Death in Seville

by David Hewson

  DEATH

  IN

  SEVILLE

  DAVID HEWSON

  PAN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  ONE

  Seville, Easter 1995

  La Soledad.

  The words echo around the old woman’s head as she wakes slowly, fitfully, from fast-fading dreams. Outside, beyond the blue-tiled pillars of the keyhole arch, the noise of the city rumbles like the low growl of an unseen animal. The scent of oleander mingles with the fumes of diesel and cigarettes. From her wicker chair, its points and cracks biting into her bones, she sees across the garden to the courtyard. A handful of orange and lemon trees dotted with wrinkled fruit, dusty in the afternoon sunlight, waxy red seed husks on a lone pomegranate, the sharp smell of cat’s urine on the unseasonably hot late-afternoon air.

  Cristina Lucena watches the ghosts reassemble and populate another place: bright, gay, noisy. The sound of laughter rings from wall to gleaming wall, the tiles sparkle in the sun. She follows the figures drifting from group to group, as they had sixty years before when, as a girl, she had watched, filled with awe and admiration, from this very room. All the great people of the day had visited in their time. Even once, Lorca himself. She had seen them sip fino and manzanilla beneath the orange blossom, heard them talk about things she could not comprehend. She had watched their faces change over the space of two seasons, shift from bright, optimistic good humour to, first, a muted concern, as faint as gossamer, then to visible anxiety, and finally to fear, simple, naked, brutal.

  All the time the trees blossomed and bore fruit. The wrinkled oranges stood on the branches unpicked, gathering dust from the carriages and cars she could hear beyond the wall.

  One day she came down from her small, sunny room, woken by something she did not recognize. The ground was littered with rotten fruit. It was as if a sudden earthquake had shaken them from the tree. They lay on the dry brown earth misshapen and decaying. Flesh and pulp peeped out from beneath the torn orange and yellow skins. There was something obscene, something frightening about the sight.

  A lifetime on, she floats above herself as she was then, follows the young girl in her pink-and-white cotton dress, loose and cool in the sun, standing outside the courtyard’s gold-and-blue-tiled door, looking down at this bitter harvest in shock and foreboding.

  She waits. It will come. It always does.

  From beyond the courtyard wall an explosion erupts, a noise so huge, so violent that it seems to tear the world apart. The air, the sky shakes with the sound. She screams and time takes leave of its senses, the seconds turn to hours, as if to extend the pain they promise.

  The trees become electric. Their branches snap, as if to attention, as if a fibrous thread of muscle, tight as steel, runs through the sap and suddenly tautens in fury or fear. They clench like fists, then release themselves and the air fills with leaves and twigs and the sweet, cloying aroma of rotten fruit. The blast of the cannon comes to her, bringing with it a new odour, the sharp smell of cordite and burning.

  Overhead, the sound of wings, the frantic cry of birds, flapping, flapping, flapping.

  A shape forms before her line of vision, floating down from the sky, tears of blood against pure white, close enough to touch. It falls with the speed of a single, descending feather, slowly, almost gracefully. She can see the red, deep and real, on its feathers, she can see the bloody gore around its neck where the blast removed the head. At the back of her skull, she can feel herself screaming. But there is no noise, there is no pain, there is no sensation at all. The world has become nothing but this single occurrence: a headless dove descends in front of her with an unearthly slowness.

  She watches its neck twitch frantically from side to side. She sees the blood pump and spill from its still-beating heart. The drops arc slowly through the air, perfect scarlet pearls half-frozen in their motion. They spatter her dress, her skin. She can see the crimson stain on her arms, sense the liquid sticky on her neck. As she screams, she can feel the light red rain on her tongue, and she cannot stop herself tasting it, fresh and warm and salty, licking the roof of her mouth in an automatic reaction, the very thought of which starts to overturn her stomach long before the physical sensation turns real.

  Time pauses. There is a moment when the dove is frozen in front of her as if to say: This is the point. And then the seconds move again. The slaughtered bird falls to the ground with a sudden, brutal force and, as she begins to retch, she knows that this event – though only the precursor to other, worse happenings – is one that will mark her for the rest of her life. In another time, a young girl vomits drily in the courtyard of her ancestral home, the small, shattered carcass of a headless dove at her feet.

  Outside, the sound of arms, the smell of blood.

  La Soledad.

  Doña Cristina watches her ghost recede, slip slowly away in the afternoon sun. There is a sudden anger in her: Why now? Why do the dead not lie buried? Tears prick the corners of her eyes. She feels ashamed of the sour, dry taste of stale manzanilla in the throat. A little lunch, a drink from the plastic container the part-time maid refills in the little store in the barrio, sweaty, sleep-filled afternoons. But at least the dreams had stayed away, for years, almost to the point where she could forget them.

