David Brendan O'Meara

Leer en español

The Man Who Loved Dogs, by Leonardo Padura
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2014

Leonardo Padura, in his novel The Man Who Loved Dogs, fulfills what might be described as the duty of the historical novelist (or at least, the duty of those who who work in the sub-genre of historically accurate fiction): that is, to maintain respect for the established facts while filling in the narrative holes. This kind of novelist takes on the task of constructing a narrative that offers plausible answers to the human questions that hover around historical events and shows us the intimate scenes, the conversations, and the decisive moments: all the details that the documentary record unfortunately lacks. The historian says to the reader, “Sir or Madam: We don’t know exactly what happened behind those closed doors, so neither you nor I should even ask.” The novelist says “Dear Reader, I know that you have human questions about all this, so I’ve used my imagination and my art to give you a story with all the intimate details that you desire, 90% true and 10% likely.” 

In the story of the murder of Trotsky, among the human questions are these: How could Ramón Mercader have done such a thing? What kind of man would you have to be to assume a false identity, seduce a woman for whom you feel nothing, use this woman to win the confidence of the family and bodyguards of a famous man? What would it be like to visit this man with a mountaneering ice axe hidden in your overcoat, just for practice, just to check out the security, and then — the second time you are alone with this old guy — pull out the ice axe and murder him? Who could have the patience and the discipline for that? And above all, the cold blood?

Padura doesn’t give us explicit answers, but his novelistic imagination provides us with the following keys to the personality and character of Mercader:

• His conflicted identity as the communist son of a factory owner, and his constant efforts to prove his dedication to the proletarian cause.
• His complex relationship with his mother, the Soviet agent Caridad del Rios, whose youthful rebellion against her bourgeois husband took her first to a lifestyle at once libertine (full of casual sex, drugs and alchohol) and libertarian (in the Spanish left-wing sense, that is, anarchist), and from there to a new discipline, with its own severe demands but free from traditional morality: Stalinist communism.
• His recruitment by agents (including his mother) of the NKVD (the secret police of the Soviet Union) and his training in Russia as a “new man” — a man with nerves of steel and an unstoppable will.
• In the metallurgical rigors of his training, the compression of the full range of human emotions into just two: pride and hatred:
  • Pride at being one of the chosen few who were going to lead humanity to a new world;
  • And hatred of the old world, the world around him, the world in which his original cause, the Spanish Republic, had suffered an abject defeat.

It’s impossible, of course, to know with certainty what was going on inside Ramón Mercader, but the psychological portrait drawn by Padura is plausible and convincing, especially his reconstruction of the intimate act of violence itself. Padura suggests that some trace of vestigial humanity in his soul caused Mercader to hesitate just a moment as he raised the ice axe, just long enough to allow Trotsky to cry out in terror and pain, and ensure that his murderer would not escape unnoticed. 

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter much whether or not we, as readers, accept the psychology of Padura’s dramatic reconstruction; what intrigues us are the questions themselves. For those of us lucky enough to still have access to the more tender emotions, whose lives have not been so hard or so bitter as to forge our feelings into weapons of steel, the answers offered by Padura help us frame our sense of wonder: How could he? What kind of a person? Where did that patience come from? That cold blood?