek out a greater destiny, since those options didn’t interest me too much. I was only convinced that the exercise of recovering a vanished memory had a lot to do with my responsibility to face life — rather, to face my life. If fate had made me the repository of a cruel and exemplary story, my duty as a human was to preserve it, to extract it from the tsunami of oblivion.

The accumulated need to share the weight of that story that pursued me — along with the repulsion of memories and blame that the visit we made to Cojímar would cause — were the reasons for which I decided to also tell my friend Daniel the details of my relationship with that slippery individual whom I had named “the man who loved dogs.”

Everything came to a head on a summer afternoon in 1994, just when we had hit bottom and it seemed that all the crisis needed was to chew us a few more times in order to swallow us. It wasn’t easy, but that day I pulled Dany out of his apathy and we went to Cojímar on our bicycles, set to witness the spectacle of the moment: the massive exodus, in the least imaginable boats and in daylight, of hundreds, thousands of men, women, and children who were making the most of the border opening decreed by the government to throw themselves to the sea on any floating object, loaded with their desperation, their exhaustion, and their hunger, in search of other horizons.

The establishment, for three or four years, of blackouts lasting eight and even twelve hours daily had served to enable Dany and me to become close again. Since his blackout area (Luyano I) was on the border with mine (Lawton II), we discovered that, in general, when there was no electricity at his house, there was at mine and vice versa. Always on our bicycles, and most times with our respective wives on the back, we tended to transfer ourselves from darkness to light to watch a movie or a boring baseball game on television (the announcers and the baseball players were thinner, the stadiums almost empty) or simply to talk and be able to see each other’s faces.

Dany, who around that time was still working at the publishing house as the head of the marketing department, was now the one who’d stopped writing. The two short story collections and the two novels he had published in the 1980s had turned him into one of the hopes of Cuban literature, always so full of hope and. . The fact is that, reading those books, you noticed that in his storytelling there was a dramatic force capable of penetration, with narrative possibilities, but someone with my training could also see that he lacked the necessary daring to jump into the void and risk everything in his writing. There was in his literature something elusive, an intention to search that was suddenly interrupted when the precipice came into view, a lack of final decisiveness to cross the curtain of fire and touch the painful parts of reality. Since I knew him well, I knew that his writings were a mirror of his attitude in the face of life. But now, overwhelmed by the crisis and the almost certain impossibility of publishing in Cuba, he’d fallen into a literary depression from which I tried to bring him out during our nighttime talks. My main argument was that Dany should make the most of his empty days to ponder and write, even if it was by candlelight. That’s how the great Cuban writers of the nineteenth century had done it; besides, his case wasn’t like mine, since he was a writer and couldn’t cease to be so (Ana looked at me silently when I touched on this subject), and writers write. The saddest thing was that my words didn’t seem to produce (actually, didn’t produce) any effect at all, and the passion that pushed him forward in his literary calling must have left him, so that he, always so disciplined, just let the days float by, busy perfecting his strategies of survival and the search for his next meal, like almost all of the island’s inhabitants. On one of those nights, while we were talking about the matter, I proposed that we make an excursion to Cojímar the following day to see with our own eyes what was happening there.

The spectacle we found turned out to be devastating. While groups of men and women, with tables, metal tanks, tires, nails, and ropes devoted themselves along the coast to giving shape to those artifacts on which they would throw themselves into the sea, other groups arrived in trucks loaded with their already-built boats. Each time one of them arrived, the masses ran to the truck and, after applauding for the recently arrived as if they were the heroes of some athletic feat, some threw themselves at helping them unload their precious boats, while others, with wads of dollars in their hands, tried to buy a space for the crossing.

In the middle of the chaos, wallets and oars were stolen. Businesses had been set up and were selling barrels of drinking water, compasses, food, hats, sunglasses, cigarettes, matches, lights, and plaster images of the protecting Virgins of La Caridad del Cobre, the patroness of Cuba, and of Regla, Queen of the Sea, and there were even rooms to be rented for amorous goodbyes and bathrooms for greater needs, since the lesser ones were taken care of on the rocks, shamelessly. The police who had to guarantee order watched with their eyes fogged over by confusion, and only intervened reluctantly to calm people down when violence broke out. Meanwhile, a group of people were singing alongside some boys who had arrived with a pair of guitars, as if they were at a camping ground; others argued over the number of passengers that could be taken on a balsa raft so many feet long and talked about the first thing they would eat upon arriving in Miami or about the million-dollar businesses they would start there; and the rest, close to the reefs, were helping the ones launching their craft into the sea and bidding them goodbye with applause, cheers, promises to see each other soon, over there, even farther: way over there. I think I will never forget the big, voluminous black man with his baritone voice who, from his floating balsa raft, yelled at the coast: “Caballero, last one out has to turn off the light in the Morro,” and immediately began to sing, in Paul Robeson’s voice: “Siento un bombo, mamita, m’están llamando. .”

“I never imagined I would see something like this,” I said to Daniel, overcome by a deep sadness. “It’s come to this?”

“Hunger rules,” he commented.

“It’s more complicated than hunger, Dany. They lost their faith and they’re escaping. It’s biblical, a biblical exodus. .”

“This one is too Cuban. Forget about the exodus, this is called escaping, going on the lam, getting the hell out ’cause no one can stand it anymore. .”

Almost fearfully I dared to ask him:

“So why don’t you go?”

He looked at me, and in his eyes there wasn’t a drop of the sarcasm or cynicism with which he tried to defend himself from the world, but that was no use when he tried to protect himself from himself and his truths.

“Because I’m scared. Because I don’t know if I can start over. Because I’m forty years old. I don’t know, really. And you?”

“Because I don’t want to leave.”

“Don’t fuck around; that’s no answer.”

“But it’s true: I don’t want to leave and that’s it,” I insisted, refusing to give any other reason.

“Iván, were you always this weird?”

Then I kept looking at the sea in silence. With that atmosphere and the unhealthy conversation we had had, an old feeling of blame rose to the surface that was giving me a lump in my throat and bringing tears to my eyes. Why did fear always show up? How long would it pursue me?

“The worst thing that happened to me when William disappeared,” I said, when I at last managed to speak, “was that I blocked myself in and couldn’t vent. I had to pretend with my parents, tell them there was hope, that maybe he was alive somewhere. When we all convinced ourselves that he was at the bottom of the sea, I could no longer cry for my brother. . But the most fucked-up thing has been thinking about what a son of a bitch luck is. If William had decided to do that two or three months later, he would’ve left through the Mariel. With the expulsion papers from the university, where it said he was an antisocial faggot, they would have put him in a speedboat and he would have left without any trouble.”

“No one could even dream that what happened was going to happen. Even this right now, did you ever imagine that we were going to see something like this? People leaving and the police watching them as if it were nothing?”

“It’s as if William was marked by tragedy. Just for being a homosexual or for being my brother. . I don’t know, but it’s not fair.”

At sunset we decided to go back. I felt too overcome by that human stampede capable of creating in my mind the closest image to my brother’s last decision and of stirring the dirty waters of a never-resolved memory — never buried, like William’s body.

Night had already fallen when we arrived at Dany’s house, where, fortunately, there was electricity that day. We drank water, mixed grain coffee, and ate some sandwiches with fish picadillo rounded out by boiled banana peels. Daniel knew that for two or three years I had been allowing myself to drink alcohol again, although only on certain occasions and in reduced quantities. So, since he knew me, he knew that at that moment I needed a drink. He opened the closet where he kept his strategic reserve and took out one of the bottles of añejo rum that Elisa, whenever she had a chance, stole from work. Seated on the chairs in the living room, with two fans on high speed, we drank almost without looking at each other, and I felt that what had happened that day had somehow prepared me for what I had thought of doing and finally did.

“I’m trying to write a book” was the way in which it occurred to me to bring up the subject, and immediately it seemed cruel to say that you’re writing to a writer who has dried up; it is like insulting his mother. I know it all too well. But I didn’t stop myself and I explained that for a while I had been trying to give shape to a story I had run into sixteen years before.

“So why didn’t you write it before?”

“I didn’t want to, I couldn’t, I didn’t even know. . Now I think that I want to, I can, and, more or less, I know.”

So I told him the basics of my meetings in 1977 with the man who loved dogs and the details of the story that, through the strangest ways and in pieces, he had given me since then. I don’t quite know why, but before doing so I imposed a condition and asked him to please respect it: he should never speak to me about that matter if I didn’t bring it up. Now I know I did it to protect myself, as was my custom.

When I finished telling him the story, including the search for the Trotsky biography in which I had involved him, I felt, for the first time, that I was really writing a book. It was a feeling between joy and torment that I had lost many years before, but that had not left me, like a chronic illness. The terrible thing, nonetheless, was that at that moment I was also fully conscious that Ramón Mercader was causing me, more than anyone else, that inappropriate feeling that he himself rejected and that frightened me by the mere fact of feeling it: compassion.

The conversation with Daniel and the immediate effects it generated served to dust off and revise what I had already written. I perceived, as a visceral necessity of that story, the existence of another voice, another perspective, capable of complementing and contrasting what the man who loved dogs had told me. And very soon I discovered that my intention of understanding the life of Ramón Mercader implied trying to understand that of his victim as well, since that murderer would only be complete, as an executioner and a human being, if the object of his act accompanied him, the repository of his hate and the hate of the men who induced and armed him.

For years I had dedicated myself to gathering the little information existing in the country about the twisted conspiracy to kill Trotsky and about the awful, chaotic, and frustrating epoch in which the crime was committed. I recalled the joyful tension with which many of us searched for the few glasnost magazines that during those years of revelations and hopes entered the island, until they were removed from the newsstands — so we wouldn’t be ideologically contaminated by certain truths that had been buried for so many years, said the good censors. But my need to know more, at least a little more, threw me into an obstinate and subterranean search for information that would take me from one book to another (obtained with more difficulty than the previous one) and to confirm for myself that we had lived in programmed ignorance for decades, our knowledge and credulity systematically manipulated. To begin with — and a couple of conversations with Daniel and Ana reaffirmed this — very few people in the country had any idea who Trotsky had been, what the reasons for his political downfall were, the persecution he had suffered, and the death they gave him; fewer still were those who knew how the revolutionary’s execution had been organized and who had carried out the final mandate; practically no one knew, either, the extremes reached by Bolshevik cruelty in the hands of that same Trotsky in his days of maximum power; and almost no one had an exact idea of the subsequent felonies and massacres of the Stalinist era — all that barbarity justified by the struggle for a better world. And the ones who did know something kept quiet.

Thanks to books that revealed the diverse horrors archived for decades in Moscow, and the capacity for judgment that those revelations extended to the experts, I came to the conclusion that now we were getting to know or at least could learn about Mercader’s world and the ins and outs of his crime more than Mercader himself had managed to discover. Only with glasnost first, and then with the inevitable disappearance of the USSR later, and the ventilation of many details of its perverted, buried, covered up, rewritten and rewritten-again history, was a coherent and more or less real image obtained of what the dark existence of a country had been that had lasted exactly seventy-four years, as long as the life of a normal man. But all of those years, according to the evidence that I was reading — going from surprise to surprise — (and to think that Breton said to Trotsky himself that the world had lost its capacity for surprises forever), all of those years, I was saying, had been lived in vain from the moment in which the Utopia was betrayed and, worse still, turned into the deceit of man’s best desires. The strictly theoretical and so attractive dream of possible equality had been traded for the worst authoritarian nightmare in history when it was applied to reality, understood, with good reason (more, in this case), as the only criterion of truth. Marx dixit.

So when I thought I was starting to have a more or less complete understanding of that entire cosmic disaster and what Mercader’s crime had signified in the midst of so much criminality, one dark and stormy night — as you could expect in this dark and stormy story — at the door of my house came knocking the tall, thin black man who, in 1977, had accompanied Ramón Mercader and his Russian wolfhounds when they entered my life.

25

Jacques Mornard felt a hair-raising chill go down his spine: Harold Robbins, smiling, let him in after shaking his hand. With a paper bag in one hand and dressed as if he were going out for a stroll, he crossed the fortress’s threshold without the bodyguard bothering to look at what he had in the bag. When the lead door closed, Ramón Mercader heard how History was falling prostrate at his feet.

After the attack by the Mexicans, he had returned on two occasions to the house in Coyoacán to ask about the state of its inhabitants. It was during the second visit that they confirmed that the Rosmers would leave for France from the port of Veracruz on the afternoon of May 28, and since, coincidentally, he had to travel to that city for some business by the end of the month, he proposed to Alfred Rosmer, with Robbins and Schüssler’s authorization, to be the one to take them. That way none of the bodyguards (two of them were still being held by the police) would have to leave the house, something that was especially dangerous after what had happened in the early hours of the twenty-fourth.

The police investigations had already dismissed the presumed participation of Diego Rivera in the attack, and despite the fact that they persisted in their hypothesis of a self-attack, the renegade’s insistence on pointing to the Soviet secret police as the author of the assault kept the Mexican authorities in check. With anxiety, Jacques waited for Tom’s return with his explanations and, above all, with the orders and final adjustments for his call to action.

Despite the fact that several people had spoken to him of what existed inside the walls, that afternoon Jacques Mornard was surprised to see the layout of the fortress’s central yard. His first impression was that he had entered the cloister of a monastery. To his left, close to the stone wall, were the rows of rabbit cages. The part not covered with asphalt had been taken over by plants, mainly cacti, between which one could still see the effects of the massive invasion a few days earlier. The main house, to the right, was smaller and more modest than he had imagined. Its windows were closed and the walls were pockmarked by the bullets shot a few days before. Alongside a small building that he identified as the guards’ sleeping quarters rose the tree from which, he presumed, the attacker with a machine gun fired into the yard. How was it possible for that assault to have failed?

Robbins pointed at a wooden bench while he alerted the Rosmers of his arrival. In the main watchtower, from which there was a privileged view of the street as well as the yard, Otto Schüssler and Jake Cooper were talking without worrying too much about him, and Jacques asked himself why the tower’s machine gun hadn’t neutralized the attackers. He lit a cigarette and, without making his interest too obvious, studied the structure of the house, the distance separating the renegade’s study from the exit door, the garden paths through which a man could move less exposed to gunfire from the towers. Like someone who is waiting, he walked looking for a better place to observe the whole scene and turned around when he heard a voice behind him.

“What can I do for you?”

Despite having seen him in hundreds of photos and fleetingly in a passing car, the tangible presence of the Exile, just six yards away from him, stirred Jacques Mornard’s senses. There he was, armed with a bunch of grass, the most dangerous adversary of the world revolution, the enemy for whose death he had been preparing himself for almost three years. What had begun as a confusing conversation on the side of the Sierra de Guadarrama had finally led him to the presence of a person condemned to die long ago — and he, Ramón Mercader, would be the one in charge of executing him.

“Good day, sir,” he managed to say as he tried to force his lips into a smile. “I’m Frank Jacson, Sylvia’s friend, and—”

“Yes, of course,” the old man said, nodding. “Did they alert the Rosmers?”

“Yes, Robbins. .”

The Exile, as if he were annoyed, stopped listening to him and gave a half turn to open one of the compartments and place the fresh grass in the basket from which the rabbits would take it.

As he felt his emotions calm down, Jacques observed the nape of his enemy’s neck, unprotected and easy to break, like any neck. The man, seen up close, seemed less aged than in the photos and bore no relation to the caricatures that represented him as an old and feeble Jew. Despite his sixty years, the tensions and physical ailments, the renegade emitted firmness and, despite his multiple betrayals of the working class, dignity. His graying, pointed goatee, the wavy hair, the sharp Jewish nose, and, above all, the penetrating eyes behind the glasses emitted an electric force. It was true what many said, he looked more like an eagle than a man, Jacques thought as he remained immobile, the paper bag in his hand. What if he had brought a revolver with him?

“The grass must be fresh,” the renegade said at that moment, without turning around. “Rabbits are strong animals, but delicate at the same time. If the grass is dry, their stomachs become ill, and if it’s wet, it causes mange.”

Jacques nodded and only then did he realize that it was difficult for him to speak. The old man had started to take off the gloves with which he protected his hands and placed them on the roof of the rabbit cages.

“But they’re going to be late,” he said, and walked toward the house. When he passed, barely three feet away from him, Jacques noted the soapy smell coming from his hair, perhaps in need of a cut. If he had stretched out his arm, he could have taken him by the neck. But he felt paralyzed and breathed in relief when the man walked away from him and said, “Good, there they are.”

Marguerite Rosmer and Natalia Sedova were going out to the yard by the door that, according to what Sylvia had told him, led to the dining room and toward which the Exile walked. The women exchanged greetings with Jacques, and Natalia asked if he wanted a cup of tea, which he accepted. When Natalia turned around, Jacques stopped her while digging into the paper bag.

“Madame Trotsky. . this is for you,” he said, and held out a box tied with a mauve ribbon that made the shape of something resembling a flower.

Natalia looked at him and smiled. She took the package and began to open it.

“Chocolates. . But. .”

“It’s my pleasure, Madame Trotsky.”

“Please, Jacson, you can call me Natalia.”

Jacques also smiled, nodding.

“Does Madame Natalia sound all right?”

“If you insist. .” she accepted.

“Seva’s not here. .? I’ve also brought something for him,” he explained, raising the bag.

“I’ll send him right away,” she said, and walked to the dining room.

The boy took a few minutes to come out, and he was wiping his mouth as he walked. Without giving him time to greet him, Jacques held out the bag. Seva ripped the paper covering the cardboard box, from which, at last, he extracted a miniature airplane.

“Since you told me you liked airplanes. .”

Seva’s face shone with joy and Marguerite, next to him, smiled at the boy’s happiness.

“Thank you, Mr. Jacson. You didn’t have to go to the trouble.”

“It was no trouble, Seva. . Hey, listen, where’s Azteca?”

“In the dining room. My grandfather has gotten him used to eating bread soaked in milk and now he’s giving him dinner.”

Marguerite excused herself, as there were some things left to pack and it was getting late. With Seva and the recently arrived Azteca, the visitor walked around the area with the rabbit cages until he saw Alfred Rosmer exit the house and, behind him, the renegade. His nerves started to settle and the certainty that he could enter that sanctuary, carry out his mission, and exit while saying goodbye to the watchtower guards calmed him. Jacques shook Rosmer’s hand and reassured him that they had enough time to reach Veracruz by the appointed hour. Natalia then came out with a cup of tea and Jacques thanked her. The renegade watched them all but only spoke again when he sat down on the wooden bench.

“Sylvia told me you’re Belgian,” he said, focusing on Jacques.

“Yes, although I lived in France for a long time.”

“And you prefer tea to coffee?”

Jacques smiled, moving his head.

“In reality, I prefer coffee, but since I was offered tea. .”

The renegade smiled.

“And what’s this story about you being called Jacson now? Sylvia said something, but with so many things in my head. .”

Jacques observed that Azteca was coming back from the rabbit cages and he snapped his fingers to call him over, but the animal kept going and settled in between the legs of the old man, who mechanically started to scratch his head and behind his ears.

“I have a falsified passport in the name of Frank Jacson, a Canadian engineer. It was the only way to leave Europe after the general mobilization. I have no intention of allowing myself to be killed in a war that isn’t mine.”

The Exile nodded and he continued:

“Sylvia didn’t want me to come here because of that passport. In reality, I am illegal in Mexico and she thought that could hurt you.”

“I don’t think anything hurts me anymore,” the Exile assured him. “After what happened a few days ago, every morning when I wake up I think I’m living an extra day. Next time, Stalin isn’t going to fail.”

“Don’t talk that way, Lev Davidovich,” Rosmer interjected.

“All of those walls and guards are just scenery, Alfred, my friend. If they didn’t kill us the other night, it was a miracle or for reasons that only Stalin knows. But it was the penultimate chapter of this hunt, of that I am sure.”

Jacques abstained from participating. With the tip of his shoe, he moved some small rocks among the gravel. He knew that the renegade was right, but the calm with which he expressed that conviction disturbed him.

The two men talked about the situation in France, whose defeat at the hands of the German army seemed imminent, and the renegade tried to convince the other not to leave. Rosmer insisted that now, more than ever, he had to return.

“I’m turning into an old egotist,” the Exile said, as if he were concentrating only on the caresses he was lavishing on the dog. “It’s just that I don’t want you to leave. I am more and more alone, without friends, without comrades, without family. . Stalin has taken them all.”

Ramón refused to listen and tried instead to concentrate on his hate and on the nape of the man’s neck, but he was surprised to discover that he was surrounded by an ambiguous feeling of understanding. He suspected that he had spent too many months in the skin of Jacques Mornard and that using that disguise for much longer could be dangerous.

Tom’s silence turned into a dense cloak that began to crush Ramón’s will. It had been more than two weeks since he had heard any news, and he still hadn’t received his orders. As the days of inactivity went by, he began to fear more insistently that, after the failure of the Mexican assailants, the operation had been postponed, even called off. Enclosed in the cabin at the tourist complex, he immersed himself in the most diverse reflections, convincing himself that he was ready to carry out his mission and that nothing would be able to impede it after having accomplished the most complicated part of his work, penetrating the Trotsky sanctuary. He knew he could and should overcome his nerves, and he had managed to keep them under control in front of the renegade, although they had played a bad trick on him when he left the fortress in Coyoacán and when he missed the road to Veracruz a couple of times, which caused Natalia Sedova to ask whether he traveled frequently to that city or not.

“It’s that my mind is somewhere else,” he said, almost with all sincerity. “I’m not too interested in politics, but there’s something about Mr. Trotsky. . Sylvia had already told me.”

“You were touched by Trotsky’s breath on your neck,” Alfred Rosmer told him, and, smiling, explained the manifestations of that paralyzing spell and the way it had affected, for example, a man as hardened and sure of himself as André Breton.

On June 10, when he picked up the phone and heard his mentor’s voice, Ramón felt his hands nearly trembling as he received the order to leave for New York in a couple of days. What was happening?

“Should I travel with all of my things?” he asked.

“Only what’s necessary. Keep the cabin. Madame Roberts will get you at the airport,” Tom said, and hung up without saying goodbye.

If they were ordering him to leave his belongings, it meant that the operation was still in motion. His spirits lifted immediately, and as he separated out the clothing he would send to the dry cleaners, he removed the mountaineer’s ice axe from the locked suitcase. He took it in his hands, weighed it again, struck the air three or four times, and convinced himself that it could be the ideal weapon. The only problem was that its downward motion was complicated by the length of the grip, which prevented the wrist’s free motion at the time of the blow, but cutting the wood would resolve that difficulty. The problem was what to do with it during his stay in New York. Leaving it in the cabin, at the mercy of the cleaning ladies, was dangerous, and he decided to search for a hiding place. Although he could have bought a similar one at any sports store, Ramón felt that that ice axe was his.

