The Blind Man of Seville

20

Wednesday, 18th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

Falcón sat at home, his fork hovering over his untouched lunch, thinking not about Ramírez but Comisario León, who had not reached his position without considerable political talent. If León was keeping in touch with his investigation via Ramírez and allowing this pressure to be applied to Consuelo Jiménez, who presumably knew nothing about MCA, what did that mean, given that the Comisario had been a director of the consultancy? Falcón put his fork down as a wave of paranoia shuddered through him like nausea. They were going to take him out at the first opportunity. While the details of MCA stayed dormant, Comisario León was happy for them to keep knocking at Consuelo Jiménez’s heavy door. If they leaked, he was finished.

They reconvened after lunch to watch some of Raúl Jiménez’s old home movies. Pérez, who’d brought them up from Mudanzas Triana, joined the session. He’d also reported that the warehouse had a single entrance and that all the long-term storage was in one area at the back of the building. Each client had a locked cage for Cases and furniture. All the packing cases were sealed with tape. The tape dated back to the time when the cases were stored, so if somebody had opened them it would be obvious. Raúl Jiménez’s cases were amongst the oldest pieces stored in the warehouse. All Mudanzas Triana personnel had access to the warehouse but only the warehouse manager had the keys to the storage cages. Nobody could access the cages without him being present. The keys were kept in a locked safe in his office. The warehouse was patrolled at night by two security guards with dogs. In the last forty years there had been four reported break-ins with nothing significant stolen as each break-in had been interrupted.

Falcón was glad that Pérez sat in on the session to react to the brunt of Ramírez’s comments. He hadn’t expected to become so emotionally engaged by the black-and-white flickering images of Raúl Jiménez’s earlier and happier life. Never before, in the dark of the cinema, had he been so moved. Fiction hadn’t been able to do this to him. He’d always seen through the contrivance, withdrawn from the imperative engagement and never shed a single sentimental tear.

Now, having come to know the protagonists in the most personal way, he watched in the darkness as José Manuel and Marta played on the beach while the uncomplicated waves folded on to the shore. Raúl’s wife, Gumersinda, walked into frame, turned and held out her arms. Running after her into the frame came the toddling Arturo. He reached her outstretched arms and she clasped his small chest in her hands and lifted him high above her head, so that his legs dangled and he looked down on her smiling face with pure and wild delight. As the toddler was taken skywards Falcón’s stomach flipped. He remembered that feeling and had to pinch at the tears, shudder under the weight of the tragedy that had torn this family apart.

He couldn’t understand his emotional intensity over this family. He’d come into contact with other families ravaged by murder or rape, drug addiction or extreme violence. Why was the Jiménez family so different? He had to talk about this before his desperation turned from leaking to free flow. Alicia Aguado … would she work?

The lights came up in the room. Ramírez and Pérez turned in their chairs to look at their superior.

‘There’s reels of this stuff,’ said Ramírez. ‘What exactly are we doing here, Inspector Jefe?’

We’re adding to the profile of our killer,’ he said. ‘We have a physical idea of him from the blow-ups we’ve taken from the video shot in the cemetery. We have been told he is guapo and he has beautiful hands. Physically he is taking shape. Mentally: we’ve talked about his creativity and his playfulness. We know he is interested in film. We know that he has made a study of the Jiménez family … ‘

He found himself drying up. Why were they looking at these movies?

‘The box in which these films were stored was sealed,’ said Pérez, reiterating his report. ‘These canisters haven’t seen the light of day since they were put in there.’

‘But what a day that was,’ said Falcón, like a drowning man clutching at passing reeds. ‘The day he expunged his youngest son’s memory from his mind.’

‘But what does it add to the profile?’ asked Ramírez.

‘I was thinking of those terrible self-inflicted injuries,’ said Falcón. ‘Before Jiménez did that to himself he was refusing to watch something on the television. Then he had his eyelids cut off and what did he see? What would have induced Raúl Jiménez to do that to himself?’

‘If somebody cut my eyelids off … ‘ started Pérez.

‘You saw the boy, the tiny helpless boy,’ said Falcón. ‘You heard him shrieking and whooping in his mother’s arms … Don’t you think …?’

He stopped. The two men were looking hard at him, their faces blank and uncomprehending.

‘But, Inspector Jefe,’ said Pérez, ‘there was no soundtrack.’

‘I know, Sub-Inspector … ‘ started Falcón, but he hadn’t known and his mind was suddenly shot through with a colourless panic and he couldn’t even remember his colleague’s name. He couldn’t think of another word to follow the one he’d just said. He’d become the dried actor he most feared: the one playing himself in his own life.

He came to as if the bubble he’d been encased in had burst and real life had streamed back up to him again. The men had moved away and were dismantling the screen. Falcón was surprised to find it close to 9 p.m. He had to get out, but he had a need to salvage something from this situation first. He went to the door.

‘You file the report on these films, Sub-Inspector … ‘ he said, that name still eluding him. ‘And when you do it I want you to use your imagination. I want you to think about who was holding the camera and the mental state of the man at the time.’

‘Yes, Inspector Jefe,’ said Pérez. ‘But you’ve always told me to report the facts and not attempt to interpret them.’

‘Do your best,’ he said and left.

He tried to dry swallow an Orfidal, but it got stuck in the clag of his mouth and he had to go to the bathroom and scoop water to his lips and over his hot face. He dabbed himself dry and found he didn’t recognize his own eyes in the mirror. They were somebody else’s, these pink-rimmed, filmy things, sunken in their sockets, flinching in his skull. He was losing his authority. Nobody would respect these eyes.

He got out of the Jefatura into the cool night air, drove back home and walked to Dra Alicia Aguado’s small house in Calle Vidrio, arriving there shortly before his 10 p.m. appointment. He paced the pavement outside the newly renovated house, nervous as an actor before an audition, until he couldn’t stand it any longer and rang the bell. She let him in and called him up a dark stairway to the light.

In the consulting room Falcón noticed that there was nothing on the light-blue walls and no bric-a-brac. In fact, the only furniture was a sofa and a double seat in the shape of an ‘S’.

