The Blind Man of Seville (40 page)

‘I don’t know. I can’t be sure. But if I had to guess I’d say that it comes from
L’Étranger
by Albert Camus.’

*    *    *

The Edificio de los Juzgados was almost empty at this time of night and Falcón’s footfall echoed through his hollow body as he walked the long corridor to the stairs. He had to hold on to the bannister to get down the steps and stop at the landing to control the shaking of his legs. He was persuading himself that it was coincidence, that there was no bizarre telepathy between him and Sergio. Life was full of these odd moments. There was a word for it: synchronicity. It should be a good thing. Human beings liked things to synchronize. But not that. Not their discussion about outsiders, Calderón talking about the film with the unmentionable title and then Sergio slapping them down with that terrible line. A line that disconnected him from the normal world of human relations, from the profound filial-maternal bond. They were the words of the loneliest individual on the planet and they had torn into Falcón like a chain saw.

He made it to security, motor reflexes normalized. On the other side was Inés, putting her handbag and briefcase through the machine. This was the last person Falcón wanted to see and as he thought this, it all came rushing back — her beauty, the sex, his longings, their failure. She waited for her bags, looking directly at him, almost mocking.

‘Hola, Inés,’ he said.

‘Hola, Javier.’

The hate was undisguised. He was condemned to be the unforgiven. He didn’t understand this because he could find no trace of rancour in himself. They had made a mistake. It had been recognized. They had parted. But she couldn’t stand him. The security guard handed over her bags and she dazzled him with a smile. Her lips returned to a hard red line for Falcón. He would have liked some inspiration at that moment. To somehow be able to make it instantly better, as people can in the
movies. But nothing came. There was nothing to be said. This was a relationship beyond the possibility of even friendship. She despised him too much.

She walked away. The narrow shoulders, the slim waist, the swaying hips, the sure feet and the heels counting out the distance.

The security man gnawed his lip, looking at her, and it came to Falcón why she so loathed him. He had destroyed the perfection of her life. The vibrantly beautiful and brilliant law student who had become an exceptional young prosecutor, worshipped by men and women wherever she went, had fallen for him — Javier Falcón. And he had turned her down. He had failed to love her back. He had tarnished her perfection. This was why she thought he had no heart, because it was the only possible explanation for his failure.

Outside he took up a position by one of the pillars of justice of the adjoining building. It gave him a view of the main door to the Edificio de los Juzgados. A few minutes later Inés reappeared through that door followed by Esteban Calderón. She waited, kissed him on the lips, took him by the arm and headed off down the colonnade towards Calle Menéndez Pelayo.

Had they kissed? Was that a trick of the light?

His powers of dissuasion failed him. It had been too clear. And in the slanting shadows of the neoclassical columns he came across another anomaly of logic. The faultiness of human wiring that could shortcircuit even the clearest of thoughts. He did not love her. He felt no rancour. They were beyond repair. So why did he feel his blood, his organs, his sinew and tendon consumed by a monstrous jealousy?

Falcón ran to his car, drove back to the Jefatura clenching the steering wheel so tight that he had difficulty unbending his fingers to write his report. He tried to read
other reports. It was impossible. His concentration flitted between the wreckage of his investigation and his inexplicable certainty of Calderón’s indefatigable sexual athleticism.

A tranche of time disappeared. A journey was lost. One moment he was straining over those reports and the next he was sitting with Alicia Aguado, her fingers feathering over his wrist.

‘You’re upset,’ she said.

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘At work?’

Laughter spurted from him like projectile vomit. He was hysterical in seconds, the laughter so intense that it wasn’t coming from him — he was the laughter. She let go of him as he threw himself on the sofa, stomach straining. It passed. He wiped away the tears, apologized and sat back down.

‘Busy … that word is such an absurd understatement for the description of my day,’ he said. ‘I never knew a madman’s life was packed so tight. I’m cramming an entire life into every tiny space I can find. Nobody can say anything to me without a whole world being dredged up. While a judge sits in his office, talking about his favourite movie moment, I’m running along a beach, splish-splashing through the waves, being launched high up in the air and squealing.’

