The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura Read Free Book Online

country of imbeciles, hypocritical bigots, and born fascists.”
    Ramón watched as his mother exhaled cigarette smoke almost furiously.
    “What does Kotov want me for?”
    “I’ve already told you: something more important than firing a rifle in a trench full of water and shit.”
    “I can’t imagine what he could want from me . . . The fascists are moving forward, and if they take Madrid . . .” Ramón shook his head, when he felt a slight pressure in his chest. “Shit, Caridad, if I didn’t know you, I would say that you talked to Kotov to get me away from the front. After what happened to Pablo—”
    “But you do know me,” she cut him off. “Wars are won in many ways; you should know that . . . Ramón, I want to be far away from here before the sun rises. I need an answer.”
    Did he know her? Ramón looked at her and asked himself what was left of the refined and worldly woman with whom he, his brothers, and his father used to walk on Sunday afternoons through the Plaza de Cataluña in search of fashionable restaurants or the elegant Italian ice cream shop that had recently opened on the Paseo de Gracia: there was nothing left of that woman, he thought. Caridad was now an androgynous being who reeked of deeply embedded nicotine and sweat, talked like a politicalcommissar, and only thought about the party’s missions, about the party’s politics, about the party’s struggles. Lost in his thoughts, the young man did not notice that, after the mortar explosion that had thrown them to the ground, a heavy silence had settled over the sierra as if the world, overcome by exhaustion and pain, had gone to sleep. Ramón, who had spent so much time submerged in the sounds of war, seemed to have lost the ability to listen to silence, and into his mind, already disturbed by the possibility of a return, floated a memory of the seething Barcelona that he had left a few months earlier, and the tempting image of the young woman who’d given his life a deep sense of meaning.
    “Have you seen África? Do you know if she’s still working with the Soviets?” he asked, shamed by the persistence of a hormonal weakness that he could not shake off.
    “You’re all talk, Ramón! You’re just as soft as your father,” Caridad said, taking aim at his vulnerable side. Ramón felt that he could hate his mother, but he had to admit she was right: África was an addiction pursuing him.
    “I asked you if she was still in Barcelona.”
    “Yes, yes . . . She’s going around with the advisers. I saw her at La Pedrera a few days ago.”
    Ramón noticed that Caridad’s cigarettes were French, very perfumed, so different from the stinky cigarettes that his battalion mates gave him.
    “Give me a cigarette.”
    “Keep them . . .” She handed him the pack. “Ramón, would you be able to give up that woman?”
    He had felt that a question like that was coming and that it would be the most difficult one to answer.
    “What is it that Kotov wants?” he persisted, evading the response.
    “I’ve already told you: that you give up everything that we’ve been told for centuries is important, only to enslave us.”
    Ramón felt like he was listening to África. It was as if Caridad’s words spilled forth from the same Kremlin tower, from the same pages of Das Kapital from which África’s came. And it was only then that he became conscious of the silence that had been surrounding them for several minutes. Caridad was África, África was Caridad, and the sacrifice of his entire past was demanded of him now as a duty, while that painful and fragile silence rested on his consciousness, feeding the fear that in the next minute his body could be broken by the mortar, the bullet, or thegrenade lying in wait and destined to destroy his existence. Ramón understood that he feared the silence more than the perverse rumblings of the war, and he wished to be far from the place. Without knowing that his life hung on those few words, it was then