The morning of the twelfth, by previous agreement with Harold Robbins, he took the Buick and drove to Coyoacán. Since one of the cars of the house had been damaged when the Mexican attackers fled in it, Jacques had decided to leave them his for the time he would be in New York, so they could use it if there was an emergency. With his suitcase in the trunk, he stopped by the complex’s offices, turned in his keys, and paid in advance for the rest of June. A few miles from the camp, he turned down a dirt road he had covered on other occasions, and between some porous rocks placed on one side of the path he hid the ice axe.

As they had agreed, Jake Cooper was waiting for him to take him to the airport and go back to Coyoacán in the Buick. All the guards, with the exception of Hansen, who was assigned to the main tower at that moment, came out to the street to say goodbye. Jacson said that he hoped to return as soon as possible, since everything seemed to indicate that, thanks to the war, Mr. Lubeck had some promising business lined up in the country. That night, when it was beginning to get dark, the airplane in which the Canadian Frank Jacson was traveling took off for New York.

Ramón couldn’t remember the last time that a meeting with Caridad brought him happiness. His mother, dressed with the elegance befitting Mrs. Roberts, received him with her usual disquieting kiss, and Ramón could taste that she had been drinking some cognac. Roberts was waiting for them at nine at a restaurant very close to Central Park, Caridad said, and immediately announced that everything was on the verge of going into motion.

“I’m afraid, Ramón,” the woman said, taking refuge in the Catalan language, which would be difficult for the Irish-looking taxi driver to understand.

“Afraid of what, Caridad?”

“Afraid for you.”

“What chance does Tom think I have of getting out?”

“He’ll tell you eighty percent, but he knows that you barely have thirty percent. He’s going to convince you of the opposite, but he can’t fool me. They’re going to kill you. .”

“You’re just realizing that now?”

Ramón thought about his mother’s words. He knew that she was as capable of telling the truth as she was of lying to make him desist and, in her strange way, protect and control him. But if she herself had pushed him in that direction, why was she trying to dissuade him now, when she knew it was impossible to turn back? Ramón was convinced that he would never fully understand his mother’s paradoxes.

“I know I’ll manage to get out,” Ramón said. “I’ve been there and I can get out if I have support. You worry about getting me that; leave the rest to me.”

“I couldn’t stand it if they killed you,” Caridad said, and looked away at the illuminated windows of Fifth Avenue, in which, with tiresome frequency, American flags were displayed. Those flags and the uniformed servicemen who could be seen every once in a while were the only obvious signs of the war, so far off for most New Yorkers.

“Do any of us really matter that much to you?” Perhaps due to the certainty that he would very soon die, Ramón felt petty and powerful. “I would’ve never imagined. Don’t you still think that the cause is above everything, including family? Are you losing heart?”

They left the suitcase at the hotel on Lexington Avenue and walked the seven or eight blocks to the restaurant. The June night was pleasantly cool and he placed his raincoat on his arm. Caridad was walking so close to him that their shoulders touched frequently and it was difficult to look at each other as they spoke.

“Sometimes I think I should’ve never gotten you involved in all of this,” she said.

“Are you going to tell me once and for all what in the hell is wrong with you now?”

“I already told you, dammit, I’m afraid.”

“Who would’ve imagined!” Ramón said sarcastically, and remained silent for a few moments.

“Don’t be an imbecile, Ramón. Think a little bit. Doesn’t it seem strange that the Mexicans who organized all of that shooting weren’t able to kill anyone?”

Ramón agreed and had been thinking the same thing since the day of the attack, but he preferred not to involve Caridad in his doubts regarding what had happened that predawn morning.

The brasserie had an authentic air and reminded Ramón of the place where, two years before, they had met with George Mink in Paris. Roberts welcomed him with a hug like an old, dear friend. Loyal to his habits, he prompted Caridad and Ramón to try the dishes he considered to be the most attractive and picked the wine, a full-bodied 1936 Château Lafite Rothschild with a delicate bouquet that left a faint taste of violets on the palate that brought back memories of Ramón’s buried life. Roberts announced that they would not talk about work, but it was difficult to avoid the subject that had brought them together. According to the latest news, the Germans were at Paris’s door. The Soviets, Roberts stated, were not going to stand by with their arms crossed and were preparing to complete the reinforcement of their borders with the occupation of the Baltic republics. That was war, he said.

The following morning Roberts picked up Frank Jacson at his hotel and they traveled to Coney Island. Roberts preferred that Caridad not be present, and Ramón appreciated it. In view of the sea, over which some gulls were flying, Roberts opened the collar of his shirt and slid down the wood of the bench. It appeared that the only motive for that excursion was his eternal eagerness to drink in the sun.

“Why didn’t you call me or say anything to me before leaving?”

“Kid, you have no idea what’s happened.”

The failure of the Mexicans’ attack had forced them to evacuate several people who had participated in the preparations, among them Grigulievich and Felipe. Later he had to prepare a detailed report, send it to Moscow, and await new instructions.

“Can you imagine a very, very put-out Stalin? Asking for blood, hearts, heads, and testicles, including yours — I mean mine?” he said, and lowered his hand to between his thighs, as if to confirm that his testicles were still there. “I had to convince him that the failure had not been our fault and that, in any event, the commotion doesn’t hurt us.”

“So why did those imbeciles fail?”

Roberts turned his gaze from the sun and focused on Ramón.

“Because they’re idiots and cowards. They did everything with fear. They got drunk before entering the house. They thought that it was some kind of Wild West movie and that everything could be solved with a lot of gunshots. Felipe tried to impose order, but he couldn’t do it alone with all of those scared, drunk animals. It was a disaster. They couldn’t even burn the old man’s papers. The one who was supposed to lead the action said at the last minute that he would wait outside, and the one who had the order to enter the house and kill the Duck was one of the first to go running out when he heard the engine of the car start. When Felipe wanted to take on the task, he was almost killed by them. Their shots crossed and no one could get close to the house.”

“What about Sheldon?”

“He did his part; he’s not to blame for everyone else’s failure. . We’re going to get him out of Mexico as soon as possible. He’s the only one who knows anything and we can’t risk the police getting their hands on him.” Roberts fell into a long silence. He lit a cigarette. “Now it’s your turn, Ramón. If you don’t complete the mission, neither you nor I are going to find any fucking place in the world to hide. Can I trust in you?”

Ramón recalled his conversation with Caridad the previous night and the superiority that he felt the whole time.

“What do you think my chances are of getting out?”

Roberts thought. He was looking at the sea and smoking.

“Thirty percent,” he said. “If you do everything right, I think fifty. I’m going to be honest with you, because you deserve it and I need you to know what you’re going to do and what you’re risking. If you do things as you should, you have a fifty percent chance of leaving that house on your own feet. If not, two things can happen to you: either they kill you right there or they hand you over to the police. If they hand you over, you go to jail, but you can count on all of our support to the end. You’ll have the best lawyers and we’re going to work to get you out somehow. I give you my word. I’ll ask you again: Can I trust in you?”

The sea off Coney Island is different than that of El Empordà. One is the open Atlantic, cut through by great waves, and the other one is the warm and peaceful Mediterranean, Ramón thought, and concluded that he preferred the beaches of El Empordà. Observing the coast and the restless gulls, he said:

“This sand looks dirty,” and added: “Yes. Of course we’re going to do it.”

With a bouquet of roses in his hands, Jacques Mornard realized that, in all his life, Ramón had never bought flowers for any woman. He felt a little sorry for him, for the commitments and struggles that his times had pushed him toward, robbing him of the carefreeness of youth and many of the stressful maneuvers of love. It was all the more sad that Jacques was traveling in a taxi with that splendid bouquet of flowers in order to give them to a woman he was using like a marionette and with whom he had to make love with his eyes closed, his secret mission hiding behind every caress. He recalled the women with whom Ramón had been involved in his youth, furious militants who tended to be as removed from romantic gestures as he was. His great love, África, would not have allowed him that romantic expression, which she would have labeled decadent while labeling him weak. Perhaps Lena, the one with the sad eyes. . Jacques Mornard, knowing the crossroads of fate that Ramón was approaching, regretted that he had never confronted those insults of África’s, just for the sake of having the ridiculous but kind memory of having bought her at least a rose, a dahlia, a carnation from the ones that perfumed some of the flower stands along Las Ramblas, which was getting more distant every day. Would he ever again walk along those places of his memory?

They had spent two days discussing the different plans that he and Tom were developing. Ramón was certain that the different variants were complicated by Tom’s insistence on increasing his pupil’s possibilities for escape. From the start, they agreed that taking out a gun and shooting the renegade in the head was a quick but impractical solution. The same went for cutting his throat in front of the rabbit cages where the Duck often lost himself. As they went on discarding options or considering others to revise them more slowly, Ramón asked himself what moved Tom, whose ultimate intentions he could never be sure of, to complicate the operation so that he would be able to leave the attack alive. Did they want him alive to silence him once the mission was completed? Was it possible to imagine that there was a bond of affection between them? Or perhaps they feared that he would weaken and confess the true source of the execution order and that was why they were searching for ways to escape. The images of the cards put on the table, and the ones that with all certainty were still hidden, bumped around in his head as Tom debated with him how they would carry out the job. It had also become clear that poison, which could guarantee his flight, was also practically impossible to use, at least in the span of a brief time period and taking into account the scarce level of intimacy that Jacques could reach with the condemned man. Left on the table were the most violent but silent methods, strangulation and an attack with a knife. Of these two, due to its quickness, Tom preferred the second one. For execution with a knife, they would need what presented itself, whichever way you looked at it, as the greatest difficulty: a private meeting between the renegade and Jacques Mornard. They calculated that the efficacy with which he could stab him determined whether the thirty percent chance of escape would rise to more than fifty or even sixty. What about the ice axe? Ramón proposed. Tom moved his head, without deciding to accept or reject the option. He liked the ice axe, he had to admit, because of the symbolism of its use. It was cruel, violent, revengeful, and a lethal fusion of the hammer and sickle, he said. Could he even enter the house armed with an ice axe? In any event, if Ramón managed to step on the street once the act was consummated, his chance of escape reached eighty percent; and if he got in the car and put it in motion, Tom guaranteed him escape either by air, by sea, or by land to Guatemala, the United States, or Cuba, where they already had safe places for him. Tom would handle the details, and in a week Jacques would return to Mexico with Sylvia on his arm and would stay again at the Hotel Montejo.

On June 27, when they landed in Mexico, Jacques and Sylvia were met with the news that, two days before, the corpse of Bob Sheldon had been found in an abandoned ranch in the desert of Los Leones. The reporters, citing the head of the secret police Sánchez Salazar, said that the American had died with two bullets to the head and his corpse had been buried in quicklime under the floor of the same cabin where, presumably, the attackers of the exiled revolutionary’s house had been hiding. Having just finished reading the news, Jacques felt a shock. Could the order to kill him have come from Tom or one of his men, or could it have been the initiative of the Mexicans? Was Sheldon’s silence more important than his life? Had Tom tried to deceive him by telling him that they were going to get Sheldon out, but thinking that the body would never be found?

That night, while Sylvia slept, Jacques went down to the street and walked along the Paseo de la Reforma. The city was moving at a calm rhythm in those hours, but inside, the man was buzzing with doubts. Sheldon’s death demonstrated to Jacques that knowing too much could be dangerous. And he, precisely he, was the one who knew the most. He thought that if that same night he went to Coyoacán and rescued his Buick and the next morning withdrew the money in his name at the bank, he could perhaps disappear forever in a peasant town in El Salvador, or a small Honduran fishing town, with nearly legal papers bought at a very low price. Perhaps he would save his life, but was that a life worth aspiring to when the door of history was just within reach? Tom had not lied to him; Tom would explain what happened; Tom had molded him for years for this mission, and it made no sense that Jacques would risk glory and even his life with a decision like that. But none of those conclusions, so dazzling, managed to displace the ghost of doubt that, prophetically, had installed itself in Ramón Mercader’s mind.

Jacques Mornard struggled to regain his routine. Every morning he said goodbye to Sylvia with the excuse that he was going to the office he told her he had opened in a suite of the Ermita building when, in reality, he only had a mailbox where, by arrangement, Tom would send the new instructions. Two and even three times a day he checked the mailbox and on each occasion left frustrated upon not finding new messages. He spent the rest of the day wandering around the city, but his spirits asked for some solitude that he could find only between the trees of the Chapultepec Forest.

On various occasions, he accompanied Sylvia to the renegade’s fortress without expressing the desire to cross the threshold a single time. On the street, leaning against his Buick, he had long talks with the bodyguards. The one who most frequently came out to see him was the young Jake Cooper, always interested in the secrets of the stock market, to which the worldly Jacques Mornard was dedicated. In an almost imperceptible way, subjects like the European war, the Soviet annexation of the Baltic republics, the need for the United States to finally enter the war on the side of its British allies, filtered into their talks. To Jacques, the faith of those young men in their cloistered idol’s sermons was almost touching, and he even liked to hear them talk about the need to strengthen the Fourth International to promote a working class consciousness regarding the options for world revolution. To demonstrate an incipient sympathy for his friends’ political cause, Jacques proposed that they mention to their boss his willingness to carry out some operations in the stock market that, with his information and experience, could generate important gains that would economically help the Trotskyist International.

When, on July 18, it was announced that thirty members of the Communist Party had been arrested as suspects for participating in the attack against the Exile, Jacques knew with certainty that his lucky date would be decided in the coming days. For that reason he wasn’t surprised when, the following morning, he found a note, unsigned, in his mailbox: “Since you like forests so much, shall we go for a walk today at four in the afternoon?”

At three o’clock, Jacques had settled in beneath the cypresses in Chapultepec, ordered to be planted eighty years before by the ephemeral empress Carlota. From there, one could see the path that led to the overbearing summer palace of the emperor Maximilian and the road going down to the Paseo de la Reforma. His doubts had turned into anxiety and he had to rely on what Soldier 13 had learned in Malakhovka, to regain control of himself and feel ready for the conversation.

At exactly four o’clock, he spied Tom. He was wearing a white shirt with a narrow collar from which a ridiculous polka-dotted handkerchief peeked out. From the path he made a signal and Jacques started moving.

“They had to kill him,” he said without exchanging any greetings, his sight set on the curve in the road. Ramón remained silent, but all the alarms in his head rang. “His nerves failed him, he became aggressive, he wanted them to get him out of Mexico, he threatened to go to the police and say he had been kidnapped. . The Mexicans were desperate and didn’t think about it too much. If you need it, I can give you my word that we had nothing to do with it. From the beginning, I told you that the American could be efficient, although he wasn’t trustworthy, but killing him. .”

Ramón thought for a few moments.

“You don’t have to give me your word; I believe you,” he said, and realized how much he wanted to utter that phrase, and that doing so brought him patent relief.

“We can’t wait anymore. While the Mexicans accuse each other and the police look for the French Jew, we’re going to finish this shit.”

“When?”

“Moscow wants it to happen as soon as possible. Hitler’s campaign in Europe has been a walk in the park and he is becoming more daring; he thinks he’s invincible.”

Ramón looked at the cypress trees. Tom’s demands resounded in his stomach. The time for waiting and strategizing was behind him, the time for reality was beginning, and he immediately felt that he must carry a difficult and heavy load. Would he be able to move it after clamoring so much for that honor?

“What’s the plan?” he managed to ask.

“You have to see the Duck one or two more times. You will know how to do it. At those meetings you’re going to start to court him. The idea is for him to think he can convert you to Trotskyism. Without exaggerating, make him feel like you admire him. We’re going to exploit his vanity and his need to amass followers. When the opportunity presents itself, you tell him you’d like to write something about the situation in the world, something that occurred to you while talking to him. You’re going to prepare an article that will force him to work with you. The idea is for you to be alone with him in his study. If you manage that, the rest should be easy.”

“Do you think he’ll want to receive me alone?”

“You have to manage it. Your possibilities of escaping will be much greater. That day you’re going prepared to eliminate him and to use a weapon to escape if necessary.”

“How many things should I enter with?”

“A gun in case you need it. A knife for him.”

Ramón thought for a few moments.

“A knife would force me to cover his mouth, to grab him by the hair. . I prefer the ice axe. Just one blow and I leave. .”

“You don’t want to touch him?” Tom smiled.

“I prefer the ice axe,” Ramón replied, evasive.

“Okay, okay. .,” the other one conceded. “That day Caridad and I will be with you. As soon as you step out onto the street and leave in your car, I’ll take care of the rest. Do you trust me?”

He didn’t respond and Tom untied the handkerchief from his neck and dried his cheeks.

“We’re going to put together a letter for you to drop when you leave. You’re going to be a disillusioned Trotskyist who has understood that his idol is no more than a puppet who, to return to power, has even been willing to place himself under Hitler’s command. .”

Ramón felt confused and Tom noticed that something wasn’t working right. Taking him by the chin, he forced him to turn around and look him in the eye and Ramón saw a glimmer of excitement.

“Kid, we’re getting closer. . It’s going to be us, you and me, the masters of glory. We have to prevent that son of a bitch from plotting with the Nazis. Always think that you’re working for history, that you’re going to execute the worst of all traitors, and remember that many men in the world need your sacrifice. The bravery, hate, and faith of Ramón Mercader have to sustain you. And if you can’t escape, I trust in your obedience and in your silence. It’s no longer your life or mine at play, but rather the future of the revolution and of the Soviet Union.”

From his eyes, more than from his mentor’s words, Ramón received the message he needed. The doubts and fears of recent days began to disappear, as if that look had evaporated them, while he felt how his life got closer to its resounding culmination.

The door of fate opened with one of Natalia Sedova’s ideas. In order to thank Jacson for his care with the Rosmers and his frequent gifts to Seva, the Trotskys invited him and Sylvia over for tea. They proposed the date of July 29, at four in the afternoon. In their room at the Montejo, Jacques reviewed the small notebook where he wrote down his business meetings and told Sylvia to call Natalia and tell her that they would be delighted to attend. The young woman’s face shone with excitement and she immediately ran to the phone to confirm the appointment.

On the twenty-ninth, at exactly four in the afternoon, the Buick stopped in front of the fortress in Coyoacán. Jacques had put on a light cream summer suit, and Sylvia, despite the sun and the heat, had insisted on wearing black. She was nervous and happy, and had spent an hour in front of the mirror in a futile struggle to make her face pretty.

Jake Cooper greeted them from the watchtower and Jacson joked that he would give him a tip if he took care of the car. The Mexican policeman smiled at him and Corporal Zacarias Osorio, the most senior among the guards, practically bowed down to the guests. Harold Robbins opened the door to them and, as they talked, guided them to the forged-iron furniture that Natalia had placed in the yard, under the shade of the trees.

When the hostess came out, they greeted her affectionately and the young man gave her the box of chocolates he had bought her. He learned that Seva, upon returning from school, had gone fishing in the river and that Azteca, as always, had gone with him.

“Lev Davidovich asks your forgiveness,” Natalia Sedova said. “An emergency came up and he’s dictating some work he has to send tomorrow. He’ll come to say hello to you in a little bit.”

Jacques smiled and discovered that he felt relieved. It didn’t bother him that the rhythm of penetration had to be slow, even when he knew that Tom needed him to act as soon as possible.

After the Mexican servant placed the tea and cookies on the table (could she be the party comrade infiltrated into the house?), Natalia told them that they were worried by the lack of news from the Rosmers. With the Nazis in Paris, their friends’ situation was much compromised, and many times they feared the worst. Jacques nodded with his usual shyness and, following a silence that threatened to make itself infinite, made a comment about the weather.

“It looks like this summer is going to be very hot, doesn’t it? I imagine you and Mr. Trotsky prefer the cold,” he said to Natalia.

“When one starts getting old, the heat is a blessing. And we’ve experienced so much cold in our lives that this climate is a gift.”

“So you wouldn’t like to return to Russia?”

“What we like or don’t like hasn’t decided anything for a long time. We’ve spent eleven years wandering the world, without knowing how much time we can spend in one place or even if we will wake up the next day.” She pointed at the walls where the gunshot marks remained. “It’s very sad that a man like Lev Davidovich, who has done nothing in his life but fight for those who don’t have anything, has to live fleeing and hiding like a criminal. .”

Jacques nodded in agreement and, when he lifted his gaze, felt a jolt, for the Duck was approaching them. First his shadow and then his shape became visible.

“Thank you very much for coming, Jacson. Hello, little Sylvia.”

Jacques stood up with his hat in his hands, wondering whether he should or shouldn’t step forward and hold out his right hand. The Exile, who seemed distracted, walked to where Natalia was and the dilemma seemed resolved.

“I am so very sorry, I regret not being able to accompany you. It’s that I have to finish an article today. . Will you serve me tea, Natushka?”

While Natalia served it, the man looked at his garden and smiled.

“I’ve managed to save almost all the cacti. I have some very rare species. Those savages almost did away with them.”

“Are you going to do new renovations after all?” Sylvia asked while their host drank his first sips of tea.

“Natasha insists, but I can’t decide. If they wanted to come in again, they’re capable of blowing up a wall. .”

“I wouldn’t think that they would attack like that again,” Jacques said, and they all looked at him.

The old man broke the silence. “What would you think, Jacson?”

“I don’t know. . a lone man. You yourself have written it: the NKVD has professional murderers. .”

The renegade looked at him with intensity, his cup frozen at chin height, and Ramón asked himself why he had said that. Was he scared? Did he want someone to stop him? He thought and always gave himself the same response: no. He had done it because he liked to use that power of playing with fates that were already decided.

The renegade, after drinking a sip of tea, finally left his cup on the table and nodded.

“You’re right, Jacson. A man like that could be unstoppable.”

“Please, Liovnochek,” Natalia interrupted, trying to change the course of the unpleasant conversation.

“Dear, we can’t be like ostriches,” he said, smiling, and observed his visitor. “Don’t smoke so much, Jacson. Take care of that marvelous youth you have.” And with a wave of his hand to indicate he was leaving them, he took the path leading to the dining room and from there added: “Don’t let him smoke, Sylvia. You can’t find a good man like that every day. Will you forgive me? Goodbye!. .”

Sylvia’s face reddened and Jacques smiled, also embarrassed. He crushed his cigarette and looked at Natalia, who seemed amused.

