The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  He walked down to the river, sticking to the main avenues, no appetite for the narrow streets of El Arenal, the tourists and their relaxed jollity. He crossed the black, gleaming river on the Puente San Telmo and stopped halfway, struck by the advertising on the apartment blocks on the Plaza de Cuba — Tío Pepe, Airtel, Cruzcampo, Fino San Patricio — sherry, phones and beer. This is Spain now — all our needs covered.

  The river rippled and slopped underfoot. Raúl Jiménez’s first wife came to mind. The torture of not knowing had been too much for a mother to bear. He wondered if she did it from where he was standing and remembered that Consuelo Jiménez had said she’d gone down to the bank one night and thrown herself away. He imagined her floating downstream, the edges of water creeping up her face, the corners of her eyes and mouth, until they met and the blackness she so craved closed over her.

  His mobile rang. The stupidity of its ring welcome amongst his morbid ramblings. He put it to his ear, heard the hiss of ether and knew it was him.

  ‘Diga,’ he said quietly.

  No answer.

  He waited, not breaking the spell with superfluous words this time.

  ‘You are thinking. Inspector Jefe, that this is your investigation, but you should know that I have a story to tell and, whether you like it or not, you will let me tell it. Hasta luego.’

  14

  Sunday, 15th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

  Falcón came round with his heart thumping in his chest, still operating at the heightened speed of an adrenalin-fired pace. He checked his pulse — ninety. He swung his legs out of bed, exhausted before he’d even started. His face was hot and his hair full of sweat as if he’d been running all night, or rather morning. He hadn’t got to bed until four o’clock. He hadn’t wanted to come home.

  He did an hour on the exercise bike and persuaded himself that he felt better. He showered and dressed. The world outside at this remove seemed dead. He drank coffee, ate toast rubbed with garlic and olive oil. His father’s breakfast. He went up to the studio and arranged the journals in date order, noting the quality of the books became poorer as the years progressed — the paper thinner, the bindings no longer stitched but glued and that all cracked, with loose pages. The handwriting changed, too. The first books were scarcely recognizable as his father’s. The letters cramped, the spacing uneven, the lines drifting downwards and the accents and tildas seemingly shaken up in a cup and dashed over the page. It was unconfident, unstable, close to mad. Thereafter the hand was more even but was not transformed into the beautiful script that Javier knew until he arrived back in Spain in the sixties.

  It was here that the gap occurred. One diary ended during the summer of 1959 in Tangier and the next started in May 1965 in Seville. Everything had happened in those years. His mother and stepmother had died. His father had painted the Falcón nudes, become famous and left Morocco. It was the vital book, but how was he supposed to use his police skills to find it?

  It was close to one o’clock and he was due for lunch at his brother Paco’s finca in Las Cortecillas, which was over an hour’s drive away. He wanted to make a start on the journals but knew he’d have to stop almost immediately. He would read the opening entry and leave it at that — a taster, a pincho before the gran plato.

  19th March 1932, Dar Riffen, Morocco Today I am seventeen and Oscar has given me this present of an empty book, which he has told me I must fill. It has been nearly a year since what I now refer to as ‘the incident’ occurred and I have begun to think that if I do not set things down as I think of them I will forget who I used to be. Although, after ten months of the Legion’s training and brutal discipline, I am already unsure. To get through the days in barracks it is best not to think. To get through the days out in the field it is best not to think. In action I can’t think, it all happens too fast. I sleep with only one dream, which I don’t want to think about. So, I don’t think. I tell Oscar this and he says: ‘You don’t think therefore you are not.’ Whatever that means. He tells me this book will change that. I hope I am not too late. Already the life before ‘the incident’ has lost its definition. It is all irrelevant now. My education means nothing except that I can read and write, which is a lot more than the tontos in my company. My old friendships mean less. My family has forgotten me, is dead to me. Who am I? My name is Francisco Luis González Falcón. On my first day in the legion the Captain told us we were novios de la muerte. He was right. I am a bridegroom of death, but not in the way he meant it.

