The Blind Man of Seville

13

Saturday, 14th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

Falcón put the letter back in the envelope, tucked it in the box. He slashed out the lights in the two rooms, sensed the darkness gulping back his father’s work, hungry for it. He locked up the gates and left the house, wanting to walk off these developments, pace them out.

The gardens in front of the Museo de Bellas Artes were beginning to fill up with young people smoking joints and swigging from litre bottles of Cruzcampo. It was still early at 11 p.m.; in a few more hours the dark trees would roar with the noise of a massive open party. He set off from there away from the centre, away from anywhere he might be known.

A rhythm settled in him, one that demanded no thought, only the feel of the cobbles through the soles of his shoes. The words of his father’s letter rattled through him as endless as a freight train thudding over points in the track. He knew that he would do it, that he could not resist reading the journals.

After half an hour he found he was on Calle Jesús del Gran Poder — a big name for an unprepossessing street. He cut through to the Alameda, where the girls were out in amongst the trees, the parked cars and the open space where the flea market was held every Sunday morning. Music thumped from the clubs and bars on the far side. A girl stretching her spandex miniskirt over her bottom approached and asked him what he was looking for. Her face was black and white in the yellow street lighting, the breasts forced up into a graphic cleavage, a fishnet top, a bare, round stomach. Her lips were glossy black, her tongue came out probing as a sea creature from a rock. He was mesmerized. She made some suggestions, which surprised Falcón by working. He would like some sex. It had never occurred to him to buy it. She had his attention now, using all the tricks. His insides were all stirred up, but in the wrong position, the wrong colour — black tripe — seething like the coils of a snake, monstrous and silent, feeding ideas into his mind, terrible ideas that he didn’t know he could have. He was appalled but gripped by the live excitement of it. He had to wrench himself away.

‘I’m a policeman,’ he said stiffly. ‘I’m looking for Eloisa Gómez.’

She sulked and nodded him to a group standing out in the square. He walked out from under the trees, disturbed to find that he could no longer be certain about himself. Unpredictability was seeping into his nature. He had to remind himself that he was good, a force for the good, because the snapshot he’d just seen of the dark side of his nature showed it to be teeming with life. As he walked the rough ground of the Alameda he conceived the insane notion that he could become afraid of himself, of what he had inside him that he didn’t know. Wasn’t that what the killer had done to Raúl Jiménez, shown him what he dreaded every day of his life?

He reached the group of women standing opposite the entrance to Calle Vulcano, where more girls stood in the light of the road, their thigh-high boots silhouetted. Fantasy women, who with their every action tell men that they can do whatever they want, except kiss this mouth. The group parted without a word and waited for him to speak because they knew he wasn’t a punter. He asked for Eloisa Gómez. A short, fat girl with stiff, dyed-black hair and a swollen face said she wasn’t around. She hadn’t been seen since she took a call from a client the previous night.

‘Is that unusual, for her not to come back here?’ he asked, and they shrugged.

‘You must be a cop,’ said one of the girls. ‘Are you with that cabrón who came here last night?’

‘I’m a homicide cop,’ said Falcón. ‘She was with a client Wednesday night, Thursday morning. After she left he was murdered.’

‘Too bad.’

He brought up Eloisa’s number on his mobile, punched it in. There was no reply; he left a message, giving his number, telling her to call. They made him feel like a zoo animal, waiting to see if he’d do something interesting, until a blonde girl at the back said: ‘You want a blow job, we’ll give you the usual police discount.’ They laughed.

He headed up Calle Vulcano past the fantasy girls to Calle Mata and then east on to Calle Relator. He was remembering the last time he’d been in this area, which must have been with his father because he never came here for a drink or a tapa. There were craftsmen in this part of town. Yes, a frame maker, and there was a copyist, too, a dangerous type, dark-skinned, who his father said was a heroin user. What was his name? A nickname. The first and only time he’d met him he’d come to the door in nothing but a pair of black satin briefs. He was thin with the musculature of a wild animal. Big teeth. He’d been shocked by him, by the way he didn’t bother to dress and discussed business with his father with a hand inside the front of his briefs.

He crossed Calle Feria to an old church with a Latin name — Omnium Santorum — which stood next to a covered market. It was dark and quiet so that when his mobile rang it startled him.

‘Diga,’ he said.

Silence apart from the ethereal hiss.

‘Diga,’ he said, again, harder.

The voice when it came was calm, soft and male.

