The Blind Man of Seville (13 page)

He stopped it. There was an audible thump in his head. He went to bed with too much happening in his body. He slammed into a wall of sleep and had his first dream, that he could remember, for some considerable time. It
was simple. He was a fish. He thought he was a big fish, but he could not see himself. He
was
fish; aware only of the water rushing past him and a scintilla in his eye, which he closed on, which instinct told him he should close on. He was fast. So fast that he never saw what he instinctively pursued. He just took it in and moved on. Only … after a moment he felt a tug, felt the first rip of his insides, and he burst to the surface.

Awake, he looked around himself, astonished to find that he was in bed. He pressed his abdomen. Those mussels, had they been all right?

9

Friday, 13th April 2001, Javier Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

He was up early; the jitteriness in his stomach had gone. He spent an hour on the exercise bike, setting himself some arduous terrain on the computer. The concentration required to break through the pain barrier helped him map out his day. This was no holiday for him.

He took a taxi to the Estación de Santa Justa, and drank a
café solo
in the station café. The AVE, the high-speed train to Madrid, left at 9.30 a.m. He waited until 9.00 a.m. and called José Manuel Jiménez, who answered the phone as if poised for it to ring.

‘Diga.’

Falcón introduced himself again and asked for an appointment.

‘I’ve got nothing to tell you, Inspector Jefe. Nothing that would help. My father and I haven’t spoken for well over thirty years.’

‘Really?’

‘Very little has passed between us.’

‘I’d like to talk to you about that but not over the phone,’ he said, and Jiménez didn’t respond. ‘I can be with you by one o’clock and be finished before lunch.’

‘It’s really not convenient.’

Falcón found himself surprisingly desperate to talk to this man, but it had to be out of police time. He went in harder.

‘I’m conducting a murder investigation, Sr Jiménez. Murder is always inconvenient.’

‘I cannot shed any light on your case, Inspector Jefe.’

‘I have to know his background.’

‘Ask his wife.’

‘What does she know about his life before 1989?’

‘Why do you have to go back so far?’

This was ludicrous, this battle to speak to the man. It made him more determined.

‘I have a curious but successful way of working, Sr Jiménez,’ he said, just to keep him on the phone. ‘What about your sister … do you ever see her?’

The ether hissed for an eternity.

‘Call me back in ten minutes,’ he said, and hung up.

Falcón paced the station concourse thinking of a new strategy for ten minutes’ time. When he called him back he had a chain of questions lined up like a cartridge belt.

‘I’ll expect you at one o’clock,’ said Jiménez, and hung up.

He bought a ticket and boarded the train. By midday the AVE had delivered him to the Estación de Atocha in central Madrid. He took the metro to Esperanza, which seemed auspicious, and it was a short walk to the Jiménez apartment from there.

José Manuel Jiménez let him into the hall. He was shorter than Falcón but more powerfully built. He held his head as if ducking under a beam or carrying a load on his shoulders. As he spoke his eyes darted about under cover of some heavy, dark eyebrows, which his wife was not keeping under control. The effect, rather than being
furtive, was deferential. He took Falcón’s coat and led him down a parquet-floored corridor, away from the kitchen and voices of family, to his study. He walked leaning forwards, as if dragging a sled.

The study had several overlaid Moroccan rugs that covered the parquet floor up to an English-style walnut desk. Lining the walls to the window were the bound books of a lawyer’s workplace. Coffee was offered and accepted. In the minutes he was left alone, Falcón inspected the family photographs sitting on top of a glass-fronted cupboard. He recognized Gumersinda with her two young children. There were none of Raúl. There were none of the daughter beyond twelve years old. The other photographs were of José Manuel Jiménez’s family through the ages culminating in two graduation photographs of a boy and a girl.

Jiménez came back with the coffee. They manoeuvred around each other as Falcón found his way back to his seat and Jiménez got behind his desk. He clasped his hands; his biceps and shoulders swelled under his green tweed jacket.

‘Amongst some old shots of your father’s I came across one of my own father,’ said Falcón, going for the tangential approach.

