The Man Who Loved Dogs

29. Moscow, 1968

Moscow could also be infernally torrid, and the afternoon of August 23, 1968, had to have been the hottest of the season. But, thanks to their medals, they didn’t have to show any kind of credentials for the doors of the decrepit Hotel Moscow to open to them and for the fresh air of the screeching air conditioners to welcome them.

In recent years, Ramón Pavlovich had resorted to the tactic of hanging the powerful medals of Hero of the Soviet Union and the Order of Lenin on his lapel, which managed to force open, without violence, almost all of the doors in the greatest and most closed country in the world. In reality, it had been Roquelia who made that fabulous discovery, one winter morning in 1961, as she shivered in an endless line that snaked all the way toward October Twenty-Fifth Street, in front of the windows of a shop in the GUM gallery. Cursing her luck, the cold, the lines, and the shoving that she had to stoically withstand, Roquelia had seen a man with crutches and a missing leg pass in front of the crowd of aspiring purchasers and, without asking permission, enter the store and leave with six packages of the coveted Hungarian salami and twelve cans of the elusive crabmeat from Kamchatka. The impunity with which the wounded man passed before the combative Russian matrons at the head of the line — who limited themselves to pressing their faces against the establishment’s window to count, in agony but in whispers, the number of salamis the man was dropping into his bag (terrified at the possibility of hearing the cry most feared by the Soviets: “It’s all gone, comrades!”) — had moved her in a proletarian way, since even in Mexico, or in any other capitalist country, there had never been deference like that toward an invalid. Because of that, when the man dropped the last item in his bag (into which two bottles of vodka had also fallen), Roquelia made use of gestures and her rudimentary Russian and discussed the matter with the woman who was behind her in line; she was surprised to find out, or in reality thought she found out, that the man’s mutilation had nothing to do with his privilege, which actually came from the medal hanging on the pocket of his frayed cloak. The wounded man was a hero of the USSR and, as such, he was authorized to go in front of everyone else in every line, even when they had slept on the sidewalk overnight to have the certainty of obtaining the desired product. What Roquelia was sure of was that the man’s decoration (she approached him almost to the point of impertinence and nausea, because of the stench he gave off) was similar to one her husband had in a drawer at home. Because of that, the following night, when she attended a party with Ramón organized by the Casa de España, Roquelia asked the old exiled Republican women and was certain that her life in Moscow had changed. From that day on, whenever she went out in search of some product in deficit (the list could be interminable), she made her husband go with her. From his jacket she hung the prestigious medals to obtain Bulgarian sausages and Hungarian salami and toilet paper, oranges and tickets to the Bolshoi alike.

The previous afternoon, the phone had rung while Ramón Pavlovich was reading an issue of L’Humanité that, every morning, he bought at the newsstand located on the north exit of Gorky Park, next to the Frunze Quay. Roquelia, always resistant to lifting the apparatus and speaking in Russian, shouted to him from the kitchen to answer the phone. Ramón hated any interruption in the rhythm of his reading or when he was listening to Bach, Beethoven, and Falla, and it was especially annoying that afternoon, since he was caught up in an article that showed how the Czech revisionists had worked cunningly for an onerous capitalist restoration, turning their backs on the will of the country’s workers and peasants. The Red Army, with its opportune entrance into Prague, invited by the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, only meant to guarantee the continuity of the socialist option chosen by the great masses of that country, the piece argued.

Ramón Pavlovich took off his thick tortoiseshell glasses and still had time to tell himself that that article showed that nothing had changed, not even the rhetoric. With difficulty, he stood up. No matter how much Roquelia insisted that he eat vegetables, he didn’t lose weight, and with the passing of years he had become a slow and wheezing man. He lifted his feet to step over Ix and Dax, his two Russian wolfhound puppies, who, despite their youth, had turned lazy with the summer heat. Ramón was almost sure that the phone call was for his son Arturo, who, in his adolescence, had taken over the phone. On the tenth ring, he managed to raise the heavy receiver.

“Da?” he said in Russian, almost annoyed.

“Merde! You already know how to speak in Russian?” The voice, sarcastic, French, was an arrow that went through the heart of Ramón Pavlovich’s memories.

“Is it you?” he asked, also in French, feeling his chest and his temples beating.

“Twenty-eight years without seeing each other, eh, kid? Well, you’re no longer a kid.”

“Are you in Moscow?

“Yes, and I’d like to see you. I’ve spent three years wondering if I should call you or not, and today I made up my mind. Can we see each other?”

“Of course,” Ramón Pavlovich said, after thinking for a few moments. Of course he wanted to see him, although for a thousand reasons he doubted it was appropriate. For starters, he presumed that their conversation was being listened to, and that the meeting would be monitored by security agents, although he decided it was worth the risk.

“Tomorrow at four, in front of the beer hall in Leningradsky Station. Do you remember? Bring money: now we pay out of our own pockets. And mine aren’t exactly healthy.”

“How have things gone for you?” Ramón Pavlovich dared to ask.

“So fucking well,” the man said in Spanish, and repeated before hanging up: “So fucking well. See you tomorrow.”

Having barely hung up, Ramón Pavlovich heard the scream again. In all those years, that cry of pain, surprise, and anger had pursued him; and although in recent times its insistent presence had dissipated, it was always there, in his mind, like something latent that resolved to activate itself, sometimes by some reminiscence of the past, and many other times without any discernible motive, like a spring he had no ability or possibility of controlling.

Ever since he’d arrived in Moscow eight years before, he had been wishing to meet with that man (what the hell was his name now? What could his name have originally been before he turned into a perpetually masked man?), and only feared that the death, of one or the other, could prevent the necessary conversation that would get him closer to the truths he had never known and that influenced the path of his life so much. And now, when he already thought that nothing would happen, at last the meeting seemed about to become real, and as usual the initiative had come from his always evasive mentor.

“Who was it?” Roquelia asked when she came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. “What’s wrong, Ramón? You’re pale. .”

He put his glasses back on, took a cigarette from the pack lying on the table next to his reading chair, and lit it.

“It was him,” he said at last.

With a cigarette in his hands, Ramón went out to the tiny balcony from which he enjoyed a privileged view of the river and, on the other side, of the tree-lined park. From the heights of his apartment, if he looked to the south, he could see the buildings of the university and the Church of St. Nicholas; if he turned to the north, he could make out the Krymsky Bridge, where he usually crossed over to Gorky Park, and beyond that he could make out the highest towers and palaces of the Kremlin. Ix and Dax followed him and, seated on their hind legs, dedicated themselves to panting and contemplating the tiny pedestrians going back and forth across the quay. Ramón felt a lost feeling of fear return and squeeze his chest. Almost mechanically, he observed his right hand, where, an inch or so from the wound he received in the first days of the war, he had the indelible half-moon-shaped scar. He didn’t like to look at those four marks hanging on his skin, since he preferred not to remember; but memory was like everything in his life ever since that remote early morning on which he said yes — it also acted with insolence independent of the reduced will of its owner.

First he had heard the shrill cry and, when he opened his eyes, saw that the wounded man, with his glasses twisted on his nose, had managed to throw himself at his weapon-holding hand and clung to it to sink his teeth in and force him to release the ice axe stained with blood and brain. What happened in the following minutes had turned into an amalgam of images where some vivid memories were confused with the stories he would hear and read through the years. The stories agreed that, perhaps paralyzed by the scream and the wounded man’s unexpected reaction, he had not even tried to leave the office, and they said that while the bodyguards beat him with their hands and the butts of their revolvers, he had yelled in English: “They have my mother! They’re going to kill my mother!” From what recess of his mind had those unforeseen words come? He remembered, in contrast, having managed to cover his head to protect himself from the blows, and that he started to cry upon thinking he had failed. He could not believe that the old man had resisted the blow and leaped upon him with that desperate force. Then he yelled, begging for them to kill him. He wanted and deserved it. He had failed, he thought.

Ramón could still feel in his chest a renewal of the oppression that had crushed his breath when, along with the confirmation of the condemned man’s death, he heard the policeman in charge of his interrogation assure him that his victim, already fatally wounded, had saved his life by demanding that his bodyguards stop beating him, since it was necessary to make him speak. That information gave meaning to what happened that afternoon and, in a strange way, fed the cry of pain and horror clinging to his eardrums. From that moment on, he was able to evoke with greater clarity the surprising relief he felt when he stopped being hit on the head with the rifle butts, and he also managed to remember the look of disgust that at that moment Natalia Sedova directed at him and the moment in which Azteca the dog came into the room and approached the wounded man, lying on the floor with a pillow under his head. Ramón was sure he’d seen him caress the dog and heard him say not to let Seva enter.

In reality, Ramón had only completely regained consciousness when, as it was getting dark already, they had taken him out of the house, handcuffed. Before getting into the ambulance that would take him to the Hospital Cruz Verde, he had looked to his left and, between the blood and the swelling that shot through his right eye, he was able to confirm, beyond the police cars lining Avenida Viena, that the dark green Chrysler had disappeared. In the ambulance, he told the head of his escort to take the letter he had in the pocket of his summer jacket. The pain he felt in his hand, where he had been bitten, and in his bruised head and face did not prevent, while the policeman opened the letter, a wave of relaxation from enveloping him, nor one sole idea, clear and precise, from taking control of his mind: my name is Jacques Mornard, I am Jacques Mornard.

Tom had warned him that the letter would be his only shield and, whatever happened, he should take cover from lightning and thunderbolts behind it. And so he did throughout the twenty years he spent in the hell on earth of the three Mexican prisons of his sentence. The saddest times were without a doubt the intense months in which they held him in the bulletproof cells of the Sixth Delegation, submitting him to interminable interrogations, periodic beatings, constant slaps, and daily kicks; confrontations with Sylvia, which always included the woman spitting on his face; confrontations with the renegade’s bodyguards and even with several of the participants of the massive attack directed by Siqueiros (“directed by” was figuratively speaking), who, as was foreseen, could not identify him and even less still connect him to the disappeared French Jew. Later came the interviews with Belgian civil servants who demonstrated the falseness of Jacques Mornard’s supposed family and national origins, and the incisive psychological tests, bordering on torture, that demanded all of his physical resistance, his intelligence, and the use of the full arsenal received in Malakhovka to keep his shield raised. The process of re-creating the attack had been especially arduous, when they forced him to represent, with a newspaper rolled up in his hand, the way in which he had hit the condemned man. Behind the mahogany desk, with his newspaper raised, he had the certainty at last that the ice axe had missed its target by a few inches because the renegade, with the pages of the article in his hands, had turned toward him. This also meant that he had had time to see the lethal point coming down and breaking his skull. That vision — which clarified why the forensics determined that the victim had received the blow from the front and explained why the old man had been able to stand up, fight with him, and even live another twenty-four hours — was so brutal that he passed out.

He also remembered the difficult moment in which the instructing judge spoke to him of the evidence that his real name was Ramón Mercader del Río, Catalan in origin, since some Spanish refugees had recognized his photo in the newspapers, and even put a snapshot in front of him, taken in Barcelona, in which he appeared dressed as a soldier. The existence of that proof came with more interrogations and torturers with the purpose of wresting from him the confession that everyone wanted to hear. The head of the secret police, Sánchez Salazar, seemed to have taken a personal interest in the need to hear that confession from his lips, and hundreds, thousands of times he repeated the same questions: “Who provided you with the weapon? Who were your accomplices? Who sent you here? Who helped you? Who provided the funds for the attack? What is your real name?” His answers, in every case, every year, and in every situation, had always been consistent with the letter: no one had armed him; he had no accomplices; he had traveled with the money supplied to him by a member of the Fourth International whose name he had forgotten; his only contact in Mexico had been a certain Bartolo, he didn’t remember if it was Pérez or Paris; he was called Jacques Mornard Vandendreschs and had been born in Tehran, where his parents, Belgian diplomats, were posted, and with whom he later lived in Brussels; and he didn’t know anything about any Mercader del Río, and although they looked a lot alike, he could not be the man from the photo.

His ability to resist in silence and almost arrogantly maintain what everyone knew was a lie gave him back the power and convictions lost in the days before his act. From inside, a feeling of superiority was growing in the certainty that they would not break him. More than once he thought of Andreu Nin and of the hard work he made for his captors when he wouldn’t admit to the faults they tried to lay on his head. Ramón knew that if the promised protection arrived, and if none of those venal policemen or the prisoners with whom he would soon live received the order to eliminate him, he could resist for as long as necessary, in the conditions and with the specifications they imposed on him, since he knew that his life depended solely on that resistance. And, at least at the beginning, Kotov seemed to have come through, although he could only see that at the end of seven months of isolation and harassment, when they allowed him at last to receive a visit from his lawyer, Octavio Medellín Ostos, hired the day after the fatal assault by a woman named Eustasia Pérez. That woman, whom the lawyer had not seen again, had handed him a large sum of money for him to use for Ramón’s case until she or a designee of hers got in touch with him. Ramón then understood that he was not alone, and when Medellín Ostos asked him to tell him the truth in order to help him, he repeated again, word for word, the content of that letter he had handed to the police.

“Do you expect me to believe you, Señor Mornard?” the lawyer said to him, looking into his eyes.

“I only expect you to defend me, Counselor. In the best possible way.”

“It has already been proven that everything you’re saying to me is nothing but lies. You’re not Belgian, nor does Jacques Mornard exist; you were never a Trotskyist, nor did you plan the murder a week before. It’s very difficult this way. .”

“So what can I do if, despite what everyone wants to believe and say, that is the only truth?”

“We got off on the wrong foot,” the man lamented. “Let’s break it down: the Mexican government is going to push until you confess, because your crime has caused an international scandal. For weeks here, people even forgot about the war. Did they tell you that Trotsky’s funeral had the largest crowds seen in this country for the death of a foreigner? They know that your identity is false and that you understand Spanish as if it were your native language. All of this they have demonstrated by conceding you the honor of giving you the first polygraph test done in Mexico. They’ve proven that the story of your meetings with Trotsky to prepare attacks in the Soviet Union is a lie, since the house’s visitors book confirms that you didn’t spend more than two hours total with him, the majority of that time in front of other people. Everyone knows that your friend Bartolo Paris is a ghost and that the letter you handed over and have repeated to me is a mockery. Whoever wrote that letter is a cynic with the greatest disdain for intelligence, since he knew that those lies would be discovered in ten minutes. With all of this against you and with the government insistent on getting the truth, how can you expect me to defend you if I know that you’re a liar?”

“You’re the lawyer, not me. I killed him for the reasons I say in the letter. That is all I can say. And I need you to do me a favor. Buy me some prescription glasses, since I can’t see anything lately,” he said, willing to face all the consequences.

