The Blind Man of Seville

27

Sunday, 22nd April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

Encarnación’s niece, Juanita, was the first to arrive at 11 a.m. Falcón was still groggy from a heavily drugged sleep. The extra sleeping pill he’d taken at 4 a.m. had as good as interred him in concrete.

He showered, and put on a pair of grey trousers that were so loose at the waist he had to find a belt. The jacket, too, did not hold him at the shoulders. The weight was falling off him. His cheeks looked hollow in the mirror, his eyes sunken and dark. He was turning into his own idea of a madman.

In the kitchen, Juanita moved around on black stacked trainers, which squeaked on the floor. As she tossed her head, a river of black hair jumped off her back. Falcón checked the fridge was well stocked with fino and manzanilla and went down to the cellar to bring up the red wine to drink with the roast lamb.

The cellar was at the back of the house under the studio. He had used this enclosed space as his dark room but had not been in there since Inés had left the house. His developing paraphernalia was still there in the corner. A line of string hung across the room with clothes pegs still attached for drying prints. He missed the excitement of revelation, of the blank sheet slipping into the developer and, slowly emerging from the waters, a face coming to him. Was that what he had in his head? All these images that just needed some developer for the latent memories to find form, come through his consciousness and solve his crux.

The metal wine racks were divided into two. French and Spanish. He never touched the French, which was all expensive stuff bought by his father. But this time he felt celebratory. Those final paragraphs he’d read in his father’s journals last night had sent him to sleep weeping and he felt like toasting the generosity of his dead parent. Their intimacy had been reaffirmed and he found traces of forgiveness for all his father’s depravity and infidelity. He pulled out bottles of Château Duhart-Milon, Château Giscours, Montrachet, Pommard, Clos-des-Ursules. He took them up to the dining room and laid them on the dresser. On coming up from the cellar for the second time he saw an urn, which he’d never noticed before, in a niche above the door.

The urn was no more than fifteen centimetres high, too small to contain human remains. He put down the bottles and took it to the developing table, turned on the overhead light. The stopper was a simple clay cone that had been sealed with wax. There were no marks on the urn, which was of unglazed terracotta. He cracked open the wax and removed the stopper. He poured some of the contents on to the table. It was yellowish-white and grainy. Some of the larger pieces were quite sharp. He moved them around with his finger. There were some brown pieces in there too and the grounds suddenly struck him as macabre, something like crushed bone. He left it on the table, repelled by it.

Paco and his family arrived first. While the women went upstairs and the children careered about the gallery, Paco brought in a whole jamón, which he’d brought down from Jabugo in the Sierra de Aracena. They found a stand in the dresser and locked the jamón into position. Paco sharpened a long, thin carving knife and began slicing off paper-thin sheets of dark-red, sweet jamón while Javier filled glasses with fino.

Juanita set up a table on the patio and put out olives and other pinchos. Paco added a platter of sliced jamón. Manuela arrived with her party and they all stood on the patio, drinking fino and shouting at the children to stop running. The only adult who didn’t tell Javier he was looking thin was Alejandro’s sister, who was no fatter than a praying mantis herself.

Paco was happy and animated about his bulls, which had all been discharged in perfect condition that morning for tomorrow’s bullfight. The horn wound was still visible in the retinto but he was very strong. He called him ‘Biensolo’ and the only warning he issued to Javier was that the horn tips were unusually upturned and the space between them quite narrow. Going in for the kill was always going to be difficult, even if the head was down low.

They sat down to eat the roast lamb at four o’clock. Manuela noticed the quality of the wine immediately and asked how many more bottles ‘little brother’ was hiding. Javier told her about the urn to divert her attention. She asked to see it and, when the meal was over and Paco was lighting up his first Montecristo, Javier brought it up from the cellar. She recognized it straight away.

‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how Papá lost Mamá’s jewellery and yet this made it all the way here from Tangier.’

‘Ach! Manuela, he never threw anything away,’ said Paco.

‘But this is Mamá’s. I remember it. It was on her dressing table for two or three days … about a month before she died. I asked her what it was, because it was different to anything else she had on her dressing table. I thought it might be a potion from that Riffian woman, who was her maid. She said it contained the spirit of pure genius and must never be opened — strange, no?’

‘She was just playing with you, Manuela,’ said Paco.

‘I see you’ve opened it,’ she said. ‘Any genie?’

‘No,’ said Javier. ‘It looked like crushed bone or teeth.’

‘That doesn’t sound very spiritual,’ said Paco.

‘More macabre,’ said Javier.

