28th December 1960, Tangier
It is a freezing night, perhaps the coldest night I’ve known in Tangier. The wind blows from the northwest bringing the chill of the Atlantic. I walk through the silent city. Not even the dogs are out. It is a long walk to T.C.’s studio and it takes me more than an hour. I do not think but climb over the wall in my usual place (I have found a spot where I land on a path rather than leave a print in the earth). I go into his bedroom and hear his feet moving over the floor and I know that he is working. I step into the light of his studio. It is warm from a wood-burning salamander in the corner. He continues to work. I move towards his back. The muscles are tense beneath his robe. I stop very close to him and still he does not notice. He lays on paint as thick as flesh. I breathe on his neck and he sets solid as stone. He does not turn. He cannot bring himself to turn.
‘It is me,’ I say.
He turns. His eyes search mine for reason and, when that is fruitless, pity. I have no need of, or desire for verbal redress and so my hand flashes out and I chop him across the throat with such brutal force that his throat cracks loudly. The brush and palette fall from his hands. He drops to his knees. I hear him desperately trying to breathe over his shattered larynx. I step behind him and hold my hand over his mouth and grip his nose. All the strength has been taken out of him by the savagery of my first blow. Only as death crowds his mind does the survival reflex shoot strength into his arms, but it is far too late. I hold him tight and snuff out the last flickering flame. I lay him face down on the floor. I take the four nudes and remove them from their stretchers and roll them up. I put them by the door. I take a five-litre can of white spirit and pour it over the floor and T.C.’s inert body. There is turpentine and alcohol, too. I drop a lighted match and leave. I walk back to my studio. I hide the canvases above my bed in the roof. I lie down. My work is done and sleep comes easily to me.
Javier drank the last of the whisky in his glass. As the enormity of what he was reading had burgeoned off the page to fill the whole room with its tumorous ghastliness, he had steadily filled and refilled his glass until he was drunk. His earlier sense of triumph had disappeared. His face felt like slapped rubber. His feet were covered in the photocopied pages that had fallen from his weakening grasp. His head nodded against his shoulder. His neck cracked back as his reflexes shunned sleep and what lay in wait for him there, but he lost all resistance; exhaustion won, his mind and body were completely played out.
His dream was of himself asleep, but not as an adult, as a child. His back was warm and he was safe under the mosquito net. He was in that half-sleep where he knew that the heat on his back was the sun and that through his half-closed eyes he could see the shallow crater he had picked from the whitewashed wall by his face. He felt the wriggling happiness of childhood come up from his stomach as he heard his mother calling his name:
‘Javier! Javier! Despiértate ahora, Javier!’
He came awake instantly, because he knew she was going to be there in his room and he would be happy and loved.
But she wasn’t. Whatever was there rolled in his vision for a moment until it snapped into focus. He was back in his study. He was in his chair, except that it wasn’t his normal chair. It was one of the high-backed chairs from the dining room and he couldn’t move forward out of it because something was cutting into his neck, his wrists and ankles. His feet were bare and cold on the tiled floor.
33
Monday, 30th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville
There was nothing on the desk in front of him. The pictures had been removed from the wall.
‘Are you awake, Javier?’ said a voice from behind him.
‘I’m awake.’
‘If you try to shout I will have to gag you with your socks, so please be sensible.’
‘I am beyond screaming now,’ he said.
‘Are you?’ said the voice. ‘I see you’ve been reading. Did you finish?’
‘I finished.’
‘And what do you think of the great Francisco Falcón and his dependable agent, Ramón Salgado?’
‘What you’d expect me to think.’
‘Tell me. I’d like to hear it.’
‘I’d just begun to think that he was a monster … I’d found those five terrible paintings in his studio … and now … I know it. What I didn’t know was that he was a fraud as well. That adds … or rather that takes away the final dimension. Now he’s just monster. There’s nothing else left.’
‘People are very forgiving of genius,’ said the voice. ‘Your father knew that. These days you can rape and murder, but as long as you’re a genius you will be tolerated. Why do you think we tolerate evil in someone with a God-given talent? Why will we put up with arrogance and boorishness in a footballer, just because he can score great goals? Why will we accept drunkenness and adultery in a writer, as long as he gives us the poems? Why will we rape, maim and murder for someone who is able to give us the illusion of belief in ourselves? Why do we let genius get away with it?’
‘Because we are easily bored,’ said Javier.
‘Your father was right,’ said the voice. ‘You do see things differently.’
‘When did he tell you that?’
‘It’s in those diaries somewhere.’
‘He always told me I was blessed with normality.’
‘That was because he suspected something.’
‘Like what?’
‘This is not the order of things,’ said Sergio.
‘Then tell me the order.’
‘How terrible a monster do you think your father was?’ asked the voice. ‘So far we know he was a murderer, a pirate, a depraved hedonist, a fraud and a thief. The world is full of those sorts of people. They are quite ordinary monsters, I would say. What would make somebody extraordinary?’
‘My father was charismatic. He was charming and witty, intelligent …’
‘You can’t go out there with blood dripping from your lips,’ said Sergio. ‘You have to be two-faced or society deals with you straight away.’
