The Blind Man of Seville

26

Saturday, 21st April 2001, Salgado’s gallery, Calle Zaragoza, Seville

The gallery was open but empty. Upstairs Ramírez and Greta were sitting next to each other going through the lists of artists that she’d given him the day before. She was looking down and speaking. He was admiring the top of her head. They jerked apart as Falcón reached the top of the stairs and he was sure he heard the snap of sexual elastic. He asked Greta if she would leave them to talk for a moment.

‘We’ve drawn blood,’ said Falcón, which got Ramírez’s attention.

‘In Salgado’s house?’

‘On the floor and in his mouth.’

‘In his mouth?’

‘Salgado bit Sergio when he was stuffing the socks back in his mouth.’

Ramírez sat back and smiled with his arms open wide.

‘All we’ve got to do now is find him,’ he said. ‘Still, at least Juez Calderón will be happy to know that, when we do, he’s got a case.’

‘Work with Greta …’

‘It’s been a pleasure.’

‘Develop a list of all artists who’ve used film or video in their works with addresses in either Seville or Madrid.’

‘Madrid?’

‘He posted us something from Madrid. He might still have an address there.’

‘What age group are we looking at?’

‘Take it up to forty-five just to be safe … as long as they’re fit and healthy,’ said Falcón. ‘Do you know anybody in Vice who would look through that material on Salgado’s computer and give us an opinion on where it’s come from?’

Ramírez nodded, always a man who built up favours. They ran through Sergio’s profile just to be sure. Falcón turned at the stairs as he was leaving.

‘If Greta knows anybody on that shortlist who has had any kind of French education, or spent time in France or North Africa, highlight them.’

Falcón stepped over the police tape at Salgado’s house and let himself in. The house was empty and, devoid of the activity of the crime scene, lifeless. There wasn’t even any sadness. There was just the sterility of a man of borrowed tastes. The walls had been repainted downstairs. There was no bric-a-brac, no photographs, no clutter. The furniture was all clean lines. Only one painting hung in the living room, an almost colourless acrylic abstract. In the study, in the middle of the bookcase, was the only photograph on display — Francisco Falcón and Ramón Salgado, arms around each other, smiling.

He went upstairs to the room at the top, which gave out on to the small roof terrace, where they believed Sergio had got in. Felipe and Jorge had left the room exactly as they’d found it. Even the key to the door was still on the floor where it had originally been. He blinked at it and called Felipe on his mobile and asked him where he’d left the key.

‘We put it back in the door rather than risk having it kicked about on the floor,’ he said.

‘In that case … he’s been back,’ said Falcón.

‘Where was the key?’

‘On the floor by the door where we first found it,’ said Falcón. ‘Why would anyone come back to the scene of the crime, Felipe?’

‘Because they’d left something there?’ said Felipe.

‘That means he’s lost something,’ said Falcón, and a high palm in the neighbouring garden swayed in the breeze and rattled its leaves. The hairs came up on Falcón’s neck and he listened hard. He wouldn’t still be here? Not in daylight. He began a slow methodical search of the house. It was empty. He went back to the room where Salgado’s body had been found. He stood in front of the desk and replayed the scene in his imagination.

Salgado came round as Sergio was stuffing the socks back into his mouth. He bit him. Sergio retaliated by hitting him three times in the face. Then he pulled back, holding his wounded thumb or forefinger. Where would he go? The kitchen was the nearest place. He went to the sink where he tore off the latex glove and washed the wound. He was probably in a panic and still bleeding with nothing to cover the cut, no plasters around here.

Kitchen roll. He’d have torn off a piece of kitchen roll, covered the wound and gone up to the bathroom. He’d be rattled by now, his nerve not quite as solid as it had been before. He might have been angry, too. He’d have wanted to finish the thing and get out as fast as possible. So he’d go back to Salgado, set up the terrible contraption, make his phone call and watch him die. Then he’d leave, fast.

Why did he call this morning? Was he worried? When did he end the call? When I asked him about his thumb. Did that give him the answer? It must have done. He knew that I didn’t know it had been his finger.