The room was narrow, the house feeling small and contained, making his own place seem absurd. It was clearly a well-managed and comfortable head to reside in. Whereas his own sprawling, multi-roomed, cavernous, storeyed, balconied, baroque, Byzantine madness was like a boarded-up asylum, where a single inmate had hidden until it had all gone quiet …

Alicia Aguado had short black hair, a pale face and no trace of make-up. She held out her hand but did not look directly at him. As their hands touched she said:

‘Dr Valera didn’t tell you I was partially sighted,’ she said.

‘He only guaranteed that you would not be interested in art.’

‘I wish I could be, but I’ve had this condition since I was twelve years old.’

What is the condition?’

‘Retinitis pigmentosa.’

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ said Falcón.

‘I have abnormal pigment cells, which for no definable reason begin to stick together on the retina in clumps,’ she said. ‘The first symptom is night blindness and the last, much later, is complete blindness.’

Javier was paralysed by this exchange. He held on to her hand, which she slowly extracted and showed him to the S-shaped chair.

‘I have to explain a few things about my method,’ she said, sitting next to him but facing him on the specifically designed seat. ‘I cannot see your face clearly and we communicate so much through our faces. As you may know, we are hard-wired for facial recognition at birth. This means that I have to use other ways of registering your feelings. It’s a method similar to a Chinese doctor’s, which relies on pulse. So we sit in this strange seat, you rest your arm in the middle, I hold on to your wrist and you talk. Your voice will be recorded by a tape within the arm. Are you happy with all that?’

Falcón nodded, lulled by the woman’s calm authority, her placid face, her green and unseeing eyes.

‘Part of my method is that I will rarely instigate conversation. The idea is that you talk and I listen. All I may do is to try to direct your thoughts or prompt you if you reach a dead end. I will, however, set you off.’

She turned a switch on the side of the chair that started the tape. She took Falcón’s wrist in an expert but gentle grip.

‘Dr Valera has told me that you’re suffering the symptoms of stress. I can tell that you are anxious now. He says that the change in your mental stability started at the beginning of an investigation into a particularly brutal murder. He has also mentioned your father and your reluctance to be treated by someone who might know your father’s work. Can you think why the first incident should — What was that?’

‘What?’

‘That word, “incident”, it provoked a strong reaction in you.’

‘It’s a word that appears in my father’s journals, which I’ve just started reading. It refers to something that happened when he was sixteen which made him leave home. He never says what it was.’

Now that he’d seen the efficacy of her method he had to suppress his desire to twist his wrist out of her grip. Alicia Aguado not only seemed tuned in to the human anatomy but also to the writhing of its soul.

‘Do you think that was why he wrote his journal?’ she asked.

‘You mean to resolve this “incident”?’ said Falcón. ‘I don’t think that was his intention. I don’t think he would have even started if one of his comrades hadn’t given him a book to write in.’

‘These people are sent sometimes.’

‘Like this killer has been sent to me?’

Silence, while she let that sink in.

‘Everything said in this room is confidential and that includes police information. The tapes are locked in a safe,’ she said. ‘I want you to tell me what started it.’

He told her about Raúl Jiménez’s face. How the killer wanted Jiménez to look at something, which he’d refused to do. Falcón spared no detail in the description of how it must have felt to come round with no eyelids and how this, combined with the horror of what the killer was showing, had driven Raúl Jiménez to appalling self-mutilation. He believed that his breakdown had started on seeing that face, because in it he saw the pain and terror of someone who had been forced to confront their deepest horrors.

‘Do you think the murderer sees himself in a professional capacity?’ she asked. ‘As a psychologist or psychoanalyst?’

‘Ah!’ said Falcón. ‘You mean do I see him like that?’

‘Do you?’

Silence, until Alicia Aguado decided to move things along.

‘Some connection has been made by you between this murder case and your father.’

He told her about the photographs of Tangier he’d found in Raúl Jiménez’s study.

‘We lived there too, at the same time,’ he said. ‘I thought I might find my father in the photos.’

‘Was that all?’

Javier flexed his hand, uncomfortable at the information flowing through his wrist.

‘I thought I might find a picture of my mother, too,’ he said. ‘She died in Tangier in 1961 when I was five years old.’

‘Did you find her?’ asked Alicia, after some time.

‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘What I found in the background of one of the shots was my father kissing the woman who eventually became my second mother … I mean, his second wife. The date on the back was before my mother died.’

‘Infidelity is not so unusual,’ she said.

‘My sister would agree with you. She said he was “no angel”.’

‘Has this had an effect on how you see your father?’

Falcón found himself actively thinking. For the first time in his life he was actually searching the narrow cobbled streets of his mind. Sweat broke from his forehead. He wiped it away.

‘Your father died two years ago. Were you close to him?’

‘I thought I was close to him. I was his favourite. I … I … now I’m confused.’

He told her about the will, his father’s expressed wishes for the destruction of his studio and how he was disobeying him by reading the journals.

‘Do you think that strange?’ she asked. ‘Famous men normally want to leave something for posterity.’

‘There was a warning letter which told me it could be a painful journey.’

‘Then why are you doing this?’

Falcón hit a cul-de-sac in his mind, a flat white wall of panic. His silence deepened.

‘What did you say it was that so appalled you about the murder victim?’ she asked.

‘That he was being forced to see …’

‘Remember who you were looking for in the victim’s photographs?’

‘My mother.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

In the silence that followed Alicia stood, put the kettle on and made some herbal tea. She fumbled for some Chinese teacups. She poured the tea, took his wrist again.

‘Are you interested in photography?’ she asked.

‘I was until recently,’ said Falcón. ‘I even have my own dark room in the house. I like black-and-white photography. I like to develop my own pictures.’

‘How do you look at a photograph?’ she asked. ‘What do you see?’

‘I see a memory.’

He told her about the home movies he’d seen that afternoon, how they’d made him weep.

‘Did you go to the beach much as a child?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes, in Tangier the beach was right there next to the town … I mean, in the town almost. We went every afternoon in summer. My brother and sister, my mother, the maid and I. Sometimes it would just be my mother and I.’

‘You and your mother.’

‘Are you asking me where my father was?’

She didn’t respond.

‘My father was working. He had a studio. It overlooked the beach. I went there sometimes. He used to watch over us though, I know that.’

‘Watch over you?’

