The Blind Man of Seville

  I cannot think what possessed him to tell me this now, and I roar that at him as I storm out of the restaurant into the street. He says to my back: ‘If it hadn’t been for me, you’d be painting window frames in Triana by now.’ It was an enormous and calculated insult for which he will receive appropriate punishment.

  17th May 1975, Seville

  A postscript to my last vent of outrage. I have discovered that punishment has already been served on my old friend R. It seems that his youngest son died in Almería, his wife committed suicide by throwing herself into the Guadalquivir here in Seville, his daughter, Marta, has ended up in a mental institution in Ciempozuelos and his eldest son lives in Madrid and no longer speaks to him. Whatever I had in mind seems like fly-swatting after this series of calamities. I think now that he only told me what he’d done to get rid of me. I was just another relic from that troubled era.

  Falcón leafed through the empty pages to the end. He went back to the last entry and read it again. Ciempozuelos stuck in his mind. Sergio would have known everything from this entry — the whole family tragedy — and there was an opening for him: Marta in Ciempozuelos. But Marta could barely speak. Falcón replayed his last visit there. Marta’s wound being tended to by a doctor. Ahmed taking her back to the ward. She vomiting after the shock of her fall. Ahmed going off to get the cleaning equipment. And that’s when he saw it again, as clear as a creative idea: the trunk underneath María’s bed.

  32

  Sunday, 29th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

  Ahmed had never told him what was in the trunk. Falcón checked his watch, it was ten o’clock at night. He went down to his study, found his notebook, tore through the pages to Marta’s doctor’s name — Dra Azucena Cuevas. He called the hospital in Ciempozuelos. Dra Cuevas was now back from her holiday and would be on duty in the morning. Falcón spoke to the night nurse on Marta’s ward, explained his problem and what he wanted to see. The nurse said that the only time Marta allowed the chain to be removed from her neck was for her daily shower and she would talk to Dra Cuevas about his request in the morning.

  Falcón had taken one sleeping pill too many and overslept. He just managed to board the midday AVE to Madrid, which, on a Monday, was full. He was back in his suit, carrying his mac and wearing his fully loaded revolver. He called Dra Cuevas from the train. She agreed to delay Marta’s daily shower until the afternoon.

  From the Estación de Atocha he took a taxi straight out to Ciempozuelos and by 3.30 p.m. he was sitting in Dra Cuevas’s office waiting for the cleaning lady to bring up Marta’s trunk.

  ‘What do you know about her nurse — Ahmed?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘Nothing about his private life. As far as his work is concerned he is excellent, a man of infinite patience. He never even raises his voice to these unfortunate people.’

  The trunk arrived and some minutes later a female nurse brought the key and locket on Marta’s chain. They opened the trunk. Inside it was a small shrine to Arturo. The lid was stuck with salvaged photos. There was a handmade birthday card with a stick woman with her eyes off her head, stiff hair and ‘Marta’ scrawled out underneath. In the body of the trunk were small metal cars, a grey child’s sock, an old school exercise book, crayons with teethmarks chewed into the ends. At the bottom were two rolls of 8mm film, just like the stock they’d found in the Mudanzas Triana warehouse. He held one up to the light. There was Arturo in the arms of his sister. He put it all away, closed the trunk and re-locked it. He flipped open the locket. It contained a single curl of brown hair. He handed the chain back to the nurse. The cleaning lady took the trunk back to the ward.

  ‘Where’s Ahmed now?’

  ‘He’s walking two of the patients in the gardens.’

  ‘I don’t want him to know anything about my visit.’

  ‘That might be difficult,’ said Dra Cuevas. ‘People talk. There’s nothing else to do here.’

  ‘Has there ever been an art student who’s worked on Marta’s ward?’

  ‘Some time ago we did a three-month experiment with some art therapy,’ said Dra Cuevas.

  ‘How did that work?’ asked Falcón. ‘Who were the art therapists?’

  ‘It was something we did on the weekends. The work was unpaid. It was just to see if the patients responded to a creative activity that might remind them of childhood.’

  ‘Where did the artists come from?’