  A sound draws her attention. For all her frailty, her eyes, her ears remain as sharp as ever. In the corner of the courtyard there is a movement. She watches as a figure darts behind a tangle of purple bougainvillaea and scrambles for the far wall. It is half-hidden by the trees. All she can see is red, red everywhere, no face, no identity.

  A deep red, the colour of doves’ blood.

  She feels the anger rise still further in her, strains her hands against the arms of the wicker chair and lifts herself upright. Her bones ache. She grips the old cane she must now use always, and her incapacity fuels her fury.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ she screams through the open door. The sound echoes around the tiled courtyard. Her voice comes back to her like the cawing of a crow. The tears prickle her eyes afresh. ‘You thieving little shits! You prey on an old woman instead of working for a living. You come h
ere. I give you what for. I shove my stick up your arse, you little shits!’

  There is a rustle of leaves from the corner of the courtyard, a grunt of exertion. The crimson figure scrambles through a straggling oleander bush against the rear wall, scales the brickwork quickly with the easy strength of the young and then is gone.

  She feels relief, and shame for realizing it. These are her days: to wake, to eat, to sleep, then to count the pesetas to make sure she can do the same tomorrow. And now to shout at young thugs who come to rob her.

  Angry, appalled, she sits back in her chair and looks around the room. The most valuable items have gone already, shipped to the auction room near the Plaza Nueva. The paintings, the porcelain, the Chinese rugs. All the fabric of her childhood is now dispersed. In her mind’s eye, that active, protean part of her imagination which she now, by preference, chooses to inhabit, she can see the apartments of the nouveaux riches in the new quarter where they live, squashed into little boxes, cheek by jowl, like the poor, but with TV sets and loud radios. Her life, her ancestry, now enclosed by their thin walls, lending faint authenticity to their shallow, mundane existences.

  Nothing is missing. She is certain almost immediately. Everything that remains is a firm, tangible cornerstone in her life. To lose one vase, one shard of reality from the past, would be something she would notice immediately.

  Doña Cristina blinks and realizes that, for a short span of time, her mind had disappeared. No thought, not even the old and welcome prick of anger, that sudden stab of feeling that kept her alive. Old age was beginning to fossilize her, slowly, day by day. The process had begun decades ago, with the gentle fall of a headless dove. Now it was accelerating towards its inevitable end. It meant nothing to her.

  She sniffs the air and begins to know. It is the smell, the old smell.

  Once more, painfully, she pushes herself out of the wicker chair. She wears an old, faded print dress that hangs baggy on her bones. Blue roses, once the colour of the sea, are pale etches against a black background pattern of leaves. Her hair, grey with gingery-brown streaks, is tied back in a severe bun. Her face, lined and walnut brown, still wears an aristocratic aspect: a stare that could wither the unwary, the bent nose that has run through her family since the Reconquest, cheekbones that flare beneath the eyes, almost to points. She looks like a fragile old eagle searching for prey as she struggles to the downstairs door, leaning on her cane.

  Doña Cristina turns the handle and walks into the hall. It is smarter than her own room. The entrance is large and airy. Sunlight pours through the dusty glass panes that surmount an ancient double door studded with brass. The floor is swept, the tiles gleam as brightly as hundred-year-old ceramic can. On one wall of the rectangular hall hangs a huge, floor-length mirror, its surface scarred by flaking mercury. She can see herself in it across the room: an ethereal, faded creature who seems to melt into the background of the mansion.

  This is how the great families end, she thinks, in decay, in shabbiness, in the pale glory of their past. The fools in the war had it wrong. There was no great turning point, no single, apocalyptic moment. Everything simply . . . fades until nothing remains except a dispersed collection of random ephemera, unconnected save for a history that no living person could discern.

  She sniffs the air again and a cold feeling runs down her spine. She begins to realize what had woken her, and it was not the thug in the garden.

  She shuffles towards the other ground-floor rooms. They are unoccupied but, in these days, who knows? The further she walks from the staircase, the more the smell recedes. Still, she takes the chain of keys from her pocket, rattles them in the ageing locks and looks inside, postponing the inevitable. Nothing but furniture covered in shrouds, like misshapen ghosts waiting for something to rouse them. All three rooms are the same: still, dusty, lifeless.

  After she closes the door on the last, Doña Cristina sits down in a small upright chair next to the mirror. There is a more comfortable seat on the other side of the room, but she does not wish to see her reflection in the glass.

  ‘The Angel Brothers,’ she says to herself, and shakes her head. They had paid well this last year, and they had, in a sense, not deceived her. They were in residence only rarely. They had reputations, they said. This was true. They showed her the articles in the newspapers: the exhibitions in London and New York, the profiles in the glossy foreign magazines. But they had reputations too, and this also became apparent. The banging of doors at midnight. Strange visitors in strange clothes. An otherness that, on occasions, frightened her, gave her a chill that was too familiar.