‘He had a pair of binoculars. He let me use them sometimes. He helped me find them … my mother, Manuela and Paco on the beach. He said it was our secret. “It’s how I keep an eye on you.”’

‘Keeping an eye on you?’ she said.

‘You mean, it sounds as if he was spying on us,’ said Falcón. ‘That doesn’t make sense. Why should a man spy on his own family?’

‘In these family movies you saw today, did you ever see the father?’

‘No, he was behind the camera.’

She asked him why he was watching these movies and he explained the whole Raúl Jiménez story. She listened, fascinated, only stopping him to change the tape halfway through.

‘But why are you watching these movies?’ she asked again, at the end of it all.

‘I’ve just told you,’ he said. ‘I’ve just spent nearly half an hour …’

He stopped and thought for long, endlessly complex minutes.

‘I told you that I see photographs as memory,’ he said. ‘I’m entranced by them because I have a problem with memory. I told you that we used to go to the beach as a family, but I didn’t really remember it. I didn’t see it. It’s not something inside me that I recall. I’ve invented it to fill the gaps. I know we did go to the beach, but I can’t remember it as if it’s my own. Am I making sense?’

‘Perfect sense.’

‘I want these movies and photographs to jog my memory,’ he said. ‘When I was talking to José Manuel Jiménez about his family tragedy he told me he had problems recalling his childhood. It made me try to remember my earliest memory and I panicked, because I knew it wasn’t there.’

‘Now you can answer my earlier question, about why you’re reading the journals,’ she said.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, as if something had clicked, ‘I’m disobeying him, because I think the journals might have the secrets to my memory.’

The tape clicked off. Distant city sounds filled the room. He waited for her to change the tape but she made no move.

‘That’s all for today,’ she said.

‘But I’ve only just begun.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But we’re not going to disentangle you in a single session. This is a long process. There are no short cuts.’

‘But we’re just … we’ve just started touching on things.’

‘That’s right. It’s been a good first session,’ she said. ‘I want you to do some thinking. I want you to ask yourself if you see any similarities between the Jiménez family and your own.’

‘Both families have the same number of children … I was the youngest …’

‘We’re not talking about it now.’

‘But I need to make progress.’

‘You’ve done that, but there’s only so much reality that the human mind can take. You have to get used to it first.’

‘Reality?’

‘That’s what we’re striving for.’

‘But what are we in now, if it’s not reality?’ he said, panicked by this thought. ‘I have more daily doses of reality than anybody I know. I’m a homicide detective. Life and death is my business. You don’t get more real than that.’

‘But that’s not the reality we’re talking about.’

‘Explain.’

‘The session is over.’

‘Just explain that one thing to me.’

‘I’ll give you a physical analogy,’ she said.

‘Whatever … I have to know this.’

‘Ten years ago I broke a wine glass and, as I was cleaning it up, a tiny sliver got into my thumb. I couldn’t get it out and because of the nerves there the doctor didn’t want to touch it. Over the years it hurt occasionally, nothing more, and all the time the body was protecting itself from that glass. It formed layers of skin around it until it was like a small pea. Then one day the body rejected it. The pea came to the surface and, with the aid of some magnesium sulphate, popped out of my thumb.’

‘And that’s your explanation of the kind of reality we’re talking about?’ he said.

‘Slivers of glass can enter the mind, too,’ she said, and just the concept nauseated him. ‘Sometimes these slivers of glass are too painful to deal with. We push them to the back of our mind. We think we can forget them. Our mind even protects itself from them by scarfing these slivers in layers … I mean, lies. And so we distance ourselves from the sliver until one day something happens and, for no reason at all, it heads for the surface of our conscious mind. The difference between the mental and the physical is that we can’t apply magnesium sulphate to draw the sliver of glass into consciousness.’

He stood and paced the room. Those tiny slivers of glass rising to the surface had triggered some minor terror. It was as if he could feel them crackling in his head like … like an ice field. Was that another physical analogy?

‘You’re frightened,’ she said, ‘which is normal. None of this is easy. It demands great courage. But the rewards are enormous. The reward is eventually a real peace of mind and the restarting of all possibilities.’

He walked down the stairwell, away from the light of Alicia’s door and into the dark of the street, turning over that last line, coming to terms with the fact that she was thinking that he’d reached the point at which the end of possibilities would become a probability.

He hit the street and walked quickly alongside a group of young people heading into the centre of town. Most of the streets were empty, still hung over after the ecstasy and excess of Semana Santa. The bars were still shut, not opening until tomorrow when the Sevillanos would finally get back into the stride of their normal living pace. Falcón found himself in squares which would normally be full of people, even in mid week, but which were nearly silent and dark, with only disjointed voices, as if it was much later, and the street cleaners were out discussing last night’s football. His mind was empty of the usual crush of everyday life, where nothing is thought about and each action begets the next.

The disjointed voices fell silent. He had no desire to go home. He would tramp about like this for some hours. He compared the Jiménez family to his own. Yes, his family had been torn apart, too. No, torn apart was too strong. His mother’s sudden death had not broken them up, but it had damaged them, like the hairline cracks on pottery glaze. He remembered his father’s stricken face, as he’d looked from Paco, to Manuela, to Javier. And he somehow saw his own gaping and fragmented face, as he gasped at the theft of his whole world. The thoughts started up a terrible welling of black ghastliness, so that he quickened his pace over the satin cobbles.

Better times came to mind. The sunny return of Mercedes. The woman who would become his father’s second wife. Javier had instantly fallen for her. And now this memory was tarnished by that photograph he’d found in Raúl Jiménez’s apartment: his father consorting with Mercedes before his mother was dead. That rucked up something worse and he jogged across the Plaza Nueva, the trunks and branches of the trees gloved in fairy lights. Christmas every day now. He stared blankly into the spot-lit perfection of MaxMara, the pristine clothes on the eternally perfect mannequins. He prayed for a less complicated life, where he didn’t have these thoughts and emotions that flayed his insides, leaving him looking almost the same from the outside, but raw and internally bleeding like a bomb-blast victim.

