The Blind Man of Seville

  At no point in the faena did Pepe try to dominate too much and it was this that he’d understood about the bull from the moment Biensolo had entered the ring. This was the bull’s space and he’d allowed Pepe into it.

  He performed his naturales. Biensolo thundered past him as if he was moving the whole of Spain forward on his horns. Then Pepe stood before the bull and just showed him one corner of the muleta, no bigger than a terracotta floor-tile, from behind his back. Some women in the audience couldn’t stand it and gasps and squeaks of fear broke out. The bull crashed past the lonely figure, the reed in the wind bending slightly in the draught. Without turning, Pepe showed him another corner of the muleta and again Biensolo tore past him. Even the men broke at that. Paco had his fists buried in his eyes. The man next to him was crying. They knew that they were seeing it. The impossible genius of man and beast in their dance of death.

  The silence was so absolute when Pepe went to exchange the straight sword for the curved killing sword that Javier believed he could hear the sound of Pepe’s light-black pumps on the sand of the plaza. The bull watched him, front legs slightly splayed, foreleg and shoulder still slick with blood, chest heaving in silent bellows, the banderillas clacking a death rattle on his back. His dance partner returned, the muleta under his arm, the new lethal sword at his side. Pepe’s long shadow met the bull’s head and walked into him.

  The horns came up. Their minds re-engaged. The crowd, who knew that if Pepe killed Biensolo well he would get everything — ears, tail, La Puerta del Príncipe — tightened their already constricted silence. Pepe released the muleta. It dropped like a bucket of blood. The bull nodded, assenting to his kind collaboration. Pepe looked at the position of the bull’s feet and, with several short passes, manoeuvred him to the barrier and then teased him with flicks of the muleta until he stood just right with his horns pointing into the Sombra crowd. Pepe, with his back to Javier now, moved lightly as if he might disturb a sleeping child. The sword came up. Pepe aimed at the coin-sized target between the bull’s shoulders. His feet braced themselves against the plaza floor. His body was no longer human but had assumed the shape of a brilliant wading bird.

  The moment. The speed was breathtaking as the two forces shunted together.

  But it was wrong. Pepe’s head came up. The sword struck bone and span away. The right horn sliced into his inner thigh and with a derisive flick Biensolo tossed him in the air. It was so fast nobody moved as Pepe tumbled in the triumphant updraught from the bull’s horns. The reed body came down, as broken as a torturer’s victim, and the horn disappeared into his belly. The bull drove forward, head down, a recollected atavism at work now that their pact had been broken. He rammed into the planks of the barrier with a splintering thud that seemed to wind the entire audience.

  Pepe’s team erupted over the wall. The stillness went out of the crowd and a keening cry went up from the women. Javier ran down, stumbling over the heads of the horrified spectators. He sprinted to the barrier where Pepe was pinned. The bull savagely rammed his quarry with brand new, brilliant strength. Pepe grasped the horn in his stomach with both hands like a general who’d seen disaster and dispatched himself. His face bore only the sadness of regret.

  The team worked to distract the bull. Hands reached over the barrier to hold Pepe. His rag legs, with a ghastly slash of red where the femoral artery thumped out thick, dark, vital blood, flapped and slapped against the wooden planks.

  The bull pulled away, turned viciously on the waving capes around him and eyed each one individually like a victorious but unpopular emperor who has to endure the frivolity of peacetime politics.

  They lifted Pepe over the barrier, arms now open, the red burgeoning from his stomach, and for a moment he was as pitiful as a pietá as they rushed him from the ring towards the infirmary.

  Javier ran after the six men holding Pepe, who reached out a hand to him. The news travelled fast and they didn’t bother with the infirmary but took him directly to the ambulance. The paramedics put him on a stretcher and threw him into the back.

  Pepe called for Javier, his words hardly more than breath.