Images shunted in Falcón’s brain. Reels of memory unspooled their secrets. His mother coming in to the bathroom to wash him in his bath, rub his back with soap. She was all ready to go out to a party. She took off her rings and set them in a seashell on the edge of the bath.

Falcón went back to the sink in the kitchen. He understood it now. That was how Salgado hung on for three punches to the face. The ring was giving him purchase. He must have dragged the ring over the knuckle and when Sergio stripped off the torn glove it fell in the sink. Or did it? It was a stainless-steel sink. The noise of a metal ring hitting the sink, that would have drawn his attention — but if it went straight down the plug hole … He put his fingers to the hole. It had a rubber flap surrounding it. No noise. It would have gone straight down into the waste-disposal unit. He took out his pen torch. There was nothing visible in the hole. He called Felipe again and asked him about the sink, which the forensic admitted to giving only a visual inspection.

There was an unused box of tools in a cupboard under the stairs. In forty minutes Falcón had disconnected the waste-disposal unit and removed it whole. He drove it round to the Jefatura. Felipe and Jorge were still working. They cracked open the unit’s housing and dismantled the grinders, which seemed to be jammed. They scraped out all the vegetable matter on to a sheet of glass and Jorge teased it all apart and there it was: one silver ring, mangled.

‘He must have tried to get it out,’ said Felipe. ‘Failed, decided to mangle it and that seized up the unit. Then he’d have had to face stripping it down, so he left it.’

‘Can you straighten it out, see what it looks like?’ said Falcón.

Felipe set to work and almost immediately asked Jorge to go back to the vegetable matter in the waste unit. He’d found evidence of a setting, which meant that a stone must be missing.

‘The odd thing about this,’ said Felipe, ‘is that I’m sure that this was a woman’s ring originally. Look —’

He had the ring under a microscope and when Falcón looked down it he pointed to the band of the ring.

‘A different quality of silver has been used to enlarge it,’ said Felipe. ‘You can see where it’s been cut and the new metal inserted. It’s been well done. The only difference is in the colour of the silver.’

‘What do you know about silver?’

Felipe shook his head. Jorge announced he’d found the stone. It was a small sapphire. They mounted the ring on some plasticine and laid the stone in its setting.

‘That is a woman’s ring, no doubt about it,’ said Felipe.

‘Why does a man wear a woman’s ring?’

‘A lover?’ said Felipe.

‘If a woman gave you a ring as a token, would you wear it? Would you go to the trouble of enlarging it and wearing it?’ asked Falcón.

‘Maybe not. You’d want to keep it whole and original,’ said Jorge.

‘I think this is more likely to have belonged to a woman who died,’ said Falcón. ‘This is an heirloom.’

‘But you still haven’t answered your question,’ said Felipe. ‘Why would a man wear a woman’s ring? It must have some significance.’

‘Ramírez wears a woman’s ring,’ said Jorge. ‘Ask him.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Haven’t you ever wondered why he wears that ring with the three little diamonds set in gold? I mean … especially Ramírez. So I asked him one night in a bar,’ said Jorge. ‘It was his grandmother’s ring. He didn’t have any sisters. He had it enlarged. He was very close to his grandmother.’

‘What does that tell us about Sergio?’

‘He didn’t have any sisters,’ said Jorge, and the forensics laughed.

‘Do we know anybody who can tell us about silver?’ asked Falcón.

‘We’ve used an old jeweller in town before. He’s retired now but he still has a workshop on the Plaza del Pan. I don’t know if you’ll find him there on a Saturday afternoon, though.’

The workshop was shut and nobody in the neighbouring shops had a home address or telephone number. Falcón tried other jewellers, but they were either busy or incompetent. He went back to Calle Zaragoza and knocked on the gallery door this time, in case Ramírez had advanced things with Greta. The door was locked. The other shops around were shutting for lunch.

He took out the evidence bag with the ring in it and something came back to him, fast moving, flashing like a jig in water to a fish’s eye. He lost it in the gloom and remembered his father saying that they were the ideas that were worth something, the ones that came up from the depths and disappeared. He put the bag back in his pocket. The woman locking the shop next door told him that Greta had probably gone to El Cairo for something to eat.

