The Blind Man of Seville

  ‘Enough.’

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘That’s Pepe,’ said Javier.

  Pepe Leal was reed-thin and tall. Standing in the street he held himself erect, feet together, head raised as if in constant expectation. He always looked serious and wore a jacket and tie on all occasions. He’d never been known to wear jeans, even. He looked like a boy returning from a private school and not somebody who would enter a ring with a 500-kilo bull and kill it with grace and poise.

  The two men embraced. Javier escorted Pepe to the dining room with an arm around his shoulder. Paco embraced him, too. They sat down at one end of the table although, and Javier had always noticed this, the torero was always apart from ordinary people. It wasn’t anything to do with the fact that he was in perfect physical condition, only drank water and sat some inches back from the table. His difference was that he was a man who regularly faced fear and overcame it. And it wasn’t as if he’d attained a permanent state of fearlessness. He was that human. Every time he entered the plaza to risk his life he would still have to overcome more fear.

  Javier had seen him trembling and ashen in the hours before a corrida, sitting in his hotel room, never praying because he wasn’t one of the religious toreros, and never looking to anyone to calm his nerves. He was just a petrified human being who could not bring his terror under control. Then he would get dressed and that would start the process. As he was slowly bound into his traje de luces, the uniform of his profession, the fear was contained. It no longer drained off him, flooding the room with an invisible contagion. The ‘suit of lights’ did something to him, reminded him of the brilliant afternoon when he’d taken his alternativa and become a fully-fledged torero, or perhaps it just encapsulated the nobility of his profession and the wearer could only behave with the dignity it demanded. It did not, however, get rid of the fear, it just pushed it inside. Some toreros never even managed that level of containment and Javier had seen them in the plaza white and sweating, waiting for their moment and praying to be out on the other side of it.

  ‘You look in good shape, Pepe,’ said Paco. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘The usual,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘And how are the bulls?’

  ‘Javier has told you about my retinto — Biensolo?’

  Pepe nodded.

  ‘If you get him, I promise you, you’ll never have to sit on your hands waiting for a contract again. Madrid, Seville and Barcelona will be yours.’

  Pepe nodded again, his nerves too close to the surface to articulate. Paco gave him a rundown of the other bulls and, sensing that Pepe wanted to be alone with Javier, made his excuses and went for a siesta. Pepe relaxed about two millimetres into his chair.

  ‘You look as if you’re working too hard, Javier,’ said Pepe.

  ‘Yes, I’m losing weight.’

  ‘Will you be able to come to the hotel before the corrida?’

  ‘I’ll try, of course. I am sure my investigation can do without me for a few hours.’

  ‘You always help me,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t need me any more,’ said Javier.

  ‘I do. It’s important to me.’

  ‘And how is the fear?’

  ‘Still the same. I am consistent in that. My level is fixed … but higher than most,’ he said.

  ‘It would interest me,’ said Javier, suddenly seeing the opportunity, ‘to know how you control your fear.’

  ‘No different to the way you do when you confront an armed man.’

  ‘I was thinking of a different fear to that.’

  ‘It’s all fear, whether you’re about to die or someone says: Boo!’

  ‘You’re an expert,’ said Javier, laughing, and grabbing Pepe by the neck, unable to restrain his affection for the boy. Maybe this was the wrong thing to talk about, he thought, I’ll just infect his mind with my idiocies.

  ‘Tell me what’s bothering you, Javier,’ he said. ‘As you say, fear is my speciality. I’d like to help.’

  ‘You’re right … we’re afraid of these outside things … You fear the bull, I fear the armed man. They’re both unpredictable. But they are only moments of fear. We feel terrible apprehension, confront them and they are gone.’

  ‘There you are. You know as much as I do. Controlling fear is in your training, in your willingness to confront, in the inevitability of it.’

  ‘The inevitability?’

  ‘You are bound by the state to deal with dangerous criminals on behalf of the citizens of Seville. I am bound by a contract to fight a bull. These are inevitable responsibilities that we must not shy away from or we will never work again. Inevitability helps.’

