The Blind Man of Seville

24

Friday, 20th April 2001, Ramón Salgado’s House, El Porvenir, Seville

Calderón took notes as Falcón spoke. At the end he lit a cigarette while Falcón looked out on to Salgado’s abundant garden.

‘Is this what you came to talk to me about yesterday?’ asked Calderón.

‘I think you’ll agree there are some sensitive points to this theory,’ said Falcón. ‘And when I saw Dr Spinola coming out …’

‘Dr Spinola was not on that list of directors,’ said Calderón sharply.

‘He was in Raúl Jiménez’s celebrity photographs. There’s a tenuous connection. It had to be thought about,’ said Falcón, sensing Calderón’s resistance, and his own pathetic need to side with him. ‘You will also notice that the proof of Raúl Jiménez being involved in child abuse is circumstantial and weak. I only mentioned it because of the convicted paedophile ring in which Carvajal was involved and what we have discovered here today.’

‘So, do you think we’re looking for an abused boy and do you think Consuelo Jiménez is involved?’ asked Calderón.

‘Sergio is male. He was somehow able to make a connection with Eloisa Gómez, possibly through empathy … as another forastero. I have not read Carvajal’s case notes so I don’t know what his predilections were, but Salgado seemed to be interested in boys and Jiménez in girls.’

‘In that case Sergio is either acting alone as an avenger of the abused or, quite possibly, he’s having his targets pointed out to him,’ said Calderón.

‘Consuelo Jiménez loves her children. Admittedly, they are all boys but if she found any pornography in her husband’s collection which was in any way related to child abuse, I am sure she would not tolerate it. She knew Ramón Salgado …’

‘But how could she possibly know this about him?’ said Calderón, tapping the computer.

‘That, I don’t know. I am only theorizing about her capability, not proving her involvement,’ said Falcón. ‘She has been evasive about all her husband’s business affairs. When I demonstrated some knowledge to her about MCA Consultores she wouldn’t speak without her lawyer present. She is a determined woman and although she says she abhors violence she did strike Basilio Lucena hard enough to draw blood. She is intelligent and calculating. In her defence it’s possible she knew nothing about MCA and was just being cautious. She has also offered to find out about her husband’s relationship with Carvajal.’

‘It’s flimsy, Inspector Jefe. As you said earlier, she could just be protecting her privacy, as well as her inheritance and that of her children. She struck Lucena, but that was under extreme provocation, given the dangers of his promiscuity. Intelligence and calculation are prerequisites for success in business.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ said Falcón, loathing the obsequiousness that had crept into his own voice. ‘Are we agreed that the murders are connected, Juez? I mean we’re not looking at a series of random acts. This is multiple murder but not serial killing.’

Calderón pinched the cartilage of his ear and stared through the glass desktop.

‘The punishment that Sergio has meted out to his two primary victims is consistent with what you’d expect of somebody who’d suffered sexual abuse,’ said Calderón. ‘The victims are clearly targeted and there is a link in that they knew each other. I agree with you that Sergio forces them to confront their deepest horrors. The removal of the eyelids and the subsequent mutilation both victims inflicted on themselves would indicate this. The question is: how does Sergio know these things? This is not available information. This is profoundly personal stuff. It is secret history. How does Sergio get inside people’s heads?’

Falcón told him about the local policeman’s burglary investigation.

‘Well, if he did spend the weekend here that would suggest that he’d already targeted Salgado, perhaps he even knew this man’s particular horror and he was just looking for the means to bring it back to him.’

‘He’s obsessed with film,’ said Falcón. ‘He sees it like memory.’

‘You know how it is … films and dreams. People are always getting those words muddled up,’ said Calderón. ‘It’s understandable. The enclosed darkness of the cinema, the images. It’s not so different to what you’d see in your sleep.’

‘We talked about his creativity before,’ said Falcón. ‘He is doing what every artist wants to do. He gets inside people’s heads and makes them see things differently or, in fact, he makes them see what they already know but in a different light. And he has to be creative about it because people don’t hold records of their horrors, do they?’

They bury them,’ said Calderón.

‘Maybe this is the nature of evil,’ said Falcón. ‘The genius of evil.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Because it’s beyond our imagination.’

Calderón turned in his seat to the four Falcón nudes.

‘Fortunately there are other types of genius,’ he said. ‘To balance out the evil ones.’

‘In my father’s case, I think he wished he’d never had it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he lost it,’ said Falcón. ‘If he’d never had it … he wouldn’t have gone through the rest of his life with that sense of loss.’

Falcón drifted back to the window as the personal reentered their dialogue. He wondered if he could do it now — salvage the situation. If he could talk about his father in this way, why not Inés? Why not bare his neck to this man? There was a knock at the door. Fernández put his head in.

‘Inspector Ramírez has found a trunk up in the attic,’ he said. ‘The lock’s been sawn through and the dust on the surface has been disturbed. Felipe is looking at it for prints.’