Less tense already, Jacques Mornard told several stories about his Belgian family, brought to mind by the recollection of his father, a smoker of Cuban cigars. Natalia spoke of Lev Davidovich’s first exile in Paris and how they had met, and the three smiled hearing about the Exile’s observation that Paris was fine but Odessa was much more beautiful.

“Mr. Trotsky should rest more,” Jacques remarked when the conversation was flagging. “He works too much.”

“He’s not a normal person. .” Natalia looked at the house before continuing. “Besides, we live off of what the newspapers pay. That’s what we’ve come to,” she finished, her voice thick with nostalgia and sadness.

When the sun set, Jacson and Sylvia bid goodbye. Natalia again apologized for her husband and promised to find an opportune moment for another meeting. They had so few friends left, so few they received, and she would love to have them at the house again, of course with Lev Davidovich tied to a chair, she said, and shook Jacson’s hand and kissed Sylvia’s cheeks twice.

When they returned to the hotel, Jacques found that Mr. Roberts had called him and was begging him to get in touch, urgently. From his room he asked for a number in New York and Roberts himself answered.

“It’s Jacques, Mr. Roberts.”

“Are you alone?”

“No. Talk to me.”

“Come tomorrow. I’ll wait for you at eight o’clock at the Hotel Pennsylvania bar.”

“Yes, tell Mr. Lubeck I’ll fly tomorrow. . Thank you very much, Mr. Roberts.”

Smiling, he turned to Sylvia and said to her:

“We’re going to New York for a few days. Lubeck is paying.”

The stay in New York ended up being brief and had precise goals: the time for preparations had ended and Moscow was demanding that the operation be carried out at the earliest opportunity, keeping in mind the progress of the war, which had already allowed Hitler to dominate Europe almost without shooting. The greatest novelty was that Mr. Roberts gave him a new raincoat that had three interior pockets of a very curious design.

On August 7, Jacques and Sylvia settled in at the Hotel Montejo once more, and the following morning the young man ran out with the excuse that he had to see the contractors tasked with remodeling the offices. At the wheel of his Buick, he went in the direction of the tourist complex and looked for the unpaved road that he had traveled a few weeks before. The mound of porous rocks where he had left the ice axe was to the right of the path, and as he entered through the road he asked himself whether he hadn’t confused the place, since according to his calculations, the rocks were two or three minutes from the highway, and he had already gone for more than five and he still had not located them. He thought of going back and confirming that it was the right road, although he was sure it was. Anxiety began to overcome him, and to calm down he told himself that in any store in the city he could buy a similar ice axe. But not finding that exact ice axe seemed like a disastrous omen. Where could the fucking rocks be? He continued on and, when he was ready to turn around, discovered the pile and breathed in relief. He climbed the rocks and saw the metallic shine. When he managed to take the ice axe out and have it in his hands, he felt something visceral unite him to that steel weapon, and the act of holding it gave him confidence and certainty.

Back in the city, he parked his car in front of a carpenter’s shop in the Colonia Roma and asked the salesclerk to saw off about six inches from the ice axe’s wooden grip. The man looked at him strangely and he explained that he felt safer climbing with a shorter grip. Twine in hand, the man measured the six inches Ramón had indicated, made a mark in pencil, and returned it to him to confirm whether that length was more comfortable for him. Ramón took the ice axe and made a gesture as if he were driving it into a rock over his head.

“No, it’s still too long. Cut it around here,” he said, and pointed to the place.

The carpenter shop salesclerk shrugged his shoulders, walked over to a saw, and sawed the wood. With a piece of sandpaper he smoothed the edges and handed the ice axe to Ramón.

“How much is it?”

“It’s nothing, señor.”

Ramón put his hand in his pocket and withdrew two pesos.

“That’s too much, señor.”

“My boss is paying. And thank you.” He said goodbye.

“Climbing with a grip that short is dangerous, señor. If you slip. .”

“Don’t worry, comrade,” he said and lifted the ice axe to eye level. “Now it looks like a cross, right?” And without waiting for a response, he walked to the corner where he had left the Buick, out of the carpenter’s sight.

He went in the direction of Chapultepec and entered the forest. From the car’s trunk, he withdrew the bag where he kept the khaki-colored raincoat that Tom had given him in New York and dropped the ice axe into it. He walked between the trees until he found a place where he assumed no one would see him and put on the raincoat. On the left side, below the waist, they had sewn a long narrow lining, almost in the shape of a knife. At stomach height, on the same side, was a smaller pocket designed to hold a medium-caliber revolver. On the right side, running from the armpit, was the third lining, triangle-shaped, with the narrowest angle below. Ramón placed the ice axe in the pocket and confirmed that, with the trimmed grip, it sank farther than he considered comfortable for rapid extraction. He verified, nonetheless, that if he kept his hands crossed over his abdomen, his own right arm hid the weapon’s lump, and that was the most important thing. He placed the raincoat over his forearm and noticed that the depth of the pocket prevented any movement. He carried out several tests and concluded that if the renegade had his back to him, he could extract the ice axe in just a few seconds without taking his eyes off his objective.

Ramón folded the raincoat over his arm when he got close to his car. During that whole morning, he had barely thought of Jacques Mornard, and that memory lapse worried him. To cross all of the barriers to enter the fortress in Coyoacán and to be ready at the instant in which he would extract the ice axe, he needed the Belgian man’s entire presence, his clumsy comments, his shyness, his insipid smile. Because Jacques was the only one capable of leading Ramón to the most grandiose moment of his life.

When they met in Moscow, almost thirty years later, and talked about what had occurred in those days as well as what happened later, Ramón asked his mentor if he had conceived of that perfect concatenation of events or if coincidence had worked in his favor. The man assured him, with the greatest seriousness, that he had planned it all, but that the devil had been collaborating with them. Each detail sketched out two, three years before had been shaped and would fit in such a perfect way that no man, only an infernal plan, could have made it thus, because in the end the events happened as if that ice axe, Ramón’s arm, and Trotsky’s life had been pulling at each other like magnets. .

On Tuesday, August 13, Sylvia at last decided to face the difficult moment of going to Coyoacán and communicating to Lev Davidovich some important messages that she had received during her stay in New York. Two hours later the woman left the house with a smile on her lips. Jacques, who was waiting for her in the street, had spoken to almost all of the bodyguards in turn, showing a loquacity that only a few days later would seem significant to those men for whom Frank Jacson was an innocuous presence. He had even made plans with Jake Cooper to have dinner the following Tuesday when Cooper’s wife, Jenny, would be arriving from the United States. Jacson was treating, of course, and he would take care of picking a restaurant that would be to Jenny’s liking.

Sylvia had reason to feel happy, although her relations with the renegade were going through a period of crisis caused by her attraction to the new political group that Burnham and Shachtman, Lev Davidovich’s former comrades, had formed in the United States. Nonetheless, the old man, so sensitive to splits — more so at a time when he needed all of his sympathizers — did not seem put out with her and, after hearing that Sylvia had spoken with Shachtman in New York, had asked her to come back in two days, with her boyfriend, for tea, since he wanted to apologize for not having attended to them during the previous visit.

“I think you made a good impression,” she said as they left rocky Avenida Viena and turned onto Morelos.

“Do you want me to tell you something?” Jacques smiled. “I thought that the old man was a proud and arrogant guy. But ever since I met him, I think he is a great person. And the truth is, I don’t know how it occurred to you to ally yourself with Burnham and Shachtman.”

“You don’t understand these things, dear. Politics is complicated. .”

“But loyalties are very easy, Sylvia,” he said, and pressed on the accelerator. “And, please don’t tell me what I understand and what I don’t understand.”

The following morning Jacques went over to Shirley Court, where Tom and Caridad were staying. His mother received him with a kiss and offered him recently made coffee, which he refused. He felt jittery and only wanted to consult his mentor about the strategy they would follow the next day. When Tom came out of the bathroom wrapped in a robe, the three sat down in the armchairs of the small living room. Seeing how Tom and Caridad were drinking their coffee, Ramón perceived that some distance was opening between them, invisible but to him very tangible: it was the distance between the first and the second lines of command.

“You’re going to cause an argument about that matter of Burnham and Shachtman,” Tom said when he finished listening to his pupil. “You’ll take the Duck’s side against Sylvia. What he most wants to hear is that those dissidents are traitors, and you’re going to give him the pleasure. At some moment, tell him that you want to write about that split and about what is happening in France with the Nazi occupation.”

“He knows that Jacson isn’t interested in politics.”

“But he is so interested in it that he will open the doors of his house to you again. Besides, he is so alone that if you write something in his favor, he’ll receive you again. And that will be our moment. You have to be careful, but at the same time you’ll seem resolved.”

“Sylvia could view it all as strange. .”

“That imbecile doesn’t see anything,” Tom assured him. “If everything goes well, in two or three days you’ll go back to Coyoacán with your article. .”

Caridad was following the dialogue in silence, but her attention was focused on Ramón. It was obvious that Tom’s enthusiasm and certainty clashed with her son’s patent lukewarmth.

“I’m going to get dressed,” Tom said. “I want you to practice with the Star revolver that you’re going to take the day of the party.”

Caridad served herself more coffee and Ramón decided to have a cup. Then the woman leaned forward and, as she poured his coffee, whispered, “I want to talk to you. Tonight. At the Hotel Gillow at eight.”

He looked at her, but Caridad’s eyes were fixed on serving coffee and handing him his cup.

Tom was able to prove that the abilities of Soldier 13 remained intact. In the small forest in the San Angel area where they had their practice, the young man fired at difficult targets and made three out of every four shots, despite the tension he was feeling. Tom talked nonstop about what would happen once the attack was carried out. The easiest escape would be through Cuba, where Ramón could lose himself among the thousands of Spaniards milling about Havana and Santiago. On the island, a pair of agents would be waiting for him with money and connections to guarantee his needs and protection. Perhaps he and above all Caridad, who adored the country where she had been born, would also drop in there and the three would cross the Atlantic together. Tom’s certainty, and the fact that his prognostics and plans tended to come true with surprising regularity, pushed aside Ramón’s doubts and fears until he was nearly convinced that escape was certainly possible.

The Hotel Gillow, in the area near the Zócalo, was a colonial building that had originally been built to house the nuns destined to serve the neighboring church of La Profesa. At midday, many of the workers from government offices tended to have lunch in the restaurant. In the evenings, in contrast, it was a place where successful hustlers and high-class prostitutes filled their stomachs before going out to face the night. It had a large hall, discreet lighting, and many tables covered with checked tablecloths. As soon as he entered the place, Ramón recalled that afternoon of rejoicing and victory when, with África at his side, he had entered an old café in Madrid to meet with Caridad. Now he could make out his mother, who was huddled at a table, smoking with her head down. Ramón moved his chair and it was as if Caridad were waking from a nap.

“Thank goodness you came. I told Kotov I was going to the movies, so we don’t have too much time and there’s a lot to discuss. . Call the waiter over.”

When the waiter approached, Caridad ordered a bottle of cognac, two glasses, and two bottles of Tehuacán sparkling water, and requested that they be left alone.

“And to eat?” The waiter was puzzled.

“We should be left alone. .,” the woman repeated, and looked at him intensely.

Ramón waited in silence for the waiter to bring their order and leave.

“To what do we owe so much mystery?”

“You’re on the verge of doing something very big and very dangerous. Although you don’t care what I think, I feel responsible for what you’re going to do and what happens to you, and I want to tell you some things.”

Caridad poured two glasses of sparkling water and another two with cognac. She raised her glass a bit, smelled the liquor for a few seconds, then drank it in one long swallow.

“At least drink.” She pushed the cognac to Ramón. “It will do you good.”

Ramón looked at the glass but didn’t touch it.

“I’m going to start at the end,” she said as she lit a cigarette. “If they put you in jail, I will move heaven and earth to get you out. Even if I have to blow up the fucking jail. You can count on that. The only thing I ask you in return is for you not to fail when you have the old man in front of you and that, if they catch you, never say why you did it or who ordered it. If you fall apart, then I will not be able to help you, and neither will Kotov, because his life and I think mine depend on your silence.”

“That’s what matters to you? That I could complicate things for you?” Ramón enjoyed the possibility of hurting her.

“I’m not going to deny that matters to me, but believe me, it’s not the most important thing. What you have the possibility to do can change the world, and that’s what matters.” Caridad took another sip. “And this shitty world needs a lot of changes. You know that.” She observed Ramón’s untouched glass for a few seconds. “Your life depends on your silence. Look what happened to that Sheldon. .”

“The Mexicans killed him,” Ramón said.

“That’s what Kotov says. . And we have no choice but to believe him.”

“I believe him, Caridad.”

“I’m happy for you,” she said, and poured more cognac into her glass but didn’t drink it. “Listen closely to what I’m going to tell you. Perhaps later you will understand why we’re in this restaurant, counting the hours left until we kill a man.”

At some point in the conversation, Ramón drank his glass of cognac in one shot and, without having any idea when he refilled it, again drank, in short sips, as he felt his insides turning. What he least expected was to hear that story of the humiliations and degradations that Caridad had been subjected to by her privileged and bourgeois husband, Pau Mercader. Although Ramón already knew pieces of the story, this time his mother went into the most shocking details, and spoke to him of the visits to brothels where her husband forced her to watch; the way he had induced her to try drugs in order to later throw her into bed, where a young man was paid to penetrate her while her husband penetrated the young man; the beatings he gave her when she refused to have anal sex; the threats, finally carried out, to separate her from her children and civilized life, confining her to an asylum where they nearly drove her mad and where, in order to not die of thirst, several times she had to drink her own urine. Those were the experiences that she had to go through in her sanctified bourgeois marriage, and hate was the seed that was planted in the center of her soul, that was barely relieved when she could direct that hate against those who maintained a miserable morality that allowed an abject and sick being like Pau Mercader to be considered a respectable man. Since then, Caridad had taken revenge with the weapons she had at hand and, more than once, upon returning to Barcelona after the electoral triumph of the Republican left, spent nights awake in front of the dark apartment on the Calle Ample where her husband then lived. The idea of going up the stairs and blowing his brains out with six shots from the Browning she always had at her waist turned into an obsession, and if she didn’t do it, it was not out of fear or compassion, it was because she understood that knowing he was poor and the employee of other men who could humiliate and exploit him was the greatest punishment that Pau Mercader could receive, and it would be better the longer it lasted.

As he listened to her, Ramón felt how the human and political superiority he had felt over his mother for some time began to disappear. He remembered the poisoning episode in the restaurant in Toulouse and the suicide attempt from which he and his brother Jorge saved her. His mother was a destroyed being full of hate who was beginning to put herself together like a puzzle with pieces to spare.

“If I am a Communist with defects, Ramón, it’s because of all of that,” Caridad continued after serving her son a third drink and pouring a fourth one for herself. “My hate will never allow me to work to build the new society. But it’s the best weapon to destroy that other society, and that is why I’ve turned all of you, my children, into what you are: the children of hate. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in two days, when you are in front of the man you have to kill, remember that he is my enemy as well as yours. That everything he says about equality and the proletariat is all lies and that the only thing he wants is power. Power to degrade people, to control them, to make them grovel and feel fear, to fuck them up the ass, which is what those who enjoy power most take pleasure in. When you kill that son of a bitch, think that your arm is also mine, that I will be there, supporting you, and that we are strong because hate is invincible. Have that drink, dammit! Take the world by the balls and bring it to its knees. And get this into your head: Don’t have compassion, because no one will have it for you. And when you’re fucked, don’t allow compassion; let no one pity you! You are stronger, you are invincible, you are my son, collons!”

26

In the early hours of May 29, while the gunshots whistled over his head, Lev Davidovich had a revelation: Death could not touch him because Natalia would protect him.

Just at that moment of enlightenment, he had heard Seva’s voice and, with an unknown fear that didn’t include the possibility of losing his own life, he had yelled: “Under the bed, Seva!” while Natalia pinned him down, pressing him against the corner of the room. The gunshots that had been meant to kill him and had filled the night with sparkling lights came from Seva’s room, from the door to the study and through the bathroom window. From his corner, he could see the flight of an incendiary bomb going toward his grandson’s room, but he had not tried to move, since above them, bursts of machine-gun fire made the stuffing of the mattress fly out. On the wall, almost at his back, the condemned man had felt the impact of the lead in search of his body. Finally, they heard voices, car engines, silence between gunshots. At that moment he had almost forgotten his previous conviction, since he was thinking: They’re going to come in; now they’re going to kill us both. Since he knew he would have no alternative, he closed his eyes, squeezed his legs shut, and waited. How long? Two, three minutes? he would ask himself later, since they were the longest ones of his life. His greatest concern had been Seva’s fate and, above all, Natalia’s, who was going to die because of him.

Lev Davidovich only recovered his senses when Seva’s voice broke the silence. As soon as he confirmed that Natalia was not wounded, he ran to his grandson’s room, where he didn’t find him, but he saw bloodstains on the floor and his heart stopped. Robbins, who had entered the house to remove the incendiary bomb and prevent the fire from spreading to the work study, asked the Exile if he was wounded and calmed him down with the news that Seva was outside with the Rosmers. In the yard, as the bodyguards who had gone out after the assailants came back, the house’s inhabitants had started to get an idea of what had happened. There had been between ten and fifteen men dressed as soldiers and policemen, and they had begun this attack by neutralizing the agents watching the outside, then they cut the cables of the alarms connected to the powerful lights inside and outside the house, ripped out the telephone lines, and cut the electric circuits that communicated with the police in Coyoacán. When the group had invaded the garden, one of them, armed with a machine gun, had climbed up a tree, where he took position and shot a burst at the area where the secretary slept. The rest of the assailants had gone toward the house, firing against the windows and closed doors. The bulletproof shutters diverted some of the bullets, whose marks were visible. The policeman and the bodyguards who had been closest to the assailants confirmed that several of them seemed to be rather drunk, but without a doubt they knew what they were doing and how to do it: so many bullets in one bed could not be a coincidence.

To Lev Davidovich it would always seem significant that the assailants had not attacked any of the bodyguards, whom they only pointed guns at. They had only directed fire against his room while they threw incendiary bombs (and even an explosive one that fortunately did not burst), which demonstrated that he and his papers had been their only objective. But why hadn’t those ten or twelve assailants, who knew how to use weapons and had as their goal the death of one man, who controlled the situation inside and outside the house, gone in to see if they’d fulfilled their mission before giving the order to withdraw? It seemed incongruous to him that there should have been more than two hundred shots, sixty-three of them at his bed, with only Seva’s superficial wound, and that had been caused by a bullet that ricocheted. Perhaps everything had failed because it had been botched, because of drunkenness or fear? Or was there behind that spectacle something darker that could still not be explained? He asked himself and would continue to ask himself, since a malignant essence, whose perfume he knew, was floating in that strange attack.

To escape, the assailants had opened the gates and gotten in the house’s two cars, which always had the keys inside, in case of an emergency. In the middle of the confusion, Otto Schüssler, one of the secretaries, returned from the street commenting that the assailants had taken with them young Bob Sheldon, one of the new bodyguards. They had all formulated the same question: Had they kidnapped Sheldon or had he left with them? One of the Mexican policemen would later assure them that the young man was driving one of the cars (they abandoned the Ford a few blocks later, when it got stuck in the river’s mud, and the Dodge showed up in Colonia Roma), but Lev Davidovich thought that, in the darkness, frightened as he was, it would be difficult for the policeman to recognize someone in a car going at top speed.

The great mystery was how the assailants had managed to enter the compound. The missing Bob Sheldon had been in charge of guarding the main door, and there were two reasons he would have allowed the assailants to enter without consulting with the head of the guard: either Sheldon, previously infiltrated, had always been part of the commando unit, or he had opened to someone who was so familiar that he thought it was unnecessary to consult with anyone.

When the police arrived, Lev Davidovich was still dressed in his nightshirt. Before talking to his old acquaintance Leandro Sánchez Salazar, the head of the secret police in the capital, he asked that they let him change, although he warned Salazar that he knew who was responsible for the events in the house, which still smelled like gunpowder. .

General José Manuel Núñez, director of the national police, assured Lev Davidovich that General Cárdenas had instructed him to personally follow the investigations, and the officer had guaranteed the president that he would find and arrest those responsible. As he did with Salazar, the Exile responded that the task should be easy, since the intellectual author of the attack was Joseph Stalin, and the material authors were agents of the Soviet secret police and members of the Mexican Communist Party. If they arrested those responsible for the party, they would have in their hands the executors of the attack.

General Núñez did not like those words very much (the same ones the Exile would repeat to the press), nor did Colonel Sánchez Salazar, with whom Lev Davidovich had already had to speak several times since his arrival in Mexico and who had always seemed to him like a typical smart aleck who had opinions about everything. Sánchez Salazar’s opinion, on this occasion, was insulting, since the policeman thought the attack could have been nothing other than an assault prepared by the Trotskys themselves to call attention to themselves and put the blame on Stalin. . If his experience had not taught him to seek ulterior motives behind everything, the Exile would have been able to understand that Salazar would think that way: what had happened was suspicious and Sheldon’s disappearance didn’t help. The colonel also commented that he didn’t understand how it was possible that, following such a violent attack, the old man could be so calm and in control of his actions and thoughts. It was obvious that the colonel didn’t know him.

Looking to corroborate his thesis, Salazar detained the secretaries Otto Schüssler and Charles Cornell with the excuse that he needed to interrogate them to collect as much information as possible. He also left with all of the servants: the cook Carmen Palma, who cried when they took her away; Belén Estrada, the cleaning lady; and Melquíades Benítez, the handyman.

Lev Davidovich would read with shock that the press was initially reporting that Diego Rivera was the possible leader of the attack. That rumor came about because while he was neutralizing the policeman watching the house, the one who seemed to be the head of the assailants had launched cries against Cárdenas and yelled “Viva Almazán!” But Sánchez Salazar’s declarations, that the attack had been staged by the Trotskys, got more attention than the Rivera possibility, and the communist press used the theory of a fake attack to accuse the Exile of wanting to destabilize the government and create a crisis in the Soviet Union — arguments that served them marvelously as they asked for his expulsion from Mexico with renewed fury. What most outraged Lev Davidovich was the realization that, with his version, Salazar was insulating himself from failure. After all, the attack had been prepared and executed without the secret police having the least idea of what was happening.

