The Blind Man of Seville (37 page)

‘I need more of a reason than that to kill him,’ I say.

‘He’s seen everything,’ says R.

‘Maybe it’s time for you to get your hands dirty,’ I say.

‘Mine already are,’ he says.

The gun is in my hand. I pull the weeping boy over to the side of the boat. His head lolls off the side. His crying is strangled in his throat. I shoot him behind the ear. I hand R. the gun thinking, This is what I am capable of.

The same hand that pulled the trigger is now guiding the words out of the pen and I am no closer to understanding how this hand can be the instrument of creation and destruction.

We take the boats up to Corsica and drop the bodies overboard on the way. I am in the Italian boat and pull alongside. It’s going to take two men to shift each body. We come to A. and I say that we should honour him with a prayer. R. shrugs. I say what we used to say over a fallen comrade in the Legion. I call out his name and make my own response, which is: ‘Present!’ As we ease him over the side, I see that he’s been hit twice, in the shoulder and the back of the head.

We offload the cigarettes and drydock both boats in Ajaccio. We remodel and repaint both boats using the money from the cigarettes. R. disappears for a day and comes back with papers for both boats in each of our names. We sail to Cartagena and register the boats under the Spanish Flag and change the boat names. We have had no time to talk about what has happened and as the time lengthens away from the incident, and all memory of A. disappears, I see that one of R.’s talents is for shutting the door. His link to me is that he has entrusted me with the only memory of importance to him, which is the death of his parents. I think it was then that he decided memory was something that interfered, rather than clarified and, in offering only nostalgia as recompense for a lack of belonging, had no value.

14th March 1944

A conversation with R. goes like this:

Me: What happened with the Italians?

R.: You saw, you were there.

Me: I didn’t see what started it.

R.: Then why did you open fire?

Me: The two guys who came aboard our boat should not have been there. I opened fire at the first hint of trouble … as ordered.

R.: Was that all?

Me: I heard a shout … like a signal.

R.: The Italian had a gun. I shouted. He shot A. I jumped in the water. I heard that burst from your sub-machine-gun and the Italians did, too. They made a run for it.

Me: A. was shot twice.

R.: What do you mean?

Me: He was hit in the shoulder and the back of the head.

R.: I was in the water. Maybe the Italian fired twice.

Me: Where did you get that handgun?

R.: Why are you interrogating me?

Me: I want to know what happened. You said you got your hands dirty. You said sometimes you have to prove yourself first before you get permission.

Long pause in which I decide I will never know what goes on inside R.’s head.

R.: The handgun belonged to one of the Italians you shot.

At least he replied, even if it was a lie.

23rd March 1944

Some more information about what I now call Opera Night. I go to the American in Tangier to get another magazine for the sub-machine-gun and ask for some more bullets for the handgun he sold to R. He gives me a box of .45 calibre shells without question. He also tells me in passing that the best thing the Allies did for business was to hand over the running of Naples to Vito Genovese. I don’t know this name. The American tells me he’s a gangster with the Camorra, which I find out later is the Naples version of the Sicilian Mafia.

There has been a change in R. since we embarked on this business. He is not as likable as before. His charm is now turned on and off as required. It occurs to me that R. has been let loose in the world with the single, burning memory of the shooting of his parents. My unthinking remark that they had been killed precisely because of his acumen must have run through him like a white-hot bayonet. The guilt I have induced has made him ruthless and savage. He has made me his partner. I don’t know why, because now he doesn’t seem to need one.

30th March 1944, Tangier

R. has given me my pay of $100. He tells me to keep the money in dollars and only change what I need into pesetas. I tell him I’m going back to being an artist and he says that I have learnt nothing.

Me: It’s what I have to do.

R.: I respect that. (He doesn’t at all)

Me: As you said, we have to think for ourselves.

R.: Forgive me, but what you are doing is not thinking.

Me: I want to see how far I can take it.

R.: Do you think that talent has anything to do with success in the world of art?

Me: It helps.

R.: Then you’re a fool.

Me: You don’t think van Gogh and Gauguin and Manet and Cézanne had any talent … do you know who I’m talking about even?

R.: The fool always thinks that everybody else is foolish. Of course I know who they are. Those men have genius.

Me: And I don’t?

He shrugs.

Me: And when did you become an art expert?

He shrugs again and nods at a few people. We are sitting outside the Café de Paris in the Place de France.

Me: How does a peasant boy from some dusty pueblo outside Almería get to know the first thing about art?

R.: How does an ex-legionnaire get to be a genius? El Marroquí? Is that how you will sign your work?

Me: Genius is not selective.

R.: But who decides? Were Gauguin and van Gogh celebrated in their time?

Me: What makes you think I want to become celebrated?

He says nothing but looks at me with intensity and I realize that I am sitting in front of someone who has found his milieu, a man who is utterly confident in his substance and who has seen something in me that I haven’t seen in myself.

R.: Why do you keep those journals? Why are you writing out your life?

Me: I only write down what happens and what occurs to me.

R.: But why?

Me: This is not for public consumption.

R.: What is it for?

Me: It is a record, just like your books of accounts.

R.: They just remind you of where you are in the world?

Me: That’s right.

R.: You don’t think people will read them and think, ‘What an extraordinary man!’?

I do think this sometimes but I say nothing to him.

R.: Any man of substance has to have some vanity.

1st April 1944

We have our first rest so that R. can work out how the banks operate. We stay in the Residencial Almería. All nationalities are here and a lot of single women working in the hundreds of companies that have set up here since the beginning of the war.