  Falcón leapt over the back of the paramedic who was already slapping a compress on to Pepe’s stomach wound. The ambulance lurched away from the plaza. The other paramedic cut away the trouser and plunged his hands into the gaping wound in Pepe’s thigh. Pepe arched his back, cried out in agony. The paramedic called for a clamp. A packet was thrown at Javier, who tore it open and held the clamp out to the paramedic whose hands were in the wound, trying to find the artery. Javier took hold of Pepe’s hand, cradled his head in his lap. There was no blood in Pepe’s face and the pallor of death was creeping over him. Javier gripped his shoulders, whispered in his ear everything that he could think of that would help him hold on.

  The ambulance careered down Cristóbal Colón, sirens blaring, and headed down the underpass by the Plaza de Armas. Pepe ran his tongue over his lips. His mouth was as dry as cardboard from the catastrophic fluid loss, his hand as cold as dead meat. The paramedic cut up the sleeve of Pepe’s traje de luces and tore a sack of blood from the fridge. The other paramedic shouted for the clamp. Javier leaned forward and they clamped the femoral artery. He turned to help plug in the litre of blood to Pepe’s arm. Javier roared at Pepe to hold on. He saw him trying to speak. He put his ear to his lips. Even the boy’s breath was chill.

  ‘I’m sorry for that,’ said Pepe.

  29

  Tuesday, 24th April 2001, Seville

  It had rained during the night. The new day arrived rinsed and refreshed. The sun played over the beads of moisture on the dripping trees and the first jacarandas came into high purple flower. Falcón stopped when he saw them, pulled over and dropped his window. He had rarely done this in the city — found in nature an expression of the complexities of the human condition. But the high, fragile, fern-like green leaf of the jacarandas feathering against the clean blue sky with the clusters of pale purple flowers hanging in the windless morning spoke the same language, could talk to anyone about pain.

  He turned on the car radio. The local news was all about Pepe Leal. The media were trying to make a story about the fact that just as Pepe was going in for the kill his head had come up. A bullfight journalist talked inconclusively about the incomprehensible distraction. Someone on the panel mentioned camera flashes, the number of people trying to capture the moment. Another person said he remembered a bigger flash. The bullfight journalist scoffed. The myth had begun. Falcón turned off the radio.

  By the time he arrived at the Jefatura the men had already dispersed. Only Ramírez remained. They shook hands. Ramírez embraced him and offered his condolences. He handed him a message, which told him that Comisario León wanted to see him as soon as he arrived. He took the lift up to the top floor, looking at his vague reflection in the stainless-steel panels. He was held together by threads. There would be no resistance from him.

  Ten minutes later he was going back down. The weight of command had been lifted from his shoulders. He had been given two weeks compassionate leave and would have to undergo full psychological assessment on his return. He had said nothing. He was defenceless. He went to his office and cleared out his desk to find there were no personal items, only some letters, which he put in his pocket, and his police-issue revolver, which he should have returned to the armoury but didn’t.

  At 6 p.m. he attended the funeral of Pepe Leal. The whole bullfighting community was in attendance. Paco was there, inconsolable and uncontrollable. He bawled into his hands, his shoulders shaking, the whole tragedy weighing down on them. Everybody cried. The mourners, the cemetery workers, the flower sellers, the onlookers, the grave visitors. And the grief was genuine, except that it wasn’t for Pepe Leal. He was almost unknown to these people. He was not a great name. As Javier stood in dry-eyed suffering amongst the weeping and the snivelling, he understood what this grief was for. They were mourning their own losses — youth, prospects, health, talent. The death
of Pepe Leal had, temporarily at least, brought an end to possibility. It was for this reason that Javier found it kitsch and he wouldn’t cry with them, and he wouldn’t join them afterwards but went home to his bruised and silent house and the compassion of his enforced leave.

  He sat in his study, still in his mac, doodling on a paper with a pencil. He wanted to get out of the city. Biensolo’s horn had punched a hole in the Feria and Falcón would leave the city to bleed over Pepe’s death. He took out a map of Spain, placed the pencil over Seville and span it three times. Each time it pointed directly south, and south of Seville there was nothing apart from a small fishing village called Barbate. But beyond Barbate, across the straits, was Tangier.

