The Blind Man of Seville

30

Saturday, 28th April 2001, Tetuán, Morocco

Falcón was up early to catch a grand taxi to Ceuta before dawn. From there he took the hydrofoil to Algeciras. The last entry of the diary was burnt on his mind. The silver ring with the single sapphire was his mother’s ring. The killer had been wearing his mother’s ring. That was why he’d had to come back to find it, because now Falcón knew the journal was the key. The killer had somehow had access to his father’s house, read the journal, stolen the vital section and set out on his avenging spree. But how had he come into possession of a ring his mother never took off? Uneasy truths slipped into his mind, along with the memory of being lifted high in the air at the edge of the sea on the bay of Tangier, legs kicking, above a face that would not come back to him.

By two o’clock he was in Seville. There was a message from Comisario Lobo on the answering machine. He was furious and used up a lot of tape telling him that it was no coincidence that Comisario León’s lackey, Ramírez, had officially removed Consuelo Jiménez from the suspects list as soon as he’d assumed control of Falcón’s investigation. He didn’t care. He went straight back up to his father’s studio. The jewellery box was still open on the table where he’d left it. He clenched the agate cube in his fist as if the impression of its geometry would take him through the lock of his memory. He paced the floor, kicked at a pile of magazines under the table which fell at his feet.

The cover of one of the magazines was totally black and its English title was Bound. He opened it with his foot and reared back. The two photographs he saw were visions of hell — two blindfolded women being tortured by heavily tattooed men. He kicked the magazine away.

Was that what his father had been driven to? Had the loss of his genius polarized him to the extent that, having painted the sublime and lost his grasp of it, he was drawn to the ugliest of pictures … to do what? To disturb his mind back to greatness? To bury himself in the philosophical hope that beauty can only exist if there is ugliness? Falcón couldn’t wait to get the appalling images out of the house and in kicking it away he saw that the whole pile consisted of pornography — hard core, bestial, depraved beyond imagination.

On the table above the pile of magazines was the roll of five canvases, none of which he’d recognized. He unrolled them again and pinned them up on the work wall. He noticed that the canvas was old but the paint was acrylic, which his father hadn’t started using until the late seventies. He was also sure that this was not his father’s work and he wished Salgado were alive to tell him about these paintings.

Then he remembered the copyist. The half-gypsy guy who lived in the Alameda somewhere, the one he hadn’t liked, who’d stood in his black underpants and scratched his genitals while his father spoke to him. What was his name? There was something odd about it. It wasn’t a real name. Something came back to him about the day he’d gone to the copyist’s workshop with his father. All the paintings were upside down on their easels. He copied upside down. El Zurdo — that was it. The left-hander. To imitate a right-hander’s brushstrokes he used to paint upside down. Falcón found an address for the copyist but no telephone number in his father’s old address book under ‘Z’.

He picked up a taxi outside the Hotel Colón and went to Calle Parras, not far from the Alameda. There was no answer from El Zurdo’s apartment, but the neighbour told him that he’d gone to lunch in his usual place, a bar on Calle Escuderos called La Cubista.

There were six lone men sitting at individual tables, eating and watching the television. He recognized none of them.

‘I wondered how long it was going to take,’ said a voice, as Falcón walked to the bar.

The cutlery activity stopped, the soap on TV continued. The dark-faced man with horse teeth who’d spoken stood up. He had grey hair just visible under a black hat, which had a number of badges and brooches pinned to the band. He was dressed head to toe in black.

‘You must be Javier Falcón,’ he said.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘Because you’ve just walked in here with a roll of canvases under your arm, looking like someone’s lost child.’

‘El Zurdo?’

The man pointed him to a chair opposite his own.

‘Have you eaten?’

‘You were wondering how long it was going to take …’

‘For Javier Falcón to come and find me,’ he said, looking over his shoulder to the blackboard menu. ‘Now, cordero en salsa, escalopinas de cerdo or atún en salsa?’

‘Cordero,’ said Falcón.

El Zurdo shouted the order across. Falcón leaned the canvases against the adjoining table. Red wine was poured for him.

‘We only met once,’ said Falcón.

‘I have an eye for faces,’ said El Zurdo. ‘You didn’t like me, I remember that.’

‘We didn’t even speak.’

‘You wouldn’t shake my hand.’

‘You’d just used it to scratch yourself.’

El Zurdo laughed. A woman put a plate of lamb stew in front of Falcón.

‘What have you got?’ asked El Zurdo, nodding at the canvases.

‘Five paintings. I don’t recognize them. They’re not my father’s work. I wanted to know if you copied them.’

El Zurdo pushed his empty plate back and took a toothpick from a jar on the table. Falcón started eating.

