The Blind Man of Seville

14

Sunday, 15th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

Falcón came round with his heart thumping in his chest, still operating at the heightened speed of an adrenalin-fired pace. He checked his pulse — ninety. He swung his legs out of bed, exhausted before he’d even started. His face was hot and his hair full of sweat as if he’d been running all night, or rather morning. He hadn’t got to bed until four o’clock. He hadn’t wanted to come home.

He did an hour on the exercise bike and persuaded himself that he felt better. He showered and dressed. The world outside at this remove seemed dead. He drank coffee, ate toast rubbed with garlic and olive oil. His father’s breakfast. He went up to the studio and arranged the journals in date order, noting the quality of the books became poorer as the years progressed — the paper thinner, the bindings no longer stitched but glued and that all cracked, with loose pages. The handwriting changed, too. The first books were scarcely recognizable as his father’s. The letters cramped, the spacing uneven, the lines drifting downwards and the accents and tildas seemingly shaken up in a cup and dashed over the page. It was unconfident, unstable, close to mad. Thereafter the hand was more even but was not transformed into the beautiful script that Javier knew until he arrived back in Spain in the sixties.

It was here that the gap occurred. One diary ended during the summer of 1959 in Tangier and the next started in May 1965 in Seville. Everything had happened in those years. His mother and stepmother had died. His father had painted the Falcón nudes, become famous and left Morocco. It was the vital book, but how was he supposed to use his police skills to find it?

It was close to one o’clock and he was due for lunch at his brother Paco’s finca in Las Cortecillas, which was over an hour’s drive away. He wanted to make a start on the journals but knew he’d have to stop almost immediately. He would read the opening entry and leave it at that — a taster, a pincho before the gran plato.

19th March 1932, Dar Riffen, Morocco Today I am seventeen and Oscar has given me this present of an empty book, which he has told me I must fill. It has been nearly a year since what I now refer to as ‘the incident’ occurred and I have begun to think that if I do not set things down as I think of them I will forget who I used to be. Although, after ten months of the Legion’s training and brutal discipline, I am already unsure. To get through the days in barracks it is best not to think. To get through the days out in the field it is best not to think. In action I can’t think, it all happens too fast. I sleep with only one dream, which I don’t want to think about. So, I don’t think. I tell Oscar this and he says: ‘You don’t think therefore you are not.’ Whatever that means. He tells me this book will change that. I hope I am not too late. Already the life before ‘the incident’ has lost its definition. It is all irrelevant now. My education means nothing except that I can read and write, which is a lot more than the tontos in my company. My old friendships mean less. My family has forgotten me, is dead to me. Who am I? My name is Francisco Luis González Falcón. On my first day in the legion the Captain told us we were novios de la muerte. He was right. I am a bridegroom of death, but not in the way he meant it.

His mobile rang, his sister Manuela reminding him to pick her up. She started to complain about how Paco was going to make her work for her lunch and Javier sympathized but didn’t listen. How the minutiae impinged.

They drove out of the city in brilliant sunshine and headed north on the road to Mérida. As they came out on to the rolling plains, the swaying grasses, Javier relaxed. The pressures of the city, the intensity of its narrow streets, the crush of people, the hordes of tourists, the deepening complexity of his investigation were all behind him. He’d never envied Paco’s love of the simple life, the space, the bulls roaming the pasture, but now, since Raúl Jiménez’s murder, the city, rather than provoking fascination, was inducing fear. It wasn’t the first time he’d run into a night-time procession of the candlelit Virgin. He’d even run into one after leavinga crime scene and been totally unmoved. He had never identified with the city’s mad Mariolatry. But twice in two days he’d been left shattered by what was, in effect, a mannequin on a float, and last night he’d panicked completely. The need to get away from it, or rather get past it, had come from instinct. There had been nothing rational at work. He shook his head and settled back as they eased through the blinding white village of Pajanosas.

As soon as they arrived at the finca Manuela changed out of her red Elena Brunelli linen suit into her veterinary overalls. Paco shouldered a gun and packed three tranquillizer darts. They all got into a Land Rover and went looking for one of Paco’s retintos, which had a horn wound in its side from a fight with another bull.

They found the bull on its own under a holm oak. He was fully grown and was already sold for this year’s Feria. Paco loaded a dart and shot the bull in the haunch. The bull set off at a trot through the trees. They followed in the vehicle until the bull settled into the grasses in a sunlit clearing, confused by the lack of force in its hind legs. They got out and, as they neared, its head came up, still with some vestiges of strength in the vast hump of neck muscle. The primitive eye took them in and for a moment Javier saw inside the bull’s head. There was no fear there, only an immense intuition of its own power, which was being slowly consumed by the effects of the tranquillizer.

The bull’s head sank back into the grass. Manuela cleaned the wound, put in a couple of stitches, gave an antibiotic jab and took a blood sample. Paco talked nonstop and held the bull’s horn, thumbed its smooth, sharp tip and watched out for other bulls that might attack. Javier, patting the haunch of the dazed animal, had a sudden wish for that sense of self that the bull had momentarily shown him. Complexity made humans so fragile. If only we could be as concentrated as the bull, so conscious of its power, rather than having to see to our constant, pathetic needs.