  The phone rang, startling him. He didn’t answer it. No more condolences required.

  The following morning he packed a bag, including the unread journal, found his passport and took a cab to the bus station at the back of the Palacio de Justicia. Five and a half hours later he boarded a ferry in Algeciras to Tangier.

  The ferry journey lasted an hour and a half. He spent most of it watching a Moroccan version of himself taking down the details of a group of six boys — illegal immigrants, who were being returned. They were cheerful. Tourists gave them the thumbs up and cigarettes. The policeman was firm but not unkind.

  Tangier appeared out of the mist without dredging up a single memory. The long rainy winter had left the surrounding country a deep, lush green, which was not a colour he associated with Morocco. There was something familiar about the cascade of grubby whitewashed houses within the walls of the old town, which fell from the Kasbah at the top of the cliff to the Grand Mosque at the lower end. Beyond the walls the ville nouvelle had pushed further around the bay. He tried to find the old house where his father’s studio had been but it was either hidden amongst the apartment blocks or had been destroyed to make way for them.

  The taxi driver took him from the port to the Hotel Rembrandt and tried to charge him 150 dirham, which involved an ugly argument and a dishonourable discharge with half that amount changing hands. The reception, still in its fifties marble splendour, gave him the key to room 422 and he took his own bag up there.

  The hotel had suffered in the intervening half-century. There was a glass panel missing from one of the doors in his room. Paint peeled off the metal windows. The furniture looked as if it had taken refuge from a violent husband. But there was a perfect view of the bay of Tangier and Falcón sat on the bed and gaped at it, while thoughts of deracination spread through his mind.

  He went out to get some food, knowing they ate early in Morocco, but found the time two hours behind Spain and at 6 p.m. nowhere was open. He walked to the Place de France and then down past the Hotel El Minzah to the Grand Soco and entered the Medina through the market, which brought him out in a street not far from the Spanish cathedral. From there he tried to remember the route to his old family home. He must have walked it a thousand times with his mother. It didn’t come back to him and he was soon lost in the maze of narrow alleys until quite by accident he found himself in front of a house he recognized.

  The door was opened by a maid who spoke only Arabic. She disappeared. A man in his fifties wearing a white burnous and white leather babouches came to the door. Falcón explained himself and the man was stunned. It had been his own father who had bought the property from Francisco Falcón. Javier was welcomed in. The man, Mohammed Rachid, showed him around the house, which was structurally exactly the same, with the fig tree still in its place and the strange high room with the window at the top.

  Rachid invited Falcón to dinner. Over a vast shared bowl of couscous Javier revealed that his mother had died in the house and asked if any of the neighbours would have been alive at the time. One of the boys was sent out with instructions. He was back in minutes with an invitation to take a coffee next door.

  The neighbouring family included an old man of seventy-five, who would have been thirty-four at the time of his mother’s death. He remembered the incident very well because most of what happened took place outside his front door.

  ‘The unusual thing was that two doctors turned up,’ said the old man, ‘and there was a disagreement as to who was to see the patient. As it happened, the woman, your mother, was already dead and so your father had called his own doctor to deal with the matter.

  ‘Your father had arrived back from his studio for breakfast to find his wife dead in her bed. In his distress he called the only doctor he knew, which was his own. A German. Your mother’s doctor, a Spaniard, seemed quite satisfied with this and was about to leave when the Riffian woman, your mother’s maid, burst out of the house and announced that her mistress had been poisoned. She held a glass of something in her hand, that she said had come from her mistress’s bedside. Nobody believed her and she took the drastic step of drinking some of the liquid. Your father tore the glass from her grip and with great drama she fell to the ground. There was consternation. The Spanish doctor leapt forward. But it was a sham. She wasn’t dead. There was no poison. And the maid was dismissed as a hysteric.’

  Falcón couldn’t control the trembling in his hands, not even by clasping them together. Sweat trickled down his cheek and nausea swooned in his head at this light-hearted recounting of the drama. He staggered to his feet from the cushions on the floor, knocking over the undrunk cup of coffee. Mohammed Rachid stood to help him.