Sweat popped out of his forehead as he walked, half trotted, down Calle Zaragoza, and something like hunger opened out in his stomach, so he thought about going to El Cairo and having a tapa of merluza rellena de gambas. He preferred the sangre encebollada, but blood and onions on a night like this required a stronger stomach. He passed Ramón Salgado’s gallery with only a single lit piece of sculpture in the window. Further on was a classic Sevillano house, which had been converted into a café with an expensive restaurant above, peopled by businessmen and lawyers with their wives and girlfriends.

Back-lit, standing in the doorway on the top step, being helped into her coat, was Inés. Her hair was up and she only wore it like that when she wanted to be attractive and sexy, never for work. He didn’t see the man she was with as they stepped into the darkness of the street, joined arms and headed towards Reyes Católicos. There was no one else. This was a dinner for two. He stopped dead as Inés glanced behind her and then her high heels tickled the cobbles as she broke into a momentary skipping run to catch up. He followed them from across the street. The earlier hunger and the beginnings of exhaustion were forgotten now as the mind fell on new fuel.

They crossed Reyes Católicos and walked past the bar, La Tienda, which was closed. They cut across Calle Bailén and went behind the museum and out on to the Plaza del Museo, so that he had to hang back until they disappeared down Calle San Vicente. He waited and then followed, but by then the street was empty. He walked up and down the first hundred metres wondering if he’d imagined it all or that maybe the man had an apartment here, in this street, barely a kilometre from his own house.

He retreated home, broken as an entire army; the hunger was gone and the exhaustion of defeat had taken over. He showered, but only the day’s grime left him. He took a sleeping pill and crept under the covers. He stared at the endlessly receding ceiling, mesmerized as he could be by the white flashes in the middle of the road unrolling in the flare of the headlights. He thought he should resist, that it was dangerous to fall asleep at the wheel. Confusion distorted his sense of place. He reached forward with a hand, expecting everything to career out of control, for the frame of his vision to suddenly include a barrier, a bank and a life-ending tree to crash into. He flew into sleep as if through an empty windscreen, into the night.

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

12th October 1943, Triana, Seville

An army truck gave me a lift from Toledo all the way to Seville, which was lucky. The country is on its knees, with no petrol and little food. There’s not much on the roads, apart from occasional carts drawn by emaciated horses or mules.

I’ve taken a room run by a fat Moorish-looking woman with long black hair down to the small of her back, which she winds up into a bun. She has black eyes as dull as charcoal and she sweats constantly, as if on the brink of collapse. Her breasts have parted company and live in isolation on either side of her ribcage. She has a belly as big as a drinker’s, which sways under her black skirts as she walks. Her ankles are purple and swollen and she catches her breath in pain as she moves from room to room. I would like to draw and paint her, preferably naked, but she has a male companion, who is as thin as a village dog and carries a knife, which I hear him whetting lovingly every morning before he goes out. The room has a chest of drawers, none of which opens, and a bed with a picture of the Virgin above it. I take it because it has a patio outside, which only the landlady uses to dry her washing. I dump my bags and go out to buy materials and drink.

25th October 1943, Triana, Seville

It must be the soldier in me but I’ve settled into a routine although I do not get up early any more. Nothing happens in this city until after 10 a.m. I walk to the Bodega Salinas on the Calle San Jacinto, drink a coffee and smoke a cigarette. I use this bar because the owner, Manolo, keeps the best barrels of tinto from which he fills my five-litre bottles. He also sells me a homemade aguardiente, which I buy by the litre. I go back to my room and work until 3 in the afternoon. The only interruption is by the water seller. At 3 I eat lunch in the bar with a jug of tinto, refill my bottle and return to my room to sleep until 6 p.m. I work again until 10, have dinner and stay on at Manolo’s, drinking with the crooks and idiots who gather there.

29th October 1943, Triana, Seville

In the Bodega Salinas yesterday one of the other customers known only by the name of Tarzan (after the film Tarzan the Ape Man) comes to sit at my table. He has a tremendous belly and a face like a cluster of potatoes (Johnny Weismuller would be appalled). His eyes are closed up and puffy. He sits down and everybody is listening.

‘So,’ he says, putting a meaty forearm on the table, ‘where do you get that look from?’

‘What look is that?’ I ask, puzzled by the question.

There’s nothing aggressive about Tarzan, despite his pummelled face. He wears a black hat that he never removes but slips to the back of his head occasionally in order to scratch the front.

‘A look that says you don’t belong here,’ he replies calmly, but I sense those puffy eyes looking through their slits as if down a rifle barrel.

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘You’re not from Seville. You are not Andaluz.’

‘I come from Morocco, Tetuán and Ceuta,’ I say, but this doesn’t satisfy.

‘You look at us and make notes. You have old eyes in a young head.’

‘I am an artist,’ I say. ‘I make notes to remind myself of things that I have seen.’

‘What have you seen?’ he asks.

I realize now that these people do not think I am who I say I am. They think I’m Guardia Civil (who are always from out of town) or worse.

‘I was a soldier,’ I say, avoiding the word Legion. ‘I’ve been in Russia with the División Azul.’

‘Where?’ asks a bandy-legged guy, who is a picador of some repute.

‘Dubrovka, Teremets and Krasni Bor,’ I say.

‘I was in Shevelevo,’ he says, and we shake hands.

Everybody is relieved. Why they should think a member of the secret police would sit openly in a bar making notes on them (the densest group of dullards in Southern Spain) I have no idea.

15th December 1943, Triana, Seville

A young man, perhaps twenty years old, comes into the bar. He calls himself Raúl and they all know him and like him. He’s been in Madrid working, but all he can talk about that first night is going to Tangier, where there is real money to be made. They humour him and tell him he should talk to El Marroquí, which is my new name. R. sits at my table and tells me of the fortunes to be made from smuggling out of Tangier. I tell him I have plenty of money and that I’m only interested in becoming an artist. He tells me that there’s lots to be made out of American cigarettes, but there’s money in everything because of the American blockade of Spanish ports. His only worry is that now that the Blue Division has been pulled out of Russia this might relax the American attitude to Franco and they’ll lift the blockade. I sit up at this because I realize that he is not just an idiot with pesetas on his mind but someone who understands the real situation. I offer him a drink; his company is more lively than the usual Bodega Salinas customer. I learn that the free port status of Tangier means that all these goods can come in and be freely traded, with no duty or tax. The companies who buy and sell these goods also don’t have to pay any taxes. Everything is very cheap. All you have to do is buy it, ship it across the straits and you can sell it at a premium. This all sounds fine except he has no money to buy and no ship to transport the goods. This he waves away as uninteresting detail. ‘You start by working for others,’ he says. ‘You see how the business operates and then you fit yourself in.