Manuela injected the beast with a stimulant and they retreated to the Land Rover. The head came up and the bull immediately began to gather its forces, instinct telling it that it was vulnerable on the ground. It stood, centred its strength and forced itself to move. The back legs performed a skipping hop as it disappeared into the trees.

‘Fantastic bull,’ said Paco. ‘He’ll be all right for the Feria, won’t he, Manuela?’

‘He’ll still have that wound, but he’ll show them who he is,’ she said.

‘You watch him, Javier. Monday, 23rd April he’ll be in La Maestranza and there’s nobody, not even José Tomás, who’ll get the better of that bull,’ said Paco. ‘Pepe heard anything yet?’

‘Nothing.’

‘He’ll get his chance. Somebody will get done between now and the Feria, the numbers dictate it.’

They had lunch of roast lamb, which Paco had baked in a brick bread-oven he’d restored on the property. There was a whole crowd there for lunch, with the parents-in-law, uncles, aunts, Paco’s wife and the four children. Javier forgot himself amongst family and drank a lot of red wine, more than usual. They all slept afterwards. Manuela had to wake Javier, who was sleeping as still as a fallen idol.

It was just getting dark as they walked out to the car and Javier was still groggy. Paco had his arm round his shoulders. They stood around saying a prolonged goodbye.

‘Did either of you know that Papá was in the Legion?’ asked Javier.

‘What Legion?’ said Paco.

‘El Tercio de Extranjeros in Morocco in the thirties.’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Paco.

‘Hah!’ said Manuela. ‘You’ve been clearing out the studio. I wondered when you’d get round to that, little brother.’

‘I’m just reading some journals he left, that’s all.’

‘He never talked about any of that … the Civil War,’ said Paco. ‘I don’t remember him ever talking about a life before Tangier.’

‘He mentioned an incident, too …’ said Javier, ‘something that happened when he was sixteen that made him leave home.’

His brother and sister shook their heads.

‘You will tell us, little brother, if you come across another one of his nudes that he might have let slip down the back of a chest or something. I mean, that wouldn’t be quite fair, would it?’

‘There’s hundreds of them. Take your pick.’

‘Hundreds?’

‘Hundreds of each one.’

‘I’m not talking about copies,’ said Manuela.

‘Nor am I … they’re all “originals”, all painted by him.’

‘Explain yourself, little brother.’

‘He painted them over and over again, trying to get back to … I don’t know, the secrets of the original work. They’re all worthless, and he knew it, which was why he wanted them destroyed.’

‘If Papá painted them, they can’t be worthless,’ said Manuela.

‘They’re not even signed.’

‘We can fix that,’ said Manuela. ‘What was the name of that dreadful person he used …? some heroin addict. He lived near the Alameda.’

The two brothers stared at her, Javier remembering his father’s words from the letter. Manuela glared back.

‘Heh! Qué cabrones sois,’ she said, putting on her filthiest Andaluz accent. They laughed.

Javier didn’t bother to ask them why they were all calling themselves Falcón, which would have been his father’s mother’s maiden name, rather than González, which should have been the family name. The diaries would clear that up. Paco and Manuela knew nothing.

Manuela drove back to Seville, Javier wedged in the corner by the door. As the unseen city drew closer the tension coiled inside him, dread leaked into his guts. The orange glow appeared in the sky and he retreated into his head, the narrow alleys of his thinking, the dark dead ends of unfinished thoughts, the crowded avenidas of half-remembered things.

Back at the house on Calle Bailén he went straight to the kitchen and drank from a bottle of chilled water in the fridge. The doorbell rang. It was 9.30 p.m. Nobody ever came to see him at this time.

He opened the front door to find Sra Jiménez standing two metres back from it, as if about to change her mind.

‘I was just picking up my luggage from the Hotel Colón,’ she said. ‘I remembered the house wasn’t far. I thought I’d see if you were in.’

A remarkable coincidence, given his recent arrival.

He let her in. Her hair was different, less structured than before. She was wearing a black linen jacket, a black skirt and some red satin mules with kitten heels, which took the grieving edge off the mourning widow. She led the way to the patio. He followed her bare heels and legs whose muscles sprang with each step.

‘You know the house,’ said Falcón.

‘I only ever saw the patio and the room where he showed his work,’ she said. ‘You don’t seem to have changed anything.’

‘Even the paintings are still there,’ he said, ‘hanging as they were when he last showed. Encarnación keeps them dusted. I should take them down … get things organized.’

‘I’m surprised your wife didn’t do all that.’

‘She tried,’ said Falcón. ‘I wasn’t quite ready at the time, you know, to strip the house completely of his presence.’

‘He did have a formidable presence.’

‘Yes, some people found him intimidating, but I wouldn’t have thought you would, Sra Jiménez.’

‘Your wife though, perhaps she was a little overawed … or overwhelmed. You know, a woman likes to make a house her own and feels thwarted if … ‘

‘Would you like to take a look?’ he said, moving across the patio, not wanting her to intrude further into his private life.

