The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  ‘The grass clippings,’ said Calderón.

  ‘If he killed her here, he buried her under the grass clippings, probably assuming that nobody would be taking away gardening detritus on a weekend. If he killed her elsewhere and got the body over the wall, he’d have had to bring her here in a car and he probably didn’t want to leave his car parked outside the cemetery walls for too long.’

  ‘This flash of inspiration you were talking about has given him a lot of trouble,’ said Calderón.

  ‘It’s important to him thematically, and he wants to show us his talent,’ said Falcón.

  Calderón went back to the Edificio de los Juzgados in a taxi. Falcón and Ramírez had the cemetery emptied and closed off for the rest of the day. Lobo came up with another twelve men and by six o’clock they’d moved through the whole cemetery. A black stocking had been found hanging from the handle of the broken sword of the bronze statue of the torero, Francisco Rivera. A large quantity of dead flowers, grass clippings and leaves were found in a skip close to a rusted metal gate in the wall at the rear of the cemetery. The wall backed on to a factory. A narrow, overgrown passage ran down its entire length. Leaning up against the wall between the factory and the cemetery were some old metal doors and a ladder of the sort used in the cemetery to climb up the high ossuary blocks. The grass in the passage had been trodden down. The passage was only visible to the security guards patrolling the industrial zone if they actually went down it on foot. The skip butted up against the wall. It would have been possible for the killer to have lifted the very small Eloisa Gómez up and over the wall and to have heaved her into the skip.

  ‘That’s the second time he’s done this to us,’ said Falcón.

  ‘Confused us about the killing scenario?’ said Ramírez.

  ‘Yes, it’s one of his talents … to slow the whole process down,’ said Falcón.

  ‘We’re always having to do double the work,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘It’s something my father used to say about genius … they make everything around them look so slow.’

  By 6.30 p.m. Falcón and Ramírez were in the Alameda but found none of Eloisa’s group in the square. They went to her room in Calle Joaquín Costa. Falcón knocked on the door of the fat girl, who kept the key to Eloisa’s room. She came to the door in a blue towelling dressing gown and pink furry slippers. Her eyes were puffy with sleep but she was instantly alert when she saw the two policemen. Falcón asked for the key and told her to start thinking about the last time she’d seen her friend and to get the other girls to do the same. She didn’t have to ask what had happened and handed him the key.

  The door opened on the stupid panda. The two men looked around at the pitiful accumulation of a small, hard life. Ramírez nosed amongst the cheap bric-a-brac on the dressing table.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘Just looking.’

  ‘Do you think he’s been here?’

  ‘Too risky,’ said Falcón. ‘We need the address and telephone number of her sister. The panda’s for her niece.’

  Ramírez looked from the panda to his boss and had a vision of Falcón as lost and pathetic, diminished and unconnected.

  ‘I won one of those for my daughter at the Feria last year,’ said Ramírez, nodding at the silent guest. ‘She loves it.’

  ‘Strange how cuddly toys bring out that instinct,’ said Falcón.

  Ramírez backed away from any potential intimacy.

  ‘Not such perfect sight,’ said Ramírez, looking down on a pair of contact lenses on the bedside table.

  ‘She knew him before,’ said Falcón, ‘I’m sure of it. Think of all that filming he did to make La Familia Jiménez. He’d have seen him going back to the same girl again and again. He’d have wanted to know why.’

  ‘She probably gave the best blow job in town,’ said Ramírez crudely.

  ‘There’s got to be a reason for it.’

  ‘She looked very young,’ said Ramírez. ‘Maybe he liked that.’

  ‘His son said he fell for his first wife when she was thirteen.’

  ‘Whatever, Inspector Jefe,’ said Ramírez. ‘This is all conjecture.’

  ‘What else have we got to structure our ideas?’ said Falcón. ‘We don’t need any more clues with the trail he’s leaving.’

  ‘We’ve still got a prime suspect, according to Juez Calderón,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten her, Inspector.’