They got the trunk down to the landing after Felipe had declared it clean. It was heavy. They opened it up and parted the brown paper covering the contents — books and old catalogues, copies of a magazine called the Tangier-Riviera, manila envelopes packed thick with photographs. Slotted down the sides were four reels of magnetic tape of the sort used on the old reel-to-reel tape recorders. There was a single can of film but no camera or projection equipment. There was a diary whose first entry was on 2nd April 1966 and which ran out after twenty pages with a final entry on 3rd July 1968.

Calderón left for a meeting when he saw that the trunk offered no fast solutions. They fixed a meeting for midday on Monday. As Calderón left the house he was confronted by four journalists who were too well informed to be ignored. He held an impromptu press conference in which one of the journalists said that the media was dubbing the killer El Ciego de Sevilla. To which he automatically replied that there was no logic in calling the killer the blind man when, in fact, he was just the opposite.

‘So you can confirm that the killer cuts the eyelids off his victims?’ asked the journalist, and the press conference was prematurely terminated.

Falcón and Ramírez split the workload. Ramírez was happy to take Fernández down to the gallery on Calle Zaragoza when he heard that Salgado had a blonde, blue-eyed secretary called Greta. Baena and Serrano continued the search of the house with Felipe and Jorge while the trunk was taken down to the study and the contents laid out on the desk. A further search of the attic uncovered no camera or projection equipment, but there was an old reel-to-reel tape recorder which Felipe managed to get working.

The diary seemed the obvious place to start but was very badly kept up. The first entry showed why Salgado had started it. He was happy. He was getting married to a woman called Carmen Blázquez. Falcón, who’d never known that Salgado had had a wife, grunted as he read the words — Salgado already proud, pompous and unctuous at the age of thirty-three. ‘Francisco Falcón has done me the great honour of agreeing to be my testigo. His genius will make the occasion one of the talked-about events of the Seville social calendar.’ It was no wonder he hadn’t kept up the entries. The man had nothing to say. The only time he was moving was when he talked about his new wife. Then, all the artifice was stripped away and he wrote in unembellished prose. ‘I love Carmen more with every day that passes.’ ‘She is a good person, which makes her sound dull but it is her goodness which affects everyone who meets her. As Francisco says: “She makes me forget the uglinesses of my life. When I’m in her company I feel as if I have only ever been a good man.”’

Falcón tried to imagine his father saying those words and decided they were Salgado’s invention. He opened up the manila envelope of photographs and found one of Carmen dated June 1965 in which she looked to be in her late twenties. There was nothing striking about her face except her eyebrows, which were short, dark and completely horizontal with no arch to them at all. They gave her an earnest, concerned look, as if she would look after her husband well.

Another entry dated 25th December 1967: ‘Last night before dinner I was taken back to childhood. My parents always allowed us one present on Christmas Eve and Carmen has given me the best gift of my life. She is pregnant. We are deliriously happy and I get quite drunk on champagne.’

The diary charted Carmen’s uneventful pregnancy, which was intercut with stupefying details of successful art shows and sale values. Salgado mentioned the purchase of the tape recorder, which he’d bought intending to record Carmen’s singing, which he never managed to do due to her self-consciousness in front of the microphone. Salgado was also entranced by Carmen’s pregnant belly, which was enormous. He even asked her if she’d let Francisco Falcón draw her. She was appalled at the suggestion. The final entry read: ‘The doctor has agreed to allow me to record my child’s first cry in the world. They are bemused by the request. It seems that men are never present at the birth. I ask Francisco where he was for the birth of his children and he says he can’t remember. When I ask if it was at Pilar’s bedside he is stunned by the notion. Am I the only man in Spain to be fascinated by such a momentous occasion? And Francisco, an artist of such genius, I would have thought he would find birth as compelling as inspiration.’

A strange note to end on. Falcón counted back the months and reckoned that if Carmen had announced her pregnancy at the end of December then the baby should have been born in July. He went through the contents of the trunk to see if there was a record of the child’s birth. In a stained blue folder was his answer — Carmen Blázquez’s death certificate dated 5th July 1968. The medical report beneath it detailed a catastrophic birth marred by high blood pressure, fluid retention, septicaemia and finally death for both mother and child.

The thought of the padlocked trunk high up in the attic of Salgado’s house took on a terrible poignancy for Falcón. The loneliness of the man — the solitary diner, the forlorn shopper, the desolate hanger-on — whose whole life had been dedicated to the genius of Francisco Falcón, walked the streets with his only possibility of happiness boxed away in a dry dusty place.

He turned to the next photograph from the manila envelope under the horizontal eyebrows of the undemanding Carmen Blázquez and there they were on their wedding day. Ramón and Carmen holding hands. Their whole happiness contained in that pocket. It was astonishing for Falcón to see Salgado so young. The subsequent thirty-five years had ruined his looks. The misery had been a weight he carried in his face.

The stack of tapes demanded Falcón’s attention, but he continued to flip through the photographs until he came to a shot of his father sitting with Carmen in a garden, the two of them laughing. It was true of his father that he’d always been drawn to ‘good’ women. His mother, Mercedes … even the eccentric Encarnación was tolerated because she was ‘a good woman’. He carried on through the stack of photographs and realized that this was Salgado’s entire collection of shots of Carmen. They were all different sizes and taken with a variety of cameras. Salgado must have systematically removed her from the photographic record of his life.

