The Blind Man of Seville

22

Thursday, 19th April 2001, Edificio de los Juzgados, Seville

Falcón paced the floor outside Calderón’s office. He’d called him after his meeting with Consuelo Jiménez and they’d agreed to meet at six. It was already seven o’clock and the passing secretaries had given up on sympathetic glances. He was glad he wasn’t being made to wait by a fiscal in their offices above the Palacio de Justicia in the building next door, where he would have been tormented by all those people who knew him through Inés. It would have brought back those winter evenings when he’d picked her up from work and found himself at the centre of her bustling world. Her beauty attracted the excitement of fame. He was her lover. The chosen one. People had looked at him with searching eyes and broad smiles, wanting to know his secret. What has Javier Falcón got? Had he imagined all that? The way women had sniffed the air as he went by, and men had glanced over the urinal walls.

Pacing the floor outside Calderón’s office it suddenly hit him that it had all been about sex. He’d been caught up, not just in his own desire, but everybody else’s, too. He’d mistaken it, as had Inés. They’d thought it was the real thing, but it wasn’t. A fleeting physical attraction had been hijacked by everybody’s need for romantic wish fulfilment. What should have been a few months of mad sex had been turned into a shotgun wedding — except it wasn’t the father with the weapon. It was sentiment.

Dr Spinola, the Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla, came out of Calderón’s office. He stopped to shake hands with Falcón and seemed on the brink of some intrusive questioning but gave up on the idea. Calderón called him into the office, apologized for keeping him waiting.

‘Dr Spinola’s not an easy man to throw out,’ said Falcón.

Calderón wasn’t listening. He searched the inside of his head, reached for a cigarette, lit it and inhaled deeply.

‘That’s the first time he’s ever come to any of our offices to discuss a specific case,’ he said, to the wall above Falcón’s head. ‘Normally I go to him and give him an overview.’

‘What’s he so concerned about?’

‘Good question,’ said Calderón. ‘I’m confused.’

‘If it’s to do with our case, maybe I can help,’ said Falcón.

In a fraction of a second Calderón weighed up the situation. Stripping his problem down to instinct he looked at Falcón, thinking: ‘Can this man be trusted?’ He decided no, but only just. If they’d had a few more moments like the one in the cemetery, Falcón thought that Calderón would have confided in him.

‘What have you got for me, Inspector Jefe?’ he asked. ‘No Inspector Ramírez today?’

Falcón had arrived without Ramírez because he wanted to develop a personal relationship with Calderón and at the same time cut back Ramírez’s access to information, force him out of the wider picture and into smaller parts of the puzzle. Now he’d changed his mind again. Seeing Dr Spinola had made him cautious. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to have the name Carvajal floating about the corridors of the Edificio de los Juzgados. There was no logic to this other than the tenuous link of Spinola being in Jiménez’s celebrity photographs, along with León and Bellido, and Carvajal being on the MCA Consultores payroll. Leaking this in vague form to Consuelo Jiménez had been a calculated risk. First he’d wanted to see if she knew about it, which hadn’t been conclusive and he was sure that she would only see it as a way of taking the heat off herself. If Falcón made this more official via Juez Calderón there could be unknown repercussions. The leak could find its way back to Comisario León. The only problem now was that he had nothing to talk to Calderón about, except the one thing he was anxious to avoid.

‘You had an idea before we were sidetracked by Sergio’s text message,’ said Falcón.

‘Sergio?’

‘Our name for the killer. It was the one he used with Eloisa Gómez,’ said Falcón. ‘You remember, we were going to contact him, point up his mistakes and try to rile him into making more fatal ones.’

‘He left her mobile on the body,’ said Calderón.

‘But he still has Raúl Jiménez’s.’

‘Do we know anything more about Sergio since he acquired a name?’

‘Eloisa Gómez and her sister talked about him as a type. They described him as un forastero, an outsider.’

‘A foreigner?’

‘Forastero to them describes a mental state. He is someone who sees and understands things beyond the normal flow of everyday life. He knows how things really work. He has an automatic comprehension of what runs between the lines.’

This sounds very enigmatic, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Not on the margins of society, where people have detached themselves from normality. Where, for instance, every day they sell their bodies for sex, or shoot somebody because they haven’t got the money. It’s not so different at the other end of the scale. Those people with power, who know how to get more and how to maintain their position. None of these people see things as normal people do, who have jobs and children and houses to occupy their minds.’

