The Verdicts of the Imagination
Of the three Catalan impostors, Ramon Mercader was undoubtedly the most criminal, the one whose actions were most clearly evil (at least from the point of view of those who judge the world with what a good Stalinist would dismiss as bourgeois morality). At the same time, Mercader is in some ways the most interesting and most dramatic of the three. He certainly has been attractive to fiction writers, playwrights and film producers. For an ambitious young actor, the character of Ramon meets all the conditions of a coveted role: athletic and intelligent, handsome and seductive, complex and cruel: the perfect antagonist. In a superhero movie, Ramon could be the bad brother or lost friend of the hero, drawn to the dark side by some childhood trauma. His quest to kill Trotsky could be the source of a million-dollar plot, except that it lacks a key element: there was no hero. No one stopped the crime. The murder was messy, awkward, and ugly. The killer got caught and served almost all of a twenty-year sentence. If this story were structured like an action movie, the ending would leave a bitter, unsatisfying taste in the mouth.
Which is to say, the encounter between Ramon Mercader and Leon Trotsky is much more than a simple story of good versus evil. The moral, political and psychological issues provoked by that meeting need more than two hours to explore, let alone resolve, and an imaginative exploration of that complexity, with multiple suggestions of resolution, is what Leonardo Padura undertakes in the more than 700 pages of The Man Who Loved Dogs.
Padura entrusts the exploration to his narrator, Iván, who is not just a voice but a central character in the novel: Iván’s life is one of the three narrative threads which Padura interweaves into The Man Who Loved Dogs:
- the story of Trotsky, from his internal exile in 1929 to his assassination in 1940;
- the story of Mercader, from the tumult of battle in 1936 to a disillusioned old age in Moscow and Cuba;
- and the story of Iván, a once-ambitious writer now a silent and depressed proofreader, a talent broken by the Cuban literary sistem, who on a Havana beach in 1977 encounters a dying man walking with two majestic dogs: borzois, Russian wolfhounds, spirited animals from another world.
Unlike Trotsky and Mercader, Iván is not a historical figure but a fictional creation: a composite, no doubt, of several of Padura’s friends and acquaintances, an amalgam of his generation. The Trotsky and Mercader threads, more than two-thirds of the novel, are based as much as possible on facts established by historical evidence. Iván’s tale, on the other hand, is not historical fiction as such, although of course it takes place in an historical context — in this case, in Cuba from the 1970s to the early years of the new century. It belongs instead to a different genre of fiction, a familiar genre: the tale of a generation, told through the life of a representative figure. Padura and his friends lived as children in the 1960s through the exhilarating apogee of the Soviet dream in Latin America, came of age amid its stagnation and rigidity in the 1970s and 1980s, and then, in the 1990s, suffered through its wreckage.
In the character of Iván, the representative of this generation, Padura has a greater degree of imaginative and emotional freedom than he has in the stories of Trotsky and Mercader. That’s because the relationship between events and truth is different in this kind of tale than in history (and in historical fiction). Verisimilitude does not lie in confirmations: “this specific event really did occur“, but in the readers’ nods of recognition: “that happened all the time,” or “yes, that’s the way things were back then.”
Using his three protagonists, Padura has constructed a triangle of perspectives regarding the Soviet dream:
- that of Trotsky, one of the original dreamers, an intellectual of action, one might say, who alongside Lenin used ruthless and opportunistic violence to transform their vision of a new world into social reality, and continued, after Lenin’s death, to proclaim that dream to the world in its most inspirational form;
- that of Mercader, the die-hard believer, the staunch follower of Stalin’s leadership, the volunteer who became a “new man” with class hatred filling the empty part of his soul where morality once had lived;
- and that of Iván, the fictional castaway, fascinated by two historical figures whose lives offer an answer to his generation’s question: “how did we get here?”
Iván functions, therefore, as a kind of arbiter, sitting in judgment, on behalf of his Cuban generation, of the two men whose lives collided in Coyoacan, Mexico, in 1940.
He’s also judging, by extension, the social project and the ideology that brought the two men to that bloody moment: Soviet communism in both its majesty and its monstrosity. What for? Iván isn’t trying to collect a debt or demand accountability. What he wants is understanding in the form of narrative. The story he’s writing, the project that just might redeem his lost literary ambitions, is the tale of a dramatic crime, but for him it’s more than that: it’s a story that will help him come to terms with the great experiment of Soviet-style communism in Cuba, especially in the ways that affected him personally: his implicit belief in the system as schoolboy, his encounters with a literary bureaucracy that feared and suppressed realistic portrayals of everyday life, the persecution and probable death of his homosexual brother, and then, most crucially, the decade of widespread poverty and malnutrition that followed the the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Iván’s judgment is never explicit. He never gives us a report card on the good and the bad of Cuban communism. His judgment is manifested, rather, in the psychological portraits of Trotsky and Mercader in the manuscript that he is writing, which is to say, the book we are reading. There’s a great deal of sympathy in the renderings of the two main characters. Trotsky comes off as tireless and charismatic, an exile troubled by the occasional regret about the bloody results of some of his actions as the leader of the Red Army, but never afflicted by a moment’s doubt as to the revolutionary cause itself. Mercader, the handsome and brave young soldier, turns out to be trapped in a web of privileges, hatreds, and psychological contradictions, many of them rooted in his oedipal relation with his mother. The subtle morality that emerges in Iván’s storytelling matters a lot, but even more important is the quality of his attention itself: his implicit conviction that the lives of these two complex men deserve an imaginative reconstruction that is careful, thorough, impartial and human.
Why should we care what Iván thinks? Or whether his research is thorough or his writing nuanced? He’s a fictional character, after all, a made-up person telling a made-up story. What does it matter?
This is the gamble that Padura is taking, his variation on the realistic historical novel. Precisely because Iván is not an historical figure, the reader need not waste any time wondering if this or that event in his story really happened; instead, Iván serves as a vessel for our imaginations. In a way that sometimes happens with real people but for which fictional characters are expressly designed, we see the world through his eyes, we believe he has an inner life, and we connect with his emotions. To the extent that the magic of fiction works, to the extent that Iván is a successful fictional character, his opinion — his meticulous and passionate opinion — matters to us.
At the end, it turns out that Padura has one more trick up his sleeve. Although we have spent about 700 pages immersed in Iván’s narration of the twin stories of Trotsky and Mercader and in his first-person narrative of how he came to write the book, Iván does not have the last word. In the last chapter of The Man Who Loved Dogs, a new narrator appears, a friend of Iván’s, a fellow writer who discovers the manuscript amid the ruins, shall we say, of Iván’s life. This friend reads the book and offers the following, not so much an opinion as a gut reaction:
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?
The generation of Padura, like all generations, has more than one voice, and any imaginative verdict that it delivers must of necessity be varied, a spectrum of ideas and reactions. For Iván, Leon Trotsky is a tragic protagonist, guilty of great crimes but still inspirational, doomed to be executed by an agent of the monster he had helped create; Ramon Mercader is a fascinating antagonist, a jumble of contradictions, a man who is able to feel love only for dogs; and the egalitarian dream of Soviet-style communism still deserves respectful attention, if not belief. For Iván’s friend, on the other hand, Trotsky is simply a bastard, Mercader isn’t even worth a curse, and communism is the perverted bullshit they were fed as children and now needs to be rejected absolutely.
One imagines that the position of Padura is closer to that of Iván. After all, the author spent years of careful and apparently sympathetic investigation into the lives of Trotsky and Mercader, and his novel evinces respectful attention on every page. But when it comes time to sum up the novel, Padura gives the stage to another voice, a voice of anger and bitterness.
