1
" In just a few weeks, Soldier 13 became aware of a mutation in the colors of his consciousness. As the theoretical classes were filling his brain with philosophical, historical, and political arguments to make his faith unbreakable, the sessions with the psychologists were draining his mind of the deadweight of experiences, memories, fears, and illusions forged of the course of a life of a past that he detached himself from as if they were skinning him. He was overwhelmed to see how his personal history was becoming a foggy haze and how even recent events, like Kotov's last recommendations before he returned to Spain, seemed to diffuse that he sometimes asked himself if he hadn't lived them in another remote and murky existence.
During those months was when Ramon really began to stop being Ramon and only became him against when the man they were turning him into was suffocating and, to save him, the former Ramon Mercader had to come to the surface. Or whenever they ordered him to go out and get some sun. But he was never again the same Ramon Mercader del Rio.
p. 208 "
― Leonardo Padura , El hombre que amaba a los perros
3
" In that instant I regretted my indiscretion, and I have never really known if it was a form of compensation of because I needed to vomit up my pent-up anger that I did something unusual for me and told him about the ups and downs my family had experienced in the previous two months since my younger brother controversially came out a homosexual. I unleashed all the resentment I felt toward my parents for having punished the kid so cruelly. As I spoke, I noted that I had been so obtuse that until that exact moment, as I confided the details and feelings I hadn't even revealed to my wife to a person I barely knew, I had concentrated my resentment on my parents' attitude because in reality I had been ignoring the true origins of what had happened: the persistence of an institutionalized homophobia, of an extended ideological fundamentalism that rejected and repressed anything different and preyed on the most vulnerable ones, on those who don't adjust to the canons of orthodoxy. Then I understood that not just my parents but I myself had been the pawn of ancestral prejudices, of the surrounding pressures of the time, and, above all, the victim of fear, as much as or more (without a doubt, more) than William. I felt a certain rancor toward my brother, precisely because it was my brother who had been declared a faggot: I could understand and even accept that two professors may have gone the other way, but this wasn't the same as knowing - and having others know - that the one who went the other way was my own brother.
pp. 175-176 "
― Leonardo Padura , El hombre que amaba a los perros
7
" Lev Davidovich contemplated the Norwegian landscape and, as he would write shortly afterward, made a silent tally of his exile, to confirm that the losses and frustrations were many more than the doubtful gains. Nine years of marginalization and attacks had managed to turn him into a pariah, a new wandering Jew sentenced to ridicule and the anticipation of a terrible death that would arrive when the humiliation had exhausted its usefulness and quota for sadism. He was leaving Europe, perhaps forever - and with it the corpses of so many comrades and the tombs of his two daughters. With him, he took the faint hope that Liova and Sergei would be able to resist and, at least, escape that whirlwind with their lives intact; they were leaving the illusions, the past, the glory, and the ghosts including those of the revolution for which he had fought for so many years. 'But with me, I am also taking life,' he would write, 'and as beaten down as they think I am, while I still breathe, I have not been defeated.'
P. 198 "
― Leonardo Padura , El hombre que amaba a los perros
17
" It’s terrible to confirm that a system born to rescue human dignity has resorted to rewards, glorification, the encouragement of denunciations, and feeds on everything that is humanly vile. I feel the nausea rise in my throat when I hear people say: they’ve shot M., they’ve shot P., shot, shot, shot. The words, after hearing them so much, lose their meaning. The people say them with greater calm, as if they were saying: we’re going to the theater. I, who lived these years in fear and felt the compulsion to denounce (I confess so with terror, but without any feeling of guilt), have lost in my mind the brutal semantics of the verb ‘to shoot’ … I feel that we’ve reached the end of justice on earth, the limits of human dignity. "
― Leonardo Padura , El hombre que amaba a los perros