‘Where there’s money,’ he says, fixing me with his young inexperienced eyes, ‘there’s danger.’

I wonder why he addresses this to me and he just says that danger means that premiums are always paid.

R. went to Madrid to work in construction but the owner of the building ran out of money. He then bought his way into a shoeshine syndicate. Only rich people have their shoes shined. He realized that rich people are rich only because they have superior knowledge. He listened to them and their talk was of Tangier, where the administration is both Spanish and corrupt and will stay that way for the foreseeable future. R. has it all worked out. I have to remind him that I don’t need money. He disagrees vehemently and tells me just how little even well-known artists make from their work. At the end of the evening we are quite drunk and he asks if he may sleep on my floor. He is cheerful and lively so I agree on the condition that he leaves before I start work.

21st December 1943

I’ve been robbed. R. and I came back from the Bodega Salinas, unlocked my room and found that someone had got in via the patio and stolen everything except my notebooks, drawings and paintings. My clothes, paints and even the Virgin above the bed have gone. The last is the worse loss because all my money was in the backing. I have only what is in my pocket. I tell the landlady what has happened. I am angry and I imply something about the only other user of the patio. She flies at me and between us we put our relationship beyond repair. Later we find broken pots in the patio and R. points to where somebody must have got in over the wall and used the pots, which were nailed into the stucco, to climb in and out.

22nd December 1943

The fat Moorish bitch is unforgiving and has appeared with her whipped cur of a husband and some other resident bandits to persuade us to leave. With my training I’m tempted to tear them to pieces but then I’d have the Guardia Civil to contend with and gaol. R. and I leave. He works on me relentlessly and now we are heading south on foot to Algeciras.

27th December 1943

I thought some of the Russians were poverty-stricken, primitive people, but the villages we’ve been through have revealed that this part of Spain is locked in some Dark Age with no hope and insanity a constant companion. It is not unusual to see people howling at the moon. In searching for food in one village R. came across a boy chained with a metal collar to a wall. His eyes were all pupil and in looking into them R. saw nothing to indicate there was anything human residing there.

5th January 1944, Algeciras

We have arrived here half-starved and in rags after an attack by some wild dogs who were hungrier than us. I killed three with my bare hands before the pack ran off leaving us torn and bleeding. R., who has always been respectful, now holds me in something like awe. There is a shrewdness about this boy that makes me feel uncomfortable.

7th January 1944, Algeciras

Spain in this state is no country for anyone. Africa is so close, visible and near across the straits. I can smell it and surprise myself by how much I want it again.

R. has come back saying that he’s found a contrabandista who has offered us two months work, food and lodging on the boat with a guarantee to drop us in Tangier with $10 each in our pockets. If it works we can renegotiate terms after the two-month trial period. I ask him what we have to do, but it is not a detail that interests him. He likes to do the deal. He produces two cigarettes, which shuts me up. I wonder why I’ve put myself so completely in his hands until I remember all those other legionnaires who left and came back to Dar Riffen, unable to stomach the outside world.

R. tells me something about himself as if to bind me to him. His tone is matter of fact. He recounts how a truckload of anarchists came into his village in 1936 and demanded from the mayor all the fascists. The mayor told them that they had all fled. The anarchists returned two days later with a list of names. Among the names were Raúl’s parents. The anarchists took them off into the ravine and shot them all. ‘Almost everybody I knew was shot that afternoon,’ he said. He was twelve years old.

10th January 1944, Algeciras

The contrabandista’s boat is an old fishing vessel about 15 metres long and 3 or 4 metres wide. It has one large hold aft with all the accommodation in the fore. There’s a small wheelhouse with two cracked panes of glass; underneath is the engine, which is where we find Armando. He is thickset with black hair and a dirty, stubbled face. His eyes are brown and soft but he has a thin-lipped mouth with a taut smile. I don’t dislike him, especially when he makes up a stew of beans, tomatoes, garlic and chorizo. He tells us there are clothes in one of the cabins that will fit us better than anything of his would. We eat and drink and I feel fat and sleepy but remember to ask A. whose clothes we are wearing. They belonged to the last crew who were shot and killed by some Italians. R. asks him how he got away and he says bluntly: ‘I killed the Italians.’

After the crumbling and sordid Algeciras, Tangier is prosperous. The port is full of ships and all the cranes are working. The dockside is massed with Moroccans, either huddled under the pointed hoods of their burnouses or crouching under the weight of some cargo. Trucks and cars crawl amidst the jostle of humanity; many of them are large American automobiles. Above the port, in a commanding position, is the Hotel Continental. Other hotels line the Avenida de España — the Biarritz, the Cecil, the Mendez. I blanche at the possibility that my father has moved here to take advantage of the boom.

R. jumps about the foredeck, whooping for joy. A. looks at me with dead eyes and asks what this is all about. I tell him that R. has the same nose for money that a dog has for a bitch on heat. A. rubs his chin, which rasps against his rope-hardened hands. I would like to draw those hands … and his face, where the sensual and the brutal meet.

Once we have moored up A. has a private talk with R. who disappears. A. smokes a pipe; he gives me a paper and tobacco to roll a cigarette. He puffs away and says: ‘You’re the best crew I’ve ever had.’ I tell him that we haven’t done anything yet. ‘But you will,’ he says. ‘R. will be the trader and you’ll do the killing.’ Those words chill my guts. Is that all he could see when he looked into my face? I realize that R. has been talking.

11th January 1944

We sailed last night. R. was back within a few hours, followed by an American and two Moroccans wheeling a barrow with two 200-litre drums of diesel. The fuel was cheaper than any A. had ever bought. R. and A. talked some more prices and by nine we were loading sacks of chickpeas and flour and 8 drums of gasoline. R. offers to do the books and A. says: ‘What books?’ R. can read and write but his real gift is with numbers. He did the books for his parents from the age of eleven. ‘When they went to market they bought this and sold that. I wrote it down. After six months I could tell them where they were making money and losing it.’ This market was in the next village. ‘Now you know why your parents were shot by the anarchists,’ I say. This had never occurred to him.