‘I’d have thought after all the blood you’ve seen you could stomach some dry old bones, little brother,’ said Manuela.

‘But crushed?’ he said. ‘That seemed violent to me.’

‘How do you know it’s human? It could be old cow bone or something.’

‘But why the “spirit of pure genius”?’ asked Javier.

‘You know who gave her that, don’t you?’ said Paco. ‘Papá … a long time ago. There were some strange things happening in the house at the time. Don’t you remember? Mamá started a fire on the patio. We came back from school and there was a black patch by the fig tree.’

‘He was too young,’ said Manuela. ‘But you’re right, he gave her the urn the next day. And the other odd thing — that wonderful sculpture he gave Mamá for her birthday the year before … that disappeared. She had it next to her mirror. She really loved that thing. I asked her what had happened to it and she just said, “God gives and God takes away.”’

‘She started going to Mass almost every day around that time, too,’ said Paco.

‘Yes, she only ever went once a week before,’ said Manuela. ‘And she stopped wearing her rings, too. She only ever wore that cheap agate cube that Papá had given her for her birthday. You remember that, surely, little brother?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Papá gave you her present to take to her at her birthday dinner. She undid the box and the lid sprang open and hit you on the nose as this paper flower burst out. Inside the flower was the ring. It was very romantic. Mamá was touched. I remember the look on her face.’

‘She must have known something was going to happen to her,’ said Paco. ‘Going to Mass all the time, only wearing that one ring Papá had given to her. It was the same with me when I got gored in La Maestranza.’

‘What was the same?’ asked Javier, fascinated by these old memories, even touching his nose to try to remember the box hitting it.

‘I knew something was going to happen.’

‘How?’ asked Paco’s father-in-law, one of life’s great sceptics.

‘I just knew it,’ said Paco. ‘I knew I was coming to a big moment and being young and arrogant I assumed it was going to be greatness.’

‘But what did you know?’ asked his father-in-law.

‘I don’t know,’ said Paco, hands all over the place, ‘a sense of things coming together.’

‘Convergence,’ said Javier.

‘Toreros have always been very superstitious,’ said the father-in-law.

‘Yes, well, when you risk your life like that … everything has meaning,’ said Paco. ‘Stars, planets … all that stuff.’

‘Aligning themselves over you?’ scoffed his father-in-law.

‘I’m exaggerating,’ said Paco. ‘Maybe it was just a sixth sense. Perhaps it’s only in retrospect that I attach greater significance to an event which, in a matter of seconds, ruined my youth.’

‘Sorry, Paco,’ said his father-in-law. ‘I wasn’t diminishing …’

‘But that was why I wanted to be a torero,’ said Paco. ‘I loved the clarity of danger. It was like living life squared at that level of awareness. All that happened was that I misinterpreted the signs. Nobody could have predicted that disaster. Throughout my entire faena the bull hadn’t hooked right and then … when I’m right over the horns, he hooks right. Anyway, I was lucky to survive. It’s as Mamá said to Manuela: God gives and God takes away. There is no reason.’

The lunch broke up after that and Manuela left with her party. Paco’s family and in-laws went up to bed for a siesta. Javier and Paco sat with a bottle of brandy between them. Paco was on the edge of drunkenness.

‘Maybe you were too intelligent to be a torero,’ said Javier.

‘I was always terrible at school.’

‘Then perhaps you were thinking too much to be a good torero.’

‘Never,’ said Paco. ‘The thinking came afterwards. Once the leg was wrecked I had to clear my head out. All those reports and footage of my glorious moments, which never happened and never would happen, had to go in the bin. It left me completely empty. I had nightmares and everybody thought I was reliving the terrible moment, but as far as I was concerned that was in the past. My nightmares were about the future.’

Paco poured himself some more brandy and slid the bottle to Javier, who shook his head. Paco rolled a cigar cylinder across and Javier rolled it back to him.

‘Always the man in control,’ he said.

‘Is that what you think?’ asked Javier, nearly blurting out laughter.

‘Oh, yes, nothing ever gets through to you and disturbs your inner calm. Not like me. I was in a turmoil. My leg like a rag and no future. Papá saved me, you know. He installed me in the finca. He bought me my first livestock. He sorted me out … gave me direction.’

‘Well, he was a soldier. He understood things about men,’ he said, conscious of himself skewing things in his father’s favour for Paco’s benefit.

‘Are you still reading those journals?’

‘Most nights.’

‘Does it make any difference to how you think about him?’

