The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  They reconvened after lunch to watch some of Raúl Jiménez’s old home movies. Pérez, who’d brought them up from Mudanzas Triana, joined the session. He’d also reported that the warehouse had a single entrance and that all the long-term storage was in one area at the back of the building. Each client had a locked cage for Cases and furniture. All the packing cases were sealed with tape. The tape dated back to the time when the cases were stored, so if somebody had opened them it would be obvious. Raúl Jiménez’s cases were amongst the oldest pieces stored in the warehouse. All Mudanzas Triana personnel had access to the warehouse but only the warehouse manager had the keys to the storage cages. Nobody could access the cages without him being present. The keys were kept in a locked safe in his office. The warehouse was patrolled at night by two security guards with dogs. In the last forty years there had been four reported break-ins with nothing significant stolen as each break-in had been interrupted.

  Falcón was glad that Pérez sat in on the session to react to the brunt of Ramírez’s comments. He hadn’t expected to become so emotionally engaged by the black-and-white flickering images of Raúl Jiménez’s earlier and happier life. Never before, in the dark of the cinema, had he been so moved. Fiction hadn’t been able to do this to him. He’d always seen through the contrivance, withdrawn from the imperative engagement and never shed a single sentimental tear.

  Now, having come to know the protagonists in the most personal way, he watched in the darkness as José Manuel and Marta played on the beach while the uncomplicated waves folded on to the shore. Raúl’s wife, Gumersinda, walked into frame, turned and held out her arms. Running after her into the frame came the toddling Arturo. He reached her outstretched arms and she clasped his small chest in her hands and lifted him high above her head, so that his legs dangled and he looked down on her smiling face with pure and wild delight. As the toddler was taken skywards Falcón’s stomach flipped. He remembered that feeling and had to pinch at the tears, shudder under the weight of the tragedy that had torn this family apart.

  He couldn’t understand his emotional intensity over this family. He’d come into contact with other families ravaged by murder or rape, drug addiction or extreme violence. Why was the Jiménez family so different? He had to talk about this before his desperation turned from leaking to free flow. Alicia Aguado … would she work?

  The lights came up in the room. Ramírez and Pérez turned in their chairs to look at their superior.

  ‘There’s reels of this stuff,’ said Ramírez. ‘What exactly are we doing here, Inspector Jefe?’

  We’re adding to the profile of our killer,’ he said. ‘We have a physical idea of him from the blow-ups we’ve taken from the video shot in the cemetery. We have been told he is guapo and he has beautiful hands. Physically he is taking shape. Mentally: we’ve talked about his creativity and his playfulness. We know he is interested in film. We know that he has made a study of the Jiménez family … ‘

  He found himself drying up. Why were they looking at these movies?

  ‘The box in which these films were stored was sealed,’ said Pérez, reiterating his report. ‘These canisters haven’t seen the light of day since they were put in there.’

  ‘But what a day that was,’ said Falcón, like a drowning man clutching at passing reeds. ‘The day he expunged his youngest son’s memory from his mind.’

  ‘But what does it add to the profile?’ asked Ramírez.

  ‘I was thinking of those terrible self-inflicted injuries,’ said Falcón. ‘Before Jiménez did that to himself he was refusing to watch something on the television. Then he had his eyelids cut off and what did he see? What would have induced Raúl Jiménez to do that to himself?’

  ‘If somebody cut my eyelids off … ‘ started Pérez.

  ‘You saw the boy, the tiny helpless boy,’ said Falcón. ‘You heard him shrieking and whooping in his mother’s arms … Don’t you think …?’

  He stopped. The two men were looking hard at him, their faces blank and uncomprehending.

  ‘But, Inspector Jefe,’ said Pérez, ‘there was no soundtrack.’

  ‘I know, Sub-Inspector … ‘ started Falcón, but he hadn’t known and his mind was suddenly shot through with a colourless panic and he couldn’t even remember his colleague’s name. He couldn’t think of another word to follow the one he’d just said. He’d become the dried actor he most feared: the one playing himself in his own life.

  He came to as if the bubble he’d been encased in had burst and real life had streamed back up to him again. The men had moved away and were dismantling the screen. Falcón was surprised to find it close to 9 p.m. He had to get out, but he had a need to salvage something from this situation first. He went to the door.

  ‘You file the report on these films, Sub-Inspector … ‘ he said, that name still eluding him. ‘And when you do it I want you to use your imagination. I want you to think about who was holding the camera and the mental state of the man at the time.’

  ‘Yes, Inspector Jefe,’ said Pérez. ‘But you’ve always told me to report the facts and not attempt to interpret them.’

  ‘Do your best,’ he said and left.

  He tried to dry swallow an Orfidal, but it got stuck in the clag of his mouth and he had to go to the bathroom and scoop water to his lips and over his hot face. He dabbed himself dry and found he didn’t recognize his own eyes in the mirror. They were somebody else’s, these pink-rimmed, filmy things, sunken in their sockets, flinching in his skull. He was losing his authority. Nobody would respect these eyes.

