He picked up a taxi outside the Hotel Colón and went to Calle Parras, not far from the Alameda. There was no answer from El Zurdo’s apartment, but the neighbour told him that he’d gone to lunch in his usual place, a bar on Calle Escuderos called La Cubista.
There were six lone men sitting at individual tables, eating and watching the television. He recognized none of them.
‘I wondered how long it was going to take,’ said a voice, as Falcón walked to the bar.
The cutlery activity stopped, the soap on TV continued. The dark-faced man with horse teeth who’d spoken stood up. He had grey hair just visible under a black hat, which had a number of badges and brooches pinned to the band. He was dressed head to toe in black.
‘You must be Javier Falcón,’ he said.
‘Why do you think that?’
‘Because you’ve just walked in here with a roll of canvases under your arm, looking like someone’s lost child.’
‘El Zurdo?’
The man pointed him to a chair opposite his own.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘You were wondering how long it was going to take …’
‘For Javier Falcón to come and find me,’ he said, looking over his shoulder to the blackboard menu. ‘Now, cordero en salsa, escalopinas de cerdo or atún en salsa?’
‘Cordero,’ said Falcón.
El Zurdo shouted the order across. Falcón leaned the canvases against the adjoining table. Red wine was poured for him.
‘We only met once,’ said Falcón.
‘I have an eye for faces,’ said El Zurdo. ‘You didn’t like me, I remember that.’
‘We didn’t even speak.’
‘You wouldn’t shake my hand.’
‘You’d just used it to scratch yourself.’
El Zurdo laughed. A woman put a plate of lamb stew in front of Falcón.
‘What have you got?’ asked El Zurdo, nodding at the canvases.
‘Five paintings. I don’t recognize them. They’re not my father’s work. I wanted to know if you copied them.’
El Zurdo pushed his empty plate back and took a toothpick from a jar on the table. Falcón started eating.
‘Why do you want to know about these paintings?’ asked El Zurdo. ‘You’re a cop, aren’t you? Your father told me.’
‘I’m not working, if that’s what you mean,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m on leave.’
‘Do you want to sell them?’
‘I want to know what they are before I burn them.’
El Zurdo lit a cigarette, stood and pushed two tables together. He undid the roll of canvases and leafed through all five dismissively.
‘They’re all mine,’ he said. ‘They’re copies I did for your father, but they’re not his work. He asked me to do him a favour and make copies of these paintings for a Swiss painter who’d just sold them at Salgado’s gallery and wanted to avoid paying tax. Of course, the Swiss guy should have taken the copies with him to show Customs that they hadn’t been sold. So I don’t know what they’re still doing in your father’s studio.’
‘Did my father give you the canvases?’
‘Yes. They were all old and there was something already on them which he’d painted a wash over.’
‘Something he’d done?’
‘I didn’t ask.’
El Zurdo smoked some more. Falcón ate his food.
‘Do you want to know what’s under there?’ asked El Zurdo.
‘I think so.’
‘You don’t sound so sure.’
‘You think you want to know until you find out what it is.’
They caught a cab, which took them through to Calle Laraña and the Bellas Artes Institute. They went across the internal patio and up to the first floor. For 15,000 pesetas a friend of El Zurdo’s put the canvases through an imaging machine and gave them five print-outs of the original work underneath. What came out looked like nothing: a mass of cross-hatching, swathes of black on white with the occasional discernible detail such as an eye, a leg, a hoof, an animal’s tail.
El Zurdo could make nothing of them. They parted at the building’s steps. El Zurdo told him if he needed to talk again he was always in La Cubista for lunch. Javier walked home. He dumped the canvases and print-outs, called Alicia and arranged to see her that evening.
‘I’ve been relieved of my command,’ he said, as Alicia took hold of his wrist. ‘I go back in ten days’ time for psychological assessment.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ she said. ‘Your behaviour was probably becoming quite strange.’
‘That business with Inés and the Juez de Instrucción decided it. She thought I was stalking her, but I was only coming across her in the street as I would in my own mind.’
‘You’ve told me all this before.’
‘Have I?’ he said. ‘Yes, to a madman a few days becomes eons. I keep reliving my life until I hit a memory blank, which I hammer at until I’m weak and then I go back and relive the same stretch again, until I hit the same closed door. It’s exhausting, and it makes the time between the real experiences of everyday life seem like ancient history. Did I tell you that I went to Tangier?’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Why did you decide to go there?’
‘I was given compassionate leave.’
He told her about the death of Pepe Leal.
‘What did you hope to find in Tangier … forty years later?’
‘Answers. Life doesn’t move at the same pace in the Third World. I thought I’d be able to find people who could remember things I’d forgotten and that would jog my memory.’
‘But why Tangier? You lost your job because of Inés. Why not resolve that? What was the impetus?’
‘I was drawn there. I made no conscious decisions. I went where fate led me. I put myself in others’ hands … and I ended up in front of my old house in the Medina.’