‘He understood the ambiguity of being human, that good and evil resides in us all …’
‘That’s an excuse, Javier,’ said the voice. ‘It’s not what made him extraordinary.’
His brain slopped from side to side as he strained against the flexes.
‘He’s a desecrator of innocence,’ said Javier.
‘Normal.’
‘He’s an abuser of trust.’
‘Normal, but warmer,’ said the man. ‘Try thinking of the most extraordinary, incomprehensible …’
‘I can’t. My mind doesn’t work like that. Maybe yours does. You find out about people and show them their most secret horror. Now that is extraordinary.’
‘You think it monstrous what I have done?’
‘You’ve killed three people in the most brutal …’
‘I haven’t.’
‘Then you are insane and I can’t talk to you.’
‘Ramón Salgado hanged himself rather than face his music’
‘So facilitating his suicide makes you innocent?’
‘Raúl Jiménez writhed himself to death.’
‘And what about the innocent Eloisa?’
‘Oh, I’m probably just in denial … like you,’ he said.
‘Only society is guilty,’ said Javier, dismissive.
‘Don’t be trite. I haven’t come here for received opinion. I want creative ideas.’
‘You’ll have to help me.’
‘Who do you know that loves or loved you?’
‘My mother loved me.’
‘That’s true.’
‘My second mother loved me.’
‘How touching that you don’t call her your madrastra.’
‘And, whether you like it or not, my father loved me. We loved each other. We were intimate.’
‘Were you?’
‘He told me. He even wrote it to me in the letter that came with the journals.’
‘Tell me about the letter,’ said the voice. ‘I haven’t seen it.’
Javier recited the letter verbatim.
‘How interesting,’ he said. ‘And what do you understand from this document, Javier?’
‘He trusted me. He trusted me over and above my elder brother and sister.’
‘It’s interesting that he made you the guardian and destroyer of his works,’ said the voice. ‘What do you think was in his mind when he imagined you reading that letter in the storeroom, surrounded by those trashy attempts at copying my grandfather’s work?’
‘Your grandfather?’ said Javier, to himself, the sweat breaking out from his hairline and trickling down his face.
‘You didn’t mention the date on the letter,’ said the voice. ‘When did he write that?’
‘It was the day before he died.’
‘Extraordinary timing.’
‘He’d already had one heart attack.’
‘What about his last will? When was that dated?’ asked the voice.
‘Three days before his death.’
‘I suppose coincidence isn’t that extraordinary.’
‘What are you implying?’
‘Where was your father found after the second heart attack?’
‘At the bottom of the stairs.’
‘He would have known by then that the journal was missing, that he was on the brink of exposure and the end of his world,’ said the man. ‘So easy to throw himself on the unyielding marble and leave it all in his favourite son’s hands.’
This silenced Javier. He sat with the pressure building in his mind, the floor of his memory creaking under the old weight.
‘This is how consciousness works. It’s slow. Scaling the high-security walls of denial is painstaking,’ said the voice. ‘But we do not have the luxury of time. Tell me why you think your father wanted you to read these journals?’
‘He didn’t. The letter made that clear.’
‘What did it make clear?’ said the voice sharply. ‘Do you seriously imagine he expected you, a detective, to put the letter away and carry on with the rest of your life?’
‘Why not?’
‘Look, Javier, I’ll say it for you. That letter is telling you to read the journals. And why did he want that?’
‘So that … so that I could share the pain of his tormented life?’
‘Is that a line from a movie? Something nice and sentimental from Hollywood, perhaps?’ said the voice. ‘I won’t tolerate that stuff in here, Javier. Now tell me why — I’m sounding like your father with Salgado now — tell me why he wanted you to read the journals?’
‘So that I could learn to hate him?’
‘You are so pathetically needy, Javier,’ he said. ‘Why did he praise your police skills so highly and tell you they would be useful in finding the missing journal?’
Javier fought hard against the idea that had just entered his head. Even now he clung on. It was all he had left. It was one of the few things that sustained him. His father’s love of forty-three years. Even the love of a monster was hard to give up.
‘Some help for you Javier,’ he said. ‘I won’t read it all … just the pertinent bits. Are you ready?’
7th April 1963, NY
On the way to NY Salgado proposes that prior to the showing of the final Falcón nude I should publish my journals. I choke with appalled hilarity at the prospect. What a fantastic undoing that would be. I laugh in great hiccuping gulps. It is Mercedes who’s put him up to this. I’ve seen them hatching their plans and M. has unnerved me on a number of occasions by wafting past as I jot my dysenteric jottings. (She has a pair of very supple and silent gold sandals — I shall have to scatter nutshells to catch her out.) I give Salgado an emphatic no, which tweaks his fascination.
31st December 1963, Tangier
I have been careless and it has changed everything. M. and I were in the studio yesterday. The children were playing in the street below, so excited about their game that they didn’t wait to get on to the soft sand of the beach. Javier, desperate to keep up, fell and hit his head. His face was covered in blood. I ran from the studio and threw him into the car and took him straight to the hospital where they put a few stitches in his head. By the time I returned to the studio I could see that everything had changed.
