The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  19th February 1954, Tangier

  R. has gone to Rabat and Fez to talk to the French and Moroccan administrators. He asked me to join him, but I am working on some huge abstracts which I hope will break me out of what M. tells me is the ‘B List’ of respected artists. She wants my name to join those across the Atlantic like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. She thinks my landscape work is as strong as Rothko’s. I look at Rothko and see him coming at his subject from a different angle. He aims high, seeking a spiritual element, I am pointed towards darkness and decadence.

  3rd March 1954, Tangier

  R. is back from his travels, much heartened by the bureaucrats. He alarms me by telling me that he has embarked on a piece of business with the Moroccans. I tell him that he does not understand the secretive nature of the Moroccan mind — they have ways of ensnaring even the sharpest operator. He dismisses the possibility and tells me not to worry. I will not be involved.

  18th June 1954, Tangier

  I drop by my home in the Medina one afternoon and am surprised to find P. is not there. The children are playing on the patio. Paco is being a torero, his little sister is the bull. He performs great flourishes with his shirt and she aimlessly toddles through and is enchanted to find herself on the other side. How this game developed I don’t know, because Paco has never seen a bullfight. I am detached from their lives. But where is P.? Nobody knows. I play with the children, giving Paco a slightly more dangerous toro. I am surprised how deft he is with the shirt and understand some of Manuela’s glee. I bore quickly though, and return to my studio.

  20th December 1954, Tangier

  We have been lucky to escape the worst of the débacle. Property prices have crashed. Everybody’s hope that Tangier would become the Monaco of Africa has faded. It moves R. to take out all his capital and we fly to Switzerland, where he opens up an account in my name and deposits the fantastic sum of $85,000, which is the major part of my profit from our ten-year partnership. I have no way of disputing this and we have a celebratory dinner. This is the end of an era. R. is going his own way in business. At the end of the meal we embrace.

  17th May 1955, Tangier

  P. has been seeking me out in my studio for the first time in ages. She has been here three days running and we have made love every afternoon. M. is away in Paris with her husband and only the odd boy comes knocking and has to be sent away with a bribe. I am puzzled by her sudden ardour until I realize that I have been at home more in M.’s absence and have rehabilitated myself with my family.

  When she leaves I lie under the gathered knot of the mosquito net and the dangling gauze makes me think of birth, waters breaking, and I wonder whether I have been coaxed into fathering another child.

  11th July 1955, Tangier

  How things converge. Today I am forty years old. P. tells me I am going to be a father again. R. has deposited another $25,000 in my account and the partnership has been officially dissolved. M.’s husband has asked for a divorce and is prepared to hand over a substantial sum to get it (a twenty-two-year old Texan girl is the reason). I have moved away from the abstract and back to the figurative. Perhaps I’ve been inspired by de Kooning, who has moved away from the crowded and chaotic patterning of his Excavation and steered himself more towards Women. Or not. Maybe I’m just chasing C.B.’s dream and my own. I have worked until the light has faded. I am about to go for dinner with my family. I feel nothing but total desperation.

  1st November 1955, Tangier

  Last month Sultan Mohammed V was recalled from his exile in Madagascar where the French sent him three years ago. He is due back some time this month. It is the beginning of the end, although you wouldn’t know it to see the expatriates here. They fiddle while Rome burns, but what do they care? I am burning for M., who has been away for months sorting out her divorce. We will all be consumed by fire.

  12th January 1956, Tangier

  Another son, whom I have decided to call Javier, which is a name I have always liked and has nothing to do with family. For the first time I look down on one of my children and feel, not so much a surge of paternal love, but a wild feeling of hope. This child, with his fists clenched and eyes screwed up, for some reason makes me think that great things are possible. He is the one bright light in my forty-first year.

  28th June 1956, Tangier

  I lie on my back under the net with Javier on my chest. His legs are braced like a little frog’s, the toes are dug into my belly. My hand covers his entire back. He sleeps and occasionally, unconsciously, kneads my chest on the off chance that there will be some milk. How quickly disappointment enters our lives.

  He lies on a blanket as I work. I talk him through the paintings, the ideas, the influences. He slowly brings his hands and feet together as if mocking me with silent, dawdling applause. I look down on him and small cracks open up in me. His soft, tiny body, his large brown eyes, his downy head, all come together and, as with a chisel slipped between my ribs, I am levered open.

  27

  Sunday, 22nd April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

  Encarnación’s niece, Juanita, was the first to arrive at 11 a.m. Falcón was still groggy from a heavily drugged sleep. The extra sleeping pill he’d taken at 4 a.m. had as good as interred him in concrete.

  He showered, and put on a pair of grey trousers that were so loose at the waist he had to find a belt. The jacket, too, did not hold him at the shoulders. The weight was falling off him. His cheeks looked hollow in the mirror, his eyes sunken and dark. He was turning into his own idea of a madman.

  In the kitchen, Juanita moved around on black stacked trainers, which squeaked on the floor. As she tossed her head, a river of black hair jumped off her back. Falcón checked the fridge was well stocked with fino and manzanilla and went down to the cellar to bring up the red wine to drink with the roast lamb.