Her heels clicked sexily on the old marble flagstones around the fountain. Falcón opened up the glass doors into the room, turned on the light, waved her in and noticed the instant shock on her face.

‘Something the matter?’ asked Falcón.

Consuelo Jiménez walked slowly round the room taking in each painting, from the domes and buttresses of the Iglesia de El Salvador to the pillared Hercules of the Alameda.

‘They’re all here,’ she said, looking at him, amazed.

‘What?’

‘The three paintings I bought from your father.’

‘Ah,’ said Falcón, economical with his embarrassment.

‘He told me they were originals.’

‘They were … at the time of selling.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, gripping her jacket at the waist, annoyed now.

‘Tell me, Sra Jiménez, when my father sold you the paintings … you had some drinks and tapas on the patio and then, what? He took you by the elbow and brought you in here. Did he whisper on your shoulder: “Everything in this room is for sale except … that one”?’

‘That’s exactly what he said.’

‘And you fell for that three times?’

‘Of course not. That’s what he said the first time … ‘

‘But that was precisely the painting you ended up buying?’

She ignored him.

‘The next time he said: “This one is too expensive for you.”’

‘And the time after that?’

‘ “The frame is all wrong on this one … I wouldn’t sell it to you.”’

‘And each time you bought the painting he told you that you shouldn’t or couldn’t buy.’

She stamped her foot, very angry in her retrospective humiliation.

‘Don’t be too upset, Sra Jiménez,’ said Falcón. ‘Nobody else owns the paintings you have in your possession. He wasn’t stupid or careless. It was just a little game he liked to play.’

‘I’d like an explanation,’ she said, and Javier was glad he wasn’t one of her employees.

‘I can only tell you what happened. I was never very sure of his motive,’ said Javier. ‘I didn’t go to any of the parties. I’d sit in my room reading my American crime novels. When the guests had gone, my father, who was normally drunk at this stage, would burst into my room, whether I was asleep or not, shouting “Javier!” and shaking a wad of cash in my face. His takings for the night. If I was asleep I’d grunt something encouraging. If I was awake I’d nod over the top of my book. Then he’d go straight up to the studio and paint the exact painting he’d just sold. By morning it would be framed and hanging on the wall.’

‘What an extraordinary person,’ she said, disgusted.

‘I actually watched him paint that one of the cathedral roof. Do you know how long it took him?’

She looked at the painting, a fantastically complicated series of flying buttresses, walls and domes all laid down with a cubist energy.

‘Seventeen and a half minutes,’ said Javier. ‘He asked me to time him. He was drunk and stoned at the time.’

‘But what’s the point of it?’

‘A one hundred per cent profit on the night.’

‘But why should such a man …? I mean, it’s just too ridiculous. They were expensive, but I don’t think I paid more than a million for any of them. What was he playing at? Did he need this money or something?’

Silence while a warm wind did a turn of the patio.

‘Would you like your money back?’ he asked.

Her head turned slowly from the painting, eyes fixed on him.

‘He didn’t spend it,’ said Falcón. ‘Not a peseta of it. He didn’t even bank it. It’s all in a detergent box upstairs in his studio.’

‘And what does it all mean, Don Javier?’

‘It means … that maybe you shouldn’t be so angry with him because the game he was playing was ultimately against himself.’

‘Can I smoke?’

‘Of course. Come out on to the patio, I’ll give you a drink.’

‘A whisky, if you have it. I need something strong after that.’

They sat on some wrought-iron chairs at a mosaic-covered table under a single wall lamp in the cloister of the patio. They sipped the whisky. Falcón asked after her children. She replied with her mind elsewhere.

‘I went to Madrid on Friday,’ he said. ‘I went to see your husband’s eldest son.’

‘You’re very thorough, Don Javier,’ she said. ‘I’m not used to such rigour after so many years of living with the natives.’

‘I’m especially rigorous when fascinated.’

She crossed her legs, flexed her toes under the red satin band of the mule, which was pointed in his direction. She seemed like someone who would know what to do in bed and be quite demanding, but rewarding with it. Salacious thoughts followed his idle theorizing and he saw her kneeling with her black skirt rucked up over her haunches, looking back over her shoulder at him. He shook his head, not used to these uncontrolled ideas rampaging through his mind. He made a conscious effort to subdue any recklessness, concentrated on the ice in his glass.

‘You wanted to know why Gumersinda killed herself,’ she said.

‘I was interested in your husband’s abject misery, as you called it, which must have been Gumersinda’s state, too, when she died. I wanted to know what could have caused such devastation.’

‘Are all policemen like you?’

‘We’re like people … each one of us is different,’ said Falcón.

‘Did you find out?’

Throughout the account of his conversation with José Manuel, Consuelo Jiménez’s jaunty sexiness disappeared. The shoe, which had been so close to his knee, was withdrawn and joined its partner on the marble flagstones of the patio floor. Only the padded shoulders of her jacket had any shape by the time he’d finished. Falcón poured more whisky.

‘Los Niños de la Calle,’ he said.

‘I was thinking that, too,’ she said.

‘His obsession with security.’