The tapes. The thought of the tapes made his hands sweat. He didn’t want to hear what was on those tapes. His hands trembled as he threaded the tape through the heads. He played it and was relieved to find that it was completely silent.

The second tape burst straight into a conversation between Salgado and Carmen. He was imploring her to sing. She was refusing. Her heels paced a wooden floor while Salgado pleaded with her, right down to begging her for something that he could remember her by if she happened to die before him. The conversation bled into classical music, followed by some flamenco and Falcón fast-forwarded to the end.

The third tape started with Albinoni’s Adagio. There followed other stirring pieces by Mahler and Tchaikovsky. He barely managed to feed the fourth tape through the heads, his hands were so slippery. He pressed ‘play’ and heard only the ethereal hiss, but then came everything that he’d dreaded. There was screaming and exhortation and panic. There was the rushing of feet on hard floors, steel trays clanging on tiles, tables and screens toppling, material ripping. There was one last cry of someone being swept out to sea with no life line, with only the sight of their lover, helpless and diminishing on the shore: ‘Ramón! Ramón! Ramón!’ And then a harsh click and silence.

The glass desktop provided support. Carmen’s final cries had hit him like three body blows and broken him in the middle. His organs felt ruptured.

He concentrated on his breathing — the calming effect of valuing a motor reflex. He turned the machine off, wiped sweat from his top lip. He was nearly overwhelmed by guilt at how brutal he’d been to this old friend of his father. All those times he’d seen him outside Calle Bailén and thought, no, not that pain in the arse. But then there were the appalling contents of the computer. What had happened to this man after he’d lost his wife? Had his misery goaded him? Had it prodded him down this worthless road to the ultimate, lonely depravity of auto-strangulation whilst calamitous images of ruined children passed before his eyes? Maybe it was in his nature and he’d seen that terrible capacity, but then Carmen had come into his life and given him a shot at goodness and he’d had her brutally torn from him. Yes, disappointment would seem a paltry word to describe Ramón Salgado’s state as he left that hospital in the dreadful heat of a Sevillano July and taken his first feverish steps down towards hell.

Baena came in with a large plastic bag.

‘We’ve finished in the house, Inspector Jefe,’ he said and handed over the bag. ‘Serrano’s done the garden with Jorge. The only thing of interest was this. It’s a whip. The sort religious nuts use to flagellate themselves. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.’

‘Where was it?’

‘In the back of the built-in wardrobe in the bedroom,’ said Baena. ‘No thorn tiaras or hair shirts though, sir.’

Falcón grunted a laugh and told Baena to make an inventory of the trunk and take it back to the Jefatura. He left Serrano to seal up the house and drove back to the centre of town. He parked in Reyes Católicos and had a quick tapa of solomillo al whisky and then walked up Calle Zaragoza to Salgado’s gallery, where the showroom was in darkness.

Greta, Salgado’s Swiss-born secretary, was sitting at her desk at the back of the showroom with her hands jammed between her knees, staring into space. Her eyes were puffy and wrecked from crying.

‘You should go home,’ said Falcón, but she didn’t want to be on her own. She told him it was her tenth anniversary working for Ramón Salgado. They had a celebration planned for this year’s Feria. She drifted off into old memories and stock phrases about ‘what a good man Ramón was’. Falcón asked if there were any artists that she could think of who hadn’t liked Ramón, who perhaps had been rejected by him?

‘People come off the street all the time. Students, young people. I deal with them. They don’t understand how the business works, that Ramón is not operating at that level. Some of them storm out, as if we don’t deserve their genius. Others get talking and, if I like them, I let them show me their stuff. If it’s good I tell them who they could show it to. Ramón never saw any of these people.’

‘How many of them show you installations using film, video or computer graphics?’

‘More than half. Not many of the kids paint these days.’

‘That’s not Ramón’s style, is it?’

‘It’s not his clients’ style. They’re the conservative ones. They can’t see its value. At this level it’s mostly about money and investment … and a CD with some creative stuff digitalized on to it doesn’t feel or look like a ten-million-peseta investment.’

‘Were there any unhappy established artists that he was representing?’

‘He worked very closely with his artists. He didn’t make those sorts of mistakes.’

‘What about in the last six months? Do you recall anything suspicious, an unpleasant or humiliating …’

‘He’s not been so concentrated on his work. He’s been concerned about his sister and he’s been abroad a lot. Mainly the Far East — Thailand, the Philippines.’

The thought of Salgado pursuing his needs with oriental boys congealed in Falcón’s mind. He felt grimy in front of the blonde Greta — he with his new knowledge, she with her untarnished memories. He realized that he was diminished by the truth, and she, unsullied in her ignorance.

‘Did Ramón ever talk about his wife?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t know he’d been married,’ she said. ‘He was a very private man. I never thought of him as particularly Spanish even. There was a lot of Swiss reserve about him.’

