Leon Trotsky's Stopwatch

By Rax Rinnekangas

Book translated by Lola Rogers.

Mexico City - Autumn 2004.

A Nordic filmmaker arrives in the city to make a documentary about a major architectural landmark - Luis Barragán's Casa Estudio house.

He meets a Mexican woman who opens a totally new door into the world of the Russian Jewish ex-communist leader Leon Trotsky, who was murdered in Mexico in August 1940.

The encounter sends the filmmaker on an extraordinary journey into an entirely new aspect of the most mistreated political figure of the 20th century and his philosophy.

The novel is also an exceptional love story set in an era when the concept of time has lost its original meaning and climate change is just an unpleasant possibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lurra Editions
• Release date: Feb 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9789527380154

Rax Rinnekangas

Rax Rinnekangas on kirjailija, elokuva­ohjaaja. Hänen viimeisimpiä teoksiaan ovat Narkomania - Kirjailija - Media - Nobel (2022), kuvaus valheista, joilla kansainvälinen media teki Nobel-palkitusta kirjailijasta Peter Handkesta yhden kirjallisuudenhistorian vihatuimmista hahmoista 90-luvulla käytyjen Jugo­slavian hajoamissotien seurauksena; Baabel - kirjojen juurella (2022) - matka kirjojen maailmoihin ja maailmoihin kirjojen juurella; EGO - minä ja Patti Smith ja te kaikki muut (2021), tutkielma maailmankuulun muusikon kirjallisuudesta ja ihmisyyden dynamosta nimeltä ego; Isadora ja Albert - vuosisadan kohtaaminen -romaani (2020), kuvaus erakoituneesta miehestä voimakkaan naisen vaikutuspiirissä La Riojan viinialueella Espanjassa; Mestarin viimeinen toivomus (2019), kuvaus Dostojevskin tuhatsivuisen Karamazovin veljekset -romaanin lukemisesta kolmeen kertaan Valamon luostarissa. Rinnekangas on ohjannut kahdeksan Arthouse-elokuvaa ja vajaat 20 dokumenttia. Kuuden pitkän elokuvan kokoelma Two North(s) & A Little Part of Anywhere ilmestyi Quartet Recordsin (Espanja) kansainvälisenä levityksenä 2018. Maailmanmaineen saavuttanut Five Master Houses of the World -elokuvien kokoelma sisältää dokumentit Konstantin Melnikovin (Venäjä), Alvar Aallon (Suomi), Luis Barragánin (Meksiko), Le Corbusierin (Ranska) ja Tadao Andon (Japani) suunnittelemista mestaritaloista. Valokuvaajana Rinnekangas julkaisi kuvateoksia mm. holokaustista ja piti 60 yksityisnäyttelyä eri maissa (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2003). Kaunokirjallisia teoksia on julkaistu mm. Ranskassa, Saksassa ja Espanjassa. Hänen työnsä ovat saaneet palkintoja - mm. valtion valokuvataidepalkinto, valtion kirjallisuuspalkinto, Varsinais-Suomen taidepalkinto, Jury Prize and Audience Prize, Ethnofest, Berliini, Honoured Prize of Jury of FIFA, Montreal, Alex North Prize, Espanja, Film Festival Carnival Award, Singapore, Ingenuity Award Socially Relevant Film Festival, New York.

Book preview

Rax Rinnekangas is an author and film director. His most recent works include Mestarin viimeinen toivomus (Master’s last wish, 2019), an essay of reading three times The Brothers Karamazov of Dostoevsky in a monastery, and Nocturama: Se­­­­­baldia lukiessa (Nocturama: Read­ing Sebald, 2013), an account of experiencing the literature of W.G. Sebald and the works of Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, and Imre Kertész, authors of the same spiritual circle. In his art films, Rinnekangas has examined architecture, visual art, and social themes. Two North(s) & a little part of anywhere, a collection of his six feature films with the music scores by Pascal Gaigne, a French-Spanish composer, was published in 2018 and is distributed by Quartet Records (Spain), one of the world’s leading publishers of the cinema music. American streaming service Kanopy distributes his architecture films. He has published photographic works on subjects such as Europeanism and the Holocaust and had 60 private exhibitions in various countries (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, 2003, Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, 2007). His literary works have been published in France, Germany, and Spain: La lune s’enfuit, Editions Phébus, France, 2011; Le juif égaré, Editions Phébus, France, 2013; Der Mond flieht, Graf Verlag, Germany, 2014; La Partida, El Desvelo Ediciones, Spain, 2010; La Luna se escapa, El Aleph Editores, 2012; Adana, El Desvelo Ediciones, Spain, 2019. His works have received numerous awards, including the Finnish State Prize for Literature, the Finnish State Prize for Photographic Art, the Honoured Jury Prize of the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA), Montreal, the Alex North Prize, Spain. Leon Trotsky’s Stopwatch describes the evolution of the most misunderstood great figure of the early 20th century and portrays the Jewish politician, philosopher, and advocate for world-wide equality who was assassinated in Mexico in 1940 with a different aura than the one the early Stalinist world wanted to give him. It’s also a different love story at a time when the concept of time has lost its original meaning.