‘Why do you want to know about these paintings?’ asked El Zurdo. ‘You’re a cop, aren’t you? Your father told me.’

‘I’m not working, if that’s what you mean,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m on leave.’

‘Do you want to sell them?’

‘I want to know what they are before I burn them.’

El Zurdo lit a cigarette, stood and pushed two tables together. He undid the roll of canvases and leafed through all five dismissively.

‘They’re all mine,’ he said. ‘They’re copies I did for your father, but they’re not his work. He asked me to do him a favour and make copies of these paintings for a Swiss painter who’d just sold them at Salgado’s gallery and wanted to avoid paying tax. Of course, the Swiss guy should have taken the copies with him to show Customs that they hadn’t been sold. So I don’t know what they’re still doing in your father’s studio.’

‘Did my father give you the canvases?’

‘Yes. They were all old and there was something already on them which he’d painted a wash over.’

‘Something he’d done?’

‘I didn’t ask.’

El Zurdo smoked some more. Falcón ate his food.

‘Do you want to know what’s under there?’ asked El Zurdo.

‘I think so.’

‘You don’t sound so sure.’

‘You think you want to know until you find out what it is.’

They caught a cab, which took them through to Calle Laraña and the Bellas Artes Institute. They went across the internal patio and up to the first floor. For 15,000 pesetas a friend of El Zurdo’s put the canvases through an imaging machine and gave them five print-outs of the original work underneath. What came out looked like nothing: a mass of cross-hatching, swathes of black on white with the occasional discernible detail such as an eye, a leg, a hoof, an animal’s tail.

El Zurdo could make nothing of them. They parted at the building’s steps. El Zurdo told him if he needed to talk again he was always in La Cubista for lunch. Javier walked home. He dumped the canvases and print-outs, called Alicia and arranged to see her that evening.

‘I’ve been relieved of my command,’ he said, as Alicia took hold of his wrist. ‘I go back in ten days’ time for psychological assessment.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ she said. ‘Your behaviour was probably becoming quite strange.’

‘That business with Inés and the Juez de Instrucción decided it. She thought I was stalking her, but I was only coming across her in the street as I would in my own mind.’

‘You’ve told me all this before.’

‘Have I?’ he said. ‘Yes, to a madman a few days becomes eons. I keep reliving my life until I hit a memory blank, which I hammer at until I’m weak and then I go back and relive the same stretch again, until I hit the same closed door. It’s exhausting, and it makes the time between the real experiences of everyday life seem like ancient history. Did I tell you that I went to Tangier?’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Why did you decide to go there?’

‘I was given compassionate leave.’

He told her about the death of Pepe Leal.

‘What did you hope to find in Tangier … forty years later?’

‘Answers. Life doesn’t move at the same pace in the Third World. I thought I’d be able to find people who could remember things I’d forgotten and that would jog my memory.’

‘But why Tangier? You lost your job because of Inés. Why not resolve that? What was the impetus?’

‘I was drawn there. I made no conscious decisions. I went where fate led me. I put myself in others’ hands … and I ended up in front of my old house in the Medina.’

‘No conscious decisions?’

‘None.’

‘Remind me how this madness of yours manifested itself in the first place?’

‘I felt the change when I saw the first victim’s face.’

‘And what was the first thing that happened, outside of your investigation, that made you think that the change was not, for instance, shock at a gruesome sight?’

A long silence.

‘I went into the centre to pick up the victim’s address book and I got caught up in a Semana Santa procession. For some reason, seeing the Virgin … I nearly fainted. It was a very affecting experience.’

‘Are you religious?’

‘Not at all.’

‘And after that?’

‘I saw the shot of my father in one of the victim’s photographs and I learned he was having an affair before my mother died.’

‘But in your life?’

‘Finding the journals with his letter … that started up something. I mean, it stirred up … some sort of darkness. I behaved very strangely that night. I thought there might be something evil in me. I’d never seen that side of my nature. I’ve always been relentlessly good. Determined to be good.’

‘Because you’re afraid?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of what?’

‘There was something else that night,’ said Falcón. ‘I was trying to find the prostitute who’d been with the victim on the night he died. She’d gone missing. The killer made contact with me for the first time. He asked me: “Are we close?” and then he said: “Closer than you think,” as if he knew something about me, which I now know he does.’

‘What did you think he knew about you?’

‘I thought he meant that he was physically close to me, that he was following me. But later I thought that perhaps he meant that we weren’t dissimilar people,’ said Falcón, stumbling over the words. ‘And I knew he’d killed the girl and I felt guilty about that.’

‘Guilty?’

‘We suspected a link between the killer and the girl and we didn’t follow it up. We should have tried harder. We failed …’

‘You didn’t fail,’ said Alicia. ‘She wouldn’t tell you. She was protecting him for her own reasons.’