‘No conscious decisions?’
‘None.’
‘Remind me how this madness of yours manifested itself in the first place?’
‘I felt the change when I saw the first victim’s face.’
‘And what was the first thing that happened, outside of your investigation, that made you think that the change was not, for instance, shock at a gruesome sight?’
A long silence.
‘I went into the centre to pick up the victim’s address book and I got caught up in a Semana Santa procession. For some reason, seeing the Virgin … I nearly fainted. It was a very affecting experience.’
‘Are you religious?’
‘Not at all.’
‘And after that?’
‘I saw the shot of my father in one of the victim’s photographs and I learned he was having an affair before my mother died.’
‘But in your life?’
‘Finding the journals with his letter … that started up something. I mean, it stirred up … some sort of darkness. I behaved very strangely that night. I thought there might be something evil in me. I’d never seen that side of my nature. I’ve always been relentlessly good. Determined to be good.’
‘Because you’re afraid?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of what?’
‘There was something else that night,’ said Falcón. ‘I was trying to find the prostitute who’d been with the victim on the night he died. She’d gone missing. The killer made contact with me for the first time. He asked me: “Are we close?” and then he said: “Closer than you think,” as if he knew something about me, which I now know he does.’
‘What did you think he knew about you?’
‘I thought he meant that he was physically close to me, that he was following me. But later I thought that perhaps he meant that we weren’t dissimilar people,’ said Falcón, stumbling over the words. ‘And I knew he’d killed the girl and I felt guilty about that.’
‘Guilty?’
‘We suspected a link between the killer and the girl and we didn’t follow it up. We should have tried harder. We failed …’
‘You didn’t fail,’ said Alicia. ‘She wouldn’t tell you. She was protecting him for her own reasons.’
‘I still felt guilty.’
‘But guilty about what?’
Long silence.
‘I ran into another procession that night. One of the Silent orders. One of the accusatory orders. And you know … she was so beautiful … the Virgin. Ridiculous that a mannequin in robes could be so … moving,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear everything she stood for and I had to get past her. I had to get away from her.’
‘And this was bound up with your sense of guilt about the girl?’
‘Yes. My failure.’
‘You know who the Virgin is?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know what she stands for?’
He nodded.
‘Say it,’ said Alicia.
‘She is the ultimate mother.’
‘The Ultimate Mother,’ she repeated it for him. ‘Tell me why you went to Tangier.’
‘I wanted to know how … I wanted to know what happened when she died.’
‘Did you find out?’
‘It was inconclusive. I found out what had happened in the street, which was a memory that had bothered me. But it was just my mother’s Riffian maid going through some histrionics. It’s not uncommon in Arab women. You’ve probably —’
‘You don’t believe what you’re saying, do you, Javier? You’ve attached some importance to this.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
Alicia breathed out slowly. The brick wall hit again.
‘What else did you find out in Tangier?’
‘Some nonsense gossip about how my second mother had died.’
‘Your second mother?’
‘I’m not going to give it the credibility of repetition.’
‘What else?’ asked Alicia, snapping at his resistance to talk.
‘I have an inexplicable fear of milk,’ he said, and told her about the incident in the Tetuán Medina and the dream that followed it.
‘What does milk mean to you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘And that was what you dreamt about?’
‘I meant that it has no meaning other than that I have always hated dairy products … just as my father did.’
‘And what do mothers produce to feed their babies?
‘I have to be going,’ he said abruptly. ‘The hour is up. You should have been stricter with me.’
They walked to the door. He stepped into the stairwell without looking at her. He didn’t turn on the light. He pattered down the stairs.
‘You will come back to me, won’t you, Javier?’ she called out after him.
He did not reply.
At home he sat in the study, leafing over the black-and-white print-outs from the imaging machine while guilt and failure tumbled in his mind. He stuck the print-outs up on the wall and stood back from them. They were meaningless. He switched them around, thinking that it might have something to do with the order, but soon realized there were thousands of permutations.
The wind buffeted around the patio, rattling the door. He went out and sat on the lip of the fountain and tapped his feet on the worn marble flagstones whose rectangular shapes reminded him of the diagram that had fallen out of the roll of canvases.
He tore the print-outs off the wall and sprinted up to the studio. He found the diagram on the floor of the storeroom amongst all the boxes. Five interlocking rectangles, each one numbered. He ran back down the stairs, possessed by the idea that this would be the key that would unlock the whole mystery. But of what? He slowed to a stop on the patio.
The certainties, the idea of their collapse, came to him in a series of Biblical film clips, statues keeled over, keystones plummeted, arches folded in on themselves, columns toppled into colossal fluted fragments. His view of his father had already changed — the violent legionnaire, the shell-shocked veteran of Leningrad, the murderous smuggler and finally the tortured artist. And yet somehow this was all explicable. This wasn’t nature, it was the nurture of history’s most savage century. The brutal and bloody Civil War, the catastrophic Second World War, the left-over brutality that eventually slid into hedonism in post-war Tangier. He could always point to the outside influences that had worked to brutal effect on his father’s fragile state. But perhaps this was different. It could be that this would reveal something deeply personal, some terrible weakness that would expose the hidden monster. Did he want that?