  His mobile rang, his sister Manuela reminding him to pick her up. She started to complain about how Paco was going to make her work for her lunch and Javier sympathized but didn’t listen. How the minutiae impinged.

  They drove out of the city in brilliant sunshine and headed north on the road to Mérida. As they came out on to the rolling plains, the swaying grasses, Javier relaxed. The pressures of the city, the intensity of its narrow streets, the crush of people, the hordes of tourists, the deepening complexity of his investigation were all behind him. He’d never envied Paco’s love of the simple life, the space, the bulls roaming the pasture, but now, since Raúl Jiménez’s murder, the city, rather than provoking fascination, was inducing fear. It wasn’t the first time he’d run into a night-time procession of the candlelit Virgin. He’d even run into one after leavinga crime scene and been totally unmoved. He had never identified with the city’s mad Mariolatry. But twice in two days he’d been left shattered by what was, in effect, a mannequin on a float, and last night he’d panicked completely. The need to get away from it, or rather get past it, had come from instinct. There had been nothing rational at work. He shook his head and settled back as they eased through the blinding white village of Pajanosas.

  As soon as they arrived at the finca Manuela changed out of her red Elena Brunelli linen suit into her veterinary overalls. Paco shouldered a gun and packed three tranquillizer darts. They all got into a Land Rover and went looking for one of Paco’s retintos, which had a horn wound in its side from a fight with another bull.

  They found the bull on its own under a holm oak. He was fully grown and was already sold for this year’s Feria. Paco loaded a dart and shot the bull in the haunch. The bull set off at a trot through the trees. They followed in the vehicle until the bull settled into the grasses in a sunlit clearing, confused by the lack of force in its hind legs. They got out and, as they neared, its head came up, still with some vestiges of strength in the vast hump of neck muscle. The primitive eye took them in and for a moment Javier saw inside the bull’s head. There was no fear there, only an immense intuition of its own power, which was being slowly consumed by the effects of the tranquillizer.

  The bull’s head sank back into the grass. Manuela cleaned the wound, put in a couple of stitches, gave an antibiotic jab and took a blood sample. Paco talked nonstop and held the bull’s horn, thumbed its smooth, sharp tip and watched out for other bulls that might attack. Javier, patting the haunch of the dazed animal, had a sudden wish for that sense of self that the bull had momentarily shown him. Complexity made humans so fragile. If only we could be as concentrated as the bull, so conscious of its power, rather than having to see to our constant, pathetic needs.

  Manuela injected the beast with a stimulant and they retreated to the Land Rover. The head came up and the bull immediately began to gather its forces, instinct telling it that it was vulnerable on the ground. It stood, centred its strength and forced itself to move. The back legs performed a skipping hop as it disappeared into the trees.

  ‘Fantastic bull,’ said Paco. ‘He’ll be all right for the Feria, won’t he, Manuela?’

  ‘He’ll still have that wound, but he’ll show them who he is,’ she said.

  ‘You watch him, Javier. Monday, 23rd April he’ll be in La Maestranza and there’s nobody, not even José Tomás, who’ll get the better of that bull,’ said Paco. ‘Pepe heard anything yet?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘He’ll get his chance.
Somebody will get done between now and the Feria, the numbers dictate it.’

  They had lunch of roast lamb, which Paco had baked in a brick bread-oven he’d restored on the property. There was a whole crowd there for lunch, with the parents-in-law, uncles, aunts, Paco’s wife and the four children. Javier forgot himself amongst family and drank a lot of red wine, more than usual. They all slept afterwards. Manuela had to wake Javier, who was sleeping as still as a fallen idol.

  It was just getting dark as they walked out to the car and Javier was still groggy. Paco had his arm round his shoulders. They stood around saying a prolonged goodbye.

  ‘Did either of you know that Papá was in the Legion?’ asked Javier.

  ‘What Legion?’ said Paco.

  ‘El Tercio de Extranjeros in Morocco in the thirties.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Paco.

  ‘Hah!’ said Manuela. ‘You’ve been clearing out the studio. I wondered when you’d get round to that, little brother.’

