The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  30th September 1936, Toledo

  Oscar has found out that the republicans left the El Grecos in the city and has arranged through our Captain for us to see them. In the end we see seven of the Apostle paintings but not the famous Burial of Count Orgaz. I am mesmerized and quite unable to unravel his technique, how he seems to achieve an inner light that shines through the flesh and blood, even the robes, of the apostles. After the roar of battle, the mutilations, the blood-spattered streets, we find peace in front of those paintings and I know now that I want to become an artist.

  20th November 1936, Ciudad Universitaria de Madrid This war has reached a new level. We have been bombing our own capital with explosives and incendiaries for more than a week. We were camped out by the railway tracks on the west side of the River Manzanares, with our every attempt to get across being easily driven back. Then suddenly we were over it and running up to the university, unopposed and amazed. We couldn’t think what had happened — another loss of nerve at the vital moment or the usual republican fiasco of one unit retreating before the replacement had arrived. The fight that ensued indicated the latter. We’ve taken the School of Architecture but have been driven back from the hall of Philosophy and Letters. We are fighting International Brigades of German, French, Italians and Belgians. The buildings ring with German communist songs and the ‘Internationale’. Oscar says these brigades are all made up of writers, poets, composers and artists. They even name their battalions after literary martyrs. I ask him why artists exclusively support the left and he gives one of his usual enigmatic replies: ‘It’s in their nature.’ And I, as always, have to ask him what he means. Our pupil/teacher relationship has never changed.

  ‘They are creative,’ he says. ‘They want to change things. They don’t like the old order of monarchy, the church, the military and the landowners. They believe in the power of the common man and his right to be equal. To bring this about they have to destroy all the old institutions.’

  ‘And replace them with what?’ I ask.

  ‘Exactly,’ says Oscar. ‘They will replace them with a different order … one that they like with no kings or priests, no businessmen or farmers. You should think about that, Francisco, if you want to be an artist. Great art changes the way we look at things. Think of Impressionism. They laughed at Monet’s blurred vision. Think of Cubism. They assumed that after Braque was shot in the head and had to be trepanned, he lost his mind. Think of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — call them women? And what do you think General Yagüe hangs on his wall? Or General Varela?’

  ‘You ‘re playing with me now,’ I say.

  An attack starts and we crawl to the window and shoot down on the men running out of Philosophy and Letters (we’re in Agriculture). There’s a large explosion in the Clinical Hospital (we find out later that a bomb was sent up in the lift to the Regulares). We decide to retreat from Agriculture and go back to the French Institute’s Casa de Velázquez, which is full of the dead bodies of a company of Poles. As we zig-zag back, Oscar shouts to me that General Yagüe will probably go to his grave wrapped in the canvas of my heroic painting. Bullets rip across the wooden doors of the building and we change course and dive through the windows on to the soft landing of the dead Poles. We fire back through the windows until the attack loses heart.

  ‘Think about it,’ says Oscar. ‘Here we are at the front line, not just of a civil war, but of the whole of cultural Spain, maybe even civilized Europe. What do you want to paint in the future? Yagüe on horseback? The Archbishop of Seville at his toilet? Or do you want to redefine the female form? See perfection in a line of landscape? Find truth in a urinal?’

  We make for the back of the building and sprint across behind the Santa Cristina hospital to the Clinical Hospital to support the Regulares. We find the shattered lift in the rubble of its shaft and run up the stairs. In one of the laboratories there are six dead Regulares with no evidence of bullet wounds or bomb blast. On the floor a fire smokes and there is the smell of roast meat. There are animals in cages all around and we realize that the Moors have cooked and eaten some of them. Oscar shakes his head at the bizarre scene. We go up on to the roof and survey the terrain. I ask Oscar what he wants out of all this and he just says that he doesn’t belong anywhere. He’s an outsider.

  ‘It’s you that matters,’ he says, ‘you’re young. You have to decide. Look … if you want to cross over, don’t worry about me, I won’t shoot you in the back. And I’ll put it in my report that you went over for artistic reasons.’

  This is what I hate about Oscar, he’s always trying to prod me into thinking, into making decisions.

  25th November 1936, outskirts of Madrid

  We have pulled out of the direct assault on Madrid. That vital month we spent in the relief of Toledo gave the republicans time to organize themselves. We could keep hammering away but it would cost us too much. The strategy has changed now. We are going to overrun the outlying country and lay siege. We are an army that swings from the most advanced techniques (aerial bombing) to the mediaeval (siege) …

  In the space of six weeks the two armies seem to have become more equal. The leftists now have Russian tanks and planes and men from all over the world are fighting in their International Brigades. They have the supply ports of the Mediterranean — Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia. Oscar had always said it would be over by Christmas, now he thinks it will take years.

  18th February 1937, near Vaciamadrid

  We have been shoved off the Madrid-Valencia road, which is what we expected when we first took it. The Russian fighters strafed us mercilessly. We are in a stalemate now and can only wait to see how it goes in the north. We have time and good supplies of cigarettes and coffee. Oscar has made a chess set out of empty cartridges and we play, or rather he teaches me how to lose gracefully. We have conversations so that I can practise my basic German, which he is also teaching me.