Ramón experienced a shock when Roquelia came out to the balcony with a glass of water and a cup of coffee on the colorful Uzbek tray.

“What does that man want from you now?” she asked while Ramón Pavlovich drank the water.

“To talk, Roque, only to talk,” he said, and gave her back the glass, ready to drink the coffee.

“Do you need to roll around in the past? Isn’t it better to live in the present?”

“You don’t understand me, Roque. It’s been twenty-eight years of silence. . I have to know. .”

“Ramón, you have to recognize that things are not good. Look at Czechoslovakia. . Do you think they’ll ever let you leave here?”

“Forget about that already, please. You know they’ll never let me leave. Besides, I don’t have anywhere to fucking go. .”

He took the first sip of coffee and looked at his wife. Not even Roquelia, after fifteen years together, could understand what that meeting with his old mentor meant to him. From the beginning, even when he was convinced that Roquelia had been sent to him by his distant bosses, he had decided to keep the woman at the margin of the deepest details of his relationship with the world of shadows, since not knowing was the best way to be protected. He had taken the same attitude with his brother Luis, since they had met again in Moscow and the latter had confided in him, very secretly, his aspiration of one day returning to Spain.

“Don’t worry, they can’t do anything to me anymore. They already did it all,” he said, and finished his coffee.

“They can always do more. And now we have children. .”

“Nothing’s going to happen. If I don’t talk. . I’m going out to walk the dogs.”

With a cigarette in one hand and the leashes in the other, he got into the elevator with his wolfhounds and pushed the button for the ground floor. That building on the Frunze Quay, where he had moved just two years before, was inhabited by local party leaders, heads of business, and a couple of high-level foreign refugees, and had the privileges of an elevator, an intercom on the ground floor (diligently operated by the soldier employed as a doorman), granite floors, a bathroom in every apartment, a washing machine, and, above all, a magnificent location on the banks of the Moscow River, in front of Gorky Park and fifteen minutes by foot from the city center. Arturo and Laura, his children, were the ones who most enjoyed the park, where they ice-skated in winter and played sports in the summer. Ix and Dax also benefited from the park in the mornings, but in the afternoons their walk was limited to the tree-lined path that ran next to the avenue on the quay, where their owner had taught them to run and jump without getting close to the street.

Ramón let the dogs go and made the most of an unoccupied bench under the shade of some lilac trees, their branches still loaded with bells of flowers. He liked to watch his wolfhounds run, observing how their brownish hair moved while their long legs seemed to barely touch the grass, how they trotted with perfect elegance. Ever since the absurd and cruel death of Churro, the shaggy little dog who got into his trench in the Sierra de Guadarrama, he had not had another opportunity to care for a dog. In the first years in Moscow, before the adoption of Arturo and Laura, he wanted to have a puppy, but the arrival of the children, so wished for by the sterile Roquelia, had forced him to postpone that desire, since space did not exactly abound in the Khrushchevesque building in the Sokol neighborhood where they were then living. Nonetheless, when his brother Luis, perhaps fulfilling some mysterious and unappealable mandates, appeared at his Frunze apartment with the two small borzois, Ramón knew that those dogs were a reward and at the same time a punishment he had to take on, like another burden of that enduring past — from the man who, with patience and treachery, had molded his fate.

Ramón remembered that, when they issued the sentence of twenty years’ incarceration, the maximum penalty allowed by the Mexican penal code, and transferred him to the dismal prison of Lecumberri (they were justified in calling it “the Black Palace”), the certainty that had sustained him until that moment suffered an upheaval; and in the creaking of that circular building, overpopulated by murderers of all kinds, his life was entering a suffocating tunnel. Only if Kotov’s promise still stood, and the silence maintained during those almost two years mattered, would his life find any support. Otherwise, he would be like a shipwrecked man in the place where a man’s life was valued at only a few pesos. The fear of dying, which had barely figured among his weaknesses, from that moment on came to accompany and torment him. Ramón knew that if he were dead he would be much less compromising for the men who, as the policeman Sánchez Salazar said, had provided his hands with the weapons. Nonetheless, the worst thing was thinking that protecting him or preparing his escape was no longer among the priorities of those same men, and less still of Kotov, who was surely enmeshed in other missions more important than protecting a soldier captured by the enemy and considered a casualty of battle. With that painful certainty he faced each new day, and more than once he would open his eyes, with his pupils fixed on the oppressive ceiling of his cell, appropriating the words he had heard his victim say: “I’ve been given another day of grace. Will it be the last?” Ever since then, the impression that his fate and that of the man he was ordered to kill had become confused thanks to a macabre confluence had pursued him without rest, just like the incorruptible scream that resounded in his ears or the half-moon-shaped scar that, for exactly twenty-eight years and two days, he wore on his right hand.

The beer hall at Leningradsky Station had not changed much in the last thirty years. Perhaps the steam produced by sweat in the August heat had increased that afternoon to a new level, but it continued to be accompanied by the stink of fish, yeast, and the rancid urine of drunks fighting over a pitcher of beer to fill it with a stream of vodka. The floor was still sticky, and the faces of the locals, with their noses crossed by dark veins and their eyes degraded behind a hepatic veil, were like a photograph immune to the passing of time; that in reality did not move, as if it feared the future promised so many times, in the same manner as those men (once upon a time hopeful of being new) fled from sobriety and the evidence that it usually reveals. Only the figures of a limping being, some time ago called Leonid Alexandrovich, or Kotov, or Tom, or Andrew Roberts, or Grigoriev, and one who was over a hundred kilos and had never again been called Ramón Mercader testified that things were no longer the same.

“You’ve turned into a fatso, kid!” the first man said, and leaped into a hug that Ramón knew would end with a nauseating kiss from which he managed to escape.

“And you’re an old baldy!” he countered, and gave him the opening to trap him in a second immobilizing hug that prevented him from resisting the Russian’s kiss.

“Time and sorrows,” the Soviet man said, now in Spanish.

“Let’s leave; this is a goddamned latrine.”

“I see you’ve become picky. What do you think of our proletariat? They still need soap, right? But look at how you’re dressed! That clothing is foreign, right? It smells of the West and decadence. .”

“My wife brings it from Mexico.”

“Does she have some to sell me?” he said, and laughed, guttural and sonorous.

“They also know that Roquelia brings clothing to sell?”

“They always know everything, kid. Always and everything.”

They went out onto the street and Ramón placed the medals on the lapel of his jacket and they were able to take the first taxi in the noisy line at the station. They ordered the taxi driver to leave them at Okhotny Ryad, in front of the Hotel Moscow.

“Why do you want to go in there? That hotel is full of microphones,” the Soviet man said in French when they saw the building’s façade, which the passing of years had turned even more incongruous and opaque.

“Make sure you avoid them.” Ramón smiled. “Wait a minute, what is your name now?”

The former Kotov again launched into his guttural laugh of old times.

“Nomina odiosa sunt. Remember? How do you feel about me being called Lionia, Leonid Eitingon?”

“They didn’t put you on trial with that name. . Wasn’t it Nahum Isaakovich? Are you going to fucking tell me once and for all what the real one is?”

“All of them are as real as Ramón Pavlovich López. You even owe your name to me, Ramón. .”

The Hotel Moscow was a symbol of the past that was still alive, like the two men who, thanks to their high-ranking insignias, entered the refrigerated bar that freed them from the Muscovite dogs. Leonid stopped Ramón and sniffed the air. He pointed at a table and, his limp more accentuated, led the way.

“We even have spaceships already, but the KGB microphones and the razors they sell us are from the Paleolithic age. . Look, here’s something that I’m sure no one has told you.” Lionia smiled. “Many of the walls of this hotel are double, do you understand? They’re made up of two walls, between which a man fits. They built the hotel like that to hear what certain guests were saying. What do you think of that?”

Ramón asked for a pitcher of orange juice, a bottle of chilled vodka, a plate of strawberries, and slices of a Polish sausage that was only sold in stores for diplomats and foreign technicians.

“And bring us caviar and white bread too,” Eitingon demanded of the surprised waiter.

“Why did you call me? I thought you didn’t want to talk to me anymore.”

“You know I got out of jail three years ago, right?” Eitingon asked, and Ramón nodded. “When they let me out, they told me not to look for you, and I don’t need to tell you what the word ‘obedience’ means. But a while ago I asked a friend who still works for the apparatus if anyone cared much if we saw each other and talked about old times. . So a week ago, when they let Sudoplatov out, the friend called me and told me that, no, it didn’t matter too much if I saw you. . as long as I told them a few things later.”

“So are you going to tell them something?”

“After what they did to us, do you think I’m going to help them? Did you know that they had Sudoplatov put away for fifteen years?” he said, and added in Spanish: “They can go fuck themselves and their superwhore mothers. . I’ll see what I make up for them. Is it wrong to say ‘superwhores’ to indicate there’s a lot of them and they really are whores?”

When Ramón arrived in Moscow, in May 1960, the KGB officer assigned to him during the first months had the deference to inform him that his former mentor sent his greetings of welcome from the prison where he was confined, carrying out a sentence of twelve years for the crime of participating in a conspiracy against the government. But before that, through various letters that Caridad sent him through the lawyer Eduardo Ceniceros (who took care of Ramón after Medellín Ostos’s death), the prisoner in Lecumberri had learned a little about his mentor’s strange run of luck. Although the letters were intentionally confusing, incomprehensible for someone without any background, Ramón managed to gather that when his mentor returned to the USSR, after fulfilling the most important mission of his life, he had been promoted to general and given the first of his orders of Hero of the Soviet Union, awarded to him personally by Comrade Stalin. Mr. K., or the Gimp (as Caridad would call him in those letters), continued working with Sudoplatov in the so-called foreigners’ department of the secret service, training the agents charged with infiltrating and sabotaging the German rear guard. For that work (what things must he have done? Ramón asked himself, although he could guess the response) he would again be decorated as Hero of the Soviet Union and promoted to brigadier general. But in 1946, Beria was transferred from the intelligence agencies to the department of investigations, and the development of nuclear weaponry turned into the greatest obsession of Stalin, who was preparing himself for atomic war. This left Mr. K. up in the air, and he was immediately withdrawn from service by the new director of the Cold War espionage and sabotage agencies. According to other letters from Caridad, who was already established in Paris by that time, everything was apparently normal in the life of that agent until, in 1951, he was imprisoned under Stalin’s orders, along with his sister Sophia, a doctor, both of them caught in the net of the most recent raid of doctors, scientists, and high officers (led by the very same minister of state security, Abakumov), all of them of Jewish origins. This time they were accusing them of nothing more and nothing less than trying to poison Stalin, Khrushchev, and Malenkov in order to take power for themselves. The case had come out in the newspapers and in Lecumberri Jacques Mornard could read French, English, and Mexican dailies that gave the details of the so-called conspiracy of the Jewish doctors discovered by Muscovite intelligence, which had prevented the assassination of Comrade Stalin and the deaths of a great number of Soviets. The tone of those accusations, laden with the same rhetoric as the trials of the 1930s, awoke the fear that Ramón had managed to exorcise after more than ten years of a relatively peaceful stay in prison. For him, the story of that dismal conspiracy could only have one lesson: behind the charges of a plot lay plans to eliminate men who knew uncomfortable secrets about Stalin’s past. And it was precisely his mentor, who moreover was Jewish, who knew one of the most compromising secrets. If they killed Kotov, how much time would Ramón have left? Would the kindness of the prison officials continue to be purchased by Moscow? The prisoner spent two years living with that anxiety, waiting each day to receive the news of the execution of general Nahum Isaakovich Eitingon, as the official journalistic dispatches called him. Until, in March 1953, the news of Stalin’s death arrived at his prison.

Around that time, Roquelia started to take him the messages sent by Caridad from Paris. In one of the first, his mother told him that Mr. K. and all of the supposed authors of the plot, imprisoned since 1951, had been released by Beria. Ramón breathed in relief. But not for long. When the new Soviet leadership team headed by Khrushchev brought down and executed Beria, Eitingon was swept up in the raid, now accused of conspiring with his old boss to perpetrate a coup d’état, and he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Caridad assured him in a letter that that was how Soviet gratitude was expressed and warned him to never let his guard down, since that gratitude could cross the Atlantic.

“What have you been doing with your life since they released you?” Ramón served himself the juice while Leonid drank his first swig of vodka.

“They insinuated that Khrushchev’s treatment of me and other old soldiers of Beria’s had been excessive. They gave me back my pension, but not my medals; they got me a job as a translator; and they gave me an apartment in Golianovo — a shell without its own bathroom. Those buildings aren’t made with cement but with hate. . Haven’t you ever heard the song of the taxi drivers?” he asked, smiling, and immediately sang in Russian: “ ‘I’ll take you to the tundra, / I’ll take you to Siberia, / I’ll take you any place you want to go, / but don’t ask me to take you / to Golianovo. .’ ”

Leonid tried to smile but couldn’t manage it.

“Was it very hard?” Ramón, his own prison experience behind him, felt he had the right to ask that question.

“Surely harder than your jail, and I know that a Mexican jail can seem like the closest thing to hell. But you knew you were protected and I didn’t even have a nail to hang on to; you knew that you were going to be there for twenty years, but I had no expiration date. And while the Mexicans could kill you and go out to party, they’re not capable of conceiving of the things that occur to our comrades when they want you to confess something, whether you’ve done it or not. And the worst is when you know that you are paying for faults that aren’t yours. And worse still when it’s your own people turning the screws. . Add to that the fucking cold. . How I hate the cold. .”

Leonid wolfed down two slices of the Polish kielbasa and drank his second vodka, perhaps to warm up the cold of his memory. He moved his head, denying something remote. In reality, he said, since 1948 he had felt his luck could change. That year, Stalin started the purge of the old European antifascist fighters who were not adapting to the new Stalinist bureaucratic model demanded by socialism in expansion and by the rules of the recently debuted Cold War. The Prague purge was the sign that the clowns of the past had to be sacrificed, but Eitingon made the mistake of thinking that those new trials had nothing to do with men like him, true professionals, so useful in times of hunting.

The failure experienced by the Great Helmsman in his attempt to gain influence over the nascent state of Israel (which, after receiving support and Soviet money, opted to go under Washington’s sphere) took the lid off of his passionate, long-standing hatred of the Jews. The general secretary pulled the conspiracy of the poisoning doctors out of the air and, with his sense of economy, made the most of the trial to take out of circulation other Jews and non-Jews who were potentially dangerous because of their ideas or their knowledge of troublesome secrets.