  ‘I’m just reading some journals he left, that’s all.’

  ‘He never talked about any of that … the Civil War,’ said Paco. ‘I don’t remember him ever talking about a life before Tangier.’

  ‘He mentioned an incident, too …’ said Javier, ‘something that happened when he was sixteen that made him leave home.’

  His brother and sister shook their heads.

  ‘You will tell us, little brother, if you come across another one of his nudes that he might have let slip down the back of a chest or something. I mean, that wouldn’t be quite fair, would it?’

  ‘There’s hundreds of them. Take your pick.’

  ‘Hundreds?’

  ‘Hundreds of each one.’

  ‘I’m not talking about copies,’ said Manuela.

  ‘Nor am I … they’re all “originals”, all painted by him.’

  ‘Explain yourself, little brother.’

  ‘He painted them over and over again, trying to get back to … I don’t know, the secrets of the original work. They’re all worthless, and he knew it, which was why he wanted them destroyed.’

  ‘If Papá painted them, they can’t be worthless,’ said Manuela.

  ‘They’re not even signed.’

  ‘We can fix that,’ said Manuela. ‘What was the name of that dreadful person he used …? some heroin addict. He lived near the Alameda.’

  The two brothers stared at her, Javier remembering his father’s words from the letter. Manuela glared back.

  ‘Heh! Qué cabrones sois,’ she said, putting on her filthiest Andaluz accent. They laughed.

  Javier didn’t bother to ask them why they were all calling themselves Falcón, which would have been his father’s mother’s maiden name, rather than González, which should have been the family name. The diaries would clear that up. Paco and Manuela knew nothing.

  Manuela drove back to Seville, Javier wedged in the corner by the door. As the unseen city drew closer the tension coiled inside him, dread leaked into his guts. The orange glow appeared in the sky and he retreated into his head, the narrow alleys of his thinking, the dark dead ends of unfinished thoughts, the crowded avenidas of half-remembered things.

  Back at the house on Calle Bailén he went straight to the kitchen and drank from a bottle of chilled water in the fridge. The doorbell rang. It was 9.30 p.m. Nobody ever came to see him at this time.

  He opened the front door to find Sra Jiménez standing two metres back from it, as if about to change her mind.

  ‘I was just picking up my luggage from the Hotel Colón,’ she said. ‘I remembered the house wasn’t far. I thought I’d see if you were in.’

  A remarkable coincidence, given his recent arrival.

  He let her in. Her hair was different, less structured than before. She was wearing a black linen jacket, a black skirt and some red satin mules with kitten heels, which took the grieving edge off the mourning widow. She led the way to the patio. He followed her bare heels and legs whose muscles sprang with each step.

  ‘You know the house,’ said Falcón.

  ‘I only ever saw the patio and the room where he showed his work,’ she said. ‘You don’t seem to have changed anything.’

  ‘Even the paintings are still there,’ he said, ‘hanging as they were when he last showed. Encarnación keeps them dusted. I should take them down … get things organized.’

  ‘I’m surprised your wife didn’t do all that.’

  ‘She tried,’ said Falcón. ‘I wasn’t quite ready at the time, you know, to strip the house completely of his presence.’

  ‘He did have a formidable presence.’

  ‘Yes, some people found him intimidating, but I wouldn’t have thought you would, Sra Jiménez.’

  ‘Your wife though, perhaps she was a little overawed … or overwhelmed. You know, a woman likes to make a house her own and feels thwarted if … ‘

  ‘Would you like to take a look?’ he said, moving across the patio, not wanting her to intrude further into his private life.

  Her heels clicked sexily on the old marble flagstones around the fountain. Falcón opened up the glass doors into the room, turned on the light, waved her in and noticed the instant shock on her face.

  ‘Something the matter?’ asked Falcón.

  Consuelo Jiménez walked slowly round the room taking in each painting, from the domes and buttresses of the Iglesia de El Salvador to the pillared Hercules of the Alameda.

  ‘They’re all here,’ she said, looking at him, amazed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The three paintings I bought from your father.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Falcón, economical with his embarrassment.

