The Blind Man of Seville (26 page)

‘I told you.’

‘You told us about “Are we close?” and “Closer than you think”, said Ramírez, ‘but “a story to tell” — no, you didn’t mention that.’

Falcón was amazed and embarrassed. It worried him that his memory was so shot through with holes. The brandy. He told them what had happened out on the bridge.

‘It’s a distraction,’ said Ramírez.

‘Insane,’ said Pérez.

‘It’s obscure on its own, but taken in conjunction with the man appearing at the funeral with his camera it could mean that he’s going to act again,’ said Falcón. ‘We have to keep an open mind. We can’t close down any possibilities to concentrate solely on Consuelo Jiménez.’

Ramírez started some agitated pacing around the room. Falcón dismissed the two men but called Pérez back.

‘I want you to do a couple of things with these lists,’ said Falcón. ‘Take the first two you gave me and find out which of those companies still exist. Then find all the names of the directors, executive and non-executive, in all these companies between 1990 and 1992. That’s all, then we drop it.’

16

Monday, 16th April 2001, Jefatura, Calle Blas Infante, Seville

Falcón couldn’t stand to be alone, which for a private man was a bizarre revelation. As soon as Pérez left the office he became anxious, frightened that something would happen in his head. He couldn’t rely on himself. He felt like an old person who’d noticed the first signs of dementia — moments of confusion, memory lapses, the inability to recognize simple things — and sensed the imminent free fall to total dislocation from life. Other people gave him context, reminded him of his old confidence. He couldn’t concentrate on the report from the Policía Científica. Panic rose in his chest and he had to walk it back down.

He became so desperate at the thought of his loneliness after work, the survival of a whole night before his doctor’s appointment, that he called the British Institute and reintroduced himself into the conversational English classes he had enrolled in the year before and failed to attend. This was how he found himself sitting in the middle of a class in a state of appalled fascination as the Scottish teacher told the students about some recent laser treatment on her eyes. Lasers in the eye? He couldn’t even think about it.

After class he went out for a drink and tapas with some of the other students. He found strangers comforting. They didn’t know him. They couldn’t judge his own strangeness. He would have to avoid his sister, her friends. This was his new life and that was how he thought of it already after only a few days.

He got home at 1 a.m., exhausted. It was a tiredness he’d never encountered before. A deep structural fatigue, like an ancient bridge that had shouldered epochs of traffic and strained against relentless tons of water. His legs quivered, his joints creaked and yet inside his head, whoever it was inside his head, was as alert as a night animal. He hauled himself up to the bedroom like a butcher’s boy with a carcass on his back.

The sheets were as cool as lotion as he crawled naked into bed for the first time since he was a boy. His eyelids rolled shut, heavy as boulders.

And still sleep did not come.

Ghastly images surfaced. Horror faces that were inconceivable except, there they were, in his mind. Every time his brain keeled over into the dark, they came and jolted him back. He writhed in the sheets, turned the light on, jammed his fists into his eyes. He wouldn’t have minded tearing them out if he could have guaranteed to blind the mind’s eye, too. The mind’s eye. He hated that expression. His father had hated it. That’s why
he
hated it. Pretentious and inaccurate. Tears came.
Madre mía,
what is this? Huge racking sobs lifted his shoulders off the bed.

He threw off the covers, staggered out of the room blinded by tears. He tried to pull himself together in the gallery, march it off. He held on to the balustrade and looked into the patio, saw the black pupil in the centre of the fountain staring up and thought he’d just hop over the ledge, dive on to the marble flagstones below, dash
his brains out in a last cacophonous roar and then silence. Peace at last.

The idea was too compelling. He pushed himself away from it, stumbled down the stairs and into the study. He opened the drinks cabinet, which was full of whisky, his father’s preferred drink. He pulled the cork out of the first bottle that came to hand and drank heavily from the neck. It smelt and tasted like wet charcoal but had the burn of a glowing ember.