“Stalin knew he was in decline and began to identify the survival of the revolution with his own. He really thought that he was the Soviet Union. Well, he almost was. He was close to seventy years old, and after fighting so long to gather all the power in his hands, after having turned into the most powerful man on earth, he felt exhausted and began to sense what was going to happen: that when he died, his own dogs were going to villify him. No one can generate so much hate without running the risk that at some point it will overflow onto the recipient, which is what happened when he died. That’s why he entered a sick world of obsessions. After the war, with the euphoria of having won and with so many things to rebuild, people were calmer and better controlled. That son of a bitch Stalin knew very clearly that, to reign until the end, he would have to make sure that no one could feel safe — ever. I really think that period after the war was much harder than the years 1937 and 1938. You don’t think so? Look, kid, although he had men who had enjoyed his trust, such as Beria, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, and that son of superwhores Vyshinsky — and other useless ones like Molotov and Voroshilov — he suspected all of them, because he was a man sick with mistrust and fear, lots of fear. Can you imagine that, when they interrogated us, they always asked if any of those men, the ones in the highest positions, the ones he trusted, were implicated in our anti-Soviet plot? Do you know that each one of them was submitted to a terrible test? He put Polina, Molotov’s wife, in a gulag for being Jewish. Kalinin’s wife was imprisoned while he was president of the country, and when she got sick he had to ask Stalin, as a personal favor, for a better bed than the straw mattress on which he found her nearly dead. . The president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, kid! At that time I understood that Stalin’s cruelty not only obeyed political necessity and the desire for power, it was also due to his hatred of men — worse still, to his hatred of the memory of the men who had helped him create his lies, to fuck and rewrite history. But the truth is, I don’t know who was sicker, Stalin or the society that allowed him to grow. . Suka!”

“This was the same Stalin whom you adored and taught me to adore?” Every time he entered those waters, Ramón felt dislocated, as if he were hearing a story removed from his own, of a reality different from the one Ramón himself had created in his head.

“He was always the same, a son conceived by Soviet politics, not the abortion of human evil. .,” Leonid replied, and paused. “When they took me to Lefortovo Prison, I knew everything was over. They told me that they would subject us to a public trial and asked me to sign statements in which I admitted, among a thousand other things, being up-to-date on the murderous plans of the doctors and of having given them political and logistical support. But I told them I wasn’t going to sign.”

“So how did you get out of signing?”

“Oh, Ramón,” Leonid laughed. “Why was I going to sign? Let’s see, so that you understand. How many sons did Trotsky have?”

“Four.”

“I have three and several stepchildren. . What happened to Trotsky’s children?”

“They were killed, they committed suicide. .”

“Do you remember if Trotsky had a sister?”

“Olga Bronstein, the one who had been Kamenev’s wife.”

“And?”

“They say she disappeared in a work camp.”

“Well, I also have a sister who was one of the accused doctors. . They sentenced her to ten years. . Do you remember the day we went to the trial to hear Yagoda’s statement?”

“Of course.”

“Do you think it was worth it for me to cover myself in shit, thinking that I was going to save my wife, my children, and my sister that way? That incriminating myself in any infamy was going to help the Republic of the Soviets and, maybe, save me? What happened to Zinoviev and Kamenev? Did they save their families when they confessed that they were Trotskyist conspirators? Stalin changed the penal code to kill their children who were minors. . If I confessed something, not only was I killing myself, but I was also going to kill other people. So I told myself I was going to take it all, and I took it, without talking. Do you know how? Well, by letting myself die bit by bit, turning myself into a skeleton that could come apart in their hands. It was the only way to avoid them torturing me. .”

Ramón stayed silent. He remembered the upheaval he felt when he read Khrushchev’s speeches, which Roquelia brought him, in which Stalin’s excesses were recognized. As soon as they put names and faces to them, the “excesses” began to be called crimes. He would never forget when, already established in Moscow, his brother Luis again stirred that pot: very secretly they had given him Bukharin’s letter “To a Future Generation of Party Leaders” to read, which the Bolshevik’s wife had kept in her memory for twenty years. It was the political testament of a man who, after labeling Stalinist terror an infernal machine, warned the henchmen — he must have been looking at Ramón, Kotov, and others like them — that “when dealing with indecent matters, history can’t stand witnesses,” and that the time of their sentencing was getting closer and closer.

“Just like them, I wasn’t completely innocent, either. In the new logic, no one in this country is completely innocent. .” Lionia had lost part of the vibrating depth of his voice. “Beria had his plans for the future and had told me about them. But not having signed that confession and Stalin’s death saved me from the firing squad. Because they were going to execute me. I was the only one who knew everything about you, and also some other things that were more or less shocking, like the attack in Ankara against German vice chancellor von Papen and certain medical experiments with prisoners during the war.”

“What are you talking about?” Ramón looked at his old mentor and thought that not everyone could cross the broad steppe of jail and torture with a lucid mind.

Eitingon cleaned his fingers several times with a greasy paper napkin as if he were trying to get rid of some especially adhesive substance.

“Poisons with no trace. Tests of resistance to radiation, activated thallium, uranium. They were traitors or war criminals; they were going to die anyway. . Stalin was obsessed with the idea of making the atomic bomb. There were many tests. . It was disgusting and cruel. .”

Ramón looked him in the eye and saw that the old Kotov had kept that sharpened transparency of his pupils that prevented knowing when he was lying and when he was telling the truth. On that occasion, something warned Ramón that Leonid was being more honest than ever.

Eitingon took a cigarette and began to stroke it.

“When Stalin died, Beria got me out of jail. They gave me back my party card and my rank. And despite everything they had done to me — I had dropped forty kilos, I knew terrible things — I thought justice existed and that the party would save us. That’s why, when I got to my house and my children told me that in those two years a couple of my friends had had the courage to go see them and offer them some help, I told them that those comrades and they had committed a grave mistake: if I was in prison, accused of being a traitor, nobody should worry about me or sympathize with me, not even them. . What do you think?. . That was my second-to-last act of faith. I was convinced that, without Stalin and his hate, the party would be just and the struggle would regain its meaning. . But forget it, I was wrong again. Everything was rotten. How long had it been rotten?”

“What do I know? Why are you telling me all of this?”

Lionia lit the cigarette at last and moved the glass across the table as if he wanted to distance it from himself.

“Because I think I owe you my whole story. I made you what you are and I feel indebted. I was a believer, and I forced you to believe in many things, knowing they were lies.”

“That Stalin wanted to kill Trotsky not because he was a traitor but because he hated the Exile?”

“Among other things, Ramón Pavlovich.”

A few months after Stalin’s death, when Beria fell into disgrace, Eitingon was arrested again. In reality, his old boss was aspiring to power, but he had committed, according to Leonid, the same mistake as Trotsky, that of underestimating his adversary, thinking he was better equipped, the master of information that guaranteed his ascent and impunity. Beria had seen Khrushchev dance like a clown to amuse Stalin, although they all knew that he hated the Georgian for not giving clemency to Khrushchev’s son who had fallen into German hands during the war and for whom the Great Helmsman refused to trade other prisoners. Beria had seen Khrushchev cry after being scolded by the great man and had in his hands hundreds of orders of execution from the years of the purges in which Khrushchev’s signature appeared as the secretary of the party in the Ukraine. Beria considered Khrushchev miserable, of limited ambitions, and that was his mistake. Khrushchev proved to be more astute, and before Beria realized it, Khrushchev had already devoured him.

The card up Khrushchev’s sleeve had been the army, Eitingon said, bringing a piece of bread to his mouth. The soldiers had not forgiven Beria for having been involved in the purge of the marshals in 1937, and they saw in Khrushchev the possible successor to a Stalin who had stolen all the credit for the military victory over fascism — obtained despite Stalin, sometimes even against Stalin. Khrushchev knew how to use to his advantage the ongoing investigation into the great spoils of war that many of the generals had taken from the occupied zones of Eastern Europe. Beria had in his hands the document from the council of ministers that itemized hundreds of leather coats, dozens of paintings from the Potsdam palace, the furniture, tapestries, rugs, and other valuable objects (thousands of yards of different kinds of fabric — he loved fabric!) that the hero Zhukov had brought back with him at the end of the war. That document had cost the marshal a demotion and his removal from Moscow, and he could still be tried by a civil court. But Lieutenant General Kriukov and General Ivan Serov had also taken their share of the spoils and knew that the great marshal’s fate awaited them. It was Serov, in agreement with Khrushchev, who incited his companions to carry out a coup de main against Beria, and because of that he was promoted to head of state security and head of military intelligence. The new school of generals created by Stalin did not much resemble the humble and poorly dressed officers of Lenin and Trotsky’s time.

“With Beria, we all went down. Sudoplatov, me. . my trial lasted one day, and the next I was in the first of the prisons I went through in those twelve years. I still ask myself why they didn’t kill me. Perhaps it was because they knew that I knew and that perhaps at some point they would need what I knew. .”

“So what does a man like you do when he no longer believes in anything?”

Lionia poured himself more vodka and lit another of his foul-smelling cigarettes.

“What can I do, kid? Flee, like Orlov? If I could do it — which is very improbable, since if I get within sixty miles of any border I get shot or they send me back to a work camp — could I leave with my children? Would I have the possibility of making a deal and offering my silence in exchange for my family’s life? Would someone dare to take me in? Let’s see, how many countries denied you a simple transit visa when you left jail?”

“All of them. Except for Cuba, which gave me seventy-two hours.”

“Do you understand that we’re like the plague? Do you realize that we’re Stalin’s worst creation and that, because of that, no one wants us, not here or in the West? That when we accepted the most honorable mission, we were condemning ourselves forever, because we were going to execute the revenge that Stalin’s sick mind thought was necessary to hold on to power?”

“Stalin wasn’t sick. No sick man leads half the world for thirty years. You yourself said that: ‘Stalin knows what he’s doing. .’ ”

“It’s true. But part of him was sick. They say he killed about twenty million people. A million could be a necessity, the other nineteen million are an illness, I say. . But I already told you that Stalin wasn’t the only sick one.”

In his long years in prison, Ramón had had a lot of time to think about his life’s actions and dream about that parallel existence, created by his mind in the vain attempt to overcome depression and agony. In the beginning, he managed to control his fear when he discovered that they would not withdraw the promised protection and that they were forging some plan to get him out of prison; then he forced himself to discard all of the doubts he had had when he made his way to Coyoacán that twentieth of August 1940. If he fulfilled his promise of keeping his mouth shut, he thought, his bosses, and with them history, would reward him for what he was: a man capable of sacrificing his life for the great cause. But the years passed and the escape never went further than being an idea in Caridad’s mind, although the protection remained and Ceniceros the lawyer always had money to ease his life in jail as much as possible. From that point on, resignation was his only mainstay, and he tried to fight to keep his mental balance.

“I’m going to tell you something that no one knows,” Ramón said, and this time poured himself a glass of vodka. He drank it Russian-style, in one shot, and felt it cut his breath short. He waited to get his breath back as he watched how Leonid devoured the slices of sausage, placing them on rounds of white bread as the starved do. “In 1948, my lawyer managed to get a letter through to me inside a book. It came from a Jew living in New York, but as soon as I read it I knew who—”

“Orlov,” Eitingon jumped in, and Ramón nodded. “That faggot loves writing letters.”

“It was signed by a certain Josue I-don’t-know-what and it said that he was going to tell me something that an old Soviet counterintelligence agent, a close friend of his, had confided in him, things he thought I should know. . In truth, he didn’t say anything I hadn’t thought, but, said by him, everything took on a different dimension and made me think. . He told me about deception — deceptions, actually. He said that Stalin had never wanted for the Republicans to win the war and that his friend had been sent to Spain precisely to avoid, first of all, a revolution and, of course, a Republican victory. The war only lasted long enough for Stalin to use Spain as a chip in his discussions with Hitler, and when the time came, he abandoned us to our fate, but with the honor of having helped the Republicans and, as an additional reward, having the Spanish gold in his hands. He also told me about Andreu Nin’s murder. His friend participated in that whole show, and he told me that the supposed proofs against Nin, like the ones against Tukhachevsky and the marshal, had been put together in Moscow and Berlin as part of the collaboration with the fascists.”

“That’s exactly how it was,” Leonid said, and drank another shot of vodka. “Stalin and his people, that son of a bitch Orlov among them, put everything together. And the best part is that they even managed to keep many people believing in them. . Those old and unconditional ‘friends of the USSR,’ do you remember? How we pulled the wool over their eyes! How they liked for us to pull the wool over their eyes!”

“And he talked to me about Trotsky. .” Ramón went silent, lit a cigarette, rubbed his nose. “He told me something that you knew very well. The old man had never made any agreements with the Germans. The proof had been the Nuremberg trials, in which not a single trace of Trotsky’s supposed collaboration with the fascists appeared. . He told me that I had been an instrument of hate and that, if I didn’t believe him, he hoped I would live long enough to see how that drama would come to light. . When I read Khrushchev’s speech, in 1956, I thought of that letter a lot. The most difficult thing about all of those years was knowing those truths and being certain that, despite the deception, I couldn’t say anything.”

“Do you know why? Because at heart, we are cynics, like Orlov. But above all, we are cowards. We’ve always been afraid and what has motivated us is not faith, as we told ourselves every day, but rather fear. Out of fear, many kept their mouths shut: what else could they do? But we, Ramón, went beyond that, crushing people, even killing. . Because we believed, but also out of fear,” he said, and to Ramón’s surprise he smiled. “We both know that there’s no forgiveness for us. . But luckily, since we don’t believe in anything anymore, we can drink vodka and even eat caviar in this dialectical, materialist hell that is our lot because of our actions and our thoughts. .”

They had agreed to meet at five, at Gorky Park, since at seven they would cross the river and go up to Ramón’s apartment, where Roquelia (be-grudgingly, as she always did when her husband invited someone over) would “lavish” Lionia with a Mexican meal.

That afternoon, his old mentor arrived with the news, obtained from a very reliable source, that two days before, while they were talking at the Hotel Moscow, six Soviets, holding up small signs, had gone down to Red Square to protest what they called the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Of course, neither the newspapers nor the television commented on the event, which was quickly brought under control and squashed, and had not reached the ears of the foreign accredited correspondents in Moscow. Save for the very few people in the know, that protest had never existed nor would it ever exist.

“What nerve! You have to be crazy to do that,” Ramón commented.

“Or have some balls and be very, very tired of everything,” Eitingon answered. “Those six guys knew they wouldn’t get anywhere, they knew what was in store for them, they were sure they would never again be people in this country, but they dared to say what they were thinking. Something you and I and I don’t know how many millions of other Soviets would never do, right?. . Maybe we passed them when we were going into the hotel. .”