We are such different things to different people, thought Falcón. Salgado was quiet, powerful, kind and private with a woman he had no need to impress, and yet to Falcón he was always oily, tedious, ingratiating and pompous. With a good memory we could be who we wanted to be, with whoever we liked — all of us actors and every day a new play.

He went upstairs to Salgado’s office, now occupied by Ramírez and Fernández in their shirtsleeves on either side of the desk, leafing through papers.

‘We’re not getting very far here,’ said Ramírez. ‘The best we’ve got is what Greta gave us in the first half-hour, which was their client list, the list of artists he used to represent, those he still represents and those he’s rejected. The rest is letters, bills, the usual stuff. No correspondence between him and Sra Jiménez. No little note from Sergio saying, “You’re fucked.”’

It was late. Falcón told them to pack it in. He went back to the Jefatura. The trunk from Salgado’s attic was already there. He took the film and spooled it into Raúl Jiménez’s projection equipment, which was still set up. The movie must have been a gift, perhaps even from Raúl Jiménez. It consisted of seven sequences of Ramón and Carmen. They were happy in every shot. Salgado clearly adored her. The look he gave her as she turned to the camera and his eyes remained fixed on her cheek, there was no mistaking it.

Falcón sat in the dark with the flickering images. He had no way of controlling himself. He had no one to control himself for. He wept without knowing why and despised himself for it, as he used to despise cinema audiences who wailed at the crass sentimentality on the silver screen.

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

2nd November 1946, Tangier

An American came to see me yesterday. A sizeable piece of humanity. He introduced himself as Charles Brown III and asked to see my work. My English has improved with all the Americans suddenly appearing in the Café Central. I don’t want him leafing through my drawings and tell him I have to show properly and to come back in the afternoon. This gives me time to find out from R. that he is the representative of Barbara Hutton, the new Queen of the Kasbah. I set up the work I want to show and when he returns and we enter the room I say: ‘Everything’s for sale, except that one,’ which is the drawing of P.

There’s a rumour that inside the Palace of Sidi Hosni there is a world of wealth beyond even R.’s imagination. Each of the thirty rooms has its own gold mantel clock from Van Cleef & Arpels at a cost of $10,000 a piece. Anybody who spends a third of a million dollars to tell the time can only value things by price alone. ‘She will not buy a drawing from you for $20,’ says R. ‘She doesn’t know how much that is. It’s as little as a centavo is to us.’ I tell him I have never sold a piece in my life. ‘Then you should sell your first piece for no less than $500.’ He gives me the sales technique, which I have put into practice. I follow Charles Brown around the room and talk him through the work, but all I can sense is his desperation to get back to the drawing of P. At the end he asks: ‘Just outa interest, how much is the charcoal drawing of the nude?’ I tell him it’s not for sale. It has no price. He keeps using the phrase, ‘just outa interest’ and I say, ‘I don’t know.’ He goes back to the piece. I play it by R.’s book and don’t go with him but smoke at the other end of the room and look as if I’m amusing myself, rather than what I want to do which is burst like a balloon of water so that all that is left of me is a puddle of gratitude and a bladder.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘this is all very interesting stuff. I like it. I mean that. I like it. The interlocking shapes in the Moorish tradition. The patterned chaos. The bleak landscapes. It all does something for me. But we ‘re not talking about me. I buy for clients. And this is what my clients want. They don’t want the cool intellectual stuff … not the people who come to Tangier. They come for … what shall I call it? … eastern promise.’

‘On the northwest tip of Africa?’ I say.

‘It’s kind of a saying,’ he says. ‘It means they want something exotic, sensual, mysterious … Yeah, mystery is the thing. Why isn’t this for sale?’

‘Because it’s important to me. It’s a new and recent development.’

‘I can see that. Your other drawings are perfect … meticulously observed. But this … this is different. This is so revealing … and yet, forbidden. Maybe that’s it. The nature of mystery is that it shows something of itself, it entices but it forbids the ultimate knowledge.’

Has Charles Brown been smoking, I ask myself. But he is sincere. He pushes again for a price. I don’t give in. He tells me his client has to see the work. I won’t let it out of the house. He finishes our discussion with the words:

‘Don’t worry I’ll bring the mountain to Mohammed.’

He leaves, shaking my damp hand. I tremble with excitement. I am in a sweat and tear off my clothes and lie on the floor naked. I smoke a hashish cigarette, one of the half dozen I prepare for myself every morning. I look at the drawing of P. I am as priapic as Pan and, as if by telepathy, a boy arrives from C. and releases my steam.

4th November 1946, Tangier

I lie in my room in a state of controlled nonchalance for two days. My ear is trained and finely tuned to the faintest knock on the front door. I fall asleep and when the knock comes I burst to the surface like a man freed from a sinking ship. I wrestle with the bolster and try to dress at the same time. I do a comic turn while the houseboy waits at the side of the bed with an envelope. It is he who has prodded me awake. I tear open the envelope. Inside is a gold-embossed card from Mrs Barbara Woolworth Hutton, and in her own handwriting she asks if she may visit Francisco González in his home on 5th November 1946 at 2.45 p.m. I show the card to R., who is impressed, I can tell. ‘We have a problem here,’ he says. R. likes problems, which is why he is always creating them. The problem is my name.

