The Blind Man of Seville

29

Tuesday, 24th April 2001, Seville

It had rained during the night. The new day arrived rinsed and refreshed. The sun played over the beads of moisture on the dripping trees and the first jacarandas came into high purple flower. Falcón stopped when he saw them, pulled over and dropped his window. He had rarely done this in the city — found in nature an expression of the complexities of the human condition. But the high, fragile, fern-like green leaf of the jacarandas feathering against the clean blue sky with the clusters of pale purple flowers hanging in the windless morning spoke the same language, could talk to anyone about pain.

He turned on the car radio. The local news was all about Pepe Leal. The media were trying to make a story about the fact that just as Pepe was going in for the kill his head had come up. A bullfight journalist talked inconclusively about the incomprehensible distraction. Someone on the panel mentioned camera flashes, the number of people trying to capture the moment. Another person said he remembered a bigger flash. The bullfight journalist scoffed. The myth had begun. Falcón turned off the radio.

By the time he arrived at the Jefatura the men had already dispersed. Only Ramírez remained. They shook hands. Ramírez embraced him and offered his condolences. He handed him a message, which told him that Comisario León wanted to see him as soon as he arrived. He took the lift up to the top floor, looking at his vague reflection in the stainless-steel panels. He was held together by threads. There would be no resistance from him.

Ten minutes later he was going back down. The weight of command had been lifted from his shoulders. He had been given two weeks compassionate leave and would have to undergo full psychological assessment on his return. He had said nothing. He was defenceless. He went to his office and cleared out his desk to find there were no personal items, only some letters, which he put in his pocket, and his police-issue revolver, which he should have returned to the armoury but didn’t.

At 6 p.m. he attended the funeral of Pepe Leal. The whole bullfighting community was in attendance. Paco was there, inconsolable and uncontrollable. He bawled into his hands, his shoulders shaking, the whole tragedy weighing down on them. Everybody cried. The mourners, the cemetery workers, the flower sellers, the onlookers, the grave visitors. And the grief was genuine, except that it wasn’t for Pepe Leal. He was almost unknown to these people. He was not a great name. As Javier stood in dry-eyed suffering amongst the weeping and the snivelling, he understood what this grief was for. They were mourning their own losses — youth, prospects, health, talent. The death of Pepe Leal had, temporarily at least, brought an end to possibility. It was for this reason that Javier found it kitsch and he wouldn’t cry with them, and he wouldn’t join them afterwards but went home to his bruised and silent house and the compassion of his enforced leave.

He sat in his study, still in his mac, doodling on a paper with a pencil. He wanted to get out of the city. Biensolo’s horn had punched a hole in the Feria and Falcón would leave the city to bleed over Pepe’s death. He took out a map of Spain, placed the pencil over Seville and span it three times. Each time it pointed directly south, and south of Seville there was nothing apart from a small fishing village called Barbate. But beyond Barbate, across the straits, was Tangier.

The phone rang, startling him. He didn’t answer it. No more condolences required.

The following morning he packed a bag, including the unread journal, found his passport and took a cab to the bus station at the back of the Palacio de Justicia. Five and a half hours later he boarded a ferry in Algeciras to Tangier.

The ferry journey lasted an hour and a half. He spent most of it watching a Moroccan version of himself taking down the details of a group of six boys — illegal immigrants, who were being returned. They were cheerful. Tourists gave them the thumbs up and cigarettes. The policeman was firm but not unkind.

Tangier appeared out of the mist without dredging up a single memory. The long rainy winter had left the surrounding country a deep, lush green, which was not a colour he associated with Morocco. There was something familiar about the cascade of grubby whitewashed houses within the walls of the old town, which fell from the Kasbah at the top of the cliff to the Grand Mosque at the lower end. Beyond the walls the ville nouvelle had pushed further around the bay. He tried to find the old house where his father’s studio had been but it was either hidden amongst the apartment blocks or had been destroyed to make way for them.