  ‘Why are you a Nationalist?’ he asks, moving out a pawn.

  ‘Why are you?’ I counter, meeting his pawn with mine.

  ‘I’m not Spanish,’ he says, covering the pawn with his knight. ‘I don’t have to decide.’

  ‘Nor am I,’ I say, supporting my pawn with another. ‘I’m African.’

  ‘Your parents are Spanish.’

  ‘But I was born in Tetuán.’

  ‘And this allows you to be apolitical?’

  ‘It means I have no foundation for political belief.’

  ‘Your father — was he a rightist?’

  ‘I have no father.’

  ‘But was he?’

  No answer from me.

  ‘What was his work?’

  ‘He owned a hotel.’

  ‘Then he was of the right,’ says Oscar. ‘Did he go to Mass?’

  ‘Only to drink the wine.’

  ‘Then that is your foundation. You learn politics at the dinner table.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘He was a doctor.’

  ‘Difficult,’ I say. ‘Did he go to Mass?’

  ‘We don’t have Mass.’

  ‘Even more difficult.’

  ‘He was a socialist,’ says Oscar.

  ‘Then you are surely in the wrong place.’

  ‘I shot him on 27th October 1923.’

  I look up, but he continues to study the chessboard.

  ‘You’re dead in three moves,’ he says.

  23rd November 1937, Cogolludo, near Guadalajara

  Our bandera has been broken up and we have been distributed around the rest of the army. We think we have been positioned here for a new attempt on the capital. Oscar is not speaking to me because here I record my first win on that most arduous of fronts — the chessboard.

  15th December 1937, Cogolludo

  The leftists have surprised us by mounting an offensive on Teruel just as we were preparing to overrun the capital and spend Christmas on the Gran Vía. We only know that Teruel is the coldest place in Spain and that 4,000 Nationalists are besi
eged inside the town.

  31st December 1937, near Teruel

  Brutally cold: -18°C. Blizzard. Snow a metre thick. I hate it. I write this with difficulty and only to take my mind off the terrible conditions. The counterattack has ground to a halt but we continue to shell the town, which is no more than snow-covered rubble. We stop when the visibility drops to zero.

  8th February 1938, Teruel

  We started an attack yesterday, trying to force an encirclement. The fighting is fierce and Oscar is hit in the stomach and we have to carry him back to the rear. I have taken over his role as NCO.

  10th February 1938, Teruel

  I found Oscar in the field hospital and even with the morphine he’s in terrible pain. He knows he will not survive the wound. He has left me his books and chess set and has given me strict instructions to burn his journals without reading them. He is sobbing with pain and as he kisses me I feel his warm tears on my face.

  23rd February 1938, Teruel

  We buried Oscar this morning. Later I burnt his diaries. I obeyed his instructions and dropped the first book into the fire without opening it. As it burned I could not resist looking through the pages of the next book which were all about a love he could not seem to bear. He never mentioned the girl by name, which did not surprise me as we never talked on a personal level except when he told me he’d shot his father. In the third book he began using imaginary dialogues, which were easier to digest than his stolid prose. It was with a jolt that I saw my own words and came to the electrifying conclusion that I was the inconsiderate lover. This was further confirmed when, enraged by some unconscious remark of mine, he referred to me as Die Künstlerin. I burnt the rest without reading it.

  I sit now writing with a candle clenched between my knees. It occurs to me that all Oscar’s urging me to write down my thoughts was in the desperate hope that I would reveal myself to him. He must have been disappointed by my endless remarks on military manoeuvres.

  I feel no disgust even though Oscar was physically repellent. I am sad to have lost my teacher and friend, the man who was more of a father to me than my own. I am lonely again without his brute appearance, his snapping mind, his sure military guidance. I am having incomprehensible thoughts. Something has been disturbed in me which I can only recognize as some shapeless need. I do not understand it. It refuses to be defined.

  15th April 1938, Lérida

  I was knocked unconscious for some hours and have been brought to the hospital here, which I have to be reminded we captured nearly two weeks ago. I have made no entries since Oscar’s funeral. I am furious with myself because I cannot remember whether I made any progress with my thoughts. This ‘need’ I wrote about is a blank in my brain. Events have been reasserting themselves. The relentless advance after we put the republicans to flight at Teruel. Crossing the River Ebro and taking Fraga. Even the assault on Lérida takes some shape. But however much I squeeze my mind I cannot recover what I was thinking of, what it was that Oscar’s diaries had levered open. I am bereft without knowing why.

  18th November 1938, Ribarroya

  This is the last republican bridgehead. They are all now beyond the Ebro and the situation has returned to what it was in July except that now the snow falls and more than 20,000 men have lost their lives in the mountains. I remember all those chess games I played with Oscar before I learnt a subtler insight. I was always the attacker and Oscar the defender who, having read my undisguised plans, would then become the fierce counter attacker and wipe me off the board. It has been so with our armies. The republicans attack and in doing so reveal the concentration of their forces and the paucity of their aims. We defend, marshal our response and drive them back to a position where they are weaker than they were before. As Oscar told me: ‘It is always easier to react than to be original. You’ll find the same holds for art as in life.’