‘And you think an artist, such as you described our killer back in the cemetery, would have this same unusual perspective?’ said Calderón.

‘It fits the profile,’ said Falcón. ‘You mentioned “foreigner”, too. Eloisa Gómez told her sister that although Sergio appeared to be Spanish there was something of the foreigner about him. He had foreign blood in him, or he’d been away from his Spanish roots.’

‘How should this alter our approach?’

‘I think pointing up a mistake is too obvious. He’d find it laughable. Forasteros know when they’re being manipulated.’

‘Maybe we should show him that we understand him.’

‘But as an artist,’ said Falcón. ‘We mustn’t be prosaic. We have to intrigue him as he does us. We’re still no closer to understanding that last sight lesson. “Why do they have to die, those that love to love?”’

‘Wasn’t he just telling us that he’d killed her because she’d seen him — the gift of perfect sight?’

‘But “those that love to love”? He’s presenting her as an emblem and he’s chosen a prostitute for his purpose. He’s trying to alter the way we see things and we have to do the same. We have to try to make him see something as if for the first time.’

‘So, all we need now is a resident genius,’ said Calderón. ‘Apparently this building is full of them, if you believe what you’re told.’

‘We borrow genius from the classics,’ said Falcón. ‘He’s a poet and an artist … that’s his language.’

“‘Los buenos pintores imitan la naturaleza, pero los malos la vomitan.” Good painters imitate nature, bad ones spew it up. Cervantes.’

‘That might do the trick of annoying him as well,’ said Falcón.

‘But what are we trying to do with this strategy?’ asked Calderón. ‘What do we want from him?’

‘We’re trying to draw him in, start a dialogue, open him up. We want him to start leaking information to us.’

Falcón, losing his nerve at the last moment, thumbed the Cervantes line into the mobile and sent it as a text message. The two men sat back in their seats feeling stupid. Their investigative world reduced to the absurdity of sending lines of Cervantes into the ether.

Now they had to fall back on their own resources, but with no point of contact apart from a recognition of each other’s intelligence. Falcón wasn’t going to talk about football and Calderón wasn’t going to make him.

‘I saw a movie last night on video,’ said Calderón. ‘Todo sobre mi Madre — ‘All about my Mother’. Did you see it? It’s a Pedro Almodóvar film.’

‘Not yet,’ said Falcón, and an odd thing happened. His memory cracked open and for a second he was back in Tangier, splashing through the shallows and then up in the air, squealing.

‘You know what struck me about that movie?’ said Calderón. ‘In the first minutes of the film the director creates this incredibly intimate relationship between the son and the mother. And then the boy is killed soon after. And … I’ve never had an experience like it; when he dies it’s like being the mother. You don’t think you’ll ever recover from that terrible loss. That’s genius, to my mind. To change a world in a few metres of celluloid.’

Falcón wanted to say something. He wanted to respond to this because, for once, there was something in this small talk. But it was too big. He couldn’t get it out. Only tears welled in his eyes, which he pinched away. Calderón, unconscious of Falcón’s struggle, shook his head in amazement.

‘We’ve got something here,’ said Calderón, picking up the mobile.

He read the small screen. A frown formed which transformed itself to pain.

‘Do you speak French?’ he asked, handing Falcón the mobile. ‘I mean, it’s simple, but … very strange.’

‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’

Falcón felt ill, nauseous enough to vomit.

‘I understand it,’ said Calderón. ‘But what does it mean?’

“‘Today mother died. Or was it yesterday, I don’t know,”’ said Falcón. ‘And there’s more: “Don’t contact me again, cabrón, I will tell the story.”’

‘He’s turned it back on us,’ said Calderón. ‘But what does it mean?’

‘He couldn’t resist it,’ said Falcón. ‘He had to show us that he could go one better.’

‘But how?’

‘I think he’s probably had a French education,’ said Falcón.

‘That’s a line of literature?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t be sure. But if I had to guess I’d say that it comes from L’Étranger by Albert Camus.’