‘By your mother?’

Falcón faltered.

‘Now that is odd,’ he said.

Silence.

‘It came back to me with the clarity of a dream,’ he said. ‘Except now I realize there was one feature missing, but I’ve got it now. I was being thrown up in the air by a man.’

‘Your father?’

‘No, no. He’s a stranger.’

‘You’ve never seen him before?’

‘He’s Moroccan. I think he must have been a friend of my mother’s.’

‘Was that unusual?’

‘No, no. Moroccans are very friendly people. They love to talk. They’re very curious and inquisitive. They have an amazing facility …’

‘I meant for your mother, a married woman, to be meeting a stranger on the beach. Allowing her son to be thrown up in the air by him.’

‘I’m not sure he
was
a complete stranger. No. I’d seen him before. He probably owned a shop, which my mother used to buy from. It would be something like that.’

‘What happened in the judge’s office?’

He recounted the meeting: the attempted dialogue with Sergio, the Almodóvar film, the terrible reply from Sergio and what it had done to him.

‘What shook me was the talk about outsiders beforehand and then the killer using a line from the book. I’m sure it’s
L’Étranger.
The Outsider. It makes me feel as if I’m going mad.’

‘Ignore it,’ she said. ‘Synchronicity. It happens all the time. Concentrate on the issues.’

‘Which are?’

Silence from Alicia Aguado.

‘My mother,’ he said. ‘That’s an issue.’

‘Why did the line from Camus have such a terrible effect on you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How did your mother die? Was she ill?’

‘No, no, she wasn’t ill. She had a heart attack but …’

A long silence in which Falcón blinked once a minute.

‘There was something … a crisis of some sort in the
street. We were in the house, Paco, Manuela and I. And there was this big row in the street outside our house. I can’t remember what it was about. It was afterwards though, that my father came to tell us that our mother was dead. But it won’t come back to me … what happened.’

‘What happened after she died?’

‘There was a funeral. I only remember people’s legs from that day and the general gloom. It was February and raining. My father spent a lot of time with us. He nursed us all through it.’

‘Did you ever see the stranger on the beach again?’

‘Never.’

‘How long was it before your father married again?’

‘We already knew Mercedes,’ he said. ‘She’d been a family friend for a long time. She helped my father a lot, marketing his work in America. They were having an affair before my mother died … did I tell you that? I only just found out.’

‘Carry on.’

‘Mercedes was still married when my mother died and then her husband subsequently died in America. Cancer, I think. She came back to Tangier in her husband’s yacht. It must have been about a year after my mother died that they got married.’

‘Did you like Mercedes?’

‘I loved Mercedes from the moment I first saw her. I still have that vague memory of seeing her for the first time. I was tiny. She came to my father’s studio and picked me up. I think I played with her earrings. I loved her from that moment, but then my father always said I was a very loving child.’

‘What happened with Mercedes?’

‘It was a very good time. My father was successful. The Falcón nudes were the talk of the art world. He was being hailed as the new Picasso, which was ridiculous given the
size and quality of
his
oeuvre. Then tragedy. It was after a New Year’s Eve dinner. Everybody went down to the yacht in the port afterwards to see the fireworks and then some of them went out on the boat at night and a storm got up. Mercedes fell overboard. They never found her body.

‘But … but just before the party left the house I crept down from my bedroom and Mercedes spotted me,’ he said, replaying it like film through the gate of his mind. ‘She took me back up to bed. I was reminded of this the other day because … That was it. It’s coming together. In my murder investigation the first victim, Raúl Jiménez, smoked these cigarettes, Celtas, and that was the smell in her hair. I only just found out that my father knew Raúl Jiménez from the forties and now I realize that he must have been at that party except … he’d already left Tangier by then.’

‘I’m sure other people smoked that brand in those days.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Falcón. ‘So, Mercedes took me up to bed and kissed me and hugged me tight to her bosom. She was squeezing her love into me so hard I could barely breathe. She was wearing perfume, which I now know is Chanel No.5. Women don’t use it so often these days. But years ago if I came across that smell in the street it would transport me back to that moment. Being in the grip of love.’

