‘In his journals he refers to “the incident”,’ said Falcón. ‘Something that happened when he was a boy, which made him leave home and join the Legion. I think he might have told people about it, my mother being one of them, but he never wrote it down. Did he tell you?’
‘He told me,’ said El Zurdo. ‘I’ll tell you if you want. I mean … these things, the further they slip into history, the less important they seem to be. They just happen to decide the direction of a life at the time.’
‘Tell me.’
‘What do you know about his parents?’
‘Next to nothing.’
‘Well, they ran a hotel business in Tetuán in the twenties and thirties. They were very conservative. His mother was a devout Catholic and his father was a drunk. He was a nasty drunk, who took out his weaknesses on his children and his employees. That’s all you need to know to understand what happened.
‘One morning his father caught Francisco in bed with one of the houseboys and he went completely berserk. While Francisco cowered on the bed in the corner of the room, his father bludgeoned the houseboy to death in front of him. Only when he came out of his terrible rage did the father realize what he’d done. The two of them disposed of the body somehow and Francisco was kept in his bloodstained room until he’d cleaned every drop of blood and whitewashed the walls.’
El Zurdo sat back with his hands open.
‘How did his mother come into it?’ asked Falcón. ‘You said …’
‘She never spoke another word to him. She withdrew all maternal affection and acted as if he didn’t exist. She didn’t even have a place laid for him at the dinner table. As far as she was concerned, in her small Catholic mind, he’d transgressed beyond any possible forgiveness.’
‘When did he tell you that?’
‘A long time ago. More than twenty years.’
‘When you were lovers?’
‘Yes. It took a while for him to come back to men after something like that. It wasn’t until Tangier after the Second World War that he … although he did have a passion for another legionnaire who was killed in Russia — Pablito … But nothing ever came of it and, of course, Pablito was betrayed by a woman …’
‘He talks about him in the journals. My father was on the firing squad that shot the woman,’ said Falcón. ‘He purposely aimed for her mouth.’
‘Do you know how he and I stayed lovers for so long?’ said El Zurdo. ‘Because I never made any attempt to understand him. I never probed. Some people don’t like intimacy and your father was one of them. Women do like it. They want to know their man. And when they find out who you are and they don’t like it, they do one of two things: they set about changing you or they abandon you. These are your father’s words, not mine. I’ve never been with women. My tastes are more singular.’
They went down to La Cubista for lunch. Javier ordered the tuna, El Zurdo the pork. He drank wine through Javier’s tormented silence and encouraged him to do the same. The food arrived.
‘You know the other reason your father liked me?’ said El Zurdo. ‘This is strange. He liked me because I was a copyist. Odd, no? He admired it. He liked the fact that I painted upside down. He interpreted it as a lack of respect for the original, even though I told him that I only did it because I didn’t want to be distracted by the structure and wholeness of the piece when all I was doing was trying to copy it precisely. You know, sometimes he thought my copies were actually better than his originals. So there are two American collectors with my copies signed by him on their walls. That, he said to me, is art. Nothing is original.’
Falcón sipped his wine, picked up his knife and fork and started eating.
‘When did you last see him?’ asked Falcón.
‘About five years ago. We had lunch here. He was happy. He’d solved his problem of loneliness.’
‘He was lonely?’
‘All day, every day. The famous man in his big dark house.’
‘He had friends, didn’t he?’
‘He told me he didn’t. The only friend he had he lost back in 1975.’
‘Who was that?’
‘Raúl Jiménez … I heard he was murdered recently,’ said El Zurdo. ‘Your father wouldn’t have been sad about that.’
‘So why did they stop being friends?’
‘That’s interesting. I didn’t understand why it incensed him so much. He told me that he bumped into Raúl in the street one day in Seville. They’d both been living in the city, on either side of the river, apparently without knowing it. They went for lunch. Your father asked after Raúl’s family and he said they were all fine. They talked about your father’s fame and Raúl’s business success — all the shit you’d expect two old friends to talk about — except your father didn’t ask him why he hadn’t been in touch with him. I mean, given your father’s fame, Raúl must have known he’d been living in Seville for ten years or more. But this is explained by what happened. At the end of lunch Raúl told him something out of the blue … nothing to do with what they’d been talking about. You may have read in the journals that your father left the Legion and came here to paint. He had money saved up from the army. Combat pay from Russia.’
‘And someone stole the money,’ said Falcón, ‘which was why my father ended up in Tangier.’
‘Right,’ said El Zurdo. ‘And that’s what Raúl told him at the end of the lunch, that he had stolen the money. And they never spoke to each other again.’
‘Why?’
‘Your father didn’t think that Raúl Jiménez had the right to alter the course of another man’s life. I said, if it was for the better, so what? He’d made his fortune out there, he’d become famous … But he wouldn’t listen. He stormed around the house shouting: “He ruined me, that cabrón ruined me.” And for the life of me, Javier, I couldn’t see the ruination in all he’d achieved.
