The Blind Man of Seville

33

Monday, 30th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

There was nothing on the desk in front of him. The pictures had been removed from the wall.

‘Are you awake, Javier?’ said a voice from behind him.

‘I’m awake.’

‘If you try to shout I will have to gag you with your socks, so please be sensible.’

‘I am beyond screaming now,’ he said.

‘Are you?’ said the voice. ‘I see you’ve been reading. Did you finish?’

‘I finished.’

‘And what do you think of the great Francisco Falcón and his dependable agent, Ramón Salgado?’

‘What you’d expect me to think.’

‘Tell me. I’d like to hear it.’

‘I’d just begun to think that he was a monster … I’d found those five terrible paintings in his studio … and now … I know it. What I didn’t know was that he was a fraud as well. That adds … or rather that takes away the final dimension. Now he’s just monster. There’s nothing else left.’

‘People are very forgiving of genius,’ said the voice. ‘Your father knew that. These days you can rape and murder, but as long as you’re a genius you will be tolerated. Why do you think we tolerate evil in someone with a God-given talent? Why will we put up with arrogance and boorishness in a footballer, just because he can score great goals? Why will we accept drunkenness and adultery in a writer, as long as he gives us the poems? Why will we rape, maim and murder for someone who is able to give us the illusion of belief in ourselves? Why do we let genius get away with it?’

‘Because we are easily bored,’ said Javier.

‘Your father was right,’ said the voice. ‘You do see things differently.’

‘When did he tell you that?’

‘It’s in those diaries somewhere.’

‘He always told me I was blessed with normality.’

‘That was because he suspected something.’

‘Like what?’

‘This is not the order of things,’ said Sergio.

‘Then tell me the order.’

‘How terrible a monster do you think your father was?’ asked the voice. ‘So far we know he was a murderer, a pirate, a depraved hedonist, a fraud and a thief. The world is full of those sorts of people. They are quite ordinary monsters, I would say. What would make somebody extraordinary?’

‘My father was charismatic. He was charming and witty, intelligent …’

‘You can’t go out there with blood dripping from your lips,’ said Sergio. ‘You have to be two-faced or society deals with you straight away.’

‘He understood the ambiguity of being human, that good and evil resides in us all …’

‘That’s an excuse, Javier,’ said the voice. ‘It’s not what made him extraordinary.’

His brain slopped from side to side as he strained against the flexes.

‘He’s a desecrator of innocence,’ said Javier.

‘Normal.’

‘He’s an abuser of trust.’

‘Normal, but warmer,’ said the man. ‘Try thinking of the most extraordinary, incomprehensible …’

‘I can’t. My mind doesn’t work like that. Maybe yours does. You find out about people and show them their most secret horror. Now that is extraordinary.’

‘You think it monstrous what I have done?’

‘You’ve killed three people in the most brutal …’

‘I haven’t.’

‘Then you are insane and I can’t talk to you.’

‘Ramón Salgado hanged himself rather than face his music’

‘So facilitating his suicide makes you innocent?’

‘Raúl Jiménez writhed himself to death.’

‘And what about the innocent Eloisa?’

‘Oh, I’m probably just in denial … like you,’ he said.

‘Only society is guilty,’ said Javier, dismissive.

‘Don’t be trite. I haven’t come here for received opinion. I want creative ideas.’

‘You’ll have to help me.’

‘Who do you know that loves or loved you?’

‘My mother loved me.’

‘That’s true.’

‘My second mother loved me.’

‘How touching that you don’t call her your madrastra.’

‘And, whether you like it or not, my father loved me. We loved each other. We were intimate.’

‘Were you?’

‘He told me. He even wrote it to me in the letter that came with the journals.’

Silence, while the horizons changed in his head.

‘Tell me about the letter,’ said the voice. ‘I haven’t seen it.’

Javier recited the letter verbatim.

‘How interesting,’ he said. ‘And what do you understand from this document, Javier?’

‘He trusted me. He trusted me over and above my elder brother and sister.’

‘It’s interesting that he made you the guardian and destroyer of his works,’ said the voice. ‘What do you think was in his mind when he imagined you reading that letter in the storeroom, surrounded by those trashy attempts at copying my grandfather’s work?’

‘Your grandfather?’ said Javier, to himself, the sweat breaking out from his hairline and trickling down his face.