‘Where are you now?’

‘Who is this?’ said Falcón, irritated by people who didn’t announce themselves.

‘Are we close?’ said the voice, and those three words transfixed him, bent him over in the middle, as if crouching would make him hear better.

‘I don’t know, are we?’

‘Closer than you think,’ said the voice, and the phone went dead.

Falcón whirled around, checked every doorway and street corner, the dark alley between the church and the market. He ran, looking down the side streets. A couple with a small dog crossed the road to avoid him. He must have seemed quite mad, dancing with the shadows like a boxer gone sloppy in the head.

He stopped and stared into the pavement, fidgeted through the two possible scenarios. If the killer didn’t know Eloisa Gómez before, he had got her number from Jiménez’s mobile phone, which he stole from the apartment. He called her last night and now he must have got her mobile phone because he’s picked up my number from the message I’ve just left, which means … Guilt settled in his chest. He’s killed her. And if he did know her before … it didn’t change the outcome.

We messed that up badly, he thought. He broke into a run, arrived in the Alameda in a sweat and out of breath. The women circled him.

‘Where does Eloisa Gómez live?’ he asked. ‘And does anybody know where she went after she got that call last night?’

The fat girl took him on a hobbling run to a house on Calle Joaquín Costa, past groups huddled in vacant lots and doorways, crouched over tinfoil, sucking on empty biro tubes, waiting for the spear-tailed moment of the dragon chase. She unlocked the door of a broken-down old building with grasses and flowers growing out of the cracks in the plaster. There was no light in the stairwell and the wooden stairs stank of urine. The girl pointed to a door on the first landing. He hammered on it. No answer. She brought a spare key from her room. Inside there was no Eloisa, only a brand-new large, cuddly panda on the punched-out sofa.

‘That’s for her niece,’ said the girl. ‘Her sister lives in Cádiz.’

The panda sat with its arms out in a stiff embrace, its eyes stupid and sad. Falcón momentarily contemplated his own loneliness in the face of that dumb toy. He called Eloisa Gómez’s number again and got the voice mail.

‘Where is she?’ he asked.

He gave the girl his card, told her the usual things. She took it with a trembling hand. She knew what it all meant.

His failure made him angry. He left the Alameda and went up Calle Amor de Dios. He walked with apparent purpose, but aimlessly turned left and right down the disorganized streets until he hit the stink of cats. The walls closed in before opening up to a church called Divina Enfermera. Divine Nurse? The tarmac was all torn up in great chunks of black cake and piled in the Plaza de San Martín. He had been here with his father on the way to the copyist. They’d passed the Divine Nurse and his father had made a dirty joke and shown him the divine nurses at work. Sixty-five-year-old women sitting outside their houses, legs apart, crow black above their dimpled thighs. His father had appalled him by endlessly negotiating a blow job until Javier couldn’t bear it any longer and ran to the end of the street and stood below a tiled advertisement for Amontillado fino and manzanilla pasada.

The street names slipped past him until he came out in San Juan de la Palma, which was packed with people spilling out of the Cervezería Plazoleta and drinking beer around the two palm trees that disappeared above the lights. It was so easy to feel alone in this city. He walked on past the home of the Duquesa de Alba. He’d been in there once, standing below the tumbling towers of bougainvillea, drinking nectar with high society. Is this how tramps feel inside? I’m becoming a vagrant from myself.

A breeze cooled the patina of sweat on his forehead. He didn’t think he was thinking and yet words drifted up from nowhere, unbidden. Male menopause. Forty-five. Ripe for it. More crap from Manuela’s magazines. No. This is just straight, unadulterated age. The creeping onset has been noted by mind and body. Age is just the disintegration of possibility and the assertion of probability with the odds shortening every day — Francisco Falcón, June 1996.

He ran. Took off as if he had a chance of getting away from what was developing in his head. People stepped aside from his pounding feet. Those with a stronger herd instinct joined him, as if he might know where he was going. The fools, the damned fools. By the time he reached Calle Matahacas there were twenty people with him and it was then that he saw the crowd materializing out of the darkness and felt the deep silence that Sevillanos reserve for two things — La Virgen and los toros.

At the end of the street in Escuelas Pías, above a heaving sea of black heads, the candlelit Virgin appeared. Her bowed head, her white, bejewelled robes, her tear-splashed cheek swirled in the updraught of burnt incense. Awe lapped at her feet from the packed humanity below as her paso swayed and rocked in the darkness.