Nonetheless, despite the sixty-three shots in the bed, Lev Davidovich would continue to harbor doubts about the intentions of that attack. He came to wonder whether it had not been just a bluff, like the fires in Turkey, and that this time the purpose was to prepare the setting for a definitive action. When he confessed his worries to Natalia, she immediately began to take new security measures, and he reproached her for spending so much money, since it was obvious that when the assassins wanted to come in, they would enter. Besides, he was convinced that the next attack was not going to be the same. As he warned in his letter to the American Jew, the next time it would be a lone man, a professional, who would come from underground, like a mole, without them being able to do anything to avoid it.

Just one week after the attack, Lev Davidovich said goodbye to the Rosmers. If at another time he would have lamented very much a departure that deprived him of the proximity of good and old friends, at that moment he was almost happy, since he felt responsible for their lives while they were with him. Friendship, like almost all the simple and necessary human satisfactions, had ended up turning into a burden for him. He lived with the memory of those who were his friends, more than those who were capable of resisting the pressures, the attacks, and his own political stubborness. The wake of affections he had left behind was painful: many had died, violently; others had rejected him, and in the cruelest ways; others still had moved away from him, out of sincere or feigned distance from his ideas, his past, his present. Because of that he had come to wonder whether the fate of all those who handed themselves over to political causes was to die in solitude. That tended to be the price of altruism, of power, and, above all, of defeat. But not because of that did he cease to lament the losses of friends for which he had been to blame owing to his political fundamentalism; when blinded by the glitter of politics, he was incapable of understanding the difference between the circumstantial and the permanent. The most insidious trap, he told himself, had been turning politics into a peremptory passion, as he had done, and of having allowed its demands to blind him to the point of placing it above the most human values and conditions. At that point in his life, when very little was left of the utopia for which he had fought, he recognized himself as the loser of the present who still dreams and consoles himself with the reparation that could come in the future.

The evening before the Rosmers’ trip, Lev Davidovich learned that, from the day in which Alfred got sick, the couple had become friends with Sylvia’s boyfriend and the youngster had offered to take them to Veracruz, where they would take the ship to New York on their way to France. Jacson, as that Belgian man said he was called, appeared to be a handsome man, although a little slow catching on. The morning of the departure, Lev Davidovich was feeding the rabbits for the first time when the young man approached him, interested in the animals’ breed. Lev Davidovich had then felt rage against the presence of a stranger in the house, but he recalled that the Rosmers had invited him and, by his looks, deduced who he was. Still annoyed, he responded anyway, making his disgust obvious, and Jacson had discreetly withdrawn. Later on, he would see him talking to Seva, for whom he had brought a gift, and he was ashamed of his attitude. It was then that he told Natalia to invite him to breakfast, but the young man accepted only a cup of tea.

The decision to return to France with the Nazis knocking on Paris’s doors had seemed to him an attitude worthy of Alfred Rosmer’s greatness. As he tended to do, that morning he shook his friend’s hand, gave a kiss to Marguerite, asked them to take care of themselves, then went to his study, since he didn’t want to see them leave. At his age and with the GPU breathing down his neck, he assumed all farewells were definitive. . At the house, with more men on watch and more tension, the couple’s absence was immediately noticeable.

Finding that his cacti were the main victims of the attack caused Lev Davidovich real disgust. Several had been stepped on, others had lost their arms, and he worked for days to save them, although he knew well that with all his effort he was only looking to bring back a certain normalcy to the life of a house that had never had it and, until the end, would live in a permanent state of war.

During all those events something had made a favorable impression on the Exile: Seva’s character. The boy was just fourteen years old and behaved with integrity. He didn’t seem nervous and said he was worried about his grandparents, not himself. Just thinking that something serious could have happened to him made Lev Davidovich feel sick. To have made him come from France just so they could kill him here would be something he couldn’t withstand. Because of that, when he saw him playing in the yard with Azteca, he felt great pain over the fate that without meaning to he had saddled him with. It was ironic that he had fought to build a better world and that around him he had only managed to generate pain, death, and humiliation. The best testimony to his failure was the heartbreaking presence of a boy confined within four bulletproof walls when he should be playing soccer in a field in Moscow or Odessa.

Thanks to Lev Davidovich’s persistence, President Cárdenas ordered the release of his assistants and Lev Davidovich wrote a statement trying to put things in perspective. In addition to accusing Stalin and the GPU — as he insisted on calling the Kremlin’s secret police — of attacking his house and of the deaths of Liova and Klement in Paris, of Erwin Wolf in Barcelona, of Ignace Reiss in Lausanne, he asked for the interrogation of the Mexican communist leaders, especially Lombardo Toledano and the painter Alfaro Siqueiros, who had been missing since the day of the attack. Would the Mexican judges be brave enough to do what the French and the Norwegians had never done? Would the investigators take the truth by the horns?

As could be expected, his new article was met with fury by the Stalinists. El Popular, the newspaper of the Workers’ Confederation, published an essay by a certain Enrique Ramírez in which he asserted that Trotsky had organized the whole attack in order to blame the Communists. Meanwhile, from his hiding place, Siqueiros made a sarcastic statement in which he also accused Trotsky of having attacked himself. The way in which those men, who called themselves Communists, rolled around in lies and used them even to defend crimes deeply disgusted him.

But Lev Davidovich’s statement achieved the desired effect when Sánchez Salazar saw himself forced to admit that “new” evidence had led him to discard the hypothesis that Lev Davidovich himself had orchestrated the attack. That evidence, nonetheless, also managed to fill the Exile with doubt, as the policeman insisted that only with collaboration on the inside would it have been possible for the assailants to enter. They believed the inside man was Bob Sheldon.

That young man had arrived at the house seven weeks before the attack. Like other bodyguards whom Lev Davidovich had employed in Mexico, he came “certified” by his comrades in New York, but Salazar insisted that it was impossible for Trotsky to guarantee that Sheldon had not been trained by the NKVD. Although the policeman’s logic was irrefutable, Lev Davidovich responded that it was absurd to consider Sheldon an infiltrated man. What he didn’t tell him, nor would he ever tell him, was that he couldn’t accept that theory because it would prove that not even his closest collaborators were trustworthy. It would also show the plausibility of the Soviet secret police’s favorite trick: making it seem that his death was the work of a Trotskyist militant who had attacked him over some political disagreement.

In the middle of that wave of accusations, allegations, and insults, some American followers proposed to Lev Davidovich that he travel clandestinely to the United States, where they would hide him. Without even thinking about it, he refused. His time for clandestine struggle had passed and he had no right to disappear to save his own life, especially at a moment in which the future of human civilization was being decided. “My naked head has to withstand until the end of the infernal black night: it is my fate and I must accept it,” he wrote to them as he forced himself to return to normalcy, even when attempting it seemed absurd. He lived in a house that reminded him of the first jail he had been held in, forty years before, since the bulletproof doors made the same noise. But at the same time he felt strong and animated, and because of that, when he felt that he was suffocating in his imprisonment, he defied all of his protectors’ safeguards and took up his excursions to the countryside again.

With that impulse, which he knew was epilogical, he sat down to give shape to his final will and testament. “For forty-three years of my conscious life, I have been a revolutionary,” he wrote, “and for forty-two, I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again, I would try to avoid this or that mistake, but the general course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, but rather more firm today, than it was in the days of my youth.”

At that point he must have lifted his gaze from the page. It had to appear to him so revealing that the entire life of a man who had been at the summit of his epoch could be summarized in those few words: surely he was at the point of laughing — for the first time in many days. All of the struggles, the suffering, the successes, and the vanities could be expressed with such simplicity? What resistance could the monuments, the titles, the fury and glory of power, offer before that incorruptible reality, more powerful than any human will? He was thinking this at the precise moment when he saw his wife approaching across the patio, making a small gesture of greeting. She opened a window wide to permit a breeze to enter his study. From his seat he could see the grass border at the foot of the wall, a flowering bougainvillea, the profile of some cacti, the Mexican sky of that clear blue, and the light of the sun everywhere. “Life is beautiful, the senses celebrate its festival. . May the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the utmost,” he added to what was written, calling up the vital burst of that moment.

Lev Davidovich had never imagined that preparing himself for his end through the writing of his last will could provide him with such compact calm. With very few words he managed to resolve the practical things in his life: he left his wife, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova, his literary rights, since the money that his books would yield was the only material thing he could bequeath her, and she was the only beneficiary possible after the profound sifting to which his family had been subjected. The house, which they had at last managed to buy, had been put in Natalia’s name, and his archives had already been sold to protect them from the GPU. There was nothing else. When he thought about what he had and what he had lost, the losses were so numerous that he felt he had died several years before and was now enjoying an extension, something like a coda to the history of his life in which his will no longer intervened. He felt as if he was enjoying an extemporaneous lucidity that had been awarded to him so he could take a look at events that didn’t come to a close with the exit of the main character.

“I am sixty years old and my body wants to collect payment for the excesses to which I submitted it. I hope it gives me a quick end, that it doesn’t force me to suffer a long agony, like Lenin. But if this were the case and I find it impossible to lead a life that was moderately normal, I want to reserve a decision to put an end to my existence: I have always thought that a clean suicide is preferable to a dirty death.” But Lev Davidovich didn’t write that the origins of that feeling of a bad end came from very far away, both in time and in space. His death, planned many years before in an office of the Kremlin, was now among Stalin’s priorities, but not, as some said, out of fear of the words Lev Davidovich poured into the biography he was writing: Stalin felt himself above words. Why, then? For years the man from the mountains had devoted himself to exterminating his party followers to make sure, like the gangster he had always been, that an avenging hand would not be able to come for him out of the darkness; besides, he had isolated Lev Davidovich and knew very well that, for the Exile, it was more and more difficult to place himself at the front of the new communist movement, as demonstrated by the farce that the Fourth International had become. The danger to the life of the political exile had begun precisely when Stalin felt that he had squeezed all the juice out of him that he needed to feed his repressions inside and outside the Soviet Union. And, like an obsolete machine, he had decided to send him to the junk yard and avoid any risk of a reactivation.

“My squalid material legacy completed,” he started to write again, “I want to take advantage of this testament to remember that, besides the happiness of having been a fighter for the socialist cause, I’ve had the fortune of being able to share my life with a woman like Natalia Sedova, capable of giving me sons like Liova and Seriozha. Throughout almost forty years of shared life, she has been an inexhaustible source of tenderness and magnanimity. She has experienced great suffering. But I find some consolation in the certainty that she has also known days of happiness. I lament not having been able to give her more of these days: it only brings me relief to know that, in the essential things, I never deceived her. Ever since I met her, she knew that she was committed to a man led by the idea of the revolution, and she never felt like this was an adversary, but rather a companion in the journey of life, that has been that of the struggle for a better world.” He signed each one of the pages, sealed them, and tried to forget them.

In reality, it was his wife’s support that most encouraged Lev Davidovich to keep going. He knew that she suffered, but she did so in silence, because her character prevented her from weakening. She continued directing the fortification of the house (the walls were made higher, all of the doors were made bulletproof, and the windows were covered with steel curtains), organizing life in the house, and helping Seva regain the Russian language while she kept waiting for, against all evidence, some news that would confirm that Seriozha was still alive. When he saw his Natasha, hardworking and tenacious, and remembered his past indiscretions, a cold shame ran through his body and he concluded that only while affected by transitory madness could he have committed acts that made her suffer.

Outside of his personal sphere, the world was also falling apart. That fourteenth of July, “The Marseillaise” had not been sung at the place de la Bastille, since the Nazis were already in Paris. The campaign had been so devastating that they barely needed thirty-nine days to bring proud France to its knees. Lev Davidovich couldn’t stop thinking about Alfred and Marguerite, since he didn’t have any idea of what could be happening to them and to the rest of his French followers. But it was more painful for him to listen to the declaration of support for the Third Reich formulated by the Soviet chancellor, the infamous Molotov, and to see the proof of the agreement to repartition Europe concluded by Hitler and Stalin the previous year, as shown by the “annexation” of the Baltic republics to the Soviet empire.

The result of those imperial conquests was that the old Europe was being crushed by the weight of Hitler’s swastika and the Soviet hammer and sickle. Which of the two, when the moment came, would take the first swipe at the other? Lev Davidovich asked himself. He sensed that times of great suffering for his people were approaching. Relying on the scarce optimism he had left, he came to consider that perhaps the country needed a new quota of pain in order to wake up and put the revolutionary dream back in its place.

Lev Davidovich was surprised to receive a visit from General Núñez and Colonel Sánchez Salazar, who came to inform him that thirty people, almost all of them members of the Mexican Communist Party, had been arrested in connection with the May 24 attack. Salazar asked his forgiveness for not forwarding the evidence that allowed them to continue the investigation, and Lev Davidovich responded that if the results warranted it, he not only forgave him but he also congratulated him. . on his luck.

According to Salazar, shortly after the Exile’s public statement, the police had the incredible good fortune of hearing the comments of a drunk that had put them on the trail of the men in charge of obtaining police uniforms used in the attack. Following this thread, they started to find accomplices until they came to one of the attackers, David Serrano, who led them to discover, on one side, two women tasked with watching the house and distracting the police guards and, on the other, a certain Néstor Sánchez, who, upon being arrested, gave the crucial information that the attack had been led by the painter Siqueiros and a French Jew whose identity none of the detained seemed to know. They already knew that in the attack the brothers-in-law of Siqueiros had been involved, along with his assistant, Antonio Pujol, and the Spanish Communist Rosendo Gómez, all veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Although the statements were confusing, Salazar thought that the French Jew and Pujol had been the ones directly responsible for the attack, since Siqueiros had remained outside the house, next to the police cabin. The order to arrest the painter had been issued, but they didn’t have the least idea where he could be and they feared he was already far from the country. Regarding the French Jew, perhaps the real architect of the plot, only Siqueiros and Pujol seemed to have been in contact with him. The arrested men even contradicted each other, with some claiming he was Polish.

As he listened to Salazar, Lev Davidovich thought about the degree of perversion that Stalin’s influence had injected into the souls of men like those who, after embracing the Marxist ideal and living through betrayals like those committed in Spain, continued to follow Moscow’s orders and were even capable of attacking other human beings. What made him laugh, in contrast, was the nerve of “El Coronelazo” Siqueiros, who, after organizing the attack, didn’t dare enter the house and direct it. It was regrettable that an artist of his scale had turned into a third-rate gunman, terrorist, and liar.

A few days later, the worst hypothesis was confirmed when the police found the corpse of Bob Sheldon buried in the kitchen of a hut up in Santa Rosa, in the desert of Los Leones. At four in the morning, some of Salazar’s emissaries went to get Lev Davidovich to identify him, but Robbins refused to wake him up and sent Otto Schüssler instead. Nonetheless, in the morning, when Natalia told him what had happened, he asked to go to Santa Rosa, where he met Salazar and General Núñez.

Bob Sheldon’s corpse was on a coarse table in the yard of the house. Although they had washed him, he had remnants of the dirt and lime that had covered him. His body was perfectly preserved, and on the right side of his head were two bullet holes. When Lev Davidovich saw him, he felt deeply moved, since he was certain that, in collusion with the GPU or not, Bob Sheldon had been another victim of Stalin’s fury against him, and that that corpse could just as well have been that of Liova, to whom he couldn’t say a final goodbye, or little Yakov Blumkin, or the efficient Klement, or Sermux or Posnansky, his old and close secretaries from the days of the civil war, or perhaps the obstinate Andreu Nin or the kind Erwin Wolf — all of them devoured by terror, all of them murdered by Stalin’s criminal fury. The police respected his silence and remained silent themselves for a few minutes. Salazar concluded that Sheldon’s death confirmed his participation in the attack, but Lev Davidovich again refused to accept that theory and asked to return home. He wanted to be alone, with his guilt and his thoughts.

There was no longer any doubt that fate or Stalin’s inscrutable designs had given him an extension, even though he was convinced it would be a short one. He fluctuated between a rush to tie up outstanding issues and depression over the certainty that everything would very soon be over and his work and dreams would remain in the hands of the unforeseeable fate that posterity would award them. For too many years he had been a pariah, a captive who should behave so as not to bother his hosts. He had been converted into a puppet at whom the rifles of lies were aimed, into a man who was completely alone, who walked through the walled yard of a far-off country, in the company of just a woman, a boy, and a dog, surrounded by dozens of corpses of family members, friends, and comrades. He didn’t have any power, he didn’t have millions of followers, nor did he have a party; barely anyone read his books anymore, but Stalin wanted him dead and in a short while he would swell the lists of Stalinism’s martyrs. And he would do so leaving behind an enormous failure: not that of his existence, which he considered a barely significant circumstance for history, but that of a dream of equality and freedom for the majority, to which he had given his passion. . Lev Davidovich trusted, nonetheless, that future generations, free of the yoke of totalitarianism, would do justice to that dream and, perhaps, to the stubbornness with which he had maintained it. Because the greater struggle, that of history, would not end with his death and with Stalin’s personal victory — it would start again in a few years, when the statues of the Great Leader were knocked down off their pedestals, he wrote.

Although Lev Davidovich knew that he should forget this turbid attack, each revelation pulled him back to it like a magnet. The story of the supposed Polish or French Jew seemed to lead the Mexican and U.S. police to the trail of an NKVD officer with years of experience in missions carried out in France, Spain, and Japan. Salazar had found out that, under the Jew’s orders, they had rented two houses in Coyoacán to use as support for the attack. Despite those advances, Lev Davidovich was convinced that the identity of the mysterious Jew would remain unknown, as would be the reasons for which a professional like him had not gone into the room and executed the condemned man himself.

The tension experienced in the fortress at Coyoacán turned into a quicksand that sucked in the days. Lev Davidovich couldn’t go back to his previous routine, abnormal in and of itself, but to which he had become accustomed. Nonetheless, whenever he could, he escaped that prison in search of a horizon. The worry over his safety had reached the point that some of his American friends sent him a bulletproof jacket, but he refused to wear it, just as he also forbade that every person who visited him be frisked or that one of his secretaries be present with him for interviews, be they with journalists or with friends like Nadal, Rühle, or others who came by occasionally.

Around that time Sylvia Ageloff returned from New York, and at Lev Davidovich’s insistence she was invited to come over one afternoon, with Jacson, to have tea. He wanted to thank Jacson for his care with the Rosmers and apologize for not having received him as he should have that afternoon on which, pressed by work, he couldn’t sit down to talk. On that more relaxed occasion, they had a pleasant meeting. Sylvia, who had always revered Lev Davidovich, seemed to be on cloud nine over his deference to her and her companion, while Jacson, loyal to his bourgeois education, had brought Natalia a box of fine chocolates and a gift for Seva.

After that meeting, Lev Davidovich commented to Natalia that Jacson had come across as a peculiar guy. First of all, it was unusual that, without the least shame, he claimed that he didn’t care at all about politics, but when he and Sylvia had argued about her sympathies for Shachtman’s faction, he had taken Lev Davidovich’s side and, with a certain vehemence, had reproached her for her Yankee attitude of thinking Americans are always right. Shortly before leaving, when they were talking about dogs and he had touched on the topic of raising funds for the International’s work, Jacson offered him his experience in the stock market and even the credit and contacts of his affluent boss. At that moment Lev Davidovich recalled that one of his secretaries had commented on that offer of Jacson’s, which he had rejected, convinced that he couldn’t get mixed up in monetary speculations even to support the most idealistic of political projects. In the face of the Exile’s reaction, Jacson excused himself, saying he understood. Lev Davidovich felt at that moment that there was something in that man that didn’t quite come together: the story of the passport bought in France so he wouldn’t have to fight in the war, his willingness to use his boss’s capital to earn money for him, his apathy toward politics despite having worked as a journalist and being the son of diplomats, his open talk about his financial possibilities. . No, something wasn’t coming together. Although the Exile thought the origins of that inconsistency perhaps came from his bourgeois talkativeness, he told Natalia that perhaps it was worth learning more about Jacson. For now, his care of the Rosmers repaid, the best thing would be not to receive him again, he added.

Sánchez Salazar went to see him to inform him that they had arrested Siqueiros in a town in the interior. According to the police, since the initial interrogations, always very petulant (and, Lev Davidovich thought, convinced that someone would rescue him from justice’s hands), Siqueiros had denied that the NKVD had been involved in the attack and refused to admit that any French or Pole had participated. He assured them that the idea for the attack had been conceived of by him and his friends in Spain when they learned of the Mexican government’s betrayal of the world proletariat by giving asylum to Trotsky, an apostate capable of ordering his followers to rise up against the Republic in the midst of a civil war. They had resolved to carry out the attack when the war in Europe started, since they believed that they could prevent the traitor from returning to a USSR eventually occupied by his allies, the Nazis. On that point, Lev Davidovich even smiled and asked the policeman if Siqueiros knew that he was a Jew and a Communist. Sánchez Salazar himself admitted that the contradictions were blatant, since the painter had added that the objective of the attack was not to kill him (we would have done so if we had wanted to, he repeated) but to pressure Cárdenas to throw him out of the country. He assured the police that they had prepared the assault without the party’s support, which seemed even more incredible, since all of the commando members were militant Communists. The only thing that made Lev Davidovich happy about that arrest was thinking that probably there would be a trial, and it would provide him the occasion denied to him by the Norwegians to denounce Stalin’s criminal methods and the lies of his regime in a public forum.

It was the afternoon of August 17, while Lev Davidovich was set to distract himself with the rabbits and Azteca, when Sylvia’s boyfriend showed up. The reason for his visit was that, after the conversation he had heard between the girl and the Exile, he had written an article about the defection of the American Trotskyist leaders Shachtman and Burnham. And he recalled that he had mentioned his interest in writing something about those subjects to him and desired to get the old revolutionary’s verdict. Lev Davidovich himself, before they said goodbye, had told him he would review the draft, although he no longer remembered that commitment.

For the next four days, several times Lev Davidovich would ask himself why he had agreed to receive Jacson when he had already decided not to see him again. He would comment to Natalia that he felt sorry for the young man’s political naïveté and for the resounding way in which he had refused to accept his financial assistance. Whatever the reason, he had allowed the Belgian into his study and started to read the article in order to convince himself definitively that the guy was a fool. Jacson’s piece repeated the four ideas Lev Davidovich had said in the conversation with Sylvia and suddenly jumped to the situation in occupied France without in any way linking one story with the other. What kind of journalist was this character?