‘And after Mercedes left you?’

Falcón grabbed his stomach with his free hand, stricken with pain.

‘I hear …’ he said, struggling. ‘I hear her heels receding down the corridor and stairs. I hear the talk and the laughter of the other guests. I hear the door shutting. I hear the shoes pattering on the cobbles. And I remember that she never came back.’

Tears blurred his vision. Saliva filled his mouth. He couldn’t swallow. The last words came out from under the shuddering wall of his stomach.

‘There were no more mothers after that.’

Alicia made some tea. The cup burnt his fingers, the tea scalded his tongue. Physics brought him back into the room. He felt a strange newness, a cleansed satisfaction, as when he and Paco had scraped and rendered an old bullpen at the finca and whitewashed it to a solid white cube in the burnt umber landscape. He’d photographed it. It had something of the simplicity of a great work of art.

‘I’ve never remembered that all the way through,’ he said. ‘I always used to stop before I got to her receding heels.’

‘And you know now, Javier, don’t you, that it wasn’t your fault that she didn’t come back?’

‘There’s a question.’

‘What question?’

He thought for a long time and shook his head.

‘You know it wasn’t your fault,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘Do you know what you’ve done this evening, Javier?’

‘I suppose you’d say that I’ve relived a moment.’

‘And seen it in its normal light,’ she said. ‘That’s how the process works. If we deny things that are painful to us they don’t go away. We only hide from them. You’ve just had the first success in the biggest investigation of your life.’

He drove back to Calle Bailén oddly refreshed, as if he’d been out running and sweated all the toxins from his body. He parked and walked through the silent, dark house until he reached the patio at its centre and its limpid pupil of black shining water. He turned the light on
beneath the arched and pillared cloister. His hands shook as he entered the study. His eyes floated over the desk, the scattered photographs and the portrait of his mother and her children. He went to the old grey filing cabinet, unlocked it and took out a brown buff file from under the letter ‘I’. He sat at his desk with the file, knowing that he would take the next step, beating back the guilt. He took out the fifteen black-and-white prints and laid them face down on the desk. He asked himself in the glass of the picture on the wall: ‘How new are you?’

He turned over the first photograph. Inés lay face down, naked, on a silk sheet on the bed. She was looking back at him, resting her head on her fist. Her hair was all over. Falcón closed his eyes as the pain eased into him. He turned to the next photograph, opened his eyes. His neck shook with tension. Swallowing became impossible. Inés was propped up on the pillows, naked again apart from a piece of silk around her shoulders. She was looking at the camera with a deep sexual intent. Her thighs were spread wide, revealing her shaved sex. He was standing behind the camera in the same state. The wonderful excitement as they’d shaved each other, the giggling at their trembling hands. There’d been nothing perverse about it. The joy was in the innocence of it. The brilliance of that day came back to him. The torrid heat of that big fat afternoon, the cracks of intense light around the shutters brightening the dimness of the room so that they could see each other in the mirror. The privacy of the two of them alone in the big house, so that when they were too hot he’d picked her up and, still connected, walked downstairs, her thighs clenched around his waist, ankles locked, heels riding the tops of his buttocks. He’d stepped into the eye of the fountain and sank into the cool water.

It was so unbearable that he had to put away the file
and lock the cabinet. He looked at the grey metal repository of his memory. Alicia was right. You could not lock things away. You could not obsessively order them, package them, file them under ‘I and hope to confine them to their place. No amount of order could stop the mind’s inclination to leak. This was why desperate people blew their brains out. The only sure way to stop the leaking was to destroy the reservoir for ever.

That question came to him again. It still had no form. He didn’t quite believe what Alicia had said he’d achieved tonight. He had
not
been certain that
he
was not the reason that Mercedes hadn’t come back. He was responsible and the thought propelled him into his mac and out into the night air, which was now wet, the cobbles shining from some light rain. He went to the Plaza del Museo and found odd comfort pacing beneath the dark and dripping trees.