A full-length mirror gave him a terrible update on his appearance — naked, quivering, genitals shrivelled, tear-stained face, both hands locked round the bottle as if it was going to get him ashore. Because that’s where he felt himself to be, out in some mountainous sea with no hope of landfall. He drank more of the liquid asphalt and sank to his knees. He was still crying, if that was what it could be called, this huge retching of the body, as if it was trying to sick up something bigger than itself. He drank again from the bottle of molten tar until it was all gone. He fell back, the bottle toppled and rolled. The label flashed away from him. He belched an essence of bitumen and slithered into a glittering darkness as if he was being laid down in a new black road.

He came to steamrollered, all joints dislocated, bones crushed, face distorted. He was lying in a pool of his own urine, shivering with the cold. It was first light outside. His legs stung. He swabbed the floor and went upstairs and collapsed in the shower, grovelling in the tray. He was still drunk and his teeth seemed as large as cobblestones.

Still dripping, he made it to bed and scratched the covers over himself. He slept and dreamt the fish dream. It was nearly beautiful to be flashing through the blue-green water, but the freedom of perfect instinct was disturbed by the terrible wrench, the visceral tug that was pulling him inside out.

Tuesday, 17th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

The savage light stepped into his head. Steel tips flashed and sparked in his dark cranium. His organs were as delicate as bone china. He gasped at the ecstatic pain of the drunk.

An hour and half later, scrubbed, shaved, dressed and combed through, he lowered himself into a chair in front of his doctor, hesitant as a man with elephant haemorrhoids that ran from nose to tail.

‘Javier …’ said the doctor, instantly running out of words.

‘I know Dr Fernando, I know,’ said Falcón.

Dr Fernando Valera was the son of his father’s doctor and was ten years older than Falcón although the last week seemed to have evened up their ages. The two men knew each other well, both were
aficionados a los toros.

‘I saw you across a crowd of people at the Estación de Santa Justa on Friday,’ said Dr Fernando. ‘You looked quite normal then. What’s been going on?’

The softness of the doctor’s voice made Falcón emotional and he had to fight back the silly tears at the thought that he’d finally arrived in a haven where somebody cared. He gave the doctor a rundown of his physical symptoms — the anxiety, the panic, the pounding heart, the sleeplessness. The doctor probed with questions about his work. The Raúl Jiménez case was mentioned, which the doctor had read about. Falcón admitted it was at the sight of the man’s face that he’d noticed the chemical change.

‘I can’t tell you the details, but it had something to do with the man’s eyes.’

‘Ah, yes, you’re very sensitive about eyes … as your father was.’

‘Was he? I don’t remember that.’

‘I suppose it’s quite natural for an artist to worry about his eyes, but in the last ten years of his life your father became obsessed — yes, that’s the word: obsessed with blindness.’

‘The idea of it?’

‘No, no, becoming blind. He was certain it would happen to him.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘My father tried to tease him out of it, told him if he wasn’t careful he’d go hysterically blind. Francisco was appalled at the idea,’ said Dr Fernando. ‘Anyway … Javier … we are here to talk about you. To me you are suffering the classic symptoms of stress.’

I’ don’t get stress. I’ve been at this job for twenty years and I never suffered from stress.’

‘You’re forty-five.’

‘I
do
remember that.’

‘This is when the body begins to realize its weaknesses. Body and mind. The pressures in the mind create symptoms in the body. I see it all the time.’

‘Even in Seville?’

‘Maybe more so in
la maravillosa Sevilla.
It’s quite a pressure to be happy all the time because … it’s expected of you. We’re not immune to modern life just because we live in the most beautiful city in Spain. We tell ourselves we should be happy … we have no excuse. We are surrounded by people who appear to be happy, people who clap their hands and dance in the streets, people who sing for the pure joy of singing … and you think they don’t suffer? You think that they are somehow excluded from the battle of the human condition — death, infirmity, lost love, poverty, crime and all the rest of it? We’re all half mad.’

Falcón wondered whether this was intended to make him feel better about being crazy.

‘I was beginning to think I was wholly mad,’ he said.

‘You are under very particular pressures. You face the momentary breakdowns in our civilization, when the condition has become intolerable and the wire has snapped. You face the consequences of that. This is not an easy job. Perhaps you should talk to somebody about this … somebody who has an understanding of the work.’