Compilation of visual material was supported by a travel grant from the KIDE Center for Literature.

Quotes from W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz are translated by Anthea Bell, W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz (Random House, 2001).

Quotes from Leon Trotsky’s Testament are translated by Elena Zarudnaya, Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, 1935, Faber and Faber, 1958

Quotes from Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet are translated by Lola Rogers from Sanna Pernu’s Finnish translation Viisas elämä, 2016.

Quotes from Imre Kertész’s Galley Diary are translated by Lola Rogers from Outi Hassi’s Finnish translation Kaleeripäiväkirja, Otava, 2008.

Quotes from Kahlil Gibran’s On Children are from his 1923 collection The Prophet.

© Rax Rinnekangas

Originally published as Leo Trotskin ajastin, LURRA Editions, 2018

LURRA Editions

[e-mail]

www.lurraeditions.fi

Cover image by Rax Rinnekangas

Image of Rax Rinnekangas by Leena Louhivaara

Cover and layout by Kim Söderström

ISBN: 978-952-7380-15-4

"Nothing in his life became him

like the leaving it."

William Shakespeare

THE CODE

1.

That autumn, at the beginning of humanity’s final century, when humankind was at long last finding the courage to acknowledge the dramatic change that had occurred in the planet’s climate and I had travelled to Mexico to shoot the last film of my documentary series, I had as yet no idea of the extent to which humankind’s conception of its entire history was based on the same sort of cowardice. Hand in hand, with eyes closed, we were living a collective lie buttressed by our need to see our history, its central figures and the factors that influenced their fates in a concrete light, to the exclusion of their more equivocal psychological intricacies. I was also unable to conceive of the idea that almost as soon as I had arrived in Mexico City I would encounter real lions. Up to that point I had thought, like many people, that almost all of the lions left on the planet were living in captivity in the numerous zoos of the Western world, and that any remaining wild lions were wandering somewhere on the African savannah, where very rich people went to secretly hunt them so they could mount their heads on the walls of their mansions. I’d seen, of course, the documentary about the shameful treatment of perhaps the proudest creatures in all creation. In certain African countries there were centers run by parasitic humans, black and white, where clones were made from lions abducted from the wild, and anyone with an interest in violence and animal torture could go there to kill them, for a large fee. But the idea of absolutely real, living lions in the garden of a middle-sized, two-story, Spanish-style hotel in the Tacubaya neighborhood of Mexico City had never entered my mind.

The hotel was a hacienda-style compound and I was staying for three weeks in a room in one of its annexes. My window opened directly onto a lush garden covered in foliage and intersected by a little gurgling brook with the hotel restaurant on the other side, and between the brook and the restaurant’s outdoor tables were the lions, living in two connected steel cages. There were two lions—an elderly female and a young male. Golden brown, quite muscular under the circumstances, thoroughly noble and unconcerned in spite of their living conditions, they lay behind their bars as if in some twice-­removed reality, or walked unhurriedly from one cage to the other casting indifferent glances at the hotel guests, who sat about ten meters away at their breakfast tables marveling at the presence of these animals, until they grew accustomed to them and became absorbed in their meals. In the darkest hours of night I heard strangled-sounding roars that made it seem as if I were sleeping at the edge of a jungle in some small African nation.