‘Name me a González who has done anything of note in the world of art,’ says R.

‘Julio González, the sculptor,’ I say.

‘Never heard of him,’ says R.

‘He worked with iron — abstract geometric shapes — he died four years ago.’

‘You know what Francisco González says to me? It says button seller.’

‘Why buttons?’ I ask, and he ignores me.

‘What’s your mother’s name?’

‘I can’t use my mother’s name,’ I say.

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t use it, that’s all.’

‘What is it?’

‘Falcón,’ I say.

‘No, no, no, que no … es perfecto. Francisco Falcón. From now on that is your name.’

I try to tell him that it will not do, but I don’t want to reveal more than I have to, so I accept my fate. I am Francisco Falcón and I have to admit it has something … Apart from being alliterative there is a rhythm to it, as there is to Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Antonio Gaudí, even the simpler Joan Miró … they all have the rhythm of fame. They’ve known this for some time in Hollywood, which is why we have Greta Garbo and not Greta Gustafson and Judy Garland not Frances Gumm, never Frances Gumm.

5th November 1946, Tangier

She came as promised and I am completely delirious. I have not smoked this evening so that the diamond brightness of the moment is not lost in the hashish haze. She arrived, escorted by Charles Brown, who is monumental next to her and utterly deferential. I am struck by her extraordinary grace and elegance, the perfection of her dress, the softness of her gloves, which must have come from the underbelly of a five-week-old kid. What I like more is her natural disapproving look. Her wealth, which is an encasing aura, sealing her off from normal mortals, has made her demanding, but I think when she falls … she falls hard. Her heels click expensively on my terracotta floor. She says: ‘Eugenia Errázuriz would love these tiles.’ Whoever she may be.

I am mesmerized, but surprise myself by not being tongue-tied as we go to the exhibition room. I have refined R.’s technique and this time the drawing is not even on display. She walks around the room placing each foot carefully in front of the other. Charles Brown is murmuring words in her ear, which I imagine is lined with mother-of-pearl. She listens and nods. She is taken with the Moorish shapes. She moves swiftly past the bleak, Russian landscapes. She hovers over the Tangier drawings. She turns on her heel. The kid gloves are off and hang limply from one of her small white hands. ‘This is excellent work,’ she says. ‘Remarkable. Original. Quite strange. Very affecting. But Charles tells me you have something that is even beyond the excellence of these pieces, which you’ve had the good grace to allow me to view.’

I know what you refer to and I told Mr Brown that it was not for sale. I thought it unfair to even show it to you.’

‘I would only like to see it,’ she says. ‘I would never want to take something from you that was so important.’

‘Then it is understood,’ I say. ‘Follow me.’

I have arranged the drawing so that it is perfectly lit at the end of a long dark corridor and displayed against an old terracotta brick wall beneath a white arch, which has been textured by decades of whitewash. This part of the house is quite dark and I know that she will suddenly come across it and will be drawn to it like a moth. I am not wrong. And, I don’t think I am mistaken, when she first sees the drawing she lets out a little sexual moan. She walks towards it and I see that in her eyes she is lost. My work is done. I stand back and let her go on alone. She doesn’t move for ten minutes. Then she bows her head and turns away. At the front door her eyes are glistening. ‘Thank you so much,’ she says. ‘I hope you will do me the honour of being my guest at dinner one of these evenings.’ She holds out her hand. I bow and kiss it.

6th November 1946, Tangier

The day starts with a dinner invitation from B.H. An hour later Charles Brown arrives. I arrange mint tea and smoke a cigarette. The conversation is long and meandering and includes enquiries relating to my past, which I lie about in monstrous fashion thinking, on the spur of the moment, that this is best, that in this way nobody will ever know me, including possibly myself, and so I will sustain the mysterious aura which will become the trademark of my work. I lose myself in this thought: that even after I’m gone and the laborious, scholarly effort is made to get to the bottom of Francisco Falcón (there, you see, the transformation is already complete, I wrote that without thinking — Francisco González has disappeared), the onion layers will be parted one after the other, leading to the kernel of truth. But, as everybody knows, the truth about an onion is nothing. When the last parchment of onion matter is teased open there is nothing. No little message. It is nothing. I am nothing. We are nothing. The realization of this gives me enormous strength. I feel a huge surge of immoral freedom. For me there are no rules. I come back to C.B. with a start. He is asking me whether I will consider selling. I say no. He asks me whether I would bring it with me to dinner to show the other guests. This would be psychologically weakening, so again I say no. C.B. and I head for the door and he says: ‘You realize that Mrs Hutton would be prepared to part with a significant amount of money for your piece.’

‘There is no doubt in anybody’s mind of the means of the owner of the Palace Sidi Hosni,’ I say.

He leaves his parting shot until the last moment.

‘Five hundred dollars,’ he says, and walks off down the narrow street, turns left and heads back up to the Kasbah.