“So what’s going on in Prague?”

“It’s the beginning of the end. . Brezhnev went at it with all his might, twenty-nine infantry divisions, seven thousand five hundred tanks, a thousand airplanes. . A show of force. The myth of the unity of the socialist world died in Prague, and also the possibility of renewing communism. Stalin had already fucked it up when he butted heads with Tito, and later Khrushchev crushed the Poles and the Hungarians, and even attacked the Chinese and the Albanians for being too Stalinist. . But this is the requiem. The next time something similar arises — and it will arrive, sooner or later — it will not be to revise anything but rather to destroy it all. Don’t look at me like that. This is a sick body, because Stalin invented everything that exists here and Stalin’s only objective was that no one could take power away from him. That is why we are going to keep swimming, even though we will arrive dead on the shore at the end. . And to think that Khrushchev planned the jump from socialism to communism for 1980. Na khuy! The things he thought of. .”

As they killed time until dinner, they wandered the park’s paths, watching the wolfhounds trot. Ramón — his former mentor’s predictions gnawing away at him — had begun to think back on the time of his arrival in Moscow and his difficulties in finding his bearings in the world to which he had given the best part of his life and the loss of his soul.

When the Mexican minister of the interior agreed to the petition of inmate Jacques Mornard, to bring forward his release from prison by a couple of months, and thus avoid the scandal that journalists willing to travel to Mexico on August 20, 1960, would cause, Ramón had the conviction that he would just be going from one prison to another. His exit from the Santa Marta Acatitla jail, where he had spent the last two years of his long sentence, had been fixed for Friday, May 6, at the end of strange negotiations. Because inmate Jacques Mornard did not legally exist and, as such, did not have Belgian nationality but continued to deny his Spanish origins — proven ten years before with fingerprints from his police record prior to the Spanish Civil War — the Czechoslovak consulate agreed to issue a passport for him with the name under which he had entered prison and served his sentence. Ramón had an exact idea of his situation when Great Britain, the United States, and France refused to even give him a transit visa for the necessary layover on his way to Prague. . Just as had happened to the renegade thirty years before, now for him the world had turned into a planet for which he had no visa. Again the macabre conjunction of fate between victim and murderer, which had exploded with the point of an ice axe, was stalking Ramón once more, only he wasn’t accompanied by the remains of glory or the disproportionate hate or fear that the Exile would provoke for years. He was pursued and marginalized by disdain, disgust, the useless blood, and his role in a story that everyone wished to forget. His only refuge was a Soviet Union where, he knew well, his presence wouldn’t be gladly accepted, either, since at the end of the day he was merely one of the more annoying proofs of Stalinism that the country was fighting to shake off. Throughout the last weeks of his imprisonment, avidly reading Khrushchev’s new speeches in which other “excesses” of the Stalinist period were revealed, he came to fear that not even the possibility of traveling to the USSR would materialize. Would they now publicly and ostentatiously admit that Jacques Mornard or Ramón Mercader had always been an obedient Spanish Communist recruited as a soldier of the Soviet ideal to commit the most hateful and repulsive crime? Did anyone ever think he would survive that attack and all the dangers of prison, and that one day he would return from the great beyond?. .

But Moscow was waiting for him, domineering, willing to challenge the world. The transit through a revolutionary and presocialist Cuba was so brief that he barely had a fleeting vision of Havana when the immigration police took him out of the Cubana de Aviación machine, coming from Mexico, and took him to the Soviet ship in which he would travel on to Riga. From the porthole of the cabin to which they took him, he observed the rocky image of the city’s buildings, castles, and churches, its resplendently green trees and overwhelmingly clear sea, and he could feel the effects of the nostalgia for that mystical country, acquired through the memories of his maternal family, rooted for years in that land where even Caridad had been born.

The first impression he had when he arrived in Moscow was of having entered a place that smelled of cockroaches and where he would never again find the man he had once been, since the city in 1960 was no longer the capital of the same country he had visited twenty-three years before. Renamed Ramón Pavlovich López, he was confined to a KGB building in the outskirts of the city, until one morning they sent him a new suit and ordered that he be ready to be picked up at six in the evening. That night, Ramón Pavlovich entered the Kremlin again and received from the hands of head of state Leonid Brezhnev the orders of Lenin and of Hero of the Soviet Union, the plaque that proved he was among the most honorable in the KGB, a huge bouquet of flowers, and the inevitable kisses. Meanwhile, from a small record player, the melody of “The Internationale” blasted again and again. And Ramón felt calm, proud, and rewarded. The KGB officer taking care of him, and with whom he dined following the ceremony in a small hall of the Great Palace of the Kremlin, promised him that they would soon give him the keys to an apartment where he could receive his companion, Roquelia Mendoza, but at the same time he warned him that his movements in the USSR should be approved by a special office of the KGB. He could maintain contact only with the Spanish émigrés and with his relatives residing in the USSR. He was still required to remain silent, said that dinosaur, without a doubt a survivor of Beria and Stalin’s times, kindly but clearly.

That conditional freedom was joined by, from the beginning, the distance with which Soviets of all ages and conditions treated him, which made him feel doubly a foreigner.

“But you are a foreigner!” Eitingon lit one of his cigarettes. “Or did you think that because of who you are and because you spent years in prison studying Russian that you were going to be less of a foreigner?. . The majority of the Soviets will never leave the country, and for them what is foreign is forbidden, damned. Although they feel curiosity and even envy (all you have to do is look at how you dress, Ramón: Did your wife also bring you that shirt? No one in Moscow has one like it), above all, you inspire fear. This is a country isolated from the world, and our leaders have made sure to demonize what lies beyond the reach of their power — in other words, everything having to do with damned foreigners. Remember that by your having unauthorized contact with foreigners, Stalin could order your execution or send you to a gulag for five, ten years. The genius of the Russian people lies in their capacity for survival. That’s why we won the war. .”

“It doesn’t happen to me so much anymore,” Ramón recalled, “but at the beginning, when I went out on the street, I looked at people and asked myself what they would think if they knew who I was. .”

“Think?” Leonid said and pointed at the sky, more or less from where the supposed order to think something should come. “Here, people almost never think, Ramón! Thinking is a luxury that is forbidden to the survivors. . To escape the fear, it has always been best not to think. You don’t exist, Ramón; neither do I. . Even less still, those six guys who protested over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. .”

The park, nonetheless, existed and exuded life. The Muscovites were making the most of the last month before the cold spending their hours in the open air: people were reading lying on the grass and there were even families that deluded themselves into thinking they were having a picnic in the forest. Because of that, the discovery of an open bench, protected by the shade of a linden tree, aroused suspicion in the two secret service veterans. While Ramón played with his dogs, Eitingon inspected the place and concluded that there were no microphones installed; despite what Stalin had always maintained, he said smiling, it was proven that coincidences could exist.

Settled in on the bench, Ramón chose to change the subject and told him how he had met Roquelia Mendoza and how he immediately suspected she was part of the promised help. Roquelia, a girl from the middle class who had been a folkloric dancer, was the cousin of another Lecumberri prisoner named Isidro Cortés, who had been sentenced for killing his wife. Roquelia’s insistence on striking up a friendship with him revealed her true motivations.

“It was the last thing I could do for you.” Eitingon smiled. “Beria authorized me to look for a sympathizer willing to help you. We sent Carmen Brufau, Caridad’s friend, to Mexico, and she found Roquelia, who accepted right away because she admired you and loved Stalin. They set aside a certain quantity of money to her for your needs, besides what your lawyer was receiving.”

“In 1953, they stopped sending her money for almost a year, but she kept helping me. She’s ugly and rather unbearable, but I owe her a lot.”

“Yes, I can imagine.”

“Roquelia helped me withstand all of that. . In prison, many people visited me, under many pretexts, but the truth is that they came to see me because they thought I was a strange bird. . Once, a Spanish Communist came with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. Now she’s very famous because of her movies. Her name is Sara Montiel.”

“I’ve heard of her,” Lionia said, distracted. “They say she’s beautiful.”

“You can’t imagine what it’s like to see an animal like that three feet away from you. . She’s one of those women who makes you want to eat dirt, to do anything. .”

Eitingon tried to sound casual.

“How long has it been since you last saw Caridad?”

“She came to see me when I arrived and she has come back through three times. The last time, last year.”

“Does she look well?”

“She’s strong, with the same personality, but she appears to be two hundred years old. Well, I’ve turned fifty-five and I seem to be about a hundred and ten. Even though you’re bald, you look better than we do.”

“I must be embalmed in cynicism,” Eitingon said, and laughed thunderously. “What’s she doing in Paris?”

“Nothing. . Well, now she has gotten into painting”—Ramón smiled—“and into being a grandmother to my sister Montse’s children, despite Montse. The truth is that no one wants her around. . She spent five or six years working at the Cuban embassy, I imagine as a KGB informant. She said that the Cubans are a bunch of thrill seekers who don’t understand what the hell socialism is and are unappreciative misers. According to what she says, she bought the ambassador’s newspapers with her own money so he would find out what was happening in the world, and now they don’t even invite her to receptions. But she blames Brezhnev; she said that he gave the order to have her removed from everything. Although she still receives the pension they send her from here. .”

“Times change. Caridad, you, and I are hot potatoes that no one wants to have in their hands. If they haven’t killed us, it’s because they trust that nature will soon do its job. .,” Eitingon stated, and lifted the bottom of his shirt to show a reddish scar. “In prison, they operated on me for a tumor. It’s a miracle I am alive, but I don’t know until when. .”

“Anyone who sees Caridad in Paris, posing as a grandmother and painting ugly, colorful landscapes, would they be able to imagine what kind of demon she is?”

The borzois were running through the park and Ramón was watching them, proud of his dogs’ tangible beauty, when Leonid spoke again.

“I owe you many stories, Ramón. I’m going to tell you some that perhaps you don’t want to hear but that I feel belong to you.”

Ramón discovered at that moment that the person at his side was Kotov. His old mentor took the same position that years before he adopted in the Plaza de Cataluña, that of an alligator at rest, with a handkerchief in his hands that he used to dry his sweat.

“You once asked me if we had something to do with the death of Sedov, Trotsky’s son, and I told you no. Well, it was a lie. We sent him off ourselves, thanks to Cupid, an agent we had placed very close to him. We also executed his other son, Sergei, after having him for a time in the Vorkuta camp and here at the Lubyanka, trying to get him to sign documents in which he admitted that his father had given him instructions to poison Moscow’s aqueducts. . Like us, the ones who killed those kids were following direct orders from Stalin.”

“Why did you lie to me? I could have understood it was necessary.”

“Because you had to be as pure as possible when you went to the sacrificial altar. The letter I gave you to carry with you that day was a string of lies, and it didn’t matter whether anyone believed it or not. The plan was that you kill Trotsky and that the bodyguards kill you, as should have happened. Everything was going to be easier that way. That was how Stalin requested it. He didn’t want any loose ends and he could give a shit about your life. But Trotsky saved you. .”

Ramón felt bowled over by emotion. To hear, directly from the man who had plotted that operation with Stalin, the admission that not only had he been used to carry out revenge but that he was considered a more than dispensable piece brought down the last mainstay with which he had withstood the passing of those years full of disappointments and painful discoveries.

“But you were waiting for me. .”

“The possibility always existed that you would manage to get out. Besides, I couldn’t tell Caridad that I had sent you to the slaughterhouse, and less still that if you managed to escape, the order was to leave you in the hands of other comrades.”

“Just like Sheldon, right? So, did you kill him?”

“Not directly. But nobody was killed without our authorizing it.”

“If you were going to kill me, why did you protect me in jail, why did you pay for lawyers, why did you send Roquelia?”

“Because if we killed you in jail after what we had done, everyone would know where the order came from. What saved you was that you kept your silence. With the Old Man dead, Stalin didn’t care very much about the rest, and least of all at that moment, with the Germans just around the corner. .”

“So why did the Mexicans’ attack fail?”

“That was botched, but that was what Stalin wanted, something spectacular, with lots of noise, so no one would forget. I saw those people two or three times and realized that Trotsky was too big for them, they were wimps and they lacked balls. That’s why I didn’t mix you up with them or let them know about me or you. . What I never understood was that our man in the group — Felipe, remember? — didn’t go in to confirm whether they had killed the Duck or not. . That is a mystery I still haven’t solved. .”

Ramón lifted his gaze toward the edge of the park, where the river flowed. He felt the disappointment eating away at his insides and he felt empty. The remains of pride to which, despite the doubts and marginalization, he had clung tooth and nail started evaporating in the heat of the all-too-cynical truth. The years of confinement in prison, fearing every day for his life, had not been the worst part. The suspicions first and the evidence later that he had been the puppet of a dark and miserable plan had robbed him of sleep more nights than the fear of being knifed by another prisoner. He painfully recalled the impression of having been deceived when he read the not-so-secret report of Khrushchev to the Twentieth Party Congress and the feeling of unease that seized him from that moment on: What would become of his life when he got out of prison?

“So why didn’t they shoot me when I got to Moscow?. . Until they gave me the medals, I was waiting for them to take me out. .”

“You yourself said it: you had arrived in a different world. If Stalin and Beria had still been alive, you wouldn’t have crossed the Atlantic. But Khrushchev would even have thanked you for telling the truth, although he could not encourage you because Stalin’s spirit was alive — no, is alive — and Khrushchev didn’t want to nor could he wage that war, so he preferred to look the other way and leave you alone. Now that Khrushchev has been defeated by Stalin’s spirit, you don’t matter to anyone anymore. . As long as you remain silent and don’t try to leave the Soviet Union.”

“So what did Caridad know?”

“More or less the same as you. Remember, we never trusted too much in the nature of you Spaniards. When she returned, she tried to convince Beria to help you escape. After giving her the runaround many times, Beria finally said yes, that they would help you, but that she herself had to take care of arranging things in Mexico. Caridad was given a passport and a lot of money, and Beria sent a thug from the Comintern to give her a good scare as soon as she arrived in Mexico. Caridad just barely saved herself. She learned her lesson, went to Paris, and has laid low, without protesting again. So now she’s taken to painting pictures?”

“Must I believe all of these atrocities? Were you always this cynical? Did you know they were going to kill me? Did you apply yourself to that?”

“You have to believe what I tell you: we were more cynical than you can imagine. You weren’t the only one who was going to die for an ideal that didn’t exist. Stalin perverted everything and forced people to fight and die for him, for his needs, his hate, his megalomania. Forget that we were fighting for socialism. What socialism, what equality? They tell me that Brezhnev has a collection of antique cars. .”

“And you, why did you fight?”