‘You didn’t mention the date on the letter,’ said the voice. ‘When did he write that?’

‘It was the day before he died.’

‘Extraordinary timing.’

‘He’d already had one heart attack.’

‘What about his last will? When was that dated?’ asked the voice.

‘Three days before his death.’

‘I suppose coincidence isn’t that extraordinary.’

‘What are you implying?’

‘Where was your father found after the second heart attack?’

‘At the bottom of the stairs.’

‘He would have known by then that the journal was missing, that he was on the brink of exposure and the end of his world,’ said the man. ‘So easy to throw himself on the unyielding marble and leave it all in his favourite son’s hands.’

This silenced Javier. He sat with the pressure building in his mind, the floor of his memory creaking under the old weight.

‘This is how consciousness works. It’s slow. Scaling the high-security walls of denial is painstaking,’ said the voice. ‘But we do not have the luxury of time. Tell me why you think your father wanted you to read these journals?’

‘He didn’t. The letter made that clear.’

‘What did it make clear?’ said the voice sharply. ‘Do you seriously imagine he expected you, a detective, to put the letter away and carry on with the rest of your life?’

‘Why not?’

‘Look, Javier, I’ll say it for you. That letter is telling you to read the journals. And why did he want that?’

‘So that … so that I could share the pain of his tormented life?’

‘Is that a line from a movie? Something nice and sentimental from Hollywood, perhaps?’ said the voice. ‘I won’t tolerate that stuff in here, Javier. Now tell me why — I’m sounding like your father with Salgado now — tell me why he wanted you to read the journals?’

‘So that I could learn to hate him?’

‘You are so pathetically needy, Javier,’ he said. ‘Why did he praise your police skills so highly and tell you they would be useful in finding the missing journal?’

Javier fought hard against the idea that had just entered his head. Even now he clung on. It was all he had left. It was one of the few things that sustained him. His father’s love of forty-three years. Even the love of a monster was hard to give up.

‘Some help for you Javier,’ he said. ‘I won’t read it all … just the pertinent bits. Are you ready?’

7th April 1963, NY

On the way to NY Salgado proposes that prior to the showing of the final Falcón nude I should publish my journals. I choke with appalled hilarity at the prospect. What a fantastic undoing that would be. I laugh in great hiccuping gulps. It is Mercedes who’s put him up to this. I’ve seen them hatching their plans and M. has unnerved me on a number of occasions by wafting past as I jot my dysenteric jottings. (She has a pair of very supple and silent gold sandals — I shall have to scatter nutshells to catch her out.) I give Salgado an emphatic no, which tweaks his fascination.

31st December 1963, Tangier

I have been careless and it has changed everything. M. and I were in the studio yesterday. The children were playing in the street below, so excited about their game that they didn’t wait to get on to the soft sand of the beach. Javier, desperate to keep up, fell and hit his head. His face was covered in blood. I ran from the studio and threw him into the car and took him straight to the hospital where they put a few stitches in his head. By the time I returned to the studio I could see that everything had changed.

So what is actually different? We are still man and wife, we still live in the same house, we are still having the New Year’s Eve party tonight.

When I returned from the hospital M. did not immediately ask after Javier, who was at home with the maid. She was on the verandah looking at me as if I was a lone wolf across an ice field. I walked towards her, telling her about Javier, as if auditioning. She manoeuvred around me back into the room. I said he was at home and wanted to see her. She practically ran for the door. We drove back in a frosty silence, with Paco and Manuela fighting in the back. She went upstairs and I to my study.

I am still here now, twenty-four hours later, watching her shadow on the ceiling of Javier’s room. It is already dark. It is only a matter of hours before the guests arrive for dinner. Later we will go to the boat and watch the British fireworks display in the port. I am nearly paralysed with sadness. I watch her shadow, which has enlarged because she is holding Javier. They come to the window and look into the dark patio and the inkier blackness of the fig tree. I have tears in my eyes because I know that she is saying goodbye to Javier, that she will be my wife at this party and then no more. She is going and in going she will betray me. I shall go to my room now and put on my white dinner jacket.