  ‘One of the board members of the hospital is a film director. He recruited people from his company with an artistic background. They were all young.’

  ‘Is there a record of who they were?’

  ‘Of course, there had to be. We paid their travel expenses.’

  ‘How were they paid?’

  ‘Once a month by cheque, as far as I know,’ she said. ‘You’d have to go to the accounts department for details on that.’

  ‘Do you remember any of the names of the males who helped with the course?’

  ‘Only their first names — Pedro, Antonio and Julio.’

  ‘Was there a Sergio?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll go and see the people in the accounts department.’

  Dra Cuevas was right. There’d been a Pedro and an António, all of whose names were completely Spanish. It was the third name that the secretary in the accounts department gave her that attracted Falcón’s interest, because in full it was Julio Menéndez Chefchaouni.

  It was 9 p.m. by the time he got back to Calle Bailén and as he opened the door he kicked another package across the floor. No address again. The number 3 written on the front.

  He was exhausted. He put the package in his study. The answering machine was blinking. There was one message from Comisario Lobo, giving a home telephone number. He didn’t have the strength for it and took a shower instead.

  The kitchen supplied him with bread and chorizo, which he washed down with red wine. He took some ice with him to his study and found a bottle of whisky in the drinks cabinet. He poured a couple of fingers over the ice. He stretched before he sat down and thought that for the first time he’d managed to get a move ahead of Sergio. He wasn’t chasing any more, but circling. He opened the package. There were more photocopied sheets of his father’s journals.

  1st July 1959, Tangier

  I have a new toy, which is a pair of binoculars. I sit on the verandah and look at people on the beach and sketch their bodies, the unaware still lives. Rather than the lithe bodies of the young, I find I am more drawn to the collapsing geography of the old and out of condition. I draw them as landscape — escarpments, interlocking spurs, ridges, plains, and the inevitable mud slide. As I train my new far-seeing eyes across the beach I come across P. and the children. My family at play. Paco and Manuela are constructing some Gaudiesque castle, while Javier annoys P., who takes him down to the water. P. walks while Javier high-steps through the shallows, holding his mother’s hand. I am entranced by this everyday sight, which seems more wonderful for their being unconscious, until P. stops and Javier sets off at a sprint and is caught up in the arms of a stranger, who hurls him up in the air and puts him down again. Javier stamps his feet in demand and the stranger complies and throws him up again. He is a Moroccan in his mid thirties. P. approaches and I see that she knows this man. They talk for some minutes while Javier forms mounds of sand over the stranger’s feet and then P. walks off, towing Javier, who is turning and waving at the man. I refocus on the Moroccan, who is still standing with his head held high to the sun. He looks at P. and the boy for as long as it takes them to merge with the crowds on the beach. I see admiration in his face.

  1st November 1959, Tangier

  The first rains and there is nobody on the beaches. There are few people in town. The port is empty. Last month Mohammed V’s decree, giving Tangier special status, was abrogated. The Café de Paris is empty apart from the grumbling few, who blame the recent move on Casablanca’s business community, who have always been envious of Tangier’s competit
ive advantage. I go to the Medina and sit under the dripping balconies of the Café Central where they now only serve poor coffee or mint tea. I am aware of being watched, which is unusual as I am normally the watcher. My eyes move over the turbanned heads, the burnouses done up to the chin, the babouches clapping against hardened heels until I come across the face of the man on the beach who was talking to P. He has a pencil in his hand. Our eyes meet and I see that he knows who I am. He leaves soon after. I ask the waiter if he knows him, but he’s never been seen here before.

  R. tells me he is moving again. Abdullah Diouri’s letter has got under his skin.

  3rd December 1959, Tangier

  M. writes, v. depressed. M.G.’s stomach pains have been diagnosed as liver cancer and no surgeon is prepared to operate. It seems he will die in months, if not weeks. She has fallen hard for M.G. and I know this news will be a savage blow. She asks after Javier, another male who has dived into her heart. Her letter makes me nostalgic for how P. and I used to be. This thought jolts me out of my seat and I pace the room. There is an intruder in my head. I root around for the lie and find the face of the man on the beach. I know I will not find peace of mind until I know who he is.