I didn’t really wonder much at the arrangement – I was in Mexico now, after all. With each meal I watched these enigmatic animals, whose invisible mental state and visible physical state impressed me above all in a moral and emotional sense because, for one thing, in any other country keeping lions in a cage in a hotel garden would almost certainly be prohibited. But not in Mexico. It was a country where ancient and indivisible self-interest and the individual right to enjoyment still reigned and legislative oversight by the corrupt government was a mere formality. The ones with actual rights were the aristocratic upper classes, and on another, more dire level el cartel de la droga, whose members divided the large country into their own personal dominions beginning at the southern border of the United States, slaughtering each other pitilessly and in the process murdering innocent bystanders with increasing frenzy and, by these openly genocidal acts of public terrorism which reached across both Americas, achieved an annual economic output greater than that of the entire country of Mexico. The right of the family who owned the hotel to have openly kept, for some unknown reason, ten or more African lions, one after another, in their idyllic hotel garden, is an example of how far an individual’s idea of his rights could be taken in that country.

I spent all my early mornings and many of my evenings near the lions as I ate my meals in the garden, which made me even more sensitive than usual to the progression of thoughts I found myself in. I watched the animals’ proud and self-assured figures in the steel cage prison that made it impossible for them to turn around more than twice in its ten square meters, let alone exercise all their natural need to run free and hunt, which must have caused them horrible suffering, and in those hours of deep anguish I imagined them in their true home on the African savannah with its grasses and trees, from whence they had been taken by some dark route of civilization to this prison, a fact they outwardly seemed to accept, but which they couldn’t for one second forget in this occult ritual where they performed the part of unending dignity for the audience of hotel guests, a role they had mastered as Homer’s Odysseus had when trapped in the cave at the hands of the cyclops Polyphemus. I saw the lions as thinking, creative individuals, and as I observed the demeanor of these creatures imprisoned in their cages I pondered all of humanity on our planet and all their wrongheaded ideas, the creative individual’s state of simultaneous imprisonment and liberty under those circumstances, the fact that even if our political reality represses spiri­tuality, consciously and unconsciously ignoring the significance of the creative individual in the development of society, both creativity and its suppression have nevertheless always been essential to the birth of local identities, including Mexico’s, through a litany of names spanning the cruel and bloody history of the formation of the country: Porfilio Díaz, Émiliano Zapata, Lázaro Cárdenas, David Alfaro Siquei­ros, José Clemente Orozco, Fernando Leal, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera... It was through the joined, bloody hands of the soldiers and politicians and artists who made revolutions that the Mexican people’s concept of its identity was born, its national imagery, its citizens’ sense of home. The latter, in a broader sense, was part of the reason I had begun my documentary project.

With the help of an architect friend I had chosen five private homes in different countries and on different continents that represented the architectural peak of 20th century modernism. Through the physical and psychological substance of the houses and their designers’ signatures I would, in the resulting documentary series, give a complete picture of the approach to architectural language and the concept of home in different cultures and language areas. The chosen houses were in central Moscow in Russia; outside the city of Ashiya in Japan; on a steep, narrow spit of land in the bay at Monaco; in my home country of Finland; and in Mexico. After a phase of preparation that lasted a year, I had obtained permission to film in all the houses, and funding from various sources around the world, and I had completed shooting in all of the destinations except Mexico City, where the project had now led me for the second time.

Before I began filming the final installment in the series, whose subject was located near my hotel in the Tacubaya neighborhood, I held a week-long workshop at a private film school in the southern part of the central city. There were about sixty students in the course, widely ranging in age and nationality. For five days I lectured on the film language represented in my work and my conviction that a film image of even one minute’s duration, whether fictional or documentary, is something completely different from the mere pictorial surface that strikes the eye. An image is not just an image but also a multi-layered code system that must be deciphered and understood in the same way that we decipher, interpret, and understand multi-layered literature, and I showed the class various shots from my films as examples and had heated discussions with the class about my vision. It was all the usual ego-stroking and helpful interaction with my students to which I’d grown accustomed in various workshops in various countries over the years. But then, at the end of the last day of the course, the whole meaning of the class, as well as the whole direction of my life, changed quite unexpectedly when a woman of about forty, black-haired, tall and erect, stepped forward from the back of the lecture room and asked if she could show me her photographs.