‘I would have had to have found out what Raúl had done. I wouldn’t have been able to leave it. I’d have to know that to understand him … his motives.’

‘What if you had to give up your entire life to the task?’

She lit another cigarette.

‘Do you think this has any bearing on the murder?’

‘I asked him whether he thought Arturo might still be alive,’ said Falcón.

‘And had returned to take his revenge?’ said Sra Jiménez. ‘That’s absurd. I’m sure they killed the poor boy.’

‘Why? I’m just as sure they would make use of him … knotting carpets or whatever.’

‘Like a slave?’ she said. ‘And what if he escaped?’

‘Have you ever been to somewhere like Fez?’ he asked. ‘Think of Seville, with most of its major buildings removed, all its squares and greenery torn out, and then compress it all so that the streets are narrower, the houses almost touching overhead and finally stew it, so that everything is falling apart. Multiply that by a hundred, subtract a thousand years from today’s date and that is Fez. You could go into the Medina as a child and come out an old man without having walked each street. If he ever managed to escape and found his way out of the Medina without being caught, where could he go? Who is he? Where are his papers? He belongs nowhere and to nobody.’

Consuelo shrank from that terrible possibility.

‘So is that who you’re looking for now?’

‘Senior policemen, I mean people with budgets to run a police force, have an aversion to fantasy. I would have to do a lot better than produce a record of my conversation with José Manuel to persuade them to start that kind of a manhunt,’ said Falcón. ‘We have to be more plodding, less inventive, because everything we do ends up going before a judge and they loathe fiction in their courts.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Look through your husband’s life and see what comes up,’ he said. ‘You could help.’

‘Would that get me off the suspects list?’

‘Not until we find the murderer,’ he said. ‘But it might save me a lot of time trying to find my way around a seventy-eight-year life.’

‘I can only help with the last ten.’

‘Well, that includes a time when he was in the public eye … Expo ‘92.’

‘The building committee,’ she said.

‘There’s also that interesting phenomenon of “black” pesetas wanting to become “white” euros.’

‘I’m sure you already know about the restaurant business.’

‘I’m not interested in a little tax fraud, Doña Consuelo. That’s not my department. I have to look at things with more dramatic possibilities. Stuff, for instance, that would require a great deal of trust and where perhaps trust was broken and fortunes lost, lives ruined, leaving powerful motives for revenge.’

‘Is that why you’re a homicide cop?’ she asked, getting to her feet.

He didn’t answer, walked her to the door, tried not to listen to her kitten heels tapping out Morse code for S-E-X on the marble.

‘Who introduced you to my father?’ he asked; a diversionary tactic.

‘Raúl was given an invitation so he sent me. I’d worked in a gallery and he assumed I knew what I was doing.’

‘Is that how you met Ramón Salgado?’

She missed a beat.

‘His gallery sent out the invitations. It was Ramón who opened the door, made the introductions.’

‘Was it Ramón Salgado who told you of your remarkable resemblance to Gumersinda?’

She blinked as if she hadn’t remembered that drop of information leaking out of her. Falcón opened the door, which led out into the short cobbled access street lined with orange trees that led down to Calle Bailén.

‘Yes, it was,’ she said. ‘Coming here tonight brought it all back. I rang the bell and heard him talking to the people he’d just let in so that he was turned away from me when he opened the door. When our eyes connected I could tell he was completely floored. I think he might have even started to call me Gumersinda, but that might be my memory exaggerating the moment. Still, by the time we got to the drinks he’d told me, which meant that I drank too much whisky and blabbed away like an idiot to your father, whom I’d spent half my life dying to meet.’

‘So Ramón and your husband knew each other from the Tangier days?’

Another thing she hadn’t remembered saying.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

They shook hands. He looked at her legs as she walked down to Calle Bailén. He shut the door and went straight up to the studio.

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

20th March 1932, Dar Riffen, Morocco

Oscar (I don’t know if this is his real name, but it’s the one he uses) is not only my NCO but my teacher, too. He was a teacher in ‘real life’ as he calls it. That is all I know about him. Los brutos (my comrades), tell me that Oscar is here because he’s a child molester. They cannot know this for certain because it is one of the precepts of the Legion that you don’t have to reveal your past. Los brutos, of course, take great delight in revealing their past to me. Most are murderers, some are rapists and murderers. Oscar says they are flesh, blood and bone with some primitive strings attached inside, which allow them to walk upright, communicate, defecate and kill people. Los brutos are suspicious of Oscar only because they fear and distrust even the rudiments of intelligence. (I hide to write in this book or Oscar lets me use his room.) But los brutos respect him too. He’s beaten every one of them at some time or another.

Oscar took me on as his pupil and charge when he caught me drawing in the barracks. He had a couple of los brutos hold me and tore the paper from my hands and found that he was looking at himself in all his brutal intelligence. I was paralysed with fear. He grabbed me by the collar and hauled me off to his room, followed by shouts from los brutos egging him on. He threw me against the wall so that I collapsed winded. He looked at the drawing again, got down on his haunches, put his face up to mine and looked into my head with his steel-blue eyes. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, which was strange. I knew better than to answer with my name and shut up. He told me the drawing was good and that he would be my teacher but that he had a reputation to maintain. So I still got beaten.