‘I still felt guilty.’

‘But guilty about what?’

Long silence.

‘I ran into another procession that night. One of the Silent orders. One of the accusatory orders. And you know … she was so beautiful … the Virgin. Ridiculous that a mannequin in robes could be so … moving,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear everything she stood for and I had to get past her. I had to get away from her.’

‘And this was bound up with your sense of guilt about the girl?’

‘Yes. My failure.’

‘You know who the Virgin is?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know what she stands for?’

He nodded.

‘Say it,’ said Alicia.

‘She is the ultimate mother.’

‘The Ultimate Mother,’ she repeated it for him. ‘Tell me why you went to Tangier.’

‘I wanted to know how … I wanted to know what happened when she died.’

‘Did you find out?’

‘It was inconclusive. I found out what had happened in the street, which was a memory that had bothered me. But it was just my mother’s Riffian maid going through some histrionics. It’s not uncommon in Arab women. You’ve probably —’

‘You don’t believe what you’re saying, do you, Javier? You’ve attached some importance to this.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

Alicia breathed out slowly. The brick wall hit again.

‘What else did you find out in Tangier?’

‘Some nonsense gossip about how my second mother had died.’

‘Your second mother?’

‘I’m not going to give it the credibility of repetition.’

‘What else?’ asked Alicia, snapping at his resistance to talk.

‘I have an inexplicable fear of milk,’ he said, and told her about the incident in the Tetuán Medina and the dream that followed it.

‘What does milk mean to you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘And that was what you dreamt about?’

‘I meant that it has no meaning other than that I have always hated dairy products … just as my father did.’

‘And what do mothers produce to feed their babies?

‘I have to be going,’ he said abruptly. ‘The hour is up. You should have been stricter with me.’

They walked to the door. He stepped into the stairwell without looking at her. He didn’t turn on the light. He pattered down the stairs.

‘You will come back to me, won’t you, Javier?’ she called out after him.

He did not reply.

At home he sat in the study, leafing over the black-and-white print-outs from the imaging machine while guilt and failure tumbled in his mind. He stuck the print-outs up on the wall and stood back from them. They were meaningless. He switched them around, thinking that it might have something to do with the order, but soon realized there were thousands of permutations.

The wind buffeted around the patio, rattling the door. He went out and sat on the lip of the fountain and tapped his feet on the worn marble flagstones whose rectangular shapes reminded him of the diagram that had fallen out of the roll of canvases.

He tore the print-outs off the wall and sprinted up to the studio. He found the diagram on the floor of the storeroom amongst all the boxes. Five interlocking rectangles, each one numbered. He ran back down the stairs, possessed by the idea that this would be the key that would unlock the whole mystery. But of what? He slowed to a stop on the patio.

The certainties, the idea of their collapse, came to him in a series of Biblical film clips, statues keeled over, keystones plummeted, arches folded in on themselves, columns toppled into colossal fluted fragments. His view of his father had already changed — the violent legionnaire, the shell-shocked veteran of Leningrad, the murderous smuggler and finally the tortured artist. And yet somehow this was all explicable. This wasn’t nature, it was the nurture of history’s most savage century. The brutal and bloody Civil War, the catastrophic Second World War, the left-over brutality that eventually slid into hedonism in post-war Tangier. He could always point to the outside influences that had worked to brutal effect on his father’s fragile state. But perhaps this was different. It could be that this would reveal something deeply personal, some terrible weakness that would expose the hidden monster. Did he want that?

What had Consuelo called him and Inés at their first meeting? A union of truth hunters. The whole reason he’d started this terrible journey was because of the irresistible urge to discover. Was he going to shy away from that now, and end up at the only end of Calk Negación? Then what? He would live his life as if none of this had happened, and Javier Falcón would sink without trace.

He took the rolls of canvas up to the studio and matched each one to the relevant print-out, but could find no numbering system. There was nothing written on the backs of the canvas except the letters ‘I’ and ‘D’, and he suddenly felt tired and desperate for bed. Then he saw, at the edge of the print-outs, some ink marks. He realized his father had numbered the canvases on their fronts, beyond where the canvas would stretch over the frame. He worked out the numbers and got the order right through a process of elimination. Then he understood that the ‘I’ and ‘D’ were izquierda and derecha. He marked off the print-outs accordingly and then trimmed the A3 sheets down to the edges. He turned them over and stuck them together as shown in the diagram. He took the finished piece up to his father’s work wall and stuck it there with tape. He walked away from it. He reached the bookshelves on the far wall and was about to turn when he felt the sweat break — the familiar trickle down his cheek.

It was his last chance to walk away.

He turned with his eyes tight shut.

He opened them and saw what his father had done.