‘Well, he’s completely and terrifyingly honest in his writing. I admire him for that, but his revelations …’ said Javier, shaking his head.

‘From when he was in the Legion?’ asked Paco. ‘They were the hardest men of all, the legionnaires, you know that.’

‘He was involved in some brutal actions in the Civil War and in Russia during the Second World War. Some of the brutality he experienced in those wars stayed with him when he went to Tangier.’

‘We never saw any of it,’ said Paco.

‘He was pretty ruthless in some of his business operations,’ said Javier. ‘He used the same techniques he’d employed in the war … terror. And that only stopped when he dedicated himself to painting full time.’

‘Do you think the painting helped him?’

‘I think he put a lot of violence into his painting,’ said Javier. ‘He’s famous for the Falcón nudes, but a lot of his abstract work is infused with emptiness, violence, darkness, decadence and depravity.’

‘Depravity?’

‘Reading these journals is like working a criminal investigation,’ said Javier. ‘Everything gradually comes to the surface. The secret life. Society — and we, too — only saw what was acceptable, but I don’t think he ever rid himself of the brutality. It came out in other ways. You know how he used to sell those paintings of his and then go straight upstairs and paint the same picture he’d just sold? I think that was a kind of brutality. He always had the last laugh.’

‘You’re making him sound as if he wasn’t such a nice guy.’

‘Nice? Who’s nice these days? We’re all complicated and difficult,’ said Javier. ‘It’s just that Papá had some peculiar difficulties in a brutal time.’

‘Does he ever say why he joined the Legion?’

‘It’s the only thing he doesn’t talk about. He only refers to it as “the incident”. And, given that he talks about everything else, it must have been terrible. Something that altered his life which he never came to terms with.’

‘He was only a kid,’ said Paco. ‘What the hell can happen to you when you’re sixteen?’

‘Enough.’

The doorbell rang.

‘That’s Pepe,’ said Javier.

Pepe Leal was reed-thin and tall. Standing in the street he held himself erect, feet together, head raised as if in constant expectation. He always looked serious and wore a jacket and tie on all occasions. He’d never been known to wear jeans, even. He looked like a boy returning from a private school and not somebody who would enter a ring with a 500-kilo bull and kill it with grace and poise.

The two men embraced. Javier escorted Pepe to the dining room with an arm around his shoulder. Paco embraced him, too. They sat down at one end of the table although, and Javier had always noticed this, the torero was always apart from ordinary people. It wasn’t anything to do with the fact that he was in perfect physical condition, only drank water and sat some inches back from the table. His difference was that he was a man who regularly faced fear and overcame it. And it wasn’t as if he’d attained a permanent state of fearlessness. He was that human. Every time he entered the plaza to risk his life he would still have to overcome more fear.

Javier had seen him trembling and ashen in the hours before a corrida, sitting in his hotel room, never praying because he wasn’t one of the religious toreros, and never looking to anyone to calm his nerves. He was just a petrified human being who could not bring his terror under control. Then he would get dressed and that would start the process. As he was slowly bound into his traje de luces, the uniform of his profession, the fear was contained. It no longer drained off him, flooding the room with an invisible contagion. The ‘suit of lights’ did something to him, reminded him of the brilliant afternoon when he’d taken his alternativa and become a fully-fledged torero, or perhaps it just encapsulated the nobility of his profession and the wearer could only behave with the dignity it demanded. It did not, however, get rid of the fear, it just pushed it inside. Some toreros never even managed that level of containment and Javier had seen them in the plaza white and sweating, waiting for their moment and praying to be out on the other side of it.

‘You look in good shape, Pepe,’ said Paco. ‘How do you feel?’

‘The usual,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘And how are the bulls?’

‘Javier has told you about my retinto — Biensolo?’

Pepe nodded.

‘If you get him, I promise you, you’ll never have to sit on your hands waiting for a contract again. Madrid, Seville and Barcelona will be yours.’

Pepe nodded again, his nerves too close to the surface to articulate. Paco gave him a rundown of the other bulls and, sensing that Pepe wanted to be alone with Javier, made his excuses and went for a siesta. Pepe relaxed about two millimetres into his chair.

‘You look as if you’re working too hard, Javier,’ said Pepe.

‘Yes, I’m losing weight.’

‘Will you be able to come to the hotel before the corrida?’

‘I’ll try, of course. I am sure my investigation can do without me for a few hours.’

‘You always help me,’ he said.

‘You don’t need me any more,’ said Javier.

‘I do. It’s important to me.’

‘And how is the fear?’