Ramírez and Greta were there at the bar, eating tapas: squid and red peppers stuffed with hake. They sipped beer. Their knees were touching. Falcón showed Ramírez the ring. He took it and held it up to the light while Falcón briefed him on it.

‘He didn’t come back for it because it was valuable,’ said Ramírez. ‘Silver and a sapphire aren’t so expensive.’

‘It has to be significant,’ said Falcón. ‘That’s why he called me this morning. He needed to know if I’d found it.’

‘You think he was worried that we’d somehow understand the significance of it?’

‘There’s evident history to it. Just the fact that it’s a woman’s ring enlarged to fit a man’s finger gives it a story.’

‘But what is the story and how or why should we understand it?’

‘Remember the call when he told me he had a story to tell and I wouldn’t be able to stop him?’ said Falcón. ‘This is part of that story and I think we’ve got our hands on it too early. If we crack the story of the ring we will know too much about his work. It will point us to him in some way.’

‘But we don’t know it,’ said Ramírez, baffled by the importance that Falcón was attaching to this small piece of evidence.

‘But we will know it,’ said Falcón, backing away to the door. ‘We will find it out.’

He stumbled out into the street, their two faces imprinted on his mind. Greta appeared concerned, Ramírez clearly thought him deranged.

Back at the house on Calle Bailén he went straight up to the studio. He knew the rest of the house was empty of his father’s effects. Encarnación had dealt with everything in the weeks after his death. He opened up the shutters in the room and paced around the cluttered tables in the middle. He was working on the memory he’d had of his mother bathing him with her rings removed. Where was all her jewellery? Of course, Manuela would have it. He called her on his mobile. She said she’d never seen any of it. She’d been too small for jewellery when Mamá had died and later, when she’d asked her father where it had all gone, he confessed to having lost it in the move from Tangier.

‘Lost it?’ said Falcón. ‘You don’t lose your wife’s jewellery.’

‘You know how it was between him and me,’ said Manuela. ‘He was convinced that I was only interested in money so if I asked for things he would always make me grovel. Well, over mother’s jewellery, I didn’t give him the satisfaction. None of it was that special as far as I remember.’

‘What do you remember of it?’

‘She liked rings and brooches but not bracelets or necklaces. She said they were the chains to enslave you. She never had her ears pierced either, so she only had clasp earrings. She didn’t like expensive stuff and, because she was dark, she preferred silver. I think the only gold ring she had was her wedding band,’ she said, as if she’d been expecting the question. ‘Why, little brother, do you need to know this on a Saturday afternoon?’

‘I need to remember something.’

‘What?’

‘If I knew that …’

‘I’m joking, Javier,’ she said. ‘You need to calm down. You’re taking your work too … personally. Get some distance from it, hijo. Paco told me you’d forgotten about lunch tomorrow.’

‘Are you coming as well?’

‘Yes, and I’m bringing Alejandro and his sister.’

He tried to remember the details of Alejandro’s sister’s diet and hung up. He went into the storeroom where he’d discovered the journals and sorted through all the boxes. He found nothing. The only thing he came across that he hadn’t seen before was a roll of five canvases which, as he opened them up, released a small diagram that fell among the boxes. He laid the canvases out in the studio but didn’t recognize them. They weren’t his father’s work. Layers and layers of acrylic paint giving a luminous effect, as of moonlight scarfed by clouds. He rolled them up again.

It was dark by now and he collapsed to the floor, realizing he’d forgotten to eat and forgotten to go to Salgado’s funeral. He sat against the wall, his hands dangling between his knees. He was becoming an obsessive. The mess of his father’s studio seemed to have got inside his head. His brain was as convoluted as a tangle of fishing line. He called Alicia and ran into her answering machine. He left no message.

He pulled a book out of the bookcase and realized that there was considerable space behind. His obsession resurfaced. He worked his way up and down the shelves until behind the art books he found a wooden box he recognized from his mother’s dressing table. He even remembered his little fingers amongst the jewels, a treasure chest from an adventure book.