5th January 1964, Tangier

I am ruined with fatigue but I have to bring myself to the page, my pristine confessional. This is what my journal has become. I vomit and the ghastly nausea of my existence subsides. On the evening of the party I was dressing. She went straight to the bathroom as if to hide. She waited for me to leave before putting on her evening dress. I went to check the children. She didn’t come down until the guests arrived. My eyes followed her as she mingled, occasionally our glances clashed and we’d switch away. Dinner was loud and boisterous, but I experienced it as a child under the table. After the meal we gathered in the hall while the women put on their coats and Javier suddenly appeared at the foot of the stairs. M. carried him back up to bed with his face buried in her neck. We left the house in a crowd, M. on Salgado’s arm. Champagne corks popped as we arrived at the yacht. The fireworks happened. The guests began to leave.

I said to Ramón that I wanted to take the boat out and asked him to put it to M. ‘She’d do anything for you,’ I said. ‘But she can easily talk me out of it.’ The three of us put out an hour later. It was flat and cold and a half-moon added to the chill. We drank champagne at the wheel with M. wrapped in a coat of Arctic fox. The stillness out there was terrible. Then the wind got up from nowhere and Ramón, who was drunk, went down below. I turned the boat back towards Tangier.

Finally M. said: ‘I’m leaving you … you know that now, don’t you?’ I asked her how she’d found the diaries. She’d persuaded Javier to tell her where I kept them. Her face was very close to mine as she spoke and she added: ‘Your secret is between us.’ If I thought about it, even for a moment, I would not be able to go through with it, so I rapped her with my knuckles on her solar plexus and she doubled up over my arm. I shoved her hard, firing her backwards to the rail, which hit her below the buttock. She vaulted over and, like a comic turn, her feet flipped into the darkness. The splash was inaudible. I didn’t look back. The sea grew before me and there was quite a storm blowing as we came into Tangier. As we entered the port I called to M. and Salgado to come up oh deck. Salgado appeared bleary-eyed. I told him to wake M. and he went back down. In seconds he was back saying she wasn’t in her cabin. We went mad searching the boat before facing the awful truth and calling the coast guard. We never found her. The following day I told Javier what had happened. He was heartbroken.

The voice continued, but at a distance because now Javier was back in that moment, heading for the room that used to be his father’s studio. He’s been called there to be told the terrible news, which has already reached him through the thick whitewashed walls earlier that morning. A damp gloom has filled the house and all he can hear is his own heart as he slips through the door into his father’s presence. His father calls him and he thinks that he will draw him into his chest and kiss his head, but instead he takes him by the arm, squeezing and twisting the bicep so that Javier comes up on his toes. His father’s huge face and head come down level to Javier’s own. He points his finger at Javier’s eye, as if it’s loaded.

‘You know why Mercedes isn’t coming back, don’t you, Javier?’

Javier was mute through this double pain of his pinched flesh and what I could see was the plummeting emptiness of what he feared most.

‘This is important,’ I said, pulling him to me so that his wincing face was right next to mine. ‘You must never tell anyone where I keep my journals. That is my secret. I want you to remember that … From now on, Javier, there are no journals.’

Back in the corridor outside his father’s study, he’s looking down at his arm. Tears well in his eyes and trickle cleanly and quickly down his smooth face. His mouth is thick with saliva and he knows that Mercedes is never coming back. Her smell is never coming to him again as his lies under the tight sheets. His small fingers will never trace those ears again. And it is his doing. He should never have told her. He breaks into a run, down the corridor, up the stairs, into his room, on to his bed, but still the black emptiness of his realization stays with him and the twisted pain of his burning arm.

‘Does that clarify things?’ said the voice, and Javier had the sense of rush as on a crowded street, until he popped back into reality still looking at his bicep, as if examining the bruising he’d sustained all those years ago.

‘He still loved me,’ said Javier, blurting it out through the saliva in his mouth. ‘He was just warning me, but he still loved me. We didn’t live all those years together …’

‘You still don’t want to believe it. I can understand that, Javier. It’s a difficult thing to give up … like life itself is difficult to give up … until it becomes completely intolerable. Until one’s actions become …’

‘Who are you?’ asked Javier. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘I am your eyes,’ said the voice. ‘Through me you will learn to see. How brave are you, Javier?’

He shook his head, not brave at all, still crushed by the weight of Mercedes’ death on his conscience and terrified at the new possibilities, the fresh horrors, the ones he knew but still didn’t.