  The cellar was at the back of the house under the studio. He had used this enclosed space as his dark room but had not been in there since Inés had left the house. His developing paraphernalia was still there in the corner. A line of string hung across the room with clothes pegs still attached for drying prints. He missed the excitement of revelation, of the blank sheet slipping into the developer and, slowly emerging from the waters, a face coming to him. Was that what he had in his head? All these images that just needed some developer for the latent memories to find form, come through his consciousness and solve his crux.

  The metal wine racks were divided into two. French and Spanish. He never touched the French, which was all expensive stuff bought by his father. But this time he felt celebratory. Those final paragraphs he’d read in his father’s journals last night had sent him to sleep weeping and he felt like toasting the generosity of his dead parent. Their intimacy had been reaffirmed and he found traces of forgiveness for all his father’s depravity and infidelity. He pulled out bottles of Château Duhart-Milon, Château Giscours, Montrachet, Pommard, Clos-des-Ursules. He took them up to the dining room and laid them on the dresser. On coming up from the cellar for the second time he saw an urn, which he’d never noticed before, in a niche above the door.

  The urn was no more than fifteen centimetres high, too small to contain human remains. He put down the bottles and took it to the developing table, turned on the overhead light. The stopper was a simple clay cone that had been sealed with wax. There were no marks on the urn, which was of unglazed terracotta. He cracked open the wax and removed the stopper. He poured some of the contents on to the table. It was yellowish-white and grainy. Some of the larger pieces were quite sharp. He moved them around with his finger. There were some brown pieces in there too and the grounds suddenly struck him as macabre, something like crushed bone. He left it on the table, repelled by it.

  Paco and his family arrived first. While the women went upstairs and the children careered about the gallery, Paco brought in a whole jamón, which he’d brought down from Jabugo in the Sierra de Aracena. They found a stand in the
dresser and locked the jamón into position. Paco sharpened a long, thin carving knife and began slicing off paper-thin sheets of dark-red, sweet jamón while Javier filled glasses with fino.

  Juanita set up a table on the patio and put out olives and other pinchos. Paco added a platter of sliced jamón. Manuela arrived with her party and they all stood on the patio, drinking fino and shouting at the children to stop running. The only adult who didn’t tell Javier he was looking thin was Alejandro’s sister, who was no fatter than a praying mantis herself.

  Paco was happy and animated about his bulls, which had all been discharged in perfect condition that morning for tomorrow’s bullfight. The horn wound was still visible in the retinto but he was very strong. He called him ‘Biensolo’ and the only warning he issued to Javier was that the horn tips were unusually upturned and the space between them quite narrow. Going in for the kill was always going to be difficult, even if the head was down low.

  They sat down to eat the roast lamb at four o’clock. Manuela noticed the quality of the wine immediately and asked how many more bottles ‘little brother’ was hiding. Javier told her about the urn to divert her attention. She asked to see it and, when the meal was over and Paco was lighting up his first Montecristo, Javier brought it up from the cellar. She recognized it straight away.

  ‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how Papá lost Mamá’s jewellery and yet this made it all the way here from Tangier.’

  ‘Ach! Manuela, he never threw anything away,’ said Paco.

  ‘But this is Mamá’s. I remember it. It was on her dressing table for two or three days … about a month before she died. I asked her what it was, because it was different to anything else she had on her dressing table. I thought it might be a potion from that Riffian woman, who was her maid. She said it contained the spirit of pure genius and must never be opened — strange, no?’

  ‘She was just playing with you, Manuela,’ said Paco.

  ‘I see you’ve opened it,’ she said. ‘Any genie?’

  ‘No,’ said Javier. ‘It looked like crushed bone or teeth.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very spiritual,’ said Paco.

  ‘More macabre,’ said Javier.

  ‘I’d have thought after all the blood you’ve seen you could stomach some dry old bones, little brother,’ said Manuela.

  ‘But crushed?’ he said. ‘That seemed violent to me.’

  ‘How do you know it’s human? It could be old cow bone or something.’

  ‘But why the “spirit of pure genius”?’ asked Javier.

  ‘You know who gave her that, don’t you?’ said Paco. ‘Papá … a long time ago. There were some strange things happening in the house at the time. Don’t you remember? Mamá started a fire on the patio. We came back from school and there was a black patch by the fig tree.’

  ‘He was too young,’ said Manuela. ‘But you’re right, he gave her the urn the next day. And the other odd thing — that wonderful sculpture he gave Mamá for her birthday the year before … that disappeared. She had it next to her mirror. She really loved that thing. I asked her what had happened to it and she just said, “God gives and God takes away.”’

  ‘She started going to Mass almost every day around that time, too,’ said Paco.

  ‘Yes, she only ever went once a week before,’ said Manuela. ‘And she stopped wearing her rings, too. She only ever wore that cheap agate cube that Papá had given her for her birthday. You remember that, surely, little brother?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Papá gave you her present to take to her at her birthday dinner. She undid the box and the lid sprang open and hit you on the nose as this paper flower burst out. Inside the flower was the ring. It was very romantic. Mamá was touched. I remember the look on her face.’