* * *

The Edificio de los Juzgados was almost empty at this time of night and Falcón’s footfall echoed through his hollow body as he walked the long corridor to the stairs. He had to hold on to the bannister to get down the steps and stop at the landing to control the shaking of his legs. He was persuading himself that it was coincidence, that there was no bizarre telepathy between him and Sergio. Life was full of these odd moments. There was a word for it: synchronicity. It should be a good thing. Human beings liked things to synchronize. But not that. Not their discussion about outsiders, Calderón talking about the film with the unmentionable title and then Sergio slapping them down with that terrible line. A line that disconnected him from the normal world of human relations, from the profound filial-maternal bond. They were the words of the loneliest individual on the planet and they had torn into Falcón like a chain saw.

He made it to security, motor reflexes normalized. On the other side was Inés, putting her handbag and briefcase through the machine. This was the last person Falcón wanted to see and as he thought this, it all came rushing back — her beauty, the sex, his longings, their failure. She waited for her bags, looking directly at him, almost mocking.

‘Hola, Inés,’ he said.

‘Hola, Javier.’

The hate was undisguised. He was condemned to be the unforgiven. He didn’t understand this because he could find no trace of rancour in himself. They had made a mistake. It had been recognized. They had parted. But she couldn’t stand him. The security guard handed over her bags and she dazzled him with a smile. Her lips returned to a hard red line for Falcón. He would have liked some inspiration at that moment. To somehow be able to make it instantly better, as people can in the movies. But nothing came. There was nothing to be said. This was a relationship beyond the possibility of even friendship. She despised him too much.

She walked away. The narrow shoulders, the slim waist, the swaying hips, the sure feet and the heels counting out the distance.

The security man gnawed his lip, looking at her, and it came to Falcón why she so loathed him. He had destroyed the perfection of her life. The vibrantly beautiful and brilliant law student who had become an exceptional young prosecutor, worshipped by men and women wherever she went, had fallen for him — Javier Falcón. And he had turned her down. He had failed to love her back. He had tarnished her perfection. This was why she thought he had no heart, because it was the only possible explanation for his failure.

Outside he took up a position by one of the pillars of justice of the adjoining building. It gave him a view of the main door to the Edificio de los Juzgados. A few minutes later Inés reappeared through that door followed by Esteban Calderón. She waited, kissed him on the lips, took him by the arm and headed off down the colonnade towards Calle Menéndez Pelayo.

Had they kissed? Was that a trick of the light?

His powers of dissuasion failed him. It had been too clear. And in the slanting shadows of the neoclassical columns he came across another anomaly of logic. The faultiness of human wiring that could shortcircuit even the clearest of thoughts. He did not love her. He felt no rancour. They were beyond repair. So why did he feel his blood, his organs, his sinew and tendon consumed by a monstrous jealousy?

Falcón ran to his car, drove back to the Jefatura clenching the steering wheel so tight that he had difficulty unbending his fingers to write his report. He tried to read other reports. It was impossible. His concentration flitted between the wreckage of his investigation and his inexplicable certainty of Calderón’s indefatigable sexual athleticism.

A tranche of time disappeared. A journey was lost. One moment he was straining over those reports and the next he was sitting with Alicia Aguado, her fingers feathering over his wrist.

‘You’re upset,’ she said.

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘At work?’

Laughter spurted from him like projectile vomit. He was hysterical in seconds, the laughter so intense that it wasn’t coming from him — he was the laughter. She let go of him as he threw himself on the sofa, stomach straining. It passed. He wiped away the tears, apologized and sat back down.

‘Busy … that word is such an absurd understatement for the description of my day,’ he said. ‘I never knew a madman’s life was packed so tight. I’m cramming an entire life into every tiny space I can find. Nobody can say anything to me without a whole world being dredged up. While a judge sits in his office, talking about his favourite movie moment, I’m running along a beach, splish-splashing through the waves, being launched high up in the air and squealing.’

‘By your mother?’

Falcón faltered.

‘Now that is odd,’ he said.

Silence.

‘It came back to me with the clarity of a dream,’ he said. ‘Except now I realize there was one feature missing, but I’ve got it now. I was being thrown up in the air by a man.’

‘Your father?’

‘No, no. He’s a stranger.’

‘You’ve never seen him before?’

‘He’s Moroccan. I think he must have been a friend of my mother’s.’

‘Was that unusual?’