The taxi driver took him from the port to the Hotel Rembrandt and tried to charge him 150 dirham, which involved an ugly argument and a dishonourable discharge with half that amount changing hands. The reception, still in its fifties marble splendour, gave him the key to room 422 and he took his own bag up there.

The hotel had suffered in the intervening half-century. There was a glass panel missing from one of the doors in his room. Paint peeled off the metal windows. The furniture looked as if it had taken refuge from a violent husband. But there was a perfect view of the bay of Tangier and Falcón sat on the bed and gaped at it, while thoughts of deracination spread through his mind.

He went out to get some food, knowing they ate early in Morocco, but found the time two hours behind Spain and at 6 p.m. nowhere was open. He walked to the Place de France and then down past the Hotel El Minzah to the Grand Soco and entered the Medina through the market, which brought him out in a street not far from the Spanish cathedral. From there he tried to remember the route to his old family home. He must have walked it a thousand times with his mother. It didn’t come back to him and he was soon lost in the maze of narrow alleys until quite by accident he found himself in front of a house he recognized.

The door was opened by a maid who spoke only Arabic. She disappeared. A man in his fifties wearing a white burnous and white leather babouches came to the door. Falcón explained himself and the man was stunned. It had been his own father who had bought the property from Francisco Falcón. Javier was welcomed in. The man, Mohammed Rachid, showed him around the house, which was structurally exactly the same, with the fig tree still in its place and the strange high room with the window at the top.

Rachid invited Falcón to dinner. Over a vast shared bowl of couscous Javier revealed that his mother had died in the house and asked if any of the neighbours would have been alive at the time. One of the boys was sent out with instructions. He was back in minutes with an invitation to take a coffee next door.

The neighbouring family included an old man of seventy-five, who would have been thirty-four at the time of his mother’s death. He remembered the incident very well because most of what happened took place outside his front door.

‘The unusual thing was that two doctors turned up,’ said the old man, ‘and there was a disagreement as to who was to see the patient. As it happened, the woman, your mother, was already dead and so your father had called his own doctor to deal with the matter.

‘Your father had arrived back from his studio for breakfast to find his wife dead in her bed. In his distress he called the only doctor he knew, which was his own. A German. Your mother’s doctor, a Spaniard, seemed quite satisfied with this and was about to leave when the Riffian woman, your mother’s maid, burst out of the house and announced that her mistress had been poisoned. She held a glass of something in her hand, that she said had come from her mistress’s bedside. Nobody believed her and she took the drastic step of drinking some of the liquid. Your father tore the glass from her grip and with great drama she fell to the ground. There was consternation. The Spanish doctor leapt forward. But it was a sham. She wasn’t dead. There was no poison. And the maid was dismissed as a hysteric.’

Falcón couldn’t control the trembling in his hands, not even by clasping them together. Sweat trickled down his cheek and nausea swooned in his head at this light-hearted recounting of the drama. He staggered to his feet from the cushions on the floor, knocking over the undrunk cup of coffee. Mohammed Rachid stood to help him.

They walked to the taxi rank on the Grand Soco, and a battered Mercedes took him back to the Hotel Rembrandt. Once out of the house and the Medina he calmed down, brought the panic under control. It was just that the old man’s benign recounting of the story had brought it all back to him. The horror of that morning. His mother dead in her bed and this unseemly commotion in the street outside. He remembered it and yet there were still gaps and he hadn’t wanted the old man to continue because … He didn’t know why. He just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

Back at the hotel he sank on to the bed in the darkness of the room and looked out to sea over the lights of the town and harbour. He was desolate. His body shuddered under a spasm of loneliness and all his deferred grief at Pepe’s death came to the surface. He fell back, drew his knees up into a foetal position and tried to hold himself together, afraid that if he didn’t do this he would fragment beyond repair. Some hours later he released himself and stripped off his clothes. He took a sleeping pill, scratched the bedclothes over himself and passed out.