‘Still the same. I am consistent in that. My level is fixed … but higher than most,’ he said.

‘It would interest me,’ said Javier, suddenly seeing the opportunity, ‘to know how you control your fear.’

‘No different to the way you do when you confront an armed man.’

‘I was thinking of a different fear to that.’

‘It’s all fear, whether you’re about to die or someone says: Boo!’

‘You’re an expert,’ said Javier, laughing, and grabbing Pepe by the neck, unable to restrain his affection for the boy. Maybe this was the wrong thing to talk about, he thought, I’ll just infect his mind with my idiocies.

‘Tell me what’s bothering you, Javier,’ he said. ‘As you say, fear is my speciality. I’d like to help.’

‘You’re right … we’re afraid of these outside things … You fear the bull, I fear the armed man. They’re both unpredictable. But they are only moments of fear. We feel terrible apprehension, confront them and they are gone.’

‘There you are. You know as much as I do. Controlling fear is in your training, in your willingness to confront, in the inevitability of it.’

‘The inevitability?’

‘You are bound by the state to deal with dangerous criminals on behalf of the citizens of Seville. I am bound by a contract to fight a bull. These are inevitable responsibilities that we must not shy away from or we will never work again. Inevitability helps.’

‘Your fear of failure is greater than your fear of the bull.’

‘If you think of all those soldiers who fought in all those wars with some of the most destructive weaponry known to man … how many of them were cowards? How many ran away? Very few.’

‘Perhaps that means we have an enormous capacity for accepting fate?’

‘Why try to control the uncontrollable? I could give up being a torero tomorrow because I fear injury and death too much and yet I’ll still cross crowded streets, drive on the roads, and fly in aeroplanes, where I could easily meet an inglorious end.’

‘So, it’s inevitable. What about the willingness to confront?’ said Javier. ‘That sounds like bravery to me.’

‘It is. We are brave. We have to be. This is not fearlessness. It is recognition. It is the admission of weakness and the willingness to overcome it.’

‘You talk about this a lot?’

‘With some of the brighter toreros. It’s not a profession known for its great thinkers. But we all have to deal with it, even the greatest of us. What did Paquirri say when an interviewer asked him what was the most difficult thing to do when confronting a bull? “To spit,” he said. Nada más.’

‘The first time I had to face an armed man a senior officer said to me before I went in: “Remember, Falcón, courage is always retrospective. You only have enough of it once you’ve been through it.”’

‘That is true,’ said Pepe, ‘which is why we can talk, Javier.’

‘But now I’m in the grip of a different fear,’ said Falcón, ‘one that I’ve never come across before. I’m living in a permanent state of fear and the worst of it is that there is no armed man and no bull. It doesn’t matter how brave I am, because I have nothing to confront … except myself.’

Pepe frowned. He wanted to help. Falcón brushed the problem away.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I should never have mentioned it. I was just wondering if there were any tricks of the trade, a way in which toreros, who live with fear, dupe themselves into thinking …?’

‘Never,’ said Pepe. ‘We never cheat ourselves on that score. It’s one of the great ironies. You need the fear. You welcome it, even though you hate it, because it’s the fear that helps you to see. It’s the fear that will save you.’

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

7th July 1956, Tangier

I should be more concerned with what is going on. I still have coffee with R. in the Café de Paris and all the talk is of an independent Morocco and what will happen to us, the lotus eaters, in Tangier. (Perhaps it is only I who am the lotus eater and everybody else is firmly in a tax haven.) But I don’t care. I am floating. I rarely need to smoke because my natural state seems to be so light and feathery. My studio, with Javier mewling (never wailing), is ambrosial. I frighten myself because my mind suddenly turns on me late at night, as my pen hovers over this journal, and pokes me — it says: ‘You are happy.’ I think this and immediately the contentment is ravaged by uneasy thoughts. No word from M. still. There’s tension in the Medina, as if the narrow alleys are filled with gasoline vapour — a spark, and the whole lot will go up. The people sense independence. They are on the brink of it and are convinced it will mean that they will be as free and wealthy as the expatriates are. The slowness of political progress brings their anger and frustration to the surface.

18th August 1956, Tangier

Riots in the Medina, which spill out into the Grand Soco. No European or American ventures out on to the streets. Windows are smashed and shops looted. At night the women ululate, a noise that Europeans find terrifying. It is animal, potentially savage, like laughing hyenas or vixens on heat. In the morning the streets are filled with men and boys singing the Istiqlal (independence) song and giving the three-fingered salute (Allah, the Sultan, Morocco). Portraits of Mohammed V bob along on a tide of humanity and then it all goes bad again. I stay at home. P. is nervous, especially at night, and the effects of the warm milk are not so calming. The Riffian woman now passes the warm milk through crushed almonds, which settles the stomach and eases the mind. It works. These people know things that we have forgotten.