‘No, no. Moroccans are very friendly people. They love to talk. They’re very curious and inquisitive. They have an amazing facility …’

‘I meant for your mother, a married woman, to be meeting a stranger on the beach. Allowing her son to be thrown up in the air by him.’

‘I’m not sure he was a complete stranger. No. I’d seen him before. He probably owned a shop, which my mother used to buy from. It would be something like that.’

‘What happened in the judge’s office?’

He recounted the meeting: the attempted dialogue with Sergio, the Almodóvar film, the terrible reply from Sergio and what it had done to him.

‘What shook me was the talk about outsiders beforehand and then the killer using a line from the book. I’m sure it’s L’Étranger. The Outsider. It makes me feel as if I’m going mad.’

‘Ignore it,’ she said. ‘Synchronicity. It happens all the time. Concentrate on the issues.’

‘Which are?’

Silence from Alicia Aguado.

‘My mother,’ he said. ‘That’s an issue.’

‘Why did the line from Camus have such a terrible effect on you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How did your mother die? Was she ill?’

‘No, no, she wasn’t ill. She had a heart attack but …’

A long silence in which Falcón blinked once a minute.

‘There was something … a crisis of some sort in the street. We were in the house, Paco, Manuela and I. And there was this big row in the street outside our house. I can’t remember what it was about. It was afterwards though, that my father came to tell us that our mother was dead. But it won’t come back to me … what happened.’

‘What happened after she died?’

‘There was a funeral. I only remember people’s legs from that day and the general gloom. It was February and raining. My father spent a lot of time with us. He nursed us all through it.’

‘Did you ever see the stranger on the beach again?’

‘Never.’

‘How long was it before your father married again?’

‘We already knew Mercedes,’ he said. ‘She’d been a family friend for a long time. She helped my father a lot, marketing his work in America. They were having an affair before my mother died … did I tell you that? I only just found out.’

‘Carry on.’

‘Mercedes was still married when my mother died and then her husband subsequently died in America. Cancer, I think. She came back to Tangier in her husband’s yacht. It must have been about a year after my mother died that they got married.’

‘Did you like Mercedes?’

‘I loved Mercedes from the moment I first saw her. I still have that vague memory of seeing her for the first time. I was tiny. She came to my father’s studio and picked me up. I think I played with her earrings. I loved her from that moment, but then my father always said I was a very loving child.’

‘What happened with Mercedes?’

‘It was a very good time. My father was successful. The Falcón nudes were the talk of the art world. He was being hailed as the new Picasso, which was ridiculous given the size and quality of his oeuvre. Then tragedy. It was after a New Year’s Eve dinner. Everybody went down to the yacht in the port afterwards to see the fireworks and then some of them went out on the boat at night and a storm got up. Mercedes fell overboard. They never found her body.

‘But … but just before the party left the house I crept down from my bedroom and Mercedes spotted me,’ he said, replaying it like film through the gate of his mind. ‘She took me back up to bed. I was reminded of this the other day because … That was it. It’s coming together. In my murder investigation the first victim, Raúl Jiménez, smoked these cigarettes, Celtas, and that was the smell in her hair. I only just found out that my father knew Raúl Jiménez from the forties and now I realize that he must have been at that party except … he’d already left Tangier by then.’

‘I’m sure other people smoked that brand in those days.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Falcón. ‘So, Mercedes took me up to bed and kissed me and hugged me tight to her bosom. She was squeezing her love into me so hard I could barely breathe. She was wearing perfume, which I now know is Chanel No.5. Women don’t use it so often these days. But years ago if I came across that smell in the street it would transport me back to that moment. Being in the grip of love.’

‘And after Mercedes left you?’

Falcón grabbed his stomach with his free hand, stricken with pain.

‘I hear …’ he said, struggling. ‘I hear her heels receding down the corridor and stairs. I hear the talk and the laughter of the other guests. I hear the door shutting. I hear the shoes pattering on the cobbles. And I remember that she never came back.’

Tears blurred his vision. Saliva filled his mouth. He couldn’t swallow. The last words came out from under the shuddering wall of his stomach.

‘There were no more mothers after that.’

Alicia made some tea. The cup burnt his fingers, the tea scalded his tongue. Physics brought him back into the room. He felt a strange newness, a cleansed satisfaction, as when he and Paco had scraped and rendered an old bullpen at the finca and whitewashed it to a solid white cube in the burnt umber landscape. He’d photographed it. It had something of the simplicity of a great work of art.