The morning was nearly over by the time he woke up. There was no hot water. He showered under cold, which brought his mind back sharply to the inexplicable fact that he was quietly weeping a stream of tears that he was powerless to stop. His hands hung limp at his sides and he shook his head in misery. His body, now, was out of his control.

He walked up to the Place de France and took a coffee at the Café de Paris. From there he went to the Spanish consulate and, showing his police ID, asked if there was anybody Spanish still living in Tangier who had been there in the late fifties and sixties. They told him to go to a restaurant called Romero’s and ask for Mercedes of the same name.

The restaurant was in a garden wedged between two roads leading to a roundabout. The door was opened by an elderly man in a white jacket and a fez, whose breathing difficulties were manifest. As they made their way to the table a Pekingese dog attacked them. Javier winced at its penetrating yap.

He ordered steak and asked after Mercedes Romero and the old man pointed to an elderly, well-coiffed, blonde woman who was playing patience at a single table on the other side of the empty restaurant. He asked the old man to give her a note of introduction, which he wrote out on a page of his notebook. The old man staggered away, placed the note before Mercedes, told her the order and was given some money to buy the steak.

Mercedes came slowly across the room. She grabbed the Pekingese by the scruff, rubbed its tummy and threw it under an empty table. She sat opposite him and asked him if he was the son of Francisco Falcón, which Javier confirmed.

‘I never knew him,’ she said. ‘Nor Pilar, but I was a good friend of your stepmother, Mercedes, who was about my age. She used to eat in the restaurant my family owned then in the Grand Hôtel Villa de France. We were very close and I was devastated by her death.’

‘I never called her my stepmother,’ said Falcón. ‘I always referred to her as my second mother. We were very close, too.’

‘Yes, she told me that she thought of you as her own son and how desperate she was for you to follow in your father’s footsteps. She hoped that you might be an even greater artist than he.’

‘I was barely eight years old at the time.’

‘You don’t remember that then,’ she said, nodding behind him.

In a simple black frame on the wall above his head was a line drawing of a woman. Underneath was written Mercedes.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘You drew that in the summer of 1963. Mercedes gave it to me as a Christmas present. It’s of her, of course, not me. I asked her why she was giving it to me and she said something very strange: “Because with you I know it will be safe.”’

Tears brimmed in Falcón’s eyes. He’d given up any attempt at control of his emotions.

‘She drowned,’ he said. ‘I still remember the night she left and didn’t come back. They never recovered the body and I think not seeing her again made it harder. I saw my mother in her casket …’

‘Where is your father now?’ asked Mercedes.

‘He died two years ago.’

‘Maybe you remember someone else from that time — your father’s agent, Ramón Salgado?’

Falcón nodded madly and told her how Salgado had just been murdered and that he was the investigating officer. It all came out why he was in Tangier, which was when the old man in the fez came staggering back with the steak and salad, which he breathed over heavily as he served.

‘Perhaps if you’d been a detective back then you might have dealt with the matter of Mercedes’ death with a more penetrating eye than the local police.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I don’t believe in gossip — I hear too much of it running a restaurant — but there was a lot of it about at that time. Enough gossip to have made anyone seriously investigating that tragedy ask harder questions than they did.’

‘What are you implying, Sra Romero?’ said Falcón quietly.

‘I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but Mercedes was my friend and I was very sorry to lose her, especially in a boating accident. She had spent a lot of time on boats. Her husband, Milton, owned one. She had sailed across the Atlantic several times. She was a very experienced and sure-footed sailor. She did not make mistakes. They said it was rough that night, that a storm had got up in the straits, but I can tell you it was nothing compared to some of the storms she’d been through coming over the Atlantic. They said she fell overboard and I’m afraid that I for one did not believe it. I did not believe the gossip that ran along the lines of how careless it was of your father to have lost two wives. That disgusted me. But both your father and Ramón Salgado should have been forced to account for their actions in an official inquiry, at least.’