R. enjoys his money. He has had a suit made for himself by a French Jew in the Petit Soco. He wears this suit to visit the banks. He dines at a restaurant run by a Spanish family in the Grand Hôtel Villa de France. After he’s eaten he takes a short walk down to the Rue Hollande and then back up the hill to the Hotel El Minzah, where he takes his coffee and brandy. His vanity is that he likes to think himself wealthy. It works, because he makes contacts and does business in these places, which are full of black marketeers looking for people like R. to run their goods into Europe.

I like to sit outside in the sunshine by the Café Central in the medina and watch the chaos of the Soco Chico. At night I find myself drawn to the sleaziness of the port. There’s a Spanish bar called La Mar Chica with sawdust on the floor and an old slut from Málaga who dances passable flamenco. She smells bad, as if her whole biology is faulty and in sweating she is actually purging her system of all its ills.

26th June 1944

Since the Allies invaded Normandy we have been working non-stop. R. found a drunken Scot who needs money to pay off gambling debts so we ‘re the new owners of the
Highland Queen.
A Spaniard, Miguel, who used to work the fishing boats out of Almuñécar, will run the new vessel.

3rd November 1944

Sitting off Naples at first light we are attacked. They go for the
Highland Queen,
which has drifted away. By the time I draw near they have M. on the deck with a gun to his head. I do not understand their language. R. radios for me to open fire, which I do and they all drop to the deck, including M. The pirates’ own boat steams away and I use a British Lee Enfield .303, which is very accurate over distance, to shoot the man at the wheel. They are Greeks. We tow the two boats into Naples. M. has a messy wound in his right leg and we have to leave him there. Our fleet becomes four.

15th November 1944, Tangier

R. is working on renting warehouse space in the port and outside in the city. My role is security, which means having trusted men who will prevent outsiders getting in and insiders from stealing. He tells me that people are afraid of me. I’m surprised. They have heard how I dealt with the Greeks. I realize that it is R. who is creating this myth around me and I am powerless to stop it.

17th February 1945, Tangier

R. has acquired warehousing. I go direct to the Legion in Ceuta and recruit veterans who know me. I return with twelve men.

8th May 1945, Tangier

The war ended today. The town has gone wild. Everybody is drunk except me and my legionnaires. The suburbs of the city have been filling up with Berbers, Riffians and Tanjawis who have been drawn from the barren mountains and set up homes in
chabolas
made from crates and pallets. They have nothing to lose and will steal anything. We have to be severe. The beatings have not deterred them. If we catch them now we cut off an ear, again and we split their noses or cut off a thumb and forefinger. If they come back after that we throw them off the cliffs on the outside of town.

8th September 1945, Tangier

The Spanish administration is withdrawing from Tangier. R. is momentarily frightened but it seems the city will return to its previous international status and business will not be affected.

1st October 1945, Tangier

We have decided to buy property. I have found the perfect house off the Petit Soco, a labyrinthine affair built around a central courtyard in which there is a large fig tree. Light comes from the most surprising places. R. thinks it is the house of a madman. His house is just inside the medina gates off the Grand Soco where a lot of other Spanish live. He alarms me by constantly talking about the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Spanish lawyer, who lives opposite. The father of the girl miraculously becomes our lawyer and it is he who draws up the contracts for buying the property. I pay $1,500 and R. $2,200 and we don’t have to borrow a cent.

7th October 1945, Tangier

I am painting again. I draw the house and paint it in abstractions of dark and light. Occasionally patterns emerge within these black-and-white structures. I think of the Russian work and realize where this monochromatic obsession comes from.

26th December 1945, Tangier

During our Christmas Eve dinner R. asks if I want to get married. ‘To you?’ I ask and we laugh so hard that the truth gradually becomes painfully apparent. He is a massive presence in my life. (Me less so in his.) He controls my every move. We are partners but he pays my expenses, instructs me on security measures, and makes all the plans. I am eight years older than him. I was thirty this year. It must be the Legion, that life … I need structure in order to perform. I am not my own man … except here when I retreat to my courtyard.

This house is like my head, which, given that (as R. said) it is the house of a madman, is revealing. I occupy new rooms. One with a very high ceiling and, at the top, a window with Moorish latticework. I sit on a carpet and smoke hashish and watch, completely fascinated, as the pattern cast on the wall moves with the sun.

P., the barman at the Café Central in the Petit Soco, pointed out a ‘fellow Spanish artist’ the other day who looked worse off than some of those living in the chabolas on the edge of town. His name is Antonio Fuentes. He paints, but he doesn’t sell and he doesn’t show. I don’t see the point and try to discuss this with him but he’s impenetrable. P. introduces me to an American musician — Paul Bowles. We speak in Arabic as my English is poor and his Spanish worse. He talks about
majoun,
a sort of hashish jam I have heard of but never tried. P. makes it and we buy some.

5th January 1946, Tangier

It is cold and wet. The weather has been too bad to take the boats out. R. shows me the present he has bought for the young daughter of our lawyer — a doll carved out of bone. It is extraordinarily delicate but a little macabre. Later we see the girl crossing the street with her parents, heading for the medina and the Spanish cathedral. She is very beautiful but still a girl. Her breasts are small bumps and the line of her body totally straight from armpit to thigh. I don’t see what is stirring him until he reveals another thing to me from his earlier life. She reminds him of a girl from his village whose parents were shot on the same day as his own. This girl though, would not leave her parents and could not be prised away from them, not even by her own father. In exasperation the anarchists shot her, too. What does this say about R.’s infatuation with the lawyer’s daughter? She stirs in him that which he values most.