The box had a Moorish geometric design on the lid and sides. He couldn’t open it and there was no apparent lock. He worked at it for over an hour until he twisted a small pyramidal piece of wood and the lid sprang open.

In front of his mother’s jewels, she came back to him so vividly that he put his face to them to see if, after all these years, there would be a trace of her smell. There was nothing. The metals were cold to his touch. He laid out the pieces on the table. The clasp earrings, clusters of silver-black grapes, a silver scimitar brooch set with amethysts, a large agate cube set on a silver band. Just as Manuela had said, there was no gold. The wedding band must have been buried with her.

He looked down on all the pieces and waited for the sacred memory to come back, the one he’d nearly remembered outside Salgado’s gallery. All that surfaced was the seashell full of rings in his bobbing vision as he sat in the bath while his mother’s soapy hand rippled up and down his tiny ribs.

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

2nd July 1948, Tangier

I squirt the oil on to my palette. I stab it with the brush. I coax colours into each other. P. lies on the divan. She is naked. Her arm rests over a pink bolster. Her feet are crossed at the ankle. Her body is fuller in pregnancy. She wears a necklace, which I have pulled tight around her neck (she does not like this) and draped down her soft back. I press the paint on to the canvas. It glides smoothly. The oil is pushing the brush. I am close. I am very close. There is form.

17th November 1948, Tangier

P. is huge with pregnancy, her belly is tautly distended, the breasts with their wide brown nipples have parted and lie in swags on her flanks. She smells different. Milky. It makes me nauseous. I haven’t touched milk since I was a boy. Just the memory of its fat coating my mouth and tongue and its cowy fumes filling the cavities of my head makes me gag. P. takes a glass of warm milk before bed. It calms her and helps her to sleep. I can’t sleep with the empty glass in the bedroom. I have not worked since August.

12th January 1949, Tangier

I have a son of 3,850 grams. I look at the mashed red face and blast of black hair and am sure we have been given someone’s Chinese baby by mistake. The child’s wails tear through me and I wince at the thought of this massive presence in the house. P. wants to call him Francisco, which I think will be confusing. She says he will be called Paco from the start.

17th March 1949, Tangier

… I now run R.’s building projects. I work with the architect, a brooding Galician from Santiago, whose dark ideas need enlivening. I pour light into his sound structures and he flinches from it like a vampire. The American, for whom we’re building the hotel, looks as if he might kiss me.

20th June 1949, Tangier

R. married his child bride today. Gumersinda (her grandmother’s name, handed down) has the face and sweet nature of a cherub … He is a different man around her, quiet, respectful, attentive and, I suppose this is it, totally in love with the idea of her. I cannot get so much as a squeak out of her. I rack my brains for topics of conversation — dolls, ballet dancing, ribbons — and feel lupine in her presence.

1st January 1950, Tangier

The hotel was finished before Christmas and we celebrated New Year with an exhibition of my abstract landscapes to which le tout Tangier came. I sold everything on the first day. C.B. bought two pieces and pulled me aside with the words: ‘This is great, Francisco, really great. But, you know, we ‘re still waiting.’ I press him on this and he says: ‘The real work. Back to the body, Francisco. The female form. Only you can do it.’

This afternoon I take one of the charcoal drawings of P. out and tell her what C.B. said. She agrees to model for me. As she undresses I feel like a client with a prostitute and go to the drawing whose simplicity is still magnificent. P. says: ‘Pronto.’ Just as a whore might say. I turn. Her shoulders and upper arms are heavy, her breasts look off to the side, her belly hangs above the bush of her pubic hair. Her thighs are thick, her knees have fallen. She has a bunion on her left foot. The green of her eyes comes swimming towards me like a tide of olive oil. She looks past me to the old drawing. ‘It’s not me any more,’ she says. I tell her to dress. She leaves. I look at the drawing like a man who’s found he can’t perform with the whore. I put it away with the rest.

20th March 1950, Tangier

R. calls me at the house to tell me that G. has given birth to a boy. The baby was big and the labour long and arduous. He is very shaken.

17th June 1950, Tangier

P. is pregnant. I move the studio out of the house to make more room. I have found a place on the bay with light from the north and which looks across to Spain. I set up a single bed and a mosquito net. I put a canvas up on the wall but no colour comes to mind.

