Leonardo Padura - The Man Who Loved Dogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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