  ‘Your fear of failure is greater than your fear of the bull.’

  ‘If you think of all those soldiers who fought in all those wars with some of the most destructive weaponry known to man … how many of them were cowards? How many ran away? Very few.’

  ‘Perhaps that means we have an enormous capacity for accepting fate?’

  ‘Why try to control the uncontrollable? I could give up being a torero tomorrow because I fear injury and death too much and yet I’ll still cross crowded streets, drive on the roads, and fly in aeroplanes, where I could easily meet an inglorious end.’

  ‘So, it’s inevitable. What about the willingness to confront?’ said Javier. ‘That sounds like bravery to me.’

  ‘It is. We are brave. We have to be. This is not fearlessness. It is recognition. It is the admission of weakness and the willingness to overcome it.’

  ‘You talk about this a lot?’

  ‘With some of the brighter toreros. It’s not a profession known for its great thinkers. But we all have to deal with it, even the greatest of us. What did Paquirri say when an interviewer asked him what was the most difficult thing to do when confronting a bull? “To spit,” he said. Nada más.’

  ‘The first time I had to face an armed man a senior officer said to me before I went in: “Remember, Falcón, courage is always retrospective. You only have enough of it once you’ve been through it.”’

  ‘That is true,’ said Pepe, ‘which is why we can talk, Javier.’

  ‘But now I’m in the grip of a different fear,’ said Falcón, ‘one that I’ve never come across before. I’m living in a permanent state of fear and the worst of it is that there is no armed man and no bull. It doesn’t matter how brave I am, because I have nothing to confront … except myself.’

  Pepe frowned. He wanted to help. Falcón brushed the problem away.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I should never have mentioned it. I was just wondering if there were any tricks of the trade, a way in which toreros, who live with fear, dupe themselves into thinking …?’

  ‘Never,’ said Pepe. ‘We never cheat ourselves on that score. It’s one of the great ironies. You need the fear. You welcome it, even though you hate it, because it’s the fear that helps you to see. It’s the fear that will save you.’

  Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

  7th July 1956, Tangier

  I should be more concerned with what is going on. I still have coffee with R. in the Café de Paris and all the talk is of an independent Morocco and what will happen to us, the lotus eaters, in Tangier. (Perhaps it is only I who am the lotus eater and everybody else is firmly in a tax haven.) But I don’t care. I am floating. I rarely need to smoke because my natural state seems to be so light and feathery. My studio, with Javier mewling (never wailing), is ambrosial. I frighten myself because my mind suddenly turns on me late at night, as my pen hovers over this journal, and pokes me — it says: ‘You are happy.’ I think this and immediately the contentment is ravaged by uneasy thoughts. No word from M. still. There’s tension in the Medina, as if the narrow alleys are filled with gasoline vapour — a spark, and the whole lot will go up. The people sense independence. They are on the brink of it and are convinced it will mean that they will be as free and wealthy as the expatriates are. The slowness of political progress brings
their anger and frustration to the surface.

  18th August 1956, Tangier

  Riots in the Medina, which spill out into the Grand Soco. No European or American ventures out on to the streets. Windows are smashed and shops looted. At night the women ululate, a noise that Europeans find terrifying. It is animal, potentially savage, like laughing hyenas or vixens on heat. In the morning the streets are filled with men and boys singing the Istiqlal (independence) song and giving the three-fingered salute (Allah, the Sultan, Morocco). Portraits of Mohammed V bob along on a tide of humanity and then it all goes bad again. I stay at home. P. is nervous, especially at night, and the effects of the warm milk are not so calming. The Riffian woman now passes the warm milk through crushed almonds, which settles the stomach and eases the mind. It works. These people know things that we have forgotten.