20th July 1950, Tangier

C. arrives furious with some young Moroccan in tow. I haven’t seen him (it’s no accident) since my shameful wedding night. He demands to know why I haven’t told him about the new studio. The boy makes tea. We sit and smoke. C. drifts into a stupor and falls asleep. The boy and I exchange glances and set to under the mosquito net. I wake later to find C. in an even greater rage and the boy holding his face where C. has hit him. It seems that C. had quite fallen for this boy and is enraged at finding him behaving like a cheap whore. He won’t be pacified and leaves with the boy holding his nose with both hands and blood in flashes down his white robe. The door shuts. I look to my blank canvas and decide that red is the colour.

15th February 1951, Tangier

I have a pink and placid daughter who is a welcome relief after Paco, whose first wails were just the start of a long campaign of relentless demand. Manuela (P.’s mother’s name) sleeps constantly and only wakes to blow little bubbles at the purse of her lips and take a little milk.

8th June 1951, Tangier

I run into C. in the Bar La Mar Chica, which has become a late-night haunt of aristocrats and other beauties. They press money on to Carmella, who beguiles the air with the horrors of her armpits, and pay no attention to her partner, Luis, who is a much better dancer. I have not seen C. since the incident with the boy in my studio. Things have not gone well for him. He is drunk and ugly. He looks drained and sucked out. The anarchy of depravity has bitten back and taken great chunks from him. He unleashes a tirade against me in English for the benefit of the onlookers. ‘Behold — Francisco Falcón, artist, architect, contrabandista and legionnaire. The master of the female form. Did you know, he once sold a picture to Barbara Hutton for one thousand dollars? No, not a picture, a drawing. A little scratching of charcoal on paper and a thousand notes fluttered down on his head.’ I sit back. It is harmless, but C. has his audience now and rises to it. He knows they’re the sort who don’t want Luis but Carmella, and he rewards them. ‘But let me tell you about Francisco Falcón and his deep understanding of the female form. He is an impostor. Francisco Falcón knows nothing of the female form, but he is an expert on boys — oh yes, let me tell you of the bums and cocks he has savoured. These are his real speciality and I should know, because he used me as his pimp …’ At this point Luis ventures over and tells him to shut up. I am white with rage but cool to the touch. C. does not shut up but launches into a final bitter tirade which ends on the occasion of my wedding night. Luis grabs him and hauls him from the bar. They do not return. I leave, followed by the audience who assume that, having seen the dirt, they will now smell the blood. Luis has taken C. away and, despite feeling capable of tearing up palm trees, I walk calmly home.

12th June 1951, Tangier

C. has been found dead in his rooms in the Medina, his head bludgeoned to an unrecognizable pulp. The boy whose nose he had broken in my studio was found with the body and blood on his clothes. He’s charged with the murder. This is the ultimate end of the sensualist — the kiss no longer satisfies, the touch is too delicate and so in time only a slap will do and then a punch and finally, down comes the cudgel.

18th June 1951, Tangier

I have decided to spend the summer months here in the studio. The house is in an uproar and stinks of caca and milk. The air is full of idiot talk. I’d rather lie here drowsy beneath my net, the world vague beyond, with only the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer to punctuate my day. His calls seem to come from the belly and resonate in his chest before issuing forth from his mouth — more plaintive than any of Luis’s flamenco. The sound always comes from silence and its eerie spirituality needs no translation. Five calls a day and I’m moved every time.

2nd July 1951, Tangier

At one of the rare lunches I attend these days P. asks me what I am doing. I go into a long diatribe about painting the muezzin’s call as an abstract skyscape and she interrupts. She has heard malicious gossip of depraved goings on. It seems that the proceedings in the law courts have penetrated her baby world. She probes and I am like a live oyster whose cold clammy world winces under the intrusions of her teasing blade. I ask her to visit my studio and see the work I am doing. I convince her of my ascetic life. She is satisfied that I am serious. I am such a monster … or at least so Paco thinks. He giggles and clasps my huge head as I feed on his tiny, tight belly. He knows no fear, this little fellow.