13th January 1944

We held off the coast before going into the small fishing village of Salobreña under cover of darkness. A. signals from off shore and, on receiving the right reply, moves in. While we’re waiting A. lets me have a look at his only firearm, a shotgun with engraved silver above the trigger guard. ‘A work of art to kill with,’ I say. I’m only nervous that I have to do this work with just two shots, but he assures me that the shot spread is very discouraging for those on the margins. They go off to do the business and I guard the ship. They come back half an hour later arguing. The buyers would not accept R.’s inflated price. A. is furious that he has to sail to another port and find another buyer. R. tells him to be patient, they will be back to talk to us again. A. paces the deck. R. smokes. At 3 a.m. R. tells A. to start the engines. As R. prepares to cast off four men come running towards us. I patrol the deck with the shotgun. Money changes hands. We unload and leave before dawn.

15th January 1944

R. shows A. that if he’d accepted the price offered at Salobreña he would have broken even and if he’d paid his usual price for diesel he’d have made a loss. R. works on him about the type of cargo he is shipping. It’s too heavy and not profitable enough for a small ship. He says we should be doing cigarettes. ‘Cigarettes are the new money. You buy everything with cigarettes. Francs, Reichsmarks, Lire mean nothing.’ A. whitens at the idea. The Italians are running that show and he doesn’t want to get involved. R. points to me and says: ‘He’s a trained soldier. He was with the Legion. He’s been to Russia. There’s no Italian who could match him.’ R. has done his homework. I didn’t tell him any of that. A. looks at me and I say: ‘I’m not doing it with a shotgun. If you want to run cigarettes we need at least a sub-machine-gun.’ R. laughs at me. ‘One sub-machine-gun!’ he says. ‘That American who sold us the diesel and gasoline … he can get you anything you want. A howitzer, a Sherman tank, a B-17 bomber — although he said that might take a little longer to arrange.’

29th January 1944

The Allies landed in Anzio last week and R. is nervous that his precious market is going to be destroyed by the end of the war. I tell him the Allies still have plenty of work to do and that the Germans will not give up territory easily. R. is desperate to get his own boat already and I point out that we still haven’t earned our first $10, let alone enough money to put down on even a rowing boat. R. insists that A. teach him everything about the boat and the sea — how to read a chart, plot a course, read a compass and navigate by the stars. I sit in on these tutorials as well.

20th February 1944

A. has been having his own way and we’ve been making regular trips with chickpeas, flour and gasoline until R. pulls off a strange deal to run a cargo of black pepper up to Corsica for a very low freight. The shipper is a German who’s come down from Casablanca and bought this cargo from a Jew in the town. I can’t think what the Corsicans want with all this black pepper and, when the German realizes that I speak his language and fought in Russia, he confides in me that they will transship it and it will end up in Germany in a munitions factory.

24th February 1944

We have put into Corsica and R. is delighted to have made contact with both Germans and Corsicans. It now seems that we will be putting into Corsica in the future with cargoes of cigarettes and the Corsicans will have the problem of putting them into Marseilles or Genoa. As he points out to A., we make more money for less risk. A. cannot give him credit for this simple piece of business. He is king because he has the boat and does not realize how important R.’s intelligence is to making his stupid boat work profitably.

I have a conversation with A. about the difference between peasants and fishermen: Fishermen are always humble in the presence of the sea. The sea’s might draws them together. They will always help each other out. Peasants have only their land. It makes them small-minded and possessive. They are never humble, only suspicious. They are taciturn because anything said may give their neighbour an advantage. Their nature is to protect and expand. If a peasant sees his neighbour stumble and fall it fills his mind with possibilities. He finishes with the statement: ‘I am a fisherman and your friend R. is a peasant.’

R. maddens me with his endless dreaming about his own boat.

1st March 1944

We dropped off our cargo with the Corsicans and put into Naples with an empty ship for R. to find an Italian to do business with. He’s learnt from the Corsicans that permission is required. A. won’t go ashore and I realize how much the incident with the Italians shook him up.

12th March 1944

R. was determined to show A. how much money can be made from a well-organized Italian deal. Our boat is filled with Lucky Strikes. We hardly have room to sleep for the cartons and boxes, even loose packets. A. is nervous. All his money is in this one run. We slip into the Gulf of Naples at night and hang in the chill blackness of a very calm sea, waiting. R. comes to me in the cabin where I cradle the sub-machine-gun. He tells me to be ready, to stay out of sight and at the first hint of trouble I am not to question anything but to kill everybody. ‘But I thought we had permission,’ I say. ‘Sometimes you have to prove yourself first to get that permission. Nothing is certain with these people.’ I ask him why he hasn’t told A. that, and he said: ‘All men have to think for themselves. If you leave it to others you ‘re taking a risk.’

I check that all four magazines are full and click one into the breech of the gun. The water slaps against the side of the boat. After some minutes there’s the bubbling of an approaching engine. I put out my cigarette and go up to the wheelhouse and crouch below the cracked panes of glass. I sense that something has changed in R., but the approaching boat is on us before I have time to think this through. A light comes on as it pulls alongside. The old tyre buffers squeak and squeal as the boats kiss together. I hear an Italian voice, singsong and unthreatening. I put an eye over the window ledge. A. and R. are standing at the rail about three metres in front of me. The Italian understands Spanish. Two men slip over the rail aft and make their way round to the dark side of the wheelhouse. I know that this is not right. I hear the two men on the other side of the wall, their clothing brushing against the slats. Is this the first hint of trouble? I hear a shout and don’t think but put a short burst through the wheelhouse wall. I run out and jump the rail into the Italian’s boat. There’s no one on the deck of our boat. I lope around the aft of the Italian ship. The engine suddenly throttles up and I put a short burst in to the wheelhouse, killing two men. I pull the throttle back. The boat idles and drifts away from ours. I listen and check the deck and then go below. The cabin is empty. The door to the hold opens on to a diesel-smelling blackness. I find a torch in the cabin. I put my back to the bulwark and hold the torch out. Nothing. No shot. A boy, no older than seventeen, is huddled in the corner of the hold. I find only a small knife on him. He is shaking with fear. I pull him up on to the deck. The white hull of A.’s boat is still visible in the rippling darkness. A light comes on in the wheelhouse and the engine starts up. R. is at the wheel. The Italian boy is on his knees praying. I tell him to shut up, but he has found his rhythm. R. throws me a line. ‘All dead?’ he asks. I point to the boy at my feet. R. nods and says: ‘It’s better to kill him.’ The boy wails. R., who I now notice is soaking wet, gives me a handgun.