‘The police psychologist?’

‘That’s what they’re there for.’

‘Inside an hour everybody would know that Javier Falcón was cracking up.’

‘Aren’t these appointments confidential?’

‘They get out. It’s like living in a barracks or a school in the Jefatura. Everybody knows you’re splitting up with a girlfriend before you do.’

‘You speak from painful experience, Javier.’

‘In my case it was even worse, Inés being a
fiscal,
and a very noticeable and unreserved one … perhaps we shouldn’t get started on Inés, Dr Fernando.’

‘So you won’t see the police psychologist?’

‘I want something more private. I don’t mind paying for it. You’re right, maybe talking it out might help.’

‘It’s not so easy to get a private consultation. There are also many different approaches to the science of the mind. Some people perceive it as a purely clinical condition, a chemical imbalance to be rebalanced by the introduction of drugs. Others use drugs and a theoretical approach based on say, Jung or Freud, amongst others.’

‘You will have to advise me.’

‘I can only tell you that so-and-so is a good psychologist, this one works exclusively with a psychopharmacologist, this one is a serious Freudian. You might not like their approaches. You know, “What does my relationship with my
caca
when I was a kid have to do with my adult
problems?” It doesn’t mean they are bad at their work.’

‘You still think I should go to the police psychologist?’

‘There’s the added advantage of availability.’

‘So now you’re going to tell me that in the
ciudad de la alegría, Sevilla la maravilla,
there isn’t a single available mind doctor?
¡Estamos todos chiflados!’

‘We all suffer,’ said Dr Fernando. ‘The Spanish, not just the Sevillanos, rise above their problems through …
la fiesta.
We talk, we sing, we dance, we drink, we laugh and party night after night. This is our way of dealing with the pain. Our next-door neighbours, the Portuguese, are very different.’

‘Their natural condition is to be depressed,’ said Falcón. ‘They’ve given in to the human condition.’

‘I don’t think so. They’re melancholic by nature, like our Galicians. They have the Atlantic to confront every day, after all. But they are great sensualists, too. There’s a country that would commit suicide if you cancelled lunch. They love to eat and drink and enjoy the beauty of things.’

‘Yes,’ said Javier, getting interested. ‘And what about the British? My father so admired the British. How do they cope with life? They’re so reserved and inhibited.’

‘Well, to us they are, but amongst themselves … I believe they have this expression: “to take the piss”.’

‘That’s right,’ said Javier, ‘they never take things too seriously. They make fun of everything. Nothing is sacrosanct. The famous British sense of humour. And the French?’

‘Sex. Love. And all that leads up to it.
La Table.’

‘The Germans?’

‘Ordnung.’

‘The Italians?’

‘La Moda.’

‘The Belgians?’

‘Mussels,’ said Dr Fernando, and they both laughed. ‘I don’t know any Belgians.’

‘And the Americans?’

‘They are more complicated.’

‘They all have their own personal analysts.’

‘Yes, well, it’s not so easy to be leaders of the modern world with the right to the pursuit of happiness written into the constitution,’ said Dr Fernando. ‘And they’re a mixture: Northern Europeans, Hispanics, Blacks, Orientals. And maybe that’s it, they’ve lost touch with their traditional safety valves.’

‘It’s a good theory. You should write a thesis.’

‘You’re enjoying yourself, Javier.’

‘Yes, I am,’ he said, looking up, as if trying to remember why he was here.

‘Perhaps you should get out more. Work less. Be more sociable.’

‘I’d still like you to find someone for me to talk to,’ said Falcón, the weight back on his shoulders.

Dr Valera nodded and wrote out a prescription for some mild anti-anxiety pills called Orfidal and something to help him sleep.

‘One thing is certain, Javier,’ he said, giving him the paper. ‘Alcohol will not resolve any of your problems.’

Falcón picked up the prescription on República de Argentina and swallowed an Orfidal with his own spit. Ramírez was waiting for him in the office with a package addressed to Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, with a Madrid postmark on it.

‘It’s been X-rayed,’ said Ramírez. ‘It’s a video cassette.’