I use all my powers of restraint not to call him back.

11th November 1946, Tangier

I should have written this last night when the perfection of the whole evening was still fresh in my mind. I arrived back so drunk and in such a state of excitement that I had to smoke several pipes of hashish to bring me down into a fitful slumber. I have woken up thick-headed, with a flighty memory rather than one tethered to the facts.

I arrive at the gates of the Sidi Hosni Palace and am admitted, on showing my invitation, by a liveried Tanjawi in white pantaloons. I am instantly in a dream world, where I am handed from servant to servant and walked through rooms and patios, on which no expense has been spared by the previous owner, whose name escapes me. Blake? Or was it Maxwell? Or perhaps both.

The palace has been made up of a number of houses which have all been linked to a central structure where I am led. The effect is bewildering, magical and mysterious. It is a microcosm of the Moroccan mind. The servant leaves me in a room in which some of the guests are behaving as if they’re at a cocktail party, and others as if they’re in a museum. Both are right. I am in a suit but am swarthier from my outdoor life, which sets me apart from the predominantly white people in the room. One woman nearly asks me for a drink but realizes at the last moment that I am not wearing gloves or a fez. Instead she asks me what wood the floor is made of. C.B. rescues me and introduces me around the room. At each introduction a flutter bursts up to the chandeliers (which are to be replaced with Venetian glass) like a flock of doves. I realize this dinner has been set up for me, to present me to society, to flatter me. A drink is put in my hand. It is ferocious with alcohol. The colossal C.B. has his hand on my shoulder as if I’m his younger statue and with a bit more bronze poured into me I could command as large a square as he. No hostess yet. I am ill-equipped for the occasion, not through lack of language but lack of social niceties. The talk is of New York, London and Paris, about horses, fashion, yachts, property and money. I am told things about our hostess, about how she gave her London home to the American government as a gift, how the carpet on the wall is from Qom, the marquetry from Fez, the bronze head from Benin. They know everything about B.H.’s world but none of them had penetrated the carapace of her significant wealth. But I had. And that was why I was there. C.B. III had told everybody, in so many words, that I had got inside and done it with the simplest and yet most beguiling charcoal drawing that said more in its moment than the endlessly restructured, laboriously crafted, massively overstuffed palace of Sidi Hosni. As I moved around the room I picked up invitations to other social occasions as well as a number of sexual offers from women. The same depravity that trickles thickly and darkly down the alleys of the Soco Chico is here behind the gilded walls of the palatial home of the old Muslim Holy Man, Sidi Hosni.

B.H. comes straight to me, holds out her hand. I kiss it. We are the centre of attention. She says, ‘I must show you something.’ We leave the room. She heads for a door guarded by a tall, very black Nubian, who is in white pantaloons but stripped to the waist. She unlocks the door, which is heaved open by the Nubian, and we enter her private gallery. There is a Fragonard, a Braque, even an El Greco. A painting by that terrible fraud Salvador Dalí, a Manet, a Kandinsky. I am stunned. There are drawings, too. I see a Picasso and others which I am told are by Hassan el Glaoui, the son of the Pasha of Marrakesh. Then comes the psychological point of the whole evening. B.H. leads me to a space on the wall. ‘Here,’ she says, ‘I want to put something that sums up my feelings about Morocco. The piece will have to be elusive, apparent and yet untouchable, revealing and yet incomprehensible, available but forbidden. It must tantalize like the truth, just as you think you can put your finger on it, it slips away.’ These were not entirely her words, some belonged to C.B. and I think others have been sewn in by me. She finishes with the words: ‘I want your drawing to be part of this collection.’ This was a planned assault. I knew I had to give in. To withhold any more risked boring my assailants. I nod. I acquiesce. She grips my arm at the bicep. We look enthralled at the space on the wall. ‘Charles will talk to you about the details. I want you to know that you have made me very happy.’

The rest of the evening passed in a crystal blur, as seen at speed through a torrent of Venetian glassware. This had much to do with the savagery of the alcohol in the drinks. As I left for the night, B.H. had long since departed, C.B. took me to one side and told me that I had made Mrs Hutton very generous. ‘She rewards genius. I have been instructed not to negotiate but to simply give you this.’ It was a cheque for $1,000. He promised to drop by in the morning and pick up the piece. I am now worth one-tenth of a Van Cleef & Arpels gold mantel clock.

23rd December 1946, Tangier

Still no word from Pilar, I am desperate. I try to advance the work. I try to put into paint what I saw that afternoon, but it does not translate. Where it was so simple it has become complicated. I need P. to come back and remind me of what I saw that day. I have given up on society. I am bored by its gentility. I was much in demand after my triumph with B.H. but now the hungry beast has moved on. I am relieved but still swamped.

7th March 1947, Tangier

I have stopped work. I sit in front of the seven remaining drawings of P. with not an idea in my head. I have even worked under the influence of majoun. After one session I came back to reality feeling I had done something great only to find I had painted seven black canvases. I hang them in a whitewashed room and stand amongst them in a state of total desolation.