17th October 1932, Dar Riffen

I admitted to Oscar that I’ve only made two entries in this book since he gave it to me. He is furious. I tell him I have nothing to report. All we do is go on endless exercises followed by bouts of drinking and fighting. He reminds me that this journal should not just be an account of the external but an examination of the internal. I have no idea how to approach this internal thing he is talking about. ‘You have to write about who you are,’ he says. I show him my first entry. He says, ‘Because you have no family does not mean you have ceased to exist. They are only a reference, now you must find your own context.’ I write this down with no idea of its meaning. He tells me that a French philosopher said: ‘I think therefore I am.’ I ask: ‘What is thinking?’ There is a long pause in which for some reason I imagine a train moving through a vast landscape. I tell him this and he says, ‘Well, it’s a start.’

23rd March 1933, Dar Riffen

I have just completed my first major work, which is the entire company individually caricatured riding their own camel, which has taken on some of their characteristics. I mount them on boards and hang them in the barracks so that they all seem to be in a caravan heading for the Dar Riffen arch, which instead of the usual legionnaire’s motto reads: legionarios a beber, legionarios a joder. All the officers come in and ask to see it. Oscar tears down my cartoon arch, saying: ‘You don’t want to be court-martialled and shot for a silly drawing.’ Now I am never short of cigarettes.

12th November 1934, Dar Riffen

We have just welcomed back Colonel Yagüe and the Legion, who have been in Asturias to put down the miners’ rebellion … Oscar is grim. There was no resistance and, having relieved Oviedo and Gijón, los brutos ‘demonstrated a lack of discipline and were not restrained by command’. This means that they killed, raped and mutilated without fear of punishment. Somehow in this conversation Oscar reveals that he is German and bores me by saying how German soldiers would never have behaved like this. His empty boots seem to be screaming in the corner of the room. ‘This is the beginning of a catastrophe,’ he says. I don’t see it like that and can only get excited by the gory stories told and retold. Apparently I still haven’t learnt how to think. I’ve noticed, in all the history I’ve read, under Oscar’s pointing finger, just how many times the thinkers are taken away and shot, hanged or beheaded.

17th April 1935, Dar Riffen

My second major work — Colonel Yagüe wants me to paint his portrait. Oscar gives me some advice: ‘Nobody likes the truth unless it happens to coincide with their own version of it.’ It’s only when I have Colónel Yagüe sitting in front of me that I realize the real nature of the task. He’s a bull of a man, with thick round spectacles, grey receding hair, heavy jowls and a half-smile that’s nearly friendly until you see the cruelty in it. I sit him so that none of the damaging profile is showing. I ask if he wants to retain the glasses and he tells me that if he doesn’t he will look like a newly born puppy. I see a coat on a chair with a fur collar. I ask him to wear it and tell him it will frame his face and give him an adventurous, heroic look. He puts it on. We are going to like each other.

1st May 1935, Dar Riffen, Morocco

The portrait is a triumph. There is a small private unveiling ceremony with a select band of officers. Colonel Yagüe is delighted by the reaction. The fur collar was inspired. I thinned his face down and gave him a jutting chin so that he looked defiant, resilient, dependable but bold and enterprising, too. In the background I have the massed ranks of legionnaires marching through the arch, which reads as it should: Legionarios a luchar, legionarios a morir. Oscar tells me: ‘I see we have had a convergence of delusion.’ Colonel Yagüe does not hang the painting. He could not be seen to be more grand or ambitious than his superiors.

14th July 1936, Dar Riffen

Summer manoeuvres finish with a parade taken by General Romerales and General Gómez Morato, our two most senior commanders of the Army of Africa. Oscar, who has a nose for these things, says that something is going to happen. His evidence is that during the banquet after the parade, even before the dessert course was served, there were shouts of ‘Café!’ which was clearly not a demand for coffee. It stands for Camaradas! Arriba! Falange Española! and is evidence of Colonel Yagüe at work. He’s a falangist, who Oscar believes loathes General Gómez Morato. I don’t know how he informs himself of this and he says that all I had to do was look at the officers who came to the private unveiling ceremony of my portrait of Colonel Yagüe.

We are locked away in our barracks with no knowledge of what is going on across the straits. Oscar finds a newspaper, El Sol, in which there’s an article about the shooting of an officer called Lt José Castillo outside his home in Madrid only a month after the man was married. ‘The Falange did that,’ says Oscar. I am puzzled. I don’t know where we stand. I ask Oscar who we should support and he tells me: ‘Our commanding officer, unless you want to get shot.’ At least there are no difficult decisions to be made on that score, although Oscar alarms me by adding: ‘Whoever that might be.’

Later in the evening he calls me in. He’s very excited. He’s been listening to the radio. Spain is in a state of shock. Calvo Sotelo has been shot. I couldn’t care less, having never heard the name before. Oscar cuffs me round the head. Sotelo is the monarchist leader and a prominent figure on the right. His murder will have terrible consequences. I ask who killed him and Oscar bats an imaginary ball from hand to hand saying: ‘Tit-tat, tit-tat.