  ‘He told me they were originals.’

  ‘They were … at the time of selling.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, gripping her jacket at the waist, annoyed now.

  ‘Tell me, Sra Jiménez, when my father sold you the paintings … you had some drinks and tapas on the patio and then, what? He took you by the elbow and brought you in here. Did he whisper on your shoulder: “Everything in this room is for sale except … that one”?’

  ‘That’s exactly what he said.’

  ‘And you fell for that three times?’

  ‘Of course not. That’s what he said the first time … ‘

  ‘But that was precisely the painting you ended up buying?’

  She ignored him.

  ‘The next time he said: “This one is too expensive for you.”’

  ‘And the time after that?’

  ‘ “The frame is all wrong on this one … I wouldn’t sell it to you.”’

  ‘And each time you bought the painting he told you that you shouldn’t or couldn’t buy.’

  She stamped her foot, very angry in her retrospective humiliation.

  ‘Don’t be too upset, Sra Jiménez,’ said Falcón. ‘Nobody else owns the paintings you have in your possession. He wasn’t stupid or careless. It was just a little game he liked to play.’

  ‘I’d like an explanation,’ she said, and Javier was glad he wasn’t one of her employees.

  ‘I can only tell you what happened. I was never very sure of his motive,’ said Javier. ‘I didn’t go to any of the parties. I’d sit in my room reading my American crime novels. When the guests had gone, my father, who was normally drunk at this stage, would burst into my room, whether I was asleep or not, shouting “Javier!” and shaking a wad of cash in my face. His takings for the night. If I was asleep I’d grunt something encouraging. If I was awake I’d nod over the top of my book. Then he’d go straight up to the studio and paint the exact painting he’d just sold. By morning it would be framed and hanging on the wall.’

  ‘What an extraordinary person,’ she said, disgusted.

  ‘I actually watched him paint that one of the cathedral roof. Do you know how long it took him?’

  She looked at the painting, a fantastically complicated series of flying buttresses, walls and domes all laid down with a cubist ene
rgy.

  ‘Seventeen and a half minutes,’ said Javier. ‘He asked me to time him. He was drunk and stoned at the time.’

  ‘But what’s the point of it?’

  ‘A one hundred per cent profit on the night.’

  ‘But why should such a man …? I mean, it’s just too ridiculous. They were expensive, but I don’t think I paid more than a million for any of them. What was he playing at? Did he need this money or something?’

  Silence while a warm wind did a turn of the patio.

  ‘Would you like your money back?’ he asked.

  Her head turned slowly from the painting, eyes fixed on him.

  ‘He didn’t spend it,’ said Falcón. ‘Not a peseta of it. He didn’t even bank it. It’s all in a detergent box upstairs in his studio.’

  ‘And what does it all mean, Don Javier?’

  ‘It means … that maybe you shouldn’t be so angry with him because the game he was playing was ultimately against himself.’

  ‘Can I smoke?’

  ‘Of course. Come out on to the patio, I’ll give you a drink.’

  ‘A whisky, if you have it. I need something strong after that.’

  They sat on some wrought-iron chairs at a mosaic-covered table under a single wall lamp in the cloister of the patio. They sipped the whisky. Falcón asked after her children. She replied with her mind elsewhere.

  ‘I went to Madrid on Friday,’ he said. ‘I went to see your husband’s eldest son.’

  ‘You’re very thorough, Don Javier,’ she said. ‘I’m not used to such rigour after so many years of living with the natives.’

  ‘I’m especially rigorous when fascinated.’

  She crossed her legs, flexed her toes under the red satin band of the mule, which was pointed in his direction. She seemed like someone who would know what to do in bed and be quite demanding, but rewarding with it. Salacious thoughts followed his idle theorizing and he saw her kneeling with her black skirt rucked up over her haunches, looking back over her shoulder at him. He shook his head, not used to these uncontrolled ideas rampaging through his mind. He made a conscious effort to subdue any recklessness, concentrated on the ice in his glass.