“At the beginning, because I had faith, I wanted to change the world, and because I needed the pair of boots they gave to the Cheka agents. Afterward. . We already talked about fear, right? Once you enter the system, you can never leave. And I kept fighting because I turned into a cynic — me, too. But after spending fifteen years in prison for having been an efficient cynic, with a few deaths under my belt, you begin to see things in a different light.”

“So how can you live with that?”

“Just like you, Ramón Mercader! The day you killed Trotsky, you knew why you were doing it, you knew you were part of a lie, that you were fighting for a system that depended on fear and on death. You can’t fool me!. . That is why you entered that house with your legs shaking but resolved to do it, because you knew well that there was no way back. When you talk to Caridad again, ask her what I told her when you arrived in Coyoacán. I told her: ‘Ramón is shitting himself with fear, but he’s already like us, he is one of the cynics.’ ”

“Shut up for a while, please,” Ramón said, though he didn’t know if it was a demand or a plea.

With the edge of his shirt, he cleaned the lenses of his glasses, which had fogged up. In the hands that had held the ice axe, that tortoiseshell frame, purchased by Roquelia on one of her trips to Mexico, seemed like a strange and remote object. At the end of the day, Eitingon was right, he had wrapped his faith tightly around himself, in the conviction that he was fighting for a better world, to then use that faith to avoid the truths about which he did not want to think: the murders, among others, of Nin and Robles; the party’s manipulations before and during the civil war; the murky stories surrounding Lev Sedov, Bob Sheldon, and Rudolf Klement; Yagoda’s strange confession that he himself had witnessed; the manipulation of the events of May 1937 in Barcelona; the vagabond he’d had to kill like a pig in Malakhovka; the lies about Trotsky and his collaboration with the fascists; the malevolent use of Sylvia Ageloff. . just one of those truths would have been enough for him to recognize that not only was he a ruthless being but he had turned into a cynic.

“In jail, I read Trotsky,” he said, when he adjusted his glasses and observed, with regained clarity, the half-moon scar on the back of his right hand. “All of the prisoners knew I had murdered him, although the majority had no idea who Trotsky was or understood why I had murdered him. They killed for real reasons: the woman who cheated on them, the friend who stole from them, the whore who found herself another pimp. . One day, when I returned to my cell, I had on my bed a book by Trotsky. The Revolution Betrayed. Who had left it there? The fact is that I started to read it and I felt very confused. About a month later another book appeared, Stalin’s Crimes, and I read that as well, and I was even more confused. I thought about what I had read and for months I waited for another book, but it never came. I never found out who put them in my cell. What I did know is that if, before going to Mexico, I had read those books, I believe I would not have killed him. . But you are right, I was a cynic on the day I killed him. That’s what all of you turned me into. I was a puppet, a wretch who had faith and believed what people like you and Caridad told him.”

“Kid, they fooled all of us.”

“Some more than others, Lionia, some more than others. .”

“But we gave you all the clues so you could discover the truth, and you didn’t want to discover it. Do you know why? Because you liked being the way you were. Don’t come to me with any stories, Ramón Mercader. . Besides, things were clear from the beginning: ever since you knew what your mission was, there was no going backward. It didn’t matter what you would read later. .”

For Ramón, walking around Moscow during the month of September was like entering a concert when the last movement of the symphony is being executed. The volume of the music rises, all of the instruments participate, the climax is reached, but the notes reveal a sad tiredness, like the warning of an inexorable farewell. As the foliage on the trees changed colors, filling the air with ocher tones, and the sleepy afternoons began to get shorter, the threat of October and the arrival of the cold, the darkness, and the forced enclosure became palpable to Ramón. When the winter came, the old feeling, discovered thirty years before, that the Soviet capital was an enormous village stuck between two worlds would become more agressive, oppressive. The forests that grew within the city, the steppe that seemed to infiltrate itself through its disproportionate avenues and squares, would become painted with snow and ice, turning Moscow into an inscrutable territory, even more remote, populated by wrinkled brows and gross insults. Then his dream of returning to Spain would attack him with renewed insistence. With increasing frequency, as he read or listened to music, he discovered how his mind would escape from the letters or the notes and go to a Catalan beach, with rocky sand, enclosed between the sea and the mountains, where he would find himself again, free from the cold, the loneliness, the rootlessness, and the fear. He was even again called Ramón Mercader and his history disappeared like a bad memory that is finally exorcised. But Spain’s doors were shut to him with a double lock, one on each side. That he had to spend the rest of his days in that world, always feeling like a prisoner between the impassable four walls of the earth’s largest and most generous country, had turned into an underhanded sort of punishment from which, he well understood, there was no redemption. In search of a relief that he knew to be false, many summer afternoons Ramón escaped from his apartment, with or without Roquelia, and dragged his frustration and disappointment toward the monument to the defeat and the nostalgia of the Spaniards left stranded in Moscow.

“So, at the beginning, how did it go with your compatriots?” Eitingon wanted to know when, on the following Sunday, they met in front of the old kofeinia on the Arbat, which was shut down in Stalin’s time because the general secretary came and went down that avenue every day on his way to his dacha in Kuntsevo. By decree, on that whole route there could not be any meeting places, or even trees: in the country of fear, even Stalin lived in fear. In Khrushchev’s time, the place had been turned into a record shop where Ramón had become an assiduous seeker of symphonic treasures at laughable prices.

As they walked without a specific destination, smoking some Cuban cigars that Caridad had sent from Paris (Ramón had to wrap them in damp cloth to bring back something of their Caribbean softness), Ramón told his former mentor that a few months after his arrival in Moscow, taken by his brother Luis, he had begun to visit the Casa de España. He remembered perfectly his disappointing first incursion in that unreal territory, built with calculated doses of memory and unmemory, where the shipwrecked of the lost war swam, encouraged by the vain illusion of reproducing, in the middle of that strange country of the future, a piece of their homeland of the past. Although a good number of the refugees who remained in the USSR were members of the Spanish Communist Party, selected, welcomed, and maintained by their Soviet brothers, Ramón had also found a notable number of the so-called children of the war (renamed Soviet Hispanics) who left the peninsula when they were less than ten years old and came to the Casa de España in search of the best espresso to be had in Moscow and of a fractured cultural identity, to which they obstinately clung.

Luis had warned him that for many years the boss of that displaced tribe was Dolores Ibárruri, already known around the world as La Pasionaria. The woman was so addicted to power and command in the Stalinist sense that the simple possibility of differing with her opinions was ruled out, at least between the walls of the building and her party, of which she had been president since handing over the — shortened — reins of the general secretaryship in 1960 to Santiago Carrillo. As he listened to his brother, Ramón could not help but remember the night he went with Caridad to La Pedrera and heard the insults André Marty heaped upon La Pasionaria, her head lowered and obedient. But Ramón feared in particular the way in which his former comrades would receive him, and the fact that he could hang on his jacket the two most coveted orders of the USSR would surely not be enough to overcome the suspicions that his personal history would cause in many of them.

“The majority of them are hypocrites,” Ramón said, now using Spanish. “They congratulated me on returning, on my medals, and gave me my membership card as a militant in the Spanish Communist Party, but deep in their eyes I discovered two feelings that the bastards couldn’t hide: fear and disdain. For them I was the living symbol of their great mistake, when they swung like weather vanes at the orders from Moscow and Stalin’s policies and many of them became — we became — hangmen; but I was also the most pathetic proof of that useless obedience. . Some have never said a word to me. Others have become my friends. . I think. What really bothers me the most is that they consider themselves the ‘pure ones’ and I am the ‘dirty one,’ the man of the sewer, when the truth is that more than one of them has shit all the way up to his eyeballs.”

“And even further up,” the former Soviet adviser confirmed.

They turned left in front of the statue of Gogol, as if they had agreed without any need for words.

“Did La Pasionaria recognize you?” Eitingon wanted to know.

“Yes, she recognized me, but she made it look like she didn’t. She has always acted like I am not worthy of her. Caridad says she’ll throw herself at her neck one of these days. .”

“I should go with you one day. . if they would let me. A few of those telling tales there would shit themselves if they saw me. They know that Kotov knows many, many stories. And if you killed Trotsky it is because we sent you to kill him. Some of them snuffed out other people because we sent them — and sometimes without our sending them — because they thought they were more worthy of being our friends if they were ruthless. .”

The almost physiological urgency to move through known territory, no matter how thorny, had turned Ramón into a regular at the Casa de España. Moscow continued to be for him a city of codes and difficult languages to process, and at least there, amid Stalinist Communists, some Khrushchevists, and simple Republicans weighed down by nostalgia and frustration, they had a perverse language that united them: defeat. Thanks to his brother Luis and to his own capacity for hiding his feelings, Ramón established closer relationships with old comrades from the romantic days of the struggle in Barcelona and with a few new acquaintances who, despite everything, respected him, or at least tolerated him, not as much for what he had done but for the way in which he had withstood twenty years of imprisonment and had proven he was a Spaniard, a Catalan of the kind who cannot be broken, who, moreover, preferred a fragrant stew to a solianka stinking of cabbage.

“Solianka doesn’t stink of cabbage,” Lionia protested. “One day I’ll treat you to one, prepared by me, of course.”

“Something very fucked-up happened to me when I asked to be part of the group in charge of drafting the history of the civil war, the one they started to publish in 1966 to commemorate thirty years from the start of combat.”

“I already read it and what I found didn’t surprise me. Franco’s crimes and those of his people are the most terrible episode of what happened in Spain, what gave the war its tone — everyone knows that. But they’re not the only bad stories.”

“And you know that all too well, correct?” Ramón attacked, and Eitingon shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, the whole rigmarole of writing the book would be directed by La Pasionaria, and she didn’t seem very happy with my being part of the team. But others insisted; I don’t know if it’s because they felt bad for me. In the end — so I would leave them alone, I think — they assigned me the task of interviewing veterans of the war and gathering their remembrances and interpretations of the events they lived through or knew of firsthand. As I already expected, every one I interviewed insisted on telling it the way it best suited them, sometimes without any shame, and only remembered what meshed with their political ideas, with their version of the war. Do you know how many spoke to me of the ‘removals’ of prisoners in Madrid and Valencia, of the executions in Paracuellos?”

“None.”

Ramón looked at his former mentor and had to smile.

“It was as if they hadn’t existed. . Fear still hounded them and they didn’t dare utter any truth. The worst was seeing how they twisted stories that I myself lived, that you lived when you were Kotov. The executions in Paracuellos were an anarchist thing, according to them. And the taking of the Telefónica is still a necessary action to get rid of the Trotskyists and the fifth columnists that had been found. They justify or don’t speak of Nin’s disappearance; some insist on minimizing the importance of the International Brigades in the defense of Madrid; they don’t remember anything about the plans you prepared for them to get the other groups out of the way. .”

As a member of the research committee, Ramón made a decision that he only shared with his brother Luis. He went to the Academy of History of the USSR, which was financing (and controlling) the project and its future publication, and began to study the documents placed at the disposal of historians. Since at that time, Roquelia, horrified by the Muscovite winter, had made her first trip to Mexico with Arturo and Laura, Ramón had more than enough time to devote to the research, and he discovered, at first puzzled and then shocked, that the documentation available to him was not only partial — overwhelmingly favorable to the Soviet and Comintern’s collaboration with the Republic — but also on occasion manipulated and differing from the experience he had lived through.

“What were you expecting, kid? The true history of the conquest of New Spain?” Leonid sucked on his cigar and found it had gone out. “Haven’t Franco’s men done the same thing, but less gracefully and more shamelessly?. . Here all Khrushchev’s thaw did was move around a little bit of leftover snow. Neither the Spanish Communists nor the Soviet government were in a position to get to the bottom of things, nor did they want to, because, even when it’s frozen, that dark thing hiding underneath is all shit. It’s like the petrified mammoth shit they found a little while ago in Siberia, thousand-year-old shit, but shit nonetheless.”

Long before Eitingon put it into paleontological terms, Ramón had understood that the order had been given that the shit, no matter how old, could not and should not come to the surface. He knew it the morning he arrived at the Academy of History and the kind archivist who had helped him was not at her post. She was out sick, the substitute commented to him, and then took his slip and returned five minutes later with the information that the files requested by Comrade Pavlovich López had been transferred to a closed section and could only be accessed by those with an authorization from the Kremlin office in charge of the History and Social Research Institutes. Ramón was not even surprised that when the first volumes of War and Revolution in Spain, 1936–1939 were published, bearing the logo of the Progreso publishing house, his new name did not appear among the members of the research committee, presided over by Dolores Ibárruri and made up of her most loyal squires.

“How did you feel?” Eitingon wanted to know.

“Frustrated, but what the hell, I’m already used to it.”

“Yes. . Now, just remember that rewriting history and putting it wherever is most convenient to those in power was not something Stalin invented, although he used it, in his rough and contemptuous way, to the utmost. And talking about ‘revolution’ in Spain, when that was the first thing that was impeded, and without going into the Republican alliance’s cruelties. . well, that’s really making a bitch of history. That’s why it’s better to have a muzzle on historical controversy. .”

Eitingon made an effort and managed to light his cigar again. Ramón looked at his: it was still burning evenly and happily.

“Things have been going on at the Casa de España lately.”

Although many refugees had managed to return to Spain starting in 1956, the ones who still remained fought to gain power. La Pasionaria, who had the loyal Juan Modesto as her deputy, felt that in recent years her absolute preeminence had come under question: Enrique Líster, who carried the record of his legendary participation in the civil war, the Great Patriotic War and in the Yugoslav guerrillas behind him, and Santiago Carrillo were becoming more notably opposed to the famous Stalinist militant’s power. “It’s the same song over and over,” Luis had said to him when the break was becoming visible. “The day we stop fighting amongst ourselves, we’ll have ceased to be Spaniards.”

“It’s not that you are or are not Spaniards, kid, it’s that you’re politicians,” Lionia said, this time in Spanish. “Franco’s end is on the horizon, and the time for the harvest is near. You have to be ready in case there’s a new division of power. You have to improve your image, keep up with the times!”

They both knew that the waters of the Casa de España, before whose walls they stood at that moment, had become very murky in recent months. Due to the Soviet intervention in Prague, some of the leaders of the Spanish Communist Party had dared to express doubts regarding the pertinence of the invasion, which caused a schism in the party’s leadership. To Eitingon, that attitude responded to the need to distance itself from the darker side of Soviet influence and put on a more seemingly democratic face; to Ramón, it was just a propitious although dangerous opportunity to gain some power within the colony, but above all, in a future Spain. The most daring refugees, incited by Santiago Carrillo and Ignacio Gallegos, had even decided to dig around in the Casa’s archives and in the personal records of each one of the Spaniards settled in the USSR. That proposal had been like bringing a flame to dynamite. If certain documents zealously guarded on the second level of the Zhdanov Street building were circulated, many of the plots and cruel maneuvers would come to light in which many of the refugees, turned into informants and betrayers of many others, were involved. And so comrades of so many years moved this time by the fear of being discovered, again divided into bands to launch a war that went from words to blows and the breaking of chairs. From the lower level of the former bank building, Ramón showed Lionia the third-floor window from which one of his compatriots was thrown.