‘You’re afraid, aren’t you, Javier? You’re afraid of what you will see.’

His face trembled under restraining flex.

‘What did you show the others … Raúl and Ramón?’ asked Javier, desperate to put off the moment. ‘What did you find to show them that was so terrible?’

‘You must know that by now,’ said the voice. ‘I didn’t show them anything terrible. No abandoned children or dead babies. No raped girls or strangled sodomized boys. You can see that sort of thing on the news, in the cinema, in magazines, on the Internet, on TV. We are inured to the brutality of the human condition. Nothing can horrify us now. Did you see those pictures Ramón Salgado had on his computer? Did you see what Raúl Jiménez watched while he screwed his puta? These were men well versed in horror. There was nothing more I could show them in that vein.’

‘Then what did you show them?’

‘I showed them the happiness that they had forsaken.’

‘The happiness?’

‘Arturo playing on the beach with Marta. She was tickling him, you know. She was tickling him until he couldn’t bear it. I added a soundtrack. Did Manuela ever do that to you? Tickle you nearly to death? Tickle you until it wasn’t tickling but torturing. Oh, the mind plays such tricks, Javier … after decades of denial.’

‘And Ramón? What did you show Ramón? His happy wife …’

‘I think Raúl must have given them that footage as a wedding present. The happy married couple, Ramón and Carmen. Did you listen to the tapes?’

Javier nodded.

‘There was another tape, which I took with me. Carmen sang in the end. Her voice wasn’t that good, but she sang for Ramón … an aria of love. Ramón clapped at the end and I could hear the emotion in his voice. I changed it a little. There was no clapping … just those last three desperate shouts — “Ramón! Ramón! Ramón!”’

Javier shuddered at the terrible exquisiteness of that torture. The men facing the double horror of the irrevocable surgery and the last moments of true happiness cruelly disfigured by the added soundtrack.

‘And me? What will you show me?’ asked Javier, his fear making him angry while he tried to remember when he’d last been happy. ‘What happiness have I forsaken?’

‘I am going to blindfold you for a moment,’ said the voice. ‘When I take away the sleeping mask, you will see.’

Elastic snapped at the back of his head and the soft darkness of a padded mask descended. It was beautiful in the velvet, quilted dark. He thought he should never come out from under it. Something was placed on the desk. His chair was manoeuvred forward. Adrenalin pounded in his system. The purity of his seething panic thinned and cooled his blood to ether. He was cold and shaking. Fingers eased off the mask and Falcón kept his eyes tight shut.

‘Open your eyes, Javier,’ said the voice. ‘You, better than anyone, know what happens if you don’t open your eyes. It really is nothing terrible.’

‘I will open them. Just give me some time.’

‘You see it every day of your life.’

‘Even you know that it’s not what’s on the table,’ said Javier. ‘It’s what’s in my head.’

‘Open your eyes.’

‘I will.’

‘Time is short.’

‘I will do it.’

‘I will make you. You know I will make you. You know how I do it.’

Javier felt his head gripped in the crook of an elbow and tilted back so that his neck was stretched tight, so tight he couldn’t scream. He felt its touch. It was like ice. The cold burn of the unfeeling blade. Warmth trickled down his cheek, thicker than sweat or tears. His eyes sprung open as his head tilted forward.

On the table was a single glass of white milk. He reared back from it but it was too late, the image stuck in his brain like a splinter of glass. He had no idea why he was so scared. There was no accompanying logic to the fear flashing in pulses from synapse to synapse, nerve to nerve, until his whole body convulsed in chair-rocking spasms.

The blindfold came down, shut out the ridiculous reality of a glass of milk. A hand sheaved his hair, a body reached forward past him.

‘Breathe in.’

He breathed in a smell of cloying, nauseating richness. Sulphur sprang into his saliva and a cold sweat broke out over his body. He vomited.

The smell was taken away, the glass replaced on the desk. The man settled down behind him.

‘I knew you would be brave,’ said the voice.

‘I don’t feel brave,’ said Javier, still gasping and coughing from the vomit.

‘What did you smell?’

‘Almonds and milk,’ he said. ‘How do you know I hate almonds and milk?’

‘Who used to drink almond milk before she went to sleep every night?’

‘I think it was my mother.’