Falcón got up from the table, his steak untouched, and walked out of the restaurant. He wasn’t prepared to listen to that sort of stuff. That was what happened when you became famous. People loved to speculate at your expense. Fine. But he was not going to be a party to that. He walked flat out back to the Hotel Rembrandt, sprinted up to room 422 and threw himself on the bed, wrapped a pillow over his ears and clamped his eyes shut.

It was night-time when he woke up and a great storm was playing itself out across the straits over Spain. The sheet lightning ran for hundreds of kilometres, illuminating the vast, stacked clouds boiling in the night sky. Outside it was spitting. He found a restaurant and ate a lamb tagine and drank a bottle of Cabernet Président. He staggered back to the hotel, collapsed on the bed and woke up sweating and fully clothed. He stripped and crawled back into bed. The rain slashed and raked at the windows.

* * *

The Friday morning was drear and sodden. He had one more enquiry to make, which was probably going to be more fruitless than the rest. He checked out of the hotel and took a grand taxi to Tetuán, which broke down on the way so that he arrived in the late afternoon. He made a quick tour of the town’s Spanish community, trying to find somebody who might have known the González family who ran a hotel business back in the thirties.

By seven o’clock he’d lost his guide in the Medina and was wandering aimlessly through the alleyways, following carts piled high with fresh mint, when he came across a sight in a narrow street that totally paralysed him with panic.

A man with a cart of steel churns was pouring milk into local women’s calabashes, in which they would make their yoghurt. The gush of white liquid induced nausea. The flat white calm of the full calabashes turned him and sent him on a wild run through the streets and out of the Medina.

He gave up on trying to find someone to explain ‘the incident’ from his father’s journals. He found a cheap hotel with a bar. He drank beer and ate albóndigas in a crowd of Moroccan men, under a pall of cigarette smoke. He engaged in their small talk so as not to slip back into more despairing thoughts.

That night he was woken by a dream, a terrible dream, which he had to walk out of himself in his small room. The dream had been of nothing, of a terrible whiteness — an amorphous, consuming blankness that contained no memories, no past, no present and no future. It was the end of time and it seemed to want him.

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

12th January 1958, Tangier

I come back home early to take Javier out for a little treat on his second birthday but P. and he are not at home. The other children are at school. There is only the one maid at home, a Riffian woman, who speaks some impenetrable Berber dialect that only P. understands. I am fuming and go back to the studio and paint a canvas with terrible slashing strokes of red, as if I’m carving my way through the ranks of the enemy. The result is a work of terrifying energy, of appalling violence such as I’ve only ever committed on the battlefield. I burn it and watching the sickle slashes of paint being consumed by fire gives me near-sexual pleasure.

15th July 1958, Tangier

R. has turned up at the studio (he’s never been before). G. is pregnant again and he’s in a terrible state. He waits for my admonishment. I say nothing and he calls me a true friend. The doctor had been savage with him. He tells me over and over that it was an accident so that I stop believing him. ‘This time I will lose her,’ he says, and I see his passion for her, a passion I used to have for P. and now have for Javier. I’m moved and try to calm him. She will have to stay still for the entire pregnancy, he says, and for the first time I think there’s something else at play here. He seems scared by the fact that she can’t be moved and when I press him on this he suddenly says: ‘We should all leave and go back to Spain.’ I think he has a problem in his business, but he won’t be drawn on the matter.

25th September 1958, Tangier

I have been naïve. I should have known that, while R. can conduct himself in business with ruthlessness and tact, when it comes to affairs of the heart he is a small boy, incapable of objectivity and subject to the whim of his, still youthful, passions. I now know why he couldn’t speak to me before. He was ashamed. It seems amazing living in Tangier, where the orgies of Ancient Rome appear as staid as English tea parties, that a grown man is capable of shame. R. is an island of virtue in a sea of shamelessness. He has never indulged in the local young men and is appalled by the idea, calling it ‘unnatural’. Since he met G., as far as I know, he has not transgressed, not even with a prostitute before they were married. Just the thought of the frenzy on their wedding night leaves me weak.