‘Except that the left have gone too far this time,’ he says. ‘This will not be seen as personal because of Calvo Sotelo’s position. This is a political killing and now, I can guarantee it, there will be civil war.’ I ask him where he stands in all of this and he holds out his hands, the palms criss-crossed with a thousand creases so that I think I must draw them. ‘Before you,’ he says and I leave him none the wiser.

19th July 1936, Ceuta

Colonel Yagüe marched us out of the barracks at 9 p.m. and by midnight we had control of the port of Ceuta. Not a shot was fired at us or by us. We were disappointed to meet no resistance as on the march we’d all been spoiling for a fight. By morning we were told that Melilla, Tetuán, Ceuta and Larache were all under military control and that General Franco was on his way to take over command.

We march back to the barracks at Dar Riffen in the early morning. General Franco arrives at the barracks in the afternoon and we are all on parade to meet him. We surprise ourselves by going mad without knowing why. Colonel Yagüe makes a speech which starts with the words: ‘Here they are, just as you left them … ‘ and we see that the general is very moved. We roar, ‘Franco! Franco!’ and he announces a pay rise of one peseta a day. We all erupt again.

6th August 1936, Seville

My first time on Spanish soil. We were one of the first detachments across the straits by boat and were disappointed not to be airlifted. They put us on trucks and we drove straight up the middle of completely empty roads to Seville. Our orders are to head north under Colonel Yagüe to Mérida. We’ve been told that anyone who resists us is a communist and, as such, against Spain, and that they are to be dealt with in the most severe manner and shown no mercy. The word is that the opposition is ‘shitting in its pants’ at the thought of the Army of Africa. Our reputation from the Asturias miners’ rising travels before us. The effect of these orders, shot through with their bloodthirsty emotion, is like electricity through our ranks. We were already fired up and now we are invincible and righteous, too.

10th August 1936, near Mérida

The advance has been relentless (300 km in four days) and we have quickly learnt that the news of the terror we inspire travels at the speed of sound. We call it castigo, punishment. When we have quelled any resistance, we move through the towns and villages with knives and machetes. It is the cold steel that terrifies. It is not impersonal like bullets.

At El Real de la Jara the people fled into the hills only to be rounded up by the Moors of the Regulares who did such terrible things to them that we met no resistance until we reached Almendralejo. There a madness seized us and we killed everybody left in the town. Hundreds of corpses, men and women, littered the streets. The stench in the heat was soon unbearable and we left the stunned houses, lifeless under a pall of smoke from the burning roofs. Oscar presses me ‘to write it all down’, but I am too exhausted for anything after the demands of the day.

11th August 1936, Mérida

Officers joke that they are giving the peasants ‘agrarian reform’.

One of the Moors from the Regulares shows us his flyblown and stinking collection of men’s testicles. They castrate victims as a rite of battle. This is too much for Oscar, who puts it in a report to our Captain and the practice is soon banned.

15th August 1936, Badajoz

The 4th Bandera stormed the Puerta Trinidad. They went in singing and took heavy machine-gun fire full in the face, which drove them back for a moment. They breached the gates at the second attempt and we went in after them, stumbling over their dead bodies. Once inside it was street-to-street fighting all the way to the centre. In the afternoon anybody suspected of resistance was herded into the bullring near the cathedral. There was a lot of weeping and wailing, but we were savage after our losses in the initial assault. Shots rang out until nightfall. The Regulares searched the town, house to house, looking for anybody with a weapon or even a recoil bruise on their shoulder. After the indiscipline of Asturias, Oscar is determined that we will not lose control and go on an orgy of looting and raping like the other companies in the bandera and the Regulares. The men are disgruntled until Oscar brings in some cases of drink, mixed bottles stolen from a bar. We pour aguardiente, anís and red wine into the same glass and this drink becomes known to us as the Earthquake.

22nd September 1936, Maqueda

I know now what it is to be battle-hardened. Before they were just words attached to veterans. Now I realize that it is a mental state which endures. It comes from making multiple decisions under extreme pressure, from the complete suppression of fear, from seeing men die around you daily, from the conquering of exhaustion, from the acceptance of the inevitability of battle.

29th September 1936, Toledo

The attack was launched at midday on 27th September. Before the assault we were marched past the mutilated corpses of two executed nationalists a couple of kilometres outside town. The order came down from the colonels: ‘You know what to do.’ The fighting was fierce and the Regulares took a beating in the initial storming of the town. Just as we were expecting to have to pull back and regroup the leftists gave up and ran for it. There was some street fighting. The Moors were particularly savage that afternoon, hacking away at prisoners with their machetes until the steep cobbled streets of the town were literally running with blood. Grenades were thrown into the San Juan Hospital and as the Regulares approached a seminary, in which a group of anarchists were holed up, it burst into flames.

30th September 1936, Toledo

Oscar has found out that the republicans left the El Grecos in the city and has arranged through our Captain for us to see them. In the end we see seven of the Apostle paintings but not the famous Burial of Count Orgaz. I am mesmerized and quite unable to unravel his technique, how he seems to achieve an inner light that shines through the flesh and blood, even the robes, of the apostles. After the roar of battle, the mutilations, the blood-spattered streets, we find peace in front of those paintings and I know now that I want to become an artist.

