The Blind Man of Seville

34

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

It was a respite. His chloroformed brain toppled through space silently. The return to reality was fragmentary — bits of audio and then shards of visual. His head came up, the room tilted. Slices of light penetrated his eye and suddenly he was jerked awake by his own fear that something terrible might have been done to him.

He could see and his eyelids still opened and closed. Relief spread through him. He coughed. The flex was no longer around his face and his feet were free from the legs of the chair, but his wrists were still attached. He orientated himself in the room. He was facing away from the desk now. He leaned forward, trying to swallow back the turmoil rising in his chest and up his throat. He sobbed, straining against the memories, the shattered certainties. Was there any possible recovery from this?

A noise. Castors on tiles. The rush of something passing too closely. A thump of air. A man — Sergio, or was it Julio now? — shot past him and sailed to the far wall on his castored desk chair.

‘Awake?’ he asked, and nudged himself away from the wall so that he drifted nauseatingly to a point in front of Javier.

Julio Menéndez Chefchaouni sat back in the chair, relaxed. Javier’s first impression was one of beauty. His looks were almost girlish, like a star from a boy band, with long dark hair, soft brown eyes, long lashes, high cheekbones and a clear, smooth complexion. It was the sort of face a camera would love, but only for a moment.

‘Here it is, Inspector Jefe,’ he said, framing his jaw with his hands. ‘The face of pure evil.’

‘Still not finished?’ said Falcón. ‘What more can there be, Julio?’

‘I think the project needs … not an ending exactly, because I don’t believe in endings — or beginnings or middles for that matter — but it needs to make its purpose known.’

‘The project?’

‘As I think your father noted: “Nobody paints any more,”’ said Julio. ‘Daubing canvases is not so far from what cavemen used to do. You know, Ceci n ‘est pas une pipe and all that. Art is all about progress, isn’t it? We can’t stand still. We constantly have to show people new things, or show them that old things can be seen anew. Carl André’s Equivalent VIII, Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks and cows. Those plastinated real dead bodies from Gunther von Hagens’ show Body Worlds. And now Julio Menéndez.’

‘And what’s your project called?’

‘Even that is new. The title is constantly evolving. It is three words in English which can be placed in any order, using any preposition in between. The words are: Art. Real. Killing. So it could be the Real Art of Killing or perhaps Killing Real Art.’

‘Or the Art of Real Killing,’ said Falcón.

‘I knew you’d understand it straight away.’

‘Where is this project going to be shown?’

‘Oh, that is not really in my hands,’ said Julio. ‘It will be all over the media, of course, but, well, you’ve heard of people who’ve devoted their lives to things such as literature. This is an extension of that. I think it will probably insist on being posthumous.’

‘Start at the beginning,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m conventional like that.’

‘As you now know, Tariq Chefchaouni was my grandfather, my mother was his only daughter, who married a Spaniard from Ceuta. His art gene missed a generation but it got me. After my first year here, at the Bellas Artes, my mother and I went to visit the family in Tangier. I asked to see some of my grandfather’s work and was told that everything had been destroyed in the fire which killed him, apart from a few effects and some books. It was a couple of years later that the family called to tell me that, in doing some building work, they’d found a small pewter box under the floor in his room.

‘I was here in Seville, studying art, and I knew a great deal about the Falcón nudes because I’d done a project on them in my second and third years. In fact, I was obsessed by them even before I came to Seville and, when I found out that your father was still living here, I even met him on a couple of occasions to iron out some technical things I didn’t understand. Of course, he only knew me as Julio Menéndez. He was very … gracious. We liked each other. He said I could call him if there was anything else I needed to know. So when I went back to Tangier and opened this pewter box I was completely fascinated to find that my grandfather seemed to have had the same obsession, except … how could he? He was already dead by the time the Falcón nudes came into existence.’

Julio opened the box and took out four postcard-sized pieces of canvas. He held each one up to Falcón. They were perfect reproductions of the Falcón nudes.

‘You can’t really see them without a magnifying glass and good light, but I can assure you they are perfect … each brushstroke is a perfect miniature of its original.

‘Now look on the back.’

He held up the reverse side of the miniatures and each piece was inscribed to Pilar, followed by the dates May 1955, June 1956, January 1958 and August 1959.

‘There was one other thing in the box, which is no longer in my possession.’

‘The silver ring with the sapphire,’ said Falcón. ‘My mother’s ring.’