  ‘If she’s hired someone and unleashed a madman she might be persuaded that she’s not so safe herself,’ said Ramírez. ‘I still think we should sweat her.’

  The girls from Eloisa’s group filed past the door on their way to the fat girl’s room. Ramírez found Eloisa’s address book. They went down the hall to where the girls slouched in the smoke-filled room.

  Falcón talked them through what had happened. The only noise was from the click and rasp of cheap lighters and the drawing in of smoke. He asked if there was anybody that Eloisa was seeing outside the business and there was some derisive laughter. He pressed them to think about it and they all said they didn’t have to. There was nobody except the sister in Cádiz. He roamed their faces. They had the look of refugees about them. Refugees from life, stuck on the borders of civilization, remote from comfort. He told them they could leave. The fat girl remained.

  ‘There was somebody,’ she said, once they’d all left. ‘Not a regular, but she saw him more than once. She said he was different.’

  ‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘Because I thought she’d got away. That’s what she said she was going to do.’

  ‘Start from the beginning,’ said Falcón.

  ‘She said he didn’t want to have sex with her. He only wanted to talk.’

  ‘One of those,’ said Ramírez, and Falcón stabbed him silent with a look.

  ‘He told her he was a writer. He was doing something for a film.’

  ‘What did they talk about?’

  ‘He asked her everything about her life. There was no detail he wasn’t interested in. He was particularly interested in what he called “crossing borders”.’

  ‘Do you know what he meant by that?’

  ‘The first time she had sex. The first time she had sex for money. The first time she permitted certain things to be done to her. The first time she got pregnant. The first abortion. The first time she was hit. The first time a man pulled a knife on her. The first time a man pushed a gun into her … cut her. Those borders.’

  ‘And they only talked?’

  ‘He paid her for sex but they only talked,’ she said. ‘And by the end they just talked.’

  ‘Did she say what he looked like?’ asked Falcón. ‘Where he was from? How he spoke? Did he have a name?’

  ‘She called him Sergio.’

  ‘Was it him she went to see on Friday night?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Did you ever see him?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘She must have described him.’

  ‘We’re careful what we tell each other … it can come back on us,’ she said. ‘She only told me that he was guapo. Maybe she talked to her sister more.’

  ‘So you think, if she was going to run away with him, that she had feelings for him?’

  ‘She said that no man had ever spoken to her like he did.’

  ‘Did he talk about himself to her?’

  ‘If he did, she didn’t tell me anything.’

  ‘What do you know about Sergio … other than a name?’

  ‘I know that he’d done a very dangerous thing,’ she said. ‘He’d given Eloisa hope.’

  ‘Hope?’ said Ramírez, as if this had no weight with him at all.

  ‘Look around you,’ said the fat girl. ‘Imagine what hope does to you, if you live like this.’

  Falcón and Ramírez were back at the Jefatura by 8 p.m. having searched and sealed off Eloisa Gómez’s room. They’d found nothing. They
went through the address book on Eloisa’s retrieved mobile and found no reference to Sergio. Falcón left Ramírez with the paperwork while he went to Tabladilla to keep his appointment with the psychologist. He parked across the street from the building and paced up and down the length of his car, eyeing the plaques on the outside of the door, reluctant to initiate the consultation.

  A memory of his father getting mechanics to tinker about inside the engine of the Jaguar, even when it was working perfectly, came back to him. He always said it was “just in case something was about to go wrong”. Madness. The point was that Falcón did need some tinkering, but what would happen? What terrible black thread would be teased out of his tightknit brain? Would it all unravel? He saw himself dazed and slack-jawed, staring up at two white-coated assistants as they eased his arms into a surgical gown. Just one small cut and you’ll be set adrift from your past. He was already out of control, he saw that, thinking about open brain surgery when all this was going to be was a talk. He wiped his damp palms together, sandwiched a handkerchief between them and crossed the street.

  The stairs were either interminable or he was making them so and he had to drive himself through the door at the top. A girl sat behind a desk.