  26th January 1939, Barcelona

  Yesterday we came into the empty city behind unopposed tanks. We’d crossed the Llobregat River the day before and could already smell the desperation that hung above the collapsing republican will. There was no sense of triumph. We were exhausted to the point of not even knowing if we were glad to be alive. By evening we were in control and it was then that our supporters felt safe enough to venture out into the streets to rejoice and, of course, to take their revenge on the defeated. We did not stop them.

  15

  Monday, 16th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

  Another 20,000-volt wake-up call, as if he’d had a heart attack and been defibrillated back to life. His watch told him it was six o’clock, which meant that he’d had an hour and a half of sleep, or rather not sleep, more like death. The brain, a strange organ that kept him awake with a torment of thoughts about his father, the Civil War, art, death … and then, just as he was about to give up on the possibility of ever sleeping again — shut down. No dreams. No rest. But a respite. The brain, unable to stand any more of the endless babble, had brought down the shutter.

  He dragged himself, heart pounding, to the exercise bike and started working out until he had the sensation of being pursued to the point of glancing over his shoulder. He stopped, dismounted, wondered if this was bad for him, psychologically — the expending of vast amounts of energy to go nowhere. Agitated stasis. He needed it though, to lull himself out of the cyclical thinking. Cyclical? That was it. He was just doing with his body what he was doing with his mind. He ran down to the river and up to the Torre del Oro and back. He saw no one.

  He was the first in the office, having driven through silent streets. He sat at his desk, desolate amongst the spartan furniture and the piled concrete silence of the Jefatura. Ramírez turned up at 8.30 and Falcón greeted him with the news of Eloisa Gómez’s disappearance. He checked the incident room, but there had been very little activity. Seville was too worn out after a week of passionate Mariolatry and bacchanalia to lift a phone.

  Ramírez produced the envelope he’d picked up from the computer room. All eight of the images of the disappearing cameraman from the cemetery were there and the operator had sharpened up the two best examples, but they still didn’t help. There was no visible eye, the nose was in shadow from the peaked baseball cap and the jaw line was obscured by the collar of the coat. There was visible skin, but its colour and texture was unclear. The computer operator had shown the pictures to a CCTV expert who’d ventured the opinion that the killer was male, between twenty and forty years old.

  ‘It’s not going to help us,’ said Ramírez, ‘but it’ll be something for Juez Calderón to feast on. Our first sighting of the killer … better than no sighting at all.’

  ‘But who is he?’ asked Falcón, surprising Ramírez with his sudden savagery. ‘Is he acting alone? Is he being paid? What is his motive?’

  ‘Are we even sure now that he was unknown to his victim?’ asked Ramírez, taking up Falcón’s tone.

  ‘I’m sure. I wouldn’t like to have to prove it in court, but I’m certain that he got his information from Mudanzas Triana, he used Eloisa Gómez to get into the flat, and he waited until the maid arrived to get out. And it was all done to confuse us.’

  ‘Then I think we should bring Consuelo Jiménez in and sweat her about the sighting … see if she breaks down under pressure,’ said Ramírez. ‘She is the only one close to the victim, with all the necessary information and a defined motive.’

  ‘At this point I want to work with Consuelo Jiménez rather than against her. I’m meeting her at midday to sort through all her husband’s business associates, divide them into those with and without motive.’

  ‘Doesn’t that put her in control of our investigation, Inspector Jefe?’

  ‘Not quite … because we’ll be doing our own digging. You came up with Joaquín López of Cinco Bellotas. He’s worth an interview. Pérez can go down to the town hall and get the names of any companies who had contact with the Expo ‘92 Building Committee. Fernández will go down to the licensing department and pull n
ames from there and then he can go on to the health and fire departments and only when we’ve been through everything, right down to the people who come in to the restaurants to sell flowers to customers who are forgetting to be romantic, will we leave Sra Jiménez alone. So we work with her, but she will feel the pressure.’

  ‘What about the local hoods?’

  ‘If there’d been something wrong there, one of the restaurants would have been burnt down, not the owner tortured and killed. But we still put out our feelers.’

  ‘Drugs?’ said Ramírez. ‘Seeing as we’re dealing with extreme behaviour, psychopathic violence.’

  ‘Talk to Narcotics. See if Raúl Jiménez or anyone associated with him has ever been under any kind of surveillance.’

  The rest of the squad arrived over the next quarter of an hour and Falcón briefed them, showed them the images from the video tape and fired them up to do a long, hard day’s boring work. He asked Serrano about the chloroform and surgical instruments; nothing so far from the hospitals, who were still checking their stocks, and he was working his way around the labs. He sent Baena down to Mudanzas Triana to interview the workers specifically to find out what they were doing on Saturday morning at the time of the Jiménez funeral. They left and he took a long call from Juez Calderón in which he covered the same ground, and another from Comisario Lobo. Normally this endless repetition would have annoyed him, but today both Calderón and Lobo had terminated the calls. After that he tore into his paperwork, which he never did on a Monday morning, especially during an investigation. He left early for his meeting with Consuelo Jiménez.