  He got out of the Jefatura into the cool night air, drove back home and walked to Dra Alicia Aguado’s small house in Calle Vidrio, arriving there shortly before his 10 p.m. appointment. He paced the pavement outside the newly renovated house, nervous as an actor before an audition, until he couldn’t stand it any longer and rang the bell. She let him in and called him up a dark stairway to the light.

  In the consulting room Falcón noticed that there was nothing on the light-blue walls and no bric-a-brac. In fact, the only furniture was a sofa and a double seat in the shape of an ‘S’.

  The room was narrow, the house feeling small and contained, making his own place seem absurd. It was clearly a well-managed and comfortable head to reside in. Whereas his own sprawling, multi-roomed, cavernous, storeyed, balconied, baroque, Byzantine madness was like a boarded-up asylum, where a single inmate had hidden until it had all gone quiet …

  Alicia Aguado had short black hair, a pale face and no trace of make-up. She held out her hand but did not look directly at him. As their hands touched she said:

  ‘Dr Valera didn’t tell you I was partially sighted,’ she said.

  ‘He only guaranteed that you would not be interested in art.’

  ‘I wish I could be, but I’ve had this condition since I was twelve years old.’

  What is the condition?’

  ‘Retinitis pigmentosa.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ said Falcón.

  ‘I have abnormal pigment cells, which for no definable reason begin to stick together on the retina in clumps,’ she said. ‘The first symptom is night blindness and the last, much later, is complete blindness.’

  Javier was paralysed by this exchange. He held on to her hand, which she slowly extracted and showed him to the S-shaped chair.

  ‘I have to explain a few things about my method,’ she said, sitting next to him but facing him on the specifically designed seat. ‘I cannot see your face clearly and we communicate so much through our faces. As you may know, we are hard-wired for facial recognition at birth. This means that I have to use other ways of registering your feelings. It’s a method similar to a Chinese doctor’s, which relies on pulse. So we sit in this strange seat, you rest your arm in the middle, I hold on to your wrist and you talk. Your voice will be recorded by a tape within the arm. Are you happy with all that?’

  Falcón nodded, lulled by the woman’s calm authority, her placid face, her green and u
nseeing eyes.

  ‘Part of my method is that I will rarely instigate conversation. The idea is that you talk and I listen. All I may do is to try to direct your thoughts or prompt you if you reach a dead end. I will, however, set you off.’

  She turned a switch on the side of the chair that started the tape. She took Falcón’s wrist in an expert but gentle grip.

  ‘Dr Valera has told me that you’re suffering the symptoms of stress. I can tell that you are anxious now. He says that the change in your mental stability started at the beginning of an investigation into a particularly brutal murder. He has also mentioned your father and your reluctance to be treated by someone who might know your father’s work. Can you think why the first incident should — What was that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That word, “incident”, it provoked a strong reaction in you.’

  ‘It’s a word that appears in my father’s journals, which I’ve just started reading. It refers to something that happened when he was sixteen which made him leave home. He never says what it was.’

  Now that he’d seen the efficacy of her method he had to suppress his desire to twist his wrist out of her grip. Alicia Aguado not only seemed tuned in to the human anatomy but also to the writhing of its soul.

  ‘Do you think that was why he wrote his journal?’ she asked.

  ‘You mean to resolve this “incident”?’ said Falcón. ‘I don’t think that was his intention. I don’t think he would have even started if one of his comrades hadn’t given him a book to write in.’

  ‘These people are sent sometimes.’

  ‘Like this killer has been sent to me?’

  Silence, while she let that sink in.

  ‘Everything said in this room is confidential and that includes police information. The tapes are locked in a safe,’ she said. ‘I want you to tell me what started it.’

  He told her about Raúl Jiménez’s face. How the killer wanted Jiménez to look at something, which he’d refused to do. Falcón spared no detail in the description of how it must have felt to come round with no eyelids and how this, combined with the horror of what the killer was showing, had driven Raúl Jiménez to appalling self-mutilation. He believed that his breakdown had started on seeing that face, because in it he saw the pain and terror of someone who had been forced to confront their deepest horrors.

  ‘Do you think the murderer sees himself in a professional capacity?’ she asked. ‘As a psychologist or psychoanalyst?’

  ‘Ah!’ said Falcón. ‘You mean do I see him like that?’

  ‘Do you?’

  Silence, until Alicia Aguado decided to move things along.

  ‘Some connection has been made by you between this murder case and your father.’

  He told her about the photographs of Tangier he’d found in Raúl Jiménez’s study.

  ‘We lived there too, at the same time,’ he said. ‘I thought I might find my father in the photos.’

  ‘Was that all?’

  Javier flexed his hand, uncomfortable at the information flowing through his wrist.

  ‘I thought I might find a picture of my mother, too,’ he said. ‘She died in Tangier in 1961 when I was five years old.’

  ‘Did you find her?’ asked Alicia, after some time.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘What I found in the background of one of the shots was my father kissing the woman who eventually became my second mother … I mean, his second wife. The date on the back was before my mother died.’

  ‘Infidelity is not so unusual,’ she said.

  ‘My sister would agree with you. She said he was “no angel”.’

  ‘Has this had an effect on how you see your father?’

