The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura

Author:Leonardo Padura [Padura, Leonardo; Kushner, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781908524119
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press

18

Of all the battles he’d waged, which did he remember as the most arduous? Those with Lenin in the days of the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks? The tense and dramatic ones of 1917, when the revolution’s birth or abortion was decided? The furious battles of the civil war, always doomed to fratricidal violence? The cruel ones for succession and for control of the party? The ones for physical and political survival in those days of exile and marginalization? And who had been his most fearful adversary: Lenin, Plekhanov, Stalin? When Lev Davidovich looked at the blank page over which he didn’t dare to move his pen, he thought, no, the battle had never been as arduous nor the opponent as tricky, for he had never seen himself forced to fight for something so essential.

Ever since Natalia Sedova left the Casa Azul and he took refuge with the bodyguards in the cabin in the hills of San Miguel Regla, under the pretext of the need for physical exercise, but so pressed to gain distance from the Casa Azul in order to stew in the solitude of his desperation and shame, he had been looking for the most elegant way to initiate a reconciliation with his wife with the knowledge that his dignity should be the first piece he would have to sacrifice in the service of his supreme objective.

The feeling of guilt that had been absent until then had unleashed itself, and not only because of the damage he had done to Natalia. During that infamous month of June 1937, the lives of two of his dearest and most constant friends had been devoured by Stalin’s fury, while he, submerged in the renewed waves of his libido, dedicated the best part of his intelligence to engineering ways to mock Diego and Natalia’s presence, to run behind Frida to Cristina Kahlo’s nearby house, on Calle Linares, the site of their sexual encounters. Van Heijenoort and the young bodyguards had been made to serve as facilitators of the meetings, lending themselves to the fictions that Lev Davidovich’s feverish brain devised: from hunting and fishing to trips to the mountains, even as far as the search for documents that he had to track down personally, he had used every excuse. For his protectors, the situation had proven to be agonizing, since they knew the physical risks of each escapade and, above all, in a scandalous venting of an affair that could destroy the Exile’s marriage and affect his prestige as a revolutionary generously welcomed in the Casa Azul, or even could provoke a violent reaction from Rivera. But he had decided not to think about anything else, and was concerned only with giving in to his cravings and receiving Frida’s uninhibited sexuality, capable of revealing to him, at his fifty-seven years, means and practices the existence of which he had barely suspected. Never as in those days of lust had madness spun around Lev Davidovich’s mind so forcefully and when he looked at

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.