26th October 1956, Tangier

It is done. The Statute of Tangier has been abrogated. The international regime is finished, but the existing financial, monetary, economic and commercial conditions of our business Utopia will remain in force until the Sultan can come up with his own ideas. R.’s contacts assure him these will not differ dramatically from the ancien régime. How money talks so much louder (even over the din of national pride and Islamic fervour), although they have banned the sale of alcohol within 50 metres of a Mosque, which has put an end to all my drinking holes in the Medina. R. has no plans to leave. I still see him in the Café de Paris, but he is now surrounded by men in robes, wearing fezes and thick-framed glasses.

26th October 1956, Tangier

I now know why M. has been so silent. An American writer (every other one is a writer these days) who claims to be a friend of de Kooning met M. at a dinner in NY. M. was with her new husband, a sixty-nine-year-old philanthropist and collector called Milton Gardener. The news leaves me stunned and blinking foolishly. My instinct is to feel betrayed, but then later I ask myself, what had I been expecting? I have no intention of leaving P.

15th June 1957, Tangier

M. arrived three days ago with her new husband whose full name is Milton Rorschach Gardener IV. We meet at a function in the El Minzah Hotel. I am delighted and at the first opportunity try to run M. upstairs into one of the spare rooms, but she quickly puts me in my place. She introduces me to M.G., who is not a doddery old fool but a very tall, imposing and impressive man. He has a cane and a knee which, when it bends, snaps with a metallic click. They ask to come to the studio.

They arrive the next day just as I’m explaining my new interlocking figurative landscapes to Javier, who has now had to be caged in a wooden pen. A worrying development is that in creating these patterned human landscapes I seem to be implying some wonderful network of human connection, which I don’t think I believe in. M. takes one look at Javier, picks him up and takes him away on to the verandah. It’s love at first sight from both sides. As M.G. and I talk we can’t help but glance over at the two of them, feeling like jilted lovers at a dance.

M.G. is taken with my new work but he has seen the drawing of P. in B.H.’s collection. He asks me if I’ve developed that idea into paint and says: ‘There’s your future, if you ask me.’

M. tells me later that M.G.’s ‘old money’ came from steel but his ‘new money’ came from playing the futures markets. Apparently in these markets you can bet on the future price of a product like wheat, sugar or even pork bellies (this doesn’t sound like work to me) and I realize how small my world has become. Because of my talent I think art important but now see that I rely on a small group of wealthy people to buy my work, who in turn can make a fortune by putting chips on bacon. It’s an epiphany of sorts, perhaps a reverse one, as I now see myself as one of M.G.’s futures markets. He’s looking at my pork bellies and wondering if they’re worth putting money on. I tell M. that he should buy Chaim Soutine’s Carcass of Beef, which she doesn’t find funny but I think the old Lithuanian Jew himself would have laughed. Come to think of it, even Chaim Soutine’s landscapes were like offal. I put this to M.G. who says: ‘Yeah, truly offal,’ which joke is spoilt because he has to explain it to me.

3rd September 1957, Tangier

R. is happy about Mohammed V’s Royal Charter, which came into effect a few days ago. The money market is still free and exports and imports unrestricted. The business community is euphoric. I am in a black depression. M. and M.G. have left. They bought one of my ‘peoplescapes’ so all was not lost. I gave M. a present of a (very) small painting of a line of carcasses hanging in a butcher’s cold store. Amongst the carcasses is a little self-portrait. I am hanging upside down, thorax and belly split, meat-hook through my Achilles heel. M. chides me for being a cynic but keeps it, ‘Because I know you will be famous one day.’ I call the piece Futures in Art. I am now reeling from my stupid joke because I have touched on the wretched truth. I am not operating in a sacred world. I am in a market. Here we all are aiming at some high truth, when in fact we are mired in the mud of commerce.

I leave the studio and on an impulse take out the drawings of P. (which I keep at home or I’d spend my day gawping at them). I pace up and down as if inspecting the troops until I find P. is in the room with me. I tell her that I’m trying to find a way to take this work forward. She says in a prophetic voice: ‘You won’t be able to take these forward until you can see beyond them.’ I ask her what she means. ‘You only see what is there,’ she says and leaves me no better off than I was.