20th November 1936, Ciudad Universitaria de Madrid This war has reached a new level. We have been bombing our own capital with explosives and incendiaries for more than a week. We were camped out by the railway tracks on the west side of the River Manzanares, with our every attempt to get across being easily driven back. Then suddenly we were over it and running up to the university, unopposed and amazed. We couldn’t think what had happened — another loss of nerve at the vital moment or the usual republican fiasco of one unit retreating before the replacement had arrived. The fight that ensued indicated the latter. We’ve taken the School of Architecture but have been driven back from the hall of Philosophy and Letters. We are fighting International Brigades of German, French, Italians and Belgians. The buildings ring with German communist songs and the ‘Internationale’. Oscar says these brigades are all made up of writers, poets, composers and artists. They even name their battalions after literary martyrs. I ask him why artists exclusively support the left and he gives one of his usual enigmatic replies: ‘It’s in their nature.’ And I, as always, have to ask him what he means. Our pupil/teacher relationship has never changed.

‘They are creative,’ he says. ‘They want to change things. They don’t like the old order of monarchy, the church, the military and the landowners. They believe in the power of the common man and his right to be equal. To bring this about they have to destroy all the old institutions.’

‘And replace them with what?’ I ask.

‘Exactly,’ says Oscar. ‘They will replace them with a different order … one that they like with no kings or priests, no businessmen or farmers. You should think about that, Francisco, if you want to be an artist. Great art changes the way we look at things. Think of Impressionism. They laughed at Monet’s blurred vision. Think of Cubism. They assumed that after Braque was shot in the head and had to be trepanned, he lost his mind. Think of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — call them women? And what do you think General Yagüe hangs on his wall? Or General Varela?’

‘You ‘re playing with me now,’ I say.

An attack starts and we crawl to the window and shoot down on the men running out of Philosophy and Letters (we’re in Agriculture). There’s a large explosion in the Clinical Hospital (we find out later that a bomb was sent up in the lift to the Regulares). We decide to retreat from Agriculture and go back to the French Institute’s Casa de Velázquez, which is full of the dead bodies of a company of Poles. As we zig-zag back, Oscar shouts to me that General Yagüe will probably go to his grave wrapped in the canvas of my heroic painting. Bullets rip across the wooden doors of the building and we change course and dive through the windows on to the soft landing of the dead Poles. We fire back through the windows until the attack loses heart.

‘Think about it,’ says Oscar. ‘Here we are at the front line, not just of a civil war, but of the whole of cultural Spain, maybe even civilized Europe. What do you want to paint in the future? Yagüe on horseback? The Archbishop of Seville at his toilet? Or do you want to redefine the female form? See perfection in a line of landscape? Find truth in a urinal?’

We make for the back of the building and sprint across behind the Santa Cristina hospital to the Clinical Hospital to support the Regulares. We find the shattered lift in the rubble of its shaft and run up the stairs. In one of the laboratories there are six dead Regulares with no evidence of bullet wounds or bomb blast. On the floor a fire smokes and there is the smell of roast meat. There are animals in cages all around and we realize that the Moors have cooked and eaten some of them. Oscar shakes his head at the bizarre scene. We go up on to the roof and survey the terrain. I ask Oscar what he wants out of all this and he just says that he doesn’t belong anywhere. He’s an outsider.

‘It’s you that matters,’ he says, ‘you’re young. You have to decide. Look … if you want to cross over, don’t worry about me, I won’t shoot you in the back. And I’ll put it in my report that you went over for artistic reasons.’

This is what I hate about Oscar, he’s always trying to prod me into thinking, into making decisions.

25th November 1936, outskirts of Madrid

We have pulled out of the direct assault on Madrid. That vital month we spent in the relief of Toledo gave the republicans time to organize themselves. We could keep hammering away but it would cost us too much. The strategy has changed now. We are going to overrun the outlying country and lay siege. We are an army that swings from the most advanced techniques (aerial bombing) to the mediaeval (siege) …

In the space of six weeks the two armies seem to have become more equal. The leftists now have Russian tanks and planes and men from all over the world are fighting in their International Brigades. They have the supply ports of the Mediterranean — Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia. Oscar had always said it would be over by Christmas, now he thinks it will take years.

18th February 1937, near Vaciamadrid

We have been shoved off the Madrid-Valencia road, which is what we expected when we first took it. The Russian fighters strafed us mercilessly. We are in a stalemate now and can only wait to see how it goes in the north. We have time and good supplies of cigarettes and coffee. Oscar has made a chess set out of empty cartridges and we play, or rather he teaches me how to lose gracefully. We have conversations so that I can practise my basic German, which he is also teaching me.

‘Why are you a Nationalist?’ he asks, moving out a pawn.

‘Why are you?’ I counter, meeting his pawn with mine.

‘I’m not Spanish,’ he says, covering the pawn with his knight. ‘I don’t have to decide.’

‘Nor am I,’ I say, supporting my pawn with another. ‘I’m African.’