“They say he fell there, in the middle of the street. Everyone thought he had been killed, because he wasn’t moving, but suddenly he stood up, spit, scratched his head, and went back upstairs to continue handing out blows.”

“And then they say we’re savages.” Eitingon smiled as they resumed their walk. They made a stop at the Sardinka beer hall, where Spanish refugees tended to satiate their alcoholic thirst, because of the wise prohibition of serving any of that flammable substance within the confines of the Casa.

The war of blows between the Spanish Communists ended with the arrival of the militia, who emptied the place, Ramón went on. At the same time, the reasons for its foreseeable continuation disappeared that same night, when a KGB unit took away the files full of the fratricidal revelations for safekeeping.

An hour later, when they came out at Dzerzhinsky Square, Ramón looked at the statue of the founder of the Cheka out of the corner of his eye and at the most feared building in the Soviet Union, behind the bronze man.

“Did I tell you I was also down there?” Leonid said, again in French, pointing at the Lubyanka’s basement with his nose. “I don’t know how long, but it was the worst time of my life. . Yob tvoyu mat!” he exclaimed with an anger from deep inside, and Ramón didn’t know if he was cursing the building or the bronze idol.

“Ever since I got to Moscow, it has always seemed odd to me that that statue survived the reforms.”

“They had enough work with the statues and busts of Stalin. There were millions throughout the country. In Georgia, where Stalin was bloodier, since it was where they knew him best, there were mobs when they tried to take down the largest ones. The people were already so used to living under Stalin, to playing by his rules, that they were afraid that somebody could think they had approved of the demolition of those statues! Do you realize what fear can do when it turns into a way of life? To fill the millions of holes left by the removed statues of Stalin, they had to produce hundreds of statues and busts of Lenin.”

They crossed the square, and when they got to Kirov Street, Eitingon entered a liquor store and came out with two bottles of vodka. On Petrovsky Boulevard, they looked for an empty bench. Before sitting down, Leonid slapped his limping leg three times while he called it suka and took his first drink. He put two fingers to the base of his neck, asking for company, but Ramón rejected the invitation. The sun was starting to set and the afternoon was becoming cool. When he saw Eitingon lounging comfortably, he wondered if a drink wouldn’t do him some good, although he preferred to wait.

“What happened with the Casa de España files and the power disputes among the Spaniards reminded me of something that you surely don’t know,” Eitingon said, and had a second drink. “When Stalin died, a lot of things happened in very little time. Beria, Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Malenkov went right into action and practically the first thing they did was send a special group from the Ministry of the Interior to gather all of Stalin’s belongings and files that were in the Kuntsevo dacha and in his offices at the Kremlin. Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, had the pass taken away from her with which she could enter her father’s offices, and until last year, when she finally managed to flee from the Soviet Union, she always said that Khrushchev and Beria had stolen Stalin’s treasures.”

“What treasures was she talking about?”

“There were no treasures. What need for money or jewels does a man have who is the lord and master of an enormous country and all it contains? And when I say everything, it’s everything: the mountains, the lakes, the snow, the airplanes, the petroleum, even its people — the life of its people. . It’s true that there were many silver objects, especially busts and plaques he had been given, but all of those were sent to a foundation. The furniture, the china, the rugs, and those things were distributed to different places. It was decided that the History Institute’s Section for the Family conserve his marshal’s uniform and some samples of the gifts workers gave him every day. But the majority of his clothing wasn’t worth anything, some was fairly worn-out, and what didn’t get thrown out was donated to centers for handicapped veterans.”

“So there was no money?”

“There was. Those in charge of the operation were overwhelmed by the amount of envelopes with bills that were everywhere. Stalin earned a salary for each one of his ten posts, but as he didn’t have to buy anything, not even to give gifts or host parties. . But that money didn’t make anyone rich, and what my companions were looking for were documents. Those seeking power, without telling each other, were afraid that a testament like Lenin’s would appear, which would complicate things for some of them and benefit others. That was why they decided, like knights, to take all of Stalin’s papers out and burn them so that none of them would have the advantage or disadvantage of having been selected or rejected by Stalin.”

“And how do you know all of this?”

Leonid took another swig and Ramón held out his hand to take the bottle. He needed a drink.

“When I recovered a little, after getting out of jail, I began to work with Beria. They made me part of that team and I was one of the ones who, after the burning of the papers, found, in a drawer of a table in the office of the Kremlin, some letters that had been hidden under newspaper. There were five — just five letters — and it appears that Stalin read them from time to time. One was the one dictated by Lenin on March 5, 1923—I can’t forget the date — in which he demanded an apology from Stalin for having insulted his wife, Krupskaya. Another one was from Bukharin, written shortly before he was executed, in which he told Stalin how much he loved him. . And there was one, very short, written by Marshal Tito, dated 1950, I believe, but I remember perfectly well what it said: ‘Stalin, stop sending assassins to liquidate me. We’ve already caught five. If you don’t stop, I personally will send a man to Moscow and there will be no need to send another’. .”

“So did anyone ever find out that Stalin’s papers had disappeared?”

“Nothing has ever been said officially, of course. But besides the personal documents, there were what were called ‘special files,’ a supersecret record where laminated documents were kept and which could only be viewed if Stalin himself authorized it. These were kept and I imagine that within them there must be some reports that are too uncomfortable, because nobody yet knows where they are, if they still exist. Hopefully, one day they will be able to be read, because on that day we’re going to discover that the earth is not round. .”

“For example?”

“Stalin’s pacts with Hitler and later with Roosevelt and Churchill. Or do you think that the partition of Europe was done just like that, à la ‘I got here first and this is mine’—style? How can you explain that the Communists didn’t come to power in Italy or Greece when they were the strongest party after the war? Or the Poles — do you think that the Poles are Communists and love us like brothers?”

Eitingon lifted the bottle, but something stopped him. He was serious, silent, until he said:

“Do you think they’ll ever knock down Lenin’s statues as well?”

Ramón looked at the river, where the sun was setting, and asked:

“Was our thing in those files?”

Eitingon at last took his drink and rolled down a little bit more on the bench. Suddenly he seemed relaxed.

“No, our thing never appeared. First of all, because almost nothing was written, and what was written went directly to Stalin’s personal files. Beria told me that, at regular intervals, the Undefeated Leader sat down in front of the stove to burn what he had in Kuntsevo and turned the papers he thought should never be read into smoke. That’s what I call having a good sense of history. We, like many other parts of history, went to the clouds, Ramón, sent there by our dear Comrade Stalin.”

Ramón suspected that he could be exceeding the limits of what was allowed when he accepted the invitation. His game of “How far can I go?” seemed similar to the one the Czechoslovaks had played throughout the first month of that year of 1968, and he presumed that, if he reached the limit, perhaps then his defenses might be invaded with infantry, tanks, and planes willing to reestablish order. But he decided to try their tempers once again.

In his conversations with Leonid Eitingon over the last two months, Ramón had received so many confirmations and revelations about his fate and of the fates of so many millions of believers that he had become addicted to those dialogues, which shed light on the actions of his life, on the very idea for which he had fought, killed, endured prison and torture, to end up living an amorphous, disappointed, aimless life. Both knew uncomfortable pieces of the past and they comforted themselves with those painful plunges into the dark depths through which their lost souls wandered. Eitingon, from the vantage point of his cynicism and with the penetrating influence he had always exercised over his pupil, had forced him to see himself from other angles and, above all, to notice the shadowy side of the utopia for which Ramón had gone, pure and full of fervor (Leonid dixit), to the sacrificial altar. He discovered or confirmed that, among the many who were defrauded, he had a certain right of priority, like in the lines at the stores: his act stood out in that infinite circus ring where the whips have so often cracked and the clowns so often danced with their frozen smiles.

Luis had assured him that he knew Moscow like the back of his hand and that they wouldn’t have any problems finding apartment 18-A, stairway F, of building 26-C, block 7, of Karl Marx Street, in the neighborhood of Golianovo. Eitingon had given them the statue of Lenin with his arm extended toward the future as a reference: from there, they would go as far as the Friends of the Militia kindergarten and, after turning to the left — always to the left, he repeated — they would find the street, the block and the building just next to the Ernst Thälmann kindergarten.

From the very day that, for his services to the Soviet homeland, he was assigned that nationally manufactured car — that, fresh from the factory, already needed a shove for its doors to close — Ramón had handed it over to his brother, since, despite his position as an engineer and university professor, a militant in the party and a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, Luis Mercader had still not managed to climb the ladder and obtain his own vehicle. That night, Luis went to pick him up a little bit before seven and, since Roquelia preferred to stay at home, Galina, Luis’s wife, chose to leave her children with Ramón’s so to better enjoy the adventure.

Golianovo reeked of Stalin. The housing blocks, square and gray, with tiny windows where the residents hung their clothing to dry, were separated by flattened dirt paths plagued with trees fighting for space. The monotony of that rushed architecture, insistent on demonstrating that a few square feet of ceiling were enough for a person to live socialistically, caused vertigo with its uniformity and depersonalization. The numbers that ought to identify blocks, buildings, and stairways had been erased long ago by the snow and the rain. The street signs had disappeared and, over each recycled pedestal (they counted four), rose one of the statues of a frowning and watchful Lenin forged in series by voluntary labor. But none of those Lenins were pointing anywhere. When they asked the few passersby out defying the cold about the address — it was Galina’s mission, since she was a native — it always ended up being familiar, but did they mean Marx Street, Marx and Engels Street or Karl Marx Avenue? And yes, of course, they had heard of the Friends of the Militia kindergarten, and invariably they told them to turn to the left — always to the left — and ask around there, pointing at an unspecific point in the labyrinth of buildings copied from the template with the most terrifying faithfulness.

Since Leonid Eitingon was not one of the few privileged ones to whom the regional council had granted a private telephone, when Luis found himself lost in a corner of the satellite city, after searching for almost an hour, Ramón proposed they give up. He regretted that his former mentor would have invested time and savings in preparing them a worthy meal, and that they would not be able to give him the bottles of vodka that clinked next to Galina every time Luis went over a pothole, but they had to admit that they were hopelessly lost in the middle of the proletarian metropolis. At that moment Luis discovered the miracle of a taxi right in the middle of Golianovo and, after he gave the driver a bottle of vodka, he led them, in two minutes, to building 26-C of block 7. Galina then left the car and went to knock on the door of the closest apartment. A woman who still had traces of the countryside came out to the street with her and pointed at the second-to-last staircase of the large building and, with her hands, counted the floors they had to climb to reach the apartment they were looking for.

Eitingon received them with a big smile and they all had to submit to his bear hug and his alcohol-flavored kisses. While he thanked them for the vodka, he introduced his wife, Yevgenia Purizova, fifteen, perhaps twenty years younger than her husband, although she seemed even more wrinkled than him. According to what Ramón had managed to find out, when he left jail, Eitingon had resumed his relationship with his first wife, Olga Nahumova, who died shortly after, and he had been living with Yenia, who became his fifth wife, for two years.

The host and his visitors settled around the table in the center of a room that was sometimes a living room and that, as they would later find out, also served as the bedroom for Yenia’s two daughters, who lived with them. On the table, covered with an oilcloth sheet, there were already plates with copious appetizers of extreme flavors with which Russians padded their stomachs in order to drink more vodka: sliced ham, pickles, tomato and apple, strips of herring and salmon, a little bit of red caviar, scallions, Russian salad and fresh salad, sausage links, little squares of lard, and black bread.

“I don’t know what you have to complain about,” Ramón said as he cut one of the sour pickles, of which he had, curiously, become a fan.

Leonid served vodka in glasses almost to the brim and asked his wife to bring the pitcher of orange juice, specially prepared for Ramón, as he rarely drank alcohol. From the small kitchen came the pungent smell of boiled cabbage, and Ramón begged that the pelmenis serving as the main course not be loaded with the spicy pepper capable of making him cry.

“I didn’t expect you so early,” Lionia said as he handed Galina and Luis their glasses.

“But we’ve been driving around for an hour. .!” Ramón began, giving free rein to his annoyance.

“It’s normal. What do you think of my neighborhood?”

“It’s horrible,” Ramón admitted, and took a bite of caviar on black bread.

“That’s the word, ‘horrible.’ Beauty and socialism seem to play on opposite teams. But you get used to everything. Do you see how lucky you are to live overlooking the Frunze and to have three bedrooms and even a balcony?. . Da dna?” he challenged Galina and Luis, and the three raised their glasses and hurried their vodka in one gulp, until they saw the bottoms of their glasses as their host requested.

“I didn’t always live like that. When Roquelia arrived, they gave us an apartment a little bit bigger than this one, in Sokol. .”

“That can’t be compared to this. Sokol is the waiting room to paradise, Ramón. You walk a little bit and you’re in Utopia.”

Ramón recalled his wanderings through Utopia, as Eitingon called it. In the 1930s, when the repression and the scarcity were at their highest, a group of artists, mostly painters, had obtained the Leader’s permission to create an ideal commune in Sokol, and even received materials to make single-family houses with backyards and gardens. Many built izbas and Nordic cabins, but also, here and there, you could see a small Moorish palace or a house with a Mediterranean air. With full intent, they made sinuous streets with parks on the corners, on which they built beautiful pigeon houses in a variety of designs. The private areas and the communal ones were planted with a variety of trees not found anywhere else in the city, like rhododendrons, almond trees, and quince trees distributed in such a way that in autumn their leaves offered a spectacular chromatic show. From the rushed uniformity of the buildings built by Khrushchev where he had been confined, Ramón only needed to cross two streets to enter that singular space in Moscow, where the free will of its inhabitants had determined the kinds of houses in which they wanted to live and the trees they wished to plant. That part of Sokol was like a museum of the never-achieved socialist dream of beauty, a paradoxical individualized and human wart on the body designed in iron molds of the strict Soviet city planned by Stalin ever since he set out to “perform a cesarean section on old Moscow,” too chaotic and stately for his tastes as the Supreme Urbanist.