  26th October 1956, Tangier

  It is done. The Statute of Tangier has been abrogated. The international regime is finished, but the existing financial, monetary, economic and commercial conditions of our business Utopia will remain in force until the Sultan can come up with his own ideas. R.’s contacts assure him these will not differ dramatically from the ancien régime. How money talks so much louder (even over the din of national pride and Islamic fervour), although they have banned the sale of alcohol within 50 metres of a Mosque, which has put an end to all my drinking holes in the Medina. R. has no plans to leave. I still see him in the Café de Paris, but he is now surrounded by men in robes, wearing fezes and thick-framed glasses.

  26th October 1956, Tangier

  I now know why M. has been so silent. An American writer (every other one is a writer these days) who claims to be a friend of de Kooning met M. at a dinner in NY. M. was with her new husband, a sixty-nine-year-old philanthropist and collector called Milton Gardener. The news leaves me stunned and blinking foolishly. My instinct is to feel betrayed, but then later I ask myself, what had I been expecting? I have no intention of leaving P.

  15th June 1957, Tangier

  M. arrived three days ago with her new husband whose full name is Milton Rorschach Gardener IV. We meet at a function in the El Minzah Hotel. I am delighted and at the first opportunity try to run M. upstairs into one of the spare rooms, but she quickly puts me in my place. She introduces me to M.G., who is not a doddery old fool but a very tall, imposing and impressive man. He has a cane and a knee which, when it bends, snaps with a metallic click. They ask to come to the studio.

  They arrive the next day just as I’m explaining my new interlocking figurative landscapes to Javier, who has now had to be caged in a wooden pen. A worrying development is that in creating these patterned human landscapes I seem to be implying some wonderful network of human connection, which I don’t think I believe in. M. takes one look at Javier, picks him up and takes him away on to the verandah. It’s love at first sight from both sides. As M.G. and I talk we can’t help but glance over at the two of them, feeling like jilted lovers at a dance.

  M.G. is taken with my new work but he has seen the drawing of P. in B.H.’s collection. He asks me if I’ve developed that idea into paint and says: ‘There’s your future, if you ask me.’

  M. tells me later that M.G.’s ‘old money’ came from steel but his ‘new money’ came from playing the futures markets. Apparently in these markets you can bet on the future price of a product like wheat, sugar or even pork bellies (this doesn’t sound like work to me) and I realize how small my world has become. Because of my talent I think art important but now see that I rely on a small group of wealthy people to buy my work, who in turn can make a fortune by putting chips on bacon. It’s an epiphany of sorts, perhaps a reverse one, as I now see myself as one of M.G.’s futures markets. He’s looking at my pork bellies and wondering if they’re worth putting money on. I tell M. that he should buy Chaim Soutine’s Carcass of Beef, which she doesn’t find funny but I think the old Lithuanian Jew himself would have laughed. Come to think of it, even Chaim Soutine’s landscapes were like offal. I put this to M.G. who says: ‘Yeah, truly offal,’ which joke is spoilt because he has to explain it to me.

  3rd September 1957, Tangier

  R. is happy about Mohammed V’s Royal Charter, which came into effect a few days ago. The money market is still free and exports and imports unrestricted. The business community is euphoric. I am in a black depression. M. and M.G. have left. They bought one of my ‘peoplescapes’ so all was not lost. I gave M. a present of a (very) small painting of a line of carcasses hanging in a butcher’s cold store. Amongst the carcasses is a little self-portrait. I am hanging upside down, thorax and belly split, meat-hook through my Achilles heel. M. chides me for being a cynic but keeps it, ‘Because I know you will be famous one day.’ I call the piece Futures in Art. I am now reeling from my stupid joke because I have touched on the wretched truth. I am not operating in a sacred world. I am in a market. Here we all are aiming at some high truth, when in fact we are mired in the mud of commerce.

  I leave the studio and on an impulse take out the drawings of P. (which I keep at home or I’d spend my day gawping at them). I pace up and down as if inspecting the troops until I find P. is in the room with me. I tell her that I’m trying to find a way to take this work forward. She says in a prophetic voice: ‘You won’t be able to take these forward until you can see beyond them.’ I ask her what she means. ‘You only see what is there,’ she says and leaves me no better off than I was.