‘Your parents are Spanish.’

‘But I was born in Tetuán.’

‘And this allows you to be apolitical?’

‘It means I have no foundation for political belief.’

‘Your father — was he a rightist?’

‘I have no father.’

‘But was he?’

No answer from me.

‘What was his work?’

‘He owned a hotel.’

‘Then he was of the right,’ says Oscar. ‘Did he go to Mass?’

‘Only to drink the wine.’

‘Then that is your foundation. You learn politics at the dinner table.’

‘And your father?’

‘He was a doctor.’

‘Difficult,’ I say. ‘Did he go to Mass?’

‘We don’t have Mass.’

‘Even more difficult.’

‘He was a socialist,’ says Oscar.

‘Then you are surely in the wrong place.’

‘I shot him on 27th October 1923.’

I look up, but he continues to study the chessboard.

‘You’re dead in three moves,’ he says.

23rd November 1937, Cogolludo, near Guadalajara

Our bandera has been broken up and we have been distributed around the rest of the army. We think we have been positioned here for a new attempt on the capital. Oscar is not speaking to me because here I record my first win on that most arduous of fronts — the chessboard.

15th December 1937, Cogolludo

The leftists have surprised us by mounting an offensive on Teruel just as we were preparing to overrun the capital and spend Christmas on the Gran Vía. We only know that Teruel is the coldest place in Spain and that 4,000 Nationalists are besieged inside the town.

31st December 1937, near Teruel

Brutally cold: -18°C. Blizzard. Snow a metre thick. I hate it. I write this with difficulty and only to take my mind off the terrible conditions. The counterattack has ground to a halt but we continue to shell the town, which is no more than snow-covered rubble. We stop when the visibility drops to zero.

8th February 1938, Teruel

We started an attack yesterday, trying to force an encirclement. The fighting is fierce and Oscar is hit in the stomach and we have to carry him back to the rear. I have taken over his role as NCO.

10th February 1938, Teruel

I found Oscar in the field hospital and even with the morphine he’s in terrible pain. He knows he will not survive the wound. He has left me his books and chess set and has given me strict instructions to burn his journals without reading them. He is sobbing with pain and as he kisses me I feel his warm tears on my face.

23rd February 1938, Teruel

We buried Oscar this morning. Later I burnt his diaries. I obeyed his instructions and dropped the first book into the fire without opening it. As it burned I could not resist looking through the pages of the next book which were all about a love he could not seem to bear. He never mentioned the girl by name, which did not surprise me as we never talked on a personal level except when he told me he’d shot his father. In the third book he began using imaginary dialogues, which were easier to digest than his stolid prose. It was with a jolt that I saw my own words and came to the electrifying conclusion that I was the inconsiderate lover. This was further confirmed when, enraged by some unconscious remark of mine, he referred to me as Die Künstlerin. I burnt the rest without reading it.

I sit now writing with a candle clenched between my knees. It occurs to me that all Oscar’s urging me to write down my thoughts was in the desperate hope that I would reveal myself to him. He must have been disappointed by my endless remarks on military manoeuvres.

I feel no disgust even though Oscar was physically repellent. I am sad to have lost my teacher and friend, the man who was more of a father to me than my own. I am lonely again without his brute appearance, his snapping mind, his sure military guidance. I am having incomprehensible thoughts. Something has been disturbed in me which I can only recognize as some shapeless need. I do not understand it. It refuses to be defined.

15th April 1938, Lérida

I was knocked unconscious for some hours and have been brought to the hospital here, which I have to be reminded we captured nearly two weeks ago. I have made no entries since Oscar’s funeral. I am furious with myself because I cannot remember whether I made any progress with my thoughts. This ‘need’ I wrote about is a blank in my brain. Events have been reasserting themselves. The relentless advance after we put the republicans to flight at Teruel. Crossing the River Ebro and taking Fraga. Even the assault on Lérida takes some shape. But however much I squeeze my mind I cannot recover what I was thinking of, what it was that Oscar’s diaries had levered open. I am bereft without knowing why.

18th November 1938, Ribarroya

This is the last republican bridgehead. They are all now beyond the Ebro and the situation has returned to what it was in July except that now the snow falls and more than 20,000 men have lost their lives in the mountains. I remember all those chess games I played with Oscar before I learnt a subtler insight. I was always the attacker and Oscar the defender who, having read my undisguised plans, would then become the fierce counter attacker and wipe me off the board. It has been so with our armies. The republicans attack and in doing so reveal the concentration of their forces and the paucity of their aims. We defend, marshal our response and drive them back to a position where they are weaker than they were before. As Oscar told me: ‘It is always easier to react than to be original. You’ll find the same holds for art as in life.’

26th January 1939, Barcelona

Yesterday we came into the empty city behind unopposed tanks. We’d crossed the Llobregat River the day before and could already smell the desperation that hung above the collapsing republican will. There was no sense of triumph. We were exhausted to the point of not even knowing if we were glad to be alive. By evening we were in control and it was then that our supporters felt safe enough to venture out into the streets to rejoice and, of course, to take their revenge on the defeated. We did not stop them.