5th July 1951, Tangier

I wake up in a stupor with some Mohammed or other lying by my side and P. knocking on the door down below. I send him up to the roof and let her in. I make tea. She asks to see my work. I am evasive because I have nothing to show. She touches me in a way that lets me know that she has not come here with this in mind. I am spent after a whole afternoon at play and I am dirty, too. She becomes irritable as I procrastinate and spills scorching mint tea on my bare foot, so that I hop about and the boy on the roof lets out a blurt of laughter, which I hope she doesn’t hear. She leaves soon after.

26th August 1951, Tangier

I glance back over the years, flicking through these journals, and am aghast at the revelations. I now hope they will never be read. If I attain any sort of fame from my work and these diaries come to light, what will it do to the classification of my genius? They have become confessions, not diaries. These aren’t the noble notes one would expect of an exhausted master but rather the tawdry jottings of a depraved rascal. I think I must be smoking too much and not spending enough time in lively company, although where I should find that I don’t know. That American Paul Bowles I mentioned earlier has had some success with a book which I haven’t troubled myself to read. I try to find him, but he’s always away. I go to Dean’s Bar, but it is full of drunks and reprobates with not one idea between them. The rest are tourists who have other things to think about. I have failed to keep up with my contacts from B.H.’s world. C.B. is not here. I give up on society.

I hear from C.B. that he has sold two of my pieces to wealthy women in Texas. The cheque is substantial, he tells me, but I had been hoping for a space in MOMA. He tries to pacify me by saying that Picasso once told him that ‘Museums are just a lot of lies,’ which is easy to say when you hang in the best of them in every country of the Western world.

17th October 1951, Tangier

R. tells me that G. is pregnant again. He is both happy and terrified after the last occasion. I am amazed how this monument to ruthlessness can be reduced to the softness of dough. He quivers at the memory of her suffering. When I tell P. about the pregnancy she looks at me with longing and I realize why she came to my studio in July.

8th February 1952, Tangier

R. has sold all our boats to various competitors and they have paid the top market price. He has also emptied the warehouses and rents them out to the same people who bought the boats. I am astonished, but he assures me that the smuggling business has peaked, that negotiations are underway between the US and Spain. The Americans want to build bases to counter the perceived Soviet threat. Franco will let them in because he wants to stay in power. There will be a trade link.

20th April 1952, Tangier

G. went into labour and it was much worse than before. The complications were such that the doctors even asked R. who they should save, wife or child. He chose G. because he could not live without her. Having decided this G. rallied and the baby was delivered, apparently unscathed. This brush with near tragedy brings P. and I closer and we go back to the old days and rediscover some of our passion. She comes to the studio in the afternoons and I work and lie down with her. The paintings are better than before, but they still haven’t recaptured that lost moment.

18th November 1952, Tangier

At a reception in the Hotel El Minzah I meet Mercedes, the Spanish wife of an American banker. Her husband had bought my work at C.B.’s gallery in NY and so she knows me like an old friend. After her years in America, she comes across as very modern, not the typical Spanish woman from across the straits. I ask her to my studio and she arrives the next day in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, which she sends away. I make tea. She braces herself against the verandah rail and looks out to sea. She has a boyish figure, narrow hips, small breasts and slim muscular legs. I show her some abstract Tangier landscapes I have been doing, which she notices have cubist elements from Braque floating in blazing bands of colour, as she’s seen in Rothko’s work in NY. I am taken with her intelligence. We are drawn to each other and it isn’t long before I find out what that taut little body, or rather, mind, is capable of. There is a wickedness in the workings of it. As she reaches her moment she goes into frenzy where nothing else matters (certainly not me, on whom she is pounding her pelvis) and she howls like a she-wolf. We come crashing to the floor, where she lies, eyes glazed, cheeks flushed, lips white and a vein in her neck, thick as cord, thundering with dark carnal blood. It’s invigorating to find such sophistication shot through with base animal desires. There’s danger here, too. M. seems capable of taking me across boundaries to zones where there are no limits. It is an irony not lost on me that here we are in Tangier, captives of the International Zone of Morocco, in the cockpit of Africa, where a new kind of society is being created. A society in which there are no codes. The ruling committee of naturally suspicious European countries has created a permissible chaos in which a new grade of humanity is emerging. One that does not adhere to the usual laws of community but seeks only to satisfy the demands of self. The untaxed, unruled business affairs of the International Zone are played out in its society’s shunning of any form of morality. We are a microcosm of the future of the modern world, a culture in a Petri dish in the laboratory of human growth. Nobody will say, ‘Oh, Tangier, those were the days,’ because we will all be in our own Tangier. That is what we have been fighting like dogs for, all over the world, for the last four decades.