  28

  Monday, 23rd April 2001, Plaza del Pan, Seville

  At 8.30 a.m. Falcón was waiting outside the jeweller’s workshop. The old man turned up ten minutes later. Falcón followed him in to a room that had clocks all over the walls and, hanging from hooks on various shelves, hundreds of watches. On the work bench were the entrails of various timepieces.

  ‘Aren’t you a jeweller?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘I was,’ said the old man. ‘I retired. I think this is suitable work for a man of my age. It’s always good to keep an eye on the time when there’s so little of it left. What have you got for me?’

  ‘I want you to identify the quality of some silver in a ring,’ asked Falcón, producing his police ID.

  The old man sat down, took out an eyeglass and emptied the plastic evidence sachet on to a piece of velvet on the work bench. He screwed the eyeglass into the socket of his eye and held up the ring.

  ‘It’s been enlarged,’ he said, instantly. ‘They’ve used a different grade of silver. The original is sterling silver, which is 92.5 per cent pure, minimum. This other silver is much less pure. You can tell from the greyer quality of the material. It’s maybe 20 per cent alloy instead of 7.5.’

  ‘Where would you find silver like that?’

  ‘It’s not of European origin. Nobody would accept it. If you told me you’d found it in Seville or Andalucía I’d say it had probably come from Morocco. They use this grade of silver there and a lot of it comes over here in the form of cheap jewellery. When you take off a ring like this it leaves a greenish, greyish mark on your finger. That’s the high copper-alloy content in the silver.’

  ‘What about the original ring?’ he asked. ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be able to offer any proof on this in court because it’s not hallmarked, but in my opinion this is Spanish, from the thirties. There was a fashion then for parents giving their daughters silver rings on reaching womanhood. It didn’t last. You don’t see them any more.’

  At the Jefatura he went straight to Felipe and Jorge in the laboratory and gave them a twist of newspaper that contained a small quantity of the ground substance from the urn he’d found at home. He asked them to identify the material.

  Ramírez and the rest of the group were waiting in the office. Ramírez was handing round the list he’d extracted from the artists’ names he’d found in Salgado’s office. There were over forty names on the list, divided into three levels of probability.

  ‘There’s a lot of names here,’ said Falcón.

&n
bsp; ‘They’re not just Salgado’s clients or his rejects,’ said Ramírez. ‘Greta put this together, it’s a list of anybody in the Seville area who’s been involved in the art world using film, video or high technology. She’s started on a list for Madrid, too.’

  Ramírez handed over six sheets of paper, which Falcón put on the desk. He saw a letter there addressed to him; he ignored it.

  ‘I think you should work in pairs on this,’ said Falcón. ‘He could be dangerous and he might be expecting a visit from us … if he’s on this list. We’re looking for a male, about 1.80 metres tall and about 70 kilos in weight with a dark complexion. He could have foreign blood in him, possibly North African. He has knowledge of French and might have had a French education at some stage, although he is Spanish and speaks it perfectly. The most important identifying mark at this stage is a bite wound to the forefinger of the right hand and possibly grazed or bruised knuckles on his left hand.’

  Falcón held up the evidence sachet with the ring in it.

  ‘This was found in the waste-disposal unit of the sink in Salgado’s house. It’s a woman’s ring, which has been enlarged to fit a small man’s finger. The silver used to enlarge the ring is low grade, possibly of North African origin. This does not mean we are looking exclusively for a North African male. He is quite possibly naturalized Spanish and from some generations ago. Keep an open mind on this. I don’t want any racial harassment complaints. Inspector Ramírez will divide up the list and give you your assignments.’

  Ramírez took the men into the outer office. Falcón opened the letter on his desk, which was an appointment to see Dr David Rato in the Jefatura at 9.30 a.m. He called Ramírez back in and asked who this doctor was.

  ‘He’s the police psychologist,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘He wants to see me.’

  ‘Probably just a routine assessment.’

  ‘I’ve never had one before.’