‘I need more of a reason than that to kill him,’ I say.

‘He’s seen everything,’ says R.

‘Maybe it’s time for you to get your hands dirty,’ I say.

‘Mine already are,’ he says.

The gun is in my hand. I pull the weeping boy over to the side of the boat. His head lolls off the side. His crying is strangled in his throat. I shoot him behind the ear. I hand R. the gun thinking, This is what I am capable of.

The same hand that pulled the trigger is now guiding the words out of the pen and I am no closer to understanding how this hand can be the instrument of creation and destruction.

We take the boats up to Corsica and drop the bodies overboard on the way. I am in the Italian boat and pull alongside. It’s going to take two men to shift each body. We come to A. and I say that we should honour him with a prayer. R. shrugs. I say what we used to say over a fallen comrade in the Legion. I call out his name and make my own response, which is: ‘Present!’ As we ease him over the side, I see that he’s been hit twice, in the shoulder and the back of the head.

We offload the cigarettes and drydock both boats in Ajaccio. We remodel and repaint both boats using the money from the cigarettes. R. disappears for a day and comes back with papers for both boats in each of our names. We sail to Cartagena and register the boats under the Spanish Flag and change the boat names. We have had no time to talk about what has happened and as the time lengthens away from the incident, and all memory of A. disappears, I see that one of R.’s talents is for shutting the door. His link to me is that he has entrusted me with the only memory of importance to him, which is the death of his parents. I think it was then that he decided memory was something that interfered, rather than clarified and, in offering only nostalgia as recompense for a lack of belonging, had no value.

14th March 1944

A conversation with R. goes like this:

Me: What happened with the Italians?

R.: You saw, you were there.

Me: I didn’t see what started it.

R.: Then why did you open fire?

Me: The two guys who came aboard our boat should not have been there. I opened fire at the first hint of trouble … as ordered.

R.: Was that all?

Me: I heard a shout … like a signal.

R.: The Italian had a gun. I shouted. He shot A. I jumped in the water. I heard that burst from your sub-machine-gun and the Italians did, too. They made a run for it.

Me: A. was shot twice.

R.: What do you mean?

Me: He was hit in the shoulder and the back of the head.

R.: I was in the water. Maybe the Italian fired twice.

Me: Where did you get that handgun?

R.: Why are you interrogating me?

Me: I want to know what happened. You said you got your hands dirty. You said sometimes you have to prove yourself first before you get permission.

Long pause in which I decide I will never know what goes on inside R.’s head.

R.: The handgun belonged to one of the Italians you shot.

At least he replied, even if it was a lie.

23rd March 1944

Some more information about what I now call Opera Night. I go to the American in Tangier to get another magazine for the sub-machine-gun and ask for some more bullets for the handgun he sold to R. He gives me a box of .45 calibre shells without question. He also tells me in passing that the best thing the Allies did for business was to hand over the running of Naples to Vito Genovese. I don’t know this name. The American tells me he’s a gangster with the Camorra, which I find out later is the Naples version of the Sicilian Mafia.

There has been a change in R. since we embarked on this business. He is not as likable as before. His charm is now turned on and off as required. It occurs to me that R. has been let loose in the world with the single, burning memory of the shooting of his parents. My unthinking remark that they had been killed precisely because of his acumen must have run through him like a white-hot bayonet. The guilt I have induced has made him ruthless and savage. He has made me his partner. I don’t know why, because now he doesn’t seem to need one.

30th March 1944, Tangier

R. has given me my pay of $100. He tells me to keep the money in dollars and only change what I need into pesetas. I tell him I’m going back to being an artist and he says that I have learnt nothing.

Me: It’s what I have to do.

R.: I respect that. (He doesn’t at all)

Me: As you said, we have to think for ourselves.

R.: Forgive me, but what you are doing is not thinking.

Me: I want to see how far I can take it.

R.: Do you think that talent has anything to do with success in the world of art?

Me: It helps.

R.: Then you’re a fool.

Me: You don’t think van Gogh and Gauguin and Manet and Cézanne had any talent … do you know who I’m talking about even?

R.: The fool always thinks that everybody else is foolish. Of course I know who they are. Those men have genius.

Me: And I don’t?

He shrugs.

Me: And when did you become an art expert?

He shrugs again and nods at a few people. We are sitting outside the Café de Paris in the Place de France.

Me: How does a peasant boy from some dusty pueblo outside Almería get to know the first thing about art?

R.: How does an ex-legionnaire get to be a genius? El Marroquí? Is that how you will sign your work?

Me: Genius is not selective.

R.: But who decides? Were Gauguin and van Gogh celebrated in their time?

Me: What makes you think I want to become celebrated?

He says nothing but looks at me with intensity and I realize that I am sitting in front of someone who has found his milieu, a man who is utterly confident in his substance and who has seen something in me that I haven’t seen in myself.

R.: Why do you keep those journals? Why are you writing out your life?

Me: I only write down what happens and what occurs to me.

R.: But why?

Me: This is not for public consumption.

R.: What is it for?

Me: It is a record, just like your books of accounts.

R.: They just remind you of where you are in the world?

Me: That’s right.

R.: You don’t think people will read them and think, ‘What an extraordinary man!’?

I do think this sometimes but I say nothing to him.

R.: Any man of substance has to have some vanity.

1st April 1944

We have our first rest so that R. can work out how the banks operate. We stay in the Residencial Almería. All nationalities are here and a lot of single women working in the hundreds of companies that have set up here since the beginning of the war.

R. enjoys his money. He has had a suit made for himself by a French Jew in the Petit Soco. He wears this suit to visit the banks. He dines at a restaurant run by a Spanish family in the Grand Hôtel Villa de France. After he’s eaten he takes a short walk down to the Rue Hollande and then back up the hill to the Hotel El Minzah, where he takes his coffee and brandy. His vanity is that he likes to think himself wealthy. It works, because he makes contacts and does business in these places, which are full of black marketeers looking for people like R. to run their goods into Europe.