‘My first reaction when I saw the miniatures was that I would show them to your father, that he must have lost them and they had strangely come into my grandfather’s possession. But then I remembered that the Falcón nudes were all painted in the space of a year, which didn’t fit with the dates inscribed on the backs. I was confused.’

‘When was this?’

‘The end of 1998, beginning of 1999.’

‘And when did you think that there was something more sinister to this?’

‘While I was in Tangier your father had a heart attack and there was a piece in the paper accompanied by an old photograph of him in the sixties. One of the older family members said that this was the man who’d come round to the house after my grandfather died and bought up his few remaining drawings.

‘I went back to Seville and I heard at the Bellas Artes that he was still taking on students for a few weeks at a time. I called him. He remembered me and I volunteered to be his companion. He was frail after the heart attack and I had the run of his studio. The storeroom he kept locked, but I soon opened it. And there I found all the confirmation I needed, through the stunning mediocrity of his attempts to reproduce my grandfather’s work, and then again in the journals. I read them all and when I finished I stole the crucial diary and walked out. I never went back. I never spoke to him again. I was mad with rage. I was going to publish the journal, to show the world the real Francisco Falcón … but then he died.’

‘Why didn’t you publish it anyway?’

‘I could see the whole thing being taken away from me,’ said Julio. ‘I wanted to have control.’

‘But then something must have happened.’

‘Why?’

‘For it to have become your project.’

‘Nothing happened,’ said Julio. ‘That’s the nature of the creative process. One day I decided it would be interesting to know everything about Raúl Jiménez and Ramón Salgado. The men as they are today. So, I started filming La Familia Jiménez and it grew from there.’

‘And what about Marta?’

‘It’s amazing how once you start working on something these things find you, rather than you finding them. I knew, from the journals, that she was in Ciempozuelos. I was very interested to see her, to find out about her, but I had no way of doing that without drawing attention to myself. At the time I was doing some freelance computer effects work for a film company up in Madrid and one of the directors asked if any of us would be interested in helping some mental patients in Ciempozuelos with some art therapy. I volunteered, but Marta was not one of the patients involved in the course. I still had to find her.’

‘And that’s why you became Ahmed’s friend?’

‘Once I saw that metal trunk under her bed I knew I had to get inside it and Ahmed was my only chance. I have a talent for friendship, especially with people like Ahmed — you know, forasteros … like me.’

‘Like Eloisa.’

‘Yes,’ said Julio smoothly. ‘Ahmed showed me Marta’s file and once I read the letter from José Manuel Jiménez’s psychoanalyst, I knew I had a project.’

‘And where did you get the idea of killing people?’

‘From you, when I found out that you were the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios de Sevilla,’ said Julio. ‘To have the son of the great Francisco Falcón investigating the crimes of his father seemed too perfect an opportunity to miss. It made sense of the whole idea.’

‘That was not a rational decision.’

‘Artists don’t have rational minds. How am I supposed to disturb the minds of others if my own is a flat calm?’

‘Killing is not art.’

‘You missed out the word “real”,’ said Julio, on his feet, the pupils in his eyes suddenly massive and shiny black, but not seeing out, only sucking in. ‘You should have said Real Killing is not Art or … or … Killing is not Real Art.’

‘Sit down, Julio. Just sit down for a moment … we haven’t finished,’ said Javier.

‘You know, the problem is,’ said Julio, ‘is … is … that I see things too clearly now. I can’t seem to lower my visual scale. Once you kill somebody everything becomes intensely real, and it’s unbearable. Did you know that, my uncle, did you know that?’

‘That’s right, I am your uncle,’ said Javier, trying to keep Julio under control. ‘And I do know that.’

‘That’s why I didn’t kill you. I only tried to do you good. To save you from your blindness.’

‘Yes, I can see now and I’m grateful,’ said Javier. ‘There’s just one more thing I need to know from you.’

‘It’s all been said and done and written and filmed … there’s only one thing left now,’ he said.

He went behind Falcón and pivoted the chair around so that it was facing the opposite wall. On the desk was the glass of almond milk, the leather-bound journal and his police revolver. Julio took a knife and cut through the flex securing Falcón’s right hand.

‘I have to go now,’ he said, throwing the knife on to the desk. ‘You know what you have to do. You shouldn’t have to face any more of this than you’ve had to.’

Their eyes met and turned to the revolver sitting on top of the journal, next to the glass of milk — the reminder of all that he had done and all that he had lost.