  ‘Hola, Sr Falcón,’ she said, cheerful, used to dealing with broken minds. ‘This is your first time, isn’t it?’

  She had blonde hair and thick pouting lips. She held out a form for him to fill in. He didn’t take it. On the wall beyond the girl was one of his father’s paintings of the doorway to the Iglesia Omnium Santorum. Checking the room he found another — one of the larger, less successful abstract landscapes.

  ‘Sr Falcón,’ said the girl, standing now, skirt hem at the level of the desk.

  He knew he would not be able to stand this. He would not be able to sit in front of someone and discuss his father’s life and work and have the man nosing about inside his head, looking for the crimps and creases in the texture of his thoughts and ironing them out. He left without a word. It was the easiest thing he’d done in years. He just walked away.

  A ghastly turbulence started up in his chest as he got into the car, but it passed as he drove back home with the windows down. He walked to the British Institute and sat at the back of the class and half listened through a session of conditionals. I would be feeling better now if I had been to the shrink. I’d be singing my madness out on the couch if I hadn’t lost my nerve. It would help if I could talk to someone.

  He looked around the students in the class. Pedro. Juan. Sergio. Lola. Sergio? His thoughts grew strange and large in his head. Sergio. We might as well call this madman Sergio. He can talk. He sees things clearly. He gets inside and turns things over. He’d talked to Eloisa, given her hope and taken her hopeless life from her. Why don’t I talk to him? He’s telling me his story, why don’t I tell him mine? Let him wrench these horrible creatures from my brain.

  ‘Javier?’ said the teacher.

  ‘I’d like to apologize if I’ve been talking out loud.’

  Falcón laughed to himself, grinned at the way the larger world outside had been diminished by the high-vaulted gothics of his own mind. He could live in here for years and, as soon as he’d thought it, he threw himself out, like a heretic from a cathedral. He delved into the machinery of language. It was so easy to fit words together, so relaxing. It was only the meaning that bled into the spaces around them that troubled.

  He attached himself to some other students and went for a drink. They walked to the Bar Barbiana in the Calle Albareda. They drank beer, ate tapas — atún encebollado, tortillitas de camarones. The students didn’t belong with the clientele of this bar who were, as they were saying, muy pijo — upper class — probably with fincas in the country, until Lola looked embarrassed and they changed the subject because they thought Falcón was muy pija in his suit and tie.

  They split up before Javier was ready to go home. Was he ever ready to go home these days? His house was a prison, his room a cell, the bed a rack on which he was stretched out every night. He walked around town, stood close to groups in well-lit bars, put his beer down amongst theirs, until they noticed him and sealed him off.

  He ended the night under the high palms and the deeper darkness of the massive rubber trees in the Plaza del Museo de las Bellas Artes. The botellón was in full swing, the air full of hashish, clinking glass and the low roar of humans at their leisure.

  Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

  30th June 1941, Ceuta

  Pablito came into my room this afternoon, lay down on my bed, rolled a cigarette on his chest and lit it. He has something to tell me. I know this but I always ignore him. I was drawing a Berber woman I’d seen in the market that morning. Pablito’s nonchalance bristled on the bed. He smoked like a cow would, always chewing.

  ‘We’re going to Russia,’ he said. ‘To hit the Reds. Kick them up the ass on their own soil.’

  I put down my pencil and turned to him.

  ‘General Orgaz volunteered us. Colonel Esperanza has been asked to form a regiment. A battalion is going to be made up out of the Legion, the Regulares and the Flechas, here in Ceuta.’

  That’s how I remember Pablito’s little announcement. Banal. I’m so bored I’m going along with it. So little has happened in the last few years I forgot I had this journal. My diary is in my drawings. I’m unused to writing. Four pages cover two years. Isn’t this the rhythm of life? Periods of change, followed by long periods of getting used to the change until you feel compelled to change again. Boredom is my only motive. It’s probably Pablito’s, too, but he dresses it up in anti-communist rhetoric. He doesn’t know the first thing about communism.