I like to sit outside in the sunshine by the Café Central in the medina and watch the chaos of the Soco Chico. At night I find myself drawn to the sleaziness of the port. There’s a Spanish bar called La Mar Chica with sawdust on the floor and an old slut from Málaga who dances passable flamenco. She smells bad, as if her whole biology is faulty and in sweating she is actually purging her system of all its ills.

26th June 1944

Since the Allies invaded Normandy we have been working non-stop. R. found a drunken Scot who needs money to pay off gambling debts so we ‘re the new owners of the Highland Queen. A Spaniard, Miguel, who used to work the fishing boats out of Almuñécar, will run the new vessel.

3rd November 1944

Sitting off Naples at first light we are attacked. They go for the Highland Queen, which has drifted away. By the time I draw near they have M. on the deck with a gun to his head. I do not understand their language. R. radios for me to open fire, which I do and they all drop to the deck, including M. The pirates’ own boat steams away and I use a British Lee Enfield .303, which is very accurate over distance, to shoot the man at the wheel. They are Greeks. We tow the two boats into Naples. M. has a messy wound in his right leg and we have to leave him there. Our fleet becomes four.

15th November 1944, Tangier

R. is working on renting warehouse space in the port and outside in the city. My role is security, which means having trusted men who will prevent outsiders getting in and insiders from stealing. He tells me that people are afraid of me. I’m surprised. They have heard how I dealt with the Greeks. I realize that it is R. who is creating this myth around me and I am powerless to stop it.

17th February 1945, Tangier

R. has acquired warehousing. I go direct to the Legion in Ceuta and recruit veterans who know me. I return with twelve men.

8th May 1945, Tangier

The war ended today. The town has gone wild. Everybody is drunk except me and my legionnaires. The suburbs of the city have been filling up with Berbers, Riffians and Tanjawis who have been drawn from the barren mountains and set up homes in chabolas made from crates and pallets. They have nothing to lose and will steal anything. We have to be severe. The beatings have not deterred them. If we catch them now we cut off an ear, again and we split their noses or cut off a thumb and forefinger. If they come back after that we throw them off the cliffs on the outside of town.

8th September 1945, Tangier

The Spanish administration is withdrawing from Tangier. R. is momentarily frightened but it seems the city will return to its previous international status and business will not be affected.

1st October 1945, Tangier

We have decided to buy property. I have found the perfect house off the Petit Soco, a labyrinthine affair built around a central courtyard in which there is a large fig tree. Light comes from the most surprising places. R. thinks it is the house of a madman. His house is just inside the medina gates off the Grand Soco where a lot of other Spanish live. He alarms me by constantly talking about the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Spanish lawyer, who lives opposite. The father of the girl miraculously becomes our lawyer and it is he who draws up the contracts for buying the property. I pay $1,500 and R. $2,200 and we don’t have to borrow a cent.

7th October 1945, Tangier

I am painting again. I draw the house and paint it in abstractions of dark and light. Occasionally patterns emerge within these black-and-white structures. I think of the Russian work and realize where this monochromatic obsession comes from.

26th December 1945, Tangier

During our Christmas Eve dinner R. asks if I want to get married. ‘To you?’ I ask and we laugh so hard that the truth gradually becomes painfully apparent. He is a massive presence in my life. (Me less so in his.) He controls my every move. We are partners but he pays my expenses, instructs me on security measures, and makes all the plans. I am eight years older than him. I was thirty this year. It must be the Legion, that life … I need structure in order to perform. I am not my own man … except here when I retreat to my courtyard.

This house is like my head, which, given that (as R. said) it is the house of a madman, is revealing. I occupy new rooms. One with a very high ceiling and, at the top, a window with Moorish latticework. I sit on a carpet and smoke hashish and watch, completely fascinated, as the pattern cast on the wall moves with the sun.

P., the barman at the Café Central in the Petit Soco, pointed out a ‘fellow Spanish artist’ the other day who looked worse off than some of those living in the chabolas on the edge of town. His name is Antonio Fuentes. He paints, but he doesn’t sell and he doesn’t show. I don’t see the point and try to discuss this with him but he’s impenetrable. P. introduces me to an American musician — Paul Bowles. We speak in Arabic as my English is poor and his Spanish worse. He talks about majoun, a sort of hashish jam I have heard of but never tried. P. makes it and we buy some.

5th January 1946, Tangier

It is cold and wet. The weather has been too bad to take the boats out. R. shows me the present he has bought for the young daughter of our lawyer — a doll carved out of bone. It is extraordinarily delicate but a little macabre. Later we see the girl crossing the street with her parents, heading for the medina and the Spanish cathedral. She is very beautiful but still a girl. Her breasts are small bumps and the line of her body totally straight from armpit to thigh. I don’t see what is stirring him until he reveals another thing to me from his earlier life. She reminds him of a girl from his village whose parents were shot on the same day as his own. This girl though, would not leave her parents and could not be prised away from them, not even by her own father. In exasperation the anarchists shot her, too. What does this say about R.’s infatuation with the lawyer’s daughter? She stirs in him that which he values most.

25th January 1946, Tangier

I have some majoun. I spread it on bread and eat it in the strange room with the high ceiling. I wash it down with some mint tea. Hardly has my glass hit the tray than I fall back in a relaxed stupor. After some minutes I feel my body come tingling alive from hair ends to toe calluses. I float upwards to within a foot of the ceiling and look out of the latticed window, which has a view across the rooftops of the medina to the walls and the grey sea beyond. A watery sunshine plays the shadow of the window across my shirt. I flap my arms and legs, concerned to be 7 metres from the ground with no visible support. I close my eyes and relax. I feel colder than I’ve ever been, even in Russia. I open my eyes to see the whitewashed ceiling and, growing out of that white expanse, small patches of black, which prove to be clusters of frozen dead bodies, and I become very afraid. I will myself out of this state but it persists for hours. I wake up in the dark. This morning I see mildew patches on the ceiling from the winter rains. The small clusters. The spores. The living dead.