‘I’ve never remembered that all the way through,’ he said. ‘I always used to stop before I got to her receding heels.’

‘And you know now, Javier, don’t you, that it wasn’t your fault that she didn’t come back?’

‘There’s a question.’

‘What question?’

He thought for a long time and shook his head.

‘You know it wasn’t your fault,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘Do you know what you’ve done this evening, Javier?’

‘I suppose you’d say that I’ve relived a moment.’

‘And seen it in its normal light,’ she said. ‘That’s how the process works. If we deny things that are painful to us they don’t go away. We only hide from them. You’ve just had the first success in the biggest investigation of your life.’

He drove back to Calle Bailén oddly refreshed, as if he’d been out running and sweated all the toxins from his body. He parked and walked through the silent, dark house until he reached the patio at its centre and its limpid pupil of black shining water. He turned the light on beneath the arched and pillared cloister. His hands shook as he entered the study. His eyes floated over the desk, the scattered photographs and the portrait of his mother and her children. He went to the old grey filing cabinet, unlocked it and took out a brown buff file from under the letter ‘I’. He sat at his desk with the file, knowing that he would take the next step, beating back the guilt. He took out the fifteen black-and-white prints and laid them face down on the desk. He asked himself in the glass of the picture on the wall: ‘How new are you?’

He turned over the first photograph. Inés lay face down, naked, on a silk sheet on the bed. She was looking back at him, resting her head on her fist. Her hair was all over. Falcón closed his eyes as the pain eased into him. He turned to the next photograph, opened his eyes. His neck shook with tension. Swallowing became impossible. Inés was propped up on the pillows, naked again apart from a piece of silk around her shoulders. She was looking at the camera with a deep sexual intent. Her thighs were spread wide, revealing her shaved sex. He was standing behind the camera in the same state. The wonderful excitement as they’d shaved each other, the giggling at their trembling hands. There’d been nothing perverse about it. The joy was in the innocence of it. The brilliance of that day came back to him. The torrid heat of that big fat afternoon, the cracks of intense light around the shutters brightening the dimness of the room so that they could see each other in the mirror. The privacy of the two of them alone in the big house, so that when they were too hot he’d picked her up and, still connected, walked downstairs, her thighs clenched around his waist, ankles locked, heels riding the tops of his buttocks. He’d stepped into the eye of the fountain and sank into the cool water.

It was so unbearable that he had to put away the file and lock the cabinet. He looked at the grey metal repository of his memory. Alicia was right. You could not lock things away. You could not obsessively order them, package them, file them under ‘I and hope to confine them to their place. No amount of order could stop the mind’s inclination to leak. This was why desperate people blew their brains out. The only sure way to stop the leaking was to destroy the reservoir for ever.

That question came to him again. It still had no form. He didn’t quite believe what Alicia had said he’d achieved tonight. He had not been certain that he was not the reason that Mercedes hadn’t come back. He was responsible and the thought propelled him into his mac and out into the night air, which was now wet, the cobbles shining from some light rain. He went to the Plaza del Museo and found odd comfort pacing beneath the dark and dripping trees.

Just after 1 a.m. a taxi stopped at the junction of Calle San Vicente and Calle Alfonso XII. Inés got out and waited on the pavement. Calderón paid the driver from the back of the cab. Falcón came out from under the trees, his hair wet, and stood in the shadows of the kiosk on the plaza.

Calderón took Inés by the hand. She was staring up and down the street and across the plaza. They turned and walked up Calle San Vicente. Falcón loped across the square in a crouching run and found the shadows on the opposite side of the street to the lovers. He walked behind the cars parked on the pavement. They stopped. Calderón took out his keys. Inés turned and her eyes found him paralysed between a car and the wall of a building. He ducked and ran for the nearest doorway where he stood, back up against the wall, pressing himself flat into the darkness, heart and lungs fighting like a sack of wild animals. Inés told Calderón to go up. Her heels stabbed the street and stopped by the pavement close to him.

‘I know you’re there,’ she said.

The blood thundered in his ears.

‘This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you, Javier.’

He squeezed his eyes shut, the child about to be found out, punished.