In his anxiety to hear Lev Davidovich’s opinion, Jacson had stood behind him the entire time, leaning on the edge of the worktable, reading over the Exile’s shoulder what he was marking in the text. That warm pressure over the back of his neck soon provoked the Exile’s fear. As he folded the pages, he called Natalia so she would accompany Jacson to the door and he explained to the young man that he had to rewrite the article if he intended to publish it. The man took the pages with the face of a beaten dog, and, upon seeing him, Lev Davidovich again felt sorry for him. Perhaps because of that, when the Belgian asked if he could bring him the rewritten text, he said yes, thinking that the appropriate and necessary response was no. Nonetheless, during dinner he told Natalia that he didn’t want to receive him again; he didn’t like that man, who, for starters, could not be Belgian, since no Belgian with the least education (and this one was the son of diplomats) would even think to breathe down the neck of a person he barely knew.

On what would be the second-to-last sunrise of his life and the last of which he would be conscious, Lev Davidovich awoke with the feeling of having slept like a child. The sleeping pills he had been prescribed had a relaxing effect that allowed him to sleep and awaken with energy, in contrast to the ones he had taken a few months before, which caused a sticky inertia. In the morning, he spent more time than usual with the rabbits, since just to see them confirmed how much he had abandoned them since the doctor had recommended rest in light of his elevated blood pressure. He had tried to explain that being with the rabbits and with Azteca, far from exhausting him, comforted him. But the doctor insisted that he not make physical efforts, and even prohibited him from writing. The bastard must be from the GPU, he thought.

The work morning lasted longer than usual. He had insisted on drafting an article for his American comrades about the theories of revolutionary defeatism and the way to adopt it in a situation different to that of 1917, keeping in mind that the current imperialist war, as he had declared on more than one occasion, was a development of the previous one, a consequence of the deepening of the capitalist conflicts, for which it was necessary to look at reality with a new lens.

The good news of the day had been the cable brought by Rigualt, his Mexican lawyer, confirming that his papers were finally in safe hands at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Rigualt had also brought him a gift, two tins of red caviar. At lunchtime he asked Natalia to open one and he himself served it. As soon as the caviar touched his taste buds, he felt a wave that took him back to the first days of the Bolshevik government, when they had just installed themselves at the Kremlin. In those days he and his family lived in the Knights’ House, where before the revolution the czar’s civil servants had lived. The house had been divided into rooms, and in one of those lived the Trotskys, separated by a hallway from the rooms occupied by Lenin, his wife, and his sister. The dining room they used was common to both rooms, and the food they were served was terrible. They didn’t eat anything but salted beef, and the flour and the pearl barley they used to prepare the soup were full of sand. The only thing that was appetizing and abundant (because they couldn’t export it) was red caviar. The memory of that caviar had forever become associated with those first years of the revolution, when the political tasks they faced were so big and unknown that they lived in perpetual vertigo and, even so, Vladimir Ilyich, whenever he could, dedicated some minutes to playing with Lev Davidovich’s children. That final midday, as he devoured the caviar, he again asked himself if all great dreams were condemned to perversion and failure.

After a brief siesta, he returned to his study, determined to finish various projects in order to dedicate himself fully to revising the biography of Stalin. Now he wanted to include in the book what was apparently the last letter that Bukharin had written to the Grave Digger while he waited for the verdict to his appeal. They were a few lines, very dramatic, even worse, sullen, that some friendly hands had sent on to him and that, ever since then, he had not been able to stop thinking about. In the letter, Bukharin, sentenced to death, didn’t even ask for clemency anymore but rather for a reason: “Koba, why do you need me to die?” Bukharin didn’t know? Because he knew why Stalin wanted them dead — all of them.

He took up his work again, dictating some ideas for an article with which he intended to respond to the new verbal attacks of the Mexican Stalinists, but at some point he lost his concentration and remembered that Jacson, Sylvia’s boyfriend, had announced he would return that afternoon with his rewritten article. Just thinking about seeing that man and reading his string of banal remarks disgusted him. I’ll get rid of him in a couple of minutes and then I’ll give the definitive order that I will not receive him anymore, under any pretext, he thought.

While he was waiting for Jacson, he observed that, outside his study, it was a beautiful afternoon. The Mexican summer could be hard but not cruel. Even in August, at least in Coyoacán, there was always a breeze. Lev Davidovich lamented that the windows facing the streets were covered and cut off the flow of fresh air and the possibility of seeing people pass by, the fruit and flower vendors with their perfumes and colors. He knew that, despite the misery, the war, and death, beyond the walls he lived between there crawled a normal and small life that tried to make do day by day, a life he had dreamed of many times as if it were a great privilege that had been taken away from him.

Since Seva still hadn’t returned from school, Azteca was sleeping at the door of his study. The mutt had grown into a beautiful dog, though a beauty different from Maya’s aristocratic one, but definitively attractive. Who does Azteca love more, Seva or me? he asked himself, and smiled. Observing the dog, he remembered that he had to feed the rabbits. He went out to the yard and put on his thick gloves, and for several minutes his mind was occupied only with the activity he was carrying out. His rabbits were also beautiful, he thought, and for a few moments he felt far away from the world’s sorrows. It was then that he heard the jail-like screeching of the door. Jacson, he confirmed, as he cursed the moment when he had agreed to see him again. I’ll finish with him as quickly as I can, he thought, and for the last time in his life Lev Davidovich Trotsky caressed the rabbits’ soft fur and directed some words of love to the dog by his side.

27

The moment he crossed the armored threshold of the fortress in Coyoacán and saw, in the middle of the yard, the table covered by a tablecloth of bright Mexican colors, he felt how he was regaining control of himself. The fury that had accompanied him all day disappeared, like dust swept away by the wind.

Ever since Ramón returned to the hotel the night before, the dry aftertaste of the cognac and the bitterness of an explosive rage had settled in his stomach, inducing him to vomit. The belief that his will, his capacity to decide for himself, had evaporated began to besiege him and lead him to feel like an instrument of powerful designs in whose mechanisms he had been enshared, refused any possibility to turn back. The certainty that in three, four, five days he would enter the murky current of history as a murderer caused him an unhealthy mix of militant pride over the action he would carry out and repulsion toward himself over the way in which he had to do it. Several times he asked himself if it wouldn’t have been preferable, for him and for the cause, for his life to have ended beneath the tracks of an Italian tank at Madrid’s doors, like his brother Pablo, before thinking that his mission would only be that of draining the hate that others had accumulated and had guilefully injected into his own spirit.

That morning, when he woke up, Sylvia had already ordered breakfast, but he barely tasted the coffee and, without saying a word, got in the shower. Ever since the last trip to New York, the woman had noticed that her lover’s affable nature had begun to turn, and the fear that the fantastic relationship could falter made her tremble with anxiety. He had explained to her that business wasn’t going well, that the renovation of the offices was delayed and cost too much, but her feminine instinct yelled that other problems were weighing down the soul of her beloved Jacques.

Without speaking he got dressed. She, with her black slip, observed him in silence, until she dared to ask: “When are you going to tell me what’s wrong, dear?” He looked at her, almost surprised, as if only at that moment had he noticed her existence.

“I’ve already told you: business.”

“Just business?”

He stopped adjusting his tie.

“Can you leave me alone? Can you shut up for a while?”

Sylvia thought that never in almost two years of their relationship had Jacques spoken with that hostile tone, loaded with hate, but she chose to stay silent. When he opened the door, she decided to speak again.

“Remember that they’re expecting us today in Coyoacán.”

“Of course I remember,” he said, violently tapping his temple, and went out.

Ramón wandered the streets of the city center. On two occasions he drank coffee, and almost at noon his body demanded a hit and he entered the Kit Kat Club. Against his habit, he drank a glass of Hennessy advertised by the mirror behind the counter. At two in the afternoon, he opened his second packet of cigarettes that day. He wasn’t hungry, he didn’t want to talk to anyone, he only wanted time to go by and the nightmare in which he was involved to reach its end.

A little after three he picked up Sylvia at the hotel and at four on the dot he was looking at the multicolored tablecloth spread over the forged-iron table on which they would soon take tea. At that moment he noticed how he was regaining his ability to confine Ramón under the skin of Jacques Mornard.

Jake Cooper had accompanied them to the table, told a couple of jokes, and confirmed their dinner on Tuesday the twentieth, his day off. They agreed to see each other at Café Central at seven, since Cooper wanted to make the most of his day walking around with Jenny through the Zócalo area and the markets. The silence Jacques had maintained until that moment seemed to disappear and Sylvia would tell him that night that, evidently, visiting the fortified house in Coyoacán had been a balm for his worries.

Just five minutes later the renegade and his wife came out of the house. Jacques Mornard observed that the old man looked exhausted and stood up to shake his hand. At that moment he understood that for the first time he was touching the incredibly soft skin of the man he would kill.

“So at last. . Jacson or Mornard?” the Exile asked with a sarcastic smile on his thick lips and a disquieting shine in his eagle eyes.

“Don’t be impertinent, Liovnochek,” Natalia reprimanded him.

“Whatever is easier, sir. ‘Jacson’ is an accident that will follow me for I don’t know how long.”

“For quite some time,” the old man said. “This war could go on for another few years. And you know what? The longer it lasts, the more devastating it is, the more possibilities that workers will at last understand that only revolutionary action can save them as a class,” he said, as if a soapbox had been placed under his feet.

“So what role could the Soviet Union have in that action?” Jacques dared to ask.

“The Soviet Union needs a new revolution to bring about a great social and political but not economic change,” the renegade began. “Although the bureaucracy took all the power, the economic base of society is still socialist. And that’s a gain that can’t be lost.”

Sylvia coughed, as if asking to change the conversation. “Lev Davidovich. . I, like many, think that ever since Stalin signed the friendship pact with Hitler, the Soviet Union cannot consider itself a socialist country but rather an ally of imperialism,” she said. “That’s why it’s invading all of Eastern Europe.”

The arrival of the maid with the tray, cups, pot of tea, and plate of pastries made the Exile pause for a moment. But as soon as the woman placed the tray on the table, the man jumped like a spring.

“Dear Sylvia, that’s what the long-standing anticommunists say and now also Burnham and Shachtman to justify their break with the Fourth International. I continue to maintain that the duty of all the world’s Communists is to defend the Soviet Union if it’s attacked by the German fascists or any imperialists, because the country’s social bases are still, in and of themselves, an immense progress in the history of humanity. Despite the crimes and the prison camps, the Soviet Union has the right to defend itself and the Communists have the moral responsibility to stand together with Soviet workers to preserve the essence of the revolution. . But if the social explosion that I expect occurs and the socialist revolution triumphs in several countries, those same workers will have the mission of helping their Soviet comrades free themselves of the gangsters of Stalinist bureaucracy. That’s why it’s so important to strengthen our International and why your friends’ attitude is so regrettable. .”

Jacques Mornard observed how Natalia Sedova served the tea. For a moment the smell of the recently baked pastries had alleviated his stomachache, but the Exile’s words had taken away his appetite. That man had just one passion and was always talking as if he were leading the masses, pushed by a disproportionate vehemence regarding his diminished audience, but with a very convincing and seductive logic. Ramón concluded that listening to him for too long could be dangerous and he took refuge in the evidence that the last door on the way to the fulfillment of his mission was coming into view, and he decided to focus on opening it. Within an effusiveness Sylvia was unfamiliar with, he then launched into supporting the Exile’s theory and criticizing the inconsistent attitudes of Burnham and Shachtman, who were removing themselves at the moment when unity was needed. Echoing his host, he criticized Stalin but defended the idea that the USSR maintained its socialist nature, and agreed with the Exile about the necessity of universal revolution, until, through some twists in the conversation, they ended up on the difficulties of the French resistance against a German army that practically controlled the whole country.

Natalia Sedova asked the maid for a second pot of tea at the moment the front door opened and young Seva entered the yard, preceded by the joyous Azteca, who, without paying any attention to the visitors, went to the Exile. The old man smiled, petting the animal and speaking to it in Russian.

“Do you always speak to him in Russian?” Jacques, smiling, asked after greeting Seva, over whose shoulders he even threw his arm.

“Seva speaks to him in French, in the kitchen they speak to him in Spanish, and I speak to him in Russian,” the old man replied. “And he understands us all. The intelligence of dogs is a mystery to human beings. In many ways I think that they’re intellectually far superior to us, since they have the capacity to understand us, even in several languages, and we are the ones who do not have the intelligence to understand their language.”

“I think you’re right. . Seva says you’ve always had dogs.”

“Stalin took many things away from me, even the possibility of having dogs. When they kicked me out of Moscow, I had to leave behind two, and when I went into exile, they wanted me to leave without my favorite dog, the only one I was able to take to Alma-Ata. But Maya lived with us in Turkey, and we buried her there. With her, Seva learned to love dogs. It’s true that I have always loved dogs. They have a kindness and a capacity for loyalty that go beyond that of many human beings.”

“I also love dogs,” Jacques said, as if he were ashamed. “But it’s been years since I’ve had one. When all of this is over, I’d like to have two or three.”

“Find yourself a borzoi, a Russian wolfhound. Maya was a borzoi. They’re the most loyal, beautiful, and intelligent dogs in the world. . with the exception of Azteca, of course,” he said, winking and caressing the dog’s ears more, then hugging him against his chest.

“You know? You’re the second person to tell me about those dogs. An English journalist I once met told me he had one.”

“Listen closely, Jacson: if you ever have a borzoi, you’ll never forget me,” the old man proclaimed, and looked at his watch. He immediately patted Azteca’s side and stood up. “I should take care of the rabbits and I am also behind on some work. It has really been a pleasure talking with you and with the stubborn Sylvia.”

“Would you like me to help you with the rabbits?” Jacques offered.

Sylvia and Natalia smiled, perhaps since they knew the answer.

“Don’t worry, thank you. The rabbits are not as intelligent and they get nervous with strangers.”

Jacques stood up. He looked at the ground, as if he’d lost something, and suddenly reacted.

“Mr. Trotsky. . I was thinking. . I would like to write something about the problems of the political parties in the French resistance. I know France very well, but your ideas have made me understand things differently and. . would you do me the favor of reviewing it?”

The old man turned toward the rabbit cages. The sun was beginning to set. With gestures that seemed mechanical, he popped the buttons on his cuffs to roll up the sleeves of his Russian shirt.

“I promise not to steal too much of your time,” Jacques continued. “Two or three pages. If you read them, I would be more sure of not making a mistake in my analysis.”

“When will you bring it to me?”

“The day after tomorrow: Saturday?”

“All I want is that you not steal a lot of my time.”

“I promise, Mr. Trotsky.”

With the edge of his shirt, the Exile cleaned the lenses of his glasses. He stepped toward Jacques and, with the glasses back on, looked him in the eye.

“Jacson. . You don’t look Belgian. Saturday at five. Make me read something interesting. Good day.”

The renegade turned toward the rabbit cages. Jacques Mornard, with a smile frozen on his lips, was incapable of responding to his farewell. Only that night, when he placed a sheet in the typewriter, did he understand that, with his last words, the man he had to kill had breathed on his neck.

He awoke with a headache and in a bad mood. He had barely slept despite the exhaustion he was pushed into by those three hours of effort, at the end of which he had only managed to write a couple of messy paragraphs with poorly put-together ideas. How was he going to write something that would end up being interesting to the old man? He was certain that he had again dreamed of a beach and some dogs running on the sand, and he remembered that he had awoken in anguish during the night. The conviction that everything would be over the following day, when he sank the ice axe in the skull of that renegade traitor, instead of calming him, filled him with disquiet. He took a pair of painkillers with his coffee and, when Sylvia asked him where he was going, whispered something about the office and the construction workers, and with his smudged pieces of paper he went out onto the street.

His mentor was waiting for him in the apartment at Shirley Court, and after Ramón had relayed the details of the previous afternoon’s visit, his anxiety exploded.

“I know how I have to kill him, but I can’t write a fucking article! He asked that it be something interesting! What interesting things am I going to write for him?”

Tom took the pages that, almost imploringly, Ramón handed him, and told him not to worry about the article.

“I have to do it tomorrow, Tom. Prepare things to help me escape. I can’t wait any longer. I’ll kill him tomorrow,” he repeated.

Caridad was listening to them, seated in one of the armchairs, and Ramón, in his daze, thought he noticed her hands shaking slightly. Tom, the sheets in hand, was looking at the typed lines, full of cross-outs and additions. Then he crumpled the pages, threw them in a corner, and commented, as if it weren’t important, “You’re not going to kill him tomorrow.”

Ramón thought he misheard. Caridad leaned forward.

“If we’ve worked for three years,” he continued, “and we’ve gotten to where we are, it’s for everything to turn out right. You’re not the only one who is risking his life in this. Stalin forgave me the disaster with the Mexicans because we never trusted them too much to begin with, but he is not going to forgive me a second failure. You cannot fail, Ramón, that’s why you’re not going to do it tomorrow.”

“But why not?”

“Because I know what I’m doing; I always know. . When you are alone with the Duck, you’ll have all the strings in your hands, but you have to be hanging on to them tightly.”

Ramón shifted his head. As always, he felt Tom’s aplomb touch him, and the anguish began to melt away.

Tom lit a cigarette and stood before his small group of troops. He asked Caridad to make coffee and ordered Ramón to go to the pawnshop to buy a typewriter, the portable kind.

When he returned with the typewriter, Caridad offered him coffee and told him Tom was waiting in the bedroom. Ramón found him leaning over the chest of drawers he used as a desk and saw that on the floor there were crumpled pages written in Cyrillic. The adviser demanded silence with a gesture, without ceasing to repeat “Bliat! Bliat!” Standing, Ramón waited until the man turned around.

“Come on, I’m going to dictate the article to Caridad and the letter that should accompany it.”

“What letter?”

“The story of a disillusioned Trotskyist.”

“What do I have to do tomorrow?”

“Let’s say it’s a dress rehearsal. You’re going to the traitor’s house with all of your weapons on you, to see if you can get in and out without anyone suspecting anything. You’re going to give him the article and you’re going to be alone with him. The article will be so bad that you’ll have to make a lot of corrections and he himself will give you the option of returning with another draft. That will be the moment, because you’ll have calculated the way in which you’re going to hit him, the way to get out. . You have to be sure you will do each thing very calmly and very carefully. You already know that if you can get out to the street, I’ll guarantee your escape; but while you’re inside the house, your fate and your life depend on you.”

“I won’t fail. But let me do it tomorrow. What if I can’t see him again?”

“You won’t fail and you won’t do it tomorrow — and you will see him again, that is sure,” Tom said, taking him by the chin and forcing him to look him in the eyes. “The fate of many people depends on you. And it depends on our shutting the mouths of the ones who didn’t trust in us, the Spanish Communists, do you remember? You’re going to show what a Spaniard who has two balls and an ideology in his head is capable of,” and with his right hand he tapped Ramón’s left temple. “You’re going to avenge your dead brother in Madrid, the humiliations your mother had to endure; you’re going to earn the right to be a hero and you’re going to show África that Ramón Mercader is not soft.”

“Thank you,” Ramón said, without knowing why he said it, as he felt the pressure of his tutor’s hands turning into a sweaty heat over his face. At that moment he convinced himself that Caridad’s story of her humiliations, mentioned in passing by Tom, in reality was part of a strategy concocted by his mother and the agent to sharpen his hate; that was the only explanation for Tom knowing of the conversation in the Gillow. How was it possible that Tom also knew that África had accused him of being too soft?

“Come on, to work.” Tom patted him on the shoulder and brought him out of his thoughts. “You have to memorize the letter we’re going to write. When you’re done, you drop it on the floor and leave. But if they catch you, that letter is your shield. You have to say that your name is Jacques Mornard and repeat what that letter says. But they are not going to get you — no. You’re my boy and you’ll get out. I’m telling you. .”

They went back to the living room. Caridad, standing, was smoking. The tension had made the worldly woman she had been in recent months disappear; her features were sharp again, hard, androgynous, as if she were also preparing herself for war.

“Sit down and type,” Tom ordered, and she threw her cigarette butt in a corner and settled down in front of the typewriter placed on the table. She ran a sheet through the roller and looked at the man.

“What are you going to write?”

“The letter.” Tom dropped into the armchair, with a pained look on his face. He stretched his body on the seat, read something from the pages he had filled with Cyrillic characters, and closed his eyes. “We’ll put a date on it later. Begin! ‘Dear Sirs: Upon writing this letter, I have no other objective, in the event that something should happen to me, than to clarify. .’ No, wait. .” And he held out his hand like a blind man feeling his way around. “Better: ‘than to explain to public opinion the motives that brought me to execute the act of justice I have set out to do.’ ”

Tom interrupted himself, his eyes still closed and some sheets in his hands, deciding his next words. Ramón was standing and smoking, and he observed his mentor and his mother and saw two different beings concentrating, doing a job responsibly. The phrases that the man was inventing and the woman was imprinting on the pages were a human being’s sentence and a murderer’s confession, but Tom and Caridad’s demeanor displayed such comfort with the idea of death that they seemed like two actors in a play.

Through Tom’s mouth, Jacques Mornard was beginning to speak about his origins, his profession, the political inclinations that led him to participate in Trotskyist organizations.

“ ‘I was a devoted student of Lev Trotsky and would’ve given my last drop of blood for the cause. I started studying as much as had been written about the different revolutionary movements in order to instruct myself and that way become more useful to the cause,’ period.”

“Same paragraph?” Caridad asked. Tom shook his head. “Just a moment,” she said, and placed a new sheet in the roller.

“Read me what’s already written,” Tom asked, and Caridad complied. At the end the adviser opened his eyes and looked at Ramón. “What do you think?”

“Sylvia will challenge it.”

“When Sylvia speaks, you’re going to be very far away. Caridad, read it again.”

Tom closed his eyes again, and as soon as Caridad finished her reading, he began to put together the story of a member of the Fourth International committee who, after various conversations in Paris, had proposed to Jacques a trip to Mexico with the objective of meeting Trotsky. Mornard, excited, accepted, and the member of the International (“You never knew his name,” he clarified to Ramón; “That’s not believable,” he replied; “I could give a shit about believability,” the other one sighed) gave him money and even a passport to leave Europe.

Suddenly Tom stood up, ripped up the pages he still had in his hands, and uttered a Russian curse. Ramón noticed that his limping, absent in recent months, had returned. At that moment he had the feeling that it was Kotov who was going to the kitchen and returning with a bottle of vodka. He placed a glass on the table where Caridad was working and served himself an overlarge amount. He made it disappear in one swallow.

“We have to give the idea that Trotsky was already waiting for Jacques because he wanted something from him. And Jacques has to seem very sentimental, a little dumb. .”

“Ramón is right. No one is going to believe that story,” Caridad said.

“When have we ever worried about people’s intelligence? We have to tell them what interests us. What they believe is their concern. What has to remain clear is that Trotsky is a traitor, a terrorist of the worst kind, that he’s being financed by imperialism. .”