‘You know it was your mother,’ said the voice. ‘Who brought her the almond milk for her to drink every night?’

‘The maid took it …’

‘No, she made it for her. Who took it to her?’

‘I didn’t,’ he said quickly, childlike. The instinctive lie. ‘I didn’t do it. It was Manuela.’

‘Do you know why your father hated you?’

Javier hung his head in misery. He shook it from side to side, denying it, denying everything that came to mind.

‘Why did your father make you love him?’

‘I don’t understand you any more.’

‘Quiet now, Javier. I’m going to read you a story, just like your father used to at bedtime. What will it be tonight? Yes, tonight it will be: “a small history of pain which will become yours.’”

3rd January 1961, Tangier

For six days I have sat in front of P. and watched her face turn to ash. Only the children bring any animation to her being. I ask her what is the matter and she says the same thing every time: ‘Nada, nada.’ I pass T.C.’s workshop. The walls are intact, the door has been burnt out and there is no roof. I hear from the café that T.C. used to frequent that there will be no police inquiry. It was a tragic accident. P. has started going to Mass regularly. I look out to sea with my binoculars. It is flat and grey as steel. The beach is empty. I watch the seagulls plummet.

12th January 1961, Tangier

It is Javier’s fifth birthday and we have a small party for him. P. is in high spirits throughout. I am amazed at her capacity. I am the star of the afternoon as the monster from the deep. Shoals of children flee from me, screaming. The odd one I capture and eat with relish — the giggling, thrashing mass of elastic child — until one little girl wets herself. End of the monster. The children go to bed early and P. and I have dinner alone in the customary silence. Even the servants walk as on broken glass. The meal is finished. The servants leave for the night. We are alone. I sip brandy and smoke. I make my usual observations about her demeanour of late and this time she hits the table with both fists. It’s like a rifle shot. Her eyes narrow and she leans across the table at me.

P.: I know it was you.

Me: What?

P.: I know that you are responsible.

Me: For what?

P.: For his death.

Me: Whose?

P.: You are as cold as those landscapes you used to paint. Those frozen wastes. You have no heart, Francisco Falcón. You are empty, you are cold and you are a killer.

Me: I have already admitted my past to you.

P.: Oh, may God forgive me, I should have listened harder. I should have listened to my father. I should never have let your icy hands near me. You are a brute. You are the perfect monster. It chilled me to my bones to see you with the children today, because that is you, that is what …

Me: What are you talking about, Pilar?

P.: I will say it to your face if you wish.

Me: I do wish it.

P.: You murdered Tariq Chefchaouni.

Me: Who?

Her contempt is almost too massive for the room.

P.: You know I’m not a fool. When you gave me that ring, when you gave me his bone sculpture … didn’t you think that I would know precisely what you were doing? It didn’t stop me though, Francisco. It would never have stopped me from enjoying the true passion of a man with more genius in a single hair than you have in your entire, vacated soul.

The words come down on me like cudgels, each one reaching some vital organ or crucial joint.

P.: So tell me, Francisco, why did you kill him? I can’t believe that it was because he was … fucking me. Or was it? Was it because he was pleasuring your wife while you played games with that rich whore, or sodomized young men with your cronies from the Bar La Mar Chica? Was that it? When did we last make love? Did we ever?

Me: You’re taking this too far, Pilar.

P.: I’m taking this too far for you, am I? This is the mother of your children speaking. She is telling you what you are. You are unfaithful. You are a sodomite. Deny it!

Me: You don’t speak to me like this.

P.: I do. I am telling you, Francisco. It’s all going to come out. Everything … right down to the fact that you were even off sodomizing young men on our wedding night with that revolting character … I can’t bear to say his name.

Me: Who told you that?

P.: I hear everything. It all comes back to me. I know it all, Francisco. I even know why you married me, you cold-hearted brute.

Me: Why did I marry you?

P.: Because you thought that I could tap your genius, that with me it would flow. But genius, Francisco, is God-given. You were offered it. You caught a glimpse of it. You took it. And what did you do with it? You sold it. And that’s why God never came back to you. He recognized you for the puta that you are.

Me: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

P.: No, no, no que no! This is the end, Francisco Falcón. You will hear it all. You were given sight. You were given a special sight. You were allowed to see into the nature of things and you treated it like coin. When I came back to you, oh, you were so pathetic. You were so grateful. Your muse had returned. And you asked to look again but, because of the man that you are, you couldn’t see inside. You saw only the surface. And anybody can paint surface. They whitewash the Medina every day.