‘Your face keeps coming out of the night,’ she said. ‘You’re following me and I won’t put up with it. You’ve destroyed my life once and I won’t let you do it again. This is a warning. If I see you again, I will go straight to the courts and apply for a restraining order. Do you understand that? I will humiliate you as you did me.’

The spiky heels backed away and then returned, this time a little closer.

‘I hate you,’ she whispered. ‘Do you know how much I hate you? Are you listening, Javier? I am going upstairs now and Esteban is going to take me to his bed. Did you hear that? He does things to me that you could never even dream of.’

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

26th June 1946, Tangier

I have terrible lower back pain and go to the Spanish doctor on Calle Sevilla, not so far from R.’s house. He examines me, takes me into an adjoining room and lays me face down on a cloth covered bench. Another door opens and he introduces me to his daughter, Pilar, who works with him as his nurse. She rubs an oil into my back which generates a tremendous heat. She rubs the oil in down to my coccyx. By the end of this treatment I am embarrassed by the state of my manhood. Her small hands have magic in them. She tells me I have to come to her for a session every day for a week. Were all afflictions like this.

3rd July 1946, Tangier

After endless negotiations I have persuaded Pilar to come and sit for me, but a boy arrives at lunchtime to say she cannot come. In the late afternoon Carlos Gallardo comes to visit. He is another of those ‘fellow artists’, but he is not Antonio Fuentes. There is none of the ascetic about him. He is louche. He drinks heavily and usually in the Bar La Mar Chica, which was where we met. We have smoked hashish together and looked at each other’s work without comment.

He has brought a Moroccan lad with him who carries his groceries, which he leaves at the door. We sit on low wooden chairs in one of the dark cool rooms away from the heat of the patio. My houseboy puts a hookah between us and fills it with a tobacco-hashish mix. We smoke. The hashish does its work and I feel pleasant. Desultory thoughts float into my mind like aquarium fish. C.’s boy is standing by his chair with one of his brown feet resting on the other. He has had his hair shorn, probably by C., against lice. He is smiling at me. He can’t be more than sixteen years old. I reset my vision and realize that C. has his hand up the boy’s robe and is caressing his buttocks. I didn’t know this about C. It does not disgust me. I make some comment. ‘Yes,’ he says,’ of course I like women, but there’s something inhibiting about sex with a woman. I put it down to us Spanish and our mothers. But with these local youths it’s so normal, something that has always happened and to which no stigma attaches. I feel free to indulge. I am a sensualist after all. You must have seen that from my work.’ I muster some reply and he continues: ‘Whereas you, my friend, are frozen solid. Bleak and chill. I hear the wind whistling through your canvases. You should be thawing in this heat, but I can’t see it. Perhaps you should take a boy for some guilt-free sensuality.’ We smoke some more and my skin feels like velvet. C. says, ‘Take Ahmed to your room now and lie down with him.’ The idea sends a bolt of electricity through me. I find I am not appalled by the suggestion, quite the opposite. The boy comes over. I can barely speak but manage to turn down the offer.

5th July 1946, Tangier

P. comes with her mother. The heat is not so smothering and we sit in the patio under the fig tree. We talk. The women’s eyes dart about like birds in a bush. I feel like a large cat planning dinner. P.’s mother is here to find out about me …

Because R.’s company, in which I am a partner, is one of the best known in Tangier’s Spanish community, she is soon eating out of my hand as if it is chock-full of millet. I keep away from all the dull socializing and am not known. Were she to go down to the chabolas on the outskirts of town they would run away in fright at the mention of El Marroquí. But P.’s mother lives between her house and the Spanish cathedral so I am safe and I cannot see her ever straying into the Bar La Mar Chica.

She asks to see my work and I politely refuse, but relent under pressure. P. stands transfixed in front of the monochrome shapes and patterns while her mother rushes around trying to find something she understands. She settles on the drawing of a Touareg, which at least has some colour in it. I sign it and give it to her and ask to paint a portrait of her daughter. She says she will raise the matter with her husband.

They leave and moments later there is a fierce knocking on the door. It is the young lad who came round with C. the other day, Ahmed. He is eating a peach and the juice is dribbling down his chin and is smeared across his cheeks. He licks his lips. It is not subtle but it is effective. I haul him off the street and follow him, trembling, through the endless rooms and passages. He understands something of the urgency and runs kicking up his robe with his bare feet. By the time I arrive at the bedroom his caramel body lies beneath the mosquito netting. I fall on him like a demolished building. Afterwards I give him a few pesetas and he goes away happy.