The people behind Falcón shunted him forward towards the astonishing vision of beauty, which both amazed and repelled him, awed and terrified him. The crowd in front thickened. Small women, waist high to him, murmured prayers and kissed their rosaries. He was trapped now in this bizarre parallel world. The Alameda with its whores and grunt-driven clients, its junkies chasing spear-tailed oblivion was running a different life, one with blood and dirt in it. One that was well outside this high, cathedral silence with this mortifying beauty that moved on a tide of reverence and adulation.

Can we all be the same species?

The question came to him from nowhere, but it made him think that it was possible for good and evil to reside in the same place, the same person. Even himself. Panic tightened in him. He had to get out of this crowd and the only way was forward.

The Virgin stopped and sank into the dark. The candle-light wavered across her face, caught the crystalline tears, the mournful eyes. He had to get past her; he had to get past this terrible emblem of loss, this gorgeous example to the world of its barbaric capacity. He fought past the penitent women, the quiet mothers, the father with a sleeping child on his shoulders. He couldn’t bear it.

They hit him. They thumped his back as he crashed through. He shouldered their derision. He hit the barrier, scrambled underneath it and ran between the silent nazareños dressed in black with high coned hats, indiscernible from the night. Their eyes were on him. Their sinister eyes in their hooded faces — the silent orders more demanding than the others. He ran through the files of barefoot men, away from the floating Virgin. He was desperate.

The crowds thinned and he was able to vault the barrier, but he didn’t slow down until he’d broken into Calle Cabeza del Rey Don Pedro and only then did he realize in the quiet of the street that he was talking out loud to himself. He tried to listen to what he was saying, which was even madder. He moved on, brought himself under control and slipped down an alleyway into Calle Abades and stopped dead in the street because alone there, looking back at the building she’d just left, was his ex-wife, Inés. She was laughing; laughing so hard that she threw her head and long hair forward and gripped her own thighs. She was facing the light shed from the door of the Bar Abades and Falcón knew she wasn’t drunk, because she didn’t like alcohol. He knew that she was laughing because she was happy.

The doors of the bar opened and a group came out. Inés took hold of an arm from one of the group and they headed down the street away from him. She was wearing very high heels, as always, and she walked with a sureness of foot that was breathtaking on the uneven cobbles. Getting his own feet to move was more problematic. The moment had opened up a yawning black ravine down his middle. On one side his earlier, happier married life and on the other his present, solitary, darkening self. And in the middle? The gulf, the rift, the bottomless pit of those terrible falling dreams where the only cure is the jolt awake into more relentless reality.

He followed her. He listened to her gaiety. There were jokes being told about judges and defence lawyers. It was a relief to find that these were work colleagues, but each peal of recognizable laughter from Inés rammed into him and stuck there with a bull’s weight behind it. Her joy was nearly unbearable beside his own brand-new torment. And when the flint of his imagination hit the circular saw of his suspicions, screeching sparks flew in his head.

On Avenida de la Constitución the group called for taxis. He watched from the shadows to see who she was travelling with. Four of them got into one taxi. He watched her ankle, the triangle of strap from her shoe, disappear behind the closing door. He watched, derelict, as the red taillights pulled away into the traffic.

He walked down to the river, sticking to the main avenues, no appetite for the narrow streets of El Arenal, the tourists and their relaxed jollity. He crossed the black, gleaming river on the Puente San Telmo and stopped halfway, struck by the advertising on the apartment blocks on the Plaza de Cuba — Tío Pepe, Airtel, Cruzcampo, Fino San Patricio — sherry, phones and beer. This is Spain now — all our needs covered.

The river rippled and slopped underfoot. Raúl Jiménez’s first wife came to mind. The torture of not knowing had been too much for a mother to bear. He wondered if she did it from where he was standing and remembered that Consuelo Jiménez had said she’d gone down to the bank one night and thrown herself away. He imagined her floating downstream, the edges of water creeping up her face, the corners of her eyes and mouth, until they met and the blackness she so craved closed over her.

His mobile rang. The stupidity of its ring welcome amongst his morbid ramblings. He put it to his ear, heard the hiss of ether and knew it was him.

‘Diga,’ he said quietly.

No answer.

He waited, not breaking the spell with superfluous words this time.

‘You are thinking. Inspector Jefe, that this is your investigation, but you should know that I have a story to tell and, whether you like it or not, you will let me tell it. Hasta luego.’