“Stalin ordered Golianovo built after the war. As always, he gave a deadline to finish the buildings, without it mattering too much how they turned out,” Eitingon said as he made space for his wife to place a casserole on the table with kholodets, pig’s-foot gelatin, for which she brought a bottle of mustard and a plate with rounds of strongly flavored wild radish as accompaniments. “But if the apartments are small and ugly, the fault, of course, is of imperialism, which is also responsible for Soviet shoes being so hard and for there being no deodorant and for the toothpaste irritating your gums.”

Luis smiled, denying something with his head, as he served himself the kholodets with the spicy radishes that Ramón detested.

“You’re such a funny man, Kotov. . Man, I remember when I met you in Barcelona. I was practically a boy and look, I’m already bald.”

Lionia looked quickly at the kitchen, to where his wife had returned, and warned in a low voice, making use of Catalan:

“It’s forbidden to mention Caridad.”

“Does Yenia understand Catalan?”

“No. But just in case. Don’t we have the most educated people in the world here?”

It was now Ramón who smiled.

“Stop fucking around and speak in Russian,” Galina demanded in Spanish. “Besides, Caridad is an ugly old woman full of wrinkles.”

“The devil doesn’t get wrinkly inside,” Eitingon said, and the rest agreed.

“I remember when Kotov talked to me about the Soviet Union,” Luis recalled, and took his wife’s hand. “I dreamed of this, and the day I arrived was one of the happiest in my life. I had arrived at the future.”

“And you got to the future. .,” Eitingon said through some pieces of lard in his mouth, and rinsed his mouth with a glass of vodka. “According to our leaders, this is the future. The West is the decadent past. And the most fucked-up thing is that it’s true. Capitalism already gave everything it could. But it’s also true that if the future is like Golianovo, people are going to prefer the decadence with deodorant and real cars for a long time. The world is at the bottom of a trap and the terrible thing is that we squandered the opportunity to save it. Do you know what the only solution is?”

“You’re joking that you have a solution!” Luis was surprised, and Eitingon smiled, satisfied.

“Close this shop and open another one, two streets down. But start the business without deceiving anyone, without fucking anyone over because he thinks differently from you, without looking for reasons to shut you up and without telling you that when they give it to you up the ass, it’s for your own good and for the good of humanity, and that you don’t even have the right to protest or say it hurts, because you shouldn’t give ammunition to the enemy and all of those justifications. Without blackmail. . The problem is that the ones who decide for us decided that a little bit of democracy was okay but not too much. . and in the end, they even forgot about the little bit we were due, and that whole thing that was so beautiful turned into a police station dedicated to protecting power.”

“So you’re no longer a Communist?” Luis asked, lowering his voice.

“They’re different things. I’m still a Communist, I will be until I die. The ones who became the masters of everything and prostituted it all, are they Communists? The ones who deceived me and deceived Ramón, were those Communists? Please, Luis. .”

Galina drank her vodka and spoke into the bottom of the glass.

“Was Trotsky a Communist? Khrushchev invited Natalia Sedova to visit Moscow. She refused, but the fact that they invited her shows something.”

“Khrushchev was always a clown,” Eitingon pronounced, and filled his glass.

Without making a comment, Ramón touched his hand where the half-moon scar showed. It was pathetic to him that his former boss was playing the victim. Eitingon, for his part, seemed upset. He picked a little bit from each plate, as if he were anxious, and at that moment Ramón remembered the lavish dinners, with delicate wines, that they allowed themselves in Paris, New York, and Mexico in their days as agents with expenses paid by the coffers of the Soviet state. How much of that money, he wondered, came from Spanish treasures?

“The country of the future. Stalin ordered the killing of millions of people,” Eitingon railed. “But what they ordered us to do was excessive. We should have left the old man to die of loneliness or to mess things up in his desperation, leaving only himself covered in shit. We saved him from oblivion and made him a martyr—”

“That’s enough,” Ramón cut him off, refusing to listen to that reasoning. “Do we have to talk about this?” And he dropped a stream of vodka into his orange juice.

“What else can we the shipwrecked talk about but the sea, Ramón Pavlovich? Let’s toast — to the shipwrecked of the world! To the bottom!” And he drank the vodka.

Following his cry, silence fell over the small room, but from the kitchen came Yevgenia Purizova’s voice announcing that the pelmenis were ready. Leonid, Luis, and Galina focused on finishing their appetizers, and did so meticulously, something that always frightened Ramón. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Eitingon stood up, and while the visitors cleared the table of empty bottles and plates, the host placed another basket of black bread, the tray with pickled cabbage and lard, a plate with meats and boiled potatoes, oil, and vinegar, and finally handed out clean plates, from different sets. Yenia entered with a slightly dented casserole and placed it in the center of the table; Ramón found that the sight of the pelmenis brought back his appetite.

“The girls ate already. They’re watching television at a neighbor’s house. Serve yourselves as much as you like.”

She sprinkled the pelmenis with vinegar and Ramón tasted how Eitingon’s wife’s pelmenis, full of lamb meat, were much better than the ones Galina usually cooked.

“Lionia told me that your wife travels to Mexico every year,” Yenia commented, trying to sound casual in the middle of the din of silverware, the clinking of glasses, and the noise of chewing jaws.

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

Yenia smiled as if it were a joke.

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

Ramón finished chewing and nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why are you asking me that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eitingon’s snores brought him back to reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Micro-concrete?” Elena Feerchstein asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jo sóc un fantasma.”

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

30. Requiem

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

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

The last time I saw Iván alive was three days after Ana’s death. That night at the end of September 2004, while we engaged in the strangest conversation, at a given moment I found the story of Iván’s Italian dream in the bottomless bowl of lost desires. I will perhaps never know if the recuperation of that thirty-one-year-old memory was the unconscious manifestation of a premonition or if it was my brain’s preemptive answer to the question of the origins of the disaster.

After that night, I would live for several weeks trapped in the swamp of contradictions, feeling myself sinking in the mud of my egotism. In any event, since Iván didn’t come by my house again, I took refuge in his demand not to see him again, since that’s what he had asked upon saying goodbye to me, and I acted in a petty and puerile way, refusing to give in and go in search of him once more, although I knew it was my duty. Nonetheless, every time I ran into friends like black Frank or Anselmo, I asked them if they had seen Iván, and it didn’t surprise me, or rather it calmed me down to always hear that they hadn’t seen him, that he didn’t want to see anyone, that he was writing something. And, like a good mediocre writer (and to top it off, without inspiration), I took refuge behind that excuse and didn’t try to seek him out.

I know that my distance was also due, more than to any envious feelings, to the fear of a responsibility that Iván had thrown at me and that I didn’t know how to manage: what was I going to do with what Iván was writing? Keep it in a drawer, as he did? Try to publish it, as he could also do but didn’t want to? That absurd decision of my friend to hand over his work and his obsession of years to me, cutting all ties with that story and with his own life, seemed to me sick and, above all, cowardly. They were his problem, his book, his story and not mine, I thought.

It goes without saying, at this point, that Ana’s death was a greater blow for Iván than all of us, including Iván himself, could have imagined. Although in his final months, tormented by the impotence and pain caused by seeing her suffer — more than once he had confessed that it was preferable that she finally rest — Ana’s irreversible absence submerged him in a melancholy from which my friend had no power or desire to emerge.

On that last visit I made to the small apartment in Lawton, the first thing I confirmed was how urgently Iván had to pull himself away from those testimonies of pain amid which he had lived for I don’t know how many years. The activity that had unfolded in the days leading up to the burial had to have been frenetic, since, when I entered his house, the first thing I noticed was the disappearance of all hospital-related objects, which had overtaken that space. Along with the reclining bed and the wheelchair, the support for the IVs, the bedpans, the needles and the medicine bottles and even the color television with remote control (lent by a neighbor, so that Ana could entertain herself with something easier to see than the blinking black-and-white TV set that a client from the clinic had given to Iván before leaving Cuba a few years before). The floors smelled of cheap disinfectant and the walls, as always, of mildew, not alcohol and liniments. Even Iván had thrown himself into a metamorphosis. He had shaved his head and was exhibiting a skull plagued with hills and crossed by the river of the scar that, many years before, had been given to him by his adversaries in the bar fight that landed him in the trauma center of Calixto García Hospital.

The change in the atmosphere and his appearance — which was like that of someone recently released from a concentration camp — made the physical devastation my friend had suffered in recent months more palpable (at some point the idea had crossed my mind that Iván was going to disappear and go to heaven), and better prepared me to hear, at the end of that night, the word, the feeling capable of paralyzing him that he had hidden for ten years, ashamed by the significance enclosed in an inappropriate reaction: compassion. Because at the end it wasn’t so much fear as that cunning noun, from which he tried to free himself, the brick that maintains the building of delays, mysteries, concealment, behind which Iván had been lost.

“Why in the hell did you do that to your head? Do you know what you look like?” I said to him as soon as I saw him, but my friend didn’t answer and accepted, with a sad smile, the container full to the brim with food my wife had prepared for him. In silence, Iván began to serve himself and, before sitting down to eat, went to the room and came back with an envelope in his hands.

“A long time ago you wanted to read this. .”

As soon as I heard him, I guessed what it was about. They had to be, and in fact they were, the pages written more than twenty-five years before by Jaime López, the papers whose existence I had known about for ten years and that, every time the subject came up, I asked Iván to let me read, since I considered that, by reading them, I would touch with my own hands the elusive soul of the man who loved dogs.

As he ate, I delved into that story, the reflections and letters about the years in Moscow of a Ramón Mercader who, in a sick way, insisted on clinging to the embarrassing mediation through the ventriloquist Jaime López and in presenting himself as a person who could be viewed with a certain distance. Or was it that he felt so stripped of his own self, so removed from the original Ramón Mercader that he preferred, to the end, to continue being one of his disguises? The essential man, the primary one, the one who had been in the Sierra de Guadarrama — had he been devoured by the mission, the dogma, and the ruthlessness of history until turning into a character who could only be seen in the distance? What was written gave off the bad flavor of a confession barely capable of hiding the request for forgiveness and the frustration of a man who, from the perspective given to him by years and experienced events, at last confronted himself and what he had signified in a sordid intrigue destined to devour him to the last cell.

But the most alarming thing, at least for me, was discovering the commentaries and questions that, in tiny letters, Iván had added in the margins of the pages, with different-colored inks and a variety of nuances — signs of an excessive and obsessive return to those words over the course of the years. I asked myself whether Iván, more than interrogating the author of the confession, had not been looking for an answer lost within himself. The papers, in addition, were greasy, as if they had been through many hands, when I knew that Iván and the tall, thin black man who brought them to him (and Ana?) were the only ones who had laid eyes on them. I was alarmed by the relationship my friend could have established with that confidence and with the intangible being living behind it.

“I’m left with a desire to know what happened once Caridad arrived in Moscow and how Ramón managed to get them to allow him to leave. .,” I told him when I finished reading, without daring to comment that my real concern had to do with him. Then Iván handed me a cup of recently made coffee and turned around, as if my curiosity did not interest him.

On the small table, Iván began to serve Truco’s food. Since I’m not especially fond of dogs, that night I had forgotten about the animal, and it was only at that moment that I realized he had not come out to greet me. I looked for him and found him under an armchair, his eyes wide open, lying on a piece of fabric. Iván brought him the plastic plate; Truco smelled the food, but didn’t muster any enthusiasm to taste it.

“Come on, boy, eat,” Iván said to him, kneeling next to the animal, and added tenderly, as if he were surprised: “Come on, look, it’s meat!”

“Is he sick?”

“He’s sad,” Iván assured me while he ran his hand over Truco’s head. I noticed the dog’s eyes, and although I’m not the type to believe those things, I seemed to detect a certain pain in his damp and disconsolate gaze. Iván showed him some food, but the dog turned his head. “He knows what happened. He hasn’t eaten for three days. Poor Truco.”

Iván’s voice sounded regretful. He moved away from Truco, washed his hands, and drank his coffee. Seated at the table, he lit a cigarette while looking at his dog, and I remember that I thought: Iván is going to cry.

“What Truco has is called melancholy, and it’s an illness that cures itself or it can kill him. .,” he said, nearly dragging out the words. He took a few drags from his cigarette and finally looked at me. “Take those papers with you. I don’t want them near me.”

“What’s wrong, Iván?” His attitude, more than surprising me, was starting to worry me. In his eyes there was a damp sadness identical to the one floating in his dog’s look.

“Meeting that man was the worst thing that happened to me in my life. And quite a few fucked-up things have happened to me. . I’m going to finish writing about how I met him and why I didn’t dare to tell his story from the beginning. I don’t want to do it, but I have to write it. When I finish, I’m going to give you all of my papers so you can do whatever you want with them. . I am not a writer nor was I ever, and I’m not interested in publishing it or in having anyone reading it. .”

Iván left his cigarette in the ashtray on the table. He seemed very tired, as if nothing mattered to him, and it even seemed to me that he was breathing with difficulty, like an asthmatic. When I was about to reproach him for his last words, he got ahead of me.

“I am also a ghost. .”

At that moment I understood what Iván was trying to say to me a little bit better. And I thought the worst: he’s going to kill himself.

“Why are you going to give me everything you’ve written? What does that mean?” I dared to ask him, fearing the worst, and I wanted to make things less dramatic. “Look, you’re not Kafka. .”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” he said to me, after letting me suffer for a few seconds. “I’m not crazy, either. It’s just that I don’t want to see those papers anymore. It’s better for you to have them, since you are still a writer. . But if you want, you can burn them; it’s all the same to me. .”

“I don’t understand, Iván. Doesn’t the truth matter to you? That man was a son of a bitch and there’s no excuse nor. .”

“What truth? What is the truth? And he wasn’t the only son of a bitch who did inexcusable things.”

“Of course not. But he was one of the ones who helped Stalin turn twenty million people to ash in the name of communism. . And he didn’t kill just anyone. . He killed another son of a bitch who, when he was in power, ripped the heads off of who knows how many people. . All of this is too heavy, Iván. Note that the Russians, after having taken the lid off things, closed it all up again, nice and tight. . You have to do a lot of terrible things to kill so many people. .”

“Mercader was a victim, like most of them,” he protested, less vehemently, as he looked at the lighter the man who loved dogs had left him as an inheritance.

“He was more than a victim, and that’s why he couldn’t live in peace. Do you know why he told you his story and then wrote this letter? So that you would write about it and publish it. .”

Iván rubbed his shaved head forcefully, as if he wanted to erase something inside it. And he was saying he wasn’t crazy?

“Sometimes I think like you do. But other times I believe it was the need of a dying man. It has to be really fucked-up to live your entire life as if you were someone else, saying you’re someone else, and knowing it’s better to hide behind the other name because you feel ashamed of yourself.”