‘My father was a restaurateur, I’m sure he had lots of photographs of his customers.’

So he knew that much about his father.

‘This was not amongst the celebrity photographs …’

‘Is your father a celebrity?’

It was a chink he had not wanted opened, but maybe, as Consuelo Jiménez had shown, revealing something of oneself could lead to surprising revelations from others.

‘My father was the painter Francisco Falcón, but that was not why —’

‘Then I’m not surprised he wasn’t on my father’s wall,’ Jiménez cut in. ‘My father had the cultural awareness of a peasant, which was what he was.’

‘I noticed he smoked Celtas with the filters broken off.’

‘He used to smoke Celtas
cortas,
which were unfiltered but better than the dry dung he told us he had to smoke after the Civil War.’

‘Where was he a peasant?’

‘His parents had land near Almería, which they worked. They were killed in the Civil War and lost it all. After their deaths my father drifted. That’s all I know. It’s probably why money was always important to him.’

‘Didn’t your mother …?’

‘I doubt she knew. If she did, she didn’t tell us. I really don’t think she knew anything about his life before she met him and my father wasn’t going tell her parents until he’d got her.’

‘They met in Tangier?’

‘Yes, her family moved there in the early forties. Her father was a lawyer. He was there, like everybody else, to make money after the Civil War had left Spain in ruins. She was just a girl, eight years old maybe. My father appeared on the scene a bit later … some time in 1945, I think. He fell for her the moment he first saw her.’

‘She was still young wasn’t she? Thirteen years old?’

‘And my father was twenty-two. It was a curious relationship, which her parents were not happy about. They made her wait until she was seventeen before they let her get married.’

‘Was it just the age difference?’

‘She was their only child,’ said Jiménez. ‘And I doubt they were impressed by his lack of family background. They must have seen what base metal he was. He was flashy, too.’

‘He was rich by then?’

‘He made a lot of money over there and he enjoyed spending it.’

‘How did he make his money?’

‘Smuggling, probably. Whatever it was, I’m sure it wasn’t legal. Later he got into currency dealing. He even had his own bank at one stage — not that it meant anything. He got into property and construction, too.’

‘How do you know all this?’ asked Falcón. ‘You were barely ten by the time you left and I doubt he told you very much.’

‘I pieced it all together, Inspector Jefe. That’s the way my mind works. It was my way of making sense of what happened.’

Silence came into the room like news of a death. Falcón was willing him to continue, but Jiménez had his lips drawn tight over his teeth, steeling himself.

‘You were born in 1950,’ said Falcón, nudging him on.

‘Nine months to the day after they were married.’

‘And your sister?’

‘Two years later. There were some complications in her birth. I know they nearly lost her and it left my mother very weak. They wanted to have lots of children, but my mother wasn’t capable after that. It affected my sister, too.’

‘How?’

‘She was a very sweet-natured girl. She was always caring for things … animals, especially stray cats, of which there were plenty in Tangier. There wasn’t anything you could … she was just … ‘ he faltered, his hands kneaded the air, forcing the words out. ‘She was just simple, that’s all. Not stupid … just uncomplicated. Not like other children.’

‘Did your mother ever recover her strength?’

‘Yes, yes, she did, she recovered her strength completely,
She …’ Jiménez trailed off, stared up at the ceiling. ‘She even became pregnant again. It was a very difficult time. My father had to leave Tangier, but my mother could not be moved.’

‘When was this?’

‘The end of 1958. He took my sister and I stayed.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘He rented a house in a village up in the hills above Algeciras.’

‘Was he on the run?’

‘Not from the authorities.’

‘A bad business deal?’

‘I never found that out,’ he said.

‘And your mother?’

‘She had the baby. A boy. My father mysteriously appeared on the night of the birth. He’d come over secretly. He was worried that something would go wrong, like the last time, and she wouldn’t survive the birth. He was …’

Jiménez frowned, as if he’d come up against something beyond his comprehension. He blinked against the interfering tears.

‘This is very difficult ground, Inspector Jefe,’ he said. ‘I thought that when my father died I would be pleased. It would be a relief and a release from … It would signify the end of all these unfinished thoughts.’