  They walked to the taxi rank on the Grand Soco, and a battered Mercedes took him back to the Hotel Rembrandt. Once out of the house and the Medina he calmed down, brought the panic under control. It was just that the old man’s benign recounting of the story had brought it all back to him. The horror of that morning. His mother dead in her bed and this unseemly commotion in the street outside. He remembered it and yet there were still gaps and he hadn’t wanted the old man to continue because … He didn’t know why. He just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

  Back at the hotel he sank on to the bed in the darkness of the room and looked out to sea over the lights of the town and harbour. He was desolate. His body shuddered under a spasm of loneliness and all his deferred grief at Pepe’s death came to the surface. He fell back, drew his knees up into a foetal position and tried to hold himself together, afraid that if he didn’t do this he would fragment beyond repair. Some hours later he released himself and stripped off his clothes. He took a sleeping pill, scratched the bedclothes over himself and passed out.

  The morning was nearly over by the time he woke up. There was no hot water. He showered under cold, which brought his mind back sharply to the inexplicable fact that he was quietly weeping a stream of tears that he was powerless to stop. His hands hung limp at his sides and he shook his head in misery. His body, now, was out of his control.

  He walked up to the Place de France and took a coffee at the Café de Paris. From there he went to the Spanish consulate and, showing his police ID, asked if there was anybody Spanish still living in Tangier who had been there in the late fifties and sixties. They told him to go to a restaurant called Romero’s and ask for Mercedes of the same name.

  The restaurant was in a garden wedged between two roads leading to a roundabout. The door was opened by an elderly man in a white jacket and a fez, whose breathing difficulties were manifest. As they made their way to the table a Pekingese dog attacked them. Javier winced at its penetrating yap.

  He ordered steak and asked after Mercedes Romero and the old man pointed to an elderly, well-coiffed, blonde woman who was playing patience at a single table on the other side of the empty restaurant. He asked the old man to give her a note of introduction, which he wrote out on a page of his notebook. The old man staggered away, placed the note before Mercedes, told her the order and was given some money to buy the steak.

  Mercedes came slowly across the room. She grabbed the Pekingese by the scruff, rubbed its tummy and threw it under an empty table. She sat opposite him and asked him if he was the son of Francisco Falcón, which Javier confirmed. br />
  ‘I never knew him,’ she said. ‘Nor Pilar, but I was a good friend of your stepmother, Mercedes, who was about my age. She used to eat in the restaurant my family owned then in the Grand Hôtel Villa de France. We were very close and I was devastated by her death.’

  ‘I never called her my stepmother,’ said Falcón. ‘I always referred to her as my second mother. We were very close, too.’

  ‘Yes, she told me that she thought of you as her own son and how desperate she was for you to follow in your father’s footsteps. She hoped that you might be an even greater artist than he.’

  ‘I was barely eight years old at the time.’

  ‘You don’t remember that then,’ she said, nodding behind him.

  In a simple black frame on the wall above his head was a line drawing of a woman. Underneath was written Mercedes.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘You drew that in the summer of 1963. Mercedes gave it to me as a Christmas present. It’s of her, of course, not me. I asked her why she was giving it to me and she said something very strange: “Because with you I know it will be safe.”’

  Tears brimmed in Falcón’s eyes. He’d given up any attempt at control of his emotions.

  ‘She drowned,’ he said. ‘I still remember the night she left and didn’t come back. They never recovered the body and I think not seeing her again made it harder. I saw my mother in her casket …’

  ‘Where is your father now?’ asked Mercedes.

  ‘He died two years ago.’

  ‘Maybe you remember someone else from that time — your father’s agent, Ramón Salgado?’

  Falcón nodded madly and told her how Salgado had just been murdered and that he was the investigating officer. It all came out why he was in Tangier, which was when the old man in the fez came staggering back with the steak and salad, which he breathed over heavily as he served.