  7th April 1960, Tangier

  I do not work any more. I cannot. My mind has no sticking point. I cannot bear to be in the studio. I wander the town and Medina looking at faces, watching and waiting to find the stranger. He is my new obsession. I am living in my head, which has the bizarre logic of the Medina, but all I come up against is dead ends.

  10th May 1960, Tangier

  I had almost given up hope when, walking down the Boulevard Pasteur, I am oddly drawn to a piece in the window of one of the tourist shops, which is of carved bone. As I lift my eyes from the sculpture I see the stranger from the beach serving in the shop. At first I think it is his shop until I see an old man running the money. I go in and, ignoring the stranger, who is serving some tourists, I ask the old man about the piece in the window. He tells me it is made by his son. I am impressed and ask for his name, which he tells me is Tariq Chefchaouni. The old man says his son has a workshop on the outskirts of town, on the road to Asilah. As we talk I see next to his cash box a small basket of cheap rings. Four of them are agate cubes mounted on simple silver bands. Now I understand P.’s puzzlement, or was it fear?

  When he’d read that name for the first time Falcón got to his feet and did a tour of his study with a clenched fist. By tomorrow morning he’d have the killer’s ID number and an address. He drank more whisky, poured himself another glass.

  2nd June 1960, Tangier

  A letter from M. telling me that M.G. IV has died, having survived two months longer than expected. She is desolate. I write her a letter of commiseration telling her to come to Morocco, leave the city, leave the scene of her grief. This is selfish. I am in need of a companion. P. and I move around each other like strangers, or rather, with a stranger in our midst. I should ask her about Tariq Chefchaouni. I should, as her husband, demand to know who she was consorting with on the beach. But I don’t. Why not? I rummage through my mind, looking for reasons and find none, other than that I seem to be frightened at the prospect. Does this seem possible of me, the veteran of Krasni Bor? But this is not physical fear. I am scared to reveal my vulnerability. I am stunned to discover that this all started last summer and I have been tormented for a full year.

  3rd June 1960, Tangier

  I go back to the Boulevard Pasteur and stand outside the shop, waiting for the younger man to leave. I go in and ask his father how much he wants for the bone sculpture in the window. He says it is not for sale (a technique I recognize) and we haggle. I play the game badly because I’m too concerned about T.C. returning. I pay $30, which seems like a fantastic sum, until I get the sculpture back to my studio and see that it is indeed quite a piece. There is a stunning beauty to the lines and shapes, which is offset by the macabre quality of the material used. It says something ambiguous about the quality of being human. I begin to think that the old man, rather than being crafty, has in fact done something unforgivable.

  18th June 1960, Tangier

  This is how I am. It is P.’s birthday. Rather than give her the usual piece of jewellery I wrap the bone sculpture. I ask her to the studio in the early evening and serve champagne on the verandah. It is still light and very warm with a gentle breeze blowing off the sea. We are hovering around a perfect moment when I give her the present. She is animated, because I normally give her a small box, rather than something which stands 40 cm high. She tears the paper off like a small girl. I watch like a wolf and see it the moment she has stripped it down to the bone. Her face, for a fraction of a second, breaks in two. Her eyes enlarge and stand off her face. She recovers. We go back to the champagne. The sky darkens. I am aware of her looking at me as if I am a strange beast that has assumed human form but been careless about leaving a hairy hoof showing. I have what I want. She has what she desires. The piece sits on her dressing table.

  A letter from M. saying she has been delayed by a legal battle. It seems that the children from M.G.’s previous marriages don’t think that she deserves half his fortune.

  3rd August 1960, Tangier

  I find T.C.’s workshop and am told he is never there in summer. The house, I’m sure, consists of no more than two rooms with a garden behind. It is unattached to any other building so is not part of the family home. I come back at night and wait and watch. It is silent. I return the next night and slip over the wall into the lush garden, which smells of damp earth. There is a large brick tank in the middle, brimful of water. The lock at the back is very loose after the summer and the door opens easily. Inside is a straw mattress on a wooden pallet and a calabash in the corner, nothing else. I hesitate as I reach the door to the next room, as if I have some premonition that my life will be changed by crossing the threshold. The room is his studio. It is full of the same paraphernalia as my own. My torch ripples over ironwork, stone sculpture, horn carving and jewellery until it catches the edge of a painting.