‘There’s your solution,’ said Julio. ‘The only way to close everything down and leave it behind for ever.’

Sweat came up on Falcón’s hands, trickled from the hairline. How could he still have so much juice in him? He picked up the revolver, flicked open the barrel and saw all the chambers were full. He thumbed the safety off. He looked down at the gun in his trembling hand and brought it slowly up to his face. Suicide had its attractions for him at that moment. It was the simplest solution in the face of this sudden nothingness. His past gone and the future frail and uncertain. His father’s love … never there. Only hate, which he, Javier, had fuelled … just by living. And, yes, who was he now? Was he still even Javier Falcón? The threads that held him together were guilt and grief; tug at them and he would fall apart. And now it could all be over. With one small pull of the trigger he could blow away the reservoir of all his pain.

A wall in his memory suddenly gave way and, rather than more suffering flooding through to his tangled mind, he remembered that kiss, the one from his mother, that had marked him with her love forever. And, under the remembered pressure of her lips, he found out who he was, recalled the boy he had been for her. It undid something, unravelled part of the vast knot, and he was suddenly able to see clear lines of thought that were not uncomplicated but at least thinkable.

He was relieved of one pressure. He did not belong to the man he’d known as his father and yet … there had always been something. They were inextricably joined, but … by what? Had it been as simplistic as Julio had said? That Javier walked the earth as a constant reminder to his father of all his failings? Was he the emblem of hate? Or was his father’s final act as ambiguous as we all are. Our constant needs make us weak. Adversity leads us down some treacherous paths to worthlessness and despicable acts, but there is always that draw to the power of the original connection. Raúl to Arturo. Ramón to Carmen. Francisco Falcón to Javier.

His father, in forcing the journals on him, could as easily have been saying: ‘Now you know the kind of man I was, feel free to hate me and absolve yourself.’

Javier turned. Julio was still standing in the doorway, waiting. Shaking, Javier stretched his arm out and pointed the gun at Julio’s face whose facile beauty had disappeared, leaving his features dislocated by his insanity.

‘Come to me,’ said Javier, not unkindly and Julio complied.

He walked right up to him until the gun barrel touched him between the eyes.

‘I’m not going to shoot you,’ said Falcón, whose other wrist was still tied to the chair.

It happened quickly. Before Falcón could even think of words that might penetrate the deranged mind before him, the boy’s hands flew up into his face. One gripped Falcón’s wrist and the other pressed his trigger finger and the colossal noise of the gun shot filled the room and the patio and echoed through the empty house.

Julio cannoned backwards and crashed through the glass doors on to the patio. His blood spread across the marble flagstones towards the stone circle of the fountain.

By 11.00 p.m. the levantamiento del cadáver had been completed and the Juez de Guardia, who was not Esteban Calderón, had left. Ramírez finished taking Falcón’s preliminary statement with Comisario Lobo in attendance while all the relevant evidence was removed.

By 11.30 p.m. Lobo was driving him to the hospital to have a stitch put in his eyelid. Lobo recounted how he’d secured Comisario León’s resignation. Javier didn’t respond.

‘You know,’ said Lobo, as they drew into the hospital, ‘there’s going to be heavy media interest in this case, especially … due to your father’s unusual involvement.’

‘That was Julio’s intention,’ said Javier. ‘He wanted the maximum and most shocking exposure possible … as any artist would. It’s out of my hands now. I’ll just …’

‘Well, I hope … I think I can help you control that.’

Javier raised an eyebrow.

‘We should confine the story to a single journalist,’ said Lobo. ‘That way you can put your version of events forward, rather than having it torn from your hands and transformed into some lurid fantasy.’

‘I have no fear of that, Comisario, only because I don’t think any editor could think of anything more lurid than my father being a brute, a pirate, a thief, an impostor, a double uxoricide and a fraud.’

‘At least, this way, the first airing of the story will be as close to the truth as possible. I think it’s always best that the first impression is the …’

‘Perhaps you’ve already reached an agreement with a journalist, Comisario,’ said Javier.

Silence. Lobo offered to go in to the emergency room with him. Javier turned him down.