  One day, in the hall, she had seen them both come downstairs, holding hands and giggling like children, dressed in some outlandish suits of leather that made them look foolish. She was not ignorant; she knew of such things.

  ‘You are from Barcelona,’ she said and stared them in the eye with that eagle gaze that no one, not even the Angel Brothers with their bloodstreams awash with substances, could ignore.

  Pedro, the quiet one, the one with fair hair (was this dyed? she wondered), nodded.

  ‘You are brothers? You are genuine brothers?’

  ‘Si, Doña Cristina,’ he said (and she realized that, for some reason, the second seemed incapable of speech). ‘We are more than brothers. We are twins.’

  She stared at them both. There was no resemblance whatsoever. She could not believe it.

  Pedro looked hurt. ‘This is true. We would not lie to you. Look.’ He shook his brother, whose eyes seemed dark, unfocused and unfathomable. ‘We will show the good woman.’

  They both unzipped their leather jackets and started to pull out the tails of white, frilly cotton shirts from their trousers. Doña Cristina could smell a fragrance from their bodies, heavy, strong and feminine.

  ‘See here.’

  Pedro pointed to a pale scar on his waist. His fingers were smeared with paint: red, blue, yellow. His nails were long and dirty. The mark on his body was about four inches long and two high, with further, smaller weals around the edges, like vicious tears in a self-inflicted wound. It was on his left side. The other brother simply held up his shirt to reveal a pale, slim waist. A near-identical scar sat there on the right.

  ‘See,’ said Pedro. ‘I am the right twin. Juan is the left. We were joined thus almost until the age of two. We are not merely brothers, we are twins. We are not merely twins, we are heavenly twins.’

  He giggled, as if through drink, though there was an energy to him that could not have come from alcohol.

  ‘This is the secret, the secret of our art. For our first two years we were a being with two minds. Now we are two beings, two minds, yet when we create’ – he used the word as if it were holy – ‘we create as one. Two minds, a single purpose.’

  She looked at him, the distaste sour in her mouth. ‘Keep quiet at nights,’ she said. ‘Do nothing to bring this house into disrepute. What is permissible in Barcelona may not be permissible here. Not under my roof, at least.’

  ‘We will bring you nothing but honour, Madame.’ He used the French glibly: he had done this before. ‘One day there will be a plaque upon your door.’

  She had left them there, stumbling out of the portico, to return God knows when. And, true to his word, the noise had abated. This last month she had hardly heard them at all. The money was welcome. No, the money was essential.

  As she stands up she realizes this is almost what she fears most. She is too old to take in new people. This was why she had never tried to fill the other rooms. The task of finding new ‘guests’, vetting them, watching them, making sure they paid on time, this was all now beyond her. The Angel Brothers, whatever happened behind their locked doors, paid regularly and no longer disturbed her. They were her security until the end came. There was nothing left to sell, except the house itself, and that, she knew, would kill her as certainly as any disease or young thug from the street.

  Doña Cristina sighs, walks past the huge mirror without looking into
it, and makes for the stairs. Once she had slid down the banister into the arms of her father. Now she grips it with wrinkled, tortured hands, shuffles one foot onto the step, follows it with the other, carries on this way, one slow pace at a time. There are twenty-seven steps – she had counted them when she was four years old – and each one takes her the best part of a minute. At the top of the stairs she sits down. Tears now streak her cheeks. Her breath comes in gasps. The door to the apartment is half-open and the smell is unbearable: a fetid, miasmic odour that chills her to the bone.

  La Soledad.

  The phone, their phone, she knows, is on a small table a footfall beyond the open door. Nothing in the world, not God himself, could persuade Doña Cristina to cross that threshold. She sits for a period of time she could not calculate, the memories, the terrors racing through her mind with a cruel clarity that brings bile to her throat.

  When the world stops spinning she wipes her face on her sleeve, stands up, takes hold of the banister and sets off down once more, step by step. The sunlight is fading through the glass over the door. Outside there is the sound of birds greeting the twilight. It takes her another twenty minutes to reach the phone in her room.

  A red light flashes on the switchboard in the police headquarters, an old building close enough to the cathedral to catch the shadow of the Giralda later in the afternoon. Miguel Domingo, an overweight civilian who thinks he really has better things to do with his time than sit taking weird phone calls, watches it flicker in front of him. He finishes a can of Coke, takes a bite of fat ham buried deep in a soft white mollete, chews, swallows, belches, then reaches for the answer key. With as much bored aggression as he can muster, he flicks the switch and bellows into the headset, ‘Digame.’

  It is a minute before Doña Cristina can stop sobbing and begin to talk.

  TWO

  At six in the morning the big trunk road is quiet. Within the hour the heavy lorries arriving from Madrid, Cadiz and Cordoba will begin to choke the dual carriageways that feed into the city, pumping clouds of black diesel into the palm trees that line the roads, getting into fights with the locals trying to drive to work from the suburbs. Now it is close to peace.