Me: I won’t stand for this.

P.: Stay seated then. But admit it to yourself, even if you can’t to me, that the reason you murdered Tariq Chefchaouni and destroyed his work …

Me: Shut up, Pilar!

P.: … was that he, some poor Arab boy from the Rif, was succeeding where you had failed. He went quite mad with rage when he discovered that his father had sold his bone sculpture. He only relented when he knew that I had it. His work was not for sale. It was between him and his Creator. That was his principle. That was his morality. You do not sell your sight to the highest bidder.

I get to my feet on shaky legs. All my strength is pouring into some central rage. I am like a volcano preparing to erupt. I have to support myself on the table with both hands to contain myself. She leans across to me so that our faces are close and I can see the sharp, hard whiteness of her teeth. Her eyes are roaring at me, burning green flames.

Me: So what was his sculpture doing in a shop window?

P.: None of us are without vanity, only a few are totally consumed by it.

I hit her. I lash her with the back of my hand across her face. It is a terrible blow, which sends her flying across the room so that she collides with the wall and drops like a befuddled beetle. She crawls directionless to the corner and sits there, retrieving her senses. The bones in my hand crackle. I feel completely murderous and savage, but something holds me back. P. pushes herself up off the floor, bracing herself against the whitewash wall, which crumbles in flakes. She is blinking, shaking her head. She is determined.

P.: I have one thing more for that ravening beast in your head to feed on. You should know that you have murdered the father of my last child and you will never be forgiven.

She leaves the room. My enraged brain has trouble deciphering the complex words, whose every letter seems as sharp as an ‘X’, a string of them, that wrap themselves around my chest like barbed wire pulled tight. I have to sit. I am in a paroxysm of agony. My heart seems to have contracted, gone into cramp. Through the stupefying howl in my head I hear her heels retreating down the terracotta-tiled corridors. A door shuts. A lock clicks. I want to call her back to save me. But I am alone with something terrible going on inside me, which I am not sure my ribcage can contain. I screw my eyes into a prolonged wince of agony. I sob and on the back of it comes a stentorian belch which fills the room with the stink of rancid chorizo. The relief is immediate. Death wanders off. I leave the house and go to my studio to sleep. I wake in the morning with a clear head and write this as if it were an unsettling dream. I do not believe what she has said to me about Javier. Her spite was her only defence against my spontaneous violence.

13th January 1961, Tangier

I go back to the house in the afternoon. As soon as I open the front door I smell burning, or rather old smoke, a cold fire. There is a black patch on the patio and the wind has stirred up the black flakes of burnt paper, which swirl and drift like a plague of insects with no escape. I move amongst this world of moths, black flecks attach to my cool but sweaty face. I cannot think why a fire should have been started here until I see a scrap of paper, its edges scorched to a black frill. I turn it over and see the vestiges of a charcoal line. I go to the room which had been my studio. I stand in front of the chest whose bottom drawer is open. The seven remaining drawings of P. have gone.

I go wild and tear through the house to her bedroom, which is locked. I throw my shoulder into the door and it blasts open. It is empty. I take the bone sculpture and go straight back to my studio on the bay. I take up hammers and go to the roof. I smash it to pieces with a hammer in each hand. I collect up the shards and with mad, obsessive strength I grind them up in the pestle and mortar. I bag the bone dust and go to a cheap tourist shop and buy a simple clay urn. I pour the bone dust into it. I take it home and place it on the dressing table.

18th January 1961, Tangier

Nothing has been said. The black patch on the patio has gone. I don’t know where the urn is. It remained on her dressing table for a few days and then disappeared. We move around each other as if we ‘re at the heart of a collapsing empire, as if we are emperor and empress with designs on each other’s power in the midst of this final demise. We know what it will take. Suspicion lurks in the corridors. We are drawn to each other’s company, which is mutually abhorrent but we have to look on what the other is doing. She will only take drink and food prepared for her by her Riffian maid. I profess disinterest and take my meals in the restaurant at the Grand Hotel Villa de France. I watch her routine and wait. There was a story from Ancient Rome of a man and wife in exactly our situation. The wife noticed the husband eating figs from the tree. She painted them with poison and watched him die. We are not in the season for figs.