Tom returned to his armchair and continued dictating. Ramón felt himself getting lost in the labyrinth of lies that his mentor was weaving so easily, as if he were telling some truth in which he had lived. He rejoined the story’s narrative thread when Tom was going into the section about the young Trotskyist’s disillusionment: the famous revolutionary revealed himself to be a cruel and ambitious being when he proposed to him, whom he barely knew, that he travel to the USSR to commit acts of sabotage and, above all, to assassinate Stalin. Tom added that his anti-Soviet action would rely on the support of a great foreign nation, which obviously was financing the traitor. Ramón felt that those words seemed familiar, as if he had read them or heard them before.

“That’s the tactic, not only eliminate the enemy, but cover him in shit, lots and lots of shit; let the shit overflow.” Tom got excited and elaborated on the Exile’s intrigues against the Mexican government and its leaders, seeking the destabilization of the country that had given him refuge. But Trotsky had to be even more corrupt, and so he had expressed to Jacques his disgust for all the members of his own group who didn’t think exactly as he did and even confided in him the idea of eliminating those dissidents. Although Mornard had no proof, he was sure that the money to buy and fortify the house where Trotsky lived did not come from those blind followers but rather came from another source and the person who knew it was the consul of that great imperialist nation who visited him frequently.

“Has anyone seen that consul?” Caridad asked.

“This is a country of blind people,” Tom responded, “and we’re going to give them some of what they like.”

Tom shifted to melodrama when he had Jacques travel to Mexico with the young woman he loved and whom he wished to marry. If he went to Russia to commit the crimes planned by Trotsky, he would have to break his engagement, which the Exile encouraged him to do, since he considered the young woman a traitor to the true Trotskyist cause. And he finished off the letter with an unexpected twist:

“ ‘It’s probable that this young woman, following my act, will not want to have anything else to do with me. Nonetheless, it was also for her that I decided to sacrifice myself by taking the head of a man who didn’t do anything but harm the workers’ movement, and I am sure that not only the party but also history will agree with me when they see the most incarnate enemy of the world proletariat disappear. . In case something should happen to me, I ask for the publication of this letter,’ period.”

With the last keystroke, the apartment became silent. Ramón, still standing, felt a shudder come from the depths of his soul. He no longer had the impression that he had heard those words before, since the lies accumulated by his mentor had the same tone as the accusations that, for years, in successive proceedings, articles, and speeches, had been launched against Trotsky and other men who were tried and sentenced. Didn’t truths, real events, exist on which to base a young revolutionary’s decision to sacrifice himself and commit a crime to free the proletariat of the influence of a traitor? Something murky emanated from each one of the words of that letter, and Ramón Mercader understood that his shaking was not only due to the fear caused by the act of falsification that he had just witnessed. He had discovered that he feared the ones who were sending him to execute a man as much as the consequences that his act could bring. If he still needed it, that letter was the last proof that, for him, there was no other way out of the world than to become a murderer.

He stopped the car near Coyoacán. He opened the trunk, removed the raincoat, and placed it over his shoulders. At that moment, as if the weight of the raincoat were trying to drown him, Jacques Mornard felt revulsion and barely had time to lean over to avoid being stained by vomit. The liquid, a mixture of coffee and bile, smelled of rancid tobacco, and its stench caused a new bout of dry heaving while his skin broke out in a cold sweat. When his stomach had calmed down, he cleaned himself with his handkerchief and opened the bag in which he kept the English dagger and the ice axe and moved them to the interior pockets of his raincoat. The Star revolver with nine bullets he placed in the small of his back, tucked in the waistband of his pants. He confirmed that the sheets of the article were in the left outside pocket of the raincoat and returned to the car.

He remembered that there was a pharmacy on the way and, upon seeing it, stopped the car. He bought a bottle of mouthwash, another one of cologne, and a box of painkillers. On the street, he rinsed his mouth several times, to get rid of the taste of vomit, and chewed a pair of pills. He never experienced headaches and suspected that perhaps his blood pressure was responsible for that pressure in his skull that hadn’t left him for the past two days. He rubbed the cologne on his neck, his forehead, and his cheeks, and got back behind the wheel.

When he took the dusty Avenida Viena, Ramón understood that he still hadn’t gained back control over Jacques Mornard. The conviction that it was just about a rehearsal, that he would enter and leave the house as quickly as possible, did not provide him with the expected relief. He still doubted whether it wouldn’t have been better if Tom had allowed him to carry out his job that very day. What was going to happen would happen, and the sooner the better, he told himself. His hate for the renegade, which should have been his best weapon, was dissolving amid fear and doubts, and he didn’t know anymore whether he was moved by irreversible orders (the imprisonment of the painter Siqueiros and the possibility of a public trial had alarmed Moscow, according to Tom) or by a deep conviction that was getting more and more difficult to recover in his mind. Because of that, upon seeing the ocher-colored fortress, Ramón decided that that would be his last visit to Coyoacán.

He stopped the car after turning around and placing it in the direction of the highway to Mexico. He doused the handkerchief with cologne and cleaned his face again. He took several deep breaths and left the car. From the front tower, Jake Cooper waved hello and asked about Sylvia. Jacson responded that he was only coming for a few minutes and, considering how talkative Sylvia could be, had preferred to leave her at the hotel. Cooper, smiling, confirmed that his wife was arriving Monday evening.

“So we’ll see each other on Tuesday,” Jacques yelled as the bulletproof door opened before him.

Joe Hansen, the renegade’s secretary, shook his hand and let him in.

“My mother always used that German cologne,” he remarked. “Was the Old Man expecting you earlier?”

“I’m ten minutes late. I got delayed because of Sylvia.”

“He’s working now. Let me ask him if he can still see you.”

Hansen left him in the yard. He took off his raincoat and folded it carefully over his arm. In a corner of the garden, close to the fence that overlooked the river, he saw Melquíades, the handyman, at work on the house. The rooms occupied by the secretaries and bodyguards had their windows open, but no movement could be seen. He then had a very strong feeling that, yes, definitively, this was his day. In order not to think about it, he concentrated on contemplating the bullet holes in the house’s walls, until he noticed a presence very close to him. He turned around and found Azteca, who was sniffing at his shoes, and saw that they were splattered with vomit. Being careful with the position of the raincoat, he bent down next to the animal and with his free hand caressed his head and ears. For a few minutes, Jacques lost all sense of time, place, and what he had set to do as the animal’s fur ran between his fingers, causing a feeling of well-being, confidence, and calm. His mind was blank when he heard the man’s voice and he reacted with surprise.

“I’m very busy,” the renegade said as he wiped his glasses with a red handkerchief that was embroidered in one corner with a hammer and sickle.

“I’m sorry, I got delayed,” he said, standing, as he looked for the typed pages in the outside pocket of his raincoat, careful that the garment, pulled down by the weight of the weapons, would not fall from his arm. “I won’t take much of your time.”

Jacques handed him the pages, still devastated by the poor quality of the text. Without taking them, the Exile gave a half turn.

“Come on, let’s see the article.”

Jacques Mornard entered through the doors of the house for the first time. From the kitchen came the sounds of activity and the smell of cooking, but he didn’t see anyone. Following the renegade, he crossed the dining room, where there was a large table, and entered the workroom. He observed that on the desk were several papers, books, fountain pens, a lamp, and a bulky dictaphone, which the man moved aside to make space.

“And your wife?” he dared to ask.

“She must be in the kitchen” was the dry response of the renegade, who was already sitting in front of the desk. “Let me see this article.”

Jacques handed the sheets over and the man, with a thick grease pencil, began to correct, quickly, the first lines. Ramón managed to place himself behind his prisoner and observed the room. Behind him, against the wall, there was a long, low set of drawers on which were piled typed papers and where a globe rested. On the wall, a map of Mexico and Central America. On the desk was a folder with a label in Cyrillic that he managed to read: PRIVATE. From his position, he spied in the half-open drawer the dark shine of a revolver, perhaps a.38, and thought about how little the caliber of a weapon mattered to him that was not going to defend its owner. He stopped inspecting the site and forced himself to think about the fact that he was three steps behind the man, and his condemned head was a few inches below Jacques’s own shoulder. He always thought he’d have a more elevated position, but even so, if he managed to raise his arm, he could bring down a brutal blow in the middle of that skull on whose crown the hair was just beginning to thin. He stuck his hand in his raincoat and touched the metallic part of the ice axe. He could take it out quickly, in just a few seconds, and hit forcefully in the exact place where the scarcity of hair allowed him to see the white skin, almost shining, provocative. He closed his hand around the shortened grip and resolved to extract the weapon just at the moment in which he realized he had not removed his hat and the sweat had accumulated on his forehead, threatening to run into his eyes. He thought of looking for his handkerchief but desisted, to avoid a sudden movement. The window overlooking the garden was open, to make the most of the afternoon breeze, and from that angle he could only see the cactus pots and some flowering bougainvillea. He calculated that, if he hit him with precision, he would need just one minute, with rapid steps, to reach the exit door and ask that they open it for him, talk to the guard on duty for a few seconds, and leave the house. Until he got in the car, it would be two, maybe three minutes in which his salvation would depend on his cool head and no one discovering the Duck’s body. But if the man didn’t die from the first blow or if his nerves faltered and he rushed too much, the fortified house would turn into a tomb from which he would never escape. He clutched the ice axe forcefully and concentrated on the skull in front of him. The old man was working, using his pencil frequently, crossing out or adding words, as his throat admitted sounds of disapproval. His head, nonetheless, was still there, in reach of Ramón’s arm.

“The poor French,” the Exile murmured.

At that instant, through the window, Ramón could hazily see Harold Robbins. The head of the bodyguard corps was looking at the study and then up at the watchtower. Slowly he took his hand out of his raincoat and decided to look for the handkerchief in the back pocket of his pants. His glasses had become damp with sweat. Without letting go of the coat, he dried his face and, with difficulty, took his glasses off and cleaned them.

The renegade’s head became clear again. It was still challenging him. In that head was everything that man possessed, and now Ramón had it at his mercy. Why hadn’t Kotov given him the letter he should drop as he went out? To Ramón, with his gaze fixed on the place where he was going to drive in the steel point, it now seemed obvious that the best thing would be to forget about the damned letter. He couldn’t keep on thinking; he was wasting the golden opportunity that had taken years to create — an occasion that was perhaps unrepeatable. But at the same time he understood that at that moment he wasn’t capable of executing the order, although his confusion prevented him from knowing why. Was it fear? Obedience to Tom’s orders? The letter he didn’t have? The need to prolong that sick game of power? Doubts about the probabilities of reaching the street? He discarded this last one, since, despite the solitude the renegade enjoyed, it was obvious that the chance of escape mentioned so many times by Tom had never gotten to thirty percent. Only if a miraculous combination of coincidences occurred would he manage to leave the house after dealing the blow, and he was certain that, if he dared to administer it, something would happen and he would be cut off from his escape options. The next time he entered the fortress, he would perhaps conquer his nerves and kill the most pursued man in the world, whose breathing he could hear two steps away from him, whose skull kept enticing him. Nonetheless, he was now completely sure that he would not manage to escape. In reality, was the escape ever really foreseen? He convinced himself that his bosses without a doubt preferred that he leave the house, but whether he managed to or not was not important, and Ramón understood that they had destined him to commit a crime that, at the same time, would mean his death. Furthermore, his mentor had designed everything with such mastery that, in the end, the condemned man himself would be in charge of fixing the date of his own death and, to reach the maximum perfection, also that of his executioner. He understood that his inability to move was a result of that macabre situation that controlled his body and his will.

“This needs a lot of work,” the Exile said without lifting his gaze.

“Does it seem very bad to you?” Jacques Mornard asked after a few seconds, fearing his voice would fail him.

“You have to rewrite it completely and—”

“All right,” Jacques interrupted him, and approached the table. “I’ll rewrite it this weekend. Now I have to go. Sylvia is waiting for me to go eat and. .”

Jacques needed to leave that oppressive space. The Exile still held sheets in his hand and had turned toward the visitor, to whom he gave an incisive look.

“Why didn’t you take off your hat?”

Jacques brought his hand to his forehead and tried to smile.

“Since I’m in a rush. .”

The old man looked at him even more intensely, as if he wanted to penetrate him.

“Jacson, you’re the strangest Belgian I know,” he said, and handed him the sheets at last, then called in a loud voice, “Natasha!”

Jacques took the pages and folded them any which way as he noticed how the cold damp of his hands stuck to the paper. Preparing a smile for the woman’s arrival, he managed to return the sheets to the pocket of his raincoat, which was on the verge of getting away from him due to the weight of the instruments of death it was carrying. He mechanically moved his hand until he touched the knife’s handle. The sound of steps getting closer stopped that impulse. Natalia Sedova, with an apron covering her chest and lap, peeked into the studio and, upon seeing Jacques, smiled.

“I didn’t know that—”

“Good afternoon, Madame Natalia,” he said, and clutched the knife.

“Jacson is leaving, dear. Please, see him out.”

Ramón felt that, instead of a goodbye, the Exile’s words sounded like an expulsion order. He had the knife in his right hand, thinking that it was impossible for that man, accosted by death for so many years, to remain impassive at the bottom of the net in which he had been caught, as if calling for his own end. It wasn’t logical; it was almost incredible that, with his intelligence and his knowledge of the methods of his pursuers, he had believed that whole story about a Belgian deserter dedicated to doing no one knew exactly what business, who worked in a nonexistent office and met with a phantom boss, who said inappropriate things and committed errors en masse, or claimed to be a journalist and wrote an article full of banal remarks — a Belgian who, to top it off, while visiting indoors, forgot to remove his hat. Without looking into his eyes, he asked the Exile, “When can we see each other again?” The silence lasted for an agonizing amount of time. If the renegade said “Never,” his own life would be prolonged while Ramón Mercader would have an unpredictable future, without glory, without history, perhaps without too much time; if he gave the date, he would name the day and time of his death, and of Ramón’s almost certain death. But if he said “Never,” he also thought, the revolver could be the most expedient alternative: two shots for the old man, one for the woman, another for himself. The work would be done and there would be five bullets left over.

“I’m very busy. I don’t have time,” the condemned man said, and tipped the balance in his favor.

“Just a few minutes; you already know the article,” mumbled Ramón, and with that plea, both of their lives fell into a precarious balance.

The Exile took a few seconds to decide his fate, as if he had intuited the tremendous implication his words would have. His future murderer moved his right hand to his waist, resolved to take out the revolver.

“Tuesday. At five. Don’t do what you did today. .,” he said.

“No, sir,” Ramón murmured, and, without breathing, dragged Jacques Mornard to the garden, in search of the street and the fresh air his lungs, congested by desperation, clamored for. Death was in no hurry; it was taking three days to return by Ramón Mercader’s hand to the fortified house in Coyoacán.

Ramón would have to wait twenty-eight years to get the answers to the most worrying questions that, from that moment, had begun to take root in his mind. Throughout those years, lived in skins that became all the more outrageous, as befitting a creature born of deceit and the manipulation of feelings, he would always remember those seventy hours — the time period decreed by the condemned man — like a murky journey toward his fate, which had been placed in someone else’s hands ever since that predawn morning in the Sierra de Guadarrama, when Caridad made her request and he said yes.

That night, when exhaustion overcame him, he managed to sleep for a few hours without being attacked by nightmares. When he awoke, he saw Sylvia, seated at the vanity table, the black slip and her myopic glasses on, and prayed that the woman would not speak. He worried that his fear and rage would explode on that pathetic being whose life he had used. Since the previous afternoon, he had discovered that his hate, far from disappearing, in reality had multiplied and it could now expand in unforeseeable directions: he hated the world; he hated every single person he saw, with their lives (at least on the surface) ruled by their wills and decisions; and above all, he hated himself. When he returned from Coyoacán, he had gotten into an argument with a driver who tried to pass him. At the next intersection, when they were stopped at a red light, he got out of his car and, with the Star in his hand, completely worked up, had run up to the other car and pointed the barrel of the gun at the head of the trembling driver as he yelled insults, as if he needed to get out the explosive violence that was burning inside him. Now, upon remembering the scene, he felt a deep shame at the lack of control that could have ruined the work of three years.

“Order coffee; I’m going to work,” he said, and went to the bathroom. When he returned, breakfast was on the vanity table and he drank his coffee and lit the first of many cigarettes he would smoke that day. Sylvia looked at him, disconcerted, her eyes wet, and he warned her, “Don’t talk to me, I’m worried.”

“But, Jacques. .”

His eyes must have had such violence in them that the woman stepped away from him, crying, and shut herself up in the bathroom.

Ramón had decided not to see Tom or Caridad, at least on that day. With the article corrected by the renegade, he sat down in front of the portable typewriter that Tom had demanded he use and felt how much he hated Trotsky’s arrogance at marking the text with comments such as foolish! banal! unsustainable! as if he were rubbing his superior intelligence in his face.

Slowly, he tried to make a clean draft, changing just a few words. He knew that what he said was no longer important, or even how he said it, just that it have the appearance of being the result of revision, to obtain from the renegade the few minutes of attention that he needed. Nonetheless, his fingers trained to squeeze throats, hold weapons, wound and kill, got tangled in the keys, and forced him to rip up the pages and start again.

Sylvia came out of the bathroom completely dressed and, without talking, left the room. When Ramón managed to finish the first page, he felt exhausted, as if he had cut down an entire forest with an axe. He ate some crackers, drank the rest of the cold coffee, and threw himself on the bed, a fresh cigarette between his lips.

At some point, he fell asleep and awoke with a start when the door to the room opened. Sylvia Ageloff, thinner and more vulnerable than ever, was looking at him from the foot of the bed.

“My love, what’s wrong? Is it because of me? What did I do?”

“Don’t say such stupid things. I’m worried. Can’t I be worried? And can’t you shut up? Are you such an idiot you don’t understand what it means to shut. . up?”

Sylvia burst into tears and Jacques felt the desire to hit her. As he got dressed, he remembered África. How would it have been if she had been there with him in that difficult time? Would she have reinforced the conviction that was cracking? Would she have had the necessary power to remove him from that well of doubts, fears, misdirected hate? It only managed to shore him up to think that África, wherever she was, would surely tremble with pride when she knew that he was the one who would carry out the mission for which so many of the world’s Communists, including her, had been willing to give their lives. With that image in mind, he ran out onto the street and wandered until he exhausted himself. For the first time in three days he was hungry and entered a restaurant, where he ordered the Pátzcuaro fish and a glass of French white wine. Later he walked to the cathedral and looked at the beggars clustering in its porticos, like beings thrown away by the earth and the heavens. The night’s fresh air and the clear firmament managed to calm him down, and Ramón remembered the beach he had dreamed of a few nights before and wished he were on the sand, in front of the crystal sea of that cove.

When he returned to the hotel, Sylvia was sleeping. He turned on a light, sat down in front of the typewriter again, and at the end of two hours had the article ready that would return him to the fortress in Coyoacán.

Perhaps due to the long nap he had taken in the middle of the day, sleep didn’t come to him until past four in the morning. The hours of wakefulness turned into a maddening parade of visions about the execution that his brain was creating, uncontrollably. About what would happen afterward, by contrast, he had just one image: a dark void that he could only associate with his own death.

He woke up when the sun was rising and noticed his broken body was almost inert. He cursed time, which wasn’t moving, which seemed to have stopped at that torturous impasse, as if insistent on making him lose his mind. He dressed and went down to the hotel restaurant, where he drank coffee and smoked until eight o’clock and got into the Buick heading in the direction of Shirley Court.

Tom had just woken up, his eyes still puffy with sleep. He offered him coffee and Ramón refused: if he drank another cup, his heart would explode. Caridad came out of the bedroom wrapped in a robe and with her hair wet. While Tom was taking a shower, Caridad and Ramón sat in the living room, looking into each other’s eyes.

“I know they’re going to kill me,” he said. “I have no way to escape.”

“Don’t think like that. We’ll be waiting for you. You just have to get one foot out onto the street and we’ll take care of the rest. Under gunfire if necessary. .”

“Don’t say that to me again! You know it’s a lie, that everything is a lie.”

“We’ll be there, Ramón! How could you think that I’m going to abandon you?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“This is different.”

“Of course it is. I’m not going to get out of there alive.”

The door to the bedroom opened and Tom popped his head in, although Ramón could see his whole body, naked, and his pubis, covered in saffron-colored curls.

“Enough with the stupidities, dammit!”

Ramón and Caridad remained in silence until Tom returned dressed and took Ramón by the arm.

“Walk,” he demanded, and almost ripped him from the armchair.

They got into the dark green Chrysler and Tom headed for Reforma, toward Chapultepec. The morning was warm, but as they entered the forest, a cool, perfumed breeze came in through the car window. They left the car and walked until they found a fallen trunk on which they sat.

“Why didn’t you come to see me yesterday?”

“I didn’t want to see anyone.”

“You’re not going to have an attack of hysteria, are you?”

Ramón stayed silent.

“Tell me what happened.”

“We agreed I would come back tomorrow, Tuesday, at five.”

“I already know that. Give me the fucking details,” the adviser demanded, and with his eyes fixed on the grass he listened to Ramón’s story, which stuck to the facts and left out his thoughts.

Tom stood up and limped a couple steps.

“Suka! This fucking leg. . It cramps up every once in a while.” From his pocket he brought out the letter written three days before. “Sign it as ‘Jac,’ so it will be more confusing: Jacques, Jacson. . And date it tomorrow. When you have to talk about the letter, you say that you wrote it before entering the house and that you threw out the typewriter on the way. You have to get rid of it. .”

Ramón put the letter away and remained silent.

“Don’t you trust me anymore?” Tom asked him.

“I don’t know,” Ramón answered, in all honesty.

“Let’s see. As you can imagine, I’ve never told you the whole truth, because you can’t nor should you know it. For your own good and for that of other people. But everything I have told you is true. Everything we planned has come about in the way I’ve told you it would. Until today. And tomorrow, what we want to happen will happen. I never guaranteed you that you would escape from that house or that you would get out unscathed after killing the Duck. I talked to you about a historic mission and my responsibility to get you out of this country if you managed to get out of the house. You have my word that I will get you out, but if you don’t believe it, forget it and think of what’s necessary. The important thing is to kill that man and, if possible, to not fall into the hands of the police. My trust in you is infinite, but you’ve seen with your own eyes how the toughest men in the world, who seem to withstand everything, will confess to what they haven’t done. So the best thing would be for you to get out, because I can’t be completely sure of your silence. What I am sure of is that if you talk, your life will be worth less than a gob of spit,” he said, and spit on the grass. “And your mother’s life even less; and, it goes without saying, mine, who will be the first to have his head cut off. If you don’t talk, we will always be with you and guarantee you our support at all times, wherever you are. . It couldn’t be clearer.”