That evening after the final film showing we met in the school’s cafeteria and she—Vero­nica Díaz, originally from Spain, a woman shot through with suppressed sorrow, as I sensed from the first moment I saw her, and confirmed later—opened up a leather port­folio she’d brought and laid before me a series of black and white photographs she had taken on a prison island in the Pacific. She told me about her numerous visits to this place which housed very dangerous criminals, most of whom would never get out from under their sentences, but it did allow the prisoners to bring their spouses and families if they were prepared to live in such a circumscribed reality. Veronica Díaz described at length and in great detail this experimental prison, run by the Mexican government and located in the open sea over a hundred nautical miles southwest of the country’s western coast. The island was Mexico’s own Alcatraz, a dumping place for the most vicious criminals, first sentenced to forced labor, then moved to paradise, as it was generally called, with the rationale that there was no reason to deprive them of their ordinary living arrangements and that some of them, having suffered through part of the sentence that the laws of society demanded, might if shown mercy return eventually to a normal life. With that in mind, there were no cells or bars on the island, and its inhabitants, who were called settlers, didn’t wear prisoner’s clothes. They lived like normal people in little houses on sunny streets like those in any small town in Mexico. The naval forces stationed on the fifty-square-mile island carried guns, but the prison guards did their work unarmed. The children of the prison, of which there were some six hundred, lived with their parents and went to school at various places on the island.

Before they started calling it paradise, it was called the hell without walls, Veronica Díaz said. And the prisoners were treated cruelly. But then everything changed.

It is now like no other prison in the world. Mexico’s annual budget for this two-thousand prisoner paradise was many times more than what was used to maintain ordinary prisons, but the investment was considered justified. While elsewhere in the country the status of prisoners was very weak due to the cruelty perpetrated by the guards, on the island the idea was to transfer the power from the guards to the prisoners themselves so that they would learn to take responsibility in all the ways one does in normal life. The method worked well; two thousand criminals categorized as dangerous were watched over by fifty guards. Veronica Díaz also told me about the dark side of the island. The attitudes of the children and young people, living in paradise for what felt like forever because of the sentence of a parent or parents, were sharply divided. Some of them enjoyed being on the island and in due course even married a prisoner, creating a new foundation for their entire reality and their future, while others learned bad habits, having never known any others, and many of the prisoners, though aware of their extremely privileged position in the national penal system, experienced the sea around them as endless prison bars whose presence wasn’t erased by their freedom of movement on the island or the patch of garden they tended or their evenings spent partying at the island dance club. The human mind furnished with the freedom of this sort of imprisonment recognized its constructed boundaries, which were strengthened by the knowledge of the reasons that they and their loved ones had ended up on a remote island, utterly removed from the entire normal world of people. As I listened to this head-spinning yet plainspoken account I couldn’t help thinking of certain very different prisoners I knew, at least superficially—the two caged lions in the idyllic garden of my hotel.

Veronica Díaz was a very beautiful, peculiar woman. There have been times in my life when I would have been instantly flummoxed by meeting someone like her and my mind, flung into a deep emotional state, would have immediately started to make plans with results that wouldn’t bode well for me. But now, watching and listening to Veronica Díaz—her fixed, sorrowful gaze, the thin layer of freckles on her thin, bony face framed by long, copper-black hair—I felt no fear, only interest, and trust, for some reason. During pauses in her story she showed me the series of photos she’d taken on her many visits to the island over the years.The black and white images didn’t impress me artistically—they were quite ordinary reportage photographs—but the eyes of the people in the photos touched me. They were men and women of many different ages, all of them dangerous criminals and all, without exception, seemed filled with vitality and emanated a power­ful self-respect. When I asked who was who in one picture or another, and what each had done to earn their long sentence, Vero­nica Díaz answered, This young man worked as a heroin mule from the age of fifteen, before his murders... This woman shot four people coming out of a post office... This old man killed two women in a drug store and wounded seven on the street outside... This young woman stabbed her mother with a knife and shot her father... She said all these things very calmly, as if she were speaking of long-settled matters in the fundamental legal arrangements of life.

When we came to a photo of a somewhat thin-looking man, black-haired, about fifty years old, with a slightly hooked nose, she was at first silent when I inquired about his identity and the specifics of his crime. But then she answered, I’ve never learned precisely—perhaps for him it was all one big, slowly growing error. As she spoke she stared straight ahead, as if bringing the matter to a close, and turned to the next photo. But I wasn’t looking at the rest of the photos very carefully. My mind was stuck on something that I felt within my body like a touch, caused by her words and the look in her eyes—that not only was the man in question, sentenced to life in prison, still a part of the photographer’s life in some way, but that this woman in the film school cafeteria also bore a particular sorrow concerning him.