15th March 1953, Tangier

R., having sold all our smuggling boats, has bought a yacht. A plaything for him to bob around on and look successful. I could probably afford one myself with the money from the partnership and the sales I am making through M.’s contacts in NY, but it would give me no satisfaction. I am nearly forty years old and ostensibly successful, but I am conscious of my problem. My mind drifts from it at the first opportunity. None of my fortune is as a result of my own doing. R. has structured my entire life in no less a way than the Legion did. P. was my muse, without her the charcoal drawings would never have been done. M. has built me a reputation amongst the Americans so that I sell well in NY. But I am a shell. Knock into me and my emptiness booms.

2nd April 1953, Tangier

The success of Paul Bowles has attracted a crowd of American writers and artists to our little Utopia. I met a man called William Burroughs who, it seems to me, has done nothing of any note except to carry a massive reputation before him. He shot his wife in Mexico in a William Tell stunt, in which he missed the glass she’d placed on her head and the bullet drilled a hole in her brain. The American who tells me this story does so in a state of appalled amusement, as if this is something from a film he’s just seen. I look across the grubby floor of the Bar La Mar Chica to where W.B. sits and am prepared to be fascinated by the wife killer. Instead I see a bank clerk, just like the ones employed in town, except this one has the skull of the figure in Edvard Munch’s Scream. When we meet I tell him this and he says: ‘How that bastard knew what was coming, we’ll never know. Shit. And I tell you, that’s how I see the sky sometimes … just like that. You know … like blood. Like fucking blood.’ His magnetism lies in his instant access to savagery. He unleashes this on those around him he does not like, but I think he reserves the real ferocity for himself. He is like a howling animal and I think of that mad boy R. saw years ago in the village in the sierra, collared and chained up outside. It brings me closer to understanding why I put pen to paper.

28th June 1953, Tangier

I have three lives. With P. and the children I am decorous. The parameters are set for little minds. I am mild and approximately cheerful while my chest gapes with shuddering yawns. I look at P., the perfect mother, and wonder how she was ever my muse. I have my life in the studio. The work proceeds. The Tangier landscapes have developed into something different. Vast red skies bleed into a massive black continent and in between is smeared a momentary civilization. The work is broken up by a stream of boys who drop by to earn a few pesetas. My third life is with M., my society companion and deviant.

23rd October 1953, Tangier

C.B. invites me and P. to an evening with B.H. I am not happy about this one life bleeding into the other. We go to the Palace Sidi Hosni and as usual wait for our hostess amidst her fabulous wealth. P. is bored and C.B. takes her off and, being the man he is, manages to charm her even with his splintered Spanish. B.H. arrives as I am about to propose leaving. She works her way round to us and, on meeting P., is seized by an idea. She leads us off to the room guarded by the towering Nubian and it’s only as we enter that I realize that I have never told P. of the sale of the drawing. B.H. takes her straight to the piece in its pride of place next to Picasso. P. blinks at it as if she’s seen one of her children hurt. I know from the green look that finds its way to me that she considers this a betrayal of trust. B.H., who has had some drink, is unaware of this pain and it is C.B. who moves us on. On the way home P. is silent as she shimmers through the Kasbah, her heels clopping on the cobbles. I shamble behind, lying to her back like a beggar who’s been refused some change.