  ‘She must have known something was going to happen to her,’ said Paco. ‘Going to Mass all the time, only wearing that one ring Papá had given to her. It was the same with me when I got gored in La Maestranza.’

  ‘What was the same?’ asked Javier, fascinated by these old memories, even touching his nose to try to remember the box hitting it.

  ‘I knew something was going to happen.’

  ‘How?’ asked Paco’s father-in-law, one of life’s great sceptics.

  ‘I just knew it,’ said Paco. ‘I knew I was coming to a big moment and being young and arrogant I assumed it was going to be greatness.’

  ‘But what did you know?’ asked his father-in-law.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Paco, hands all over the place, ‘a sense of things coming together.’

  ‘Convergence,’ said Javier.

  ‘Toreros have always been very superstitious,’ said the father-in-law.

  ‘Yes, well, when you risk your life like that … everything has meaning,’ said Paco. ‘Stars, planets … all that stuff.’

  ‘Aligning themselves over you?’ scoffed his father-in-law.

  ‘I’m exaggerating,’ said Paco. ‘Maybe it was just a sixth sense. Perhaps it’s only in retrospect that I attach greater significance to an event which, in a matter of seconds, ruined my youth.’

  ‘Sorry, Paco,’ said his father-in-law. ‘I wasn’t diminishing …’

  ‘But that was why I wanted to be a torero,’ said Paco. ‘I loved the clarity of danger. It was like living life squared at that level of awareness. All that happened was that I misinterpreted the signs. Nobody could have predicted that disaster. Throughout my entire faena the bull hadn’t hooked right and then … when I’m right over the horns, he hooks right. Anyway, I was lucky to survive. It’s as Mamá said to Manuela: God gives and God takes away. There is no reason.’

  The lunch broke up after that and Manuela left with her party. Paco’s family and in-laws went up to bed for a siesta. Javier and Paco sat with a bottle of brandy between them. Paco was on the edge of drunkenness.

  ‘Maybe you were too intelligent to be a torero,’ said Javier.

  ‘I was always terrible at school.’

  ‘Then perhaps you were thinking too much to be a good torero.’

  ‘Never,’ said Paco. ‘The thinking came afterwards. Once the leg was wrecked I had to clear my head out. All those reports and footage of my glorious moments, which never happened and never would happen, had to go in the bin. It left me completely empty. I had nightmares and everybody thought I was reliving the terrible moment, but as far as I was concerned that was in the past. My nightmares were about the future.’

  Paco poured himself some more brandy and slid the bottle to Javier, who shook his head. Paco rolled a cigar cylinder across and Javier rolled it back to him.

  ‘Always the man in control,’ he said.

  ‘Is that what you think?’ asked Javier, nearly blurting out laughter.

  ‘Oh, yes, nothing ever gets through to you and disturbs your inner calm. Not like me. I was in a turmoil. My leg like a rag and no future. Papá saved me, you know. He installed me in the finca. He bought me my first livestock. He sorted me out … gave me direction.’

  ‘Well, he was a soldier. He understood things about men,’ he said, conscious of himself skewing things in his father’s favour for Paco’s benefit.

  ‘Are you still reading those journals?’

  ‘Most nights.’

  ‘Does it make any difference to how you think about him?’

  ‘Well, he’s completely and terrifyingly honest in his writing. I admire him for that, but his revelations …’ said Javier, shaking his head.

  ‘From when he was in the Legion?’ asked Paco. ‘They were the hardest men of all, the legionnaires, you know that.’

  ‘He was involved in some brutal actions in the Civil War and in Russia during the Second World War. Some of the brutality he experienced in those wars stayed with him when he went to Tangier.’

  ‘We never saw any of it,’ said Paco.

  ‘He was pretty ruthless in some of his business operations,’ said Javier. ‘He used the same techniques he’d employed in the w
ar … terror. And that only stopped when he dedicated himself to painting full time.’

  ‘Do you think the painting helped him?’

  ‘I think he put a lot of violence into his painting,’ said Javier. ‘He’s famous for the Falcón nudes, but a lot of his abstract work is infused with emptiness, violence, darkness, decadence and depravity.’

  ‘Depravity?’

  ‘Reading these journals is like working a criminal investigation,’ said Javier. ‘Everything gradually comes to the surface. The secret life. Society — and we, too — only saw what was acceptable, but I don’t think he ever rid himself of the brutality. It came out in other ways. You know how he used to sell those paintings of his and then go straight upstairs and paint the same picture he’d just sold? I think that was a kind of brutality. He always had the last laugh.’

  ‘You’re making him sound as if he wasn’t such a nice guy.’

  ‘Nice? Who’s nice these days? We’re all complicated and difficult,’ said Javier. ‘It’s just that Papá had some peculiar difficulties in a brutal time.’

  ‘Does he ever say why he joined the Legion?’

  ‘It’s the only thing he doesn’t talk about. He only refers to it as “the incident”. And, given that he talks about everything else, it must have been terrible. Something that altered his life which he never came to terms with.’

  ‘He was only a kid,’ said Paco. ‘What the hell can happen to you when you’re sixteen?’