So what is actually different? We are still man and wife, we still live in the same house, we are still having the New Year’s Eve party tonight.
When I returned from the hospital M. did not immediately ask after Javier, who was at home with the maid. She was on the verandah looking at me as if I was a lone wolf across an ice field. I walked towards her, telling her about Javier, as if auditioning. She manoeuvred around me back into the room. I said he was at home and wanted to see her. She practically ran for the door. We drove back in a frosty silence, with Paco and Manuela fighting in the back. She went upstairs and I to my study.
I am still here now, twenty-four hours later, watching her shadow on the ceiling of Javier’s room. It is already dark. It is only a matter of hours before the guests arrive for dinner. Later we will go to the boat and watch the British fireworks display in the port. I am nearly paralysed with sadness. I watch her shadow, which has enlarged because she is holding Javier. They come to the window and look into the dark patio and the inkier blackness of the fig tree. I have tears in my eyes because I know that she is saying goodbye to Javier, that she will be my wife at this party and then no more. She is going and in going she will betray me. I shall go to my room now and put on my white dinner jacket.
5th January 1964, Tangier
I am ruined with fatigue but I have to bring myself to the page, my pristine confessional. This is what my journal has become. I vomit and the ghastly nausea of my existence subsides. On the evening of the party I was dressing. She went straight to the bathroom as if to hide. She waited for me to leave before putting on her evening dress. I went to check the children. She didn’t come down until the guests arrived. My eyes followed her as she mingled, occasionally our glances clashed and we’d switch away. Dinner was loud and boisterous, but I experienced it as a child under the table. After the meal we gathered in the hall while the women put on their coats and Javier suddenly appeared at the foot of the stairs. M. carried him back up to bed with his face buried in her neck. We left the house in a crowd, M. on Salgado’s arm. Champagne corks popped as we arrived at the yacht. The fireworks happened. The guests began to leave.
I said to Ramón that I wanted to take the boat out and asked him to put it to M. ‘She’d do anything for you,’ I said. ‘But she can easily talk me out of it.’ The three of us put out an hour later. It was flat and cold and a half-moon added to the chill. We drank champagne at the wheel with M. wrapped in a coat of Arctic fox. The stillness out there was terrible. Then the wind got up from nowhere and Ramón, who was drunk, went down below. I turned the boat back towards Tangier.
Finally M. said: ‘I’m leaving you … you know that now, don’t you?’ I asked her how she’d found the diaries. She’d persuaded Javier to tell her where I kept them. Her face was very close to mine as she spoke and she added: ‘Your secret is between us.’ If I thought about it, even for a moment, I would not be able to go through with it, so I rapped her with my knuckles on her solar plexus and she doubled up over my arm. I shoved her hard, firing her backwards to the rail, which hit her below the buttock. She vaulted over and, like a comic turn, her feet flipped into the darkness. The splash was inaudible. I didn’t look back. The sea grew before me and there was quite a storm blowing as we came into Tangier. As we entered the port I called to M. and Salgado to come up oh deck. Salgado appeared bleary-eyed. I told him to wake M. and he went back down. In seconds he was back saying she wasn’t in her cabin. We went mad searching the boat before facing the awful truth and calling the coast guard. We never found her. The following day I told Javier what had happened. He was heartbroken.
; The voice continued, but at a distance because now Javier was back in that moment, heading for the room that used to be his father’s studio. He’s been called there to be told the terrible news, which has already reached him through the thick whitewashed walls earlier that morning. A damp gloom has filled the house and all he can hear is his own heart as he slips through the door into his father’s presence. His father calls him and he thinks that he will draw him into his chest and kiss his head, but instead he takes him by the arm, squeezing and twisting the bicep so that Javier comes up on his toes. His father’s huge face and head come down level to Javier’s own. He points his finger at Javier’s eye, as if it’s loaded.
‘You know why Mercedes isn’t coming back, don’t you, Javier?’
Javier was mute through this double pain of his pinched flesh and what I could see was the plummeting emptiness of what he feared most.
‘This is important,’ I said, pulling him to me so that his wincing face was right next to mine. ‘You must never tell anyone where I keep my journals. That is my secret. I want you to remember that … From now on, Javier, there are no journals.’
Back in the corridor outside his father’s study, he’s looking down at his arm. Tears well in his eyes and trickle cleanly and quickly down his smooth face. His mouth is thick with saliva and he knows that Mercedes is never coming back. Her smell is never coming to him again as his lies under the tight sheets. His small fingers will never trace those ears again. And it is his doing. He should never have told her. He breaks into a run, down the corridor, up the stairs, into his room, on to his bed, but still the black emptiness of his realization stays with him and the twisted pain of his burning arm.
‘Does that clarify things?’ said the voice, and Javier had the sense of rush as on a crowded street, until he popped back into reality still looking at his bicep, as if examining the bruising he’d sustained all those years ago.
The Blind Man of Seville Page 48