3rd August 1946, Tangier

Trust has been established between myself and the doctor and P. is allowed to visit the house on her own to sit for her portrait. The sessions take place in the afternoon when the surgery is closed and can only last an hour. It is very hot. I have to work in one of the rooms close to the patio for the light. I am drawing. She sits on a wooden chair. I am close to her face. She does not flinch. We do not speak until I look at her hands. They rest in her lap, small, long-fingered, delicate instruments of pleasure.

Me: Who taught you to massage?

P.: Why do you think anybody taught me?

Me: The expertise in your fingers strikes me as coming from instruction rather than trial and error.

P.: Who taught you to paint?

Me: I had some help on how to look at things.

P.: I was taught by a gypsy woman in Granada.

Me: Is that where you’re from?

P.: Originally, yes. My father was a doctor in Melilla for some years before we came here.

Me: And your father allowed you to mix with the gypsies?

P.: I am quite independent, despite what my parents might want you to think.

Me: You ‘re allowed out?

P.: I do as I please. I am twenty-three years old.

The boy arrives with mint tea. We lapse into silence. I work on her hands and then we drink the tea.

P.: You draw figuratively but paint abstracts.

Me: I teach myself to see with the drawings and interpret it with the paint.

P.: What have you seen today?

Me: I have been looking at structure.

P.: How well am I built?

Me: With delicacy and strength.

P.: Do you know why I like you?

The question silences me.

P.: You have strength and individuality, but you are vulnerable, too.

Me: Vulnerable?

P.: You have suffered, but there is still the small boy in you.

This intimate exchange seals something between us. She has told me something she has kept from her parents. She has seen something in me which I have not denied. But she is wrong. I am those things … but I am not individual … not yet.

10th August 1946, Tangier

I am hobbling around again with my bad back. I have a lump on the right side of my spine. P. arrives for her sitting and immediately sees my problem. She leaves and returns with her little wooden case of bottles of oils. The bedroom is out of bounds. I lie on the floor. She tries to work on me from the side but it is hopeless. She tells me to shut my eyes. I hear her skirt slide down her legs. She lowers herself until she is astride the backs of my thighs. Only her bare legs touch mine on the outside. I can feel the heat of her above me. She kneads the lump in my back with the tips of her fingers while I take root in the ground.

She finishes with me. My whole body has been claimed by the floor. She puts her skirt on and tells me to get to my feet. We stand in front of each other. I have myself under control physically, but mentally I am in disarray. She tells me to walk around. I do this and there is no pain apart from a dull ache in my testicles. She tells me to keep walking. Activity is the secret of the healthy back. I must not sit to paint or draw. She leaves. I smoke some hashish until I feel liquid, like olive oil flowing greenly from room to room.

Ahmed turns up later with a friend. He is mischievous, this boy. I wonder whether C. is putting him up to it as an artistic experiment. Where P. and I are physically so demure, these boys are completely uninhibited. I smoke and they perform for me, their muscular adolescent bodies entwining like rope. They turn their attention to me. The release is explosive and they giggle like children playing around a fountain. Before they leave Ahmed presses a stoned date between my teeth. I lie there with the dreamy sweetness leaching into me, replete and satiated as a slumbering pasha.

11th August 1946, Tangier

It has been reported to me that two of my legionnaires have fought over a lover in a hotel room in town. The fight was long and bloody and the floor of the room was as slippery as a butcher’s. One of my legionnaires is dead, the lover is badly wounded and the other legionnaire is in gaol. I ask the police chief if I can see the lover, thinking that this might be an international incident if she dies; he tells me not to worry as the ‘lover’ is a Riffian boy. He shrugs, arches his eyebrows, opens his hands … es la vida.

I pay a bribe and the legionnaire is released on condition that he leaves the International Zone immediately. I take him to Tetuán and give him some money. On the trip over he tells me he was with the División Azul in Russia and stayed on with the Legión Española de Voluntarios and, after they were disbanded, he joined the SS. He was with the infamous Capt. Miguel Ezguera Sánchez when the Russians stormed Berlin. He shows me a handful of the leading currency at the end — cyanide pellets. He gives me two samples as an odd souvenir and as a novio de la muerte, a bizarre way of thanking me.