25th June 1947, Tangier

I am repelled by my own rapacity. My inability to create has induced a need for endless change. I tour the brothels and hunt out new young men and tire of them instantly. I smoke powerful hashish and spend whole days fluttering like a flag in the enervating cherqi that knocks incessantly at the doors. My arms are weak, my penis flaccid. I spend whole nights in the Bar La Mar Chica surrounded by drunks, reprobates, idiots and whores. I have given up on majoun, under its influence I only revisit the old horrors — blood-covered walls, ramps of dead bodies, mud and blood, flesh and white bone churn in my head.

1st July 1947, Tangier

After ending up drunk on R.’s doorstep he has sent me back to work on the boats.

1st January 1948, Tangier

A new year. It has to be better than the last. I still cannot face the blank canvas. These are my first writings since July. I am in better shape physically. I am no longer fat but I am unable to rid myself of this sense of desolation. I have tried to find P. I even went to Granada only to find that her home has been sold and that the family had moved to Madrid, but nobody knew where.

I have nothing to report. The wind-whipped chabolas on the edge of town contain nothing of the misery in my privileged body. I laid out the seven drawings of P. in the hope of feeling a new surge of possibility. I accomplished the reverse.

I have been allowed up, I have been granted the enormous privilege of putting my eye to the crack and have seen the real nature of things and I have brought it down and shown the same to ordinary mortals. But P. was a part of it, she was my muse and I have lost her. I will not paint or draw again. I am destined for the trough where everybody bends their heads — eat, work, sleep.

25th March 1948, Tangier

I have seen her. In the market off the Petit Soco. I have seen her. Across a thousand heads. I have seen her. Was it her?

1st April 1948, Tangier

Am I so desperate that I will pin my hopes on phantoms? I go to every doctor in town to see if she is in their employ. Nothing. R. wants to send me out on the boats again rather than have me crash to earth like a sunstroked bird.

3rd April 1948, Tangier

I leave the house and there she is in the street, pacing this way and that. At the sight of her I have to hold on to the door, my legs have gone. I ask her in. She says nothing and crosses the threshold in front of me. Her smell fills my chest and I know that I have been saved. The houseboy makes us tea. She won’t sit even when it arrives. She strokes the houseboy’s head. He slips out as if touched by an angel.

I don’t know where to start. It is as if I’m in front of the canvas and my hand goes to this corner, that quarter, the middle and makes no mark. I have done this for hours and when finally I decide where I am going to touch the white, white canvas, I make no mark. There is no paint on the brush. This is how I am now. I force myself to speak.

Me: I came looking for you in Granada … when I didn’t hear from you.

Silence.

Me: They told me that your aunt had died, that your mother was sick and that you had all gone to Madrid.

P.: That was true.

Me: They had no address for you. No way of contacting you.

P.: That was not true.

Silence.

Me: Why was that not true?

P.: They knew exactly where we were. My father had told them and he had also told them not to tell anyone answering to your description, coming from Tangier, asking questions about his daughter.

Me: I don’t understand.

P.: He didn’t want me to see you ever again.

Me: Was it something to do with me … I mean, … those drawings? Did he hear about them? That you had stood before me …?

P.: No. That was private between you and me.

Me: So what happened? I can’t think how I could have crossed him. We only ever talked about my back.

P.: My father speaks Arabic.

Me: Of course he does, he was in Melilla. Where is your father … I must talk to him.

P.: My father is dead.

Me. I am sorry.

P.: He died six months after my mother.

Me: You have been suffering.

P.: I have had eighteen months of sorrow. It has aged and hardened me.

Me: You still look as you did. You don’t wear it in your face.

P.: I was telling you that my father spoke Arabic and because he spoke some of the Riffian dialects he was asked if he would spend a morning a week treating poor people in the chabolas on the outskirts of town. The American woman, ‘La Rica’, Sra Hutton had given money for medicines and food. He volunteered. He came across the usual things in malnourished people, but he also came across a surprising number of mutilations. Ears missing, fingers and thumbs cut off, nostrils split. Nobody would tell him how these injuries were incurred until he treated a woman who had been there the week before with her son, who had lost an ear. She was covered in shame at having to be handled by a man but was in such pain she had to succumb. He asked her about her son and why nobody would tell him what had happened. ‘They won’t talk because it is your people who are doing this,’ she said. My father was stunned. She told him how these boys have to steal because they are starving and about the injuries they have to sustain to feed their families and the deaths that have resulted. My father was appalled and asked who was doing this. ‘The men who are guarding the warehouses.’

I am silent. The inside of my body is frozen. My chest is an ice cave through which the coldest wind is blowing. My muse has returned to tell me why she can never speak to me again.

P.: A boy with an infected wound was brought back to the surgery. This was unusual but he’d touched my father by his courage and his acceptance of pain without complaint. The boy recovered and my father employed him around the house. One lunchtime he disappeared. We searched the house. He was cowering in the back of the laundry. He couldn’t speak except to ask, ‘Has he gone? Has he gone?’ His terror was pure. We asked him who he was afraid of and he would only say: ‘El Marroquí.’ It happened again the next day. My father looked in his consultation book and his only patients that day were Sr Cardoso, who was eighty-two, and … you.