  8th July 1941, Ceuta

  There was a good turnout in the port to see us off. General Orgaz stirred us all up. If we didn’t suspect it before, we know it now — we’re a political device. (Am I sounding like Oscar now?) The uniform says something about what’s going on in Madrid: we’re wearing the red berets of the Carlists, the blue shirts of the Falange and the khaki trousers of the Legion. Royalists, fascists and military all satisfied and implicated.

  The Germans have been at the Pyrenees for months. Rumour had it that they were going to send a strike force to take Gibraltar, which sounded too much like invasion. We’re being sent to Russia to make the Germans feel better about Spain, to make it look as if we’re on their side. The newspaper tells us that Stalin is the real enemy, but no mention of us entering the war. Games are being played and we are in the middle. I have a feeling of doom about this whole expedition, but beyond the harbour walls we pick up a school of dolphin, who escort us most of the way to Algeciras, which I take to be a good omen.

  10th July 1941, Seville

  We’ve been put in the Pineda barracks at the southern end of the city. We had a night on the town. We didn’t pay for a single drink. The last time some of our number were here they were hacking men to death on the streets of Triana. Now we’re the heroes, sent to keep communism at bay. Five years is an eon in human relations.

  Despite the brutal heat, I like Seville. The dark, cool bars. The people with short memories and a need to express joy. I think this is a place to live in.

  18th July 1941, Grafenwöhr, Germany

  We changed trains at Hendaye in southern France. The French shook their fists and hurled rocks at the carriages as we passed through. At our first stop in Germany, Karlsruhe station was full of people cheering and singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’. They covered the train in flowers. Now we’re somewhere northeast of Nürnberg. Weather grey. New recruits and most of the guripas already depressed, missing home. Us veterans depressed because we’ve just been told that the División Azul, as we ‘re called, is not going to be motorized but horsedrawn.

  8th August 1941, Grafenwöhr

  Pablito has a black eye and a cut lip. He doesn’t like the Germans any more than the communists he hasn’t yet met. The men, the guripas, like wearing their blue shirts and red berets inst
ead of the regulation German uniform. A fight broke out in the Rathskeller in town. ‘They tell us we don’t know how to take care of our weapons,’ says Pablito. ‘But the real reason is that we’re fucking all their women and the girls have never had it so good.’ I don’t know if we’ll ever fit in with our new allies. The food stinks worse than the latrines, their tobacco smokes like hay and there is no wine. While Colónel Esperanza has taken delivery of a Studebaker President, we have been supplied with 6,000 horses from Serbia. It should take us two months just to get the animals trained, but we ‘re moving up to the front at the end of the month. Pablito’s heard that we ‘re going to march on Moscow, but I see the way the Germans look at us. They put a high value on discipline, obedience, command and neatness. Our secret weapon is our passion. But it is too secret for them to see. Only in battle will they understand the flame that burns inside every guripa. One shout of ‘A mí la legión!’ and the whole floor will rise up and ram the Russians back to Siberia.

  27th August 1941, somewhere in Poland

  Our reputation with local women precedes us. We’ve been forbidden to have anything to do with Jewish women, who we recognize by the yellow star they have to wear, or the Polish women (panienkas). We heard that 10 Company of 262 marched with blown-up condoms attached to their rifles as a protest.

  2nd September 1941, Grodno

  First signs of battle on the march to Grodno … outskirts of the town have been levelled. The centre is full of rubble, which the Jews have been put to work cleaning up. They are exhausted as their rations are meagre. Pablito’s attitude to the Germans is hardening by the day. He now finds them sinister. We’re to be toughened up by being marched to the front. Pablito has fallen for a blonde, green-eyed panienka called Anna.

  12th September 1941, Ozmiana

  Colonel Esperanza’s Studebaker has taken a beating on the roads. It won’t be long before he’s marching like the rest of us. A black Mercedes pulled up alongside the other day and General Muñoz Grandes got out and had lunch with us. Pablito and the guripas were in an uproar. He inspires us, as he is one of the few commanders who understand what it’s like to be an ordinary soldier.