The young man looked at the forest, trying to process those words.

“I would like to be the Ramón I was three years ago, before the lies started,” he said, without realizing that he had begun to speak in Spanish. “I would like to enter that house tomorrow and smash the life of a renegade traitor and be sure that I’m doing it for the cause. Now I don’t know the difference between the cause and lies.”

Tom lit a cigarette and focused on the blades of grass he was moving with a stick. When he spoke, he continued to do so in French.

“Truth and lies are too relative, and in this work that you and I do, there’s no border between the two. This is a dark war and the only truth that matters is that you follow orders. It’s all the same if, to get to that moment, we climb a mountain of lies or truths.”

“That’s cynical.”

“Perhaps. . Do you want a truth? I’ll remind you of one: the truth is that the Duck is a threat to the Soviet Union right now. We are at a point in which everything that is not with Stalin is in favor of Hitler, without any in between. What do a few lies matter if they save our great truth?”

Ramón stood up. Tom discovered that the fear and doubts had made an obvious mark on his pupil’s soul. But he was certain that Ramón had understood the essence of his situation: there was no turning back for him.

“What you told me about África, that thing about me being soft. . Did she tell you that?”

Tom dropped the stick he was moving around in the dirt.

“África is a fanatic, a machine, not a woman. Don’t you realize that a person like that cannot love anyone? For her, everything is a fucking competition to see who says more slogans. And if that crazy woman ever thought you were soft, now she’s going to know how wrong she was. .”

Ramón felt the effect of those words. His muscles relaxed.

“Kid, go to your hotel, eat something, try to sleep. Think only that you’re going to leave that house alive and that once you get to Moscow you’ll be a hero. . I’ll take care of the rest. We’re going to take you to Santiago de Cuba. I wanted to get you out to Guatemala, but Caridad wants to go with you to Santiago, because she hasn’t been back since they took her to Spain. She tells a whole story about how her father was the first one to free the black slaves.”

“Another tall tale,” Ramón said, and nearly smiled. Tom shook his head, smiling. “My grandparents were shameless exploiters and that’s how they got so rich. . When will we see each other again?”

“I have to arrange a lot of things. I hope we’ll see each other tomorrow when you finish your work at the Duck’s house. Incidentally, do you know what you’re going to be called when you leave there? Juan Pérez González. Original, right?”

Ramón didn’t answer. Tom stood up and, in silence, they went down to where the Chrysler was parked. The adviser drove to the city center, his eyes fixed on the road. When they entered the parking lot of Shirley Court, he looked for the Buick and stopped next to it.

“I worked with you the best I could. I have taken you to the door of the most protected man on earth and I’ve shown you that it’s possible to do it. Now everything is left to you, and the rest depends on luck. That’s why I wish you all the luck in the world. We’ll see you tomorrow when you leave the house. . Incidentally, Caridad says that the best rum in the world is in Santiago de Cuba and that her grandfather, the one who freed the slaves, was a business associate of the first Bacardis. I hope the three of us together can confirm it. The thing about the rum, of course.”

Ramón recalled the conversation he had had with his mother a few days before. He then asked himself if Tom had ordered Caridad to tell that sordid story from which, if it was true, the hate marking their lives was born.

“We’ll see each other tomorrow,” he said, and when he went to get out of the car, he felt Tom’s hand clutching his arm. The adviser leaned toward him and Ramón let himself be kissed on both cheeks, and finally he felt the man’s lips on his own. Tom released him and patted his shoulder.

Ramón Mercader had to wait twenty-eight years to get another kiss from the man who had led him to the shore of history.

Sylvia insisted that they go to the hospital. Jacques took two more painkillers and, with a damp handkerchief over his eyes, leaned his head on the pillow and begged her to leave him alone. The tiredness, the pain, and, at last, the relief brought by the pills plunged him into sleep, and when he awoke the following morning, he didn’t know where or who he was. The hotel room, Sylvia, the typewriter on which he had placed the pages of the article, brought him back to reality and into the soul of Jacques Mornard.

He took a long shower and, despite his lack of appetite, managed to ingest the café au lait, fresh bread smeared with butter and strawberry jam, and a strip of fried bacon. He drank coffee and got dressed. Sylvia watched him the whole time, like a little scared animal, without daring to speak. The woman stopped hesitating when she saw him take his hat.

“Dear, I—”

“I’m going to the office to see what those damned construction workers are doing.”

“What time are we meeting Jake Cooper and his wife?”

“At seven.”

“Where are you thinking of taking them? Wouldn’t you like to go to Xochimilco?”

“It’s not a bad idea,” he said. “Oh, I had forgotten. . Tomorrow we have to travel to New York.”

“But—”

“Pack our bags. In New York, I’ll go back to my usual self. I think the altitude and the food in this inferno of a country are making me sick. .” And he got closer to Sylvia. He kissed her on the lips, just brushing them, but the woman couldn’t contain herself and embraced him.

“Dear, dear. . I don’t like to see you like this.”

“Neither do I. That’s why we’re leaving tomorrow. Will you let go of me, please?”

She loosened her arms and Jacques Mornard stepped back. He took the typed pages and the portable typewriter. He observed Sylvia Ageloff, her scared-bird face, and remembered the carefree days in Paris, when everything seemed like a game of hunters and gazelles, of cold calculations that set off multicolored lights when they fitted in the predetermined places, while they went on giving shape to a story that, step-by-step, led him to a heroic climax. Without knowing why, he then said:

“At twelve I’ll pick you up and we’ll go eat something.”

There were eight hours left until his meeting with the condemned man. What would he do until five in the afternoon, the moment set to kill a man called Lev Davidovich Trotsky? He drove the Buick to the outskirts of the city and thought of África again and, for the first time in many months, of his daughter, Lenina, of whose life and fate he had never received any news. She must be six years old already and perhaps was still in Spain, without the least idea who her father was. What would it have been like to live with his daughter? The damned fascists and the blasted war had cut off that possibility.

He drove in the direction of the tourist complex where he had lived for several months. He looked for the path on which he had hidden the ice axe and stopped his car next to the porous rocks. He opened his trunk, took out the typewriter and the envelope in which he kept the letter written by Tom. He sat down in the shade of the tree and began to read it. He couldn’t concentrate: each word led him to lost memories, the singing of the birds bothered him, even the murmur of the nearby stream — and because of that he had to go back over the text several times until he felt that, like other lies, he could also absorb these, inject them into his blood and take them out of his brain at will. Next to him, the cigarette butts piled up and his stomach had turned into a boiling cauldron. Fortunately, the headache that had irritated him so much was gone.

He recited the letter from memory and replayed in his mind, with utmost care, the chain of actions he would have to execute that afternoon. His victim’s skull and thinning hair were the point he always reached; then he got lost in confusion. In reality, he didn’t even know if he would try to escape. He feared that his legs wouldn’t respond and that, if he managed to get to the yard, he would give himself away with his confusion. What most bothered him was not being able to clearly discern his feelings, since he was convinced that it would not be a normal fear that could paralyze him or induce him to betray himself by running. It was a new and sharper fear that grew within him, a terror over the certainty of having lost it all, not just his name and control over his own decisions but the solidity of his faith, his only support. And cursed time wasn’t moving. .

Ramón would always remember the end of that morning and the beginning of the afternoon of August 20, 1940, those agonizing and turbid hours. The entire arsenal of psychological resources they had armed him with in Malakhovka had become jammed in his mind and the only thing that remained of his training was the hate — but no longer the central and basic hate they had instilled in him; rather, it was one that was getting all the more dispersed and difficult to control, a complete hate bigger than himself, visceral and all-consuming. Close to one o’clock he remembered that he had made plans with Sylvia. He knew that a strange anticipation had led him to arrange that meeting. If he didn’t want to go crazy, he needed to fill his time, and Sylvia could once again be useful. He stood up and beat the typing machine against the rocks, threw its fragments toward the stream and returned to the car.

Sylvia was waiting for him at the door of the hotel, in the company of Jake Cooper and the woman who had to be his wife, a young woman so blond she seemed yellow. Ramón would always think that he had never managed to exercise greater self-control than during the conversation he maintained for a few minutes with Jake, Jenny, and Sylvia. After introducing his wife, Cooper explained that he had coincidentally walked by and seen Sylvia. Ramón would remember vaguely that he had smiled, perhaps even made a joke, and confirmed the date they had that night at seven. He bid them goodbye and went with Sylvia to the Don Quijote restaurant at the Regis Hotel, where they served Spanish food. As soon as he ordered, he lit a cigarette, told the woman his head hurt, and fell silent.

Sylvia told him something relating to Cooper and his wife, talked about some people she had to visit in New York, and told him that, before leaving, she would like to say goodbye to Lev Davidovich. Jacques, who could barely taste the food (he would never be able to remember what they had served him, only that he could barely swallow), told her he would pick her up at five so that they could stop by the house in Coyoacán for a few minutes. Then he felt an urgent need to be alone. He calculated that in less than three hours he would kill a man. He took out some bills and handed them to the woman.

“You pay. I have to go get the plane tickets,” he said, and drained his glass of water. He stood up and looked at Sylvia Ageloff. At that moment Ramón noticed a warm feeling of relief running through him. He leaned over and pressed the woman’s lips with his own. She tried to take his hand, but he avoided it with a rapid gesture. Sylvia had carried out her last function and wasn’t worth anything anymore. Sylvia Ageloff belonged to the past.

At four in the afternoon, tormented by a persistent beating in his temples and sweating that came and went, he decided it was time to put an end to his agony. He left the movie theater, where he had spent almost two hours thinking and smoking, and returned to the car. He took the raincoat from the trunk, adjusted the Star at his waist, and confirmed that the other weapons were in their place. He placed the pages of the article in the outside pocket and put away the letter in the summer sportcoat he had chosen that morning. With the raincoat on the passenger seat, he drove, paying as much attention as he was able to, convinced that he had more than enough time to get to Coyoacán. When he passed in front of the small stone chapel, he was tempted to stop and enter it. It was a fleeting idea, arising from the most remote area of his unconscious, and he discarded it immediately. God had nothing to do with his story; besides, he wasn’t fortunate enough to believe in a God. He no longer believed in many things.

It was eight minutes to five when he turned down Morelos and made a half turn onto Avenida Viena before stopping the car in front of the house, pointing it again toward the Mexico highway. He put his hand in the pocket of his jacket and took out the letter, wrote the date on the first page — August 20, 1940—and his signature—Jac—on the last one. He folded the papers and pressed his temples, ready to burst, and repeated twice that he was Jacques Mornard. He took a deep breath, put the letter in his pocket, dried the sweat off his forehead, and got out of the car. Charles Cornell, the guard on duty in a tower, greeted him, and he tried to smile at him while making a gesture with his hand. The Mexican policeman posted next to the bulletproof door gave him a nod, but he didn’t deign to respond. The door’s mechanism activated and Harold Robbins, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, shook his hand. When Robbins let him pass, Ramón remembered something. He took one step back and looked out to the right side of the street. About 150 yards away, he saw a dark green Chrysler, although he couldn’t make out its occupants.

“Mr. Trotsky is expecting me,” he said to Robbins.

Jacques arranged the raincoat over his left arm again, searching for a balance between the length of the fabric and the weight of the weapons.

“I already know. . He’s at the rabbit cages,” Robbins said, and pointed to where the Exile, his head covered with a straw hat, was tending to the animals.

“Sylvia and I are leaving for New York tomorrow.”

“Business?” Robbins asked.

“That’s right,” Jacques said, and Robbins returned to the door.

Ramón looked at the yard. He could see only the figures of the Duck and Azteca the dog. He walked toward them slowly.

“Good afternoon.”

The old man didn’t turn around. He had just placed the fresh grass in the metal basket of one of the compartments.

“I’ve brought the article,” he said, taking the typed pages from his raincoat pocket and holding them out as if they were a safe-conduct pass.

“Yes, of course. . Let me finish,” the condemned man asked.

Jacques Mornard took a few steps toward the center of the yard. He was overcome by dizziness and thought of sitting on the iron bench. At that moment Natalia Sedova came out of the kitchen and walked over to him. At the door’s threshold, Jacques saw Joe Hansen, who waved at him and went back into the house.

“Good afternoon, Madame Natalia.”

“To what do we owe you coming around here again?”

“The article, don’t you remember?” he said, and immediately added: “Tomorrow, we’re going to New York.”

Azteca had gotten close to him and he looked at the dog as if he couldn’t see him. His stomach was in flames; he was sweating again; he feared losing his concentration.

“If you had told me before, I would’ve given you correspondence for some friends,” the woman said sadly.

“I can come back tomorrow morning.”

Natalia thought about it for a moment.

“No, don’t worry. . So you brought the article?”

“Yes,” he said, and handed it to the woman.

“At least it’s typed. Lev Davidovich doesn’t like to read things that are handwritten,” she said, and pointed at the raincoat. “Why are you carrying that around?”

“I thought it was going to rain. Here the weather changes in just a few minutes. .”

“In Coyoacán, it has been sunny and hot all day. You’re sweating.”

“I don’t feel very well. My lunch didn’t agree with me.”

“Do you want a cup of tea?”

“No, I still have food at the top of my stomach. It’s suffocating me. But I would love a little water.”

The condemned man had come closer and heard the end of the conversation.

“I’ll go get the water,” Natalia said, and returned to the house.

Jacques turned to the old man.

“It’s the altitude and the spices. They’re going to kill me.”

“You have to take care of your health, Jacson,” the Exile said, taking off his gloves. “You don’t look very well. .”

“That’s why we’re going to New York: to see a good doctor.”

“A sick stomach can be a curse; I’m telling you because I did mine in by mistreating it for so many years.”

The renegade slapped his legs so that Azteca would come over to him. The dog stood up and put his front feet on the old man’s thighs. He patted the animal with both hands below his ears.

“Sylvia is about to arrive. She’s coming to say goodbye.”

“Little Sylvia is very confused,” the Exile said as he cleaned his glasses with the edge of the light blue shirt he was wearing.

Natalia Sedova returned with a glass of water, placed on a small plate, and Jacques thanked her and drank two sips.

“Let’s see this famous article,” the renegade said, and without further ado he walked to the dining room entrance but stopped, and Jacques almost bumped into him. He addressed his wife in Russian: “Natasha, why don’t you invite them for dinner? They’re leaving tomorrow.”

“I don’t think he’ll want to eat,” she answered, also in Russian. “Look at his face: he’s practically green.”

“He should have had some tea,” the man said, now in French, and resumed walking.

Jacques followed him to his workroom. When they passed the dining room, he saw the table set for dinner, and it seemed an incongruous image. When he entered the office, he saw that the dictaphone had been moved to the side of the desk; in its place before the renegade’s chair were a dozen books, all of them thick and dull looking. The window to the garden was open, as on the previous occasion, and he could see the plants, beaten by the sun, still strong at that hour of the afternoon. The condemned man again cleaned the lenses of his spectacles and, as if he were annoyed, held them up to the light. Finally he moved his chair and Jacques handed him the pages. The man pulled toward him the folder on the desk labeled with Cyrillic characters, perhaps to use it to lean on.

“Do those letters mean ‘Private’?” Jacques asked, without knowing why.

“Do you know Russian?” the Exile asked.

“No. . but. .”

“They are some notes. A kind of diary that I write when I can. .”

“And does it say anything about me?”

The condemned man sat down and said:

“It’s possible.”

Ramón asked himself what that man could say about a man like Jacques Mornard, and he realized that he was worrying too much about something insignificant. Even though the conversation had served to definitively displace Jacques and his mind was now occupied only by Ramón, for a few seconds he had almost forgotten his mission. Nonetheless, a piercing desire to read those papers made him think of the possibility of taking them with him when he escaped: it would be like reaching the ultimate degree of perfection to appropriate the body and also the soul of his victim.

Ramón Mercader regained control when, from his position, he again saw the head, the white skin under the sparse hair that, he thought fleetingly, always seemed to need a trim at the bottom. Almost without realizing it, his mind began to work automatically, with simple reasoning, leading to just one purpose; no matter how hard he tried, for many years he could not remember having thought of anything but the mechanics designed to place him behind the seated man. He would not even remember if the beating in his temples or the shortness of breath were bothering him at that moment. Days later, he would start to recover the details and even believed he had embraced, at some moment, the dream of escaping and saving himself. Perhaps he also thought of África and her inability to love. Perhaps about the tumultuous way, in a matter of seconds, he was going to enter history. If it was not a trick of his memory, the image of a beach where two dogs and a boy were running passed through his head. In contrast, he would always remember with shocking clarity the feeling of freedom that began to run through him when he saw the renegade prepare himself to read those typed pages. He noticed how a kind of weightlessness invaded his body and his mind. No, his temples weren’t beating anymore; he wasn’t sweating anymore. Then he tried to recover the hate that that head had to provoke in him and enumerated the reasons he was there, a few inches away from it: the head of the revolution’s greatest enemy, of the most cynical danger threatening the working class; the head of a traitor, a renegade, a terrorist, a reactionary, a fascist. That head held the mind of the man who had violated all the principles of revolutionary ethics and deserved to die, with a nail in the head, like an animal at the slaughterhouse. The condemned man was reading and, once again, he was crossing out, crossing out, crossing out, with brusque and annoyed gestures. How dare he? Ramón Mercader took out the ice axe. He sensed it hot and exact in his hand. Without taking his eyes off the victim’s head, he placed the raincoat on the low shelves behind him, next to the globe, which tottered and was about to fall. Ramón noticed that his hands were again bathed in sweat, his forehead was burning, but he convinced himself that to end that torture he just needed to lift the metallic spike. He observed the exact spot where he would hit him. One blow and everything would be over. He would be free again: essentially free. Even if the bodyguards killed him, he thought, his freedom would be absolute. Why hadn’t he hit him already? Was he afraid? he asked himself. Was he expecting something to happen that would prevent him from doing it? That a guard would enter, that Natalia Sedova would come in, that the old man would turn around? But no one came, the globe didn’t fall, the ice axe didn’t slip out of his sweaty hand, and the old man didn’t turn around at that moment — but, in French, he said something definitive:

“This is garbage, Jacson,” and he crossed the page with his pencil, from right to left, from left to right.

At that moment Ramón Mercader felt that his victim had given him the order. He lifted his right arm, brought it well behind his head, squeezed the trimmed grip forcefully, and closed his eyes. He couldn’t see, at the last instant, that the condemned man, with the typed pages in his hand, turned his head and had just enough time to discover Jacques Mornard while he was bringing down the ice axe with all of his might in search of the center of his skull.

The cry of horror and pain shook the foundations of that useless fortress on Avenida Viena.

28

I don’t know at exactly what moment I started to think about that; I don’t know if I already had it in my head at the time that I met the man who loved dogs, although I suppose that it must have been afterward. What I am very sure of is that, for years, I was obsessed (it sounds a little exaggerated, but that is the word and, moreover, it is the truth) with being able to determine the exact moment at which the twentieth century would conclude and, with it, the second millennium of the Christian era. Of course, that would in turn determine the moment that would start off the twenty-first century and, also, the third millennium. In my calculations (I always counted by the age) I would be — fifty or fifty-one? — upon the awakening of the new century, according to the date on which the end of the previous one was established — in the year 1999 or in 2000? Although for many the crossroads of the centuries would only be a change of dates and diaries among other, more arduous concerns, I insisted on seeing it another way, because at some moment in the terrible preceding years, I began to expect that that leap in time, as arbitrary as any human convention, would also propitiate a radical turn in my life. Then, against the logic of the Gregorian calendar, which closes its cycles in years with zeros, I accepted, as part of a convention and like many people in the world, that December 31, 1999—soon after my fiftieth birthday — would be the last day of the century and the millennium. As the date approached, I was excited to know that computer programmers around the globe had worked for years to avoid the computer chaos that the radical alteration of numbers could produce that day, and that the French had placed an enormous clock on the Eiffel Tower counting down the days, the hours, and the minutes to the Great Leap.

That’s why I took it as a personal affront that, when the date arrived, in Cuba a more logical calculation was made and it was decided, more or less officially and without appeal, that the end of the century would be December 31 of the year 2000 and not the last day of 1999, as the majority thought and wanted. Because of that almost state decree, while the world celebrated the (supposed) arrival of the third millennium and the twenty-first century with great fanfare, on the island we bid the year farewell and greeted the newly arrived one like any other, with the usual anthems and political speeches. After having dreamed for so long of the emergence of that date, I felt that they had swindled me of my excitement and anxiety, and I even refused to watch the brief news flashes on television of the celebrations that, in Tokyo, Madrid, or next to the Eiffel Tower, were greeting the perfect four-figured sign on the historic clocks. My malaise lasted for several months, and when, on December 31, 2000, some Cuban newspaper announced without much interest that the world was truly and Gregorianly arriving at the new millennium, it barely surprised me that no one could be bothered to celebrate what almost all of humanity had already feted. At that moment, I knew all too well that, besides some shitty numbers, nothing would change. And if it did change, it would be for the worst.

I bring up this episode that for many would be insignificant and seemingly removed from what I am telling, because it seems to me that it captures the perfect metaphor: at this moment, I don’t think there are many people who will deny that history and life have treacherously shown no mercy to us, to my generation, and, above all, to our dreams and individual wills, subjected to the straitjacket of decisions that were impossible to appeal. The promises that had fed us in our youth and filled us with faith, participative romanticism, and a spirit of sacrifice turned to salt and water as we were besieged by poverty, exhaustion, confusion, disillusionment, failures, escapes, and upheaval. I’m not exaggerating if I say that we have traversed almost all the possible phases of poverty. But we have also witnessed the dispersal of our most resolved or most desperate friends, who took the route of exile in search of a less uncertain personal fate, which wasn’t always so. Many of them knew what it meant to be uprooted and the risks of chronic nostalgia that they were throwing themselves into, how many sacrifices and daily concerns they would be subject to, but decided to take on the challenge and set forth for Miami, Mexico, Paris, or Madrid, where they arduously began to rebuild their lives at an age at which, in general, they are already built. The ones who, out of conviction, a spirit of resistance, the need to belong, or simple stubbornness, apathy, or fear of the unknown, chose to stay, more than reconstruct anything, dedicated ourselves to awaiting the arrival of better times while we tried to erect stanchions to avoid collapse (in my case, living between stanchions has not been a metaphor but rather the daily reality of my little room in Lawton). At that point at which life’s compasses go mad and all expectations are lost, so too are all our sacrifices, obediences, deceits, blind beliefs, forgotten slogans, atheisms and cynicisms more or less conscious, more or less induced, and, above all, our battered expectations of the future. Despite that tribal destiny in which I include my own, many times I’ve asked myself whether I have not been specially chosen by that son of a bitch providence: if in the end I haven’t ended up being something like a branded goat designated to receive as many kicks as possible. Because I received the ones that were due to me generationally and historically and also the ones that they gave me cruelly and treacherously in order to sink me and, in passing, to show me that I would never have peace or calm. Because of this, in what was perhaps the best period of my adult life, when I began my relationship with Ana, I fell in love completely for the first time and, thanks to her, I regained the desire and the courage to sit down and write until my wife’s illness began to worsen, crushing any hope I had left. And on December 31, 1999, when they told us that the day of the great change I had been dreaming of for so long would not change anything, not even the disgusting century in which we had been born, I saw the bluebird of my last hope fly out the window of the little apartment in Lawton — an insignificant bird, but one I had raised with care and that the winds of high decisions were taking from my hands. Because the authorities had not even allowed me that innocuous dream.