  I fix my beam on it and am drawn to it as if falling on my own sword. At the end of the room are three abstract nudes. Looking at them down the mote-filled flute of light is not the best way to see such works, but even in that wretched dimness their quality stands out. Two nudes reclining and one standing. I know immediately, even though they are abstracts, that the subject is P. I am eviscerated by the sight of them. They are the perfect and beautiful developments of the charcoal drawings of P. that I’d accomplished fifteen years before. Hot tears roll down my face as the thought enters my head that this should have been the rightful end of my work.

  On the table there’s a sketch book which I cannot resist leafing through. The drawings are of the highest quality. They are figuratives of details. A hand, an ankle, a throat, large heavy breasts, buttocks, a waist and a belly. They are entrancing. Then I arrive at my own face, brilliantly dashed off. I see developments from that. Caricatures. Uglier and uglier until, in the bottom right-hand corner, I am a brute, a cartoon horror. My hand trembles with rage. His vision gives me righteousness. I am capable of anything now.

  30th October 1960, Tangier

  Summer is over. The tourists have abandoned us. I leave the house and wait for P. in the market. She goes through the Petit Soco to the taxi rank on the Grand Soco and gets into an old Peugeot. I follow in the next taxi, pressing more dirhams on the driver as I tell him which way to go. The Peugeot stops at T.C.’s workshop. She gets out and is welcomed in. I tell the taxi driver to wait for me. I climb over the garden wall. The bedroom door is open. I hear T.C.’s talk and P.’s laughter from the studio. The door is ajar. I see her naked as she steps out of her underwear and walks to a rumpled sheet spread out on the floor. She kneels with her back to T.C., whose robe is already showing the ludicrous signs of arousal. He works with pencil first. He has a way of putting his whole body into creating each line. The lines become balletic flourishes, as if he is dancing the work out of himself and on
to the paper. He goes through three sheets and then asks P. to change her position. He moves behind her and gathers her hair up and pins it with a brush. He moves in front of her and pushes her shoulders back so that a ridge forms down her spine. P. sees his arousal and, with instinctive intimacy, pushes up his robe and strokes him until he is shuddering. She drops her head to him and he gasps. She brings up a hand to his buttocks and pulls him to her. She slowly bows her head as if in prayer. His hands tremble on her shoulders and he lets out the cry of a child woken suddenly in the night. She drinks him in. I leave.

  I go back to my studio in the taxi and take up my brush for the first time in months. There are five blank canvases which I tack up on the wall. I prepare black paint. I take up a pencil. My mind is like steel. The thoughts rifle down the channels like bullets and within moments I have sketched out a drawing of utter obscenity, with P. amongst satyrs of appalling priapism. I paint with vigour and viciousness, but with clarity and precision so that when I take the paintings down they are nothing to the viewer but five black-and-white canvases. My revenge only takes shape with a precise configuration.

  3rd December 1960, Tangier

  I am not working. I only watch. My eye rests solely on the entanglement of two people. I have cooled to ice. My mind works with the clarity of a shout across a still, snow-covered field. I have established T.C.’s winter routine. He wakes up late, always after midday. He walks to a small café and eats breakfast and drinks tea. He smokes three or four cigarettes. In the afternoon he rarely goes back to the workshop. Sometimes he goes to his family home. He has a wife and three children, two boys and a girl, aged between five and eight. Other days he goes to the beach. He likes the bad weather. I watch him from my studio, standing in the wind and rain with his arms spread out, as if he’s welcoming the cleansing powers of the elements. At night he works. I have watched him. He is so absorbed he notices nothing. Sometimes he works naked, even in the freezing cold. Occasionally he drops, literally, to the studio floor, exhausted. He has completed a fourth nude. P. kneeling. It is phenomenal. A marvel of the mysterious simplicity of form, but with the same quality that distinguishes the previous three — the joys and dangers of the forbidden fruit.