‘He was also maddened just by the fact that Raúl Jiménez had told him what he’d done. He couldn’t understand it, until he found out what had really happened to the man’s family. The wife had committed suicide. The little boy died. The daughter was in a mental institution and the son didn’t speak to him any more. It was a disaster and that’s when he realized that the last thing Raúl Jiménez wanted at this stage of his life was an intimate friend. What he wanted was a new life … one without Francisco Falcón.’
‘You said earlier that my father had solved his loneliness problem.’
‘He told me he didn’t want any friends, that what he really wanted was companionship.’
‘What about Manuela?’ asked Javier. ‘Didn’t Manuela ever go and see him?’
‘She did, but he never liked Manuela. She came for a few hours a week, but that wasn’t what he was looking for. He just wanted somebody to fill the empty spaces in the house. He liked the idea of young people, uncomplicated and forward-looking people, who would be relentlessly cheerful. And he came to an agreement with the university here and in Madrid that they could send him the occasional student for a month at a time. It worked for him. I’d have hated it.’
‘He didn’t tell me about that.’
‘Maybe he didn’t want to admit that to you,’ said El Zurdo. ‘Maybe he didn’t want to alter the course of your life.’
It was nearly dark by the time Javier had taken a long circuitous route home. As he entered the house he kicked two packages across the floor. Both had been pushed through the letter box and neither was addressed. Only the numbers 1 and 2 were written on the outside.
He took them to his study, where he had a pair of latex gloves. He opened the first package and took out an envelope that had Sight Lesson No.4 written on it. Inside, the card read: La muerte trágica del genio. The tragic death of true genius.
There was something else in the package with more weight to it. He laid paper on the desk and emptied out what he thought was a piece of glass, until he saw that it was the back of a shard of mirror. He turned it over with the nib of a biro. The initials P.L. were written i
n what looked like dried blood.
Falcón sat back in his chair. He knew what Sergio was doing. He was hijacking the media’s myth by telling him that he’d used the shard of mirror to distract Pepe Leal when he went in for the kill. Javier didn’t believe it. It just wasn’t possible. But it interested him because he realized that he’d finally forced Sergio’s hand. There was some desperation in this arrogant and unsubtle ploy.
He tapped the card with the sight lesson written on it. The same words his mother had used when telling Manuela about the contents of the clay urn. Hints pressed against the membrane of his consciousness, but nothing came through. He flipped the card across the desk. He opened the second package, which contained a set of photocopies. He could tell from the handwriting that these were his father’s journals.
7th July 1962, Tangier
I have quite lost track of Salgado since our return from NY when, just as that thought had drifted across the flat calm of my horizon, a boy arrives with a note from him written on Hotel Rembrandt notepaper and telling me to come immediately to room 321 alone. I’m not so surprised by the note. There is no phone here. It’s only as I make my way to the Boulevard Pasteur that I become unnerved. What could have happened that he should think to interrupt me in my work time? I am intrigued and disturbed. The lift in the Hotel Rembrandt, which is only a few years old, is one of those halting affairs that make me feel as if the cable is about to snap at any moment. I arrive at the door to 321 in a state of impending doom. There’s a short corridor between the main door and the door to the room, one of those perplexing design features that seem to be made for just this kind of occasion. It means that Salgado can pull me inside and explain the direness of his circumstances without the full horror of the incident overwhelming us.
The short version — there’s a dead boy in the room.
Salgado tells me he’s accidentally been killed.
‘Accidentally?’ I ask.
‘He fell over and hit his head,’ he says. ‘He must have hit himself in the wrong place, but he’s definitely dead.’
‘How did he fall over?’
‘Tripped on his way to the bathroom … but I’ve put him back on the bed.’
‘Then why don’t we call the police and explain the incident like that?’
Silence from Salgado.
‘Shall I just take a look at him?’ I ask, and don’t wait for an answer but push into the room and find the naked boy growing out of a twist of sheet. An arm is flung out. His tongue protrudes from his mouth and his eyes are bulging. There are bruise marks round his windpipe.
‘I don’t think he knocked his head, did he, Ramón?’
‘It was an accident.’
‘I don’t know how you accidentally strangle someone, Ramón.’
‘I was trying to make it better.’
We blink at each other and Ramón suddenly turns to the wall and starts hitting his head against it and intoning something which sounds like Basque. I sit him in a chair and ask him what happened. He presses his fists into his head and repeats over and over that it was an accident. I tell him I’ll call the Chief of Police and he can tell him just that, with the boy lying on the bed sodomized and strangled. He gets up and starts striding about the room, throwing his hands about and making great declamations in the same strange tongue. I slap his face. He turns into a pathetic creature and sinks to the floor. He cries and his bird-like shoulders convulse. I slap him again, which turns him to me.
‘Tell me what happened,’ I say. ‘I am not your judge.’
‘I murdered him,’ he says.
‘Were you in love with him?’
‘No, no, no que no!’ he says emphatically. Too emphatically.
I stare into him and see his corruption, so terrible that he cannot admit it to himself. I know Ramón Salgado has killed this boy for no other reason than for what he was making him into. Salgado is vain. He is a great flatterer of women. M. and he adore each other. He has affairs which never last. He is now wealthy, famous in his small world and reputable, but … he likes to sodomize boys and that interferes with his gilded self-image. That’s my reading of it, anyway. He’s killed the boy because he was forcing him to see what he hates.