At the end of the 1990s, life in the country had begun to regain a certain normality, lost during the hardest years of the crisis. But while that new normality returned, it became clear that something very important had come undone along the way and that we were in a strange spiral in which the rules of the game had changed. From that moment on, it would no longer be possible to live on the few pesos of the official salaries, the times of equitable and generalized poverty as a social achievement had ended, and what was starting was what my son Paolo, with a sense of reality that superseded mine, would define as every man for himself (and which he, like many of the children of my generation, applied to his life in the only way within his reach: by leaving the country). There were people like Dany who, relying on cynicism and a better spirit of survival, had more or less managed to adapt themselves to the new reality. He had left his job at the publishing house and bagged all of his literary dreams and now earned much more money as a hired driver of the 1954 Pontiac that he had inherited from his father. Besides, his wife had an attractive job at a Spanish company (where they paid some dollars under the table and gave out a couple of bags of food twice a month) and they lived with some comfort. But the ones who didn’t have anything to hold on to or anywhere to steal from (Ana and I, among many others) began to see things for ourselves as even darker than in the years of the endless blackouts and the breakfasts composed of orange-leaf teas. With Ana retiring early and with my demonstrated incapacity for practical life, the rope we had around our necks did nothing but get tighter, until it had us continuously on the verge of suffocating, from which we were saved only by the gifts that the owners of dogs and cats presented to me for my services and the additional pesos that the pig breeders gave me as payment for the castrations, worm removal, and other jobs for which I charged the ridiculous price of “give me what you want.” But it was clear that we had fallen to the bottom of an atrophied social scale where intelligence, decency, knowledge, and capacity for work gave way before craftiness, proximity to the dollar, political placement, being the son, nephew, or cousin of Someone, the art of making do, inventing, increasing, escaping, pretending, stealing everything that could be stolen. And cynicism, bastard cynicism.

I knew then that for many in my generation it wasn’t going to be possible to come out of that mortal leap unscathed without a safety net: we were the gullible generation; the one made up of those who romantically accept and justify everything with our sights on the future; the ones who cut sugarcane convinced that we should cut it (and, of course, without charging for that infamous work); the ones who went to war because the proletariat and internationalism required it, and we went without expecting any recompense except for the gratitude of Humanity and History; we were the generation that suffered and resisted the ravages of sexual, religious, ideological, cultural, and even alcoholic intransigence with just a nod of the head and many times without filling up with the resentment or the desperation that leads to flight — that desperation that now opened the eyes of the younger ones and led them to opt for escape before they even got their first kick in the ass. We had grown up seeing (that’s how myopic we were) in each Soviet, Bulgarian, or Czechoslovakian a sincere friend — as Martí said — a proletarian brother, and we had lived under the motto, repeated so many times on school mornings, that the future of humanity belonged completely to socialism (to that socialism that, if anything, had only seemed to us a little ugly aesthetically — only aesthetically grotesque — and incapable of creating, shall we say, a song half as good as “Rocket Man,” or three times less lovely than “Dedicated to the One I Love”; my friend and buddy Mario Conde would put Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” on the list). We went through life removed, in the most hermetic way, from the knowledge of the betrayals that, like that of Republican Spain or invaded Poland, had been committed in the name of that same socialism. We didn’t know anything about the repressions and genocides of peoples, ethnicities, entire political parties, of the mortal persecutions of nonconformists and religious people, of the homicidal fury of the work camps, and the credulity before, during, and after the Moscow trials. Nor did we have the faintest idea of who Trotsky was or why they had killed him, or of the infamous subterranean and even the evident agreements of the USSR with Nazism and imperialism, of the conquering violence of the new Muscovite czars, of the invasions and geographic, human, and cultural mutilations of the acquired territories and of the prostitution of ideas and truths, turned into nauseating slogans by that model socialism, patented and led by the genius of the Great Guide of the World Proletariat, Comrade Stalin, and later patched up by his heirs, defenders of a rigid orthodoxy with which they condemned the smallest deviation from the canon that sustained their excesses and megalomania. Now, with great difficulty, we managed to understand how and why all of that perfection had collapsed like a giant meringue when only two of the bricks of the fortress were moved, a minimal access to information and a slight but decisive loss of fear (always that infamous fear, always, always, always) with which that structure had been glued together. Two bricks and it came down. The giant had feet made of clay and had only sustained itself thanks to terror and lies. . Trotsky’s prophecies ended up coming true and Orwell’s futurist and imaginative fable 1984 ended up turning into a starkly realistic novel. And there we were, not knowing anything. . or is it that we didn’t want to know?

Was it pure coincidence or did he consciously pick that horrid night of 1996, after almost twenty years? In the afternoon, a storm of rain and thunder had been unleashed that seemed to announce Armageddon, and when night and the blackout came, there was still a cold and persistent drizzle falling. Because of that, when he knocked at the door, I supposed it was someone pressed to have their animal looked at and, lamenting my luck, went to open the door with one of those little kerosene lanterns in my hand.

And there he was. Despite the time, the darkness, the fact that he had gone completely bald and that he was the person I least expected to find at the door of my house, I recognized the tall, thin black man at first sight and immediately had a very strong certainty that, throughout all those years, he had been watching me in the shadows.

Faced with my silence, the black man said good evening and asked me if we could talk. Of course, I invited him to come inside. Ana was with Tato in the room, trying to listen to a soap opera through the modulated frequency band of our battery-operated radio, and I shouted to her not to worry, I would take care of our guest. With my usual clumsiness, augmented by my surprise, I told the man to be careful with the bowls placed around the room to collect the rain that leaked from the ceiling and I asked him to sit down on one of the iron chairs. After settling in the other chair, I stood up again and asked him if he wanted to drink some coffee.

“Thank you, no. But if you would give me a little bit of water. .”

I served him a glass. The black man thanked me again, but he drank only a couple of sips and left the glass on the table. Despite the half-light, barely broken by the lantern’s flame, I noticed that in those minutes he had studied the apartment’s atmosphere, as if he needed to formulate an overall opinion about who I was or look for a way to escape in the face of any dangerous situation. Since the black man was thinner, older, without a hair on his head, in the scarce light of the lantern, his face looked like a dark skull — a voice from beyond the grave, I thought.

“Compañero López asked me to come see you sometime,” he began, as if it was taking a lot of effort to get started. “So here I am.”

You took some time to come, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut. Coming out of the shadows and the past, he would only tell me what he decided to tell me, so it wasn’t worth the trouble of trying to force any specific conversation.

“Did you receive Luis Mercader’s book? At the post office, they guaranteed that if you didn’t receive it, they would return it to me.”

“So how did you know my address?”

“You know that here everything is known,” he said, elusive. And without further ado, as if he were repeating a libretto he had studied for a long time, he explained that in 1976 he was working as a driver for an army leader. One day they called him and told him that, since his superior was being sent to the war in Angola and he was a man of complete confidence, a party militant, a veteran of the clandestine struggle, they were going to entrust him with a special mission, that of driving and to a certain extent taking care of Jaime López, an officer of the Spanish Republican army living in Cuba whom doctors had prohibited from driving his car. They also warned him that in that job he should keep his mouth shut — with everyone. And they asked him if he saw anything strange around the man, he should inform them immediately, and they specified that, when it came to that Spaniard, anything could be strange. .

When he began to work with López, there were already other compañeros tasked with taking care of him, of taking him to a special clinic and even of driving him when he went to certain meetings or very specific visits. They never told the black man who López was and, of course, he hadn’t dared to ask, although from the beginning he assumed that with so many people around him dedicated to his care (and to keep watch on him? he wondered), he thought he couldn’t be just any López. . Almost two years later, when the man was already doing very poorly and some nephews and, later, his brother showed up in Cuba, he learned at last that Jaime López was Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río. Since he had never in his life heard anyone talk about Ramón Mercader and almost nothing about Trotsky, and since he couldn’t ask anyone anything that had to do with that man, he realized that he was involved in something too big for a simple driver, no matter how much of a party militant or army veteran he was. And if they had told him he had to keep quiet, he knew that the best thing was to keep quiet.

The tall, thin black man confirmed for me that Jaime Ramón López had traveled to Cuba in 1974. Although he didn’t know it at the time, he would later come to be certain that they had opened the Soviet cage and allowed Mercader to come to the socialist island, the birthplace of his ancestors, because death had already marked him. Just when the arrangements for his trip were being finalized, suddenly the first flare-up of the strange illness had come up. The doctors at Moscow’s most select clinic, where they treated the Kremlin’s highest in command, diagnosed a hemorrhage caused by a pulmonary infection. Ramón, who until that moment had possessed a constitution capable of resisting twenty years of prison and its attendant horrors, spent three months at the hospital. Later, even when the diagnosis was favorable, he felt that something inside him had come undone. From that moment on, despite the temporary improvements, his body would never again respond to him the same way and he would live until his death with those dizzy spells, intermittent fevers, headaches and sore throats, and a permanent difficulty in breathing. But he still did not know that in reality he had a cancer that would end up corroding his bones and his brain.

“They had run thousands of tests on him,” the black man said to me, and in his voice I seemed to notice a touch of sadness. “I don’t even know how many analyses, encephalograms, X-rays, without finding anything. But when the Cuban oncologists finally saw him, they immediately diagnosed cancer. . Doesn’t it seem strange?”

“Luis Mercader says that Eitingon was sure that in Moscow they had poisoned his blood with radioactivity. With the gold watch that his comrades from the KGB gave him. . Activated thallium.”

“Yes, that’s precisely why I’m telling you it’s strange.”

“But I don’t believe it,” I said. “If they had wanted to kill him, they would’ve killed him and that’s that. They had lots of time and opportunity.”

“Yes, that’s also true.” He nodded and almost seemed relieved to accept the possibility. “Well, the doctors found the cancer at the beginning of 1978, after he had spent a few months in bed because the dizzy spells barely let him walk. When that crisis began, he said that it was all because of the pain it caused him to sacrifice his dog, Dax, the male, remember? Because of those dizzy spells, he couldn’t go see you as he had arranged. And a few weeks later, when he didn’t know if he would ever be able to go back outside, he began to write those papers I sent to you years ago, until he couldn’t write anymore, almost couldn’t even move. . The poor man was screaming like a madman at the end because of the headaches, and every time he moved, he could break a bone. Morphine kept him alive until October.”

“Just hearing about it gives me pain,” I commented.

“You don’t know anything about pain. . The worst thing about it was that he never lost his lucidity. In August he was so bad that his brother Luis came to be with him when he died. But Luis had to leave at the end of September because the Soviet permit that, after much struggle, authorized him to return to Spain with his wife, was expiring. Two weeks after his brother left, Ramón received a letter from him: he was in Barcelona already. . I heard him say that he was going to die with the satisfaction of knowing that at least one person from the family had managed to return. .”

“So he had asked to come to Cuba?”

“It appears so. It’s not like he had too much to pick from. . On the one hand, the Soviets didn’t want to release him, and on the other, it wasn’t easy for someone to decide to take him. Of course, no one wanted him. . I think that coming here was the only alternative. I don’t know how all of this was negotiated, but the condition for him to live here was that he live incognito. Despite that, some people recognized him, but the majority of people who were close to him — almost all of us who tended to him when he was sick and even visited his house, his children’s friends, the doctors — we didn’t know who compañero López was in reality. I found out because of the level of trust we came to have. Because I was with him until the end. .”

At that moment, I felt that an old and dormant fear was waking in some part of my memory, and I dared to ask him: “And you didn’t tell your bosses that López was seeing me? Wasn’t I one of those ‘strange’ things?”

That was the only time the whole night that the black man smiled.

“No, I didn’t have time to inform. The first time you saw each other, I think you met by coincidence, and I didn’t think much of it. The second time, after you talked, he asked me not to say anything so that you wouldn’t be scared away and he could talk to you. Seems as though he liked you, no?”

“I think something else, but it doesn’t matter. . So the nurse. .?”

“She’s my sister. She did me the favor. . The poor woman, now she’s very ill, she’s going to die at any moment. . The problem is that López had tasked me with giving you those papers, but I didn’t dare come. . Although I didn’t make any report, they learned that you were seeing each other and I imagine they were watching you a little bit and. .”

In another time, that news would have paralyzed me, but in 1996 it seemed folkloric, even comical because it had been a while since I’d crossed over the borders of nothing and almost reached invisibility. That was why I was more interested in knowing what that man thought and felt than trying to understand what was meant by “watching you a little bit.”

“And now. . why did you decide to come now, after so many years?”

The tall, thin black man looked at me and I knew I had stepped on a landmine. By what I could see of his face, I realized that he was deciding whether he should stand up and leave my house. Later I thought of the motives for which, at the end of so much time, that man dared to disobey a mandate that perhaps no one remembered and fulfill the promise of coming to see me. Maybe he was dying, like his sister, and he decided that it no longer mattered what could happen to him. Or because things had changed so much, and he was less fearful. Perhaps he dared because, after reading Luis’s book, he understood that it didn’t matter too much if he told me something, since I could get my hands on the information in other ways. . Or he simply decided because he thought it was his duty to tell me after having promised a dying man: it seemed that someone, for once, had done something normal in this whole story. .

“Do you think I was a coward?”

I tried to smile before responding.

“No, of course not. I was the one who was shitting myself with fear. And that’s even when I wasn’t sure that they were watching me ‘a little bit’. .”

But my response didn’t satisfy him, because he continued with his interrogation.

“Why do you think Luis waited almost fifteen years to write the book? He was already living in Spain. Who could he have been afraid of?” he asked me, maintaining the same timbre, the same intonation, as if he were playing a fixed dramatic role in that frame of mind. “Why did Luis wait until the Soviet Union and the KGB and everything hanging on it disappeared?”

“Out of fear,” I answered, and then I did what I could to look into his eyes when I asked: “So why did you put the book in the mail to me? Nobody asked you to. .”

“When I read it, it seemed that if there was someone who had to read it, it was you. Especially because Mercader was dead and you didn’t know it. But also to give you an idea of what fear is, how great and long it can be. .”

“You’re telling me all this because you read López’s letter, right? So tell me, why does it end like that?”

The black man thought again. And he decided to answer me.

“Because López — I mean, Mercader — couldn’t write anymore. In April, when they discovered the cancer in his glands, they sent him for radiation, but it had already spread. In June or July, he was so fucked up that he broke an arm when he went to lift a glass of water. His bones started to shatter. He couldn’t write anymore. . That’s why it ends like that: suddenly.”

“And do you know if he saw Caridad again?”

“One of the people who worked with López from the beginning told me that his mother had come to see him here at the end of 1974 and that she had ruined his holidays and, in passing, those of his wife and his children. She was a crazy and unbearable woman, he told me. She had friends in Cuba, old Communists she had met here in the 1940s and later in France, and she even passed herself off as a Cuban. . That must have been the last time they saw each other, because the following year she died in Paris, I imagine desiring to return to Barcelona, like all of the Mercaders, because Franco beat her in the battle against death by a month and kept the doors of Spain shut to her. Through López’s wife I learned that she had died alone and that her neighbors discovered the corpse because of the smell. .”

While I listened to the stories of abandonment and death that that man was telling me — that man who, despite his decision to come to see me, was still surrounded by fear — I discovered that again a bothersome unease was threatening me, a surreptitious feeling that was too close to compassion.

“Bad luck pursued them. It was like a punishment,” I said.

The black man barely nodded but remained silent, observing the buckets and the cans collecting the water dripping from the roof.

“This house is going to fall down on you,” he said at last.

“You really don’t want coffee?” I asked him again, since I had gotten lost in the conversation, although I knew that I had several holes yet to fill in and I was certain that was the last time I would speak with him.

“No, thank you, really, no. I have to leave already. . Let me see if I can grab a bus.”

“So why do you know so much about Mercader? Why did he trust you and give you those papers?”

“When we went to walk the dogs, he talked to me a lot. Sometimes I think he told me all of that so that I would then tell someone. Although he never confessed to me who he was or what he had done. . That, I had to discover on my own. He told you more things than me. .”

“So what about the borzoi bitch, Ix? What happened to her?”

“You see? Because of that I think that he trusted me a lot. López gave her to me, because his wife didn’t want to keep the dog. It was like the inheritance he left me, right?. . Ix lived with me for four more years. .”

“And what about Dax? How did they sacrifice him?”

Again the black man looked at the ceiling of the apartment, dark and agonizing, as if he feared that its collapse could be imminent.

“In reality, they all ended up fucked-up, even Stalin,” he said, as if that same night, in my ruined and shadowy house, he had had that revelation. He took his eyes off the ceiling and looked at me. “López felt very bad, but one day he asked me to take him with Dax to a little beach that is near Bahía Honda. There’s never anyone there, but since it had recently rained it was a little cold and there wasn’t a single soul around. López let him off the leash, let him run a little while, but Dax got tired right away and started to cough. He spent a lot of time caressing him, talking to him, until his cough went away and he lay down. Dax loved to have his belly dried. After a while, he put the towel over his head and took out a gun. . López was sure that his dog had died in the best way, without knowing it, almost without having time to feel any pain. . That was at the end of January. We never went back to the beach. .” The black man stood up, and at that moment he didn’t seem that tall. “How long has it been since the lights went out?”

“About five hours. . I try not to keep track. After all. .”

As we spoke, the man was digging in one of his pockets.

“Coño, I almost forgot.”

He took out a piece of cloth, smaller than a handkerchief, and opened it. He took something out and put it on the table: even in the weak light, I was able to recognize the valiant gas lighter that had belonged to Jaime López.

“It’s yours,” he said, and cleared his throat. “That’s your part of the inheritance.”

The end of the century and the millennium were approaching when, of nothing more than old age, Tato, Ana’s poodle, died, and my wife’s osteoporosis entered its most aggressive period with the sustained crisis that left her practically an invalid, with very strong pain, for three months. We had still not imagined the true seriousness of her illness, and all my friends, inside and outside Cuba, began to look for what seemed to be the only remedy for her: vitamins — calcium with vitamin D and B complex, above all — and bone enhancers, including the supposedly miraculous shark cartilage and those Fosamax tablets with such strong effects that, after ingesting them, the patient had to remain upright for an hour. So Ana improved, at the same time that Truco, the mangy stray mutt that I had picked up shortly after Tato’s death, was getting fatter, turning into the family’s happiest and liveliest member.

The expected change of century and millennium passed and the world, having turned into a place that was getting more and more hostile, with more wars and bombs and fundamentalisms of all kinds (as could be expected, after going through the twentieth century), ended up turning into a remote place for me, repellant, with which I was cutting ties, as I let myself drift along on skepticism, sadness, and the certainty that solitude and the most resounding neglect awaited me just around the corner.

What most pained me was seeing how Ana, despite passing improvements, was gradually dying within the four damp and flaking walls of the propped-up little apartment in Lawton. Perhaps because of it, first as a companion to my wife’s desperation, and then as a practicing member, I approached a Methodist church and tried to pin my hopes on the great beyond, where perhaps I would find everything that had been denied to me in the great over here. But my capacity to believe had been ruined forever, and although I read the Bible and attended worship, I constantly broke the rules of a rigid orthodoxy demanded by that faith which had too many unappealable obligations for one lifetime, too many desires to control the faithful and their ideas for a freely chosen religion. Control, damned control. What ended up complicating my credulity was the demand for a necessary Christian humility proclaimed from the pulpits by a theatrical hierarchy, whose sincerity I began to doubt when I learned of the existence of cars, trips abroad, and privileges acquired in exchange for forgetting the past, for complicity and silence. If it had not been for Ana, more than once I would have told all those pastors where to go and shove it. But she always told me that God was above men, who were sinners by definition, and so I shut my mouth, as was habitual in my life. Then I grabbed onto the essentials that offered me escape and forced myself to believe in what mattered. I didn’t succeed. I didn’t care about the great beyond or the salvation of my immortal soul. Or about the great over here with its manipulated promises of a better future at the cost of a worse present. I would have preferred other compensations.

Looking for medicine for my wife, smoking cigarettes with a suicidal intensity, taking care of Truco after each accident or street fight for which he had such a propensity, practicing a tyrannical religion without faith, looking stoically at the chinks in the walls and ceilings that would eventually lead to the collapse of our small apartment, and curing dogs as poor and scruffy as their owners — these turned into the limits of my shitty life. Each night, after putting Ana to bed (she could no longer do it herself) — and without any desire to read, much less to write — I acquired a taste for climbing my neighbor’s wall and sitting, whether it was hot or cold, on the fork made by the branches of his mango tree. There, under the gaze of Truco, who followed each one of my movements from the hallway, I smoked a couple of cigarettes and felt the plentitude of my defeat, of my anticipated old age, of my cosmic disillusion, and examined the almost dead conscience of the regrettable being that turned into the same man who had once been a boy who was pregnant with illusions, and seemed gifted to tame fate and make it bend down at his feet. What a disaster.

In that incorruptible spirit I asked myself, as I observed the infinity of the universe, who the hell cared what I could say in one book? How was it possible that I had let myself be convinced by Ana, but above all by myself, and had tried to write that book? Where had I gotten the idea that I, Iván Cárdenas Maturell, wanted to write it and perhaps even publish it? Where, at some point in a far-off life, had I pretended and thought I was a writer? And the only answer within my reach was that the story had pursued me because it needed someone to write it. And the bitch had picked me.