  Falcón found himself actively thinking. For the first time in his life he was actually searching the narrow cobbled streets of his mind. Sweat broke from his forehead. He wiped it away.

  ‘Your father died two years ago. Were you close to him?’

  ‘I thought I was close to him. I was his favourite. I … I … now I’m confused.’

  He told her about the will, his father’s expressed wishes for the destruction of his studio and how he was disobeying him by reading the journals.

  ‘Do you think that strange?’ she asked. ‘Famous men normally want to leave something for posterity.’

  ‘There was a warning letter which told me it could be a painful journey.’

  ‘Then why are you doing this?’

  Falcón hit a cul-de-sac in his mind, a flat white wall of panic. His silence deepened.

  ‘What did you say it was that so appalled you about the murder victim?’ she asked.

  ‘That he was being forced to see …’

  ‘Remember who you were looking for in the victim’s photographs?’

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  In the silence that followed Alicia stood, put the kettle on and made some herbal tea. She fumbled for some Chinese teacups. She poured the tea, took his wrist again.

  ‘Are you interested in photography?’ she asked.

  ‘I was until recently,’ said Falcón. ‘I even have my own dark room in the house. I like black-and-white photography. I like to develop my own pictures.’

  ‘How do you look at a photograph?’ she asked. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘I see a memory.’

  He told her about the home movies he’d seen that afternoon, how they’d made him weep.

  ‘Did you go to the beach much as a child?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, in Tangier the beach was right there next to the town … I mean, in the town almost. We went every afternoon in summer. My brother and sister, my mother, the maid and I. Sometimes it would just be my mother and I.’

  ‘You and your mother.’

  ‘Are you asking me where my father was?’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘My father was working. He had a studio. It overlooked the beach. I went there sometimes. He used to watch over us though, I know that.’

  ‘Watch over you?’

  ‘He had a pair of binoculars. He let me use them sometimes. He helped me find them … my mother, Manuela and Paco on the beach. He said it was our secret. “It’s how I keep an eye on you.”’

  ‘Keeping an eye on you?’ she said.

  ‘You mean, it sounds as if he was spying on us,’ said Falcón. ‘That doesn’t make sense. Why should a man spy on his own family?’

  ‘In these family movies you saw today, did you ever see the father?’

  ‘No, he was behind the camera.’

  She asked him why he was watching these movies and he explained the whole Raúl Jiménez story. She listened, fascinated, only stopping him to change the tape halfway through.

  ‘But why are you watching these movies?’ she asked again, at the end of it all.

  ‘I’ve just told you,’ he said. ‘I’ve just spent nearly half an hour …’

  He stopped and thought for long, endlessly complex minutes.

  ‘I told you that I see photographs as memory,’ he said. ‘I’m entranced by them because I have a problem with memory. I told you that we used to go to the beach as a family, but I didn’t really remember it. I didn’t see it. It’s not something inside me that I recall. I’ve invented it to fill the gaps. I know we did go to the beach, but I can’t remember it as if it’s my own. Am I making sense?’

  ‘Perfect sense.’

  ‘I want these movies and photographs to jog my memory,’ he said. ‘When I was talking to José Manuel Jiménez about his family tragedy he told me he had problems recalling his childhood. It made me try to remember my earliest memory and I panicked, because I knew it wasn’t there.’

  ‘Now you can answer my earlier question, about why you’re reading the journals,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, as if something had clicked, ‘I’m disobeying him, because I think the journals might have the secrets to my memory.’

  The tap
e clicked off. Distant city sounds filled the room. He waited for her to change the tape but she made no move.

  ‘That’s all for today,’ she said.

  ‘But I’ve only just begun.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But we’re not going to disentangle you in a single session. This is a long process. There are no short cuts.’

  ‘But we’re just … we’ve just started touching on things.’

  ‘That’s right. It’s been a good first session,’ she said. ‘I want you to do some thinking. I want you to ask yourself if you see any similarities between the Jiménez family and your own.’

  ‘Both families have the same number of children … I was the youngest …’

  ‘We’re not talking about it now.’

  ‘But I need to make progress.’

  ‘You’ve done that, but there’s only so much reality that the human mind can take. You have to get used to it first.’

  ‘Reality?’

  ‘That’s what we’re striving for.’

  ‘But what are we in now, if it’s not reality?’ he said, panicked by this thought. ‘I have more daily doses of reality than anybody I know. I’m a homicide detective. Life and death is my business. You don’t get more real than that.’

  ‘But that’s not the reality we’re talking about.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘The session is over.’

  ‘Just explain that one thing to me.’

  ‘I’ll give you a physical analogy,’ she said.

  ‘Whatever … I have to know this.’

  ‘Ten years ago I broke a wine glass and, as I was cleaning it up, a tiny sliver got into my thumb. I couldn’t get it out and because of the nerves there the doctor didn’t want to touch it. Over the years it hurt occasionally, nothing more, and all the time the body was protecting itself from that glass. It formed layers of skin around it until it was like a small pea. Then one day the body rejected it. The pea came to the surface and, with the aid of some magnesium sulphate, popped out of my thumb.’