Without either of us actually suggesting it, we took long walks in different parts of the Cent­ro Historico over the next two evenings. We didn’t talk about the photos of the prison island on either of these walks, because I had already sincerely expressed the deep impression her photo­graphs had made on me, and that seemed enough for her. We also didn’t discuss the contents of the workshop I’d given. I felt however that it was the experience of taking my course that had made this serious and unusual individual come from the back of the lecture hall to talk to me. That knowledge was enough for me. I didn’t need recognition of my filmmaker’s language or want to pry any further about her relationship with the man in the photograph. I simply enjoyed her presence and her aspect and her stories. I also sensed that our unexpressed need to spend time together was due to some entirely different cause. I could feel that there was some factor in our natures that bound us together in an invisible way.

On both evenings we began by visiting the Palacio de Bellas Artes to look at large paintings by famous Mexican artists, and both times we lingered in front of Rufino Tamayo’s Birth of Our Nationality, as if the fate of the Mexican people depicted there, the bloody victims of chaotic Spanish colonialism, caught in the rapacious grip of Western conquerors and Western culture, the cosmic colors, dynamic forms and harsh symbolism in the nearly seven-square-meter painting touched us particularly, especially now that there was a peculiar sense of expectation quivering between us, a feeling I interpreted as not physical so much as spiritual. On both visits we examined the painting’s many elements and colors in great detail for about half an hour, discussing our impressions, before moving on to the other paintings in the museum. When we left the Palace of Fine Arts we walked through the city’s busy streets, then sat for a long while on a stone bench at the edge of Zocalo Plaza and looked at the

people crossing the vast square and the dark, rugged height of the cathedral looming before us, planes soaring behind it like slow, black bats every two minutes toward Benito Juárez International Airport, and on both hot evenings we also went into the church to light candles to the unknown departed and then sat for a little while in the cafe of the American bar on Cinco de Mayo street before parting at the edge of the square in front of the metro station, where I caught a taxi for the seemingly endless one-hour drive from the city center back to my hotel on the other side of the Bosque de Chapultepec.

As I sat later at my dinner in the hotel garden watching the lions, who were more and more familiar as the days passed, the warm evening was filled with an unnatural-seeming climate of cedars and oaks and ornamental flower beds and steel cages, and I felt the same emotions I’d had two years before when I’d opened a collection of essays in a bookstore in Brooklyn, New York. In the pages of that book, having recently pondered universal concepts of home for the first time, my eye was caught by a certain passage in which the author of the work, the German writer W. G. Sebald, ponders the illogic of the gigantic fortresses built in Belgium in previous ages and ends his musings with this sentence: Such complexes of fortifications... show us how, unlike birds, for instance, who keep building the same nest over thousands of years, we tend to forge ahead with our projects far beyond any reasonable bounds. The reference to the saintly-seeming humility of winged birds, their consciousness of the actual size of one of the basic needs in their lives, compared to humankind, wingless yet endlessly dreaming of wings of their own, their greed ever-­increasing even with regard to their own dwelling places, made me realize that instead of the single film I’d been planning I should make an entire series of separate films about masterpieces of residential architecture in different cultures and on different continents, the homes of those who were, in their own lifetimes, very successful and cultured people, clients who granted their architects creative freedom and counted themselves among the chosen few when it came to houses. My documentaries would examine, as I said, not just the architectonic elements of the houses and their approach to the concept of home but also the history of the concept of home, including such oddities as the ability of a certain persistently persecuted Pakistani tribe to carry their home with them, a sacred place symbolized by a short wooden pole around which these hounded people could gather no matter where they were in their fugitive travels and experience being both at home and in a shrine, a concept of home also represented, in Mozambique at least, by the minority language they spoke. My film series had its impetus in that moment with W. G. Sebald’s text. Now I was filled with the same emotion without being able to explain the germ of it to myself except to think that it all must have started with meeting Veronica Díaz.

We met for the third time on a Sunday, the day before I was to begin shooting my documentary. A thick mass of smog hovered like a layer of false age over the vast, dried-up lake, a plateau above the metropolis, and we escaped that aged city center on the crowded metro—a quarter-hour trip to a little town in the district of Coyoacán, where we passed the time with leisurely wandering in the market squares and enjoyed cocktails on a terrace somewhere amid an unending blare of trumpets, surrounded by crowds dressed in national costume and other colorful clothes, then took a long walk in hushed older