R.’s revelations are quite a shock and are drawn from him at visible cost. We are on the verandah of the studio and, when he is not holding his head in his hands giving me his confession (who has begun to feel like a fat, corrupt prelate), he is pacing from side to side and casting about in case there is someone in the vicinity who can hear. R., at the age of thirty-five, has now transgressed in a spectacularly irresponsible fashion. I realize that I have been making light of this, but what R. has done is serious. I’m not sure that it has been done without the guile of the Moroccans with whom he has been doing business. We Europeans and Americans in particular are impressed by strengths, we like to see them displayed before us, especially in business. The Moroccan, however, and perhaps the African in general, is not so interested in strengths, which are always overt, but in the weaknesses which are hidden. It is sad that virtue should be seen as a weakness … or is it virtue? I was always disturbed by R.’s passion for G. when she was still a girl. He has succumbed again. He caught sight of one of the young daughters of a business associate of his in Fez. The girl was not veiled so might even have been as young as twelve years of age. R.’s interest was noted, the girl was made available, R. transgressed and now perhaps the most serious thing in Moroccan society is at stake — honour. R. is expected to take the girl for his wife. This is impossible. And here we have the cultural clash and the reason for R.’s torment. There is a solution: he must leave the country. He will lose his entire investment in the Moroccan project, which amounts to $25,000. But G. cannot be moved and he cannot uproot the family without making some unpleasant revelations. He fears that now the International Zone no longer exists, his family could be at risk. Of what? He leaves his final revelation to the last moment. The Arab girl is pregnant. He thinks that if he leaves Tangier there could be some revenge attack on his family.

7th October 1958, Tangier

As a security measure R. has rented a house nearly opposite his own and we have put four legionnaires in there. Pressure is mounting on him and he is buying time by continuing to invest money in the Moroccan project. It costs him thousands of dollars, but he is prepared to pay any amount. P. has been to see G. and she is in no fit state to be moved, let alone undergo a sea journey across the straits in winter.

14th December 1958, Tangier

The pressure on R. has been too great. His health has suffered and he has been laid up with a lung infection. I tell him that as soon as he is well he should leave, which is what he did yesterday, taking Marta, the six-year-old, (who, after her difficult birth, is a little simple) with him. R. has done everything possible. He has bribed the whole of Tangier. I don’t know how deep his resources are, but they must be considerable for him to have raised his investment with the Moroccans to close to $40,000. He has given them some excuse or other that he has to go to Spain and that they have nothing to fear from a man of honour. I wish I knew more about these people, but R. will not let me near that end of things. I have no idea whether they are rogues who’ve seen a way of milking a vulnerable European, or genuine traditionalists who adhere to some ancient code of behaviour and mores. R. says they do not understand why he can’t simply divorce G. In their culture they only have to say the words three times and it is done.

22nd January 1959, Tangier

G.’s waters have broken and she goes into a prolonged labour of what P. describes as almost constant contraction. P. is convinced that the baby will not be able to survive the trauma. I call R. in Spain. He receives the news in silence. Twelve hours later he appears in the house, which is tomb dark on a grim winter morning. The fifty-year-old Spanish doctor and midwife are doing everything to get the baby out, but it is the wrong way round and also stuck. The atmosphere in the house is one of hopelessness. There is something of the torture chamber about it, with G.’s screams, the attentiveness of the medical staff and the black, lightless desolation of us all. After fifty-two hours the boy is delivered. He weighs three kilos. G. is so exhausted that should she sleep too deeply she might slip away. The doctor delivers a savage monologue to R., who asks when G. can be moved. ‘She might never leave this house alive, but you should know within the week,’ he says.