The next day he took the boy to the Petit Soco. You took your usual seat at the Café Central. And the boy told my father that you were the one — El Marroquí.

I cannot move. The green eyes are on me. I know that this is the crux. I know it because life is tearing past as if both our lives are being compressed into this one moment. I decide I will ignore it. I will lie. Just as I have lied to all of them — C.B., the Queen of the Kasbah, the Contesse de Blah and the Duque de Flah. I will lie. I am Francisco Falcón. No. He is Francisco Falcón. I no longer exist.

P.: Were you responsible for what happened to those people?

The green eyes are willing me, beseeching me and I know that I am lost. I look into my hands, which contain life’s water, and see it bubble and wink, mocking me, as it leaks through my fingers.

Me: Yes, I did those things. I am responsible.

She doesn’t leave. She looks into me and I realize I have done the right thing.

P.: My parents made discreet enquiries about the company you worked for. My father found out that you were a legionnaire and a contrabandista and that it was your capacity for violence which inspired fear in all your enemies and competitors. They decided to send me away. It was a coincidence that my aunt became sick.

Me: But why force you to leave? Why not just forbid you to see me?

P.: Because they knew I was in love with you.

She finally sits down and asks for a cigarette. She can hardly hold it. I light it for her and put it in her fingers. She stares into the floor. I tell her everything. I tell her about ‘the incident’ (or nearly everything about it) that drove me out of my family home to join the Legion. I tell her what I did in the Civil War, in Russia, at Krasni Bor. I tell her why I left Seville, what happened in Tangier … everything. I tell her about my desolation. I tell her how she fits Inside me, how she is my structure. She listens. The sky grows dark. The wind gets up. The boy brings more mint tea and a candle that wavers in the draught. There is only one thing I don’t talk about. I tell her every hideous thing, but I don’t tell her about the boys. That is not something for a woman’s ears. The admissions have been of such staggering enormity that to introduce depravity would put me beyond redemption. I finish by talking about the work. How I have stopped the work. How I have been unable to progress beyond the drawings. How I need her to open my eyes again. I ask her if she remembers her last words to me on the day we made the drawings. She shakes her head. I tell her: ‘Now you know.’

As I write this she lies on the bed, a vague form beneath the mosquito netting. A candle with a tall spear of flame burns by her bed. She sleeps. I reach for the charcoal and paper.

3rd June 1948, Tangier

P. tells me she is pregnant. I drop tools for the day and we lie in bed together with our throats so full we cannot speak about the wholeness of our future together and the children we will have.

18th June 1948, Tangier

After a civil ceremony at the Spanish Legation and a short Mass in the cathedral P. and I are married. R. arranges for a reception at the Hotel El Minzah. As they have begun to say now, in true Riviera style: le tout Tangier was there. We are surrounded by strangers at our own wedding and leave as soon as it is polite. We disappear under the mosquito netting with a hashish cigarette. We float on each other’s caresses and make love as man and wife for the first time.

She is tired and wants to sleep. I rest my head on her belly and hear the cells doubling within. I have too much energy and get up to work. I think it is an auspicious day so I take up paint and make my first mark on the canvas. It is a start. I become nervous and decide to take a walk through the Medina up towards the Kasbah to stand on the fortifications and look out over the night sea to contemplate my future. I am stopped in the Petit Soco by people who want to congratulate me and buy me a drink. They are insistent. C. is among them. I haven’t seen him for months. I let him buy me a whisky. We talk and joke for a while and I take my leave. C. catches up with me on my way to the Kasbah. He takes my arm and asks why I have been ignoring him, why have I been sending his boys away? He tells me I have frozen up again, that marriage is for lawyers and doctors, that bourgeois living is the enemy of the artist. I remind him who P. is. We have been walking at a leisurely pace and he is now steering me towards a house. He tells me it is a bar and he would like to buy me one last drink. We take a seat in a courtyard and a drink is served. There is a walkway around this courtyard, like a cloister. Without my noticing, candles are lit in this walkway and suddenly young men are loitering there. C. is prattling about the subversion of sensuality, the anarchy of depravity. I don’t listen but look at the muscular delineation of the boys’ thighs as they walk beneath the uncertain light. I am stirred up. C. hands me a cigarette. There is hashish in it which slips into my blood like cream. My lips caress the cigarette. The night folds around me. More boys float past. C. leaves with one of them. They take me by the arms and lead me away. They undress me. They knead me. They massage my resistance away. I collapse to their touch.

I come round with my lips to a boy’s back. I dress quickly. I find the courtyard. There is no sign of C. I walk back home. I strip in the bathroom and scrub at my genitals until they are raw. I stand naked at the end of the marital bed and look down on my sleeping wife. What sort of a man am I?

She stirs under my gaze and her head comes up off the pillow. ‘My husband,’ she says and smiles. She rubs the bed next to her. I lie down. What sort of a man am I?