“What kind of shitty shame are you talking about? None of them had any shame or anything like it.”

“Don’t you think he paid for all his faults? Do you know that another prisoner from Lecumberri said that Ramón had been raped in prison?”

“He had to know what the risks were, and even then he accepted it. . And it seems fine to me that his ass was ripped open in jail.”

“He wasn’t running around killing people. . He was a soldier who followed orders. He did what they asked of him out of obedience and conviction. .”

Iván stood up, served more coffee in the cups, but neither of us drank. He was looking at his dog again when he said to me:

“Do you know how I was sure that López was Mercader, before reading those papers — before seeing the photo?”

“I don’t know. . Because of what he said to you about Trotsky’s scream, right?” I guessed, willing to give him a break: at the end of the day, Iván hadn’t killed anybody or helped anyone else get fucked over. He was definitely a victim, after all.

“No, no, the key was the way he treated his dogs and how he looked at the sea. He was Mercader in search of the happiness he felt in Sant Feliu de Guíxols. His paradise lost. . Cuba was a placebo.”

“So how could you keep talking to him after being sure that he was Mercader?”

Iván looked into my eyes and I stared back. He mechanically drank his coffee, grabbed the cigarette packet, and removed another cigarette. How many was he going to smoke?

“I think I was never sure that he was Mercader. When López told me about Mercader’s life, it seemed that he was talking about a man from long ago, I don’t know, from the nineteenth century. . And although it sounds morose, I wanted to know how that story ended. But above all, I felt he needed me to listen to him.” He paused and lit a cigarette. “Do you know what bothers me most about this whole story?”

“The lies?”

“Besides the lies.”

“That Stalin perverted it all? That likely his same comrades killed Mercader, poisoning him with radioactivity?”

“More than that.”

I stayed silent. When you looked at it all, everything in that story bothered me. Iván smoked without taking his eyes off of me.

“What he stuck in here,” he said, and pointed at his shaved head. “When I read those papers and had a clear idea of what Ramón Mercader had done, I felt disgust. But I also felt compassion for him, for the way in which he had been used, for the shame it caused him to be himself. I know: he was a murderer and doesn’t deserve compassion; but I can’t help it, dammit! Maybe it’s true that his own people released radioactivity into his blood to kill him, as Eitingon says, but it wasn’t necessary, because they had already killed him many times. They had taken everything away from him: his name, his past, his will, his dignity. And in the end, for what? Ever since he said yes to Caridad, Ramón lived in a jail that followed him until the very day of his death. Not even by burning his entire body or by believing he was someone else could he get rid of his history. . But, despite it all, I felt bad knowing how he had ended up, because he had always been a soldier, like so many people. . And if they killed him, you can’t feel anything but compassion for him. And that compassion makes me feel dirty, contaminated by the faith of a man who should not deserve any compassion, any pity. That’s why I refuse to believe that his own people killed him, because, in a way, that would make him a martyr. . And I don’t want to publish anything, because just to think that this story could move someone to feel a little bit of compassion makes me want to vomit. .”

I looked at my friend and felt that I was finally beginning to understand something. His life (if you’ve come this far, you already know) had been a series of disgraces and unwarranted but unavoidable frustrations — so many and at the same time so common that it seemed incredible that the weight of his times and his circumstances could fall on one man alone. It was as if he personally was chosen to receive each one of the blows meant for an entire generation of people forced to be gullible. To top it off, he had lived with that damned story inside him for almost thirty years and had the disgrace that Ana, the purest thing in his life, should reproduce with her death Ramón Mercader’s final torture and that he should see himself forced to watch, day after day, an agony that couldn’t cease to remind him of a despicable and despised murderer. Even so, along with indignation, Iván felt compassion for that man and his fate, and that feeling provoked an intense rancor toward himself.

“Iván, he was one of them and they treated him ruthlessly, as they taught him from the beginning that others should be treated. But he doesn’t deserve your compassion for any of that.”

Iván thought for a few seconds. He must have been weighing the consequences of what he wanted to tell me, and just by looking at him I sensed that it wasn’t going to be anything pleasant. It was at that moment that I remembered, I’m not sure through what association of ideas, the story of Iván’s desire to travel to Italy.

“It’s just that I can’t go on. .” he said at last. “I’ve spent my entire damned life with the feeling of trying to escape from something that always grabs me, and I’m tired of running. . Now, take those papers and leave. Go on, I want to lie down.”

Almost relieved, I stood up, but I did not grab the papers. When I went to leave, I turned around and saw him smoking again. Iván had his eyes fixed on Truco, who was sleeping in the corner. I felt pity for my friend and for his dog, real and justified pity, but also an enormous desire to tell it all to go to hell, to curse the entire world, to disappear. Of course, I didn’t need to ask Iván what he had been trying to escape from throughout his life; I knew that he was fleeing from fear, but as he himself said, no matter how much you run and hide, fear always gets you. I know all too well.

“We’re fucked. All of us,” I said. I don’t know if I said it out loud.

How is it possible that I let so much time go by? It’s true that I was — am — also afraid, but Iván deserved more from me.

It wasn’t until December 22 that I finally went out to search for Iván. My wife gave me the excuse, although it wasn’t very good, that she wanted to invite him over to eat with us the night of the twenty-fourth. The problem was that Iván and I both had always hated the holidays and viewed the festive spirit that people assumed around that time as an obligation.

When I got to his apartment, I found the door and the window shut. I knocked several times, without any response. Something about the house seemed strange to me, although at that moment I didn’t notice what could be out of the ordinary, besides the inscrutability and the silence.

Since it was barely three in the afternoon, I went to the veterinary clinic where Iván worked and also found it closed, with the chain and the lock he tended to put between the door and the doorframe. I asked a woman who lived across the street and she told me that Iván had not come for two or three days, and that had her worried: he was never away for so long.

I returned to Iván’s block and knocked on the house of the neighbor who had lent the color television during Ana’s illness. The man recognized me and invited me in, but I told him I was in a rush and just wanted to know if he had seen Iván.

“Three days. . No, I haven’t seen him in about three days.”

I thanked him and, out of basic courtesy, I wished him a Merry Christmas, and the man responded with two words full of meaning:

“Lo propio.”

When I was walking toward the Pontiac, asking myself where in the hell Iván could have gone, I remembered that the Christmastime formula his neighbor had offered me was the same one that, according to my friend, he had said by way of farewell to the man who loved dogs, on the very day they met for the last time, exactly twenty-seven years ago. And at that moment, a light went off in my head. How was it possible that Truco didn’t bark when I knocked at the door of the apartment? Iván and Ana’s dog was a compulsive barker, and he would have stopped making noise for only a few reasons: if he was very sick, or if he wasn’t at home, or — the most probable — because he had died, perhaps of melancholy over Ana’s absence.

Overcome by a bad feeling, I switched course and went in search of the only public telephone working in the neighborhood, at the newspaper and magazine stand that doesn’t sell newspapers or magazines. From there I managed to call Frank’s and Anselmo’s houses, and both of them confirmed that Iván hadn’t been by in a long time. Then I called Raquelita and she said she hadn’t seen Iván in ages and it would be better if she never again saw that “miserable comemierda.” Sitting in the Pontiac, I started to think and saw very few alternatives. I didn’t have the least idea of where to look for him, although I knew I should look for him. In this country, people don’t tend to disappear: when someone gets lost it’s because the sea swallowed them up or because they still don’t have enough coins to make a phone call from the first telephone they find in Miami. But that wouldn’t be Iván. Not at this point, not after everything he had lived through inside the island’s four walls.

Suddenly I was inspired. I started the car and went to the cemetery. That place was deserted after the last burial of the afternoon. I looked for Ana’s grave, in her family’s section, and found everything in the horrifying state of neglect that the dead are always left in. A long time before, the floral wreaths had given way to the dust and dirt that had again taken over a place that didn’t seem to have been visited by anyone for several weeks.

Outside the cemetery, I found another working telephone and called Gisela, Ana’s sister. She didn’t know anything about Iván, either; he hadn’t even called her again after the burial. More and more alarmed, I remembered his family in Antilla, out in the east, with whom he had gone to live for a few weeks after leaving the ward for drug addicts at Calixto García Hospital. Since I was in the neighborhood of El Vedado, I drove to Raquelita’s house (the spectacular mansion that her second husband, a fat jeweler and trafficker whom most of Havana knew as Alcides “the magician,” one of socialism’s winners, had “managed” to get for her) and I managed to get his ex to find, in an old notebook, a telephone number for Serafín and María, the cousins of Iván’s mother, out in Antilla. Raquelita, despite herself, had become infected with my concern and made the call herself, receiving the same response: that the relatives in Antilla didn’t even know about Ana’s death. When I left Raquelita’s mansion, I was weighed down by an additional pain in my chest, since it was obvious that Francesca wasn’t too interested in what could have happened to her father, although it didn’t surprise me to know that she was also trying to figure out how to leave the island — a decision that her brother Paolo and my children, typical representatives of their generation, had already beaten her to.

At night, as I pushed around, rather than ate, what my wife had served, I noticed how the worry had turned into a feeling of guilt, since I was convinced that something very serious had happened. I told my wife about the afternoon’s search and she gave me the idea, which I hadn’t thought of, of going to the police. It seemed ridiculous and excessive to me, but I started to consider the possibility. Something could have happened to him: perhaps he was in the hospital after having been in an accident, or having a heart attack; I don’t know what the hell I thought. And what if he had really gotten on a balsa raft and still hadn’t arrived anywhere or had drowned like his brother, William?. . Almost at midnight I got dressed again, resolved to file a report at the station on Acosta Avenue, and when I was just two blocks away from the police building, I felt a flash of certainty. I went off course and went down to Lawton. I still didn’t know (nor do I know now) why I was convinced of what I would find.

I entered the apartment through the dark and slippery hallway. In my hand I had the sledgehammer that I always keep in the Pontiac’s trunk. In front of the door, I was surrounded by a stench I hadn’t noticed that afternoon, giving proof to my bad feeling. Nonetheless, I knocked several times, yelled Iván’s name and Truco’s. Only silence answered. I didn’t wait any longer. With just one blow of the sledgehammer, I busted open the door, so rotten it almost fell off the frame. The stench intensified immediately, and I felt for the light switch, taking care not to run into the wooden stanchions holding up the structure. When the apartment lit up, I saw what I never wanted to see: in the other room was the bed, sunk in, its legs broken by the weight on top of it. On top of the mattress, also sunk in by the weight, I managed to make out the shape of some legs, an arm, part of a human head, and also something of the yellow fur of a dog below the pieces of wood, concrete, and plaster. I raised my sight and saw that from the ceiling were hanging a few pins of steel, rotted and gnawed away, and beyond that, a flat and remote sky, without stars.

I grabbed one of the steel chairs and dropped into it. Before me was a disaster with apocalyptic resonance, the ruins of a house and a whole city, but above all, of dreams and lives. That murderous pile of rubble was a mausoleum that was apt for the death of my friend Iván Cárdenas Maturell, a good man whom fate, life, and history had destroyed. His cracked world had at last come undone and devoured him in that absurd and terrible way. The worst thing was knowing that in some way — in many ways — Iván’s disappearance was also the disappearance of my world and the world of so many people who shared our space and our time. Iván had at last escaped, and left me as a legacy his cosmic frustrations, the malignant weight of a compassion that I didn’t want to feel and a cardboard box, marked with my name, with all of those papers written by him and by Ramón Mercader, which were the best picture of his soul and his time. . What was Iván thinking of when he heard the wooden beams creaking and saw death coming down on him from the sky, dragged by inertia and gravity, the only forces still capable of moving us? It’s possible he wasn’t thinking about anything: he had finished writing what he needed to write, only to fulfill a physiological need, and his life had turned into the most desolate of all voids. This is what we come to after so much walking, with our eyes blindfolded. And at that moment I remembered Iván telling me about his dog’s melancholy, of the infinite freedom and the open windows to the collective mentality. . And again the vague image came to mind of the Trevi Fountain, where neither Iván nor I were ever able to throw a coin.

At last, I’ve been able to read all of Iván’s papers. More than five hundred typed pages, full of cross-outs and additions, but carefully ordered in three manila envelopes that he had also marked with my full name, Daniel Fonseca Ledesma, so as to avoid any confusion.

As I was reading, I felt how Iván ceased to be a person who was writing and turned into a character within what was written. In his story, my friend emerges as a representative of our times, like a figure who is sometimes exaggeratedly tragic, although with an indisputable breath of reality. Because Iván’s role is to represent the masses, the multitude condemned to anonymity, and his character also functions as a metaphor for his generation and as the prosaic result of a historic defeat.

Although I tried to avoid it, and I twisted and turned and denied it to myself, as I read I started to feel compassion rise within me. But only for Iván, only for my friend, because he does deserve it, and a lot of it: he deserves it like all victims, like all the tragic creatures whose fates were decreed by forces greater than they were, that overwhelmed them and manipulated them until they were turned into shit. This has been our collective destiny, and to hell with Trotsky with his obstinate fanaticism and his belief that personal tragedies don’t exist, only changes in social and superhuman stages. So what about people? Did any of them ever think about people? Did they ask me, did they ask Iván, if we agreed to postpone our dreams, lives, and everything else until they disappeared (dreams, life, and even the Holy Spirit) in historical fatigue and the perverted utopia?

I won’t think about it too much, because I might regret it. I’ll do the only thing I can do if I don’t want to condemn myself to forever dragging around the deadweight of a story of crimes and deceptions, if I don’t want to inherit every ounce of the fear that pursued Iván, if I don’t want to feel guilty for having obeyed or disobeyed my friend’s will. I am returning what belongs to him.

I am arranging these papers in a small cardboard box. I am beginning to seal it with tape until the entire surface is covered with the steel-colored strips. This morning I buried Truco next to the wall of the backyard of my house, and inside the death shroud I made for him I placed a copy of Iván’s long-ago book of short stories, Mercader’s lighter, and Ana’s Bible. This afternoon, when they close my friend’s casket, the shipwrecked cross (of all of our shipwrecks) and this cardboard box, full of shit, of hate, and of tons of frustration and a lot of fear will go with him — to heaven or to the materialist putrefaction of death. Perhaps to a planet where truth still matters. Or to a star where there is no fear and where we can even be happy that we feel compassion. To a galaxy where perhaps Iván knows what to do with a sea-worn cross and with this story, which isn’t his story but in reality is, and which is also mine and that of so many other people who didn’t ask to be in it but who couldn’t escape it. They will perhaps go to a utopian place where my friend knows, without any doubt, what the hell to do with truth, trust, and compassion.

Mantilla, May 2006–June 2009