25th January 1961, Tangier

I sit in the studio. It has taken me all day to find this screw of paper that I have in front of me. I smoke and smooth out the paper. I finger the two glass capsules of cyanide given to me by the legionnaire I’d saved from gaol. I sniff them. Nothing. From the recess of my brain I remember that cyanide smells like almonds.

2nd February 1961, Tangier

P. has been going to bed earlier and the Riffian woman now calls one of the children to take her warm almond milk to her. Paco and Manuela always send Javier, who is delighted to perform the task. I watch from the patio. P. puts the milk on her bedside table and kisses Javier and hugs him before sending him off to bed. She drinks the milk and turns out the light.

I ask myself whether this is what I want. To be an uxoricide. Have I no morality? The question doesn’t seem relevant. The pressure is from a different quarter. The nights are longer and longer and my thoughts spend more time in the solitary dark. I lie at the centre of my studio, the mosquito net tied above my head, and an image comes to me of those first days in Russia. I see Pablito’s betrayer in my sights. Her panting breast is in the pinhole of the sights. I shift my aim, and on the command, shoot her in the mouth. Her jaw shatters. I have my answer.

5th February 1961, Tangier

I sit beneath the fig tree on the patio. I have both capsules with me. I roll them in my palm. I am not consumed by hate but moved by inevitability. We are at the crux. There is no way to change the outcome.

I hear the Riffian woman call out. Moments later Javier’s bare feet thud over the terracotta tiles. I hide in one of the rooms off the corridor to P.’s room. I hear the approach of Javier’s rustling pyjamas.

Again Sergio’s voice receded as the words tumbled down inexorably. Javier finds himself looking down at his bare feet on the terracotta tiles, the glass of almond milk chinhigh. He chews on his lip with concentration, trying not to spill a drop and is startled by his father suddenly appearing at shoulder height. His big face emerging from the dark with such suddenness that Javier nearly drops the glass which, thank God, his father takes from him.

‘It’s only me,’ he says, and opens his eyes wide and squeezes his fingers over the glass with the word, ‘Abracadabra.’

He gives him the glass back.

‘It’s all right now,’ he says and kisses his head. ‘Go on. Take it. Don’t drop it.’

Javier clasps the glass and his father pats him on the shoulder and his feet are on the move again across the terracotta tiles, the contour of each crater and join is imprinted on his bare soles. He reaches the door, puts the glass on the floor; it takes two hands to work the handle. He picks up the glass and goes in. His mother looks up from her book. He closes the door by backing into it until he hears the latch click. He places the glass on the bedside table and clambers up on to the bed and his mother squeezes him to her bosom and he is momentarily lost in the squashiness of her nightdress. He feels her hand, the ringless hand, holding his taut tummy and her breath and the touch of her lips on his head, the way it tickles him. She is warm and the cotton smells of her and she crushes his ribs into hers and gives him a final hard kiss on the forehead, which marks him with her love forever.

Javier froze in his chair as he came back into the dark reality of the sleeping mask. The flexes still cut into him, his eyelid still burnt at the edge, the velvet of the mask was soaked from his tears and the voice behind him rolled out the final words from his father’s journal:

Moments later Javier runs past on his way back up to his bedroom. I go to the window and look through the cracks of the shutters. P. holds the glass of milk. She blows on it and drinks the first centimetre. She puts it back on the table. By the time she turns back the cyanide has reached her system. I am shocked by its speed. It’s as fast as the blood itself. She convulses, reaches for her neck and falls back. The Riffian woman goes to the children’s bedroom and their light goes off. She goes to her own room soon after. I go to P. and remove the glass. I wash it thoroughly in the kitchen and fill it to the halfway point with a bottle of almond milk I prepared earlier in the studio. I replace the glass by P.’s bed and turn out the light. I go back to the studio to write this down. I must sleep now because tomorrow I have to be up early.

Sergio finished and there was silence in the house. Javier’s tears, which had soaked into the sleeping mask, mixing with the blood from his cut eyelid, now broke down his face. He was drained. There was some movement behind him. A rag closed over his nose and mouth and a hard chemical smell as ugly as ammonia batted his brain into another soundless galaxy.