1st September 1946, Tangier

R. has taken out a loan and bought two more boats. I have been to Ceuta again and recruited more legionnaires. We train them to run the boats and pay them well for it. They like the work. They still have a weapon in their hands and there is adventure, although, because of our reputation for violence, nobody comes near us. The pirates pick on the small fry. My importance to the business is now paramount because trust is a rare commodity. The strong allegiances between legionnaires means we can rely on them and they will not steal. It releases R. and I from the grind of running the ships. R. is investing in property. We are building and I have to secure the construction sites. R. plays the gold and currency markets with the endless stream of cash that comes in from the smuggling operations. I do not understand these markets and have no inclination to involve myself.

Now that Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, has taken up residence in the Sidi Hosni Palace, R. tells me that Tangier will be the new Côte d’Azur. He plans to move more heavily into property ‘to build hotels for all the people who will come here to warm their hands on our affluence’. He also tells me that La Rica bought the palace for $100,000 — a quite unimaginable sum for all us Tangerinos to contemplate. The Caudillo, as General Franco is now called, had offered $50,000. He must be sitting in his El Pardo Palace fuming.

3rd September 1946, Tangier

P. comes for another sitting. As soon as I open the door I see daring in her eyes, but also amusement and mockery. It is hot in the middle of the afternoon. We start to work in the usual silence until I lose concentration and she walks around the room looking for anything she hasn’t seen before. She finds a lump of hashish amongst the brushes and pots on the table and sniffs it. She knows what it is but has never tried it. She asks to smoke some. I’ve never seen her with a cigarette even, but I charge the hookah for her. Minutes later she’s complaining that nothing has happened. I tell her to be patient and she releases a small moan as I imagine she would at the first sexual contact. Her eyes have distance in them as if she has retreated into her mind. She licks her lips slowly and sensually. I want to put my own mouth there. I drift and watch the light change in the room. P. says: ‘I think you should draw me as I really am.’ This I’ve been trying to do for weeks. In fast fluid movements she stands up, removes her blouse, lets her skirt fall, unharnesses her brassiere and steps out of her underwear. I am speechless. She stands in front of me, her long dark hair on her naked shoulders, her hands resting on the tops of her thighs, framing the triangle of her pubic hair. She slowly puts her fingertips to her shoulders and moves them down over her breasts to the brown pointed nipples, which harden to her touch. Her fingers trace the outline of her body. We are both so engaged in the sensuality of the moment that I think they are my fingers. ‘This is who I am,’ she says. I grab sticks of charcoal and sheets of paper. My hand flashes over them with bold, fluid movements. I must have drawn her six, seven, eight times in a matter of minutes. As I finish, each drawing slips to the floor. She continues to hold herself, utterly beautiful, and naked, with the supreme confidence of complete womanhood and it is that mysterious essence that I am ‘seeing’ and am able to draw. Then, as occasionally happens with hashish, we are in a different moment. She is pulling her clothes back on. She moves to leave and I stand with the drawings at my feet. She looks down at them and then up at me. ‘Now you know,’ she says. Her lips brush mine with the softness of sable and the coolness of water. The lightning touch of the tip of her tongue on mine stays with me for hours.

20th September 1946

I have returned from Tarragona to find that P. has gone back to Spain with her mother, whose sister has died. The doctor does not know when they will be coming back. I feel both bereft and oddly free. Ahmed and his friend come round at night and my mood is celebratory. A night of total hedonism comes to pass.

23rd September 1946

I show Carlos the charcoal drawings of P. He is astounded. For the first time he says something about my work and the word is ‘Exceptional’. Later as we smoke a hookah together he says: ‘I see the thaw has started. I hope Ahmed and Mohammed have been a help.’ I look as if I don’t know what he is talking about. He says he will send others to my door. ‘I don’t want you to get bored.’ I say nothing.

30th October 1946

Still no word from P. and now her father has also left for Spain. The only possible address I have for them is Granada.

R. has sold a plot of land to an American who wants to build a hotel. One of the conditions of sale is that we do the construction. It is our first major building contract. I want to be involved in the design, but R. insists that I keep my art and work separate. ‘Everybody associated with me knows you as my security adviser … I can’t have you designing the reception as well.’