7th February 1959, Tangier

I go down to the port with my pockets full of dollars. It is better for G. to be moved on a quiet sea than driven to Ceuta on rough roads. The night is calm. The officials are malleable. We bring G. down to the port in a lumbering Studebaker and load her on to the yacht R. has chartered. As they ‘re about to cast off a police car arrives on the quay and a row develops in which the travel documents are confiscated, permission to leave the port is revoked and we all have to go back to the terminal for questioning. We ask on what charge and are stunned when they say it is fraud and mention the company that R. has been investing in. R., believing that the game is up, parts with $200. The sum is so vast that a deep silence ensues in which the situation could go one way or the other. The money is pocketed. Documents are returned. Permission is granted and a salute goes up.

12th February 1959, Tangier

As the legionnaires I had positioned opposite R.’s house were leaving, a group of Moroccans turned up with some police and a warrant. They broke the door down to R.’s house and removed all contents. Later a letter arrived at my home written in Arabic script, which I cannot read. I take it to the Spanish Legation where even the translator blanches at its contents.

I am Abdullah Diouri. I was a business associate of your friend whose name I cannot bring myself to write. You may know that he has deeply offended the honour of my family. He has treated one of my young daughters as nothing more than a common prostitute. Her life has been ruined. There is no amount of money that can repair the damage done to her or my family name. You should know that I have withdrawn from the business in which my associates and I had invested.

You should tell your friend that the family of Abdullah Diouri will be avenged and the price that we shall exact will be the same as exacted from us. I have lost a daughter, my family has been dishonoured. I will seek out your friend to the ends of the earth and I will reclaim my family honour from him.

There was a crudeness and a lack of affectation to this letter that gave it the ring of authenticity. The dots above and below the lines of script had been added in red ink. The effect was one of spattered blood. I send the original and translation to R., who has not yet been able to move G. from hospital in Algeciras, where she arrived unconscious after the crossing.

17th March 1959, Tangier

I have been too occupied by R.’s problems these last six months to contemplate the end of an era. It has stolen up on me and left me in its roiling wake. R.’s departure has hit me harder than I thought. I sit alone at his table in the Café de Paris and the talk is like an ongoing lament. Offices have closed down. No alcohol or tobacco can be loaded in the port. The hotels are empty. We have to use the dirham. The smart shops on the Boulevard Pasteur have closed down and been taken over by Moroccans selling tourist rubbish. Were it not for B.H. in Palace Sidi Hosni we would slip completely off the world stage. My work has foundered. All I seem to be doing is copying de Kooning, even though M. writes to tell me how admired my ‘peoplescape’ has been by those allowed into M.G.’s apartment. Even these words cannot stem my sense of decline. I feel like an old Roman, post-bacchanal, jaded and listless, prone to ennui and anxiety at the demise of empire.

R. sends word that he is living in the Sierra de Ronda. The clear dry air agrees with G.

18th June 1959, Tangier

The first heat of the summer is brutal. My brain is a seethe of nothingness. I lie about on carpets in my studio drinking tea and smoking. I sleep all afternoon and wake up at eight in the evening to find the temperature nearly bearable. I suddenly remember it is P.’s birthday and that I’ve failed to buy her a gift. I rummage about in the drawers and find an agate cube on a cheap silver ring. It must be a cast-off of M.’s. I fashion some coloured paper around it so that it looks like the pistil of a flower. I press it into a box and crush a lid on top so that when opened it will spring out. I tie it up with strips of red cloth and go home.

By midnight we have eaten. The children are about to go to bed when I remember my present. I send Javier round the table to her with my little box. P. opens it with great ceremony. The flower springs out and the box lid hits Javier on the nose. Everyone is delighted, including P., but then a look of complete puzzlement crosses her face. I panic that it was one of her old rings that I have given back to her. But I’m sure it’s not. I would have noticed it. The moment passes. She puts on the ring. I kiss her and notice that it is the only ring on her finger apart from her wedding band. This surprises me, because there was always one ring that she never took off — a silver band set with a small sapphire, which was given to her by her parents when she became a woman. I nearly ask her if she’s lost it, but that look on her face when she saw the agate cube has left me uneasy.