‘Unfinished thoughts, Sr Jiménez?’

‘Thoughts that have no ending. Thoughts that are interminable because they have no resolution. Thoughts that leave you forever hanging in the balance.’

Although these words were recognizable as language, their meaning was obscure and yet Falcón, without knowing why, understood something of the man’s torment. Hints prodded his own mind — his father’s death, the things left unsaid, the studio uninvestigated.

‘It may just be our natural state,’ said Falcón. ‘That in coming from complicated beings who are unknowable, we will always be the carriers of the unresolved and further compound it with our own irresolvable questions, which we in turn hand on. Perhaps it is better to be uncomplicated like your sister. To be uncluttered by the baggage of previous generations.’

Jiménez drilled him with animal eyes from under the brush of his brow. He fed on the words from Falcón’s mouth. He pulled himself up, cleared the intensity from his face.

‘The only problem there …’ he said, ‘… in my sister’s case, is that her lack of complexity gave her no system, no potential for reordering the chaos after the cataclysm hit our family. She lost her tenuous link with a structured existence and thereafter floated in space. Yes, I think that’s what her madness is like … an astronaut disconnected from his ship, spinning in a massive void.’

‘I think you’ve run ahead of me.’

‘I have,’ he said, ‘and I know why.’

‘Perhaps we should go back to your father fearing that your mother might not survive the birth.’

‘What I was thinking then, what I was confronting was the surprising memory, in view of later events, that my father was profoundly in love with my mother. It is something that even now I have a great difficulty in admitting. As a boy, when my mother died, I could never believe that of him. I thought he had set about breaking her.’

‘And how did you come to that conclusion?’

‘Psychoanalysis, Inspector Jefe,’ he said. ‘I never thought I would be a candidate for that quackery. I’m a lawyer. I have an organized mind. But when you’re desperate, and I mean full of despair, so that all you see is your own life collapsing around you, then you admit
it to yourself. You say: “I’m nuts and I’m going to have to talk it out.”’

Jiménez levelled this explanation directly at Falcón, as if he’d seen something in him that needed attention.

‘So what happened to your mother and the baby?’ asked Falcón.

‘My mother needed some days to recover. I remember that time very well. We weren’t allowed out of the house. Servants were told to say nobody was at home. Food came in secretly from neighbours’ houses. Some armed men, who normally guarded the construction sites, were installed across the street. My father paced the floor like a caged panther, stopping only to look through a crack in the shutter if he heard something in the street. The tension and the boredom were there in equal measure. It was the start of the family madness.’

‘And you never found out what it was your father was afraid of?’

‘At the time I was a kid, I didn’t care. I just wanted to avoid being bored. Later … much later, I thought it was important to find out what it could have been that had driven my father to such lengths. So, thirty years after the event, I thought the only person to ask would be him. It was the last time we spoke on a personal level. And this is the magic of the human brain.’

‘What?’ asked Falcón, jumping in his seat, as if he’d missed the vital moment.

‘If we have something in there that we don’t like we bypass it. Like a river that’s tired of flowing around the same loop again and again, it just cuts through and joins up with the stretch of river beyond the loop. The loop becomes a small disconnected lake, a reservoir of memory which due to lack of supply eventually dries up.’

‘He forgot about it?’

‘He denied it. As far as he was concerned it had never happened. He looked at me as if I might be insane.’

‘Even with your mother dead and your sister in San Juan de Dios?’

‘It was 1995 by then. He was married to Consuelo. He was in a different life. The past could have been as distant to him as … a previous existence.’

‘Were you surprised by Consuelo?’

‘Her appearance?’ he said. ‘My God, I was stunned. It made my flesh creep. I burnt the photograph he sent of their wedding.’

‘So you got no help from your father?’

‘Only that what I thought I needed to know was unimportant. There was nothing in my father’s world, as far as I could see, that he could have possibly placed more value on than the life of a child. The admission was in his silence, in his flat denial, in the whole expression of his life … this marriage to his wife’s lookalike …’