He says the fateful words:
I couldn’t face a scandal.’
I don’t despise him, even for that. Who am I to despise anyone? I sit at the boy’s feet. I light a cigarette for him.
‘Will you help me?’ he asks.
I tell him a story, which I first heard from a friend of B.H. back in the forties, about a wealthy homosexual who ‘d picked up a bunch of servicemen from a well-known bar for queers in Manhattan and taken them back to a party at his mother’s apartment on 5th Avenue. They were all drunk and one of the soldiers passed out. They removed his pants and for a joke started to shave off his pubic hair. And, accidentally — I emphasize that — they chopped off his prick. So what did they do? Salgado looks at me like Javier does when I’m telling him a bedtime story, all hunched and wide-eyed. They wrapped him in a blanket and dumped him on a bridge somewhere. He was lucky, because a policeman found him and got him to a hospital before he bled to death.
‘What do you make of that, Ramón?’ I ask.
He blinks, desperate not to say the wrong thing and be sent out of class.
‘If you help me, Francisco,’ he says. ‘I will never do anything like this again.’
‘What? Kill somebody?’
‘No, no, I mean … I will never go with boys again. I will lead an exemplary life.’
‘I will help you,’ I say, ‘but I want to know what you think of my story.’
More silence. He’s too panicked to think.
‘They paid the soldier off,’ I add. ‘So that he wouldn’t press charges. How much do you think?’
He shook his head.
‘Two hundred thousand dollars, and that was in 1946,’ I say. ‘You made a lot more money from losing your prick in those days than you did from painting pictures.’
Salgado rushes past me and vomits in the toilet. He comes back wiping his mouth.
‘I don’t know how you can be so cool about this, Francisco.’
‘I’ve killed thousands of people. All of them as guilty or as innocent as you and I.’
‘That was war,’ he says.
‘I’m just pointing out that once you’ve seen slaughter on the scale I have, a dead boy in a hotel room is not so terrible. Now, give me your comment on my story.’
‘It was a terrible thing to have done,’ he says, drawing on his cigarette.
‘Worse than murdering a boy?’
‘He could have died for all they cared.’
‘Right. And what does that reveal about the people you’re so desperate to impress?’ I ask. ‘The perpetrator is still free, by the way, and he’s still a friend of Barbara Hutton.’
Ramón is too muddled to work it out for himself.
‘We are their lapdogs,’ I say. ‘We are their little marvels — yes, even me, Ramón. They stroke us, feed us morsels, tease us and then grow tired of us and throw us out. We are nothing to the very rich. Absolutely nothing. Less than toys. So remember, when you sip their champagne, that it is for these worthless people’s high opinion of you that you have murdered this boy.’
The words shunted into his chest like high-calibre bullets. He thumped back into his chair.
‘For them?’ he said, puzzled.
‘You killed the boy because you did not like the idea of those people knowing this about you. You killed him because it is the one thing you find hateful in yourself, and you think others will, too. And you have been very wrong.’
He sobs. I pat him on the back.
‘Francisco,’ he says, ‘where would I be without you?’
‘In a far happier place,’ I reply.
It wasn’t so difficult to dispose of the body. We took it out into the garden of the hotel at three in the morning and heaved it over the wall. We put it in the car, we took it to the cliffs
out of town and threw it into the sea. On the way back to town Ramón stared into the window utterly wordless, a man coming to terms with a changed world, in which, because of a moment of blindness, nothing will ever be the same. If you have to kill. If there’s nothing to be done. Then always kill with your eyes wide open.
Falcón let the photocopied sheets fall from his lap. They scattered on the floor. He was mesmerized by his thoughts, the confirmation that the killer had access to his father’s diaries and now, with the additional information from El Zurdo, he realized that it must have been one of the art students his father had taken on to relieve his loneliness.
The Bellas Artes would be closed. El Zurdo was uncontactable. He went through his father’s address book and found the name of somebody at the university with a home telephone number. He called but there was no answer.
His thoughts turned to Raúl Jiménez and the revelation that had broken his friendship with his father. He thought it unlikely that his father would let that pass without comment in the journals, but it had taken place on a date after the final entry in which his father had announced his total ennui.
Javier shunted back his chair, ran up the stairs. He slowed to a walk around the gallery and stopped outside the studio. He stared into the black pupil of the fountain on the patio. An apparently disparate thought had come to him. One of the insoluble elements of the case was what Sergio had shown Raúl Jiménez. Where had he got his images? Salgado’s horrors had been easy enough to solve. They’d found the trunk in the attic and the necessary images and soundtrack, but with Raúl Jiménez they’d never succeeded. Despite endless inquiries at Mudanzas Triana there’d been no evidence that any of Jiménez’s long-term storage had been touched.
He pushed himself away from the wall of the gallery and went into his father’s studio. He found the last journal in the storeroom. And there it was, some ten pages after what he’d thought was the final entry.
13th May 1975, Seville
I am in such a rage that I have had to return to the confessional in the hope that it will calm me.
The entry told the story he’d heard from El Zurdo and finished with the line:
The Blind Man of Seville Page 46