What had Consuelo called him and Inés at their first meeting? A union of truth hunters. The whole reason he’d started this terrible journey was because of the irresistible urge to discover. Was he going to shy away from that now, and end up at the only end of Calk Negación? Then what? He would live his life as if none of this had happened, and Javier Falcón would sink without trace.
He took the rolls of canvas up to the studio and matched each one to the relevant print-out, but could find no numbering system. There was nothing written on the backs of the canvas except the letters ‘I’ and ‘D’, and he suddenly felt tired and desperate for bed. Then he saw, at the edge of the print-outs, some ink marks. He realized his father had numbered the canvases on their fronts, beyond where the canvas would stretch over the frame. He worked out the numbers and got the order right through a process of elimination. Then he understood that the ‘I’ and ‘D’ were izquierda and derecha. He marked off the print-outs accordingly and then trimmed the A3 sheets down to the edges. He turned them over and stuck them together as shown in the diagram. He took the finished piece up to his father’s work wall and stuck it there with tape. He walked away from it. He reached the bookshelves on the far wall and was about to turn when he felt the sweat break — the familiar trickle down his cheek.
It was his last chance to walk away.
He turned with his eyes tight shut.
He opened them and saw what his father had done.
31
Sunday, 29th April 2001, El Zurdo’s workshop, Calle Parras, Seville
Falcón pinned the print-outs up on the wall while El Zurdo busied himself rolling and lighting a joint. Javier tapped him on the shoulder just as he took the first toke. El Zurdo turned.
‘Joder!’ he said. ‘Who is that?’
‘That?’ said Falcón, spitting it out. ‘She. She is my mother.’
‘Joder,’ said El Zurdo, moving closer, fascinated. ‘This is quite a piece of work.’
‘It’s not a piece of work,’ said Falcón. ‘It’s a piece of shit.’
‘Hey, I’m not involved in the same way you are,’ said El Zurdo. ‘I’m just looking at this …’
‘As art?’ said Javier, incredulous.
‘Technically. I mean, it’s extraordinary to create five interlocking pieces which are meaningless and apparently disconnected … I didn’t even see the joins in the jigsaw and yet when they’re put together …’
‘They become the most vile expression of a man’s hatred for his wife and the mother of his children, that only the mind of a monster could possibly produce,’ said Javier.
The two men stood in silence with the horror work filling the room. The picture had revealed a woman entwined and under the ministrations of two ravening satyrs, one thrusting from behind while the other graphically filled her mouth. But it was not a rape. There was compliance in the single visible eye of the woman. It was nauseating. Javier strode past El Zurdo, tore the piece off the wall, screwed it up and hurled it into an empty corner of the workshop.
‘What could possibly have made him want to produce …?’
‘Take a toke of this,’ said El Zurdo.
‘I don’t want a toke of that.’
‘It’ll calm you down.’
‘I don’t want to be calm.’
‘Look … maybe he found out she was having an affair.’
‘Oh,’ said Javier, ‘while he was a total innocent? While he wasn’t off sodomizing young men at every opportunity …’
>
‘It was different for women in those days,’ said El Zurdo.
‘While he didn’t go sodomizing on his wedding night. While he didn’t start having an affair with a mistress, who was to become his second wife, before his first wife had died.’
‘He hated women,’ said El Zurdo, matter-of-fact.
‘What did you say?’ said Javier. ‘I didn’t hear that … what …?’
‘I said that he hated women.’
‘What are you talking about, El Zurdo?’
‘Just what I said … and I’m not talking about the completely normal level of misogyny that existed in those days. It was beyond that … well beyond.’
‘He was married twice, he’s painted the four most sublime nudes of women the world has ever seen and you think he hated women?’ said Javier.
‘I don’t think anything,’ said El Zurdo. ‘That was what he told me.’
‘He told you that? Since when were you so intimate with my father that he would reveal something like that to you?’
‘Since we were lovers.’
A long silence developed in which Javier slumped into a battered armchair. All his strength sapped out of him. He was conscious of himself gaping, his face flabby with shock, his arms weak.
‘When?’ he asked, quietly.
‘From about 1972 for eleven or twelve years, until he got scared by SIDA.’
‘So … that time I came here with him …?’
El Zurdo nodded. More painful time eased past.
‘And you don’t think that this is the bitterest irony of all time?’ asked Javier.
‘That he should have painted those nudes?’ said El Zurdo. ‘That was just his work … it didn’t have to be his life as well.’
‘Where did it come from … the hate?’ asked Javier. ‘I don’t understand where that could come from.’
‘From his mother.’
Javier’s brain ticked like a metronome counting out the seconds before insanity struck.
The Blind Man of Seville Page 45