He went into the hospital and sat under the bright neon of his new life while they put two silk stitches in his eyelid. His mind recoiled from the harsh operative light and he shut his eyes while his thoughts writhed. How would Manuela and Paco react to the media onslaught? What would he say to them? Your father … but not mine, was a monster? Manuela would throw it off or it would just bounce off her. She wouldn’t let it in. But Paco … His father had ‘saved’ him after his goring, given him the finca, set him up in a new life. There would be no easy rejection from Paco. And Javier was relieved to find that the connection was still there, that this would not change anything for him.

‘Am I hurting you?’ asked the doctor.

‘No,’ said Javier.

‘Nurse,’ said the doctor, ‘swab these tears.’

He was out by midnight, still in his bloody shirt. He took a taxi home. He stood in the middle of the patio looking at the bronze statue leaping out of the fountain. Always on the move, that boy. He went upstairs to the studio; the black pupil of the fountain followed him round the gallery. He went into the storeroom and removed all his father’s attempts at copying Chefchaouni’s work and the five canvases that made up the obscene painting of his mother. He threw them down into the patio. He followed them with the box of money and the pornography. He took a five-litre flagon of alcohol down and drew everything into a pile next to the fountain. He poured the alcohol on top and threw a match on it. The flames thumped into life and jaundiced light flickered in the silent patio.

He went into the study where the pewter box was still on the desk. He lifted out the priceless miniatures and laid them out one by one. His father’s work. His real father’s work. And for a moment he was up in the air again, looking down into the face he’d never remembered and seeing him for the first time.

He showered and put on a new shirt. He had no desire for bed or to stay in the house. He had a sudden need to be with people, even strangers … especially strangers. He walked out into the night and was drawn to the lights along the black leathery river and then across it into the Plaza de Cuba, where the crowds drew him on up Calle Asunción towards the Feria ground.

He ended up in front of the Edificio Presidente where it had all begun, a lifetime ago, and Consuelo Jiménez came to mind with her daring eyes. He admired her strength. She had never wavered despite the continuous onslaught. Calderón was right, she’d held them all together. He remembered her dinner proposal and the click of her kitten heels on the marble flagstones. He shook his head. Too early for that.

He turned and entered the Feria de Abril through the massive, garishly lit portals of the main gate and walked into a surreal world, where everybody was beautiful and happy. Where the girls flounced in their figure-hugging trajes de flamenca with flowers and tortoiseshell combs in their hair while their men struck poses in grey bolero jackets and flat-brimmed hats. He walked, looking about him with childlike fascination under the lanterns and the bunting, past the endless marquees where everybody was eating, drinking fino and dancing. The air was full of the incense of enjoyment — music, food and tobacco. Under the silken tented ceilings women plaited the air above their heads with sinuous arms, the men upright, chins raised, shoulders braced torero-style.

He walked amongst the people, all of them smiling and laughing, as if drugged. How could there be so many and so happy? In this small galaxy he seemed to be the only human present with a direct line to misery, the only one with memories and guilt, hopelessness and fear. He wondered if he would ever be able to plug himself back into a whole life from the half-life in which he’d been living.

A burst of handclapping snapped him back into the fantasy world of the Feria. The rhythm of the Sevillanas being sung and danced all around him insinuated, and as he passed one of the smaller casetas he heard his name shouted.

‘Javier! Heh! Javier!’

A small, dumpy woman in a white traje de flamenca with big red polka dots appeared to know him. She danced a few steps, her feet suddenly dainty and her hands turning and twisting, beckoning the air, as if encouraging him.

‘You don’t recognize me. I’m Encarnación. Welcome, stranger,’ she said. ‘Will a stranger dance a Sevillana with me on the first night of the Feria de Abril?’

His housekeeper, the perfect stranger, one who represented all that was uncomplicated in the world, had finally taken bodily form. He followed her into the caseta. She insisted that they start with a dance and a glass of fino. She took two sips of her pale Tio Pepe while Javier knocked his back in one. He slammed his glass down, raised his head, clicked his heels together and they started their first Sevillana.

Encarnación was instantly transformed. The sixty-five-year-old woman became elegant and smouldering, coquettish and daring. They danced four or five Sevillanas, one after the other. He ordered more fino. They ate a plate of paella and some calamares and he remembered how good food tasted. They danced again. His anguish subsided, his misery drifted off. He forgot everything and concentrated on one thing — the mood of his Sevillana — and he threw himself into the dance, each sequence drawing him closer to the perfect expression. And he realized that he’d found it again — the Sevillano solution to misery — la fiesta — and he danced his problems out of his head, down his body to his feet and stamped them into the ground.