19th February 1954, Tangier

R. has gone to Rabat and Fez to talk to the French and Moroccan administrators. He asked me to join him, but I am working on some huge abstracts which I hope will break me out of what M. tells me is the ‘B List’ of respected artists. She wants my name to join those across the Atlantic like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. She thinks my landscape work is as strong as Rothko’s. I look at Rothko and see him coming at his subject from a different angle. He aims high, seeking a spiritual element, I am pointed towards darkness and decadence.

3rd March 1954, Tangier

R. is back from his travels, much heartened by the bureaucrats. He alarms me by telling me that he has embarked on a piece of business with the Moroccans. I tell him that he does not understand the secretive nature of the Moroccan mind — they have ways of ensnaring even the sharpest operator. He dismisses the possibility and tells me not to worry. I will not be involved.

18th June 1954, Tangier

I drop by my home in the Medina one afternoon and am surprised to find P. is not there. The children are playing on the patio. Paco is being a torero, his little sister is the bull. He performs great flourishes with his shirt and she aimlessly toddles through and is enchanted to find herself on the other side. How this game developed I don’t know, because Paco has never seen a bullfight. I am detached from their lives. But where is P.? Nobody knows. I play with the children, giving Paco a slightly more dangerous toro. I am surprised how deft he is with the shirt and understand some of Manuela’s glee. I bore quickly though, and return to my studio.

20th December 1954, Tangier

We have been lucky to escape the worst of the débacle. Property prices have crashed. Everybody’s hope that Tangier would become the Monaco of Africa has faded. It moves R. to take out all his capital and we fly to Switzerland, where he opens up an account in my name and deposits the fantastic sum of $85,000, which is the major part of my profit from our ten-year partnership. I have no way of disputing this and we have a celebratory dinner. This is the end of an era. R. is going his own way in business. At the end of the meal we embrace.

17th May 1955, Tangier

P. has been seeking me out in my studio for the first time in ages. She has been here three days running and we have made love every afternoon. M. is away in Paris with her husband and only the odd boy comes knocking and has to be sent away with a bribe. I am puzzled by her sudden ardour until I realize that I have been at home more in M.’s absence and have rehabilitated myself with my family.

When she leaves I lie under the gathered knot of the mosquito net and the dangling gauze makes me think of birth, waters breaking, and I wonder whether I have been coaxed into fathering another child.

11th July 1955, Tangier

How things converge. Today I am forty years old. P. tells me I am going to be a father again. R. has deposited another $25,000 in my account and the partnership has been officially dissolved. M.’s husband has asked for a divorce and is prepared to hand over a substantial sum to get it (a twenty-two-year old Texan girl is the reason). I have moved away from the abstract and back to the figurative. Perhaps I’ve been inspired by de Kooning, who has moved away from the crowded and chaotic patterning of his Excavation and steered himself more towards Women. Or not. Maybe I’m just chasing C.B.’s dream and my own. I have worked until the light has faded. I am about to go for dinner with my family. I feel nothing but total desperation.

1st November 1955, Tangier

Last month Sultan Mohammed V was recalled from his exile in Madagascar where the French sent him three years ago. He is due back some time this month. It is the beginning of the end, although you wouldn’t know it to see the expatriates here. They fiddle while Rome burns, but what do they care? I am burning for M., who has been away for months sorting out her divorce. We will all be consumed by fire.

12th January 1956, Tangier

Another son, whom I have decided to call Javier, which is a name I have always liked and has nothing to do with family. For the first time I look down on one of my children and feel, not so much a surge of paternal love, but a wild feeling of hope. This child, with his fists clenched and eyes screwed up, for some reason makes me think that great things are possible. He is the one bright light in my forty-first year.

28th June 1956, Tangier

I lie on my back under the net with Javier on my chest. His legs are braced like a little frog’s, the toes are dug into my belly. My hand covers his entire back. He sleeps and occasionally, unconsciously, kneads my chest on the off chance that there will be some milk. How quickly disappointment enters our lives.

He lies on a blanket as I work. I talk him through the paintings, the ideas, the influences. He slowly brings his hands and feet together as if mocking me with silent, dawdling applause. I look down on him and small cracks open up in me. His soft, tiny body, his large brown eyes, his downy head, all come together and, as with a chisel slipped between my ribs, I am levered open.